 All right, well, let's get started. OK, give me a second to warm this baby up. Commissioner McKelvie comes. You can join in. All right, so I will now call this meeting of the city of Santa Cruz Planning Commission to order. Tess, could we have a roll call, please? Mr. Conway, here. Dawson, Maxwell, McKelvie, Paul Hamas, Gordon, here, and Chair Kennedy. Here. This is an informational item, so there would not be any statements of disqualification. We do want to open the public hearing for oral communications. Does anyone want to speak on an item not on the agenda tonight? Seeing none, we'll move on to the first agenda item, approval of minutes. Can I hear a motion? We could just put that over. We don't have a comment. Let's continue that till our next meeting. Good point. All right, so now we'll move on to general business item two, feedback on the energy reach code presentation, please. Yes. Good evening, commissioners. My name is Tiffany Weiswest, and I am the Sustainability and Climate Action Manager for the city of Santa Cruz. I also want to acknowledge John McLucas here, the senior plans examiner. We've worked with a team within the city, including Advanced Planning, Clara Stanger, Matt VanWaugh, as well as the building division, John Jarvisoni, and our new green building specialists who are really excited about Jackson Day. We've brought into this as well. We've also been working with TRC, which is our consultant and has been since the days of our natural gas prohibition over three years ago. So today I'm going to share with you our new buildings energy reach code. I'm going to give you a little bit of background, what the proposed reach code is. Really break it down in some easy to understand ways. And then our next steps. As you all mentioned, while coming to Planning Commission wasn't a requirement for this to go to council, when we brought through the natural gas prohibition in 2020, Planning Commission was a key point for us to get valuable feedback that ended up causing some revisions to the ordinance itself to clarify some things. So we really wanted to come to you all because we know that you guys are really interested and would be providing great feedback for us. So just a little bit of background in terms of policy. We adopted a resolution in 2022 that essentially adopted our climate action plan and its targets. We do have a community wide, so not just municipal, goal of carbon neutrality by 2035 and a legal target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 from 1990 levels. And building electrification factors very heavily into the achievement of those targets. Secondly, ordinance 2020-06, which was adopted in April of 2020, put in place the natural gas prohibition in new construction adding chapter 6.100 to the municipal code, essentially banning natural gas in new building construction. And that ordinance had been implemented extremely successfully. In fact, we had over 12,000 units that are somewhere in the permitting process right now that are all electric come through in that time period. However, earlier this year, there was a suit that's been happening between the California Restaurant Association and the city of Berkeley that said that Berkeley's ordinance, which is very similar to our ordinance, was preempted by the Federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act in 1975 and said it was invalid. Now they did not issue a stay or an injunction and so Berkeley continues to implement their ordinance. Different jurisdictions across California, some kept their ordinances in place. Others, like us, suspended ours. So in June then, we temporarily suspended enforcement of our natural gas prohibition until we could either bring a substitute to council or the appeal of the ruling was settled. Something that I'm not gonna touch on today that we've spent a lot of time in the community and leading up to our first ordinance is the why. And just really quickly and high level are right now our electricity that's procured by Central Coast Community Energy, which we have a representative here, is 50% renewable. By 2030, it'll be 100% renewable. So that means very low greenhouse gas emissions, closing down beaker natural gas power plants and improved health, safety, and indoor air quality in homes that have these little fires in them. So that's really the rationale as to why we had brought this forward in the first place. So again, we temporarily suspended enforcement of the natural gas prohibition in June. Could I expand with a quick question? Yeah, go right ahead. Is that based on, why is Berkeley going ahead while we're not, is it just based on legal risk and resources if you get sued, basically? Yes, it's based on legal risk and our attorneys deemed that, although that it would be prudent for us to suspend it this time. However, Berkeley did not exempt restaurants like we did. So from that standpoint, we weren't facing likely anything, but just out of an abundance of caution, we went ahead and suspended the ordinance. So however, we're bringing something forward now because of a few reasons. Number one, the Berkeley appeal is not likely to be resolved in a timely manner. We