 Good evening. It's the second Wednesday of the month, and we're here at 585 Pine Street for the monthly meeting of the Burlington Board of Electric commissioners. As it says, it beats at 530 here at 585 Pine. As always, the public is welcome to come join us, join in the conversation. So here we go. We'll start with the first item on the agenda, which is the agenda. It looks like we have one change to the agenda in that we will not be having the IRP update because James is sick. So item number 10 has been taken off the agenda. We added 6A. And we added 6A, which is the money I chose for July. Can I complete this other piece, Executive Session? So we'll go both over June and July this evening. And we're going into Executive Session. And we've got an Executive Session. So I guess we've got a few different things going on here. All right. It sounds like James is trying to say something. James is trying to speak. James is saying the volume is low. Volume is low? It's being fixed. We're fixing it right now, James. OK. Next is the minutes of the July 12, 2023 meeting. Barring any substantial changes to or corrections to the minutes of July 12. Hearing none, I'll entertain a motion. Make the motion to approve July 12, 2023 meeting. No. Second. Motion and a second. Discussion on the motion. Hearing none, I'll in favor of approving the minutes of July 12, signified by say, aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed, say nay. Four ayes. Motion passes. Lots of number three. Number three is the public forum. This is a chance for the members of the public, both online and in person, to come up and speak to the board and have any concerns, praise, whatever. It's all fairly open game. See, we have one person here with us in the audience. Do we have anybody online from the public? No. Sir, it is your ballgame, if you wish to speak. Oh, no? Just to miss any. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you for joining us. We don't often get met. So thank you for joining us. We don't often get too many members of the public here to come in and listen and listen to this. Certainly, if you have any other questions, if you have something that comes up later on, we're more than happy to give you a chance to speak up. All right. So we'll move on from public forum to commissioners corner, number four. This is a chance for, and I'll always, again, back to public forum, public, always welcome here, second Wednesday of the month, 585-5, and please come share your thoughts, your ideas, your concerns, where that's where we're open to listening to it and working on it. All right, on to commissioners corner. This is an opportunity for commissioners to have a say on something that they've may have seen or done or whatever, something that's come up in the last month. And so I opened it for two commissioners for a comment. I noted in the notes the reference to battery technology for the South 40, somewhere in the meeting if somebody could say something about that. I'd be happy to touch on it briefly now if you'd like. My understanding is there is interest by the project owner, the South 40 solar, to look at adding battery storage there and working with our team to evaluate what the economics would look like. So we've had a few different opportunities where we've tried to consider utility scale battery storage around the community. We're continuously evaluating that. So this one was brought to us and could be a good opportunity. We'll definitely be interested. But our kind of continued pitch for battery storage is it has to pencil for us in terms of particularly peak reduction opportunities. Because unless it's part of a microgrid and there's some resiliency component, which I don't know that there would be in this case, it will get some value from other services. But peak reduction, I think, is going to be the main one. So maybe with some of the inflation reduction credits, we'll have some economics that are favorable. Other question or items? All right, hearing none. Move on to number five on the agenda, which is the general manager update with general manager Springer. Thank you. Thanks. Good to be back after our break in August. I'll start with our electric bucket trucks. Some good news. I hope you all maybe had a chance to see it. It's definitely been out in the community. And we are working through a couple little issues with the chargers, getting those kind of squared away. But it is able to charge. It's going to be popular at a number of events, including our Net Zero Energy Festival. I believe it may also be at the REV conference and at one other event. A lot of people, it's the first one in the state. People want to be able to see it and check it out. Our line crew, Kieran in particular, did a great job at the press event explaining. Sorry. Explaining kind of how it works. Did a demo in the bucket. Went up about 60 feet near, it seemed like. And was able to kind of talk through how that works. One of the things he shared at the press event was that there's a separate battery, obviously, for the bucket system compared to the propulsion system. And then there's even a backup battery within the bucket that if somehow you were ignoring charging the bucket and you got stuck up there, there's a backup battery that then can kind of bring it back down. So a lot of interesting redundancies for this type of truck. We shared some of the news clips in the report. We're really excited to see it rolling through the community and glad you all got a chance to check it out. Mention the Net Zero Festival, I want to mention again, Net Zero Festival, September 23rd, rain date September 24th. We're continuing to add to all of the things that were listed in the report. I believe our latest addition is that we will have Ben and Jerry scooping ice cream from a fossil fuel-free Tesla. So we're happy for that. We will have fossil fuel-free food trucks. We'll have Champ. We're gonna be raffling away an e-bike, courtesy of VCCU, our sponsor. The bike is from North Star Sports. We'll have an electric lawn trimmer also raffle, Ego model from ACE. So we're happy to have their support. We're gonna have two live bands and one DJ throughout the event. The city fleet of EVs will be present. We're gonna have EV test drives and e-bike test rides. We'll have lots of bike parking, local motion. So all kinds of great things going on, heat pumps, solar vendors, others. So we're obviously, we welcome the entire commission to join us at any point during the day. The time changed from last year. It was nine to one. Now it's 10 to two, which we think will be a little bit better aligned for having folks join us. And the also happening this year will be the first ever Net Zero Energy Award at the event. ETA, our energy equity project analyst, has worked with Betsy, who's here, from McNeil, and we're designing a very unique award with help from the generator. And we took nominations from the community for different individuals and organizations that are making progress on our Net Zero Energy goal and demonstrating leadership. So we'll be announcing that as well, I believe at 12.45 on the day of the event. So very exciting stuff coming up on September 23rd for that. Also wanted to mention, we are waiting for the carbon fee ordinance to have an ordinance committee meeting. It could happen as early as next week. And I don't know if it will be one in