Ann Arbor Energy Commission 12/10/2024

001e e e good evening everyone um um I now call this meeting to order uh it's uh 6:03 p.m. my name is Gabriel harp the chair of the an arbor energy commission and I'm calling this meeting to order participating from my home in Ann Arbor uh welcome this is the December 10th 2024 electronic meeting of the enery commission we will conduct this mer this meeting like iners meetings and Commissioners during roll call please indicate your current location also during the meeting please remain camera just as you would be visible during inperson meetings finally M mute your microphone when not speaking public comment will be bya telephone only to speak during any of the public common opportunities please call one of the following two toll-free numbers 877- 853 5247 or 888 78899 and enter the meeting

002ID number 956 8718 7876 on your phone this information is also available on the published agenda in the Public Notices section of the city's website and on the broadcast of this meeting on CTN Channel 16 AT&T channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org CN Joe would you please read the land acknowledgement statement um I acknowledge that the land the city of an arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of anab including Odawa wujiu and badm and wind out peoples I further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the United States on lands obtained generally in unconscious ways from indigenous peoples The Taking of this land was formalized by the Treaty of Detroit in 1807 knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding

003of the ongoing consequences of this past can Empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you joean would you mind doing the roll call yes um and I will note we do have a new council member joining us council member Malik um so if folks don't mind when we do um the roll call if you can just give a quick introduction to who you are and what what brings you to the energy commission um commissioner berwitz oh I don't hear you I saw your mouth movement so I come off mute but trying again with microphone issues pres Arbor thanks all um council member Briggs y here in an arbor I think we know each other uh commissioner coven Garcia here in an arbor U

004welcome council member Malik I have uh been participating with the energy commission since 2017 what brings me here to uh now and it has been is um definitely interest in renewable energy as well as decarbonized transportation and um I don't want to go into my entire background right now actually um but it would be great sometime maybe we can see each other in person and introduce ourselves uh chair harp uh gber harp joining from my home in Ann Arbor present um uh welcome council member Malik and uh I have been part of the energy commission now for about two and a half years uh joined uh primarily out of an interest in um looking at energy use practices and how to uh reduce Reliance on uh fossil fuel intensive energy use practices and just how

005that fits into the sort of shape of everyday life um here in Ann Arbor um but also regionally and have an interest in in the sort of uh service design of programs and how they're how they uh how that experience plays out over over different types of programs to reduce um energy use or or um other other planning and and built environment types of activities um voice chair Hans from my home in Ann Arbor um I uh I guess C council member Malik um uh I am a member of the local Electrical Workers Union um and that's primarily my background um suited for this committee I am also born and raised in an arbor and have always had uh some Civic involvement and this is a continuation of that uh commissioner 11 uh yes I

006am here in my home at an arbor uh welcome uh to the energy commission I have on been on the commission for a good while now uh my background is as a an attorney uh I've done uh various things with environmental law um on the commission uh yeah I'm just interested in seeing how we can uh help the city to be greener and get to our energy goals council member Malik hi everybody uh thanks for the the welcome and this is my cat trying to make his introduction as well um uh as stated I'm uh new to the energy commission as well as new to city council I am I think maybe I've hit a month as of this week sometime um my day job is with the Michigan Department of Agriculture and rural devel

007velopment mdard uh where I am the policy director and I have spent the last few years helping the department um get in line with the uh Statewide uh Michigan healthy climate plan so a lot of climate energy and Emissions worth there um look forward to learning uh what the energy commission is able to do and getting to know all of you a bit better thanks oh and I'm calling from Ann Arbor's second ward uh commissioner Mercy uh I'm here uh in my home in an arbor in W 2 uh I've been on the energy commission since 2016 and for most of that time I've also been the liaison to the environmental commission uh where council member Malik we first met a couple of nights ago uh I'm a mechanical engineer I was born and raised

008in an arbor left for graduate school um moved back in 2015 after retiring um after a career a career with Bosch and uh I'm involved in a number of different uh nonprofits and um advocacy groups working in the environmental and climate and housing spaces the other is commissioner overc who I am not seeing who also is a member of the commission guess he's not here tonight um with that chair you have a quorum and back to you thanks Joe okay we'll move on to the approval of the AG of the agenda is there a motion to the approve the agenda as posted and a second so moved Commission mki in a second second second H thank you um Commissioners please raise your hand if you want to propose any changes or discuss an issue seeing

009No Hands raised all those in favor of approving the agenda as posted please raise your hand and say hi hi thank you all um all those post please say no seeing none uh the agenda is approved okay we'll move on to the approval of the minutes is there a motion to approve the minutes as posted and a second uh commissioner Coen Garcia and a second uh do I see a second commissioner mki thank you um Commissioners please raise your hand if you want to propose any changes or discuss an issue seeing No Hands raised all those in favor of approving the minutes as posted please raise your hand and say I I all those opposed please raise your hand and say no okay thank you the minutes are approved this is now an opportunity for

010uh public input and for people to speak for up to 3 minutes if you're watching this on CT please call 888 78899 or 877- 85352 47 and enter meeting ID 956 8718 7876 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed City staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star9 on your phone and you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any background sound so that we may hear you clearly have um caller ending in [Music] 134 thank

011you Mr Langan and chair harp Ken Garber 28 H Hill Court second ward I'd also like to welcome council member Malik I'm looking forward to the a20 presentation here here's how one way I look at the challenge basically our scope 1 and two emissions come down to 2/3 buildings 1/3 Transportation I'll just talk about buildings as we'll hear tonight Bryant neighborhood decarbonization is underway Bryant is 262 homes roughly 280,000 Square ft great project here's the problem the Legacy 19-story building on East Washington will open to students next year 255,000 square feet all heated with fossil gas that one project will almost completely negate negate emission savings from Bryant and it's just one Broadway Park West now Rising on the hon River 260,000 Square F feet all gas sorious AG off Ellsworth 250,000 squ ft gas

012huge energy footprint The Village 400,000 square fet with gas then there's Maple Cove South home to Hotel Hampton in bright Dawn Village and on and on heck even the Marriot going up across from City Hall will burn gas the city approved over a million square feet of gas heated new construction last year alone 200 2.5 million since adopting a20 most you have to come online reduced Community emissions only offset a fraction we don't even count embedded emissions from all that steel and concrete which can be up to 50% of a building's lifetime emissions my point is this I think we'll be doing well get any emissions reduction At All by 2030 unless we pay massively for offsets which is not a solution and in my opinion would be counterproductive the seu won't impact gas combustion

013at least not in the shorter medium term and negotiating a gas franchise for 2027 while a great idea is too late even if it succeeds which is in doubt that doesn't mean we shouldn't do Bryant and the seu and the others we absolutely should every pound of CO2 matters but as for carbon neutrality in 2030 that horse has left the barn the city's carbon fueled building boom has seen to that I mean we're not going to retrofit the Legacy or Sartorius not in our lifetimes anyway unless we tax carbon emissions from buildings which we should but I see no political will for that otherwise positive messaging at this point just leads to complacency or cynicism in my view none of this reflects on OSI good work it's a collective failure I include myself we all

014need to look inward but let's start from reality and move forward from there I have my own ideas but I run out of time I look forward to hearing staffs and commissions thank you um no further callers hey thank you for those comments and moving on to the next part of our agenda we have a presentation tonight um from the office of sustainability and Innovations and Dr stultz um will be I believe giving us a a a brief overview of more or less brief overview of of different programs um and challenges that have been accompanying the20 plan um and I will just pass it over to you missy if that's okay and great thank you CH harp and thanks everyone for the opportunity to be here today and excited to be here you council member

015Mallet for your first meeting so um what I am going to do is exactly what was in the agenda and set up I'm going to talk to you a little bit about where we actually um despite the comments I think we have notable achievements that we really do want to lean into because every ounce of CO2 does matter that we're able to keep out of the ecosystem and a lot of our work has fundamentally shifted people's lives in really transformational ways and so I I do want to spend some time talking about that want to share a little bit of a look ahead of what's coming in 2025 with the laser focus on the Energy System there are so many things going on in our office so if you'd like to know more I'm not

016going to spend a lot of time thinking about the circular economy and talking with you about that here today just give the perview of this group but if you have questions let me know and I can tee up some of what we're working on and then I'm going to end with the reality the challenges that we're facing and uh you hopefully know if you've worked with us at all that that a challenge is but an opportunity in our eyes to think a little bit differently um it would be delightful if we could move forward the way uh a community might have in California or a way someone did in Colorado or how they've worked in Massachusetts but we can't and so we have to work within the context and that's where I think a lot

017of the creativity comes in and we're very much excited to hear ideas people have but it does I just want to name often lead to some frustration when people say but why can't you do this thing why aren't you doing this thing and the answer is we can't do that thing that way but we can do it in a different way and so we do inherently have to be quite creative in a lot of the work so uh with that we'll jump in so in terms of a little bit of a highlight of some of the things we're going to break these down by the 7820 strategies you may know we intervene in quite a lot of cases uh we are not particularly good at coming out with press releases announcing that we intervened and

018we successfully secured x amount of a reduction in rates for for rate payers but we are behind the scenes pushing for lower rates greater investments in reliability holding our utilities accountable to actually make the Investments that they're getting money to make as opposed to putting it in shareholder Pockets so uh right now we are in five Active cases mostly our history has been on the electric side so we intervene in vgp cases volunte pricing cases the irps integrated resource planning uh the rate cases of course are infrastructure cases uh we we intervene a lot this year was the first year that we intervened in gas cases and you um it's it's kind of now become common for us to intervene but we are often I think exclusively we've been the only municipality to intervene in

019the cases here in Michigan in the gas case it's pretty rare for a lot of people intervene at all so this time this was our our future inter or our first time intervention we intervened in both the gas system depreciation case and the gas rate case we argued for a future gas proceeding that would require the utilities to put a road map for how they were going to completely transition away from gas and what would come next uh we got some notable victories in in truth we had things that the AG fought until we talked to the AG and they realized what we were doing because people do not think about a transition away from fossil gas in the way that we intervened now we did not get a future of gas proceeding in the

020add sense like what Massachusetts New York Minnesota has but we are we did we did make our intervention made notable progress such that the utilities are required to come back with the beginning of what a transition plan would look like we you'll hear in um I don't actually know if this is on the SL deck but we are also looking to commission a report where we could do our own future of gas study and put it into the formal record so instead of having only one option we have a counter that's a holistic analysis of what a future would look like uh that's truly decarbonized in the heating and cooling space u I mentioned we intervene in gas cases solarise hit a major Milestone we hit five megawatts I mean that's just insanely successful program

