 I haven't heard any. No, I'm good. All right. So thank you. Thank you, commissioner Shagun. We'll move on to the next agenda item, which is the minutes approval and whether or not there were any recommended edits that are substantively related for the August 11th meeting. This is the September 8th meeting. Second. Scott, did you make the motion? I did. I moved to the subject as presented. Okay. Thank you, Bob. It was second. Second. Second. Hi. Commissioner Shagun. Hi. Commissioner Hanger. Hi. Commissioner Moody. Hi. Commissioner Stevens. Hi. Thank you. Man, too bad there aren't any speakers. Next, we have the public forum. Yes, we do. Mike, I'm wondering if there are any members from the public in the room, or Laurie, if there are any visitors? There is a guest. His name is Tom. Am I not pronounced correctly? Correctly, Leitz is present for the meeting via Teams. And Commissioner Stevens, no members of the public here at 585. Okay, thank you. Tom, thank you for joining us. If you would like to ask a question of the commission or have any, I see you unmuted yourself. I'm assuming you'd like to say something. I'm just an interested party. I have no public comment. Okay. Thank you for joining. Thank you. Next up on the agenda is we have the commissioner's corner. This is an opportunity for viewers to basically bring up any items that might be needed and are not necessarily identified in the agenda. Wondering if any of the commissioners have any suggested comments. Hi, this is Bob Herendine. Thank you, Mike, for sending me the information about how we estimate the number of houses for defeat the peak. So thank you for that. I also want to compliment something that I'm embarrassed to say I learned 50 years ago and forgot. And that is the idea of using yard signs to promote acceptance of various measures. I learned 50 years ago that, and this is before satellites, people took pictures from hypercubs and noticed neighbors influenced neighbors. So it's a great idea. Congratulations. And for anyone who might be watching or watching later, that pertains to some communication in the monthly update about some marketing efforts that will be underway shortly was my sensing next week. I did have a few questions regarding the monthly update. I'm happy to hold off until after, Darren, after your update. Or I could ask them now. Do you have a preference? Whatever works best. I'm happy to answer questions now before the update. OK, so I did want to ask what would be occurring on September 10th? There's a mayoral net zero event. I'm wondering if you could shed a little bit more light on that. Oh, that is a meeting to actually reconvene a group that we had talked with a few years ago just when we were launching the net zero energy roadmap. And we had gathered some different community stakeholders, some of whom are not necessarily in the energy space, just to get a sense of what their understanding was of the net zero concept of some of the work we were doing, what areas they saw for additional outreach or improvement in terms of actually, just to go to your last point, marketing and letting customers know about these opportunities. So we had a good discussion. I think we had had a plan to sort of get back together with that group and then COVID intervened significantly. And so that's just something that we're going to do again this week just as part of getting feedback from different members of the community, some of whom are involved with energy and some of whom are just leaders in the community and other areas just to get a sense of how they view the net zero energy roadmap efforts and initiatives. Is it open to the public? I don't believe it was intended to be a public meeting. I think it's being hosted at Hula. And we are going to do a little visit to see some of the renewable energy initiatives that are going on at Hula. I have an intent to bring the BED leadership team, the broader leadership team, to the Hula campus at some point in the next few months. And I'd love to extend that invite to members who would be interested from the commission or others. I think we're fairly excited about what's happened at Hula from the standpoint of renewable energy, geothermal, which we've discussed with the commission, EV charging, and just general environmental sustainability at the campus. So I do think we'll have another tour of Hula that'll be available. Commissioners or others could join us for. I think the meeting this coming week was not open to the general public. When you share the next tour, I think that would be helpful. I think a lot of folks paid to what you were just talking about, which was I saw something about funding for testing whether or not sites might be possible locations for ground source heat pumps. And then second, also related to the net zero goal, there was something in the notes that said that BED had helped coordinate a portion of leadership Champlain feedback from local businesses and their views on electric vehicle charging stations. And I'd love to know a little bit more about that if you can on those two items. I think the I can talk to the geothermal item. I think the leadership Champlain EV charging piece is something that Jen Green had been working on. And I don't know that she's here with us. So I don't know if we might need to ask her for some follow up to the commission on that one. In terms of the geothermal, and this actually goes to one of the items in the GM report. We since our last meeting have received the order from the Public Utility Commission to approve our proposals for Act 151. And that included being able to continue our green stimulus incentives for heat pumps for electric vehicles through at least the end of 2023. Previously, we had announced they would continue at least till the end of 2021. But with the Act 151 order, we can now continue those for several more years at a minimum. So that's good news. We also have new programs and initiatives that were part of that filing, one of which is this concept that geothermal drilling and testing can be certainly a five figure expense sometimes, depending on the site. And that may be prohibitive for some businesses or nonprofits or commercial entities, customers of ours that might be looking at geothermal. And so we will have some funding reserved to support geothermal test wells that would let a customer know, just like Hula did, with their site, whether it's appropriate for geothermal. And then the benefit being if the customer goes with geothermal, we'll have some additional incentives that we may be able to design from a custom standpoint with tier three or potentially a prescriptive standpoint to help further with the project. And worst case, if it's not a good test site, these funds were specifically reserved for that purpose. So there's not a penalty in terms of BED's regulatory investments, these are test wells that are designed to be, some are gonna succeed and some may not succeed. So that's one of the new programs that's a part of the Act 151. I realize now that both James and Emily are on and may be able to help on the second question relative to leadership Champlain. So I'll see if Emily or James wants to chime in on that one. Yeah, there is a hand up from James. Yeah, I was on that phone call and happy to just offer a bit of color on that. There was a leadership Champlain group that did as a basically their final paper, a series of survey outreach type of questions for business owners about barriers and experiences around the EV charging. A lot of those questions and survey responses that they did and went over with us were very similar to work done by our intern from Jamaica over this summer in the residential space. So what we're thinking is that there's a lot of possibility to take their survey information, marry it up with the EV charging guide for multifamily that she did and create an EV charging guide for business owners. And I believe that the group of students had offered to help us when we get a chance to take a pass at that, to take a look at it and see if they think we basically got it right or not. So that's, Emily, is that a fairly good summary? I mean, it really felt a lot to me like they happened to be doing what our intern had done but in a completely different market segment. And we do have a draft guide for residential EV charging to help people work their way through it that we're trying to finalize, but we could take that, marry the two things and create one for commercial industrial as well. I'll just amend that slightly James to say that it wasn't exactly happenstance. We submitted several ideas for projects that a leadership Champlain cohort could work on. And this one was accepted and picked up by a leadership Champlain to offer as like a capstone project for one of the group of participants. So it was something that we had offered and we're happy to get assistance from leadership Champlain to do some outreach for us. Yeah, I guess I stand corrected it was a cunning plan. I was actually though surprised at how well it dovetailed with the work that the intern did and how she started her research. This looks very similar and has many of the same kinds of questions though. Thanks, I appreciate the follow up. I had two more thoughts. One is Emily, thank you for updating like the percent of goal in the strategic direction in terms of where we're doing in terms of percentage of getting to the specific criteria. So I appreciate that. And I also just wanted to ask a clarifying question which is the rate case investigation that's mentioned. That's just the normal status quo. We filed for a rate case and now we're going through that process. Is that accurate? Don't know if Darren, you want to respond to that first or James, but the short answer is no, not exactly. So it is not normal to have a full consultant led investigation of municipal rate case. But I think there's a reason for that which is that we are the only municipal utility large enough to make that rational at any level. I mean, we are six to seven times the size of the next