 the minutes of the July 13th, 2022 meeting, we held off on voting on it because we didn't have a quorum. Yeah, no worries. You let me know that you were gonna be late. Did you find any substantive issues or changes? Okay, so could we have a motion to... Sorry. Oh, you do have one. Yeah. Since we're gonna be talking about dark skies and street lanes, standards are used for about three pages of text in there where the word is really recommendations and I think they could be changed with a word search and I would recommend that. I think we've realized meaning that they are recommendations and not standards. And I'm feeling the future discussions would be better if they were specified correctly. So specifically I'm saying please sweep through and check it out. Okay. Thank you. Other changes? Could we have a motion to approve? To approve. Second. All in favor. Aye. Abstain. Yeah. Okay. So we will now shift to the general manager's update and there's a little bit of a fun thing here too. Very good. I will have a substantive general manager's update for you. But before we do that, I wanted to note we have another visitor with us, Mike Highland, who is the new executive director of NEPA, the New England Public Power Association of which Burlington Electric is a member. And yes, a happy occasion. I'll turn it over to Mike if it's okay with the commission. Thank you. You said my name is Mike Highland. I am the new executive director at the Northeast Public Power Association. We're located in Littleton, Massachusetts. And we represent the interests of the 78 municipal and cooperative utilities in the England. We represent about 2 million, just a little over 2 million people served. So pretty excited to be here. Every year we give out awards and none more prestigious than the commissioners award. And this year, and I will read the nomination that came in to nominate Robert Bob Herringdeen from the Northeast Public Power Association's Commissioner Service Award. Bob has selflessly served on the Burlington Electric Department's board of commissioners since March 26, 2007. Passion includes energy consumption, environmental issues with a focus on climate change and economics for our customers. Due to Bob's dedication to the commission, he has worked with the city of Burlington and Burlington Electric Department to become the first city in the United States to source 100% of its electricity from renewable sources. Bob is continuing his work with the commission to help the city of Burlington transition away from carbon emitting fossil fuels and becoming a net zero city by 2030. Bob not only serves on our commission, but as an adjunct professor at the Rubinstein School for the Environment and Natural Resources. In this capacity, Bob has written about barriers to effective energy policy and how to surmount them. His projects cover details of energy accounting principles and net energy of energy conserving retrofit construction. Some of Bob's past projects include studies on the energy cost of living, fairly allocating effects of energy carbon taxes and mathematics of trophic, cascades and ecosystems. It's difficult to find someone as passionate as Bob when it comes to energy, environment and the impacts it has on our customers. Bob has recently been reappointed to another term on the Burlington Electric Commission until 2025 and we are quite certain this is not his last. Through the many changes in leadership over the years, Bob has been steadfast on his commitment to energy efficiency. Bob continues to exemplify the missions and goals of the Burlington Electric Department and has positively impacted the people of the city of Burlington. His skills, knowledge, willingness to work on climate change and his dedication to community makes Robert Herendine a great nominee for the Commissioner Service Award. The committee that reviews it unanimously agreed and I'm proud to be here to hand this award to you, Bob. Okay, well, a brief word. I thought it would just remind everyone how old I am but I thank you very much. And I hope to continue your trust. I can just add a brief appreciation to Mike for joining us here and appreciation as well to Emily and Lori for helping with the nomination and the process. And I think if it's okay to briefly disrupt the commission meeting, Mike was hoping we might get a photo with you, Bob, with your award and perhaps with the commission and... We're dressed a little differently. We wanted to surprise you. We have a cake as well. It's me, it's me, it's me. So where do we go? Maybe in front of the sign. Yeah, we're in front of the sign here, yeah. All the photographer, he's got his camera up. Do you want to come up to help nominate? Lori, you got to come up. Come on, Lori. No, I'm good. Come on. Anyone else want to get in on this? Let's do one with just them. James, do you want to get in on this? Me too. Paul, you want to get one with the whole commission? Please. Everybody in and a few others? Yes, sure, man. We just talked about cardiology. Something's about to happen, I don't know. Excellent. Paul has a nice camera on that phone, so that'll come out pretty soon. Yeah, it was wonderful. I didn't see it on the camera, especially in the nice meeting too. Did you drive up from Littleton? Nationally. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yes. Congratulations. There's a box over here, too. If you want to put it in that, so you don't do it right now. Thank you. And there is cake. There is. But do we have other members of the public? I just in case they're waiting, but no. So we could. Could take a minute for some cake. Or do you guys just want to go get it? Go get it during the meeting. Is that OK, Bob? Of course. OK, so I think shall we continue with? Happy to jump into the substantive report. Congratulations again, Commissioner. And thanks, Emily. Thanks, Lori, for the nomination. In terms of the general manager's report, I mentioned charter change work that we're doing on buildings. That continues in real time. We had a meeting today on it with the Building Electrification Institute. We're working to come up with some policy options that we can detail for stakeholders. We're having a continuous conversation with various stakeholders who would be affected by potential building changes for new construction or large existing commercial buildings. We've had conversations with affordable housing developers, with a variety of building owners and folks who are in the design field and energy efficiency field. More to come on that. The goal is a report to the council by the end of October in time to have a potential vote on town meeting day 2023 if that's required under the charter change, which it is if we propose anything related to a carbon fee. So that work continues. We'll keep the commission updated on how that's going. Big event this weekend. We hope you can all join. Saturday, September 17th from nine o'clock to one o'clock, right here at 585 in the parking lot, our first ever and hopefully first annual Net Zero Energy Festival. We have an event that's really to focus the community's attention on climate change, on our efforts, on our incentives and programs to help our customers make the switch from fossil fuels. We have a number of great activities. We have the VEEP program, which works with students in the schools becoming to do energy education and kids activities. We will have our line crew with the bucket truck for touch a truck and a power town energy safety demonstration. We will have e-bike test rides available. We will have EV test drives available with our friends from Suncommon and Sierra Club helping out. We will have heat pump weatherization, EV and solar vendors available to talk to customers who are interested, as well as our energy efficiency team available for questions. We will have a DJ and two live musicians as well. Some giveaways, including walk to shop carts and an electric lawn trimmer. And we will have fossil fuel-free food truck options that will be running on electricity and not on propane or diesel, including Lake Champlain chocolate ice cream and Pizza 44 right here in the South End. And we will have Champ from the Lake Monsters, who's a big supporter of electrification. He electrified his golf cart with our help a few years back and now rides into the stadium fossil fuel-free. So we're excited. We've been talking about this on Front Porch Forum and social media. We've had some ads in seven days and in the Kids Magazine in seven days. The farmers market's still going on down the street, so we're hopeful that we'll draw a nice crowd and that this will be an event that can perhaps become an annual tradition for the community. And we welcome the commission joining us. So the write-up that's in our packet, is that what you would want us to use if we were to post in Front Porch Forum or share with like kindergarten classes? This is great. We also have a, we have a link on our website, a direct address with all the updated information. So if you are sending anything out and you wanna provide a link, we have it right on the homepage. It's one of the top scrolling options. If you click on it, it has a list of all the activities right there handy as well. But this is also perfectly good to use if you wanna send something out on Front Porch Forum or via email and appreciate obviously if the commission is able to do that. No buses though, no electric buses. No, we will have an electric bus. Yes, I forgot to mention that. Yes, electric bus included. So all transportation options accounted for. We had a site visit from Evergreen for our district energy work. James was able to meet with them, I think in person along with our friends at BGS. And we had them over at the McNeil plan. I think maybe Rodney and Paul got a chance to work with them. We are engineering and designing this project with the intent that it moved forward. So they're doing very serious work, trying to make that happen. We are doing some work ourselves on the economics and we're getting with Evergreen hopefully updated construction pricing in the next few months and working with VGS and then we'll be looping back obviously with the potential customers as well. Again, with a goal towards the end of this year, early next year of having a go-no-go decision. So we will be ready if it's a go decision to move this project to financing, permitting, construction but still some hurdles to overcome. This is not an ideal economic environment to bring something like this forward. Higher interest rates, challenging inflation and construction pricing, volatile energy markets. We are also making some progress with the federal funds. We've had communications with the Department of Energy submitted a volume of documents that Emily and James helped me with along with Michael Ahern at Evergreen. And so we're working towards securing those funds that were allocated from Senator Leahy through the Department of Energy. Another event, fun event that we would invite the commission to join us out if they're interested, just let Lori know. October 12th, we'll have our annual employee appreciation lunch. There is a terrific new net zero item of clothing that we'll have on hand at the lunch to continue to promote our net zero efforts. And this year as a result of a suggestion, a good suggestion from the employee engagement committee, we're gonna be hosting the lunch at McNeil out on the lawn, right? Under a tent, hopefully good weather, nice fall weather, no rain, and we're gonna have catering from Papa Franks in Winooski. So we're looking forward to hosting the event at McNeil, involving the McNeil team, making it convenient for them to join us for the lunch and having folks from Pine Street who maybe haven't been to McNeil recently perhaps in a couple of cases with newer hires, maybe not at all, get a chance to go over to the plant and enjoy that collaboration between the Pine Street and McNeil teams. And I think last on my list, the, I just wanted to recommend the Energy Action Network 2022 progress report, full disclosure, I'm on the board at EAN. And I think that their work on the progress report is really critical in terms of data tracking for the state, just like what we do with our net zero report for the city. The state data is typically not as current. We are a year behind and we have 2021 data. They look now at 2018 data for the state. The thing that strikes me as the most relevant piece or maybe two relevant pieces is number one, the state's not on track to meet its goals for 2025, 2030 has a challenge just like we do in Burlington of trying to meet these ambitious climate targets on a relatively short timeframe. The