 webinar. So that's going to start the recording just so you know. Thank you. Hi, Stephanie. Hi, folks should be joining shortly. Excuse me, Stephanie, I'll give you a heads up. I have COVID so okay, they have difficulty speaking from time to time. I was diagnosed a few days ago, I'm actually feeling a lot better today. So this is the first thing work thing I'm doing since I got it. But am I finding difficult to speak in which case I'll just shut up. Okay. I yes, I've been there so and I worked through it as well. But you kind of do get tired, for sure. Yes. The end of the day is tough for me. The mornings have been not so bad. But the end of the day is tough. So I'm sure I'll be done after this call. Yeah. Well, we may cut this one a little bit short, we don't have to go I had given us two hours because I couldn't remember if we said an hour or two hours for this particular meeting. So I gave us two hours, but you know, we can cut it short if we need to. I have a couple of follow up questions from our last meeting. And I don't know if that's appropriate to ask them in this meeting or or schedule a different meeting. But I thought I'd throw it out there. I guess it depends on what your questions are. Why don't we wait until we get everybody here? Okay. Fair enough. So I know we need Chris, at least to get the meeting started. Tom said he would attend but not until later. So once Chris arrives, we can get going. And I will note, for those of you who just arrived that the recording when I open the meeting, the recording starts automatically. So we are recording. Just be aware. Well, then I'll be careful what I say. Darcy, it looks like you were trying to say something, but you're muted. Oh, you're still there you go. Just looking for our agenda so I can put it in the notes. Is it in was it in one of those emails? Yes. I sent it. I can always add it if you know. Okay, just to take notes when it's in that framework. Sure. Do you want me to forward it to you? If it's easy, if you can find it easily, I just give you one moment. Hi, Chris. Hi, Chris. Can I throw out the question and then you can all decide whether or not you want to address it today or wait till some other time? Sure. Now that Chris is here. Chris, I said that I had a question that remained from last week's or last time we met. And the question is, you know, I have to confess that I don't understand the electricity purchasing market. But I assumed that when you went out to buy electricity that you could choose what kind of electricity you wanted because there are so many suppliers that they must offer different products. But the last time in our last meeting, I mentioned that we wanted to purchase renewable energy generated electricity as part of our mix. And the suggestion came up that we would need a PPA. And I didn't understand why we would need to go to a PPA model unless I really don't understand, which is entirely possible, the electricity market. Well, so that, well, let me ask Chris, Stephanie, do you want to address that question now? We could talk about certainly as far as work and certainly we could talk about it for a few minutes. I think we could spend a few minutes. Chris, you're muted. I think I could answer it, Paul, but I think you'd probably be better at answering it. Well, I don't know for sure, but I could take a first crack and then you and Kim too I know could help to clarify. Great. So your question is a good one. And I think that the high level responses that there are lots of different ways of purchasing renewable energy and depending on how you want to do it, you would you have different options and you would do it in different ways. So the core way in New England, by far the most common way that people purchase renewable electricity and the way our electricity market is designed is you actually buy the energy and the renewable content of it separately. And there they've been divided into separate products and you buy the energy as energy and you buy the renewable energy content as Rex, which are renewable energy certificates, which are developed by renewable generators. And to clarify what I say you buy, in the case of an aggregation, what it would mean is the retail supplier you choose for the aggregation would buy those two things. And in particular, in the by all the electricity you need, and the whatever mix of Rex, you tell them you want. So that's the that's the core way to do it here. And for that, you don't need a PPA, you can use just a standard retail contract. And that's the way all or virtually all aggregations do it now. There is an argument, though, that while that's good, there are other things you could do that would do more to support development of renewable energy than that model I just described does. And we can and other ways would include entering into a contract with a particular renewable generator. And for the reason that if you enter into direct contract with a new renewable generator, you can say and you would as a as a community, you'd be responsible for helping that project get built because you've made a commitment to a particular generator. But to get that part, you were responsible for it getting built. You need to enter into a long term contract. Because if you just enter into a typical the typical term of a normal retail supply contract, which might be two years, for example, that's not a long enough commitment for the renewable generator to get built. So if you want to take that next step, you need to enter into a longer term contract and form enter will be a PPA or there's also something called the virtual power purchase agreement, the VPPA, which we can talk about separately. But that's, that's really the main divide. Are you buying electricity and Rex, which is the way 99.9% of the people do it? Or do you want to do something that goes a little deeper? If so, that requires a different kind of commitment. I could throw a specific example out. That thing could be clarifying. So the city had a three megawatt array built on our landfill. And we have a power purchase agreement. So in that, as Paul said, it produces two products, it produces electrons, and it produces a societal benefit. So in that societal benefit, we have quantified in Massachusetts and other places as Rex. So it's worth something. And so what happens with that landfill right now is in order to make the finances work, the owners of that land of the PV array on the landfill and Morisco, they sell the SRECs. So they make an income from that. And whoever buys those SRECs can say, I am using a lack of renewable energy. On the other hand, we buy the net metering credits, which gives us a really good economic benefits. But we can't say we're using renewable energy, David Markowitz, Mayor Narciss hated it when I pointed that out, that we are not providing most of our power through renewable energy, even though we built this beautiful array out on our landfill, making good use of a landfill space, but they're selling off Rex. And so normally what you do when you buy, go out for power purchase, not power purchase groups, when you go out to buy electricity, you're buying Rex or SRECs. So you're buying the right to say that renewable energy that's being produced there, that's mine. I'm paying for it. And I think last week, I remember there was some kind of conversation about us wanting to build a project locally. So something that actually exists in our territories. And in that case, if you really want to support it whole hog, as Paul was saying, then you have to buy both products. You'd have to buy the Rex or the smart credits, whatever they do nowadays. I'm not even sure I understand the smart program. But you basically have to buy the right to the renewable energy so that utilities can't buy it. You're buying it because utilities buy all that stuff. That's where most gets bought. And you buy the power and you can't directly connect the array. I mean, if you raise behind some meter, then you've got to directly connect it. Now you're getting the electrons. Wonderful. But if it's separate, then you can't tell the electrons, you know, take a left at Main Street and go down. You won't do it. So you buy you buy net meter and credits instead. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Paul and Chris. That was a wonderful mini tutorial. I'm glad we haven't recorded. Okay, well, because Tom is not going to be able to join us now, I'm going to skip reviewing the minutes. We'll just go right to updates. I don't think we have any updates. At least I don't. Does anyone else have any updates? Okay. So then let's go right into our discussion. And I sent around to everyone the outreach and education plan forwarded by Marlena. Thank you so much. And we can start with looking at that document. Marlena, do you want to share or do you want me to share my screen? Either way, if you want to structure the conversation and control the scrolling, you're welcome to share or I can share. You can tell me where you want to look. Well, I guess I was sort of hoping to look to you to sort of guide us through. So I can, if you want to talk and I'll scroll, how's that? Okay, sure. Hold on one moment and I'll, I just had it. Okay, so if you'll bear with me a moment while I share my screen. Okay, I'm assuming you can all see that now. Yes. So Marlena, go ahead. Yeah, you'll just, you can launch it. Well, no, so it's pretty heavily annotated to explain it all. So I don't know if everybody had an opportunity to look at that. What would be helpful? I don't want to like repeat something. If you guys have already read the annotations, I don't want to just like repeat something you've already read. So what would be the most helpful thing? Well, I think if we just sort of scroll through, maybe if you could just just give a quick snapshot of the pieces where we really need to weigh in. I mean, maybe not sort of the general information, but maybe some of the timing, some of the additional information that we could add. So if I just sort of start by the beginning, I can't see people while I'm sharing my screen. I can't see you all very easily. So I would just say that if someone has a question as we go through, just speak up and stop, you know, stop us and we'll ask the question and then we can continue. Does that sound okay for folks? I could say one place that I would kind of focus on. I mean, I think the idea of an overview is good. But if there's any place I want, I would want to focus on, my brain would want to go to right away would be, what are the next steps? Right. Where are the first steps? That's what you were saying, Steph. Yeah, and that's mine too. I just, but that's why I wanted, I thought it would be good for Marlena to just sort of give an overview and then we can maybe focus on the real next steps. Does that sound okay, Marlena? Sure. So at a high level, the next step is to complete this document. That is the next step that I would recommend you folks work on. And throughout the document, you'll see there are areas where you need to explain exactly the details of the types of outreach that are going to happen, including names of organizations, things like that. So