Okay, and we're okay. All right, so hello everyone and welcome to the energy and climate action committee and Amherst. For those who are attending, we are the group in Amherst that helps with policy around energy and climate. And there are a lot of things going on right now and there's a bunch of them on the agenda today. So I think without further ado, we should just get started. Who is our note taker? Don was last time. So I'm not sure who's next. Stella's name shows up next on the list. And then Lori. And if we wrap to the top, then Dwayne, then roof. So Dwayne or roof want to take this on. I know you both just did it fairly recently, didn't you? Well, what goes around comes around, I guess so yeah. Are you good with that Dwayne. Yeah, I'm not. Speak slowly to start. Yeah, I'll get on it. All right, so we'll start then with just a review of the minutes from last time I had a few last minute changes that I just sent to Stephanie. Do you want me to put up my copy of it Stephanie? If you could because I'm, I don't have easy access to it at the moment.  Close that and bring up. Oh, great. It's not open. Hold on a minute. It's going to take me a moment to get it. Just have to find the right folder. I thought I had the folder open, but of course I closed it. Got to find today's meeting. There it is. And there are my suggested changes. Okay, let me make it bigger and share it. Share. Okay, let me try to make that bigger and bigger again. Hold on a minute. I'll make it bigger so it doesn't do that. New page width. Okay, now that's really big. So this all looks right from last time. I'm going to go back here. The only changes I had were this note about we are having a presentation and Q&A today on heat pumps by Scott Chernak. It was really Scott Chernak in the panel, but that's okay. It was mostly Q&A. So I asked for that to be changed. And then there was a note here about questions were raised about the positions that. Springfield pipeline initiative. So last time we had a discussion about the Springfield pipeline and how we could support efforts of Springfield climate justice coalition to halt building of this pipeline. This came up originally because Andra had suggested it. And I didn't remember, there was a note here that said Andra recommends that the town council write a letter supporting the coalition but Andra wasn't actually there. And she had a comment that we she had discussed that sometime previously but I wasn't sure exactly what had transpired so I just changed that to it has previously been suggested that town council write a letter supporting that coalition. And then this was a little bit funny comment that I made Laurie asked whether it made sense to address this one pipeline when there's a more when the town's position on the moratorium is to end it. So the town wrote a letter years ago to end the to ask Berkshire gas to end the moratorium on gas and Amherst. And that was never that's a still official town policy so that sort of derail the whole discussion of supporting this pipeline should be to be clean our own house first. I didn't even think it was on today's agenda but it did make it back on to the agenda. Which I think I'm going to punt on but anyway I made that one little change here to make that a little clearer that that was what the issue was that did it make sense to address this one pipeline when there's this bigger issue of Amherst supporting gas in Amherst. Those were the suggested changes I had made that all make sense should I keep scrolling through or suggest we had an aid to carp. Oh yeah yeah where was that. I think it's twice spelled wrong I saw it somewhere else to see if I can find it CRP. Maybe that was the only one. Okay good. And I already sent you this except for the double a on carp solar bylaw. We had the items for the next agenda any other comments. Someone want to move to accept the minutes. Was there any public comment at the very end. It doesn't say whether there was or was not. I think there wasn't public comment at the end because we just finished the panel. Right. All right we might we might just want to add that no public comment. With those edits I'm happy to move that we accept the minutes as amended. I'll second that. Hey and by voice vote. Goldner. Yes. Walker. Yes. Burger. Yes. Yes. And salmon. Yes. And it's approved. So now we are open for public comment. Any of the attendees have comments for us today. I think you need to raise your hand. I see John Hayes John Hayes go ahead and you can unmute yourself. Yeah hello everybody I'm John Hayes I'm in Salem mass. And I happen to be the chair of the city sustainability. Energy and resiliency committee. I just wanted to look in on your committee. We have a state university here and so we're a college town.  And I, I, I probably look in on your agenda about once a year. And I did it today. And what caught my eye was your heat panel. Web and heat panel. Heat pump panel. And I was just wondering, could you just make a couple comments about how well it went and what it was. Yeah, we had about 19, 20 people in the audience. I think it was a high of 20, but mostly about 19 people in the audience. So that for us was huge. We had, we had a lot of people attending and I don't know about anyone else, but I've already gotten a couple of follow-up emails. From people wanting to know more. So what we did is we got a local contractor who owns one that he actually is owner, I think of one of the local installation firms that does heat pump installations. We had a little 15, 20 minute introduction to heat pumps. That he took out all the mention of his business, which I thought was very nice. And then we just took out all the, all mention of his individual business. So it really was brief introduction to heat pumps, which was, which was nice. And then the bunch of us on the panel on this, on this committee have done transitions recently. So we each spent a minute just introducing the transition we've done and opening up for questions. And there were a lot of questions. So I think it went pretty well. You meant that your, some of your panel members actually have, have many splits. Yeah, we have, we have many splits. We have ducted. We have heat pump hot water here as we have hybrid systems. We have everything. Yeah. I just wanted to let John know that if he goes to the town of Amherst YouTube channel. Yeah. I just wanted to let John know that.  Of May 10th, 2023. And you can watch the recording and you can see the, the heat pump presentation and the panel discussion. Thank you. I'll check out the presentation. Thank you very much. John, that was actually a follow up on some other stuff we had done. There's a lot of good heat pump seminars out there by like a couple of weeks ago. We had a lot of good heat pump seminars. We had a lot of good heat pump seminars. We had a lot of good heat pump seminars. We had a lot of good heat pump seminars. We had a lot of good heat pump seminars. And so we had watched one of those together at one point. And it was, but it seemed like people just wanted to talk about it. Everybody has done a different transition and everybody has a different house. And it was helpful to hear all the different stories. So if I had attended. So I'm looking into getting many, many splits for my home right now. I have solar panels on the roof. I have solar panels on the roof. I don't know if you have the many splits would have been. How was it when you, when the polar vortex hit. And we had very, very cold temperatures. Do some of you not have a furnace? Are you pure air sourced heat pumps? Or do you have a backup furnace? Does anyone not have backup? I'm not sure if any of us are pure. Okay. I am. I have a backup furnace. It worked. It worked fine. I don't know if you know what it was. I don't know if you know what it was. I don't know if it was a fire because of course solar doesn't work as well in the winter. And that's when it's cold. But sort of averaged out over the year. I don't think, I think it's on par. Maybe a little bit cheaper than our oil used to be. I was worried about the money. I was just, I didn't know if anybody was pure heat pumps. with the severely cold temperatures. Even though it was short-lived, it wasn't a long-lasting cold wave, but that was why my question was, but so thank you. Yeah, the problem we did have one time when it snowed was that snow covered it. And so we had to like uncover it. That's the main problem. That's the only time the heat wasn't working as well. All right. I can also say that a properly designed system has no trouble serving its load in subzero temperatures. OK, thanks, Jesse. Sure. I don't want to hog your meeting, so thank you so much for your. I'll just listen now for a while. Thank you. Thank you, John. Any other comments? That meeting recording, it looks like it's been watched 121 times. Whoa. I've shared it, I think, too. We're going viral. Finance committee meeting last month, they got 705, and a Board of Health meeting got 5.2,000. So we're not up there with other town committees, but we're doing pretty good. I don't see any other hands up. All right, so then let's go on to our updates. Don is not here. So I guess we won't hear about the PACE update, although I will be talking about specialized stretch code later, and solar. Duane, do you have a solar update for us? Well, we have a report. Which I haven't looked at yet. So maybe that's what happened, though. Yeah, give us an update on the report coming out at least. Well, maybe that's more of a staff update from Stephanie. OK. But I don't really have an update. I mean, the solar bylaw working group continues to work. We are meeting tomorrow as we do each Friday. Same weeks as ECAC for the most part. And we are at this point focused a bit on what we call these NEXA statements of trying to set the vision and the purpose and the guiding principles associated with the bylaw, which is sort of an articulation of the yin and the yang of having a climate emergency to work with and to be proactive and contribute to those solutions, but also to also be respective, respectful, and purposeful to try to minimize harm associated with siting and land use. So we're working our way through that. And that'll be the main content for tomorrow. OK, great. Thanks, Duane. Is there anything? Are you going to give us, Stephanie, a staff update on that solar report? Just to, well, I guess it was going to be very brief. My yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say my staff update is later in the agenda. So I would give it just a quick one then. OK, all right. OK, so Andra is still not here today. So we're going to have to put that one off. This might be a short meeting, but I do have something I wanted to bounce off of everyone. So one of the things that I spent quite a lot of time on this week, I guess, just to be clear, we're skipping over the letter to the new DPU commissioners because Andra is not here. So we're going on to item five, which is the specialized stretch code. So I spent quite a lot of time this week. I sent a bunch of materials that were there were links and number of links in the packet for this meeting to webinars and information about how other towns are getting the specialized, the new specialized stretch code adopted. And at the same time, I tried to put together a little PowerPoint. I took the DOER PowerPoint and looked at what some of the towns had did and just tried to fill in a few things. But I have some questions that I would bet, for example, Jesse