 Good morning, everyone. My name is Ellen Vaughn and I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And thank you so much for coming out this morning. It's great to see you. Welcome to the briefing today on federal programs for energy and housing, a lifeline for America's low-income families. I want to thank the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition and NRDC in particular for partnering with us on this important briefing. And our first speaker is going to tell you a bit more about energy efficiency for all. I'll just briefly tell you a little bit about EESI, which you can see up there. We're a not-for-profit independent 501c3 small organization that does events like this. We're trying to be a good resource for Congress, and that was really our roots starting as a congressional caucus back in the 80s. But we're totally independent and still trying to provide good fact-based information on sustainable energy and related issues. Today we're discussing energy and housing, and those are big topics individually and complex together, but they are very much intertwined. We have an expert panel who's going to sort of sort out some of these issues. For example, we're seeing from the Energy Information Administration that we're paying as a whole, on average, less of our GDP on energy. And yet, there are many people who are energy-burdened, and you're going to hear what that is. So there are some disconnects. And literally, again, the EIA, in their residential energy consumption survey, has found that nearly a third of U.S. households reported facing a challenge in paying energy bills. Or sustaining adequate heating and cooling in the year 2015. So it's having to make choices about necessities. About one in five households reported reducing or foregoing basic necessities like food and medicine in order to pay an energy bill. So again, I am delighted to have this panel of experts today to sort out some of these issues. And first I'd like to introduce Ellen Laurie Hoffman, who will talk more about EFA, the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition. And then we'll bring Ellen back up to talk about some other housing issues. Lots of seats. Don't be shy. We won't bite. Thank you, Ellen. It's always nice to be with another Ellen. And I wanted to thank ESI for this opportunity. We're really thrilled to be with you here today. And there's a lot to talk about. I'm going to be brief. And then I'm going to come back and talk about federal affordable housing programs. But I wanted to just introduce EFA. So EFA is Energy Efficiency for All. It is a national coalition. You can see the four lead national organizations on the bottom of this slide, as well as our funder, the JPB Foundation. The Energy Foundation, the National Housing Trust, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Elevate Energy came together five years ago to start EFA. And we now have a coalition of 13 state-based coalitions which work together to make multifamily affordable housing healthy and affordable through energy efficiency. Our coalitions provide, as you can see, technical expertise, hands-on technical expertise and coordination. We have a national network, but we work with grassroots organizations at the local level. And we work directly with state utilities that have a mandate to address energy efficiency issues to help them channel their resources to support energy efficiency in multifamily affordable housing. So EFA supports affordable housing, equity issues, energy issues, resident health, resident affordability, and we make the case. I'm the Federal Policy Director at the National Housing Trust, which is one of the four lead organizations. The National Housing Trust has been around for over 25 years, and we're focused on preserving affordable rental housing for low-income people. And so I'm on the hill quite a bit talking about affordable housing, both appropriations for rental assistance, which I'm going to talk about some more, as well as the low-income housing tax credit. I've gotten involved in EFA as we have encouraged our state coalitions to, in addition to work at the state level, to advocate and educate their members of Congress about the importance of federal affordable housing and energy assistance programs. So that's my role. We just did a big survey of, nationally, about Americans' perceptions of energy assistance, energy burden. The survey is not quite ready to be released yet. Stay tuned. We're going to be doing a big release of our survey results in a couple of weeks in mid-August. And my colleagues here are going to talk more about the fact that low-income renters are currently underserved by energy efficiency programs significantly. And I just want to just quickly, as I'm introducing EFA, just pull out two of the survey findings that you'll be hearing more about in a couple of weeks. Half of the people that responded to our survey that have incomes below $40,000 a year report that, in order to pay their utility bills, they have to make sacrifices. For example, paying for medicine, paying for food, paying for housing, they're really challenged to meet the cost of their utility bills. Another finding that we thought was significant is that the vast majority of our respondents from across sections of Americans think that renters, including low-income renters, should receive the same benefits as everyone else when it comes to energy efficiency programs. We know that currently energy efficiency programs aren't serving low-income people particularly well, but that most Americans, according to our survey, think that they should be. And stay tuned. We will be following up with all of you with our full survey results in a couple of weeks. I'm going to step down and turn it over to my colleagues who can tell you more about the energy burden on low-income Americans, and I'll be back to tell you more about affordable housing programs. Thank you, Ellen. So our next speaker, as we talk about some of these programs that Ellen mentioned, will also talk about a study that has just come out, and one that's come out before that that really shows some of the data behind this. And I wanted to mention that the good news in all this is that there are solutions, and you'll hear more about the federal programs and energy services that Ellen alluded to. So I am delighted to introduce now Arielle Drehoble, who is with the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, as it's fondly known. Arielle conducts research and analysis on local-level energy efficiency policies and initiatives with a focus on energy affordability and low-income communities. She joined ACEEE in 2015, and before that she worked for O-Power on energy efficiency research, has interned for the U.S. Climate Action Network, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. So Arielle, welcome. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. All right, so I'm going to start off by providing you all with a high-level overview of some of the national trends in terms of energy affordability, as well as provide a few national policy considerations that can help expand low-income energy efficiency programs across the country. So a little bit more about ACEEE. We are a non-profit research organization located in Washington, D.C., and we conduct research on energy efficiency across all sectors of the economy, as well as policy research as well. So to start, what is an energy burden? Energy burdens are the percentage of a household's annual income that they spend on energy each year. And for example, if a household spent $200 a month on their utility bills and had an annual income of $60,000 a year, this would equate to a 4% energy burden. So this is a way of measuring what the impact of those energy bills are on a household. So through our research at ACEEE, we found that the median energy burdens vary in different areas of the country. We found that the average nationally is 3.3%, in that this burden is higher in rural areas with an average of 4.4%, and a little lower in metro areas with an average of 3.1%. But this value varies greatly depending on a lot of other demographic factors, such as income and race, which I'll talk a bit more about. In terms of driver of energy burden, there are four main categories of factors that drive an energy burden to be higher or lower. These include physical factors, such as the structure of someone's home, so how well the building envelope is sealed, the efficiency of the appliances inside the home, also factors such as weather. If it's a hotter year, you might have a higher energy burden that year because you have higher bills. There's also economic factors such as sudden or chronic low income or the ability to afford financing options in order to finance energy efficiency upgrades in a home. There's policy factors such as the availability of energy efficiency or bill assistance programs, and also behavioral factors such as education, knowing about programs, knowing how to do energy efficient actions in a