I'm going to make Lori, I'm going to assign you as host. Okay.  Make sure I know how to. I've not hosted a webinar before I've hosted plenty of zoom meetings. So I want to make sure I know how to let people in. Yes. So if you, if you. If you click on the participants at the bottom, and then if you click on attendees, you should be able to pull people in. The other thing just to tell you, Lori is just in case you need other folks on the calls to be able to share their screens. If you go to the shares, the share screen feature and enable them to share. Okay. So make sure. Right. One person can share at a time. So we're good. So everybody can share. So yeah, looks good. That part I know. All right. I'll, I'll, I'll excuse myself and have a good meeting. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. And welcome. Caitlin and Miguel. Thank you. Hi, thanks. Hello everyone. Hi to our. Attendee. Okay. So this is the August second meeting of the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee. We have a pretty full agenda tonight because we have our two. Two interns who are going to talk to us a bit. About their projects this summer. So let's go ahead and get started. Let me just get to my notes here. With a review of the minutes. So I can share. The minutes. Now. I have a request. I just want to make sure that we have the minutes. Which is that whoever's going to be taking notes today. And we have to decide that now. Should please send both me and. Stephanie copies of the draft. Because I missed something last week that I had to go back and correct that some of you may have noticed an annual report. It's been corrected. I'll talk about it later. But I just forgot something we had discussed and I didn't get the time to go until when you guys did. So let me share this. Sorry. Can't agenda minutes. There they are. Share. Sorry. This is taking a moment. There and I can see you all. Are you sharing that? Wait, that's not. Something's wrong. I'm not sharing the right thing. Am I? There you are. Can you see the. Yeah. That's weird. That's weird. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's right. Good. Got it. Okay. So I added one thing to the minutes in yellow here. I added the link to the seminar that Laura. Mentioned last week. Did anyone else see anything in the minutes that needs to be. Fixed or addressed. So I, it looks like I'm supposed to take minutes today. Okay. I'm going to be the only parent home right now. And we'll be for the duration of the meeting. So if somebody else could, that would be amazing. And I can pick up an extra minute taking shift when I have. Another adult in the house. That's fine. Dwayne, do you want to. Go ahead and take. Yep. If I'm next, I'm happy to do that for sure. Yeah. Let me go. Go ahead. I'll get organized. Okay. I'm not shipping me because I have a hard time chairing and. No, no, not you. Yeah. Okay. So are there any comments? So the thing that I forgot is I sat down about a week after the meeting to finally finish off the annual report and send it in. And I finished it off like on Friday and sent it into. Sent it into Stephanie at some point. And I didn't. The minutes didn't get to me until the 31st, which was after I worked on the report. And I had totally forgotten about the importance of adding. Adding the comment. Or is it about annual report review? Emphasizing that departmental activities within both within the department and the larger community should be a focus. And so I had to send the correct version to Stephanie. It was just a section, but only in a correction. It's not in the copy that you guys got. So I have to send the corrected version. I did send the corrected version to Stephanie just before the meeting. So I saw this about two hours ago and was like, Oh, no. I forgot about that. So I made that change. As well as did a proofread through the whole thing in each or everything was in good order. Anything else here that we need to talk about. I can move to accept the minutes. Second. I'll be happy to second. Nobody else. Ready for a vote or people still reading. Should try to read them beforehand if possible. So should we go ahead and take a vote then. So I'll do what Stephanie usually does in a no particular order. Jesse. Yes. Stella. Actually, I'm abstained. Technically. Okay. Yes. Dwayne. Yes. Don. Yes. And a yes from me. So. Passes. We adopt the minutes with four yeses and an extension. Okay. I believe. Let me stop sharing that the next thing on the agenda. Is public comment. So Martha. If you have a comment for us, go ahead and raise your hand. Okay. I will. I think Stephanie usually promotes you to a panelist for this. Or does she just allow you to talk. Let's try a lot of talk. See how that works. Go ahead, Martha. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I really did. Whoops. Can't hear you. Oh, sorry. Did I accidentally mute you? No, I didn't. I don't think so. You're muted. Okay. I didn't have anything profound to say, but since you asked me. I was, I'm interested to know whether you folks as a, as a committee are following or thinking about the Hickory Ridge. At all. In terms of the large picture of whether.  Great things in terms of environmental. Aspects for development or planting trees or nature trails or anything like that. And also then the. You know, Solar array, whether you've been following that development at all. And apparently there's a concern about the. Type of battery that's been selected. For that facility, because it's the same. Make as ones that have been causing some fires at various locations around recently around New York state. So I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And I think that would raise that as a potential. Subject you folks might be interested in. So. That's all. You've put it on my radar screen, but I don't have any comment other than that. Yeah. It's just, you know, I see lots of possibilities for Hickory Ridge. And I should think that maybe you folks might. Think about what opportunities there might be in the future. And also then the concern about the solar array. So thank you. Thank you, Martha. Let's see how do I put you back in. I'm not sure how to put you back in the participants. Why. Hmm. That didn't work. I just hid you, but you're still there. Hold on a moment. Well, I promise I'll behave if you. There. If nothing else you can see there as a participant, I'm just trying to figure out, oh, change role to attend the, I found it. So thank you again, Martha. All right. So let's go to. The next agenda item, which is the presentation by Caitlin. And Miguel. Where did Caitlin and Miguel go? Oh, there's Miguel. Yes. And there you are. Hello, sorry, we just had our videos off. Okay. Oh, and I accidentally hid non video participants. I didn't mean to do that. So let me try to fix that. How did I do that? I did that by accident. Oh, good. Oh no. I don't know how to undo that. This webinar stuff is a little more complicated than the usual. I can keep mine on. I just had it off because my internet was really bad. Now I'm good. Well, if I next time someone turns one off, I will try to figure out, I think I just have to promote you back to visible, but let's go ahead and do it. So go ahead. Who would like to go first? Sure. I'm going to go first and then Miguel will follow. So let me. Try to share my screen. All right. I'm going to ask the question everyone asks, can you see my screen? Yes. Okay. Super. And then let me see if I can make it full screen for us. Cool. Okay. So hello, energy and climate action committee. My name is Caitlin Hart. I am a sustainability fellow with the town of Amherst for the summer working on updating the greenhouse gas inventory. It was last updated in 2017. And I am also a graduate student at Tufts University, studying environmental policy and planning. So very grateful to be here. I'm sorry. I'm going to talk about my project this summer. It is not yet complete because our fellowship lasts for about two, two and a half more weeks. So I'm sorry. I can't share the full picture with you all today. But of course you will see all of the final deliverables. Closer to the end of the summer. And I'm looking forward to hearing any thoughts and feedback that you all might have about where I'm currently at. So the 2023 greenhouse gas inventory update. I don't think I have to remind any of you all what the climate goals are stated in the climate action adaptation and resilience plan or carp, but just for a refresher using the baseline year of 2016. The town of embers has committed to some ambitious reduction goals, reducing the 2016 emissions amount by 25% by 2025, reducing by 50% by 2030 and reducing entirely by 2050. And so I just gave, I'm sorry I don't have grass right now there will be good graphs in the report, but I gave us some numbers based on the community wide inventory so that accounts for only Sorry to interrupt you, I don't know if maybe I'm not seeing I'm still seeing your intro slide. Oh, really. Not sure if anybody else is having a problem. It looks like my screen sharing is pause thank you for. Oh, what happened. That may have been me. Thank you for letting me know that I'm so sorry. Yeah, no worries. Let me just stop sharing and then try to start again. Yeah, folks. That's strange. Okay, let's try it again. Screen sharing active new slide. Okay. Thank you. Sorry about that I don't think you missed anything. Exciting. Yeah. Okay, so these are some numbers obviously they're like hard to grapple with. I think it's a better job of adding visualization in the final deliverables however just putting some numbers to the goals that were set out so my task this year includes both a community wide inventory as well as a municipal inventory. So these are numbers referring to the community wide inventory, which will encompass kind of everything. More or less within the