that's specifically where you folks will need to weigh in and help fill in those blanks. So if we start kind of what we're looking at on the screen now, you'll see there's an introductory section and then the first big chunk matches up to where we are right now, which is the aggregation plan development period. And generally this document is structured to match this, the phases of aggregation development review and launch. So this is where we are now, we're in the aggregation development period. And you might recall from our first conversation that the big milestone we're headed toward when we first start working on a program is the public presentation of the aggregation plan. So the aggregation plan and also documents like this education outreach plan and a couple other things have to be presented to the public for comment and review for 30-day period before they can be submitted to the DPU. So this first section here in the document addresses what is the outreach that's going to happen there. And what I include here are kind of the typical things that would be expected, typical and minimum bar that would be expected for any community. So this is where I would need you guys to fill in like what are the local newspapers, what are the social media accounts, if you can believe that the DPU actually cares about which social media accounts and if we don't list them they will come back and say list which is at Facebook or is it Twitter for some reason that's important to them. If there are other ways to publicize this public presentation of the plan and public comment period we would want to list those as well. The caveat I will always offer with this document is that whatever we put in here is the minimum that you'll be committed to when we're actually doing the work. So you can never do less than what's in this document but we can always do more. So I don't recommend that we need to kill ourselves to put in every little tiny possible detail. What we really want to do is put enough in here so that the DPU and the public feel confident that outreach is being taken seriously and that it reflects the particular needs of each community. So if there's something for example that works in Amherst but it doesn't work in Pellum we would want to say we'll do this in Amherst, we'll do this in Pellum, we'll do this in Northampton, that kind of thing. So I would envision this section and any section where we're listing things we might have a few items that we do across all communities and then we might have a few things that are community-specific also and we would specify which is which. So that will need to be filled in here. If you scroll down a little bit past there you'll see next we move into the regulatory review period section of the document which is also what we move into after we submit everything to the state regulators so then we will be in the regulatory review period. There is not a DPU requirement that outreach has to happen in this period of time the same way there is around the public presentation of the plan and then later around launch. So this middle period is really left up to the communities to decide what they want to do and if they will really if they want to do anything and if so at what scale. So it may be that you folks don't want to do a lot of outreach in this intervening time but if you do want to do anything we would want to explain it in this part of the document. Typically what communities will say here is what I put. Typically communities will say during this time we'll endeavor to try to start doing some outreach and you list the organizations that that outreach will be done to the DPU always wants as many specifics as possible. I like to use words like endeavor to as you might imagine that gives you a little bit of wiggle room so if we don't actually get around to it or it doesn't work out for some reason it's not a big deal and so in here you would list the organizations. For example if this is what you want to do you would list the organizations and you would list what kinds of outreach you might want to do. If you don't want to do this we should not put it in. I'll be clear about that as well. There is some requirement here that during this period we just have to have links available on the municipal websites to the documents that have been submitted to the DPU. So that's that last paragraph that you see on the screen there that says to ensure access. So that's just required language that's the only thing that's required in this period it's not really so much outreach as it is just making the documents publicly available. The DPU is always concerned with transparency. So that's that's the regulatory review period it's very flexible very much up to you folks whatever you want to do we should put here whatever you don't want to do we don't put there. Then the next section of the document is really just in order to make the document make sense there's no outreach around signing the electricity supply contract it's just the next step after regulatory approval is received and the document doesn't make a lot of sense if we leave that out. I'm remembering this document is both written for regulators and also for the public. So the electricity supply contract text just says this is the next thing that happens. Moving beyond that into section D is the formal public education and outreach period and that's a section or a period that the DPU really cares about and as a reminder that's the period of time between when your electricity supply contract is signed and when your program launches. So that's the point at which you have all your program details like price, renewable energy, content, who your supplier is, how long the prices are locked in for and even when your program is going to launch. So at that point that's when the automatic enrollment notification mailing goes out and that is something everybody has to do and that's included here and then there are other DPU requirements like you have to do public information sessions and trying to think what else. I think those are the two big requirements that they officially talk about but everything else I put in here is kind of the minimum that people would expect at this point. Oh yes, so the announcement as well. So it has to be posted on the website, the announcement has to be sent out to local media publications, those kinds of things. So what I've got here is kind of a combination of the minimum bar and also the typical way people meet that minimum bar. Very often this section is very similar to what's in section A, what you do around the public presentation of the plan. This is just a little bit more robust than what's in section A. For section A when you're publicly presenting the plan we have one presentation, we don't have a series of presentations, there's no mailing that goes out. So and it's also a time when you have less program details so the amount of outreach is often tempered down a little bit but many of the same avenues might be used like the municipal website, like sending announcement out via social media or to the local paper, things like that. So you'll see there will be some parallels between those two sections but this is the part where the DPU will really expect it to be more amplified. So more outreach here as much as we can put in with confidence that you'll be able to do it whenever this program launches that's what we want to include. If you have a question about whether it will be feasible or in existence or desirable we shouldn't include it because again you can't do less than what's in here but you can always do more. So this is the typical structure of what I would include. So for example if you want to work with agencies and organizations in the community we need to list who they are, some exemplar organizations. If we are going to send anything to faith-based organizations we should list exemplar organizations, things like that. So you'll see that's wherever the brackets are and there's capital letters, that's an opportunity for you folks to weigh in. If there's anything that's not on this list that you would want to do, for example we had one community that has a big electronic billboard on the side of, gosh I don't even know which highway it is, but one of the major routes they have access to it. That's not a typical thing but it was unique to them so we put it in here so you know big electronic billboard sign. If you guys want to do things like a-frame signs around the community, things like that, we can add that yard signs, we can add that. Again just whatever you want to put in here is going to be what you're confident in. Scrolling down a little bit more you'll see the program website, we have to describe what's going to be there. This is a very standard list of what we include when we provide the program website. It's got a lot of ability for customers to self-service through the website. I mean this is just, it's a very standard list, so it's not necessarily something that you need to weigh it on, but of course if you have requests around the website we can discuss that. Following that there's the coming soon postcard. This is not something that's required by the DPU but it's something that we do and we recommend doing it so I've included it in here. So I mentioned the mailing that goes out to everybody that's going to be automatically enrolled in notification mailing. We recommend sending a coming soon postcard out a week or so before that and that really just primes people to keep an eye out for this letter and reduces the number of people that complain later, oh this happened and nobody told me. So the coming soon postcard just draws attention to the fact that the automatic enrollment letter is coming. So that's something that we just build into our planning and I went ahead and added it to this. It's something you don't want for some reason though, we're free to take it out. It's not a DPU requirement. And then item three there is the automatic enrollment notification letter that I mentioned. So the opt out the DPU calls it the opt out letter. So we have to use their language in this document. So it's the opt out letter which is mailed by your supplier and paid for by your supplier and then the public education events. So in general most communities do two events, one generally and one for seniors I started with that but it maybe we want to do a different combination since there are three of you working together. The way I wrote it it assumes six so two in each community. I don't know that that's necessarily a requirement though. I was just trying to make a guess at what might work for you folks but it may be that you want to do you know two in the larger communities and one in Pelham because it's a smaller community something like that. In general the way to think about this though is that you want to definitely put emphasis on seniors. So if there is an ability to do a special session for seniors you'll want to include that and then also something general for the community. Again you can do more than two. So if you're thinking well two's not enough we're going to want to do some special outreach to agencies