Ann Arbor Energy Commission 12/12/23

001good evening it's currently 6:01 um and my name is Claire McKenna I'm the chair of the in Arbor energy commission as chair I'm calling this meeting to order and I am participating from an arbor uh welcome to the December 12th 2023 electronic meeting of the energy commission we will conduct this meeting like in-person meetings Commissioners during roll call please indicate your current location also during the meeting please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings and also meet your phone when not speaking uh we're going to have a f- minute break today so just uh so you know after after our speaker share we will go to a fem minute break so you can plan for that um public comment will be via telephone only please uh to speak during any

002public comment opportunities there are two tonight please call one of the following two toll-free numbers 877 5247 or 888 78899 and enter the meeting ID 956 8718 7876 on your phone this information is also available on the published agenda and the Public Notices section of the city website on the broadcast of this meeting on CTN Channel Chann 16 AT&T channel 999 and online at a2gov.org slatch CN Joe would you please provide the land acknowledgement for us yes once I find it there it is um I acknowledge that the land the city of an arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the Ana shanab including Odawa oju and badmi and W do peoples I further acknowled that our city stands like almost all property in the United States on lands obtained generally in

003unconscious 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 of 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 so much and do we have any known or excused absence today yep uh commissioner SRA and commissioner Smith will be unable to make it I also heard from um council member Rina that he is on his way back from meeting so he might be joining a little late great and can you please take the role yep um commissioner burwitz here from my home in an arbor council member Briggs here in an arbor

004um commissioner coven Garcia actually they might have messaged they were also not I need to check my not um forgive me um commissioner Hans not seeing um okay um Vice chair harp here from my home an aror uh commissioner 11 here excuse me here from my homeor uh chair McKenna here from an arbor missioner msky you're from my home in an arbor commissioner overc uh you're muted but I see you're here I am here but I'm in San Francisco um council member Rina here in an arbor and then uh commissioner zlan here in an arbor all right Cherry you got a quorum thank you so much and we'll move to approval of the agenda is there a motion to approve the agenda as posted thanks commissioner overpack and a second thank you Vice chair harp

005um Commissioners please raise your hand if you want to propose any changes or discuss issues with the agenda tonight okay uh seeing No Hands raised all those in favor of approving the agenda as posted please raise your hand and say I I great and that's unanimous approval the agenda is approved and moving moving forward to the minutes approval is there a motion to approve the minutes in a second harp and commissioner Mery thank you so much um is there any uh anyone who wants to propose any changes to the to the meeting minutes from last last meeting okay seeing none those in favor of approving the minutes as posted please raise your hand and say I I I thank you so much Anonymous approval of the minutes the minutes are approved okay we're going to

006move to our first opportunity for public input tonight this is an opportunity to speak for up to 3 minutes if you are watching on CTN please call 888 788 0099 or 877 853 5247 and enter the meeting ID 7876 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the video feed City staff will select colors 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 you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak and when speaking please move to quiet area and leave any background sounds so that we may hear you please take your name and address at the beginning of your comments Joe is

007anybody on the line yep um let's see caller ending in thank you Mr Lang and chair M Kenna Ken Garber 28 hav Court I look forward to today's presentations but I'm disappointed that the carbon impact user fee which the commission first considered back in August hasn't come back for second reading uh to remind you this would be a fee on any new construction with a gas connection for primary Heating in the amount of $190 per metric ton CO2 equivalent emissions which is epa's proposed social cost of carbon in August your main concern was the inexact calculation of building emissions which the ordinance tagged to iecc building type specific energy use uh some Commissioners wanted more precise energy modeling um my view is that an estimate is good enough because the ordinance is mainly designed not

008to collect from developers who build with gas but rather to shift the incentive structure so that they build with gas in the first place this issue isn't going away if anything it's getting worse last month Planning Commission approved two gas burning developments phase two of the sartorious biotech complex on Research Park Drive which I calculate would will put 700 7800 metric tons CO2 equivalent emissions in the atmosphere every year over the life of the building just from burning gas that assumes energy use intensity of 250 kobus per square foot per year as in Phase One commission also approved a Marth Hotel on Hon across from City Hall its public spaces 30% of the building will have gas heat emitting about 153 tons carbon each year from gas and next Monday city council will probably approve

009phase two of The Village project off Pontiac Trail 120 gas burning apartments that will add 680 tons annually I to me it's insane to be putting fossil fuel infrastructure in our new buildings they'll either emit for the rest of the century or will require expensive retrofitting and CO2 sticks around as you know heating the planet for centuries we need to be electrifying our vast existing building stock not putting gas in new buildings to get out of a hole first stop digging here's how dire things are a paper last month in the journal Nature of climate change put our remaining carbon budget for 1. 5 degrees CI at 250 gigatons that's for a 50% chance we're currently emitting 40 gigatons a year going up by the way so in just over six years just over six

010years we'll blow past 1.5 degrees you know I think we should forget carbon neutral by 2050 or 20 240 or even 2030 let's stop talking in those terms or in terms of targets at all that just enables delay we run out of time for that just because the world is doubling down on fossil fuels as we've seen at cop 28 doesn't mean that Ann Arbor has to time thank you uh no further callers okay thank you Ken for calling in we hear you I think that that is a great segue to our fabulous speakers that we have with us today um Quinton I hope that that that you heard that uh that comment and know you've heard many like that in your work um so I'll I'll share a brief intro and definitely feel free

011to add some info as you introduce yourself but Quinton zervan is joining us from Cambridge Mass um former city council member and a leader in Sustainable Building Development um he and I worked briefly together um during my time in in the Boston area and um he's been instrumental in the campaign and movement disallowing natural gas and new construction in the Boston area and in uh State policy in Massachusetts so without further Ado please uh take the floor Quinton thank you much thanks for inviting me I'm I'm still a city counselor until January 4th okay yeah sorry about that no worries still have a couple of weeks of City counciling in fact what your caller just spoke about is very gerine because I'm still trying to push one more amendment to get new buildings to not

012burn deaths but I'll take a few steps back so back in 2013 when I was just a regular citizen we filed a zoning petition asking new construction commercial building to be fossil fuel Free Net Zero and we were denied at that time 10 years ago but that led to the formation of a net zero action pass Force created a net zero action plan that was adopted by City Council in 2015 that's a legislative road map that lays out different Milestones along the way to getting to Net Zero and one of those was to address our existing building which we we were finally able to do this summer when we passed amendments to the building energy disclosure orance so the building energy use disclosure ordinance was the first recommendation out of the med passport and that

013became law in 2014 and that requires the building over a certain size to report on their energy use and Emissions on an annual basis the Amendments that we adopted the summer require emissions reductions for existing buildings so buildings over 100,000 square feet have to get to Net Zero by 2035 buildings between 25 uh 6,000 and 100,000 sare feet has to be met Zero by 2050 and they have to meet um annual reductions along the way there are some Provisions in there including an alternative compliance fee of $234 a ton so that if the building is unable to remove the actual emissions they can pay the alternative compliance fee and still be Net Zero under the law because we can't you know of course compel them to remove the equipment then in terms of new construction

014we were able to be part of a a new state law called the fossil fuel free demonstration program that allows 10 communities in math phic including Cambridge to require fossil fuel free construction starting next year unfortunately that state law has an exemption for biomedical facilities which is why I'm still actively trying to negotiate further amendment that would require those new buildings to be met Zero by 2030 because without that they can legally continue to pollute until 2035 or 2015 depending on the size of the new building so you know like your caller I I completely agreed that it it makes zero sense to build fossil fuel infrastructure going forward but unfortunately that's still the game plan in most places including even in C but that's a very quick high level overview of what we did

015and then as part of what I call the green New Deal for Cambridge we also passed zoning that required for the first time commercial buildings new construction to give a full life cycle analysis and accounting of their emissions including for the construction itself and the building material and we also passed a green jobs ordinance that requires the city to support GRE jobs trainings for our residents so that particularly low-income residents marginalized community members can get training to participate in the green job Industries because we know that we're going to need that Workforce to actually decarbonize our economy and this creates Economic Opportunity as well that's fantastic is that all you wanted to share for now I'm sure many questions right yeah for have to answer any questions all the all the documents and ordinance language

