 We're now recording. And if we're ready, I can bring all our folks are filing in. We're at about nine attendees outside of our esteemed panelists here. OK, great. Yeah, why don't you bring people in? I'm sure there's going to be more people coming. And they're in. We have nine still. And I was just going to say Chris, Chris, Steve, and well, I guess mostly Chris and Steve, if you want to introduce each other to save time. So Chris, when you're done with your presentation, you can hand it over to Steve. Steve, you will hand it over to Laura. I'm just going to hand it over to Steve. And Steve's going to say who he is and what he does for a living and who he's married to and how many kids he has. Right, and then he's going to do his presentation and hand it over to Laura when he's done. OK, for people who are coming in, we'll get started in a very small amount of time. But the agenda for this evening should be on your screens. So you can see what we're going to do. You have all of the topics, as well as each of the panelists will be speaking to those issues. I don't want to push continue. I guess I do my head in time. I'm talking about what's for me to do or somebody else, but you're right. OK, so. I'm going to wait till 6.35 to get started. Sounds good. Remind me, Jesse, if I don't get started right then, please. And if folks can remember to mute their microphones while they're not speaking, that would be great. Thanks, by the way, to all the panelists for getting here a bit early. We're now at 13. But as usual, the recording is seen by a lot of folks as well, so I'm sure folks will look forward to that. One minute, sir. OK, thanks, Jesse. OK, why don't we get started? Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the third forum of the Amherst Affordable Housing Coalition. My name is John Hornick, and I am the chair of both the Housing Coalition and also the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust. The other major sponsors of this evening are the League of Women Voters of Amherst and the Town of Amherst, and I appreciate both of them as well. Tonight's focus is on climate and affordable housing. We have many excellent presenters who will help us better understand the complexities of climate and housing at every level, but with particular emphasis on Amherst. You should see their names and our agenda on the screen now. In the planning for this forum, there is one very important lesson that I have learned. When we talk about climate, we are not only talking about reduced admissions, the Green New Deal, and reaching 2030 or 2050 climate goals. We are also talking about assuring the health, safety, and economy of residential environments in which we live. Those are very important goals that we cannot lose sight of. Some brief housekeeping. John Page, my principal collaborator in the Housing Coalition, will be monitoring the chat function in Zoom this evening. If you have a question or a comment, please put it into the chat. And as time allows, John will insert it into the conversation. We also have time reserved for public comments and questions later in the forum. At that point, we will call on individuals as they raise their hands. That's my contribution for tonight. Now I will leave you in the very capable hands of our moderator and our first speaker, Stephanie Ciccarello, Amherst Sustainability Coordinator. Thank you again for coming. Thank you so much, John. And thank you for inviting myself and members of the Energy and Climate Action Committee to join this evening. This is an amazing, wonderful series that you all have put together. And we're so honored to be a part of it this evening. So I wanted to start with giving people a little bit of a context of how there's an intersection between climate change and affordable housing. So if you'll give me a moment, I'm going to share my screen. And I have just a few slides to share with you. OK, so starting with looking at our, sorry, our climate inventory that the town conducted in 2017, we see that there are, there's a substantial amount of emissions that come from the residential sector. And these building emissions are primarily from electricity use. And in and of itself, that may seem like that's not necessarily a good thing. Emissions are, you know, are generated by the things that we, you know, the electricity that we use, the fuels that we use in our home. And the thing about that is that when you're in affordable housing, you don't necessarily have any control over the energy that you use. So because residential buildings and electricity use are such a large piece of this pie for the town, it's really important that we look to affordable housing to be constructed in a way that's sustainable so that it's more efficient and emits less emissions. So I'm sorry, I'm having trouble with my. So if we look at how we can make affordable housing more sustainable and more efficient, we would look to how it's constructed, how it's designed, how it's constructed. And I know that there are other speakers that will get to more details about this. But some of the things that we can look to as kind of co-benefits is reduced energy cost. So if a building is designed and constructed in a more efficient manner, then it's going to reduce your energy use by efficiency measures like the fact that you will have appliances or that will use less energy or you will have a more efficient fuel mix. So your electricity, perhaps, will be from solar. And that will have a greater content of renewable energy. And therefore that. I think we've lost Stephanie's audio and I'm going to go out on a limb if you can hear me and just sort of I see the slide. And I think what she's talking about is some just amazing stuff. Better air quality. Stephanie, can you hear us? I can. Can you can hear me? We lost off there for about a minute. OK, I'm sorry. Can you hear me now? Yes. OK, I apologize. I'm not sure what's going on having some technical glitches, but it's not evident on my end. So you'll just have to speak up if you lose me again. Am I breaking up or can you hear me OK? We can hear you well now. OK. So improved. We lost. But we lost you. I'll jump in again, which will probably cause Stephanie to show up again. So indoor air quality. The air you breathe. I'm so sorry. You're home. Yeah. I'm stepping on your toes, Stephanie. Is that OK? Nope, that's fine. If you keep if you keep losing me, then please step up. That's fine. And I think what it looks like is houses that are more comfortable to be in there. They're warmer in the winter. They're cooler in the summer. They cost less to operate. And in the event of a power failure, pipes don't freeze and people stay warm. I think it's in some ways these are the greatest benefits of low energy housing. And can you hear me now, Jesse? Yes. Yes. We could. I'm sorry. Can you hear me now? Hello? Yes, we can now. OK. All right. I'm going to very quickly wrap up and say that ultimately all of this contributes to community resiliency. Because when we look at sustainability and we look at three parameters, it's usually the economics, the environment, and equity. And equity is often a piece that is hard to achieve in building design for affordable housing in terms of the ability to provide an efficient structure if it really depends on the landlord and the construction of that building, of whether or not you as a tenant are going to be able to reap the benefits. So if we look at sustainable design, if we look at more efficient construction, then ultimately it improves the quality of life for folks in the community. So I'm going to just very quickly wrap this up then and pass this on to Bev Craig. So I may have to dip out and come back in. So Bev, I'm going to let you introduce yourself and thank you. And apologies for the glitch. No problem. Hi, everyone. My name is Bev Lee Craig. I work at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. And we are a quasi-governmental state agency. Actually, there's a small fee on everybody's electric bill. It averages about $0.20 per residential customer per month that goes into a fund that helps fund our agency. And we really are, we're not mass-save. And it's really our goal to try and encourage the clean energy economy in the state. So you guys may have heard about the offshore wind procurement. That's us and we own the blade testing facility. You may have heard of our internship program. So we funded over almost 5,000 interns working at clean energy companies in the state. And we also work on sort of, I guess I would say things nobody else works on. We try and innovate and do as much as we can that can spin off to other programs and state agencies. And so I come from an affordable housing background. Actually I worked in Cambridge at Homeowners Rehab for 12 years retrofitting existing buildings. And so first I just want to say we are so excited to have this climate bill in stone and signed by everyone. And now DPU and Massave and everybody has the same goal of getting to net zero by 