Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 4/13/2021

001let's call the meeting to order my name is john mursky i am participating from my home here in ann arbor um and as chair of the energy commission i'm calling this meeting to order so good to see you all this evening uh i'm gonna proceed with my obligatory statement i need to do a video tape of this and just hit replay every time so welcome to the april 13th 2021 electronic meaning of the energy commission this virtual meeting is to affect social distancing and to mitigate the spread of the coven 19 virus we will conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners please remain on camera just as you would be visible in in-person meetings also mute your microphone when not speaking public comment will be the telephone only to speak during any of the

002public comment opportunities please call one of the following toll-free numbers 888 788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter the meeting id four 913-578345 zero two these numbers will remain the same during the entire year for energy commission meetings this information along with the two local dial-in numbers is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn on channel 16 and at t channel 99 as well as online at www.a2gov.org backslash watch ctn so missy do you want to read the land acknowledgement thank you tremblers can't be happy too i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including the ottawa ojibwe and botawatomi and wineda peoples i further acknowledge that

003our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable 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 very much so now we'll do the roll call and as you've seen there's a slight change in the protocol when your name is called please not only indicate that you're here but also state your location in the city from which you're attending so missy if you would go through the role of commissioners and council member liaisons that

004would be great absolutely chair uh commissioner hookum uh chuck hookham i'm in the fine city of san angelo texas at our aviator wind farm today thank you so much commissioner mccumber present and joining from my home in ann arbor thank you commissioner schreiber uh here and joining from my home in ann arbor as well thank you commissioner clevy here joining for my home in ann arbor as well thank you commissioner levin sorry yeah i'm here also in ann arbor thank you chairmerski here also from my home in ann arbor at 505 burst in place thank you vice chair colvin garcia i'm here and i'm in my home in ann arbor okay councilmember briggs present at my home in ann arbor thank you councilmember radina president also at my home in ann arbor thank you commissioner

005zacker president and also at my home in ann arbor great commissioner hatcher present and also home in ann arbor commissioner mccoy here also home in ann arbor thank you commissioner george here ward 5 ann arbor great commissioner singleton commissioner kerber here and in ann arbor there you have a quorum thank you very much one of these days we're gonna have to do home tours so uh maybe that's not a good idea uh looks like we have um here what's that again mark can you do the seller home tour on the energy commission meeting there we go we could do that so um look i think we have a really interesting agenda in front of us um i'm wondering if i can get a motion to approve the agenda i move to approve the agenda um

006so we have a motion from commissioner calvin garcia and a second from i think uh commissioner briggs and i heard somebody else also i which i missed so um do we have any discussion though before we actually proceed to a vote any requested changes well i have a comment opportunity to comment as commissioners so um okay so i'm all in favor of the agenda as published um say i or raise your hand i i all post so that passes unanimously so next on the agenda is approval of the meeting minutes uh people hopefully had a chance to look at the minutes anybody um willing to go out on a limb and uh motion that we approve the minutes i move that we approve the minutes there we go thanks marisa you have a second thank

007you so second from um commissioner treiberg and councilmember radina i think also um all those in favor say hi hi hi wanna pose any changes thank you passes unanimously so now we are at the point of public comment and i think we have someone who's ready to do that so this is an opportunity for members of the public to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on ctn please call eight seven 888-788-0099-4876 eight five three five two four seven and enter the meeting id that i mentioned before nine one three five seven eight three four five zero two again this information is also in the meeting agenda in the video feed city staff will and that's missy missy stoltz will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last

008three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated message that the host is allowing you to speak and when speaking please move to a white area mute any television or background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and finally please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments do we have anybody lined up we do caller ending in zero two two you should have just been asked to unmute hello my name is uh madison zimbrick um i'm a voter in ward 1 at the park point apartments complex um i'm calling in support of municipalization i believe that this is the way forward for less expensive more reliable and greener

009power and i encourage the commission to approve a feasibility study um that's that's my thing thank you thank you thank you for calling in all right caller ending in six eight nine caller entering in 689 you can unmute six eight nine oh there we go you should be good hello yes we hear you okay good hello my name is sophia lakeman i live on jefferson street in the old west side of ann arbor and i've lived here for all 19 years of my life um so i would really love to see um ann arbor support a municipal solar utility because you can you can find the core values of our community on hhs.com and the first one is storage the direct quote from the website being we responsibly manage and care for natural cultural and

010physical resources for current and future generations and as a current and future young ann arborite i would really love to see us reflect our values in the decisions we want so i urge our commissioners to help us have a greener future thanks for calling in and we appreciate your comments we have anyone else you do call our ending in 113 hi my name is pam hayes i live in ward 5 on charlton avenue i've lived in ann arbor for 32 years and i also support a municipal solar utility i'm definitely on board with um renewable energies we we need to get there thank you caller ending at 802. hello hello my name is aina my name is aina bernay i live at 803 brook street ward 5 and i support ann arbor having a municipal

011foliar utility i am ready to convert to renewable energy sources so thank you very much thank you for calling in great sorry chair let me just sorry uh caller ending in two to eight hello can you hear me yes hi my name is greg woodring i'm a member of a2p2 and i am once again calling in like a broken record uh advocating strongly that the city pursue a municipal electric utility it just makes sense cheaper more renewable power that puts the power of a clean future into our hands so i really hope that i see some great discussion and movement on this topic thank you so much all right a caller ending in one three four uh thank you dr steltz and chair mursky um this is ken garber another habitual caller i'm at 28

012haverhill court in ann arbor um buildings account for an astounding 68 of ann arbor's greenhouse gas emissions according to our most recent inventory so i'm really looking forward to tonight's building code presentation by jan culbertson and chuck halkum commissioner hookham is one of two energy commissioners in the news this month i want to thank him for injecting a dose of realism into the ann arbor observer feature story about jonathan overpack dean overpack is a great climate scientist but i respectfully disagree with him on the transition to renewables his view is way too rosy like commissioner hookum i think the transition is going to take at least several decades maybe longer the market isn't driving change nearly fast enough yes the price of renewables continues to fall but only on a levelized basis the cost of

013transmission and grid level storage are still major limiting factors and will be for a long time the solutions are expensive and companies won't make these investments on their own because everything considered it's still cheaper to fall back on fossil fuels so what stands in the way of a faster transition is dte which is pursuing its best interests which is okay except they're not our interests that brings me to commissioner mccoy's excellent opinion piece for the energy news network that she wrote this month with master sweeney it's titled to build energy resilience in michigan we must challenge dte they highlight dte's extreme dependence on fossil fuels its high rates and service failures and dte's political domination of state energy policy i don't blame dte for any of this it's what corporations do but we're in an

014emergency situation i agree with previous callers we should municipalize and not just to decarbonize there's a very lucrative electric franchise here in ann arbor let's put it under public control so um we can spend these big surpluses on our needs rather than exporting them to dte's executives and shareholders again i've got nothing against corporations but they're in it for the money and we should be too as michael douglas tells charlie sheen in the movie wall street it's all about bucks kid the rest is conversation dte has known this all along we should realize it as well thank you thank you mr garber uh caller ending in 371. hello my name is laurie white i live at 408 fountain street in ann arbor and i am just calling in to say that i support a municipal

015solar utility thank you thank you for calling caller ending in 194 sorry hi this is rita mitchell i live at 621 5th street and i also support a municipal energy system for the city of ann arbor i want us to move as swiftly as possible off fossil fuels to renewable energy options and um that means all nonsense oh non-fossil fuels and non-nuclear so um i'm looking to you all as as those who are in touch with the issues and how to move us in that direction and um the way we need to go thank you calling in missy or muted it's been a long time since i got that one on zoom uh yes no more hands raised no more hands ready okay um any comments from any commissioners or should we go ahead and

016move on to the main which is the energy report and i just i just have a comment um i think it would be uh worth having a a look at the uh if we do move to a feasibility study um it should be apparent to people that as a municipal utility we would be responsible for all electric utilities in ann arbor and we would have to probably be buying fossil fuel generated electricity for some time to from outside sources to deliver in ann arbor until we were able to ramp it up so i know that calling this a municipal solar utility has some cachet value but we're not talking about creating a renewable energy utility some people in michigan are talking about licensing a third utility which would run all of the renewables for the

017state and that would be a renewable energy utility but a municipal utility as a portfolio of power and one could look to a number of municipals in the state who buy power from consumers energy and from others um as well as self-generate renewables and others so um i just want to make sure that we're all sitting on the same song book and municipal utility can generate power with solar as well as other sources but it's not necessarily i don't think anybody's talking about a municipal solar utility but if they are that uh it would be really difficult to do just to clarify that any other comments if not we'll have an opportunity to do that um after the energy report from the office of sustainability innovations um missy you want to go ahead and start

018with the energy report then sure chambers can we do have one hand that just popped up from public comment i don't know if we've considered moved on or if you're okay taking that that's fine uh caller ending i'm just double checking yeah 172. hey yeah i'll be brief um my name is daniel smolkin i live in ward 4 at ann arbor and yeah i just wanted to add my voice in support of having municipal energy instead of relying on dt thanks for calling in daniel anyone else to see uh no no okay very good we'll have an opportunity at the end at the end again so uh energy report lots of very exciting things happening over in osi uh you know a lot but not enough i guess that's sort of the moral we did

019get received bids back for uh solar on 13 municipal facilities we're working our way through those at the moment pretty exciting stuff we're also working on our parallel rfp for all all of the affordable housing sites or housing commission sites to have rooftop solar as well uh tying that with battery storage where we can and where that makes sense pretty exciting stuff um it's also been a world i don't know covet time what it looks like for you but i have no idea what day it is ever uh sometime between when we last met and today we have been working pretty hard on a lot of federal asks for the infrastructure bill there's been a number of opportunities across different sectors so really excited that we in sustainability partnered with a number of units to