016of on our website Happ to follow up and great so let's open the floor up for questions does anyone have questions comments commissioner mki I wanted to make sure I captured the key points um the requirement is net zero by for what for new buildings existing buildings and new buildings I didn't catch that exactly and then that's coupled with a compliance fee of how many dollars per ton if you could repeat those that would be great sorry yeah no worries so so the the requirements are Net Zero by 2035 for all buildings exting buildings as well as new construction currently unless my Amendment passes and that's for commercial buildings over 100,000 square feet and and then for commercial buildings between 50,000 and 100,000 square feet the requirement is Net Zero by 2050 but the Net

017Zero definition is is net zero emissions and that includes potentially a certain carbon offsets and it also includes an alternative compliance fee of $234 a ton in case the building owner is unable to to remove the actual emissions they can still be compli by paying that fee on an annual basis thank you is is that basically modeled in a sense on um the zero code are you familiar familiar with the zero code where um it's the possibility of achieving Net Zero with uh energy generation onsite that's um fully recognized and then depending on where it is um it's multiplied by a factor that goes down to 02 if generation is done elsewhere is is there provision like that in your ordinance no so we we spell out what uh types of um renewable energy can

018be subtracted from your energy accounting right so if you're purchasing 100% renewable electricity that meets our definition then you just subtract that out when you're calculating your the $234 a ton comes from Boston's comp similar ordinance called Berto and that is based on the average estimated cost of removing a ton of emissions from a building in the Bost one last quick question um does this apply also to emissions from heating the building um sa from natural gas it does as well yeah so so the um energy disclosure requirements required that all energy consumed in the building as well as from the grid are you know disclosed and then the emissions are calculated based on that energy consumption including onsite okay thank you go ahead Comm overpen yeah thank you very much for spending time with

019us very impressive what you're doing I would love to know uh your opinion at this stage uh what what could you do better if you were all of a sudden given a magic wand in other words not things that are completely maybe magic isn't the right word but if you really were given a a little more power than you've had I mean how could we how could we do better do you have some ideas so we make the most of our efforts right so you know as I mentioned earlier one of the remaining loopholes in our in our framework right now is the new buildings because the state we have to get special permission from the state to require fossil fuel free construction because that impacts the building codes and those are preempted by the

020state so so the state made available a um stretch energy code as well as a what's called A specialized stretch energy code and the spe specialized stretch energy code which we then adopted includes Pro Provisions for fossil fuel free construction and under this separate state law then we are allowed to require fossil fuel free construction for only those parts of the code can be used starting next year that would result in a fossil fuel free building but that law also exempts biomedical facilities so starting next year once we are fully approved to this program if you build a house in Cambridge you cannot put in gas infrastruct if you build an apartment complex you cannot put in gas infrastructure if you build an office building you cannot put gas infrastructure but if you build a

021biolab or a hospital you can put in gas and of course biolabs are the primary emitters of Cambridge because we have a thriving bio uh industry and so I'm pushing an amendment right now that would close that loophole not completely because you know the building owners are telling us that on the coldest days of the year they will still have to burn some postive fuels okay fine so maybe we can exempt those days but the rest of the time we shouldn't be burning any F fuels the the point being that we really have to relentlessly eradicate fossil fuel combustion particularly for new construction because we can there's a a 350,000 foot building that's going up literally down the street from my house that is 96% all electric they have geothermal Wells they have solar panels

022they have a stor seat pumps they will not be burning fossil fuels in the regular course of buiness it's only when the temperature goes below 8 degrees fenhe that they're going to kick in their gas boiler to to heat the building so we can already do that today right it's being built in our city today so we should be requiring that level of fossil fuel eradication even in you know biochemical biomedical buildings where you know they have to do a lot of air changes and so they have a higher energy requirement but they can still meet more strength and standards than than what is you're he you're on mute forgive me so that sounds wonderful and so there's really no wiggle room except for the biomedical exemption right unfortunately those are the biggest the biggest

023pooters yeah no but I like the way you're thinking about it other's let them use it on the very coldest days and and uh thank you very much yeah welcome I will say that you know that amendment is hanging by a thread we're actively negotiating as we speak and the final vote will be on on Monday evening and right now I have four out of nine votes the the fifth vote has voted with us so far just to keep the conversation alive but is not committed so M you know even in 2023 we're still struggling to impose these requirements and that's that's very C oh great I'm going to make a quick comment here so I wanted to share that the um talking about the legal framework is really important for us and reflecting on

024what the city of an arbor can do and is is currently trying to do um and that's kind of why I invited here to reflect a little bit more on basically how you went from a city movement I mean of course you had you were a city council member and had you know a lot of support and um you know political will behind this uh work but I'm really interested in how you moved from that to the state level and kind of like the framework that was negotiated with what what body was it exactly I mean how did you end up um making that that happen and I I I'm I'm wondering if folks on the call can kind of reflect like is that possible for us or like how do we move forward um

025potentially in that direction too yeah definitely I mean it's with anything right it's it's all about relationships and so I've been working on this stuff for over 10 years and through that work got to know one of our state senators Senator Barrett and have done a lot of work with him and we reached a point where the state was supposed to bring to to promate um the building code that would allow for n zero construction and as we realized that they were not actually going to do that that they were watering it down and the building code would fall short of that uh Senator Baron actually got upset about that and and started negotiating with the the chairman of the house on you know closing that that Gap a little bit and what we did

026at the city level was we started pushing what are called home roll petitions basically petitions to the state legislature asking to be allowed to implement our uh requirements our our building energy standards and through that process Senator Barrett was getting support from the municipal level and ultimately was able to negotiate this 10 communities fossil fuel free demonstration program where entry into the program was based on communities having filed their their home R petitions um but that's how we got into that program but it was definitely high stakes negotiations until the very end and of course because Senator Barrett is from Lexington where there's also a lot of Biotech activity he Exempted the biomedical facilities and so you know we're still dealing with that loople but but in any case it's it's a lot of progress

027from from where we were just a couple of years ago cool thanks uh council member zlan did you wanna sorry uh commissioner zlan did you want to share uh yeah I just wanted to ask a really quick question that 200 $140 value is that getting like annually revised or is it pegged to inflation or is that expected to stay flat unless there's like an amendment or something that's a great question so it's $234 a ton which you know came from Boston there was they they had done an analysis on the cost of removing a ton of carbon from a building in the Boston area and under the ordinance that number can be revised without Cal vote um it's not required to be done annually but it will be time to time it will be reviewed

028and adjusted thank you Comm mki have you um had any legal challenges or do you anticipate any we have not and and we don't expect any of course anybody can be sued for anything at any time there you know there there's some grousing about well the building code you know says that we can burn gas and then you're trying to impose this other requirement that says you can't but of course my argument is well we're not saying you can't burn gas we're just saying you have to pay for it if you do so you know but our our legal department is confident that we would be able to successfully defend um this this ordinance and you know it was negotiated with heavy participation of the the building Industries in in Cambridge and so they are

029you know they they may not be super happy about it but they are not actively opposing it and so that means it's it's not very likely that there would be a legal challeng would you speak briefly on how you got the building uh industry to the place where they were not actively opposing it I mean um I can remember having worked in the Boston area that there was a time when they were opposing it so share a little bit about that timeline yeah certainly I mean 10 years ago you know when we were proposing F field reconstruction we would get the carpenters union and you know other trade groups would would come in and and say well you're going to make it harder to build buildings and you know that's going to cost us jobs

030we've continued to ratchet up those Green Building requirements the the buildings continue to go up you know the building boom continues and so that level of opposition has died down as particularly as the trade unions have come to realize that the stricter our requirements the more likely it is that they will get the job right because you need even more expert trades people to to build buildings for those standards and then the the development Community you know a lot of the leadership there is from MIT and Harvard and you know the BC industry and of course they're also facing political pressure from from their stakeholders you know from the students from the employees and and from the the general public to do better and to reduce their emissions and so forth so they've also changed