that support various groups within the community or we want to do two general outreach sessions in addition to seniors. We can definitely do that. This is just kind of a place to start here. Marlena I have a question for this section. Could we because I was looking at the numbers in terms of folks who don't speak English we have Spanish and Chinese seem to be the two primary other languages. Is it possible to do sessions just in those languages? Yeah we could hire an interpreter to help deliver those sessions. Sure. Andrew has her hand up so go ahead Andrew. Yeah I was curious why seniors in particular and rather than renters. Well seniors are often there's a large portion of seniors that are often in the low income bracket and in general the low income electricity customers are often the ones that are negatively impacted just proportionally negative impacted by predatory competitive supplier marketing and also seniors often struggle to understand these programs. So those two things combine to make them a really important audience for a program like an aggregation. It's important that they understand that it's a resource so that they can get away from high prices from electricity supply contracts and it's also important that they have a little bit of extra time to understand the program in general. If anyone else would say if you want to do special outreach to renters you can certainly you can certainly do that if you can figure out a way to corral them. Yep. Anyone else have any questions for the section? I'll just chime in not with a question but just with one further response Stephanie to your question about doing presentations in other languages and you mentioned both Spanish and Chinese. We could certainly check with your community but it might be that whereas a Spanish language presentation would be helpful a Chinese language one might not be needed. What we found elsewhere is that while in a lot of communities there are a significant number of people who speak Chinese generally they're in families where someone is very very capable in English. You know it's a different often a different kind of immigrant population so we might find that the Chinese people who speak Chinese don't need the translation as much as maybe people who speak primarily Spanish or some other language quite. Thank you. Stephanie. Darcy go ahead. Just wondering what we do about it looked like Amherst was the community that has a lot of international folks from a lot of different countries and there were there was a smattering of a whole bunch of different languages just wondering what we do about that. If there's five people who can only speak Polish or I mean I understand that there might be somebody in their family that can speak English but how do we find that out? I think it's more how we translate at the materials that we provide and the information that we provide is I think typically how the town's done it when getting information out. How does that serve someone who only speaks Polish? In being provided materials in Polish? Yeah. I think what we've done is you know usually we'll go through organizations you know there's a few organizations that work with the immigrant population that's available to us and we typically would outreach to them so I mean that's a discussion we can dive into deeper. I was looking more at the sort of the larger groups but we you know there's no doubt that we tend to cater to the sort of the larger group. When we when we drill down to really small numbers I don't think there's as much of an effort to specifically meeting those specifically meeting those needs I feel like in this case we need to so we can we can have that conversation later. I just want to make sure that there's opportunities for some of these bigger groups to have we wouldn't have a big large meeting and information session for five people you know maybe there might be some outreach with a community member who is bilingual that we could go to somebody's house and invite people you know we might do something more small and intimate and we might do that on our own somehow separately I don't know so I'm talking more about these larger meetings would be for bigger groups of folks and so that's why I was wondering about like a Spanish session Spanish speaking session. I'll also add there the website that we create they they have machine translation available from a drop down so that's just kind of built in in addition in in addition the automatic enrollment letter that goes out is accompanied by a DPU required cover sheet that's in 26 different languages and the the 26 languages all say the same thing which is this is really important be sure to get somebody to help you translate it if you don't understand so that's a DPU requirement it doesn't mean that the letter itself is translated into Polish but at least there is something that draws people's attention to it and says don't ignore this go go get some help so those those things are already built in to how this works for everybody kind of everybody in the state does that the town's website Darcy just because I know you're concerned about Amherst does have translation also similar it has a inability to choose a language and the entire site is in that language does it actually work my understanding is it is I haven't specifically used it but I have spoken with the IT director and I've watched her navigate put it on and you know shown other languages so anybody else does it make sense also to just mention the translation through the customer helpline oh yes thank you Paul I did think of that and it went right out of my head so Paul's right the one other piece is that our customer support through our customer support line we have access to on-demand interpreting in at least 200 languages so if people call so they get this cover sheet with the letter and the cover sheet says this is important you should get it translated and at the top there's a phone number which is our customer support phone number so if they call us and they ask for a language we get an interpreter on the phone right then and we do this all the time so we have a lot of experience with that too so people that have that are members of language populations that are smaller so they're not on the receiving end translated marketing materials for example they can still call and have a conversation with us wonderful anybody else and I guess we can keep going okay so I think just scrolling down yeah so the timeline so this is something the DPU started requiring recently and it's a challenge so what their requirement is that the timeline has to show each thing that's in the list above so everything you say you're going to do you got to show in the timeline when you're going to do that and this I'll be honest this is really tough because we just don't know in advance you know 18 months in advance when are you going to schedule a select board meeting or when are you going to schedule a public information session or or anything else or when our social media post going to be done so this is meant to be illustrative as it says and and the reason I say that in the header and also I say it again in the second sentence of the paragraph is because we just want to build in some wiggle room here so that the DPU understands that the that you folks are making your level best attempt to take your commitment seriously and lay it out in a timeline to show that it's really going to happen and it's going to happen far enough in advance of that enrollments that people are going to be able to use the information which I think is one of the DPUs concerns but this is really very much guesswork and I don't think we need to tie ourselves and not necessarily to try to get this just right so I guess that's you'll see what I've done is I try to pull in all the things that were in the list above if we add anything to that list we need to add it here it's a pretty aggressive timeline it may be that things don't happen quite this quickly or they happen in a slightly different order and I don't think that would be a problem I don't I don't see the DPU I don't know how they would do this pulling out a list of things that the town has done and comparing it to this timeline there would be no mechanism for them to do that so the real I think goal here is just to show the DPU that these efforts are going to happen in time for people to use them before the opt-out deadline and to show that you know the town is serious about or towns are serious about incorporating these these ideas into the outreach so if we scroll past that standard text so then after program launch this section has a lot of DPU required language in it you folks are free to and I would encourage you to do outreach efforts after launch to keep the programs visible in the community and we help with that on an ongoing basis we're always sending over social media graphics around various things you know helping you write announcements if you want to write announcements or draw attention to the program your programs are always going to have perennial competition from other electricity suppliers and people will forget even that they're enrolled and and go sign up for some new agreement so you want to do that all the time the DPU has its own focus for this section so there's just a lot of stuff here that's DPU required and so you'll see that that's what this section is fundamentally about it's just satisfying the DPU that after the program launches you're going to meet their requirements around the outreach obligations that's what this section is really about and I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing a lot more in there but if you if you want to make a public commitment to something you know some other kind of marketing on an ongoing basis you're welcome to do it but there's no requirement to and and you can do ongoing marketing without making a commitment to it in this document again you can't do less but you can always do more so typically this section of the document is just full up with with DPU requirements just a note about one that's always perplexing to people is as you're scrolling down here you'll see this section about disclosure labels so I should say a few words about what that is because nobody knows what that is so these are documents that are any of us might might be familiar with from the utilities it's a document that describes among other things the sources of the electricity supply that you receive and associated emissions the documents are a requirement for electricity suppliers they have to create these are supposed to create them quarterly and that includes the utilities the utilities mail them quarterly to us they include them in our bills so you may have seen something like this in your bill aggregations get an exemption from that mailing requirement in exchange for committing to publicize them via alternative means that are supposed to be as equal to a mailing as you can get in the past the DPU was kind of content to just let people say yeah we'll do something now they're diving into it they're concerned that this document which can be fairly opaque I'll be honest