020put in some asks in that bill including the possibility of our first net zero energy fire station which i'm really excited to see move forward and then we also put in some of the projects uh rooftop solar storage systems throughout the community so fingers crossed those move forward we're also actively working on some transportation elements including some uh i think the phrase is solar assisted ev charging infrastructure uh looking to kind of build more of that and leverage as much solar potential as we can but also acknowledging we may have charging when when we don't have the sun so how are we comparing those so we're working on all kinds of efforts there also excited to share that some of you may have gotten this email we have had a lot of interest in heat

021pumps emerge kind of more broadly in the community and conversations and so members of our team have been working with heat pump manufacturers and some of the installers and we're hosting a special heat pump workshop for the community to come and learn more we've also been actively negotiating discounts on heat pumps so that if people move forward kind of like solarize they would be able to access those discounts it will be a different phasing because it won't be this neighborhood it'll be perhaps like a year-long opportunity where you mention a20 and you get a discount on a heat pump system because it is a lot more customized to your home than a solar system might be we're really excited to see that take off uh we put a call out to solarize participants and we

022had 100 over 130 people respond that they wanted to learn more and possibly move forward this is really exciting for us to kind of just jump right in uh we also continued to work in the bryant neighborhood unfortunately we were going to kick off our our work in the bryant neighborhood this is the neighborhood decarbonization assessment on thursday with a face-to-face walk by and a virtual town hall uh that face-to-face has been delayed due to spiking members of copen in the community but we are still going to kick off the virtual portion of that work and continue conversations with rmi rewiring america and others to try to unlock some pretty significant seed capital to help actually move through those homes and decarbonization really strategic kind of comfort decarbonization there are a number of other things

023but i'll just kind of stop there with the last exception being please mark your calendars a20 week is coming it'll be june 1st through june 6th it's a combination of uh decentralized and yeah like disaggregated events around town and some cross-cutting things excited to announce we have green fare f-a-r-e with local restaurants where they're promoting sustainable food locally produced food and plant-based food we're really going to bring home our local businesses highlight them that week we're working on a demonstration of we'll just show you for funding reusable takeout containers that the businesses can keep using so we're piloting this with a handful of businesses we also are looking at possibly having reusable bags for to-go containers that people might be able to participate if we don't really want to promote a lot of eating in

024restaurants right now so we afford to getting takeaway how do we reduce uh waste consumption associated with that that's one event and then we're doing other fun things like uh launching a product with the ann arbor distillery which will be an a20 sponsored beverage and the proceeds will all go to low-income solar programs in the community there's a there's a bunch of stuff that's coming out that week including an opportunity to meet our first cohort of a20 ambassadors which will be in your neighborhood in one of your neighborhood parks details coming shortly and an opportunity for the community to really tie into someone that they see every day or every week when they're out walking their dog who lives next to this is deeply connected a lot happening uh fun stuff but i'll stop there

025does anyone have any questions for dr schultz yes bridget um yeah hey missy going back to the heat pump item um just to clarify for anybody tuning in as i understand it heat pumps don't save you any money i mean the advantage of of them is that you're heating your house with electricity that could potentially have some renewable energy in the power mix but um unlike solar there isn't a payback on terms unless you're an electric resistance heating household uh which we believe 20 of our market is in ann arbor and so in those cases they might actually see savings from it but yes for the kind of more updated households it's probably oh uh i will confess i haven't heard that term what does it mean oh i see chuck i feel like i

026am going to say it wrong if i attempt to go into the technical engineering details of what electric resistance heating is chuck can i totally put you on the spot chuck you're muted i i can say what it is um it's basically um something like baseboard heating um except it's done with electric resistance and it's done with um you know like an element that you would see in your toaster oven or in your oven uh and it's it's electric and it's very inefficient and very expensive and therefore for those households that are using that and i know of one in an arbor at least it used to be that way um switching to a heat pump would probably be a savings but for houses that are eating with natural gas did you want to add

027anything to that just when whenever you think about this always think life cycle so i always convince people or talk to people that that a heat pump combined with maybe some minimal resistance heating on a really cold day ann arbor probably needs that still that the air source heat pump that you see is pretty efficient these days but if you look at it and value carbon and start thinking about life cycle costs now this gets really attractive really quick so as the cost go down and fro in first cost because everybody's worried about the first cost and planning around replacing your furnace for the first cost if you can manage that and get it to a point where it's practical the life cycle benefits are pretty dramatic and i think that's what i wanted to

028add if i can say one more thing before i recognize jay um there is a social cost to carbon there is some discussion about what that cost is and if that's ever monetized then we have to pay it individually then that will certainly make a difference but i think we should all recognize that if we are burning carbon um we are making society the rest of society for pay for the health and other negative impacts of burning that carbon so when we are asking people to look at switching to an electric type of heating mode that would hopefully be then powered by renewable energy that would then dramatically reduce those social costs so let's let's also keep that in mind commissioner zucker yep and i just had a quick question on the heat pump if

029are we focusing primarily now on on air-to-air source heat pumps or is it still kind of geothermal in or yeah in the mix as well yeah so the workshop is going to cover both but it is uh most of the systems actually both uh installers have offered the possibility of discounts so both are going to be discussed very customized though the perfect example of why it's just not as easy to offer as it is solar anyone else john maybe maybe to point this out you know this too john but and i put in geothermal in in ypsilanti the deciding factor j is that you need property to put in the well system so if you live in a dense community you probably can't unless you communitize the ground the the geothermal yeah and there are

030some opportunities potentially at reducing the well costs um hopefully that'll be covered in the workshop missy my understanding i heard from fung is that it's going to be on may 12th is there a time that people can reserve do you know what time of day it's going to be i do somewhere in my inbox can i come right back let me just have her yeah you can come back any time during the meeting and let us know and anybody else that's watching because i think that might be of a broad interest um i did that one question does anybody else have any questions for dr spokes so so missy i have one question if i can bother you for a second um and that is uh we have as i understood two separate requests for

031proposals one for housing commission properties and one for municipal buildings um is the structure of those such that if those were to be awarded uh to the same vendor that there might be some volume discount by selecting the same vendor for both sets of properties we i don't have the rfp out yet for the housing commission sites right so it's possible although i will say having looked at the rfes most of them don't have that kind of capacity to probably do them at the same time i think they would have to sequence just based on our respondents which is great um it's a really good question also fong is on it it is may 12th at 7 pm and more details are available on the city's website you go to our events page you can

032see and actually directly register for the heat workshop okay so i encourage commissioners to keep that time free that's may the 12th at 7 p.m as well as anybody else that's listening in uh i'm sorry it might be worthwhile i just thought of this for us to mention next month's meeting because it does look like it will be a joint for that first portion yeah go ahead if you want to finish that but sure yeah absolutely so next month uh for our meeting we'll be starting jointly with the planning commission and we have uh rmi formerly the rocky mountain institute coming in to do a kind of overview of the electrification market broadly this is coming up more and more as planning is seeing developments that are pushing towards all electric there's questions about technologies

033and what's viable and what's not viable and uh chair mursky and vice chair cleveland garcia and i thought that sounded like something that was interesting based on the voting to this commission so we decided to merge the meetings so it should be fun great great so um what i'd like to do now is open it up to all commissioners if they have any points of interest or announcements that they would like to make now is the time come on we're not that boring of a group well we won't twist any arms so we will now move to the body of the agenda and first we're going to have a presentation on the green belt and um i seen remy uh here uh on uh the zoom call from the very beginning remy you want to

034take it away and introduce yourself and we're looking forward to hearing about the green belt and how we can better leverage it absolutely hey everyone um bear with me while i share my screen can everyone see my screen and hear me yes all right so thanks for the opportunity to discuss the green help with you all my name is remy long i work for the conservation fund um which is a national land conservation non-profit and a leader in complex conservation real estate transactions conservation financing and strategy so since 2005 the conservation fund has been on contract with the city of ann arbor to build out and implement this screen belt program as well as assist with parkland acquisitions within the city limits so uh to just to start i'd like to briefly discuss the context

035in which the greenbelt program or this millage emerged then look at the function it serves in the community and region and then finally cover some of the impacts to date so we are all here right now or all but one of us physically but let's start from a landscape level context here we are michigan the great lake state population 10 million the second most diverse agricultural economy in the united states second only to california and the heart of the great lakes which represents 21 of the earth's fresh water zooming into southeast michigan we see the expansive metropolitan detroit region which contains nearly 50 percent of the state's population on just six percent of the land base uh here sits ann arbor positioned within this sort of emerald arc of state and local conservation lands buffering

036metro detroit which serve uh as an agricultural and recreational base for supporting the densely populated region um in the early 2000s noting the landscape level changes occurring and their impacts to the local environment the ann arbor community began to have a discussion about what they could do to um protect land for the thriving local food economy that serves ann arbor and the greater southeast michigan region protect upstream green infrastructure to help ensure the city's source water protection and to create recreational opportunities for community so in time that conversation and idea became a campaign that drove the passage of a 2003 ballot initiative that received 67 percent of voter support who approved a 30-year millage to protect park land within the city and regional farmland and open space surrounding the city the passage of this millage

037and the subsequent work it would cause prompted the city to issue an initial rfp and since 2005 the conservation fund has been contract minister um the city's open space and parkland preservation program often uh summarized as the greenbelt millage so we support on the real estate transactions securing federal and local matching funds developing local partnerships and implementing the greenbelt strategic plan so let's take a look uh at the millage's impact over the last 18 years within the city limits the millage has funded 32 acquisitions um parkland acquisitions worth over 13 million dollars adding 168 acres to the city's park system these acquisitions constitute both natural areas and neighborhood parks with improvements and facilities on them moving outside the city in a truly visionary step the city chose to support a greenbelt district where it is

