 Lois Lee is the Executive Director of the Intergovernmental Relations and Planning Branch of the DC Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development. Lois Lee leads the ministry's work to support and advise local governments on community planning, regional growth strategies, and climate action initiatives. She also provides solution advice and assistance where disputes arise. Jennifer Hill is here as well and she's a senior planner with the Intergovernmental Relations and Planning Branch of the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development. Jennifer joined the provincial government in 2009 after working in the private sector as a planning consultant. She has a background in architecture and community planning. Haike Schmitz is a registered planner with the Planning Institutes of British Columbia. After eight years as a planning consultant working predominantly in southern British Columbia on Vancouver Island and the mainland, she joined the province in 2008 in her current role as senior planner. David Ramsey is on the line and he's the City of Vancouver's Senior Sustainability Programs Manager. In this capacity, David is responsible for the development and implementation of the city's climate protection, green building, air quality, and electric vehicle programs and policies. And Emanuel Menchato is the Manager of Sustainability Services and Special Projects with the District of Seashells and he's responsible for the development and implementation of the district sustainability plan. He has extensive experience working with communities on all aspects of sustainability with a focus on renewable energy, water, and food. So today's agenda, we'll start with Lois Lee Goodwin, Jennifer Hill and Haike, and then we'll move on to David's presentation to talk about Vancouver's green zoning policy and innovative funding strategies. And then Emanuel will close off the session talking about the experience of Seashells related to integration and alignment, their alignment strategy for achieving GHG reduction goals. So without further ado, I will pass it back to Darby who has a few quick poll questions. Great, thanks very much Amy and I'm just going to put the line on lecture mode now so we don't have any feedback from those signing in, so just one moment. The conference is in lecture mode. Great, so just as Amy said, we'd like to just put out a two poll question for you right off the top so you are able to actually put in your input on these as I see some of you already started to do, so the question is what best describes your current work role or employer, so at least if you could put in the best response for you and I'll share these results with you right now. So results are great, so those choices again, local government, consultant, developer, elected officials or other, and we're just going to take a quick tally of these, the population of the community you are calling from today. Please, for your particular situation, click on the color in front again to show you the results. You need to be getting the system number there, just taking a tally quickly, things over slowly. I just wanted to provide and welcome everyone, I wanted to provide a little bit of context on the provincial context, so climate action in the province, as many or most or all of you are aware that back in 2007 the UBCM and the provincial government established the Climate Action Charter and local government started to sign on to the Charter, in 2007 there were 65 communities that signed on to the Charter at that time that that's very much still alive and well and both the province and the local governments are working towards the goals of the Climate Action Charter, that the currently there's a lot, all with a lot of questions about whether climate action is still an interest and a priority of the province and I think one of the key priorities of the province currently the implementation of the BC jobs plan that's very much a high priority for government focusing on families throughout all the work that government does and an open and transparent government are three key priorities of the current government, but climate action is still very much a priority. It's within the context of those economic, environmental and social sustainability that achieving a reduction in GHG goals is still there and just to clarify that. The Climate Action Charter, so the local government commitment, there are 179 local governments that have signed on to the Climate Action Charter over the last four years. The Joint Green Communities Committee, so Joint Provincial and Union of BC Municipalities Green Communities Committee is a very active committee currently focusing on carbon neutral local government work, but the community-wide admissions reduction work is still very much high on the agenda there too. With the legislation was brought forward in the 2017 and 2017 bill 27 as I'm sure many of you are aware was brought forward in 2008, spring of 2008 and one of the elements there was the GHG admission reduction targets, policies and actions, the requirements that needed to be in official community plans of local government and 96% of local governments have targets, are developing policies, actually have policies or are developing policies and are taking action across the province. I think it's important to note that there is a lot being undertaken across the province in small, medium and large communities, urban and rural and we have to, I think, applaud all those communities that are doing a lot of work there. It's definitely, it's a collaborative effort that it's not just an effort of local government themselves as the corporation, but working with the citizens in the community, also the business community, including the development community. So that collaboration and cooperation is extremely important in getting to approaches that are going to work within your community, all the unique circumstances and integration as well. So local government looking at land use planning in context of infrastructure and capital, financial planning and public works as well and transportation planning too. So that's definitely a key. From the provincial government side, what we are focusing on and what we are working towards and what we're encouraging local governments to work towards is complete, compact, energy efficient and I would add affordable communities in there as well. And as I've talked about sustainability as a focus and by sustainability I do mean economic, environmental and social sustainability. And as I mentioned before, integration as well, integration within local government and their planning. And so it's on the tools. So there are four key areas or key categories of tools. The legislation which I mentioned, Bill 27, which has a requirement for the GHG Mission Reduction Targets. Density bonuses in there, it wasn't part of the legislation at the time, but there are opportunities there for community amenities, development cost charges, the ability for local government to look at alternative approaches to the provision of infrastructure and reduce or waive development cost charges for developments that have a low environmental impact. Tax exemptions, the revitalization of exemptions and development permit areas which will be one of the key focuses of the discussion today. Under category are the incentives, the Climate Action Revenue Incentive Program, local governments that have signed on to the Climate Action Charter and which is all local governments in D.C. except for maybe 10 or 11 that haven't signed on. All of those local governments are eligible for a refund of the carbon tax that are paid through local government operations. So that's an incentive and also through the gas tax, that's an incentive as