 Hello everyone. This is Miguel Giannes with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We are very happy to co-host this webinar about Ombio Financing for Iowa's communities. And I would like to welcome everyone this afternoon and thank everyone for attending this webinar. So as I said, we're going to be talking about Ombio Financing and how it can work for municipalities across Iowa. And so before I start the webinar, I would like to ask everyone to please mute your phones if you're using the phone. And so you can use star 6 to put your phone on mute later on in the webinar. There will be a time for questions after the two speakers that we have for the webinar. And so you can use the chat box to ask questions or you can also raise your hand on the upper level, on the upper part of the webinar. We can unmute if you are doing through your computer. If later on if you want to ask a question, you can use your phone. If you're doing the phone and you want to ask a question, you can just do it with pound 6 to unmute your phone at that point. So as I said, my name is Miguel Giannes and we here at ESI in Washington DC, we've been doing Ombio Financing for the past five years and we are very excited about this project and how to help communities develop this great research for engine improvements and for water improvements. So in this webinar we have two speakers from Eugene Municipal Utility, the Eugene Water Electric Board in Oregon and also from the city of Bloomfield in Iowa. But first let me hand over to Sarah Kaplan from the Iowa Municipal Utilities Association who has been very gracious to co-host these webinar with us. So Sarah, take it away. I'd like to thank you for joining us. We have been looking for new ways that we can improve the energy efficiency services that we offer to you and ways that you can perhaps improve your programs to get better results as technology is developed and changed. And this is one way that we think might be the wave of the future and might be beneficial for you in evaluating your energy efficiency programs and how to, what are our next steps and how to move forward. So I'd like to thank you for joining us and thank you very much. Great. Thank you very much Sarah for those great words and again everyone for attending this webinar. And now let me hand over to I believe Misty Fisher from the Eugene Water and Electric Board who will talk about their ambient financing program that they've been running for the last decade. Misty, the floor is yours. Okay. Actually this is Mark Freeman. I wanted to introduce who we have on our end. We have Misty Fisher who is our loan administrator. And, well, Misty Fisher is our loan administrator. Kathy Gray who is, wow is this on auto feed, the slides? There we go. We stopped it. We stopped it. So we have Misty Fisher, our loan administrator. Kathy Gray who is our residential program supervisor. Dan Morehouse who is our commercial industrial supervisor. And then I am the manager of customer service and energy management services here at E-Web. And we've been doing this for almost two decades for a pretty long time. So hopefully what we have to share with you will be helpful. We're the largest municipal utility in the state of Oregon. Been around since 1911. We have about 80,000 customers, 80 of which are so are residential. We have a five person board which compared to IOUs I'm realizing just how wonderful a five person electric board is versus a public utility commission. And we started doing energy efficiency stuff in 1978. So we're, gosh, what, almost 40 years into this. So let's give it to Kathy now. So hi, this is Kathy Gray. Why would a utility want to loan money to his customers? Using public money is always risky. And that question was one we had to answer before we could go forward. Fortunately for us, we had a storm that worked in our favor in that we had entered a contract with the Bonneville Power Administration to provide energy efficiency to our customers. Part of that contract included a financial penalty. And we were part way through that contract and realize we were not going to meet our financial obligation. And we needed to do something to get our customers to take part in the efficiency programs. So we went out to our customers and we asked them, why? What's going on? And we learned from them they did not have the out of pocket money to pay for the costs of doing the work. We were incenting customers a certain percentage of the cost, but that little bit out of pocket they could not come up with. So what do you need to get started? Could you back up, Dan? Thank you. What do you need to get started? You really do need a pot of money. You need, you know, the support of your upper management and your board. You need to figure out what you're going to offer, the kind of requirements you're going to have, and, you know, what you're going to do on your security. E-Web started with a pilot of about $200,000. And using that pilot, we were able to prove to our board into the executive management that loaning money to customers was a viable means for reaching our targets, our energy efficiency targets. After the pilot, we went forward with our loan program being available only to residential customers who had excellent credit with the utility. And the loan amount was up to 1,500 zero interest and paid over a term of one to three years. In 1995, we expanded that program beyond the original offering to