May 7, 2025 — Environmental Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:01] If you think think it was estimated, it all comes, don't know so. But we yeah, why don't need to see myself one second, let me try and leave myself jumping around. I don't know the extent of that one, because it's only the subscription. We only have one card alright. Are you ready? Everyone's ready. But good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Eab meeting, so we'll 1st call meeting to order, and then, before we hop into the agenda we'll have heather. Go over our

[1:21] welcome. Everybody to tonight's Environmental Advisory Board meeting. My name is Heather Sandin and I have with me Karina Gonzalez. I will be serving as the technical host for tonight's meeting. and we appreciate your patience. If any technical issues pop up the city has engaged with community members to co-create the vision for productive, meaningful, and inclusive civic conversations. This vision supports physical and emotional safety for community members, staff and board commission members as well as democracy. For people of all ages, identities lived experiences and political perspectives.

[2:03] For more information about this vision community engagement process. Please visit that website, boulder, Colorado, Gov, forward slash services forward slash, productive hyphen atmospheres. The following are examples of rules of decorum found in the boulder revised code and other guidelines that support this vision. These will be upheld. During this meeting all remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business. No participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person. Obscenity, racial epithets, and other speech behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited. participants are required to sign up to speak, using the name they are commonly known by, and individuals must display their whole name or being allowed to speak online. Currently only audio testimony is permitted online because we do not have registration for open and public comment. Tonight, you can indicate you would like to participate by using the raise hand function.

[3:07] The raise hand button is in the participant box which can be found in the menu by hovering over the top or the bottom of your screen and then clicking on the participant icon. When the box opens you will see the raise hand button at the bottom. By clicking that button you can indicate, you would like to participate in open or public comment. If you join us by phone, you can press Star 9 to raise your hand. and I believe we'll come back to public participation after the next 2 items. So I will stop sharing and pass it back to you. Great. Hi. okay. So our 1st agenda item is to welcome and officially approve our 2 new board members. So we're gonna go through office for the 2 of you, which I believe is just the 2 of you reading your office in front of you aloud. So I guess you can start 1st with Hannah.

[4:01] Make this super awkward. Yeah, you can just read it. No repeating necessary. Just shoot it out loud, and we'll be good. I, Hannah Oldman, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States of America and of the State of Colorado, and the charter and ordinances of the city of Florida, and faithfully perform the duties of the office of a member of the Environmental Advisory Board, which I founded. Wonderful sign that now it can be later we'll have you sign it and grab that hand. Thank you. We'll move on down the line. Good! I, Adam Winston, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States of America and of the State of Colorado, and the charter and ordinances of the city of Boulder, and faithfully perform the duties of the office. a member of the Environmental Advisory group which I am about to enter.

[5:06] Thank you. Welcome. Officially. We are happy to happy unless there's anything else we need from that already. Move on to the approval next. Okay. So I will motion to approve the minutes from the March 5th meeting. Anyone second, which, now that you are official members. You can second these motions. Okay, a second great. Thank you. Hey? Take a note. Second form. You can have 3.rd But then that's fine. Don't we approve the motion? Yeah, all those in favor great. And we have nobody online for public participation. So go ahead and start as long as you are discussion items, so this will pass it over to Jonathan. All right. Thank you. Welcome to the 2 of you. I'm really excited to have you here tonight just for the record, Jonathan Cohen. I'm the director of the Common Initiatives Department and the staff liaison to the Eab. I've been with the city since 2,006. So a very long time I had a little hiatus away from the board, and I'm really glad to be back, and it's really fun to see the new

[6:26] I guess the the new skill set and gifts that Board members bring to our conversation. So again, I'll just say how excited I am to to have you here. If it's okay with the board, we're going to flip, flop the 2 discussion items tonight. That is just to give a little gift of time to Jamie, who is here to talk about some of the work that's going on in our department. Specifically with the plastics program in our circular economy area of work. And tonight, just because we have 2 new members, I just wanna encourage you to ask questions as we go. I'll try to just interject a little bit of

[7:04] how we manage the flow of some of the staff side of the presentations, and the items that we bring before the board. So you can kind of get into the groove a little bit we thought it would probably make some sense. And tonight, obviously, it's just a lot of presentation. You're gonna hear a lot of talking, and I'll apologize in advance for that, but thought it would be useful exercise to go through and give you some grounding on some of the work of the department. But I also want to preface by saying that we always, and I think many of the advisory boards find themselves in this interesting, interesting space of being an advisory group to city council on policy related issues. But obviously we're most connected between our department and the work and the charter of the Eab. So we talk a lot about the work that's going on. We often bring programmatic things to you for some thoughts and input. But ultimately we want to figure out how that translates into advice to city council on policy related items, and so I'll you'll hear me say this a lot, and be very vocal about

[8:05] just well, that's and I'm fully open and welcome to advice and feedback on the programs. But there's always this kind of delicate balance of programs versus policy. So I I preface that by saying that tonight is a lot of updates on programs and the really the architecture of the department. But I also want to say that climate sustainability, resilience, environmental issues does not live with one department. It is across the entire organization. It sits at the very highest level around the framework, and how we invest our resources, and so I'll talk a little bit about that when I pick up after Jamie's done. So I'm gonna let her kick it off and again, this is an update on one particular program that we're really excited to highlight in one of the program areas within the department which is our circular economy area, and Jenny can introduce herself as she manages that group.

[9:03] I want that for Tia perfect. See if I can figure out how to share. I'll buy you some time to. And just say, I, my guess is that we don't have any public here tonight. There is a meeting that's taking place right now between City Council and the Boulder Valley School district. And they're talking about a number of issues to transportation, sustainability and other things. So it's going on right now, too. So suspect that many people are watching that meeting, or at that meeting. Good evening, everyone. My name is Jamie Harkins. I have also been with the city a very long time. I actually just hit my 15 year

[10:00] work anniversary, which is pretty nuts. so not quite as long as mine esteemed colleague here. But pretty close. And I manage our circular economy team, which is one of our focus areas in the climate initiatives department. And I just thought tonight, as Jonathan mentioned, we're not looking for specific feedback on anything. But we have a lot of work in this area coming up this year. And so I just thought it would be a really great opportunity to introduce all of you, and especially our new folks, to this area of work at a super high level, and then talk a little bit about the reuse and plastics work we'll be doing this year that you will absolutely be hearing more about and be able to provide some feedback on. And so this is just a quick little timeline slide that shows you we have been working on 0 waste since 1994 here in Boulder, and it shows some of the big milestones along the way. We're one of the 1st cities in the whole country to pursue 0 waste strategies in partnership with Ecocycle, who 40 years ago was one of the 1st recyclers ever started in the country like Curbside.

[11:11] and so we have a very long history in this work. I would say it really culminated in 2016, when we adopted our universal 0 waste ordinance. and that happy to go into that in more detail if you have questions later, but really achieved a lot of our long term goals around providing at least access to all these services for the whole community and driving participation. So it was around then that we started asking like, Well, what comes next? Where do we take this work from here? What is the best thinking happening around? Honestly, the whole globe around, how we get to the next step. And so I started hearing about this concept of a circular economy. and I was able to sit in excuse me on some panels, at some really great conferences internationally with folks who are talking about this. And it really became like such a light bulb moment of the direction our work needed to go in, because while 0 waste is great, and you know, we've achieved relatively high diversion rates for a United States city.

[12:16] we still weren't wrestling with the fundamental question of like, we're still producing all this waste, even if we're recycling it or composting it. So this idea of a circular economy really challenges that, and it starts to ask the question, how do we start shifting our economy away from a linear model which you're probably very familiar with, even with the recycling that happens, it's still most of our materials are bound for the landfill eventually. So how do we start shifting it to this more circular model, where, you know, waste is a design flaw. And we really have an economy that thinks differently about the materials and the natural resources we're using. And so there's 3 high level concepts. And this is put together by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, which, if you ever want to geek out on this topic, their website is amazing. But these are the main 3 principles behind a circular economy.

[13:08] The 1st is that, you know, waste is a design flaw, and it's just not part of the Product Service design philosophy that obviously is a little out of the scope of the city government. But we try to have influence where we can. And then this middle one, keeping products and materials in use, and what's not on here, which should be now that I look at this is at their highest value possible. And so, before we're down cycling a plastic into frankly a crappier, plastic, or less stable, how do we keep materials circulating at their highest use and highest value as much as possible. So this looks like repairing things before you're ready to dispose of them, really thinking about recycling being like the last resort. And how can we keep things circulating longer? And then, while we're doing all this, we're regenerating natural systems.

[14:01] So that's just a recognition that we've done a lot of damage along the way to our natural system. So how can our economy start to give back? So we started asking this question of like, what would this mean for Bowler? I think this was around 2018, and then we engaged a group of consultants out of Amsterdam named Metabolic to ask this question. They did a great report. I'm happy to share it with you all later called Circular Boulder, where they did sort of an analysis of our material flow within the city and and tried to look at where things were going and where they weren't. And It's a great. It also had a roadmap in there that that did inform some of our early strategies. But the biggest learning of the report is right here, which is. if you count up all the emissions embodied in all the products and services we use in boulder. that those emissions would be larger than all of our other local emissions combined. So all of our heating and cooling, our transportation, all of that. And so it really is like a wake up call of how much what we're consuming on a daily basis has an impact on the planet and climate change specifically, and it really

[15:15] elevated this area of work to a climate strategy rather than just a resource strategy. And so we like to show this slide just especially to the public, to really give them some empowerment around the small changes you can make around this topic can really have a big impact, because you're affecting emissions all the way back to wherever these things are produced. And so at a super high level. We categorize our work in the circular economy focus area into these 4 groups. The 1st is consumer goods, which is kind of all the traditional work we used to do and continue to do around recycling. This includes repair. Now we're starting to support repair efforts in the community. So all the things you interact with on a daily basis. Frankly, are thrown away or recycling.