second piece to me that was very interesting is if you look at the electric generation sector in 2015 we were over 10% of the state's emissions as a whole. We passed the renewable energy standard at that time. We've had progress since that time. And we're now looking at between one and 2% of the state's emissions coming from electricity, which is incredibly low. We have the cleanest grid in the nation essentially is what the EAN progress report shares on the flip side transportation and thermal are 74% of our emissions. So that is going to guide and that's even more true in Burlington where we're a hundred percent renewable and electricity is even cleaner than it is in the state of Vermont as a whole. This is gonna guide our thinking when it comes to the legislative session. There's been different conversations around does the clean heat standard come back up and try to move forward. Some advocates are arguing we should do further work in the electric generation sector. BED is firmly in favor of moving ahead with thermal and transportation policies that can help those sectors decarbonize the way that we've done with electricity. We're putting our dollars through the revenue bond and the incentives towards electrification. The inflation reduction act at the national level is doing the same thing. We know what we need to do to decarbonize those sectors. We know that needs to be the focus. And so our efforts in terms of policy recommendations are gonna flow from that understanding which means we may conflict from time to time with some folks in the generation space who may be arguing for changes there that could negatively affect us. But I wanted the commission just to have that context. And I'll pause there if there are any questions and otherwise I know there's a lot else on the agenda. One question and then one critical. There's a thing on the two proposed defeat dates. And what are those arbitrary, do they align with what we think? Any time we call a defeat the peak event, it's because our team has looked at the conditions ahead and thought this may be a time where we're gonna see the Ice of New England peak. So we called three this summer and I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe we hit the peak with one of them. Yeah, with the first one. And I'm just wondering if we hit the mark in that. Yes. And if that didn't have any effect on what Ice of New England does in terms of setting a rate. Well, it'll affect our power supply costs because we'll reduce our share of the relative peak. So I think, again, correct me if I'm wrong, I think we had about a 445 kilowatt reduction in event number one. And that's money that we don't have to pay towards our share of the ISO peak, essentially. There's two primary chargers. There's transmission and capacity. And capacity is a percentage of a total amount of money based on how much load you have at the time of the peak. So anything that reduces our load, reduces our share of the cost. Transmission is built on your load at the time of the monthly peak. And so again, if the reduces our load at that time, reduces our transmission costs. And what you'll see, I can pull the data, I don't have it with me, but the second two events did not beat the first event that they were within fractions of a percentage point of it. And you have to be very careful because if you capture the first peak and then you don't call an event and the next day beats it by a megawatt, you've got no value out of the first peak. You have to be there for the peak day, which is determined after the fact. But so again, the last two events were not the peak hour. The first one was so far. Again, I don't think it's likely to be beat at this point in September, but they were really, really close. So we couldn't not call those events the second two events. And we had our check presentations with AALV, Heineberg, and Burlington Partnership for Health Community. So three events, actually not that many for a summer, usually at five or six, but. I just wonder if they are just have, how do you, how do you pick them? Just how do you predict those? You're looking at a combination of forecast, weather, input, keeping in mind that just for everyone's information, New England's peaks are not obviously based on Vermont. Vermont is not big enough to drive any of that. So really what we're watching is the weather patterns in Southern New England, particularly around Hartford, Boston, things like that, looking at the, whether their storms are going to come through, which can affect the solar. I mean, it's getting harder to predict. We've succeeded, I think, every year except one. I think it was one year where the peak was early in June, which was never happened before and never happened since. And we weren't ready early in June, but every other year, I think we've gotten the peak correct. But I expected to get harder to predict too, as people are taking more and more actions in the load control space, dispatching storage, things like that. You start to have a lot more people moving loads around. Dynamically, it gets harder to tell too. I expect that to be the case. So I've asked the question before, did it pay? We won once and we paid three times, but the answer is still yes. Yeah. I mean, let's use a ball of rough numbers, right? Capacity maybe $40 per kilowatt per month, per kilowatt saved, I guess I would say, right? Transmissions maybe 10 per kilowatt per month saved. I mean, so $416,000 savings, $17,000 savings paid out three, it's very, very successful program, as long as we can get the peaks right. We typically well exceed the minimum target to pay for the three to five events, provided we get the date correct. That's the big unknown and of course, other people are trying to do that same thing and they're moving their loads around. So again, it's predicting a dynamic peak and it's getting more so. I wonder how many Berlin Tonians receive those emails and they're like, it's not that hot out. Not thinking. Whatever this comes up, which is this is not a reliability program, it's an economic program and it's driven by economics in New England, not economics in Vermont. Best thing for Vermont is to have Vermont, you have a very cool day, while the rest of New England is busily setting all new peak levels and then our share drops before we do defeat the peak. And then if we do defeat the peak on top of that, it's better still. I don't think that point is clear to a lot of people. I repeat it every year when we do do that. I say it every chance I get. And it's abstract. But I get it. It doesn't register as much. When I look at my front porch forum stuff just bopping around. Maybe from, well, it seems like even from BED, I don't recall that being made clear. Yeah, in our press releases, I think we've tried to do that to make clear it's not a reliability event. This isn't, because reporters will sometimes ask, are we at risk of a brownout or blackout? And I said, no, this is not that kind of event. This is purely for savings for our customers and to help reduce the number of 30 generators being called on the grid. You can go to peak days, the fossil tool generator. Right. Yeah, but I don't mean that. It's the geographical separation time. Oh, we mentioned that too. But yeah, that's not always intuitive. But it doesn't, you know, to be honest, I don't like read the emails, you know, in deep detail. And maybe I should as Mike here. In his way. Okay, good. But I do skim it. And if there was some way, you know, maybe it's defeat the money peak, defeat the regional peak, defeat the regional peak, save us money. Like, I don't know. Suck it to Boston. I might do it. Suck it to Boston. Suck it. Suck it. No, I just, and I don't even know that you need to get into that, you know, level of detail of, you know, all the detail, but just, yeah. I usually try to put in all the detail, but Mike usually takes it out. I know. Okay. I realized too, I had one other quick item that wasn't in the report, but Scott, did you have another question? And I just had one quick thing. It's kind of, this is my opinion. Okay. Mach-E all-wheel drive selects. Yes. Do we really need Mustangs? Well, so with the Mach-E select, it's actually one of the lower priced EVs that are on the market. They are, they're not the fancier version. They don't have the maximum battery and the maximum range. And we're purchasing them at a budget that is similar to what we use to purchase trucks. And we're replacing trucks, I think in both cases with the Mach-E. So instead of purchasing what could be a 50, 60, who knows how many $1,000 truck, we're able to get a $40, some $1,000 electric vehicle. And then the operating costs are much, much less. Less maintenance, we save, we're using our fuel instead of paying for fuel that's coming from out of state. So a lot of benefits there. The other piece is we're working on trying to get an F-150 Lightning contractor grade, which is again the lower end. So I think it's in the, Paul, $33,000, $32, $33,000 F-150 Lightning to replace another of our current fossil fuel trucks. So we are, there's two reasons to kind of be doing this. One is we, and this is my decision making through our budget have avoided replacing vehicles for the last number of years where we could because we were in tough times during the pandemic. We weren't following our vehicle schedule replacement. So we're trying to catch up a little bit now. But secondly, we want to lead by example. We want to be trying out the electric vehicle technology, the electric lawn technology and utilizing it. But when we purchase, we purchase the cheapest model that is available. Yes. Yeah. My first blush is it was like, that's just, it just seems a little, do we really need muscle cars to get around town? They're really a four-door crossover. That's just the name Mustang. Take the Mustang out. Yeah. It just, I don't know, just didn't have a good look to it. Like, you know, on the face of it. Okay. Yeah. We're definitely, to be fair to, it's been very, very hard to locate inventory. We're kind of at the mercy of the market right now in terms of supply chain. And Jeff Turner on Paul's team did a great job finding two vehicles that were available because the order lead time is out plus a year. So he was able to find two that were the cheaper model that have all-wheel drive, which we tend to want for the winter time. And that had the cheaper battery and that we could use to replace trucks and then drive fully electric. And then also found the F-150 at 33,000 contractor grade, way cheaper than the fossil fuel truck that we would be purchasing. Otherwise, not to mention all the savings on using electricity instead of gas. So I appreciate their perception challenge with that. But there is real savings in terms of the operation and the maintenance and very competitive pricing on the vehicles. Not to mention that all three of those, James can claim some tier three credit for our efforts as well. So we'll get a regulatory benefit from purchasing those two. Just briefly, cause I know we have a lot on the agenda. I did want to mention the finance team update. I think since we haven't covered this, I don't think since we were last all together, Emily Byrne, who was our finance director has left us to go back to the state of Vermont. And also we had Dan Roy, a senior accountant who has moved on from BED as well. Emily is managing the finance team. We actually at city council this past week pursued a couple of changes given our experience with the finance director position. It's been a challenging position to keep staffed, really dating back to when Jim passed. We looked at it and took feedback from Emily as she was doing her exit interviews and looked at it critically as we do anytime we backfill a position. And we determined that the breakdown of responsibilities was really too much for a single position in terms of attracting and retaining candidates. We were asking for a variety of things that most people didn't have all of those attributes. So we've refocused the position. It's gonna be called controller now and it's going to be a focused position on accounting and financial operations management. And we've adjusted it with HR and we had approval at the city council to adjust the position. We'll probably be posting it if it's not already posted. In recognition of Emily's work not only managing the finance team multiple times during the last several years but also playing a lead role in terms of a lot of our work with the budget, with Moody's and with our rate cases from the finance team side of things. We've changed her title to be a CFO as well as manager of strategy innovation. And Cheryl Mitchell who does our budget work is reporting direct to Emily. And so we've taken some of those responsibilities out of the finance director position which is now controller and allocated them to Emily which frankly just reflects actual practice within the organization for the last several years anyhow. So one of the commission be aware of that. We do not have July financials to report given that we're in the midst of the audit and we had some turnover on the finance team. I think we anticipate next meeting we'll have July financials and probably be able to share them with you ahead of the next meeting in case you have questions. But we might be catching up on some of the financials reporting while we address the audit and the rate case for the time being. So I wasn't in the report but I wanna make sure to share that with the commission. Did you touch upon, I don't think I saw it in the packet. Has the city council voted on the wrap? Yes, that was also Monday evening. So that was approved which you all voted on it. Your last meeting in July and that will be filed with the PUC shortly. And I think there was a relatively expedited approval for the utilities that filed in July. I believe there's already has been approved. So we're hopeful maybe it'll be a couple months process to get that through the PUC and then be able to offer it once we have an agreement with VHFA to our customers. Thank you. Council was enthusiastic about that. Great, as they should be. Is there any sort of any mechanisms? I would assume there are but that you might be putting in place that you can really sort of evaluate program success. Further wrap program? Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, it's really a kind of a statewide pilot. I think they have funding to do roughly 2,000 customers for the first round. So part of it will be, how many of those customers can we have participate here in Burlington? They also have a program goal slash requirement of trying to reach the 75% or more of the customer participants being low moderate income. So certainly that'll be a piece that we'll be focused on as well. And then we'll look at things like, are there defaults within the program? Because we're trying to have it be that the energy savings is modeled along with the finance costs to still exceed from a cash flow standpoint, the payments. If there are defaults, the great thing is nobody gets disconnected. The HFA has a loan reserve to cover that, which is one of the reasons we're comfortable with it. But a lot of times these programs have proven to have very low default rates, but if this has a higher default rate, that'll be something that we would wanna learn from as to why that was. Typically they're in the one to 2% range. So if it's exceeding that, that would be something I'd be concerned with. And then our energy services team will certainly be interested in some of the energy savings data as we start to see it, what measures are being utilized and what combination. Those will be some of the things we'll be looking at. And VHFA may have a broader set of metrics that they'll be reporting on as well to the legislature. Yes. Any other questions for Darren? We do, I believe have a member of the public here as well. Yes. And we did jump around. We did actually not come back to the public forum, but we do have financials. I suppose if everyone's okay with it, we could shift back to public forum or we could shift straight to the street lighting update. As long as he's here, let's listen to him so he doesn't have to stay. My name is Gary and I'm sorry, I got in late too. It's okay. Gary, would you mind coming up here? Coming up here. I was actually gonna say what I'm here to talk about or at least to listen is about the street lighting. So I don't know how this agenda is set up. If it's something that I can chime in on during that presentation or after that or ask a question that would probably be more of what I'm here to do. I don't have a prepared speech that I wanna give about street lighting. I was more interested in hearing about the role of street lighting in the South End and some of the changes to the street lighting standards and what that's gonna be for my particular neighborhood, which is the South End edition of street lighting in Richardson while it's Ferguson. So I don't know Andrew a bit. So I would be interested in actually listening to what people have to say and then if I have questions that I can ask them at that time. Yeah, so why don't we, we have a couple of presentations, I believe, because Commissioner Herendine, you have some information to share as well. We can do that. I think what we'll probably do is take questions from commissioners first, but then I'll open up. And you folks, we're having cover everything. I just, I heard- It was great to have you here. Yeah. Yeah. Causer, C-A-U-S-E-R. So why don't we move on? Come on up, Andy. So for folks watching, this has been a bit of a jump around agenda, but now we are shifting to agenda item number four, the street lighting update. And we've been talking about this off and on for several months. And we do have Bill Ellis on teams as well. Ooh. Great. Just getting set up here, good evening all, and congratulations, Commissioner Herendine, on your work. Oh, we have to admit that. We have to admit that. Okay. If you'd like. Yeah. Yeah. A little share. I just have a fairly brief presentation, just summarizing kind of where we are, where we left off. So this was last on the official agenda back in June. And at that time, engineering had just become aware of an update to the IES recommendations that we follow. And I agree that we review them and I would provide some feedback at this meeting. So here I am. So like I mentioned, we became aware of the update to IES RP-8, recommended practice eight, which is street lighting level recommendations that we follow. Most significant change that we found in our review of the effects our designs is the classification and lighting levels for sidewalks, specifically in residential areas, which is the area that we've had most comments and concerns from residents. So the bottom line here is for the criteria that we apply to sidewalks in residential areas, the recommended levels are significantly lower compared to the previous version that we were following. So knowing that, also I'll just mention that the lighting levels for roadways, just the road portion, remains the same as the previous version. So no changes there. So knowing this information, we immediately went back and revised our designs for all of the streets in the south end that we had recently done. So that included Sparke Avenue, Ferguson, Richardson Street, Well Street and the goal of funding review lower sidewalk lighting levels in our crews implemented the changes in July, August of this year. That's the kind of the overview. Oh, and also just to mention, Lyman Avenue is another street in that area that's currently under construction and we did revise our design for that prior to the condo that was getting put in the ground, but nothing has been installed on that street yet as far as street lighting is concerned. Just a point of clarification because we talked about this two months ago. The June recommendations are lower than the ones we were following previously, but they will still feel like more for folks living there. If there was nothing there previously, yes. Which is like predominantly most of the area. Because they had two poles, I remember. Yeah, the initial scarf, right? Conditions were, yeah. Did you remove poles from? Just never updated, right? From on Scarf Avenue, because you did remove poles. Yeah, I was gonna get into some of the details on that. Next few slides. Generally speaking, does that jive with safety and your concerns, Paul? Yeah, as long as we don't go below the minimum standards if you're able to IES recommend that we'll file that and we'll allow us to speak to that also. All right. There's more questions. So just to put some numbers to it, you're not gonna, I apologize, you're not gonna be able to read that very well on the screen. The previous version, the way that was structured for the lighting levels or sidewalks was that they were included in a separate section of the recommendations. They weren't with the roadway recommendations. They were in a different chapter. And they had, they were just as a refresher for sidewalk levels, it's classified based on what they call pedestrian complex. The number of people expected to be on the street at night. So for our designs, there were two different levels that were applied. Medium was for like downtown streets and residential would be low pedestrian activity. And then that low activity area was further classified into what they refer to as rural, low and medium. So we had to pick medium based on the housing density in Burlington. It says two to six blown units per acre. So that's what we followed. And the new version, they moved the sidewalk recommendations to the same section as the roadway recommendations. And now it's just simply classified into high, medium and low. So there's no more distinction for the low, whether it's, it's not dependent on the density of the structure of the neighborhood. But the really, the key point here that I wanted to make is the actual numbers. The level for low density in the new version is half of what it was previously called the following. It went from an average illuminance of four down to two. The other levels, like I mentioned, didn't change the roads or higher pedestrian areas that we could use downtown. Okay. If what we were doing pre-June was four and now it shifts to two with the new language, what would you call it currently? Would you, so what would you call the current level? Say like on Lyman. I haven't do a study. That's just the average. So there's areas where it could be higher, it could be lower. There's also criteria there about, there's an average value, a minimum value and then a ratio for the uniformity. So you don't want to have levels of really dark to really bright. Right. I'm just, I'm just trying to get at like, would it have been a one? And so, so we've gone from four to two, but it's currently, I'm just trying to get a sense of how the pieces could shift. Yeah, I should, I should clarify, I apologize. It's an average and a minimum, and then the uniformity, which is the ratio. You explained that last time. Yeah. So previously, average was four, minimum was one, now it's average of two, minimum and the ratio is actually went up to below, so you can have a little bit more variation. So as far as how this affected our designs, just go through street by street, just give you some numbers. So the original design as constructed on the card had a total of 23 poles and fixtures for the two blocks between Richardson and Shelburne streets. So that was 10 in the first block, 13 in the second. Updated design, that went down to 14. So there's seven in each block now. So that meant that we were moved nine poles and we moved two of them slightly just to get the levels to line up. Yeah, the recommendations. Same height? Yes, same height. Those were the, we refer to them as the town and country style. There's sort of a more decorative fixture. That's what was on the street before we did the projects. We were just painting the same style. And like I mentioned before, that was implemented in July. On Richardson and Welles streets, number of fixtures did remain the same. So that's a total of 18 between plentiful factors, which is a somewhat longer stretch than the Sarker, Bergen, Harrison level. What we did on Richardson is that we replaced the existing fixtures with lower output fixtures. And then on Welles street, just really the only change there was to remove one fixture. So now the new total was 11, with the same stretch to implement at home. The reason there's fewer changes and fewer total fixtures on Welles street is because the majority of it does not have any sidewalks. The fixture that we removed was on the very short section toward home avenue that does have a sidewalk. Since the levels for sidewalks went down a fence, that was the change there. And we did those changes in August. And Ferguson Avenue was another street that we had done in the past few years. The original design had 11 fixtures between Richardson and Shelburne streets. The new design has seven, so we removed several of them. We also replaced six of the fixtures, it's actually six of the seven fixtures that remain were replaced with lower output. That was also done in August. We don't have the numbers in front of me for linemen, but I believe