031their stance over time from you know we're against this to okay well how do we make this work and so when when we you know they had sort of pre-negotiated a net zero for all buildings by 2050 with our city staff but then when that those amendments hit the council floor we said no no that's that's too long we need a tighter timeline for particularly the largest buildings and so that caused a lot of conspiration we had like know dozens of meetings with the the industry representatives and ultimately where they came out was okay well you know we're we're not going to oppose you on on the stricted timeline but then in order to meet it we'll need more flexibility so that's where we ended up allowing for carbon credits to a limited extent and

032with a lot of guard rails to make sure that that's not you know abused um but but that was really the the tradeoff was to provide more flexible mechanisms for compliant in exchange for more deadline great okay if there are no additional questions and comments um we're going to move to our next presenter so anybody speak if you have great seeing none we're going to move along so uh Dr hman thank you so much for joining us um I hope you heard a little bit about that and excited to kind of be in conversation here um so Dr hman is an associate professor at the fourth school public policy at U ofam and she's here to um share some findings from a recent study that broadly covers the societal impact of Shifting patterns from sources

033of energy consumption um so Dr hman take it away thank you thank you very much for having me um it's good to to be able to speak with you let me share my screen I just have a few slides I'll spend um maybe 10 minutes sharing my research with you um and then we can move move to Q&A so let me make this full screen okay I assume you're able to see those good so this work is on who will pay for legacy utility costs and we're really focusing on the natural gas sector um which is why you see the picture here that I've borrowed from NPR this work is joint with Lucas Davis at UC Berkeley I should say that all of my views are my own based on This research they're not representing

034Lucas's views or those of the Ford School of Public Policy um where I am very happy to be a faculty member so I wanted to just I'm an economist I'm an energy and environmental economist and I wanted to share how I think about some of the challenges that come up when we speak about electrification and moving off of natural gas um a a big part of how we should probably be understanding many aspects of the energy transition is understanding Legacy costs and um stranded assets and things of that nature so we argue that regulated utilities including the providers of residential and Commercial natural gas are different from other businesses in three really important ways the first is that they have very large fixed costs so you think about a natural gas distributor it has you

035know most of its worth is tied up in pipelines that you you build and you bury and then they're along around for a very long time as a result the way that we have traditionally um dealt with these kinds of businesses in the US is by giving them Monopoly franchises doesn't make sense to have two sets of pipelines running down the street so we say you know this business has a sole right to provide this service to this neighborhood and because they operate under these Monopoly franchises they are of course regulated by state level commissions for the most part although they could be regulated by a municipality or by a co-op and we argue that this really complicates the transition because it changes how we think about stranded assets and the stranded asset problem so

036the way that these regulated utilities typically recover their fixed costs and this is true not just for natural gas but today we're going to focus on natural gas is they spread fees out over time across their entire customer base so when I sign up with my utility I pay a monthly fee to them and some of that monthly fee is covered in sort of their ongoing like administrative costs for instance but some of it is also intended to help them recover um their Capital costs from many years ago this is very different from how we think about your typical firm in like an econ one class so I personally am still paying for the recovery of the construction of pipelines that were done you know many years ago so in that context if the customer

037base shrink uh it could be population loss or it could be something like electrification then the question becomes how does the utility recover these costs um I'm not going to speak a whole lot today about how they should recover these costs I'm going to speak more today about pragmatically how the regulatory framework usually looks in the US and the problem of course is that the natural gas pipelines don't go away so as the customer base shrinks the costs don't shrink one for one for the utility our research um draws on cases where the customer base is shrinking because of population losses things like demographic changes in the US and where people live um but we argue it has implications for electrification as well as other energy transition topics so I want to be very clear

038our research does not use electrification um to get its data we're using population losses to get its data get our data and then drawing analogies to what happens with electrification and electrification is of course very important as you all know um being called a Lynch pin solution for decarbonization um lots of reasons to think that electrification is going to be really key and there are many different policies being considered around the country that I've listed here an example from an academic paper reminds us just how Stark this is so between 2020 and 2040 or 2050 it shows this really steep ramp up in the Residential Heating stock for electric heaters whether electric resistance or heat pump and the way reason I say that's really Stark is that that is not just new builds that's the

039entire stock so this paper is picturing you know not just um policies for new builds but also retrofits and conversions so our data come from the Department of energy and the Department of Transportation um covering All 48 contiguous states over the years 1997 to 2019 and what we specifically analyze is how utility finances and consumer prices evolve as utilities lose customers and I won't go through all the statistical details but I'll give you a link to the paper if you want to follow up basically what we show is that when a utility loses customers the pipeline network doesn't shrink and so prices rise for all of the remaining customers as the utility is still trying to recover its fixed costs we don't then say as a result we shouldn't Electrify we say if we're going

040to Electrify we need to think about where the incidence of these policies will be to put the numbers in perspective we estimate that a typical utility adding a customer receives about $300 more per year from that new customer um but a utility losing a customer doesn't receive $300 less it receives $100 50 less what that means is that about half of per customer costs have disappeared with the exiting consumer and about half of the costs have been stayed have stuck around and they've been passed on to the customers that are still part of the network and that number um that's an average per customer number for small numbers of customer exit this means bills don't rise all that much for for remaining customers but as you get more and more defections G uh bills rise

041nonlinearly for the remaining customers a sort of cartoon version of how to think about this is if everybody leaves the natural gas system but we don't disconnect any pipes then the one person remaining still operating natural gas heating or natural gas cooking is bearing the entire cost of the fixed infrastructure that of course is an unrealistic scenario but it helps you get a sense of why there's this nonlinearity lots of details in the paper about how we do the data analysis um different robustness checks and we also bring in administrative data on what kinds of costs we're talking about so we think separately about things like admin costs versus operations and maintenance versus returns for investors and what I'll just say briefly is that there you should think about a utility having three kinds of

042costs some costs that stick around when people people Electrify or depart the natural gas system for instance you still need to do maintenance on the remaining pipes some costs really do disappear when a customer defects obviously you're not selling the same quantity of gas anymore you don't have to do as many meter readings so some of your costs go down and then there's this third category of cost that's really important that ultimately is a political and legal decision for instance a big portion of costs are returns for Shar holders and there are questions about whether utility commissions are going to continue to allow that recovery or whether those are going to be disallowed in the future what we think this means is there are a lot of policy implications I've listed them just super briefly

043and this is my last slide so we can go into detail on any of these if you have specific questions is that we think that some of the policies that have been proposed sort of open up a can of worms for instance you could imagine that if only High income people are the ones who initially Electrify then prices could rise for remaining low-income customers and that might not be something that you want to have happen a policy proposal that's been named to alleviate this problem would be things like subsidies for low income electrification but that's really only a partial solution um unless you really manage to Target like all lowincome households right in fact that can make the price rise for the low-income customers who don't get the subsidy even more dramatic other Solutions include

044targeted electrification where you disconnect an entire geographic area and the idea is that then you can save on maintenance costs um so that's a partial solution but it doesn't uh address this problem of returns for shareholders which again is a legal question um so I talked about bullet point two um bullet point three I think think is really important nationally although I don't have detailed data on what this looks like for an arbor nationally there are a lot of natural gas pipes that are leaking and methane leaks are really bad for climate change and how to deal with this problem at the same time that we're talking about taking away These funds from natural gas companies is a a dicey problem um fourth bullet point we focus on full electrification so customers really fully departing

045the Natural Gas Network um we can talk if you like about partial electrification where you stay connected um but you don't use as much natural gas that will have different implications and then just note that there are parallel issues in electricity policy if people defect from the grid because of things like solar plus battery storage um so we argue that the stranded asset problem is just a really important policy question in the energy transition in general um and we don't don't advocate for any particular solution um but we want to think through sort of what these costs are before we go down the road fantastic uh thank you so much I want to open it up quickly for questions kind of definitional and vocabulary um you know this is something we we came up with

046last time in our meeting and I just want to make sure that we can talk about that if necessary before moving forward with more theoretical questions any questions okay all right oh Vice chairart thank you very much for presenting um that's extremely helpful and I don't I don't know if I have my question fully formed yet but I it it just makes me think that there's lots of infrastructure that's deployed by many of these um many of these utilities over time in a lot of different areas and occasionally they update that infrastructure um and I I guess my question is is there anything to learn from the way that they currently update infrastructure and the sort of stranded costs in terms of how um how these Legacy costs might be dealt with um into the