have no real clear, when is this gonna happen? Number two, despite a lot of advocacy happening at the state level right now, there are no imminent statewide fixes for the problem. We're probably two code cycles away, which is some time. And we've already started to receive mixed fuel building permit applications, which we really don't want. So we are bringing forward an alternative approach. So what we can do is adopt increased building energy performance requirements via local amendments to the California energy code, which this is called a reach code, right? So you'll hear me use that term reach code. And how, kind of the differences between what we had adopted before versus what we are bringing forward now is that the decision on Berkeley really limits how the city can regulate emissions. We cannot restrict fuel choice, but we can regulate performance standards. So these reach codes, these amendments to the California energy code are expressly allowed by state law and they're consistent with federal law. So they don't preempt EPCA, which was the issue that was cited for Berkeley. Just some real quick basics and you may or may not be already familiar with this, but this is kind of a little bit that's needed as we get into the mechanics of the reach code. We've already mentioned that we can regulate energy demand caused by buildings. The reach code refers to the local amendments and source energy represents the underlying fuel source such as coal, renewable energy, natural gas used to power building systems and equipment and that source energy is what this ordinance is going to regulate. So what you see on the screen here is a summary of the energy design rating. The energy design rating is the output from the modeling software that's utilized to assess the building performance. And you can see that there is, this is an example single family building design under the current code, what we're showing here. You can see this first line shows the standard design and it shows three components of the energy design rating or EDR. The first is source energy, also called EDR one. The second is efficiency EDR or EDR efficiency. And then the third is the total EDR two, the total of the two. And in order to be compliant, the proposed design needs to have a positive compliance margin. So you see this is blank here because that is the standard design. Whereas the proposed design, we show the compliance margins which are essentially the difference between the standard design and the proposed design for each of the components of the EDR. So you can see 29.7 minus 26.7 is three. And in order for a building to be compliant with their current code, all of these must be positive. These compliance margins must be positive. So in this example, this would be compliant with the current code because all of these values are above zero. So again, when we move on, you're gonna see we're really trying to regulate this source energy and the source energy compliance margins. There will be a minimum number or threshold for each building type that needs to be achieved by proposed designs going forward. One thing I wanna note is this is a single family building design and the compliance margins are in terms of points whereas for some of the other buildings types, the compliance margin for source energy is expressed in terms of percentages. And I'm gonna show you that right now. So for an example, again, using single family building design under our new reach code, if this does go forward, you'll see that the source energy EDR one is 9.1. And you're gonna see some tables that kind of lay this out for each building type, but for EDR one under our reach code must have a score of at least nine. So this has met the compliance margin because it exceeds nine. So looking at this for all the building types, you'll see again, we start with single family. It requires an EDR one of at least nine points for multifamily residential low rise. You have to exceed the source energy requirement by 10% for multifamily residential high rise by 4% and for non-residential buildings by 7%. We are also going to be requiring some additional electric readiness requirements related to non-residential and multifamily residential buildings with central water heating. And in that case, where a gas appliance is installed, we're requiring that the applicant illustrates reserved physical space and ventilation paths for all future electric equipment and install sufficient electric panel and transformer capacity, making them electric ready. So one thing I wanna say here, and this was a question that we got at our recent Climate Action Task Force meeting is, well, what's the scale of what's gonna come in across these different building types? And we're still figuring out the projections for that, but I think you all know we aren't seeing a lot of single family permits coming in, right? These are mostly multifamily or non-residential, primarily multifamily. We are trying to project that out and include that in our frequently asked questions. So let me tell you how applicants can actually meet these compliance standards and how it's different than what the code has now. We