they're concerned that this document is not you know people aren't taking it seriously enough so they want this education outreach plan to articulate a robust commitment to publicizing these labels on a quarterly basis and by label it's a PDF file one or two pages sometimes more designed by the electricity supplier to be their best understanding of DPU requirements which means it's by their attorneys they're not consumer friendly I'll be honest but they the suppliers are on the hook to to develop and deliver them and then the communities are on the hook to publicize them and we have to report to the DPU that publicity so this is this list here is what I or what we understand as the minimum expectation from the DPU right now for what will be done on a quarterly basis there is a line in there like announcement on municipal cable access if you have that if you don't have a cable access channel then we wouldn't include that but the minimum requirements are they need to be available low tech so on just on bulletin boards the DPU does expect them on like the municipal website and not buried so you'll see there's a note there about the home page and then social media and then on the program website which we take care of so if you guys want to see what those look like I can send you links from some that are an actor programs right now but that's what that's all about and then the next section is what we were talking about before which is vulnerable community members so the DPU requires a lot of census data I already did the homework for you there so that's all included and then there's a section after this where you if you keep scrolling you describe the actual outreach that will be done or the accommodations that will be made for folks who struggle with English so I think there's also a section if we keep scrolling on accommodations for people who might need ASL interpreter that kind of thing as well so this is that section where we address the concerns that you raised earlier which is how to make sure people who are not proficient in English or who are otherwise struggling to understand make sure that they have equal access to information and I think that is the end of the documents I think the last part is just the original data which we have to attach as well so I think that's kind of the overview all right thank you so much Marlene I really appreciate your taking the time to go through that with us and I did read it but actually hearing you speak through it more really was helpful so does anyone have any specific questions before we move on to next steps yeah I have a question are there any similar communities to Northampton, Amherst or Pellow that we could go talk to that have done a good job so I mean basically is there a good example out there then you guys work with many communities so I'm just wondering if for outreach or yeah yeah there's someone who's done a really good job at outreach they've been creative they've been engaged they have lessons learned and we might want to strike out a conversation with them well we always point people to Newton okay they I mean their program launched a few years back before this education and outreach plan document was even required Newton was very committed to running a robust campaign that started long before they had DPU approval whether anybody could possibly match what Newton did it was really an astonishing amount of work they put into it I don't know but Ann Burwick is definitely the person to talk to about outreach efforts I think they've been the most robust of any community that we've worked with we're working with like since this document was required we haven't launched any communities prior to this document anybody else that had a robust launch I'm trying to think of who else went as far I mean Newton is just so far out and above everybody that worked with by miles from an outreach perspective about their launch I don't know Paul am I can you think of anyone who might be comparable I mean I know other communities have done outreach but they've all been very it's all been very similar yes one other community I was thinking of but I'm I don't know if you to be more Marlene it might be Lincoln which is very small community very different they did a lot of outreach to a lot of yard signs was was big for them which got a lot of attention and a lot of their outreach was around convincing people to opt up to the optional 100% green product and they got the very high percentage of that or high compared to everybody else so everybody else is around 1% opt up and Lincoln is over 10 I think so it's still a small percentage but much higher than is typical so that's an interesting idea Paul and just for your folks reference Lincoln and Newton used us in different ways when it came to outreach so that's one of the reasons Lincoln didn't jump right to my mind so Newton used us a lot for help with materials and things Lincoln is their their committee is the driver behind their program and the committee members really didn't want us to create materials because they wanted to do it it gave them a sense of satisfaction and I offered and they said no we every time we try to have somebody else come in and make materials our committee members get frustrated with us because they want to they want to do the stuff themselves so they did a lot of very grass rootsy stuff as Paul said they did their own yard signs they I know they sent a lot of emails Lincoln's a very small community so I think there's a lot of just networking within the community of people who knew each other or who knew someone who knew someone that kind of grass roots outreach which is a little bit different from Newton which really took more of a broad brush approach so in Newton there was a lot of meetings with community agencies and organizations it's a city there are a lot of those as well as you know city departments and then also we created outdoor signs and banners and things you know to put out throughout the community visibly Lincoln was the yard signs but then I think I think everything else was done by a conversation one way or another electronic or in person so if you talk to them you would get two really different approaches which might be useful given the diversity of the you know among the three communities that you have you might actually get a nice well-rounded perspective so good idea before Catherine yes okay let me jump in with the follow-up question just before so you just told me what Lincoln's success was which is wonderful you know what was Newton's success so they had this huge outreach program did it produce something yes so before Lincoln launched Newton was the state leader in opt-ups yes opt-ups yep yep okay very good thanks and I'd also add there Chris I think in some ways the real measure of success of extensive outreach is that residents make an informed choice about whether or not to participate and that's that measure of success is a very difficult thing to measure so you know there there isn't necessarily a number you can put on it but we certainly feel like the more people understand the program and can decide understanding the program whether they want to be in it or not that's real success but it is it's hard it's hard to measure okay great Catherine go ahead yeah I just wanted to add that everybody knows that I've been monitoring the work for you know all the time that you guys have been doing it largely to share with the rest of the region but especially the city of Springfield because the city of Springfield has been funded by the Kresge Foundation to advance two policies through the Kresge Foundation's climate change health equity initiative and they've settled on a community choice aggregation they're calling it community choice energy and so there's been two years already of education so this is all funded not by the city to the city government its advocacy groups it's the public health institute and then the Piranha Valley Planning Commission arise for social justice neighbor to neighbor and wayfinders are all part of this collaborative under the live well Springfield umbrella and so they've been doing two years of outreach to black and brown residents in the city in particular to do all the grassroots behind the scenes work to build the understanding and support for you know going to 100% renewable when the city finally moves on community choice energy so right now the team has hired open pixel and is making a little video we had a hour long you know zoom webinar on what is community choice energy with a bunch of resident leaders that have been joining us for a year for two years and they've been doing we gave them scripts and they've been doing neighbor to neighbor you know family member outreach so you can get all those materials they're not up yet but they will be up on the live well Springfield website they're just finally getting loaded they're behind on all that but and then you can reach I mean I can connect you with Samantha Hamilton at the Public Health Institute of Western Mass if you need any of those materials so there is they're obviously Springfield it's different size than all of three of you but there are a lot of materials that have been developed you know locally for this kind of thing that's terrific great thank you Catherine okay other questions all right so I guess we're going to launch right into next steps so and it looks like you know going back to the beginning of the document sort of the the beginning of the outreach resources that we would utilize seems to be one of the things we have to cover and I don't I don't get the sense it's something you know we'll probably have a separate meeting just to sort of discuss with amongst ourselves first what it is we might want to do before we bring you back to follow up I'm thinking that probably makes the most sense or I don't know if folks want to do this on their own I guess I should get the pulse of the group and see if we want to try to sort of collaborate on an approach or do folks feel like you want to focus more on your specific community and I know Tom is not here so Chris I guess and Adele I'm kind of looking to you too what you think well I personally think that us working together with Amherst would make the most sense and of course with Pelham as well so I don't I don't see the value of us working separately yeah I'm going to say the the way this group has liked to work in the past is to take the document and put it into Google Docs is that it Google Docs yeah we can't do that now though we can't do oh because of open meeting we can find our way to work on it but we'll just have to work on it together as a group you know our meetings that's kind of how our meetings have been though I mean we share the document it might be on Google Docs for people to do separate editing on their own but we can't certainly you Tom and I at least can't go in and sort of make suggestions or change anything outside of public session unless we provide them you know just directly with no communication I think it's just easier we can just do it together Darcy Yeah Stephanie I'm assuming you have a long list that we could use for