021uh helping save over I think it's 1.2 over it might even be higher than that Joe you know the number um million in upfront dollars the cost of solar we're running another group by in January we are also in discussions about handing this program over perhaps to the county or someone else as we scale up the seu so we still help people get solar but we really focus on filling other gaps in the system since this program has a lot of momentum so that's kind of a transition that we're working through internally uh but solariz continues just to be wildly successful and then we were able this year to bring on some more quite a lot more solar we have just hit 700 KW in Municipal facilities and the next system the one that's uh

022in Final interconnection at this point they're kind of working through the last pieces will double that uh because it's a just over 700 KW syst in and of itself we also are finalizing a 1.2 megawatt system that's coming online we have about four megawatts of additional solar that are in final design right now so 700 KW might not seem like a lot but uh in a blink we're going to have a lot more on that system so working really hard on energy generation in terms of our work to promote electrification our rebate program has distributed $250,000 you're going to hear we're doing a little bit of a a revamp of that program what we're finding people ate up uh certain programs really quickly uh we've talked in this body about what I call the peas

023and the carrots of Energy Efficiency it's true we are not having people take rebates for insulation or air sealing they're taking them for bigger things that they want like a battery or an electric panel upgrade or an ebike so I I think what you're going to hear is we've been working to redesign that program take a lot more funding to support the Energy Efficiency work that people seem somewhat reluctant really double down on uh but we're in redesign right now on that program but we have money going out the door we've also done a district geothermal study analysis and Technical design for the Bryant neighborhood uh we as part of that broke ground just a few weeks ago on a geothermal system for the Bryant Community Center which is part of our work to make

024the community center a living learning laboratory of decarbonization so people can come in and see the Technologies experience it understand what it means when we say geothermal or we say a smart thermostat or energy storage to see these things in real life and interact with them as opposed to kind of in an ethereal space we successfully secured a grant to expand charging uh we got uh 2.9 2.8 million and we also launched a commercial EV charger program where we're giving away Chargers to Commercial and multif family sites for a 5year period we're buying the charger we're doing the insurance we're doing the whole package as long as they agree to install those Chargers and make them publicly accessible and then with the CFI award the charging and fueling infrastructure award we're going to be able

025to go even further and helping really tackle the kind of split incentive problem where the people that would use those Chargers don't own the facilities where the Chargers would actually get installed so we focused on multif family and Commercial we're also looking at expanding our curbside charging infrastructure structure where we can and this is a combination of fast Chargers and level two charging Joe is leading our work on a Citywide geothermal study in partnership with stanch that's advancing to really understand what is the potential what's the optimization of sizing for geothermal system so what kind of commercial load paired with residential load makes sense how many units uh do we build a network system that's linear kind of running down major road corridors or do we build it more in a Spider Sense where maybe

026Parks become aners and pick up surrounding neighborhoods but sanch is helping us do a lot of the preliminary analysis we'll be moving in the New Year into a deep dive into three areas of the city to really deeply design what a a geothermal potential could be for for those areas and then of course we continue to do do engagement we just put this forward our electrification Expo it always amazes me how many people come out to talk to us about electrification we had dozens of vendors that were there our reviews from the vendors were exceptional and we had hundreds of members of the public who came out and were interacting again with kind of like a a touch experience these Technologies get your questions answered including from some of our ambassadors who are going through

027their own decarbonization journey and so could help really demystify what this process looks like in terms of Energy Efficiency work we have our home energy advisor which has actually delivered um as of today more than 200 path to zeros which are these customized strategies for individual homes on how they can hit their own decarbonization goals it connects them to rebates whether those are local state or federal rebates utility programs ways they can operationalize those strategies we're now starting to go back to the people who got those assessments to see how it's going uh what kind of support do they need to start operate operationalizing the ideas that have been brought forward we uh were successful in winning 3.1 million from the Michigan Public Service Commission to advance our work in Bryant that particular Grant was

028to fully decarbon 50 of the homes in the neighborhood because we've been successful um I I know we've talked about Bryant some of you are also new we um we fundraise a lot for our neighborhood decarbonization work we don't fund our office through this right we're funded through taxpayers we're we're good we fund can we fund physical improvements in homes we fund the things that are hard to fund but we also do fundraising for can and with can and can Community Action Network that runs the Bryant Community Center has been pretty successful in bringing down some Misha funding to help do decarbonization work so in conversation just last week with Derrik Miller the executive director of can we think we're going to extend past 50 homes and probably get more to 70 75 because of

029our ability to stack the funding we've been able uh to receive which is very exciting our herd home energy rating disclosure is in full swing you can see Steven jell here on the top they're out in the field they are working with Realtors they are getting into compliance uh they are doing a really really great job of that uh bringing that program into fruition we are working now to transition our street lights to LEDs thanks to the grant we were able to bring in from semcog that our team helped uh secure and then we initiated our green business challenge this year in partnership with spark I'm delighted to share for those of you who might have a business or if you want to talk to your friends who do that challenge is a very supported

030way to help businesses make sustainability improvements that align with whatever their Mission and Service delivery is and we just brought in fresh Coast to provide customized sustainability planning for businesses so it's an additional service that can help businesses really figure out sort of like our path to zero for residents this is a similar offering for businesses that we have here in the community in terms of our work on VMT reduction we have been putting money in the ground so we've been funding the expansion of bike lanes and side walks really closing some sidewalk gaps and doing some lighting to make sure our sidewalks are well lit uh we we very much know this time of year in particular it's nice to have sidewalks but if you do not feel safe on those sidewalks you may

031not be on those sidewalks so we need to have proper Lighting in those spaces um I sometimes feel unsafe biking because the distance between uh different lighting options for me leaves me in the dark even with a reflective vest and the lights on so this is a something we're really aware of we hear from bikers and we're trying to really close some gaps on that we are active in the comprehensive land use Plan update that's taking place right now uh we got briefed on where things stand from public engagement I am ecstatic and very excited to talk about what this might mean in terms of smart infill and density that will help us hold multi-use function so that we can walk-in bike scoop take transit to the places we want to go um also making

032sure we really lean into Transit corridors where people have access to multimodal options and then uh we partnered to bring in Bike Share actually with human electric hybrids and common cycle you can actually check out a series of electric bikes right now and take them around town they're all branded a20 uh they're out in the wild I hope you get a chance to ride one enjoy one uh they're they're pretty fun circular economy is really exciting there's a there's a lot going on our team here here has been growing kind of into what it's meant meant to look like we launched the sustainable Food business Coalition this year we have our first 40 members this is co-chaired by Argus uh and us we are actively recruiting more businesses into this landscape they're working on what

033their goals and their their values will be as they move forward in promoting more sustainable food uh and more a more sustainable food ecosystem broadly we have been continuing to do Outreach with veg Michigan about plant forward diets you know not exclusive we that's we're not there's no shaming in this work that's not an effective strategy to make people feel small or challenge their choices instead what we know is inviting them in to try something is actually leading to a lot more success and people being excited about trying a planet forward option that they hadn't before so uh We've this number is wrong because we were out at kindlefest on Friday and we signed up I think 200 more folks so we're almost at 4,000 people who have joined us to try plant forward diets

034we did our first Electronics takeback event we collected over 6,400 lounds of electronic devices that certainly at end of life will be recycled but go further up the point here was they're all scrubbed and meant to be reused if they're damaged repaired or refurbished and put back in circulation so these are going to uh as they're donated they're cleaned up and then they're sent to Schools they're sent to uh IM imant families there these devices are staying in use which is really exciting we it was so successful that we plan run many more in the new year so take those devices especially as the holiday season comes up please do not discard of them uh do not put them in the trash that is a terrible idea given the amount of toxins in them uh

035save them for an electronic event and we'll make sure they stay in productive use we made significant progress towards the end of this year in designing a Citywide returnable container program in partnership with the University of Michigan and anber public schools we also put in a nearly $20 million Grant to launch the largest city-wide returnable container program in the country uh fingers crossed uh that that comes together but a lot of time and attention went into figuring out what this would look like and the whole point is to minimize single use Plastics in our system and then we want a grant to help some of our small businesses think like a corner store make a transition in their refrigerant systems to low ghd refrigerants uh there's an RFP that's going to be on the street

036next year to bring in The Firm that's going to help us do this but this is our first fora into uh refrigerant management which has such a high global warming potential that even a little bit of work has really notable impact resilience just a few things here we have hit our our goal of 10,000 trees uh distributed through the program so that's great sea Reynolds gets incredible uh credit for his vision his progress his dedication to this program we've now pivoted into a survival study we want to understand how many of those trees are still with us how are they doing what support do people need we also W A Grant from the US Forestry service to start helping people manage their trees on private property we can't require you to do anything with that

037tree on private property on your own lawn but we know that some people really struggle to maintain them it might be a mobility issue uh it might be a time issue and so we're trying to figure out how when people have value from those trees which we know value for all of us we can help them keep those trees as opposed to have those trees deteriorate and lose them in our system pollinator where arcade program is still wildly successful uh Bryce pictured here graduated his H 100th Ambassador through the a20 ambassadors program which also was one of our E20 goals he uh just launched today the next cohort the application for the next cohort of ambassadors so if anyone you know is interested please let them know that that is open and then we launched

038work on our fourth and fifth resilience hubs which are peace neighborhood center and green backer Court uh the these two have funding support from a us uh Environmental Protection Agency grant that we won we are actively in design work we also helped peace apply for some additional funding just a few weeks ago we should know about that uh what they say is next week which would be great but it's this is the Deep sustained community- based work that we're doing and you may know our philosophical approach to resilience hubs is to invest in existing trusted Community institutions to make sure that they're there every single day every day even Blue Sky days and gray sky days and so this is these are two of those really important institutions that that we've been working with uh

039some highights on engagement we launched our social media accounts uh for those who don't know me I am not a fan of social media uh the team knows this intimately but it is important and so our team has these accounts we are putting material out every day on these accounts to keep people engaged we launched Greenlight which is a CTN series that highlights we shine the green light on sustainability activities that are happening in the community our viewership has been growing in that program it's all chronicled on our website we launched a series with 1071 uh we have a weekly episode on a20 uh that airs every Wednesday morning so folks can hear what's going on in the office and we can invite people in our americore program uh our first cohort has graduated and

040we are now in our second cohort which is great we are recruiting if you know any folks who might be interested uh we're looking for three to four more Amor Corp members to join us so please please do help us share that news and in partnership with Leslie science and nature center and the neutral zone we have launched a youth Le youth designed sustainability program aaps is also part of this but this is uh youth telling us and literally designing how they want to function in the sustainability space What can power what kind of activities it's it's a pretty it's a pretty exciting space to be in with our emerging leaders so that's some of the stuff that's going on in 2024 there is a lot more that is not on here we just released