well. Funds for green infrastructure investments and also approximately five percent, five million dollars approximately of the General Strategic Priorities Fund. The Innovations Fund is dedicated to integrated community sustainability planning and important to note that any local government's receiving gas tax fund has to undertake the integrated community sustainability planning process. The better information, so important we've heard from local governments that it's important for information to be out there, both about what one another is undertaking on the emissions and the community energy and emissions inventory is an important tool. Now second year completed of that, there are bi-annual reports there for local government, let communities track and compare their overall greenhouse gas emissions, their density, urban density, their housing type and also how people move around and get to work. So that's an important source of information and you've told us that that does help. The Climate Action Toolkit, it remains a focus of efforts to provide local governments with information on resources and tools and best practices related to the climate action. It's recently had a facelift. It's easier to navigate now, which I'm sure that everyone appreciates. There is a toolkit oversight committee that has just completed an evaluation of the site and got information from a number of different users and a result of that, one of the things that was stressed is particularly important is increased sharing of stories and learning from one another, so the success stories and so you'll see more of that information in the future. A smart planning for communities, so Fraser Basin Council and the partnership that we've had with them to help local governments with development of their integrated community sustainability planning processes and also mapping and modeling is an interest of the province to allow communities to visualize different scenarios and we're doing quite a bit of work on that. And partnerships, I mentioned the Fraser Basin Council and smart planning, but also the partnership with the Union of BC Municipalities on the Green Communities Committee are a couple of examples there. With that, Jennifer, thanks Lois Lee. Well, you've just heard from Lois Lee about a range of tools for local governments to help them achieve their Climate Action objectives and today I'm going to talk about one of those tools and that is the Expanded Development Permit Authority. In 2008, the Local Government Act was amended and one of the ways it was amended was to enable local governments to address climate change in the communities using an expanded development permit area authority. So local governments have had this authority for a long time, but in 2008 three new purposes were added to the legislation and those purposes were for establishing objectives to promote energy conservation, water conservation and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. So the idea behind this expansion of this tool was that it was an existing tool and how could we use existing tools to help local governments achieve these objectives. So I'd like to highlight that the Expanded Development Permit Authority in the Local Government Act is intended to apply to elements that are exterior to buildings and other structures and this is reflected in the requirements that are outlined in the Local Government Act legislation. So for DPA purposes, Development Permit Area purposes related to climate action, local governments can make requirements in five areas and those five areas are landscaping, fighting of buildings and other structures, the form and exterior design of buildings and other structures, specific features in the development and machinery equipment and systems external to buildings and other structures. So we will take a look at some example strategies related to each of those areas of requirements in a few moments. But one thing I'd just like to make a note of now is that DPAs are one of a range of tools that are in what we like to call the local government toolbox of potential ways to achieve climate action goals. So we think that is important that you think about how you can use DPAs in conjunction with other tools to get a bigger impact on your climate action goals. So for example, you might want to think about combining a DPA for climate action with bylaws that increase density near transit or perhaps with policies and practices that fast track development approvals or even combining it with reduced development cost charges for development that's located near existing infrastructure. The Local Government Act also provides the authority to combine more than one purpose within the development permit area. So for example, you could consider combining a DPA purpose of protecting the natural environment with climate action DPA to, for example, achieve broader rainwater management goals. So the reason I'm talking about this today in particular is because we have developed a guide to help local governments use this expanded authority. It's available online and Darby has reassured me that you have the link. I'm not sure where exactly it is, but you have the link to that guide. It is on the ministry website and I encourage you to take a look at it. So the purpose of the guide, as I said, is to help local governments use the Climate Action Development Permit Authority to conserve energy, conserve water, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the guide does this by first of all providing an overview of the legislative authority in the Local Government Act, explaining where that is located and the provisions of that authority. But it also spends a bit of time talking about the kinds of considerations that you might want to think about when you're about to implement Development Permit Area for climate action. The other thing it does is it provides some example strategies for each of those areas, as I mentioned earlier, and they're identified by the area requirement as possible. So there's landscaping strategies, siding strategies, specific feature strategies in the guide. The guide has been sent out during its development. It's been sent out twice for two rounds of consultation and it's had a fairly rigorous review. Local governments from both urban and rural areas have had a look at it and weighed in with comments. The Urban Development Institute has had a look at it, the Canadian Homebuilders Association, members of the legal community and landscape architect community have also had a chance to review it and provide input. So as I said, one part of the guide is looking at considerations, things to think about when you're about to embark on developing a DPA for climate action. And I'll talk about two here, there are others, but two key ones are basically about the importance of assessing the feasibility of using a climate action DPA. It's going to depend a lot on the local feasibility, so therefore on the local circumstances in which a development permit area might be established. So it's important to think about those local conditions and how they could impact the effectiveness of a DPA. So some of the kinds of things that are identified for consideration are, is the community growing or anticipating growth? Are the climate conditions, the topography or the existing build environment, are they suited to the DPA provisions that are being considered? And so for example, are the conditions appropriate for a passive solar DPA? We've got some self-facing access available. The other thing that we're encouraging in the guide is to consider things like the cost of implementing requirements related to a climate action DPA. So is this about putting in tail some expenses, some high costs to implement related technology, for