[16:05] We have a whole organics area of work. We're trying to build at the same time a circular organics economy like, how do we improve composting? Yes, but also make sure that compost is getting back to the soils here in boulder to start building that soil up and really making it more circular. We're looking at some Biochar pilots just any way we can interact with the organic economy. Or it is, yeah, it is an economy, and really get those resources back to water. And then buildings is a huge one. We could have a whole meeting happy to in the future of our buildings work. And this is specifically around deconstruction. So a few years ago, City Council, about 4 years ago, now adopted a deconstruction ordinance really out of the realization that there's a lot of pieces of this work we don't have total control over. But how buildings get built frankly, how they get unbuilt is one area we have control over as a city. And so this has become a huge area of work for my team, and we require 75% diversion of materials for recycling or reuse from any project, commercial and residential.

[17:16] as being deconstructed in the cities. We don't, I mean, I guess you could say we do have demolitions still happen with folks who are just decided they're not going to comply, but comply with the city ordinance. We have no demolitions anymore. And frankly, I think it's only happened once last 4 years that that's actually happened. We're achieving 75 to 85% diversion in all of our so it's really an incredible success story. We were just talking about it at the Circularity National Conference last week in Denver. My team member Emily and I were there. She was talking about our successes. So it's getting a lot of national attention. we're also the 1st city to direct directly reuse steel beams out of the hospital that was deconstructed into the new fire station. So that's also a really great thing to celebrate.

[18:11] Oh, yeah, I have a question with the consumer goods. How are you aligning with the state of Colorado? I love that, you know about it. I was just gonna highlight that law in a minute. So okay, because I know it's specifically tied to consumer goods for the 1st year. Yeah, yeah, in addition to Biochar. Do you know if there's like. yes, yeah. Exploration. Not right now. I don't know. Do you have any? It was kind of a 3rd rail topic for a very long time. I'll just be honest. Waste energy kind of still is anaerobic digestion, I think, is different. It is yeah. The waste energy. Conversation is one that is a little bit polarized, not just in boulder, but in the state of.

[19:07] because we have mature markets for a lot of goods to be recycled and reused and repurposed. I think there's a little bit of controversy on whether or not that's the right thing to do. And as generators, and I won't get into this too far. But the ability to bring online an energy generation facility is a little bit more difficult from a regulatory standpoint in Colorado what you can and can't do so it would be a partnership with a utility or a partnership with a private investor who then partners with the utility. And so it's a little bit difficult to do that. So it's been something that, as Jenny said, is a little bit. But the anaerobic digestion is something that has been not. I wouldn't call that a 3rd rail. No, no question is, it's on our radar, for sure. Yeah, it yeah, especially now. And one of the things we have talked about with the Board previously is just some of the organics. The changes in organics collection at the state level and in the regional level. How do we want to respond to that? And Jamie's been reading a lot of really incredible work with Boulder County and others to figure out what comes next in terms of the right infrastructure that we need to continue to do really good organics collection.

[20:16] And you know, in vessel, and you know, animal digestion. It's obviously one of the options that we would consider to have expertise in mapping. I had. I'm gaining more knowledge. I'm very interested in this awesome great. No, thank you for the question. And then just our 4th area, which I'll be talking about more tonight is our reuse systems. And so this is really, how do we advance reuse as a city? You know, one of the areas like buildings that we do interact with are all the consumers and all the residents and employees in our city. So how do we facilitate a transition to more reuse? And then. Yes, I wanted to highlight state policy within all 4 of these areas. We are heavily engaged in the legislature and had some really amazing success stories we talked about. We had a whole session last week at circularity about the journey of Colorado in legislation that was really honestly emotional for me to just listen to, because we've been working a really long time, and we're now a leader in the whole country for State policy which

[21:21] it did not used to be the case, even like a handful of years ago. And so I did want to highlight one of our huge wins which you mentioned was the extended producer Responsibility Bill. And this really was a win in that. A lot of the communities in Colorado frankly lack any kind of recycling infrastructure. It's very hard to make the economics of this system work in this state outside the Front Range, and it really was a belief that, like the producers of all these goods we consume should bear some of the responsibility for managing them. And so this law actually kicks off. Next year, 2026, we did lobby in support of it. And all those brands up on the screen actually ended up supporting it. Because they want these materials back. They want to meet their own recycled content goals. So this is focused on packaging.

[22:13] and it does place a fee on any producer in the whole world that is selling an item in Colorado based on their packaging. and that money will go into. It's called the Pro. The Producer responsibility organization at the State to pay for universal recycling for the whole State of Colorado and so this has been super interesting to interact with. To answer your question a little bit. I'm not on the board designing the program. But I've been listening. And as a city we've been waiting. it's super complicated. they. I haven't seen the final version of like the plan that's going to be implemented yet. But we definitely are engaged. We actually have been really more engaged on the side of how do we get reuse in this conversation? And how do we fund reuse infrastructure as part of what that money goes towards?

[23:05] so yeah, it it was the talk of that conference last week to all these big brands that were there, like California, Colorado that are coming online with packaging. Epr, and so sorry that stands for extended producer response. And so it's a hot topic. And all the big brands are trying to figure out how they're gonna make it work. But we're we're definitely engaged. It's on the city side. It's a lot of conversation around like, because Boulder is an open market. You can hire any waste holler. You want. Most people hire Western disposal. But how do we actually get the money like through the city to the hauler like? It's a lot of like logistics right now, and like 30 conversations figuring out how it's all gonna work logistically. But I can't wait to see how this rolls out and see what kind of difference it makes for our state. So we shall see more to come for reference. Yeah.

[24:00] what was the timeline? And just to give like a sense of the work behind this. Okay, this is as someone who's very familiar with the legislative process at the state level. This is not a typical case study. This was the 1st year we introduced this bill, and it passed. If you would have asked me to put money down, I'm like. Whether or not this is gonna pass in the 1st year. But it said no way. It took us the Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, which I'll mention in a moment took us like 6 years and so recycle Colorado, which is a statewide organization we're a part of. They have a lobby team, and every year we work on like a big bill together, and this was the bill. It was kind of a Goldilocks scenario of just things that worked champions in the legislature that really wanted to make it happen, and frankly, like brands, were willing to. The timing was right. They were willing to come to the table like it was a lot of compromise around, like. I remember the marijuana industry because their packaging is regulated. They wanted to carve out. It was a lot of like back and forth around certain carve outs. But

[25:03] it got done, I think, on like the last day session. It made it through. So yeah, it was really fast, and we'll see. One of the questions last week was like, What would you do? Differently from other states, and we just don't know yet, because we haven't implemented yet. They they had a few answers. But We'll see how it goes. See what lessons learned. We have a few years down the line. Where will the fees come back? I know you said. They come back for recycling. Do they come back to city government for use or counties, or do they go through? We're still working that out. Okay? So it's they're supposed to go to the haulers. And then the haulers would not bill you for the service. How that will work, and how we make sure the haulers aren't like raising rates to get more money like it's all very right now trying to figure out how this will work. It's a lot easier when a city runs the waste collection because they just get the money and they

[26:01] put in them pile. But for us, actually, it's I'm in a working group of cities with open markets like we do. It's a little more complicated. So Tbd, to let you know. Yeah. And so I wanted to focus a little bit more tonight on our reuse and plastic reduction work. This is a really big area of work. This year. We've had evolving classic strategies over the years all the way back to 2012, when we did our 10 cent older bag feed, and that did become a model for a statewide back fee in 2021. So through the years we did our bag fee. And then we were really recognizing. This had to be at a state level, bigger plastic reduction strategies to be more effective. And so we started running a few different bills over the years that all failed. And so in 2021, we got this big bill that actually had 4 pieces integrated into it.

[27:00] including a model of our bag fees like the exact same language and then that phased into a statewide ban on bags and polystyrene food containers, which is, in fact, now I know there are people still using it, not in boulder, but I've heard, because the State didn't put any enforcement resources in this. But word is getting out that these things are banned. And so That was a huge win. And then the piece of this bill that's a little Wonki, or that we specifically in Boulder, lobbied for for many years, was a repeal of. and sorry, not exemption. What sort of preemption? Sorry there was actually a State preemption saying cities could regulate plastics. We couldn't ban them. And so that's why we did the fee back in 2012. And so this act in 2021 repealed that. So that was a really big win for us didn't get as much press, but it was very exciting in that we could finally, as a city, pursue our own regulatory answers to this plastics question. And so

[28:08] that's what we are doing right now and then. My final point here is, you know, Jonathan mentioned the limitations on what we can put in our compost, which I'm sure you're all familiar with, and really my team and I. When we discussed this, we really saw it as an opportunity. It don't get me wrong. It really stinks that we can't compost our forks and our coffee cups, but at the same time it really provided us an opportunity to push, reuse as much as we can like. Compostable items are no longer an option for you to like properly compost of when you're out and about. So let's try to really accelerate this reuse piece. And so that's why we've shifted a lot of our focus towards supporting, especially the restaurant sector right now in reuse. And so it's a little busy of a slide, but really all it was capturing is all of our financial incentives. So we started back in 2021, providing some direct funding to a startup that was doing reusable takeout containers called repeater.

[29:12] They were later purchased by Deliver 0, who's still operating here in town. They apparently are now being acquired by someone else, so the name will change again. But in addition, we have some really aggressive, quite frankly, compared to other cities, direct incentives. So we provide $2,000 to any business in Boulder who wants to either adopt a service like, deliver 0, or install a dishwasher, or buy durable service where for their eatery? this is a $2,000 initial, yeah, plus like a grant. It's been really popular. And then we are also funding a lot of event incentives. So we've been partnering with a company called our World. Excuse me. Used to be called our cup to do reasonable cups at some of our largest well, actually, all last year, all special events. And so we subsidize that entirely up to the Max of $5,000 per event, which that was only one gigantic Marathon, half Marathon that got up that high. But so we're really trying to provide city support in

[30:19] an effort to start shifting the norms around. When folks can expect to see these things out in the public. And when they go to a local business. They're interacting with these reuse systems more. And we're really doing this through. As I mentioned some private public partnerships. So I mentioned, deliver 0 up top. There's our world they have been fantastic to work with. They mainly focus on venues. So close systems like a lot of the concert venues in Denver, red Rocks is using them. Now. Our venues have actually been a little slow to adopt internally our cup. We're trying to get like the dairy and boulder theater online. But we've been using them for the event side more. So where you have a closed event and you can control where those cups go.