a series of meetings, or if they're gonna plan to try to resolve it all in one meeting, but that had passed the two committee. It's now waiting for the ordinance committee and then it goes to the full council after that. The goal is to have it implemented for 2024. We've had a couple three Defeat the Peak runs now. And I think we're probably done, barring a late kind of late breaking surge of further summer weather in September, which is not unprecedented, but we had initial one was with Old Spokes Home and we were able to hit our targets for each of them. Jen Green was the Jim Reardon Award winner, was able to pick the first non-profit, picked Old Spokes Home over in the Old North End, which is a great bike shop and organization. Agewell and the Interveil Center were our two other ones. We're doing check presentations for those in the near future. Obviously we wanna support the Interveil Center through all the flooding that occurred there and they're a good partner of ours and Agewell, Vermont. The oral argument took place in the FY23 rate case. We are still waiting as you may see on your bill. We have now, as you get, I got my bill, I think yesterday, you'll see a FY23 and an FY24 line item surcharge on the bill. The issue that's been holding us up is a resolution around the Moran frame payments that you all remember. The Department of Public Service has been, I think, reasonably supportive of our position. Council at the PUC had raised concerns about the, not so much the current arrangement, but prior negotiations around the Moran frame and how those impacted on this current arrangement. So that was what the oral argument was about in part. Bill Ellis represented Burlington Electric as he does. He's our PUC Council and that took place and we're now waiting still to get resolution on that in order to make the FY23 rate case part of our rates as opposed to a line item surcharge. Typically, you'd only have one line item surcharge on a bill at a given time. But to extent you hear about that from anybody or anybody's listening, that's why we have both still is that the 23 rate case is still pending based on that. And then lastly, district energy. I think we had, do we have an agenda item on that separate? I'll hold then talking about that. We'll get to it at the agenda item. Those were the major updates. I think I saw something over my email flash from James about the Solar Test Center maybe, is that right? I think I just saw that. And I'll just mention that the, we've talked about this for a while, this McNeil Solar Test Center partnership with UVM was just over there today. The panels are going in. We're looking at trying to establish a commissioning date. But there's a bunch of solar now in what was the wastewood yard area and the wastewood yard's been moved back. So we're excited to open up that project in the near future. I think we're waiting on some couple items to be able to move forward with commissioning. And Mike will let the commission know when we have a date for the Solar Test Center event. And let me stop there. Questions? No questions? Okay. Thank you. We'll move on to item number six on the agenda. The FY 20, July 23 and June, both June and July's financials. Double win. Double shot. Is it possible to get the screen share working? Thanks. Is your camera stuck? Thank you. Marvelous. Thank you. No, no, no. I'll get more out. Okay, so that's... All right, so where am I starting? I am starting with the, yes, June. So I wanted to give you the final, not the final, but the June FY 23 unaudited preliminary results. These were included in the packet you received in August when we didn't have a meeting. I just wanted to go through them quickly. The numbers here will change as we do. A few year end adjustments. We always have a pension, expense and liability adjustment to make. We always have an OPEB adjustment to make after we receive certain actuarial reports. But we're not really sure yet. Sorry. Yeah, I just let you in. You bet. Wait, it was there, now it's gone again. Sorry, I hate to be in vain. So we'll be asked, keep us tuned. Yeah, that's a little... Okay, thanks. So as I said, these numbers, I do expect to change, but wanted to give you a preview of where they are at the moment. We, due to the adjustment and purchase power that we've discussed before, we're seeking approval within the 2023 rate case to amortize $4.162 million of lost revenue from excess sales of winter energy from last winter to amortize that over eight years. And so as a result of that 4.162 million dollar reduction in expense, and then we've added one eighth of that back. So we're gonna spread it over eight years, right? That is the preliminary, that's showing preliminarily a positive net income of 3.2 million. It's 2 million better than budget. So that's kind of where we stand on a net income basis. And then scrolling down, you can see that we ended the year about 88% spent through the capital budget. We went over a little on production due to gas turbine repairs that were unanticipated and then timing affecting the other projects. And I reported this at our June meeting, but we ended with 4.463 million in operating cash. That was about 217,000 less than we had budgeted to begin FY24 with, but it was kind of where we were forecasting to end as we kind of tried to plan where we would land. And then you can see here, the preliminary Moody's rating factors for June 2023 would be an adjusted debt surface coverage ratio of 1.28 and 93 days cash on hand. The cash on hand number improved so much because the operating expense number shrank due to the adjustment for the winter energy revenues. Because remember, that's a ratio, right? So we didn't have any more or less cash than we had been forecasting, but our expenses were reduced. And so you can then spread that expense over more days. Makes sense, or spread your cash over more days because your expense for each day is less. Again, those numbers will change once we get final audited financials, then we'll have an official expense numbers and then the ratios will be updated accordingly. It's very complicated because it's like a less revenue, right? And so you, but because you budgeted for a higher number and you brought in money for less, that gap still has to be accounted for and that's where you spread even though. You're talking about the amortization of the, yeah, so it's in net, we talk about power supply expense, but as Commissioner Herendine has elucidated before, it's a net number, right? So it's all the things we're paying related to power supply, transmission, capacity, purchase power, but then it's any revenues we receive for purchase, in the power supply area, including sale of any excess revenue to the ISO New England when we are basically when McNeil is online, right? And we have more power at a given moment than we need. So, yeah, it doesn't appear on the income statement as revenue, right? But it appears in the expense line as a net to the other purchase, to the other power supply expenses. Right, it reduces those costs. And that's how you can amortize costs then because costs are higher than anticipated because revenues were lower than expected. And that's where you get that delta that can then is a hard, a real number. Right. That can be spread across. Right. Because so the way we budgeted according to, or not exactly the budget number and the rate case