geographic boundary of the town. And then I kind of extrapolated from the 2016 municipal numbers. I think that we will be aiming toward for the municipal emissions, which encompasses everything kind of controlled by the municipality so the town government operations. Okay, so I have kind of three components to my project this summer. The first is to update the existing inventory. I'm very fortunate that the fellow who came before me created a robust framework. And so it's been, it's been relatively easy to plug and play with what Taylor set up years ago. So update the, the numbers of the inventory, then try to assess the prod progress made toward the 2025 goals. And then recommend in alignment with recommendations that are in the carp action to further reduce emissions and really try and meet that upcoming 2025 goal. The deliverables include workbooks for both the municipal inventory and the community wide inventory. There will be a workbook user guide which may be less interesting to the committee but will be super useful to anyone updating this inventory in the future. Hopefully the methodology document will be useful for anyone updating the inventory in the future, and then a final report to summarize the findings and proposed next steps based on the inventories. So the status of these items currently the municipal inventory is in pretty good shape however I do need to do kind of a QAQC check to make sure that you know just double check to make sure that calculations and the data entered are in good shape. The community inventory, there are a couple of places where I need to add some empirical data, as well as some model data so I don't have any numbers to share with you on that side today I apologize but they are coming. The workbook user guide and the methodology document I'm kind of updating as I go along, working on the workbooks, and then the report is kind of the final step. Again, there exists a document that that the previous fellow created that I can update but I'm going to try and look at some more accessible and simple ways to present the findings, probably in a graphics heavy executive summary. So this is kind of our municipal inventory numbers at a glance. There's obviously more detail in the workbooks but as you can see. We have have actual numbers here for. And I should clarify these are fiscal years 2016 and 2022. So beginning in July and ending in June. Sorry for my noisy cat in the background. And then we have what what should be our 2025. Numbers. So you can see kind of at the bottom it looks like, you know these are not don't take these as final numbers but it looks like we are, we are on track, we're moving in the right direction. However, some more. More action may need to be taken to reach that 2025 goal. And I'll also note kind of the discrepancy, or the big leap in heating oil emissions. That is something I need to look into during kind of my quality check. We think it may just, it may be unreported or missing heating oil data from FY 2016. And that's why it seems like it seems like we're using a lot more heating oil and in FY 2022. However, I think it is probably likely that some buildings usage was an accounted for and 2016. But as I said I'm sorry I do not have community inventory numbers, I feel comfortable sharing with you all at this point in time. How. But they are coming. To reiterate their, their remains. It sounds like a lot of work to do. However, the kind of community inventory workbook user guide and methodology document is just kind of tying up above little loose ends, and then the report and analysis will be done. But, you know, it's all, it's kind of all working toward the report. And that is what I have for you all today. Thank you for listening. Thank you and apologies for referring to you as interns before your fellows. So, it's basically the same thing fellows just sounds better. It's really higher level and I think then, then one usually thinks of interns working so it's very, very nice, very nice work. I am shocked to see that heating oil I really do hope you solve to figure out what's going on there. Any questions for Caitlin. Oh, I see Jesse. Okay, thank you. I, this is one of my favorite spreadsheets of that I've seen it's I love it's it's I think super important so just love. You seem to have dug into it in a great way so first of all thank you for taking it all on. It's super important. The question is, how much energy or how much have you been able to look at the methane kind of, which I, is what some people call natural gas, I think I like methane sounds better to me or toxic combustible gas, however you want to call it. Thank you. The fugitive emissions of that, not just in direct pipes into Amherst but also as those pipes go to our electricity production is that something is the, did that change. Did you look at those fugitive emissions specifically or is it just the same factor applied as last time. These are modeled numbers so it's not data that I've obtained from Berkshire gas or ever source. I don't think I asked, but I would certainly be willing to to ask and try to get those real numbers. Thank you for having a colleague of mine from elsewhere recommended so thank you for that reminder. It's worth a shot and also thank you for that note on language I don't know if the town of Amherst or the ECAC largely agrees but at least in my small edits I've been changing natural gas to methane gas. I believe language. Yeah, around this is important. Just to follow up on that this interesting thing just occurred to me maybe this is obvious and everybody knows this but you know we all get our gas bills we know what our meter readings are and you assume the gas company knows how much they're actually delivering so they ought to be able to tell you how much they're losing. Maybe that's what exactly you were talking about. And even if it's not a recorded amount. Oftentimes it's it's like a factor or a percentage so of course if our assumption is X delivered, then we add X plus something is the actual amount. And it's, and it's, and it's a different. It's a different factor in the atmosphere because the birth methane at your home is much less of a global warming potential than the released methane from the frack to everybody knows this but I'm just. Yeah, it's a different number difference that difference has to be known by the gas company right because Oh they know that's because it's attached to dollars if they know. Well they don't, they don't say they, they will not say they know. They won't tell you. No, I mean they pretend they don't know. They don't know because it is attached to dollars but they don't care. Yeah. So they haven't been trapped they don't track. They don't track this stuff. And still has her hands up so I want to recognize Stella. Go ahead Stella. Yeah, thank you so much Caitlin. This is really, really interesting. Do the. My question is that do the, does the vehicle fleet, does the off road sector include equipment like chippers blowers, that kind of thing. Yes. Amazing. Yes, I believe so yeah. Excellent. Any other questions for Caitlin. Last question from me, hopefully. This is your area of expertise sounds like you're talking to colleagues and everything like, what do you think of our inventory does this feel like a, you think someone did good work to prepare you like this seemed like a good one and you've seen others like how how are we doing in your opinion, as far as keeping track of these things. Sure. I may not have as much experience as you think. So, I'm not sure if I can exactly answer your question. I think that Taylor, who is the fellow in 2017 did a very, very thorough job of setting up a workbook that anyone can use if they have the activity data. So I think that, you know, other municipalities may be using software that is theoretically easier but this is actually a pretty like a pretty robust and accessible because it's in Excel framework. I have been able to speak with a couple of fellow fellows and former fellows who have done inventories. This one seems pretty comparable to what other folks are doing, you know because we're using the, the GPC greenhouse gas protocol framework which I think a lot of folks are using. One of my fellow fellows who is working for the town of Durham, New Hampshire this summer is kind of tackling, or is supposed to be tackling I haven't checked in with her in a while but an inventory that includes consumption related emissions. I have a background of basic literacy and embodied carbon so I think that's, you know I don't think anyone's including those in their inventories right now but it would be cool to see. One question for me starting out in this project was, do I approach this apples to apples using accounting for exactly what the previous fellow accounted for, or do I approach this, comparing apples to more apples. And, you know, for the purposes of this project. For the limited 10 weeks that I have to do this work, it ended up being apples to apples. And I think that makes sense. But, you know, there's always, there's always more that can be accounted for. Sorry, that was a long answer to your question. That's good. Always more apples I appreciate that thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. If not, big well would you like to, or let me share my screen. And my internet hasn't been working super well so let me know if it gets really choppy and I'll try eliminating my video. If that helps. All right, so, yeah my name is Miguel, and I am also a sustainability fellow through UNH, but I'm a student at UMass Amherst in the sustainability science program, focusing on renewable energy and efficient design. And this is the practicum component of my degree so I will be graduating in September, or essentially at the end of August when I'm done with this project. The intent is to take the, or to create an inventory