it's three lights per block total. And the reason it's different than SCAR is because the design for linemen follows the existing that was there, which was, I believe, aerial with poles. So we're replacing the aerial underground there. So our standard design for underground is a fiberglass pole, which is taller than the shorter poles that were installed on SCAR. And with a taller pole, you can, the fixture spreads out over a larger area and you light the same area with fewer fixtures. The fixtures on SCAR are shorter, so more of them, and the output is lower. That was what I had prepared, so if you want to put any questions. When you say they're implemented, the first street you talked about, you haven't put the poles in yet. You just put the underground, I believe. No, that was linemen active that is currently in progress. Okay. All the others implementing doesn't mean in the plan, it means in the flesh. That's done in the field, yes. Have you heard from the community since you've done that? I've gotten a number of emails. Mostly happy. Mostly positive, yes. We did get one report on C-Click fix that they felt it was dark. Of course. Was it significant change? Other questions? When you say reduced power, how much difference? So just, I can't see in the picture. I think some of the fixtures that were on Ferguson were, we rate them on wattage, even though they're not, they're LED, but that's what they use for sales, for sure, and things like that. I believe there were some that were 80 watt fixtures. We've gone down to maybe 55, in some cases, 35 on that street. The other section of Ferguson is all 25 watt now. There was a few 35s, and maybe at an intersection that might have been one of the brighter intersection we brought down at, I think, 55. A little 3,000 K? Yes. Yes, they should all be the same outer structure. Is that the question? Yeah. Would have been nice to have had this updated language before you did all the first batch. If there aren't more questions for you, Mr. Herendine, do you want to present your information? Yes, and Larry, can you help out? This is kind of the academic run through. To really get into this stuff, I'm finding really daunting. I guess people here know that. By the way, I want to thank Andy and Ennis for a meeting with you and then supplying some info for me. So I've contacted a number of places around the country, which I'll briefly discuss. Okay, the question is legal. Next slide, please. And can you blow that out? Go to presentation mode. Sorry, go to slide show, right there. Okay, anyway, if you look at the data on that, that's 2015. Okay, yeah, next slide, please, yeah. We looked at it a long time ago and I presented this with a student. That was then, next slide, please. One of the slides in that presentation pointed out four communities in Vermont that removed a number of fixtures. And the question that came up then and the one that we want to talk about now is the next slide. When you do that, do you run into legal trouble? So I've been asking that question around. So let me go to the conclusions first, next slide. Ennis confirmed this and I heard this from others. Less than 10% of municipalities actually use, i.e. as recommendations. What I observe and this is not a really scientific observation is that those that have active knowledge of it and engage with it tend to follow it, meaning the recommendations of the IES. Those that don't follow it have a broad spectrum of criteria and policies, some are casual, some are very intentional. I found no legal battles or pushback in any of the places I contacted or reviewed and my list is about 10 around the country. I'll mention a few specific ones and that'll be that. In Flagstaff, I finally got an engineer there to say that they don't follow IES, as you can see, but it's estimated that they're about one half of IES in terms of luminance and that's not just sidewalks, that's the whole thing. On the other hand, history there is they've been trying to keep the observatories nearby happy for about 50 years, so they've already gone in that direction but they did not use IES in their criteria. Interestingly, they still use low pressure sodium because of the astronomers. Next please. Lee Cron is now the city manager and Shelburn, previously he was in Manchester, so he had two experiences. Green Mountain Power actually sponsored an LED conversion there, they paid the capital cost. No IES consideration was used, no legal issues. Next please. Now he's in Shelburn, there was a big reduction in number of lights before he got there. Over time, he's put a few back in with minimal pushback, no consideration of IES at all. Next please. Tucson, Tucson underwent a dramatic LED change and you can see that they dropped their average of luminance suitably defined by 68%. Yet now they're at IES recommended levels. How could they do that? They were super overlit previously and so they were conscious of IES in this change. They do dim at midnight or 3 a.m. in the university in downtown, that's called adaptive lighting, it's another wrinkle in all of this. You can cut down things at different times if you've got the technology to do it. Next slide please. Pepper Ome, Massachusetts is in the process of, well actually they've already done it. They converted from high pressure sodium to amber LEDs, 2200K. They did that because they canvassed the population and they were very careful in involving citizens in all this and they dimmed down at night between 50 and 70% from the levels they had before. No reference to IES in all of this. However, here's a note from Tim Brothers who is kind of leading that effort in Pepper Ome. When I asked him about IES said, oh, well, I'll check. So maybe we'll find out how they compared IES standards. But the point is they didn't know they didn't worry about it. And so far they haven't been sued. That's all except to say that there is a list of all kinds of issues about spectrum, eyeballs, driving, consumers that really complicate this. So if we were ever gonna do anything about anything different than what we're doing, we'd have to consider a lot of community involvement and probably some really good consultants. It seems to me the only reason that you would get any sort of legal involvement or pushback would be if some sort of accident or something happened where someone could say that I got hurt, I died or whatever because of the darkness. And has there any been in your research any cases of that where? No, but again, my research is anecdotal. In fact, I was referred to the Riverside, California judgment a long time ago in which basically the person who was hurt, anyway, that was one in which the city won against the claim of that sort. But that's a legal question. I was an empiricist here. I said, let's just see if I can find one. I didn't turn the world upside down, but I gave it a shot. I couldn't find any. And I also wanted to find people who had done it on their own and then embraced IES. Many cases, well, several cases no and a couple of cases, yes they did. But specifically no, each one I would say, did you use lawyers? Have you talked to lawyers? Has anybody sued you? The answer was no. We had a case in Bronton, right? There is that case. I think that's a detailed discussion. I know we've gone around twice on that. BED was a part of the settlement. There's, in my non-legal mind, it's pretty subtle about how BED was involved, but maybe Paul, you want to say more about that? Yeah, I spoke about that. You talked about it, yeah. I came up to the microphone and again, reluctant to share some of those details, but that is a case you can probably get online. But to echo what Scott said, I know two months ago I think when I spoke, I heard you bob loud and clear about maybe not any pushback. I guess my question, which I mentioned two months ago, was about legality of claims that have occurred, what was the pushback maybe from some of the lawyers of representing people that got hurt. So that would be a side angle and that's exactly what Scott just mentioned. And I know I mentioned a couple of months ago. So I think it's great that you've come up with these cases where there hasn't been maybe some pushback, but ultimately there has to be some, whether it's IES or what our engineers or someone has determined that we're comfortable with, I think there's still gonna be a threshold or that once you go below that, and if there's an accident or if there's a claim, then I think you have to be ready to respond to that. And I think that's what Scott's saying. Okay, well, I will make a comment. I say I'm not a lawyer. If you start from scratch, apparently there's a lot of flexibility. And if you decide to go below IES, sovereign immunity may actually protect you and this Riverside case was one such. But if you've got something in place and people become dependent on it, that's different. That's my layman's interpretation of that. Of course, we're not sorry, Mr. Scott. So I've been using IES standards for many, many years. So you go below that and I think you better be ready. Face impunity if we have a potential claim, whether it's any pushback from the creators or customers. But I'm not a lawyer. Sounds like it's up with you. I'm missing four. I'm sorry, I thought you were. An engineer or something. Risk analysis. But we have our lawyer if we need him. Bob, thank you for doing this work. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate sort of your highlight at the tail end, which is if there is an interest and a desire to dig into what if, if not the IES, what that undertaking looks like. Intermediate consultancy lawyers, I think that's important. Just from a, if we go down this path, it's a significant path and it's a big undertaking. I will make, could you go back one slide? Whoops. Anyway, I'll send it around. There was a link to a YouTube by the folks in Pepperrill, which laid out their whole program, how they interact with the community, sort of how to. Yeah, the other thing, thank you again. The other thing that comes to mind is Commissioner Whitaker, what you were saying maybe three months ago, that if there were to be changes, we should be ensuring that we're reaching out to everybody so that we're not necessarily changing a policy based off of the people that we've happened to hear from. And I'm mindful of that as well. Other observations or comments or thoughts from the commission, and then if you wanna say a few words, anything that you wanna add for now? Do you want me to pass out your PowerPoint? Do you want me to send that out? Sure. So if you, do you have anything you wanna add or comments? You should come over here so that the viewers and the microphone. I'm also not a lawyer or an engineer, just a resident of the town with a few questions. And I thank you for your presentation because this is the question that I have in mind and I know a lot. As I've seen the changes in lighting, it might be moving from 1995 until now, they've been very gradual and then a lot. I'm looking at this beautiful Burlington Electric artwork back here, 100 years, 1905 to 2005. So we've been lighting the streets of Burlington, I don't know from 1905, but probably since 1925, we've been lighting these streets. So BED has been doing this and has some sense of what is acceptable amount of light, what is the needed amount of light. And I'm wondering if the IES standard has, in some ways, taken away our ability to build on the knowledge that BED has had from lighting these streets for 100 years because we're following a standard that is set for the entire country. I look at what's happened in my neighborhood where the lighting has gone from slightly subjectively, a slightly underlit to unbelievably lit and now being backed off again because of the standard and had to be reached because of another project that was taken on. And then the standard was revised and now we're pulling poles out, which I'm thankful for, but it's subjectively very, very bright. There are 18 fixtures on Richardson Avenue between Flint and home, 18. There's no sidewalk on half of them. So, again, it's subjectively bright and I'm looking at the standard that we're holding ourselves to and it seems like from a homeowner's point of view, a layperson's point of view, the point of the standard is to meet some sort of liability standard that is there so that if something happens, like what happened in 1990, we can say, well, we've got the standard. Maybe there's other reasons for uniformity or something like that, but I'm not seeing great uniformity in the south of them right now. I'm seeing lights at different temperatures, I'm seeing lights at different