have these illustrations that makes this really kind of nice and an easy friendly way to kind of explain this. So under a standard design, the single family building, in order to comply with the current code, they can have a mixed fuel building. However, it's likely they're going to have to install a heat pump water heater. They're gonna need energy efficiency like LED lighting, really tight building envelope. They can still have a gas furnace and then rooftop solar panels are required in single family. So under our reach code, what changes is that in order to reach that source energy score of a minimum of nine, the really the only way you can achieve that is by replacing the gas furnace with a heat pump HVAC, in which case this makes this an all-electric home. There is a second way that this can be achieved, however, so we're going back to the standard design building, what I showed you before, mixed fuel with a gas furnace. A second way that folks can comply is they can keep the gas furnace. They will need to probably increase energy efficiency, tighten the building envelope, and they could install battery storage. So they can have a mixed fuel building with battery storage and increased energy efficiency that will get you a score of over nine. So mixed fuel is still available as an option. Let's look at the low rise. Before I leave that one, can I button in one square? Yeah, go ahead. So the baseline building has PV panels in it, which is quite an amazing thing. Yes. Can you increase the size of your PV and offset your gas furnace? Yes, I don't know that you can reach it entirely though. You could use that as a method. You could try it. Okay, that's good. Yeah, and then for low rise multi-family, the compliance margin, so under a standard building, the compliance margin is zero. You can add a heat pump HVAC to reach 10% above the standard design building, or you can keep your gas furnace, add more efficiency, add more solar PV, and add a battery storage system, and you will exceed 10%. So again, you can keep your mixed fuel building, but in order to meet the compliance margin, you'll have to add in these other components. And this is similar for high rise, same thing. If you add a heat pump HVAC, you can increase likely 7% for the prototype that we analyzed here. And if you wanna keep your gas furnace and add efficiency and additional solar, you can add 4%. And in fact, we modeled, you can actually achieve up to 7% potentially, depending on the efficiency measures that you utilize for high rise multi-family. For non-residential buildings, this is kind of, you're getting the gist of this. You can add a heat pump HVAC, your compliance margin will exceed 4%, or you can keep the gas furnace and add efficiency and additional solar, and you can exceed the standard design by 7% and meet the reach code. So there are options here for fuel source, but clearly it encourages all electric buildings. So an important aspect to this is that the city is required to illustrate cost-effectiveness and energy savings over the life of the building, the life and the maintenance of the building, or performance of the building rather. The California Energy Codes and Standards Statewide Utility Program, they developed these cost-effectiveness studies. This was the single family new construction that was produced in 2022. And in your agenda packet, we had the other cost-effectiveness studies as well. And the city has found that all of the proposed local amendments in this reach code that affect energy use are a more efficient than the base code, and cost-effective on a time-dependent valuation basis. And time-dependent valuation, or TDV, is a composite measure of the actual cost of energy for each electricity, natural gas, and propane to the utility, the customers, and society at large. So that's how TDV is designed, defined. One thing, you know, a question that we get a lot is, oh gosh, how am I gonna pay for this? Right now is probably the peak of all rebates and incentives available. And there is more that's going to be rolling out. We are gonna be including links to credible search sites, switches on, Desire, and Energy Star that keep the rebates updated. And we're gonna be linking that on our website and also in the Frequently Asked Questions list. But you can see that there are a number of different rebates for, you know, summer for multi-family only, summer for single-family. Central Coast Community Energy offers direct rebates for affordable housing. And there's quite a bit coming out from the Inflation Reduction Act, which is gonna get passed through the state. And then also the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments is launching what's called a local, this is actually renewable energy network, not rural energy. And our local REN, we're really excited that that's gonna be stood up. A lot of other regions have RENs. And the benefit is they're funded by the IOUs, so it will be an additional source of incentives. But it'll also get into your workforce development question. It will also provide trainings and just all kinds of really beneficial stuff to enable electrification and energy efficiency