 There are a few things we can do within those constraints, such as dimming lights late at night, dealing with people who are particularly bothered by the new LEDs in their neighborhoods, but basically not a lot. And if the goal, or a goal, is to let the night sky allow folks to look at the stars, so many words, dimming lights from, say, midnight to 5 a.m. doesn't help a lot of folks because they're not up. There are some reasons about health, which are pretty weak. There's some reasons about vegetation, which are kind of weak. And of course, there's always a reason of saving money, but we really haven't sorted that out. The arguments for not doing anything are pretty strong. They hinge particularly on that law situation, law case. Over 30 years ago, and I've asked in this note if we still could come up with a narrative we all agree on. We sort of have a discussion like that. I will point out that there is an extreme position. The International Dark Sky Association has just changed their name to Dark Sky. It's kind of like Vermont Public. And I'm quoting, at the core of the new strategic plan is the recognition that artificial light at night is a pollutant. Well, even hopeless poets like me can't quite take that position. But maybe we could. So I'm asking that we have a conversation about what we want, if it's different from what we have. Not right now, but soon. I said I was in contact with one person in Prepro, Massachusetts. Gabe Arnold had sent us a reference to an article about what they did there. Yes, I've been talking to Tim Brothers, the guy behind that, for months. He always promises me to give me some numbers about what their actual light levels are now. He's an astronomer at MIT. So you think he should be able to do that? He claims he does. So far, he has not. So I'll follow this up with a note to everybody. But I think you get the message. If we want to do anything, we should say so. I'm not sure where we stand. Is that group, are we still doing for another discussion with? Gabe? Not no, but I don't think anybody's trying to set it up. Gabrielle is obviously busy. She didn't respond to my note. So I don't think I can depend on her anymore. So I said, oh sorry, I sent it to Gabe. I sent it to Gabe, Gabrielle, and you, I think. I know I sent it to you. If you're asking, we want to have another meeting. I guess I'm asking, I wasn't sure whether or not we were done with that group. Because I don't feel like we've come to a final, you know, put a stamp on what we're doing either. Yeah, well, OK. No, the answer to your question is no. We haven't set up a continuing interaction. I haven't done it. And again, just having another meeting to me is not necessarily all that fruitful. Because we come up against these barriers. Every time I come in here, I commit to something, and then I sort of do half of it right. I will follow this up with the statement that I've read with some details and press folks for a response. Then I would feel OK about getting in touch with Gabe and or going south. I think it was in, anyway, this is a southern group, non-profit, that helps cities with their lighting. But I'm hoping for some serious, and the answer may be no. The answer to my question is how do we put all of us in? I'm not sure it may be. Yeah, Paul and I should. We have chatted. Maybe we should arm wrestle. He'll win. I think Paul will win. But anyway, yeah, that's a factor. And there are some tweaks. The question is how deep we want to go. For example, in peperol, they've gone in for 2,200k, which is about as yellow as the old sodium lamps. They went for that because they asked folks what they wanted. Showed some examples, and that's what they asked for. Right now, we're at 3,000, and some of our stuff is 4,000 before we went down to 3,000. We could do that. That's a relatively small step. And also, it takes a long time because we have a way for bulbs to burn out. I would say if we've gone through, I would be interested in, since we pursued recommendations or pursued data, might as well get the closure there of understanding what comes back. I appreciate Gabe's voice just having worked with him. And I also appreciate everybody. It'd be good to see all the pieces on the table. His last communication with us was to draw attention to this article about peperol in Massachusetts. So, OK. All right, I will be in touch. Anything? Oh, but first, show of hands. At the core of the new strategic plan is the recognition of artificial light at night as a pollute. Yeah? Not really? OK, all right. Over-simplify me. In my head right now, all I can think of is that our policy and how I defer to Paul that anything that we might do to change anything would have to fall within that narrow, very narrow scope of what stays within our policy. Or if not, it would have to take a long time, a gradual ramping. And what do we mean by that, a decade? I was going to say, I have an item in the GM report that was going to address this. Maybe it's pertinent just to address it now, since we're on the topic, if that's all right. Yes, sure. So we were planning just to reference that, obviously, Munir and Paul participated in the meetings. And we understand there's kind of desire for additional dialogue. And we'll engage however we can. I think the two things I wanted to reference is we had talked about and we did pause any of the ongoing work that was happening until the spring, but we're in the spring, as the weather is indicating. And we feel fairly strongly that, given that we are operating under a current policy, that we need to move forward with the work that's currently in the budget and planned for fiscal 23. So we want to give the Commission notice of that. And obviously, we'll do the appropriate community engagement ahead of time and work as best we can within the confines of the current policy with the community. So I wanted to provide a heads up on that. And then secondly, just to say that I think we can certainly have a discussion around what flexibility, if any, there is under the IES standards or what other types of options there are. I think our team, as we've looked at, it feels fairly strongly that we're not in a position from an insurance or legal standpoint to really go outside of having that type of standard. We appreciate that there's balancing concerns. And ultimately, the policy is a policy the Commission adopts, but were any of us to have to put our name on something from a professional standpoint, from a legal standpoint, we want to have a defensible, identifiable legal standard that we can fall back on because unfortunately there's a safety concern around this in terms of streets, traffic, accidents and other things. So glad to engage further in the conversation. We've definitely kind of, I think that's not a surprise, we've expressed that previously, but I just wanted to reiterate that as we've looked at it, that's something that continues to be for forefront of our mind. I don't know if Paul or Munir have anything to add, or they both may have something to add. Whoa. Thanks, Dan. I just want to also just go back and summarize our meeting that we have months and two months ago. And really my understanding, my takeaway from that meeting is BED is doing everything per IS standards to minimize the light levels in the residential streets, on the residential streets. And yes, the IS does speak about dimming, but does not give you any specific level to dim to on residential streets. So that was really the outcome of that meeting with regard to dimming the lights. And I would add, and you heard this before, at least the people of Scott and Bob and Daryl, I'll re-reference it, but from a legal risk management safety liability for all those reasons, certainly not. Personally in favor of that, and I think that would put the department and the city and the commissioners at risk if we were to have an event. And I think the documents I shared from a 1996 legal opinion that was written specifically on this topic, we've heard from our, in 2007, as Bob mentioned, the time of the claim from the current, the previous broker that said that would be a mistake, our current insurance agent, i.e. broker has weighed in and said that would not be a position that they would support. And as well as our policies, as you know, you adopted the most recent version in 212 of 20, that speaks very clearly that we are to meet at minimum the IS standards. So even if we down the road want to go below that, that's something that would take time, as Bob mentioned. Well, okay, there are two parts of that. One is what weight the Kelly-Devitt case carries. The other is even if that weren't there, what do we do? And even if that weren't there, there's a real constraint about changing an existing, long existing policy. Personally, I'd like to separate the two so they could be separated. The history's there, and so if industry standard, when we put those IS standards and quotes, but if you go below them, you'll have to have an engineering department or a legal firm to say, yeah, that's the right move. And I know that that's not a position that we're comfortable with. So as it stands now, where our projects that we've got coming forward, we're not gonna slow them down any. We're gonna continue going what our standards are, installing what we need. I