example? And what's the benefit of doing that? Does the benefit of it, or is it a relatively simple kind of requirement that's likely to deliver some notable benefits? So thinking about that, cost-benefit assessment, what are the risks associated and are the risks at a level that we're prepared to accept? And what might some unintended consequences be of acting on that? Part of understanding that can be achieved through consultation. So the guide also encourages meaningful consultation early on with stakeholders in the community. So we see this as an important reason, an important thing to do for several reasons. So building stronger buy-in, that won't be news to many of the folks that are planners or local government in the audience. That's an important aspect of meaningful consultation, but it also can help provide some needed expertise. So consultation with experts in some of the areas of technology, with the development sector, can help to understand what the cost and benefits might be. And talking early with these folks can help develop guidelines that will be practical and implementable. So we're encouraging that to happen early on. So who are the kinds of stakeholders that have in mind when we speak in the guide? Members of the public, community neighborhood groups, are they on side with climate action goals? Are they likely to support related development? The development sector. The success of a DPA is going to rely on the actions of the development and building sector who are going to design, build and install the features associated with the climate action DPA. So it's important to initiate that consultation with that sector early on and keep the conversation going as the DPA guidelines are developed. Other stakeholders might include experts for example, representatives from warranty providers, from insurance companies, financial institutions, or utility companies. So again in the guide there are other considerations in there, thinking about the optimal location for your DPA. Do you need specialized knowledge? Do you have access to it internally or is there access externally available? What about combining DPA purposes, types of guidelines you might think of using, prescriptive versus a performance-based guideline for example, and climate adaptation. If you're putting in these DPAs to mitigate against climate change impacts in the future, the way you create those DPA guidelines, you could think about how those requirements actually address some of the climate change impacts that are happening now. That's putting in that climate change adaptation lens on the guideline. So again I encourage you to look at that aspect of the guide. So the next few slides that we'll wrap up with are we'll illustrate some of the example strategies that are presented in the guide. So I'd just like to point out too that these examples are really intended to illustrate the kinds of things that could be done, but it's going to be necessary that each local government that's considering the kinds of strategies they would use consider whether and how any of these strategies is going to work under your particular local circumstances. So these are suggestions you've got to think how you would use them, whether you use them, and how you would adapt them to meet particular situations. So the worst example relates to landscaping requirements that can both reduce energy and reduce water consumption. Planting for passive solar gain for instance. Selective use of trees can maximize passive solar gain, natural ventilation and natural cooling, and help increase the entry of natural light into buildings. Wind rate planting, think about trees using trees as wind breaks, vegetation types. Using indigenous species can reduce the need for supplemental irrigation, so you're reducing water use, but you also will reduce energy use because you'll have less energy use to treat and transport reduced water use. The other thing I'll point out is there's a lot of resources identified in the guide. So lots of links through the guide online that you can click on and get to. So an example here is there's a link to the DC Society of Landscape Architects. Another example, strategy related to siding of buildings. Thinking about the site selection, does that give you opportunity for passive solar, and the particular layout of the site as well, how building might be oriented to capitalize on that. Form an exterior design of buildings. This can influence the amount of energy savings and GHG reductions. Exterior design is talking about the exterior elements of the building, and thinking about how you might design them to respond to local environmental conditions. So minimize your windows on the north facade. Think about where overhangs or shades, external shades, can minimize heat when you don't want it, sunlight and heat inside when you don't want it in the summer, but still allow entry of natural light in the winter. And here you can think of opportunities where you might combine a DPA form an exterior design with another purpose related to form and character objectives. So the features and the development, these are intended to apply to features external to the building, and there are examples in the guides related to permeable pavements, naturalized ponds, bioswales, and even innovative design elements such as multi-purpose shared amenity spaces. This area of requirements is machinery, equipment and systems, again external to buildings. This brings to mind example strategies of using innovative technologies for energy generation, and also district energy systems for distribution of renewable energy, systems to manage rainwater collection, another example of machinery equipment and systems. And that wraps up a quick overview of the guide. Jennifer, myself and Haika were available if you have inquiries, questions about that, just feel free to give us a call or contact us by email. Thanks very much Jennifer, and we do have a poll question for you for you all now. This is our last poll question, but it's timely to this part of the presentation. So if you could once again vote for us, how would you describe your familiarity with local government land use planning tools for building green community? And again, if each of you could just click on the one that's most appropriate for you, very familiar, familiar, or not familiar. And I'll show you the results. If we settle on a number here, we'll take a, we'll jot down the numbers here, and it looks like we're there now. And while we do just have a minute here, I'd also firmly request that if you do have any questions at all, please do enter those in the Q&A button on the header at the top of your screen there, and we'll be making some time in between presentations, but also have the broader discussion period later following the three presentations. But you're welcome to put those questions in now, and again, we strongly encourage it. So I think we have our numbers down now, so I'll be turning things over to David. And David unfortunately does not have a camera available for us, so we'll actually be turning off the video so that you're not looking here at us in this room. So you won't see anything in your video screen. But David, if you could unmute your line, star six, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. Great, and I'll hand it over to you. Well, hi. Okay, well, it's a, you know, a pleasure to be here today. And while I don't have a camera, I assure you I am wearing a suit and tie here and looking my very best for all of you here today. So anyway, the topic of my presentation will be today two points. I was asked to cover some of our innovative financing tools, namely I'll cover that in the form of our Home Energy Loan Program at the City of Vancouver, and then also our Green