residential customers into our business customers and to our investment residential property owners of multifamily buildings and rentals. This is Misty Fisher, and I'm going to continue on with the slideshow. I am the loan administrator. I've had the privilege of doing this for E-Web for about 11 years now, and I manage the process for loans from the beginning of the loan application received from our customers through loan funding and including any loan issues once it's into our billing system. And right now, for residential, all residential loans are zero interest loans. They have a term between four to five years. We lend up to $20,000 to each customer. However, that is broken down into different programs that we have such as window offerings have a max amount of 4,000. Our Douglas heat pumps have a max amount of 4,000. So the 20,000 is an aggregate amount of, which could include multiple loans to one person. And our business loans right now are interest-bearing. They're at 4%. There's no fixed cap for that, and that has also a four to five-year payback term as well generally. The requirements or how I process my loans, obviously, first I look at the application. I make sure all the information is there that I need. The first step is I confirm ownership through Arlid, which is our Lane County Dees and Records website. The owner has to be the applicant. It can't be the renter, and that's because if I do file a lien on the property, I have to lend to the owner of property. The other thing I look at, of course, is their eWeb payment history. I'm looking to see that they pay us on a regular basis, that they pay their account on a monthly basis to zero. I typically first look at the first 12 months history. I do go back farther than that if I see a pattern of nonpayment or some type of delinquency, I'll go back farther. For the most part, I look at the last 12 months. Then what I do is I go into TransUnion and I pull a credit report, and I review their personal credit information. Obvious things such as, are they current on their mortgage? Do they have collections? Are they paying their credit card bills on time? I take the information from both their eWeb payment history and their TransUnion credit report, and I put that or plot that on a credit matrix that I use. The credit matrix helps me determine whether or not an approval can be applied to the customer also for what dollar amount, because based on credit worthiness there could be adjustments based on how much will lend or the term that will lend it. So that's all determined and worked out through the credit matrix process. Based on the outcome of that, I will determine whether or not the loan will have a lien placed on it or whether it will be unsecured. If their credit worthiness isn't quite up to par, the choices that we have if I file either a UCC1A lien through Lane County Deeson Records or a memorandum of agreement, both place a lien on their title. And then the other options I have if I need additional security is I give them an option of autopay on their eWeb account or a reoccurring credit card. And that might be used in the case specifically when a customer has issues with their payment plan back to eWeb and an autopay might help them get better credit with us and keep them on track and improve their credit score through eWeb's credit history. So once I process the loan applications and it gets time to fund the loan, I send out loan contracts to each of our customers. They send them back to me. I then enter the loan into our CIS billing system. I do that on a batch process. I do it every Monday. We fund the checks on the same week. It's a very efficient, quick process. People can make prepayments. That's allowed. They cannot make partial payments. That works great in our favor because it doesn't allow a customer to become delinquent on just their loan or just their electric and water charges. So what that means is that if they're billed 100 bucks and they send in 50 bucks, they can't say, I want the 50 bucks to go to the loan or they can't say, I want the 50 bucks to go just to electric. The 50 bucks is spread evenly open, all open items. And that has worked in our favor specifically when there's a loan on their eWeb account. And once the loan is in the billing system, I follow it through any customer issues that might happen. Including payment arrangements if they need them, account issues that come up, or any delinquency that might happen. So the next slide shows an example of one of our bills. And you can see under additional services, that's where the monthly loan charge shows. So it's a separate item charge on their bill, so it's clear for them to see which part is the loan versus their electric or water charges. And again, you can see on page two under additional services, it shows the heat pump loan and what the charge is. So the security just a little bit more specifically. Again, it is dependent upon how it comes across on the credit matrix. However, it allows me to place a lien on the person's personal property and how that helps us in later in the loan life is that if someone is delinquent and I have a lien on their property, if for some reason there's a foreclosure or a short sale or something happens with that property, my lien stays on the property until it's paid in full, whether that be via the customer or the new buyer or the bank or whoever ends up paying it. And so those liens are a really good mechanism