047future if they're sort of left left out I guess is sort of where I'm going with the question and I don't I don't know but that's sort of what it made me think about yeah I think one thing that we talk about that might relevant for answering this is considering utilities a hypothetical utility that has fully recovered its cost its capital cost already so everything's already been depreciated out and recovered you might picture something like a 30-year timeline for recovery of a capital investment and so you could imagine a utility that is no longer recovering um costs for those returns to shareholders um so in my nonlinear plot we had three lines the middle line is sort of what our base case scenario is and then one of the the lower line was what you

048would get for utility that has already fully depreciated everything I think that's not realistic I don't I think utilities generally have not fully depreciated everything because they're continuing to either um you know either they're maintaining their original network but they're also adding on a little spur to reach a new development would be one example um and that the costs of adding on that spur have been socialized across the entire network or another example would be replacing or fixing lines because of methane leaks um so I think that bound is not a super realistic one but it does help you see sort of the magnitude and what you see is you still have that steep upward Rising Bill impact for everybody else and the reason is that there's still these operations and maintenance costs there's pensions

049right pension liabilities are a big deal for a lot of utilities so it's not only the capital cost recovery commission 11 uh yes uh thanks for the presentation um I was just wondering if you considered uh the differences with say like GTE for example they own both Gas and Electric that's not going to be the case like across the country of course but does that provide like a mechanism possibly for sharing this cross maybe with electric users uh that used to be gas and now they're 100% electric yeah that's a great question um so we think the political there's sort of two different questions there's like what cost do you need to recover and then there's the political economy questions of how you recover those and also what sorts of opposition you might expect to

050face from the utility um if you move forward with a policy I think those are two separate questions so in terms of opposition um I you know it seems quite plausible that you could expect less opposition we didn't look at that but seems like a straightforward thing to in it in terms of how you would share the costs yes one of the things we talk about is the possibility of moving all of the costs onto um electricity rate payers um and if you expect you know electric load growth to happen as a result of the electrification then maybe that bill shock is not too bad um so we do talk about that possibility but I I would like to say that question is about how you share the costs and sort of how proportionately big

051that cost shock looks as opposed to how big the actual costs are right so even if you have a utility that serves both Gas and Electric it still has this pipeline problem so it's not like the cost problem is smaller in dollar values it's just that it might be easier to think about who you pass them on to great commissioner mki I'm wondering if you've looked at studies that are maybe similar to yours particularly in other countries like in Europe um as you probably know um Germany proposed a very aggressive um heat pump uh law that's been toned down a little bit but they're obviously on a similar path uh or at least have are raising SAR concerns um there they still use pipelines and everything else um that's not just in Germany that's across

052Europe that's in Japan that's everywhere else where are other Progressive countries on um this type of analysis and the type of conclusions and the type of opportunities in terms of how these costs might be carried and spread thanks I sadly I don't have a good answer because it's a very good question um I think the two things I would look at in the other countries would be um what they're transitioning away from um of course some European cities have District heating but then others as you pointed out do not um so I would look at what they're transitioning away from and I would also look at what their regulatory environment is and whether it's you know municipally run utilities or federally run utilities or regulated privately owned utilities like we mostly have in the US

053so I'm sorry I don't know Mr Al hi thanks Katie that was H very helpful uh I'm wondering you know given the state of things uh and the urgency of getting out of natural gas for example how we would you know what could we do um you know in the University or uh University Plus the rest of the the world um to really get a comprehensive view of our options both uh Economic Policy uh political political economy um so they're not just theoretical Solutions but they would be really thought through um to the Practical implementation stage and I'm guessing um not an in this but what you're talking about with gas is is not that dissimilar from uh water infrastructure and the incredible costs that uh less affluent people in Flint and Detroit and Benton

054Harbor are having to Bear because people have pulled out of those communities um and leaving behind the poorest people to they have to deal with it these are things we as a society just have to do and so I just want to get your free thinking IDE ideas on what would happen you know if uh we could Is it feasible that we could do a a big study where we bring legal Scholars and we bring policy and economists and we bring PR you know people from practice and we really try and just figure this thing out what's it has to be doable or else and you know and obviously we've gone through other transitions you we've gotten out Cole largely um and you know but we got to find solutions to this what what are

055you thinking this is an opportunity to sort of think outside the box I guess and let me give you answers to three subp parts um I think one sub part is like what would happen in an arbor as an you know what do I think would happen in the short term if you had a small number of residents in an arbor that defect you know it's been spread out over all of dte's service territory Maybe the price impacts are not so dire and we're not talking about something like flint and you just ignore my presentation and move forward with your plans um the question becomes as you sort of accelerate that defection from the natural gas system what happens with that with those costs I think we don't want utilities going bankrupt because we want

056them to maintain those leaky pipelines in the interim so it's not so much a question of the end goal it's a question of how you get to that end goal where you don't want cost of service to go up for remaining customers too much maybe I don't know and where you don't want operations and maintenance procedures to be uh at risk in the interim and you are exactly right about water that gives us this really Stark example of what can go wrong when you have socialized costs um and then people depart and that is exactly the story with water quality and aging infrastructure in the US um in fact that was one of the motivations for us to write this paper with examples like of things like the Flint Water Crisis so you are exactly

057right there um so you know what can be done well I think you're doing the right things you're talking to cities that are doing this already and there are certainly nonprofit groups around the country that are studying these options and thinking about them I mean I think the solutions are really context specific right what works here and what works in Massachusetts and what works for a place like Philly right the largest municipally provided natural gas system in the US with uh loss of population and also high levels of poverty and high levels of leakage rates so like it you know it's very context specific versus what happens in Colorado or the Southwest where you've got new subdivisions being built every month um so I think there are lots of smart people working on these questions

058and it just it needs to be context specific can I ask one more question Claire um so I think you know about what's going on uh certainly Jan and and uh Jenna benar I think I I guess they've talked to by now um but we are we're talking to a donor about a a new policy and climate policy and Law Center at the University and I'm sort of revealing this to everyone just to sort of give hope I hope um but the idea would be to take on problems like this that are kind of wicked um and context specific I think your point there is really well taken and figure out what could you do in Michigan um because I don't think in an arbor our goal on this commission is not to have a

059few people defect our goal is to you know is to you know end the use of natural gas in Michigan and um perod period you know I I think the rest of us would agree um and we need to we need to like figure these problems out so that we do it in a way that is least pain especially for people who don't have money um and um gets to the goal as fast as possible and I'm just wondering do you think there' be appetite um to pull together a project not where money's no object where we had quite a bit of resources to really look at this from all the different angles do you think there's there there's hope we could do it for Michigan let see why not you certainly have lots of

060expertise in this town I just wanted to hear you say that thank you all right we're hearing some great news from from Over Yonder a u ofm uh Quinton did you want to share you're at U ofm though don't forget okay never mind yeah thanks so just wanted to weigh in that the Massachusetts State Department of Public Utilities under the new governor just announced this past week an orderly getting off of gas program that they are going to mandate for our gas G utilities so they're basically telling them you have to start dismantling this infrastructure and and basically get rid of it by 2050 and and it had to happen in an orderly way so you know I I I do agreed that it probably makes the most sense to figure this out at a

061state level and and then ultimately you have to impose these types of regulations and force the utilities to to start dismantling this infrastructure and you have to have Protections in place for low-income communities and you know against for gas me Contin amazing I hope that that is our future too in Michigan and I don't know if we can have like a buddy program um but anybody who knows anybody that would be fun okay he yes commissioner berwitz would you like to share I just have a a follow-up question um and also thank you to the presenter um it's very interesting and quite timely um if you spoke to this I I might have missed it um but I wanted to ask um as we're talking about stranded assets do you see any Trends um among

062the different customer classes between residential commercial industrial I know we've talked a lot about like uh environmental justice communities you know low-income uh folks but I'm curious about like um residential commercial industrial sector customers yeah that's a really interesting question and ties to what we heard from our first Speaker today um about the you know the the separate policies for certain kinds of Industries so we did not look at that the numbers I showed you were all for residential we did a little bit with commercial where we see a similar story because you know commercial customers are distributed somewhat similar ly in terms of both residential and Commercial are geographically distributed and so we can't talk about just disconnecting a single pipeline um we did not look at industrial um both because of data limitations