because we don't wanna forget about energy efficiency or renewables, of course. We wanna, you know, get energy use really low before we install renewables and size these other appliances. So there's a lot coming. We are trying to evaluate how can we help stand up or is there through Central Coast Community Energy or other venues for like a concierge service? Let's say a contractor doesn't know how to navigate this, how can we help them? And of course that will be helpful when we bring through existing buildings, which is coming next year. We'll start, you know, which will be an incremental process. It's gonna be much tougher for existing buildings, but that's coming next. So suffice it to say there's a lot of funding here. I'll even mention, I use this concierge service called Quick Carbon at my house. And we're evaluating right now if we should utilize that. And this is kind of a little anecdotal aside because obviously this is existing buildings. But I have solar PV and EV charging station. I have a Coleman wall heater that's 60 years old and I have a natural gas water heater. Quick Carbon went through all I had to do is take pictures of all my appliances, even my stove and everything and send it to them. I gave them access to my PG&E usage. They came back to me with a report on exactly what I could, the models I could swap out, exactly the incentives that were available for me and how much it would all cost. And then they kept calling me, hey, what are you gonna do next? And what's your plan? And it was great. And for me, it took a $25,000 retrofit from my house down to eight and that was before many of these rebates were out. When the IRA rebates come out, it's gonna take it down to zero and that includes a panel upgrade. So that's pretty amazing. Now again, this is existing building so I don't wanna conflate what we have here, but all that to say that there are resources available. Okay, public engagement. As you know, we completed extensive outreach between 2019 and 2022, both in support of the natural gas prohibition, as well as for our climate action plan project. Again, which electrification features heavily and in support of this ordinance, we did conduct a developers round table. Chair Kennedy was participated in that. We also brought this in front of our community climate action task force, which we felt was really important because that group is comprised of yes, some energy professionals, but also mom and pops. And we wanted to get the perspectives and the questions from everyone. And then here tonight at Planning Commission. And we did, again, we noticed this as a public meeting because we did wanna encourage participation, although we don't have anyone here, except for Center Coast Community Energy. So just to round things out, our next steps, we have our first and second hearing. Did you have a question? No, it just takes so long to do anything. Yeah, we have our first and second. We're going fast, thank you. We're trying. We have our first since, and this is largely modeled off San Luis Obispo with some tailoring of our code, but this is the ordinance that a lot of jurisdictions are considering as a replacement throughout California right now. So after adoption, assuming adoption happens, we'll have a few months to get approval from the California Energy Commission. The reach code does have to be approved by them. And then we are targeting putting it into effect March 1st. A couple of things to note, however, excuse me, if the Berkeley ruling is vacated, we will likely rescind or suspend this ordinance, the reach code and go back to our natural gas prohibition because that is the strongest mechanism we have for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. So just wanted to note that. We are putting together frequently asked questions sheet and I'm happy to share with you some of the kind of frequent questions we've gotten and the website updates. And then we have some other grants pending on the topic of workforce development. I also want to mention, we have a workforce development team. Our climate action plan had a specific green economy section to it. So there's a lot calling out workforce development related to electrification. We have a bunch of things that are going on through our workforce development team. We're working regionally on this. We have a trades day coming up in November where we're gonna have energy vendors and contractors that are gonna have hands-on activities for over 700 high schoolers, which would be awesome. There's a new Cabrillo College course that we collaborated on, on heat pump design. Central Coast Energy Services, which is a low income weatherization and energy provider is standing up their own training program. They have a major grant with us in Watsonville, a $2 million weatherization assistance program grant from the Department of Energy to electrify low income households. And then there are some other initiatives happening around that. So we acknowledge there's a real need, there's a huge need for electricians in our region, also for transportation electrification. Would you mind if I follow up? Since we're talking about workforce development