of HVAC equipment in Amherst municipal buildings, and from that creating a building electrification strategy. So the intent of this project is to create a database of all of the HVAC equipment in all of Amherst buildings, including heating and cooling equipment, any auxiliary systems. And then a note of the distribution system of the building so if it's hydronic hot water or steam or air, etc. And then, as kind of a additional component. We've also documented onsite or backup generators because they are also combusting fossil fuels at that site. So that's an additional part and mostly just for documentation. And from this database that I'm creating the hope is to be able to approximate emissions reductions through electrification, create a strategy and a prioritization rubric for building electrification. Financial analysis, sort of secondary to the emissions reductions, since it's going to be pretty rough numbers. And additionally, additionally to this. The database will be useful for the facilities department just having an inventory of what they're servicing and maintaining all in one place, not necessarily needing to go onsite to troubleshoot or just know what's at each building. Similarly, I am in this part of my project where I have lots of analysis still left to do. But I haven't, I mean I have started all of them. I just have not finished them. So I don't have a whole lot to report. And I can discuss some of these a little bit further. But what I have completed is all of the site visits and documentation of all the equipment into a single spreadsheet. And most of these components are pretty interconnected, but kind of my logic goes through this diagram in a clockwise fashion where I'm going to approximate emissions reductions. And from the inventory that I've created the inventory will inform my financial analysis, both the emissions reductions and financial analysis will inform my prioritization rubric slash timeline, which is the strategy that I'm proposing of what I, or of how I think this will happen. Finally, I will summarize this in a report documenting each building, each building's profile. What I can report today is just a breakdown of each building's heating by fuel type and domestic hot water by fuel type. I did not include in these graphs buildings that have no heating or cooling is about 17 of the of the buildings. There's about 50 or 52 buildings I think total. I just took up too much of the pie to really show what's out there. Mainly fuel oil and gas and the one one building that has already installed electric heat pumps is an open and that's the North Amherst library. The North Amherst school does have heat pumps, but it's only in half the building. I don't remember if I should record that as a primary heat source or secondary, but in either case, and domestic hot water, mostly electric resistance throughout the building stock, but they have made an effort to replace those as they retire with electric heat pump, hot water heaters, and so far what I've collected. I'm still missing some consumption data, but so far what I've collected is an approximation of 60% reduction in CO2 I should have put an E on their CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions, or just heating. My final deliverables, as I mentioned earlier, are going to be this HVAC inventory, which is going to be a large database that includes models, serial numbers, manufacturers, age of the equipment. If I can find it, which I can for most electrical information, stuff like that that's handy for facilities, mostly. The emissions reductions estimation, financial analysis, electrification, and then this timeline that so far I've just broken it down into near mid and long term, and then I'll sort of estimate kind of that what each of those categories would be in terms of years. So that it sort of fits between now and 2050 or sooner. So actually going back to these, this list I can sort of go a little bit deeper into at least my process for two of them. My electric heating demand estimations is kind of built on little information. I'm not doing a full analysis of the building performance, which would typically include heat loss calculations through installation and administration. However, I do have access to the amount of fuel that's being utilized at each site and kind of working my way backwards into an electric heating equivalent. So what I've got is the gas supply, the efficiency of the boiler. Assuming, or thinking about it, in terms of this whole system of the building losing heat on a cold day and occupants inside calling for heat and creating this system. I was able to control my next slide, build this formula in Excel, where I take the fuel use converted to kilowatt hours so that all of the units are uniform. Divide that by the heating degree days for a weather station that's close by, which I think was chickpea. Divide that by the boiler efficiency, which again is an approximation just taken from the data plate. So in the for the most part it's a conservative estimate on the higher end, just originally what the efficiency was for the heat plant so I don't know why they're there, but for the most part, they're boilers in each building. And then the set point can be changed in my calculation. And I used Celsius for this because it didn't didn't come out the way I wanted to for Fahrenheit, for some reason, and then all that divided by 24 to get rid of hours to get heating demand in kilowatts, which can be converted to BTUs and then two tons. This piece is the prioritization rubric. I kind of developed it starting from left to right, thinking about how this is just my thought process of how I got to where I think it'll end up. Each being a pretty important component. It's not ideal or necessarily financially the best idea to retire equipment early, necessarily, especially since a lot of equipment is old, but there is something. I'm getting more information to add to the analysis. I added area as a factor. However, this doesn't really account for some of the buildings that aren't in use and there are a handful of those. So taking the ratio of age to how long it's expected for that equipment to last and dividing that by the ratio of emissions per area is gives me information about whether or not that building is being used. And so, yeah. Earlier this week, one of our advisors from UNH gave me this idea of mapping out the emissions and financial analysis of whether I do return on investment or payback period on two different axes. That gives you a pretty good idea of what what to electrify sooner because it'll cut the most emissions and give you the best payback period or return on investment. However, it does not consider the age of the equipment. So, I guess I'm trying to do both or see if I can combine them into sort of a multi decision criteria analysis and see maybe if I can play around with the weights on on both of these to come up with a schedule that makes the most sense or or reflects their values most, whether they want to retire stuff early or consider the age or finance. And yep, that's my project. I don't know if I have any questions or feedback. I do questions. Are you, are you working with Adam Kohler at UNH? Any chance. No. Sorry, he's a consulting engineer I used to work with who who went to the sustainability department at UNH. And he's just, he has a expertise in sizing equipment. Looks like is what you're doing. And so I was curious if, if he was one of the people, and he's also a nice fellow. I'm not technically a fellow.  You know what I mean. I have a couple of questions or comments. First of all, I'm really sort of surprised I'm a little disappointed to see how little of the municipality is using heat pumps as a primary heat source. I have the feeling that the numbers in the community are quite a bit larger than that, but I guess we don't know. I just know in my own neighborhood.  So I find that a little surprising and disappointing. And then I have some technical questions about one of your equations that I didn't understand but I think we'll go to Laura I think your hand was up first so go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Thanks Miguel. For the costing discussion, or not quite costing I guess but I think there's a couple of things we should consider and I don't, I'm not necessarily saying that you should do this analysis but I think we should speak to it. One is that I think it's hard. I think it's not. I think you're exactly right that historically, and by cost of capital, like replacing capital equipment that has more life left to it is not the most cost effective thing to do. But I think what that misses out on are two things one of course is just the cost of emitting carbon. One is that right now we have this historic moment where we have a lot of funding available for updating buildings. So it may actually be cost effective to move quicker and leverage some of the IRA funding and state level funding to update a bunch of these buildings now even if the heating system has five years of life left in it or or whatever, whatever the situation might be. Um, I guess I would suggest or that maybe even we just mentioned that. Because I think we have to move away from sort of the more traditional costing of things, if we're going to be able to make a case for why. And another point to make and I know it's not necessarily true for natural gas given its current costs but um, you know, there's operational cost savings that can be achieved if we do a good job with heat pumps and weatherization of some of these buildings to make them more energy efficient to just throwing all that out there to included your write up if you can. Yeah, no I understand that too. I think it just be interesting to maybe look at them both, like, yeah, the one on the graph and then also what if you consider age as one of