outreach for Amherst and local energy advocates you know when we were preparing for the for the Ithaca presentation we put together a pretty huge list that has a page for each community and so we can share that as far as you know key groups that we reached out to so yeah to the extent that would be helpful or we can do some of the reaching out presumably I don't know I'm offering things that have not been okayed with the other to board members that are in this meeting okay with me so what I mean does it make sense that we our next meeting doesn't have to be with Paul and team because it's basically you've handed off our task to us right the first the first thing is this this document and maybe you know we take a short meeting and go over a couple sections just to kind of get our ideas of where do we want to go with it we all go off and we work on our own parts to it we meet again and we put it together go to the next section just kind of take the document and work through it section at a time or multiple sections at a time so that we're doing everything in the public except for our own personal piece yep um that's not workable Tom is yeah Tom is here and I'm gonna Tom I'm gonna allow you to talk I don't I'm trying to promote you to panelists but you don't seem to be getting in so I'm just gonna allow you to talk you want to jump in here you're muted Tom he may be working still okay so Tom we can't hear you I'm just gonna assume that you're maybe doing double duty here so um I have a question for the team here how how have other communities handled this once you've presented this document have they gone off and worked on it separately and then come back to you typically yes right thanks yep so Darcy I just have a quick question I guess I'm hoping that's that we can't we can do it so that we don't hold your process up so that we're you know working in parallel and so I guess I'm wondering I think Paul said that he thought that we would be ready to submit in like four months or something three or four months so working backwards can we figure out somehow figure out like how fast we have to work in order to accomplish that so that we're not you know like slowing things down Paul go ahead um yes so absolutely so that mean the timing to filing is it's it's mostly you know it's the schedule is driven mostly by you guys so our we can we can we can work around you the just kind of just thinking it throughout loud for a second here so in order to take the next formal step which is the public presentation of the plan in the three communities we have to have a total of four documents complete one is the education and outreach plan and that's the one that requires the most input from you and that's the one we've been talking about and that's why we started with that one the next is the aggregation plan itself excuse me sorry that's largely DPU prescribed it has just a few places where your input is required and that's mostly around the renewable energy content and what you want the products to to look like so we can either talk about the decisions there and isolation which is usually how we do it or we could give you a draft of the document with sort of an annotated draft similar to the education and outreach plan and then the other documents is the electricity supply contract and I think probably what makes sense there is if we get that to you you typically what communities do is they have their town council review it ahead of time to be sure they're comfortable with it that can take a little bit of time so be good to have that in process and we can send you the documents you need to get that in process and then the final key document is the opt out letter which again kind of flows from other decisions but Marlene what would be the best way good timing for presenting that that letter well that flows from decisions around program options and program option names so typically once those decisions are made I can get a draft of that letter to y'all if we if we do take any of these documents on and kind of work out in sections and so then we end up with pieces that are finished does it help to pass those on to you guys that's not like it does but I thought I would ask for this particular document it would be great to just get kind of the whole thing I think working on it in sections makes sense I also find it helpful to see the document as a whole because as I mentioned there's often stuff that you you want to duplicate in two places and so you should make sure that you're expressing it the same way in two places there's going to be some similarity between what you do for the public presentation of the plan and what you do around the program launch announcement it's two announcements that you put out so announcement publicity will be similar maybe you're not going to have public information sessions plural with the public presentation of the plan and you are going to have plural later and you're not going to have a mailing with that first thing which you are later so they're not going to be identical but there's going to be some stuff that should be pretty much the same a few elements and so I find it's useful to look at the document as a whole and say you know are we saying we do we do press releases one way here but we do them a different way over here you know it would be we do this thing one way here we do it differently we don't want to do that and the CPU gets tripped up on things like that so I would say having the whole document is most useful that makes sense no it does I'm not surprised by that I'm just seeing us as doing what we've been doing which is convening and starting at the beginning it would certainly be helpful for the three communities especially to bring their contacts and outreach resources to the meeting so that would be our homework ahead of time so that we're not there may be some overlap but making sure that we're sort of have at least a general list to begin with from each community to the next meeting does that seem okay Chris and Tom I'm not quite following this I think a list so if we have a list of who our typical outreach agencies are who we typically go through you know and sometimes they do include additional agencies so we might want to just bring what what does Northampton typically do we have a communications director so basically I'll just be going to her and saying here's what we're working on what do you see is you know the usual outreach that we do I feel like if we get those basics down from each community then we can sort of talk about how we might want to expand upon that does that sound like an okay strategy for folks I'm Tom it's okay it's okay it's okay for me sorry Stephanie I'm having a heck of a time here I'm getting most of it what you're saying and yes your strategy sounds good to me I'll I'll commit to that okay and Chris I'm sorry go ahead you were starting to say something yeah I could bring that information I mean I think what's I'm I know I haven't read the docs yet so that might be one reason why but I'm thinking an initial meeting to kind of talk about well what piece do we want to you know bite off and what do we want to accomplish what do we want to fit in there it's going to be needed but bringing this information before we have that initial meeting is still fine I think that's a way to start because that's going to be one of the first things that we have to provide I have looked through the document so that's why I brought that one up because it's the first piece and I'm very jealous that Amherst has a communications person Northampton does not yeah she's really great too Darcy yeah I just would say that it seems like the outreach document isn't particularly controversial it seems like we should be able to finalize that pretty fast I think might personally feel like we just need to make sure it has you know some language in there including the climate justice community kind of getting outreach to them but other than that I don't I don't see it as a big barrier to moving forward quickly it's not a barrier we just need to be on the same page and be comfortable with it so I just want to make sure that you know because what works for Amherst and Northampton may not specifically work for Pelham so I think we just want to make sure we're clear on what we're providing because we do have to be specific is what I understand yeah basically just kind of grunt work yeah we need to pull the stuff out and put it together right so so the next meeting so what I'm suggesting is just we bring that information to the next meeting each community who who are your usual points of contact for outreach and I'm sure we'll allow like the same news agencies and all that kind of thing for me it's more just the additional communities and as Darcy noted environmental justice communities but also you know I want to make sure that we're reaching you know really specifically making sure we're reaching the rental community and others and I think there's agencies that we can partner with to get the information out as well so any other comments there okay so I sort of feel like we have our next step that we need to do which I think we would do on our own and then maybe I guess I would forward to you all I guess to you Marlena what we come up with and then would we come back you know then have a schedule meeting after that so I guess you could do it a couple ways if you come up with a document and there are and you want to send it to me and there are questions embedded in it we can handle that electronically potentially I don't know what your requirements are around public transparency but many groups will will deal with it that way they'll they'll send me a file and they've added their stuff and then they've also got a bunch of questions like you know what about this or is this okay or why is this inherent I can I can we can resolve that by email if that works that's one option or we can come back together and discuss those things if if you want to do things in parallel another well slightly parallel another option is we handle the document revisions via email and the next meeting is to discuss the next the set of decisions you have to make around like program options and things because we do need that information in order to draft the aggregation plan and work on the letter itself so again it kind of depends how you how we resolve the document might influence what happens in the next meeting so we could use the next meeting to talk about the document or we could say from now on the documents hand electronically and the next meeting is is addressing those those decisions and talking about those so I think I'm more comfortable doing it publicly because I don't want to run into any potential open meeting conflict so I would think we would want to do it in open meeting but I think if we provided the questions to you ahead of time you answered them and then we discuss them seems like that would be a quicker review and that would allow us to get on to the sort of next steps discussion as well so are people okay with that approach? okay great so it sounds like we have okay thanks time no I'm glad you I'm glad you