2050. And so what does that actually mean? So just like we were hearing before, residential energy use is really important to that calculation because our greenhouse gases for fossil fuels that are used on site for our housing does make up a big piece of the pie of the greenhouse gas pie. So the biggest piece of the pie is transportation which we all need to start thinking about what the next time we replace a car or an electric vehicle will we buy? But we also need to look at the housing stock. And just to give you a sense of perspective, there by 2050, there should be about 20 million of the existing buildings in the state right now that we're gonna have to retrofit which means we're gonna have to make them at least 30% more efficient and get fossil fuels out of them to get to this goal, which is a huge task. But we also expect about 500,000 new buildings to be built and boy is it important that we build those right. The last thing we wanna do is have to retrofit them in 10 years, right? That just doesn't make any sense. And so in the state, many of you I think have an affordable housing background so I'm not gonna go into too much detail but we fund most of our affordable housing through low income housing tax credits through the state and about two thirds of those are right now have been for new construction projects and about a third is for refurbishing existing buildings and keeping them affordable. And the scoring in this system right now, there's probably seven projects for everyone that gets funded and that means it's really competitive and you might have to wait a long time to get funded. And so the scoring for how do you prioritize which ones get funded is pretty important. And right now what there's the scoring or with AKA the QAP, which people in the know always talk about the QAP. So the scoring system basically has 182 points and only 20 of those really are focused on environmental design right now and they call it environmentally friendly design which I think all of us know is sort of like outdated language but one thing that is nice is that the last round of updates and they do update this every two years they did put more points. So at least a two point differential and sometimes a three point differential between lead and enterprise green communities buildings that are certified and passive house which is the most energy efficient standard in the world. So that is great because it gives projects that come in with more efficient construction a higher chance potentially of getting funded quicker. So the current scoring doesn't really address retrofits very well. And I mean, I personally think that's a big problem because affordable housing only comes up for refinance every 15 or 30 years if we're lucky that's the only chance we're gonna have to do a deep energy retrofit. And then so I will say at the end of the presentation I'll say that there are opportunities for people to comment on the QAP there's one that just passed right now that they'll probably in about two or three months be another open period for comments. And any of you who have thoughts about that I encourage you to write in to DHCD and talk about how you really think it's important that these fit for both retrofits and new and maybe even it should be more heavily weighted to be consistent with the state's climate goals. The other thing that's great is and I'll talk a little bit more detail about this passive house, which is that most energy efficient standard in the world. The MassSafe program actually has a very good program for that right now for new construction. And that is fantastic. We do wanna see that continue. Unfortunately, though the low income program for MassSafe the lean program which honestly has been a really good program. I'm not trying to knock them but they really do shallow work over a lot of properties. And we're at a point now that we need to do deep dives deep retrofits at refinance that's coordinated because that's when the resources are gonna be. So just stepping back to these different standards lead most people have heard of, right? It's probably the most recognized green building standard and it's great and I'm a lead AP but it deals very shallowly with a lot of different issue areas. So you see all this, these circles along the way but is it a shallow fashion? Passive house standard instead really hyper focuses on two energy and atmosphere and indoor air quality. And so that is why new construction that is passive house certified is five to six times more airtight than stretch code is gonna require. And it also has much more healthy levels of ventilation than anything you're gonna see around. It actually requires fresh air to every bedroom which is right now the biggest incremental cost of going from standard to passive house. And I think after COVID, aren't we all wanting to have better ventilation? So what makes passive house different? So it is much more energy efficient. So actually when we're tracking performance in other states of multifamily buildings and the one that we have in the state we are seeing 40 to 60% better energy use than traditionally built code built same timeframe buildings. And then you also have this balanced heat recovery ventilation to every bedroom as well. Those are the two big things that you'll see as different. So our agency, we didn't have much luck getting DHCD to put in more bonus points like you've seen in Pennsylvania. And so we said, what can we do in the state? Let's, DHCD was very worried about the cost. They thought it might be 10 or 15% more expensive to build to passive house standards. And we didn't see that in other states. So we said, well, let's just prove it, right? So we've funded eight projects that were going for low income housing tax credits to upgrade to passive house standards. We provided up to $4,000 per unit in those and 540 total units. So one's built, the others are all under construction they're all funded. So it's great news. So far the costs are coming in great between 1.4% and 2.8%, which is exactly what we wanted to show is that it's not that hard to do this. And that this is the range of up and down in a project this size that's regularly seen because of different site conditions. So it means, yeah, it's a little more expensive. You might have to sacrifice on landscaping or finishes or something to bring it into budget, but it's not so far out the range that we can't fund similar numbers of units. And so the cost is one side of things, right? And then the performance is the other side. I think especially after a lead, when people expected a lot of good energy performance out of lead buildings, there's been disappointment that it hasn't been meeting its mark. But because of this hyper focus and all the construction verification that goes on in the process for getting certified for passive house, I think it's a much more predictable what the energy use is. And this is just Boston. So in Boston buildings above a certain size have to disclose their annual energy use. And the first multifamily passive house building in Boston the distillery is on the left in green. You can see the energy use intensity. The lead projects are all in purple and the code projects are in blue. And so I mean, when we look at other cities too like Philadelphia and New York, I think what you see is really interesting because you don't see much variability and the baseline's so much lower with passive. With code, you see it's all over the place. Like a great architect is gonna really focus on envelope and make sure that GC builds it right. But you can't guarantee it's gonna come in because it's just not really part of what's, it's only 30% of the points in lead are energy related. And here's another example sort of more in your neck of the woods and maybe a little bit smaller scope which I think some of the Amherst properties affordable might look a little more like this. So this was Trinity financial built 16 townhomes between nine, two and nine units. And the architect basically speculated as a passive house. He didn't tell anyone. It was a stealth passive house. And he brought it in at cost. He didn't certify it, but it's amazing. So the other thing that was really like genius is Hank pre-funded five years of performance measurements. So we actually have five years of performance data of this all-electric development costs have been amazing. So even on a super, super cold year the median, the annual energy costs for all in. So this is plug loads, hot water, all heat, all cooling was 1,528. And in the low year, we were talking $38 per month. Like boy, I wish my energy costs were that low. And this is like how different. So a similar lead townhomes that were in a similar area that were built around the same time. Look how off the charts, the oranges, but the blue is all the passive house ones. And so nine months after mass CEC put our program out mass save introduced a very similar one. So it provides $3,000 a unit. So it's not quite as generous, but it's