Building Resoning Policy. So I'll just jump right in. I'll also talk a little bit today too about our Greener City 2020 Program, which sort of serves as the, I guess, our policy foundation for a lot of the work that we're doing right now at the City of Vancouver. So what is the Greener City 2020 initiative? Well, about three years ago, our Mayor, Craig Robertson, laid out a challenge that he wanted the City of Vancouver to be the greenest city in the world by 2020 and, I guess, appointed a sort of a blue ribbon committee of various industry stakeholders, academics, nonprofits, you know, political leaders, mayors of the Council's past and Councillors of the Council's past to identify areas where the City would need to improve, lay out targets and goals in these areas in order for us to achieve this goal of becoming the greenest city in the world. What that resulted in is 10 long-term goals, all with measurable targets out to 2020, and those goals are everything from climate leadership to green buildings. In the green buildings category, for example, the target is to have all construction carbon neutral and operations by 2020. In clean water, it's to have the, for Vancouver residents to enjoy the cleanest drinking water in the world and also to affect a 33% reduction in potable water use by the year 2020. Clean air to hold ourselves to the highest international standards for air quality, for zero waste, to achieve a 70% reduction in waste going to landfill and incinerator by the year 2020. For the green economy target, it was to increase the number of green jobs in the City of Vancouver by 10,000 new green jobs by the year 2020. So really ambitious targets, and you know, this has resulted in about 132 new individual policy initiatives that have come out of the City of Vancouver in the last three years that try to address all of the sort of the 10 goal areas here. So it's led to quite a substantial transformation of the bureaucracy here and the way we do our business. So to start off with the home energy loan program, it addresses multiple targets within the greatest of the action plan, but most noticeably our climate action target. So our climate action target is to achieve a 33% reduction in greenhouse gases community-wide by the year 2020. Now that's pretty substantive when you consider that, you know, the Kyoto obligations which we've just recently met here in 2012 was to achieve a 6% reduction over 1990 levels. So we had to achieve about a 6% reduction over about a, you know, approximately a 20 year or thereabouts time horizon. And now we're looking at trying to achieve a 33% reduction in about eight years or so. So when we look at where our greenhouse gases come from as a City, you know, you can see the major chunk here really come from our building stock. So a little over half, 55%. It's fairly consistent with a lot of a large sort of post-industrial center city communities out there in North America. You know, other cities that may have more industrial backgrounds may have sort of a one-third, one-third, one-third split between transportation buildings and industry. Not a lot of industry in Vancouver so, you know, it just gets lumped in with our building usage. When we did an examination of where we could achieve the most reductions in terms of achieving this 2020, 33% reduction, we came out with the following analysis, which was that 33% reduction would mean that we'd need to trim about 975,000 tons worth of greenhouse gases from our portfolio community-wide over an eight and a half year time frame. So, you know, we looked at all the potential sources of those emissions reductions. So everything from sort of compact smart communities and improved transit, we figured we could get, you know, about 240,000 tons of reductions out of that, you know, incorporating, you know, what the provincial government has already laid on the books in terms of new vehicle regulations and clean fuels, incorporating that into the mix, looking at district energy opportunities and providing low-carbon energy to the new developments in the city of Vancouver. We thought we could get about another 100,000 tons. But most substantially, what was interesting to me is, you know, and being a green building guy by trade was to see that in the building sector, the role that retrofits has to play in achieving, you know, substantial reductions. So, you know, the single biggest piece of the pie by which the city can take part in is affecting energy efficiency retrofits in our community. So 170,000 tons. And even in an urban city like Vancouver where, you know, over half of our population lives in multi-unit residential development, about 90,000 of this 170,000 ton pie here could come from renovations to single-family homes in terms of energy efficiency upgrades. So, you know, we looked at this significantly in terms of some opportunities to achieve some greenhouse gas reductions. And this is especially shocking, I think, just to put in the context, to look at that new construction number which is, you know, in the neighborhood of about 14,000 tons as compared to 170,000 tons. When a lot of us think about green building, we tend to think of a lot of new buildings rather than the buildings we already have. So next slide. So the bigger play when we looked at to start with the renovation question is that one of the tools we have obviously as a local government is regulation. But we can't be very ambitious with this regulation because not everybody wants to, you know, retrofit their home because they have too much money in their bank account. You know, we have to be very cautious as governments in terms of regulating retrofits, making sure that we're not asking for too much when people are coming in for renovation permits. So, you know, we try to, you know, align that as much as we can with incentives that make energy efficiency retrofits more appealing. And then also developing financing tools seem like the most prudent next measure which would, you know, make these energy efficiency retrofits more palatable and therefore more easy to regulate. The idea being that if we have, you know, a way where the energy efficiency measures or the energy efficiency savings can finance the retrofits or upgrades to a home making it, you know, zero or no net cost to the consumer, we can then be more aggressive with our regulation which will then drive people to more incentives which can then, you know, promote uptake of financing tools. So it's sort of a, you know, a cycle that allows us to, you know, achieve more in the energy savings sector. The other spin-off benefit of retrofits we also found too was the green jobs component. So, you know, retrofitting energy efficiency retrofits when we talked to Fortis about this, they estimated that province-wide just in looking at what, looking at the age of most of the furnaces and hot water tanks in the homes in the province and the presence of insulation in homes currently in the province, they estimated that the retrofit market in the single family sector represented about $3 billion of potential investment that could happen in the province, all of which could be potentially financed by the energy efficiency savings that these retrofits would achieve. The energy efficiency retrofits are really good job generators because this is money that stays really within your community. It's money that goes to contractors who work and live in the community. It's not going, you know, say to a big box store or at least not all of it's going to a big box store that's, you know, going to China or, you know, flying out of our community. So it's going to people who have, you know, small businesses and who keep that money local. So by incentivizing or providing financing tools to promote uptake of retrofits, we