mean, I think this is a great idea because how many complaints we get are very few. So I think we should just keep on going forward with that and not try to adjust until we get all the facts that we wanna look at and go from there. But I wouldn't wanna slow down anything that we got in the projects and what's going down now. Or would I? And the other concern I have, not concern, but the other thing is dimmable. Can you explain a little bit, Muneer or Paul, how does that work? So if I'm on the street, I don't like the brightness, dim just my light or you dim all the lights. I mean, it's gonna be a very costly thing to do so, but can you explain a little bit how that works? Yeah, I don't think we have a plan or really policy about how to dim because really we haven't thought, we don't have anything to fall back on. But I believe in places where they dim the lights, they dim the whole street or the whole city. They don't dim one light or two. Gotcha, okay. You would need to have the right controller on the lights, plus you need to have a program to control the lights, software and of course there's costs associated with that too. We don't have the items on the individual lights. Do we have the software and the connection? No, we don't have any. We don't have an electronic eye that we can control. Right, that would be the other thing that would be cost wise where we would be being that way budget is. You talked about the whole city, all of a sudden the whole city goes down at midnight? Well, I don't think even, I don't... Well, yeah, I mean, obviously each street has a different criteria, so you don't want to dim every street to the same level. There's a catch 22, the reason they can justify dimming the lights is that nobody's around. So it definitely doesn't have a person advantage and the advantage to people. Is it saving anything in terms of power usage? Well, sure, that's one place where there's a concrete potential. I was gonna bring up that flexible load potential, but it doesn't coincide with peaks and you'd have to balance with the safety element. Just compete with EV chargers. But a resilient, yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't really coincide with peak in a meaningful way. And as you get to any kind of resilience or future peaks, you deal with it then. But if the controls are not built in to either from a core controllability or even a series at a street level, then it's a different plan. It's a different approach. That's more about different values. I'm feeling the weight of the pushback pretty hard. Hard to try to have a light touch. No, no, I mean, I hate to say it, but barring anything that's gonna convince our insurance companies and our lawyers against making decisions that put us in jeopardy hands off. We are, I just wanna say we are, and we'll continue to be sensitive to feedback when we're designing. And I know in previous iterations where we've been able to accommodate concern without compromising safety, we've certainly tried to do that and we'll keep working with neighborhoods as these projects come up to try to make them as comfortable for everybody involved as possible, knowing that when you're dealing with a kind of a public good project that doesn't always happen for everybody, but we'll do everything we can to be accommodating and work with the public, work with the communities and neighborhoods. And we'll continue engaging in the conversation. We learn new things or there are communities that are doing interesting things that we wanna learn from. We're always open to learning about that. That is cool for nano and say. For now, given that the policy remains in force, we'll continue to comply and projects will start rolling forward now that it's spring. We didn't want you to be caught by surprise with that. You found this? This. Nope. All right. Any other commissioners corner discussions, things to be brought up? All ready. We'll move on to the general manager update. Darren. One item down. One of the other items we'll get into in much more detail. So I'm gonna pause on the budget and rates discussion until we get to that presentation. So just to kind of cover a few of the other items. Grants, we're doing quite a bit of work on applications. We had two encouraged under the federal GRIP, the infrastructure bill proposals. So team of folks working across areas, engineering, finance, policy and planning, energy services and communications and others. There's some proposals on a tight timeframe and we're hopeful for those. And there are other state grants around EV, charging that we're pursuing. And then if folks haven't seen or hadn't heard, wanted to share the news, also grant related because we got a VLITE grant to support this. But we have at the Champlain Housing Trust building the old North End where the family room is now a car share vehicle with an EV that's available with a dedicated charger located there and then a charger that we helped put in that is for tenants of the building during certain hours available to public other hours. So it was a good opportunity to add some off street charging in the old North End, which is something we've heard from the community. There's not a whole lot of at the moment. We'll continue to try to add more, but this was a good opportunity. So that's in effect. And I think if you go on the car share social media, you'll see the vehicle. I believe it's a Nissan Leaf, if I remember correctly. And legislature is active. So we've got a lot of things going on there. There is a bill that will continue and expand upon our ability to do innovative work with our efficiency funds. That's S137 that advanced through the Senate. It's heading to the house. So we'll probably have testimony there. We testified in the Senate. We're testifying next week on the renewable energy standard in the Senate. There's a bill that would increase tier one of the renewable energy standard to 100%. We're already there. So the only impact on us would be that the rec prices for compliance may become a little more expensive if other utilities are buying more of them. But we don't have an objection from a policy standpoint to that. There's some other pieces of the bill that we may have proposed changes to in concert with other utilities for the consideration of the committee. They're looking at studying broader changes to the RES structure, but wouldn't be enacting any at the moment. And the clean heat bill is moving in the house. It already passed the Senate continues to support renewable district energy as an option, which is important to us. So that's still in the bill. And I think those are the plans that we're tracking. There's also these EV fees, and then there's base registration or base EV fee. We've not wanted to have a kilowatt hour charge based EV fee that was easily bypassable. So if you're going to put a fee on EV drivers, plug-in drivers, if you only do it on those who are participating in our off-peak rate, and then it creates a disincentive for folks to sign up for that rate because they could just plug into the wall or get a charger that's not signed up. And so we've worked with the committee to try to articulate that concern, along with Sierra Club and other utilities who've been involved in that effort. District energy, so in the state of the city, the mayor referenced our work to complete district energy feasibility within the next few months, reaching to go no-go decision in the very near future. We are working on multiple fronts, Act 250 process. We have a reconsideration of the initial decision that it wasn't a quote municipal project. And so there's some reconsideration around that because we know that Evergreen is supporting a nonprofit to make the application along with BED, but it is a municipally led, municipally funded, municipally driven project. So we're articulating that. We have continued to work with VGS and Evergreen on financials. There's a new program now available from the Treasurer's Office through the Local Investment Advisory Committee that could offer a more favorable interest rate for a portion of the financing for the project. So we're certainly gonna look at applying for that. We are also doing a lot of work just on getting ready to present the customers with the potential financials for the project. So we really are gonna try to kick into higher gear and get this over the finish line to the point where we can make a go-no-go decision in the not distant future. So we'll keep the commission updated on that. Also, state of the city, the mayor referenced the new carbon fee authority that voters passed on Tom meeting day. We're gonna work with the newly constituted ordinance committee, which I understand may have some new members and some existing members. We'll work with the chair of the committee who's been traverse and hope to have a resolution in the near future to kind of jumpstart that work, which would be to put the fee in place and the broader buildings policy in place ahead of the 2024 timeframe for potential implementation. And then I think we've referenced multiple analyses, all of which are coming soon, none of which are ready this evening. One is our net zero 2022 data for the roadmap. I think I've referenced that our early read is that the natural gas usage in the city overall is up. So that's