of security for us. Again, the auto bank draft, it just helps customers who might be having some payment issues become current and actually improves their credit rating for eWeb. And LLCs and partnerships that apply, I also prepare a personal guarantee that they sign along with their paperwork. So right now, what we currently offer through EMS, and this does change, our programs change with time and different trends. And right now, our residential is offering insulations, windows, ductless heat pumps and ducted heat pumps. And on the commercial side, it's their custom project and it's just out-of-pocket expenses for a custom project that goes through the commercial department. And again, time those have changed. We've had other programs such as solar or HVAP or air sealing and time and trends will change what our offerings are. So this slide just very briefly can show you the number of residential projects that went through, how many of those projects had a loan, and then the total monies loaned out for that year. So for example, in 2002, you can see that there were a little bit over 2,500 projects done. And it looks like about 40% of those took out loans, 40-45% of those took out loans. And also in that year, that the money lent out was a little over $3 million. So that's just an example of what that is showing. And then commercial, same thing, the number of projects we did, the number of loans taken out, and then the monies that were lent out to the eWeb customers. So the cost of the program internally for us, what we consider is the labor for loan administration. So all the items I touch are any other staff touch in preparing loans, the recording fees through Lane County for filing my liens, and then the credit checks that I do for all the applicants. And then the estimated cost, just the general number would be about $100,000 a year. About four years ago, we started charging a $50 loan administration fee to our customers. The only customers we don't charge that to are ones that are qualified limited income at the time that they apply. But all other customers get a $50 loan origination. And if they go through the program multiple times, they have the multiple charge. So if they come through the program at one time and they do multiples, that's a charge for each different program. And, you know, despite the fact that our credit matrix is pretty liberal in the sense that because we have the power of power, because they have a power bill with us, we can be a little more lenient in the customers that apply in regards to, say, their personal credit. Our default rate has been under a half a percent, so that's not 50%, that's under half a percent since the inception of our loan program. It's always remained really low. And, again, that's because we have the power of power. People have to have electricity. And, again, just a brief note that partial payments of bills are spread across all open items on a bill, so that, again, also doesn't allow someone just to choose to pay their electric or water. They, monies would also be applied towards their loan, in that case. So, this slide I included because although there are lots of great reasons and things that, including our loan program, there are some issues that come up. So, realistically, wanted to bring those to your attention. Some of the things that I deal with on a daily basis with the loan program are refinance limitations. So, we notify our customers about six different ways in the upfront application process that if they go through a refinance during the time that they have a balance on their loan with eWeb, that their loan needs to be paid in full. And the reason that is, is because if I file a lien on the property, any time you do a title transaction, you have to have a clear title. So, we put upfront in as many ways as we possibly can to our customers that if they go through a refinance or any title transaction during the time they have a loan with us, it is due and payable. Their loan to us would be due and payable. It does create problems. People sometimes don't remember that that's in their contract and they don't remember seeing that in the upfront paper so they can, it can cause them problems through their refinance process. The other thing that we don't do for our loans is we will not subordinate our loans. And again, customers that are going through a title transaction, it can cause them issues in that process because we do not subordinate. Move out customer. It's put in their contract that when they move out or sell the house, that the loan becomes due and payable. Again, it comes up when customers just didn't realize that or didn't read maybe their contract fully and they didn't realize that that was in there and so I deal with that issue with some customers. There's also red flag implications simply just because the credit application has a lot of personal information including name, address, social security number, things like that. So there are some processes in place to reduce any implications with red flag that might come up. And then the other one just being personal, interpersonal issues that customers come across in their own lives such as divorce or separation that might happen when they have a eWeb loan on their eWeb account and say one calls to disconnect or one's staying and one's going. So those personal issues come up also with people that have loans. So although again the overall picture is it's a great