home, but also factors such as the ability to do these actions. Sometimes, if you're older or have a medical condition, you need to use more energy in the home, so that's another factor. And the impacts of high energy burdens can also be extreme, which we'll hear more about from other panelists as well, but these can be impacts such as on the health of those living in the home. If you live in an inefficient home, this can lead to higher cases of asthma, respiratory disease. It can also lead to more stress and trade-offs between other necessities, such as food or medicine, in order to afford those high bills. So ACTRIPLY has published two reports that measure energy burdens across the country. Both of these reports use census data from the American Housing Survey, which collects household-level data that's self-reported on energy bills, income, and other household characteristics. Our 2016 analysis focused on the largest metro regions in the country, and our recently published 2018 analysis focuses on rural regions. You can find these reports at the URLs here, and each of them contain an appendix that has specific energy burden numbers for metro areas in rural regions. And if you're interested, you can follow up with me after the briefing, and I'd be happy to go through this data and find the data points that are relevant for your needs. So now I'm going to briefly go over some of the high-level findings from both of these reports. On the urban side, we looked at the largest metro regions in the country, as you can see here on this map, and we found that cities with the highest median energy burdens tended to be in the southeast and midwest regions of the country, but these burdens still varied depending on different demographic factors as well. So we found that low-income households had the highest overall burdens in these cities, followed by African-American households, low-income multifamily households, Latino households, and renting households. All had higher burdens than the average in every city. We found that overall, low-income households had energy burdens three times that of non-low-income households, but it's also important to remember that these values here are just median values, and that many households had much higher burdens than the ones listed here. For example, we found that in 17 of the cities in the study, a quarter of the low-income households had a burden over 14%. About two weeks ago, we published our Rural Energy Burden Analysis, which analyzed energy burdens in rural regions across the country, and we broke down the regions based on census region tracks, as you can see here. Rural households make up about 16% of all households in the country and are spread across 72% of the nation's land area. We found that rural burdens were 40% higher than the metro average. We also found that the burdens were highest in the northeast, in mid-Atlantic, in south-central regions, and we also found that a quarter of the low-income rural households had burdens above 15%. So how does energy efficiency fit into this picture? At ACEE Tripoli, we believe that energy efficiency is a long-term strategy that can complement bill assistance programs to reduce high energy burdens in the long term. Through our research, we found that investing in energy efficiency can reduce household energy burden by up to 25% and can save households up to $400 annually. In addition, energy efficiency provides a variety of additional benefits to households beyond just energy savings, such as improved health and well-being, reduced stress, improved property values, local job creation, and many other benefits as well. I also want to note an important finding that we found through both of these studies is that we did not find a correlation between energy prices and energy burdens, which means that lower energy prices do not necessarily equate to affordable bills. And this is because there can be a lot of other factors at play. If you're living in an inefficient home, even if those rates are low, you're still having to buy a lot of energy in order to maintain proper heating or cooling, and this can still lead to a high bill. So just because rates are low doesn't mean that people are going to be able to have affordable energy. There's a lot of other things which we'll hear more about as well that are needed. So here, finally, I have a few high-level policy recommendations that can be considered to help improve and expand low-income utility programs and achieve more affordable energy across the country. So the first recommendation is to expand federal weatherization assistance through the Federal Weatherization Assistance Program or other federal programs that provide weatherization services. Currently, there's many more households that are in need of weatherization than are able to be served through the current program dollars and more funding is needed to meet that demand. Secondly, states can set low-income spending and saving targets for their energy efficiency programs. This requires that the regulated utilities in the state spend a certain portion of their energy efficiency portfolio dollars or achieve a certain level of savings from their low-income programs. Currently, 20 states have either a low-income spending or savings target in place. Third, states can also aim to expand their energy efficiency programs for low-income households through utility or other weatherization providers. This can involve creating new programs or improving the reach of current programs. ACEE Tripoli has many resources on best practices for low-income program design and delivery, and we also work a lot with different utilities to help improve those programs and expand them. Fourth, we recommend supporting financing options for multifamily-building owners and also rural households in the country. Due to the split incentives between building owners and tenants, which I think we'll hear more about as well, often financing is needed in order to encourage building owners to make their multifamily buildings more efficient. And if you're able to line up program participation in an efficiency program with when a building is undergoing renovation or refinancing, this can increase the likelihood of the building participating in the program. In addition, many rural households do not have access to energy efficiency programs, and in these cases, having financing that has strong consumer protections in place can allow for some rural households to access energy efficiency and achieve more affordable energy bills. And lastly, we recommend that it's important for program managers to collect and track demographic data on who's participating in their programs in order to measure who their programs are reaching and ensure that all customers are being equitably served through the energy efficiency programs and bill assistance programs that are being offered. And with that, I'll turn it back to Ellen. Great. Thanks, Arielle. So energy efficiency is a key solution to housing affordability. And now I'm going to turn it back again to Ellen. And Ellen Lurie Hoffman, as she mentioned, joined the National Housing Trust in 2014 as the Federal Policy Director. Ellen is responsible for federal housing policy, spanning the HUD budget, maintaining and improving the low-income housing tax credit, fair housing, and housing finance reform. So you may have seen Ellen up here from time to time. She facilitates the National Preservation Working Group, a coalition of over 40 nonprofit organizations dedicated to the preservation of affordable rental housing. Ellen, I'll welcome you back. Thank you again, Ellen. Okay. I am here to provide you with a very quick overview of two key programs that provide affordable housing to low-income renters. Because before we can talk about how energy efficiency assistance can help low-income renters, we think it's important that you understand how can low-income renters access affordable housing. What are the federal programs that Congress is involved with that supports low-income renters? And before I start, I want to share a really critical piece of information, which is on this slide, but not at the top, which is that federal rental assistance currently, whether it's project-based, which means the assistance is attached to the building, or tenant-based, like a voucher where the tenant can take the assistance and find their own apartment in the private sector, only meets the needs of 25 percent of the low-income renters who are eligible for it. That means 75 percent of the low-income Americans across the country whose incomes qualify them, which means they are, you know, well below average, do not have any rental assistance. And those folks are paying, recent data has shown in many cases, more than 50 percent of their incomes for rent. We know that low-income renters who don't have rental assistance are often making sacrifices in having to decide between paying the rent or paying for their medical bills, their medicine, their food. Many times they have to double