might know the answer to, or maybe Steve, let's see. So why don't I can I share this document? It's a sort of a document in progress with you guys. Is that OK? And then I'll send it to you afterwards, Stephanie. All right. Just for the, sorry, for the minutes here. Are we now on part four? Five, I think, right? Isn't this five? OK, yeah, actually it is five. That's why I missed it. Anything on four? OK, you mentioned that. Because Andra's not here. Gotcha. OK, sorry. Yeah. Um. So let me go ahead and share this and we just put it in some sort of mode where you can actually see it. And then let me share it. Stretch code. OK. I'm going to go to the first one. All right, let me move this where I can see it. OK, good. And now I've got you guys over here. Just a moment. All right, so now I can see everyone. OK, so this was, I think, designed to be something to show to the town council. Is that right, Stephanie? Or in consideration, the idea being that we want to get in front of the town council a vote on this new specialized stretch code. And so if we do that, it would be nice to have some PowerPoint slides to go through. So the Building Electrification Accelerator, which is a statewide group that has been collecting lots of presentations from different towns on this topic and providing links to things like the DOER webinar on this topic and linking in other places that are that are other useful resources. Anyway, I went through as much of that as I had time in bandwidth for and tried to pull together a few things. And mostly what I did was you make use of the slides from DOER. So the presentation is, why should Amherst adopt this new specialized code? It all it takes is a vote the same way the stretch code was adopted some years ago. So in the way of background, there are now three levels of building code in Massachusetts. Increasingly green. There's this base code, which I think almost no one uses. There's only a few towns that haven't opted into what's called the stretch code. Amherst opted in in 2011. And then these are increasingly green. So there's the base code. There's the stretch code, which almost all communities have opted into. And then there's a specialized code, which became available now about six months ago and has now been adopted by more than 16 communities representing 70% of the state's population. This includes Boston and Arlington. And every day, there's another announcement out of BEA for more towns that are opting in. So that's sort of the background. Diving in a little bit more. And this is taking, again, this is the DOER slide. I left a little DOER symbol in the corner of the ones that I took directly or just maybe modified a little bit. The base code you don't really need to worry about. Nobody uses it. The stretch code that we're using had a 2023 update, which made it even greener. And it involves both new construction and major renovations. So if you pretty much rebuild in, if you've got a house, you're going to be currently in Amherst building under this 2023 stretch code, under the updated stretch code. And again, most communities in Massachusetts have opted into this. I didn't even realize there are 52 that are still using the base code. I'm surprised it's that high. So there's 299 communities that are using the stretch code. And it involves both residential and commercial. There are separate rules for residential and commercial construction. A major difference of the specialized code is I think it only concerns new construction. And in order to opt into this, we have to do the same thing we did for the stretch code, which is when you voted the town council. I don't even think it's a bylaw. I think it's just a opt-in. There's a little discussion about it here. Yeah. I think it does affect renovation as well over a certain size. Maybe, but I couldn't. Maybe. I thought not. But let's keep going and you will find it. I did have some questions for you, Jesse, later because the stretch code seems to cover some cases where the specialized code doesn't. So I guess that means that if we adopt the specialized code, are we throwing away the rules for the renovations that are covered by the stretch code? That was actually one of the questions I had that I didn't know the answer to yet. Or do the stretch codes still apply in cases where the specialized code doesn't? I believe that's how it works. I think it's cumulative. OK, cool. All right. So then I put one quick slide together just why is this urgently needed? And first of all, we have the CARP that this committee, a previous version of helped write and plan. So including some of the current members. So we have a climate plan for the community. And if we're going to meet those goals, then these are the sorts of changes that absolutely have to happen. Also for meeting state goals. We really need buildings to be greener than we're currently building them. It's also true that building codes generally are a powerful tool for social justice, making sure that people are living in safe housing, that you don't get safer housing if you're wealthier. Everybody has the same experience in the safety in their home and the energy efficiency of their home. So if we're worried about social justice, if we're worried about equity, then building codes are a good way to go. And it also sends a message to Beacon Hill to our legislators in Massachusetts government that we really want a net zero building code. We want to see this in place. We want them to take this seriously. So it would be very sad if they gave us the opportunity to do this and then nobody opted in. That wouldn't be helpful. So these are, I think, the three biggest reasons I could think of. And this is actually distilled down from a document put out by, I forget if it's the Sierra Club, or there was some document that was linked on the BEA site. That was a toolkit. And it was about three pages. And I distilled it down to three bullets. OK, so the benefits of the specialized code are that, generally speaking, it lowers costs overall. It protects against having to do costly retrofits down the road so you put in gas today and then later on they turn off the gas and now you have to retrofit your house maybe before you would have otherwise needed to. It gives contractors some stability. They know what to expect so they can plan. The same, I think it was Sierra Club document pointed out that the number of contractors able to do the work, this sort of work, is large and growing, demonstrating that there is an industry shift. And as that industry shifts costs, of course, come down as you have more and more people doing the sort of work. And in a lot of cases, electrification can reduce utility bills. And if there are small upfront costs, they tend to be recouped in a few years. We all know there are exceptions to that with gas and that won't stay that way forever. But right now we have the unfortunate situation that gas is a lot cheaper than anything else. But if you have to retrofit your house in a few years, it won't be a lot cheaper. And finally, there's health and safety. This isn't really an issue in, well, it is sort of enamorist. In enamorist, to the extent that we have, the health risks of indoor methane, of methane stoves, of having methane in your house are only in the last decade or so really becoming recognized. They now, a few years ago, there was a study that showed that 15% of childhood asthma in Massachusetts was because of leaky methane. It was because of methane, mostly in the house. Methane is a greenhouse gas. It's 25 times more potent than CO2. It leaks out all over the place. It leaks out if you have a stove, you're going to get some in your house. And this causes problems. And generally speaking, heat pumps are safer ways to heat than any sort of fossil fuel. So if you're burning, if you have a furnace in your house, that's always going to be more dangerous than using a heat pump. So there are health and safety benefits of the specialized code above and beyond what the stretch code does. All right. So before I even get into a little bit more about what the stretch code is, about what the specialized code is, reasons that the stretch code aren't quite enough. The stretch code still permits and makes it easy to use fossil fuel and fossil fuel infrastructure in building new buildings. So long as the HRS rating, which is a rating of the efficiency of the home, of how well heat sealed it is, how small a heat leak it has, right? If the HRS rating is sufficiently low, if you design it well enough, you can put in all the fossil fuel you want. The specialized code does better, requiring that it actually still does have a pathway for fossil fuel, if you're going to be using fossil fuel, you have to be net zero, meaning you have to have solar on your roof, right? You have to be doing something to offset the fact that you're using fossil fuels. It actually makes it sufficiently difficult to put fossil fuel in a new build that chances are nobody will do it or very few people want to do it. There is a very detailed comparison and a webinar and I didn't want in this particular presentation to go through that, I was trying to keep this to six or seven slides, maybe eight slides, right? But my suggestion would be, if we're going to ask the town council to vote on this thing, they really should look at the DOER webinar recording on the topic, which I watched again as I was putting this together to remind myself of this stuff. And finally, let's see, what else was in here? Specialized code, I guess there's nine slides. And then I have a little bit more than nine. All right, so then there's some specific things on the code and this is all covered in that webinar. But just for our own, just to remind everyone if you haven't watched the webinar, the adoption process again is similar to what we did with the stretch code. I don't know which of these, this is a slide I needed some help with because I don't know what the right process in Amherst is. So if we use this, a presentation like this, somebody, maybe Stephanie would have to go through and what is the adoption process in Amherst? It's similar to what we did for the stretch code. What do we do for the stretch code? Right, Stephanie? Oh, sorry, I didn't know if you were asking or... Yeah, sorry, if you have our comment. Well, it was a different time. So we went through town meetings. So that was, you know, there was a lot more community outreach involved in that. We had Jim Berry, who was the regional coordinator for the Western Mass Region of the Green Communities Program come out. And actually he came out a few times. He came out once in person and did a presentation for folks live. And then we also recorded the presentation that he did at Amherst Media and then put it out over the airwaves for about a month or so prior to the vote. So there was much more targeted outreach into the community to make sure that people had the information to even understand what the stretch code was. I mean, at this point, you know, we know about the stretch code. So this is just sort of saying that we're taking it that much further and sort of talking about what those additional guidelines would be. So, and I think, you know, getting the information to the town council is important. And, you know, certainly what you're doing here. So people have access through the media channel and the YouTube link to see the recording is really helpful. We didn't have these things in place when we did this with the stretch code the