the factors just since I feel like for the most there's kind of, I didn't show it because I kind of forgot to put it in there kind of a histogram of, and it doesn't really tell the whole story because different equipment lasts for different lengths of time. It's kind of a wave of some new stuff tapering down and then a bunch of really old stuff to ranging in the 30 to 50 years category. Yeah, and the reality is we're not going to replace it all at the same time either so we definitely need a better approach. So it's helpful to think about age in that, in that perspective as well. Right. Thanks. Jesse. Yeah, first of all, I forgot to say what you're doing is really tricky and really important, just like the greenhouse gases say it so it's just also just a general sort of like, this is awesome I'm so excited to see this work happening in Amherst but you know, it's what you're doing for the buildings what Caitlin did for everything and it's a great, it's a great looking. Laura mentioned weatherization and, and I want to just speak maybe a little more specifically to that and again, I know what it's like to be two weeks away from finishing a report and then have someone say, Hey, did you do this so you do whatever you want to do but what I would say is, if you can incorporate some language and potentially even recommendations of what that tonnage wants to get to to what's in other words what the weatherization needs to do to make it an optimized cost effective solution. None of these buildings can just go straight to electric they all need some level of envelope work, and there is some targets, and I'm going to recommend the place to find some of that information. North Hampton has a capital improvement planning study to upgrade seven municipal buildings to net zero energy use. And that report has I think some good general language just like to help Amherst benefit from that report, basically, and like, and, and some ways just like it's a BT us per hour per square foot target number and you don't have to figure out envelope plans just to get that concept in there in a specific way. I think it would be super helpful. It's a couple sentences really. If that doesn't make sense. Reach out to Stephanie and she can reach out to me and I will hand that to you. Yeah, as well as I can. Yeah, that makes sense. I did write up like I started writing some stuff and that was kind of one of my assumptions slash parameters is that there is no envelope considerations in this report or in my project. However, it would immensely help each building to lower its initial costs and operating costs in an electric electric scenario. Yeah, it's still it's still valuable the report still makes sense, as long as you acknowledge that component. Yeah, but yeah having something more specific but numbers would strengthen that argument for sure. And I just wanted to echo what what Jesse said that this is the sort of numbers that we wish we could get for you know every building and every, every, every structure in town. There's been a lot of talk about this in the last year about writing into rental bylaws getting information about what the heating system is and what the energy usages and we haven't been very successful at being able to get that sort of information so this is fantastic. I want to really thank you. Can I ask that you go back a couple of slides to the formula that you wrote down the first one. There, where you're trying to understand the heating demand estimation I do I'm a I'm a physicist so I'm going to geek out a little. I've been doing similar sorts of things this year thinking about similar sorts of things and you're taking that can you go through this again what you're doing here. Sure. So I'm only using this for a building that has as heated by fossil fuels. Exactly how much is being burned so you know how much energy is getting pumped into that building it makes it easy that part I get right yeah. I'm not using it for electric systems but then I immediately realized that I wouldn't be able to split it up between lighting and anything else that's happening in that building. So just for fuel. So we've got the three different kinds of fuels propane oil gas, and they're all in different units and they all have different amounts of energy per unit. So I'm converting that into a like unit kilowatt hours. I'm doing when I did this for my own house and for other yeah I do the same thing it all goes into kilowatt hours. Then what are you doing with it. Then I'm dividing it by the heating degree days in degree Celsius. So that's the, those are the number of degrees per day below the average. You're getting an energy usage per day. And then multiplying it by the boiler efficiency. So it's taking this amount of fuel, and it's not considering anything after the boiler so it's just how much it's taking in and how much it's putting out. So of course there's going to be more losses throughout the system but I don't have that kind of information. And then multiplying it by the step point that's what calling for heat within the building. It's confusing me a little bit so maybe we can talk about this offline but I'm not quite sure what you're doing there you made a somewhat scary sounding comment about the answer depending on the units which it shouldn't, if the, I might have just, that might have just been, you know, you just have one line in Excel, and I tried changing it all and I said, you know I'm just going to keep it in Celsius but you can. I have cell references the Celsius degree but you can change the step point Fahrenheit, just because that's what we all use. But I found this formula in Celsius and I just didn't want to. I just didn't ever change it. Okay. Yeah, if you ever want to talk more about that I'm happy to chat with you about it I'm a little lost on that last point there but, but I get what you're trying to I absolutely get what you're trying to do because it's the same thing I did for my own house when I did a transition this year and I've been thinking about for a couple other people's houses. Yeah, and this is just something that I got from an HVAC person. And that's how they, they roughly calculated it's a little bit more precise than just the area of the condition space. Because it considers what you're replacing and how efficient it is or was. Okay, I don't want to take up a lot of time geeking out so. Again, are there any other questions for Miguel or Caitlin. I actually have a quick comment and request if that's okay Lori. Kind of to Laura's point about all of the IRA and additional federal funding that is upcoming in my report, along with recommendations for action I hope to point to some of these resources. I have a couple of good summaries from Northeast energy efficiency partnerships but if any of you have information on that. Oh, so many. Yeah, if you could send that my way. You know it won't be a huge like very in depth part of the report but just to plant seeds and point in the right direction. I appreciate that. Okay, you should check out the minutes when they are updated and posted because the IRA discussion that we had last week that link is now in the minutes will be. But there's also are you on the building electrification accelerator mailing list. I don't think so. Massachusetts. And both that information if I'll give it to Stephanie is on it so she could also get it to you I don't have your email addresses but unless they were on the last mailing to everyone so if I have your email I'll send you that directly but that mailing list is invaluable they have everything. Everything and they've been talking a lot lately about incentives and rebates and renters what renters can do. So, actually have an internship they just posted for the fall. So, yeah. They also post jobs that's right, not only internships but but you know regular jobs so you're going to want to be on that list. Thank you both. I want to say thank you to both Caitlin and Miguel. I've been busy taking notes so haven't really been able to ask questions but and just a hi to Miguel student who was in one of my classes last last fall. And in the spring. So great to see this wonderful work for the town and and finishing up your practical. Thanks friend. Thank you. Thanks to both of you. I guess you're welcome to say the rest of the meeting if you want to but you don't need to. I think we're going to go on now to updates. So I don't know that the first thing under updates is heat pumps and that's me and I don't have anything specific to say about heat pumps we're all just waiting on that. RFP the heat pump program that was in legal last week so I don't have too much more to say on that other than I continue to get requests from neighbors about about you know how to go about getting started converting the heat pumps who they talk to. How do they know who to call and so I think that's really good it speaks to the need for a program where you know they can call a number in the town and get some expert on the line who can help them think through the process and maybe recommend. Or if not recommend at least give them a list of qualified installers. So I don't have anything more to say about this for the minutes Lori. So we're we're awaiting funding announcement from the state. No no we're awaiting there is the town has a heat pump program that they've been putting a I guess it's a request for proposals or a solicitation of some sort. And it's with legal because the issue was that they want to give money out to buy heat pumps. And they're not allowed to use I guess this is this ARPA funding I don't even remember where the funding is coming from the funding is not allowed to be used for you know individuals to install heat pumps but it could be used to. You know, to to lift up a particular community right to it has to be a community use. So there has to be the argument made that