up or live in substandard housing, and obviously there's a huge problem of homelessness. So I just want to set that as the context for talking about the two programs that I'm going to talk about. First is project-based rental assistance. This is a HUD-administered program. It receives federal appropriations every year. Right now, the Senate is debating, you probably know, a mini-bus that includes four spending bills, including the transportation HUD bill. This is how project-based rental assistance gets funded every year. PBRA is a public-private partnership, and it provides affordable housing for over 1.2 million low- and very low-income households. The average household income is $12,000 a year, so these are very, very low-income folks. The majority of residents that get assistance from project-based rental assistance have someone in the household that's either elderly or disabled, and the rest are families or individuals. HUD administers project-based rental assistance, but again, the assistance goes to private owners of buildings that have signed a contract with HUD and have agreed to make the units in those buildings affordable to low-income people. So according to the way the program works, qualified residents with low incomes pay no more than 30% of their income for rent, and the federal government makes up the difference in payments to the private landlords so that they have the correct amount of operating income to keep the buildings in good physical and financial condition. So that's basically the gist of it. We work every year to make sure that appropriators understand the amount of funding that is needed for project-based rental assistance contracts to be renewed for a full year. It's critically important because if there's any shortfalls, then ultimately low-income people could lose their housing. Also, there's FHA insurance on the majority of this housing, so not fully funding PBRA could trigger defaults, which is very obviously risky for FHA. And in order to keep the private sector that has agreed to participate in this partnership invested in these properties, full funding is critically important. Also, there's usually complex financing that keeps these properties in good condition. It's important for Congress to continue to renew these appropriations at full funding in order to make sure that private investment continues because otherwise it can create an uncertainty. We're not really here to talk about spending bills, but I will say that both the House and the Senate bill that have gone through committee level so far do provide full funding for project-based rental assistance. I'm going to quickly switch to a completely different program, but that also served low-income renters, and that is low-income housing tax credits. The low-income housing tax credit is an invaluable tool for building and preserving affordable housing. In fact, you pretty much can't build or preserve affordable housing without the low-income housing tax credit right now. Since 1986, when the program was created, the credit has financed more than 2.8 million affordable apartments across the country at a rate of nearly 100,000 per year. The properties serve more than 6.7 million low-income families, seniors, people with disabilities, et cetera. Again, low-income residents pay no more than 30% of their income for rent. But it's a very... Again, as opposed to rental assistance, the credit is used to either build new buildings or to preserve them, which is what the National Housing Trust and other nonprofit developers do, which is when a building serves low-income people, but it needs to have a recapitalization and oftentimes it needs to be renovated, there'll be an investment. And low-income housing tax credits are critical to come in, invest in the properties, ensure their long-term affordability moving forward. And at that juncture in time, we do energy efficiency improvements in conjunction with the low-income housing tax credit. So that's important to understand. States administer the credit. Each state gets a per capita allocation of tax credits. They have federal statutory guidelines on what the credit is to be used for, but each state also sets its own priorities on how to use the credit based on the needs of their residents in that state and the demographic challenges that they have. And we encourage every state to prioritize energy efficiency improvements when they're... as well as, obviously, addressing the needs of the low-income residents. The National Housing Trust has a website. I'm going to do a shameless plug, prescat.org. The link to it is on this slide, which will be distributed. It is a catalog of how every state uses its low-income housing tax credit allocation. You can see its Qualified Allocation Plan, which each state has to write, which designates its priorities and what it's telling developers in that state about how it wants to use the credit. So I would encourage anyone that's interested in learning more about how your state is using the credit to check that out because it does vary somewhat state by state. I think I'm going to stop there. I know we have a lot more to cover, and I could talk about the low-income housing tax credit all day, so I'll stop. Thanks. Okay, great. Thank you, Ellen. And I forgot to mention in the beginning, as you've probably figured out by now, we will hold questions until the end. We like to have a half an hour for Q&A and get your questions. Keep those in mind. So I am very happy to introduce our next speaker, Carmen Bingham. And Carmen is the project coordinator on affordable clean energy for the Virginia Poverty Law Center. She worked in state government and advocacy for much of her career before coming to VPLC. And she was the chief of staff for the minority leader in the House of Delegates, an aide to another House of Delegates member, a coordinator with the League of Conservation Voters, and staff at the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. So welcome, Carmen. Did we get that? Yes, okay, great. Hello, everybody. As Ellen said, I'm Carmen Bingham from the Law Center. We are a lawyer, a low-income lawyer assistance firm statewide. We basically work on policy. So we are not really energy people. We are not necessarily in the energy efficiency. We are not providers. But we are working on trying to move policy in Virginia to assist our low-income consumers. Back in 2015, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law that actually froze rates for our largest investor-owned utility, which is Dominion, and I'm just going to refer to them as Dominions because we all know who they are. When that happened, it unfortunately did not keep bills low. All it did was freeze the base rate. And at that time, we were working at VPLC on predatory lending, and we were finding that through our hotline calls that more and more of the people who are actually getting predatory loans, payday loans, cash advances, were actually getting those loans in order to pay their utility bills. So they would get a spike in their utility bill. They'd get behind, and before they would have their service shut off, they were going and getting a cash advance or payday loan. Well, once they did that, because of their income levels, they would go deeper and deeper into debt to the payday lenders. So in a conversation with some folks who do work on energy issues, and particularly on energy efficiency, we started looking at how can we assist low-income households in Virginia in mitigating those high expenses and keeping them from actually getting into these payday loan downward cycles. So when the 2015 legislation came out, we realized that low-income bills are not going to get any lower. We're frozen. This is where we're going to be in Virginia, almost into perpetuity until we actually change some ways we do energy business in Virginia. And we commissioned a study with some help of our friends about looking at rates versus bills. Dominion has always been very good in our state, along with APCO, the other investor-owned utility, of talking about how we have low rates in Virginia. And we do. Nationally, we have some very low rates. The problem is that the way our structure is set up in terms of how we set our rates in Virginia is our base rate might be low, but then every time the utility builds a new generation plant, wants to do any type of program to build new distribution lines, underground some lines, anything, they actually add a rack to our bill, a rate adjustment clause. So that comes on top of our base rate. The SEC did a report before the legislative commission on utility rate making in Virginia back in December of 2017, and actually showed how Virginia's bills from 2007 to 2017 had actually climbed by 43%. Not because our rates had increased, but because the racks on top of our base rates had increased in numbers. We went from three in Dominion's bills to 11. So the bills, again, jumped 43% just in that 10-year period. Not the rates, but the bills that people were paying. So we did