 start in. Okay. Please tell him do not take the call. So we will need to record. Go ahead Danielle. Do you know? Okay great recording. And are we, is this being recorded for public television as well? CCTV is on. Yes. Great. Okay. Excellent. Thank you everybody. This is March 10th. This is the regular meeting of the Board of Electric Commissioners and we have a light agenda this particular month, but we have quite a bit coming up in the next two months. First up on the agenda itself is the agenda. Wondering if there are any edits or recommended changes. Gabrielle, I'm on. Excellent. Thank you, Commissioner Shagnan. I appreciate you getting through the, uh, admirers of internet technology. Sorry, sorry about that guys. Not a problem. Any edits to the agenda? We'll begin with the minutes, the review and approval of the minutes from February 10th. Wondering if there are any substantive changes that have been identified that need to be modified or edited? Just one little one. In there, somewhere, and I can find the page. We say the fee that would come about should develop item pass, which it did, is $100 per ton of carbon. I would recommend amending that so we say whether it's carbon or carbon dioxide and also for, for how many years? $100 per what? So point of information. That's that. Okay. Great. Thank you, Bob. Thank you for your keen eyes. Any other edits? If someone could make a motion to approve these? I moved to approve the most minutes as submitted. A second? Second. All in favor. Commissioner Shagnan. I wasn't there for the meeting, so I'm not. Okay, same. Okay. Commissioner Herondine. Hi. Commissioner Modi. Is he not on? I think so. I guess not. Commissioner Whitaker. Hi. Thank you. We're passing as amended, correct? Yes, but I need somebody to move. Yes, with a slight amendment, yes. Okay. And I'm also an I. Oh, sorry. Did I skip you? I'm sorry. That's okay. Okay, I just texted Commissioner Modi. Moving forward, we have the public forum. I'm uncertain if we have any members of the public with us, Laurie. No, we do not. Okay. And so the next step is the commissioner's corner. This is an opportunity for commissioners to raise questions or share thanks or provide any observations with the staff as well as the other commissioners. Okay, thank you. James, thank you for the information about Hula and the ground source heat pump. I think I have quelled my inner hangups about that, and your response was clear and more than adequate. Thank you. And again, I just want to thank Bob Boland without whom, whose knowledge it would have been utterly impossible for me to craft that clear communication. So thank you. Let's see, just for my own information, I noticed that in, I guess January, there was terrible capacity factors for the two solar installations, one in Pine Street, one at the airport. I presume they were just snow covered for most of the month. So if somebody can verify that fine, but we're capacity factors are like half a percent. Whoa. Moving on some day, maybe not now, I'd be interested in knowing what a typical reduction in energy use is when one of our weatherization projects goes through. I may have asked that before, but I'm still interested. And that was mentioned in our notes. Residential? Yeah, let's say residential. And also the question of the cost effectiveness of 75 percent rebates per heat pumps. Just wanted how the argument goes. No rush on that. Even though the rebates got my attention. Okay, one more thing. No, never mind. That's it for now. Thank you. Other commissioners? Okay. Commissioner Herendine, I'll just note that I feel like it's been gray in Burlington since like October. I don't know about anybody else, but I think I just started to see sun about like six days ago. But my thought is I wouldn't count on it improving for February either. Well, so is it clouds or is it snow? Well, I think it might have been clouds and snow in January and I suspect it will be snow in February. I mean, we got an awful lot of snow in the last month or so. But again, we'll check. Yeah, the airport was 0.1 percent. Yeah, my panel is on my roof had a very similar capacity factor during the month of January and February due to the ice and snow. And you know, if they're covered even on a sunny day, they won't they won't really produce much. So unless that cunning plan by UVM goes through, Darren. Is that a secret? It's a reference to a pilot project to look at using thermal energy to defrost the animals. Okay, thank you. We'll move on. Next up, we have the general manager's update. This is an oral update followed by the financials. And thank you, Darren Springer. Great. Thanks everybody. Two items that we have. Want everyone to know that we launched a new incentive for residential leaf blowers. $40 incentive that's now available as of March 1. And that is complementing an existing commercial leaf blower incentive that we have. We had hoped to have a snowblower electric incentive as well. We're going to keep working on that in hope to have something available in time for the next winter season. Sometimes the value proposition is really related to how much usage you're going to see and how much fossil fuel reduction you'll see. And with the snowblowers, we're still calibrating a little bit on that. But the leaf blower incentive is out there, rebate forms up on our website under the lawn equipment lawn mower section. I know we've had some discussion previous meetings. I want to thank Chris Burns for compiling in this month's commission report a list of a variety of low and moderate income programs and incentives with participation information where it's available for the commission to review. We're obviously, I checked the numbers again this month on the EV program between the low moderate income incentive for new vehicles and the purchase of pre-owned vehicles. We're seeing above 20% of our total