largest municipal utility and we haven't done a rate case since 2009. So there is essentially a new commissioner. There's a new view of regulation. There's a new view of how rate cases should be looked at from a prudency point of view. And this is the first big municipal rate case that they've had the opportunity to do this on. I'm not expecting it to be a particular odious review. We've met with the GDS consultants. The discovery period starts this Friday but we're already exchanging informal information with them through the attorneys. So it would be normal for VAC. It would be normal for GMP. It would not be typical for the other munis but that's because we're closer in size to VAC than the other munis. Great. That was what I expected. I just wanted to clarify. Thank you. And I realized I've dominated with my questions during the commissioner's corner. Do other commissioners have questions or comments? So this is Bethany. I just wanted to let you guys know I'm here. Sorry, I'm late. No, thank you for the advanced warning. Okay. So we will move on to the general managers. Oh, one more, one more. Okay. There's discussion in here about residential heat pumps. And I wanna ask again about where we are regarding boilers, residential boilers using heat pumps. Somewhere tonight, I'd like to hear that. We do have air to water heat pump incentives that are available. I think that's what you're referring to is the air to water type systems. We do have those incentives scoped out and available for customers. I haven't seen very many of those going forward yet. I know they're a little more costly and the technology is a little newer. What we are seeing at least some uptake on is the centrally ducted heat pump systems that have use of the furnace duct work and are able to connect to those. So we have a number of incentives, more than a dozen at this point that are for centrally ducted heat pumps. But I haven't seen a whole lot on the air to water heat pumps just yet, but I am enthusiastic about that technology. I think that's gonna make a major dent in customer carbon emissions when we're able to deploy it at scale. Great. Okay, thanks. And for my day job, Mr. Herondine, air to water to Darren's point, it does hold a lot of promise and it is evolving, but it is still in the R&D mode and still being evaluated by many different players and entities to make sure that the design, the application, as well as the training for the building documents is really what is needed. Any other comments for commissioners? Okay, so Darren, now if you wanna give your update, thank you. Very good. I will hold on a couple of items till the end because we have a couple of screen sharing exercises that we'd like to do for you. One is PowerPoint slides that I wanna share that we're gonna be presenting to the city council and board of finance on the revenue bond on Monday. We wanted to share those with the commission this evening. I know the revenue bond is not an item on the agenda you've already reviewed and recommended it, but I wanted you to have the latest information that we're gonna be presenting to the council and the board of finance to the extent you are getting any additional questions or just to make sure that you have the most current information as you're talking with folks in the community about it. I'm also gonna hold on just until the end, but I'm gonna turn to Mike for a screen share on the yard sign item that we discussed briefly so we can share some things with the commission relative to the idea of the net zero energy yard signs. So we've spoken about Act 151, the two other items that we had in the general manager's update was in the intervening time between our last meeting and this meeting we did get the good news that Moody's has affirmed our A3 rating with a stable outlook for our outstanding revenue bonds. And this is a strong and welcome development for us as we head towards the consideration of the net zero energy revenue bonds. A number of different factors that Moody cited but I certainly wanted to call to attention that one of them was the fact that we were proactive in raising rates as we're coming out of the pandemic and as we saw the need and I think the ability and willingness to raise rates and to be successful in that effort is certainly one of the strong factors that they look at when they're examining these ratings. So again, I thank you to the commission for all of your work with us as we went through the review consideration and ultimately the recommendation to move forward with the seven and a half percent rate increase which has taken effect as a surcharge on customer bills as of August. And as was discussed earlier is in the process of going through the PUC review. So good news relative to the Moody's rating, I shared the press release that they had offered in the GM report. And the second item prior to those other two is district energy. I actually don't have a whole lot to report this evening. We've still continued with a number of intensive engagements with the joint owners McNeil with VGS with Evergreen. We're doing quite a bit of work and analysis relative to some different options in terms of cost financing terms, et cetera. And our hope is to come out of that work in the near future to reengage with some of the potential customers for the system with some concrete terms coming out of this last round of negotiations and obviously to share an update with the commission, with the city council and the public sometime heading into the fall. But we definitely work was a little slower this month not because we weren't engaged but just because the discussions have become a little more intensive and a little bit more rubber meets the road. And we're trying to work through some of that at the moment. So moving from those items, I will go to Mike to see if we can screen share some of our concepts, mock-ups if you will, for the net zero energy yard signs that we are looking to roll out to customers who participate or have participated in our various incentive programs. And just to clarify, this does not mean necessarily that the property at which the sign is located is a net zero property but more that they just participated in one of the many incentives. That's correct, the latter. We're hoping, and you'll see in a moment when Mike screen shares, we're hoping that depending on which incentive that they've participated in that we'll have a kind of sticker that they can place or multiple stickers in some cases. And it'll signify, hey, we're taking a big step. We were one step closer to our vision. Here you can see it on Mike's computer screen. So this particular version shows three different options for stickers. And you can see it's kind of a, we're one step closer with the net zero logo with our website and then interchangeable options for different measures that the customer may have taken, electric vehicle, e-bike, heat pump could be an option, e-mower, different types of ways we can fill in those stickers. Mike, do you want to mention anything about the yard sign concept? Really just the idea that, folks hold on one sec. Sorry about that. You got me now? Can you hear me? Yes, it's good. Great, sorry about that. Yeah, just the idea that we have so much excitement going on in the community as people are taking their strategic electrification measures and we want to really blow up in the positive sense that excitement. We want neighbors talking to neighbors more. We want passers by who are out walking the dog and they see a sign in someone's yard. And it might be a person they don't even know well, but that person's out there. They ask them, hey, what does that sign mean? What's going on? And we just hope that that power of seeing that other community members are taking these steps will influence friends and neighbors. And we believe that a sign like this, something simple, could be very powerful. And the idea would be, if somebody got an electric vehicle, they'd start with the sticker that said electric vehicle. If they did more, they'd have more stickers on their sign. We hope, as people take more steps, neighbors would see, wow, I thought it was just the heat pump. Now it's the EV as well. And we just want the conversation to grow and excite people to take action. We kind of wanted people to think, we could be part of this too. And this idea, we're one step closer reminding people about the goal of net zero energy and even putting in the bottom right corner the website address with the slash NZE. Hoping it's simple enough where even somebody walking by might remember to go look at the website and think about net zero energy. And hats off to Adam Rabin for his really creative designs. And just to add one last thing to that, which is that we're conceptually looking at having the net zero energy site on our website keep some sort of a fun running tally of the different measures so that if somebody does decide to log on to brollingtonelectric.com NZE maybe they'll see some different measures there the heat pumps, the EVs, the mowers and as we add more each month as the commission sees in the report and the different data that we share we'll make that kind of into a more usable forum and share that with customers through the net zero site so that people can see the various measures and their growth over time. But we haven't designed anything for that just yet but it's something that we've discussed. Hey, so just a quick question about that. Are you gonna have a sticker for E-Bikes? Absolutely. In fact, the one on here on this mockup has an E-Bike sticker on it. And I think that was certainly one of the stickers we were planning to have. Perfect, I can't see it. So I was just checking, yeah, that's great. Yeah, maybe you could run through what the stickers are. I mean, I'm assuming weather station or ceiling heat pump water heater or seat pump I'm assuming they're still full dammit but yeah. It would be the full dammit. Hi, this is Bob, I have a couple of questions. Is this supposed to be legible from somebody driving by versus