our study. We started talking to legislators how we needed to get away from the conversation of rates and actually start talking about bills. And in doing this study, we actually came upon AC Triple E's Ariel's 2016 report that looked at the top, the 50 largest cities. Yes, the 50 largest cities across the United States and the energy burden within those cities. And we found out that our capital, Richmond, as well as Virginia Beach, were in those top 50. And when we looked at the figures that AC Triple E had found, the energy burden within those cities for our low-income families was actually twice what the energy burden was for the median households. So we began to dig a little bit deeper, and that's what my slides are showing, is we are actually in the process now. This study has not been released. We're not quite ready for primetime yet. But this map actually shows you what the energy burden looks like across the state of Virginia, across the Commonwealth. The red signifies a higher than state average, which is actually higher than the national average, burden on people in those zip codes. This is by zip code, not by locality, unfortunately. We're still working on that. The green is showing a lower energy burden. As you can see, the redder the locality is, the higher the energy burden. When we looked at this, we realized this is huge. We are looking at southwest Virginia, south-side Virginia, the eastern shore, which is a rural community over there to your right, and then some pockets all along where our capital is, and then up through to the Piedmont, kind of Shenandoah Valley area. Now, when we looked at this and waited it by population, because as you can see up in northern Virginia, it's pretty green. But when you look at it and wait it by population as to what the populations are, and again, this is by zip code, so as you're looking at this, these don't line up to, anybody who knows Virginia's map, this does not line up to the locality in terms of the counties and cities. But the energy burden in northern Virginia is right at average, if not a little bit lower, or a little bit higher, excuse me, for the population when you wait that for a population. So that means that even in these areas where we had the lower energy burden, there are still great pockets of low-income families that need to be served within those localities. And just as an example, I pulled out, this is Arlington and Alexandria, and you can see where in the left map there, the close-up there, the high-energy burden locality is in Arlington. And when you wait it for population, it actually goes a little green, but that just means that all of the people who already have a high-energy burden, all of them have a high-energy burden within that zip code. So that is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Arlington in terms of median income for this area. And that is telling. Because as we look at the service territories in Virginia, and that's another piece that we're adding to this survey, when you look at these territories, this is actually served by Dominion. So these are localities that are served by Dominion utility for their electricity. There are plenty of places where our utilities could actually do more for their customers, their low-income customers. Virginia is served, as I said, two investor-owned utilities. Dominion has got the largest footprint with almost 3 million customers. APCO serves that Southwest region. And then the rest of the area, a large portion of the South Central is actually served by cooperatives. And at this time, the state of Virginia does not actually have any energy efficiency standard. We don't have a renewable portfolio standard. So it is coming upon our utilities to actually develop and implement energy efficiency programs to help their low-income people. Right now, Dominion is actually operating as forced by the legislation that was a compromise that they agreed to in 2015. And then again, in legislation they just passed in 2018. And yes, I did say Dominion passed the legislation. And I say that both as a former legislative aide and as an advocate, part of the compromise on both of those pieces of legislation was that they were to revamp what they call their energy share program. Originally, prior to 2015, it was strictly a bill assistance program. In 2015, with that legislation, SB 1349, it actually became an energy assistance, bill assistance program, as well as our weatherization program. So we do have weatherization programs that do come down from the federal government through our state. We do not, as a state, add any funding to that. We have weatherization providers. We are just the pass-through funnel conduit for those monies. And since 2015, we have found and worked hard to push the utilities to actually work with our weatherization providers across the Commonwealth. They're already in place and already using law heap and wet money in order to provide energy efficiency programs and weatherization to our low-income constituents. We have found that APCO actually, because of the demographics of the area that they serve, which is part of the poorest part of Virginia, they actually do a much better job of leveraging, using their funds to leverage the weatherization and law heap funding to serve their people so they're actually doing deeper retrofits, finding more energy savings with the work that they're doing than what we're finding with Dominion at this time, because they're still not quite there yet. Let's just put it that way. The other issue is that we do have a lot of service territory that is covered by cooperatives, electric cooperatives, member-owned institutions. They do not, now they are member-owned, so they have a tendency to be a little bit more conscientious about taking care of all of their members, including their low-income, but they do not have the resources in order to invest in energy efficiency programs, because again, they're member-owned, any profit goes back to the members. It's not necessarily something like the shareholders at Dominion or APCO can actually put money into an energy assistance or weatherization program. However, we have two pilot projects that are going on with one of our weatherization providers that serves basically the northern Virginia Piedmont area and down south into Roanoke. They're working with those weatherization providers to actually develop a pilot program to serve their low-income customers, and hopefully we'll get some good data from them in terms of how these programs can actually work and be able to replicate that through the rest of our co-ops. There are a number of factors that go into why low-income households have energy burdens. We are currently at VPLC. We are currently working on a campaign to reduce evictions. I'm not sure if many of you are probably familiar with Matthew Desmond's book that came out in 2016 that looked at the eviction problem across the country. There was a New York Times article out just last year about how the city of Richmond, Virginia, is the number one city for evictions. Our housing attorney actually started to dive a little deeper with VCU's Center for Urban and Planning that wanted to look at why Virginia has such a high eviction status because not only was Richmond listed as number one on the list, but then we had three other major cities that were listed in the top 10. We wanted to look at what the causes of eviction were and how can we as an organization and as well as working with our partner organizations work to reduce and if not, reverse that tide of eviction rates. And one of the things that we are finding is in collecting the data, and again, these studies are not yet out yet. We're hoping by the end of August we're going to have everything together, that housing stock is very important. What type of house the people are living in, whether they own it or rent it, how long they've been in that house, how long of a renter have they been within that house, how long is that particular landowner owned that particular house? How many times has it changed hands in terms of generations? It makes a difference, and so that's the data that we're trying to pull together now to see how we can actually address the housing stock issue as it comes to evictions as well as looking at energy efficiency and how we can actually get into those homes and start working on them. The other piece that we look at, too, is also the economic demographics of that particular region. Again, like I said, there was four cities in the top 10 listed in this in Matthew Desmond's Eviction Lab for eviction rates across the country, and most of them were all located either in Tidewater. Like I said, we had Richmond in the Tidewater area, which is our Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Hampton Roads, and Newport News. As you may know, it's a huge naval base there, so there is a lot of renter turnovers as well as a lot of low income, both military and non-military personnel. So we're trying to find where the correlations