first time. All of this additional technology that we have accessible to people is really helpful. Right. And we could probably, I mean, if you were, you know, we might be able to get something up on the, you know, if this is gonna go before the town council, it might be prudent for us to have something on the town's website on the main page. That's just kind of an informational piece about what the specialized stretch code is and what that would mean. I know I can tell you that already I kind of overheard a conversation the other day that our inspectors are concerned just in that the updated stretch code information isn't necessarily getting out to those that it will be impacted by it. So they're concerned that people are gonna be a bit blindsided by the additional changes. So, you know, this would be a good time to get all of that information out, really. Right. So that's why I think we need to do a little bit of outreach around this, maybe somehow get this word out that this is important. The communities that there was an interesting discussion on the BEA listserv that I didn't have time to finish reading, but the communities, most communities that had it up for a vote, it's passed. There were a few communities that it didn't pass that it was turned down. And that usually had to do with one of two things, the main one being there was some building expert in the room or a contractor or somebody who had a very specific, you know, concern about what it would mean for building new somethings. And having our building inspector really up on this and having someone in the room who can address any questions that come up, I think is gonna be really important because that was what killed it in at least two towns, I think was, there was a building expert in the room who had a problem with the new code. And there was nobody there who could respond. So that's something to keep in mind. I forget what the other issue was, but that was the big one. All right, so we probably need to just put in a process what we expect the process to be here in our town. And then just to talk a little bit about it, there are, whoops, for low rise residential buildings, single family homes and the like, right? There are three paths to making a home and this to making a building, right? One of them is all electric in which case you have to meet certain efficiency standards that are known as either hers 45 or passive house, right? So all electric houses have to pass these standards or if you do a more efficient house, you can use mixed fuels, you can use oil but you have to have a solar install and you have to have the place wired for electric under all of these, I think they have to, the houses end up wired for eventual electric heat and everything. So with mixed fuel, you have to be even more efficient, you have to have solar, right? It's, and if, and then there's a zero energy pathway which means that you're either a her zero, the house is completely makes its own. I think our new school probably is our new school considered a her zero? I don't know, but I think it's considered zero energy, right, net zero? So anyway, there's three different pathways to getting there and different rating systems that you can use. This hers and Fias and these are all different rating systems that are used by builders and building engineers. All new homes that are really big have to use all electric or zero energy. There's no mixed fuel in a big home. So this allows us, this takes care of the problem that right now the cheapest way to heat is still methane. And right now we can't access methane in Amherst anyway, so this may not affect us, but low-cost housing is still often, you often want to build it with methane because it's still cheapest, unfortunately. What if we should say that though, Lori? I mean, I don't think for a brand new build, we can say that with any guarantee. No, we can't, you're right. So I think we should be careful about that. Oh, and there is an additions and alterations thing, the same as stretch code. So for housing, there is, oh, this is the same as a stretch code, right? So there isn't, okay, sorry, yeah. So there's not a specialized code for additions and alterations. It's the same as the stretch code, okay. And since all of these, this just gives us a little additional impetus to move toward fossil-free fuel buildings. Lori, I think there's a trigger if an addition is over a certain size, I believe it's 1,000 square feet. Yeah, I think so too, right. And that's gonna trigger work in the entire building. I think that's correct, yeah. All right, so there's a specialized code for multifamily housing. Which has two different steps. It steps up next year. So for multifamily housing, it has to be a passive house, if it's five stories or less, if it's, or passive house required for five stories or less if over 12,000 square feet. Okay, so it has to be passive house if it's big. And if it's larger, there's some other rating that I don't know, I forget what this even stands for, but there's another rating that it has to hit. Yeah, the teddy is, it's like a total energy demand. And what they're trying to do is create a, the teddy I think is very much a response to not trying to overwhelm the grid. It's all about peak demand. Right, okay. And minimizing that in buildings. And so it has nothing to do with annual energy. It's really limiting the spikes. Okay, interesting. Which also would in turn limit annual energy. But that's sort of the basis. There's a heating teddy and a cooling teddy that they're establishing. And I still don't know anyone who knows how to calculate it, but seems like a decent idea. Yeah. And then next year, the passive house standard becomes a standard for all residential buildings over 12,000 square feet, which is interesting. And this is third code for commercial buildings that I, again, this is all covered in that DOER presentation in some detail. So I won't go into it, but again, there's three different possible building types. And this is not excluding the multifamily, which was covered by the other one. So all electric passive house and it can have gas or other fuel so long as it has the solar on site, it's feasible. And all of them, the electrification has to be there. The electric wiring has to be there. I mean, I think that's the main thing about this code is every building that's built is built to a standard where that has to be able to support electric for EVs, for electric vehicles and for heat pumps and anything else you might need. All right. And that was all the rest of these slides are about the stretch code. Oh, so solar photo will take, yeah. Okay. So there were some questions that I'm still trying to figure out, but I think we just answered this one. And the other question was, what are the major obstacles to adoption and amours like me to be? And I think Stephanie picked up on one of them, which is we need to let people know the rest of these slides are on the stretch code. I didn't bother the DOER presentation talks about the stretch code first and then the specialized code. And I didn't really think it was necessary to go over the stretch code, we're already there. The question is what comes next and how does it differ? And I try to hit on those points in the first eight slides or something like that. So what do people think? Should I patch this thing up a little bit? Maybe get Stephanie to help with that one process slide and or any slide you want Stephanie and put it on the town website or to Vasu? Hey, yeah, sorry I'm late. Lori, so this is, what are we doing this for again? This is like more of an education and FAQ section. No, we're trying to get the town to adopt the specialized code. Okay. So I spoke to a town council member a couple of days ago and an email was sent out to Lynn. Stephanie, I'm not sure what Lynn's role is, but the ask from us and for me was whether we can be part of a town council meeting where Jesse, maybe you can present information and answer any questions. And then if we need to build an FAQ after the fact because there's going to be public comments after. And so I think that's also in progress Lori, so I'm not sure. And that's what I was, right. And what I was trying to do was block out a presentation to be used at exactly something like that, right?  I looked at what the BEA has been, what other communities have been doing. Most of them have been starting with the DOER slides and then adding historical stuff about their own town, where we are now, what the process is, some town specific things. So that's sort of what I tried to do. I took half a dozen slides out of the DOER slide deck and then elaborated it with some Amherst stuff. I think what we should also add is what's the process look like? And then there's a ticket from BEA, I think. That's the slide. Okay. That was a slide I specifically need your or Stephanie's help, someone needs to fix the slide up because this is a generic slide. And the question is, what is the process in Amherst? There's also some additional information. I'm trying to pull that now. It also has examples of how the other towns have gone about adopting. Right, that was the BEA website. There's literally dozens of these. Yeah, there's so much information out there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I looked at about two of them and then I get all the emails from BEA. So I've been, I did as much as I had time for, Vasu. Yeah, I'm surprised you were working on it. You're working on everything now, Lori. It's near and dear to my heart. I didn't work on the next thing that's on the agenda that I was supposed to work on. So this I thought was more important. I agreed that this I thought was the more important thing that we could be doing. Yeah, so I'm trying to get some time on the calendar where we can present to the town council. And I think it might be possibly some best practice going forward and how do we connect with the town council directly? Can we be part of their meetings going forward and address some of the questions that they have upfront instead of emails that I've been sending back and forth and it's taken been a month and two months now since the last email went out. So I think we should think about a different way to approach this and Shalini is who I spoke to and she agreed that we can change the way we're approaching and connecting, having town council connect with ECAC in a, in a different way than just via emails through town manager. So, and we have that part of our charge is we can continue to be the ears and voice for climate change and we can help the town council think about what goals that they need to take on and how do we approach a certain problem? Vasu, did you hear the part of this discussion where I was talking about what the major obstacle was in other towns? I missed that. There was a big long discussion on the BEA listserv that one of the biggest problems that a couple of towns had that didn't pass, they came up for a vote and they did not pass the specialized code was because there was a building expert in the room who had some specific concern and there was nobody there who could respond to it. So I think having Jesse up on this is really important. Yeah, makes sense. I think we should volunteer Jesse to give a presentation. That sounds great, I'm more than happy to do it but I also, and I see Stephanie and Laura have their hands up, but just quickly to respond to that. I think putting contractors in the room, putting other people who are