heights, I'm seeing different fixtures. I'm seeing, I didn't know these changes were implemented, frankly, but I see scarf as having, the upper block is having one temperature of lighting and lower one having a different temperature of lighting, the lights are kind of all over the place. And so, I'm interested in seeing if we have to have this standard. What have we been doing all this time? So those are all my questions and I appreciate everybody speaking out tonight and letting me to chime in and particularly appreciate the interest and comfort of the population. I do appreciate that. I just want to share from this moment's point of view and certainly many of my neighbors, it seems off-face subjectively bright and Wells doesn't have sidewalks in his mind. So those are sort of my thoughts on the ground because I see it's an evolving process, but I'm only here now. Thank you. I probably shouldn't do this, but let me at least say what I think I've learned with regards to your comment about how different it is in different places. I mean, what I've learned over the last several months are first that what triggers the upgrade is when they're doing other work. So if nothing is done, it can stay as it is for 10, 20, 30 years. And then what I was just hearing you say was an attempt to try to mimic, if there's a town and country style to mimic that or to kind of keep something consistent. That to me sounds like that's more of a internal Burlington Electric. Hey, this is what the people are used to. Let's try and keep it with that. But then once you start making those variations, then you have to reach the requirements by the IES in different ways. If it's the wattage or the lumens or whatnot or the height or, and Andrew might be turning over in his engineer. But that's my understanding of at least why there is this level of variation and inconsistency. Not that that answers your frustration or your sense that you don't think it's needed. I just want to let you all take a little bit of this. So yes, my name is Michael. Yes, I'm sorry. In my neighborhood from the time that I moved in in 1995 until these major changes happened, I'm assuming that we were sub IES team. And so is there a liability issue there? Someone crashed their car into a tree and you can say it's really dark on that street and you say, well, we have my IES team, but if you're not meeting it then, you know, well, how good was the liability then versus how in terms of your own protection? And there's funny stories in this town that are subjectively dark. Frankly, it's very dark in front of my house. I don't know if I can tell it. Oh, it's very bright, but I get it. It's a kind of a funny thing to think for a long time. Because we probably can have the IES standard as something that we had in place. Generations, it's been a number of years of looking at the mayor because he's comparable to longer than me, but I believe they were, we adopted them back after that accident happened. They put all this together. So that was in 1994, and so we've been subs, so we've been below the standard for a very long time. Yep, I can respond to that. First of all, I think it would be a good idea if we really got the complete story on that accident in 94. I had in the first presentation back in 2015, I had a law student at Vermont Law look into the question of what the city's responsibilities are about lighting. And there is a concept called sovereign immunity, which basically means the city gets off the hook on a lot of stuff. And generally that applies to street lighting as well. That's what this student found. That's my strongest legal input. There was an accident up, I think, right in the area where the roundabout is being constructed on St. Paul, involving some kind of an island with a light on it and a light one out or something. And a lawsuit came down in the city one where it wasn't, I hope I'm saying it right. So anyway, cities have lots of new way apparently. And in the case I referred to in Riverside, California, a person was in a walkway which used to have a light. The light went out, the person walked out on the walkway and was hit by a car. Eventually her lawsuit, she lost. They said it wasn't a traffic light, that would be different. But an overhead light on a walkway, the city didn't have an obligation. Now that was then, this thing changed, I don't know. But sovereign immunity gets cities off a lot of hooks. I was gonna say, maybe we could hear from Bill Ellison. Yeah, because my understanding previous, I'd like if Bill could weigh in. Bill, if you're there, this is Darren, we've got something for you. But I think if I've heard in the past that the legal standard is, is that if the city chooses to light the streets, that it is well advised to follow a lighting standard for purposes of liability. Is that, Bill, could you weigh in on that? Sure, thanks, Darren. A municipality doesn't have any legal obligation or responsibility to light its streets, but once it does, it must do so in a non-negligent fashion. On the immunity question, that would not fly in Vermont. I would hazard to guess at this point. Running an electric utility and lighting a street is a proprietary function. Meaning that it's carried out by private industry, C, Green Mountain Powell. So immunity wouldn't save you in Vermont, in my opinion. And so I say again, you've got a light. If you're going to light, you've got to do so in a non-negligent fashion. What's the standard? If it is an IES, which states right in it, last time I looked at it, is that it's not a legal standard. But what is the standard? And if you have a catastrophic injury, like happened in the case, I think it was 94, Paul says, they're going to be coming, any plaintiff's attorney worth their salt is going to be coming after the deep pocket. And in that case, it was the parks and rec that was negligent. But there was a streetlight nearby. And they said, well, maybe that streetlight wasn't properly lit. And so here comes the suit against not only the city of Burlington, but they drag in the electric department as well. The suit was against the city of Burlington. BED is a department of the city of Burlington. But as opposed to a $2 million policy, there was a $50 million policy that was then at risk. So, and I think I wrote a month or so ago is that you don't have to follow IES. As long as you have an engineer that says, this lower standard does not create an unreasonable or substantial risk of personal injury or property damage, then you don't need to abide by IES, but you need to have an engineer that'll say, this lower level is safe, basically. It doesn't create an unreasonable risk. Bill, a question for you. If you got the engineer, you couldn't do it overnight, I presume. You'd have to have some kind of a ramp down so that folks are accustomed to the change. Any comment on that? I would think that a survey of, I can see that there'll be different opinions from different people. Different neighborhoods would say, I'd like it darker so I can see the night sky. So I'm saying, I don't feel safe. But then you have to look at, well, how many people are out there which is are using the streets at night? Is it a high crime area? And all these things need to be taken into consideration, but if it was the will of the electorate, for lack of a better term, that we don't wanna have lights or we like it dark, well, that's a choice that you folks can make. The question is, is that when somebody gets hurt because of a lack of lighting and they can prove causation, then I think, you're got exposure. I mean, this is all a risk management issue. And as I said in my email from, let's see, June 30th, I wrote to Paul, this is from a risk management perspective. BED's policy is fine. Do you know of any of these engineers? Well, there are consulting firms with engineers, yes. Muneer? No, no, I'm not one of those engineers. Actually, just to follow up the question to Pearl, what the liability of the board member, the commission board member, they choose to enter the IES recommendations? Any lawsuit would be against the city, Muneer, it wouldn't be against individual board members unless they were acting outside the scope of their duties. Okay, so if they elected to eliminate the IES standards and have an accident, somebody gets hurt, they do. It would be the city's responsibility, Muneer, it wouldn't be the individual. Definitely, have we done an indication pause? So, probably something, but, right now, if something were to happen, that would most likely be the city and Burlington Electric or predominantly city? It would be the city of Burlington, but if it was related to the lighting of the streets, it would be and- Your insurance policy would be implicated at that point. Okay. So one conversation that we might wanna have if the commission is considering something like this would be with the parking board, presumably, because they help us manage our insurance policy that Paul dutifully reports on every October, November, in terms of that. So we haven't really had that conversation with them. We could. And then just- Gary, to address your point, I think earlier, my understanding is we will obviously update the lighting anytime we're doing a project in an area, but we also update it and do a study of lighting if somebody calls and suggests to us that the lighting in a certain area is not adequate or not safe. So those are the different scenarios. We don't have- And this is kinda similar to underground power lines. We don't have the budget to do all of it in a given year or even in a given few years. You have to spread this work over a number of years because it's capital intensive and budget intensive. So that's the way we've gone to the IES code is essentially around the city. Similarly, we underground lines from time to time when we have a project that we're able to for reliability or aesthetic purposes. So just the way that Bob, you suggested there would be a ramp down if you or Bill was speaking to it, if you change the standard, it wouldn't all change overnight. Every time you were doing something, you would potentially have to make changes in that way. So the entire city is not ever at one particular level is my understanding. For us, it's mostly a ramp up. Understood. No, I'm understood. I just wanted to provide the explanation. Yep. So thank you, everybody for your presentations. I guess, you know, first of all, I don't think that four or five volunteer commissioners can make this judgment call. If there could be a potential lawsuit for the city as well as for the city, I think that there could be a potential lawsuit for the city as well as for the city. I think that would involve reaching out to the city council, certainly. But I'm curious as to what you all think in terms of next steps, we've been discussing this now for a long time, 2015, but we did have a break for about six years. And I guess, besides speaking with the city council perhaps, Hickok Boardman, I guess going back to how does the entire community feel and then how does that ripple through all of Burlington? I guess I'm looking to you all, is that a survey? Would people want to do a survey? Do we want to go there? Is that valuable? Citywide? It would have to be citywide, right? Because we need one standard for the whole city. It just can't be if you want more or less light that you get to have it. But we have had, I think since I've been on the commission there's been three complaints or whatever and they've all been about being over lit. But we also have a lot of problems. I just think we need a standard that everybody, it's gonna be hard to get a standard that everybody agrees to. But you can try. And it might be some engagement and some surveys and some research into it. My last slide, which I didn't show you, but you will see it as this list of all the issues. I think it's a big undertaking. And so we probably have to start with some strong motivation from us with something about what the community might want to think about. Then look at some communities that have done it like Pepperel, but that's not going to be enough. It's just a tiny place. And then realize how expensive it's going to be to do it. So we need motivation, but I mean just talking to, running that survey in a way that really is binding and works is not just a matter of getting people to write stuff down, but it's two-way street. I think that's one of the messages in any of this community involvement means community engagement this way. And then the question of expertise, both legal and the engineers, is going to cost real money as well. Well, I also think once, if you send a survey out to an entire