exist, and why they exist. I guess that's my timer, right? And pull that all together. So I know that there'll be a lot of questions when we get ready to release the study, but this time this is what we're looking at and the trends, what we believed are coming true through the data that we're actually seeing. So that's what we're doing in Virginia and how we're still going to have to work hard on trying to address this issue on both a policy level as well as with our independent, our investor owned utilities. Thank you. Carmen, thank you very much. I live in Virginia, so there are certainly some things I learned, some disheartening things. So to bring this, we've heard some of the bigger policy issues and then some of these issues at the state level, working with utilities. And we're now going to take a look at some of the projects that people put together and some of the work that folks are doing on the ground, so to speak, and very happy to introduce our next speaker, Sarah Rolich. And Sarah is with Action Housing. She's the Energy and Construction Manager. So she's working on the real estate development team, as well as managing all energy usage data and retrofits for Action Housing's portfolio. So I imagine she will talk about some, using some of these programs and tools that you've heard about. Oh, we're doing Dave. Okay, so Dave. Okay, so we'll hold that thought for Sarah, sorry. Okay, so Dave Reinbolt is, I wasn't getting, some people were giving me cues and I wasn't picking up on them. Dave Reinbolt is currently working with clients on weatherization and bill payment assistance programs and also consumer protection issues. Prior to rejoining Ohio partners for affordable energy, he was the manager of DOE's Weatherization Assistance Program. So he knows this program well. He's been involved in the authorization, funding and management of social service and clean energy programs for over 35 years. Dave, welcome. Thank you, Ellen. Oh, good morning, everybody. Good morning. There you go. I figured after 45 minutes we might as well get you a little engaged here. Weatherization programs past, present and future. A little bit over the top title, but you know, the cat there blowing insulation in his Tyvek kind of says what we do. What I want to talk about today is the infrastructure that has been created over years to deliver energy efficiency. And while I am a recovering lawyer, I have Don Tyvek and been in addicts in the middle of the summer and I've rolled underneath mobile homes in the middle of the winter. And so this job is not for the faint of heart if you're in the field. A little quick issue, history of low-income weatherization. From 72 to 75, the Community Service Administration, which funded community action agencies, one of the last vestiges of the war on poverty, started caulking and putting plastic sheets over people's windows to stop drafts up in Maine. And that was really the genesis of this program. At the same time, on an academic level, people started to study building science and how buildings actually operate and how the characteristics of the buildings interact. So ultimately, that science came together with the infrastructure that we built. 76 Weatherization Assistance Program was authorized. We just passed. We're now 42 years old. So people have been thinking about and doing this for some time. In 92, we really culminated the building science components of it and turned the program into a whole house program that really used diagnostics to look at aero infiltration levels, to look at insulation levels. We started to use infrared cameras to look at cavities in the house and see where there was insulation. And so we treated the house as a system and we do that to this day. In fact, in the federal statute, we can go back to a house that was weatherized before September 30th, 1994. And then the next day, October 1, apparently we were all building science base, so there's no reason to go back now. And then finally in 2012 is the result of ARA. And ARA, the American Reinvestment Recovery Act, which people don't talk about much anymore, but it gave the program $5 billion to spend in two years. It actually took four, but one of the things that it exposed was that we had some weaknesses in the system and with congressional direction, we made some changes that I think have improved, not just low income weatherization, but home performance programs across the board. The program itself provides grants to states, territories, and Indian tribes. So we've got programs in every county in the United States. We weatherize houses, which I think is pretty impressive when you think about it. We've got about 8,500 full-time equivalent jobs out there. And so it's not a huge employer, but we are pretty efficient. We've weatherized, and then those employees work for 720 local nonprofits. So that's how we cover everything. And those nonprofits are real familiar. They're part of their communities. Often community action agencies, so they're running Head Start, they're running summer feeding programs, they're running food pantries, they're doing housing, medical clinics, dental clinics, just whatever their local area needs. And so they really understand the local population. We've weatherized over 7 million homes since the program started, which is pretty impressive. Now some of those that are pre-94 didn't get the quality that we're able to provide clients now. Now we save somewhere between 23 and 31% of the primary energy used to heat and cool home. And we did 1 million homes during ARA. We were supposed to do about 800,000, and we did over a million. It took us a little longer than we planned, but we did get them all done. In Ohio, we did 41,000 homes in 27 months. We hired and trained 1,100 people that we ultimately had to lay off. At least they had a job for two years, and that's another thing that we try to do. WAP funding, oh, WAP serves clients with incomes under 200% of the federal poverty line. So that means about 20% of utility clients are eligible for low-income programs on average. Though I've worked with utilities, such as American Electric Power in Ohio, where 42% of their clients are eligible for their low-income programs. By contrast, about 10% of the money in utility DSM portfolios is allocated to low-income. So we're not getting served on par with the others, but part of that's because low-income programs are the most expensive residential programs, because we pay 100%, whereas if you buy energy-efficiency light bulbs that a utility has subsidized, you're paying part of it. And the same with product rebate programs. You're still buying the product, but you're getting a rebate. So, and I would tell you that our clients are pretty self-selective. If you look at the LIHEAP program, which is sort of the universe from where we draw most of our clients, LIHEAP has a market penetration of about 20%. About 20% of the eligible participate in the program. That's because the majority of low-income people somehow manage to afford their utility bills. It's the lowest income, or those with the highest energy usage that come into the program, they need the help. If you look at the data, the majority of low-income customers use less energy than the average household. But we're catching those folks who can't afford to invest in their housing or live in rental housing that's not maintained adequately. So, it's kind of a self-selected client base. I was talking to an energy coordinator out in Ohio last week. He has a four-year waiting list for services. And another friend of mine estimates that in Appalachia, Ohio, it would take us 100 years to do all the eligible housing at current funding levels. So, we got a challenge. And how do we do this? Well, WAP is $250 million a year thanks to Congress for giving us a $35 million increase for these last two years. That's a wonderful thing. But that is the smallest percentage of money that we spend. We actually spend almost half the money comes from LIHEAP transfer. And over $300 million comes from utilities because utilities have chosen to use the infrastructure that's been developed that pre-exists to run their programs through. So, we spend over a billion dollars a year and have for many years about a billion and weatherize around 120,000 homes. We provide the foundation for the industry. And so, as a result of congressional direction, we developed the standard work specifications which tell you how to weatherize a house or a multifamily building. We have training center accreditation. We have a network of 22 training centers across the country that we only partially support. Don't go into the training center business. It's really hard to survive. We have building performance institute certifications and then we also maintain the weatherization assistance which is a public sector audit tool. And it includes single-family, multifamily, and manufactured housing audits. So, and we're putting that on the web. That was one of the last projects I started before I left. So, that will