this is my understanding anyway Stephanie would be able to say better that you know that that taking marginalized communities and giving them access to this. To heat pumps to to clean energy is a community good and I think that's what they're trying to do is figure out how to say that. So that's last I knew it was stuck in legal over that something like that point. It has to benefit a group we can't just benefit individuals I think has benefited community. Anything under. How about so how's the solar bylaw working group going. I think that's next on the. Yep. No, no dramatic updates except we continue to meet and basically, we have a extended meeting on Friday, if anybody wants to join we're actually starting Stephanie will get these announcements out starting at 1030 as opposed to 1130. With the first hour, being primarily a conversation with the town council, not legal council. With regard to questions that we've posed as a as a working group with regard to our limitations and advice on how to structure some of the zoning language. And, and, and abilities. And then we're going to be really starting to dig into the first of our two primary areas that we need to grapple with. First up on Friday is really how we want to approach as zoning recommendations these are all recommendations to to the town approach zoning with regard to farmland. And then subsequent to that will work with issues around zoning for solar on in, in their on forced land. And so we have sort of a framework to discuss on farmland on Friday, and we'll see where we get to. And that will be, I think the substantial accomplishment, if we can reach a reasonable consensus, and then we'll move on to the forest, forest issues. Actually update doing sounds like, unfortunately, I won't be able to attend on Friday but it would be interesting if you're back from any cake members you can attend. And of course you find how that how that meeting goes. All right, anything else, any other updates on heat pumps or solar any other questions regarding heat pump or solar efforts, not solar outreach. Laura, this was sounds like a continuation of last week's discussion. Yeah, and I have zero control of my inbox. And so I sent something just did Stephanie send out that solar outreach campaign idea document that I shared. I think you you I asked you about that and you sent it to me, but I think what you sent me was an email that she had sent. So let me take a quick look I think she had sent it. Yeah, so Stephanie sent out and I had lost this to on. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet on July 19 Stephanie sent to the committee. A couple of links from Laura, one was for the solar outreach campaign idea which is a nice document, how to do this campaign and the other was the webinar link directly. And I'm not saying that I have not had a chance to look at it yet. I've just been swamped but on my list of things to do so yes that did go out to the committee. Wednesday July 19 so that would have been our last meeting. Yeah, okay great so I'm just, just glad that it, that it went out. So, um, so yeah so this is a campaign idea. This is a very rough draft I didn't spend a ton of time on it. The idea being that you know there's a lot of. There's a new direct pay provision in the IRA, which is going to allow non tax paying entities to directly access. And that would be the same amount of, and sometimes more incentives that they previously have not been able to directly access. So previously if a school wanted to do solar, they would have to partner with a private company that could leverage the tax credit, and it would be a whole process now. It would be easier for schools, towns, municipalities, faith based organizations NGOs to own and operate their own solar. And I believe it also has implications for electrification and other, and other things. So, but specifically on the solar you know we talk a lot about wanting to maximize solar on rooftops and other spaces. And this seems like a really great opportunity to connect with other groups in town to try to raise awareness about this. So potentially, so my sort of idea here is that we would start with probably an educational campaign of some sort so identify groups that we could partner with. I think I'm going to go out to people that might be able to speak to this. I think I noted last time and I included the link here to this evergreen action blog post which includes a link to a webinar. I'm going to go ahead and refer to it including someone from UMass. So, um, Laura, it occurs to me that that this probably should have been in our packet and I don't think it was do you want me to share the document with everyone. Yeah, sure. If you have an opening open now I don't just go ahead and share this it's open in my browser. So give me a second. I'll just share this browser. There it is. Okay, did that share correctly, or did that share something else what just shared. No, I see it. Yeah. Is it there because it keeps hiding these windows on me every time it does this is very annoying. There it is. Okay, got it. Okay, good. So this is the document that that you put together. Yeah. So there's a link to the resources there which I encourage anyone to check out if they haven't. It's quite a good webinar. But anyway, so my initial idea it's not particularly innovative so if folks have other thoughts on how to do this I'd welcome them, but basically get a list of partners get a list of non tax paying entities that we want to engage with and post some kind of educational sector session develop outreach material. And then, you know, follow up and support follow through. So my basic idea is that we have an info session, we develop some material based on what we hear is that info session and, and get that material out to all of these non tax paying entities. I'm just also adding local energy advocates to that list because they are also looking I mean they're the group that I think work to help try to get together the CCA from which that seed happened. And they're always talking about, you know, what's the next step what's the next step how do we develop our own clean energy sources. Actually, my email to you all was to help me fill out this list so I have not completed either of these lists. And I can be the contact for that since I usually go to they didn't have a meeting this month but they will have one next month or this month. Yeah, so it would be great to get all of these groups. Anyone else who. Yeah, and Stella thanks for adding some some some points here, I started to get down the list of them. And I had a list of experts and maybe I thought Dwayne I think you could potentially add some folks here started putting down these lists and then I got, you know, I think there's a ton of opportunity here even with just all the schools and things. So I welcome any. This was like my five minute. Yeah, I was meeting JCA. Sorry, not JCC. I think there's a bunch more we could put on. I haven't, I haven't given it much thought but so welcome folks to add to this list and add any contact information that they that they might have. It'd be great. Sort of my, maybe my hope is that we could find at least one partner organization that would be really willing to run with this and help us organize it. Particularly if we could find one that has, like, because you know we're limited in terms of we don't have any funding but if we could find a partner organization that does have some funds like to help make them and like do all the things that would be helpful. So, I think a first, a first first step would be getting a greeting a group of partners together and having a meeting, and maybe just one or two of the of us for me cat could could participate and report back. So anyway, I'll pause there. Okay this is great we should definitely take this up again I'm sorry I dropped the ball on this one a little bit I meant to do a little more with it. And does everybody have that link or should I send that email to everyone again I have the email from Stephanie and I can just forward it to everyone again if you need it. That would be good. Always send it again. Send it again. And this is without comment because you don't want to be doing, you know, offline meeting, right. So just, there it is again just everyone has it again. Throw in two additional things that I think this is great to get ahead of this, because it's a real game changer and appreciate lower taking, taking this on, and recognizing this as an opportunity for for the town. I think two things one is we're ahead of we're a bit ahead in that the, you know, exactly the rules of what these nonprofits would do to claim this direct payment is not worked out yet so it's like there's not any, anything to get yet because it hasn't been worked out in rules that being said preparation and getting ahead of this and we're not asking buddy to anybody to file for a reimbursement quite yet. So getting ahead of this and being ready in six months when it might be available makes a lot of sense. I would also say that there's another program that EPA just announced a couple weeks ago called solar for all. And that is not a gazillion but billions of dollars that are being spread around a pretty formulaic lead to each state hundreds of millions of dollars potentially for Massachusetts that would most likely be going into the state centrally but then dispersed in and despite its name solar for all. It's really focused on solar for those less fortunate amongst us and and gaining and really providing them access to solar. Solar for all because the rest of the market takes care of the rest is but this money is really targeted specifically to low income disadvantaged communities and energy burden communities. So if we can, and that again that's going to be a year and a half before it's money available but also something to prepare