can create more green jobs. This in turn leads to community economic development and by government playing a role in it and directing how that those green jobs are funded through, say, an energy retrofit program. We can actually make sure that there's some kind of social investment to make sure that the populations that most need jobs or most need job training can get access to those jobs. And one example of that is our, you know, a social enterprise that we helped start here in Vancouver called Embers Green Renovation Services. It's a weatherization and air sealing enterprising non-profit that we helped co-finance the startup of with Vansity Credit Union. And it's now a, it provides job training to inner city residents that have previously faced barriers to employment and hires them on and they do a fee for service energy retrofit company that provides energy efficiency services to Vancouver homeowners. So we've incorporated them into our home energy loan program and I'll show you how just in a minute. But there is, we saw that the green jobs and economic development component of a retrofit strategy also being a hugely important component of getting this program together. So what is our home energy loan program? Well, it's a partnership between Vansity Credit Union again and ourselves. It provides homeowners with financing of $4,000 to $16,000 for home energy efficiency retrofits. It provides them with a preferred rate of 4.5% fixed over the 10-year term of that financing. And this is kind of low interest long-term mortgage-like financing that can be had with sort of the process or application of say like signing up for a credit card. So it doesn't require you to go through the onerous qualification processes you may have to with other sort of personal unsecured loans. But it's a much more expedient streamlined one-stop shop for energy efficiency financing. The things that we will finance under the program are listed here just on the side. So everything from furnaces and heat pumps to hot water heaters to insulation and then air sealing and weatherization. And you can see here that we provide a max loan amount for all of these items. And we model that max loan amount not only on the cost of these items but also on the expected 10-year payback. And you can see that in most cases they're fairly aligned, which was the idea of the program was to design a financing program whereby the energy efficiency savings could be financed by the savings themselves. The upgrade, pardon me, dev grades could be financed by energy efficiency savings themselves. We offer two options for the home energy loan program. One is our direct install option, whereas after you qualify for the program you can make one phone call and have a single contractor perform all of your energy efficiency services and do all the upgrades for you and then be paid directly by the bank. So all you have to do is just sort of make that one call. If the quote is acceptable to you, you sign on with this group and they'll perform all the upgrades for you. Very good for people who have busy lives. Or there's the traditional self-serve option which models sort of the live smart model which is either you or you hire a contractor of your choice to do the work for you and then you get the loan directly from the bank and pay them out accordingly. The way the actual program works in a structure is very similar to the live smart itself in that it's structured around getting an eco-energy audit from an approved contractor. They fill out the application form for you. That then gets submitted to Vansity for their approval. That approval will happen usually within 48 hours and then you can either move through to step three getting either your own contractor or one of our direct install contractors to provide you with some quotes and sign them up. You then have 90 days to complete the upgrades and then get a post-upgrade audit and have your loan funded. The repayment of the loan happens through your property tax bill or your utility bill that the city provides. It's billed quarterly and we will also process any live smart grant and incentives you get against the loan as well too. We're trying to make it as streamlined as possible and really make it as easy for the consumer as possible to get access to this financing to perform these upgrades. When I mentioned the social equity piece earlier about leveraging the green jobs piece, we made sure that any of our direct install contractors that were participating in the program had a social equity component. One of them is proposing to use embers as their weatherization services provider. We'll be making use of that green jobs utilization training program. Others are just making contributions to local charities that will provide energy efficiency programs to social housing, make a contribution for every job they do and we've had some other proposals as well too. Again, utilizing this energy efficiency greenhouse gas reduction program to achieve other social benefits. That's our home energy loan program and I'll quickly end off here with our green rezoning policy. The policy itself requires that it's for new construction and it requires that all rezonings in the city of Vancouver will have to apply to be lead gold or another equivalent standard and they'll have to apply for certification under one of these third party standards. The city of Vancouver, I guess, is maybe a bit unique as compared to a lot of our rural partners in that we get about between 30 and 40 rezoning applications and certifications every year. It does represent quite a significant portion of our overall development approvals. To give you an idea about how Vancouver fares on the comparable cities in terms of the amount of green buildings we do get, good proxy for that is a number of lead projects that you currently have in your city. When we compare ourselves to Portland and Seattle, which are cities of similar size when we compare the Metro Vancouver area, all are about in the five to six million person category. You can see that Seattle itself is far and away the leader in terms of green buildings. Portland is a bit further behind but very comparable with Metro Vancouver. Of that 290 green buildings you'd see in Metro Vancouver, about 170 reside specifically within the city of Vancouver and not within the other 26 member municipalities. Oh, there you go. My animation did work, so 176. In a comparison of how our policy has worked to date, so in the comparison of the 18 months prior to us enacting the policy where we required this of rezoning to be lead gold, we saw about 35 new lead registrations in that time period, eight of which were government buildings. In the 18 months after enactment of the policy, we saw an increase of 46% in terms of we went for the 51 active lead registrations, only three of which were government buildings. What we've seen in the past is that a lot of the buildings that tend to be lead buildings or green buildings typically are government funded in some way because it seems to be the public sector part of me that leads the way in terms of green building, at least in this province today. But we seem to see that turning around a little bit with the development of this policy. So how does the policy mechanics actually work? At rezoning, applicants are required to submit a sustainability strategy, so this is just about how their project will achieve its green building goals. So if that's say lead Canada NC1 or lead 2009, whichever standard they want to use, they're going to lay that out in the rezoning here and maybe provide us with a checklist and a rationale. At development permit, they're going to show us proof of registration with the CAGBC or another third party green building approval authority. At building