gonna reflect not well on our effort. That'll be a drawback or a rebound in effect. I believe the usage is still down relative to the 2018 baseline, but it's up year over year. So we're not sure if that reflects sort of continued reopening from COVID or construction in the city taking some sort of impact or different use of ventilation systems, building ventilation systems could just be seasonality. There's a number of different reasons why that might be the case. It's not whether normalized data, it's actual data. So there's gonna be some variability year to year. I don't have a clear sense of what the transportation data is gonna show just yet. We are working actively with Green Mountain Transit on trying to support deployment of many additional electric transit buses. So we have two, as you recall from 2020, we're working actively on deploying more and that will be a help to us in the transportation sector going forward. So we'll have that out soon. There's also gonna be updated third party analysis for the IRP that we're doing with Innovative Natural Resource Solutions. They did some McNeil analysis in the 2020 IRP. We're updating that, we're getting more granular in terms of looking at the sustainable harvesting and the carbon pieces around McNeil to address questions that have come up in the context of various discussions. So I think we'll have that data hopefully by our next meeting to share with you and hopefully the net zero data as well. And then we're doing some additional analysis on district energy that I'm not sure exactly when it'll be ready but we'll obviously be sharing that when we can as well. So a lot of studies and analyses in the hopper, hopefully by our next meeting we'll have a few of those to share. I look forward to doing so. And I will stop there. I know we're gonna have a more detailed conversation on the budget and rates but any questions on any of those items, we'll have to answer. Oh, sorry, one last thing before I forget and Lori reminded me, we are doing the Jim Reardon Public Service Award next week on Tuesday at Lund at the pavilion that's been named after Jim at the Lund facility here in Burlington. We'd welcome any members commission who'd like to attend. Scott was helpful to us in serving with the executive team and helping to select the awardee for this year. And we will have members of Jim Reardon's family with us. It's been a nice thing to be able to honor Jim's legacy of public service. This will be the fourth time that we've done this since we unexpectedly lost him in 2019. So welcome any members of the commission who can join us 1 p.m. on Tuesday at Lund at the outdoor pavilion and Lori will send a reminder over email as well. I'm sorry, with that glad to answer questions. Questions. Okay. Thank you. Item number six, the FY23 March financials. That would be Emily. Good evening. One of these nights I'll get my Zoom ratio set correctly before I walk up to the table, but not tonight. All right, so these are the February FY23 results. We had a net income, sorry, where am I, yes, net income for the month of February of $1.4 million compared to a budgeted net income of about $1.8 million. So $396,000 negative variance. Getting into the details, sales to customers was down about $100,000 versus budget. Both residential and commercial were down slightly to combining to make up that delta. Miss, sorry, power supply revenues were positive to budget by $318,000. That was largely a timing difference relating to McNeil-Rex that we place for both ourselves and GMP. So that was a positive variance, but for the year overall, we anticipate that power supply revenues, rec revenues, will be reduced, will be less than budget due to lower renewable generation in prior periods, which then results in fewer recs to be able to sell. Sorry, I skipped over other revenues there. That's $157,000 positive variance. That is largely driven by higher than budgeted EEU reimbursements. Moving to expense, you can see the large $1 million negative variance on net power supply expense. Most of that variance driven by energy prices, well lower than budget, $1.2 million of that million dollar variance is due to the energy prices. Also contributing was our highest mystic R&R capacity payment that we've seen since that agreement was put in place for $317,000. That was a completely unbudgeted expense. And then offsetting those negative variances were lower wind production and favorable transmission fees. Other O&M was about $136,000 favorable to budget. Then moving down out of the operating section into other income and deductions, there's $183,000 favorable variance, which is a combination of favorable interest income, non-operating income, mostly customer contributions, and the timing of asset retirements. So assets that we had budgeted to retire we haven't retired yet due to transition in our fixed asset accounting position and that person kind of still getting up to speed on their role. And then we had an unfavorable unrealized gain on investment also in the mix with that $183,000. Difference to budget. So as I said, overall off from budget by about $400,000 for the year to date, we have a total net income of $627,000. It's about $3 million worth in budget. And as we've been discussing all year, just about all of that due to lower than budgeted energy prices in the winter. I appreciated last time talking about some of the precursors you could see that this is gonna continue for this month. Are you feeling like it was better than you expected? Is it worse than you expect? I can't quite remember where you, if you talked about projection. It was about where the power supply team projected. It would be, yeah. And now as we're into the shoulder season, the risk and the volatility is much reduced. I think Neil is on a scheduled outage. We planned for that to happen. So, you know, there will be variants from budget on power supply. They're always, this is a little bit, but it won't be of this magnitude for the rest of the year. I will then move on to, oh, sorry. Was there another question? All right, capital spending. We, through the end of February, I'd spent about five, I'd spent $5.2 million. We had budgeted to spend 6.6 million by this point in the year. So about 57% of budget. The McNeil overhaul began two weeks ago. So that will be a lot of the production capital spending will occur during that time. So when we report again in, when we report April results, you'll see a significant change in the production capital spending. And I know the distribution crews are out doing a lot of spring work as well. So most of this variance is timing. Go further down the page. So our cash position, operating cash as of the end of February was $7.8 million. We had budgeted to be at a $12 million operating cash position, so about $4.2 million off. You can see the credit rating factors there. Definitely low, right, given the operating results. 2.64 debt service coverage ratio. Just for this month, adjusted debt 0.76 and 100 days cash on hand. Just a reminder that when we are rated by Moody's, they are looking at a three-year average as measured at the fiscal year end. So this is not a result obviously that we repeated it month after month, we would have a bad result. But we're measured as of June 30 on a three-year average. Any questions? Yes. The power supply expense, always my favorite topic. So it was high because it was something about a power plant in Massachusetts or something like that from last time? Well, that's one reason that it was, sorry, I'm failing to scroll up here so that I can look at what you're talking about. So the variance was, the variance was due to energy prices being lower than budgeted, which means we received less than we anticipated for sales of our excess energy. And the, there's a plant, is it MysticMass? Yeah, that ISO New England entered an agreement with to sort of keep it available for capacity reasons, which the region is being asked to pay for. And so yes, that is another factor in the net power supply expense. Fortunately, they're correlated the same way. So essentially if they position gas and the energy prices are low and they can't run because they're not economic, then they need to do something with the gas. So those two impacts are related to the same thing, which is low energy prices both, but they're very different mechanisms. So you'd mentioned this latest 300 and something, $1,000 payment to them was completely unexpected. Help me out with that, is that a monthly bill that we get for that? It's a monthly bill, yes, but they entered the contract this past summer after we had done our budget, right? So yeah, in August or something, we got a letter in the mail that says we're writing to inform you that we've now, anything. Yeah, exactly. Because we didn't know about this agreement. And the formula is very complex. It has to do with whether they are making, whether they are or are not making money in the energy markets and capacity markets. So if they're not making money in those markets, they bill us the shortfall, effectively. We can't see the contract. We can't see the inputs. We've talked, at the state level, has talked with ISO New England about this lack of transparency. No reaction, effectively. So, and there are no projections for it. So it's really, it's