very generous. And I think the important thing to let affordable housing owners and really any multifamily owner because both market rate and affordable are eligible for this is there's really not a downside to doing the beginning of the pre-construction studies that mass save funds. So they actually provide a hundred percent up to $5,000 for your design team to look and see what would be different and what would have to be changed. They also pay for 75% of the energy modeling costs which are much more precise than the normal modeling done for code buildings. And so even if you decide at the end you're not going to go with triple glazed windows or whatever is too expensive, you can get that pre-design work and I bet it will make for a better building. And we've seen this statewide. So three years ago we had this one multifamily project passive house certified in the state. Now we have 102 projects that have at least gotten modeling money over 7,000 units. So it's really a market transformation. And I feel like as people learn more we're going to find more ways to make this less expensive. So this is just a visual interpretation. It's pretty obvious which one was retrofitted passive. It's where you don't see the heat going out in the cold weather. And then I just wanted to mention I mentioned the mass save three year plan and how right now the low income program for multifamily really doesn't interact well with retrofits in particular at refinance. There is an opportunity for commenting on that. There's three public hearings the first three weeks of June. They take written comments even just like two sentences is helpful. And then the other thing I want to encourage everybody to do is anybody who has connections with local leaders in Hamhurst or anywhere in your region I really encourage you to reach out to elected officials and energy commissions and even planning staff sustainability staff to come to a zero carbon building municipal summit that built environment plus is putting together. You'll probably see emails about this from MAPC. There's like every possible co-sponsor on this and it's coming up on the 11th. A lot of very practical things that municipalities can do right now including even just like procurement of concrete. You can probably reduce the embodied carbon by 40% no cost change. So there's a lot of things that localities can do in addition to the state and then they'll also be talking about things to continue the forward progress at the state level. Thank you. Jesse, do we have any time left or did I go over? Well, I think if we're tracking a couple of minutes behind then we've got time for questions. Otherwise, I think we'd pull it over to Ashley. Ashley, can you share your screen or are you having trouble? I didn't know who was Michael to do that. Yeah, it was hard to tell. So I'm handing it over to Ashley and CET is one of my favorite organizations, so. Oh, thank you. Well, good evening everyone. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. My name is Ashley Muspratt and I am the Director of Innovation at the Center for Technology. And I'm gonna be talking about ways to save money and carbon emissions in affordable and multi-family housing. So first a bit about CET. We are, I can get my screen to advance. We are an environmental nonprofit based in Northampton and we are about 45 years old and all of that has been helping people in businesses save energy and reduce waste. Relevant to this conversation, I would mention that we are lead vendors for the Mass State program for utilities across the state, serving primarily the commercial and industrial and multi-family sectors. We also administer the residential energy efficiency program for municipal light plants. And on the way side, we designed and administer recycling works, the program to help businesses and multi-family properties strengthen their waste management programs. And I'll talk in a bit more detail about that in a minute. But I'd like to start with the Mass State program that I've spoke to some aspects of it. I'd like to speak to opportunities to save money with existing buildings. So as you all know, in Amherst, your natural gas comes to you, the Berkshire gas and with electricity is what my efforts are. Both members of the Mass State program and its customers, you have access to some really significant incentives related to energy efficiency. So as I mentioned, CET is a lead vendor for multi-family properties. And as such, we can provide free energy audits for you. So if you come to our website located at the bottom of this page, you'll find a form or a phone number that you could fill out to sign up for a free energy audit. No cost to you. And really no obligation for us. It's just a really great chance to identify opportunities to implement energy efficiency or electricity. And I'd like to talk about three in particular, three measures in particular that tend to have a lot of relevance in multi-family properties. And it can lead to significant cost savings and carbon emissions reduction. The first one is domestic hot water. And by this, I'm talking about low flow shower heads and faucet aerators. These measures are known as instant savings measures, which means that the energy auditor installs them for free that's across the covered by the utility and you can instantly start saving them. And the nice thing about these measures is that they're simultaneously saving energy, but also water. The other measure that's really relevant to most multi-family properties is weatherization. And by this, I mean insulation and air sealing. So a leaky building that undergoes weatherization can save up to 20% or more of its kind of baseline energy consumption. So this is a really great kind of consistently the most cost effective measure that you can take to save energy in an existing building. And Berkshire Gas incentivizes weatherization very well. We tend to find that we can get anywhere from like a 60 to 90% incentive on weatherization jobs. So definitely something worth looking into. And it's a really important measure too, is we think about preparing existing building stock to be 2030 or 2050 ready, as we sort of electrify our heating systems that we'll talk about next. It's really important to have a tight building because these systems end up performing much better and are a lot more cost effective. So the third measure I wanted to mention was air source heat pump retrofits. So this means converting from an existing furnace or boiler might be fueled by either natural gas oil or propane to a heat pump or taking kind of an inefficient baseboard kind of electricity resistance heating and upgrading to air source heat pumps. The air source heat pumps are an incredibly efficient technology. The thing that sort of distinguishing them from other heating sources is that they're in fact just moving heat from one location to another as opposed to generating it. And as such, they could be incredibly efficient. So whereas a boiler, if we're just kind of talking in equivalent units of kilowatt hours, if you kind of spend a kilowatt hour producing heat from a boiler, you're gonna get slightly less than that, a kilowatt hour of heat moved into your room. Whereas with an air source heat pump, for every kilowatt hour that you spend running the machine, you could get three, four or five kilowatt hours of heat into your room. And that kind of coefficient of performance as it's called depends on the outdoor air temperature. So in kind of shoulder warmer seasons, you get a really high coefficient of performance, four or five and colder seasons you're still at a two or three. So air source is really interested in doing more air source pump projects. It's a measure that they have some pretty ambitious goals for, but that to date has still had pretty low uptake, particularly in the multi-family sector. So if there are buildings in Amherst that are currently fueled by coping or have electric resistant spaceports, they could potentially be really good at candidates for an air source heat pump. Especially if the systems are approaching their end of life. Of course, we're also thrilled to look at replacing natural gas systems with heat pumps, but because of the pricing differential at this point today, natural gas still kind of takes a lot less expensive to running heat pump. Whereas if you're on a delivered fuel for electric resistance, you can actually save quite a bit of money by switching to a heat pump. So as I in the mass save program kind of piggybacking on some of the things that I've spoke about, we have a team of building scientists to perform a lot of the services that she was talking about for designing, lead or passive house building. So our team would be the ones that go in and consult with architects or contractors or property owners to conduct the diagnostic tests and figure out what the existing building looks like or if it's new construction, we'll assess the plans and then provide advice for moving those buildings toward a