[31:10] and then hiccup is another cup a company we just started working with last year. They do the collapse of both silicone cups for the Marathon. So they came into town for the boulder Thon, and that was our 1st big race that we had completely reasonable. So that was a big win for us as well. And just here's some stats on what we've been able to avoid. Over a hundred 11,000 single use cups and containers for what period? This is to date collectively. So I would say, the last 3 years. it's when we've been working with them is the Board of Governor gonna adopt that. They have not my team to you. So we can talk about policy later this year. We haven't been able to require that of folks. We've been trying to be very generous with our funding to try to encourage them, or based on what folder on found incentivizing

[32:15] that has, I obviously have not translated from older folder, assuming, just trying to figure out the right incentives and speak the right language somewhere. Oh, just for for events, or like you said in house like the Boulder Theater, that there's different language and incentives. I'll I'll get to our challenges and barriers in a second. One of them is just frankly like, it's a new thing. People don't change, and they're very busy. And there's a status quo involved with, like, how we currently serve our beverages and food, and don't really want to change that. So I will say, the organizers of Boulder Cloud came in like like, how can we do this like they were very personally motivated to make this like a no waste event, and they actually found this company and brought them to us. So it was a little unique in that the organizers were bought in when they came to us. We didn't have to like, you know, but I do think it provided us an excellent case study of how it could happen. And how successful I mean, people loved it. The racers. Nobody wants to create trash, you know. So it was a really awesome

[33:24] example. We can now point to how many participants in the what in the oh, I do not know. I'm sorry they had a half Marathon and a full Marathon. because I wonder if you can share that with people. Not a runner. I'm sorry I don't know. I think so. Yeah, like, we've been trying to see a lot of what we do is also seeding conversations among all these partners. And

[34:03] they got all these we'll see. Haven't. I'll check with my team member that was talking to them to see if there's been any. It's an interesting point. I just wanted to raise this comment that it's easy to kind of start from the bottom and pick off the bigger events. But there's also a different approach which which is looking at policy and regulation for special events that are held in Boulder. And I will just say one of the items that's probably going to come to the board. I don't know if it'll be this year or early next year. Is in this space, because we have this opening now with sundance. And we're deeply involved with the organizers around. What are? We're not interested in greenwashing. Or if we're interested in really creating a model that is, addressing the impact of bringing a good number of people into our committee.

[35:01] And I think waste is such a key focus of that waste transportation opportunities to connect with community. There's a lot of key focus areas that my office is working with sundance on. And so I would see that we're going to be able to move this forward, maybe in a more holistic way, in the upcoming year, and I think the Board would have a pretty strong role in that. And and so like, just for my understanding of like, what the policy would look like in this case, it could be as drastic. It sounds not saying we're limiting permits, but making sure, like there could be requirements. We've already done it. Our universal 0 waste ordinance actually has requirements for any special event that pulls a special event permit that they have to provide recycling. We are not currently enforcing the compost requirement because of the problems we have with compost, but they are already required to do certain things. So if they're pulling a permit, that's sort of our leverage to say, Okay, we'll approve your permit. But here are the requirements. Are there similar other cities have similar?

[36:05] Yeah, absolutely. Around events. I'm not as familiar. I haven't heard of any like Denver has a lot of event incentives, but they haven't done requirements yet. There are some. We work really closely through some of our networks, and a lot of times it's anchored to some big event. So we're talking right now with our good colleagues in Seattle. They're going to be hosting Fifa. So thinking, then, about how you, when you have such a large event. What does it look like? You just talk about? Certain venues across the board, and you know it's complex. We also have good partnership with Cu, and some of the work that's going on there with some of their sports events. So wanting to think about. How do you do this? In a less of a patchwork kind of way, certain venues or types of events, and thinking about some umbrella type policy. And there are, there are communities that are in the same direction. But

[37:01] we're talking about Fifa last week. The Seattle folks. Yeah, yeah, they're all over it. So I just I didn't really want to highlight the barriers and challenge, because to all of us this seems like a no brainer like I personally love interacting with these systems, and it makes me feel good. I will go out of my way to use a reasonable system. A lot of people will not. And so this was a lot of our discussion last week at circularity, and we had a panel on barriers and challenges with some of really amazing insights. none of which were surprised. You know our- our funding of that startup really spoke to this 1st point of the high upfront capital costs, and you have to like, buy all these containers. And just quite frankly, I am seeing we've had about 6 companies come and go. Maybe not quite that many 4 in my career here at the city. It's really hard to make this business model work. because you kind of need, like the small of an upfront cost, if any, for the consumer to use it. And yet you have to run this whole system. And so what we're just seeing is, it's really hard for the private sector to fill this void. We're like, we're we're still trying. We're not in a place yet where we're

[38:18] we have an alternative to that, although we're talking about it. But it's very, very difficult. You need density. You need a lot of people using it. And that's just really hard to get going. I heard a lot last week about how critical it is to achieve 95% plus return rates. Otherwise your system and that was really spoken to by the folks. This picture on the right is actually, I had never heard of this. The Petaluma project. Did you know I know about it. So close loop partners came in and funded a 3 month pilot. It was only 3 months where they had most of the city eateries, using reusable cups, coffee, shops, cafes, and they had 60 of these return bits all around it, and the city's like 30,000. So it's smaller and older.

[39:06] but this was the key of like being able to return that cup like wherever you went from the city. Was really the key to the success of that program, and it sounded like it went really well, they had the panel had Coke Pepsi Starbucks there? Engaged in this project. And so, yeah, I just got the report of the findings from this this project that I'm gonna read through. But that's the critical piece is getting them all back logistics and transportation wash hubs right now. Our big wash hub is in Denver, and so our companies that are working will have to wash everything down there. So we're talking about how we maybe help with that. And then, just like I said, the status quo of how easy it is to have just dispose of things. The consumer culture around, you know, walking up one. And so that's a lot where, as a department think about

[40:04] reuse and circular economy. Solutions have to be as convenient as as otherwise. They're just not gonna work a lot of the companies I talk to. You want to come in and charge like a $10 deposit on their dinner. Take out container. It's like that is a family of 4 is that's just never good time. can't upfront that kind of money. And so we've seen these evolutions in the model over time, and I'm just it's still not there. But folks are very smart. People are working on it. Question, yeah, that 3 months trial. Do you know what time of year they did it? I I imagine that could impact. I have to look. I have a report in my inbox. Haven't read yet. I think I mean looking at the picture. It looks like warm weather, but it is California. So actually, I don't know. I think we should have higher attended in the summer, I wonder I don't know. And so finally, to get to the point where you all will be involved. This conversation later this year we have received Council direction. When I mentioned that repeal of the preemption that we achieved

[41:08] in 2021 that didn't actually take effect until last year. And so but we are now able to put in place additional regulations on single use. Plastics and council has asked us to bring them some options we would like to incorporate, and we have talked to them about this some reuse language, and that's not just talking about plastics. But how do we encourage reuse as well? There are some models around the country of cities who have required durables for in house dining. But that's it. They don't take on the takeout question. So there! There's lots of it would be getting into the week this evening to talk about all the different ways we could do this, but we will certainly be bringing what we come up with to you all for your input as far as what options we're going to talk to council about later this year. In the meantime

[42:00] we have some exciting things going on that I wanted to mention. We're trying to do. We're in a data gathering phase right now, an engagement phase with stakeholders. We have 2 things happening. The 1st is we're partnering with chart reuse who has developed a tool to help say, a coffee shop really work on the economics of switching over to a more reusable options and like the return on investment. So our our team that does business advising pace. They're actually doing some case studies for us right now. working with some older businesses to to model out those economics so we can bring that to council. You know, we know their question will be, What will this cost in advance? What does this roi look like? What are the environmental impacts that will happen? From any kind of transition. So we're doing that with the businesses. And then, later in June, late June, we are doing the 1st ever boulder plastic count, which is super exciting. and hopefully you'll all participate. I will be sure to send you a link to sign up our colleague Lara, our communications manager, is working on a website right now. But this was really modeled after something I saw happen in the Uk. So these are their materials. These aren't ours. But they do this country wide. It's amazing for 2 weeks, but they count all of the plastics that come into a household. So it's really a twofold

[43:24] strategy for us. We a sure, we want the data. We want to know what the most problematic plastics coming into boulder households is, and that will be really interesting. But we're also using this as a tool to get folks engaged in the conversation, knowing we'll have that policy conversation later in the year. We hear about plastics all the time for my 15 years. We get emails about, what are you going to do about plastics? And so we're really hoping this gives people a concrete, really actionable way to contribute to the project. And yeah, we're just. We're getting folks to sign up now. We announced it at our our Earth Day event and already have sign ups. And so working on our account, she will just be doing it for a week.

[44:06] So yeah, do you imagine, like an under reporting problem? Or do you sure think that the people who are willing to participate in the 1st place, are genuinely curious about what their count truly is I don't know. I mean, this is the 1st time we're trying it. I think I don't know if there's an incentive to under report if it's not like, can be another test. Yeah, there's no stakes. I hopefully will. I hope people will be honest, because I think that would give us. A really good picture of one of the problems we have is we get data from our recycling center. But we don't actually know what's not being recycled unless we do a waste composition study where we're like ripping trash bags open. And we do do that. We're actually doing this year with the county. But we haven't done one in 5 years, and so we don't have a lot of good data on what people are consuming in their house. If it's not getting into that recycling bin. And so I think this will just be a really fun way to like we do this every year every other year and track our efforts over time.

[45:07] One thing I'll just quickly mention the Uk does with this after they're done is they take everyone that participated, and they send them tips and and toolkits on how to reduce plastic in your life. And so I imagine us doing that as well. It's really driving the conversation through the engagement in this discount. On how folks can start avoiding plastic. No. no, I know that you use stuff, but not consumer products in 2025, and all business products in 2026, and businesses have to report. It's like, Epr, 2 point. Oh, you can report your plastic composition in your packaging and your products, if you want to do business in the the full extent of the fines, are lost, lots of market access. I did not hear that talked about at all last week. Yeah.