041our newsletter last week there's some highlights in there and I encourage you to take a look and of course we do our annual report in June that corresponds with the adoption of a20 so we'll give you we'll give you more as as things progress but as we look ahead major things coming in 2025 there are many many many of them uh one is of course the sustainable energy utility uh I've been working with a number of staff on the preliminary things that we need to do to launch the seu we are telling everyone from an expectation standpoint 18 months before you see an seu that's actually installing things in the ground but we have a lot a lot to do before that point we're working on bylaws governance structures the charter uh Amendment and language

042the voters authorized the amendment to the Charter but now we have to actually amend it and bring that forward we are working on a job description hopefully in the spring we'll be hiring our executive director so they can come in and start building the elements like the Recruitment and Retention plan the technical specs for how we're going to work with what are the expectations for contractors that are going to bid in to help us build the actual infrastructure we have to have Standard specs specifications for them to work from we're working on the legal elements working on all of the fun stuff the financials um and I'm fundraising quite a lot right now and I'm very excited to hand off a little bit of this to our executive director when they come in uh because

043we got a lot of stuff in A2 Z to work on but a lot of time and attention is on getting the seu world's class so when it launches it's just it's it just is it's it's just great and people love the experience that they have and they tell their neighbor and it snowballs and becomes wildly successful I mentioned uh when I was talking about our home energy rebate and home energy advisor program we are doing some work here to make sure these programs you know these are new programs how do we get more people to take advantage of them and doing some revisions to the rebates to really significantly increase the amount of funding we'll offer for things like insulation uh people are coming to us um we're also going to offer some additional

044rebates hopefully soon for appliances that we're in like induction cooktops I think we're going to bring those forward as a as a remade option which I'm I'm excited to see and we have interest in we're gonna be launching um I feel sort silly saying this but I love this word uh a Huga Campaign which is a kind of like Scandinavian concept of it's really hard to describe like comfort and uh coziness and delight and just like this incredible sense of your place and purpose so we're gonna kind of lean into helping people understand how these programs improve quality of life we're going to try to really bring this down so people can see themselves taking advantage of these programs but if you know anyone who's sitting on the sidelines waiting to do a project we

045have rebate dollars we have the home energy advisor they are there these contractors are ready to move dollars or move programming please send them our way the home energy rating disclosure team is working on wraparound services to really work with our real estate agents to think about uh from the beginning how we help them move houses that are really efficient or if their house isn't really efficient we help make it efficient can we do a joint program to do air sealing in those homes is one of the things we're exploring to the other end when a homeowner buys a home how can we follow up with them and maybe bring them in to the home energy adviser or a rebate program and so they're using that information that they've collected to do something meaningful you've

046seen green rental housing uh Joe even today was working powerlessly with legal on some elements of this this is going to be moving forward hopefully in January uh to council uh we also come the New Year will'll be launching an electric lawn care program for commercial Enterprises this will be a a rebate program with some discount that we've negotiated I'm very excited to move that forward and then we likely will have a discount program for residential where we've just negotiated that off the off the top you're getting a certain amount so it's not a rebate from our office it's because we think we're going to move volume the the manufacturer the distrib has agreed to reduce reduce costs so we're going to help our commercial businesses es especially our small commercial businesses make this transition

047we leaf blowers are the primary thing because of our our leaf blower ordinance but we are we did not stop there we are looking at all the equipment that they might have and how we can help them make the transition to electric now I mentioned Joe's working on U with santech on a geothermal feasibility study at three different areas of the city well we're doing it Citywide in the new we'll be doing a deep dive into three geographical areas one of which will be downtown because that will be a very difficult place to do geothermal at the volume needed so we want to do that site and then we'll be looking for two additional sites to analyze and then um we've already selected our second neighborhood to start neighborhood decarbonization work we're trying to figure

048out how the time sort of gets uh shorter in terms of moving into other neighborhoods so we'll be starting our work we've already started our work with Pittsfield Village which is the second neighborhood engaging with but we're continuing Bryant and what was I mean I'll just say this what I think was a twinkle in our eyes when we did a20 this idea of creating one of the first carbon neutral neighborhoods in America with all of the things coming together we are we're gonna do it and that's incredible it's a lot of work it is incredibly hard and the lessons we've learned are profound and this is where we have stories of peoples who whose lives have literally changed from a home that was killing them and they'll tell you that uh they might have had

049COPD or asthma and a gas leak was increasing their hospital stays to folks who were about to lose their home because they couldn't afford their bills anymore and they were making choices between heating their home and buying groceries and these incredible residents who've been going through something that I think most of us can't actually imagine living through we might intellectually imagine uh we're seeing their homes stabilized we're seeing their homes be healthy spaces for them to raise their family and invest in their future this program is fundamentally changing lives and I I I don't know how else to talk about this when we think about impact we can obviously think about the mother metric and we cannot lose the humanity of this work this is significant uh for all of us to be able to

050stay in the community that we love we're waiting to hear about the geothermal award from the US Department of energy would which would in fact be one of the last pieces is it would help us transition the entire neighborhood to a sustainable source of eaing and Cooling and stack with the remainder of the funding that we've secured so these are some of the things coming in 2023 again on the energy side but I'll name we've got grants out there to launch that city-wide returnable container program we've got huge goals around natural systems uh that we're working on I've got a franchise that I think will probably come to council sometime in early 2025 for discussion we are working on land use strategies if you think think about it uh sustainable food is going to be

051a very important topic I think in 2025 uh we are open to your ideas about what we're not thinking about but please do not leave this and say this is all OSI is working on these are just some curated examples of what we've got going on so let's talk about the reality um doing this work is incredible it is a gift it is a true gift to be a public servant in an arbor and get to work on sustainability and it is also a gift of creativity because it's not easy it's it's not a linear path some of the things that we struggle with very intently are state and federal preemptions there are many things we've tried to do that the state has said Thou shalt not and pulled away our right there are many

052things that we thought about doing that they got ahead of us and said Thou shalt not so an example is we've talked about the building code we canot set a more aggressive building code than the state of Michigan period full stop sentence end you cannot go above you cannot go below that has been litigated that is established well what if what if we ask the legislature to do a pilot program with six communities where they test a different code and they collect data that mirrors what the state is establishing their code on to demonstrate is a more aggressive code actually bad for homeowners is it bad for home builders or actually is it all Hyperbole and this is a really good thing now the the answer is the legislature may say no but we are

053working on legislation to ask for permission to test a different code it's a different process right we we can't just Implement a new code so we're trying to play in the gray and figure out how might we get at the core problem which is people are really afraid that this is going to impact home values well let's test it let's collect the data and see if that's true and maybe it does and we then have the data to say you're right we need to stick with this code for those reasons or we can say the world did not end it is okay so those are the kinds of things we think about but I transparently this is a big one you know building performance standards are something I wish we could do we're trying to

054figure out how we might be able to do something like a building performance standard here but acknowledging it's just not as simple as we pass a resolution and we have a building performance standard so that's key for us we are working really hard with our state representatives and Senators to try to uce more transformational policies that will help us do what we need to do now Michigan has had some really notable successes in the last year on the energy space but we're not sure what it's going to look like in January right so we're trying to find what priorities our legislators have how we can lean into those and help them move things forward and we're nervous about what's going to happen in a federal Administration I think we're we're doing a lot of well

055I don't think we are doing a lot of contingency planning what happens if all the EV in Ines go away what happens if all the federal tax incentives vanish right we need to be prepared that that's a possibility what happens if all the grant funding that maybe we secured but we don't have a signed Grant agreement never comes through what do we do right these are these are just realities that we can't we can't solve for so what we're doing is everything we can we're getting our lobbyists on the phone we're talking to the funders we're offering additional information when we hear that we want an award we won an award for two more electric Refuge trucks which is great they gave us five days to encumber that because they needed off their books they

056need it safe we can't move in five days our processes do not look like that we have to go to councel we have to get authorization so we explained to them and then we called our city administrator and said I need a council sponsor can I get someone to sponsor this outside of City process traditional process to move this fast right so we are trying to be nimble and responsive to how things are moving uh grant funding our office is well funded from the standpoint of the capacity to do kind of basic things but the things we are talking about and the speed in which we need to do them is astronomical we have to have more resources and it's not just grants for dollars to to do it is certainly that ways to make

057this more enticing for people to do what we need them to do but it's also capacity we are at a point where we will not take a grant if I do not get more staff to take it on we can't everyone is underwater uh we'll be putting out a job description Caren this one's for you uh we're going to be hiring an EV manager well an EV coordinator is probably what it'll be to come in for four years to manage our CFI program I negotiated with them to bring in to use some of that award to fund a person right to go as fast as possible to expand charging infrastructure in the community so we need to build more capacity to actually do these things moving money through Bryant it it's not as simple as

058in here's $50,000 to do all of these things you've got to help with the Contracting you've got to sign up and do site visits so there's just a lot of very exciting things that happen but the reality is this work moves at the speed of trust and we have to establish trust and be present in these spaces in a meaningful way if we're eventually going to Sprint otherwise all we're going to do is trip as we try to move this work forward and then somehow we've got to figure out how to get people excited about those peas and carrots right they are super healthy they're super good for you but boy oh boy people do not want to do insulation uh I cannot get them to do air sailing we just we're going to try

059to increase dollars I don't know if you've got some creative ideas of how to make these things really sexy so people want to do them but if I talk about a heat pump people will show up if I talk about solar people will show up if we talk about air ceiling w w like it might be us on that line right we're just not getting people excited so we need more creative ways of doing that and then it's not on here but I'll end this is the last thought is people are overwhelmed and so part of what we're trying to figure out is how do we bring them into the movement in a way that really reflects their needs their desires their interests and not an and for them how do we how do we

060let them be part of this work because unlike me um I can do whatever I want to do in my own life and I can control what I'm doing in this home but I as I move into director role cannot control what you do in your home I cannot control what that business down there does when a boiler fails are they going to think Geo or are they going to think heat pump or are they going to go for a boiler we have to find a way that they want to be a part of this movement and so we're trying to find creative ways fun ways accessible ways for people to see that this is theirs right it is not osis it is not the energy commissions it is all of ours this is our

061movement and we have to have space for everybody if we're going to be successful so that's kind of an overarching challenge I think that we all face in the work that was a lot too much I'm sorry but that's all thank you DRZ that was great um really appreciate the presentation um and I think um the the intro to the challenges but I'm really congratulations to you and the team and I think everyone on the commission and I know many many many people around the city are really excited about a lot of these programs and a lot of the successes and so it's it's really great to hear your enthusiasm um as well as always and so um I'll maybe I'll just open it up for questions and clarifications and and comments and whatnot um

062from from commission members commissioner Burker wtz uh thanks Missy awesome presentation and um I forgot to do this during the roll call introductions but uh welcome council member Malik very excited to see you on the energy commission um I've been on the energy commission for a couple years now I'm in Ward five and uh my day job I work for Elevate I'm the director of policy in Michigan and I spent a long time working for the Sierra Club beforehand so probably got here um Missy I just wanted to ask you for a quick update on the city's benchmarking program um it's one of the things that maybe was not listed but I think has made some progress and folks have been interested in that in the space so I'm curious just where things stand there