063a lot of the eia data are um you know blacked out for confidentiality reasons at the industrial level um but also I do think it's a different problem because their geographic distribution is different um and so how we think think about disconnecting um specific parts of the pipeline grid is going to be really different with industrial customers but also their needs are different in terms of their substitutability um so great question but I don't have anything to offer you on Industrial no fair enough and that makes sense um and I'm guessing there's been kind of less industrial um examples that are focused on decarbonization but you know I just um the reason I asked that is because like Michigan we disproportionately pay the highest uh Electric rates in the midwest um uh Michigan even though

064you know we are working to get off gas Michigan does naturally have features that store gas really well and so you know um gas can be bought like offseason and then sold at like a subsidized rate during the winter and so um it does actually help rate payers in some ways and so anyway I I don't want to say nice things about gas um but I um in Michigan residential rate payers disproportionately pay you know you know um the price um commercial uh customers somewhat as well but industrial you know uh rate class has um gotten um either stagnated rates or declining rates um over the past decade uh two decades in Michigan whereas residential customers have only ever seen increases in electric rates and continue to see increases every single time a utility files

065a new rate case so um it's just something that I've been thinking a lot about the dispar between residential customers and other R classes great okay we'll end our talk with our amazing guest presenters there um thank you so much for joining us Dr hman and quinon it's it's um really really special and I'm so happy that we had a conversation and thanks all to all the Commissioners for um for commenting too so we're going to take a f minute break um so guests feel free to drop off everybody feel free to Black yourself out um we'll come back at uh 708 thanks okay so we're moving to the next part of our agenda we where we will return to reviewing the bylaws um so I'll ask if there's a motion to open the meeting

066for discussion of the bylaws and a second commer mki thank you and a second thank you commissioner burkowitz okay the meeting all those in favor of opening the meeting for discussion please ra raise your hand and say I okay unanimous the the meeting is upward for discussion um council member Rina did you want to share an update um I look to you if not let me know if there's a way you want to go about it yes I can do that and council member breaks feel free to jump in at any point since we've both been engaged and actually Joe has been as well um so last meeting you'll remember we'd kind of discussed the possibility of uh revising the bylaws uh around council member Briggs and I or any future liais On's ability to

067vote at these meetings um there we have largely learned there's not really a standardized practice um across the city um uh and and that there is a process for changing them um but that we could have it sounds like we need to initiate at the council level by essentially sending passing a resolution for you guys to change them um but we did not want to initiate that process without getting additional Fe feedback and understanding from you about your feelings on this and so um it was largely a conversation uh where you know we we mostly wanted to know where this body felt um before moving forward at this stage um and and also just to acknowledge in terms of process if this is a direction that we want to move in Nothing is Stopping You

068from approving the bylaws um and then we can amend them once this process initiates so that this doesn't I don't believe delay um adoption of the bylaws um council member BRS is that some everything up the way you remember or is there anything else okay but I believe we can also vote to approve the bylaw as as revised right do you have a a version for us that is the has a revision in it or no so so we do not the process the process would essentially play out after adoption of the bylaws I see okay so then I feel that the body is prepared to adopt the bylaws because there are no changes of course the we're still open for discussion um but just for efficiency sake yeah V your her yeah I'll just

069I'll just reiterate I I think I had mentioned this in the last in the last Council uh excuse me in the last commission meeting um I yeah I'm generally supportive of of that move um in part for the reasons that the the council members raised about um uh potential uh conflict is not the right word but um just wanting to to sort of um not have to necessarily take a vote on those those issues so I'm I'm supportive oh yes commiss 11 uh yeah I was actually thinking about it a little more um over the past month it's and I don't have like a strong feeling about this but I I do actually kind of think maybe leaving it the way it is and I I kind of like that a little better um I

070know there is like some argument that's a little awkward um because we're supposed to be advising Council I do think it adds something though if the uh council members do want to come on board and show their support for it and as you mentioned before you're always welcome to abstain from it and I wouldn't necessarily want to take that away from future council members that felt differently about it since you do always have that option to not vote on anything that you feel it would be awkward or a conflict of interest Comm mki uh commissioner 11 captured exactly my sentiments and I would only add that my sentes is that commissions and boards were created by Council and I think if Council feels strongly that our deliberations should be strictly internal without um votes by

071council members that they make those wishes um known and and and Implement that in the form of the decision at the council level um as I mentioned the environmental Council um and you all know I serve as liaison from this group to environmental Council they also have voting council members as voting members of the commission so um we've I think we've made it um live with it pretty well um I agree with the sentiment or the statement that um you can uh council members can always abstain um so they could abstain and they could completely um not offer any comments when we're doing something I mean if they feel strongly about it so I I my my thoughts basically align with commissioner Lance thanks yes go ahead um does any we we've heard Commissioners kind

072of expressed the different views on this a little bit and so I guess one of the things that would help us you know I don't know that we can there's obviously not a formal vote um but to get some sense from the body how they would like us to proceed um as to whether or not we should initiate the process or not um I think because lacking direction from the body I I don't think we would likely move forward and initiate Direction uh forcing it upon you so that that's um if if folks feel strongly one way or the other it would be great to know thoughts yeah it does seem like the feeling was the opposite in the last meeting and um so I also welcome additional comments or or perhaps if folks even

073could you know give uh you know thumbs up or thumbs down if they would like us to maybe initiate the process let's hear from commissioner koven Garcia I thank you very much and um I would just like to say that I I have valued the contribution and the perspective um that council members bring to our deliberations and knowing that they can vote they they they can vote if they choose or not and they can vote how they choose I is I think it adds value uh to this to this commission and to you know to all the commissions that um that they they serve on so that's my opinion opinion to add to council member uh I'm sorry to commissioner msky and uh commissioner Len's comment okay um there are eight of us that are

074not council members today um I yeah I don't want to force people to do an informal vote but um I mean I can just share as as also a commissioner on the body that um I support you and uh council members in bringing this forward and um and I feel that you should ultimately decide um Let Go commissioner covin Garcia in the sense that absolutely your input and participation is super valuable and um knowing uh what's at stake and um just you have a different perspective on on these issues and I think um but at the same time I don't see that value specifically in the voting um I find that that's is just the case throughout the meetings and I don't I don't find that coming to a vote on specific things is is

075where the value is necessarily the most um present and so I would support um the original uh movement to to take you off as voting members I'll say you know I honestly don't feel strong one way or the other but I care about our uh city council members and you know their um sanity and uh like um you know know whatever makes their life easier in some ways may be something worth considering too so um again I I don't feel strongly one way or the other but I'll chime in because nobody said that yet yeah calra Rina thanks and and I appreciate that and I you know I will Express I don't think um either of this either of us are necessarily coming at this from like our own sanity perspective or Comfort perspective I

076think one of the things that we've noticed I think we've been relatively lucky at least in my time on this commission that we haven't had that many close votes um most things have come relative with relative unanimity um but I think we've kind of always acknowledge that there's potential for awkwardness that in a close vote um we could largely be deciding what advice we receive from the body um and so you know there there are two of us that could swing a vote one way or the other and then um that impacts the advice from the body that the entire Council would receive um and then um I also have just kind of we already do kind of have an outsized voice in a lot of these deliberations because of the nature of our positions

077um and so you know we have obviously an opportunity to vote on things at the council table um but when depending on you know the commission this is again I think I've shared this before one where I actually often feel like um everyone else in this room has so much more experience in this space than I do that I like to sit back and listen um but often in a lot of the rooms when you know I start speaking everyone else feels like they can't challenge what I've said or things like that and adding a vote to that gives me additional power in a space where the citizens are supposed to be advising us um and so that's kind of been my perspective in suggesting this um I also don't feel that strongly either way

078that is just I think where council member Briggs and I kind of noticed um where we have seen since we have seen differences from commissions that we serve on it was something we wanted to bring back to you um but ultimately we're going to respect the direction you guys want us to take council member BR yeah thank you and I just wanted to um say I completely agreee with council member adina's take on this I think that's made um kind of those were a lot of our thoughts in terms of bringing this forward um and there's obviously benefits pros and cons to having us weigh in on a vote right um there's even when there's I think when I'm I'm voting on something I may be um speaking a little bit more forcefully on an