038this millage has funded 70 acquisitions totaling nearly 6300 acres of land the majority of which is protected through development rights restrictions uh which i'll get into in a little bit more detail in a moment um in all the greenbelt's protected 57 farms 20 28 miles of river stream and waterway frontage and protected over 16 percent of the available farmland surrounding the city within the greenbelt district so far so that 6300 acres represents over 72 million dollars worth of real estate protected with the city taxpayers only contributing 24.7 million toward that protection uh in part due to our success uh leveraging federal and local matching funds as well as the strategic use of conservation easements which is restriction of development so talking about development rights and conservation easements um owning a piece of property is said

039to be like owning a bundle of sticks and each stick represents a right you have to that problem uh the right to sell to access to develop etc restricting the development rights through a permanent perpetual legal agreement a legal contract called a conservation easement removes some of the sticks from the bundle of ownership that threaten the conservation values associated with that property but allow a private landowner to continue to retain select rights that do not threaten uh the conservation value of that property whether that be active farmland wetlands green infrastructure forest land biodiversity all of those conservation values are then protected by removal of select rights conservation easements are used across the united states this is not unique to us or our area they've protected over 32 million acres of land in the us of

040an area larger than the state of new york um we use them locally to guarantee the presence of agricultural lands in the future to safeguard green infrastructure and to protect regional biodiversity so that's a lot of talking uh not a lot of maps and i love maps so let's do a couple of those um what does this look like on the landscape all of this work here is a map of the green belt district circa 2000 um the green belt being the green outline surrounding the city and here is a map of the greenbelt district today in 2021 that 6300 acres added map so in all the city and its local partners um have added nearly 6 300 acres to the map uh while these may appear random or buckshot on a map it should

041be noted that all of these acquisitions have been driven by landscape level analyses that inform the program's acquisition strategy and uh focus on creating critical masses of protected land um in a highly fragmented environment which we live so with 12 years to go uh in this 30-year millage what's next for the green belt in 2019 the greenbelt advisory commission uh initiated an update to the program's strategic plan the results from both partner and public feedback were clear and re-emphasized many of the program's goals that existed which was support the local agricultural economy create new land access opportunities for new and beginning farmers and prioritize opportunities that meet at the nexus of farmland and source water protection but there was also a clear desire and new and emerging priority to have the greenbelt advisory commission's outcomes

042or the greenbelt programs outcomes more closely align with osi reporting and have our contributions more widely understood as part of the sustain the city's sustainability platform okay so that was a lot uh and i apologize has taken me this long to get to a slide geared toward um your efforts but i felt context was necessary before discussing the green belt in any greater detail so from time to time uh in speaking about renewables on greenbelt properties uh in the greenbelt district um i do field calls from district interested in knowing what general conservation eastern restrictions are and what they entail but also more specifically what they need for renewable energy on the property whether it be for personal use or for commercial and the restrictions can be summed up as this it's limited to on-farm

043energy needs uh and residential needs of the property or the farm itself there are restrictions uh on the types of commercial and industrial uses of any protected property that's protected with an easement all protected properties are subject to a two percent impervious surface limitation meaning no more than two percent of the total protected acreage can have structures that prevent infiltration of rain water and all of those impervious surfaces need to be cited within a small and specified area on the protected property so that is to say for example a 100 acre farm is allowed two percent impervious surface that would be two acres it needs to be sited in a small areas usually typically within the three to four acre range in a specified location on the property um so not widespread uh infrastructure sprawling

044across um the protected area uh so this is all to say large-scale renewable energy on green belt protected properties is not possible [Music] i um to share that the green belt advisory commission has a map of priority parcels within the greenville district that they do consider high priorities for protection and the green belt advisory commission has no desire for our work to run in conflict uh with the mission of expanding renewable energy infrastructure in the region um but this map is missing a critical piece of uh information and overlay uh to say simply that would help inform our work what parcels in the greenbelt district could be considered high priority for new renewable energy sites um from my position i could make you know easy large assumptions of i'd imagine those sites would be near

045substations or established energy transfer corridors but if greenbelt advisory commission were to be given a meaningful overlay of prospective renewable sites we would gladly incorporate that uh data into our own landscape level prioritization to ensure that our efforts don't pose any conflicts in the future um and with that i've talked enough and uh i'll be happy to take questions if there are thank you very much looks like we've got a couple of people lined up with questions commissioner zucker yep thanks um i have two questions one is related to the the two percent uh impervious surface i'm wondering if um like solar panels and a raised you know raised solar panels um that could be used in kind of a combined agri-solar usage that don't actually you know there's still infiltration under the solar panels

046i don't know if there would be some potential of those not counting towards the two percent um impervious surface if they don't actually make the ground beneath them impervious and then um i got my other question out there and you asked them both and then my second question was uh related i don't know if there's any way that we are relating the open farmland um there's a lot of uh info out there now about kind of the bios of christmas secretion of the kind of regenerative farming versus kind of traditional industrial farming and if there's any way we could kind of tie tie the usage of the land for farming moving forward to be in greener and greener methods to kind of actually capture carbon as a reward or somehow monetize that um so let

047me try question one um i said the any new um infrastructure with house barn uh solar panels uh wind turbines they are uh it needs to be contained within a specified limited area so that it just doesn't uh sprawl across the property so um the nuance the of a solar panel not really being a detriment to rain water infiltration that certainly hits on one of those gray areas in the language around a conservation easement but i think the general parameters of limiting the scope of any infrastructure on a property to a small corner um or up along the road um limits the use in a wide scale or sprawling manner so i'm not saying it's uh black and white um there is some gray area there but uh some of the other restrictions um seem

048to preclude it from being functional a functional option um so part two um conservation easements are pretty expansive documents i mean they're they're they're not like a power line easement document or pipeline easement document those can be pretty short two three pages um these are 25 30 page agreements that detail the do's and don'ts on a property but even at that level of detail these agreements are restrictive and not necessarily prescriptive so um we do require the landowners we work with obtain a farm conservation plan that is approved by the natural resource conservation service a subset of usda uh which ensures that they're using some of the best practices usda is putting forth there are certainly issues with that that's not the cutting edge by any means but it does help us create a baseline

049for enforcement if something is going terrible with erosion or mismanagement or misapplication of certain things so we do not have leverage in these agreements to mandate certain farming practices nrcs themselves has a whole suite of other pay for performance programs that farmers can tap into um the function of the greenbelt and similar land conservation programs is to as i think of it protect the most fundamental piece of the farming equation which is the land itself and then the market and other programs and paper for performance incentives will drive other changes on that protected land base if that makes sense yeah commissioner question was um when you say it is restricted to only uh renewable generation that can be utilized on site uh restricted uh by whom i mean is that is that a green belt

050piece or is that something more global i'm just trying to figure out where the restriction uh comes from sure yeah uh that is a federal um standard for the matching funds that we receive um so nrcs uh is the one that has what they call minimum conservation easement deed terms that they require incorporation into each agreement if we are accepting their funds the city has a strong track record of securing nrcs funds for these projects um hence you know that much real estate protected for what we've only had to put in um so uh the the mandate on that comes from nrcs and then if nrcs is not in the picture in terms of the funding structure for the transaction um it's a local requirement that we also have written into our own templates so

051there are layers of restrictions coming from layers of uh federal state or local agencies um that get baked into these agreements um uh that some can be adjusted but depending on who's at the table with the funding um we are required to put some in in just a quick follow-up quite getting uh what the rationale for it is right because i mean nrcs policy could change under under a different president or under the current president but what's the like i'm finding so if you were under the two percent restrictions or if you've got the already developed land generate enough solar for example to utilize more off-site what is there a rationale for why you would restrict that um i think the i think the rationale is generally um so certainly want to help the farmer

052keep a viable farming operation and reduce costs by investing in renewable that's going to serve them they're not restricted from selling back to the grid um but the purpose of the infrastructure has to be to serve them and their farm uh we're not gonna there's no penalty for selling back to the grid for whatever additional access you do have in generation um but it's to keep it uh marketable and the incentive to keep it transferring i believe among farming generations um and not looked at as a prospective spot for commercial enterprise beyond agriculture and i know that that can get fuzzy and how do we define agriculture and agricultural production but for instance uh the 6300 acres protected within the greenbelt district there are 85 000 acres worth of land in the greenbelt district so

053we there's plenty of other land base for um these other uh initiatives to take place on um and this is an incentive to keep this as the agricultural land base and that's primary function and purpose that's it thank you commissioner yes my question is this are bio digesters that process animal waste and crop waste into methane consider renewable or not um i'd have to take a look at the easement language to see if they even specify biodigesters um it's not something we've come across locally that i'm aware of yeah i'm not sure that one i'll hand to attorneys um that would be worth clarifying i think [Music] thanks for the question commissioner cleavy um commissioner um levin did i hear see that you would wanted to pose a question yeah you need to unmute yourself

054uh yes um where's the two percent restriction from from is that another federal restriction it is federal it's also rather ubiquitous across all um land conservation programs in the u.s if you go to a non-profit land conservancy in california or one in maine you're often gonna find a consistent use of two percent um i couldn't cite the study that is the basis of that but somewhere at some point someone said once you go past two percent on a certain area things start to degrade like maybe there's like a court case that said over two percent now like we have to you know you're violating you're no longer in the right categories so we're gonna have to like tax you at a higher level does that have something to do with it like because the whole

055point is to alleviate their their taxes well that's one of the one of the benefits to the farmers yeah one of them um yeah i'm not aware of any court case around the impervious surface limitation just that uh the in michigan there's a state association of land trusts or land conservation uh groups um that puts forth a model conservation easement um that is intended to be a resource for all the non-profit land trusts to utilize as well as the government agencies should they wish to pull from those best practices or that language and all of the michigan land trusts utilize two percent as well um has there ever been any one that's looked into like a different like kind of alternate conservation agreement that is a little bit more favorable to putting solar or other