right now, thank you. So thank you for that, I appreciate that. Part of the question that I received was also whether there could be some sort of bonus points for training efforts. I'm not sure exactly what they meant by that, but could there be a role in nurturing like a public-private partnership with local entities to establish some further job training programs, something like what the homeless garden project is in terms of food. And then also, is there justification maybe for doing something, applying something like VMT calculations? I'm not exactly, I don't understand this question very well, I didn't have a chance to follow up. But in scope to evaluations, that would just shine a light on local content and in terms of benefits during construction. Okay, bonus points, not anything we've discussed. I'm not sure that we're gonna go back right now to revise this ordinance to include that, but it's something I can explore most definitely. The public-private partnerships, most definitely. We have hired, we have two workforce developments, a specialist working out of the water department right now, and we've looked at, there's a state program that it provides direct funding to the contractor for hiring, and however, it's in collaboration with the Workforce Development Board and other entities. We are trying to find the right fit for that and see that's something that the contractors themselves have to apply for, but we can help facilitate Greece the Wheel, so to speak, on that and be a partner. That's something that's being explored right now also, so really open to the PPPs for sure. I'm not sure I understand the question on VMTs either quite honestly. The one related question that we've gotten related to vehicle miles traveled is, or anything transportation related, is a question related to EV charging and whether EV charging is included in this, and it is not. But in fact, our Public Works Department brought through a parking ordinance within the past couple years that requires EV charging beyond what code says. So we do have that in place. I'm not really sure how to answer the VMT question. I wonder if John, does that resonate with you at all? Not at all, is it true? It might have been somehow related to the water, what they're trying to do with the water department, I'm not sure. I'll poke around. Yeah, I don't know how to answer that one. All right, well thank you, I appreciate that. For sure, for sure. And really, that is the end of my presentation. This is going to be our recommendation to city council that they adopt the ordinance. And lastly, I'm happy to take any questions. I did want to share with you a couple of the questions we've gotten because I think it's useful. We got asked a couple times, does this regulate natural gassing in cooking appliances like broilers and woks? And at cooking appliances, dryers, and most other kind of process loads, they don't factor into the compliance margin modeling. So they're not, because they're not regulated in the same way as space and water heating in the energy code. So this does not regulate cooking. I've already talked about the EV charging. Another one we've gotten twice, does this ordinance apply to ADUs? So only detached ADUs, they qualify as new construction, and they're subject to the reach code. Attached ADUs that are additions or alterations would not be subject. However, detached ADUs that are under 1,075 square feet are exempt under this reach code. And there's a specific citation, section 150.1b1, a newly constructed building that does not require a PV system in accordance with another section, does not need a source energy compliance margin of nine. So we are going to be exempting those smaller ADUs. I've already talked about the scale of multifamily versus single family. I've talked about the rebates. We did get a question on how the hourly source energy compliance margins are determined. It's a rather technical question, but we are answering it here. We also got a question, does the ordinance and cost effectiveness analysis factor in both heating and cooling? That is yes. And does this ordinance apply to renovations or significant alterations? And no, they don't. It's new construction, which is a building that's never been used or occupied for any purpose. Excuse me. I had to call it a couple of weeks back and it's lingering the cough, not the disease. Back to Zoom, back to Zoom, oh well. Excuse me. This is great. You know, we do these energy calculations at my day job. I don't do the calcs, but I talk to our energy department about it. We've got like three or four big four story and above projects, including the downtown library, which is kind of like a very interesting building with all its different pieces. But our technical advice was this is just fine. Like it's pushing it a little bit further, but it's not yet over that like, well, you can't do gas at all kind of point. Also, we do tons of edu's and small houses. And as my coworker Andrew, who's like a mountain man, and he kind of balances out my extreme liberalism sometimes. He said, if you really want to, you could still do your gas furnace, but you're going to have to work. And