city, you have to be mindful of what you're bringing up and what you're going to hear and what that level of involvement is. And just thinking if it makes sense to, I mean, so if we do that, if we do a survey, where does that go? How much money is that to actually get a survey that is reliable? Funny enough, we just did a further agenda. What response rate did you get? Like 3.2%? What was the survey on? Customers. This is our triennial customer survey with Michael Moser. Too bad we couldn't tack on a... I think the lighting questions are very difficult to word. You would have to be super careful. You need some advocacy for starters, and then of course that means polarization, but making the case for why we should even think about this. On the other hand, that will at least elicit responses rather than just saying how do you think, would you like, how about half as much light? Anyway, I guess I see all of this stuff is requiring real money. And maybe it's okay, but we'd have to be motivated. I see what those question is. Have the lives of which street? The street that lives on or the street that has 18 lights on? Yeah. Well, you'd have to connect the survey response to the street and location. And I also wonder if it wasn't a question of just like happening too quickly and all of a sudden. And like all of a sudden, like Scarf had two light poles, I think you said, or three, and then there was 23. So, and everyone's like, oh my God, this is runway. And I don't know about the community engagement and the firing and the information that went out that this is coming. Here's what is going to happen. You know, it's going to be more lit. Here's why, you know, like all of that, maybe you did and maybe no one listened. We did because we'd asked you about it. But in, or maybe there was more information that could have. But I do. I think part of it's the shock. I don't know. But yeah, and then to, you know, to what end, right? Like we can do the survey. Are we really going to do anything? But it's a tough question. Yeah. So I'm going to suggest. Well, actually, I'll ask you just as a random sample of one person, given this conversation that you've heard, where would you go? Would you? Are we not? No. I think it's a list. I think if you have your expertise, I think you would like the streets for a long time. The lighting can be improved. There's very dark places in this town. I think I've seen work even. It's just. You just said. It's just got meant up so hard and so fast. And to what end is, is it a good question? What was the point of all this light? Because it felt like it was meeting a standard. Not providing for the general good of the people who live here or the cars that went down the street. But it's a gentle, very bright. Whereas before it was slightly dark. I think you're going to get the answer to the survey. Well, that's true. But I also feel like. You know, it's, it's there like several thousand people who live here. And to change a policy that. Based off of complaints of a handful of people. Yeah. That's challenging because I know that in other places, we've heard the opposite that they want more lighting. So the person who showed it tonight at your meeting is the guy. Of course. Yeah. Okay, so I don't. We have been talking about this for many, many months. I think. I mean, do you commissioners have a feeling one way or another in terms of where you'd want to go? Or would you like to mull it over? And we can. I could also reach out to city counselors. And check in with them. Okay. What do you mean by where do we want to go? If we wanted to do a survey, if we wanted to find out if there are engineers that. We could potentially. Change the standard or look at what is considered. You know, whether or not they would be able to look at our streets and identify. Whether or not existing, existing lighting is considered. To meet, you know, safety considerations based off of what. Bill Ellis was saying. The answer is yes, but to your question. I mentioned a couple of names explicitly. One of my slides. Jim Benia and Chris. On rat. Who have worked in a number of places. I didn't mention something about Malibu, California is something going on there right now. These are. Even from. Back when I heard about one of them. They're highly regarded lighting people. They're expensive. They're engineers. They're expensive. They're expensive. They're engineers. And they also can reference some almost academic research about. What kind of lighting. Makes certain objects in the road. Visible at certain distances. There's a lot of stuff I didn't mention today, but it's out there. You want somebody who really knows that stuff. And I think. The appropriate consultants should have to be careful. We'd know that. So I think the answer to that is yes, but it's. Yes, it's got a dollar sign on it. Right. So I think we could try to find out a dollar sign. And I also think. That. I do know. One of the lighting engineers on the IES standards that I could speak with directly. To get a sense from his experience. Who those engineers would be and what that price could be. And. I mean, I also think it might be helpful. I could speak with all of you. And have this mull over in the next few weeks and speak with you all and get a sense of. Where folks are thinking that they want to go with this. Yeah, I would. We got to be careful. I'm not trying to assign a term paper, but I do think there's a rule for advocacy. And so if we are going to dig into it. I think we should have some brief statement about. Why. And probably even why we think less light. Might be better. All right, one to me. The question though is there is the level of lighting correct appropriate. For the type of use it and not at making a statement that we should have more or less. But what is the right level of lighting given the use on the roadway? Well, there's also the question just of what. What about the night sky and how bright should the world be at night. And all that, which in ways sounds like poetry, except it's gotten quite institutionalized. The international dark sky associations. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, all of those things are. And so the international dark sky association is now really a big deal. So that's there as well, at least for certain advocates. I would like to be able to see the Milky Way. At some level. Twice a month in my backyard. Yeah, that's really. On that note. Did you want to say something? Yeah, I'm getting frustrated by this whole conversation because. You know, even years ago before, I think Bob might have been the only one on the board. We had this discussion with the folks on Cromby Street and brought out the engineers and city councilors and they wanted, I think they wanted more light because they thought it was too dark. The guy, there was a guy out in North Ave and it was just before the, on that street that that it was too bright and not dark enough. And I think it's all subjective. My issue personally is with color temperature. Cromby Street's got several different color temperatures drives me nuts. My gut feeling, especially given what I heard Bob say tonight and Paul's concerns is, as long as we're lighting to IES between that and the lack of legal challenges over the years to these lighting things, we're fine. I don't think we should do anything but follow the IES standards. And we're, I think we're covered and we're safe. I think a lot of this is really subjective and you're not going to please everybody. Well, that's just that's my takeaway. Okay, so I am going to wrap up this conversation in the interest of other agenda items. We are also missing a commissioner. So I'm going to suggest that we do tee this up for a check in at our next month meeting, but I am also going to connect with Commissioner Shagnan and sort of let him know what we heard from today. And I'll try to I'll try to share your information as well. Commissioner Herndine and I'll probably end up reaching out to you all as well. Once you've sort of molded over a bit and try to move this along rather than have a five hour conversation here because I'm not sensing that folks are ready to go any which way, particularly since we don't know what a dollar sign would be for any one of these next steps. And maybe that's something we could do as well. Like you could let us know what how much the survey that I think you're going to present to us cost that would be helpful and whether or not that survey was designed by a statistician or if that was just in house or whatnot. Does that sound like, I mean, it's it's not a full plan, but it's some additional next steps. I'm with Gary. I'm not feeling the survey. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Herndine. Thank you, Gary. So we will shift to we skipped over Commissioner's Corner. I'm going to keep skipping over that because we can check in at the end. Shall we come back to financials? We don't have financials. That's what I thought you said, but she is on the agenda. Yeah, we had hoped to, but we don't. So, okay, customer satisfaction. We did. We saw one of these three years ago. No, him. Oh, have we seen you before? I don't think I have. It's a triennial survey, but because of COVID, we couldn't conduct it 2020-2021 like we would have. So now it's a whatever the term for a five-year survey is. But we'll get back to three years from here. And just just for reference, what do you do here? Um, so I am a consultant that's been hired by VED to conduct these customer satisfaction surveys over time. And I have done that since I think 2005. As a matter of fact, conducting versions of if someone would let me and then create conducting versions of this survey that is required by the Department of Public Service. Yeah. So are you comfortable to let us know how much you think a survey like we can just talking about would cost? Not at all. I can tell you that, you know, it's always nice to collect data from various sources. So getting data from your constituents, your customers, it's just as important as getting data from engineers, at least from my perspective, so that you can sort of compare and contrast the subjective stuff with the more perhaps subjective scientific stuff that you put all that information together and it helps you make more informed, more holistic decisions. I'll venture again. I think it's potentially lo-fi figures. Like 10,000 or 20,000? To get a statistically valid sample could be, you know, high four figures, low five figures, based on our experience with things like that. Obviously, you could do a survey monkey unscientific survey, quite inexpensive. Because you need enough people to answer and you need to be representative and it's the labor intensive as this survey is. Okay, here we go. Nope, you're not grandile. We'll be able to give you participation percentages or whatever. How many, you know, can you send out 50,000 and, you know, like whatever. How many people responded or that'll be in it. I am okay. I guess I'm not joined. I love it. Let you make it. Glory's coming, generous. Yeah, I appreciate that. Last time. Seems. Oh, I see. Thank you. You lost your audience. No, no, there's Kate. My name is Michael Moser. I'm a consultant that's been doing this customer satisfaction survey with BD several iterations now. And these are the, I'm going to present tonight the results from the just a brief presentation of some of the results on all the results. There's full reports for the commercial and residential surveys that we've conducted. These are required by the QC's name. I used to know them as DPS or DPS is still around to two separate PSB used to be the PSB. PSB, that's right. Yeah. So there is a there's a commercial survey that's conducted at the same time that there's a residential survey being conducted. It's to be conducted by a third party unbiased firm. That's me. I guarantee you responding to confidentiality. It's sort of just a step away from the D doing this. We utilized a random sample of 16,000 residential customers. We utilized the commercial customer list of about 1900. In years past, we've always done this by a primary, well, by only telephone outreach sort of direct one-to-one and asking questions over the phone. Given some unique challenges that we've experienced over the past few years, we opted to we first took a look at your lists and looked at how many email addresses you had available for your customers. We determined that you had a substantial number of email addresses available and that those with email addresses were not significantly different from those that did not have email addresses. So I ran a little bit of those analyses. And we