056types of renewable energy on the property it wouldn't of course maybe they would get taxed at a slightly higher level um but i'm just wondering if that's ever been explored something like that that you're aware of that would help us to maybe you know do two purposes one can serve the land and also to generate more green power yeah i would imagine as how diverse the field is across the us and the different uh landscapes that are being worked in i mean a single conservation easement in colorado covers five to ten thousand acres whereas a single conservation easement around here over 30 to 300 acres it's a it's a very different landscape um so i'm sure people are working uh on some creative restrictions where we come from or or where we're coming from as

057a program is uh city council in many prior years and the greenbelt commission has placed great emphasis on leveraging the city's greenbelt dollars as far as they can go so we do seek that federal state local matching funds for every transaction we do if we were able to put 100 percent of the funding ourselves on the table we would have complete control over the negotiation of the terms associated with the conservation easement but ultimately two things there i think given that there is a landscape of uh unrestricted land available um it makes sense for energy developers um or communities to look to unrestricted properties because you just do not have you worry about any of the headache associated with restrictions embedded in the contribution um and maybe there's good opportunities for synergy and adjacency um

058or surrounding uh there's there's opportunity uh certainly overlap in positive outcomes but maybe not on the same prior or on the same parcel itself okay one more question sorry say that one more time of the green belt uh so the total millage account uh the greenbelt account i believe has about 5.8 million and the parks portion of the account has i think 6.1 um but in our pipeline we've fully committed or not fully committed we've committed council has approved a few million three and a half maybe 3.7 million dollars worth of projects right now to that 5.8 million dollar account balance that we're working through but we generate that 1.2 million in revenue annually so it's given that these transactions take often one to three years to complete um we're always kind of doing a

059pipeline projection of what we have in the account book the actual tangible account balance right now it's 5.8 million liquid council member briggs so i appreciate appreciate all your work on this and all the background information that's really wonderful um and actually i'm glad to to know that those kind of what the source of those restrictions are i think there's a real temptation to to have this land serve multiple purposes and i i think the the goal of preserving agricultural land for agricultural land is a good enough purpose all on its own but to to get to the concept of the um the map overlay and um that would sort of then layer on um what might be um unrestricted land that we we would want to use for for green energy production he have

060there been discussions yet about how um when there when there would be a conflict about you know what we see is value really valuable land to preserve um for agricultural purposes versus really valuable land to for for energy green energy production um how how we might help to to guide those decisions that have have you started having those discussions or have thoughts on that i i haven't um i the program is a beast to manage in and of itself these kind of far-reaching things also the parameters of the millage um don't really allow me to enter this territory um if this is really your your guys's territory um that i would look to help inform and draw from but to be the leader on uh or prompt uh conversations um this is the extent uh

061is showing up here for for my part i've certainly thought about it and i've wished for a while that i've had that overlay i think if the overlay was done if there was an analysis and it was fairly transparent uh i can imagine that it may only be 30 or 40 parcels which is a drop in the bucket in the entirety of the greenbelt district but i don't know for sure what they are and i wouldn't assume to know or have expertise in figuring that out so i would look to you guys and the private sector partners to help inform that analysis and gladly take that on um i i can tell you that solar commercial solar prospecting um specifically some private entities sending letters to greenbelt landowners saying we're interested in establishing a solar

062commercial solar lease on your property have changed some of the dynamics around um the negotiations that i do you know if development rights are appraised at let's say 6 000 an acre and it's a one-time lump sum on a 100-acre farm for 600 000. um the the solar developer offering 40 000 or 20 000 an acre each year for 40-year contracts uh in these letters that aren't guarantees they're just prospecting they certainly call into question the farmer's willingness to work with the greenbelt program um so i'm not saying that's a bad thing farmers should do what's best for them uh but it would help me to have a more informed approach in these conversations with the farmers i work with to say there is a map of priority parcels for solar energy um you may

063have received this letter but uh i can tell you that you're a priority on my map but not a priority on that map so your best chance may be working with my program if you need to realize some capital in the near term from your farm if that makes sense yeah no it does make sense it helps to see how it could help benefit the work that you're doing um so that's great i guess is in terms of helping to to guide um some of that is there any additional data that you feel like would um i guess we don't certainly don't have a program that's about acquiring land for green energy production yet in terms of maybe that'd be something we'd be thinking about in the future but um you do exactly um but

064do you have a sense of uh is there more data that you need in terms of um helping to protect potentially inform the benefits of of of what how the land could be used and and you know yeah it doesn't have to be limited to solar um you know i i i would say run an analysis that looks at multiple types of renewable energies and their suitability and proximity to the city limits um it it also can be as general as just a buffer i imagine that many of these sites it would be beneficial if they were closer to the city rather than further away and the extent of the greenbelt district stretches out um five miles from the city so if it's that everything within a quarter mile of the city limits should just

065be kind of on a pause until it's thoroughly vetted on an individual basis instead of a a comprehensive overlay in a gis analysis or or private public uh partnership to just discern what those parcels are it can be a soft pause not a freeze on doing work within that area um but there's many solutions to kind of uh giving notice to the greenbelt advisory commission hey we're looking in this general area maybe it's not the entirety of the city limits maybe it's just the south east corner uh of the greenbelt district or maybe it's um yeah it could be chunks to put it crudely okay thank you commissioner george and i think uh dr school did you have your hand up and put it back down did you want to ask a question no okay

066go ahead commissioner george thank you mr chairman um so my question it kind of goes along the lines of council member briggs's questions um just moving forward as the green belt is looking at acquiring new properties and so forth and as the city continues to develop the a20 plan and looking at um you know possible uh solar developments whether the public or private uh wind or other renewable energy sources i guess um and this is a question what what type of considerations would the green belt advisory uh board either do they already do or you know what would some possible solutions be to considering um you know maybe not purchasing this type of land because it could be used for renewable energy production later on in the near future now i think that's a it's

067a great question and right now so the 2019 strategic plan update occurred for the greenbelt program we had some nice outcomes from that some updated priorities that we wanted to then uh make use of by incorporating them into the scoring system that we have for applications um uh so for instance is it a smaller farm in which case by restricting the development rights lowering the cost of the property we're making a land access opportunity for a new and beginning farmer whose number one barrier is finding affordable land in the region um so if we take that uh priority and put it in our scoring system it's whereas a 300 acre parcel is going to score way better typically um how can we make the opportunity for create fostering new and beginning farmer land ex access

068opportunities a higher scoring criteria um i think similarly they the scoring committee of the greenbelt as they work through integrating the priorities um could certainly have a line item saying is this parcel aligned with the suite of city initiatives um uh that are being explored um and could it run in conflict to it as sort of flagging it and giving it points associated with it's not near energy transfer corridors it's four miles out from the city so good proximity but not suitable for energy and um therefore it scores you know medium high in that regard under the context of the full spectrum of 820 initiatives um i could see that being incorporated into the scoring uh for sure um i would uh hesitate to make any hard and fast rules but more put it in

069something that we use like the scoring system help prompt conversations as we evaluate if that yeah no that that makes sense it kind of goes along with that overlay that you mentioned earlier um i it seems like one of the biggest things is just a good communication between people doing different things to make sure that everybody's on the same page thank you we we are trying to get close more closely online there's a um university of michigan c's master's team currently doing a carbon sequestration analysis of the entire portfolio of greenbelt properties to see what the equivalent carbon storage is that we've done to date uh and how does that convert into social cost of carbon um so that when we do go to council on a project by project basis in our memo we're

070able to say this is the cost of the conservation easement and the permanent protection of this green infrastructure but also here's this relative return by permanent sequestration of this carbon in in this project so those are data points we've used dollars and acres as our measurement for success for too long and we need to become more uh holistic and understanding and um tied into the system of wider osi reporting and a 2-0 reporting by having those kind of metrics okay we need to try to pull this to a close because we got another agenda point that's pretty important um commissioner zucker did you have a short one and commissioner yeah just super quick i was just wondering um when someone does uh gets into the greenbelt program are they committed to do 100 of their

071parcel or could they is there's you know or do they often do just like 75 percent of their partial and then we could piggyback on you know some other yeah another parcel the conservation the legal conservation easement boundary does not need to match the tax id boundary um it can be custom created we could do a squiggly line uh and carve out i don't want to that's miserable to try and enforce but um it is possible i do carve outs um typically with a hundred acre farm and a five acre farmstead complex that's already in existence i'll just carve out five acres around it so that we don't have to worry about enforcement around that area at all and we've protected 95 acres so yes they can have exclusions um it's fairly common commissioner i

072just wanted to remind the commissioners that you know before we have to start making these hard choices of you know turning our green spaces into environmental renewable energy sacrifice zones that in 2019 chairman mursky and i uh brought a report on solar feasibility to the commission which has become the basis of the 78 megawatt target that uh a20 is now and the we did maps of the whole city and identified over 200 megawatts worth of solar potential only 78 megawatts of which we need within ann arbor that didn't include the university of michigan so i think you know there is more than enough places with solar energy if we do it on a distributed basis we're going to put megawatts where the solar ons on green spaces that's going to be sold to the utility

073companies um through a centralized utility program and as chuck hook and commissioner hook them said a couple weeks ago in this presentation their ability to uptake that power is restricted on their um on their ability to to deal with its intermittency intermittency that doesn't create the same problems on a decentralized basis so i think we should keep in mind that before we even begin to go down the track of wow we need that land for solar concentrates industrial solar we might want to look at our own buildings because when we put solar on buildings in ann arbor we raise the real estate value of that property when we sacrifice a green space for an industrial renewable energy facility we get nothing for it so um i'd be happy to share that report with you uh

074rennie if you'd like to look at it we got maps uh all over the place we did lidar studies showed sites as i said there's multi 200 megawatts with the solar potential here and we're only using 78 megawatts of that if we meet our ann arbor you know our 820 plan so go send me an email i'll be glad to share that report with you thank you thanks commissioner cleavy um i i have two quick questions if i may hopefully quick um one is if i were a greenbelt farmer and i said i would like to put in ground mount solar and graze small livestock sheep or goats and have artisanal cheese production on my farm is that something that is conceivable within the specified area where you can have additional infrastructure so only within