you know, those batteries are not cheap. Those are what, six or 12,000 bucks. Right, and that could discourage folks and just say, you know what, we don't need the gas. Totally. If we need to buy that battery. So what if we just bumped it up a bit? Like, can we go further? That's my question. We could bump up the compliance margin. Yeah, just take each of those. Take the nine, make it 10. Take, you know, just to go like 1% further. We did that. I can't remember which building type, but we actually did. I think it was actually a single family. Eight would meet it, but nine, we went to nine. You know, I have to say I'm fairly sensitive of the, I'm fairly sensitive of, I think at city council, we're going to have a lot more discussion around this. You know, when we brought the natural gas prohibition through, it was during COVID. And I think we're pushing, but we don't want to push too hard. Right now, we want to make sure that this gets in place with all the other regulations, which is a big pain. I can tell you about that. Where is the county on this? Are they interested? Just like, great. We can do gas again for pain time. I haven't heard, I have not heard that they are coming out with anything alternate yet. The one other thing I wanted to mention is we are looking at for ADUs. This is not going to come now, but it could be a future amendment. We are looking at how could we further regulate ADUs and perhaps reduce the exemption. That's something that TRC is modeling, but it's a bit further out. But many jurisdictions- Is the square footage is so small? Is that way it gets weird? Yeah, yeah. Because solar PV is not required. So I think it makes it really difficult for them to be able to meet the compliance measures. But they are running some analysis to see, is there, what compliance margin could be, what could we hold folks to right now? I don't know. I will find out about the county. I have not checked in with them. In fact, I don't think that the county suspended their natural gas prohibition. I don't know, that's a good point. I think they're still enforcing it. So I don't know that they have anything alternative coming for it. But I will get that question answered. That's something I need to know. I'm just coming from a place of consistency in your average builder who's building in this county, maybe another county. Just nice, we can do it all at the same time. Absolutely. I think that I still think we should go a little further on single family. But that's just my opinion, information life. Well, do you remember also single family are the least number of permits we see coming through? Yeah. Other questions? Yeah. I guess I was curious the 1075 square feet for the ADUs. Was that, that was a, I'm assuming, factored from some sort of calculation. I'm going to let John answer that. Yeah, it's in the energy code. There's a, it's under the prescriptive requirements. So when the size of the PV is less than 1.8 kilowatts, it's not real. It's all based on square footage and what climate zone you're in. And you will see that like if you look at San Luis Obispo's ordinance, their compliance margins are different because the compliance margins are dependent on climate zone also. So if you're looking, if you happen to look at other ordinances that are similar, you are going to see different numbers if they're in a different climate zone. Thanks, John. And you just mentioned, and I know it's not your main tonight, but you are looking at new rules for existing buildings as soon as next year. We were supposed to bring it through this year. That's how we modeled it in our climate action plan to reach our 2030 target. But because of what happened with the Berkeley case, we had to come back and correct this first. However, we had done quite a bit of work on existing buildings last year in the beginning of this year. We were part of the Rocky Mountain Institute's cohort of cities that had gone through an affordable existing building electrification planning process. So we have a really good understanding of our existing building stock in terms of appliances, energy use, energy burden for folks because the affordability piece is really important. And I wanna mention right now we have out, this is super exciting to me. We've been doing a lot of work in the beach flats and we have a HUD Pro Housing grant application that's out for public, a required 15 day public review period that's going to a public hearing at council on Tuesday of next week. It is entitled an affordable housing and climate resilience for frontline neighborhoods in Santa Cruz, California. And there's a few elements to that. There's an affordable housing policy evaluation and roadmap that's gonna come out, tenant protections and things like that. There's an affordable housing decarbonization roadmap that will be coming out. There is, based on those two things, we're gonna be standing up with seed funding from HUD, this really unique about the funding, an affordable housing and climate resilience fund. So to help fund the tenant protections and the climate resiliency measures, including electrification. And then lastly, it includes a major riverside