[46:13] Could give you some ideas for well, I think I mean on top of the reporting. I think it just also gives them a really good idea. Yeah, the data in terms of like. for sure, we're using it. The business of reporting versus the consumer. Awesome. Thank you. I think it has some efficiency. Yeah, has there been involvement with the companies that are owned generating plastic packaging. particularly within, like their product design, because I know that that's like, 1st stage, like, okay, what features that we have, what materials are available. And then

[47:03] city is not involved in that. But I'm just wondering if there's any effective efforts. There are lots of efforts. You're right that we're not directly involved in a lot of that. We are through our State policy efforts, like the Epr. Law, will start driving that. But I can just tell you from being at. It's great timing last week. I mean big brands. They're all having this conversation. What was really eye opening to me, though, was a lot of the product designers last week, said 90% of the solutions we need for circular copy. And I was like, Oh, I was kind of surprised. It was that high as far as like material design and and creation, and and I heard a lot about how hard it was to bring in new material to market. You have to go through all this testing. And I just I had no idea I tried to do a session where I would like learn something new. there's a really cool effort by.

[48:00] I think it's a subsidiary of Google. It it's called X. You did. Yeah, not in the plastics one. But I, yeah. that's my 1st job. I was wowed by Ray he presented to us. He's awesome. Yeah. I went to his session about. They're launching a whole solution around to like the molecular structure materials tool is gonna help us do every other company do like Lca, who wants to do? Lca. yeah. And they're really machine can read the products and tell you that that's so cool. They're really focused on materials that are not. I mean, at least from what I understand, not being recycled. Currently, some of these films, and like the pouches and a lot of the things we can't do anything with right now. Quite frankly,

[49:00] and so yeah, it was really exciting to hear about that. And I think they're working on like how for materials that you? Just because a lot of times these policies get passed. And then I know from my company, at least we get we didn't get exemptions for them, because there's no alternative. We go with that 90% statistic. And say, we make this product. And we're now, I work a big manufacturing, and we're the only one who gets it to get an exemption. And so I think what that's gonna provide is. But there are tons of those conversations happening. the company, that, or the organization that ran the conference last week. They have a whole circularity commerce network where they're talking the biggest brands in the world about all this. So yeah. lots to come. I think it's quite frankly, all you have to, and I could like. Sorry I could talk about this for an hour, but all you have to do is look at what happened during Covid of supply chains collapsing, and know that, like, we really need

[50:00] more stable supply chains. And so circular, really unique in that it like, there's actually a lot of talk of tariffs last week, as well of like this supports domestic produce production. And, like a weird. interesting political conversation that happened at the conference of like circular economy concepts are an answer to a lot of our our product. Our global economy concerns moral material abstraction. So there's a lot of really fast conversations happening so much more to come. But though yes, for sure. heard from Bill Mcdonald last week, too, we wrote cradle to cradle is like one of my personal heroes. It was it was awesome. So yeah, I think. that's the future is all these companies are looking for how to design waste out of their products. I think a lot of solutions have yet. So let's see.

[51:00] But that's all I have for y'all tonight, I believe. Yes. so like, I said, we'll come back to you later this year with some of our policy related questions. And yeah, okay, anything else. From that we're gonna go. We just did a deep dive, and we'll kind of now you're gonna zoom out. I'm only one focus area. But I appreciate your questions and your attention, and I love that y'all are interested. I can't believe you work there, that's so cool. I was just like so loud person because he came from like watching his own time. Yeah, he talked a lot about his entrepreneur history.

[52:05] It's very interesting. That question I have is so with this as understand that there early stages of working through the extended police responsibility law. like with true words. But there's something that's been open for like public comments. So I know that you know, the focus is gonna be on a lot of cities and especially rural areas program. It is. I assume that, like eco, cycle and other, is the city of Boulder involved to kind of share. Best practices like this is possible for us. Okay, we're not. We don't sit on the Advisory Board. Eco cycle does but I attend, and we're always sharing

[53:04] best practices and frankly trying to get. I I personally need a lot more money will come in than is needed just for recycling services. So how do we make sure some of that money starts funding? Some of this innovation reuse some of what we know needs to advance along with just access to something. So yeah. it's been a great collaboration, and having the brands come to the table like the pro is run the head, the chair of the yeah. He's from Keurig, Dr. Pepper. So we're like, you know, it's it's the biggest producers. So it's really fascinating to watch the process unfold. but much more to come on that topic. So if you want to learn more, Caro. They do sessions. Yeah, you can go for my own job. So

[54:03] any more problems. But that's true. Shift to the second discussion. Item. again, a few opening remarks. Then I'll get into some slides here in just a moment. we don't typically do an onboarding. I was thinking about the 2 of you on that end of the table. We didn't necessarily do an onboarding with the departments work when you joined the board, and I felt like this might be a really good opportunity to go through some slides and give you a little bit of a overview. I will try very hard not to linger too long on any of the slides, because, like Jamie, I will talk about this for the next 8 h straight. One of the things I did want to key in on. And I want you to hear this theme as I'm talking through some of the action areas. And some of our key focus areas is

[55:29] we thought a lot over the past, say, 5 years about how we've learned over the past many, many decades in in working in this space, and one of the learnings is really thinking of the spectrum of where we could be most effective. And I say that we I mean a department within local government within one company. And it's important to keep that reflection because we talk a lot about areas of influence, the things that we can control, the things that we influence, the things that we care about. But we really don't have any interface with.

[56:04] But we use that right. Next to the model of individual change. So that the model that many, many sustainability programs were built on which is, we just need to change individuals behavior. And then if you change your behavior and your light bulbs, then you'll do the same, and you'll do the same. And then suddenly it like we'll just flourish, and then that will go city to city, and we know that that hasn't happened at the speed and scale that's necessary. So we talk a lot about yes, we're not going to abandon individual actions. It's critically important. But we also try to steer those actions in ways that are collective in nature. And then those collective actions really support the systems. So you just heard a lot of comment from Jamie about how we, as a city, are working at a different level, we're working at the State in a pretty regular basis to identify the regulation, the laws setting the landscape that helps us do what we need to do at the local level and boulder has a reputation of always being working outside of our own boundaries. And so I want to preface by saying.

[57:10] you'll see a lot of that in my slides that I'll go through pretty quickly. But that's a lot of our philosophy is, how do we scale how do we make meaningful change. That is necessary outside our own boundaries. So I'm gonna go through a few slides. And hopefully, I will be plenty of time for questions, but I would just say, Raise your hand, jump in, cut me off. I want this to be a pretty interactive as we go. so I'll just give you one really quick snippet. The department of climate initiatives. Is a relatively new department. Actually, we came together about 5 years ago. while the city has been working in this space for decades. It's been different configurations. I joined the city as the manager of the Affairs department where we were really tasked with. We just passed our carbon tax in 2,006. We had just developed our climate action plan. And our role was to really figure out how we were going to spend those dollars in the most effective way.

[58:13] Then we bifurcated a bit and we had the local environmental action provision, which is our local programming. And I had a number of folks really focused in on energy, particularly municipalization effort. But we were always kind of interfacing together. And then in 2020, we came back together and created intentionally created the new department. With the purpose of saying. we should not be a sole department, an appendage working on environmental things. We should be the thought leaders that are working with our elected officials, our community and our other departments to really advance the goals that we have. So we talk a lot about. I mean, our department is entitled Climate Initiatives. And it. It's just as easy to say sustainability, or any of the other words, because anything that kind of falls into that space usually falls to us as a department

[59:08] in some way or another, and that's not a bad thing. But we've really refined how we think about our work where we can be most effective. Functionally, we are about 20, just over 20 staff working in 3 functional areas. And then we have amazing support. From Karina and from heather on admin we have communications, folks. We have an engagement specialist. And obviously we are very, very well connected to the other departments. And that's been really effective. You don't need to read this, but I think it just speaks to the urgency of our work, and we think very differently now than we once did about how we select the programs and services and policies that we focus on and how we resource them. That's based on some things that we've learned. Thank you.

[60:00] So some of the things that we learned. And I just wanted to pause on these, because this is, I think, really been our theory of change over the past couple of years. 1st is that climate and the impacts of a changing climate are not in the future thing. They are here and now, which is always justifiably frightening. So we always think this is not a future problem. So how do we acknowledge that we are feeling the consequences today, and we realize that they're not felt equally amongst those in our own community. And so how do we acknowledge that? And how do we identify the most vulnerable and the highest risk community members? And we also know that that emissions reduction. it's not going to be sufficient to stabilize climate. So we get we, we really geek out on this. We talk a lot about what's the right metric, the indicator? We've really shifted our thinking away from carbon. I know that sounds really profound, but there are a few reasons for that. No one is really motivated by metric tons of carbon

[61:11] and and what we are realizing now is the science is really telling us that carbon follows water. So as we think about water cycles, how critical it is to connect those 2. And that's why I'll get into the importance of our nature based solutions and the work that we're doing there with other departments, parks and open space, etc. So I mentioned this a little bit earlier, too. We were part of some national studies with some peer communities. And we realized that idea of vanguard cities really being aggressive and showing that they have aggressive goals. And they're making progress is not enough. We know that there are really, a small percentage of communities across the Us that actually have programs or plans. A very few of those are really executing on those plans. And so we need to think differently about

[62:05] the idea that cities are gonna be the key drivers. This is where action occurs, and this is where we can incubate solutions, but we have really shifted our thinking in terms of emissions. emissions, reductions really need to happen at larger scales, and it allows cities to focus on values based issues like building more resilience, thinking about things that people care about more like happiness and health and joy and safety and economic productivity. And so a lot of our work is starting to pivot away from just using metric tons as the metric for success. And I'll talk more about that briefly. And then, of course, we have thought a lot about how resilience has to be a critical factor in our work. 2 big themes. 2 big areas are one. What does it mean to think about climate, justice and equity? What does that really look like in practice? And how do we think about the adaptation, resilience, element. And so we talk about resilience and stabilization as kind of the 2 sides of the coin, so to speak, but resting on the central pillar of equity. So we talk about that as a design principle of our programs. And so we have a resilience strategy. It was something worked on in 2016, and it was really developed out of

[63:24] a necessity when we were one of the 1st of the cohorts in the Rockefeller 100 resilient cities cohort to say, what does a resilience, strategy even look like? And how do you? How do you really make that happen? And what look, how would it look different from what we're doing today? Besides, just flood mitigation, and wildfire resilience like, how do you forecast and recognize that things are going to change in a pretty dramatic way. And how do we actually align towards those changes resources, or even. yeah, I'll get into it. Great question. So this is what I was just visually depicting. And we've talked to our community a lot about the stuff on the left is what we describe as climate stabilization, the the work that we do generally to align with values. But as a byproduct it does reduce emissions, and then really think about our adaptive capacity. What we are doing. To recognize that

[64:22] we do need to make progress and become more resilient to to the shocks and stresses that we're feeling. And then that equity concept right in the middle. We need to update this. But that's generally the idea. the equitable climate action places. This. This is, I'm really proud of the work that we've been doing here, because it's very easy for communities to say, oh, we're going to do our work equitably. We have an internal team. We have a racial equity plan that the city follows that I'm very proud of. We have a racial equity instrument, and it's led us to different places. I'll use one example. This board was instrumental in thinking through some of our recommendations around banning gas, powered landscape equipment.