program that we offer to our customers. There are some things that you have to consider that will come up like this with customers. So we started off doing loans with our energy efficiency programs. The loans have become a very effective tool for eWeb in many ways and customers appreciate it because it is on their bill. It's not a separate item or they don't have to deal with the credit union or a second party in this process. So what we've done as we've expanded it, we live on the McKenzie River. We provide water and electric and the McKenzie is the source of our drinking water as well as three hydro generation plants. And so we have a bunch of septic tanks on that river that were challenging for us or were leaking. So we provided loans so customers who owned those septic tanks could have the money to repair. So in turn they would not be leaking into our water source. Water leaks is just in general. There's a lot of customers out there who they find out on their bill that they used way more thought. And the cost of fixing those water leaks was beyond their means. So we helped them finance that. We used to have steam heat in our downtown area and we decided that we were no longer going to provide that. But that provided a big problem for a lot of our customers to pay to transition to either put in their own gas boiler or transition to an alternate heat. So you see that was a pretty sizable amount, about 3.3 million. And business growth and retention, we specifically don't call it economic development because we feel that most of our growth can be better served by helping our existing customers. Grow and expand. Not that we're at first to new businesses. These loans would be available to them. But this allows people to basically spread out the cost of the upfront cost of doing business with us with all these system development charges. Pipes, wires, transformers allows them to spread that over five years as opposed to paying it all up front. Human resources should pay. Again, we do loans for pretty much anything these days. And that is somebody we pay to relocate when we offer them jobs prior to the period needed to not have to pay that back. And so this is a loan to help them pay back the moving expenses you would pay to get them here. And we just recently started a loan program to help our commercial customers with the cost of installing EV chargers. So the way we can help promote that and hopefully expand the amount of charges in our service territory. So we feel like it's been pretty successful. We've done, you know, well over 11,000 loans since we started loaned, you know, 47 plus million dollars. You see the vast majority of that from a percentage wise goes to residential customers, but dollar wise it would be probably a different split than that. Especially when you look at the 3.3 million we did for our steam customers, that was all commercial. And the amazing thing is the default rate is 0.5%. I mean our default rate overall for our utility is very low as well. But we have had in 2014 and year to date in 2015 we haven't had any defaults. So during the recession, you know, that kind of spiked a little bit. But there wasn't anything that made us rethink our process or want to do less of this. It's a go-to tool for us not only for our energy efficiency but as you can see from the previous slides was to help our customers do business with us. So there you go, there's the happy all four of us. And that's the end of the presentation, open for questions. Great. Great. Thank you, Mark. And thank you also, Misty and Kathy from Eugen Water Electric Board there in Oregon for detailing and going through all the details of your ongoing financing program, not just for residential but also for commercial and all the other loans that you provide. And I think we should go to our next speaker, Chris Ball of the city of Bloomfield in Iowa. And then after Chris, we'll have a few moments for questions. And so if everyone can hold a person for after Chris goes through his presentation. So Chris, take it away. Thank you, Miguel. We've been looking at on bill financing for about six months and talk to many, many people. And every time we speak to someone else, we learn more. So I want to say thank you to the folks in Eugene. That was some great information. And I picked up a few things that I hadn't learned yet. So thanks a lot. As Miguel mentioned, I'm from the city of Bloomfield. I'm the energy efficiency director. It's a new position. I've been in place for about five months. So one of the questions is, and Eugene addressed this, why would a city begin to loan money at all? So I think it's important, you know, we get caught up in our day-to-day jobs. It can be difficult to start new programs, especially if it's significantly different than things we've been doing in the past. So I think it's good to step back and remember, and state the obvious, why do governments and municipal utilities to exist? And primary reason is to serve our citizens, members, and customers. So I just want to set that as the framework for where we're going. Bloomfield is a little different in terms of our structure. We are a municipal utility, and that municipal utility is housed under the director of public works. It's not a separate entity from the city. The director of public works reports to the city council as do the city clerk and myself, the energy efficiency director. It may seem a little odd to separate the energy