corridor rehabilitation. So take undergrounding utilities, putting in a ton of active transportation and trees down on riverside as the entrance to the beach flats. We're really excited about it. We worked with a grant writer and we think we can be very competitive for this grant. So just other ways that we're looking at the existing building electrification and really our climate action plan says to start with affordable housing. We need to figure that out first. And it's not easy because with the retrofitting, it's sometimes like folks that use not a lot of energy when electrifying their utility costs may go up. And that cannot happen. We cannot swap people's, and that can happen for even people that can afford it, right? But we need to start there and make sure those folks are taken care of. And I know Central Coast Community Energy is gonna be a huge partner on that. Anyway, really proud of this grant proposal across fingers. Yeah, we have a ton of partners involved in it. Community Bridges, Tenant Sanctuary, CAB, Midpen Housing, Central Coast Community Energy, Central Coast Energy Services. I mean, Ecology Action, it's been really great. And even just scoping the project, like if we don't get the funding, we've got it scoped. It's ready for another opportunity. Sure. What would the trigger be for existing housing? I can't even say now. There's so many ways that it could be. And also, it may not be just policy. It may not even be policy. It may be just standing up programs, right? Heavy incentive programs. But some of the things that have been discussed, and I'm not giving any preference to these because we really don't know yet, but like San Luis Obispo is looking at building performance standards. So what do you have to do to retrofit your building to meet a performance standard? Perhaps you'll need to benchmark your building energy performance. That's one thing. Another thing we're looking at right now is our rental inspection program and what are the deficiencies around water heaters and HVAC? That again, would need to be a grant to come and help fund that. But that also gets to the renter that often doesn't benefit in this kind of space. So that'd be more programmatic. San Mateo went and gave a blanket permit to everyone in San Mateo for water heaters swap out. So there's a lot of creative stuff out there right now. We need to figure out what's right for our community because there's resistance and it's understandable. We're trying to forge ahead here on this and we wanna make sure we do it right. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome. I appreciate all that thinking about existing homes because that's just a whole different like don't get me saying anything. It's so, I mean, this is complex. That is another level with complexity. I was reading the other day about, you know, they have induction stoves with batteries in them. So you get your like two kilowatt hour house battery. Yes. Like in the bottom of your new stove. And it's like, that's the kind of thing that literally in three years you could probably just like show up on some of the doorstep. Yeah. Here you go. It plugs into a 110 boom. Yeah. You just took a gas stove out and so. Incidentally, we're launching in two weeks a partnership with our library and induction cooktop loaner program. We have nine kits. And yes, because you know, they loan out all kinds of physical things. So we have these kits. They have an induction cooktop. They have cookware. They have a magnet so you can test your own cookware. They have a compatible utensils. Vegan one pot cookbook and a journal for folks. And then we have a little QR scan tag with a really simple survey. And that was funded by our internal carbon fund as a partnership with the library. So we're really excited that's just gonna be within the city for circulation. That's launching probably by November 1st, I think. Interesting. Yeah. So people can try it out. You know, people don't believe that you have better temperature control with induction cooktop. We want them to play with it and see that you do. Good, well that's all I've got. Thank you. I'm always proud to be in the lead with Berkeley and you know, these other jurisdictions. Seriously, this has been continuing for 10 years. Like we're, it's like Palo Alto, San Francisco, oh, I love it. Yeah, I was just on yesterday on the Green Cities California call, which we're a member and it's pretty much the 20 most progressive cities in California. And everyone's, you know, we're all kind of at this point where they, you know, some didn't suspend their natural gas prohibition, but every, you know, it's us and slow and everyone else is right behind us on the alternative. And then slow, Marin, Palo Alto, they already, they're bringing existing building already, believe it or not. So we're gonna be looking at that. Unfortunately, TRC is working with a lot of them. They're our consultant also. So we really, we get to benefit by this collaboration, which is really great. It's cost effective for us. Great. Thanks. Thanks for the great conversation. I know you do have one person here from Monterey that wants to give public comment too. That's