somebody walking the dog? Well, the idea of the machine or herondine is it would be about the size of kind of like a campaign yard sign. And we would hope people would put it in their yard closer to the curb the way they do and folks want to see it. We realize, if you're just seeing a candidate running for office and it says elect morrow, you would just see that name and people understand. There is more detail on this sign. It's probably gonna get more views from people walking by or riding a bike. But the hope is that even if people driving by notice them, they may stop to take a look. But there's the, it's a good question because you don't wanna clutter the sign cause you wanna make it easy for people to read but we need enough information so people know what it is but certainly up for suggestions if you have them. There is an election a while ago when one side had such cluttered signs they were absolutely illegible. So I think that is something to watch. Also color, we've got the colors in the background from our flag but these sort of blue black stickers are kind of dire. So I'm wondering about brighter colors for the stickers. Brighter colors for the actual. For the stickers, yeah. I don't need, don't respond on now but I'm just, I'm shooting from the hip. Colors and signs I'm concerned about. Yeah, I hear the commissioner Rudy is agreeing that perhaps the color of the stickers could be a bit different. We could definitely work on that. Also even just something as simple as just one step closer, get the wear out of there. Now you've got more room to do, one step closer. Just think things that can make the font sizes bigger, legible. Yeah, we were trying in that instance and you have a good point, fewer words can be better. We were trying to make it seem attainable for everybody. So by saying wear one step closer it hopefully would incorporate even the people reading it even though it's about that household like we're in this together and we can do it. But no, I hear you. Again, I'm just shooting from the hip. Yeah, no, these are all good. It's really good because when you work on something like this with just a couple or a few people you sometimes get kind of set in the mode you're in. So these are great suggestions. Other comments from commissioners? The one thing that comes to mind is, I hate to be Debbie Downer but I guess these won't be as prolific as election signs. But my first thought was like, oh my God, the clutter around the city but it won't be that way. Because these won't be in the right away. These would just be, it would be a customer choice. More like putting security in this house by that thing or advertising the construction company that's working on your house or something. Correct, correct. You wouldn't see the right away with 35 signs. The hope is just that customers who took these steps would be happy to have the sign. And we have a plan where we would be delivering and we haven't figured it out exactly but we even thought there could be a particular time whether it's every two weeks or once a month but try to make a splash with the delivery and perhaps even get some media to tag along, try to make some stories out of the fact, hey, look what's happening here. Certainly when we roll it out, we'd like to do that. If anyone has further suggestions, they're all welcome. Feel free to email me and certainly ask more questions now. Unless other commissioners have more, I have two comments. Okay, so one is with a nod to Commissioner Herendine's comment of how much text is already here. I think 2030, you probably thought about this but the fact that we are not net zero energy now and how do we clarify that this is steps towards a future date and really the net zero goal is by 2030. So I'll just, you don't need to respond to that, just throwing that out there. The other piece, Darren, you'd mentioned thinking about how to have something on the website that could tally up what Brilliantonians efforts are on this initiative and I would just flag that to the degree that we don't have to internally redesign more IT web interface given that we're currently hiring for some of those positions, how much we could sort of build upon the Vermont Energy Dashboard and whether or not there's an opportunity there to leverage some of the work that's already been done and then in that way with the Vermont Energy Dashboard, which if anyone Googles it, it's basically an opportunity to upload the types of efforts each resident might make and you can look town by town and see how those communities are doing to reach their internal community goals. So I'll just throw it out there. We have an IT forward goal that's critical and if we can leverage some of that other effort and if it makes sense for what BED is doing, that might be helpful. Completely agree in terms of we're not gonna be looking to add any work there. The BTVSTAT dashboard as well, which is something that we've traditionally fed data into and it would link up with some of our other data efforts. They're restarting that process as well. And so one of our thoughts was that if we create sort of some symmetry between what we're doing for BTVSTAT and what might be publicly kind of shared through that dashboard, what we're creating with the commission dashboard that there might be a linkage between these steps where we really don't have to do a whole lot of additional process, but we might be able to just share out on a regular basis as we process some of these incentives. So completely agree, we're not gonna reinvent the wheel for this one, but we'll try to use some of our existing systems and just share data. First things first, we wanna get the yard signs designed and available, but then we thought it'd be great if folks can kind of log on and see some of the progress steps. And Adam does a great job, as Mike said, with a number of different web design and other graphic designs. And I'm sure he could come up with a creative way to share some of those data points with our customers. Great. Any other items or questions on this particular item? Nope. Okay. So assuming we're ready to move on to the financial. I actually wanted to, if it's okay with the commission, spend another minute and run through the revenue bonds slides first. And then shift to the financial. So I'm actually gonna share my screen here in a minute. Thanks, Mike, for sharing your screen. Oh, and I did have another question. I'm sorry I was unable to attend the revenue bond announcement last week. And I trust the employee lunch went well today. Well, I should say, well, the revenue bond press conference was excellent and we are sorry to have missed you for that, but the employee lunch has been postponed, unfortunately. I didn't miss it, yay. You did not miss it. We postponed out of an abundance of caution, given the Delta variant and are gonna look like we're rescheduling sometime this fall if we feel we can do it in person or pursue a virtual event if necessary, like we did last year. So we'll keep you updated. Lori and I are gonna work on getting some scheduling together for that in the near future. Thanks. Yep, we wish we could have moved forward, but we wanna be very cautious. No, I think that was wise. That was wise. Absolutely. Okay, you can see my screen. Excellent. So these are slides. I won't run the commission through this one, which you've seen any number of times, which is our intro, but here we're starting with the revenue bond as we'll present again to the Board of Finance and City Council. And this is just a slide in terms of kind of what the revenue bond is and is not. It's authorized under city charter. It requires a majority approval from Burlington voters, which I believe is different from general obligation bonds of the city, which require a two-thirds vote. So there's a difference there in terms of the level of approval that's necessary. This is very important because I've certainly heard from a number of folks about the reappraisal and different concerns over taxes and general fund expenditures. The BED revenue bond is payable from BED revenues, not from the general fund. It does not affect property taxes. It is solely from BED. It's an obligation of ours. It does not affect the city's debt policy cap or debt ratio. So that's an important point that we wanna make upfront because we've certainly heard questions about that. And obviously we have a history here that's detailed of different events where we've used revenue bonds in the past with the approval of Burlington voters. So just some context and background there. Please jump in at any point. If anyone has questions, I'll be glad to answer them. Here we're just detailing some of the concept behind the revenue bond. I think we've shared this really with the commission at the last meeting, but for the purposes of the presentation, we're gonna highlight the precedent from our energy efficiency revenue bond that was launched in 1990 as being kind of a forerunner of the net zero energy revenue bond strategy. The fact that by using the revenue bond in the way that we're proposing, we will free up some geo bond capacity to increase our investment in customer tier three incentives and accelerate our progress towards net zero, which we'll detail more in a couple of slides. And then the revenue bond is really focused on not only upgrades and maintenance, but also continued reliability for distribution system, for our technology system, for our renewable energy plants and does all of this in a way that is, we believe fiscally responsible for our customers, for our rate payers, and does so in a way that's meant to accommodate the increase in loads that we would see from electrification. These are the investments that the revenue bond would make roughly speaking. And I have a more detailed slide later on, but it also includes some full year totals from FY 25. And the revenue bond only covers a half a year. Roughly speaking, the grid investments are about 12.3 million of the 20 million. About seven million of those are reliability related investments