number weren't the same way, but we take the same approach, right? You take the same approach to budgeting that we take to the cost of service in the rate case. And the cost of service in the rate case, the methodology that the department advises us to follow that's been supported by the commission is look at the energy forwards at the time you're submitting your rate case. And that's gonna be the cost of your energy, right? That's accepted as the basis on which to, you know, say, okay, we're gonna spend that much on purchase power. At the time we did the rate case, those forwards were extremely high last summer, as you remember. And so we sort of had to kind of assume we were going to make all this money from selling this excess winter energy at really high prices. We couldn't lower, you know, the methodology is use the forwards, right? And so that gap between what we were kind of regulatorally required to include in rates versus what we actually collected due to the energy prices we saw was so big, right? And we did some analysis to say, you know, what's been the historical variation on the forwards at this point in May or June and what they actually turned out to be up or down? You know, how many times in the past since the creation of ISO New England has it been this off, right? Have the forwards been that wildly off? And James and Casey Lamont on his team kind of looked back at that and it's really only happened like once in the good direction and one other time in the bad direction. And that's kind of also... And then we have eight years. Yeah, and that's also how we came up with the eight years. In part, and also it also spreads the effect sort of across, you know, across more rate years, so to speak. Anything to add to that, James? Did I? Okay. No, again, we knew this was a problem. We pointed it out when we made the rate filing that the methodology that the department prefers to use exposed us to a lot of risk of lower market prices. And in fact, after we filed the rate case, the department said the poor prices have gone up and would argue for an even lower rate case, but it didn't pursue that. And then in fact, they came in lower than all of those others. So again, it's a structural problem. And it affects you either if you are long or short energy and it affects you in different directions. So it's a known problem in rate dating, I think. Thanks, James. Anything else on preliminary FY23? Okay, I'll, with your permission, I'll switch to July FY24 results. So in July, the story, generally speaking, was it was quite warm. And energy prices were good. McNeil was online and it rained. So there was water in the river. So that all adds up to, those are the major drivers really, in a positive variance to budget of $596,000. We're reporting an income of $284,000. We had budgeted for a net loss. So we did better than budget in July. You can see sales to customers were up, largely weather driven by 67,000, both commercial and residential classes usage was up. Miscellaneous or other revenues on your sheet. This month, that's just about all EEU revenues. We didn't have any rec sales this month. That was down versus budget. And then moving down to operating expense, looking at the net power supply expense. That's where we can see the effects of the energy prices and McNeil. It's generally overall, it's a positive delta of $289,000. Always some puts and takes within there. Fuel was over budget because our wood price was slightly higher than budget and also McNeil ran more than was budgeted. But then on the other side, purchase power was less than budget because our wind production was down. We had excess energy to sell to ISO and McNeil and Winooski-1 were both producing well. Transmission was also better than budget, contributing to that positive variance. And then in other operating expense, that too was better than budget by $426,000. Mostly timing, it's the first month of the fiscal year. In, where are my other income and deductions? So I'm now just above the bottom bottom line. A $39,000 negative variance. So the timing of work order billing and offset by a positive unrealized gain on investment. Questions on the income statement before I move over to capital and cap? Well, here's another 90 point. Going back to the previous chart, we showed a net income of $2 million last year, sort of saved by that amortization. Does this make our rate hike look exorbitant? No, because that adjustment and that amortization was included in the cost of service that we submitted as the basis for our most recent five and a half percent rate request. So even with that betterment or that adjustment, then the, we believe anyway, the five and a half was more than justified and we had costs that would justify even higher. Now, while that's still be investigated and ultimately determined by the Public Utility Commission, but that was, that's the evidence that we've supported in support of our rate filing. Nothing else on that, I'll scroll down. Capital spending early on, we're about 10% of the budget for the year. Actually, we spent a head of budget in this month, so about a million dollars on our 11, almost 11 million dollar budget and so anything, right. So of note here, this is skewed a little bit. As Darren mentioned, we received our all electric bucket truck. We've paid for the whole thing. We'll get reimbursed for a lot of it from the state once we complete all of our compliance paperwork, but so the full capital cost is appearing here, even though that's not gonna be the cost we ultimately bear. And then moving down to cash, we have 4.8 million, just about 4.8 million dollars in operating cash. That's just a little, a touch under our budget amount of 4.9 million dollars. And we have debt service coverage, 4.25, adjusted debt ratio 1.48 and 102 days cash on hand at this point in the year. Any questions for me? Very welcome. We'll move on to item number seven on our agenda and that's district heat update with the general manager's brand. All right. So we were originally considering whether we needed kind of more full agenda item for this, but update will suffice for the moment. We had originally planned to potentially have a work session at the city council as early as September, excuse me, 18th. But we've asked to move that back to October 10th to give us a little more time to conclude the discussions around the potential terms, the project, the economics, the financials with the medical center. So we've had a number of different things that are all kind of happening simultaneously. We've been visiting with some of the MPAs where there's been a request for us to come and talk about district heat. Jen and I joined ward six last week. I'm gonna try to join ward one at least by zoom this evening. I think they start, they're form around seven 10. So dependent upon this meeting, I may try to join them. And then we have wards two, three tomorrow and then later in the month, we have four seven and there may be others that choose to engage on this as well. We also had the webinar yesterday that I know commissioner Moody, commissioner Bonn were able to join. The link for the webinar recording is on our website at burlingtonelectric.com slash McNeill. I don't know if any other commissioners were able to, commissioner Herendine. Okay, so we had three commissioners on for commissioner Whitaker, commissioner Shagnan. If you're