right. Let me open, yeah, here in public comment please. And thanks for coming up. Absolutely, thank you so much, members of the city of Santa Cruz Planning Commission. My name is Sophia Schwartzke and I am a customer accounts manager with Central Coast Community Energy or 3CE. I am here tonight to express 3CE's support for the city's reach code efforts. Municipal code amendments to Title 18, building and construction chapter 1804, building code, creating an energy reach code for newly constructed buildings, introduces an ordinance approving local amendments to the California energy code. The city of Santa Cruz has emerged as a climate leader through the adoption of your climate action program and the establishment of a community wide greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals, including achieving a 40% reduction by 2030 and carbon neutrality by the year 2035 among other initiatives. The adoption of the proposed code amendment incentivizing electrification aligns with the city of Santa Cruz community wide greenhouse gas reduction goals is cost effective and is further supported by rebates and incentives offered by 3CE to encourage the electrification of accessory dwelling units and affordable housing. 3CE's governing boards have identified electrification as a strategic goal recognizing that all electric buildings are cost effective, highly efficient, provide cleaner indoor air quality and provide substantially lower operational emissions than buildings that use natural gas appliances. As individuals, the most significant action we can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality is to transition from fossil fuel appliances in vehicles to their all electric alternatives. Currently 3CE supplies 50% clean and renewable energy to our customers and we are on track to reach 60% by the year 2025 which is five years ahead of the goal set by our state. Our strategic commitment to meet 100% of our energy demand with clean and renewable resources by 2030, a full 15 years ahead of the state's goal is in perfect alignment with your sustainable municipal government measure M2 to procure carbon free or 100% renewable electricity for municipal operations by 2030. Together the city of Santa Cruz and central coast community energy are poised to achieve our climate and clean energy objectives. We enthusiastically support this reach code effort. Thank you so much for your time tonight. Thank you. Any other questions or thoughts? I thought of one more. Like at some point our voluntary green building program is so, there's so much little left because it's all become the baseline code that maybe we should think about getting rid of it one day. What do you think? I'm gonna leave that up to John to respond. I'm working on a little ADU and I was looking at it just now. I'm like, you know that there's so few things left because right just like Cal Green is just making them required. So. There's quite a few things left on the, there's a lot of meat on that bone, definitely. All right, all right. I don't mean to compare it. We've compared it to tier one requirements in the Cal Green and it falls, you know, the Cal Green just falls way short of what we require. Cool. So, yeah. All right. There are some other interesting things that are in our climate action plan like low carbon construction ordinances which again, Marin just brought through Santa Monica is bringing through. So there's some other things that I think complement our green building program and, you know, that aren't energy related necessarily. Embodied energy is entering the code next cycle for certain very large commercial buildings. So that's kind of cool. All right, well, take it to council and go quickly, please. Thank you. We're going in a couple of weeks. So we appreciate your support. Yeah, thank you. Let us know if you need letters or, you know, anything we're happy to do. It all helps. Cool. Yeah, thank you. We don't have any announcements, subcommittees. I've got some information items for you. They tasked me with a list and said let them know. We're going to keep you busy towards the end of the year. Some things coming your way. November 2nd is the climate adaptation and local hazard mitigation plan updates from Ms. Wise West. And the Wharf master plan will be presented to you. Also on the same. That's correct. Same agenda. I'm assuming by Mr. McCormick from Economic Development. That was heard at the Historic Preservation Commission yesterday. 1116 is the housing element that'll come before you. So lots of, you know, big stuff. And then on 127, there is an appeal of a zoning administrator, approval of a 40 unit project at 900 High Street behind the Peace United Church. Also an appeal of that one? That will be presented to you. And then that's all they have. So you may get lucky on the second meeting of December, but you'll be busy from now until then. Okay. Cool. I'm on being here. Yeah. And just generally heading toward the holiday season, let tests and or me and everybody know. Yeah. We'll be out of town. All right. With that, I will adjourn this meeting. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you. Drive safe.