driving the utility power supply people a bit crazy because you just can't plan for it. I'm assuming other utilities are also, this past month, but holy cow. Based on their load share. So you can imagine. Yeah, you actually got a million a dollar bill for a single month. And they were on the phone call, see what this is saying. It will continue until May of 2024. That is a multi-year contract, but with unknown impacts every month. Not much probably in the shoulder months, but the winter is, you know, open season. Not even an explanation of how you get to the final number. It's all around great. Yeah. Where's the regulatory, you know, they got our transparency to the, sorry, did I, were there any other questions on the February results, lost my place. I think we're doing everything we can, you know, you know, you have to sort of keep operations running, right? So we're looking at, yeah, reducing expenditures wherever possible and we're monitoring closely. We've reached out to our debt advisor to kind of preview the situation with her and kind of prepare for, you know, kind of no matter what happens, it's not gonna be a year of good financial results, right? So kind of thinking about how do we tell that story to Moody's and, you know, kind of what can we do to ameliorate the situation? Yeah. Any other questions or are you, or where are we at here? Are you all? Questions? Thank you. Oh, goodness, all right, all right, moving on to other things here. Number seven on our agenda tonight is the budget rate update with both Emily and Darren. So I'll just start off while we're loading the slides by these two conversations are completely correlated. So how much cash we end, so Emily's correct that the adjusted debt coverage metric is not gonna be where we want it to be regardless of any mitigation strategy because we had such a significant variance in power supply expectation versus actuals. And we knew going into this budget that that would be a significant variable but it broke against us in a way that I don't think was, you know, seemed likely at the beginning of the year based on where the forward prices were when we actually went to do our rate case. We had a warmer weather, you know, a lot of things kind of worked against us in that sense. Our entire focus now is how much cash we end fiscal 23 with so that we can start fiscal 24 in a stronger cash position as possible and we can try to end fiscal 23 with a cash position that's in line with our Moody's metrics even if the adjusted debt coverage for this particular year might not be. Last year was a stronger year relative to prior years. So this year will be a little bit weaker and likelihood on the adjusted debt but we're looking to keep the cash metric strong as possible. So heading into 24, that's gonna be kind of the key opening consideration and it's a variable we haven't locked down yet. We have the March actuals, hopefully within the next week or so and then we'll be able to re-forecast with the remaining quarter of the year based on that. So some of this is gonna be not only subject to revision but you're gonna see in a couple of places we'll have some placeholders because we're still working through that. All of that said, we started the fiscal 24 budget in as tough a position as I think we've started a budget and I think Emily will document in the opening slide she's gonna cover on the budget and then I'm gonna cover on rates. The work we've done already to bring this closer to where we want it to be. A lot of cuts, a lot of revisions, a lot of creative thinking going on. But I do wanna say that it started off tough. The one thing is, is that we're not using the forwards that are in effect now for the energy prices. We're using a different metric that's a bit more conservative. So we're trying to build in some cushion even though in a rate case they might use the forwards for our budget purposes, we're not using them because they have not materialized in fiscal 23 and we're also gonna be more conservative related to that in fiscal 24. So we'll walk through with Emily some of the budget considerations and then I'll cover some of the rate pieces and then glad to answer questions. Okay. So these are the assumptions that we have in the budget at this point. Starting with sales to customers. Underlying sales growth is modest, very modest, only about 1% in terms of revenues, about only 0.28% in kilowatt hours compared to FY22 actuals. Now I'm questioning whether I've made a mistake on the slide but I don't think I have. I think it's FY22 actuals. So we don't have a full year of 23 in place yet. So just the note there is that sales are increasing only very slightly, right? So therefore the revenues associated with sales are increasing only very slightly. Just a quick note on that just because I looked at it earlier today for a different purpose but our sales were around 360,000 megawatt hours back in the 0.608 timeframe and then pre-COVID like 16 to 18, we're around 340,000 megawatt hours and then more recently with COVID and then coming out of COVID we've been in the kind of 314 to 319,000 megawatt hours. So even as we're slightly recovering here year to year and we've bounced off of our COVID lows, we're not really even at the pre-COVID levels that we were at in 2016 to 2018. So if you think about that, we're selling less. We have had some rate change obviously but it definitely is not a helpful metric when we're thinking about strategic electrification. That's growing but not at a level where it's overcoming some of these other barriers. Just as you think about occupancy or like whatever those drivers are would be correlated. Yeah, we still don't know the full effect of remote work on electric use either. I don't think, you know. Yeah, I mean, you know, loss of blotted ovens and specialty filaments and the like, right? Is it that's kind of part of why we came out of 360 territory, right? And then kind of immediately pre-COVID, you know, the city place or losing the mall, right? That commercial square footage is not back yet. So that's another kind of pretty big factor. All the offices that are not being moved? Yeah? Yeah. There's some of that still. We're 75% commercial energy load so if residential is up and commercial is down that doesn't break in our favor from a sales standpoint. Right, right. All right, so along with sort of underlying sales growth being quite flat, we haven't assumed, we have assumed at this point in the budget a 5.5% rate increase which would be effective on a bills rendered basis for bills after September 1st. And that's on top of the most recent rate? Yes, yes. Rack revenues are up very modestly just about in line with FY23. Wood fuel cost, we have reduced, actually sorry, rack revenues are down modestly but they're, it's very modest. So they're eventually the same, about the same as FY23. Wood fuel cost we have reduced for this budget around $1.80 per ton. And then the energy prices as Darren just alluded to, we're not using the current forwards. We are taking kind of a midpoint between what the forwards are and the average of the prior two years to try to be a little more conservative about how we plan for that. There is a 5% cost of living adjustment per the IBW contract and we negotiated that contract last April, May, June, sort of in the midst of like record high inflation. So an inflation, you know, March was 5%. So that turned out to be about right. And we are budgeting for tier three or strategic electrification rebates at about one and a half times our compliance requirement. Sorry, didn't mean to advance the slide. So we are, to date, we have exceeded our compliance requirement in the past several years. We're anticipating that we will continue to do that. And we have, you'll see an increased capital budget. We have the revenue bond available to finance capital projects. We will continue to receive our annual $3 million of general obligation bond funding. And this year, there is a $1.7 million of Velco equity investment in the budget. Timing of that largely driven by the timing of one Velco issues calls for equity. So they call, we respond. Kind of how it works. And just on the Velco equity, and we'll touch on this maybe in a couple slides, but just to mention it, that's the only piece of the capital budget that's not really covered by the geo bond or the revenue bond. And we are exploring a couple of different options related to that. One of which is just for commissioners who weren't on the commission back in 2018, which is a few, we had an agreement consideration with VEPSA, the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority, become a strategic member of VEPSA at the time. The commission authorized us to enter into that. We hadn't done so yet. The pandemic got in the way. There were other things. We're re-exploring, actually pursuing that because one of the things you can do among all the various synergies that we have with VEPSA, one of the things is, is that they are able to finance the Velco equity investment for their members. And you can get a favorable kind of cash flow setup from having the dividends from the Velco equity flow against an interest rate, not have to come up with the entire amount in a given year. So that's one option. We're also looking at whether we can have deferrals