075the two percent yeah which would be limited to a yeah a specified corner area yep and then the other question um i'm just going to leave as an open question i don't know that it has to be um answered because not really directly related to energy production and that is really maybe the sense directed to the council members and that is if i understood correctly the millage has allowed the city to purchase 168 acres of parkland um and is that all in the city or is that also outside the city that is the vast majority of that is within the city limits um and just for context there's about there's about 2200 acres of park land in the city of city limits or the city's yeah park system has about 2200 acres so um we've

076added yeah whatever percent that is a 8 since um right yeah 2 000. i'm just wondering if council has ever thought you know this were what roughly 13 years in there's a little bit of money in the pot um we're going to generate more money for another roughly 17 16 years all that money then is also land that's taken off the tax rolls and i'm wondering if the council has ever thought about what the implications of that are um and i just leave that as an open question um you know it's another roughly maybe maybe the the price of parkland is going to be going up and up so it's not going to be another you can't extrapolate directly but maybe it's another 150 acres that come off the tax rules and i know that's

077already a big problem when you look at the university and parklands and all these other things i'm wondering if anybody's ever looked into those indications so um it doesn't have to be answered now because it's really not maybe not the point the time and place to do so um there's a couple of hands still up i assume we've answered those questions so if that is true if somebody else doesn't raise their hand um i'm just gonna respond to your question really quick and it's not totally taking the property off the tax rules and it might not actually be reducing it that much because i'm not sure exactly what level it's being taxed at already it is going to reduce um the taxes but it's not zeroing out the tax on that property okay very good

078okay um so we're gonna move on um and we've had um another presenter join us um um jan culbertson and i'll let jan introduce herself if she even needs to be introduced but i'll let her do that and i think the intended order was um so this is on a building code update and changes that are uh potentially going to happen at the state level and i think the agreement was that uh commissioner hook um you were going to start and i think um january going to take it off from there and that was going to be sort of interactive with the whole commission after that is that correct i think so okay i'm going to speak very quickly so i'm not going to steal jan thunder i promise so i was very happy that

079she could join us and speak to us so i'll just share my screen and walk through a few quick ones great is that viewable can you see that yes yes yeah okay very quickly so thank you for having me um you heard ken garber earlier today talk to us a little bit about 68 in ann arbor of our greenhouse gas emissions anthropogenic are caused by buildings um nationally it's probably over 40 and as we press forward in the utility space and in transportation to reduce the greenhouse gases buildings become a bigger part of the portfolio and another important fact our buildings tend to be 60 to 100 years in length of service which is significant because they'll continue their their pathway of producing greenhouse gases for quite a while um we also know i think

080as a commission now that energy efficiency is much easier to build in upfront than it is to retrofit i have lots of examples of this if anybody's interested in how much it really does cost later to change things but it's really pretty significant lastly i think folks know where greenhouse gases come from there are some direct emissions which come from our combustion of fossil fuels that are used in heating cooking and other places there's indirect from energy consumption industrial uses cooling off gases of our insulation and all kinds of other sources that are not really large typically in terms of focal point but the electricity piece being indirect is a pretty important commodity and that's why we talk a little bit about um electrification potentially as being a potential offs offshore of some of this

081indirect and if we can think about the direct greenhouse gases and focus on those i think that's a really good process to move us along in our grease greenhouse gas eight to zero goals a busy slide i apologize for that some key takeaways that um all buildings that we have in the in the city are designed for um the michigan codes and standards in the stilly the rossignol hale single state construction code act in in 1972 pretty much limited the cities from doing anything that they wanted to do and forced most new construction to be following the state codes um the state codes that we currently use were adopted in 2016 2019 you can see them listed i won't go through them residential is obviously for small smaller structures building code for the balance uniquely

082the the energy code was based on 2014 data it used the 2015 international energy conservation code in ashrae 90.1 2013. the distinction there being in which is now amazingly seven years ago the cost of led light bulbs and the cost of retrofitting lighting controls and putting renewable energy on buildings was not so inexpensive in a code situation pretty much recognized that and didn't enforce significant prescriptive requirements um and started to focus more on performance-based ideas which are really crucial as we move forward because prescriptive tend to reduce put rules in place that don't fit all buildings very easily so just think about the codes we have in place now are somewhat dated since the 2015 window there's been a ton of code updates from bashrae we've had at least two revisions of ashrae 90.1 all

083focused again on performance and reducing greenhouse gas improving energy efficiency what's happening in the state of michigan for various reasons are the codes are lagging a bit the energy code is not on the docket right now it's it was supposed to be 2021 perhaps now i'm thinking it's probably not going to do much until 2022 so it continues to slide so we yet have another year of using an older code situation and like i said many codes right now are focused on energy efficiency greenhouse gas reduction which are all feasible plausible i was involved in 2015 when the codes and standards were adopted the energy code was pretty much a war of various factions standing up to one another and fighting for what they what they could do and what they couldn't do so it

084got pretty brutal and it really slowed things down even further um so what are our options if we can't focus on a state code that is going to well here's our options really we have four options right in front of us to try to resolve some of these imbalances with respect to codes and standards on buildings we could wait for this next round 20 22 we're not sure what that's going to look like um so that's one option um we can try to use our our leverage that we have which is pretty minimal but go to the state and say that there needs to be a revision of that de rossi act so that we can do our own thing that's going to take a lot of political pressure to make happen um i put

085an x by that um the two real drivers here things we can do in my mind are to use an optional energy stretch code as a means of reinforcing and enhancing our our infrastructure and that can affect both existing and new um we could we could design or adopt an optional netcode zero type approach i think jan's gonna talk to us about that i'm not going to launch into that much um the the real issue here is we need to do something and the the one case example i'll bring to your attention is i think this is now 10 years ago i designed a building in massachusetts it was 100 by 300 not a big bit not a big building not a lot to it the initial building was designed with conventional fluorescent lights and

086it had natural gas forced air heating we submitted the plans for the billing to the building department and they said nice try um that doesn't meet our performance standards and i didn't know what their performance standards were i just felt that was the normal so we went back to the drawing table redid all our hvac system and electrical and modified it all we actually went to um electric heat thinking that was easy we're an electric utility we know how to do that it's easy all the hardware is easy to buy it reduces the duct work submitted the plans lo and behold the city came back and said you're not doing that either think a little bit differently so we thought outside the box went back to the drawing table again this is my designers were

087going nuts um we basically came up with an air source heat pump design with electric heat supplement because massachusetts did get cold and we didn't want our residents to be unhappy so back to the code officials and they actually liked it so the third time was the charm um what this was was this energy stretch code they had adopted this they basically made it an enforceable standard in their city which they could do in massachusetts and it was really effective to get us as designers to think outside the box ten years ago so i i really like that concept and i'll throw that out there um the fundamental conclusion here is that optional codes we need to do something soon my thinking is we need to do something as a city with the limited options

088we have in front of us i'm personally ready to stretch and and do something about it i would be more than happy to lend my my experience base to do this and i'm going to turn it over to jan because um i think she's got a lot more to share with these other options and talk a little bit about the code in more detail so thank you for indulging me and we'll go from go from after jan's slides thanks chuck and i'm jan culbertson i'm an architect i'm also a leadership chair of the ann arbor 2030 district um as a part of my involvement in the aia i also um and co-chair of the government advocacy committee um at the state level which also um engages with uh engineers uh and so what i wanted

089to do i in the packet i linked to like some full presentations that have been done on the energy code update which missy was involved in with eagle um and also a full presentation that vince martinez did on the xero code um and i can give you a link to actually his video um webinar if you want to hear him get the full presentation i didn't want to do the whole thing tonight we'll just do some summaries so with that i'll go ahead and share my screen i want to make sure you can see that okay yes we can okay great so um my involvement with um architecture 2030 which developed the xero code goes back about i want to say about almost 12 years now where we actually brought um the it was called

090aia plus 2030 and was basically a continuing education uh series for architects on on how to design more efficient high-performance buildings and with that i've stayed in touch with them and continued to kind of follow um some of their leadership around um carbon neutrality and the so the zero code is something that makes a lot of sense to me um the rationale behind the zero code um has to do with one new buildings place an additional load on the grid um and what xerocode does is it really accelerates um progress toward a clean grid by requiring new buildings that are coming online they come with their own additional renewable energy that exceeds what utilities are already required to do and the renewable energy requirements are fixed for a prescriptive path so there's an option you

091can and this helps with like very small buildings where you're not going to do energy modeling et cetera there is a prescriptive path and then there's a performance path it encourages the performance approach because um it's it's much more it's easier to reduce the amount of renewable energy that you have to procure if you use the performance method the way it works is relatively simple you design an energy efficient building it has to be in compliance with the 2021 iecc which chuck mentioned or better and then you establish the building's renewable energy requirement from either that energy model that simulation or from a default renewable energy table which has to do with building types and your climate zones then you can meet that requirement by either integrating on-site renewable when that's feasible or uh procurement

092and um really uh this has been updated now and really now that they've published the ashrae 90.1 um 2019 that's really the basis of it um with you know 2021 and we'll talk a little bit about the different code steps when we get to how the code updates are done in michigan so there's the the energy code standard and then there's um what was adapted which is the renewable energy code appendix and right now there is a zero code network um i'm a part of that um uh the aia in grand rapids and detroit are and i believe zach um smith from the city is also a part of that uh network and they are working um there are stakeholder groups that are looking at implementing the zero code oregon has adopted the xero code