efficiency director from the utility chain of command, but I think it kind of sets things up so that there's a healthy amount of checks and balances in place. And you know, sometimes the energy efficiency director might propose ideas that can seem in direct constant, like the irregular operations of the utility, but I think the council's decision to separate the two departments creates a structure where ideas can be challenged and scrutinized just a bit, and then that scrutiny helps make the new projects stronger. Earlier this year, the city council decided to pursue energy independence with regard to electricity. Essentially, that means that we will be a net zero community by 2030. It doesn't mean that all of the electricity will be produced by renewable generation. We have generators on site and we may choose to operate those generators here at gas and diesel. But I think it's also worth noting that Bloomfield is using the term energy independence as opposed to net zero. Simply put, energy independence does a better job of speaking to the values of our community than the term net zero does. And so one of the first steps to look at is energy efficiency, because simply it costs less to use less energy than to produce it, right? So last year, the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities did a study on Bloomfield to see if we could be energy independent. And according to that study, we could reduce our electricity consumption by about 23% if we pursued aggressive interdiciency actions. I should mention there's a lot of very good information in that study and we don't have time to go into all of the during this webinar, but it is available on IAMU's website. And for the executive summary, and if you'd like the more detailed version, feel free to call or send an email. I'll be happy to send it out to you. So installing energy efficiency measures at homes can, I mean, it costs money. Bloomfield is not a wealthy community. We have about 2,600 people, 1,200 residences. Over half of our households have low to moderate incomes. And frankly, traditional sources of old simply may not be available for energy efficiency types of expenses. But I think it's also worth pointing out that limited access to capital isn't confined to those of lower income. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, almost half of all Americans are unable to come up with $2,000 in cash within 30 days without selling or punning possessions. You know, while those in lower income brackets were less likely to have access to cash, it wasn't limited to lower income households, across the social and economic boundaries. Put bluntly, Americans aren't known for their saving habits. And when cash emergencies arise, they can put real stress on households. I know perhaps some of you have experienced and come through economic hardship, and you might remember how much easier the rest of your life can become once those problems are solved. I mean, you might remember how much more productive and creative you became once you knew that your family's basic necessities were covered. And so that's part of our goal when we're in a community where there is a lot of economic stress. If we can help relieve some of that stress, not only do we address our energy issues, but we also think we're going to free up people's bodies and minds to do much more for our community. So last night, the Bloomfield City Council decided to fund an on-bill financing pilot project. And I got to tell you, I'm sweating because I wasn't really sure what I was going to say today if the project wasn't funded, but thankfully, I don't have to figure that out. The pilot project will be funded at $150,000, and it's our hope that we can complete 10 to 15 projects with the initial funding. Now, I want to pause here for just a moment and talk again about that access capital. Last night after the City Council meeting, one of the members in the audience came up to me and he said, how do I participate? My friends broke down last spring. It's going to cost me $2,800 to replace it. I can come up with $2,000. I know I'm going to come up with the other $800. And this isn't a person that most would consider to be low to moderate income, pays his bills, gets things done as a respectable member of the community, but he still has that economic stress and he's trying to figure out how to solve it for his family. So what are we trying to accomplish with our pilot project? Well, first of all, we need to clarify our business process. This is a brand new thing for us, and so we have to figure out how do we take the application? How do we process them? How do we put it into our billing system? How do we track all of the information? What level of monitoring of the installations are we going to do? Are we going to work with vendors and contractors? So just from a very business process point of view, we've got some things to work out. We've established the policies and procedures, but this is a chance for us to do a real-world test and work out the bugs before expanding the project. We also hope to do measures to changes in energy consumption. We hope to generate some buzz in the community and then decide whether or not we want to look at expanding the project. So our details, we're looking at about a $15,000 maximum loan. There is no application fee, but once the loan has been approved, there will be a $100 origination fee to cover our administrative expenses, including