079issue and that feels a little uncomfortable sometimes when we're in an advisory body that's supposed to be advising counsel however that does provide additional feedback to the commission um in terms of kind of how we're thinking about an issue or different different aspects as well so um I'm less concerned about my comfort um on this because council is not a comfortable job by and large so that that that's all fine um but you know just want to make sure that you know we're we're listening to you as our advisory bodies and you know definitely I you know I don't feel strongly on super strongly on this so happy to take the the feedback of the commission on this M yeah I think what we're hear what I'm hearing um is that um we really respect

080and enjoy the participation of our two council members on this commission um and this is certainly not a uh referendum on you I think and I like to think of you as just our partners and getting stuff done and I think a lot of us feel the same way I'm guessing um the problem of course is we are especially those of us with some gray hair have all been on committees and commissions in you know not the same exact situation but in situation where um there are a couple members who have an outside outsize sort of impact and influence um and we want to just keep things clean you know because it didn't go well in those other cases um so I'm guessing that's sort of what I'm sensing here um if you guys agree

081to be council members for as long as we're all Commissioners then I think we got a deal because we really do appreciate working with you and and value what everything you have to say I like the idea of of knowing where you stand I guess um and I like that point a lot um and because you do you are careful both of you um and that again that yields respect um but it also uh you know we don't I don't know you know I don't go back and watch you know exactly how you vote on Council um all the time um so uh it's nice to sort of if an argument is not tight enough or an idea is not refined enough you know you're going to let us know that and I think we

082definitely need to know that but you two would let us know no matter what without a vote or with a vote uh and that's why we like working with you in part um but we could imagine getting uh some council members down the road who uh and we might not be the Commissioners then either um and they would be it would be might create awkward situations so I mean I don't have an answer here other than just I wanted to say how much we enjoy working with you and being your partner in this over I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit here so were you saying just because we have four uh essentially supporting no movement forward with changing the bylaw um and again not that we're voting but just to get

083a sense would you say you were more in that camp or more in the changing the bylaws Camp I don't know you know I've just been on some commit where some really weird things H you know undesirable things happen when uh there's unequal power I see and uh so it probably is better to keep things clean and you know there is commission advising Council and Council then has their to act with that but I think you know what we're hearing is that by allowing them to vote we might be giving them more influence um and right now as we're trying to do a20 that's an important thing because we're all all in this together I think we're all headed in the same philosophical Direction um maybe down the road though that would have to be

084changed back maybe that' be another option um but uh if it got more contentious and we got a feeling that we were working cross purposes and then commission would want to be able to speak with one voice loud and clear um and that might actually help our council members too I just don't know I mean I'm not a political scientist but I have been in the situations where um it gets pretty darn awkward and right now you have a very clean demarcation between Commissioners and council members but gosh you know we're all working on this together and I would like to do whatever I can to increase the influence and the speed at which we move forward as a community I mean I'm talking in Arbor Michigan sorry I can't answer your question not sure

085I just want to get my two censing okay um well in that sense do folks feel more comfortable shelving this for a future discussion it sounds like there was actually a lot of mental movement um since last time we talked about it so we can vote to approve the bylaws today as was proposed by the council member so we have our processes moving forward um but at the same time we can keep this open for discussion maybe talk about it one more time um and I just encourage you to really think about it um some new points were made today um or maybe that I hadn't heard in that way before you know this this balance between the the outsized voting impact of the council members um which could on one hand be ugly but

086also maybe on one hand move us forward with our common goals maybe because of of the folks that are working with us and how align we are um so that's that's a little messy but um but I think that that is indicative of why we can't quite decide um so I would ask uh if are there any more comments um and if not I will look for a motion to vote to approve the bylaws as currently written Vice share har and commission ref at a second or a comment second great great great yeah okay and are there um any proposed changes raise your hands for proposed changes at this point we're discussing uh an additional issue okay see No Hands raised all those in favor of approving the bylaws as currently written as posted um

087please raise your hand and say I okay voting members here we go okay that's a unanimous vote um in favor and so the bylaws are approved thank you so much for this great conversation okay so agenda wise we're GNA move forward um with this next time uh so you'll expect to see that on the agenda again for January and hopefully we can come to a point where we can actually advise on the next steps for the council members um to do their work okay so we're going to move to a report from staff um Joe what do you have for us yeah um couple things one to follow up on uh whenever that meeting was but just note and this kind of gets into the council report a little too but just noting on uh

088next Monday the the contracts for the administration of the home energy advisor program with uh Walker Miller Energy Services and the administration of the residential rebate program with Elevate will go to council for approval so be on the lookout for that um couple other things some of this you may have seen some you may not but um just a fun note from uh today Ann Arbor surpassed its highest number of solar installations in one calendar year um 2117 solar installations have been installed in the in the year going across residential commercial um and government uh this is about 1.8 megawatt of solar total um I would also be remiss not making a plug that about half of those residental residential installations came from the an arbor solariz program um which is currently actively recruiting residents

089so if you know anyone who's interested in installing solar in 2024 looking to learn more potentially interested in bulk bu discounts on solar installations um they can reach out to me at J Lang a2gov.org or go to our website a2gov.org solar um we're also still recruiting for our sixth co- of a20 ambassadors um for those who are unaware this is a a program to kind of get your um you know get get more involved get more information about office sustainability Innovations our a20 plan and generally sustainability in the community um so if you know anyone or you yourself are interested um you can apply uh through February the bro it's open um we also you may have seen some media and stuff here uh but we have recently um installed and operational the state of

090Michigan's first two utility pole mounted electric vehicle Chargers um there's a like I said some media out there you can also go to 407 North Engle Street to see uh one of those Chargers in action um and then also wanted to note that uh we received our um uh what our grant through the Energy Efficiency and conservation block grant program through the department of energy uh which is going to be working uh with our uh partner Community Action Network to uh transition the Bryant Community Center into a fully carbon neutral building um in addition using that as kind of a a a living learning laboratory so folks can see what a uh what it means to transition a home to carbon neutrality in the process so that's what I got thanks thanks Joel um I

091know we heard some feedback from Commissioners and I also spoke with Rita Mitchell who's the chair of the environmental commission and she was asking also about updates on Bryant and uh the work done there knowing that the black rant has just been um funded so exciting and I'm wondering if there's a possibility that we can hear some uh next steps Lessons Learned just a little bit more about the the block grant program and the um the work being done in Bryant and kind of how that's a a laboratory for the rest of the city yeah I know it's come up a few times um just one are we because if yeah we want to do a presentation on the work that's been done how it's going stuff like that happy to do so um you

092know some of the other I know we've talked a little bit about you know kind of like oh is being integrated in other things um can do a little bit of that I know some of it we've already talked about some for instance again in the home energy advisor um you know all the energy assessments part of that are fully part you know came from the work in Brian so that's already kind of being implemented there as well as a lot of the work with the um housing commission we're doing as well as several other the grants we've applied for and talked about here um are directly using that but yeah if we want to do like a presentation or again here's what's happening Brian how's it's going things like that um yeah we can

093certainly set something up cool yeah I think i' I'd like to see that just hearing that feedback and um Additionally the list of things that you red off about you know that we may already know I think it's really nice to hear about them all in one place and I think um I don't know who's watching on ctm but I think the citizens would be interested to hear too just because sometimes you know I may know what a home energy adviser is but um you know just to hear again in in kind of like a a a repetitive way can kind of set it in the brain a little bit um as to you know all the great work that that you guys are up to so I would I would uh really appreciate that

094council member Rina um I may get myself in trouble here by suggesting something that I don't know if we can make happen um but I I don't know how many folks here have had the opportunity to see Brian and some of the Transformations that have happened there and I know that there had been I think I think this body is one that suggested maybe getting together for an in-person meeting um and I wonder if maybe there would would be interest in kind of trying to host that meeting at Bryant where folks could also see some of the updates firstand and um so I I am suggesting that knowing that it is something we would have to coordinate with Bryant um but um they do you know open houses all the time and are always excited