with Velco for a longer period of time so we can buy in increments. But the Velco equity is good. It provides a roughly 12% return in dividend that is a key part of our budget, but having to put in seven figures annually for calls, which wasn't necessarily the forecast a few years ago and has turned out to be the case, puts us in a tougher position from a cash standpoint. So we're looking at ways that we can align that cash flow benefit with paying for it over an increment of time. So just wanted to make you aware that we may pursue one or the other of those options in the final budget will provide clarity on that. Okay, I'm gonna move on. The next slide kind of shows you the variances in the FY24 budget compared to FY23, the more significant ones. So you can see sort of what's changing from year to year. Rec revenues, as I mentioned, are down only slightly $140,000. Interest income, we're predicting to be higher by $400,000 and $2,000. Interest rates are higher. Capital contributions from customers for projects, we anticipate to be down by about $350,000. So you can see that we're, not all of these are considered revenue, some of them are considered other income, but those items are netting to a net decrease in income or revenue. Okay, this one makes a little more sense. Anything in expense items, if it's positive, it's bad, right? Correct, yes. And then expense, fuel expense, we are budgeting to be $124,000 less than our 23 budget. Purchase power, mainly the energy prices, right? There's the big one, $3.5 million in additional expense compared to 23. Transmission, we're predicting to be down slightly, just under $200,000. Labor and overhead combined are actually going to be lower than last year. That's a combination of two things working in opposite directions. Labor itself is up $666,000, but it's offset by our labor overhead expense, decreasing by $745,000. So yeah, more labor dollars, but a decreased benefits and pension expense, basically, associated with the labor dollars. So when you combine the two, it's a net decrease. City allocations, what we pay the city for, things like HR and city attorney, racial equity and belonging, that bundle of services is up $83,000. And then our tier three compliance expense is up $209,000, sort of per the renewable energy standard where our compliance obligation increases every year. Just a couple of notes on this, our combined operating expense that's not power supply is actually down, it's pretty much flat. It's down 133,000, like 0.4%. And then on purchase power, even though there's a tremendous delta to what we budgeted last year, it's only a $621,000 increase compared to FY22. So it's a big change from what we budgeted before, but it's in the scheme of things, not a huge increase from sort of FY22 when we hadn't seen the sort of really volatile forwards that we started seeing when we budgeted for 23. And to get to this place, actually maybe I'll show you the place, I'll do this and then there's slide or two, capital is quickly, it's a pretty large capital budget, $13.2 million. The revenue bond is picking up $9.1 million of that and then non-revenue bond, which would be essentially either general obligation bond funding or our own cash reserves, 4.1 million. And just a reminder, so that includes the Velco equity purchase of $1.7 million. So we're kind of looking at ways, we kind of have our capital budget funded, so buy bond proceeds, except for that Velco equity piece. So how do we conserve cash by financing that investment in a different way? Because we're not able to use bond funding for it. That's where we're exploring. You can't cut capital and help your cash position. Other than the Velco equity, which is not funded by the GO bond or the revenue bond, if we cut down on those projects, you're just not reimbursing yourself from the revenue bond, so. Can't cut any further is what we should say. We've done the cutting that you can do without starting to kind of chip away at those sources. So this is a relatively high capital budget, but that's the reason for it is we have a three year spend on the revenue bond. So this is a big chunk of it happening in fiscal 24. Okay, so here's where we stand at the moment. We have an operating loss of 2.8 million, a total net loss of 461,000, and then ending cash, we're really not sure yet is the answer, and we're gonna be pinning that down as we get another month of actuals and a tighter forecast for where we're gonna end on June 30. To get to this point, kind of compared to what we started, Darren said we'd started in one of, about one of the worst places. We've improved net income by 5.8 million to get to that net loss. So it was 5.8 worse of a net loss when we kind of just put the whole budget together. And we've improved our, we've, I should say, saved or conserved about $8 million in cash through those capital cuts and the net income cuts or the operating cuts as well. So the team has done a lot of work to get to this place. It's certainly a very, a difficult budget exercise this year. We know the cash flow in the budget model. We just don't know the starting cash position. So our goal too, just is to get to that net income to be positive, maybe modestly positive, but to have it be positive going into the year. So that's the work we have remaining on that side of things between now and May when we come back to you. And to get the cash to a 90 day level. By June 30, 24. The rate hike is in. The rate hike is in. That's right. That's right. And then so this is the final slide that I'll share, which is sort of where do the Moody's metrics land with these assumptions. Day's cash on hand, we're leaving TBD for now. The debt service coverage ratio at that level of net income would be 3.46. And the adjusted debt service would be 1.03. So as we work on that income, our goal is to get the adjusted debt service up a bit from where it is there. Still not going to be at the target level where we'd like it to be. And obviously the FY23 budget, the 1.41 is not going to be realized. So we had a 1.22 in FY22, which was a relative positive from the prior year. So we're going to have that delta in 23 and then we're going to try to have 24 kind of bounce us back a bit, pending the additional work that we have to do. So we're going to get into the rate increase as well. But any other questions before we get off of this slide? Yeah. Just a question. You talk about a rate hike that would kick in the 1st of September. Which is scant six months, five months. So it's another one of these arrangements when you ask, but you're able to institute it before it's actually been acted on. Correct. So the last one went into effect August. So this is going to happen a month later into the fiscal year. But yeah, any rate adjustment that we make, we would go to the Board of Finance on May 17th to present our budget and our rate change. We would then go back to the Board of Finance with an agenda item, pending your approval of it to bring them an approval and then the city council with a goal of filing it 45 days or more before implementation. And then implementation would happen, then we'd go through the rate case process. We're still going through the rate case process and finishing it for the 3.95% that was implemented for FY23. So I think we're going to have to get used to this kind of cycle of the implementation of whatever the rate change is at the beginning of the fiscal year, first few months, finishing up the kind of rate case from the prior year. I mean, all of our changes so far have been well documented, well justified. I think we've asked for less than what we can justify. This will be the case again. The 5.5 could easily be a double digit request based on the metrics that the regulatory process uses. We're doing everything we can to keep it at a manageable level for customers and that's why we're going in with the 5.5, which we'll get into more, but. Question about, would the goal of being to end up every year being given, one or two percent before we don't involve the P&C? If we can get to a point where you're... Like, we can't ask for this, we're only asking this. So does that prolong, I guess it would assume, and especially not knowing some of the things we're not knowing here, prolong the period of time that we're asking for, rate increase is higher than our goal of being one or two percent. I mean, you could ask for a double digit rate case and it might solve more than one year's worth of challenge and might get you to a point sooner, if I understood your question correctly, where you were asking for something like a 2% or less. I mean, I do believe, and I think we had this great run of 12 years without a rate case, but I don't see that happening again. I see us wanting to adjust, even if it is modestly, one, two percent, every year just to make sure we're keeping up with the costs of doing business and inflation. Those costs have been much higher than that more recently. So yeah, you could do something much more significant, but it would have a really disproportionate impact in the year where you requested it. And I think what we've been trying to do is keep the annual adjustment at a reasonable level, hopefully getting to a point where things are lined up well enough, the compounding benefit of the prior rate cases is enough