for. And the fact that these disadvantaged communities, many are low income nonprofits can now also get the tax credit from or the direct payment from the federal government. This money will go even even further so we might, I'll keep. Follow what the state is doing with regard to the solar for all but that's also something you might think about in this campaign and outreach. That's a good point to in and I think we should definitely. I think if we aim to have an education session in the fall. I think you're right I think you know some of these details won't be worked out but we can get the ball rolling and get a group of people together who want to work work on this I think the other thing that. I know from listening to that webinar that's not worked out yet but you know it is. It's a I think it's intending to it's intended to be a direct payment meaning like once you got your system on place you fill out some form with the IRS and they send you a check right, but there's still potential limitations there. And so I think one of the things that we could maybe do as a community is like, is there a way that we could partner up with the credit union with the college with college or with others that could provide these like, you know, bridge loans at no interest so that we are handcuffing folks that can't pay that full upfront capital, or making them pay, get a private loan that has a high interest rate so that's like, I think to get this conversation started. We need to include that that in the conversation. And I'm hoping by enticing groups like Amherst College and others into these meetings because they would also benefit that we could also maybe start to raise these these issues. I did have one other thing I wanted to flag around the sort of related but also not quite directly related from the webinar on the deep on this, the network geothermal but I'll pause and and Lori, like, just tell me when I just talked about that. I think, since we don't have staff updates today, unless any of you have a staff update from Stephanie or someone else that we're going right to member updates anyway so if you want to just keep going Laura. Yeah, great well just to close the loop on the solar, I folks can just go in that list and start to add particularly partners, so that maybe we can start and contact information then we can start to maybe plan first that partner meeting to just talk to folks and see their thoughts on it. And, but of course welcome also any additions you can add to the non tax entities that we'd wanted to invite to a meeting so I'll leave that there. So I don't know if anybody else was able to attend that network geothermal funding meeting. I'll send around the slides and the recording. It was quite good it was super impressed with HEE T, the folks from HEE T that we're presenting. And this is a so there is a funding funding opportunity through built the building electrification accelerator, I believe, to give 10 to 12 communities. $50,000 to do a feasibility study for neck network geothermal and the point that HEE T was making that I hadn't personally hadn't thought of was around the, the just transition challenges with individual homeowners switching to geothermal or not even geothermal switching to heat pumps and off gas. And actually maybe I'll share my screen so I can show this slide because it was really compelling. And again, I'll share these slides with you all. But the point she was making with on this slide in particular is that because the gas infrastructure unlike oil where we have individual oil tanks and individual heat pumps and there's less of a distributed system right. Although it's still a bit that way, but gas in particular, it costs a certain amount of money to maintain and every time a customer gets off of gas. And if it's not being maintained is not changing, it's just being distributed to all the remaining gas customers. So, if everyone in my neighborhood gets off gas and goes to although we're not on gas but let's pretend we are if everyone in my neighborhood gets off gas, and moves to heat pumps. And there's another neighborhood down the street who has not been able to do that they're going to start paying more for gas, their gas. So it, it was sort of a really good. I mean there's lots of good reasons why we should consider these sort of network systems but I thought it was a reason that I had particularly thought of myself directly. And so, and there's two test cases I believe one in Lowell and one in framing him that they've already already done but all to say, it was a very interesting webinar. So if you have some funding available they were very clear that 50 K is not going to be enough necessarily to do a really robust feasibility study. However, you know, they were offering up some ideas for matching funding and again I think there's an opportunity here for us to consider whether we could get some matching funding. Not from the town, you know, from some other entities that might be interested in thinking through this so I will, my plan was to share these slides with you all but also with Stephanie and Paul and the town council. Anybody could apply like I obviously we would need to work with Stephanie, but I think we should probably encourage Amherst to to apply for this so we can do this feasibility study. Okay, thank you Laura that's really interesting I was making my own notes so that I don't forget to talk to Stephanie about this. So, and the woman explained it way better than I did so you should watch it. Absolutely. So, I'd be very interested in seeing those slides. So you'll pass them around Laura we're going to Laurie to distribute and it was a recording to the webinar as well do you know there is a recording yeah so also for some reason I went to my work email so I will send it to myself and then I'll send it to everybody in a minute. Okay, I will distribute it. Okay, I'll just send it to you Laurie and you can strip it out. Okay everyone's email. I had a brief update I just wanted to mention if anyone else noticed that the gas pipeline extension in Springfield has been put on hold by the state as they're asking for a. And they claim that Berkshire gas did not think it's Berkshire gas did not include in their environmental impact the effect on carbon emissions on greenhouse gases on warming greenhouse emissions, and they need them to redo the environmental impact study to include the effect on the state's climate goals. So, that's good. It's not as good as saying they're not going to do it, but it's, it's, I was encouraged to hear that. Are there any other you can't remember updates. I'm going to be at the CRC meeting on August, or fourth. Today. No, maybe August 3rd. I'm sorry CRC is remind me too many acronyms. She's, I was hoping no one would ask me that if the community resource committee so this is on the specialized code so they at the town council meeting they referred it to CRC, which is a subcommittee of the town council. Right. Attend that meeting. Anna and Stephanie both can't make it. I think it's tomorrow. It's August 3rd. And we will be here. The goal of that meeting is to answer questions and comments about why, you know, pros and cons, or not even pros and cons, but sort of like what are the concerns, what are the people's questions about going from the stretch code to the specialized code. I've already spoken with a few council members and heard their specific concerns. So, and what I think the deliverable that comes out of that would be kind of like an FAQ sheets, which I'm starting to work on. So basically be like, will this make it so Amherst explodes. No, like we'll, you know, we'll, or will it add costs to buildings and cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The town, will it be a burden to the staff and, and, and my goal is to put together sort of as objective and rational as possible and not be too biased when we're trying to create kind of that fact sheet to give back to the town council September 7th. And the lead is when they, the CRC meets again as a more kind of public input kind of way I'm not entirely sure but that's when I would kind of give answers so I think I'll probably have a draft that I could share with this group before September 7. And I research a dug in pretty extensively to the literature, and the sort of studies where it says it's going to be unaffordable to build a house now. I don't think that's true, based on reading these articles like you look into the studies. But the amount that it changes the cost of the house is, is minimal compared to, I'll give one example, then I'll move forward. For example, there's a base house that has three bedrooms and three and a half bad bathrooms. And I think it's reasonable to say, you could save four times as much money by having a three bedroom, two bathroom house, then what may be required so it's, it's sort of a red herring like the amount of money is nothing compared to the many other choices that go into the design and the house and I'm going to try to find a sort of non judgmental, less soap boxy way to say that. I think you need to be careful because I think in the long run, especially taking into account long term savings I think it ends up being cheaper right there's been a lot of discussion on the about exactly that point lately right so they have. Have you been watching that chatter. No. Okay, you should I'll try to forward you one of the more relevant email chains because they're. This is exactly what they've been discussing that way I have not been reading the email chain very carefully, but there was a someone somewhere had the same issue where someone at their town meeting or whatever it was complained this was going to raise the cost of housing. So it was a Boston Globe article that claim. And it's, it's wrong and they've already written a rebuttal and this this it just generated