permit, we will check their energy model to ensure that they are on track to achieve their green building objectives. At occupancy permit, they will supply us with the final checklist of how they're going to achieve all of their sustainability, I guess, commitments. And then they'll have six months after occupancy to show proof of application to the CAGBC or another green building approval authority about how they, that they did in fact apply for certification for lead gold or another equivalent standard at that time. I guess that's all I had there. I can talk about, you know, if there are questions, I can talk a bit more about how the program also comes as a bit of an incentive in that all of the additional costs required to go to lead gold are covered in a sense by the city and that we factor that into the pro forma analysis that we do as a part of each rezoning. And that pro forma analysis is used to calculate what community amenity contributions that developer will be required to make as part of the, or will be requested to make, I should say, as part of that rezoning application. So, you know, we do provide a bit of a credit in terms of the green building requirement that we lay on as part of this policy. So, it's a bit of a carrot and a stick approach in terms of, you know, we are making this requirement, but we do actually provide them with a cash credit to make it happen. So, that's my presentation. Thanks very much, David. And we do have quite a few questions here. We are running just a little bit behind. So, what I'm going to ask actually is that perhaps we just move on to Emmanuel's, excuse me, presentation now and then those questions that we have can start the discussion there after his presentation. So, I'm just going to turn my camera back on and I ask Emmanuel to do the same. And also, Emmanuel, if you could unmute your line, start six and I'll just help you off to your next slide. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much, David. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been mindful of phone as well just to get light on it. We, sorry, just a second. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about, in the case of seashells, what we thought was the need to create some alignment and some integration within the organization, how we used our sustainability plan, auction plan as the framework to do that and how we are currently using or proposing to use some of our checklists and development permits. The need for change, really, it's not necessarily need to seashell for a very evident year. In the small community, we're still very much working in silos and are trying to really get into a stage where we work more as teams, particularly when you have processes such as developments that are key to our business. And, you know, when it's two silos and there's increased delays and that leads to pressure from the business and the development community in particular, which these days tend to pulling cities for both of their issues. And so, but that's the reality, whether it's a fact or not. The recent election in new counselors just really shows that pressure that we're all feeling, whether it's increased fees or increased housing prices, cities now are having to answer for that and the question of value for money. An example of that has been the municipal auditor general is just a reflection of that. And of course, the constant bombardment we get from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business is just yet another group that adds constant pressure to our political leaders to implement change. And just to make things more interesting, climate change is very real. And we're seeing that in reduced water usage, particularly in the summertime, and this is not specific to the Sunshine Coast in most cases. Storms, definitely, we get plenty of those these days and causing a lot of damage to our infrastructure. So, these three aspects in particular have really forced us to think about how we're going to deal with that. And so, this sustainability action plan, which in its, as a framework is a bit of a mix of a variety of action plan, of sustainability frameworks, you know, really has a solid vision for our future, grounded in guiding principles, tiers of strategies and actions and goals for each area or focus that we have, and decision-making tools. And I'll explain this in a couple of minutes. It's really an area that we put a lot of work into it in trying to measure our progress as we work towards our vision and our guiding principles. Most cities in BC, our size, and seashells in particular, have really been working in those silos that I mentioned before, and just within the realm of the strategies and actions, without really working toward the vision, and without decision-making frameworks or principles to measure that. So, we're sort of heading towards the future, but without any common vision. So, we hope to, with this process that we're putting in place, to really get everybody together, and it's a little bit like herding cats, the work is ongoing. One of the areas that we're really concerned with is, how do we go beyond just making economic decisions and expand that of tools? For Council in particular, there's this series of strategic questions that could ask themselves or ask the developer or the proponent when they're dealing with them. Do your projects meet and sit with the overall community vision? Does it consider long-lasting impacts? Does it protect or enhance the natural systems? And if you've attended Council meetings as much as I have, these are not necessarily the types of questions that you get. And what you tend to get is very developers to have to rethink and redesign their projects with increased costs. And therefore, there's sort of that increased pushback of a streamline. It's really the process to do that. We're working on and trying to go beyond just sort of dealing with economic implications and really helping to expand those reports to include as well. And so, we've provided sort of a strategy to help to do that and get everybody to really complete their reports as much as possible. One neat tool that we've been working with Simon Frazier University on is a community capital tool, which measures the things that are difficult to measure in practices in places like Holland and Denmark. And the first of its time coming to Canada is being tested in seashells. And you'll see this tool in the next version of Mark Roslund's Towards Sustainable Communities book. We'll have this example in seashells testing that just to engage with community groups in particular about the things that tend to be behind their concern or their pushback in certain activities or development or what have had you. And how do we inform our decision makers, our counselors, of how the community really feels. So, I'm excited about that and I think we'll have that out in around early May. And of course, the sustainability checklist is another area that we've really been engaging our development community and our building community to use it more and more. And at this point, it's strictly for development permits, rezoning and subdivision applications. We've been focusing on using the sustainability checklist more as an educational tool rather than a regulatory tool. And the reason for that is because, you know, there's a need to help this with community goals. And that does not happen by accident, but a single one-page sustainability checklist basically reminds them in the different areas that of their project powers their project meeting our goals. And in what region you live, we have four levels of government on the Sunshine Coast and everybody sort of has different goals. And so we're trying to work together on aligning the sustainability checklist