primarily and about 5.3 million are net zero upgrades. We have a little under four million for the technology systems, a little over two million for the renewable generation and the remainder focused on net zero energy capital investments, the charging stations, demand response technology investments and others. This is the breakdown. As I mentioned, FY 25 has full year totals, which is why the numbers to the right in the total column add up to a little bit more than what I just mentioned. The revenue bond would run from FY 22, half a year, a full year, 23 and 24, and then a half year, 25. So it's a three year proposal as the commission remembers. This part is, of course, one of the exciting parts. We have some additional quantified numbers here since our last discussion. So as mentioned, we're gonna be able to continue the green stimulus incentives under Act 151. That's a relatively new development by doubling the funding for the tier three incentives between FY 23 and 25, as we're proposing to do under the revenue bond strategy. We would double our compliance level under the state RES and the incremental reductions. So that everything above compliance level, we've quantified the emissions reduction is 47,000 tons of lifetime emissions avoided, which is the equivalent to just under 100,000 barrels of oil consumed. So that's just putting a little bit of perspective on the additional emissions reduction we're going to essentially procure through this strategy above and beyond what would be required under state law. And the GEO bonds that are gonna be supporting that would be roughly 5.3 million of our annual GEO during that three-year period to support tier three investments for these different incentives. So this is a new graph that we've worked on, James and his team have put together. I think it highlights some interesting things. And I wanted to make sure we shared this with the commission as well. The green dotted lines represent the RES Vermont state renewable energy standard compliance obligations for BED. The lower dotted line is the 100% of compliance. So essentially what we're required to do and the higher and darker dotted line represents the double compliance level that we're proposing to fund via the revenue bond strategy. The blue line at the bottom, the light blue line represents prescriptive program activity. That means all the different incentives that we offer customers, heat pumps, EVs, et cetera. We now have, and this was interesting to kind of look back on, we've issued over 1,350 incentives for customers through that program. If you look at the heat pumps, the lawn mowers, the leaf blowers, the EVs and plug-in hybrids, all the different program incentives that we've been offering. We've now issued over 1,350 of them. So that prescriptive line, as you can see, is already getting pretty close to the 200% compliance level. The darker blue line that you see represents our actual program activity, and it includes things like the Hula geothermal system, which as we've noted is a major fossil fuel reduction. And I believe the blue line also includes the transit buses, the two electric transit buses that we've been able to add as well, incentives for those. So the blue line shows that we're already looking at demand level that is above the 200% compliance. What we think is more relevant for purposes of planning is really the light blue line, which is the prescriptive program activity because not every year will you see a Hula project come along that we can fund and achieve that level of reduction. But we think we can support customer incentives at double the RES compliance level during these coming years. And I would say that if this trend continues and we do pursue another revenue bond strategy for 2025 and beyond, which is something that we certainly have contemplated, it may well be that we would wanna do something even more ambitious than doubling tier three at that point. There might be an argument for doing something like triple the tier three compliance level at that point, dependent upon customer demand, dependent upon whether we're able to maintain some of these higher incentive levels during that period of time. And obviously dependent on how we're doing relative to the roadmap. This is intended to accelerate some of our progress towards the roadmap, the funding strategy that we have here would help cover during the years that it's active, roughly 25% of all of the investment that's needed for the net zero roadmap. If you were to try to fund all of it through the tier three incentives, which I think as we've discussed, that's not our strategy. We know there are a variety of partnerships and different federal, state and local policy initiatives that are all a component of that. But this just gives a sense of some of the scale there. And I've said a lot on this, and maybe I'll just pause, make sure that there aren't any questions or comments before I proceed. Presenters. No, it looks great. It's super interesting. Yeah, it looks good to me. I have a couple of questions, not surprisingly. When I look at the strategic direction dashboard, it does look like some of the numbers, we were April, 2021 for residential heat pump installs. It went from April, May, June, July, August, like 30, 25, 32, 58 in July and 14 in August. I wonder if like, do you guys have any sense? Is that sort of a timing of, yes, a lot of people go on vacation in August? Any thoughts on that? I don't have any insight as to why, you'd see less of them processed in August versus some of the other months. Other than, I know certainly the cooling has been a factor in the heat pump purchases. So it's entirely possible that we saw some upward movement as we entered the summer, as people had cooling on their mind. And it's possible we may see a similar kind of movement as we get past shoulder season and into the winter heating season. One thing I would mention, it's not directly on point, but I'm working with Mike on as we are gonna send a survey out to all of our heat pump incentive customers in the near future and try to get a read on exactly how they're using their heat pumps. Are they using them for heating and cooling? Are they focused primarily on cooling and maybe they're not as aware of the heating benefits that they're offering and we wanna let them know about the heating benefits and how to use the heat pump in a way that will maximize fossil fuel reduction. So that's something we're interested in. But other than speculating on that, I don't have any other hard data to offer in terms of why August might be less active. Do you plan on doing, I'm guessing the answer is no, because this is a lot of work and you'd probably need an intern or somebody to do this. But it would be interesting to look at when someone installed their heat pumps, you know where I'm going and whether or not you saw only an increase in electric consumption and demand in the summer, but also, or perhaps also in the winter and whether or not you might cross correlate that with some of your surveys. Right, I mean, our hope is to reach all of the heat pump incentive customers dating back to 2019 when we first launched the heat pump incentives for natural gas. And depending on the response we get, it's possible we may be able to kind of look back over the responses and the data and try to get a sense of that. Cause one concern I have is we don't want folks just getting a heat pump for cooling purposes and not utilizing it for reducing fossil fuel use in the winter. That would be counter to some of the assumptions we're making with the incentives and counter to our goals. So I do think the survey and some followup work and it could be a good internship project. James and his team have hosted, as was mentioned, a number of great interns over the last few years. So looking at some of this data and drawing out some conclusions, maybe making some improvements into the way we communicate with customers on the heat pump incentives could be helpful. Cause getting them installed is important, but getting them used correctly is also critically important. Let me mention that, well, now it's pushing 40 years ago, I actually did some work with some students in Illinois about the impact of the ceiling insulation. We published it in a bona fide journal and all that. And so if there is an intern working on it, I'd be interested in dipping into it. Excellent. James, you're still on. I can't see from my screen. James is still on. James was not being able to find his mouse cursor for just a second. But yes, I am on. There's another very interesting point that I just sent you an email on Darren about the survey, which is understanding some of the set points that contractors are using for switching from the whole team to heat pumps to the alternate heating systems is also going to be interesting. If they're setting those temperature changeover points based on natural gas fuel break-even, we may have some interesting stuff to look at there about decarbonizing versus renewable natural gas. So it's just a side note that you may find interesting, Gabrielle, which is that if they're sitting there doing a straight, simple math on when it's economical to not use the cold climate heat pump based on very, very, very cheap natural gas and someone's installing their cold climate heat pump to decarbonize, we need to be thinking about that. Right. They would have to override what they're talking about. Or set the set point based on an RNG price, not a natural gas price to be a lot lower. Yeah, again, I have a question about that too. When we talk about the 1991 bond, we have numbers that are put out that can sort of give you a rough payback time or something like a benefit cost ratio in money. You just talked about doing that at the micro level. Do we have any overall picture of that for the, let's say the solid blue line, for example, on this graph? We do. I'm gonna touch on that a little bit for the revenue bond investment in just a couple of slides, Commissioner Herndon. We've done some work to quantify that since