063yeah absolutely and Joe I'm GNA put you on on the spot too so I can jump in Connor on our team has uh the Theo transitioned as many of you know and Connor has stepped into this role and has been phenomenal he has done incredible Outreach uh we did not have high compliance rates Connor has fundamentally shifted that uh Joe do you have the updated data I think he's looking for it it looked like he might be I think he's at about 75% compant at the yeah I I mean we were like sub 20% compliant when Connor took it over so he's really supporting businesses and getting to compliance and then uh OSI just got authorized to actually do enforcement so enforcement had fallen on other units and uh Council just off authorized that a

064few weeks ago we're in the process of getting our our person ready so they can actually issued tickets on a very limited basis our goal is not to ticket our goal is compliance but we do have some people who have candidly told us there's no Universe in which they're doing it and we would like to deliver them a pretty little gift uh to say well that's fine uh we are excited for your donation for our office we're tentatively looking to uh have an update um a report and an update to y'all in January we're we're going to get everything compiled for that so that's the goal perfect thank you both yeah commissioner over P yeah Missy great job great enthusiasm um it's really just wonderful to see how things are developing uh and I can

065understand your pain with not having the staff to grow further that's always a uh problem for rogo Getters um I'm wondering about the University of Michigan and your p uh what you're thinking about our uh cooperation or coordination with the city are things going pretty well now yes and I'm really excited to see what comes out so next Friday I'm in a three 4our strategy session with the University of Michigan and aops on some of our shared work um one of the things that is on that agenda something like geothermal uh solar installations in right now we're sort of cannibalizing each other's Market uh because we're putting a bid out and the same firms are bidding and then they're going to start aap's work and then they're going to go to um's work and then

066they're going to come to our work and so we're all delayed in process uh geothermal is particularly acute there are not a lot of Drillers in the state of Michigan and so part um this is just an example part of our our purpose for Gathering is to say what if we don't go after these individually what if we start putting out a joint RFP and we actually asked a firm to relocate here and grow its business in an arbor so instead of taking all the the rigs that are in Michigan we just bring more rigs to Michigan you know like how do we grow that so that's one of the conversations that we're deeply exploring together and then some of the other things the 25 megawatt solar program we're in a lot of conversations about

067that because one of the things the developer offered the winning developer was a community contribution and so we're trying to figure out what that looks like right how how do we put that to use in the most meaningful way within the community we're talking about the seu and the role that the university could play um we're talking about curriculum you know how do we have students when they're at the University understand that the city is also doing this and you can engage in it you know be on campus but also when you walk across that line on State Street how you can engage more broadly so I'm pretty lucky that I get to have uh regular meetings with with shaa lmer and sha Baker to think about those different elements and same with aaps uh

068we meet regularly thinking about what we can meaningfully do together excellent I happen to know of a Dean who leads one of the most preeminent schools for sustainability and I'm very excited to see what ideas he may have about how we can continue to grow that collaboration well he's very proud of his alumna uh and uh yeah I I think one of the things would excite me um and shaa knows this and shalanda will know this too is figuring out ways that you know we're going to build out the living lab on campus and in Detroit um and it would be really nice if it was you know like you said just sort of seamless with an arbor so our students could end up doing a lot more learning from what you're doing in an

069arbor but you know we just sort of um their projects their experiential learning uh hopefully would help accelerate things too well talk to those other Deans too we'd love to work with them as well but OB sees our fa well the big one is tman you know and Jonathan massie's no Dean is more excited about living labs in this space the built environment Urban Tech than he is um you know I'm excited for sure but I mean I think he's someone who uh we could get on board and you know we could even like you know you and shaa and shalanda and he and I you know we could all just have a session and we should eat lunch that be great great yeah council member Briggs I will Echo those thanks on a outstanding

070presentation and outstanding work from everybody on the team um would you speak a little bit more to the capacity issue and um opportunities there and also um a little bit more about the A2 ambassadors program and if there's an opportunity to um to engage folks there in um how I guess how folks how those 100 individuals are being engaged I should say yes so I'll start with the the Ambassador and then move in to sort of the other space the ambassadors have been of critical importance in community engagement they they really they're your neighbor they're the person you see in the grocery store and so they're so relatable and they're helping bring more people into the movement in a way that's accessible that has been priceless uh they also are doing like they're doing their

071own work and so they're storytellers for us of all all of it right things that are not going well they are telling us and we are able to go talk to contractors course correct fix our own internal processes and when things are going well they're inspirational right uh sort of advocates in that space so the ambassadors have been critical in particular in Outreach engagement education elements uh that that has been wildly successful I think not for every Ambassador for sure right let's not sugar coat that but the ones who've been with us um really powerful they've also come with with some pretty creative ideas too that we that they're running on their own that are supplemental to what we're doing in the office so all of that is fabulous and I'm excited to see where

072it goes on the capacity side every person in OSI has a full work stream right there there's no one who's kind of like twiddling their thumbs someone started yesterday uh as an over hire we have someone transitioning out they're a little bit slow right now but like they won't be in four weeks they're the only person who's like any capacity and that's good right and and part of that's because because we've been successful in securing additional funding the millage of course new programs were standing up uh that require capacity they require work behind the scenes so what we're doing now is uh We've set the goal that we rarely apply for Grants under 100,000 anymore because it's just as much work for a $20,000 Grant as it is for a million dollar Grant so it

073has to be for something that's really important like stiens for residents would be something we'd apply for that's that's really smart and strategic and our grants need to have funding for staff so historically OSI has fund raised for everyone else we've never fund raised for capacity for us we fundraised for peace Neighborhood Center to be able to hire more people to do work or Community Action Network to be able to hire people we have a lot of things we have to do in a very short period of time I can't ask staff to do more I can ask them to do different right which we're evaluating efficacy and impact but if we're going to take on a new thing assuming the things we're doing are working we have to have bodies to move that work

074forward with intentionality and purpose so that's what we're looking for in the office we're not going to come back to council and ask for a new person um and to be candid the seu is beautiful but it's like it's been tough right holding that in addition to all these other things we're doing because we held it so once that spins off I will get time back that I haven't had and so maybe that will be useful but you know just just hope there's a lot going on council member I don't know if you know can't a lot it's beautiful it's so lovely what a gift what a gift commissioner koven Garcia this is really great to hear this update this report I love the questions that everyone's asking I'm taking all kinds of notes U

075my question is is the city working with a neighborhood neighboring uh municipalities in any in any way that's like more structured you know joint programs joint funding joint how are you working with your neighbors yeah so all of the above depending on the topic we uh the county LED but we ghost wrote a grant for charging infrastructure for the whole region for all the municipalities in the county but we let it um because we could right but the funding a portion of it would come for projects in an arbor but it's for the whole region we won that EPA resilience Grant which is in fact working with the county to build resilience infrastructure both physical and social infrastructure countywide uh the county has hired a resilience manager it's someone that I know very well and

076have worked with quite a lot um in previous roles and responsibilities so we've had multiple me meetings kind of figuring out what that might look like uh one of the things we talked about you heard me say the solarized program you know I think I think that program actually might we've done so much work it might be ready to go to the county to expand um and we might be technical experts behind the scenes to kind of help but we're in those kinds of conversations at the moment to figure out how we can expand and then you didn't ask this but I did want to share we're working with the state as well so the state is the state brought down some pretty big dollars like solar for all or the climate pollution reduction Grant

077and we are helping them think about how to spend that in ways that are deeply meaningful uh they are under the same time constraints we are they're worried about clawback and so there's a natural proclivity to give it for example to the utilities because the utilities can spend it and we're saying whoa pump the braks let's talk about how we can actually design something that meets the timeline you have but also meets deep sustained Community impact so we work across those various scales quite a lot thank you I just wanted to uh thank you uh for your team's participation in anber Township's first public engagement event for yes congratulations thank you so much for helping and sending um some of your team out there anytime anytime climate doesn't care uh that it things are happening

078in an arbor we gota we got to do it all M mki and then council member Malik thanks Missy hi John you are the gift that keeps on giving so uh you've heard it already from several people but I'd like to reiterate it just you're doing a fantastic job together with your group and uh I want to just uh emphasize something you said and that is um everybody here should read the November and December issues of the charging station there's a lot of material in there and there's a lot of nuggets that you weren't able to cover tonight and there's really a good summary of everything that's been going on uh all that said um we had a presentation of the greenhouse gas inventory and uh as Ken mentioned at the beginning of the meeting

079whether you look at the simple inventory or whether you look at the expanded inventory we're reducing our greenhouse gas emissions at the rate of about one to one and a half% per year and as Ken indicated and this is something that's really the challenge for all of us it's not only for us for the state the country the globe I mean if you look at tipping points and more and more evidence that the kind of tipping points that the PC uh presented to us in back in January they're looking more and more dire and so we we have this challenge of moving from a reduction rate of one to one and a half percent to 15 to 20% so a tenfold increase in in what we're doing basically and that that is just extremely challenging

080and um I think Ken said something also that's really important and that is that I think there's a group in an arbor that is tremendously engaged and involved but there's still a lot of people that see this as being the responsibility of Civil Society to do and you I I'll be frank here um you know even within my my circles um everybody has gone back to just living life like it's the good old days flying all over the place not even thinking about offsets or anything else they're just running their life as they used to and you can see that also here in another perspective and that is um we looked at the dashboard and the dashboard shows that the percentage of commutes in vehicles is increasing again it's it's back to where it was

081pre pandemic and and and even higher than that it's basically at at a high so um I'm going to throw out some some ideas and um you can respond to them or we can um just maybe talk about them at at some later point in time um the first is I'm wondering if it's worthwhile getting a bunch of people together to talk about how do we engage residents in Ann Arbor I'm thinking back to the kind of meetings that we had um four years ago five years ago when we were brainstorming what should be an a20 we met several times multiple times in the basement of City Hall we had a meeting um with a whole bunch of of different people at County Farm and we broke up into groups and we talked about what

082do we need to do and I think we need to talk about what do we need to do to accelerate the the the rate of decarbonization we're just we we collectively have to do this we can't just depend on you and your team it's just impossible and then as you pointed out there's there's going to be lots of headwinds that we're going to have to overcome or maybe headwinds is not the right word is there going to be undermining potentially from the the federal level and and other levels um a couple of other ideas just throwing out things um we need to rapidly Implement our most impactful actions as quickly as we possibly can um one was discussed already tonight green rental housing program 50% of all housing units that needs to be really an