so that everybody is, you know, it's essentially the same builders, but unfortunately, they have to have four sets of books to meet everybody's demands when in reality we could do a lot better, I must say. So basically what I want to get across is that climate change and the tools that we've introduced here and the province, the leadership they have provided, it's not embed these requirements into existing tools or into new tools. And I was very pleased recently, I went to Ottawa for the Federation of Canadians College conference and there was a workshop the day before put on by SCM and Engineers Canada. And it was the release of their, it's a mouthful, it's the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee that developed essentially an assessment protocol to help engineering communities with those folks. They weren't exactly early adopters of climate change, happy to see how the adaptation and the mitigation for climate change is embedded in this assessment tool. And there was very little discussion about, you know, whether climate change was real or not. And I think I'd like to see more and more of those types of examples show up because, so then we're actually working on solutions. And for time and I appreciate the opportunity. There's my contact information and look forward to the response. Any questions if there's any? Thank you. Thanks very much, Emmanuel. And yes, exactly. We will turn things over to the discussion portion of today's webinar. I'll just point your attention to the feedback button on the top right hand corner, not one means through which you can indicate that you've got a question. Just change the indicator from green, just proceed to the purple, which is question, and they'll queue up there and we'll take them off. As they come up, you can also use the Q&A button again on the header top of your screen. And we do already have a few questions in there. So why don't we turn to those right now? And just going from the top of the list, we have a question here from David Black, I believe it is. Can you provide a list of municipalities that have put in place DPAs specifically for Climate Action GHG Reduction? And who would like to... Yeah, I can respond to that one. David, one place you can look is that the Development Permit Areas for Climate Action Guide. At the end of the guide, there are a couple pages of local government examples. It's definitely not a comprehensive list and a number of the examples include municipalities that are thinking about implementing the DPA, so may not happen in their OCPs as of yet, but there are some examples. So City of Fort St. John, for example, has included some DPA guidelines related to landscaping methods for low water consumption, design elements that facilitate solar heat retention, and stormwater best management practices. So there are a few more examples in the guide, but also the Climate Action Review and Inventive Program reports, the CARAP reports coming in. Local governments are asked to indicate actions that they're taking, and those reports are available on the ministry's website. So all of the reports are available, but also there's a summary document. So in that document, there's probably additional information about local governments that are undertaking DPAs. The website for that is www.cscd.gov.bc.ca slash lgd slash green community slash CARAP, the ARIP. I don't know if you caught that, but give me a call or an email if you haven't, and I'll be happy to provide that information for you. And I will be putting out a follow-up email, and then people know that the materials and recordings are available, so maybe we can use that as a means to get that link out to people as well. So just taking a look at that. Okay, great, and we also do want to speak to our audience as well. So what I'm going to ask is actually everyone, if they haven't done so already, to mute their lines. So if you could just start six. What I'm going to do is unmute, take things out of lecture mode, and actually ask individuals that have their virtual hands to speak to us. So just one moment here. The conference is no longer in lecture mode. Okay, and Jelique, you've raised your hand. Could you unmute your line, start six, and please ask your question. And Jelique, are you still there? We're just not hearing you now, Angelique. If you would like, you can type in your question into the Q&A box there. Perhaps we'll just move on to the next question. This question comes from Jeff. Legal authority has asked for lead or alternative certification. Is it in Vancouver OCP, or is this a policy endorsed by Council? Who, that's, I guess, going to be for David, wouldn't it? Yeah. David, can you unmute your line and respond to that question? Yeah, I have to. So it's not anything specific to Vancouver, or it's authority, or it's any charter authority. It's just something that is a policy that's enacted by our Council that provides guidance to both the community and, I guess, the director of planning in terms of how to advise rezonings, or the processing of rezonings. So what it states is that the expectation is that this Council has, is that they expect all rezonings to achieve a lead gold certification. And, you know, so applicants, I guess, are, you know, while we haven't really had any yet that, where we've asked it of them, have not come forward with some kind of either lead or sustainability related strategy with regards to their rezoning, they theoretically could. So it's not like a by-law or anything like that. So it's just more of like a policy. Now that said, if somebody did come forward with a rezoning that didn't have, you know, a green-building component to it, you know, they would kind of be rolling the dice with Council as to whether they would get their rezoning approved or not. Given that, you know, the advice that they would probably receive from the staff report and the presentation would be that, you know, they're not meeting our policy with regards to what we expect out of extra zoning. That said, you know, if they were meeting maybe there could be other reasons for if they're providing, say, social housing or some other objective that, you know, that Council may want to look at and balance. So it's not, it's not, hopefully that is, that answers your question. It's probably more information than you wanted. And the next question is from Naisel. And the question is, regarding the green-building permit process, are you having any issues with enforcement, such as people not applying for occupancy or not applying for green-building status once occupancy is granted? So we are, we're just coming up to our first sort of sets of occupancy. The policy was enacted in July of 2010. So we're sort of, you know, we're just coming up to sort of two years beyond that date when we would have, we start to see, you know, the first buildings coming through and out of the ground and achieving that occupancy. So I'll, I'll let you know. You know, we've, we have had active communication with sort of the first five buildings that have gone through the process. And we've made it known that, you know, we are actively tracking their progress as they move through. And we intend to report back to Council with the results of the first five at least to, you know, in sort of a, you know, public manner to see how that is going to go. So, well, stay tuned, I guess, so I can say. And we did get into this question here. And here it is. How could smaller, unincorporated communities best participate in greening? In our area, people are very interested in alternative energies, but we do not have any zoning or community plans to use this tool. I'll jump in initially and then maybe some of the other, a couple of the local government folks on board might be able to provide some