an enormous amount of chatter on exactly that point. So I'm sure you'll find interesting tidbits you can pull from. Yeah, that would be great. If you could forward that I mean like that's what I'm finding is the Boston Globe articles wrong. It makes sense it's written by home builders and real estate agents. It's super biased, but you know I don't want to, you know, this is a good venue to sort of say it out loud. But if when, when, when I write it down and it represents this group I want it to be, you know, unbiased and sort of reference but yeah, for every one article like there's two other studies that show the cost going down, or being cost neutral and operational costs. It's just, it's really. Exactly. I'll try to find it if you read if you read the study that was done at Wentworth that's referenced in the Globe article. It just, you can, it's very easy to start questioning the conclusions that aren't the conclusions of the Wentworth studies as much. So, it's interesting. It's been fun to get into. And it's CRC tomorrow night and come, come watch, hope fun at us all and but I think potentially September 7 might be a time when we would want more people there. I'll verify that. Just real quickly Jesse for the notes. Excuse my ignorance. What's this new code, code calls again. The specialized code. Specialized. To discuss going from stretch code to specialized code specialized that's the word I was looking for specialized. Yeah. I think it's specialized stretch code even or something like that isn't it. I'll put that in there. So and then the only other thing I'll say is, I was out west in an unplanned trip. For family, personal family reasons, but that aside, I now know what 110 degrees feels like. Oh dear. The shit's real. Swimming in the ocean at 100 degrees feels like. Yeah. That should be another update. My, my partner is an environmental journalist and all of the environmental environmental journalists right now are freaking out because this is the this is they're convinced the next 15 months are going to be what they've all been dreading. For years now, because between the El Nino has partly kicked in yet, and the fire season isn't even really here yet. And, you know, all all this has happened already so it's it's going to be a rough next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, and if the ocean currents stop that that's shared they yeah they're all, I mean, it's on the table. It's on the table. They're not expecting that to happen right away but it's on it, but it could happen. It's anytime almost it's it's pretty scary. It's very scary. It's very scary. Yep. Sorry. Oh, it's okay. The hot tub Florida like pushed me over the edge last week like doing this work day in and day out like I try not to get discouraged but the hot tub Florida was like I can't, I can't read this. Who would want to go to Florida and try to cool off in the ocean. I think it was 102 degrees in the Argentine winter. I didn't even see that one see. I have a friend who has been pushing for a better standard than the, what is it they always the weather service always reports the temperature and the feels like temperature where they call it the heat index. What they really need to be reporting is the wet bulb temperature because when that reaches body temperature, we're all dead.  You know that there are already a lot of people dying from the heat and it's going to get much, much worse. And the wet bulb temperature is the thing to watch. So anyway, with that happy thought. Let's put on some items for the next agenda. I have something I've noticed anecdotally, this is kind of just something that chit chat relevant chit chat category. But I've been like talking to a lot of people who want tree work done lately and like one thing I'm finding is that a lot of times like solar companies are telling people they need to cut their trees. But anecdotally this is totally anecdotal at this point. If people put up solar panels anyway, the trees like don't actually really influence like how much energy is like created by the solar panels. So I feel like there's this like false choice being presented a lot of times. How do you get that I don't understand that if it's in shade it has to affect the amount of power produced. The hypothesis and the hypothesis of some of the people I've been talking to is that the algorithms, because this is all determined algorithmically like when the solar, I believe when the solar companies like they plug it into software that says like, your roof will be shaded but like where they think the roof will be shaded doesn't always actually match the like reality. Oh so they're thinking that the models are wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just something I wanted to flag I'm like kind of keeping an eye on it as like a thing that's happening because of course like with all this like heating and cooling stuff I mean trees also influence, like decrease the amount of energy you need to keep cool. So ideally we have solar and trees, obviously like this is a whole big conversation but I don't know it's just like an interesting thing I've noticed that I have like started paying more attention to and if anybody comes across anything or hears anything or sees anything quantitative or qualitative in that category, let me know because I think it's. I can say anecdotally that I have certainly seen lately in my bicycling around the region, a number of houses that recently put in solar that took out all of their trees, and I was sort of horrified. Yeah, I think solar companies are telling people to take out all of their trees like, no, like, because of these algorithms that may or may not actually be be true, you know. Yeah, that's interesting we've had the I had the opposite problem they told me my trees were fine. And then they grew faster than I could ever imagine and now I am trying to decide. They've cut down production, notably. In my neighbor. Top them. Yeah, it's common for people to make hedges out of hemlocks in my neighborhood so maybe. So maybe you could come. It's the opposite problem Jesse but it is the same thing I'm talking about where the predictions are not matching reality. Yeah, exactly. I would just, I would just caution, Lori, your point that we shouldn't assume that just because all their trees are gone it means they did it because of the solar company. It could have been that they had wanted to remove all their trees and then they had a reason to. I was I was thinking that as I was saying it, some people just want an excuse to remove the trees and that's what they used. I have seen several houses just this weekend as I was bicycling up through shoots berry and like while and down that seemed to have really taken out a lot of trees recently. There's also a lot of I mean, there's lots of reasons to take out trees including that they're not healthy, right. Um, so we just never really know right but anyway, it's a hot it's a controversial topic. All right, so a meeting for the next agenda Laura will take up your the IRA, IRA funding again I think we'll get updates on transportation. And what was the other one. Oh, Don pace is anything. Oh, actually guys I do have one more thing I want to share with everybody which I can talk about it more next week, but RMI normally Rocky Mountain Institute now just no name I guess I'm came out with these really cool state scorecards please. No. Um, so they basically score. Anyway, it's, it's fun to look at here I'll just again share my screen really quickly. Um, so here's the website if you want to go to it states scorecards.rmi.org. So they use this. Um, here I'll go to Massachusetts. They don't do all the states. Um, they use this energy policy simulate simulator. So none of this is perfect right um, and they do it related to not specifically related to the state plans but related to how much the state needs to reduce to contribute to the US national nationally determined transportation through the unit triple C process. But anyway, it shows, of course, the sector emissions which we all know in Massachusetts are mostly transportation and buildings. And then it goes through and it shows it has this like cute little rabbit that shows how close we are to meeting our goals. So sort of overall Massachusetts is not too far off 2030 but we're not there. And then it shows the different sectors. And it shows as a whole then it also shows by like specific things and so what's really interesting. So electricity we're not doing too bad. That's mostly driven by the fact that we were ahead of the game in return and retiring coal, but we still have work to do on generation. But a building sector, we're really far behind, which is not surprising to anybody on this call, but, um, and building gas consumption of course is one of the areas. Transportation, we're not far off our goal. Driven a lot by electric duty vehicles but this in my mind is a red herring, because we know that replacing everybody's car with an electric car is not a solution to our issues. And this one here the light duty vehicle miles traveled reduced we're like have no plan for. So, and this is, and I had had one of my team members look at all the states because I imagine all the states are behind on this light duty vehicle mile traveled reduction which of course. Laura, what is that what is light duty vehicle. Basically, it's mode shifting. So instead of replacing every individual vehicle with an electric vehicle. We're, that's not going to help us with that that isn't the doing that is not going to meet our climate. You mean more basically and basically more public transit. Right, gotcha. Um, and so this is an area that anyway you saying transportation reminded me of this. And it's just further evidence that as a state, and then of course as a local area we need to be figuring out how we build mode shifting into