jumped in so it sounds like we have our next steps then which will be for us to look through the education and outreach document we'll come with our typical usual outreach list we'll work that out we will draft something and get it to you if we have questions we are very good about making notations in documents with our questions so we will definitely provide those questions as part of the document and then if you all would review it and then we schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss the answers you can answer them and send it to us electronically and then we can discuss those responses and then next steps okay that sounds good that sounds good so unless there are other questions for mass power choice I feel like you all could jump off and then we just have housekeeping stuff like approving our minutes from the last meeting which you don't have to sit through so does anyone else have a question for folks or Paul go ahead yes so I just wanted to ask Darcy so I think we've we've made great progress on the education and outreach plan and have great outline good next steps for to get that finalized kind of building on Darcy's question of earlier though for us to be working on the other things in parallel there's really just mostly what we need from you as a discussion around the structure of the program and the program options if there were more time today and it was I think it was on your the note the agenda you posted so if there was more time today that we could spend another five or 10 minutes together maybe a discussion of that would at least give us enough of us understanding for us to move ahead on the plan on the aggregation plan document and the letter absolutely so I and I think the easiest way to tee that up if folks are comfortable with it is we could just share a one or two of the slides we presented last time which tee up those questions and we could talk about that we didn't last time I think we went through a whole bunch of stuff so we didn't really get to dig in on the questions but maybe we could do that we could do that now that would be great and yes if you would share your screen and probably if you could get me those specific slides just so I can add it to the packet for today you bet so that would be great let me let me share my screen all right to folksy the slide that says program options great so the key the key decision really that flows through the plan document is just to be able to speak to what you would like to have as the options that your program offers the residents very commonly it's a three part there are three options that are offered and there's a standard product that has some amount of additional renewable energy above the required amount there's an option that's a hundred percent and then there's an option that has no extra renewable energy which is available at a lower cost that's a typical way to do it it's not the only way to do it some communities have no extra renewable energy in the standard other communities don't offer the budget the low cost budget option some communities have four options not three so you have choices around that but we would need in the aggregation plan to articulate these options and you don't even need to give us a final decision today but if you gave us some direction today that would be that would be super helpful for us well given that we haven't discussed it in our as a group I'm kind of at a loss other than to express my own personal preferences how we would how we would let you know that I would jump in and say I'd be interested to hear what people's personal preferences are and it's good to hear that we can adjust these because I think I could give you my opinion but I would want to go back and kind of think it through and kind of check it out and make sure I would stay with that so how about this how about we all share our very quick personal opinion and we sort of maybe go with whatever the sort of majority consensus seems to be and knowing that we can change then we can discuss them at the next meeting great good with that so are you going to call on people so yes so just give me I'm going to sort of yeah I'll call on folks so I guess I'll start with you Adele I really love the three options the real question is how we define within each of these I mean I love the 100% renewable option but we're still debating about you know Rex versus PPA etc so you know that that's to be determined I would like the standard green product to offer double the amount as is it currently in the RPS how about budget budget would be the same the matching the RPS requirements and and I'll just jump in Stephanie if I could for the purposes of the plan you it's because in case I didn't explain this before you don't need to decide like how much extra is in the standard you need to you can decide that later after your plan is approved and after you have price bid so you know how much the extra would cost so you don't need to go all the way to saying how much really what you need to decide is do we want our standard to have for example you would decide we want our standard to have some extra we want an option that has a whole lot extra or maybe we want an option that's 100% and then we either do where we don't want an option with zero extra but it's only that level of decision making that you need to make at this at this stage okay Darcy yeah I would agree with Adele about the 100% option I personally would like to call our standard option local green like Cape like compact us with much more double or whatever a lot more than the RPS and I would like a budget program I'm also interested in knowing if there are other innovative options out there that we don't know about that could also be interesting okay I will go to Andrea they really need to understand more I feel like I need to uh some schooling even though we've been talking about this and you know studied what Brexar and everything um I I still have questions I feel like there's gaps in my knowledge that I need to understand in order to have a strong opinion but um given what I do know that 100% entails wrecks there's no way to get to 100% without wrecks then I don't know I question what our goal would be and you know there's that old idea that we might be able to bank some of the income for a big project and that might not be possible under the current DPU but maybe in the future so so you just want more time to think about it and help I got a lot of understanding to do and could use help understanding well like we said we can sort of have a sort of general idea today and then discuss it again so Chris I'm going to jump to you all right I go with the three that we have in front of us um maybe modify standard green but then I want to add a fourth so the impression I have is a standard green and 100% renewable are going to be all buying wrecks that's what's going to produce the amount over but there's also alternative heating wrecks and demand wrecks there are other types of wrecks that I would like to see if we can take advantage of those by by supporting stuff local so I would almost want to have instead of having have standard green be local green I think I'd like to have a fourth that would be local green and I and it's that's the one that is the hardest to be able to say we'll be able to structure something that actually we can do something with but it's something that I think we we've been trying to aim for so I want I want one that allows us to be creative and play it whereas the rest these these three right here are great just to get started but another one that we can be creative with I have a question Paul if we said that we sort of wanted to start with three and add a fourth is that does that give you enough it absolutely does and I was I was thinking I was I think was really liking the way Chris was talking about it just then because from the what we're trying to do sort of stepping back per second is give the the in the plan say enough that you have enough flexibility to do what you want later without having to go through a whole bunch of more regulatory review where you really run into trouble with the DPU is if you say we want to offer two options and then decide later you want to offer a third one then they make you come back again and it takes a year out of your life and it's it slows you way down it's terrible so it's on okay and we don't we don't need you don't need to say we're gonna we want four options and they're all going to be available on day one we could Chris's idea was a great one we could absolutely say we're gonna have we're planning to have four we expect three to be available on the start and then the fourth will will become later but here's what here's what we're thinking about we could do that okay so I'm just gonna jump in and say I like that approach so I'm just gonna go with that Sam do you want to add anything to that? Yeah first I had a clarifying question for Paul when we commit to a supply that has additional renewable content above our PS does that additional content have to come from Rex or could it be Rex PPA or virtual PPA? So that's a that's a really good question there so the DPU and we're kind of going back and forth on this with the DPU now where there with some of the plans we have pending where we've said you know the renewable energy content may come from Class 1 Rex but it may also come from other things the DPU is trying to push to people to specify that more so I think what we'd have to do is go into it and then to it describing it in a way that we were flexible but anticipate that the DPU may push back and ask you to nail it down so we'd have to be clear though what we mean correct so but if if we say and this is we've tried to get away with it this way otherwise is if we say Rex but not Class 1 Rex then that covers a lot so as you know as Chris was saying you know there are other kinds of Rex and even a PPA or a VPPA you're going to be getting Rex depending on where the generator is there may or may not be Class 1 Rex but there's still going to be Rex is going to be part of what you get so we may be able that that may give us enough wiggle room but without without going on too long about like the intricacies of the DPU requirements let me try I can try to draft something up pro's plan for you that gives you the same the flexibility that Sam was just talking about we'll put that in and you know what I recommend is let's let's try that let's see if it works recognizing that we may get pushed to become more more specific okay I want to let Tom weigh in as well stuff you do go ahead I was just going to get my thought based on Paul's response and thanks for that response Paul I think that I agree with others at least three tiers where the standard is somewhat above RPS and then you have an optional higher tier that's going to be a lot more renewable content and you have an optional lower tier that's going to match the RPS and I think I'm also think it's a good idea to have a fourth option or have the flexibility for a fourth option if we ultimately determine that that would be a good thing to have like to be decided okay thanks Sam sorry I didn't