our last discussion. Okay. But duly noted for your interest if we do a survey and have in turn opportunities available. James and I, one of us will follow up if that happens. Well, and also what's interesting about heat pumps is as you guys all know, I mean, if they're if they're ductless heat pumps, whether or not people have a little fan to help get the flow circulating, whether or not they have an integrated control or a separate wireless thermostat, all of those help the homeowner feel more comfortable with it. So that'll be interesting to see where that goes with the survey results if you plan on probing into that at all. I did just wanna throw out two other questions. My major response to this slide is, wow, our legislated requirements for a city that has a net zero 2030 goal are nowhere near what we need in order to achieve some of the climate targets that now for the state of Vermont with the Global Warming Solutions Act are now legally mandated. So that's one thought. And then the other thought is I'm looking at the megawatt hour equivalent. It'd be really interesting if really our goal is to like decarbonize. I'm seeing this as look at how we're getting all the megawatt hours, but I'm not necessarily seeing the, and this is the reduction on the carbon. And that's really kind of just like a random question because I don't really know how you would present the slide differently, but maybe James knows exactly where I'm going already or maybe Darren does. Well, I would offer on the legislative kind of side of things that, well, the tier three requirement does continue to ramp up. It's not, I don't think it was intended to be certainly anywhere near 100% of what the state needs to reach its own climate targets. I think it likewise was closer to kind of a quarter at most. That combined with the rest of the RES was meant to do about a quarter of the work of decarbonization to reach some of the state goals that were in place at that time. And I think have now been made law by the Global Warming Solutions Act. So I think it speaks to the need for additional activity as is happening at the state level, but you're absolutely correct. I think this is a recognition by us that what seemed like a very ambitious goal with tier three, that BED has a legislative carve out if we found it to be too difficult for our particular utility, which we've never used and we have no intention of ever using, we actually need to go above and beyond it by a significant amount to accelerate towards our 2030 goal, which is certainly the most ambitious goal anywhere in the state and really anywhere that we're aware of in the nation. I think in terms of the carbon reduction, yeah, this is expressed in megawatt hours equivalent because of the tier three compliance, but yes, I agree that carbon reduction is really what we're getting at. That's why we used that 100,000 barrels of oil, carbon equivalent, 47,000 tons to describe the incremental benefit. And I don't know, James, if you have other things to add on that. Yeah, just a couple of things I would add. One is this graph was done to illustrate a very specific point in Darren's PowerPoint for the city council, not as an attempt to argue about or demonstrate carbon reduction. It was talking about whether the 200% target was unrealistic in and of itself. So the answer is, I don't think it is. It could be converted to carbon, certainly. With regard to the comment that you and Darren responded to, made Darren respond to, which is it would, I think it would be a tragic error in judgment to try to use tier three to meet all of our carbon reductions because these all become electric costs. And then you drive up the comparison against the alternate fuels and make your life even more difficult. Again, if all you're gonna do is raise the electric price to decarbonize and natural gas remains $2.60 in MMBTU, that doesn't help your situation any. And lastly, we have some of the most aggressive incentive structures in the state for tier three, too. So it is not perhaps not surprising that we have been able to meet our targets because again, we're going after them very aggressively. Thanks. Are there commissioners? Otherwise we'll let Darren keep going. Okay, I will proceed. That's a good conversation though. Appreciate that. So moving to the next slide, let's see here. Okay, this you've seen I believe from the memo but just to reiterate the kind of rate comparison to reach 110 days cash on hand, which is the level that we had projected in our forecast with Moody's during this most recent review for FY23 and assuming full funding of all of our capital projects and our net zero initiatives. You can see with the revenue bond we're seeing about 4.9% of upward rate pressure. Again, that's not a rate case. That's not a rate request. That's the pressure that we're seeing under current forecast that will fluctuate based on things like how sales are doing relative to budget, what type of expenses that we are able to see during FY22 and what we're projecting for FY23. But 4.9% with the revenue bond, which is moderated from the 7.5% that we saw in FY22. Without the revenue bond, if we attempted to do all of this work and maintain that day's cash on hand, upwards of 23% of rate pressure. So that's obviously not a level that we could support that the commission would wanna support or that we even could justify at the PUC. So it would necessitate major decisions in terms of curtailing projects, changing the really the financial structure that we're operating under. So this just draws out that comparison a little bit. This is something that we did since the last commission meeting that I think will be helpful as well. This is our existing revenue bond debt service schedule. And as you can see, as highlighted in yellow, we are scheduled to see a significant maturity take place between 2025 and 2026 on our current revenue bonds. And that is going to yield savings, which have been on average, the debt service for that maturity has been on average $684,000 a year. So that capacity, which is currently going to pay an existing revenue bond will be available to support repayment on this new net zero energy revenue bond starting in 2026. And as you'll see on this next slide, the way we've structured the debt service for the net zero energy revenue bond is that the principal repayment would come in fully in 2028. And you can see that the interest in principle that year would be 1.6 million. So that's 684,000 of capacity will be available to apply towards that 1.6 million of debt service starting in 2028. And then to go back to Commissioner Herendine's question earlier, we've quantified the incremental average net revenues from the doubling of the customer strategic electrification tier three incentives between FY23 and 25. So this is not the total tier three. This is just the doubling, just the doubling and its incremental net. So it's net of costs of the incentives and the power supply to serve that load. We project that we will see average revenues from that of 467,000 between FY25 and 32. So that 467,000 plus the 684,000 of maturity can go towards supporting the debt service on the revenue bond and the portion of the GO bond that's being used for electrification incentives. And another helpful way to look at it below is that the total net revenues from all of the strategic electrification incentives that we're gonna be doing between FY23 and 25 will support about 40% of the combined debt service over the life of the bonds 20 years for the GO portion and the revenue bonds for net zero. So that's a substantial factor there is that 40% of that debt service can be supported just from the new net revenues from the strategic electrification projects between FY23 and 25. Looked at another way, as mentioned, we have about 1.6 million of additional debt service from the revenue bonds. We have 684,000 in capacity from the maturity, 467,000 from the incremental net revenues from the doubling. So either way, I think we're able to make the case here that the rate pressure, the new rate pressure from repaying this revenue bond is going to be substantially reduced because of these different factors here, the maturity savings and the net revenues, incremental net revenues from strategic electrification. So I think that's an important point. I understand again that the city, the taxpayer and rate payer is facing a number of different challenges at the moment with the reappraisal. Some cases with water rates changing, obviously we had a rate change. So we're not looking to add to the burden, we're actually looking to reduce upward rate pressure through this strategy relative to what it would be if we were not pursuing the revenue bond. And this is gonna be a revenue bond that will have a substantial return on investment to help support the debt service. And I think that's a point we're interested to make. That wraps up the PowerPoint. Let me un-share my screen and come back to the screen here. Mr. Harris. Okay, fair enough. But from a voters standpoint, we're going to borrow 20 million bucks. And we can argue the previous bond in the 1991 had a cost-benefit ratio that looks good by more or less conventional thinking. Where are the profits that we can balance against the 20 million for the consumer standpoint? Yeah, that's the thing that's a little challenging is a chunk of the 20 million is investment that we really need to make regardless of net zero just from a reliability standpoint, just from the standpoint of continuing to have updated and modernized systems that are functioning that are providing reliability. So part of this is not necessarily intended to be an argument that the entirety of the debt service should be covered by the net revenues from the small portion that's being put relative to the broader bond towards these incentives. But I think the point is, is that the incentives, the funding of the strategic electrification incentives punches well above their weight in terms of how much additional debt service they can help support. And I think