not on our committee in the room, architects, engineers, contractors, people as many people as possible who have that capacity to respond would be, and I think we can, and I guess, do those need to be Amherst, those would need to be Amherst residents, correct? I don't know, Stephanie. Not necessarily, I mean, if you're talking about, I mean, people would identify themselves, they don't have to be Amherst residents if they're speaking to a particular expertise. Okay. But you know, you have, but I would point out that you do have experts that live in the town, so I don't know that you need to go outside the town. I mean, it wouldn't be all that hard, but I think Laura had something to say too when I would left the phone before me. Okay, so Laura, you wanna go ahead? Yeah, I just was thinking that it's, I think this sounds like the right approach. I guess the question I have is the timing and what the order should be. I think we'll have an easier go at town council if we have the support of town staff on this. So I'm wondering if we should maybe start with Stephanie helping us talk to town staff or to your point earlier, Lori, like having, making sure it's clear that we're addressing some of their concerns in our process. I imagine that the question that the town council will have is what impact will this have on staff regarding, you know, fermenting and things like that. I really like just this idea of having people in the room that can speak to it. I also think, and this is sort of maybe more pie in the sky, but to your earlier point about the impact on the emissions, it would be interesting if we could sort of map out like how many, like what is our, does the master plan have like sort of a assumption on how much new development we'll have over the next 10 or 15 years? Or can we look at old data and say, generally we put in two new houses a year or 10 new houses a year or whatever it is, sort of understand what actual impact this will have both on our GHG goals and also just on the number of, so like if those houses were built without this code, what would the impact of that be versus building with this code? That's just something that's popping into my mind both in terms of like showing that it does have an impact, but also in terms of showing that like, we're not building a ton, I don't think. So it may actually not be that big of an impact either positively or negatively. Right, thank you, Laura. That's good. I'm trying to write down some of these suggestions. Stephanie? Yeah, sorry. So there were a couple of things. I think one was just about the process with working with the console. I think Vasu, you know, you request to be on the agenda, you know, for a town console meeting, you just request to discuss the specialized stretch code. And it might, maybe you want to have a meeting with Lynn and Paul Backelman first. That might be a way to sort of approach that piece. As far as town staff, I think I already discussed at the last meeting that the town manager has reached out to town staff about the specialized code because I think Vasu, your outreach to counselors did get to Lynn, which got to Paul, which got to Paul trying to get more information. I do think it's really important for you to make sure that you have a discussion with the inspections folks, specifically the building commissioner who they report to, especially because I think if they believe that it will be, that this isn't the right time because I think I've already heard some reference. I think Jesse, when you and I spoke with the building commissioner about this a while ago, what he said was there's already going to be an updated stretch code. So that's already going to be more stringent. And then it would be better to wait, you know, a year or until the next round to sort of, or the next year to bring that specialized code on so that people can sort of get used to the updated stretch code and then the specialized code won't be as much of a stretch. But that was at least how I heard it. And Jesse, you can correct me if I didn't hear that properly. So I think you wanna make sure that you include or have some conversation with him ahead of time because I just don't want this to be a situation where you're sort of trying to push something through and then staff is on a different page. I think you wanna just hear what he has to say and go from there. I think Stephanie, it would make sense to maybe to have a repeat and say we met whenever we met a year ago, you gave us this recommendation. The finally committee had a strongly felt and unanimously voted to push to do this as quickly as possible. It's been any number of months. How do you feel? To keep the consistency, I'd be happy to sort of update Rob on our progress and tell him what we're thinking. I agree, it's a great idea. It would be a shame to be like, hey, give us your opinion and then never tell him that we're gonna do something completely different. Is Rob the building inspector? He's the building commissioner. He's Rob Mora. So I would love the opportunity to update him on where we are and get sort of the next round of input. And I thought Dave Buskevitz was also very useful at that evening. Dave Buskevitz is the senior inspector. Okay, Dave is the senior inspector. I think I've got him. So sorry, real quick then. So Jesse, you're gonna reconnect with Rob and I'll work with Paul and Lynn to get some time on the calendar, one of the meetings that we can go to present on the specialized code for the town council. Does that make sense? Yeah, okay. Okay, one other thing, one thing to remind Dave and Rob about that there even DOER recommends that if you adopt the code today, you don't implement it for six months. And we did the same thing when we did the stretch codes some years ago. We did. Yeah, we're shooting for July, 2024. Why not January? Six months is the minimum, right? Is the minimum. I think that's gonna be on the letter to the town council, I mean it. Right, but we're more than a year away from. Yeah, but we're talking and going to the town council, getting, all right, feedback. Yeah, I think realistically July, 2024 is what we were targeting. How do places like Boston do it so fast? Well, there's a difference between, but there's a difference between a governing body voting to adopt it and it formally take taking effect. And that's what that six months to a year is. We want the vote sooner. Right, okay. We're not saying let's vote on this in July of 2024. Yeah. And I doubt any of these towns have, I don't know if it's affecting any of these towns. I don't know. All right, yeah. Okay, so the only request I have is if I can, I will send, I'll just snip out those first nine slides and send them to you, Stephanie, for posting. But if you want to, again, we should probably try to put something about what our actual process is on that one slide about process, probably needs to be reworked even the conversation we just had. Yeah, we can follow up on that separately. Yeah, okay. Just one more thought is, Lori, whether or not you have, did the BNA, the EEA, let's serve, actually say what the problems were that people were raising? Yeah, it's very detailed. It's all in there. Those. Yeah, there've been a number of different problems that have come up and honestly, I've glazed this so, there's so much information, that stuff just sort of glazed over. I just made the note that it was, something about building Inspector Knot or building somebody having, and there were a number of different ones that have come up in the last few days. Is that something you could forward out to us? I can, you can put, what I would recommend is you put yourself on the listserv, I'll forward that to you. I'll try to find, there was one conversation, oh my God. No more listservs, Lori, come on. Okay, yeah, well, there's not one place that it's all, I mean, you know, there are these long conversations back and forth, and you have to dig down into it to find the update, somebody will send an update that Arlington just passed the stretch code and somebody else will say, oh no, but we didn't and here's why, and then there'll be a back and forth about that all in the same email train. So it's like many, many topics in one email train. So it's a little hard to, I can try to fish through it a little more and find the important stuff, Jesse. If, yeah, I wouldn't wish that upon anyone. So if it's easy, great, but, yeah, if not. And I'll send the toolkit, it's pretty comprehensive. I'll send it over right now. Yeah. I think, Lori, did you, didn't you include a link to the toolkit in your toolkit? Yeah, there's several things that call themselves toolkits, but the Sierra Club one, I think, is the one that made it into the... That's the one I'm talking. Okay. Yeah. That's good for background. Yeah, it's all in your packet. The link to that is in your packet that I sent. And that one's online too. Yeah, it's good for background, but it doesn't have a lot of detail about building in it. I pulled stuff from the first few slides out of there. All right. So we should probably move on, although I think the rest of the, well, we do have some more things on here. The next thing on the agenda was also had my name on it, but I decided to work on the specialized code thing this week instead of the gas moratorium letter, because last week, we sort of put that on hold. It wasn't clear what we were writing anymore because it didn't actually make it onto the agenda at the end of the meeting. So I was a little surprised to see it, but I also left it on just in case Andrew was here or there was something more to discuss. But I think that we have two issues that, we still don't know if we should do something about or not. One of them is the fact that we still have a gas moratorium here and an official town policy of opposing the gas moratorium. And our neighbor Springfield has a gas pipeline that's going in. So it's not clear to me anymore what, if anything, we should be doing about all of that. So for now, I did nothing. And that's all I'll say about that unless anyone else has something they want to add. I mean, I think the only thing I would say to that is I think where the conversation landed was we should be, it may not make sense to, I guess one thing I had like a point of clarity, there's a difference in my mind between seven years ago, Amherst wrote a letter saying, please remove the moratorium. And us having like an official like buy law or resolution or something on the books that says we don't like the moratorium. So to me, those are two different things. And if it's the latter, if it, or the former, if it's like we wrote a letter once in 2016, I'm actually not that concerned about that. I think what we can do is write a new letter that says we have, now we have climate, we have climate goals, we have, we want to, in our lines on fossil fuels, we want the state to step up and do more. If we could pass, if we could in that letter say, we also just pass the specialized code, that would be even better, right? But like that, and we don't think we should be investing in pipelines in the Western, in, you know, whatever, we can talk about that generally, as opposed to talking about a specific problem. I think that's where the conversation landed. I don't think we have enough clarity and that's where Andren needs to come back in on like what I tried to ask around to see what this potential, our position on the moratorium was, and the only thing that came up with some letter. So in that