rebates going to one of those two categories, which has increased from very small percentages now over 20%. Hopefully that'll continue to grow. And then likewise with heat pumps, we've seen the 75 or the up to 75% incentive that Commissioner Herndon referenced, I think, is inclusive of the low moderate income rebate in some cases. And that helps get to that 75% threshold. And we've seen a number of Berlin-Tonians be able to take advantage of that low moderate income incentive. So hopefully that's helpful. If there's follow-up as you review it, let me know. But again, Chris Burns did some great work putting that together. I want to express appreciation. On March 22nd, we'll be bringing the final tiering packet to the City Council Board of Finance for approval. This stems from our IBEW contract, the current contract. We had agreed to do tiering for at least 25% of the positions, the union positions, in each fiscal year. If this item is approved at the Board of Finance City Council, we'll complete that work one year ahead of schedule and have provided a position tiering for each of the positions throughout BED that qualify. And Monir Kasti and Lynn Reagan from HR have done a tremendous amount of work on this program along with the IBEW and particularly Duke as the Chief Steward. We really appreciate all their work to bring us this point on tiering. And it's gratifying to see when there are folks who can take advantage of it. They gain some additional cross-training or take some additional courses and are able to move into a more senior level position as a result of the career ladder program now that we have. I think it's a great opportunity for employees and for the company. And very much appreciative of that. I included in the Commission packet an op-ed that Betsy Lesnikowski, Chief Forester at McNeill, and I put together really wanted to try to put some of the information about McNeill and sustainability and economics all in one place and be able to refer to it in the future. Certainly, there's lots of discussion. We've had good discussion, I think, at the Commission in the past around McNeill and sustainability. There was some discussion around this in the community as well, and we thought it was timely to put something out there that talked about the story at McNeill. A couple other items. The next month, I think Chair Stebbins referenced, I'm expecting we'll have quite a busier agenda for you. I anticipate we'll have a draft budget to review for FY22, which will be a weighty item. We may have a transmission-related, power supply-related MOU that we're working on, that may be an agenda item next month. And then, as I highlighted in the report, we anticipate being finished with our Synapse Net Zero Energy Roadmap update, which will cover emissions and fossil fuel data for 2019 and 2020, and we'll be able to report out on that at next month's Commission meeting. We have a couple of items we're working on completing there, and I won't ruin any of the surprise of seeing the results and the data, but we'll have graphs and good facts and figures, and obviously, the key thing will be we're looking at how the pandemic affected some of those numbers as well, and so we're doing some analysis, both from the top down, how much fossil fuel are we using as a community, and also from the bottom up, how many incentives are we seeing going out the door, how many folks are participating in different programs. We'll be able to present all of that to you next month. So, we'll likely have a busy month in April and likely as well in May. We'll have a final budget presentation in May. I believe we'll also be working on updating the strategic direction in the May and June timeframe, so we'll work with the Commission on that process as well, and just one other quick item. I know Commissioner Moody is not here, but we appreciated him joining with the executive team to make a selection for the second annual Jim Reardon Public Service Award. We will be setting a date. In fact, Lori and I need to connect to set a date. We heard from Deb Reardon, Jim's wife, that she and her family will appreciate joining us for an all-employee meeting where we can make that presentation, and certainly if there are members from the Commission who'd like to join without triggering a public meeting requirement, then certainly we'd welcome if a member or two from the Commission would like to join us for that. They'd be happy to have you. And I think those are the items that I had on my list. Questions for Darren? Thanks, Darren. Once you've selected a date time, if you don't mind letting me know, and if I can attend, I'd love to, but it may not work if it's Tuesday through Friday. Commissioner Herndine, I think you're on mute if you're trying to speak to us. Darren, it sounded like there's an action item that's going to come out of Chris to us. Can you, is that on some kind of schedule? Is that relative to the low-modern income customer information? That was already in the report this month. It was at the back of the monthly report. So it's more that after you review that information, if there's additional follow-up that you have for us outside of the questions, I know you just referenced that James will follow up on. Let us know and Chris is glad to follow up, but we provided that additional kind of low-modern income focus based on some of the discussions from previous months. Okay, thanks. Really looking forward to seeing what Synapse's updates are. That'll be great. And financials, do you have a PowerPoint? I do, thanks. Good evening, everybody. Oh, and one other thing I did hear, good evening, sorry, I did hear from Commissioner Moody and his laptop isn't starting up. That was it. Okay, so let me show my screen. Okay, can everyone see that now? Yes, okay, thanks. So before I got into sharing the COVID low data has become our routine, I also wanted