093um in many are on the coasts so it's nice to be able to talk with the different municipalities um many um not there are about 50 percent maybe of this of the states adopt the code as a statewide code um and so there's support here for moving forward with adoption of this of this code so it's it's really um the zero net carbon comes from the renewable energy on-site or off-site or combination needs to be greater than the energy that the building uses and again it can be done through the energy modeling or the default so it gives you because energy modeling even though it's become um more prevalent in uh design it isn't always used by everyone and especially for simple buildings um so go on this i'm going backwards sorry there we go

094um what's interesting about the code is there's a whole guide uh kind of a technical guidance around um the procurement of the renewables and this is where it can get very flexible and that you can actually tailor it to what works for your area it has to be a legally binding contract not less than 15 years [Music] the wrecks have to be assigned to the building product it has to be additional in other words um it can't be used for what's already been promised by the utilities um it is restricted right now um to photovoltaic systems solar thermal plants geothermal power plants or wind turbines there's some flexibility if people want to add other types of renewable and some of the folks that have hydro are looking at that and it has to be located

095in the same area sort of your utility zone um so that you're not you know buying a wind farm in texas um and then there needs to be a transparent accounting um so that's attributed to that specific building um and um you know there's direct either options are you know direct ownership community renewables virtual power agreements renewable energy investment funds are kind of really are very interesting um that's where um let's say ann arbor you know um through you probably couldn't do directly but through you know incentives through the zoning ordinance um could then uh require you know give um certain incentives for uh developers to um it to comply with the zero code and then if let's say a lot of downtown sites are really difficult um to um install solar um then they

096could contribute to this renewable energy investment fund which then could be used to fund community solar et cetera um and kind of an interesting uh concept so then there are you know the um other um options for procurement and what they do with these options is um you go through sort of your value how much value do each one of these classes and assign classes to them so you know community renewables the reefs the power purchase agreements the direct ownership you know that that's that's um that's valuable renewable energy and um so that's one class class two and then finally down to rex which would be class three and what happens is then when you um the code requires you to um when you procure it it's the kilowatt hours that you purchase are marked

097down okay so onsite solar has a value of one the class ones point seven five point five five point two for what rex so if you do unbundled rex which are kind of um you have to procure five times the value of your renewables so it really does um direct people to do the more um valuable durable um additional um renewables so and and you could bundle a bunch of different ones together if you wanted to procure a variety of different types of of um renewable energy off-site um so uh what's in what's important about the um uh renewable energy appendix is um it's the way it's positioned in the iecc it's optional for jurisdictions to adopt and compliance is is required with the 2021 iecc it sets that minimum renewable energy requirement and it

098provides an incentive for buildings to be designed more efficiently than the code requires encourages on-site renewable when it's feasible and it supports valuable off-site renewable energy and then uh the efficiency requirements can't be traded off with renewable energy you have that that baseline of energy efficiency that you have to meet um it's also uh it's not only a consistent framework that local governments can kind of modify for their specific needs and conditions and conditions it's also within the code framework that is easily enforceable by building officials and i think that's really key because if you enact something that isn't enforceable or requires a lot more um education to enforce you get into some some issues so um there are some good uh technical procurement um documents uh that you can get on the xero code

099uh website um and it does allow some a flexible um approach you know for the jurist for different jurisdictions so um this is um i i'll send this to missy into john um so you can see the link vince does a great a much better job than i do um in presenting the xero code but it might be helpful for um if people have more interest in it okay so the michigan energy code adoption process god it's um so it's it's rules that um govern um it's a rules that it's administrative rules process so it isn't a legislative process per se um and you know it's kind of funny it's sort of like the minimum energy efficiency requirements okay the worst home that can legally be built right and um it does adopt uh the

100national codes so uh it it makes sense for us to advocate for um adoption of the 2021 with the renewable energy appendix it is a part of the typical code adoption cycle okay and i think that's key when you're advocating for something like that um and in our case the the the um in michigan um the state adopts that code and the municipality or the state depending on jurisdiction um enforce the code there are as chuck mentioned there's the residential code um which is a separate um document and it goes through the same sort of process they don't they don't open the residential code and the commercial energy codes together typically the residential code gets a lot of pushback from the home builders associations and it doesn't look like they're really going to open the

101energy portion of the residential code um it sounded like they were moving on um the commercial code they have said that they're going to open it after they finish the building i think they have the building in the mechanical to finish um they're about six months behind in what their original um schedule was um but uh it i think late this year or or the beginning of next year they'll open it um and then what's interesting is the codes apply to new construction but also with the existing building code when you do a major addition or renovation then you have to comply with the energy code as well the process is is convoluted in my mind but um it's it basically goes through there's a request for rulemaking there's draft language um there's a impact

102statement and then and there's a public hearing um only this is really what that whole process looks like and in red are the points where there's public input and i think that's where it's important if we're going to advocate for adopting um one the 2021 iecc rather than the 2018 um [Music] yeah the 2018 iecc um which would be the three it's a three-year code cycle and we're already so far behind it would make sense to go ahead and adopt the 2021 rather than the 2018. and in fact um lara is going through a um an audit process and we already know that the auditors have um kind of flagged the lag in the code adoption so i think the later it goes the more uh leverage there is to actually jump and adopt the

1032021 that's my hope anyway chuck is smiling so anyway these three points are really important for advocacy um and to make our voices heard both building officials architects engineers municipalities because those are the those are the public input points um and within the rule promulgation process what they are doing is if there's a justification for a change these are all the things that they're looking for so in our letters um we really want to um you know talk about what we're trying to accomplish with a20 um and and climate and so forth and and so this is really what they're looking for their committee as they're looking at rules changes now one of the good things about um the adoption process is we're really not asking for a rule change we're asking them to jump

104the three-year cycle and adopt the renewable energy appendix the renewable energy appendix will be a little tough the backup position could be um to make it optional for um it as a stretch code for authorities having jurisdiction so anyway that's um and this is sort of uh once they open up the rules um you can subscribe to those rule sets and get automatic updates from the state so that's the way to kind of stay with it so anyway i'll stop sharing there that's sort of the background of the xero code and the potential of it um and open to some questions thank you jan commissioner cleavy you're on mute mark are you recommending that the city of ann arbor um engage in advocacy to push this new thing and get on board and be supportive

105of adopting this code absolutely uh i think it's it's what we can do with in the sort of existing um administrative process um and and so i think that makes a lot of sense and i'm actually making my rounds to all the aia chapters um in the state uh to talk about this and kind of try and make it a priority for them and then also reaching out for the engineers out to the engineers to do that as well commissioner um john i'll go last i'll uh i'll just want to add a few words to the end okay council member regina thanks um yeah i also just wanted to point out that both uh commissioner councilmember briggs and i serve on the policy committee and we are finalizing actually at our next meeting on the

10620th um our list of priorities for the year to pass along to council as well and so certainly there were there was an opportunity at some point i think a relatively brief period for all of the commissions to add input but if this is something that the body wanted us to take to the policy committee as well i think that that's something that we could add to the agenda for discussion hope so [Music] thank you i wanted to chime in on two points one is i think it is in the list of things for the policy committee to consider council member dean i think staff put that that one in there but if not absolutely and then i just let you know that stuff are actively involved in this and working on the advocacy zack

107is on the line right now i don't know if he wants to chime in oh there he is uh zach do you want to talk at all about what you've got going on just to kind of pretty quickly what staff are organizing around the codes um yeah sure a couple things to touch on um are that currently the iecc is opening up development committees uh so that they can get feedback from uh municipalities and other interested parties who are would like to serve on such committees for how codes are developed and adopted at the icc level that's not at the state or jurisdictional level but it does allow for us to advocate for certain codes that is something that is the applications are currently open for and for which i will be applying and am

108working with the usdn the urban sustainable directors network to coordinate with other uh jurisdictions and municipalities across the country to ensure that we that the sustainability voice is heard during these discussions um so that's that's what's coming up right now the just quick background that that it will be key to be on these development committees because as of march 3rd the international code council has removed governmental members from the voting process um even though the codes that they write are explicitly to serve uh um governmental officials as they don't have a vested financial interest in the code um and they are ultimately the ones who enforce it so um we are pursuing the means that are available to us and those right now are development committees so that's that's one avenue through which we're we're

109pursuing just one other thing i wanted to elevate too is that zach has been working with other municipalities across the state to try to organize and understand needs so that we can be a loud voice at those points of intervention so jan highlighted those red circles uh to make sure that we're we're there making noise uh representing the people at the other end of this thanks zach thanks for joining us tonight i have a quick question if i may just um certainly for my identification and maybe for others um and i guess maybe this is addressed to jan or or chuck or possibly zach when we're talking about the they that are adopting these um new changes who is they and who are we targeting our lobbying at so others go jump in there is

110lara lara controls the building codes the building codes are written as zach points out for the code officials which are the city of ann arbor's building department to enforce right so and then those of us that are architects and engineers have practice the design of buildings and those that build the buildings have to comply with those codes so it's actually a life cycle if you will of adoption that has to be addressed and is laura then is that a state agency is that under the governor basically or what was it a branch somehow of the legislature or how is our what's the organizational structure for law it's the licensing bureau of the state of michigan so they licensed like myself as a professional engineer i get licensed through lara right okay okay um just real

111quick like the the api that rule making process that's for any agency so these are all like agencies that sit under the executive branch and ultimately they do report to the governor um it's a similar thing on the federal level too we have administrative agencies the epa for example they have to follow a similar process and take public comment at certain points and i would also add that anyone as an individual can submit public comments at the stages that these happen or if you represent a non-profit or anything like that so it would actually probably be good to get other groups involved to submit comments too thanks noah i i think uh council member briggs and then helps commissioner george after that yeah thanks for those presentations um in terms of the xero code obviously

112since this is optional um i understand that the the benefit of it is it's a strong framework and it's enforceable but the key piece is is incentivizing this um so do you have recommendations or um about smart ways to to go about incentivizing this for for a variety of different types of buildings in our community so incentivizing would be if it's not the code if it's adopted at the state level it's an enforceable code incentivizing gets into and i'd be interested uh because i know in sioux township we're looking at i'm chair of the planning commission in scio and um you know we're trying to look at um how at what point do uh you know density increased density factors and so forth really start um making a difference for developments and um like i'm