interested, burlingtonelectric.com slash McNeill and it's also on our YouTube page. It was about one hour webinar featuring Lund, Sweden, Dalhousie University and Hal Fax Canada and then St. Paul, Minnesota as well as the president of the International District Energy Association. The event was hosted by Linda McGinnis who's South Burlington resident has done work for both the Shumlin and Scott administration on energy and the Obama administration. And there's a former world bank lead economist. So great resource for us in the community and has worked with energy action network and others. So it's a good discussion. It was interesting to hear kind of how they were thinking about it and what their systems are like in these other communities. They're not identical to what we're looking at but they all use biomass with, you know a district heat and in some cases combined heat and power application. So we hosted that as just another educational opportunity for the community. We've posted three Q&A documents which I've also sent to you that are on our website that are cited and researched and respond to things that we've heard in the discussion try to provide some additional information. One's on the McNeil economics. One is on district energy itself and one's on climate and forestry related to McNeil and the broader discussion. So at the moment we are looking at having potential city council work sessions kick off on the 10th. If we do reach a point in the next several weeks where we do have kind of a go of trying to move the project forward to the process with the city council, I would anticipate that our October meeting we would want to have an agenda item with a full proposal and a potential vote at that point from the commission prior to it moving all the way through the council process. Council as I understand it would have one if not two work sessions prior to actually taking up a vote. So we won't be late at all in the process if the commission looks at it in October. And I'm trying to think, I don't know if there are any other items to provide an update on now, but that's kind of what we've been working on where we are in the process and glad to answer any questions. Commissioners, any questions? I just make a comment that I've been approached by people who are critical of biomass and I thought at least in one case we're burning something like 85% sawdust and I just wanted to say, boy, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy? Sure. Yep. I think we're closer to around 10% mill residue. So for our mix as of 2022 and obviously quite a bit coming from tops and limbs and residues within the woods and a percent and a half from the wastewood yard. So I did look at our kind of supply mix over a period of time, our fuel mix. And we were at one point closer to 10% low value roundwood. Now we're about 0.3% low value roundwood. So to the extent that folks are concerned about that, there's been a move kind of in that direction away from low value roundwood at McNeil, which is mainly for fuel security purposes if you can't get in the woods during mud season, have that on hand. And I think we have a fairly favorable mix of fuel when it comes to climate payback. But these are all issues that get discussed, debated. I'm under no illusion that we'll reach a consensus on these topics necessarily within the community and district energy doesn't necessarily require us to. It's more of a narrow question around if we have this facility, do we want to improve it? Do we want to increase the efficiency? Do we want to utilize it to help reduce commercial sector natural gas used by a substantial amount? It doesn't really require us to change the operational dynamics of McNeil or the wood inputs for McNeil. That's really about improving the facility. And I hope we get to that discussion because I'd be excited for us to bring this after long last to a potential positive conclusion, but more work to be done. So are there any public and community engagement requirements as part of this district energy or is it just an agreement between you all and well be ED and EDM? Well certainly, I don't know if there are requirements but we're trying to visit with the MPAs to really enhance public engagement. We hosted the webinar in part to engage and obviously there were folks in the chat who didn't agree with the project or had different views and they expressed those obviously as they should. But so we've had those opportunities. We did the TOOC forum back in June as another public engagement opportunity. And my understanding is there'd be potentially three city council meetings where this would be a topic of discussion, the work sessions and then a potential vote as well as the commission meeting next month. So a significant amount of public process around it, but ultimately the ask would be really around a more narrow set of things. It would really be around if we're successful with the project bringing it forward would be around creating approval to have an agreement to provide steam for McNeil for the district energy system, what the parameters of that looked like, any potential incentives that BED might offer as a part of that. Those are the hooks and the pieces that would really be within sort of the commission and the council's jurisdiction to look at and to decide upon. Okay, because I think, I mean, I know there's like this public opinion piece going on in the community, but it's so technical like even the Q and A's and everything, it's really a conversation between just a handful of people. And maybe that's fine, but I do think like some simplifying it and making it a little more accessible to more people might be a good thing. It's a complex topic and I agree that I don't think most of the community is engaged on this despite whatever efforts we're just talking about. Not everyone attends an MPA meeting, not everyone's gonna attend a webinar. A lot of people I talk to in the community aren't even aware we're really looking at this or that there's any potential debate around it for good or bad. And I do think if it moves to the council that that will have a unique opportunity to focus the discussion and for us to try to present it in as clear and concise a way as possible. And the MPA presentation I have is just 10 slides. I'd be happy to share it with the commission as well just for your reference. I've tried to get better at speaking about this in a way that is concise and relatable and understandable, but it has many distinct deep technical areas where we can get into a level of detail that may be important but less helpful for that. So I appreciate that. Yeah, because I think most people just need to know is it the right thing to do or not? I would say yes, but that's probably not good enough for everybody. And just like a few, yeah, I get it. It's really complicated. And I think in general like this, that energy conversations feel really important but people are just not accessible to most people. Yeah, no, and I think the other benefit if we are able to move forward with the October discussion is we'll be able to get more detail on the financial pieces of it, what that looks like because we haven't been at, we don't have an ability to discuss that now while we're discussing the term. So if we get to that point, we'll have more clarity that we can offer on that. And I do think that we don't have to