095to talk about their work there so it might be something to consider also it's just on Ro for me so oh yeah convenient yeah I love that idea let's um Circle back with staff I'll talk in our agenda setting meeting um and just you know I just want to hear from the staff and the Brian team that that that they can support that um at least within a a certain timeline and um let's make it happen okay Joe was that that was your everything you had and then I forced you to make a brag presentation great fantastic let's move on okay um so we're going to move to a working group update um and I want to hear from members there's a lot of little tidbits that I had um to update folks on additionally

096so let's go working group and then we'll hear from council members and then I'll share some additional items Vice chair harp did you want to share commissioner burwitz about your working group ideas sure so just to follow up on on on the working group around um sort of character and sticks and and looking at the tradeoffs on um electrification and housing um as you may remember there was a vote to create that working group um there was we one of the things we did was we went back um into the bylaws and and um rad those a little bit more carefully and also realized that um the working group doesn't have the same sort of requirements as a committee does um prior reading and so effectively our understanding is by voting to create the working

097group there's a working group um uh commissioner burkwitz and myself have expressed interest in and following up on that and we've um exchanged an email just about starting to develop um and pull together some of the things that have already been uh proposed both in terms of resolutions and and past things and and possibly also looking elsewhere um and we're going to start to compile um some of that and do a little do a little homework um to prepare and then in the January meeting um we briefly discussed that we'll try to share a time when we might uh when we'll be able to meet um and invite others to to come meet as well uh as well as members of the public and we can uh sort of work on that a little bit

098more um with the goal of sharing um Concepts ideas insights and recommendations back with the commission um in in a timely way possibly uh with some some more um uh some some more clarity around which kinds of particular carrots or or incentives or sticks that might be useful in this context or other questions that we might want to try to resolve around these real or parent trade-offs great commissioner mki yes uh question uh I can't remember if we discussed this at the time we just talked about the idea of in a working group but in June Council passed a resolution asking the city administrator to come back by the end of the year year with recommended and I think in that context it was only incentives for building electrification um I don't know what the

099status is I don't know what uh Council plans to do with those recommendations um but uh what I don't want to see happen is that we spend a lot of time on something that potentially would not have any return on the time invested if something that's already uh being worked on by city that Council might act on um so maybe someone can talk to that that's thanks well that's a great segue to our council member updates so jump in on that I think we um hopefully we'll be receiving that um that memo from from staff soon and we'll be able to respond and react to it or um and see what's there and another piece that may feed into this a little bit we're anticipating um attached to our next city council agenda a um

100Economic Development um report recommendations which is there should be some some pieces of information that I think the energy commission and um will find interesting within that as well in terms of um the sustainability recommendations that wasn't my understanding is that that's not a predominant portion the report but that it is touched upon within it as well um and so it certainly come came up within our discussion of working session that we had our annual working session this past week so um I'm going to be drawing from both of those resources um in terms of how we move forward um with this and I think that might provide greater direction to this working group as well in terms of um what's what's there what's what's missing and I know there's some Community groups that are

101they're working on this as well um I'm not sure if I've got other updates like guess one other one um City administrator has asked us to think a little bit about this came up within context of the admin committee um our what sort of priority priorities we might have in terms of working with University of Michigan and one of those recommendations we came forward we obviously have a lot of different things that um we often often come up in the in the context of thinking about our partnership with the University of Michigan but um a desire to be more focused in those asks and so one of the things I had came came forward which is um our sustainability and climate action work um so um it's not fully fleshed out but something I think

102that folks here would probably consider to be one of our top priorities in terms of Partnerships with the community so all I can think right now so very compliment we be I don't know that I have anything else to add beyond that either um one of my updates was related to the bylaws and I've already given that piece so great commissioner over did you want to respond well yeah just the uh the idea of a climate policy and Law Center that I shared a little earlier would be explicitly designed to be um something that would really benefit Ann Arbor and you know be a coll you know in a collaborative way as well as the state so I think that's um trying to get more resources you know into the game on the University of

103Michigan side is critical um that's that's sort of the carrot that's always needed in the university to get people to do things great commissioner Mery uh I have a request of councel or Council Council the aison uh as I think we all know the University of Michigan is uh going through its campus plan for 2050 um together with its consultant suzaki the city is also um reviewing and updating its comprehensive plan uh with a different consultant interface um hopefully the two entities are collaborating closely on that and not just looking at what's within property lines uh I know that city council passed a resolution I believe it was in 2022 asking the city administrator to work with um the university on uh the idea of creating mutually more Workforce housing um part of the justification

104for that was scope three emissions reductions um just uh to give a sense of that the new house hospital that is being constructed in the main hospital complex will create 1,600 new jobs and I don't know of anybody that knows of 1600 new uh housing units in ant Arbor that are going to house those people so there's definitely a a need for that and so I'm hoping um I think I had emailed both of you and council member dish um about that council member dish said that she would check with the city administrator I've yet to hear from her so hopefully maybe at the next meeting we can hear an update on what the status of those discussions might be and what they might be leading to thanks yeah council member Rina so that that's

105perhaps another good update that we can provide um yesterday we had our December planning session um and the final hour and a half two hours of that was a presentation from the University on their planning process um they did give us a bit of an overview of some of their plans um I probably can't speak too much to how much collaboration existed in going into developing their plan um but that was something that we um expressed or many of us expressed last night from the council table um and I do know we have this is not the first time they've engaged us on it so several of us were invited to a community leaders breakfast on this um several uh months ago or a couple of months ago um I know that they're kind of

106going through the community engagement process and including stops with us has been part of that um and they also did seem to commit last night to partnering with us on um energy aspects for example when pressed on working with OSI it sounds like those conversations are happening and I know that um administrator dhoney has been in convers ation with the university um one of the things that he also brought to admin was um some priorities for us to consider in his conversations with the university and so we're hoping to provide feedback to him in January on that um so conversations are definitely happening um I would say I think that there are always more opportunities for us to work more closely together um I'll let council member bre speak for herself but I know she

107and I both pressed for some additional University support for non-motorized transit in our conversation last night um and um I also to to the point about Workforce housing I think one of the questions that was raised last night by one of one of the colleagues was that um we would also like to understand the University's vision of growth in the future and whether or not they're planning for that because um we we also know that we would like for them not to continue gobbling up land in the in the city um and so one of the things I do appreciate about their plan is kind of a very intensive revisioning of North Campus um but also making sure that they're providing adequate housing for the students as they continue to grow as a university um

108because that obviously needs to be a top priority as well so I will stop talking now and let council member Briggs also speak thanks um just to add to that uh Workforce housing was something that was mentioned by the university um I expressed support for that there was actually a little bit of conversation around um whether or not that should be the scope of University um um in terms of thinking about housing I strongly support very much for the same reasons that you mentioned um commission mki um the the need for Workforce housing and um specifically reference the medical center in my comments as well um I would say I also pressed the university um to be thinking uh about um its connection with the community because it's very much a campus plan that seems

109to um be fairly insular in in nature um and things like active Recreation were mentioned were but there was in health and well-being but no ties to active transportation for example um and so you know that's just one one example but I think thinking about the growth of the university and and how that impacts um uh we rely on each other very much so so the university wants a strong community and we want to see a strong University and um we're going to be a lot more effective achieving our our shared goals if we're working together and thinking about the impacts of of um you know each other's planning efforts and Investments so I'm definitely reinforce that but I think there's going to be um a fair amount of need to continue to reinforce that

110cool any other comments from our council members no great okay so now I'm going to put Vice chair harp on the spot um um he had suggested perhaps a way of gathering and setting future topics for our body and I was wondering if he wanted to share about that and if he thinks I'm crazy then we can forget about it um thank you chair McKenna um I I shared a one of the chall one of the challenges of figuring figuring out priorities is is um the process of of figuring that out and and and getting those listed and then sort of how we identify and sort of relatively rank the outcomes and and I shared just a a sort of digital platform or tool that was developed at at uh Princeton University and can look

111it up I think it's called all our all ideas and it's it's very useful for helping to sort of um uh rank uh different sort of options and so I just posed that to um chairman Kenna and um and Joe is a possible uh way to uh both surface some of the priorities for the next year in terms of agenda topics um but also to help um sort of figure out which ones are coming to the top relative to others in a fairly lightweight way um that also might allow for the introduction of of new additional topics um either from this commission or or from elsewhere and and so uh I shared that with them just via email and as a as an option that we could explore uh during one of the commission meetings