got permission from the PUC to do primarily email outreach, although we did do a significant amount of telephone research outreach with a commercial list because it's really hard to reach businesses and to reach the folks who are responsible or who can answer the questions or on behalf of their business. Sometimes you just get a front, you know, you'll get like info at email or you'll get the front desk of business and that's not really the folks you want to get across. So anyway, in this iteration, we collected 923 residential responses and 183 commercial responses. These response rates, it's actually quite a bit fewer residential responses this time around and just about the same number of commercial responses that we've been collecting over time. Residential data, we have a margin of error about 3.1 percent commercial data. It's about twice that, 6.8 percent margin of error on any of the results overall. And I apologize. Actually, I can see this much better over here. Some of these, I couldn't see it from back there, but I hope that you all can see everything that I've been able to present. Yeah, maybe I just need my glasses. All right. So some of the demographics, just who are the folks that we heard from from the residential side anyway? We've been asking if folks own or rent owners and renters, we'll see that over time those numbers are fairly evenly split. So something, you know, just so that you all know that you're getting responses from both sides of that equation. This year we did ask there was an effort to ensure that we're, or at least to understand who we're reaching as far as, you know, folks to speak English or a language other than English in their home. So some of the Americans and migrants to the city from away. And we found that about 7 percent of folks said that they do a response, residential respondents to speak language other than English in their home, which I thought was great. The rate in the city of Remington is, according to the Census Bureau, is about 12.6 percent. So this was without any sort of like language switch in the survey. This was without, I don't know if the outreach included multiple languages or not, in any of the outreach materials. I don't know how many translations you do and any of those, but we did discuss it at length, but I think we were a little bit limited in terms of that. I think there's a desire to do a bit more for the future. We can help with that. Great. We have, I've had some experience doing outreach in, you know, 12 languages in the past, which is confusing. And then, you know, just looking at things like kilowatt hour usage. This is, again, for residential. We see that there's a pretty steady breakdown of the percentage of respondents from your prefab categories of low, medium, and high kilowatt usage. So we're able to sort of look at the results over time and be assured that for the most part, the demographics are sort of following themselves all the time. And length of service to another one with some variations of course. But essentially, we want to have a good, you know, composition of, you know, representation across all these different categories. And that's, I feel like we've got that. Any questions so far? So just getting into the, jumping right into some of the highlights of the results. And there's some of this will be residential and commercial. Some of this will just be residential, depending on some of the results. And again, you can see some of the data over time as well. How satisfied overall would you say you are with Burlington Electric Department? What we've got here, it is a result that is really fairly static over time. Particularly with the residential and we're seeing the same. This is asking folks on a scale of zero, how satisfied overall are they? And these are the mean results for those. And I think, you know, I guess I was going to make a judgment on that, but I think it's, I'll just say in my opinion, I think it's great that, you know, you're above 80 over time all the time. And I think it's, would be really challenging to approve on that overall satisfaction rate, because it's so high and it stays that way over time. Go team. Yeah. So a function of that work closed system and rarely have outages. One of the other questions that we've been asking for quite a while. And this is about how important different characteristics of BDR to your, your clients. And consistently providing reliable electric services. One of the top most important characteristics for an electric utility. So don't think. Go right. That does do is it helps us to validate, you know, the results that we're not getting jump data and you see that that sort of system over time as well. So that's, that's really nice. And commercial and residential was, you know, pretty similar over time. You can see what's most important. What's most important is the prefabricated list of your folks to respond to. And again, those are the new responses on that scale. And how satisfied overall our folks with how BED handled the question on inquiry. That satisfaction level has remained similar. It's gone up in recent years, recent iterations in the residential. There was a dip in 2014, but it's, it's conback out to rates that it was at previously. And then on the commercial side, we see quite an increase in the satisfaction level specific to BED's handling of a question or inquiry. So primarily where we're, where we're testing is the satisfaction of services, service provision, these types of factors. We have asked about satisfaction level with energy efficiency programs. Again, really high satisfaction levels overall, and they've increased in the most recent iteration. So that's always nice to see. You can see the trend is somewhat up, but again, you get to a certain point you're hitting the ceiling and you're probably there, which is a great place. We've asked some other questions over recent periods. And again, these are just some of the highlights that we thought you'd be interested in. Why folks aren't participating in BED energy efficiency programs. What we found is that awareness has increased substantially. So the number of respondents that said they were unaware decreased from 2017 to 2022. And consequently, the number or the percentage of respondents that haven't participated because it doesn't fit their needs has increased. So we're talking about renters, we're talking about people that, you know, maybe already have brains or whatever or don't need them. So we've asked a series of questions as well about this is a commercial question. I'm sorry, actually, this is for commercial and residential as well. Do you or does your company own an EV or plug-in hybrid electric? This is for, you know, essentially market research, right? For you all to understand what the market looks like in your service area. You see that a pretty substantial increase in the residential side and actually a fairly substantial increase on the commercial side as well. Just in the past few years. And so you can use that to start, you know, forecasting what demand like the future and how your programs can meet those demands, right? Sorry, what is the zero to 20? Is that, did you say what, like I would have thought that the vertical axis would have been like zero to a hundred and we'd see a percentage? Yeah, absolutely. It could be zero to a hundred, but then, you know, like it's changed. But is this, so is it like we went from 4% to 7.4% in commercial? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the zero to 20 is just cutting. Yep. No, I got it. Thanks. Just a question about that. That says that almost one out of 10 residential respondents has an EV. How does that check with what we think are out there? I don't know. What is that? We think roughly that there are 25, 23 to 25,000 light duty vehicles overall in Burlington. Terms of EVs, we know for our rebates that we've given out over 400 rebates. We know that the DMV registration numbers tend to be close to double that because not everybody qualifies for our rebates. So it's possible there are currently 800 to 1,000 EVs and plugins that are out there in Burlington. And I don't know what percentage of the light duty vehicles are residential versus commercial of the 23 to 25,000. But we'll get another update on that from Synapse and the next iteration of the net zero analysis. But those are some numbers just top of my head from the last iteration and from our most recent rebate report. Okay, but that would indicate a some bias in this data set. It's entirely possible. Defer to Michael. It's entirely possible that of the group that happened to answer the survey, more of them were EV owners maybe than the broader population. I don't know. I mean, I think that's conceivable, right? It is possible. And there is a margin of error of 3% on any of these. So, you know, for the residential anyway, plus or minus 3%. Which we have to take that into account. I can talk a little bit about bias to if you'd like to, you know, as far as who will respond to the outreach. You're always going to find that in an active kind of outreach where we're calling people up, you're going to have, you're going to reach a wider range perhaps. But there's bias, there's a transit bias and just talking to someone saying things that you think they might want to hear. So that's one type of bias. And then in this work with the email outreach, it is passive. And so people who are perhaps more interested in responding about energy usage and sharing information to their electric utility may be more inclined to respond. We also included a prize drawing to sort of offset some of that bias. So, so that we would, you know, be hearing from a wider range of folks who may perhaps be more, you know, being, taking the survey, providing us data and hoping to end up $50 gift cards or whatever it was. So there's always bias in any response that you, any kind of survey work that you do or research in general. So, we asked another question. Why have you not used a BEV rebate to purchase an EV? We asked a series of these questions about not just the EVs enough, we'll show some others. I thought it was very interesting that 44% of respondents said they're waiting until their current vehicle needs to be replaced. You know, that says a lot about, you know, again, potential demand sitting there, latent demand, right, it will eventually occur. Again, 30% though of respondents, the third respondents said that they're too expensive, even with available dates. So that's kind of a feedback mechanism for BEV to utilize and, you know, the outreach and what kind of incentives you can provide. Although it sounds like you're buying Mustangs for a pretty good price. I'm sorry. Right? We are. That's a great price for any vehicle, I guess. Average new price of a new vehicle is $45,000, just for the record. They're incredibly high. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have an other or did people have to pick from these? There was an other and it's not included in this. Yeah. You know, you've got, you know, 10% that are considering because of higher gas prices that's getting more demand. And then, of course, the inventory issues that were mentioned earlier tonight, you know, 7% of folks say that and 7% saying they're completely uninterested going to any of these. So that's actually a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be. We asked folks, both residential commercial, if they have a cold climate heat pump and commercial response, just over a quarter of commercial response that would do. Residential is about half that. The number of residential respondents that were unsure or the percentage of residential respondents that were unsure is quite a bit higher than commercial. Of course, we're talking about, you know, about half the respondents being renters. And so, of course, they may not know what this heat is for now. And again, we asked, we followed up, you know, those who had not, who had just told us that they had not used the EDG rebate, which is a cold climate heat pump, we asked them why. And sort of following the other trend with the EDG, the AGV, the majority of respondents or the plurality of respondents said that they are waiting until their current heating system must be replaced. Of course, that's a pretty big capital upgrade. And why would you just jump into that until you had to, right? Makes sense. And, you know, 20% saying that they're too expensive even with the rebates, just over 15% saying they're constrained. Purchasing one now because of climate change. And we're going to get into that a little bit in a moment as it relates sort of consumer perceptions of cold climate heat pumps, which is right here. As a matter of fact, we followed up with another question. Would you still consider getting a heat pump if the operating costs would be the same or slightly more expensive, but would benefit the environment? This is great market research. 