resolve every aspect of the debate around biomass writ large because that's a broader conversation. I think if we come to the conclusion which I certainly believe that we are not in a position where we would want to shut down the McNeil plant because we need it for reliability. It provides a really important economic benefit but more importantly, it's providing energy at a time where we would otherwise be reliant on natural gas. And I believe that with our fuel mix, there's a carbon benefit to having McNeil relative to burning fossil fuel. If we agree on that, that we need McNeil for the foreseeable future because there's not a renewable alternative. But even that nugget right there is rare. We should be able to communicate that simply. Right, but if we agree on that, then the question becomes very different. And you've removed some of the extraneous discussion that is good and is happening but isn't actually what we're debating here. We're not debating whether to build a biomass plant. We're not debating all those aspects of that. But that's a lot of what the challenge in the community is. And then I think people don't understand it and they see steam and they think. They think it's pollution and it's not. Right, and so I think it's some of those just really simple basic things. And then what does it mean to me as a rate payer? Am I gonna pay the lesser more or is it no impact? Right. I think like there's, and I think, because a lot of these Q and A's are like three, two or three pages and they're really dense and yeah. And they could be graphic. Yeah. We've tried a number of things and we'll keep trying. But ultimately it's gonna come down to having to bring the question to the appropriate forums and present the best information we can. But I will share the MPA slides. You may find those more digestible. You're in word one. Oh, so yours is this evening then. Yeah. I wasn't gonna do slides there. We didn't have a formal presentation but there's a public forum between 710 and 740. So if I have the chance I was just gonna drop in and introduce ourselves again and the topic. But I'll email you all the slides. Okay. You recall several years ago I did a little presentation. I do. On the biomass question and when I hear the discussion I say, well, yeah it's complicated but there's just two fundamental concepts that handles it all. Lags and where you bound the question. So you just tell people that and that you take care of everything. But as soon as you look into what those mean it gets very complicated fast. Anyway, if I have anything I think I can add to your slides I'll let you know. Please. No, we'd welcome your feedback. I appreciate it. I'll email them out tonight so you have them. Can take a look. Other questions? So these slides are the five minute version. So they'll be more concise than the Q and A's. Sir, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to ask a question. Excuse me sir. Can I give you an opportunity to ask a question? I don't have any questions right now. I'm new to it. I'm interested. I'm from the Bob Young days. Alan Yandall. Sure. So thank you, I mean. Okay, just a little bit. I hope to come to your October meeting. Okay. And learn. I appreciate Scott and you. We appreciate you coming to it. That's why there's been a lot of things said here. In respect to the work you're doing and being doing. I do. Thank you. Just want to make sure that, yeah. I'm disappointed that it seemed like I'm the only one from public here. You know, it's sad. You know, being, you know, Burnett is a so-called progressive town that there are not more citizens here. You know, it's discouraging, but you know, what can I do? We agree. There's not often a lot of public engagement here. And I'm kind of surprised given that there's as much public discourse on this particular subject that not more people are here. So we appreciate you showing up and that's why I wanted to give you an opportunity to ask a question or two. Thank you, I appreciate that. All right, are there any more questions on this topic? If not, all right. Thank you, sir. We'll move on to the public EV Charger Deployment Plan. Emily? Okay, so Paul and I are here to share with you the results of kind of a months long effort internally here at VED to think about where we want to put public EV Chargers in the city. We have been deploying them right along since about 2014 or 12? 13. 13. Okay. But with the adoption of the net zero plan with the issuance and approval of the 22 revenue bond, part of that was to increase EV Charging Deployment in the city. And we didn't really have a long-term plan for locations, for how many we need to support charging over time. So this group of folks from sustainability, technicians, engineering, policy and planning, communications, energy services and distribution got together this spring mostly and kind of really kind of put together more of a strategy. And so just wanted to update the commission on the results of that. This was also the basis for this work was the basis for the application we submitted for a Department of Transportation grant to fund EV Charging. So generally what we did was Freddie Hall on the policy and planning team. Policy and planning actually had an intern or a fellow, I should say, a graduate fellow from the University of New Hampshire two summers ago did some work with Freddie on projecting out how many chargers do we think we'll need in Burlington over time, given certain assumptions around the number of EVs that'll be on the road over those years. And then we came up with criteria for ranking or prioritizing spots in the community. And we kind of ranked neighborhoods around those criteria, brainstormed a list, scored the lists and then kind of put them on a map and then sort of looked at them visually to sort of validate or tweak our scoring and our thinking about where they should go. This is, I can't go very deep on this slide because this is getting into Freddie's model which is quite complicated, but he did use a regression model. And so the key thing is it assumes growth in EVs about 25% a year. We are planning to put about 80% of the ports at the level two level, 20% of the ports at the level three level. And then we're kind of putting 60% of the level twos in commercial areas and 40% in residential. What's a 25% increase? Like what do we have, what number of cars does that represent? I don't know, but it's assuming that there's a, that there's a, you know, as people see more chargers there's going to be a greater adoption of EV units. I don't know what that number would be on that. I don't remember the current number of EVs from the synapses. That we have currently? Yeah, the registrations. In the community? Yeah. It's a little over 600 as of the 2022 data. Yeah. So yeah, so you do the math out on that. It's 25% growth of that year over year. But exponential, right? Yes, exponential, yeah. This is, so this is a little bit more friendly visual. This basically shows the number of ports that we're going to install in each year. So this is not a, not cumulative. It's the number of new installs. So you can see we're planning to install every year more ports than we installed the year before. What are the two colors? Sorry, yes. The green one, top one is level two. Ports. This goldish one is fast chargers, DC fast chargers or level threes. So overall. It should be like a bar. It