new passive house or energy star rating. Before I leave the topic of energy, I also wanted to mention a really powerful kind of new form of financing that we have available for classic plastic tools called PACE, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy Financing. And it's a financing mechanism that's been available through, or that's kind of administered by mass development and the DOER. And essentially it's a way to finance clean energy projects and this can include energy efficiency and or renewable energy projects like solar PV. And that's being financed through a long-term assessment on the property. So what it means is instead of paying a loan, you're paying off these energy improvements on your income or on your property tax bill. So on a similar or annual basis. And the thing that makes this type of financing so powerful is that it's off the financing. So if a property owner is maxed out on credit or doesn't want to take a loan to pay for these energy efficiency improvements, maybe they'd rather spend it on buying another property, they can use this type of financing and not have to take out a loan for it. Another benefit of this financing is that when a property is sold, the lean transfers fit the property. So if the owner's like, I'm only gonna have this building for another five years, I'm not going to invest in solar PV or a heat pump or anything. Well, it can become cost-effective if they're saving costs on the building, implementing these measures. And then when they sell the building in five years, all they've done is improve the value of the building for the next owner. And then the next owner will pay down what remains for the paying off the project. So in order to take advantage of PACE, towns do have to opt in. And I noticed that Amherst hasn't yet passed an ordinance to allow for PACE. It's something that I believe would happen at the city council level. I know that's what happened in Northampton and the city council and then eventually the mayor. But my understanding is that it's something Amherst is considering and I really think it's a great way to unlock projects that might not otherwise happen, particularly in the commercial or in the multifamily space. The changing tax a bit, before I close up, I did wanna say a little bit more about the waste management services that CDT provides. It may not seem like quite as big a lever maybe for saving carbon and some of the energy efficiency improvements, but I think it's really important. So the Mass Department of Environmental Protection sponsor is a program called Recycling Works which CDT administers and it avails free assistance to businesses, institutions and commercial properties across the state for strengthening their waste management. The backbone of this service is a really robust recycling works website that anyone, I mean, it could even apply to single family residents, but any business or property owner can use this website to find service providers. So if they're trying to, if they're doing a remodel and have construction materials to deal with or tenants have moved out and have left some coaches on the sidewalk that they want to deal with, go on here to find service providers for things like that or more mainstream things like recycling and composting, crop compost collection. Recycling Works also provides, like I said, free technical assistance, which is virtual or onsite assistance where our field specialists will kind of take a walk through the property, take a look at your dumpsters, take a look inside the dumpster, see how people are doing with their support separation of recyclables and trash and organics if you have organic separation and provide you with very tailored site-specific guidance on how you can strengthen your programs. We also provide free signage. I know this can be like really crucial in multi-family properties, particularly in like a college town, if you have high turnover, having really clear signage, be a sign on some examples of the signage that we produce. We'll use kind of a mix of pictures and language to make it very clear what belongs in the bin and what doesn't. You can also provide these signs in multiple languages. Here, I'm showing the example of Spanish, but we make signs in whatever language is the tenants of your property. Finally, I just wanted to mention a very specific guidance document that we've produced, which is tips for property managers. So if you can go to the Recycling Works website and find a guidance document that's kind of tailored for your needs and gives kind of best practices for helping your tenants apply with Massachusetts Wisdom. There is the website, PDF. I will leave it there. Thank you very much. And I'm looking forward to questions a little later. Great, thank you so much, Ashley. Really appreciate your presentation. And I know I'm kind of a disembodied voice here now. So thank you everybody for your patience. I think John gave me too much of a buildup in the beginning. So I think what was great was that Ashley was really able to point out the ways in which people do have some ability to have some influence on their living space in terms of efficiency. And there are things that you can do. So thank you so much for that, Ashley. And also I will say that the town of Amherst is not just interested in PACE, but we're definitely going to be participating in the PACE program. It's just a matter of moving us forward, but it is happening. I know our finance director is very committed and I know the town manager is committed and I know the council, many of the council members that are aware of the program are very committed as well. So it's just a matter of time before that gets in place here as well. So, and I think we do have a few minutes for questions for Ashley, if someone wants to type in a question. Sure, so we have a few already. One from John Hornick is, has ZT been involved with planning any affordable housing projects? We are involved in quite a number of affordable housing, both retrofits, so kind of at the time of refinancing, as Bev was saying, as well as new construction. So all the sorts of projects that she was describing are high performance building team has taken quite a bit of this. Great, and Bev did have to leave, it looks like, but Laura Baker from Valley Community Development did mention that she believes there is a passive house project in Northampton, North Commons at Village Hill. So I don't know if anyone knows about that project specifically. And we do have another question here. Could you talk a little more about heat pumps and gas-fired heating systems? In comparison of the two or cost comparison? That question's from Chris, so I don't know if he wants to elaborate a little bit. I just want to, I understand that MassSafe will not fund a heat pump retrofit in a project which is already natural gas-fired. Is that still true? I believe that is true at this time. I mean, there's a new three-year plan coming out that will hopefully, where that will hopefully change. That said, I know that the electricity provider, so Eversource is incentivizing heat pumps and I'd have to double-check as to whether like a building that was served by like, that had natural gas from Berkshire Gas but had Eversource for electricity if they'd be able to use Eversource for a heat pump retrofit, I could double-check on that. It would be more expensive, but. Is it really generally more expensive, a little bit more expensive, a toss-up? I mean, operating a heat pump in, when you're in kind of bio-use territory for your electric utilities is right now today more expensive than natural gas. We do a lot of work with the municipal white plants where you may be aware their electricity rates are pretty much half of the IOUs, so typically coming in at around 11 or 12 cents a kilowatt hour, and there is a whole different game. There, they can blow any fuel source out of the water and so we're really pretty aggressively pushing heat pump retrofits in residential homes in that territory. But yeah, gas is still less expensive. I think it pencils out if you have a rooftop PB system, but if you're just kind of one for one paying your utility bills, you'd expect to pay a bit more. Thank you. Great, thank you, Ashley. Oh, go ahead. Laura also noted that CET is Valley's passive house consultant for the 132 Northampton Road project. So those of you that are familiar with that, that's really exciting news. Alisa Campbell has her hand up. Should we see if she has a question? Sure, let's let Alisa ask a question and then we'll maybe, I don't know how much time we have left, Jesse, for questions, so. Oh, it looks like she put her hand down. So we can move on. We're a little behind and we could maybe catch up and have questions at the end, I think would serve us well. Sure, so Ashley, I'm gonna ask if you have, if you have the ability to stay with us till the end and then perhaps if folks have other questions, if not, that would be great. Thank you so much. So I'm gonna transition