we've structured the repayment in such a way that the maturity savings is going to benefit us because that comes in in 2026. The full debt service is coming in until 2028. So I guess I would argue that we're going to minimize the rate pressure for our customers by doing the strategy. But really the portion that you would look at the way you just described would be the 5.3 million that we're investing in the customer incentives because the portion we're investing in the grid is not going to have a payback in the traditional sense in terms of returning revenue to the utility. It's really upkeep that we need to do in some cases relative to our needs and in some cases relative to facilitating net zero progress. James has his hand up may want to jump in with more. Yeah, for example, every year we don't provide an analysis that says the $3 million of GO bonding is going to make us money. It's not going to make us money. It's like, what is the payback on borrowing money for your house? I mean, if you need a house and that's the only way you can afford the house, that's what you have to do but you're not going to save money by borrowing money. Except in the rare case of tier three and energy efficiency where those pieces of it, yeah, you can make that case. And like I say, that's where those incremental revenues are coming from. Okay, well, I think I'm happy to use the word infrastructure and the general idea which applies here, of course. But I guess I would still say if I'm trying to save the world, I'm going to spend $5 million to cut down greenhouse gas emissions. I can just say that the end of story, compare money and tons or I can put $100 per ton and convert it to money and do some kind of a cost-benefit ratio or I can do something else like the saved bill that I have with this new technology. Do we, and it seems to me some version of that is going to be appropriate to convey to voters, can we? We have, and James jump in on this one. I believe we have an imputed price of carbon relative to the tier three investment that we're making. Not that I'm using in the economic analysis. The economic analysis we're using there is simple retail revenues. No, that's right. But I think we had some sort of a comparison if we wanted to dive into it around price per ton avoided, essentially. Well, yeah, you have some of avoided carbon and you could calculate what the delta is per ton. I mean, if you could back solve for that if you wanted. Right. But again, I don't personally normally think of bonds as being revenue-based items and that's not normally how to do that. Well, maybe this is my lack of economics. The city doesn't have to borrow money except that there are good reasons. And as a taxpayer, I and other people would say why are we doing this? It's going to cost somewhere. What's the benefit? Now, the social refers to the conversation we had a while ago about that spreadsheet which I said I didn't fully understand and probably still don't. This is maybe not an argument we want to use, but if somebody's going to ask, if we want to be borrowing money all the time, this is a terrific way to time the payments and all that. But specifically, is there a money story here? The simple one would be we're spending the money but we're going to save it on reduced energy bills. Maybe that's enough and we don't have to invoke a carbon price at all. I'm just asking if that number is going to be conveyed. I think this is a more complex story, unfortunately because I know it's easier to convey a simpler story but this is a more complex story which is partly we're going to invest funds in these incentives so that we can save more carbon, reduce more fossil fuel, add more revenues for the utility. And that portion of the story, I think could be conveyed to some extent in the manner that you're describing similar to energy efficiency investments. But then there's a story of we need to upgrade the grid to facilitate progress towards net zero and we need to invest in our systems more broadly because we want to continue to run an efficient and economic utility. And if we didn't do the revenue bond and borrow money at hopefully what are continuing to be historically low interest rates and repay them in a way that is strategic, we would have to raise the funds to make those investments and maintain our days cash on hand through rates in a way that would be detrimental to our customers relative to this strategy. That's my view. Or we would have to prioritize the things that are reliability-based and critical needs-based over the carbon reduction items until we had the cash to do it. I mean, if we can't ask for a 24.7% rate increase, then it becomes prioritization. This gives us the ability to do things we need to do and things we want to do earlier rather than as cash becomes available. Okay, but I get that. And maybe one answer is the future is expensive, which is an okay answer. Actually, if it's laid out what you have done, is that the answer? Well, I think that we're facing kind of a couple of different problems here that we're trying to solve all in one strategy. And that's why this is so relatively complex to talk about. We have the need to accelerate the next year of progress. We understand we're not doing enough at scale now to reach our 2030 goal and we wanna do more. So there's that investment. And then we have the grid investments that are intended to help us achieve that as well. But then really there is just that question of, we wanna maintain a certain level of days cash on hand for our financial health. And we wanna be able to invest in the capital projects that we've laid out. So if we start from the assumption that all of the capital investment we've outlined in the revenue bond memo, the IT forward technology upgrades, the maintenance and upgrades of our renewable facilities, the investment in the grid. If those are all things we wanna do in addition to doubling the incentives for tier three, then really there's either the revenue bond strategy or there's the rate strategy. Those are really the two ways to fund it. And we're arguing I think that the revenue bond strategy is more beneficial for our customers and more in line with traditional utility practice than it would be to try to have an astronomical rate increase. Which again, it's sort of a false argument. We could not justify a 23% rate increase even if we wanted to. And I can promise we do not want to. None of us on this call wants to. So that's almost in itself an exercise that's hypothetical more than concrete. And so I think it's really a question of do we wanna make the investments that we've outlined? And if so, then we really have this strategy to help facilitate it in a way that doesn't impact customer rates in a negative way kind of on a year to year basis. That's my way of going about it. All right, I'm asking a simpler question. If we say that these goals we set with tier three and all that are there, that's something we want to do. We understand that may cost money. We want to do it anyway. And I'm trying to find the best way to do it and you've made the argument very strongly. This is the best way to do it. Well, and we're marrying this with a change in accounting for tier three two. So we're gonna be trading cash for an asset in terms of the tier three we're doing early. It doesn't expire. It has future value to us, right? And we're gonna recognize that rather in the year we use that to comply rather than the year we pay the incentives out. And that's another big plus about doing it this way. Otherwise, we would be limited to what we have in rates for tier three, which is essentially a 100% compliance level. And we have to curtail our programs all the time to meet that level in rate. The other thing that I feel like is not being captured here is there is a push. Yes, the city has a net zero goal by 2030. But there are plenty of Berlin Tonians that are going all electric onto their own desire. Heat pumps, heat pump, water heaters, electric vehicles. There is a portion of this revenue bond that is just for reliability purposes. But if we do see more and more people choosing to shift regardless of what the city goal is, if we see more and more people shift towards strategic electrification, we need to figure out how to meet that at the distribution level. And for me, this is sort of a, we have customers pushing and pulling and then we have our policies both at the state level as well as the local level pushing and pulling. And to Darren's point, if you have two options, you have a rate increase that none of us can support or a revenue bond that if we see Berlin Tonians shift to more electrification, we will see more KWH and we will see more revenue come into the utility, thereby being able to pay off our revenue bond. That is, those are our two options, absent, a larger federal or governmental mandate that shifts how we capture the full costs of our different fuel options. But what I'm hearing here is, first, Darren, I hope I don't see your slides in the packet that was sent out. I'm betting it was part of the press release that Mike probably sent out. It wasn't? Okay, if you can send them out to the commission, I think that'll be really helpful. Also, I feel like not to make you have to watch this meeting, but I feel like you answered some of Commissioner Herringdon's questions in a way that isn't really captureable on a PowerPoint slide. Like, how is this addressing so many different issues at once? If you could provide some of that bulleted language to us, that will help us not only understand the thinking, but also ask more questions, because obviously this is coming up on Monday to the council, and then it'll be also coming up in March to all of our neighbors. So to the extent, Emily, you're shaking your head. I don't know. It's actually November. November. November, oh my God, it's right around the corner. Okay, so to the extent that we can really articulate and understand these nuances better, that would be really helpful. No, absolutely, and what the slides, the reason they weren't