083impactful ordinance with teeth and we can't do what we did with herd where we pass an ordinance I mean I don't know if there's if there's any City policies that prevent this but when herd was passed there was six months until it took effect and then another six months before it had any teeth so we're talking about another year for before anything really starts to happen um you talked about District geothermal I think that's fantastic um I think many people in this group have heard that the University's study that the was commissioned by the pccn indicated that just for the University roughly 20,000 geothermal Wells were going to be needed um you already talked about that that's just not going to be possible um at least right now um especially I just listened to a

084video clip um a couple of days ago indicating that drilling rigs have been taken out of service they're like down 30% um so one thing I think we really definitely need to collaborate with the U ofm on that I'm glad your meeting um one thing that I would ask that maybe you look at and I've mentioned this several times to Folks at U ofm is enhanced geothermal um so this is the kind of geothermal that's being done by fero um they already have a u uh a I guess you call it pilot but it is feeding the grid um this is where they're going down to 10,000 ft or or below they're using I don't know if they're using it but there's a company called quaz out of MIT they can drill at about 10

085or more times the typical drilling rate um and it seems to me we should be look especially for U ofm with where they have existing power plants instead of drilling hundreds and hundreds of Wells um for example on Mitchell Field D drill one really really deep well down to 15 10 to 15,000 ft and and feed the central power station do the same thing on on North Campus I mean we're we're going to have to think about not what's what is the realist what is it realistic about drilling having all these rigs the Aesthetics of that all over campus I just don't think it's it's it's really palatable I think it's going to run into a lot of a lot of issues um I already talked about vehicular commuting I mean that's that's that's a

086mess um I'm glad to hear that the SCU um roll out is happening as fast as it can what could be done to make it even faster I mean you know we're we're in emergency situation here is you can give me the funding John make some phone calls okay soon as that funding comes in we're done yeah yeah well I don't know I mean I don't think there's going to be more funding given when what's going on with the federal government and even at the state with the state house being under Republican control I don't know if there's other resources that can be used um I I'm going to make a pitch for something also that that Ken has talked about regularly and that is I think Council and I'm this is a message to

087our council members I know there's no appetite for sticks when it comes to Natural Gas We considered an ordinance here a year ago um a draft of an ordinance a resolution I should say brought by Ken Carver um based on uh actions that have been taken in other in other uh jurisdictions putting a fee on carbon I mean we we can't say that there's nothing there's things that just cannot be touched we all have to do something you know that's landlords that's all of us with private citizens that is developers um all of us need to do something and I'll just repeat then my idea again let's all get together um staff um an our climate partnership um citizens climate Lobby ambassadors and let's brainstorm what we can do to just dramatically increase the rate

088of decarbonization otherwise we talking about 2040 or 2050 um before we are carbon neutral Jo I think we should take that back to DeAndre and use the collaborators network uh our next meeting should be focused on on doing that I think that's great um I'm not gonna answer I I I know I can't because I know you're all you have a policy agenda but I just want to take a few things and say a lot of what we're working on is structural right which is not fast but is transformational if we get a land use code I mean one of the things in the land use policy we're thinking about is housing 40,000 more people in the city right in the City if we do that that increases density walkability you know VMT so that

089won't be tomorrow but that is we have to be doing that and the other things so I think there's there's elements there I just wanted to name I know you know I can just comment on that I'm um on the board of housing uh nonprofit we made a presentation to Jeff chadis today to put 4,000 housing units at the corner of Plymouth and murphin and create a village there and he received it very positively it's our probably third meeting with him we've also met with several of his vice presidents I mean these are the kinds of things that really and I would hope because we haven't seen a lot of evidence of it at least this within this this nonprofit talking to both people at the city and the University at the city and the

090University's two planning processes are really engaging vigorously on on opportunities like that I can't speak to vigorously but I can say yes they are engaging in those opportunities and what folks may know I know you know John but I'm not sure if everyone else does when a20 was adopted there were two strategies that were removed from it by Council and they were both land use strategies they were about density right they got pulled because they just were not politically palatable fast forward those are exactly the strategies we are talking about implementing through the comprehensive land use plan it just took four years because the community wasn't quite where we were in that moment and here we are so I think that's that's really helpful and useful and then I just want to say I I

091agree with you about one of the things that from a management standpoint is difficult is the world is not fabulous uh in the planet space right now right I mean all you have to do is read any article that's coming out about the state of of where we are and the Tipping points that are uh you know pack there are things that I studied in school that we thought would never happen that now we're starting to see evidence that could potentially in our lifetimes take place how do you manage that reality and keep people motivated to do the work and that's the tension that we face so it is not blind hope it is action right and that's what we focus on because action is Hope and so doing the things that hopefully lead to

092the transformational changes in the system the idea is we can't spend five years in every neighborhood like we are in Brian but Brian is one of the hardest places to figure out how to do this work because of all barriers I mean the mold the flooding the like lack of intergenerational wealth like we it's everything is stacked against some of these households if we figure out how to solve for this we can take it and go quicker in the next and the next and the next and the next and build a model that's inspirational for others to move forward so it's that tension and I can choose to look at the world and say what everything we've done has been negated by new development or I can choose to say you know what that new

093development is actually in a dense urban area and I don't love the it's connected to gas but that is a hell of a lot better housing than it would be if it was 50 miles outside the city or 10 miles outside the city and they were going to commute in every day and I'm negotiating a franchise thinking about how do I get people off of gas how do I actually and not just like take it away from them how do I give them something better right so I just want to say I hear it and I see it and I hear folks like Ken Garber and I feel that exact same thing and you can fall in on yourselves or you can choose I think and what we're trying to do is choose to kind

094of like lift up a counter narrative and say we don't have to have that we can have this and this is even better so I don't know that's why we're all here tonight we love yeah we're we are I am so appreciative for your time tonight sorry council member Mal and then council member Briggs thank you so much Dr staltz um hearing from you two nights in a row and all of the progress you and your staff are up to um it's such a treat um so you mentioned with the home Energy rebates um for instance that the air sealing and insulation um are not particularly sexy and that folks are are not really using them to the extent you had hoped um well I'm happy to say my husband and I did do some

095of the insulation and air sealing and we did apply for rebate and got it so we're one of the few I suppose um but my question is what kind of data are you receiving on the uptake of the rebates so far um as in like who's applying for these rebates are they folks who have already interacted with OSI and the a20 overall you know maybe like taking part in a different program and now they learned about this program then learn about that one or is it folks who otherwise are disconnected um in in my own example you know we worked at the city through these rebates and now we're getting solar on our home in a few weeks because we you know learned more about the solariz program and everything worked out really well with

096the rebates that we were like wow you know this is very effective we're excited to see what else were eligible to do so I guess yeah you know is any of that gonna if that data does exist can it help in engagement on how to get folks involved in the future yeah absolutely so we have Elevate and Michigan energy options are a rebate administrators so they're the ones actually doing the intake and they're collecting data on demographics how people hear about the program and so we're able um and you probably know we have an income qualified track and then we have a market rate track and so there's different techniques we also do Outreach and engagement to help bring people into the programs so we do in fact have that data we also have data

097on why people are declined a rebate um we're seeing people come primarily from some touch an OSI or OSI adjacent so it's an ambassador it's they went through the concierge it's you talk about your program to someone and now they went and looked for it so we're not um we're not getting the UN of familiar yet so that's that's one of the things that we need to pick up on your experience is also the experience a lot of people have is that they come in through some program it might be food based program it might be a rebate program they have a good experience which is why we try to have really top customer service where wherever possible and then and then they stay with us and so part of what we work on is

098how do you like what are the different Entre into the work and then expand the portfolio so they can be with us on a long-term journey in the space yeah great question and I'm happy if you want to see the data um I can have Elevate pull it but we will we just did a six month it's not even six months we we've been doing evaluations to recalibrate in January you're going to see a refocusing of the rebate program based on what the data we've collected Missy isn't it posted on your website on on the web the dashboard is so you can see exactly in real time how many rebates have been given out and how many are reserved how much is left in funding but it doesn't tell you for example why someone was

099rejected U from getting a rebate or uh the demographics specific demographics or how they heard about the program those are things we're tracking just not on the dashboard yeah if you're able to share that that would be wonderful thank you yeah yeah you bet council member Briggs yeah and I just wanted to um respond to a query and clarify a little bit um commissioner mki had um posted a uh a challenge I think to counsel around um sort of our appetite and at least from from my perspective and what I understand um from from my colleagues there is nothing that we have been presented with that is uh legal that we have not um is resistant to um to to implementing you know climate initiatives as quickly as possibly we can were you were you

100present when we discussed the ordin or the resolution that was presented by Ken um I actually think I missed that particular meeting but I do I do know what you're talking about um so um you know if there's a certainly again yeah and then also for I know many on the screen probably know this but others may not who are listening um there has been a complete sh almost complete change over on Council over the last four years the only um existing the mayor is the only person who um has been on there before 2020 so those those elements that were taken out of the comprehensive or the a20 plan were not by this existing body of council um and I think in that situ uh on the land use side again this is an

101area that um we're interested in lean into and what we're hearing from the community is that there's a really strong interest um in making these changes that does not mean it's not going to be difficult um because the reality is that change is difficult but um I think there's a lot of awareness of how important um it is to to to be looking at these uh issues comprehensively and cohesively Miss if you don't mind one you know one last question um I you know I I want to pick up the communications and the engagement thread I think that John mentioned and and and council member Mal briefly mentioned um and that you referred to as well and it's and it's just a question of how how you're thinking about some of the communications challenges in

102the landscape because I you know I think in general now it's a very difficult landscape but um and Ann Arbor has a number of I think somewhat unique challenges but um yeah but there are also a lot of lwh hanging fruit and I I think you know knee wall insulation is probably one of them and things so you know I'm just wondering how how are you how are you sort of thinking about those challenges but also like what do you what might do you think that you need to sort of really get at that and to really broaden that engagement around rightly probably directed so one of the things I didn't share is in 2024 we've already hosted over 250 public engagement events so our office actually does a lot of Engagement we just don't

103do a lot of big engagement um we do sustainability forums we do green Fair we spend a lot of time really deeply working with say Temple Beth emth Or peace Neighborhood Center or uh you know a given neighborhood that we're engaging with uh going like really really deep with places so part of and and then we have these bigger Strokes of of Outreach and kind of education we're doing a door knocking campaign we're going to hit every door and leave a20 lit using the americ cor members because we don't have centralized media right like that's the thing that stinks we don't have a daily circulation that everyone gets some people get the Michigan Daily some people pay for M live a lot of M live is behind a a pay wall we have it's just

104hard to hit people um constantly and things like social we can be more playful in social media but we're hitting a different demographic um one of our team members said it beautifully their social media generation we're putting out social media and yet their parents don't use it right so we miss them by focusing on Instagram posts uh so we're having to kind of fire on multiple cylinders because we just don't we don't have a big Market media market and in the way other places do it's why you catch us um you'll catch us on NPR you'll catch us on the radio you'll catch us on CTN we're we're sort of like Buckshot because that's how our community gets information so I like the idea of bringing people together a little bit more in not um