75% of respondents said that they would get one if it was even slightly more expensive when you approve that concept of the benefit of the environment. So that's, you know, I think if you're doing your outreach and this is great market research to sort of like convert people over or help people to convert. There was also some interest in understanding when people are using or how people are using their cold climate heat pumps and when and how they're using them. So we asked specifically if they were using them for residential and commercial customers, if they were using them for heating only, cooling only, or rotating and cooling. Obviously, the vast majority of respondents are using them both ways. I don't know if it's set it to get it or what, I'm not sure, but it's pretty interesting. And we have detailed data on, you know, what times of year, month by month they're being used. That's good though, because a lot of people use it for cooling only. So it's great. Yep, yep. 10% residential, 11% residential saying they're using it for cooling only. We didn't even get. Or oil or something. And that was one of the comments is, yeah, that there's, you know, well, first of all, do they know? And then, you know, what kind of a mix is this cold climate heat pump a part of? So how many different options, heating and cooling options are people pulling in homes and businesses, which I don't think we have that information. We certainly didn't ask about it. We did a non-scientific survey on heat pump usage, sending it out just to our heat pump rebate customers. And I think it was fairly similar to this. And I was, there's definitely room for improvement, because we want everyone to get to heat pump to use it for heating and cooling, if that's what they're looking for. But particularly heating is offsetting gas. But those are reasonably high percentages that are using it for heating. And we've had concern on the regulatory side, are we, are we providing these incentives and are they being used? And these are pretty good percentages, little room for improvement on residential in particular, but We were asked to do some cross-calculations and get things like, well, in this instance, how income affects ownership and therefore adoption of cold climate heat pumps. Perhaps not, not surprisingly, it shouldn't be any surprise to anyone that has income increases ownership increases generally across the board. And sorry for the hard switch over to communication and outreach. But we also had quite a pretty robust series of questions around how people receive information from the ED, levels of trust and different types of inflation. We'll get into some of that. But one of the first questions is, from which of the following sources do you get your community news and events? This is probably not pertinent necessarily to the group here, but for marketing and outreach, you want to understand where you can reach your customers. And these are the ways that they're getting their information, seven days being at least in 2022 when it was added to the equation, sort of the highest percentage of respondents getting their visit information from seven days in the paper, prompt large forum right out there, social media, of course, respondents could select many of these. That's why the percentage is either when they are. And again, I mentioned we did the net zero festival ad in seven days. Informed by this data. Yes. I'm surprised how low the number is for North Abinah News. I was too, actually, because I know a lot of folks who really do utilize that. And we continue to have a column there and advertise there as well. Don't want to look for the seaboard season. And the Leonardo's coupons. As I mentioned, along with the question about where they get their information, we've been asking about trust over time, who folks trust to get their information from energy. And from electric is most trusted source for energy information, residential energy information increased over time. And, you know, follow closely, not so closely by efficiency, the mods. And then from there, you know, they sort of drop off a little bit after the state of Vermont. And that's that trust has increased recent efforts like that data. So again, this is meant to be just a very, very brief highlight of all of the data that we collected. There's full commercial and residential reports available with, I don't know, like times as much information in them. So I would encourage you all to check those out if you have any questions. Good job, Darren, let them know. And I'll take feedback. I know there's been some interest in some additional analyses that we'll look into as well and see what questions, what other questions we can answer with the data that we got to add. Thank you. Yep. Fascinating. Thank you. Are there any questions now? I was just going to say, Jesus is all great. So what's the worst news you can pull out of this? It looks like it's pretty hard to find any. Keep it to show that slide. Darren told me to take that one out. No, there was, I don't know, in looking through the data, did you see anything? There's a couple of things that I think we've looked at. And then I think back to the 2017 survey as well. I think we still have a challenge with not enough people knowing about our energy efficiency programs. The people who know about them and who use them are very satisfied. Not enough people know about them. And I attribute some of that to the fact that we do have 5,500 to 6,000 residential customers turnover each year. So you constantly have to re-engage the community. It's not like we'll reach a saturation point where everyone understands. You have to constantly communicate. And so I think that's a challenge. And I've anecdotally experienced this, like walking around my own neighborhood, had a neighbor who was using an electric lawnmower and trimmer. And I said, oh, you get a rebate. Oh, I didn't know you offered rebates. And to me, I'm always talking about lawnmower rebates. But Gabrielle rolled her eyes at me because I am always talking about lawnmower rebates. But no, but it's amazing to me how hard it is to get the word out. And so to me, it's a point we have for improvement. That if we're doing a good job when people participate, but only a quarter of people in a given time know to think of us for that, that that's an interesting challenge to me. Thank you. Thanks a lot. So have you sent the full report? I don't think so. Could you do that? Does my camera have it? I'd be interested. It's also just a good nugget to know the high percentage of people using heat pumps for both heating and cooling. So last on the agenda is the commissioner check-in. If anything has come up. I know it's really late, but there's two things I wanted to... There's three, but I can hold one. One is, I think I'm not talking out of school, but did you know that the general manager for Green Mountain Transit is leaving? Yes. So does it make sense for BED to get involved? I also heard the operations director. I don't know if that's... That was like... Don't know about that. I heard about that. But it does seem like if there are going to be a partner in the electrification that maybe the commissioners, I don't know if somebody can get involved with that. I did briefly connect with the person, I think who's leading the search. Paul Bone. No, maybe it's a person on their board who reached out and just asked for our thoughts and recommendations. So we were engaged briefly that way, but they're going to be an important partner for us. And my hope is that they're planning, and I've heard this, that they're gearing up to purchase, perhaps up to seven additional electric buses, which we are in touch with them about and working to incentivize. So yeah, I think it's a good partnership. We don't have any other direct communication at the moment, but happy to engage or happy for you to engage if you would like to as well. I just feel like that that's such an important relationship for we want somebody that's going to be open to electrification. And then the other thing was Jack Hansen. So he, I don't know if you guys know, he's the Ward 1 rep. He stepped down. There was an article in Seven Days, and it made it sound like he was going to take a job at Burlington Electric that he created. And the position was listed for, I just want to, you know, like, I think that that's something that's important. So I am a living Ward 1. And there's just some optics there that were, I think BED would be advised to kind of speak to that. I think the article used some imprecise language. So the position was created by BED, not by the city council necessarily. It was by BED. It's a position that is in Emily's area reporting to Gen Green in the sustainability area under the Center for Innovation. We proposed it along with a net zero energy engineer position as part of our effort during the fiscal year 23 budget to ramp up our efforts in terms of staffing capacity. I think we talked about the commission during the budget process about that. So it's not that the city council proactively created the position. We brought the proposal to the council. They reviewed and approved it. So that was a little imprecise, I think, in the article, the framing of it. The second piece is that the position just opened last Friday. It will be a fully open and competitive process. And we welcome applications from anybody who's interested in qualified and we'll go through a full competitive process there. So any implication that it was somehow, anything other than that is inaccurate. Yeah. And I think if he is the preferred candidate, that will have to be very clear. Understood. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for reminding me on that. So why was his name even in the article? Because he's stepping down as a city councilman person. He's stepping down from the city council. I mean, it made it sound like to take this job at BED, which yeah. So not only have we not made a hiring decision, I believe the position just opened on Friday and we haven't even taken in all the applications we hope to get much less gone through a hiring process. So he's stepping down, in a sense, was independent of this job opportunity. So potential job. The way that this article read was it was read like it was linked. I believe what he indicated. He said he wanted to apply for it. He couldn't apply for it if he was still in the city council. He felt it would remove a perception of conflict in the article. He indicated by stepping down to apply for the position. It wasn't required. He advised that the city attorney had suggested he could continue, but he'd have to recuse himself from matters involving the department, which he suggested in the article are a number of the matters that he cares quite a bit about. So he chose just to step down. And that's his choice, of course. Correct. Yeah. Just to roll the dice on the job. This is helpful clarification, though. Yeah. And he's got a mixed reputation, obviously. Nobody from the media reached out to us. So I didn't have an opportunity to clarify anything for the articles, but I appreciate the question so that we can clarify for the commission. And we've communicated as we always would for any opening to any interested applicant that we welcome the application. That it's an open and competitive process. And that's just how we operate as we must. This is where, seven days? Yes. Then perhaps a letter to the editor to clarify. Was it digit or seven days? Was it seven days or seven days? Both had an article. Either way, I guess I would suggest a letter to the editor to clarify so that for the next edition. Yeah, or maybe not. Maybe it's fine. Yeah. And of course, it's an IBEW position. So if somebody who is qualified, who is an IBEW member currently applied, they would have by contract the first opportunity at it as well. So I don't know that we have an internal candidate who's looking at that. But if they did, that's also something I should mention. Thank you for bringing it up. Anything else? Just thanks again. Yeah, congratulations again. Emily's idea to nominate you. So I want to note that for the record. And congrats, CFO. Thank you. Motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All in favor. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Somebody's got to eat the cake now. Yes. Somebody's got to cut the cake.