now be web-based and accessible. That's the house. And it lists all the things you can do. Look at it on the slides. I'm running out of time. Okay. And let me see. Oh, that's the thank you and questions. You're not going to get to ask me questions now. But I'll give you a parting shot here. Low-income customers and the housing stock in which they reside is desperately in need of attention. We have removed pretty much all the barriers in the weatherization assistance program to serving multifamily. We do not require, in the resident, in the single-family home, we do not require landlords to contribute, though we do try to talk them in to putting up some money. In the multifamily space, again, no contribution required. But if a landlord wants to say do windows and windows don't meet our cost-effectiveness standard, which is pretty simple, savings to investment ratio greater than one. So, every measure has to save enough money to pay for it over the life of the measure. That's how we judge. That's a basic cost-effectiveness. So, we've tried to drop the barriers to working with multifamilies, but it's still a tougher market to crack. Because you do need willing landlords. We've found our greatest success in working with managers. Managers like to bring us into work on the buildings, because then they can tell the owner what a wonderful thing they did to improve the building. So, it's about who you touch. About 23% of the units we do are multifamily, but the vast majority are single-family homes. 13% manufactured homes, the balance, single-family homes. And believe me, there is nothing like finding an old stick-built farmhouse and being able to pump the walls through full of cellulose and air seal it and get, like, 50% savings on the utility bills. It happens. I mean, if you're averaging 30%, you've got to have a couple fifties in there. So, it's a very satisfying job. The people that I work with have been in this business for 20 years sometimes. I gave out about 20 certificates in Missouri last year for people who had been in the program over 30 years. So, I know that's not for me, but I think this might be a really good time for me to stop so we have plenty of time for questions. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Dave. So, that order makes sense, that we get an overview of the Weatherization Assistance Program, which is the U.S. Department of Energy, which is funded in the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. And so, then Sarah Rollich will talk about local case studies and her work with Action Housing as Energy and Construction Manager. So, Sarah, welcome. Hello, I'm Sarah Rollich with Action Housing, and I think it's a little unfair that I have to follow a comedian, but we'll make do. As Ellen said, I'm the Energy and Construction Coordinator and Manager for Action Housing. Action Housing is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We are a nonprofit. We are an owner, developer, and manager of affordable housing. But we are also Pennsylvania's largest Weatherization Assistance Nonprofit Provider. So, we kind of covered a lot of this, but I'm going to talk about it from on the ground. It is estimated that 60% of the affordable housing stock in Pennsylvania was built more than 20 years ago. And I suspect that this is a similar statistic all over the country. Now, older affordable multifamily buildings have deferred maintenance, are energy inefficient, and lack the necessary funds for improvement. Efficiency investments in affordable housing mean energy savings, lower energy bills, more stable rental payments reduced the pollution and better quality of life for the tenants. So, what does it mean to weatherize multifamily housing and how is it different from more traditional single-family housing? The important thing to note is that no two multifamily buildings are the same. Some have residential grade equipment inside the tenant units. Some have larger commercial grade equipment that is central to the whole building. And that is why multifamily weatherization is complicated, but also why it's so important. Okay, so weatherization benefits everybody, all parties involved. It benefits the building owner because they're able to upgrade their equipment and their building without the need of refinancing or depleting their replacement for reserve account. Sometimes we do use weatherization money during a refinance to better increase the efficiency of the building, but it's a good tool if you're not going through a refinance. It benefits the manager and maintenance staff because they get better, newer working equipment and less maintenance time changing light bulbs, dealing with faulty equipment, et cetera. It ultimately benefits the tenants because depending on how the building is metered, they will most likely see a decrease in their personal utility bills. They also get the benefit of any health and safety measures that were included in the project, which is often better indoor air quality due to upgraded systems of the ventilation. Basically, everybody benefits from the preservation of affordable housing. It's also a great tool because you're able to tackle gas, electricity and water savings all at the same time, whereas most utility programs, you have to do one or the other. It also brings funding and technical expertise to building managers, which is necessary to improve the buildings. Sometimes owners, they know they want to improve their buildings. They know that their equipment is inefficient, but they just don't know how to get to that next step. Bringing in certified energy auditors and technical expertise really helps these owners and managers think about that. I have two different multifamily weatherization case studies to share with you today. The first was done during federal stimulus area years, so I am going to talk about it, Dave. The next one was done about a year ago using traditional weatherization funds, not during a refinance. During the era of federal stimulus, the Weatherization Assistance Program in Pennsylvania partnered with the Pennsylvania Housing and Finance Agency, which is the agency that gives out our LIGHTEC credits, to weatherize buildings in a program titled Preservation through Smart Rehab. Since the funding ended, there hasn't been any multifamily weatherization in Pennsylvania up until last year, so we're really trying to push for this to happen more. Wood Street Commons is located in Pittsburgh, and the original construction was from 1923, and it had been renovated in the early 1980s. It's a 16-story building right in our downtown, 10 stories of residential. It houses 258 single-room occupancy units, and the building primarily serves folks who are homeless or at risk of being homeless. It was operating in a deficit every year, and it was at risk of being closed. It was formally owned and operated by the YMCA. The building was acquired in 2009 by Action Housing. We are the managing general partner in the new ownership entity whenever we did the refinance. The total acquisition and rehab costs were $4 million, just for the residential floors, but $1.25 million came from the weatherization program. That cost per unit for just weatherization was about $4,800. The rest of the financing came from the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Foundation money was also used for gap financing. All mechanical systems, all HVAC systems were upgraded. The exterior walls were furred out and added insulation, and all of the lighting was upgraded in addition to all of the other renovation measures that were done. We were required to stay on Pittsburgh's steam system, so we couldn't transfer out of that, which we think we would have seen a larger savings, but the total energy savings per year turned out to be $75,000, which really helped bring the operations back into budget, and without the WAP dollars, we would not have seen those kind of savings. So it was a very, very important project. The next one I want to talk about is Broadview Manor Apartments, which is located in Pitcairn, which is in the Mon Valley, about 25 miles east of Pittsburgh. It's a 72-unit building of seniors built in 1979. So for this one, the total project cost was $180,000, which equates to about $2,500 per unit, which is actually the sweet spot where a lot of weatherization folks want their projects to be at. And this is an added perk for a provider because doing multifamily projects often brings the cost per unit down, which helps their overall budget. So in this project, we cleaned and tuned the furnaces in the tenant units, and we installed two new high-efficiency units for the community room. All exterior doors were weather stripped, and the lighting upgraded to all LED lights in the tenant units in all the common areas in the exteriors. We also, probably the biggest part of the project, we upgraded, there was a ventilation system in the building that wasn't quite adequate, so we were able to bring in 24 hours, seven days a week fresh air into the building, and we