105we do big like everyone inviting but I think what I heard from commissioner mki was also this idea of invested organizations coming together to think about how do we lean more into them messaging and engaging with their audiences and bringing people into the movement and what kind of Engagement techniques have they found effective and how can we leverage each other that is something I'd like to spend more time with pleas chair Hans and then commissioner overp um just wanted to take an opportunity along with the others uh to thank you for uh being here with us tonight um Missy the presentation was fantastic but also um just uh speaking from uh roughly you know three decades of experience in this town um I've seen a a lot of the changes uh particularly recently in accessibility

106of of the infrastructure in this town and and it's been quite profound over the last five years so um I think that speaks to a lot of the work you guys do so I just wanted to thank you for coming tonight and for the work you do and thank you commissioner Hans for the work that you do both on the commission but also in your day job it's really really critical that we have a skilled trained Workforce that has paid uh a wage to be able to be part and contribute to our community so thank thank you for the working thank you real quick uh there's a new Pew survey out that came out just this week how many people have seen it but I'll send it to Joe but one of the things that's

107really loud and clear in this survey is um majority of Americans want their uh government and their corporations to do more climate work and that majority goes way up like 80 to 90% among Democrats which of course is our community so I think it's a really a a clear message that you got a good headwind uh behind you when it comes to our citizenry I hope but thanks again well when I P them too far just remember one of you wants to hire me I'm just kid we're fine we're going to keep going thank you Dr saltz um I think we'll put a pin in that for now and um thank you again really appreciate you taking the time and and the questions so and next on the agenda uh a discussion of uh city

108council um priorities and challenges um and but if before we do that maybe we could just take a five minute break and come back at uh 7 32 and then we'll reconvene thank you s I have to leave early because I'm a I'm in DC right now I gotta go to an event thanks thank you for popping in e e e welcome back everyone I think we might have briefly lost council member Briggs I saw yeah I saw their screen freeze up but um carve out some time um just to have a I think a a a brief discussion around city council priorities one of the roles of of the energy commission is helping to advise um council members on uh policy and policy priorities other um uh technical advice um and other issues that

109uh come before the the commission and so um I think we wanted to sort of set aside some time to sort of hear what um Council might be facing and dealing with but also um to use it as time to sort of frame that discussion um leading into next month's energy commission meeting in which we'll also just take a look at the agenda for the year ahead and so if there are some um particular issues that we want to begin to tackle head on and and set aside energy commission time for um this is sort of one way of starting to get at get at that and and really focus on whatever we need to do to to be able to um help bring those forward so um maybe I can pass the the the

110um pass it over to council member BRS um if you don't mind just sort of giving some uh sort of overview or or however you'd like to to tackle this yeah sure and um thanks for for asking for that um feedback sorry I'm having a few Zoom issues so hopefully it'll it'll actually stay on um but in terms of you know Council priorities I mean you you heard um how incredibly active and um and um ambitious the osi's office is so I feel like we are certainly very rapidly and um kind of at the edges of Staff capacity um in terms of our work on on the a20 plan um but that doesn't mean that I think there's still a lot of work for the commission to be able to to dig into um in

111many ways uh you know one of the key you know fundamental places where you can help is recognition that we as council members are you know in addition to our our day jobs and serving on on Council and lots of different commissions um you know it becomes difficult at times to dig into the the details of issues and so that's really the function of this commission is to be able to um every time the um OSI is bringing forward a program or a project or an idea to be able to ask those types of questions to really be able to dig into it here so that we know that when it gets to council it's had that level of scrutiny so um that you know that's a really important function that the the commission is

112um needs to continue serving and um working on I think um Dr Sto spoke to some of the challenges that the office is facing and I think it's worth going back and really thinking about those um and figuring out um you know is there an opportunity for the commission to take on some you know to dig in deeper into those issues um I think a lot of good questions got raised tonight um in in the discussion around reflecting upon the work of 2024 and looking ahead at 2025 um that you know there's some opportunity to dig in deeper there um as we struggle with the the limitations of what the state allows us to do um I'm a transportation geek so I'm my my I'm always going to turn towards Transportation as the solution on

113things I know that two-thirds of our missions are coming from buildings I get that that's a big piece of this but we do have full control over uh almost full control over our transportation infrastructure in town uh there are some mot controlled roadways but um we've asked the city to to work with mot to take control of those but thinking about if there's more opportunity for um there um I will always be supportive of of those options that that might be get might get generated but so I think there's there's real opportunity to think there about um you know the overlap between um our different different plans whether that's a20 with our um uh Transportation plan or the development of our new comprehensive plan um that is a huge piece that's coming up this spring

114with the land juice and that is going to be challenging um one digging into the details of that's important and obviously you're all Commissioners you just can only take on so much as well but just throwing out there some of the things that we're that we're struggling with um so you know what another are is just simply that um the comprehensive plan um my understanding is you know there's there's going to be a lot in it um and we're going to be wrestling with that the community is going to be wrestling with that and there's going to be need I think for um you know uh I guess we're just going to have to see what comes out of those recommendations but um encouraging folks to kind of to look at that um is another

115area of overlap that really impacts our our energy usage so you know I think for for Council um we're going to be looking a lot of our time this coming year is going to be um on the comprehensive land use plan that's a lot where a lot of the focus is going to be on some of those changes and so that might be an area um to be spending and thinking about um more time um and then of course as Dr Schultz mentioned uh the development of the seu that is that's something that is is going to be um moving forward over the next 18 months and hopefully launching then um you know that won't be an OSI activity um when it actually moves to to launching is my understanding and that's a little bit

116you know the running of utility is really outside of osa's responsibilities but I it's still a huge part of of moving our our energy um goals forward so that's what's that's what we're that's what I'm thinking of I think that's a lot of what's on our minds um and you know thinking about how that might work into the work plan next year what elements of that are bite-sized chunks that the commission might be able to take take on um you know certainly starting I think with the challenges that Dr stz mentioned are a good place thank you um come council member Mal did you want to add anything to that as well uh I was just gonna underscore uh something council member Brigg said about you know just the comprehensive land use plan you know

117it's my understanding that we haven't done this in a while in the city and what we do this time around may be the plan that's in place for several decades so it's important that we get it right and that it includes you know a lot of forward-looking things when it comes to energy environment and things like that so just to just to underscore that if it wasn't already a high priority great thank you um commissioner mki I had a question uh for clarification purposes uh as your Le on to the environmental commission we went through this same process in our meeting last week and uh my understanding um from that meeting was uh a couple of points first of all that the council is going to be looking at recommendations um for policies directed at

118the state level and finalizing those priorities in January and so the environmental commission focused in our meeting last Thursday exclusively on policies that were directed at State Legislative um and let's say related kind of uh policies that could be enacted um at the state level either at the department level or through leg legislative action not at policies that might be something that we would be doing um directed at the city or maybe the county or something like that so one of the things that um I would hope we get clarification for for the discussion going forward is what are we talking about tonight and um if it's at directed at the state level then um what I would suggest is what you implied earlier um chair harp is that we look at other policy kinds

119of topics directed at let's say the more local level in our January meeting and where we talk about topics that we might take up in um calendar year 2025 is is that an accurate um assessment um and one of the things if so one of the things that we did is we looked at the current um or let's say the past set of policy agenda items um and there's a half dozen or so of those from the energy commission as well as a half dozen from the environmental commission and interestingly enough the ones that made it into that list from the environmental commission were almost all climate and energy related even though they don't deal with climate and energy they deal with water air um Solid Waste um things like that um so uh what

120do we actually doing here tonight as we continue the discussion yeah so so th this part of this part of the agenda was was just a um some time that we wanted to set aside after the challenges and opportunities also to just touch base with council members on the priorities of council sort of moving forward into the next year we have a next the next item on the agenda is feedback from the energy Commission on policy recommendations that I believe then the city can take uh or city council can take to to move forward on those and those might be ones elsewhere at the at the state agenda so we're going to get there in just a second um that's great to hear that there was some overlap um and um uh but I think

121this you know this will be useful there may be you know probably what we're hearing are more local locally driven ones that I think we can fold into that January discussion of the agenda items um that we want to take up and and really focus on moving forward and so this is really helpful just in our sort of us setting the stage for that and and I'll just um I'll mention now if you all start thinking about what hopefully you're all making notes so that when we have that discussion next month we're able to sort of surface those and I'll follow up with an email between now and then so we can have a productive discussion in January any other um clarifications or or questions um for for Council Members um at this stage okay

122this is you know this is of course a dynamic dynamic disc discussion particularly with council members and so I this won't be the last opportunity we just want to make sure to touch base um in a in a fairly explicit way on the agenda around these things because it was so tied to the OSI presentation on a20 and sort of the successes and challenges and also as we're looking ahead to some of the next um the the next months ahead in terms of um our agenda as well yeah and I um just to chime in a little bit more about what I mentioned earlier I feel a little guilty when I suggest that you should take on everything that the city is doing like land use and transportation you know like I just want to

123note that these are these are areas of overlap um oftentimes you know when the Planning Commission which is really tasked with focusing on land use um and it's their charge to be moving for the um recommendations the comprehensive land use plan and bringing you know that final plan to council for adoption but um they're looking at it through certain lenses right and so there's some opportunity to to be getting feedback for us to be getting feedback um as council members that you know may go into um might be might be able to be feedback that goes into that process as well um on the transportation side obviously people come to Transportation with a lot of different um through a lot of different lenses um but a lot of times the the conversations in Transportation Commission

124are very safety focused because it's it's a um a vision zero based Transportation plan about ending um roadway fatalities and and injuries and so you know think just making sure that we're you um also taking the opportunity to think about how our transportation Network really advances our energy goals I know OSI is doing that but it's an opportunity at times for for the commission as well great thank you commissioner coven Garcia I um you you bring up the the topic of transportation and it just so I've been in this this phase of our meeting right now and thinking that um I need to like get cut up on the information the statistics the data of what's going on in the city as far as the vision zero um injuries and fatalities like how are we

125doing um and um it's as far as being able to contribute to conversation uh more effectively um and um the same goes with with occupancy for housing and high density housing and cost and things like that for you know like temporary rentals and things like that and how how is how is that being track and and with um all this development what what's in place you know to make sure that that you know housing is either being owned or rented in a way that's being fully utilized um and accessible so that's what's on my mind right now um as far as like in informing myself um and then engaging based on that okay thank you commissioner colen Garcia that's great um I think it's one of the challenges is there's a lot of there's a