113thinking you know uh with the uh to increase like at the residential level could you could you incentivize the energy rating index for housing and say hey you could have it you know increase your density by whatever the number of stories by whatever if your housing complies with say you know code is like i think an eri of 55 um and if you did a 45 you know if you met that um and you could do the same thing with commercial buildings you know meeting um certain uh guidelines and performance standards um but i guess what what's tricky is to try and understand the economics of the development and where those tipping points are and that sort of leads to my next question which is around affordability one of the pieces that were obvious we

114struggle with a lot in ann arbor is just the encouraging green green building versus affordable um both in housing and i think we should be thinking about it more in terms of commercial and retail as well in terms of promoting local business but um particularly in terms of housing this may be a little tangential but i would certainly welcome any information that you might have around how how this does or doesn't increase the cost of of um of building yeah and they um the the groups are trying to pull that together arm i just came out with a a pretty interesting study on how residential housing and the real savings is is actually in making them all electric because that is a whole section of infrastructure that you don't need and so you can invest

115then what you don't um have to pay for in in gas and duct work and some of that other those other elements and invest that in the energy efficiency uh uh and the and the tightness uh if you will the weatherization of a building um i know uh there are a couple of um folks that are also looking at the way we build um and doing more things from in a in in more of a factory um setting and um and being able to do that for for less uh funding we're going to be looking at i think tara is one of those um companies that's that's doing it all the way from design all the way through the manufacturing and so forth and that may be a way that um will bend the market

116toward more of affordability i'm trying to get um a speaker in from philadelphia who does market rate this isn't affordable but market rate um quasi passive multi-family um and he's been successful and he's been doing some renovation in it in as well so um you know it's uh they're they're doing it out there the the what's interesting is in new york city what they've been doing because they have the caps of and and they're reducing um the caps for your greenhouse gas emissions based on buildings they're finding that it's um encouraging a lot of passive um kind of house quality uh construction because people can actually then start selling that additional um greenhouse gas um that that they have and so it they can use then that to help finance the um better construction kind

117of interesting like a cap and trade kind of a thing almost or yeah almost yeah yeah i have a real quick question um before you move on and i know there's several so as far as i know the rocky mountain institute study that you talked about i think they studied like seven municipal areas or 12 or something and i think the costs were actually lower in every single one of those cases for an all-electric building were they not that's correct yep okay so um i think it was commissioner george and commissioner zucker chuck at the very end commissioner george go ahead councilmember briggs asked my question i'm good to go okay mr zucker and this is probably a good segue going right into chuck but just wanted to kind of understand you know what our

118options are for for setting optional stretch targets you know can we just you know what are the legal frameworks that we have can we at least put this net zero code out as an option and then do we have anything to bend people to move that way yeah i'm wondering is it legal and missy i don't know if you've discussed this to require that that um new buildings provide their own renewable energy i mean can you is that even possible you know it's really really tricky to require anything with the code in michigan so incenting for sure uh when they're asking through the zoning if they're asking for a change in zoning then we have more space to ask for more things so um actually speaking of rmi it looks like on monday night uh

119there will be a resolution before council to increase our contract with valerie brader our city attorney because rmi is actually helping fund her looking at a lot of questions around how far we can push the building code for all municipalities in michigan but it's going to come through us because we're ready to push the code so we'll have more answers soon but we're in dicey i think that's the word she used for with me like moments ago when i text her she's like we're in dicey territory here so uh specifics matter in the questions we're asking yeah yeah uh commissioner kerber yes so one of the things that i've observed in just in my neighborhood on nixon road there's condos that are being expanded very expensive condos and if you look at those condos they

120just defy putting solar energy on their roof all of the south facing roof surfaces are filled with um you know things that just i i assume are just done for just appearance and all the north facing roofs are basically empty i mean it's just i guess the word would be as9 and why did this get approved and and i just i'm looking to say all they have to do is say why don't you just turn 180 degrees and get rid of all those dormers on the south side where solar panels should be because those everybody in that condo anybody who wants to do solar won't be able to do it because all they have free is a north facing roof silly absolutely crazy anyway so i assume something like that doesn't go through the planning

121commission it may very well but i mean this gets to kind of when we have control when the city has control and when it doesn't um sometimes there's the ability to incentivize or at least make recommendations around the planning commission table but that's kind of where they often the conversation ends is discussions but i think that what we're sometimes lacking in the city is even providing really good guidance to folks up front so that maybe they might be able to think through some of those questions i think um ready for me john well i don't know did mark did you raise your hand again just a quick thing you know as we move to this electric it's probably remember that we buy our electricity from dte energy and they make their electricity with coal and

122uh fracked gas has large amounts of fugitive methane so um somewhere in there we got to balance these efficient buildings that we're going to be putting up and all the solar and stuff but you might we could go a long way by moving into clean gas um that would solve a number of these problems in that very quickly it thanks mark and um thanks jan for joining us and spending your evening with us appreciate your presentation um zach thank you for inputs um i served on icc on a committee if i can help you get on it great they're difficult to get on good luck i'll i'll send you a recommendation letter or something whatever it takes but they're very valuable to your point to get in on the grassroots side um lara is the

123body we have to work our way through they're administrative but they're difficult i've been through that process as well what i'm proposing to the commission i wasn't ready to to present a resolution but what i'd like to do is i wanted to capture everybody's thoughts and they're all kind of leading i think in a direction that's positive um i think we have to take a multi-pronged approach here to help keep the city out of trouble and miss you out of jail i'm just teasing missy you won't go to jail but um it's kind of two-pronged i think we have to press for what we can do and not look back we have to force our way in and be a part of the equation that adopts 2021 iecc there's a likelihood because of past history

124that the people we're up against the folks that don't want to do that will have a pretty big value of knowledge that's going to be going to fight that so there's a possibility that the next round we get from the state is the 2018 iecc it's a step in a good direction but couldn't it doesn't get us to net zero it doesn't get us to where we couldn't be i think it's a mistake the fallback then becomes the stretch code and to commissioner briggs point what kind of incentives are necessary to make it affordable and adaptable because if you don't put in something that's that we'll know we know what the alternate is it's not a good situation so i look to my son's community he lives in arvada colorado it's a suburb of boulder

125in denver they adopted something similar to a stretch code they basically incentivized the entities building subdivisions to put solar on all the roofs and for nominal money from you put up four panels didn't cost the homeowner a nickel through exotic solar designs on rooftops that were a little more expensive to their down payment for their house it was adopted you wouldn't believe the solar in arvada it's got a lot more solar insulation than we do but it was readily adopted by all the builders it was in innocuous cost and it was part of the equation of their zoning process and their planning approval so there's not much we can offer we can't offer tax rebates it's very difficult to do that i think maybe impossible um so we have to be creative in finding solutions

126as to why it might be adopted my advocate my ask to the commission is would you be willing to support a resolution i guess in advance just talk out loud about it i'm not sure that's all credible either whether i can present a resolution at the next meeting that we pursue a multi-pronged approach both the pursuance the spouse plus pursue if a fallback a stretch type code chuck just for clarification for my benefit at least is this your green star approach that you showed on your second slide i think it was yeah okay okay yeah i'm certainly in favor of that and what what i'd like to have is a little bit of discussion about exactly what we can do and i'd like to also throw out there potentially to commissioner schreiberg um who's uh

127heading uh you know a region a regional portion of a very significant e-ngo and that is what can we do to work with engos and with let's say mark organizations like glrea and others that share our ends and our objectives and values to be able to collectively lobby laura and play a significant role in this process as opposed to just us talking about it in this meeting and then walking away or proving a resolution at the next meeting i really think it's important that maybe jan and chuck um and maybe we have an off line meeting with uh staff um i'd be happy to participate so that we really talk about what is it that we can specifically do who do we contact who do we engage maybe who's an umbrella organization that can uh

128pull this together uh those types of activities i i'd like to open it up for a few thoughts along those lines before we close this topic anybody want to speak to that john i'm glad to i'm i'm happy to kind of check in with our allies in the environmental ngo community they're working on state energy policy and with my i've got a couple staff that that are that are working on that so i'll bring that back to the next meeting don't have comments on specifically today though right i mean i i think we know all the the organizations that um would potentially do this i mean lead conservation voters i mean there's a whole host for groups that we could potentially like um i was saying before with mark and glrea uh you know this

129is this is all in our interest uh and i think we should mobilize collectively will be a lot more powerful because there's going to be powerful interests as was pointed out earlier that we're going to be going up against did somebody else want to comment on that jam go ahead i just wanted to say one thing and that was iecc has said even if a jurisdiction adopts the um 2018 iecc you can still adopt the renewable appendix with that it just doesn't give you that efficiency base that however the renewable energy appendix would certainly um incentivize making your building much more efficient chan correct me if i'm wrong um recent steps in um the ashrae uh when you're talking about the efficiency standards the latest one typically they're about in the last couple of years

130there are improvements of steps of about seven percent does that sound about right yeah and it affects different building types differently um but the in looking at the percentages for the 18 it's kind of minimal compared to um going to the yeah the 2021 you really want to go there and i i'm hoping this audit of laura will um i mean administratively they may just make the decision that they have to do 2021 because of that audit is is the does the governor have any influence over this too given this is under the executive branch like uh commissioner levin was talking about earlier so like the laws i just passed a bunch of laws for professional engineer licensing and it goes all the way up to the governor to sign off it goes through all

131the layers above lara as was pointed out earlier and the governor of the governor appoints the director of lara also all right okay clearly they're not going to do lara is not going to do something without the governor's desire to do it it would be an interesting question to find out what her stand is on this topic specifically and maybe the aia or jan your group should determine that question because it will it's a lot easier strategy for us to jump on board with likes than to go against you know lara knowing she's she's behind them saying don't do this right okay um yeah i think we had a couple more um commissioner levin you had a comment you're you just muted yourself no i went the wrong way um yeah i was just gonna