us to start with Jesse, who is then going to introduce Mark, but I will have the pleasure of introducing Jesse Selman, who is a local architect and one of our energy and climate action committee members. Thanks, Stephanie. And I'll just say, as an architect, we've worked with CET many times and tip of the hat, great organization. Thank you guys for everything. I first met Mark many years ago at the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, Building Energy Conference. And this is a conference made up of people who are really dedicated to understanding and reducing building energy. And still Mark stood out as somebody who really cared. For that organization, he's served as a board member, a conference chair, recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, although it's the service award, not a design award. He has given his time to Habitat for Humanity, YMCA, numerous educational organizations, but what really impresses me is Mark's ability with to bring climate consciousness to his daily practice. And those of us who count carbon, we love our numbers, kilowatt hours of electricity, dollars of propane, cubic feet of air. And I think Mark really brings heart to this conversation. And I would say, if you wanna see more of his work, award-winning architecture, go to marksternickarchitect.com. That's Mark with a C, sternickarchitect.com. So for the next nine minutes, I get to interview Mark. And so if someone could tell me when it's 724, that would be helpful. I will let you know, Jesse. So Mark, thank you for coming. We know that kind of business as usual, will not solve the climate crisis. And my first question is, how does having an open mind to creative solutions and an eye for opportunity play into this work? Well, thanks, Jesse. And thanks for that wonderful intro. Really appreciate that. So in terms of opportunities, one really good example where, the opportunities are all around us and we need to look for them and really just grab them when we can. So the thing I'd like, the example I'd like to talk about is a project I did with Valley CDC in, I started it in 2010 and we finished it in 2014. That's Parsons Village in East Hampton. It is 38 units and in about seven buildings. And I did that under Joan, Joanne Campbell. And back when we first started, I had proposed doing it zero net energy. And probably rightfully at the time, Joanne expressed concern that she had a problem in the budget to stick to. And that's it. I mean, she would love to do more, but do as best as you can, do a little better than code, but we're not going whole hog. I don't want this project to implode. So I designed it a little better than code. And there were seven buildings ranging from five to seven units each. And after I designed it, and they were, we had it priced. And then I realized that because each of these strips of units, these five to seven unit buildings, they needed mechanical space. And that mechanical space happened in a basement in the middle of each building where we got the utilities up and out, the heating and hot water to all the units. It was the most efficient way to do that. And I thought about that and thought about the new technologies and expected especially the air source heat pump technologies that had just been coming online or were more readily available at the end around 2010. And I just went ahead on my own and on my own time redesigned the project to be zero net energy capable. I beefed up the walls, beefed up the insulation everywhere, figured out how to get relatively cheap triple pane windows and looked at real air sealing. And what that did is not only did it get rid of the more expensive mechanical systems, it got rid of the basements. So this entire development is now slab on grade. And when we had that repriced, it came in at about the same price or a little less. And because there's a lack going on on the roof and I'll actually share screen for a minute to show you what this project looks like. Now, are you able to see this or not? I've got several screens going. You can see it. Oh, okay. So that's the Parsons Village and we've got a small community building and a community gathering space with a park in the middle. And if I can just get my cursor to the right place, this is hard now with three screens. All right, well, I'm going to stop sharing my, there we go. I'm going to stop sharing my screen because this is not working. Okay. So basically we got, if we were able to do a canopy over one of the stretches of car parking, we would potentially be able to have that project be zero net energy. But so it is designed to be very energy efficient. And I was able to prove that by looking at things in a different way, we were able to come in on budget, very much on budget for the entire project. I love it. I love that story. I love that lesson of sort of seeing the whole picture as part of the energy, not just the individual parts. Many projects get called net zero energy capable, but after a building is designed and built, how do you make sure that management and occupants are able to really drive these projects as low energy consumption? What role is that? Well, this is one of the places where it gets tough with affordable housing, because often or typically people are not paying for their own utility. And having to figuring out ways to make people care enough about saving energy is a challenge. I had one project in Williamstown, it was 40 units of senior housing came out very nice. Everything was done very energy efficiently with that. However, several months, maybe nine months after the project was completed, the owner called and said, hey, Mark, this project isn't, it's not running as efficiently as it's supposed to. What's going on? And so I said, I'll come out and I'll take a look and see what I could find. And I drove out there and before I got out of the car, it was clear to me what was going on. It was 28 degrees when I got there. And I look up at one portion of the building that I parked in front of and there were, I forget if it was six or eight windows wide open. I think I found the problem. So, and this is gonna be typical of any project where we really have to figure out ways to work with people. When I offered to come in and do sessions with the tenants to really let them know how this building was designed and kind of get them more interested in saving energy and kind of not opening the windows all winter. The ones who came were very interested and they were lovely and they had no problem talking about their neighbors who were smoking in a non-smoking building and that's why these windows were all open. It's a tough problem. And one thing I have a way that potentially solves that problem, it's not cheap necessarily or at least it isn't yet that I know of. But there is a very simple way and it's becoming more common. You can put sensors on the windows and either have them wired or wireless and have them go to any smart thermostat. And when the window is open, it turns the heat and air conditioning off. It's great. And you know, people can get fresh air if they want but they're gonna start getting cold and they're gonna need to remember to shut the window if they wanna feel comfortable after a long period of time. I think it's wonderful. We looked at it for a recent project and it came out to about $1,000 a unit to do the several windows for that unit. But I think it's becoming more common and I think there are ways to do it cheaper now. So hopefully that's something that's gonna be become prevalent in affordable housing in the coming years. Or any housing. I think we could- Any, yeah. That's, my kids need that. All right, we've got a minute here, Mark. Okay. And I got a question that has sort of an endless answer but I wanna see if you ready you to give us this and I'll use up most of the minute asking it but if you have a good, pithy answer. So so much of our energy work and activism kind of talks about this idea of it's less bad. Oftentimes the decisions come down to choice and I'm curious how do we change that narrative away from the making it less bad and to deliver affordable living that's not just healthy and low energy but also welcome and really wonderful. This shouldn't be less bad. It should be amazing. How do you do that? Well, there's a couple of things. There's a lot there. But there's a couple of things. One is I've really, I started out like 10 years ago or 12 or so when I found out about passive house I was resistant to it. Now, I think this is a real way forward. I think it really gives us a very clear defined way to do severe is not the word but extreme energy efficiency as much as you can do that's reasonably affordable. And I think that when you start thinking about the extra costs which are really from zero to three or four percent extra if you can roll that into your mortgage or into your long-term funding it starts paying for itself by with the much lower utility bills immediately. And so when you pair that with designing not just energy efficient boxes but communities and focus on the community aspect of these affordable housing projects that we're doing and really work to make these better places to live for the people who live there not just in terms of energy efficiency but in terms of life. That's the best I could do in a minute. I love it. Can you stick around if there's more questions? That's so great. Thanks, Mark. Sure. Chris, I'm gonna quickly pass the baton. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, Mark. Sure. Hi, I've got prepared remarks. So I'm just gonna read them, no slides. Hello, I'm Chris Riddle, retired principal with Q and middle architects and a longtime Amherst resident. I'm involved in several climate activist projects. I want to speak about how we might be sure that all housing in Amherst including affordable housing is constructed to high efficiency standards that are consistent with the world's compelling need to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050 period. What tools are available for us to be sure that all or at least the great majority of the housing in Amherst is carbon neutral by 2050? We need to achieve the following basic objectives in the next three decades. That all homes and apartments are in efficient buildings with walls, roofs, floors, doors and windows that are highly insulated and airtight. That the heating, ventilating and air conditioning of appliances and lighting in these buildings are energy efficient and don't burn fossil fuels. That the small amount of energy that these efficient buildings still need is supplied by renewable electricity. And for rental housing that achieving the above three objectives does not decrease comfort, worse than air quality or increase the overall cost for rent plus utilities for the tenants. What tools are available to a municipality like Amherst to cause this to happen? First, for new buildings, for our own projects funded by Amherst taxpayers we can just build them that way. We already have a zero energy bylaw in Amherst that requires all buildings built by and for the town to be net zero. We can afford to do this because the small additional construction cost is paid for by the annual energy cost savings. For projects funded by the state or the feds we can first encourage those subsidy programs to require net zero construction. We've heard already about the standards that go with funding through the DHCD. Then if they fall a little short we can fund the shortfall with our own resources. For all the other new privately developed market rate housing. Well, we can provide encouragement, information and assistance to the developers. We can help with statewide incentive and financing programs like PACE, Massave, Solarise Amherst and the Heat Smart. We have a rental permitting bylaw now. I'm sorry, yes, the rental permitting bylaw now. Landlords have to obtain a permit to rent out an apartment. We could add energy reporting to that process an energy report card that we would share with the public and prospective tenants. This will incentivize energy upgrades by raising awareness and improving competition among tenants that will give us some leverage. Then there is the state building code. New construction has to meet the standards in the building code and it includes a section on energy conservation. The building code energy standards aren't close to net zero now but work is going on in Boston as we speak to raise the code energy conservation standards up to net zero. When the state adopts the net zero building code all we have to do is adopt it here in Amherst. Done. Wait a minute, there's still a tough one. What about the hundreds of apartments that are already in town and existing apartment buildings? What about the fact that the people who own those buildings usually have no dollar incentive to invest in energy conservation or renewable energy? What about the fact that they don't have to comply with the building code if they do nothing? Well, in that case, we can still provide encouragement, information and assistance. We can still help with statewide incentive and financing programs like pace, mass-save, solar rise, heat smart. We can still use our rental permitting system and its energy report card to incentivize energy upgrades by raising awareness and improving competition among tenants. But those things probably won't do the job by themselves. I am really concerned about these existing buildings, the existing apartment buildings, existing houses and really all other types of buildings in town, since they all need to be upgraded to net zero by 2050 also. Here are two additional ideas. We could work with the state to upgrade the building code by expanding its applicability, not just to new buildings, but to renovation of existing buildings. And we could add a performance standard to our rental permitting system. We could start with the poorest performing buildings that were reported to us via the energy report cards and we could require minimum energy performance standards as a prerequisite for a rental permit and then gradually upgrade that standard over time. I'm now stepping on the next speaker's work. I would like to introduce you to Steve Roof. Steve is on the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee and has been working on the whole idea of a rental permitting, how we can use the rental permitting system to solve our climate problem. Steve. Thank you, Christopher. I am, my name is Steve Roof and I am a resident here in Amherst, been living here 20-something years and for the last two years I've been serving on the Energy and Climate Action Committee which has been really wonderful working with a group of people. And I've been working with Chris Riddle and some other folks in town, some on the Energy and Climate Action Committee but we're trying to solve this problem that Chris was just referring to. And let's see if I can share my screen here. Just a brief outline. So the problem, as we've heard, the building sector represents a very large fraction of the carbon emissions in Amherst. Amherst, we have over 50% of our residents living in rentals. And 55%, I believe. And more than 50% of those renting households are financially strained, meaning that more than 30% of their monthly income goes towards housing. Most renters, I believe, as I understand it, most renters pay their electric and gas bills. So the building owners have no real incentive to take, to improve energy efficiency. So many of the things that Ashley talked about with the CET and those cool things that Mark talked about, building owners really don't have any financial incentive to invest in those since the tenants are paying the energy. So we're trying to solve that problem. We have three goals. We are trying to overall decrease energy use in rental buildings. We wanna help renters and building owners save money on their electric gas and fuel oil bills. And we wanna help building owners finance those energy efficiency improvements, take advantage of programs that CET offers and others, the PACE program that's new and Amherst. We wanna help building owners find those programs and use them to improve energy efficiency. How we hope to get it done? Right now, our group is doing a lot of research. We're looking at how other communities are doing this. And there are quite a few other communities, not in Massachusetts, but elsewhere. Burlington, Vermont just passed some rules about energy efficiency in rental buildings. Austin, Texas has some rules. Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon, both have some regulations. So we're studying those. And what we hope to do is build on Amherst's existing rental registration bylaw. This is a bylaw that requires rental units to meet certain standards. We would like those standards to be expanded to include energy efficiency. I wanna make clear, we wanna do this in a way that doesn't cause rent increases or at least not cause rent increases that are greater than the energy savings that the tenants might realize from efficiency improvements. So we want people to save money. We are going to work and hold community meetings. We've held one or two. If anybody listening wants to give me their ideas or help with this initiative, would love to have your ideas and or help. And how it might work, we are thinking many other communities we would ask that or require that an independent certified inspection takes place and rates the energy efficiency of the building. That then has to be disclosed to potential renters and buildings with the poorest scores would be required to upgrade efficiency. That means probably putting an insulation or doing air sealing or perhaps improving windows. After a few years, we would then ratchet down those standards so that more and more buildings then have to begin to do some investment to improve the energy efficiency score. We're still working out the details. There's two ways to go about this. One is to look at the actual energy use of an apartment unit, look at