labor in the office and filing liens at the courthouse. We looked at a 0% loan, but it was much more attractive to the council if we had at least a 2% interest so that we weren't losing money on the process. Our goal is to aim for bill neutrality. In other words, we hope that we can structure the loan so that savings realized through these energy efficiency measures will offset the loan payment and we're looking at loan links between 5 and 10 years. We haven't done the math on them yet to figure out what it's going to take for the individual, but we will look at each loan individually to decide what seems to work for the quickest payback and try to get as close to bill neutrality as we can. We've got a number of measures that we're proposing to cover with the initial financing. As you can see here, furnaces, air conditioners, appliances, water heaters, lighting. Even though it's not a big expense at the household level, it can have a big impact, so we want to make sure that if they're going through and doing other things, let's go ahead and get some lighting taken care of as well. Our applicants, we are opting not to do credit checks, formal credit checks. Instead, we're just going to rely on our in-house accounts. If we haven't notified them that we're turning off their utilities within the past 12 months, then they'll be qualified for the loan, as long as it's an owner-occupied residential facility. We spoke to several other utilities and as Oregon shared, the default rate is extremely low and we want to be as liberal with our ability to assist people as we can be. Our process during the pilot program is we're going to identify the potential applicants who best support the pilot program goals and we're still trying to figure out what that means if we're trying to find those people that are kind of seen as leaders in the community but maybe need some help on their homes, so we looked at those houses that are the most energy inefficient right now. We have done an analysis of the entire community and identified homes that we believe are energy hogs, but we haven't figured that all out just yet. We are going to go during the pilot phase and do a pre-application energy audit and make recommendations to the homeowner. Then we'll want the applicant to get estimates, bring those estimates back as part of the application process. Once we've approved the application, we have some data loggers that are going to measure temperature in the homes. Let's look at their utility usage. We want to see if sometimes you implement a measure, an energy efficiency measure, or do some weather feeling and now because the home is more efficient, maybe the temperature changes and so you don't see necessarily a reduction in energy usage because instead of keeping the temperature at 65 in the winter, they keep it at 75 because it's more comfortable and now they can afford it. We want to be able to track both energy usage and internal temperature. After they install the measures, we're also going to do a post-inflation energy audit so we can see, you know, just try to track what was the difference between the before and after. Then hopefully once we collected this information, we'll analyze it and decide what that means for the future of the program. One of the things that we've heard from some of the utilities that we've worked with to develop this program is that you can get some untrustworthy contractors and vendors. So one of our goals is we don't want to select which contractors or vendors a household will use but we are going to publish a directory. Anyone can qualify to DM that directory as long as they fill out the application for the listing. I guess it's our hope that maybe there will be some self-filtering that some of those people that don't go to the effort to get the proper licenses or get the proper training, maybe they won't go to the effort to fill out the application to get listed in the directory. Again, the directory isn't an endorsement by the city. It's simply a listing of those that have applied to be listed within the directory. After the pilot program, it's our goal to secure some outside funding to expand the program. We're working with EESI in order to try to find some additional funding. I hope that this pilot project will establish our process in a way that we can demonstrate how we can – that we know how to run the program here to secure the additional funding. I do want to point out we have had a lot of help with this project. EESI has provided a lot of technical assistance. They've brought resources to us from around the country to help us while we're developing our pilot project program. Within this data biome, we also spoke with Cedar Falls Utilities and the city of Woodbine. Both of those communities have run under the financing programs in the past. I'll reach out to any of these three organizations and, obviously, the folks from Oregon could be a help as well. I want to thank a few people here. As I mentioned, EESI has given us a lot of support as has the IO Economic Development Authority, IAMU, Cedar Falls Utilities and the city of Woodbine. All of them have put together great materials for us and pointed us in the right direction. Warren Helverson is one of our local VISTA members that is serving in Bloomfield to work on building energy efficiency capacity within the community. We wouldn't have that opportunity without funding from AmeriCorps. That wraps it up for