should be a bar not a line, right? Yeah, I mean, you could visually show it as a bar. Yeah, we could do the bar, yeah. You could visually show it as a bar. It's not cumulative. It's not cumulative, yes. No, I think what we're trying to visually show is that that kind of increase in growth of the number of chargers in the area. But you're right, cumulative, it should show almost like a stepped approach. Yeah, so the total number of ports essentially from now until 2030 is 200. Some level, mostly level twos, some level threes, but 200 ports over the next seven years. So then we, you know, said, okay, where, what makes a good spot for a charger? Thinking about commercial locations or business districts in the city, proximity to multimodal transportation, amenities, tourist attractions. We looked at the load factor or kind of usage level of our current chargers and which chargers get a lot of folks using them, which ones are not used so much. We considered, from a distribution system perspective, ability for expansion, where we have room on circuits, where there's space for cars. And then also thought about where might there be opportunities as DPW plans, you know, street work or their capital improvements could we leverage and take advantage of those projects. On the residential side, we considered housing density. We considered justice 40 or disadvantaged community census tracts. We thought about where there might be synergies with local organizations. Again, looking at multimodal transportation. We've sort of put a pin in the idea of, in certain areas of the community, maybe not picking a precise spot yet, but going into that neighborhood or that area and saying, hey, we wanna put some chargers in, here's some ideas and getting community input and then ultimately picking the spot with that engagement considered. We thought about lighting and safety. We thought about, for the grant, one of the requirements was that it's not, it can't be restricted access. So it can't be like an employee-only parking lot or a customer-only parking lot. It's okay to part-charge parking fees, but it has to be open to the public. The site has to be open to the public. This is busy and hard to see on your screen, but it's generally what, I want you to get the sense of here, is that each of these things here is a neighborhood. So this is like downtown and then this is the rank order of the kind of neighborhoods by how well we thought they met our criteria. So no surprise, downtown met all the criteria for the best place to put a commercial, in a commercial area to put a charger. And in the new North end, didn't score so well because there's less commercial activity there. It's highly residential. So this is kind of showing how the neighborhood scored and then we used that kind of scoring of the neighborhood to think about, okay, how many ports should we drop in each neighborhood over time and how do we spread the new ports out among the different neighborhoods based on the suitability of those neighborhoods given their criteria. It's interesting the old North end scored low because they have high housing density. They have a lot of commercial activity. This is commercial. Yeah, they scored well, better on residential. Yeah, if you actually look at the older. So here residential downtown still scores well but old North end kind of commercial area when you ski have and the sort of more residential areas of the North end scored number two and three respectively. You know, the DC fast charger takes a much larger footprint so that kind of also limits a lot of space down in that part of the city, aside from saving you down in shops down there. I was just gonna, I'm saying the old North end. Sorry, the new, yeah, sorry, the old North end even worse, but yeah, the DC fast charger itself really needs kind of an open parking spot and parking lot whereas the level two chargers, we actually have a pole mounted one that we're gonna be rolling out that makes it a little bit easier to throw some out there. So. All right, so I'm gonna move a little, hopefully a little bit better visual. Okay, so let me explain all the pins. This is some great mapping work that Freddie did. So the blue dots are where there is multifamily, subsidized multifamily housing. The green pins with stars are the proposed new charger sites and the orangey gold lightning bolt pins are where we have chargers now. And so we, and the, let's see, the red buildings are commercial, I believe, commercial buildings in this view. It's tricky. So some of the spots we're looking at over the next seven years, the schools, so admins for the downtown area. We thought about how faculty, staff at the schools could charge during the day. After three o'clock, the parking lot is a lot less heavily used and community members, residents in the neighborhood could potentially use those chargers overnight. So that you could, you know, kind of serve kind of two groups of people potentially. We thought about city-owned properties. So the DPW, city market lot, the Fletcher Free lot, the Main Street, that's the corner one, I believe, on about by the power station, thank you, the Super Block, the downtown garage, city market's own private lot potentially, the YMCA's private lot potentially, and then potentially expanding next to our current chargers at Manning Church or Manning St. Paul. City market, does the city market have any chargers at all? I think they have a couple. They have one, but I don't think anyone was using it and they closed it, right? They have some here. I don't know if they have some downtown. There's one in a very narrow space. Yeah, it is a small space. And you gotta go in and get the key and then come out and unlock the charger and put your thing in. So it's not that convenient either, but people don't use it, yeah. So then the waterfront, this is an area we actually don't have any public charging right now. So this is on our near-term list to add some public charging infrastructure. There's a number of park-controlled parking lots, of course, with Perkins Pier, the waterfront lot, Battery Park, the sort of lot near the sailing center, the Lake Street extension lot. And then we have a few 2030 district members on the waterfront, the sailing center, Echo, and Main Street Landing. So quite a few potentials, we think. I'm surprised you don't have a lot where foam and deep city and all those businesses are because that thing is full all the time. There's nothing there. The Lake Street extension lot, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, we don't have any in this area right now. That lot is prime for this, I think. Okay, so Old North End, let me show you what this, so the colors on this map are a little different. This is showing the residential housing density. So the green is less dense and the yellow-orange red is the more dense. And so here we're thinking about the two schools, we're thinking about the two parks, the community center, but then you can kind of see there's some holes here, right? Where there's no park, there's no school, there's no DPW lot and here, but there is a decent amount of housing density. So these would be potentially the areas where we'd be looking at. The pole-mounted charger, yeah. The pole-mounted on-street option, where we might do some community engagement to think about what would people feel is more most safe, most accessible? Would