[65:04] and we hear about it. 2 big cycles spring and fall. We hear people saying, This is ridiculous. It's it's dangerous, it's loud, it's polluting. And that sounds logical until we applied a racial equity focus to say, Wow, no. In fact, this will have devastating impacts to our small businesses. And so our approach was, instead of Banning. How do we support a transition to electrified equipment? How do we incentivize that? And we've made really, really incredible progress? There doesn't mean that people don't still complain because they're they still make noise. Let's be honest about that. But they we have seen such an investment by a good number of the businesses. I think there are over 70 that do work in Boulder, and a good number of them have already transitioned to electric. So it led us to a different place. And it's a really, it's really a central thing that we as a department think about on a pretty regular basis. And I I. We can talk about that another time and go in deep on what that actually looks like and how it shifts our thinking.

[66:09] So I talked a little bit about this. But as a department we're organized in 3 big work streams. So energy which encompasses a lot. So that's supply. That is mobility. It is a lot of our efficiency conservation work. It's a lot of policy work. We are central in passing, and the Board also saw us a presentation on the updates to our energy code. We're talking about our building code updates. Right now, we're talking about our embodied carbon analysis which will likely become code, our deconstruction code. So energy is a lot. There's a lot there. And I'll talk about some of the key programs. Our nature based solutions team that brick and Karen heads up. and then you just heard from Jamie. But then we have a lot of cross cutting work, so to make sure that we're connecting across those buckets, and then, obviously outside of our own department, how we're connected into the work of all of the other departments moving forward. And there's so much that happens in that space that is really emerging over the last couple of years that I'm really excited and proud of.

[67:17] So I'll just to show this slide. I I'm not one to really walk out on the targets necessarily, because and that's what these are. We? We refer to them as goals. But they're really targets. They're numeric targets. They're milestones that we're trying to hit. The goal, obviously, is to drive carbon out of our portfolio as much as possible. So we do have some pretty aggressive targets. To to achieve 100 renewable electricity by 2030, reduce community wide emissions by 70% by 2030 the last one. There we actually already met in 2022, which is 100 megawatts installed capacity of local renewable generation. We're getting close now to about 150.

[68:03] And so we're already on to our 2030 target, which is 175, and and that is purposeful, not just because we like renewable energy, but it really pairs when we start thinking about micro gridding, resilience hubs cost offsets. So not just let's install more solar. But let's do it in a meaningful way that connects to achieving some of the other things that we're now actively seeking to achieve field technologies. obviously, reliability and and resilient energy systems. That's really our key focus. There. He's the Google's targets. Are they line with the science based targets. They are, they are. Yeah. Yeah. And we talk about these a lot. And that's why I think it's it's very interesting. And part of a lot of these networks, one that we're going to meet in a couple of weeks. The Carbon Cities Alliance, which is a global group of vanguard cities. There are about 30 of us.

[69:01] and, for example, Vancouver is saying, Well, we are not on target to hit our 2030 targets, should we change them? And the answer is, no, these are science-based targets. This is what the science says we need to do, and not just our fair share. This is not just boulder boulder does. This is what we all need to do. And so I think it is really important to the credibility of of the targets to say, we're not going to change them. This is this is what science says we have to accomplish, and we're going to do our best to get as close to this as possible, but I also, I think our team is very good at recognizing that if if we get to, for example, we know now through our work, we're likely going to be between 90 to 95% renewable electricity by 2030. So how important is it to fill that gap? That last remaining 5%, it's going to be very difficult, very expensive. 95% is not failure. So for us, thinking differently about these targets again, having that conversation with Council. I think it's been really instructive

[70:07] in-in how else over tracking targets right now? Well, so these are our targets. Right now, and I'll show. I think I have it on the next slide that one. So depending on depending on the baseline that we use. We've reduced emissions we're now at about 45% emissions, reductions from a 2,005 original baseline. We change. We shifted our baseline to 2018 just because it it's the right thing to do. And I will also tell I'm gonna go back a slide. The report that Jamie mentioned from metabolic. One of the outcomes of that report was to really understand the importance of consumption based inventories. So we are one of very few communities in the country that is looking at consumption based emissions. So those are the emissions that Jamie was describing. Not what if you put the bubble over boulder? You have your scope, one and 2 emissions, your energy, your transportation, your waste.

[71:15] But what about all of those emissions that she mentioned from upstream? So from sourcing materials, from transporting materials, from our services and goods that come in. We call it the Amazon effect, right? So the the consumption based inventory. We actually do a very, very rigorous, and that these are just the covers of our inventories, and I'm happy to share these with you if you've not seen them already. But we do an annual greenhouse gas inventory. That explains our methodology of how we calculate where we get the data, what assumptions we make. And then the consumption based inventory takes that and says, Well, here are all the other emissions that you should be accounting for, and it helps us then tell the story of why our circular economy work is so critical in the emissions space. So we'll say, Oh, come on! Emissions from waste is like a tiny little silver. That's not. That's not really the case. So it's a more honest way of accounting.

[72:12] And so this is. This includes all of our emissions, and I think it's a great success story. We have a ways to go. but I think we now know where we can target the biggest sectors of emissions. And again, part of what we are learning along the way. And I'll get into this. We talk about energy. So much of our work has been trying to change the system. So, working with excel, working at the State Legislature, working with the regulatory agencies, to change the model, to get excel. to deliver carbon free electricity versus us, saying, well, we'll just have to use less of a dirty product, and that really doesn't change the emissions of what excel is doing in terms of Comanche 3. And their peaking plants doesn't change what they're burning. So we needed to go change the system.

[73:02] So that's why we know that from the energy space we kind of done it in a pretty big way. We have a really clear sense of where our portfolio will be in 2030, and it will be at a minimum 93% emissions, free electricity. So that allows us to change our thinking, to say, let's change our tactics and not just talk about energy efficiency and carbon free electricity. Let's drive gas out of the portfolio. That's where we need to go now. So a lot of our codes, a lot of our regulatory work, a lot of our programming and incentives is now shifting into that thermal space. And I think it's been really effective. And I'll I'll share some of that work here. In a second question, has there been any kind of financial analysis of what investment needed to hit these targets. Kind of well, yes and no, and and it's and I say yes and no, because you have to make huge assumptions on which levers you want to pull.

[74:01] So, for example, the investment that we had analyzed, and we did it on an annual basis. With respect to our our carbon tax, the amount of private sector investment that we would need to hit our energy related emissions, targets was extraordinary. You could invest much less, and you could send people to the State Capitol to change the law totally changed the landscape. And so, yes, we have done a huge amount of an economic analysis to say the things that within our sphere of control, what would it actually take to hit these targets? And this is something that Council has asked for we've had a lot of dialogue with council members about scenario planning to say in one scenario, if we were on it, if if we had no change in regulation. What would it actually take? for example, if you think about renewable generation? Who who's paying for that is that private sector investment? Does that include city investments? Does that include incentive structures? So we've done a lot of that. And we have a lot of that on our website. And we needed to do a lot of that through the meeting process. Municipalization process to really understand.

[75:19] The economics around running, standing up and running around utility. And are we better off to do that to achieve our goals or not? And so, yes, we have but I'm just caveat on that. With that, it's always a moving target and and pretty difficult. I think when we get into net 0 and carbon positive, specifically, we're gonna have to refine our numbers quite a bit more to really understand what it's gonna take. And and frankly, we don't know the technologies, the policies that don't exist today. That doesn't mean that we're going to shy away from what's the science based? Targets tells me. I'm wondering if, like the current status compared to the 2018 baseline, like a 24% versus 70,

[76:04] yeah, 7%. Do you? Would there ever be kind of like bullet points of like, okay, these are the reasons why we still have a ways to go. These are within our control. These are outside of our control. Yeah, for sure. And so this is where you start to see the lumpiness and how emissions are reduced over time. So the electricity, if you just look at the big circle, the circles are proportionate in terms of the actual emissions. So the bigger circle, 38% still comes from electricity. But what we know from our work at the Puc, and we know what the portfolio is going to look like between now and 2030, and which units are coming offline what the replacement strategy is so it's more of a stair step than this, like nice, nice line going from today to 2030. Transportation, obviously, you can see, will be reduced. As we electrify mobility, it becomes a bigger portion of our overall emissions. But the over the actual emissions are going to go down, and that's through a combination of local programs, local strategies and obviously regulation, both at the state and local level. So that's a package of how we're

[77:21] forecasting this gas obviously is a big one. And when I talk here about energy in just a moment, you you. Our strategy is, you can see on the left hand, or excuse me on the right hand side. really hard to read. I'm happy to share these slides with you. Our strategies really align with how do you phase gas out in the areas that it's easiest to do how do we match the technology that's available and the cost that consumers are going to incur. That's why a big focus to start with last year was our energy code and really creating electric only energy code with carve outs. So we have that backdrop. We have the architecture in place