shared previously is we just finished them today, and they are part of a packet that have been shared with the city council in anticipation of Monday. So they were not part of the press release last week, but what I will share with the commission as we shared just this afternoon with the council is the updated memo, which includes, I think a more thorough examination of the points that we've discussed tonight, in terms of the various goals of the revenue bond, the strategy for repaying it, and all of the different pieces here. The slides really are a summary at best of the concepts that are in the memo. And so I'll share the memo and the slides with the commission. So you have the latest materials that we've prepared. And yes, we'll be at city council board of finance on the 13th with the request to approve a special ballot question. And then if approved, that question would go to voters in November. And also if it's approved, I have reached out to the various NPAs in the city and would plan to join each of their meetings in October to present and answer questions on the revenue bond at that point as well. So yeah, I will send all the materials to you. And I apologize for taking up such a long portion of the agenda here, kind of unanticipated, but I thought it'd be helpful to run through with the commission again ahead of Monday's action at the city council. This is important. I think we need to take the time. This is a large request and a large investment. So personally, I think it's important that we have this conversation. I didn't wanna ask whether or not you have it on your to-do list, to do some sort of, the revenue bond does help customers because we're able to float those incentives over a longer timeframe, but customers will still have to figure out how to pay for these investments either through savings or financing or various loan options. I wonder at what point BED has thought about putting together a, instead of a municipal utility budget spreadsheet, the customer spreadsheet, what it costs for two heat pumps, weatherization, how you're gonna actually pay for it, is it through VSCCU or Opportunities Credit Union? And is it with various efficiency loans or is that on the to-do list? Because I do think we're gonna get that. One of the things we're working on with the Building Electrification Institute, which has been helping us, national group that's been helping us on the policy side primarily on the city new construction policies that have affected the charter change discussion and the more recent ordinance and the weatherization discussion, but they are helping us. One of their kind of deliverables with us is to have a customer-friendly calculator that we'll be able to put up on the website. Chris Burns and his team and Jen Green have been intensively engaged with them and I've joined some of the calls. And the idea is you can input your very specific kind of, I need one heat pump or I need two heat pumps. I need a single head or a double head. This is my fuel currently or these are my multiple fuels. Here's what I'm looking for and then it'll spit out some economics and some carbon reduction numbers for the customer. And then we do have, I think on the heat pump and the EV pages, we have network of contractors that we work with both the heat pump contractors and the auto dealers that we work with. At the auto dealers, you can get our rebate right at the point of sale just like you can get the state rebate and really package those together to help reduce the upfront cost. And then we have the three credit unions that we work with who will finance those auto loans with our rebates included. We also have worked with them on the heat pump side. And most recently, this is new on the website, I believe, as of since our last meeting, we've highlighted that some of our credit union partners are also supporting electric panel upgrades if they are part of an electrification project. That was something we were concerned about is, okay, you wanna put in a heat pump and you are gonna also need to upgrade your panel. Can we include the cost of the panel in the loan? And the answer in many cases is yes. And so we have some financing information and I'll share this in an email with the commission just so you have it handy. But we have some information about that up on the website now as well. Great, thanks for going through that. I know you mentioned the calculator in a previous meeting, but it's helpful to just keep saying it because who knows when someone might watch this. Last question, we're going through our regular audit process. Wondering how, I mean, you touched upon it in the general manager update, but how that's going, whether or not there's discussion about the revenue bond, Moody's rating, that sort of thing? I will, and maybe it's a good segue because I know we're doing the financials next, but I will defer to Emily because she has been point on the audit with KPMG. Thank you. Yes, so the audit is underway. The auditors began their field work virtually on August 16th. We have been prepared, we have sent, I think all but I think two or three items and are prepared by client lists so far and they have begun sampling and requesting sample, made sample selections and we've been providing them sample data back for three weeks now. And we are the process now of drafting the statements themselves and the footnotes to begin the review back and forth with the auditors. We have advised them and updated them on major sort of developments and plans in the fiscal year, including the proposed revenue bond, the cure of the event of default, the key bank capital lease, for example. So there's sort of a number of sort of major developments and events that affect the financial reporting that we've been communicating with them throughout this, since all year really and beginning with sort of pre-audit planning discussions in May. Thanks. And feel free to start in on the financials. Okay, thanks. Let me just reorganize my screens here. So if that worked according to plan, you should now see a graph of the monthly COVID-19 impacts, is that right? Yes. Great. All right, so I have a COVID analysis through the end of June. I do not yet have one through the end of the July. There's been some vacations and a lot of project work on the billing team. So this analysis has not been updated for a little while. June was an interesting month in that as when I turned to the financials, you'll see that as you'll remember, it was a warm month. So our sales are actually up over budget. However, they were down compared to what we would have predicted them to have been given the weather that we experienced in June, if that makes sense. So June was hotter than normal, sales were above budget, but if not for COVID, we project that they would have been even higher than they actually were. So this is showing net system energy down 3.2% versus what we would have expected it to be without COVID based on the weather we saw. And as usual, residential up about 6% and commercial down about 6% also. So netting out to 3.2% down as a system. I will hope to have updated results, excuse me, for August and September at our next meeting. Excuse me, and I'm also, I'll just say sort of like the longer we are in the pandemic, sort of the more difficult it gets to predict sort of where we would otherwise have been because all of our models now have COVID in them, so to speak, right? The algorithms are being trained on COVID. So, yeah. So I'll flip now to the preliminary June results. So major caveat here, these are still changing and they're unaudited. So the final June results that you see at your next meeting will be a little bit different, but these are solid enough to give you a preliminary picture. And since there are gonna be some puts and takes, I won't go through them in a lot of detail, but in summary, we are projecting to end the year with a net loss of around 300,000 or 275 here, compared to a budget of just under 2 million. So we are just over 2 million off of budget. This does include a 1.2 million dollars pension expense adjustment. So that is most of this variance right here and operating expense. It's hitting the labor overhead category. So a lot of that 1.4 million variance is the 1.2 million dollar pension expense adjustment, which is based on the actual report that we received for the pension as of June 30, 2020. And for viewers, moving forward, our budget has accounted for this. Yeah, that's right. We have budgeted about a million dollars. I just wanna make the co-admission aware that though we have seen a variance in that range for the past few fiscal years, the way that this is calculated, it is really, really hard to predict. There's a lot of factors that go into the actuarial report, the value of the investments in the pension fund, the performance of the investments, the age and demographics of the retirees. So having seen the accounting for this, it's very complicated. And there have been variations, big swings and deferred inflows and deferred outflows from year to year in each actuarial report. So I agree. It is good that we are budgeting and that is a definite improvement from where we were. I just don't wanna overstate like the accuracy of our budget because there's quite a bit of uncertainty still and the amount of adjustment we'll have to make. So again, these are preliminary. We do have some, we haven't closed the fiscal year officially. We still have some final journal entries to make. Some will be positive to the net income. Some will be negative to the net income. I predict that this will be probably within $100,000 plus or minus of this net loss figure after we finalize all of the period 13 entries. None of them are gonna approach any sort of order of magnitude of the $1.2 million pension adjustment. And then I'll just quickly show capital spending. So we spent overall 65% of our capital budget and FY21, pretty much on target for transmission, which is not surprising. This was our Velco equity investment. Fairly on target for production and