the energy bills and add up the energy and figure out how much energy that is. A separate or different approach is to rate the building's energy efficiency. So more of an asset rating. And this is a little simpler. It also doesn't that that rating doesn't depend on individual tenants. So if there are tenants that like to keep the place warm, that wouldn't cause the score for the building owner to go down. Those are the ideas that we are considering and we're getting help from the Rocky Mountain Institute out in Colorado that has helped many communities with this. Community members, as I said, if you can help, we'd love your help. Town of Amherst Inspections Department. Stephanie has been an integral part of our team and we hope to get more folks involved from CET and others, particularly with the financing side of things. So I'll leave it there and happy to take questions. When is time for questions? Thank you so much, Steve. So we're gonna hand this over to Laura Drucker who is the chair of the Energy and Climate Action Committee and Laura, you can do some introductions yourself. Great, thanks, Stephanie. Hi everyone, happy to be here. Stephanie said on the chair of the Energy Climate Action Committee, ECAC, as we not so gracefully refer to ourselves. And I'm gonna take it a step higher for just a moment and talk a little bit about the work we've been doing as a committee. We are committee formed in, I believe, May of 2019. So just two years ago with two main tasks to set climate goals for the town and then to develop a plan to meet those goals. At the end of 2019, the town council unanimously approved our goals which included a 25% reduction in town-wide emissions by 2025, 50% by 2030 and town-wide carbon neutrality by 2050 that are aligned sort of with what the science is telling us needs to happen at a global scale to keep the impacts of climate change below 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is very technical but basically that means just to avoid the absolute worst impacts of climate change. So we were really great to get those goals, happy to get those goals approved and we quickly moved on to developing the plan. And we've been working on that since early 2020 with the town of Amherst through a grant that we received, the town of Amherst received from a state program called MVP, Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program and that's a state program that supports cities and towns as they build resiliency to climate change. We're really excited to say that we're finalizing this plan in June which serves as a blueprint for actions that we need to take in four main areas, buildings, renewable energy, land use and natural systems and transportation and infrastructure. In addition, a fifth area, governance and communication lays out key actions to center equity in planning and decision-making. And we really hope these actions can be a blueprint far beyond just climate, the climate committee and climate work in town. The processes we undertook to develop the plan work to put many of these governance practices into action which brought many more diverse voices into our process and helped ensure the actions identified in the plan address equity. So this is I think a really important, this is really why actions like continuing to lead on affordable housing is included in our climate plan for many of the reasons that have already been discussed today about the connection between affordable housing and energy equity. So please be on the lookout for the plan which highlights many of the actions already mentioned but of course plans don't implement actions all by themselves. So implementation is the next step. We would really love to work closely with community members and organizations like Amherst Affordable Housing Trust to ensure implementation. So one action I'm gonna highlight quickly in my last minute here is something to help solve this split incentive problem that's already been highlighted where if landlords pay for utilities they get the call savings for doing the upgrades but they can often pass those costs to tenants or not realize the full savings if it requires some tenant behavior changes. On the other hand when tenants play utilities which is the case most likely in Amherst landlords have little incentives to do the upgrades. So in addition to really making sure we're leveraging these state incentives to make the upfront costs for developers and landlords very little like pace we also need to think about some other options. So one program we have been thinking about is the idea of a green lease where the tenant and landlord in their lease come up with an agreement where they share energy costs in a way that both incentivizes retrofits by the landlord and energy saving behaviors by the tenants. So maybe being a little bit more cautious about windows or just opening up lines of communications a bit better so they don't feel like they need to have windows open to feel comfortable in their space. For my initial research these are most common with commercial leases but I think there are opportunities to bring this to the residential space. So thinking about how to actually drive these changes we would likely first start with a pilot project and then scale it up with outreach education and policy. So if there are any landlords or developers on the line today who would be interested in piling one of these green leases or these incentive programs we've been discussing please reach out or if you happen to know of someone in that landlord or developer who you think would be game for doing something like this please also let us know. So with that I'll close this part but please don't hesitate to reach out you can reach anyone in our committee through Stephanie. Great, thank you so much Laura and thank you all panelists you've done a fabulous job. I apologize for my technical glitches at the beginning and my technology really failed me because my slides froze and one of the slides that I wanted to show at the very beginning was that 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions in our community come from stationary sources which is basically buildings. So because buildings are such a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that's why and we do have such a significant number of affordable housing complexes within our town that's why this is such an important issue for us and why we hope that we can do things that will help incentivize more sustainable construction that will reduce our emissions. So with that said I'm going to open this up for questions and answers from our panelists. So what would be probably the best is if you could include who your question is directed to and you can type it into the chat and John can acknowledge you and we'll read your question and who it's directed to. So far very quiet. I guess that means everyone did such an excellent job. Don't be shy. Yeah, please. And also I will say that as Laura pointed out you are very welcome to please send questions or even feel free to call town hall. I can be reached to town hall. You can get questions to all of the committee members through me. We will be definitely doing a lot more outreach and especially now that we know things are going to be opening up more in the state. We're very likely to be in person coming to a complex near you, I hope. So we'll have some opportunities to do some really direct outreach to the community as well which will be great since we haven't been able to do anything in the past year. So we look forward to some of that face to face contact with people that we miss. So any last opportunities for some questions? If not, I will hand it over to John. Looks like we have one. OK, great. From Elisa Campbell, what about those folks that live in condominiums? They pay their own utilities but can't get an audit through Massave. So if anyone wants to speak to that, folks living in condos. Ashley, do you maybe want to take a step at that? I will try and then I can also follow up with colleagues. So my understanding is that we have serve condominiums but typically have to work through the condo association and usually what needs to happen is all of the tenants of the condominium have to agree in advance to kind of move forward with an audit and measure. So it's certainly a challenging property type to serve but I know that there are ways that we have done it. Great, thank you Ashley. Any other questions? The person who asked that question, you could certainly follow up with me by email and I'd be happy to provide you with more information or connect you with one of our field staff that could give some more specific guidance on how to serve your property. Well, I just got unmuted I think. You did, yes you did. The condos I live in, we have about nine different designs of buildings which complicates the issue and none of us have attics. So it really is, I mean, I don't know that much about the construction of the other condos in town, maybe they all have attics