me. Be happy to stay online and take questions. You can also feel free to contact me by phone or email. I think that we don't cover today. Thank you. This is Miguel Yance again. I would like to thank Chris very much for talking about his program in this webinar, providing all the details of the pilot. I would like to congratulate him for getting the City Council of Bloomfield yesterday to approve the on-bill financing program. It's very exciting that Bloomfield is going to start this pilot and that hopefully it will become a larger program and getting a large percentage of the homes in Bloomfield retrofitted with energy efficiency measures. Again, thank you for both speakers, Eugen and Bloomfield for presenting in this webinar and writing your lessons, learning experiences, your programs. Now I would like to open this remaining time for anyone who may have questions for both the speakers that have presented. Just to remind everyone that if you're using an iPhone computer, you're muted by default. If you can pose a question as a comment on the box on the lower right-hand side. Alternatively, you can also raise your hand, which is an icon on the upper part of the screen, and then we will unmute your speaker if you're doing through a computer and then you can ask a question. If you are listening to the webinar through your phone, you can add six to unmute your phone if you want to ask any questions. Miguel, this is Chris Ball, and I'd like to ask the folks in Oregon a question by May. I'm interested in learning. My understanding in Iowa is that we can't disconnect for nonpayment of the loan. The two you told is that I've spoken to and it hasn't really been a major issue anyway, but I am wondering if you run into issues that the requirement that any payment has spread among the utility payments and the loan could solve that issue for us. I wondered how you found out the language. I'm interested in the language that you use to get that done, I guess. Perhaps you could share that with me by email. Yeah, this is Misty. I'd be happy to share that via email. Just on a general statement, it does, because payments are spread, it does greatly reduce any situation where we may have to disconnect. However, because the homeowner has to apply, they could have, if the homeowner sells the house, or let's see, let me back up here a little bit. Because an owner may not live in the house, that's a situation where if the loan payment became default, we could disconnect. I've been here almost 11 years and I think I've put out a disconnect maybe three times, three or four, under five times for a situation like that. Typically, because people need to have power, they simply can't get to a disconnect situation, and including the loan on their bill, it helps us. It does happen very rarely where we've had to disconnect or at least put out a letter of disconnect for that. But you are right, in the sense that when you spread any payments over all open items, that it greatly reduces that situation from coming up. And we do have language in our contract that covers that. And again, I can share that with you via email. But it is written within their contract that we bill monthly, they pay monthly. And so they do put themselves in default of their contract if they get behind on their eWeb bill and they have a loan charge on them. Thank you. Great question, Grace. Anyone has any other questions and may want to ask? Yeah, hi. This is Stephanie Enla with the Center for Rural Affairs. Chris, you said that right now the program is only available to owner occupants. Do you have any plans to extend the program in the future to be available to renters? And then what would need to happen to make that viable for your utility? Sure. And I think there is interest from the City Council to look at renters. We know that rental units are, in some cases, some of our least energy efficient homes. So I think it is something that we would look at just that we wanted to be sure that we could really study things well in this pilot and so we just chose not to go that route. And then I think, additionally, depends on where our funding comes from to expand the program if we do it internally or if we have access to external sources of funds what their requirements will be. Great. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Stephanie and Chris. Any other questions? Hey, Miguel, this is Mark at eWeb. We failed to put our contact information at the bottom of our screen. So hopefully you have that or that you could share with folks. But in general, we're willing to share anything that we have including like our matrix on determining credit worthiness. So everybody saw our names. So it's really pretty easy. Firstname.lastname at eWeb.org and those are our email addresses. Happy to answer any questions after the webinar is over. Great. Mark, that's a great way to point that this webinar is being recorded and will be posted in our website ESI.org and we will also send the link and the presentations to Sarah Kaplan. So if she wants to post it on her own website or would like to send them to members of the Iowa Municipality of the Association she can do that. And also the slides will also be posted and any additional information will be posted in our website that's EESI.org. I see that Jeff wants to ask a question. You can either type it or speak in your mic if you have one on your computer. So Jeff's question is, did Eugene quit loaning money