they like them sprinkled all over the place? Would they like a sort of central, all the chargers are here kind of spot and get some feedback? Right, because Palmary Park and Roosevelt, they don't have any parking associated with those parks. So you're talking about street parking on the perimeter of the park. But you can use the city-owned land to post the charger? Is that the idea? Yeah, that's the general idea. Yeah, yeah, that'd be the plan around those spots. And then you just get an excuse from residential parking or whatever that if there's any restraints. Yeah, we'll have to work with DPW and we've had some initial conversations on them around charging and resident permit only and kind of how did the various ordinances and rules governing parking and the city work. We've also had some discussions about potentially making the public charging rate time of use because, okay, so right now our public charging rate is what it is all times of day. Most folks who use it are not Burlington residents, right? But if you are a renter who doesn't have off-street parking and a place to charge at home, right, you shouldn't be penalized and pay a higher rate by having to use a public charger. So if we put a pole mounted charger on your block, right, and then you park there on the street as a renter, is there a way that we can make the rate you pay more equitable with the home charging rate that your neighbor who has a garage or a driveway, right, is able to obtain? So we've got some tariff parking things to work through, but it was this whole conversation with this team kind of started to surface those issues and so I think we have some good working concepts and models to refine. So part of your public engagement would perhaps, and I have one parking line in mind, would bring out perhaps other ideas kind of like what I'm thinking. I'm just thinking of looking at our office at the channel 17, 294 with UC Avenue, hot yoga, and that's another lot that's always full, completely full all the time. So would you engage with, that's a privately owned, would that be part of the four discussion, engaging with private owners like that to see if perhaps some night parking would be okay for folks that might be able to choose because there's also heavy residential right there to slip in there at night and charge up their cars? There's places like that and I just think about it in particular. That discussion has to happen with private law owners to see if we have other opportunities like that. So yeah, I agree with you. And we've got some precedent, the new North End near the Haniferts, that's a privately controlled lot, right? So we've done it before, we have some at UVM, those are UVM controlled parking, but they're open to the public. So yeah, we've had those discussions and we've used private lots before and so definitely those are not off the table. We were just trying to go with the city controlled and then sort of maximize that city resource as a first strategy. Here we go, okay. And then looking at the new North End, the new high school was an important opportunity. The schools there expanding what we have at the shopping center potentially. We thought about North Gate and the density there, a number of parks in the new North End. And the parks department also has reached out to us to express interest. They would like to have more chargers at just about chargers at all the parks, right? It would be their ideal goal, so. East End, the hospital is an opportunity expanding at Champlain or UVM, Schmanske, maybe Gardner's supply, maybe the Chase Mill. And then sort of looking at these sort of the college student neighborhoods along North and South Willard Union and Wienewski. Those are really high density, not a lot of off street parking. So we'll have to think about how to serve those neighborhoods. There's not a ton of like parks or public facilities in those areas either. But the street is public right away. Yeah, we do. I mean, that's ours. Right. Of course you gotta be careful of bike lanes too. Yes. Yes. And then finally, South End, we've got Champlain Elementary. We think the Market 32, TJ Maxx lot, right? Is it big opportunity? That's one of the sites that's on our list actually for this fiscal year to put a fast charger there and capture some of perhaps the route seven commuter, sorry, tourist, right? Traveler traffic. What about across the street? Shaw's? Shaw's and that, I mean. We don't have to. That's South Rolling too. We're like, okay, well, I didn't know. Yes. It's not our territory. It's another great park in Lafayette. Yes, we want to get that intersection first. You're talking board minute, that's what it is. That's the line. Okay. Talk to GMP. They're busy. Not too bad. Yeah. So that's kind of the overview of the neighborhoods and our thoughts on sites. Just a little bit about the grant. As I said, 200 ports. We've estimated that to be about six and a half million dollars. If we are awarded the grant, we'll have to kick in 20%. The federal government will cover 80%. And as I said, we'll focus on publicly owned properties, but if a private property owner is willing to make the location publicly available, definitely, definitely something to consider and open to that. Is that kind of a local match too? That would be the local match. If they, if some, Oh, like if a private property owner provided the space, does that count? I don't know. Could be. Are there initial thoughts for how to finance our share? Revenue bond, primarily. Yep. So that was what we had. How many take questions? Questions. I just wonder, given the special in homogeneity, as we say, it's tough to think of things this way, but if this is done, to what degree does that cover the problem? Court, as you envision it, what percentage of charging sessions we can anticipate being demanded by the cars you assume and so on, would actually be dealt with by this? I don't know if that's a question I can answer. It's more, that's more of a, like a Freddie trending and the policy and planning. I'm sure that was taken into consideration. Yeah. It's a tough one for sure, but I'm still thinking about the 15 second message. Why should I get an electric car? Because X, and you say, no, no, this program is gonna allow so many cars, et cetera. Right. Right. See if there's anything. I mean, like we said earlier, one of the hurdles is the access to the charging. So we're trying to lessen that hurdle a little bit. So yeah, to, Friday could provide a little bit more insight or something from policy and planning could provide a little bit more insight on how they modeled it and what they anticipate for the trends. But yeah, this used to be one of the major charges is that we're just trying to lower that barrier of entry. I think again, a public perception is when you say access, it's that there's a line at the charger ahead of me and each person is there for 30 minutes, that sort of thing. Right. Not just I can't get parking because somebody else is parking in that spot. Free parking for Tesla, right? Like that also doesn't sit well with people. Agreed. A priority for the wealthy, yeah. And it'd be good to know because we're starting presumably behind. Yeah, we can certainly follow up on that and get you an answer by email. I'm not saying there's an answer at this point. What is saturation? Yeah, you just have to know. Right, that's a good