case, I'm actually not too concerned about that, unless it's something different. What is the outcome we're hoping for here? No pipeline in Springfield and a community that very clearly opposes additional natural gas cookups or pretty yet supports no fossil fuels. But it's a letter from ECAC address to the state to- That's what we're trying to figure out. So I think initially there was conversations about like, do we get our town council to write a note of support to about the Springfield pipeline? And I think the answer is like, we're not sure if that would actually do anything. And the lift to get our council to do that when they have so many other things on their plate, when we have other things we want them to do, like the specialized stretch code is probably not, we could probably do more by just having ECAC engage with focus more on just the generalities of getting the whole state off fossil fuels. Yeah. It's my take. Dwayne? Yeah, I'm not sure if I followed that all completely, but it seems like in terms of outcomes, the most tangible and effective outcome and appropriate, I think for us is to ask the town council to make a statement that they're in favor of the moratorium on our town. That seemed to be sort of our local issue. And then I think at that point, then to make a more credible letter to the state, stating that the town has just made this decision, we think it's important for the rest of Massachusetts or other towns to likewise. Yeah, I believe I remember correctly, Andrea had mentioned that we need this letter out by end of May. She had a timeline. And so I don't know if this is gonna end value anymore. That was a different letter. She was looking for town support, I think. She was looking for town support of the stop climate, whatever the name of that group was, that is trying to stop the pipeline. And that group's webpage has on it a whole list of community organizations that are opposed to the pipeline, but none of them were government organizations, none of them were town government associated organizations. So I think, I don't know because Andrea hasn't been here, but I think she imagined us adding our name to that list, writing a letter, supporting the stop the pipeline movement or maybe asking town council to do so, but I don't see any of the towns doing that. So I'm not sure that's the right way to go. That's how this discussion got started. I actually wrote a letter to do that, that I still might just send to the local paper in the next couple of days, if I have the bandwidth. But. I think we should drop this from our agenda. We've talked about it and we don't have Andra here. And I don't know what effect this is gonna have. I mean, if we want to go to that website. Yeah, no, I think we should keep talking. What made it onto the agenda was the gas moratorium. And I think the gas moratorium probably should stay on the agenda. What do we do about the gas moratorium in Amherst? Should we do something? Yeah. I think if we drop it from the agenda, I think it's worth saying to the public, anyone that's here now or anyone that sees this meeting, go to the website, check it out. If you think it's something you wanna sign, sign it. Chances are objecting to investments in natural gas, which is not specifically designed to curb leakage is probably a good objection to make. We don't know, go be a citizen. Yeah. All right, any more commentary on that one? If not Vasu, you're up next, annual report. It's my turn, okay. And if you want to take the meeting from here, I should have offered it to you when you came in as the chair. No worries, no, go for it, Lori. I don't wanna step on your toes in between. All good. So I think I mentioned this last time and we only had, we talked about it briefly, but trying to figure out, Jesse, I remember maybe about 10 months ago, you brought up that things need to be easier for us, especially when we're writing these reports, gave me to build a template that we could just fill in going forward. And that was the thought that I had when I started putting this together. And so the intent here is to have, hopefully a short document, but talk about our five focus areas that we've been working on. And then any other items outside of these five focus areas that we've worked on. And then specifically talk about community engagement. So the festival, the couple of festivals that we were part of and the education series. And then also start discussing the town manager goals for 2024. Now this is going to be in draft state. This conversation will need to continue for the next two months. And as part of the budget cycle, we'll need to have a discussion with finance and with the town council to make sure that the goals that we're recommending make it into the town manager goals for the following year. And that was the intent behind this. I think this is otherwise pretty straightforward with the intent. Now the other point that I'm trying to make here is around these five different sectors that we've all been working on. Does it make sense for each of you who are obviously you're more familiar with your area, you worked on it over the last year. Does it make sense for you to work on your specific sector, summarize it, send it to me, I'll compile all the information. But within each sector, the way I have this set up here is talk about accomplishments, talk about what any metrics that we have, effectiveness. And this is all part of our charge. And that's why I've listed effectiveness and accomplishments. And also talk about what do we need from the town to be more successful in the upcoming year. That's how I have this set up. Pretty much every section has the same with accomplishments, any metrics if we have that, what was the effectiveness of that metric, and then what supports needed. Any thoughts? Thanks. Looks good. So that's the case. Can I send this over? If you are all in agreement, can I send this over to all of you to look at? I'll make some changes here in the summary section and some of the other sections here. But if you can all get back to me in about three weeks with your specific sectors and what you've done, now I'll start compiling all the information and we can review it on the 21st of June. This looks like a really good model. I like it. I'm looking forward to reading it. Okay, that's all I had. Okay, so next on the list are staff updates. Things. First, you noted earlier in the meeting that you all received the GZA final report on their outreach summary. I didn't have a lot to say because Adrienne had come in and done a presentation and basically she gave you the content. It's just now been put together with the pretty graphics. So it just looks more solid, but I think they did a great job that went out to you and the Solar By-law Working Group as well as all of the department heads. So I think they've done a nice job. I was pretty pleased with it. So I hope you'll enjoy reading it. I wanted to give you all... I think Steve has a question. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, Steve, go ahead. I had a question. I had a chance to look at it briefly last night and there's a series of column charts in there that show values, acreage for different sort of categories that they present. But it's hard on those column charts to actually get the actual acreage numbers. Is there a table that lists the values behind the column charts that could be made available? I can... I might have some of that raw data. So let me just make a note to myself and I can also ask Steve, if you wouldn't mind, can you just shoot me an email with your specific request so that I'm clear on what I'm asking her for? Okay, sure, I can do that. That would be great. Okay. And I guess I wondered too, maybe that table data may be online when the maps get put online by the town GIS staff? Yeah, so, yes. So I don't know where exactly I was at all just yet. I've got another update that will probably tie this all together. Okay. So if I can get through that to there, I'll go ahead and be able to get to your point. So I just wanted to give you an update on the mapping tool which is that I met with Mike Warner. He's been putting it together. You know, some of the data comes from other sites. So he's basically just loading other existing mapping tools for instance, one of the ones that I wanted him to make sure he included was one on agricultural soils because I know that's something that the solar bylaw working group is very interested in having access to the information. So he's gonna work on that. It takes a while, but he should have a draft to me by Friday. So I'll be hopefully taking a look and meeting with him. And Duane was on a technical review committee with me. So we may just do a quick technical review committee update. So Duane, I might ask you to just sort of join me in that meeting again, just to sort of look at what he's put together. So that will be coming, I would say that's probably about a week or so away maybe, hoping no later than that. I also wanted to let you know that the CCA process I had mentioned at the last meeting that we're going to have the launch the comment period, the community comment period in June, that's gonna start June 1st and go through the 30th. And we have scheduled the big three community meeting, informational meeting for June 6th and that will be June 6th from 630 to 8 p.m. All three communities will be represented. It will be Amherst, Northampton and Pelham and we're going to have our executives from each community say a little something and then it'll be a presentation from Mass Power Choice who is the consultant that's helping us with moving that CCA forward. That is fantastic, thank you. That is really a very exciting milestone, very long. Can you just provide the time of that meeting again at June 6th? Yes, 630 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thank you. And then today I had a meeting about the community dashboard which gets to what Steve was asking about earlier. We're working with KLA associates. Steve, you might remember them. They were one of the consultants that applied or doing the carp. They're creating our dashboard and we had a meeting today. So we were just sort of talking about the formatting and the content and all that. So that's gonna be built up over time. It's not something that's gonna show up just next week or even next month. It'll take a little while for us to sort of build it. But what will be great about that is that we can have things like, we will have the solar link to the mapping tool. We will have the report that GZA did. And then if we have our data, we can actually have data there as well. So it'll be an opportunity. It'll be, my thing was I, I definitely wanna make it easier for people to have access to the information. So this dashboard will really, really probably just take over the webpage that we currently have for sustainability. So everything will kind of live on that dashboard. And one of the things we talked about too is we really wanna make it as a way to engage people to have it be a call to action. And one of the things we talked about was heat pumps, but also solar and having an opportunity for people to sort of go through the process of, here's our mapping tool. Does your site look like it? Solar is feasible on your property or on your house. Then what would be the next step and sort of to have these series of steps that will sort of help get people through the process. And we'll probably do that for heat pumps as well. We'll probably