to provide an update on the event of default on our revenue bonds that was cured as of February 8th, 2021 by our new bond trustee, Zion's Bank. So that event is over and we're very happy. So it was one of the last pieces of business that former finance director Andrew McNeill took care of prior to her departure, working through the transition to the new bond trustee and then working with that trustee to file the supplemental resolution that this commission and the city council passed last spring almost a year ago, I think. And so that's now on file with Emma, which is sort of the bondholder disclosing service that serves as a notice to bondholders that that event has been cured. So piece of good news for us, which we certainly celebrated here. So now turning to the normal financial review, these are the loads for residential sales in green, commercial sales in purple, and then total system energy in orange for January, which is the financial results that I'll share in a minute. Overall, system energy was down by just over 2%, 2.2%. So again, residential has been higher, commercial also down a little bit less of an imbalance last month than has previously been the case. For February, it's actually looking different story, but kind of overall as a system better, residential is up higher and commercial though is also improved. So as a system only down half just under half a percent. So that's the where loads continue to be kind of up and down, but sort of a similar pattern through the winter. And I'll turn now to the January 2021 financial results, making this a little bit larger for you. So looking at the income statement, perhaps a bit too large, there we go. For January, we had a net loss for the month of $320,000 compared to our budgeted expected loss of $253,000. So $67,000 are, you know, variants to the negative. Sales to customers continue to be down as we just saw with the COVID loads. So that's one main source of the variants under budgeted results. Other major items to call out are in power supply expenses were favorable by $150,000. The main driver of that was that McNeil production was 36% under budget for the month of January. So that meant we had less fuel expense. It was somewhat offset by higher iso energy exchange purchases compared to budget, but the fuel savings were greater. On operating expenses, we had some favorable timing of outside services, and we continue to just be very careful and proactive in limiting anything unnecessary in terms of expenses. Gain loss on disposition of plan is a pretty large favorable variance, but that's mostly timing. There was a $35,000 amount that hit in December that wasn't supposed to hit in December. So that will balance out to own budget by the end of June. And then also some variants, which we've again seen throughout the year in terms of fewer customer contributions to capital projects than budgeted because of COVID. And there's some timing in here in terms of when work orders have been billed. So overall, again, for the year to date, we have an actual net income of at this point $262,000 compared to budget of almost $700,000. So $428,000 of variance. I'll then move down to capital spending. So here we are, as of January, about halfway spent through the capital budget, significant variance in where that half is coming from, depending on the type of plant production and transmission are fairly well spent through. The timing of those happened kind of sooner in the fiscal year. Distribution in general, which includes IT forward, have more timing issues. IT forward, we actually are kicking off the MDM implementation next week actually. So this line here with general will start to change between now and June 30th as we implement license purchases and start to implement the MDM and have professional services fees. Then I'll move down to cash on hand and the ratios. So we had just under $8 million in cash and investments in the operating fund. Adjusted debt service coverage ratio is at 0.86 as of the end of January. That's slightly down by one tenth of or 100th of a percent. We were at 0.87 last month. And our days cash on hand actually bumped up a little bit. We were at 105 as of December close. We're now at 109 as of January close. I think that's largely due in part to received almost a half a million dollars in its LGER local government COVID grant relief which reimbursed us for some of our COVID related labor expenses. So that was a help to the cash balance. Any questions for me? Yeah, can you go back up to the year to date stuff? Certainly. I think it's kind of a basic question, but I am curious what happens at the end of the year when and actually the chart or the table. So if we end up in the red, what happens on June 30th? Yeah, the net income or being a net loss rather, if we have a net loss as opposed to a net income, excuse me for a second, is not that great of a concern? I mean we've had net losses before, not that we've planned to, but it hasn't occurred before. The bigger impact is on the cash reserves and the days cash on hand and making sure that we're managing that so that we actually have cash money to cover expenses as an on and on going basis. So not all of the expenses or transactions or ins and outs that you see here are actual cash moving, right? Some of them are revenue recognition or expense recognition, right? But that doesn't don't reflect green money, you know, leaving the bank, so to speak. That makes sense? Yep, yep. So this is a second year in a row too, right? It did it happen? I can't remember how big the impact of the pandemic was on fiscal 20. And so yeah, I mean it seems like some of these are transactional or they're not actual, as you mentioned, green money. But at some, how long does this go before it starts impacting the, you know, the ability, I think you showed the bond ratings, the need to have cash on hand to