112yeah it seems like um I think Joe can definitely send out the link to share with folks and maybe you can review over the next uh month or so it's kind of nice um it's sort of this dichotomy so you're given uh two options and um can kind of pick between them and let's say we we posted different topics for you know for agenda moving forward um there there's actually an example if you go to the website from plan NYC which is about um the question that you can just test out online right now is what do you think is better for creating a Greener greater New York City and it's like zoning requirements or parking minimums and so it's I think that's very pertinent for our use here um it's already being used in

113this way yeah yeah and and and so part of the way this work is we might compile a list of agenda items that have already been submitted um and topics um and and pre-fill those out um and then introduce it through some period to allow others to add ones and and the nice part about it is it just sort of updates the voting and so it's cumulative and and um it it moves pretty quickly and we can get a sense of that and that that'll help po entally help us have a sort of um prioritized list that we can use throughout the year um also to refer back to in a fairly ordered concrete way and we can Shuffle that sort of as timing and and um and needs Prevail great great so to that

114end let us know yes C bricks I love the idea I think it's also a good way to maybe bring voices um you know help to make it easier to to weigh in on different topics um I hope there's a way to move this forward it sounds like the way that it's structured it's um very individually um uh I'm just thinking the open meetings act I know this has come up in previous commissions like Google Docs or something that are very like commissions can't necessarily work on all at once because it's violation it doesn't sound like it's structured like that and so um we just have to be cognizant that the the work of the majority has to be seen by the public at large so um hopefully it's structured in a way that allows

115us to do that um kind of sounds like what you're talking about it would I think I think there's capacity to um make the results public and and we may be able to share a a nominal URL um that would make that public um as well so that people could see the outcomes and and the rankings and and see how those are I believe that that should be easily doable um but we Al obviously want to also explore yeah Council Rina yeah I I think staff can probably be helpful on this a little bit and making sure that everything's above board but um it's not I would I would just say it's not just about making sure that the public can see the outcome um because that it it would all need to it would

116all be foilable so they they would be able to see all of it anyway and we should make it all accessible but a decision couldn't be made or a majority of the body couldn't be working on something offline in a way that's not public because that would violate om so so that's just yeah there's a a slight difference there but I think it's important to note yeah great maybe we can get staff to to dig into the the how it functions exactly and maybe report back I can also help with that Joe so okay yeah we can look at it together and and maybe at our next meeting F that out okay let us move along um so before we move to our final opportunity for public comment I wanted to share that I made

117the executive decision that we would have a happy hour next month um and whatever happy Means to you uh we're just going to get together and we are going to meet at Argus on Liberty per Vice Sher Harps recommendation it's a nice little cozy spot I think it'll be good for us quiet enough to talk and it's not a bar um they have Kucha and of course beer on tap um and chai lattes and whatnot so is it's a nice spot they're open till 8 I believe so um let's meet at 5:30 um we're not going to talk any official business but we are just going to get together and perhaps meet each other for the first time in person okay I forgot to mention the date um January 17th on Wednesday um 5:30 to

1188 that is what I decided if that doesn't work for everybody and there's an outcry we can change it but um I thought setting a date might be nice just to kind of set a Northstar for about month from now um it's it's midweek and um it's mid Monon so um yeah reach out to me or Joe if if that's an issue otherwise I will be there I know Gabe's gonna be there and um and we'll hope to meet you okay so we're move to Joe could Joe send out a meeting invitation so at least yeah I was just gonna say I will do that shortly that's great great thanks everyone okay we're going to move to our final opportunity for public comment um this is an opportunity to speak for up to 3 minutes

119if you're watching on CTN please call the number 5247 and enter the meeting ID 956 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 and you will hear an automated announcement indicating that the host is allowing you to speak and when speaking please move to a quiet area um and again say your name and address before beginning your comments is there anyone on the line Jo I don't currently have any hands raised but gonna give it 10 15 seconds or so not even after all that juicy discussion earlier all right um me hit the right

120button uh caller ending in 134 thanks Mr Lang and chairman Canna Ken Garber again yeah I wasn't going to comment but since chair McKenna seemed to invite um some kind of comment I decided to chime in one more time thank you for the opportunity um I was there at the uh city council work session last night and I want to thank commissioner Briggs for pressing the University of Michigan um fairly hard on their commitments um and their plans around things like housing and Transit land acquisition um future enrollment um you know I personally found the uf's responses vague non-committal evasive and um you know I think I agree with commissioner brgs said this is going to take more work um to get the kind of constructive action out of the U ofm that I think

121we need um or at least cooperation um on the discussion tonight on electrification I really like what uh Cambridge is doing uh and one of the things I most like is that they require energy disclosures from building owners so they can calculate emissions um you know for the regulatory purposes that were described we don't do that in N Arbor we have no idea what the emissions impact of our decisions are so I've been taking it upon myself to to make those calculations for uh individual projects I'm not the best qualified person to do it um but staff isn't and no one else is so um and so and I think we need that kind of information in order to make informed decisions let me give you an example um Mr Lang just mentioned the 217

122solar installations this year uh giving us 1.8 megawatts of new solar um uh Power uh yeah I calculate that that will save 1,420 metric tons of annual emissions if it replaces um current dirty electricity or gas um but uh uh the uh project that city council will be voting on next Monday the second phase of the of the village uh will emit 620 tons from gas combustion now that doesn't take into account the fact that our electric supply currently is very dirty it assumes 100% renewable energy uh electric generation which is the city's goal for 2030 it also doesn't take into account reduced um uh automobile emissions from commutes that presumably will be reduced once people can relocate to an arbor but that just compensates for a fraction I guess my larger point is that

123um we're wiping out you know something like 44% of our solar gains of the year just with this one project on the face of it um so uh we really have to get at this problem of new construction um otherwise you know we're treading water at Bast and probably losing ground overall that's time so I'm sorry thank you thanks Ken um no further callers commission mki two comments um first of all we missed the report from the environmental commission and if I may I'll go ahead and give that now and then I have a quick comment to Mr garber's comments is that okay yes okay um so real quick I think the most important thing for uh our commission is that um chair Mitchell introduced a resolution in support of a phase 2 feasibility study

124um of municipalization um I believe uh that uh she contacted you chair McKenna and talked about that before it was introduced uh the status of that was that there were um some edits uh that were suggested and uh the resolution was tabled those edits are going to be worked in and um presumably reintroduced um at a future date that was something that was on her initiative she mentioned it to me I recommended that she talked to chair McKenna and so that's what the status of that is the two other uh points that were considered is we had a report from uh Vice chair Brown who is a PhD chemist about pasas um and why it's so concerning why it's so persistent um why it's bioaccumulative and why it's so toxic how it's been introduced into

125the environment and what the implications are and the other thing is um we had a discussion on input to council and policy recommendations um for um basically lobbying and things like that and that's something that we might want to do um here coming up as an agenda item um real briefly uh to um Mr garber's comments um the city does have a disclosure ordinance but the disclosure only applies to buildings that are already built and so there is no disclosure requirement for buildings that are proposed so that is maybe something that we should think about as a body in terms of a recommendation to council if they're going to require it after the fact when a building is built and uh really some of the infrastructure is going to be there for decades uh then

126maybe we should be thinking about whether there should be disclosure upfront so that there might be a sense of uh what that impact is going to be and what kind of interventions could be applied and what their impact might be those are the to C sinus thanks commissioner mki I love that idea I think um you know what I read from quinton's talk was that um the initial disclosure for new and existing buildings was really a a step on the path towards compliance with um you know Carbon emissions reductions and it's this you know we can't manage it until we measure it so um I would I would support that moving in that direction okay um let us talk briefly about items for our next agenda um we do have a long list and we're

127going to move to a process of hopefully refining it but does anyone have anything new that they'd like to share [Music] none all right um we're going to move to adjournment uh this was a very fantastic meeting thank you so much for your attention um I'm happy that we got to meet tonight um it is currently 8:03 p.m. and as chair I declare this meeting adjourned have a great night and we'll see you in January byebye thanks all