have a section on installing heat pumps. So there's gonna be a lot of information. And it, you can look at, I think Cambridge would be a great example for you to take a look at their community dashboard and how theirs is set up. Ours won't be exactly like theirs. Every community is a little different obviously, but the information will all live there. So I'm really, really excited about that moving forward. And then our fellows will be with us really soon. Like I said, that's coming the week of June 5th, I think is their first week. So Caitlin Hart and Miguel Gunther Rees will be joining us. And Caitlin is doing the GHG inventory update and Miguel is gonna be working on the building inventory. So really excited about having them both with us. And then last, I just wanted to let you know that I attended a New England Municipal Sustainability Network meeting last week. And we dovetailed it on the Climate Migration Conference that Antioch University put on. And the new climate chief was there, which was really nice because there was a small reception the night before the Antioch conference where she spoke and it was kind of an interview with her and not a lot of people. So it was the really intimate setting and really nice. So I had sort of asked her a question and then was able to meet her afterwards and just follow up and said, talked about it about solar and our solar development and how asked if they were really addressing the sort of struggle between sort of land use and solar development. So how was the state gonna be tackling that? And she said it's kind of a big issue they're looking at and I think they're gonna be having some more guidance coming out in the not too far future. But one thing is she seems very accessible and I think she encourages people to email her. So I'm just putting that out there. That is a committee. I don't think anyone should hesitate to if there's something of concern, I say we start reaching out to the climate chief. And that's it. That's my update. Thanks. Can I just offer? Sorry, you mentioned the climate chief. There's importantly also just in the paper this week was an announcement of the appointment of a rural economy officer, if you will out of economic development, secretary it, who will be particularly having her eyes on opportunities to support the rural economies beyond energy, all things, but energy would be on that plate. Turns out to be Ann Gobi, who's a senator, was a senator, she's stepping down from her Senate state Senate position and is a well-versed on issues on energy from my experience. One other thing I want to mention, Stephanie, that you reminded me of as you were talking about the dashboard and heat pumps. One thing I noticed this week, which I'm a little distressed about is that the mass save and the green, what is it mass CEC I think keeps a list of heat pump installers that they certify somehow. And that list used to be fairly limited. I was trying to refer someone who contacted me as a result of last week's heat pump panel about it. I was trying to refer someone to it and I went looking for it and that list now has everyone and their brother on it. It's got hundreds of contractors, some of whom I've never heard of. They don't seem to be in the area, but they're all listed as serving our area. So I don't know what happened to that list, but it seems to have been made useless by having been expanded to the point of unrecognizability. So I'm a little distressed about that because all of the contractors on it used to be people that I contacted most of them. I mean, there weren't more than the Navy 12. Yeah, I mean, I think they used to be more vetted.   But I don't know what their process is. Yeah, and I don't either. And I'm worried that I wish there were some way for us to get a list of local providers that we know can actually do this right because it's so tragic when it's done wrong and it is done wrong. Well, yeah, the one, so the one thing that we can't do as a town is specifically recommend one business over another. That's one thing if the agency does that as part of their process, that's sort of different than in municipality. So we can't. Maybe us as individuals could put something together that would be...  You're still the committee for the town. So I don't think that you can actually say like you should call this installer of this one. And when we did the Solarize program, that was part of a state program. We interviewed an installer and we chose an installer because that was how the program was set up was that you worked with an installer. So it was a little different, which is why it was easier for us to sort of say we're working with this one company. So, and I hear you and I don't disagree that we don't wanna just be unleashing anybody on people, but what we've done is what we did do actually, now that what we have done in the past and I would wanna make sure this is still okay because I did this years ago with wetlands. But when I was the wetlands administrator, I had put together a list of consultants in the area. But what I stated was this is just a list, a partial list. There are many more, this is to get you started, you can certainly call anybody and work with anybody. So putting together that kind of a list with that kind of a statement might be okay. I just need to make sure, cause that was years ago, I just need to make sure first of all, if we're still even using something like that for the wetlands, I can check in with Erin, but then to make sure like through the town manager, like is this actually an okay thing to put together? So we could start to put that together. I mean, cause you already seem to know a lot of the more local folks. So put it together and let me just vet it through the town manager's office. And we can always add the statement to ourselves if there's like specific language we should add to it, I can do that. Okay, just a thought. ECAC member updates is next. Do we have any updates from anyone on anything else? If not, then what are our items for the next meeting agenda? We had a couple of them. Let's see, what do we have so far? Well, we have the annual report, maybe for which meeting was that going to be for? That's June 21st. So for June 21st, we'll report. Next week, we can certainly keep on going with the updates. Yep, go ahead, Steve. I think it might be useful after the GZA mapping results are available through the town website. And we've had a chance individually to look at those. It would be nice to have a time where we can discuss those. I suspect we'll all have various questions about what is the data, how to interpret it, how to make sense of it. So it might be useful to have that as an agenda item. Maybe not for the next meeting, but the meeting following the next. Okay. And Laura, I'm doing Laura first then doing. Oh, sorry, minute, take your prerogative. Steve, sorry. I was trying to update a different part of my minutes. Could you state that request again, just briefly? Yeah, a request for an agenda item to discuss the GZA mapping results after they're posted online. To give us an opportunity to ask each other questions to try to sort of make sure we understand the results. Laura. Yeah, I think we talked about this a little bit. There's two things you've talked about in the past that I think we should revisit, although I'm agnostic to the timing of them. One is the rental housing bylaw energy efficiency stuff. I know Steve was gonna maybe pick that back up when the semester ended, which I know just happened. So I won't give you too much slack Steve, but maybe I wanna add that back to a future agenda and then, and I'm happy to help with that. Then the other piece that we talked about a bit, I think last time or the time before, that would be a new bit of work is focusing on what we do know we all want with solar, which is getting more solar in the places where we all want it. So parking lots, rooftops, whatever. And so I'd like to figure out what we as ECAC could or should be doing to facilitate that discussion, sort of how to be proactive about getting solar in the places where we want solar. And what would that take and all of that. So I don't have much more information than that to say about it, but I'd like us to explore maybe what, and I can take the lead on maybe developing some thoughts, but to explore what would be some of our levers that we could explore there. Right, and Vasu? Yeah, and to add to what Laura said, I think we'd also discuss the possibility of a field trip, Steve, just to create some awareness in the community about solar, I mean, it's somewhere, I don't know how many people we're gonna have, but that's something that, I don't know if you've given that a thought, that's something that we should do. I would be happy to give a tour to anybody who would like on the committee or out in the public of the Hampshire College Solar Fields. I know I've given that for different school groups. I gave it to Martha Hanner, she called me up and we had a pleasant day looking at those facilities. Be happy to do that. Yeah, thanks Steve. Should we target a specific time just like how we have the education series, we send it out to the community ahead of time saying this is a specific date. Is that something that we wanna do for the field trip? We could do that, yeah, set a specific date and invite our committee as well as members of the public to meet us there. Do you two want to decide on a date and then we'll just announce it at the next meeting or do you wanna decide on that right now? Sure, maybe we can get, yeah, work that out. I probably should check with Hampshire College, make sure it's okay with everybody there and then we can announce a date. Thanks Steve. And who else, Vasu? The only other thing is we should probably get, I think there's gonna be some work going on individually on this specialized code but maybe we should just get an update on that in the next agenda, on the next agenda. And then if Andra is back, maybe we should bring up again the gas moratorium issue but let's wait for Andra before we discuss that one. So if there's nothing else, we should move on to public comment. We have two community members, if either of you would like to speak, please raise your hand. So seeing no hands, I think we can adjourn. Thank you. One last comment, Lori. I'll be out next, well, in two weeks, I'm gonna be traveling, I'll be in California for a work trip. So yeah, you'll have to chair the next meeting. Okay, I make a note. I will be gone the week after that but I might still be able to attend. I'm just gonna be on vacation. Did you mean meeting after that or? You said week after that, did you mean meeting? Meeting after that rather. Yeah, the June, so next time is June 6th. June 8th, 7th. 7th, right. And after that would be June 21 and that'll be right in the middle of my vacation but I don't know if I'll be able to attend or not that one, most of all, I'll have to see. I collected people's calendars and I don't, it doesn't look like. I didn't send it because I only decided that this week. For most that I did receive, it doesn't look right now like we have any threats of not having a quorum but I'll double check. Yeah, if you have those dates just get it to me. I'll send that to you, yeah. All right, move to adjourn, anyone? I agree. Move to adjourn. All right, we got it. All in favor say aye. All right, have a good week. Thanks for chairing, Lori. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, thanks. Bye. Bye, all.