126lot of information and we're often time to trying to process and and and nudge out the this the technical details and the policy details and I think um trying to process that and and make and pull forward questions um and comments and perhaps even Frameworks that are that are going to be useful um and so if if there's anything I think in terms of how Commissioners or how this body can can do that and sort of um package that in ways that are useful and helpful for council members I think we we're often times open um and excited to hear in ways that we can be more effective in sort of uh putting that forward as well so um please please let us know um I want to move on to the next agenda item

127which is the policy recommendations for fiscal um fiscal year 25 and um perhaps Joe would you mind framing this a little bit um I think for for commission members if you don't mind um I think and and council members you may you may have a a a good handle on this as well part of what we're trying to do is is put forward what kinds of policy priorities the energy commission might have for Council and for the city to to work on going forward in the next the next year um and so we wanted to open it up for uh discussion comments um questions or clarifications about that but also ideas that you all might have yeah and I will I also don't have a ton of information on this so I want to make

128sure I'm getting it right as well as with council member Briggs especially if you have any um other understanding of what it should be my understanding was it was things for the um to Advocate at the state level but if that is incorrect please let me know no then I'll let you take over because I just got like an email three sentences that's all I knew yes so yes sorry um you are correct that it is for at the state level um so the this is from the policy committee um you know in that I'm I no longer serve as a lean to the um Council policy committee but a couple of years back by um the process changed a little bit there used to be a long list of sort of very specific um

129legislative policy goals um and sort of uh down to you bills that might be uh might be of interest to to pass and that it's that was deemed to not be as useful to our lobbyist in Lancing and so it's a little bit um um grouped a little bit more broadly now in terms of that um that policy agenda um in terms of what our objectives are is my understanding for for a lobbyist but um yes I think if there's we all know that this things have shifted in Lancing in terms of some of the opportunities there um but certainly um you know I think that this is this is an opportunity to to to provide some guidance to the policy committee around what the energy commission thinks that our legislative agenda should look like

130as related to energy um in Lancing this coming year um you know and they will take that feedback and provide it you know discuss it and provide it to the lobbyist and you know try to work in um elements into into our sort of legislative agenda and obviously that gets shaped by what is what's moving and what's possible and um what the opportunities are this coming year had some understanding but not the full so appreciate that and I will I'll say it for in terms of like process just for um you know quick like um commissioner mki was mentioning just to give us sense of I'm just going to flash it on this screen real quick but um for what it looked like for you know what um the environmental commission did um just so

131we have too buttons um you know just kind of have just kind of a list of some of the different things here and so what I'll do is I'll be taking a list on you know my screen I can share the screen if we want otherwise so we can see each other's faces I'll just kind of keep taking those notes um and then at the end we can share it talk about if anything should change or anything like that and then we can vote if we agree with those General suggestions things like that um but I'll also pass it over to M if you have other um how that process went for you all during that discussion so uh what we did with uh Council liaison input is we agreed that we had very little

132time um so we have in the environmental commission three active three or four active working groups and what we were advised to do was to whittle down our list that long list to three to roughly five ideas so each one of those working groups is meeting to take those lists and to whittle those down and to provide them um through our staff liaison um back to essentially Council to to um provide a very very shortened and broader list so that's that's the the the tact we're taking um it seems reasonable to me also it seems reasonable given um the political situation at the state level and that we're probably not going to get through lots and lots and lots of environmental or energy or climate bills we're probably going to be having to pick and

133choose what we do I think Mike can give us a lot of uh good good guidance here but that's what that's the the path we're taking forward and we wanted to make sure we had the input before the meeting in January where Council finalizes the list yeah the only thing I want to note in terms of timing um what I got is we they needed the um items for consideration by January 3D which unfortunately with our schedule this you know from the time I we got that uh that request and when that meeting or that needs to be put in this is our only time we are meeting uh in between those things so apologies for the timing on all of that but just noting that's how it's coming about so in terms of process

134one thing that might be feasible is for us to share o policy recommendations if if um we can um discuss any or share any top ones here in this meeting now but if any come up in the next week or two to to share them with the staff leaz on Joe um who might be able to compile them and and feed that back to the the energy commission um and if we we may not have time to discuss them but we could certainly forward that list to to the other um committee as well yeah and also noting like staff are also working on compiling um you know these different topics and such and so I can okay pass things along from people on on your behalf kind of a deal okay and I think it

135might be helpful if you know we shared out uh what was adopted last year so you can kind of see that format um and folks can and can think that way that might be a little bit more useful um after you leave the meeting I was just looking on legar and for some reason I I cannot find it right now but okay we we'll we'll do that then with with with Commissioners as well we'll we'll try and follow up with that as as a way of um soliciting anything else um is there any are there any items that uh any Commissioners would like to share right now or and maybe they're they're sort of Topline um items for for those policy recommendations at the moment commiss mki I'll throw one idea out on the table

136but again I think um commissioner Burk is probably the expert here um at least within within this group um the one uh and this is now getting pretty specific so this is running a little bit against what I heard from council member Briggs um the one thing that one thing that really stood out to me that didn't make the the the package of energy bills that was passed last year is community solar I don't know why that was it seems to me that that's the one um thing that looking forward if you were looking for any support across the aisle it might get some libertarian leaning Republican support and if you think of how people who live in condos and Rental uh units can share in doing something that relates to solar it's that's really

137their one major Avenue the the problem is obviously that the IUS DTE CMS are probably going to fight against it so I don't know if it should given that should be high on the list um and the only other thing that I would throw out there um and maybe this is something that um Council aison or or or Joe can comment on and that is um you know Community Choice aggregation was um something that figured prominently in the a20 plan it's never really been pursued um even with the the change there for a couple of years where Democrats had a trifecta um it's also somewhat libertarian leaning in the sense that it gives communities a choice but it doesn't Ram anything down their throat so those are the two things you know we have a

138short list to me those particularly the community solar thing Rises to the Top If CCA is is been abandoned by people who in the know then then we should probably drop it so I'll let others talk that that's really all I have to share I can follow up a bit there commissioner mki thanks for uh saying kind things about me uh I appreciate that um I I think you're spot on with Community solar um essentially the I think the reason it didn't get through in the large package that was passed last year is because the utility companies were not willing to allow it to happen um and I don't think that Dynamic has changed uh going forward but um Community solar in the past and I think going forward is specifically bipartisan the initial proposals

139on it and the proposals before the legislature this session were introduced by Democrats and Republicans um and so it's not just a democratic issue um I do think there are still lots of active coalitions and interest groups working on that and thinking that maybe in the future there's some roads to Victory so I think that makes a lot of sense to to include um the other thing I would kind of maybe pair in with that um are enabling uh micro grids and uh Ral power plants um know the same thing is community solar um right now our state law does not allow for virtual power plants um essentially like using batteries and storage uh integrated with the the grid um and then micro grids like islanding if you've got say a critical facility or um

140you know institutional buildings that want to be separate from DTE you know some of those things might be a little moot now that we've got the once the seu is up and running but in in the interim I think those are still important so um uh the other thing there there are discussions about incentives for behind the the meter uh solar in storage um again I don't think that most of these things will actually pass unfortunately the utilities are still very strong in their lobbying and their political spending um and I that's not going to change despite the you know kind of partisan makeup going forward um but those I think would be the things on the power generation side that would make the most sense and be the most helpful to the city I've

141got a couple other things but I've talked a lot so why don't I back off see if other folks have ideas and then I'll jump back in all right hearing none um so I guess I talked about Power Generation Um on the building side of things um we uh Missy mentioned uh getting the state to you know enable a pilot around going beyond their building codes um I know there's a coalition that is working to draft legislation that would One enable stretch codes allow municipalities to go further than the state energy code um and two it would make the state adopt energy codes more frequently I think folks might know from we had like a a presentation on this at some point in the past year but Michigan is still operating on 2015 building toads

142um we're struggling to adopt even the 2021 codes at this point so U we are really behind the f ball and so this legislation you know if adopted would require the state to update every three years and make sure this doesn't happen in the future um similar deal I think the Home Builders Association will go hard against that they are a power powerful lobby but I think they're less powerful than the utility companies and so there's maybe more opportunity there um and then there's some kind of pie in the sty ideas around buildings there's a coalition working to uh essentially get the state to establish a whole home retrofit program so instead of like doing weatherization here and doing Michigan solar for all here and doing energy assistance over there just kind of putting it

143all together and having a direct pot of money that funds all this so then you can do the health and safety fixes uh and then do the Energy Efficiency and then solarize and Electrify and kind of you know do it all as one process in package instead of being siloed in all these different departments again that's challenging um in its politics and um the inertia with state government it also require a lot of money but I think that's a like North Star to aim towards and there's an active Coalition um working towards that that the city can you know Le on so it doesn't have to own all that work uh there's one other thing I'll mention um the state gets funding from the federal government from the Department of energy for uh Li Heap

144the lowincome heating and energy assistance program certain percentage of that goes to the state's weatherization program each year beond it's lower than the percentage that goes to weatherization in other states across the Midwest um so like Minnesota and Illinois they put I want to say it's like bubble percentages of the funding into weatherization um in Michigan we normally put a single digit into weatherization and the rest goes to directly just helping people pay their energy bills and that's important um but you know reducing people's uh energy use making their buildings more efficient is like the long-term solution versus a Band-Aid that's just oneoff payments uh for energy so um the state you know could be essentially through the budget process told to allocate more to weatherization or a higher percentage I think that's something that

145potentially could still be on the table and is maybe a little more lwh hanging fruit any those were the top things I thought of I could come up with the huge La laundry list as well but I figured with the impending grid lock at the state level that might not be so useful and um M briggs' comments I think uh nailed that on the head too so leave it there it's great uh thank you commissioner Ritz so I think what maybe we'll do is um if there aren't any additional um items that anyone wants to share at this time if you would all um or if you do have some please share them with Joe um who who I think can compile them and we will um and I think we'll try to compile them

146and then share them all back out with the commission and then I think uh I imagine staff are probably since they're also working to compile other things um maybe can integrate with those as well if that makes sense with that I think one of the things because that if we can get a resolution for lack of a better term from the commission would it be helpful to send you know I share what I have right now just check on those things make sure I worded things correctly and then share that as a you know resolution from this and then I can also continue to add things as we go but that way there's something officially coming from the Commission in the in lie of everything else coming in that so um I said I was

147trying to quickly capture them I'm sure I did not word these correctly um so let me just share real quick and then please tell me what to fix that I did not adequately right zoom in for so that looks perfect for the items I I discussed thank you and good job from from my side as well I I think these need to be put through Jo a filter that maybe or Missy or others have in terms of uh what's realistic or not and where we're going to have the greatest uh um resistance as well as um you know for the second point for example you know I don't even know if that's really something that's that's really desirable anymore given the seu and things like that but I think this you've captured act accurately what