for renewable energy projects and if so why? Specifically talking solar, as I assume that's part of it. We have a green power program, a voluntary green power participation program that offers incentives. Well, through the people who fund it they've chosen where it's a voluntary process for our customers. They create the pool of money which creates an incentive base for the solar program. So yes, we no longer loan for the solar, we only do incentives and we also do some pretty sizable grants like $50,000 grants for solar on an annual basis. But you're correct, no loans, just incentives or grants for solar projects. Also we do, this is Kathy, we do an evaluation on all of our programs to determine the cost effectiveness of those programs. And so the solar, in the case of solar water heating has kind of fallen out of our resource planning purview. It's not cost effective for us to forward with those projects at point in time. So also this is Miguel, Jeff Gertz also has a question for Eugene. He asks what energy efficiency measures do you loan for most often and which measures have had the best impact for the money? Well, we've been doing this. This is Kathy again for quite a long time and in the beginning it was your insulation, your envelope measures for houses that had the greatest impact. And now what we're seeing that has the greatest impact are the heating systems, the heat pumps, the ductless heat pumps in homes. And so I would say that's what we're seeing, the majority of our loans in those areas and at this point in time that's where we're getting our greatest savings. Great. Thank you very much, Kathy for providing those answers and also for Jeff to ask those questions. And so if anyone has any other questions for the speakers, this is the time to ask them. Again, you can also send some questions that are on if you have some questions to the speakers webinar. This is a great time to do them. So Jeff also asks how does Eugene identify contractors and verify quality of insulation? Just like Chris mentioned in his presentation, we have a directory of contractors that is made available to our customers. Those contractors apply to be on that list. They show proof of insurance, license, bonding, and all of that. So that provides some surety to our customers. We do not endorse anyone contractor. Now that is in the residential area in the business arena, the commercial area, the contractors, we do not have a directory of contractors per se. The business operators select the contractors that they typically work with. We have what we call verifications. We go out and look at the installations. We're also participating in the Bonneville Power Administration and Energy Efficiency Programs. Through that, they provide some third-party verification. They will take a percentage of the work that we have completed and actually send somebody else a third-party out there to look at that work to assure that that work is being done to the specifications and standards. Great. Thank you, Kathy, for your answer. And thank you, Jeff, for the great question. So we still have a couple of minutes more for a few more questions. If anyone has any questions, they may want to ask the presenters and speakers. Well, it looks like Jeff has one more. He's asking if you provide or support training for contractors. Well, we like to consider our contractors the professionals. However, we do provide support and training. So if there's a new technology that is coming into our marketplace, we will bring in the manufacturers, the distributors, to come and talk about those products. We also have a contractor's website which we post information for the contractors. We post, like, if we change forms or if there are other links to places that would provide them information. There is also regionally in the Northwest some projects where they actually do certify contractors to do certain types of work, like installing ductless heat pumps, is one in particular that they certify the contractors. They certify the contractors for duct sealing, for in the ducted heat pump arena and commissioning. There are programs out there to help support the contractors. We have in the past even purchased software for our contractors to use when they were beginning to do the analysis of the heating system so that they could do the balance charts and it would comport with what we would be looking at. Wonderful. Thank you again, Kathy and Jeff for those questions and answers. Just about to finish this webinar. We still have one or two minutes for additional questions if anyone has them. Great. It's already time at the end of the webinar so I would like to thank everyone who has attended this webinar and participated and asked questions and also one who would like to thank very much for the presenters at Eugen Water Electric Board Mark Freeman, Misty Fisher and Kathy Gray and Dan Morehouse for explaining and detailing their on-bill financing program in Eugen so we'd like to thank very much Chris Ball at City of Bloomfield UDT for explaining and talking about his on-bill financing pilot that has just been approved by the City Council I would like to forgot with him again and so thank you everyone for attending and I'd like to see you everyone who would like to see how City of Bloomfield goes with its pilot program so thank you very much again and thank you for Sarah Kerblat and the Iowa Municipal Association UDT Thank you very much. Bye. Thank you.