Hi, I'm Alex Williams from Silicon Angle, here live at the Stratoconference. I just love that ad, it's so catchy. I just want to dance, I mean, every time I hear that, we'll disco here on theCUBE. Here with the two fine gentlemen from Informatica, would you guys please introduce yourself and we'll get started with a few questions. Sure, my name is Hasib Badani, I'm the VP of products at Infaneta Systems. I'm Rob Ramarow, co-founder and CTO of Infaneta Systems. Great, what I'd like to do is just get a framework for the market right now. Tell me about where we are in the marketplace with WAN and big traffic, I think is what you call it. Where are we in the market? How is it compared to like a year ago? Sure, so we like to think of ourselves as the van optimization company for big traffic. We've been around for three years and in three years a lot has changed, so certainly in the last year, a lot of things have changed, particularly around how people are thinking about big data and how just a kind of non-sexy thing such as replication are making a big impact on enterprise vans. So where the market used to be five years ago, even a year ago, where a gigabit was a big link between data centers, now 10 gig is its table stakes and a lot of our customers are talking about multi 10 gig, 40 gig links between their data centers. And in order to address these kinds of van links, the approach you need from a van optimization perspective is entirely different. So that's what our focus is at infinite. So that really is essentially big traffic. That's exactly right. And what is the correlation between big traffic and big data? So in a number of cases, and you know what, I'll be honest with you, a year and a half ago, I didn't even know what big data is and I've heard of it before. Some of our customers who are large users of big data, they started looking at using multiple resources in different data centers for big data users, for Hadoop in particular. And they talked to us about moving data between sites to process it in larger clusters. And when they pulled us in to understand better how van optimization can help with big data, that's when we started looking at things like latency and how that impacts big data processes and the need for bandwidth between data centers and how that impacts big data end to end. So let's get a little bit into that. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the technical challenges. Virtualization has become mainstream. And so companies are trying now to figure out how they can actually now start to avoid these latency issues, because the latency issues are now more of a problem than anything else. And it costs a lot of money when you have latency issues. Tell me about the technological challenges around that. Now, as I said just mentioned, on one hand, we have a huge amount of data going between data centers. And on the other hand, any physical distance has to be taken into account when talking about latency. So you can go faster than light. So there is some inbuilt latency as soon as you have separated data centers. So now what happens is when you try to reduce the amount of traffic by doing something to that, like deduplication or compression or whatever, in that process you are introducing more latency into the end to end system. So what we are trying to do is essentially make sure that we do not increase the latency between data centers in any appreciable way at all. In fact, our products introduce about 50 microseconds of latency on each side. So for a total of about 100 microseconds, as opposed to any number of milliseconds and so on, that other competitors products introduce into the system. So I think of things like, you know, in my world, I think of things like memcached, right? Where, you know, you cannot, you can automate it to some respects that experience. Is there a similarity into what we're talking about here?  In a way, you can think of what we are doing like memcached, introducing extremely small amount of latencies, but at the same time, reducing the amount of traffic substantially so that you are able to send much more traffic without introducing any significant delays into that. And in the process, actually reducing the delay end to end because the amount of traffic being sent is far less than what you would have sent without us in the middle. So in fact, we are adding a lot more value in terms of reducing the overall latency end to end and making applications more productive and efficient. And you talked about the virtualization, so a lot of people talk about VM ability, doing VM motions across data centers. If you read the literature from VM motion, they talk about an end to end latency budget of say five milliseconds. If you want to do VM motion between any distances. Now, the challenge with that is if bandwidth is the problem that you're facing, because if you're doing many, many VM motion flows, what you're going to run into is, if you use any traditional van optimization systems, they will add a few milliseconds of latency in order to process that traffic. Now if your end to end budget was five milliseconds, if you had another four or five, that kills the VM motion. You can't do VM motion anymore. So our product actually is the only product that can actually work in a VM motion environment or even for that matter, for synchronous replication environments, which is something that van optimization has never looked at before because of the latency challenges that come with van optimization, particularly deduplication and compression. So deduplication and depression, and you're talking about that. Can you explain your process for that? Okay. So again, looking at the existing approaches to deduplication, basically they are meant for 90s, early 90s type systems, where you have single core IO band which is extremely expensive and so on, so they don't scale. Okay, that's the first thing. So you are hardly looking at maybe one gigabit per second type rates they can process. So if your link is 100 megabit link, it's okay to use their kinds of products. But when you go beyond that, when you're talking about one gigabit links, 10 gigabit links and so on, the amount of traffic you ought to process is now at least four or five times more than what the link can carry because you are reducing it. Okay. Which means we are talking about 40 gig, that kind of amount of capacity in the system to process the data. Okay. Now again with the existing systems, the existing technologies, that's not possible. So what we have done is we have started ground up to solve this problem, make it very scalable, at the same time reduce the latencies and also keep the reduction overall due duplication you get at the same level as the other guys can get. So we can get into more detail on exactly how we do it but essentially that's what we accomplish. Great. Okay. So where do you see the market going over the next year? What is happening in the marketplace now? And why is an event like this important for you? So particularly because of big data and what it does to the two band links, right? We have a number of customers actually telling us, you know, the 10 gig box that we build, that's great but a couple years out, 10 gig is actually not enough. So many of our media customers in the financial services industry, a number of our customers who are using big data as an internal resource for multiple of their internal clients, they're looking at 10 gig as, you know, at something that was a 2010 thing. In 2012 and onwards, they're going to be looking at much larger links. So they're actually forcing our hand and asking us to build bigger and bigger systems.  And the financial services market tells a lot about where the rest of the markets go. Exactly right, yeah. Tell me about the, what you're finding interesting here. I mean, one of the things that seems to be that I can try to deduce from what we're talking about here is like predictive analytics start to play a role in your service to some extent because the more data you have and you can't start analyzing that and start to develop efficiencies by understanding the patterns around that data. So is that something that you're looking at right now and predictive analytics going to be important for your technology as you go forward? Yes. Yeah, actually predictive analytics is one area and also the advancements coming through SSD type technologies where the bandwidth has increased substantially and now we are able to do inter data center processing for huge amounts of data. So those are the areas where we are very much interested in working with some customers and some other partners and so on to get our solution to deal with those problems directly. So who are you seeing as the customers then for this solution? So we spend a lot of time with financial services so my boss and I, we spent a lot of time in New York for sure, right? We've had a lot of pull in the federal sector so we have a number of intel agencies who are our customers which is surprising for a small company in the early days and in addition we're working with a number of internet centric companies who have a lot of bandwidth and they're really frankly, if you have a latency issue you can keep throwing bandwidth at it it doesn't really solve the problem. Is services a big component for what you do? We try to sell systems that are very easy to manage being a small company but certainly we provide a lot of very close handed support to our customers. Who are some of your technology partners? So right now we're focused on storage partners actually so we're working very closely with EMC to get certified and then we're going to go down the line of the storage guys, the EMCs and the NetApps and so on get certified with all of them and work with them in the field because that seems to be where we see a lot of pull in that direction. How about a provider like FusionIO? Certainly, as Rob mentioned, we're looking at a lot of SSD technologies for our system so we're working with somebody like FusionIO we haven't gotten to FusionIO yet but all in good time. So we have cash in that respect it might be of interest too. Sure. Right, right. That seems to be really kind of important for your company going forward to be able to take advantage of these very powerful storage environments. Right, and you know, I will say the thing that runs on the thing that's really cool about the technology is that it does not assume anything about the underlying hardware. So today if we use memory or tomorrow we use SSDs it's an extremely scalable system. So today we use it for van optimization and there are so many other users of this deduplication technology that we haven't even started looking at and that's what's really exciting about this company. Well, terrific. Well, thank you very much you guys for coming and joining us today. We're going to be right back with more interviews here on theCUBE. I'm Alex Williams, a Silicon Angle. We'll see you soon.


So over the last year, Input has produced this consensus statement. The title is Drug Use Under Prohibition, Human Rights, Health and the Law. And it gives a snapshot into the impact that Prohibition has on the lives of people who use drugs in terms of our human rights and in terms of our health. And it shows how the law is twisted by the war on drugs or the war on people who use drugs. The document is entirely driven by the words of people who use drugs from different regions and it captures the way in which our rights are so clearly trampled upon and it then goes on to list what demands we have in order to realise our rights properly. People who use drugs are entitled to their human rights, which must be protected by the rule of law. People who use drugs have the right to non-discrimination. People who use drugs have the right to life and security of person. People who use drugs have the right not to be subjected to torture or cruel inhuman degrading treatment. People who use drugs have the right to the highest attainable standard of health. People who use drugs have the right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. People who use drugs, they have the right to bodily integrity. People who use drugs have the right to found a family entitled to protection by the law, entitled to privacy and entitled to be free from arbitrary interference. People who use drugs have the right to assemble, to associate and to form organisations. People who use drugs and drug use must be decriminalised. Decriminalisation alone is not enough. People who use drugs must have access to legal justice and police protection. Members of the law enforcement, and especially the police, must be sensitised to the needs of people who use drugs. People who use drugs must not be assumed to be sick, deviant or criminal. Drug use of phobia and drug use of shaming, it should be recognised as stigma and discrimination and hate speech. Violence perpetrated against people who use drugs in civil society and at the hands of authorities, the police and health care providers must be investigated and prosecuted. Executions and extrajudicial killings of people who use drugs and for drug-related offences must end. People who use drugs must have access to the highest attainable standard of health care, service provision and harm reduction. Harm reduction services must be available accessibly, freely and comprehensively and must take into account people's nuanced and variable realities. Service and health care providers as well as the police and staff of closed settings must be sensitised to the specific needs of people who use drugs. Comprehensive health care and the harm reduction services must be available in all contexts. Including closed settings such as prisons and pretrial detention. People who use drugs must be involved in the conception, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of service provision. Whenever possible, service provision must be purely. Barriers to health must be undermined and dismantled. Not only people who use drugs must be decriminalised, but also drugs must be produced in a regulated context. People who use drugs must not be treated differently from their coworkers on the basis of their drug use. They have the same right to employment as all others. People who use drugs are entitled to stable non-hostile workplace environment. People who use drugs must be able to work without threat of arbitrary discrimination, termination and harassment. People who use drugs must not be subject to arbitrary detention or arrest, arbitrary stop and search, compulsory treatment or forced labour. People who use drugs must not have their bodily integrity violated by drug testing or through being pressured or coerced to terminate their pregnancy or to be sterilised. People who use drugs must be respected as experts in their own lives and experiences. Participation of people who use drugs in debate and policy formation must be meaningful, not tokenistic. The well-being and health of people who use drugs in their communities must be considered first and foremost in the formation of laws and policies related to drug use. Networks of people who use drugs must be allowed to be legally registered so that we are identified as a registered legal entity with political legitimacy. I believe people who use drugs must be able to organise a network without fear of discrimination and arbitrary of intervene and violence from the government. So we designed this consensus statement to be a practical tool. It's very clear on what our demands are in order to see our rights realised. From our perspective, our rights can't be fully realised and respected until prohibition is ended, until the war on people who use drugs is ended. But in the meantime, this gives you a list of our demands. People can use our communities should use it and can and I hope will use it at national, regional and of course global level. We commend it to you, it comes from the community of people who use drugs to be used by the community of people who use drugs. Read the document, use it, advocate with it.