that we can start asking for something around the 2% level that would be ideal. But clearly we have work to do to get the financial health of the organization to that place. We're not there yet. Maybe we should, we'll jump into those slides just since it's the topic. So some of these are familiar from prior years, but they've been updated. You can see the history of rate change really dating back to the 80s. And you can see a few of those really jump out at you. Those are the big double digit increases. We had one in the decade between 2020-10. There was a 22% and an 11% in there. You can see our more recent runs more at the modest level. As a reminder, we had originally in our, when we did a five year plan with Moody's to submit to Moody's looking at our rate change trajectory, we had projected the seven and a half in fiscal year 21, or sorry, 22. We had projected a closer to 5% or 4.9% in fiscal 23. We asked for 3.95 because the forwards were so high that it would have been harder to justify the full amount that we had planned. So this year we would have been closer to what we asked for last year had we asked for what we thought we were gonna ask for last year. So these two years have essentially flipped in the forecast more or less. We were hoping to do a seven five and then like a five and then a four instead we did a seven five and then a three nine five now we're doing a 5.5. So that's how that lines up a little bit. We can go to the next slide. This is looking at over a period of time that's roughly 2010 to current. Looking at the prices of various commodities relative to the BED increase, which you can see at the bottom in kind of the darker greenish blue line still being quite a bit lower than a variety of other cost increases, whether that's housing or education or medical care. We've added a new slide, which is the next one, which I think may be more relevant. This is a shorter timeframe looking at 2020 to today and looking at inflation and the BED rate changes, all of which have happened during this relatively short period of time in the post pandemic period. And so even with the rate changes that we've had that I know are kind of something we're not quite adjusted to yet, we're still below the rate of inflation during that period of time, which is still a reasonable accomplishment. We have seen double and even triple digit rate increases in neighboring utilities in the New England region who are dealing with this volatility that we're dealing with. So being under the rate of inflation until that period of time is something of a positive metric even though obviously for customers we see on our bill an increase that's not something we welcome, it's not something we welcome asking for, but I feel like this is an important contextual slide here that we've added. We can go to the next one. Residential rates, here we have a split on the BED line between the BED rate and the, what we're calling BED energy assistance program, EAP, which is essentially our low income pilot rate. And you can see that the Delta there, both of which are favorable to the rest of Vermont and to New England on the residential rate side. So even with the proposed increase, we continue to be a good bit lower on the residential rate side than where other utilities are and where they're projected to be. They could come in higher than these projections potentially, so this is just our best knowledge to date. And you can see with the low income rate, essentially that rate is equivalent to what BED's traditional rates had been during the period of time where we weren't raising rates. So still a relatively favorable proposal there. And that program will continue in FY24. Yeah. How does that compare to other PAP rates? Yeah, so ours is a pilot at 12.5% discount on the bill. And obviously as the underlying bill is larger, it has a slightly more of an effect. I think that it's a little lower than what GMP has for their rate I believe is a 20. Them and VGS both have a program between 20 and 25% discount. And I believe we're the only ones that have such a program in the state of Vermont. I don't believe that the other co-ops or munis have one. There's a docket at the PUC that's exploring what this would look like on a broader basis. And we're kind of in a learning mode at this point, trying to figure out how many customers we can get signed up, what the annual fiscal impact could be, because we're still able to draw on ARPA funds to help reimburse the cost of the rate during the period of time where we're in pilot mode. So we'll evaluate and we can potentially keep, adjust, expand. I have a slide at the end that talks about how many customers are signed up. So we'll get a little more detailed at that point. I think you have to go to the mic. They can't hear you on the TV. Just quickly to mention too, of course, we're watching that 12.5% of our rate versus 20% of GMP's rate are different numbers. Their rates are generally higher than us for residential. And also the impact of average use, too. So again, one of the things we're talking about in the docket is the metric isn't what percent discount you're offering. At the end of the day, it's what is the cost of electricity to people who need assistance. So that's what we're playing with in that docket, I think. They're at the energy burden. Wait, what is the energy burden? And it's not better if you have a 20% discount if the rates start twice as high. So that's what we're looking at. So on the commercial side, you can see here that with the proposed increase and based on what we know of rate change for other utilities, we would be slightly higher than the Vermont average, lower than the New England average. We were lower than the Vermont average for the period of time where we didn't raise rates. I think prior years we had been at or above the Vermont average. So that kind of goes back and forth a bit and you can even see it there, that those lines crossed a couple times at various points. So still lower than New England, little higher than Vermont, at least based on what we know projected for commercial industrial rates. And then, I think we have a couple... So total rate, combining all of it, we're still a little bit below the Vermont projected average and well below the New England projected average. Different way of looking at it, this breaks out by state. So you can see BED residential on the left side there. The current rate is lower than every other state. With the proposed change, we might edge ahead of the main residential average, but still be below Vermont utility average and the other four New England states. And then you can see for commercial, we wouldn't really change our respective position, but we would be lower than four New England states, higher than Maine and a little bit higher than the Vermont average. Total rates, we would be below everybody other than Maine. Maine traditionally has been the lowest cost state for electricity and New England, Vermont has been between second and third most years. We've gotten pretty close to Maine more recently, but so these are still, everything being relative, we're still a relatively low cost proposition within the region and within Vermont. I'll be pleased to hold that, get for a second. Are we cutting off our nose to sped our face to be way down here low and not be competitive along with the rest of New England? Well, I mean, it kind of goes to how much we think customers can manage in a given year, right? And we'll touch on this a little bit more. It's not, we're not not changing the rate higher for the purpose of this slide. I think these are good metrics to look at, to make sure that we're not out of line with where Vermont is or where New England is. And clearly we're not, we are still on the lower end, which to me says we're offering a relatively favorable proposition compared to other utilities, but this isn't the reason to change rates or not change rates really, it's the next slide, what's the bill impact for customer? That's what we're focused on. I know the commission's always focused on that, has asked about it. So this kind of spells it out, monthly, residential average customer, current rate, proposed rate, gonna see a $4.39 increase. We know that's material. We know for a lot of folks that matters, that's why we have the energy assistance program to try to help. We know we've had a couple of increases already, so that this has not been a static cost. For the small general, which represents about two thirds of our commercial customers, smaller businesses, smaller commercial loads, it's about a $5 increase per month. So again, not an overly burdensome hopefully, but not nothing either. So really it's this that I focus on and worry about more than where we are relative to the other utilities in the region, is this something that we can ask of our customers and that they'll be able to manage in a given year? And if we were to ask for a $10 a month increase, I worry that's gonna be too much for too many folks for us to be asking. Even if it's what our financials might merit, breaking it up into increments on an annualized basis, as opposed to putting it all in a given year, I think is something that we find to be a good approach. I think we have to just adjust the thinking. I mean, utility rates are