upgraded the exhaust. So we really saw an increase in the indoor air quality of the building, which was big for the residents. And in Pennsylvania, the weatherization program will pay for 20% of the health and safety costs. So the building was required to pay for the rest, but just bringing that technical expertise in and having those dollars available really, really, really helped. So Mary, one of our tenants at Broadview, I had the privilege of speaking with her last week about the program and her thoughts on it. She's been in the building for 18 years. She loves her home, and she was really excited to talk to us about it, and I think if she was able to get around better, she would have liked to come here and talk to you about it actually. She is saving about 20% on her electricity costs every month, and she says that it's warmer in the winter without the furnace having to be turned up and the indoor air quality. She's a cooker, and she said that as soon as she's done cleaning the dishes, she can't even smell the smells anymore and that they're not going out into the hallway. So they really saw an improvement there. And then seniors in particular love the brighter LED lights. It's safer in the hallways. It's safer in the exteriors at night. And again, just the weatherization program provided the mechanism for these improvements, and we're really happy that we were able to do this without a whole refinance of this building. But thank you very much. Sarah, thank you so much. It's helpful to bring it home and see how this is actually affecting people, real people, real lives, real housing, real indoor air quality. I also have to thank Dave for mentioning building science. I handle building policy for EESI, and so we like to bring science to the policymaking process or building science to the policymaking process. So that's great. But Sarah, thank you. And now I'd like to open it up for your questions. We have heard a lot of information today about a lot of programs, and you might have a few questions. So please, it's your turn. No one said anything about community land trusts. They're just coming into Maryland and all of the so-called affordable housing programs, particularly in Montgomery County, Maryland, did not protect the existence of the programs, and at one point within three years they could return to the marketplace, would be lost, tax dollars would be lost, and more tax dollars would be used to try to replace them. We've brought two community land trusts into the state. Unfortunately, they have not incorporated energy efficiency or renewable energy, so I'm curious as to how that might be pursued, but how do you preserve the existence of affordable housing as affordable? Okay, now you can hear me. Thank you for that question. Community land trusts are really important. They're another tool. We really only talked about two tools for preserving affordable housing, mainly because EFA has focused on those two tools as our top priorities, and they're really important ways to go about preserving affordable housing in community land trusts is certainly one of them. The National Housing Trust has long supported community land trusts and looked at financing models to help support them, and we certainly believe that energy efficiency improvements should be done in any preservation of affordable housing. It just makes sense. Operating costs, the number one driver of operating costs in affordable housing, if I haven't mentioned it already, that's why this is so important. We have to be sure that if we're going to preserve affordable housing and we're committed to doing that, that we're addressing how to reduce the energy costs by promoting energy efficiency. So I don't think we have... Community land trusts is a whole other conversation that we weren't prepared to talk about today, but we very much support it, and we try to lift up models of where it is working really well to serve communities to make sure that affordable housing isn't lost. Thank you. Anyone else? Oh, another question? Hi. Thank you all for the discussion. One of the things that Mr. Reinbolt brought up was that many low-income users of electricity and other utilities use those utilities less, and I think a lot of that also comes down to being worried about the affordability and making sacrifices to their quality of life. And I was wondering if any of you have done or come across health impact assessments to increasing energy efficiency and increasing access to utilities for affected groups. Well, thanks. I'm glad you found it useful. As a part of the evaluation that was done of the 2008 WAP program and the ARRA program, we were able to determine that the value of the health improvements to our clients was over $14,000 per unit, which is below what we're spending per unit. By comparison, we're saving clients, on average, $283 a year on their bills, mostly because natural gas prices are relatively low. But the health impacts are profound. Fewer misdays of work, fewer doctors visit. Folks are well aware that we reduce asthma triggers in the home and can significantly reduce health care costs associated with that. But it also affects people with breathing difficulties, COPD, emphysema, and even circulatory issues, because they're very sensitive to both indoor air quality and heating and cooling loads. In fact, there are a number of pilots around the country that are really looking at this, and if I had a dream, one of my dreams is that someday a doctor will be able to write a script for a client so that they can have their house weatherized. Cheaper than sending them to the emergency room three or four times a month. Another question. Oh, sorry. Ariel is going to add to that. Yeah, I wanted to add on to that. That, sorry, even though low income households tend to have lower bills, they also tend to live in smaller housing units as well. So that's one reason why those bills may be lower. And through the studies that we've done, we have found that even though that they're using less energy, they're still paying more per cost of square foot in their homes and they have higher energy burdens. So just the fact that they're using less energy doesn't mean that they're having more affordable energy. I just wanted to note that. Thanks. Another question. Hello. My name is Steve Petriolo. I work for the USDA Rural Utility Service Electric Program. My question is geared for the woman that I live in the center that will speak out the rate adjustment burdens. I like your modeling, but I was curious, have you done any research or trying to look at the counties where you're trying to observe purchase power agreements and trying to attract the generation transmission flow? Because that may actually help to isolate geographic regions where those high red, those high burdens are where you can at least get in touch with congressional representation. You'll probably be able to flesh out some more noise with that. I'm curious if you've done that. I specifically, the majority, for those familiar with my agency, help a lot of the cooperatives and state, local, tribal, government, and even private sector representation. I'll rate your response. Thank you for that question. It is not something that we have looked at yet, but I would love to talk to you more about that, specifically as we are moving towards trying to work with our electric cooperatives in the state to see how they can actually serve their low-income members through their electric service. It is not purchase power agreements in Virginia is something relatively new. It is not something that has been in deep practice yet. So we've only just had enacting legislation within the last few years. So it is something that we have to take a deeper look at as we move forward. So I appreciate that. And yes, definitely want to talk to you about that. Thank you. I know there was a question up here. Yes. You briefly mentioned manufactured housing in this process. That's an interesting spot. I represent Peter DeFazio in Oregon District 4 and manufactured housing is very common there. Often it's sort of a hybrid model where someone owns the land and then you rent your spot. And I suspect that they also have somewhat idiosyncratic usage of utilities compared to other structures. Could you talk a little bit about the weatherization patterns for that and other issues relating to that and also whether that would go through the landowner or the renter who also owns their own manufactured home because there's two parties involved there. Thank you. Manufactured homes are pretty unique. And trailer parks, I mean, let's call it what it is, sometimes are sub-metered. So the landlord is actually selling the electricity, comes in as a commercial customer and then they sub-meter and sell it. If that's the scenario and the owner of the unit doesn't have a contractual privity with the utility company, you can't access any utility programs. But we do try to work. So you normally don't see the landlord involved in the, or the landlord who owns the park