[78:05] for all new construction remodels and additions. And now we can start thinking about, how do we deal with existing structures and driving gas out of the portfolio. Gotcha. hey, Jonathan, can you comment on one of the listed there? The electric grid changes. I feel like that. We haven't discussed that too much. What does that landscape look like? Yeah. So that's what I'm describing with Excel's portfolio. So we talk about supply. Yeah, that's what. When I say, we are going to hit 90 to 95% emissions, free electricity, that is from our supplier. Okay? And that is because of State law. That is because in large part that we've been at this for a very long time, and being very strategic with the requirement for all investor and utilities to submit their clean energy plans and how they're going to meet those targets. And it's based on markets the same time. So right now I mean I I meet with excel pretty regularly, and just yesterday we were just chatting about

[79:08] my request for them to acknowledge and and help our community, and others who might say, Oh, here a Federal executive orders are going to be by the coal industry. Does that mean that excel is going to divert. It's already in law. It's already required of them to meet these requirements, and the market is already. We're kind of over that hump where they will never revert to a different type of portfolio makes no sense. So so this is a 50% reduction, mainly driven by the the renewable energy of the electricity sector. Correct? Okay, correct. And then for the other graphic. It was compared to 2018, baseline. But what was the year for the 2,005. Is that what you're talking about? No. Sorry if you click the that one? Yes. So, okay, so that is, that's currently what our missions are in

[80:05] in 2022, or 2020. These are 20. This is a snapshot of 2023. Okay, yeah. Compared to the baseline. Correct. And the goal was 70. That's correct. Okay, Gotcha. All right. Yeah. Sorry. 2 questions, how are you thinking about the impact these costs will have on consumers specifically low income people. And are you anticipating in your conversations, for example, that this will drive costs up? Or is the state or city working to reduce cost to consumers if you could help me understand? When you say this, what defined this? Yeah, I'll just, I guess, all of these policies. But we didn't start with the electrifying of the grid like, are you anticipating like, how is that working to reduce costs for consumers, or are we anticipating a huge impact of who can afford this versus any of these policies? And maybe if there's like I I know that framework to make sure it's gone through. But

[81:11] even it's hard to yeah. So cost is when we talk about impact, I was just gonna pop here for just a minute when we talk about cost. I mean, there are costs that we can control, and there's costs. Can't the ones that we can't are passed on to consumers from excel directly and from the. And so we are very active. At the at the Puc, and I'll use an example of just a wildfire mitigation plan, which is 2 billion dollar investment. And so we were there as pretty much the only community talking about. the appropriate cost recovery mechanism. And I won't go too deep on this like basically saying, what kind of profits should the utility be able to make on this, if they pass on to utility, to to their customers. So the way we can control this is

[82:05] the programs that we administer start with equity in mind. They get it's not an afterthought. It's oh, yeah, let's do this, and then let's figure out how to give some incentives to offset the cost. So, for example, we wrote and we're awarded 200 million dollar EPA. Cprg. Grant that we are administering through Dr. Cog, and it is electrification 100% for income qualified low income business. So that is that is how we target to say, these are these are our residents who are at highest risk, most vulnerable, and will benefit the most from these investments. So the way we do it is that is where we start until we feel like we've actually made a dent in that. Then, for example, we don't invest in putting solar on rich people's roofs. I would say that very directly. All of our solar programs have shifted. Now. We wrote Community Solar Garden. I have a pen that the governing is to sign that into law, because I I get got to help write that legislation.

[83:18] We are the only city in the country that has a dedicated that the city actually owns a dedicated community solar for low income. It's for Ponderosa Mobile Home Park. So we, going back to the comment about using solar to help offset cost. Driving our programs to really address cost issues and equity issues has been such a shift in focus of ours. One more example. And I realize that I'm there's no way I'm getting through all these slides. one of the programs that we launched 2 years ago, related to to a good number of our community members that didn't lose their homes in the Marshall fire to fire, but were extremely damaged to the wind events, the the straight line wind event. We had over 250 homes actually over 400 homes that were damaged. Some of those are still in a state of disrepair, and part of our

[84:12] response to that is, these are a good number of our community members, our our neighbors who a do not trust that government is there to protect them. Do not have the ability to apply for certain grants or recovery. And so we actually use our dollars through our climate tax, and we do direct repairs to those level homes. And we've done this is a way outdated slide. I think I'm I'm looking at you, thinking you might have the number. I think we're over close to 200 repairs. At this point repairs go from replacing a roof to heat pump, domestic electric hot water, heating, skirting, weatherization duct sealing. We've actually replaced one mobile home completely. That was just inhabitable. So we're using our dollars to leverage the the investments that we want to see in those communities and connecting it to our work in our nature based solutions. So these are many of our neighbors who don't have air conditioning, for example.

[85:15] So rather than saying, Let's put in air conditioning. What can we think about not just planting, but growing trees. And how do we support that? So, looking at all of the solutions together, and then thinking about the resilience aspect of mobility, where will people go during times of emergency? So part of this is building the trust that's necessary, and you may have heard some of the work that we sponsor through this fabulous woman here in town by the name of Isabel Sanchez, and so she is leading resilience training in neighborhoods, and and we fund that. So? She is creating mechanisms to go into neighborhoods, and and they fill each and every class. What is your what is your go back? Where are you going to get your medication? Where are you gonna go during emergency? Where are your trusted people? You're not going to go sleep in a gym on a cot. So where should you go? How can you learn to trust your neighbors and know your neighbors? And so it's this building community resilience and social cohesion that's been really, really cool. So see, I told you, I was just gonna keep talking about this stuff really excited

[86:21] curiosity question. When you have a major event where there's a lot of damage that occurs at once. How I how are prior organizations made in this kind of triage situation, where you have anything from replacing a roof to an entire mobile home being gone. Yeah. Well, I would answer it a couple of ways. So the city has a very effective and mature model for disaster recovery. We have an entire office dedicated to that. We're a newcomer into that space from a climate perspective. But in in a really positive way, we start to utilize our forecasting, to say things will look different, and emergencies are gonna are are gonna fundamentally come in different shapes now. So yes, those shocks like the 2013 flood, like the Marshall fire. But what about those stresses that really expose those underlying

[87:21] kind of fractures in a community. So the stresses around economic impacts, stresses around extreme heat. So we start to bring that into the the conversation, too, and which is really kind of broadened our whole emergency response and emergency and disaster recovery program for us. We're live. This is our 1st as a department, our 1st kind of step into doing direct repairs. But it's now kind of been swept into this broader ecosystem of of disaster recovery work that the city is involved in. So I don't have a direct answer to that necessarily.

[88:01] But it's a good question. Let me see, where do I want to take this? I wanted. I wanted to hover on a couple of these. This is a a screenshot of our storyboard. You heard me make a comment a little bit earlier, and I get really dramatic about carbon. This has been my life, and I just realized, well, carbon is not what we should be talking about. We should be talking about impact. And so we developed 2 years ago an impact report. And this is a story map on our website that explores the impact that we are having. So when we talk about health, what does that actually mean? How is our work contributed to improving lives in in this community? So the story map, there's videos, there's audio pieces. There's testimonials, interviews. we interview. There's a whole piece with one woman in Ponderosa who became a subscriber, and we pay for her solar and what that actually meant to her.

[89:01] And it's important because it helps to shift the model away from cost per ton, and that that is somehow the metric. And it's all based on really wild assumptions. And I'm not saying that carbon doesn't matter. I'm just saying for our community members. The impact is what's most important. So I'll share this link with you. I'd love for you to just take a look at the story map. We just updated it for the second year. And we're gonna continue to kind of build this into a report each and every year. The other piece of our report is just making sure that you recognize the comment I was making about working outside our boundaries. We think about where we can be most effective. We have a lawsuit against fossil fuel majors Exxonmobil and Suncor. Really for the intention of saying, and I can get into this more. Given the board a couple of updates here. and another area just thinking about policy. We have always historically been the only community that shows up that we engage Public Utilities Commission, we intervene as a party. We have a long history. I have spent more time in here in Rene than I'd like to admit

[90:14] But realizing we were only one community that kind of kept coming and like, Oh, here comes Folder again what they're gonna say, we realized we needed to build a more solid foundation. So we created Colorado communities for climate action. CC, 4. Ca, we now have 43 jurisdictions across the State that are aligned around climate policy at the State level. We now have a seat at the table. Legislators will call us asking what we think our priorities for the session. So in a matter of years, that's become a really really powerful engine. And it's a model that we're exporting to other States right now, which is. I don't need to talk about this one just again. Jamie, didn't she? She was very humble. She was very instrumental in the extended producer responsibility Bill, she.

[91:06] as a former elected official, she was the mayor of Lafayette. She used both her role, political role and her role with the city to really, really get that done. So really proud of the work she did there. And we've we've had some pretty impactful wins with respect to policy at the at the General Assembly over the past couple of years. Wanna talk about this one. Just briefly. a lot of the work we do is really based in data collection. A lot of it is based in science and community science. I don't know if anybody participated. But a few years ago we started this process of capturing heat data from the community. We had about 120 or so community volunteers map heat. either on sensors, on dog collars, sensors that people were walking with or in their cars if they couldn't. And what it allowed us to do is create a heat profile for our community. And it allows us then, and you can't really see this. But there is a whole website dedicated to this. So you can start to see

[92:14] what are the factors and characteristics that lead to holding heat longer? How do you overlay those with those that are most vulnerable in our community, not just to heat. But are they also in pockets that are more susceptible to wildfire smoke, or to flooding or communicable diseases because of standing water in West Nile? So starting to look at those risks. we were able to take that information and use it in in a policy application to start thinking about our landscaping code that's going through the process right now, our Boulder Valley Comp plan. How do we think about location tree canopy, pollinator corridors and land use design that starts to solve some of the issues that we're seeing around extreme heat.

[93:00] And so we now have a tool that we're getting ready to roll out publicly. I know Brett has been here and shared some of that visual with you. We are now matching that up with a really cool tool that we're doing on wildfire risk, too. So looking at the and looking at areas where we actually need to do some pretty serious investment, and starting to think about it a little bit more holistically as a tool for community members to use. How do you partner with the university in twin cities? Do you, partner with all the time. Yeah, all the time in in a number of ways, whether and whether it is through faculty, I'm actually on faculty at Cu. So I kinda have that added in. Yep, we work pretty closely with them. We're actually trying to stand up a new center there right now on ecosystems and biodiversity. No, it's not Ibs. It'll be a new stop recording interesting. And then to create partnership research. And then with the maps and all that, you're able to leverage.