meet certain bond ratings. And so yeah, maybe this can keep going. But it seems to me like just intuitively that at some point there is an end, right? Like we can't keep losing money, losing money, losing money without doing something about it. And I don't know when that and there are strategies, right? I'm sure there's plenty of levers you could raise rates or do some other things. But I'm just sort of curious, like, are you worried? Is there a time when that you might be worried? Is there something to pay attention to or keep our eyes on or should we just keep saying, okay, whatever, we're in the red, that's fine. Because it's not all real money. And but we have seen, I think many of us have seen other government institutions fall into financial problems, right? Like, and I don't know at what point we need to watch this or is there something that we can be keep our eye on so that we understand when we might be getting closer to that point? These are perfect questions and it's why we're having this meeting, even though there isn't a ton else to talk about. I was feeling the same way about those last three metrics where at this point they seem really lopsided relative to what we want to keep for, which has been a goal of ours to try to keep that or close to an A rating or that, you know, isn't it seems like right now it's getting further, further lopsided. So I'm happy to speak to those items. I agree, Commissioner Whitaker, that we don't want to see year after year net income losses. We certainly, I think in FY 19 had a challenging year. In FY 20, we had planned to have a better year and we were on track for that kind of through March and then COVID impacts certainly created an end result that was not favorable compared to where we thought we would be. Some of the net income loss that's reflected for FY 20 and FY 19 is a non-cash pension adjustment. So that is a little less concerning than a, you know, operating cash impact. But we certainly had planned in the budget for FY 21 absent significant COVID impacts to have a stronger net income to be able to add cash back to the business and clearly while we're currently have some modest net income year to date, not on track as the negative variance shows. So there's an open question whether we end the year with a positive or negative net income. I think a lot of that will depend on sales to customers as the COVID impacts start to, you know, ameliorate hopefully with the vaccine rolling out. But regardless, we're not going to in all likelihood not going to produce the net income at the full-year budget level of 1.937 million that we had anticipated in a what would have been a normal year. So that's a lot of the thinking that's going into the FY 22 budget. Emily correctly pointed out that our first concern is making sure we have the cash position to transition from FY 21 to FY 22 with the general obligation bond and continue to fund all the basics of our business. And I think we are in position to do that. But longer term, we've obviously gone 12 years without any sort of rate increase or rate change. We're seeing continued significant arrearage challenges due to COVID, some of which may be relieved through state or federal programs. So that'll have an impact on kind of where we end the year. But we will absolutely review whether it's appropriate in FY 22 to have a rate adjustment as one of the factors in looking at making sure we have a stable and productive business. Certainly with Moody's metrics, as Commissioner Moody pointed out, we still have a strong debt service coverage ratio and a strong cash on hand well above the metrics for an A rating. But the adjusted debt service coverage ratio has been lower than where we want it to be now for several years. And we certainly know that and will be considering that as well as part of whether we recommend any sort of rate adjustment for FY 22. Okay, that's interesting. And then sort of follow on question to that is there's a rate piece, but then there's also the business model and certainly BEDs. And I don't know that I don't know this for sure, but I think we all sort of operated under this pre COVID paradigm of how our society worked and how people spent time in offices or generated energy and used energy based on this, you know, a lot of assumptions about a nine to five type of scenario and blah, blah, blah. And maybe this is going to, maybe we're going to bounce back to that, but maybe we're not. And it does seem like fiscal 22 is really going to be a year for us to see that. And I'm curious, have you guys started thinking like, okay, if we don't go back to pre COVID levels and there's some interim place that we end up in, what does that, how does that impact or how does that change the way that BED says this is how we should be operating as a utility? Right, no, it's an excellent question. I think we're thinking about it for our own workforce. And for the, I think the city's thinking about it as well as with these remote technologies that we have, are there going to be flexibilities in the future where people may not be completely nine to five or seven to three or whatever the shift might have been exactly the same way? Are there going to be changes in commercial and residential use? I think it's interesting for February from the data that Emily showed that although residential was up and commercial was down not as much, we were basically back to where we would normally be pre COVID on the overall system use, but the way we got there looked quite a bit different than the way we normally might have gotten there. I think the biggest pressure though is if there was just less electricity use overall and we had the same fixed system costs then all things equal, that puts upward pressure on rates to maintain the system. And obviously our business model that we've laid out for the coming years is to do exactly the