involved in these. It's really on the individual customer. We do a lot of mobile homes in Ohio. We just, we have the same issue. It is the dominant new low-income housing. And we're starting to do a lot of heating units in them. Aerosource heat pump technology has really improved significantly. And so if you can replace baseboard heat with heat pumps, you can have a huge impact on somebody's bill. Not the easiest things to insulate. But one of the agencies up in Vermont invented this thing they call the taco. And it's like a roll-up thing. And you go underneath the mobile home, put up one side, and then you unroll the insulation across the bottom. So we're looking for ways to streamline and get what we can. But it's because of the nature of the structures. It's a tough one to do to get for dollar in and energy savings out. I'll just add very briefly. The National Housing Trust has this community development and financial institution that's part of our organization, NHTCDF. And we do financing, typically a gap financing to support preservation of affordable housing. We have done some work also in Vermont to support. Manufactured housing historically is not very energy efficient. We are supporting financing to try to preserve and create manufactured housing that in certain small cases and we're interested in doing more to make sure that it is energy efficient. Because it is an important source of affordable housing. The financing model, as you described, is complicated. It's very different than rental buildings or even single-family rental homes. But we're looking at that and we're interested in doing more and we can help with some gap financing. We're trying to do that. Thank you. A question over here. Hi, my name is Eric Baena. I'm with NASCAS. We represent the State Directors of the Wellerization Assistance Program. Carmen, you touched on it and Dave as well. Could you talk a little bit about the benefit of leveraging that utility funding into the traditional wellerization network as opposed to kind of what sounded like this patchwork of multiple utility programs with different rules and different systems? Sure. I can just give you an example of some information that I received from one of our largest wellerization providers, CHP. They operate, like I said, through the northern Virginia, Piedmont area, and then they have counties around the city of Roanoke, which is in our southwest part of the state. APCO is the investor-owned utility that serves that Roanoke area, and they have found that with APCO, they have developed their program, their weatherization program, and this is a regulated program. So this is a program that their rate payers actually pay for. It's approved by our state corporation commission. They can take about $2,200. Let me just get my figure right. $2,200 from APCO funds to leverage that and use only $5,000 of weatherization funds in order to retrofit, and this goes back to the manufacturer home because there's a lot of manufactured homes down in that area to actually weatherize and then retrofit those homes with some energy efficiency appliances and heating systems where otherwise that money it would all have to come from weatherization, which is about $7,300. So they're able to do a few more homes that way than actually having that investor-owned money there than just having the weatherization money, and so they've been actually able to serve, I believe the figure is about 24% more homes just in that particular district, that region of the state. Dominion's relatively new at doing these low-income programs. Again, we only started working with them on developing their programs since 2015. I think the first one actually went into place in 2017. We have not quite figured out how to get them to work as closely with the weatherization providers as APCO has figured out how to do it, but again, I think part of that is just because the service territory that APCO has, they do have a high percentage of low-income customers, and back in 2012, they actually saw a spike in their energy bills that almost tripled, which was devastating to some of their low-income population, particularly in the coal region of our state. Thank you. And I'm glad you mentioned APCO. I actually helped design that program. I'm glad it works. No, the leveraging is critical, and I'll tell you what the best practice is as far as I'm concerned. You have the WAP dollars. You have all the standards. It's a very prescriptive statute, so you can only spend a certain amount on health and safety, but it basically runs around the savings to investment ratio for each item. The LIHEAP money that gets transferred in should certainly follow the WAP technical standards, but it shouldn't be run through the WAP state plan because LIHEAP doesn't care about the savings to investment ratio. And believe it or not, when you do the shell of a house, you insulate it, then a furnace isn't cost-effective, generally. So if you want to replace the furnace while you're there and you can't go back, then you use the LIHEAP money or you use utility money. And I find that the utility money is best run through another route and not run through the state. We had several states that have budget impasses and they couldn't spend the utility money that came through because they had no spending authority, plus sometimes it gets stolen. All of the Connecticut low-income money got taken last year for deficit reduction. So one last thing. The WAP program is structured. We get about 5% admin at the local level and the states get 5%. You try admin in a complex program for 5%. It's really, really tough. So the LIHEAP money, but most importantly, the utility money, if the program is properly structured, can help you support the admin, the outreach. I like to call it the program delivery because you got to schedule the clients, you got to qualify the clients, and those are costs that have to be absorbed somewhere in the program. And anti-poverty agencies generally don't have extra money to subsidize a federal program. So we have to find other people's money to do it. And in a number of states, we're pretty dang good at that. In Ohio, we have $12 million in WAP money. We have about $22 million in LIHEAP transfer. And then the balance of the $85 million, or the majority, is utility money. Great. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for the question. We have a couple minutes for one or two more questions. Anyone? Yes. What Dave and Carmen referred to in terms of lessons learned is the way I would characterize those responses. What do you have that we can take back to our communities in terms of lessons learned, or what really can make the difference? Well, while Carmen coughs, I'll... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. But if you live in a town that has a municipal electric system, I would sit down with your Munis and see about having them develop some sort of an energy efficiency program that targets their low-income customers. It's always better to help somebody pay their bill and shut them off, you know? Also, we have... Local governments contribute money to this program oftentimes for health and safety for home repairs. So, for example, the agency in Licking County in Ohio has a senior levy, and they get $120,000 from the senior levy every year, and they use it to repair roofs and gutters and mitigate mold, and then they can go in and weatherize the units. So, developing some funding streams that can let us do the things that the feds, federal dollars, or the utility dollars, which by definition are focused on energy savings. We have a real problem in the business with deferrals, with houses we can't fix, and those are the ones that can often save the most... We can save the most energy and improve the health the most, but we have to have those additional funds. I would also just add, going back to the low-income housing tax credit, as I mentioned, each state has to develop a plan every year for... or every two years, usually it's annually, for how they're going to prioritize their use of the credit. It's a public open process, and there is an opportunity to comment and to take a look at that. I would encourage people to do that if you're interested in letting the state know how you think they should be prioritizing their use of dollars. Certainly, prioritizing use of targeting energy efficiency retrofits in preservation or in new construction is directly relevant to this conversation. So, that's all publicly available. Again, if you look at Prescat, you can see what they've done in past years, and you can get contact information from the different state agencies. Thank you. So, that's a great question and comments to end on, I think. Lessons learned. Thank you all so much for coming. I think this really shows all the possibilities of making homes more energy efficient and reducing the energy burden and utility bills, improving health and comfort and safety, and we didn't even talk about the benefits to the environment. Thank you all very much.