but anyway, it is tricky. And when there's 56 different units getting everybody to agree on anything, you know, so. Anyway, I may email you but I have requested audits in the past and somebody showed up and said, oh, you're not eligible, so. Okay, please do email and hopefully we can figure out how to serve you. Thank you, Alisa. We have another question here from Erica who is on our housing trust and is on our working group writing an RFP right now. And hers is that RFPs are often the way we can have control over developers and request energy efficiency in affordable housing. Do you have any advice in specifications to include without scaring developers off? I guess I can take a stab at this one. Unfortunately, Bev Craig would have been a great person to answer that question and unfortunately she couldn't stay for the meeting. But I will say that one of the things that we're hoping to do is to reach out to the state along with other communities to really encourage the DHCD to create more net zero guidelines for construction so that there are actually requirements of affordable housing construction in the state. The town can do so much and we can certainly have some specific designs but we can't really necessarily go as far as the DHCD. So right now I think that's kind of an advocacy stance. We really need people to reach out to the state and encourage that to happen. But yes, the town can certainly put some suggestions for more sustainable design but we can't go as far as we'd like at this time. Jesse. Yeah, I would just add that we saw a number of precedents this evening that showed that some of these upgrades are not cost prohibitive and certainly are cost positive in the long term. So simply putting passive house certified in the RFP would do the job. And there are plenty of examples to prove that it's possible. Any other questions? We have a few more coming in here. Great. Felicia has asked if there are solar panels put on a property, especially a multifamily property, how ready is Eversource to hook them up to the grid? That is a really good question. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those things where you know, it's a bit unpredictable and I know that there has been some frustration with some folks that the panels don't go live, if you will, in a timely fashion. So I think it's not something that we can necessarily as a community have control over. That's kind of an Eversource question. I've never had that problem on some of the large multifamily affordable projects where, you know, when it's done, they go through all the paperwork and all the protocols and it's online. But I'm sure there are places and instances where that's not the case. Can I talk to that? I think that Felicia must be referring to the phenomenon, which is that there can't be a solar array for more than one property. I wonder if I'm trying to say, a condo project can have one and only one solar meter. It's a screwy and the same is true of a multifamily project, any multifamily project. You have multiple tendencies like a condo project. You have many, many condos, but only one piece of property. That one piece of property can only have one net meter. And that's a real problem for having individuals in condo projects put, get solar in their property. Yes, and we've definitely had that issue in town. I remember several years ago there was, I think it was actually in a co-housing development where folks wanted to put solar on the housing and couldn't because the transformer couldn't support theirs in addition to their neighbors who had solar on their unit. So that has been a challenge. And that's not, that's really been a problem for quite some time. It has. Is that a limitation of the technology or state regulation or ever source policy? It's capacity and it's also very expensive to, if they can add, they can add to the transformers, but it's, sorry, Chris, I'll let you finish after I, so I know that when, in the past, when that unit wanted to add solar, they were told by ever source that they had to actually pay for the transmission. So it became very cost prohibitive for the people that wanted to install solar because the utility wasn't going to do it. Go ahead, Chris. My understanding is that it is also, and probably overwhelmingly a regulatory problem, one meter, one property. And then never mind the size of the transformer, it's really, there's a regulation that can't have multiple net meters on one piece of real estate. Yeah, that may be more recent. This transformer issue was what happened years ago with that co-housing property. Is there anyone else that has other questions at this time where we're probably needing to wind down here? Sure, my battery is dead, so I'm gonna hang up. Chris, thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. I do one more and I think I can rephrase it in a way to wrap things up. Sharon has asked our property management companies involved in these discussions, especially for condominiums. And I might rephrase it to the members of ECAC is communication and bringing more people into the conversation has been a huge part of your work. So maybe some of you could speak to that both in the area of adversity and equity, but also how you bring in developers, builders, and management into that conversation. Laura? Yeah, I can speak quickly to that. The answer is that's our ultimate goal and we were making some good progress, particularly in advance of presenting the goals to the town council of going around and interviewing different constituents in town. And I actually had the opportunity to meet with some property management folks and I'm gonna blank on the name, but they're right above your office, John. Forget what their management company's name is, but they were super interested in engaging with us on some of these things and piloting some programs. And then of course COVID happened and kind of all of that communication fell to the wayside. But I'm really hopeful that we will reinstate some of those connections now that the plan is done and we can move into really implementing and identifying actions. And this conversation is just highlighted. There's some things that are gonna require a lot of comments and complaints to DPU, for example, about utilities being slow and there's other places or comments to Massave to help make the next three-year plan meet some of these needs that we have identified in this call. So I've learned a ton, probably I've learned more than I've taught everyone else. So if anybody else has anything else to add. I'll add that in our group working on the rental energy efficiency bylaw, we plan to have a large group process modeled after the group process that created the Amherst rental permit system quite a few years ago. So we expect and look forward to communicating with property owners and landlords in town to help find the best way to do this that benefits as many people as possible. Does any property managers or landlords out there? I'd love to hear from you. Absolutely. So thank you all so much. Thank you panelists so much for your willingness for to participate this evening. You are all really great. And thank you, John for the invitation. This was a wonderful opportunity. And especially for those of us who have been working in the energy and climate action committee to sort of really be able to think more about strategies for our next steps, especially in this arena. So thank you. And thank you, John Page, for your technical prowess. I wanna thank everyone for participating, presenting tonight. As well again, as our co-sponsor in the League of Women Voters of Amherst and the town of Amherst. I also wanna thank Stephanie for being an excellent moderator despite the technical difficulties that she was encountering. There are a few events that I wanna mention coming right up on Tuesday, June 1st. We have a special meeting of the housing trust to finalize the RFP for the Belcher Town Road East Street affordable housing development. So if people are interested in that, that will be posted on the town website as will the regular meeting of the housing trust which is on Thursday, June 10th. We generally welcome visitors. We usually have at least a half a dozen people at those meetings. So feel free to log in. The next meeting of the Amherst affordable housing coalition will be on Tuesday, June 29th. So the end of the next month and we'll be reviewing the reform done. The forum tonight, we also had a forum on home ownership and a forum on racial equity and housing. And if people are interested in those links to those recordings are already posted, right, John on the affordable housing website. That's part of the general town government website. So people are interested in those. They are well worth listening to. And again, I thank everybody for their participation this evening. Thanks everyone. Thank you everyone. Good night. Thanks. Thanks and Jesse, thank you. This was fun. Thanks Mark. Hope to see you all soon. Thanks Mark. Bye all. Thanks, bye.