132uh add to that that yeah i mean the governor ultimately it's like the one that at all the buck stops with but they don't tend to get like too directly involved i mean if they're if it's a big political issue they might um get a little more involved ultimately though the standard is that the agency has to meet is like a rational standard which they have to make a rational decision which um it does sound kind of irrational to wait three years but at the same time it's kind of it's not as uh it's a pretty easy standard for them to meet in court which is ultimately the the way a lot of these regulations tend to get overturned is because they didn't follow the process properly uh like all those steps along the way

133if they didn't do that quite right that's where they ultimately get get stuff overturned more often than not but yeah so if you just have to have a rational reason for the regulation basically thank you add one piece which with you know obama administration's infrastructure money is going to be coming down we're just going to relate to this and come and direct and indirect ways so i'm sure that's that's part of the equation here to figure out how to how to maximize um it would be awful for us to be ineligible to get some of that money because we adopted the wrong damn code did you did you want to wrap things up for us chuck was there anything that you wanted to say into wrap we talked about a resolution um and maybe the

134resolution can talk about also um some specific next steps that either we or council or the city would take does that make sense makes sense i'll be reaching out to jan and others that talked a lot tonight about this and we'll see what we can put together and it won't be it won't be a chuck hook them special it'll be something with me to it and hopefully we'll get something to the commission next time excellent any any closing comments on this uh i'd like to thank jan for joining us this evening dan you're welcome to uh sit through the end of the meeting um i think we're now um up to updates on the working groups but before we do that um missy you indicated that there was a topic that you wanted to provide

135an additional update on you yeah i forgot to share an exciting piece because it's moving so fast so on monday night um this will be hitting legistar tonight or tomorrow morning council will be hearing or voting on a resolution of settlement in our vgp case our voluntary green pricing case late on friday afternoon the parties have reached a general terms for settlement you can read far more than you probably want to in terms of what the settlement looks like but i do want to share some high level takeaways one of them is an agreement to pilot the first community solar program with an anchor tenant in dt's territory uh here in ann arbor and the other is looking at actual carbon reduction programs that we would work in collaboration to develop with utility to demonstrably

136shut down plants and and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the system that we're talking about especially as we're talking about electrification making it by criticism as possible the more details will be available in the legislature file uh but surprise council members uh it's really last minute you're going to see it on monday and i just want to say a special thanks to uh val brader and the team of tufang woo and others who've been working to make this happen great thank you uh so um i think we want to run through the various working groups um they're not outlined but maybe people can raise their hand i'll start maybe uh with uh carlene and transportation electrification i want to give a brief update there uh very quickly um we're exploring uh dif different uh activities

137that are happening in the area uh most recently we had a presentation by a company called may mobility that is an um it's a public transit company uh specializing in driverless uh vehicles and we're learning about what they're up to some of the projects that they've done uh different parts of the state in detroit grand rapids and what they're working on uh coming moving forward there's going to be some cool updates that are going to be announced uh in the next month or so and that's another day for now um other working groups want to give an update uh then i'll give a very brief update on the environmental commission um the last meeting was devoted to solid waste issues um and we had an update in particular from the county and what's going on

138with warma and right now the city is in the process of joining former city council voted to join and there's a few process steps uh that has that warm uh administration has to go through to um accept the city um and so hopefully the city will be joining that right now it's focused primarily on education and outreach but it could expand into other different kinds of things um including you know different things like um landfill issues and recycling and using um common immersion things like that that those would be future steps but um at least we're in the process of doing that we got an update from staff um so if anybody's interested in any of the specifics on that you could go to legislar i think i'll leave it to that because most of

139that doesn't really relate to specifically to what we're talking about here is there anything else before we move to the close of the meeting and our second public comment anybody else want to share anything okay so this is um our second opportunity for public input and uh again as before that's limited to three minutes per person uh give the call-in numbers again call two four 888-788-0099-487-853-5247 and enter the id nine one three five seven eight three four five zero two and again that's also on the meeting agenda and it's on the video feed on ctn dr stoltz will select callers who have raised their hand by calling on them with the last three digits of your phone number and to raise your hand uh please press star nine after you've dialed in and you're going

140to hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak and we ask that again you limit your comments to three minutes that uh you move to a quiet area and that you state your name and your residence right caller ending in six five at zero there we go hello we hear you uh this is wayne ample yard calling a great meeting i had a couple of things that i wanted to talk to you to convey with you um that gives you an idea as to how tough it is to do what we're trying to do um and there's two things first of all i have succeeded in making my house net zero but i do that with the benefit of the grid uh it turns out that about 70 percent of what

141i produce with my solar array actually goes out under the grid and then comes back and the real important part of all that is the difference between what we get in the winter and what we get in the summer and i get over five times as much solar uh in the moon the summer months as i do in the winter months and in the winter is when i use most of my electricity because i have an air source heat pump so um in order for us as a bigger community to go to 100 renewables we're going to have to somehow get uh involved with other things other than just solar including quite a bit of wind that can produce in the wintertime the other thing that i want to mention is what happens when you

142start to look at buildings in the city and there are two buildings that i remember that came up before planning commission where everyone said it was really wonderful that they were putting solar on the roof and they were like three-story buildings one on packard and one off of hoover and although they were trying to put as much solar on the roof they were getting they were estimating they were going to get six percent of their energy needs from the solar on the roof and that shows me first of all that they're not doing anywhere near enough energy conservation and also it means that 94 of that uh solar array has to go someplace else um and some place out in the greenbelt um might be where it has to be but the big thing is

143that we are going to continue to have to rely on the grid and although people can put in storage it's short-term storage you're not going to store from the winter to december so it's a big problem we need to work on it and hopefully we can get working with dte on it although that's probably being a little naive that's it thank you former chair apple yard um i'd like to point out that um it there's it's an expense issue but there's lots of parking areas and space for solar carports and at some point in time hopefully that's going to become more and more necessary and more and more attractive also from the cost point of view um dr schultz did we have everybody else yes uh 661 color ending in 661. hi good evening my

144name is gus teschke i live at 313 montgomery in the fifth ward um i'm calling tonight in support of uh municipal solar um solar electric utility i urge you all to make some progress on that and do a feasibility study as soon as possible so we can judge what's going on thank you very much bye-bye thanks for calling in anyone else missing that's all risky okay good so now we're at the point where we'll talk about agenda items for the next meeting um i just like to remind everyone that we had a session of our last meeting devoted to that topic where we elevated a number of different topics i don't have those off the top of my head i don't know that it's necessary to uh read the law specifically but we have those

145votes and we will continue to work down that list i'd like to open it up though for others to add to that list or or potentially emphasize a topic that you think is something that we should be taking up here um either in the next meeting or in a subsequent meeting commissioner zuckerberg sorry um and i don't know if this necessarily needs to be in a full meeting but i just kind of want to reiterate um you know kind of our next steps of looking at the funding funding options i know we had an initial meeting and you know a lot of the stuff we were talking about tonight since we don't have um legal authority to mandate or to ban or things like that maybe our the only leverage we may have is to

146incentivize and that incentivize usually goes back towards cash so um yup just wanted to check i don't know that we're ready for a full meeting agenda but just wanted to check in to see what kind of maybe our next steps are on that or when we might be able to bring something forward dr scholz let's see you want to talk about that yeah i just wanted to thank you for raising it and also publicly apologize that it's been slow with the federal administration asking for a lot of stuff this last month we've been really trying to get our hand in the air for that so uh do not forget you at all just trying to get some infrastructure or dollars hard fast in the city before you put yourself on mute missy my recollection is

147that we've tentatively lined up uh presentation by mary rosenthal for the 13th of may i think it's the 13th of may yeah we have rmi first doing the electrification right yeah and then murray for solar created a solar faithful um kind of ppa model right so rmi on electrification in general and then ppa models and specifically than the solar faithful which can be used um actually for any non-profit it could be even used for school system um government buildings whatever so it has fairly wide applicable ability um i'd like to also remind everybody i think we've talked about this before that a week before this meeting missy and josh carlene and i have a meeting where we prepare the final agenda for this so keep that in mind if you have something that you feel

148is particularly important that has changed since we did our voting uh that you want us to take into consideration reach out to any of the four of us um and you know we can even have one of you join us as a guest if that's appropriate because that's typically when we sort of finalize the the agenda for our our next meeting is anybody else that has any other comments about agendas for the next meeting i have a comment about um one of the uh having um murray here i think that's outstanding but one of the things that is in that i've been reading about that's in the biden agenda is to change the investment tax credit to a direct payment and my understanding of changing it to a direct payment would literally mean that instead

149of having it as an offset of your taxes it's more like having cash in your pocket and this immediately solves the non-profit problem because now if you're even if you're a non-profit you're just reducing the cost of your solar system directly and i would really like to see if there's something that we could do to voice our support for that even though it's at the national level you know we do have representation here in this state that could make that happen and that would be very valuable for the solar industry this is a priority amongst the office and other sustainability offices is to change everything that's based almost everything that's an incentive a tax incentive to a direct rebate because you're excluding people who don't have tax appetites nonprofits houses of worship low-income folks who

150need the money up front and it's more money in people's pockets directly so i i think that's fabulous i just wanted to share that's that's a high priority for us right right here anyone with anything else before we adjourn for tonight okay well before we do that i want to recognize uh i failed to do this earlier um remy long for joining us uh that was a really informative presentation um and i'm gonna share it with the environmental commission i think it'll be of interest to them and i encourage the rest of you to share it with potential people who would like to know more about the green belt and also of course jan culbertson and as always i want to thank all of you for joining and for serving um and with that um

151i'll join the meeting and wish you a nice rest of your evening good night everybody you