mean to cut you off there not at all Tom yeah I can be very behind Adele's proposal and I love everything sorry you're breaking up Tom I'm here in a witness protection program there yeah Tom you're we can't really hear you Tom your audio is what about having him added sounds great to me is there a chat function can you hear me yeah now we can now we can yes we couldn't before but now we can hear you clearly now you can hear me yes okay I'll come out of witness protection I was trying to be short and simple I'm behind Adele's proposal and I'm very supportive of putting in the amendments that Chris and Sam articulated so well okay all right so it sounds like we have come to an agreement that we are all interested in the three options with the potential for a fourth that's more local and that that can be something we develop further down the road so unless there's any other thoughts on that does anyone disagree Stephanie I was just going to clarify maybe even within those three options you could potentially have something more local it sounds like there's flexibility there so maybe just leaving that sort of as an open ended dialogue you know yep does that work for you Paul I mean I think we all would we would like within the first you know within the three options for them definitely for there to be local as part of those three options is that possible you wouldn't be prevented from that and and I'm thinking what you mean by local is like really local so yes really nearby you know often the way that term is used for CCA's local means New England which is good it's not Texas but it's not next door either so I'm thinking you're you've got a priority for things that are that are really close and in so far as that's available those could that that those local resources could be blended into the options with additional renewable energy in them and we could still hold off the the possibility of a fourth option that was dedicated truly local we could we could do that as well yeah I think we like the idea of a really truly local option so okay if everyone's good with that then Paul it sounds like you have some feedback to move forward yes absolutely so that's that's really helpful on this issue there are a couple of others that I think in the interest of time will go through more quick well I mean how they talk as long as you want but we could go through more quickly potentially so one is the names for the options that might be too much to try to decide today and at least for the aggregation plan I can just use placeholder names these are examples of the types of names often folks in other communities have really strong opinions about these names so we need a little time to talk those through but we can get going on using just placeholders and fill in the actual names later the other key decision was whether to have the adder and we did talk about that some last time and I think the takeaway is you're definitely interested in that we draft up the plan to include the adder and then we can have maybe a more detailed discussion about exactly how you would use it but we would write it in a way to try to make to give you some some flexibility about how you used it there is no question that we want the adder good so that that's great so I think with that we can you know we can do a draft aggregation plan for you that includes the options we've discussed we'll use generic names to include the adder we'll try to build out that language for you and then if if you'd like given some of the questions we could also as part of a follow-up we could dig in we'd be happy to dig in a little deeper on the renewable energy market what different options might be for the community both communities both immediately and what might be more available longer term so if it would be helpful to have a more organized discussion of that with you know with slides and everything as opposed to me just blathering away we could we could certainly do that at an upcoming meeting that would be very helpful yes definitely all right so I think that's trying to sorry just struggle to unshare there for a second and Paul don't worry about sending the slides because we had them in the presentation so we're good okay great anybody have any other questions or is there anything else you need from us go ahead Darcy do we need to say anything specific about the adder or can we just say that we would want an adder because isn't there isn't that also something that could be larger or smaller and or can we just generally say that we'll be looking for that so that's a good question so the way it works is what we have to say in the plan is the maximum amount you would collect you can always collect less than that or you could collect none if you decided but you need to set a max that will be set in the plan and then you also need to say how you would use it so you could say things like you know administrative costs that kind of thing staff position that kind of thing I think there's a real interest here in you know supporting the local project you know local rec so we we put that in we may or may not get some pushback from the DPU to get really specific about some of those uses some uses they say yeah yeah yeah fine other uses they say well tell me what you mean by that exactly and give me a budget and stuff like that so that's something the degree of specificity we might we'd have to work out through the DPU review process and I I'm assuming for the max that what you would want to collect is the what's the typical amount which would be about 100 result in about $125,000 a year for you guys we could ask for more if you wanted to be a little bit harder burdened though to to get that approval whereas if it's a typical amount that should shouldn't raise any problems anybody else Adele and then Andrew oh I think Andrew was first okay sorry go ahead Andrew so we worked on a draft aggregation plan which I think you might have now we sent it to Paul the draft that I'd sent it a while ago that we had sent to you we'd worked on it and then I forwarded it do you have that I do so I'll look through that more carefully there has been an evolution in the requirements for those plans since you wrote that and in particular since the plant yours was based on the Cambridge plan I think so that was which was we helped write but that was several years ago now so the rules are a little bit different now so I'll I'll definitely review the plan you did let me ask and and I'll certainly certainly incorporate everything anything that seems unique in there let let me ask whether you're you're particularly committed to the format of that plan the the only reason I ask is that the Cambridge plan which is a good one is is non-standard so most everybody does their plan is organized in a very specific in a particular way Cambridge likes to do things their own way so they just like reorganize things a bit were you did you look at all a whole bunch of plans and say wow what Cambridge did is is way better we're going to use that model or did you just use Cambridge as a good model but not specifically choosing that model over others I think that we mostly used it because we thought it would have more of the content similar to ours not for the format got it okay yes because that like you their community that wants to be wants to be aggressive in this area got it okay so I'll definitely incorporate use that as as in those elements in the plan I might stick if it's our with you with the more standard structure that makes it a little easier for the DPU too because it's more familiar with what you know design similarly to what they've seen before so it's easier for them to see what's different I think we're just looking for you to look at what we have that might be sort of like Cambridge a little more aggressive and a little more beyond the standard so but as far as formatting and all of that I think we completely defer to you so however you see it best to put that together Adele yeah I was wondering I don't remember what terminology was used but in in this document that you sent there was something about disclosure and you mentioned that different suppliers that the suppliers were didn't provide the information in a very user friendly way which doesn't surprise me at all but it also implied that different suppliers would be have a have a different energy mix and and that that was very intriguing to me because as you know I'm trying to understand what is the difference between different suppliers and and so I'm just wondering whether that in your experience you've seen that different suppliers disclosure of their energy mix is is in fact different well so I just I think this is related to my description of the disclosure labor earlier earlier in this meeting and I did not mean to suggest that they were presenting the energy mix in a different way they present the label they format the label in different ways so where where they put the residual mix and where they show voluntary renewable energy purchases how those are organized can be very different from supplier to supplier those elements are present from supplier to supplier it's really just how each supplier how each supplier chooses to render them visually if there's anything written that you could provide to us that we could study to understand better this whole world of suppliers that would be very helpful thanks I mean isn't it true that you could you can get a supplier who's list of he was going to include 100% winds from Texas others are going to do we're going to do 100% hydro I mean you're not going to get 100% hydro but you need to hit the RPF standard so whatever it is but it it doesn't have to be the same source if someone's got a really good deal on solar they're going to include a lot more solar in their mix if I'm right and if for the non-green part of this renewable portfolio standard you know there might be a different mix of gas versus coal versus oil am I correct I mean it's basically what they can they're trying to find their cheapest source and then pass that on to you competitively they are trying to find their cheapest source for sure and you are correct in the first part that the voluntary recs the recs they buy can differ if they're class one recs just focusing on class one for example you know they might buy all wind or they might buy a mix of wind and some of the other class one eligible resources so that would show some differences in in the labels but for the underlying electricity they're all just buying generic electricity because as you were saying before the electricity and the recs the electrons on the recs are sold separately so all rec electrons are exactly the same and the only difference is what recs they buy as Marlena pointed out if they all did the labels the same way that would be clear from looking at the labels but everybody does the labels differently and so it creates the impression that these things are all different when they're actually the same it's kind of like little kids on halloween they're all little kids but one looks like a pumpkin and somebody else looks like a wizard but they're actually all just little kids okay all