[94:11] Yes, absolutely. A lot of this was done with a number of Federal labs, too, and some of the heat was actually our own Federal labs, but also University University of Georgia. So we worked with a number of research facilities to start to unpack and understand what this regime means and what assumptions are at the city of Phoenix. Have you looked at their research mitigation solutions? Is it changing like the building materials? Or is it more sure that there's access to? Yeah, it's a it's a great question. So without zooming in on this and and the small boxes over on the right hand side start to signal. Some of this is testing and modeling reflective roofs or reflective asphalt services. A lot of it is around tree canopy

[95:12] or not just tree, but vegetation in general, so shrubs, etc. It's not just jumping to. Well, this is the reddest spots. We better make sure that people have air conditioning there. We need to do a little bit of typology of the buildings, and we have that already. So we can start to see what options for intervention are. and the tool that we've created allows you to forecast. So basically, to put in. Say, if you were going to do some bed management in this particular area, what would that look like in 5 years, or what would it look like in 10 years? And how does that? How does that heat model actually change over time, so we can start to get a better sense of what's most effective. But our billing codes and our energy codes are those are the things that the city is good at. We were regulators. So we look at those levers to pull, and then we look at the other solutions that are both the things we can control. So it's leading us in a lot of very interesting directions for sure.

[96:16] And and I'd love to bring that tool back to all of you, and I can dig a little bit deeper into what it shows. I'll I'll just touch on this pretty quickly. Alex, your question, I think about how more of the disaster recovery? So when we passed the last update to the carbon tax we dedicated 1.5 million dollars annually to wildfire resilience. And what that has resulted in is this really really amazing cross departmental collaboration around? What does it mean to be resilient to Wildfire. it's not just hardening. So right now, we're using that group to think about our landscape requirements and not just moving into a space of let's pull out all organic material and put in rock scape. That's not what we want. We don't want to increase heat. So what are the options. And what is the science telling us, for example, the state requiring

[97:15] buffers within 5 feet of of structures. But what we're learning in coordination and discussion with our colleagues in La, for example, that in many cases deciduous trees actually deflected a lot of those numbers, so can we create a list of of plants and materials and vegetation that works and is best suited in in those combustible zones. So that's some of the work that we're doing really really great work across many departments to think about how we need to do better, and learning to live with fire in different ways, but also not just going to. Yes, we have to do, prescribed Burns, and then etc. But there's a lot of ecosystem and biodiversity work that we can do at the same time.

[98:02] So you kind of hinted at this potential answer after each fire, maybe not every fire event, but the many fire events that happen across our nation. or even does this collaboration locally kind of investigate things that may have had impacts, things that helped, for example, block, fire, travel, etc, and kind of rope that into the discussion. And what can be applied or useful in our community? Yes, great. It's a great question and point that you're making. In fact, we're doing a conflagration tabletop exercise in a couple of weeks. And and I'm actually hosting a panel with the head of I'm trying to remember what her title is. She was with our the State of California, Puc. Now they have their own office of infrastructure safety. So they are the ones that oversee and partner with all of the utilities. And so I'm hosting a panel with her and my colleagues in La and Marshall just to talk about some of those lessons learned? Not just

[99:07] how. How do we put out fires faster, but how? What are some of the what are the more interesting solutions. And how do we get multiple departments and our community to recognize that we're now at a point that cities are not always going to be there to save you, and that's a hard thing to communicate, but that the personal resilience piece is is a really really critical piece of the work that we're doing now, our wildfire mitigation planning just out of curiosity. I think that you know some of the solutions being evaluated that could have had an impact in the Marshall fires. One is like, you know, you know, warning systems, early warning systems for evacuation 2 is probably like cutting power early. And I know that there's been some like forecasting or predictive analytics. For okay. based off of, you know, where the wildfires could. Are there any other things that kind of came out of

[100:06] the martial entrepreneurs of like, oh, we need to do this. This would really kind of yeah, I mean, I think I think there's a lot, and without going too far down, and and I'd be happy to schedule something that can bring in our wildfire folks, too. But we do actually have some recordings on our website with some of the 1st responders talking about some of the lessons learned bench management and some of the drainages and ditches and Greenways. you know, from a utility perspective, one of the things I and I probably won't get to it tonight. But that's that's okay. We were a lead architect in this while in excels, wildfire mitigation plan settlement. We had a big press release about that a couple of weeks ago. and part of that is to acknowledge what is the true risk that is represented by utilities. What are some of the solutions they could be thinking about, whether it's undergrounding, whether it's free closers, whether it's Psps which is public safety power shutoffs, whether it is wildfire settings, meaning that basically it trips easier so they can, when there is a wind event, excel, be putting their

[101:13] system into kind of wild virus, setting. How they re-energize the system, what it takes to do that quickly and not make sure that you have energized lines lying on the ground. So there's a lot of strategies that I think have been looked at from a risk perspective. There's a lot around the response to what did we learn from that response? communications, how people were notified or not how people were able to evacuate or not. One way in one way out, you know, was an extraordinary event, of course. but there's a lot to be learned from that. Not just fire behavior, but also what are the things we ought to be doing to respond to that differently?

[102:00] We're gonna see more extreme wind events and fires all year long. Land management practices stuff. One question I had is, are you doing any type of partnership or work with our indigenous experience, is it? Thanks, thanks for raising that, and not just in the fire spaceship with some ages. responses which doesn't quite come. Yeah, for sure. I think I think a lot of our work as a city, an extraordinary amount of work with our indigenous tribes in the region. But there's also indigenous learning that we are trying to tap into. And I think that's been really powerful, especially in our biodiversity Center nature based solutions. And we do a lot of collaboration and work with tons of organizations.

[103:10] That I I'm not even going to begin to get into, because I will talk for like another hour on that alone, so I'm happy to share some of that with you, and I'm glad you brought that up. Why don't I just kind of hit. These I just wanted to give you a sense of within our teams, the energy systems. Obviously, we have just energy transition. So that's really about job creation. That's where a lot of our Dr. Work is now contractor training, the equity element of our of our work. These are kind of our objectives or out outcomes that we are seeking the clean and resilient electricity supply. High performing healthy buildings. You all are. Gonna see? we brought the roadmap. I think a couple of meetings ago

[104:00] you're gonna see another turn of the crank on our buildings roadmap. We're gonna be taking that to council in July. So we'll bring that to you in advance. And then, of course, on the mobility side. Really getting into what problem are we solving? Is it congestion and city missions? Is that accessibility? Is it all of the above? So a lot of our work in the energy systems? Again, policy down to programs. I think I'll just kind of go through that. So things are working on right now. kind of talked a little bit about all of these. some of our new pilots we have a virtual power plant. We have a 12 million dollar grant with cu and excel, to look at a virtual power plant that we feel confident we're still going to get those Federal funds. We'll bring that back so you can have a sense of what we're talking about there. A lot of the work now is that our building codes, looking at investing in bidirectionally charging, really thinking about how we use technology to solve the real problem. So is it about resilience? Is it about cost? Is it about price hedging, thinking about the bidirectional opportunities to shape peak demand, and some of our largest consumer and buildings.

[105:21] the bidirectional ev charging. Has it been decided where that will be located? And if so, how was that decided? We have. We've had one at the North Pole Rec Center for 2 years. And as a pilot to see like 1 1 vehicle, what? What kind of impact. Would that actually have? The next deployments are in the parking garage at 30 pearl. And so it's for the low income car share. And so we have bidirectional charging there, and we're seeing some really good benefits. So those are in. They're not energized yet, but I don't think not as of today. But next, we're kind of looking at those opportunities for bidirectional charging with some characteristics. So our team that in my department, and also transportation looks at some of those characteristics where we can learn the most by doing some of that.

[106:21] Say that one more time. What does that mean? Oh, I'm glad you just asked. So the picture on the by the bottom right hand corner is a good visual of of what it is. So that is a charger that's connected to the rec center and the solar on the right side. So the charger allows you to feed electricity both directions. So, for example, the configuration of that charger is that that leaf is plugged in and during times where electricity is the most expensive at the Rec center. The computer basically says, I'm gonna pull energy off of that car battery to shave like the. If you can imagine a graph right? The peak you shave that peak down and it reduces those demand charges that you pay at the highest time of peak and it also connects it with well, you can charge

[107:16] the car with solar store that energy in the car batteries and then deploy it at night. When you want to use that electricity. So that's this one car. If you can imagine we do that with buses, too. So our project with via mobility. Now, now you have mobile power plants. except that not all cards these days are built for that. So all evs have the capability. It's the charger that has the ability to charge and discharge so vehicle to grid or vehicle to building. You'll hear those acronyms, E to G or B, 2 B. The ability to kind of move that electricity between that interface of the vehicle, the actual grid or a building?

[108:04] It depends. So this charger is for a city pool vehicle. The others are not charged because it's the car share. But we're reevaluating now. The model of offering free public charging, whether that's something we want to continue to do or not. Do. yes. Well, sure. Of course everybody has an Ev wants free charging. But so let me just say I, I talked a bit about our nature based solutions work already cool boulder is our keystone program. If you've heard of cool boulder, this was our work to really align the 3 categories. key action areas, connected canopies, pollinator pathways, absorbent landscapes, regenerative bag.