our transportation strategy for greenhouse gases. So anyway, these are very cool to check out so I would recommend them for for folks and that's. If you send me a link to that as well and I'll try to that'll remind me to send you to everyone. Back to agenda items for next week. I refunding transportation pace. There was something I wanted to stick on the agenda what was it. I had something that I wanted to bring up and now I can't figure what it was. Well there is one thing I'd like to ask. One thing that I've seen some of the groups I participated in do we tend to at some point during the during the meeting, talk about current disasters going on in the world and also current wins like the pipeline in Springfield getting stalled for the moment anyway. Would it be worthwhile having a little update at the beginning of the meeting maybe just with you know, things going on in the world this week, both good and bad. Or is that something we don't need to hear again at this meeting, like wins and, you know, things to guess. Thinking about possibilities I don't know if that would be useful not anyway send me a note if you think it might be useful or not. Having a list of sort of wins and challenges. Keep us focused. Oh, I know what I was thinking about the block party is coming up. Stephanie's not here but I'm pretty sure the block party is in September so we only have a couple more meetings before it. Would anybody like to take on organizing. I assume there's going to be a block party this year we'll put it on next month next we'll put it on the agenda for next time for sure about that. Because I'm pretty sure that's coming up soon, usually in September, anything else to the agenda. If not, then I will open the floor for public comment again. So we have Eric here. Eric if you have a comment. Please raise your hand. And if not, then. I think the only thing left is an adjourn. So do we have a move to adjourn. Jesse, did you have something. I moved to adjourn. Second, I'll second. All in favor say aye. All right. See you all in two weeks. All right, thanks. Yeah, take care. Bye. See you.


Hey, it's Brett and Tom with Lawrence Systems, and this is business talk and In order to continue to deliver positive results, we will be increasing your rates. Isn't that a great opener? I was reading a letter that we're sending to clients about The fact is is that rates are increased time over time inflation happens, right? There are a lot of people that in 2020 Didn't increase their rates from 2020 to 2021 because of what was going on There was a lot of cash, but there were a lot of companies that did and I don't recall Employees making less money in 2020 and 2021. I think they got raises still I think that certain things happen costs for products increased, right Tom? Yep, definitely So why wouldn't you raise your rates and why wouldn't somebody? Not expect like a client to for you to raise your rates It's something that happens you're paying more for gas and you were you know a year ago You're paying more for groceries and you ever have so food's costing more Everything's costing more and the big topic is what should I raise my rates to or should I raise my rates? The answer is yes, and yes You should be charging what you need to charge to pay those employees to buy those products because Let's face it. The RMM isn't getting any cheaper and I viruses aren't getting any cheaper. What are your thoughts Tom? You know one of the most just persistent questions I've seen a lately is about the rate increases how much notice you give your clients and this is actually very very key if you Don't give them anything more than a 30 days heads up then you're doing yourself a disfavor You're going to cause some drama with your client having a clear path of communication people understand It anyone is in business understands that hey, I'm paying more for something that I wasn't before You know, we have a lot of people in the transportation market They will tell you that the fuel costs and things like that are just constantly things are dealing with even their insurance rates We all know insurance rates went up. It's just kind of expected it. You're Just Making sure that you communicate it is one of those so key points It's one of the reasons we open with a letter like that because you know We have to have some formal letter that we send to these people But telling them plenty of time ahead is what allows them to fix it and put it into the budget You even look at Microsoft for better or worse They've decided to increase the rates of what they're charging for their office 365 descriptions But how long in the head do we know quite a bit? You know this rule from large companies even to smaller businesses is the same Make sure you have clear line of communication to let people know the rate increase is coming and there'll be a lot more Understanding to it. It's kind of an expected thing every year that this happens So it's not when I see people asking should I I'm like, well, why wouldn't you did right? I'm incredible windfall happened you created some incredible efficiency in your business that somehow cut all the cost by One half well great now you can actually think about delivering a service for less money or how you're gonna be more profitable But that just doesn't usually occur especially in the more niche space We're talking about here and the managed services space of how we manage IT We're dealing with ourselves insurance increases just like our clients are we're dealing with tooling increases some of the tooling Hey, the price goes up and not much but a little bit But that all adds up when you start managing many many end points So a small increase per endpoint or you know per license means kind of a ripple effect of art This has to be compensated for all the way across the board and as Brett mentioned Employees they don't see progress if there's wages stagnate they'll start looking around somewhere else So if you're not giving your employees wages, do you really want to risk losing the talent? That's one way to do it I've seen this happen There's so much turmoil right here in 2021 in the IT industry with turnover amongst employees is because they don't feel valued They don't feel they got a raise and it's just a calamity of things that if you don't manage it You'll end up on the losing side of it. It's actually a big problem right now You know, we've we've got friends in the industry that Have hopped around to different different places and and and have it they're making an Really good income now, but somebody else wants to offer them Half, you know double that or a lot more exponentially raising their their dollars They make so we have to stay in the game with our employees and pay them. Well, they have to be paid what for what they do and Hopefully your employees are learning as they go, right? So they're getting more and more skills and we talked about that this morning You know the people that work here at Lawrence technology service. They Their their skills are through the roof here We're always pushing them for more and then we have to in the same balance while I'm pushing it While I'm helping to pay for classes and anything that they need to give them the resources They need to grow. It's not like I'm just saying grow so so you can keep your job. It's grow Here's how we make more money. Here's how we can leverage that knowledge you have But all that comes at a price internally that is then reflected externally to your clients so we can deliver services better It's just the cycle of things. It's not really a matter at all. Oh, should you increase prices? It is a matter of how much and I don't I don't think that it should be unreasonable That is just not an easy formula. It should be not like double your prices But maybe at least at the very minimum you have to increase at the cost of inflation Also the cost of your two links. It's not directly just because food costs more. I mean, yes Our food bill here as we buy food for people at the office is definitely higher But that's not really just the reason I'm increasing it There's a lot of other factors you have to take in that are very industry specific here in IT So it's just the way things work right now I wish and despite the cloud promising to make things cheaper everyone it works and it goes Yeah, that didn't happen and It did change a lot of dynamics But it still now does part of the process of these yearly rate increases that we send out notices We send out to our clients right and there's a process that we follow in doing that like you said It's always about a process and and how you follow that process and there's there's a there's things We do you want to reach out to me and ask me we'll talk Love to love to talk to people and love to love to give our knowledge away in some respects But we also you know, we want to we want to be helpful out there, but Raising your prices is something you're gonna have to do. I'm not paying the same for gas that I did in 1986 or 87 when I started driving that'll tell you my age right there. I mean, I remember paying 89 cents a gallon Yeah Well, we won't reminisce too much about the good old days But we will leave you with something I will throw in the description down below a link to a general template for how we send out price increases Just kind of a generic letter. So for those you struggling for the wording. I want to give you some value You can use that that phrase we have the baby will be in there along with some general stuff Please customize it to The company that you are and put your information on I enjoyed writing that letter. What are you talking about? Okay, use Brett's words. If you like it's not copy written. I'm actually giving you permission All right, he gave permission you're done this video use it as evidence if it ever comes up All right in thanks