right anything else okay I think so Paul and team thank you so so much we'll follow up with our draft education and outreach feedback on on our outreach and I think we'll just schedule the next meeting we'll assuming two weeks I may not be available that Friday so I think I might have to do the poll folks um uh I'll discuss it with the committee afterwards but then I'll reach out to you Paul I guess primarily sure that's funny for the next meeting sure okay I mean we're going to have a meeting before before we meet back with you so I guess our meeting with you might be in like a month or so sounds like is that too long or is that okay no we work at your schedule we have things we can do behind the in parallel and as we have those done we'll send them off to you so we'll get you a draft plan that you can review in fact if you're thinking you're you're going to be meeting again in two weeks we'll make that a deadline for us to get you a draft plan and to try to get you a template for the electricity supply agreement and we'll send those with emails that explain how they fit in and what the next steps would be okay that might if you give us more information that's going to make for a longer meeting because I think we have to get through the education and outreach plan first and we'll hold off and we'll send them to you so maybe we'll say a meeting in a month that if we can get them you know get that information then that would be great excellent that sounds fantastic okay well thank you all so much we're going to all stay on just to do our housekeeping like I said earlier just to review our minutes and check in about our next meeting so unless anyone has any other questions and Paul, Marlena, Julie, Kim you all are free to go and thank you so much thank you, thanks for having us thank you thank you thank you have a lovely weekend you too stay cool stay cool stay cool if that's possible bye all righty so thanks folks this is really exciting to be moving along like this now finally so I don't know just there's so much possibility it's really great so I guess we'll just go to the minutes I'm not going to display them unless you really want me to do you is there anyone it's really Tom, Chris and I that need to approve them so Tom and Chris do you have you looked at them do you need me to display them I'm trusting that yeah go ahead Chris I'm a trusting soul Darcy's done a great job so far okay yeah Darcy thank you so much definitely makes it very easy to go through them and approve them yeah great I did do some editing just because just there I I take out hyperlink Darcy just FYI and Andrew too we don't have hyperlinks in minutes so I do take them out but I'd leave the URL where possible so okay well then I do I have a motion to approve the minutes from the meeting on the whatever that date was the 8th so moved okay so voice vote Mason yes Thompson yes Chicago yes okay minutes are approved so for our next meeting I'm just looking at dates where are we today's the 22nd so the next meeting would potentially be the 5th and I think I'm going to be away on that Friday it's not definite yet but it's a strong possibility so excuse me is there another day that week that might would the fourth maybe work for people or that's a Thursday so that doesn't work for you Darcy not during the day now I will be gone the first to the third actually I'll be gone from the 27th to the third I'll be back on the fourth okay so you're away the 27th through to the third Tom what about you just so I know do you have any plans to be away within between now and then no just work related travel but I generally can generally I can figure it out earlier in the days always a little better it seems okay Darcy if we it it sounds like if we can get the staff here on the fourth because otherwise I think we'd be looking to the week of the eighth so it was early in the week of the eighth yeah if you if you have to meet on whatever that day is you know I might be able to get my daughter to cover something you know I think I'd rather meet on the eighth than the fourth Stephanie just knowing I'm gonna be back from vacation and have to scramble to get something ready by the fourth or get ready before I leave I think I'd rather so my this is just really my schedule and it's making me feel like I can't do what I want to do so I would be gone the fifth through the eight oh I see so and then I'm gone the entire week of the 15th what about the 10th yeah I'd be fine with the 10th so we could do the 10th Tom does the 10th work for you it's a Wednesday I think that was a yes it can I'm going to be in Utah signal again hello Wednesday the 10th we can hear you so I'm gonna be in Utah so if we could do it earlier in the day preferably nine o'clock local time here would be better for me the 10th could work nine o'clock local time you're in Utah no local time for here on the east coast okay so nine nine est yes yes that's what I got yes okay yep I think I can do that does that work for others Tom is it much worse to do 10 well my work day will start out there and I'm traveling for business so in a way it it is sorry so you have a conflict Andra yeah Adele and I have another meeting but you can one of us skip it or both yeah are we talking about a one hour meeting typically our meetings had been for an hour I think what we would this is going to be to discuss the education and outreach plan so the three communities need to go through and identify their standard outreach and then we were going to come together as a group and discuss and there's going to be a lot of overlap so I think we're just be going to be sort of filling in those additional agencies or organizations that we think we should include as part of our outreach yeah I don't think it's pretty long to do the the plan because most of us can be we're going to go back and do most of it ourselves we're just going to kind of strategize what we want to get done and then come back and know I thought the idea was to prepare it ahead of time prepare information ahead of time come to the meeting with information but not already blended yeah we're not going to blend it in until we all discuss it right so that we're putting together we're basically going through and putting the document together while you know real time so it could be I mean potentially that could be how about we give it an hour and a half and I know Tom you may have to bail but what about Friday the 12th then that's too late and I've got another Solar By-law working group meeting that day and that's a big lift I've just got yeah too much yeah so maybe Tom could trust us to receive whatever information he's gathered from Pelham and then we could meet on the 10th later in the day I would like to have Tom there quite frankly that'd be great I just don't know how we're going to get around his schedule and ours well his I mean if we start at nine we would have him from at least nine to ten well if we start at nine we won't have Andrew and me well didn't you both just say that maybe one of you at least could maybe maybe but it's certainly not ideal I think we're never going to get everybody and I think I just think at this point you know having the three communities because we have to actually vote I feel like it's really important to make sure that we have them and Tom is we wouldn't even have Tom for the whole meeting so I don't feel like I have to be at this meeting anyway it's kind of not strategy or it's just yeah I mean it's literally just identifying maybe some organizations and you could even send like if you have ideas about organizations take a look at the education and outreach plan ahead of time and maybe send them we have Darcy mentioned already Leah has a whole list yeah and you've got it so you could just forward to us what you have and then at least if one of you are available at that meeting to you know I don't know that we're going to include every single organization because remember if we list it we have to do at least what we list we can't do less we can always do more so I don't I think we want to be really we don't want to over promise and then not be able to deliver so yeah that's what I think the document doesn't really matter yeah it is more yeah really that's true my slide won't work um but I'm just gonna have to so no one mentioned Tuesday the night is there a problem with Tuesdays Darcy is not available Tuesdays and Thursdays I was wondering okay I'm actually not available on the 10th either but well then maybe we should go back to the Thursday before and and miss you there yeah Chris I know that you don't prefer the fourth but well I just checking in with Chris would that be impossible if you can accept me not being as prepared as others I think just you know honestly even if you just had I mean you know there's not a lot I think I think it'd be fine I mean if I don't come with my list of outreach because we don't have I don't have one person to go to I'm I'm gonna have to ask around to find out you know where what kind of outreach happens in the city so if I don't come with that list I think I could still be fine with having the meeting and I can go find that later on and plug it in so what I would suggest is and just starting right at the mayor's office when they're doing yeah I'm gonna ask starting there I'm gonna ask the mayor's office yeah but I'm just saying that I think that like typically for us the town manager's office usually goes beyond what other folks might do so even if that's the only one you you can get to it's probably gonna be more comprehensive than some of the other groups I can probably come with something I mean I have yeah so that's good so but I don't think it's essential I do have it I mean I think we're we're just gonna plug it in at some point and we don't need a group meeting for me to write in the Gazette yeah well and we're all gonna have like I said there's gonna be overlap we're all gonna have the same news channel stations we're gonna have the same publications probably we'll all have our websites right I think we're making social media I think it's gonna be I think this is gonna be it's gonna be grunt work but it's gonna be fairly straightforward exactly yeah once we get into it okay so Thursday the fourth then and time for that one sorry I'm just looking at my calendar here Tom do you have constraints on the time on the fourth I don't think I do at this point although I will say that generally speaking earlier is better than later okay so I have I do have a what is that meeting oh I have a meeting at 10 so I could do nine but I would have to I would only have an hour from nine to 10 or I could do 12 I could do noon to one possibly even noon to two if we had to on the fourth preferences that sounded like Tom wanted 9 a.m. okay makes it more predictable for me yeah thank you okay so it has to be it'll have to be a one hour nine to 10 one hour meeting okay all right all right I think we're good then thanks everybody hey so Chris have a great safe trip and Tom all of your safe travels as you normally do everybody stay cool all right yeah have a great weekend thanks everybody so great take care take care bye bye