148what at least I discuss too okay yeah go ahead I'm not one change and someone correct me if I'm wrong it we may want to add um the stretch codes for both the state and for both the building and energy codes and then if you'd like um we can vote to approve these as our U recommendations um obviously up to yall move second vote all that kind of stuff but in terms of next steps do I hear a motion to um move towards a vote on on these that moved second that so moved and seconded by um commissioner mki and commissioner burwitz um council member Briggs yeah and I just wanted to um kind of rise up or raise up what um commissioner mki had just mentioned around um thinking about Advan in terms of

149these recommendations being adopted that um it's useful for OSI to take a look and make you know make sure there's not any conflicts with existing OSI or you know what's what what they're recommending putting forward I think that things that sort of um are coming here and also coming from OSI might be the what might end up going to um policy committees would that make sense to folks here I don't want to try to block anything that anybody's suggesting okay I think there's agreement yeah I think there's broad agreement that that um perhaps both with the prioritization and also um how how those might be filtered is what I'm hearing from commissioner Commissioners um commissioner mki yeah a quick question along the lines of the statement from council member Briggs uh I'm wondering where in

150this process if at all and maybe OSI does this particularly just in the climate and energy space there is an attempt to align our priorities with potential partner organizations that are doing lobing at the state level like the Sierra Club like um Great Lakes renewable energy Association I know they just had their annual meeting unfortunately I wasn't able to go um but it seems to me if if we want this to be impactful it would make sense that we not only align our recommendations with osis but we look at what OSI is potentially recommending and seeing do these align with those of of partner organizations and what they're putting forward um so that we're applying resources to basically that you know the the same top uh grouping of of uh of lobbying uh efforts so

151I I just throw that out there Joe you might check um whether that's done at some point in the process maybe the lobbyist does that I don't know yeah I can't speak on my end but I know there's definitely work on that I can check in on that and similarly um said we're we're all in the process this week as well compiling all our recommendations from staff to and then working on that as a team to do all that as well so that'll be working in this process as well yeah and then I imagine there's work done with others there I just don't know where in the process that is one sorry one clarification do we need to add um to this resolution something about um making it flexible for OSI to sort of prioritize

152or filter F to them um from my opinion I'd say it's okay as is just because this is the recommendations from the you know the commission itself um who you know advises OSI advises as well so it's kind of you know okay we can put something in there if it'd be helpful but in terms of like is it required it it's okay as is okay all right well then why don't we move towards a vote um and um all those in favor of the policy recommendations um as described please raise your hand and say I I hi hi all those opposed please say no seeing none opposed the motion passes and these are some recommendations that we can then forward on to OSI and the policy committee as well thank you okay we will move

153on um we have one two few more agenda items um but I think these will go relatively quickly um next up is the establishing the 2025 energy commission calendar and I'll just pass it off quickly to Joe for that yep just uh noting annually we have to establish our calendar nothing has changed it's just it's still the the second Tuesday of each month at 6 PM um if anyone has any egregious issues with the second Tuesday of each month at 6m let that be known otherwise happy to just move forward and continue doing business as uh as we've been questions are clarifications okay uh moving on to our next agenda item um we would like vote to we would have to vote to approve that is there a motion to vote to approve um the

154energy commission calendar for 2025 so moved commissioner burit is our second Comm commissioner culvin Garcia thank you all those in favor of approving the 2025 energy commission Calendar please raise your hand and say I hi hi all those opposed please raise your hand and say no seeing none opposed the motion C passes thank you um next item of business is the um is a resolution to hold the January 14th energy commission meeting in person um and the goal was to try to uh pull the energy commission together in person and conduct that meeting the uh plan for the agenda for that meeting is um ATT tenative plan to cover the the um benchmarking ordinance and and review that and also to discuss the agenda uh of the year ahead and and prioritize some of those

155items based on the discussions that we're having today but aside from that um Joe I believe there were up to four energy commission meetings that we could have in person per year um if I'm not mistaken um but we'd like to try to um meet in person and um I'll open up for any questions or clarifications on that I believe this would be held in where would this be held Joe we'd be able to do council chambers for this council chambers for for this as well so I guess while we're discussing this um I'll add in here um we had like an inperson happy hour as a commission at some point last year I was on vacation so I wasn't able to join and so selfishly I would love to do another one of those

156in 2025 and if we're meeting in person maybe a few of us could just stick around for beers or go across the street after or something so I would just throw that out there all right that's the most popular topic of the evening can we get a vote for beers is that is that allowed is that how that works I had one question about meeting at council chambers doesn't the Planning Commission meet in person the same night we do at 7 o'clock in council chambers they do but the way it is structured now is their if they have every other meeting is when they are in person and council chambers the other week is they virtual in working sessions and so the the overlap for that one is a working session that will be virtual

157so we're okay for for this one sometimes it overlaps weirdly but this one we're okay and for future reference if it were we would still be able to meet we would meet in the city council basement which has all the or not the City Hall basement which has all the same capabilities minus the fancy room and all that okay hearing no more questions or um clarifications uh is there a motion to vote on the resolution as written motion CH Hans sorry motion to vote yeah is there a second I'll second thank you commissioner Cen Garcia okay all those in favor of holding the January 14th 2025 energy commission meeting in person please raise your hand and say I hi all those post please say no the motion carries thank you I will get just for

158refence I'll get everything set up and I'll send out information on how to do all the different things and get there and Logistics and all that sooner rather than later so be on the lookout for that if anyone has any questions thank you okay staff report yeah um so um yeah we ended up talking about a little bit during Missy's presentation U but did just want to give an update on some of the green rental housing stuff because we talked about it recently had the resolution support um like we're talking about I've been in just kind of concept communication with um legal and other City departments on just the various things like this we mentioned it does cross stretch across a couple different city departments various codes and all of that uh so we've just

159been working really hard to make sure we have everything as buttoned up as we possibly can you know Crossing te's dotting eyes all of that to make sure that we have a program that as we discussed here achieves our goals while also being a program that is um you know legally allowable and enforcable so we're we've been working really hard on that the goal is to have that going to counsil in in early next year ideally in January so working really hard to get that done with that in mind um also like Missy mentioned the Ambassador me Ambassador applications are now open for the seventh cohort of a20 ambassadors to gain increased knowledge tools and resources to discuss sustainability broadly and specific options that you and your community can Implement to advance carbon neutrality uh

160community members are welcome to learn more and interview in person on December 17th from 5: to 7: p.m at the downtown an Harbor District Library branch December 18th from 10: to 11:30 a.m. at the dwood library uh branch and December 18th from 12: to 2 PM at malet Creek Branch and then December 19th 5: to 7: pm at the Westgate Branch you can also learn more and apply online at OSI a2gov.org ambassadors um lastly less energy Focus but still um kind of in that vein we are working to do an a20 Community cook book uh we're currently um compiling um recipes from the community for this and so if you enjoy cooking uh with local seasonal ingredients have creative ways of using food scraps or have a tasty plant-based recipe you love you can contribute

161recipes and sustainable food tips to the a20 community cookbook at OSI a2gov.org cookbook that is all from me at this time unless folks have questions on any of that um report from other Commissioners commissions environmental commission I mentioned that we talked about the uh policy priorities um from the uh environmental commission's perspective um and I mentioned what our processes and how that's being finalized um the other thing that was discussed was uh there was a presentation of the annual Solid Waste um status um reported on was a number of different action um I'd like to take the opportunity to point out um to our Council liaison that um after the meeting I looked at the Public Services uh uh performance dashboard and the only information that's there on Solid Waste by the way in the

162presentation no no Trend information was presented on tonnage diversion tonnage per person Etc and the only information that's posted on public services website is five years old and if you look at the uh osi's 820 dashboard there's a section on circular economy that has one graph only that is just a snapshot of tonnages from last year so uh there's opportunity for improvement in in that regard but those are the two topics that we discussed in the meeting thank you um and any updates from Council Noone okay great um we will turn to our last opportunity for public input oh sorry are there any other updates from Commissioners that anyone else wants to share before we do that none okay um this is the last opportunity for people to speak for up to three minutes if

163you're watching nctn please call 888 78899 or 877 853 5247 and enter meeting ID 956 8715 7876 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed and City staff will s callers that raise their hand uh using last three digits at their phone number um please press star n on your phone to indicate your desire to speak and when speaking please move to a quiet area um so we may hear you and please state your name and address at the beginning of the comments don't have any callers with hands raised so back to you okay thank you um are there we've had a few uh items for the next agenda shared um over email and um we're also planning as I mentioned previously to tely take up the uh uh presentation around

164the benchmarking ordinance um and then also to look at agendas um agenda items for the year ahead um so if you have agenda items um please mention them now please feel free to email uh the the um the chair Vice chair and and and staff member Jang around um those uh agenda items as well um but if anybody has any hot hot items that they want to share right now that would be great I'm curious to learn about um any battery storage like grid scale battery storage projects that might be um occurring in an arbor or in the vicinity of an arbor you know onsite or offsite okay if if that's available and just a quick note we haven't um yet settled or organized our our process for sort of the agenda items for um

165the next meeting um part one one possibility we might do is similar to what we did last year um where we try to identify all of those but then we also try to do uh uh some some prioritization of those as well to get a sort of clear sense of how to proceed um and also sort of what's floating floating to the top based on some of this discussion and prior discussions as well and sort of what's resonating um so we will um pull that together over the course of the next month with any luck and share that and other items out with you over email in advance but if if you're able to um share any of those by email or any other items um please please do okay thank you everyone no I

166just wanted to say thank you Joe for queuing up the benchmarking uh topic for January know uh handful of us have been asking about that for a while so just very much appreciate that and uh Qui update you and Missy were able to give earlier too um the other thing that popped into mind um at one point we were discussing like incentives and you know um sticks carrots and sticks around um electrified buildings or you know ping against gas and buildings um and I know the city administrator had of come up with a proposal uh with deage or classification um and so would be interested in revisiting that at some point if there's still interest or the city administrator is still thinking about that and just to follow up I will follow also um offline

167with um I know we're we're still sort of thinking about the the vacancies on the energy commission and also sort of what that looks like moving ahead and I'll I'll follow up um with staff and council members offline over hopefully over the next few weeks too to sort of touch base on on where we're at with that um as well um and we may be able to um discuss that in the New Year too so I'll add that to the agenda as well I know that I know that's been brought up a few times on the last couple meetings so I just want you to haven't lost track of that um okay um I think with that sorry is was is there another question I just want to say thanks to everyone for what's been

168I think a fairly busy year on a number of fronts and um but I also think we've been um reasonably productive and we've had a lot of good uh good discussions and presentations as as well so I want to thank you all for um being here and and being present in the sort of in the work that you've done as part of the commission and and helping um council members as well so thanks everyone and uh stay tuned and we'll follow we'll follow up over the next the next few weeks thanks happy holidays all okay it is now 7 and I declare the energy commission meeting adjourned happy holidays stay safe all that thanks everyone see you next time