question. Yeah, this, if I'm reading the slide correct, it sounds like his model is assuming the chargers are used about 50% and so it's. Yeah, he's assuming that 50% of the charges are gonna be used so you need to install about twice as many chargers as you cover what they anticipate for the EV demand there and then to your point with a line at the charger that's discouraging for somebody it's just like waiting in the line at a fueling station. You're sitting there going, I gotta keep waiting for this car to charge but if you have one just down the street that you can hitch up to and get the charge you want or if there's enough on the street so that everybody can park and just leave their car overnight that's definitely enticing for folks. But it's interesting to think about how it will change the sort of streetscape and kind of, you know, driver behavior and right like we have a lot of cars we have a lot of parking lots right now. EV chargers are kind of the anomaly and EVs are the anomaly but if you sort of envision a future where more cars are EVs than not EVs kind of what does that pretend then, right? For the way our streets are set up the way our parking lots are set up the way that charging infrastructure is kind of integrated into our public infrastructure and, you know, planning is interested in that conversation DPW is interested in that conversation and, you know, we're reaching out to those departments to kind of get them thinking and have them be engaged as we roll these out because we don't really, you know, it's a lot of it that's unknown exactly, you know what behavior will be like and what demands, how demand will shape that? Most people have autonomous coming. Autonomous vehicles also potentially changing things but yeah, that's a, I can't know for sure. Any other questions? Thank you, that was very informative. Thank you. And encouraging. Moving on, I'm gonna ask do we, the next subject which is we're expecting executive session are we looking for a vote out of that? Or is that strictly informative? This is informative. And so the reason I'm asking is I'm wondering if we can do the commissioner check-in first here and then kind of end the public part of the meeting with that and then go to our executive session and kind of be done. I think that would be the best thing to do that way. Which means, well, I don't want to hold Travis up or this gentleman without waiting for us for anything. So as long as there's not a vote coming out, does that sound fair to commissioners? That sounds good. If it's legal, sure. If it was, yeah. So let's, we'll finish here in the public section here with commissioner check-in. Any last thoughts, ideas, whatever questions that's still lingering from the course of the meeting? I have one thing and it's anticipating the lighting questions that we made for next year. Do you know what streets you're gonna be changing lighting on next year? And I'm just, I'm gonna have to solve this at this moment, but I do think it makes sense for if, if, cause it's happened, I think two or maybe three years in a row, like that the lights go in and people get angry, they didn't. So what can we do to avoid that for next spring? And is it, if we know now what streets are gonna get light post change, when do we plan out a community engagement conversation about the placing in those posts so that we can be in front of the conversation instead of behind? I think that would be something that the commission would, I would like to be interested in seeing. I mean, I know district energy is big and whatever that might take a couple of years, but if November, December might be a good time for us to talk about that and then prepare for a conversation, maybe March, April, before installations in June or July. What's the question? The question is, do you agree that we should be doing something like that and do we already know what streets that they are? Like, yeah. Not light levels. Not light levels, but are you gonna change the polls and are people gonna be surprised when their polls are gonna be changed? I mean, can we make something on the next meeting? Yeah, we can, sir. Yeah, or maybe November is better. I'm actually not gonna be here. We can certainly look into what next fiscal year is. What next fiscal year is going to consist of, but to your point about community outreach, we've actually adopted that across all camera projects. So when it goes into a residential neighborhood, whether we're touching street lights or not, we're actually doing street walks with all the, any resident that's interested to discuss this without meeting. I was gonna say, in previous meetings, we've discussed that going forward a bit more public engagement. Not just the latter. It would alleviate those things coming to us. Right, absolutely. So yeah, we'll definitely take a look and see what the next fiscal year, we're certainly telling you what we're working on this fiscal year as well. Do you say November you weren't gonna be? I'm not gonna be here on November. But October you would. Maybe virtually, yeah. Okay. Any other thoughts for commissioners? All right, the last thing, so we're done with the public part of the meeting. The last item on our agenda is a cybersecurity update. And we're gonna do that in an executive session, but if General Manager Springer could just tee that up, it's whatever public statement that can be said about that. And then just basic kind of the idea of what we're gonna talk about and then we'll end it from there. Well, we've got Erica here to lead the conversation. I won't say anything in public session about anything, but that I shouldn't. At least the public has something in the idea we're talking about. But I think it's good practice for us to regularly update the commission on cybersecurity practices, issues, items. I'll let you know what our team is working on to be proactive. I think I wanna applaud Erica's leadership and her team on this issue has been incredibly dedicated and proactive. And I believe you're the lead rep for the utility group, right? The State Cybersecurity Advisory Council that you've formed this year. So Erica's playing a leadership role, I think within the utility community as well. And so this is really just good practice for us to be able to provide these types of updates. And with that, I'd hold any other thoughts unless you have any other introductory thoughts. The only thing I will add is that in our current day and age, cybersecurity is important. And the more that we can focus on it and the more that we can share, at least at this level to the commissioners, I think it's important that you're aware of what we're doing and where we're spending money. Excellent. All right, thank you. Should we go upstairs or do we do it here? We can do it here. I think here. So we'll try this out for hopefully a little bit too long. All right, yeah. So that's at the end of the public part of this. We're gonna talk about this in private and then come out and adjourn the meeting. Sir, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. I appreciate you making me feel welcome and I appreciate your public service. Thank you for joining us this evening. And thank you all for joining us this evening. That's the end of our public part of our meeting. As always, we meet on the second Wednesday of the month, 525 here at 585 PINE. Please join us in the discussion. Thank you.