advice too. What I would suggest is to, Angelique, is to contact, go on to the Fraser Basin Council website and click into the smart planning for communities. A portion of the website to get some contact information. There should be a sustainability facilitator that can help you, provide you with some information or guide you in the right direction as well. There might be others. Thanks, Leslie. Yeah, any of our other presenters? So, I want to speak to that question. Do you have another question here from Ron McDonald? And the question is for Dave. Has there been any uptake on the home retrofit loan program? Hey, Ron. You know what we've had about, I think, between 30 and 40 applications out there. And we've had, I think we're at about two or three completed applications so far. So, we launched just before Christmas. And so, we've kind of been a little bit handicapped by the Christmas holidays. And then, it was only really been kind of active through January here. And it's a bit of a slow onboarding process with regard to getting your energy audit and then getting, you know, people to commit and get on board. But yeah, we're hoping to have these, we're hoping to see a lot more numbers here in February and March as we as we progress through and build some more momentum for the program. That's actually the end of the list that we have in our Q&A's right now. So, this is an open call for any questions here. And again, you're welcome to also speak to us. You can use that feedback button to raise your virtual hand and meet your line and speak with us. Or again, please do type them in if you feel through the Q&A. Also, have some questions for the audience. So, perhaps we'll put those out now and leave them up in front of you if you're able to see the slide. What have been some of the opportunities and challenges related to implementing green energy use planning tools at the local level? Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak to that question? If so, please just raise your virtual hand and please ask your question or speak to that question that we put out. My comment on that is it's still largely a voluntary program. And, you know, our whole municipality is a green house. But, you know, when people come into the counter, it's still, I think, largely an education and a convincing of them and a voluntary sort of aspect for a builder or an individual homeowner. We want to look at some of these things or to do some of these things that they cost them more money. That's just my comment. Just quickly ask others if they could just mute their line. Star six, so we can't hear those comments and questions a little better. So, thanks very much for your comments. We do have another question here from David Blase, David Block again. What is the cost of the City of Bangham to manage and implement the health program? What is the cost to manage and implement? Well, I mean, outside of the staff costs of mine to, you know, me and one other staff person that were kind of sort of full-time on this for a couple months to develop the program, I guess the only real costs for us are sort of the marketing and promotion of the program. And those are not insignificant because, you know, it's difficult to get the word out on these types of programs. So, I think we're spending about $65,000 to market and promote the program and get it out there. We did receive about $50,000 from BC Hydro to help support that marketing, the marketing of the program. And I think we did spend last year in the neighborhood of about $30,000 in consultancy studies on sort of developing and gathering information for the program. And for that, we did get about, I think, $18,000 worth of grants to help cover that from Natural Resources Canada. So, we had about half those covered. So, you know, I guess out of pocket, the city right now of its own money is in the $30,000 range in terms of, you know, just sunk costs in terms of getting the program out of there. And then in terms of, you know, other costs, we, our financial model for lending on this program is contingent upon the, you know, the city making an investment in this low-moss reserve account, which essentially acts as a bit of a collateral mechanism for the home energy loan program. Now, that money, about a half million dollars has been invested into an account, but we expect to receive, you know, all if not, you know, the majority of that money back, you know, either within five to ten years upon maturity of the program. So, so that isn't necessarily a cost right now. We are earning a return on that, that investment, similar to as we would any other kind of investments that we make right now. And again, it's an open call for any further questions. We do have another five minutes or so at least here for some, for questions. Perhaps we'll put out yet another question to you. How have you worked with your business and development community to implement local government tools to build green communities? Anyone in the audience wishes to raise their hand and speak to that question as well, open it up to that as well. And that question is, do you have any lessons learned to share about using land use planning tools? It's really an open call for questions or comments to these questions we put out to you. Yeah, one thing I didn't kind of comment on or bring up today which we've had some success with, with regards to using local land use legislation is the development of our passive design toolkits that we developed in concert with BC Hydro. And what we did is we looked at, you know, what passive design measures would be optimal for the kind of the local Vancouver building environment. We did this for both one and two family dwellings and for, you know, larger comprehensive buildings. And what that did was that we used those toolkits as a platform to look at our zoning and development bylaw more broadly and then saw how we could remove barriers to passive design initially and then also encourage more passive design. So what we've done is actually looked at, you know, our approach to the glazing ratios and buildings. We've looked at providing side yard and front yard setback relaxations for solar shading. We've also provided height exemptions for green roofs and for, you know, renewable energy infrastructure that goes on top of roofs. We've also provided floor space exclusions for thicker walls and better insulation and for renewable energy infrastructure that's inside the buildings. So, you know, we've taken a kind of a constructive look at our entire zoning and development bylaw and seen where we can kind of get out of the way of passive design, but in some cases also encourage or require it. So, and in other cases too, we've also, we used to have floor space exemptions and which were there to sort of promote bay windows, for example, and we've actually removed that exemption because it's shown to have a negative impact in terms of energy efficiency on homes. So that's another kind of useful thing that we've done in terms of using our local land use legislation and trying to, you know, encourage more energy efficient building. Pretty much, Dave. And again, a call for questions or comments. Or maybe I'll just say 15 seconds last call for comments or questions pretty much to our presenters and to all of you for attending today's session. As promised, we do have links to resources here and the DPC site. I believe it is listed here as well. We'll certainly be getting that link out to you as well through a follow-up email and we'll make sure we make it available to you as a supplementary material on the rural BC website where the recording, the promotion, and the slides will all be made available to you. So again, I'll be sending out an email letting you know when those are available to you.