interesting, right? Because the price of gas adjusts daily and we've all gotten used to that, although those of us driving electric don't have to be used to it anymore. And we can focus on a much more stable commodity price with electricity. Other utilities like Vermont Gas and GMP have a much different regulatory model where they have storm charges that are added to the bill or they may be able to adjust their commodity costs quarterly. When fuel goes up, your bill might go up 30%. And when fuel comes down, your bill drops 10%. And that's all happening kind of within the year. And so I think we offer relative stability. Rate changes once a year in the single digits in this inflation environment is, I think relatively reasonable. We'd love for it to be lower, obviously. But I think we have to adjust the idea that we're gonna change rates every year. And it's gonna be hopefully in the lower single digits, hopefully never in double digits because that means we had to ask for more. We hadn't maybe planned the way we had wanted to. But I think having that mentality that this is a cost just like everything else, particularly in a high inflation environment that goes up, 5% COLA. Certainly when Maneers and the McNeil team are getting materials for projects, those all have increased in cost. So we're seeing it across all the different areas of our business. And we, in our regulated model, we don't have a choice. We don't have any other way to pay for it other than through the rate structure. So I think it's just a mentality change. And I think, because we went for so long without changing rates. And I was certainly appreciative of that at BED that we had made that run. But now we have to be in the mentality of let's try to have moderate rate increases annually to keep up so we don't ever fall too far behind. So the other thing that could change is sales. You know, city place project is underway. Emily mentioned that the mall load has been offline. So part of that's gonna come back online. You know, high school project is underway. That's a load that's offline could come back online. Those are our material potentially for us. Other projects around the city, housing projects, development projects, and strategic electrification is projected eventually to break out of the noise of variability and make a material contribution. I think we just started from such a low base that even with 20X growth in residential heat pumps, we still have, you know, 900 some odd heat pump systems in the city and we have, you know, over 40,000 customers. So we still have a lot of room to run till we get to the point where it's making the kind of impact that we would see on the financial statements. So, you know, our hope is, is that those trends break in our favor longer term and that we're not as dependent on power markets to make our budget or not. But we really have an underlying sales because sales is our commodity. Like that's our bread and butter. It's like we're playing catch up and we're playing a lot of catch up in those 12 years or so that we, yeah. We are. I mean, we are. There were periods during that time where we really would not have been justified to come in for a rate increase. There were periods where we might have been able to. So it wasn't as if the entire 12 years was an opportunity to change rates. There might have been a period where if you'd gone in and looked at rates, they ought to have been adjusted downward. Odd as that is to say. You know, a lot of that had to do with the rec markets being incredibly high. And then, you know, there were, so there were different points in that period where, you know, in the early part of that period, I think we had just had a 22% and an 11% rate change in the prior decade. So the effect of that was really gonna bolster your revenue from sales. Then in the mid part of that decade, we had rec revenues up in the $13 million annual, whereas now they're closer to seven or eight million annual. So if you'd gone in and asked for a rate change, then you might not have been granted one. Towards the end of that period, we ran right into COVID. And then we didn't really have a choice at that point. So, you know, I understand the rationale for the decisions that were made, but certainly if we had had an adjustment once or twice during that period, we might be playing a little less catch up, but I think that we just need to adjust our thinking now. How does that tie into our net zero? Well, this is one of the things that I think we're gonna emphasize too in the legislative discussion is electric rates are really important for the climate now. If we want people to convert to EVs, heat pumps, all these other technologies, we have to have a favorable or competitive Delta. The good news is right now we do. With the electric charging at the public stations, it's competitive cheaper than gas. With the residential EV rate, it's way cheaper than gas. And it'll continue to be even with this change. That's another reason not to have dramatic increase. We don't wanna exacerbate the favorable advantage that we have and lose that. With heat pumps, it's been right on the edge. There's a period of time where natural gas was much cheaper for a single family home, let's say, than a heat pump. More recently, heat pumps got cheaper to operate than gas. Gas is moving around as a commodity, so that may change around a little bit. But that's another reason to kind of have more measured approaches to rate change also to do the work that we're doing on end-use rates. So just like we have the EV rate, we're hoping to have a heat pump, either rate or bill credit structure in the near future. And we're doing that pilot right now to try to figure out how we can minimize peak impacts from heat pumps, be able to offer the customer a little bit more economic benefit for operating the heat pump. So where we can do that for those end-use technologies, that's gonna be really important for the net zero effort as well. And the more net zero takes off, the less rate pressure we'll have, which is interesting to think about, assuming we manage peaks well and implement it well. Yeah. Other questions? We have a couple more slides to walk you through. Or actually, maybe this is the last one. Yep. So one more to walk through, but it's the one that we were touching on earlier. So for the assistance program, we're looking at here, you can see the before 23 and after July 23, which again, this will really be September of 23, the bill, and this is for kind of using an average bill. So you can see that there is 85, 21, and then compared to 89, 91. The bill credit, the amount of money itself does grow a little bit because it's a 12.5%. So the relative percentage stays the same, but the amount of dollar value increases as the bill itself has increased. Reminder about the kind of the program eligibility here at the bottom, as of 410, so we checked them this couple of days ago, we have 134 customers approved and enrolled. Our kind of initial kind of anticipated goal was try to get between 800 and 1500 residential customers enrolled and we've tried to make it relatively low burden by utilizing other programs that they're already eligible for, for verification and not requiring an independent and lengthy verification process. So we've grown the program, but we have more work to do, more room to run here to get more folks signed up and our team is interested in doing that. The growth's been very incremental month by month, but that's the kind of bill impact for the energy assistance program customer on an average kind of monthly basis. And I think there's maybe, I know we kind of had an appendix that we didn't quite have, but if we have the EV slide, maybe we can pull that up because I think Scott, it goes to your question a little bit, I think it's helpful. Yeah, I think it was in the appendix, there it is. So this is just across the different utilities in Vermont, the cost to charge an electric vehicle per kilowatt hour and you can see at the bottom the BED rate and then the proposal for the 5.5% what that does and really we continue to be by far the cheapest place to charge an electric vehicle in the state of Vermont with our EV rate. So that one does matter, I think. We're not always gonna be competitive in every respect with every utility, but Burlington being 100% renewable and the cheapest place in Vermont to charge an EV, something we're proud of and that'll continue despite the rate change. Maybe we'll take it out of the appendix put it in the main deck for the rest of the day. Yeah, it tells a good story. All right. So thanks for bearing with us. I know there's a lot of information, a lot of slides. To be clear, we're not seeking any approvals or votes this evening. This is just the draft presentation. I don't think we've always had this level of detail on the rate change in April. Typically we've had it in May. Sometimes you had to have another special meeting in May give the commission time to digest it because we're a little more focused on what the rate trajectory is now and the budget is still variable. We'll have a little more detail on the budget in May, the final cash numbers and other pieces. But at least with this, we hoped we gave you enough kind of time to look at the rate change. And if you have questions in