generation facilities. We saw the most delays related to COVID in distribution. And then some spending on IT forward making up a lot of this variance in the general category, but not as much as budget. Distribution related to COVID, sorry, I'm sure you've explained this before, but related to like those were projects that Muneer purposely slid to the next year to address COVID. Yeah, I would say either purposely or they were customer-driven and they were delayed and or we saw supplies and materials delays, supply chain disruptions in a lot of cases where necessary material was not able to be ordered or delivered timely. Okay, in general is predominantly IT forward? Yes, about looks like 1.6 of that $2.1 million was IT forward. Yep. There it is. And then cash ending cash. So this is a firm number. This is what it is on June 30. We ended at $6.4 million that was below budget, but not terribly so given the revenue losses that we saw in COVID and the other challenges that was only $213,000 worse than our budget estimate for ending cash. The actual ratio or sorry, the actual days cash on days cash on hand number may move a little bit depending on where our operating expenses land. So don't hang your hand on the 108, but it should be again in that range. And then same with the debt service ratios, those will be adjusted slightly once we have final balance sheet and net income numbers. So I will move down now to July. So for July, sales again were, unlike June, they were below budget by 389,000. We also saw other revenues down a bit, mostly EU returns. Power supply expenses were favorable to budget as was operating expense. Small variance here in depreciation and amortization. So again, most of this being the sales numbers driving a lot of this variance. So we ended July with a net loss of 325,000 compared to budget of 456 for net income. So essentially when we were working on our budget, I, when do you guys start? You probably start like March of 2020. 21. March of 2020. Oh, well, no, March of 2020, we were hoping COVID would be way better than it is now. And we would have seen more commercial industrial uptake. We budgeted for this fiscal year starting in February or March of this calendar year, 2021. And we budgeted for sales to be impacted by COVID, but in a minor way, in a minor way. Yeah, yeah. So we didn't, we didn't budget for like the full kind of net system effects of down 3% or so. We budgeted overall for more of like a 1% decrease. Well, I think a lot of us were hoping that we wouldn't see a Delta variant and more folks would, yeah, we'd see more of a return to normal. And you're right, 2021, not 2020. Okay. Right, right. Does this make you think at all about the budget for next year? Hmm. I mean, of course. Yeah, I haven't honestly given it a lot of thought yet. I think the fall will be interesting, not only because of the variant, but also because the schools and institutions in the city are operating at more regular capacity than they were last academic year. So I think that will be interesting to see what kind of difference we see once they, like for September loads, for example, if the weather is sort of normal, where are we in the commercial sector, especially, after a full month of what I understand to be relatively normal occupancy at the academic institutions. Okay, thanks. So capital, not a lot to report here with only one month of spending. We're kind of in the single digits with some timing, a lot of timing on projects not being exactly what was planned. I will note that we had budgeted in this fiscal year to receive our first electric bucket truck. It was very exciting. And we are still going to receive the bucket truck. I just, it will not happen until next summer. So it will be not in this fiscal year. So there'll be an adjustment in that capital item. And then cash for July was at 6.8 million, 6.9 million. That is below budget by quite a bit. A lot of that is timing of receipt of state and city arrearage funds. So state programs are still running. We are collecting or our customers are collecting really arrearage assistance. And we are also expecting additional arrearage assistance through the city and their ARPA grant. But the timing of that is still being determined. So we're at 116 days cash on hand as of the end of July. And the adjusted debt service coverage ratio is at 0.96. Questions, comments from commissioners. I just wanted to point out just briefly on the adjusted debt service coverage ratio that July obviously does not include the surcharge for the rate increase. And that we expect as that is rolled out and we expect as the year goes forward, we are anticipating improvement in that number, reasonably substantial improvement relative to where it has been and where it is currently. So I just wanted to remind folks of that. We'll certainly be tracking it very closely as it's an important component for our Moody's review. Yeah, still pretty grim, right? I mean, I think it's frustrating and historic models aren't doing a good job to help us look forward in this time. And yeah, I just hope taxpayers don't get confused with some of the financial data. I don't think most people don't look at it but and asking for more money. Well, I think that's why it's really important for Darren and crew to share those slides and also try to give us more, if we can follow up with questions based off of if you're sending us information with those bullets in terms of how you describe some of the slides earlier this evening. I mean, to Commissioner Whitaker's point, this is not tweetable, right? I mean, it's more complex. No, it is. And I think, I understand there are gonna be other items that are up for discussion, whether it's now or in the near future, everybody's watching the discussion around the high school and other needs that the community has. So I do think pointing out that these are revenue bonds that are payable by BED that they're helping with upward rate pressure for BED customers and that they're not affecting somebody's property taxes that they're not interlinked in any way with the reappraisal is a point we're gonna need to stress over and over again because I think it's not immediately intuitive in every situation that somebody would assume that. So I think that's a very critical point. I do think relative to the financial metrics though, we are forecasting that those will improve during the course of the year. And I think if we follow through with our plans as we have them in the financial model, we're expecting to be able to, and this may require a further rate adjustment in FY23, but we're expecting to be able to get back to around the 1.3 or higher level for the adjusted debt service coverage ratio and sustain that over the course of the next five years that's in our planning model. And the good news there, because I do wanna keep us positive as well, the 7.5% and this is outlined in the memo that I'll share again this evening, the 7.5% rate increase should be a high watermark for us in terms of rate pressure, 12 years without a rate case coming out of a pandemic. We may need more frequent rate adjustments, but they should be increasingly moderate as we go. So what we need in 23 should be less than 22, what we need in 24 should be less than 23 and so on through the duration of our five year planning horizon. So I do think that we have a path here that is gonna have more moderated rate pressure as we go. Yeah, and I also just add that even though COVID is continuing to suppress sales, it's also masking the load growth that's occurring from the success of our incentives. And that makes it a little hard to see what otherwise should be an upward trajectory in sales as our incentives continue to be successful and hopefully even more successful with the revenue bond and the developments in the city, right? Coming to back online, I think things are starting to progress and that too will add sales, but it's hard to see that trend turning around because the data is clouded by the COVID effects. Yes, while it's not helpful to look at the, roughly 300,000 that were off, I still, we do have six million plus cash on hand and we're going through this right case. And if anything, I still really applaud the work that you all are doing in terms of keeping an eye on this. And yeah, we'll just have to keep, if you see things shift sooner than the next October meeting, that's good to reach out and connect. I mean, to Bethany's point, this is kind of consistent with what we've been seeing in terms of sort of ongoing management of the challenge at hand. But commissioners or Darren, it looked like you might say something. You know, the last item on the agenda is the commissioners check-in at the tail end. Any final questions or comments? Well, okay, I'll do it. If we didn't want to cut down greenhouse gases and if we weren't told to, would we spend the five million? That's an easy one. Yes. Yes, that has a concrete business case, regardless of your feeling on climate. There, I finally got a suitable answer, I think. Yeah, and you can see how simple the question was. Right. Sorry about that. Feel free to add that to your bullets, Darren. We'll do. Anything else? Okay, again, from the commissioners, thank you all for your work. Really appreciate it and appreciate you all keeping the lights on because boy, would we hear about it otherwise. So, we're talking a lot more about net zero and the finances and accounting, but I thank you also to the nuts and bolts of distribution and Muneer's team, as well as Dave McDonald's team for just keeping things going. But, all right. Lori, if you don't mind calling a motion to, or Jordan. That's a great question. So move. Okay, Scott, was that Scott? It's hard to tell. That's correct. Second. Jim, Commissioner Shagman, second. Commissioner Shagman. Aye. Commissioner Herondane. Commissioner Herondane. He's just on mute. Aye. Commissioner Moody. Aye. Commissioner Stevens. Aye. Commissioner Whitaker. Aye. Thank you. Meeting adjourns at seven 14. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.