[109:04] And it it really is administered out of my office. But we really wanted to make sure that it retained that flavor of a collaboration of many, many local organizations. So we don't brand things with city Logos. That was very intentional. So you could see a number of the groups that are part of that. Just some pictures of the other cool boulder stuff that's really focused on community based action. Our tree tenders program, our yeah, talk a little bit. The just kind of move on from that. We we talked about circular economy. Already. The one that Jamie mentioned that I wanted to just come back to. Is she talked about the hospital deconstruction? And this is I. I just wanted to reference that this is how we tried to pair our regulation with the program. So our office oversees the deconstruction permitting process in in partnership with the planning department

[110:13] and it's been such a such a great experience and experiment to really see how far you can go in deconstruction. And it's helped us think about where we want to go next? Really employing that embodied carbon philosophy that we're evaluating right now, where do we want to go with deconstruction? How does it inform our our building codes in terms of building for deconstructibility how you're using materials in ways that allow you to deconstruct. So, for example, use when you use spray foam, insulation. It's the cheapest and highest insulating and very quick, but you can't. Then you construct and reuse that would so trying to match up some of those priorities right now, from a policy perspective, it's kind of interesting. Has there been any any estimates on how this

[111:01] these diversion requirements? How those have impacted the overall, either deconstruction costs or construction costs. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we had quite a bit of that analysis done for council. Originally, when we passed the deconstruction plan and ordinance and then during the building code update, excuse me, the energy code update. We gave them some additional analysis. I'm happy to share that with you in many cases. it's another one of those. It depends. It depends on the structure. That's being deconstructed. Is it cheap? Is it cheaper for a contractor to come into the bulldozer and smash everything and throw it in a can and drive it to Erie? Yeah, it is. But at the same time there is value to those materials. And so we have created that reuse market that is starting to shrink, that that disparity a little bit, which is pretty extraordinary. So we use the hospital case study to say, well, how much more was it actually to deconstruct, and a hospital had never been deconstructed anywhere that we're aware of.

[112:08] Yeah. And we hit, I think 93% diversion on that facility. So and then with deconstriction, is that just for public, like city and buildings? Or is that for all buildings? And then does the business? Who own the building? Do they get first? st Here's a criteria. Yeah, of course. So it's mostly homes. It's when when somebody is taking down a home and wanting to, you know, straighten it and rebuild their the requirement is to divert 75% of those materials from that site, and they have to show way tickets. They have to prove that it was diverted where it went. And so that's the work, the due diligence that my team does to make sure that before they get their their service to move forward with any. Yeah, but it's all. It's all buildings I can't remember. And because I know we talked at length about this. When you have residential homeowners

[113:03] doing this deconstruction does the city provide material, not materials as in goods, but references for how or where to divert materials, to have kind of like a standard packet that they send out. It is a packet that they receive, and over the past couple of years we have built the market for this. So we have contractors in town who do this, and we know they do it well. They're pre-qualified essentially, to go do that deconstruction work. We held many, many workshops and webinars with constructors with companies and contractors. So they are very familiar with where that material can and should go a. Occasionally we get somebody new and they're asking questions like, What am I have to do? I don't really understand. And then they have a whole packet of walking them through. It's actually on our website, too. So somebody that's building a homeowner if they want to understand, like what those requirements are. So it's not necessarily a barrier for entry for a new company.

[114:08] That ordinance has been in place now several years and already refining it and thinking about what comes next. So it's pretty well established. Okay, take a breath. That was a lot I just threw at you. My guess is that in there might have sparked an idea of something you want to learn more about. Let me know I'm happy to do that. for the 2 of you. Part of what I want you to be aware of is that you know, for the Eab there are things that are gonna come your way that are gonna require your feedback. And input either from my department or other departments. But we like to fill in some of these discussion items just to build literacy, because I I want you all to understand the work that you're doing. And then, of course, to give you an opportunity to provide input as we bring things forward.

[115:00] I know that was a lot. I apologize, based on everything you talked about. What are kind of the some things that you mentioned. One group accounts on July. But what are some of the big policies that are gonna come out of all this work and research. Yeah, we we bring policy issues forward somewhat regularly. The next is going to be our buildings roadmap which will be in July. We'll be coming back with potential policy recommendations around embodied carbon. Once that analysis is done. We're selecting a con, a consultant right now to do that work and how that fits in building code. We participate in a lot of other policy items that are going to council. For example, the Comp plan. We're we're pretty central in the work that's going on around the Comp plan. policies related to water as an example, were included in a lot of that discussion in terms of the drought plan. The water efficiency plan, the new water plan. So we we engage in those types of things. Transportation is another big one.

[116:09] So we're involved tangentially in a lot. The things that are led out of my office are obviously in the building space. We'll see the plastics piece come forward later this year. Remember what else we have coming forward. I'm again looking at you and trying to think of our look ahead. Calendar. We have a few other things that I know. We're going to be going to Council adoption of updated goals and targets. Anything related to excel, and the partnership, and our franchise relationship is out of my office, and so that may or may not be going to council, may or may not be going to voters. Is there an ex- excel energy related ballot measure coming up potentially? There is a citizen's petition that's being circulated right now that has to gather signatures by May 28th to get on the ballot. It's not being led by staff. It's not being led by council. No, but it is

[117:11] yeah. And so the community group is gathering signatures to put an item to exercise or opt out of our franchise agreement. Yeah. And the is that for individuals to opt out or for the city to opt, yeah, we don't have consumer choice in Colorado. So that would be opting out of our franchise. Excel would still be our provider until we chose a different path. Whether that's to go back to municipalization or some other outcome that we haven't evaluated. And then with things like that, is it just kind of best practice for us to see neutral tokens if it just doesn't allow them to be a spam. say it because it just says. Yeah, that's a really good question. You're kind of getting into a bit of protocol that

[118:05] yeah. So the way that works is you are certainly welcome to support or oppose any ballot measure. As a as a board, you all could choose to take a position on a thing. You have that ability. If you choose to do that again, you are making recommendations to council. But in this case council. so is not necessarily calling the question of whether they should proactively put this on the ballot, in which case I think there would be a role for the Board to say we support or don't support that action. They are talking tomorrow night about ballot measures, but we had a public session with Excel. On March 13th we talked about the potential for an opt out, and the question that I was asking council was there an appetite to consider some analysis. This Council want to consider opting out, and at the time Council said, No, so they are not actively pursuing that. But citizens petition. They may gather enough signatures that it goes.

[119:15] It's all right. Talk a lot tonight. Oh, sorry so you had, said Jonathan. I guess. Do we have other questions about general climate initiatives. Department. You had, said Jonathan. We want to move the settlement agreement unless you had like a very quick statement. I assumed that there was going to be a little bit to that. Yeah, sure. What I can offer is this, and I could just as easily send you the link to the website that we created about the Wildfire mitigation plan of the settlement. It is on our site. It talks about what the settlement is. What was our role? What's included in the settlement?

[120:00] The the proceeding is going to hearing next week, so we will know more on whether or not the Puc is going to accept that settlement or modify that settlement. What I will say about is, we were very active in that process, and feel very, very good about what came out of that discussion in terms of what it will do in terms of the investment in wildfire mitigation. What it means for boulder cost recovery issues and so feel good about where we put out a press release with with a little bit of the basic details. But I will just send a link to the website in case you have questions. and that's pretty much required. No, no, I'm sorry I wasn't clear, so that won't tha? That hearing won't take place till this fall? This is Excel's plan that they filed with the public Utilities Commission called their Wildfire Mitigation plan. They file a plan that has a price tag. And it's about 2 billion dollars. We are a party in that proceeding. The parties all came together and talked about what we wanted to see happen. What were the concerns, questions? How do we want that plan to actually be executed? And so that took a lot of effort, and and we were central to a lot of that discussion.

[121:23] So it will be how they invest in their system across the State, and specifically here and then with 2 million, is that like the same cost would occur to the city by their customers? Ye- yes, that's correct. But then the question is, do they actually get profit on top of that? Get into what assets that and upgrades to their system? Should they actually get profit on top of that?

[122:03] How much is it where the cost of capital think! Do you want me to do a motion to extend us by 5 or 10 min? I will motion for us to extend 10 min. A couple of other really quick items that we needed to talk about the calendar preview or just as a reminder in your packet you can see a list of items that are council items that they are going to be discussing over the next couple of months. and I like to show this to all of you, just so you can read it and say, I'd really like to learn more about that particular thing, and that gives me a signal that I can go to that department head and try to get something calendar to bring to you. So a couple of the things

[123:14] that are on here that you might want to just be flagging and walking, for it's I think I find it easier to go to the very last page and the anticipated upcoming council items. Obviously, the water supply information. July 31st is a study session that comes right after our waterwise, landscaping, wildfire hardening update. I would assume that that's going to come to you in advance. We have our healthy buildings roadmap. That is our item the Comp plan analysis update on August 14.th And then the manufactured home strategy. Are those that we're involved in. So I would anticipate that we're going to get those calendared and scheduled for all of you along with the bullet. Correct? No, this is just an idea. We're trying to be a little bit more disciplined in scheduling items for you to provide feedback on. And so I just wanted to give you a sense of these are the topics that I'm I'm seeing on Council's agenda. So now you can kind of get a sense of what's going to be coming.

[124:30] Sure that's great. And then the last thing I'm doing on Heather's behalf. the summer meeting schedule. We have 2 July second, very close to a holiday just wanted to check in with the board of whether you wanted to keep that date. Oftentimes we try to either push it out a week or 2 rather than just cancel your meeting. But that's certainly the Board's purview. However, you want to do that. And then August 6, th I think, was another day that we

[125:01] traditionally had trouble with summer vacation. Yeah, I think last time we cancelled one meeting. I think my only hesitancy to cancel this is personally just based on seeing what's coming down the plate in relation to everything that is in our purview. It'd be a missed opportunity to start canceling some summer meetings. So I think if we can reschedule, I would. I would prefer that I was lining it up against what you have on here, right? So I don't know if you wanna have a meeting before that July 24.th So but then that comes up. So that's up to you. That one we'd probably bring to you in June, just to make sure that there's plenty of time to incorporate feedback and not doing the Gyms first, st my personal preference would be definitely move the July second 15 and the August 6th should be okay. I think this.

[126:06] yeah, this should fix it. maybe discuss at the next week. Yeah. And we don't need to make a decision on August date yet. Nope, okay. just wanted to fly on the August 6.th I'm in favor of moving it. Okay. how much of them? No, I'm available on the on the second, I'm going on a refreshing trip. I don't know. It's with the local skeleton. Yeah, I think something will happen. Typically we tend to stick with Wednesdays. Attempt not to overlap with other board meetings.

[127:13] Probably should great right any other questions alright, and I motion to close this meeting. All in favor. Hi, meeting is adjourned. Thank you alright.