between now and the next meeting when we'd be asking for a vote, let us know. We're happy to provide more information. We have notified some of our large customers who we know budget and are impacted significantly to look at holding a placeholder for the 5.5% including UVM Medical and the city itself which are our three biggest customers. We also will subsequent to this meeting we wanted to talk with you all first. My plan was to send a note to the city council in the next day or two outlining what our proposed rate change is gonna be give them a chance to ask us questions if they have any in advance of our Board of Finance presentation on the 17th. So we've tried to build in a lot of time in the process for people to absorb the information and think about any questions or concerns they might have. Questions and concerns? For either just customers, I mean, it will get boosted some level or? I mean, nobody is ever thrilled with any kind of rate change. But I think what I would say is I don't think we were outside of the ballpark of what was expected given where things are with inflation and other energy costs. So I don't think we surprised anybody and that's definitely a positive. We've had regular communication. Emily and I meet usually in the winter time or kind of late fall early winter with UVM and UVM Medical to keep them apprised of where we think we may be. But then obviously not knowing at that point we kind of reconvene towards the March, April timeframe to offer a more concrete estimate. Cause we know when we first had our seven and a half percent rate change and we hadn't done that in a while. That certainly caught folks by surprise and it can have a big impact for their budget. So we've certainly implemented a more regular communication on these items and we're in good communication, no surprises. So that's a benefit, yeah. Again, one once, going twice. All right, thank you, Darren. Thanks. Onto number eight on our agenda this evening, the IRP forecast update number three from Mr. Gibbons. So the same update should be fairly brief. I assume you've all read the email that you received at five minutes before the meeting started. And sorry, couldn't resist. Just let me pull my notes up for a second. So just the things that have happened since the last meeting, the forecast, the email you received was the forecast, a PowerPoint summarizing the forecast and the actual ITRON report on the forecast. We have a meeting with the department, our recurring engagement meeting next week and the primary topic will be those forecast package that we sent you. We will also be sharing it with the department of public service or comment. We are finishing up, as Darren mentioned, the McNeil economics appendix and the McNeil appendix to the appendix, which is a carbon assessment by INRS. The carbon assessment is not required by the last IRP. The update to the economic assessment is, but as long as we're doing this, we figured we would get another metric, another carbon metric to measure against the other choices we've got, which are the original DEIC work and then the work that you mentioned, Darren from Vermont Gas. So we're having multiple different ways of looking at the carbon profile of McNeil, different timelines, different levels of granularity. Those should be shared with you well in advance of the next meeting. We sent back the edited versions today. Engineering is working on their section of the IRP. We have spoken to them. The 102.8 megawatt threshold level that was evaluated in the last IRP, they have updated all of the costs of those. They have also run, and Mernier, correct me if I'm wrong, but a 120 megawatt case. Given the forecast, and you'll see it when you look at it, we may stop at the 120 megawatt case and not actually run the math for the 140 megawatt case. We do know that the 120 megawatt case is probably a threshold above which substation, major substation work would be required, and we are certainly nowhere near the 120 megawatt, and in fact the IRP forecast doesn't exceed 80 right now, which is sort of the underlying system level. You'll see in the PowerPoint why that is and what is not included in the ITRON forecast, and that is largely the commercial industrial heating space, which is hard to sort of model through an energy forecast, and some of the commercial cooking, which we're having trouble getting a handle on. Those will explain really the difference between the high level of the IRP forecast and the net zero forecast. There is one Delta Climb cohort member. Delta Climb, for those of you who haven't heard, is an incubator accelerator. I always lose track of, they prefer one and not the other. Program, one of the core this year is working on modeling system requirements under increasing renewability and things like that. So I'm actually gonna talk to them about the proposal that we had for modeling 100% renewability and see if they're in a position of offering us any assistance there. It'd be nice to sort of link the two things together and the timing would be pretty good. And with that, that is my update for tonight. And welcome for any questions? Sorry. Does your email explain who said what because I couldn't quite follow it all? The email is entirely around the forecast, okay? So it is a PowerPoint, explaining the forecast at a summary level, and the actual ITRON forecast report. And we are certainly happy to take either email questions or to do a presentation at the next commission meeting. We were just a little concerned that with the budget and rates on the agenda tonight that we didn't wanna push the time too much today. So again, either email questions if you prefer, or we can do a PowerPoint, or again, if you wanna call and we can walk you through it. Any of those options are certainly on the table or we could just present the PowerPoint at the next regular meeting if time permits. My initial response would be I would like, I would love to see this PowerPoint again next month because I think between what you said and what, there's a lot more to unpack here. And I would like that we have a full commission tonight, so. Yeah, I certainly have no objection. I don't set the agendas, but I'm certainly available in more detail the next month that would be great. Yes, available to do it, agenda permitted. But again, like I say too, if there are questions, if you look at the PowerPoint and you say, oh, that actually makes more sense. And I thought and then you have a few questions. Again, any of those things are on the table for as far as I'm concerned. You can preview it. A PowerPoint along with a live discussion of it, I think it's more, makes more impactful. And again, we don't have a full board here to unpack it all. Okay. So yeah, you wouldn't mind coming back. Again, I don't mind, but I defer the agenda to the powers that be, so. Also, we didn't get a chance to look at it tonight before getting it presented. So I would, if that's okay with the general manager spring or that would be, of course. Thank you. Thanks. Commissioner's check. Ah! All right, yeah. Last thing would be a commissioner check-in. Do we have any other items from commissioners as a result of all this, are they? Well, I picked this up on the way down here today. I haven't really read it except to skim it. Looks like it's mostly about neighborly fights. I read it. I presume some of the people in the room were visited and maybe even courted in here? Nope. We were not asked to comment for that article. Although they used the Electric Avenue's title and we obviously have the Electric Avenue street sign. So we would have been a good photo opportunity. But no, we weren't a part of that article. It's primarily about issues around solar development in southern Vermont in part. And then partly about the discussion about whether or not there needs to be changes to the renewable energy standard with some renewable energy Vermont and developers cited. And then Lewis Porter from Washington Electric Co-op and June Tierney from the Department of Public Service cited. So we weren't asked or offered to comment. There's some profanity in the article. So watch out for that from renewable energy Vermont. But otherwise, no, we weren't a part of that particular one. Would have been happy to offer time, but they didn't ask. Anything else? I got one thing that I've alluded to before. I am walking the talk. I talk the talk. Walking the walk. Signed that we're going to get our house weatherized. That's already underway and looking to get a vendor to take a look at heat pumps and all that, I think, from my house. Trying to walk the walk while I talk the talk here. So so far, the process is going smoothly. So we'll see. And thanks for BED and Vermont gas both eagerly helping us out. No, that's good. Our efficiency teams work very well together. And I'm glad to hear it's been a good process so far. So knock on wood, I'll have a much more efficient house by the end of the year. Hopefully we'll have a heat pump, rate or bill credit for you. Talk about it. Exactly. That's the whole idea. All right. Again, anything about some commissioners? If not, I will take a motion. Motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Right here, second. I have a second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. We are adjourned.