opposite of that, which is to use more kilowatt hours, spread over the same or similar fixed system costs, but do so through the electrification programs that'll help reduce fossil fuel use. So I think there are going to be some interesting outcomes on that front for FY22, but all things equal, if we have relatively the same fixed system costs, if there's less electric use overall, we're certainly going to see rate pressure as a result of that. And that is something that we're going to need to account for. And if I could just add a couple points of color to Darren, in terms of where we end the year and as Darren alluded to, we know that the budget, that $1.9 million of net income include, well, didn't include an almost $1 million pension adjustment that's non-cash. So the first thing is we know that and we're making sure to build it in for FY22's budget so that the net income that's projected will be more accurate. And then secondly, currently we're tracking on a reduced net income, but it's still a positive net income through January. As we're doing our monthly forecasting and predicting where we are going to end the year, we're predicting that we're going to end at this point roughly $900,000 net loss. However, if you consider the fact that that budget target included $1 million of pension, non-cash pension expense, then we're essentially ending at a zero dollar balance even with COVID, which isn't really that bad considering the challenges and the fact that the budget was developed without COVID baked into it, so to speak. And we've been managing with COVID fluidly throughout the year. And then, so that was a little bit about where we are predicting we're going to end FY21 and then as we are now budgeting for FY22 and planning that. In addition to kind of considering whether a rate case is necessary, this year our load forecasts, now that we have the benefit of a year of COVID data, we're able to model our load forecasters, able better to model like, okay, what are the loads going to look like assuming? And what we're assuming right now is kind of a similar hangover effect, so to speak, to what we experienced during the last recession in 2008, 2009 and even the previous one where, yes, the pandemic may be hopefully gone or much, much better. It may be perhaps in a period of months, but those are the things that we don't know is how long will the economy take to recover, what will be the change in use in commercial space, what kinds of businesses will come back, which will take longer, and how will those, all of those micro individual, you know, consumer decisions affect our overall bottom line. You know, we can't know that, but we have assumed sort of a lag. We were not assuming a like immediate bounce back, but kind of a gradual coming back up over a period of months. Interesting. Thank you. That helps, yeah. Other questions? I've been thinking the same thing, Bethany, and I will really, it's kind of amazing that we're at a half million given what's occurred over the last year and as well as with the one million pension sort of timing of that announcement as well. I do have a question about interpretation, page 17 of the financials. Just a question of how you do pluses and minuses for a capital purchase. Right at the top, for example, for the Champlain Parkway. I'm just not sure how to interpret those reds and blacks. Sorry, 17. One more. Yep. Okay. So let me see how I can do on this one. So these are, remember how every month I say customer contributions to capital projects are less than budgeted because the projects have been delayed due to COVID? That's where you're seeing, that's where you're seeing this. These are the quote unquote customer driven capital projects where we are doing capital work, but specific, we're doing that in response to specific development where the customer is contributing toward the cost of that asset. And due to GASB accounting rules, we are having to record that as income on the income statement when the project is completed. Even though it's really a contribution to a capital asset, but that's the way we have to account for it. So here we are seeing that we were expecting to see, for example, I believe this 555 is a customer, yeah, the customer contribution is actually showing as a negative revenue, I think. And so we haven't received any of it. Okay, but have we spent, how much money have we spent on it? No. So none of these projects have advanced essentially this year, even though they were planned to. But so one of the impacts of that is that if we had labor that was going to be attributed to those capital projects, then that labor has to be reallocated and it may happen in a way where if it wasn't being paid for by a customer project, it's absorbed more into the operating expenses for BED. Okay, but just let me make sure you understand, when I look at the top line, can I tell from those three numbers that nothing's been done? Yeah, because there's no actuals to date. This is blank. Okay, thanks. Other questions at it? Not at it. Fascinating. Okay, so thank you, Emily, and also thank you because clearly you're still doing two jobs. Is there any sense of when you might not be doing two jobs? We are, we are the finance director's position or posting closed on March 1st, and we are reviewing applications now, meaning later this week to discuss. Thanks for carrying on the torch. It's definitely critically important. The last item on the agenda is, you know, the commissioners closed out if folks have anything they want to add. Now's the time. Otherwise, we could make an emotion to adjourn because the next two meetings will be very packed. I moved that we adjourn. In a second. All in favor? Commissioner Stevens? Aye. Commissioner Modi? Aye. Commissioner Shagman? Aye. Commissioner Herndy? Aye. Commissioner Whitaker? Aye. Thank you. We adjourn at 613. Thanks, everybody.