Morocco has arrested 19 people who attempted to illegally cross the Mediterranean Sea. During the operation, the police seized two boats and arrested one person for alleged involvement in human trafficking and migrant smuggling. On Friday, the police arrested eight would-be immigrants and one individual in the northern city of Nado for alleged links with a criminal network active in the organization of illegal migration. A Moroccan Navy unit operating in the Mediterranean also filed a drug trafficking operation and seized three tonnes of cannabis off the coast of Nado.


And now, for your U.S. Army Europe spotlight. You don't have to go far to understand we have a lot of challenges in the world. And I would tell you, a lot of those challenges are right here. And what we do as a team, as an allied team, through our training, through our exercise program will help shape the future. More than 250 military planners representing 35 partner nations came together for the Semi-Annual Combined Training Conference, co-hosted by U.S. Army Europe and NATO Allied Land Command at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany. We do not do an exercise anymore, just involves U.S. personnel. All our exercises has at least one or more multinational participants. Points of focus for the military planners included the NATO Connected Forces Initiative, improving combined training and exercises, and maintaining interoperability between partner forces.


Welcome to the Rich TV Live podcast. I'm your host Richard D'Souza and we're gonna talk about what is hot in the markets and the markets kind of a choppy day today in the markets as we've had a huge huge huge November and We're starting off December kind of choppy some stuff doing good some stuff doing bad But we got some four hot stocks today and bitcoins killing it We're gonna go through that, but this is the hottest stock of the day right now up 207% SS NT look at that huge candle Massive candle that's on the daily chart. So this is a one-day move and it's going up on a 1 billion investment from JPE private equity So that is the catalyst for this move and you can see here it moved pre-market and then it went even higher So this has been an absolute juggernaut today been a big winner for day traders and investors So keep your eye on SS NT now what I buy this now after it's gone up this much a billion dollar investments a lot So it's may go up. It's may continue higher. It's possible. Take a look at the five-year high So it it is approached that five-year high. So As an investor looking at this Probably not because I've seen it come to these levels before and it typically goes down So very difficult to want to buy it now But 1 billion dollar investments big and that could be the catalyst to take us to all-time high So keep your eye on SS NT the biggest mover of the day up 206% HAA HAA up 187% Hawaiian holdings Big big mover here and if we look at the five-year chart, you can see that it's been higher So this one's another interesting one that could go higher based on what it's done before big big move here off a bottom huge move and Definitely one. I'll be watching will I buy it up 187%? No, but definitely one I'll be watching today as it's up 187% and flying EYPT Kind of much of the same. So the one-year chart you could see it's actually at a 52 week high so Very very risky in my opinion to buy this at a 52 week high, but it's hot so definitely put it on your radar and put on your watch list EYPT up a hundred and 75% on the day now most of this was done pre-market as you could see pre-market and then sideways consolidation So like I said, I don't like to chase green. I like to Watch stocks. I like to evaluate stocks. I like to get to know their financials Get to know their products get to know their management team and then from there make good decisions But these are stocks that are moving today and they're hot. Here's ATHE up 122% on the day Another one that moved pre-market and then sideways consolidation and actually kind of gone down. So These are all stocks to put on your radar and put on your watches They're all really hot right now and this one actually looks like at least on the minute chart It could go higher, but on the daily chart. It looks like it's pretty high on the RSI So definitely proceed with caution with four of these stocks, but all of them up over a hundred percent SS NT up 200% so huge moves for those four today Here's one that I talked to you about last week view Starting to bounce from a bottom and it's continuing that trend today So keep your eye on view starting to kind of make a trend reversal here and starting to make its move So put on your radar put on your watch list. It's really gaining a lot of steam and up 70% on the day view All right, here's the pick I gave you guys when it was at 50 cents KSCP Brought it to you guys last week told you guys I thought it had huge potential Big day today since I talked to you guys about it It's been up for four days in a row and it's up now 12% on the day with growing revenue. That's night scope It's an AI stock It is one of our clients put it on your radar put on your watch list It had this drop and it's now starting to move back up off the bottom and starting to make its move back up So definitely put night scope on your radar and on your watch list up 12% on the day and you can watch that video on Rich TV live all over social media. Here's micro strategies Obviously up 7% today as the price of Bitcoin is climbing Micro strategies is also climbing coin base told you guys coin base is hot price of Bitcoin shot up this weekend What do you think coin base is gonna do? Of course coin base is gonna go up up 6.9% on the day coin base is absolutely on fire one of my top 10 stocks for December and it is flying Uber just broke 60 bucks huge move for Uber It's at an all-time high also one of my top 10 stocks for December and it continues higher Congratulations, if you're in Uber GBTC my number one pick for December Starting December in the green up 4% on the day as Bitcoin goes up GBTC one of the largest holders and Institutions in the world holding Bitcoin 660,000 Bitcoin held under man, excuse me under management at GBTC And they're my number one pick for December and they are absolutely on fire Bitcoin Why thank you Lord for this amazing asset Bitcoin that is doing so much for so many and if you've been watching us since 2017 when I brought you Bitcoin first at a thousand dollars you'd be up 40 times your money on Bitcoin We're now at 41,500 for Bitcoin. So it's been an epic ride up this year from 16,000 to 41,000 this year on Bitcoin absolutely Unreal and we are now officially up on Bitcoin. Let's see how much are we up? We're up a hundred and fifty percent on Bitcoin this year a hundred and fifty percent Can you believe it a hundred and fifty percent on Bitcoin this year? It's absolutely epic Unbelievable unreal and Wow, what a move for Bitcoin and I just feel like this momentum will continue I really do I feel like this momentum will continue and I think there's a lot of catalysts that are gonna continue to push this higher So definitely keep Bitcoin on your radar and on your watch list Ethereum you can see a theorem also doing quite well Okay, I don't know what I did here, but I messed up my indicators I'm gonna have to fix this up. So those are the hottest stocks of the day and Let's take a look at lift What the heck did I do to my indicators? There we go. All right, so Here's lift I brought it to you guys last week currently at $5 and 70 cents I think there's some huge Upside for lift put on your radar put on your watches. Here's Bitcoin I wanted to show you the one-year chart so you could see clearly up up and away on Bitcoin for the last year and if you look at the last five years You could see we're approaching all-time highs on Bitcoin There's a nice gap to fill here and I believe we will fill this gap on Bitcoin I really do and I think we're gonna see it back to all-time highs Probably next year. So next year is around the corner, you know Christmas around the corner There's a lot of huge catalysts. There's Bitcoin having coming. There's Bitcoin ETFs coming lots of catalysts and obviously full disclosure I'm a holder of Bitcoin and Ethereum and I did say that there's a gap to fill here on both and I believe that it will and Bitcoin is my number one crypto holding and Ethereum is my number two and I think if you want to get into crypto, you want to be in these trades All right, so I told you what lift roblox one of my top 10 stocks for December. They keep climbing They're now back over $40 and I think that they've got Incredible upside and a great future as a stock PayPal one that I really like. I think the upside is tremendous here Square another one that I really like. I think the upside is tremendous both of them are in the green today COMT a nice dividend play and with oil down. I think this is a good time to start thinking about buying COMT Tesla Little dip here as they are releasing their Cybertruck. I think there's gonna be a huge move for Tesla at some point Ripple slowly, but surely climbing Oil taking it on the chin oil kind of dropping right now and really While everything else Bitcoin is up gold is up and the stock market's been up oil is down So something had to be down and that's oil right now Amazon they're down 1% today. That might be a Reasonable dip by opportunity new month gold down as well Apple down so a lot of these bigger companies that have been on fire finally pulling back today Microsoft They're down in the red today little pullback meta down on news that Mark Zuckerberg will be selling shares Gold gold still holding above 2000, but it's down 2% today. So big big drop on gold today Google dropping 2% today. That might be a decent buying opportunity for Google obviously Google is one of the magnificent seven and I think if you can get it on a dip Below 130 it might work out pretty well for investors NVIDIA given a six hundred and twenty dollar price target today I don't know how I feel about that. It feels a little bit rich for me Even these prices feel a little bit rich for NVIDIA But you know what who knows anything can happen in these crazy markets and arm talk about an IPO this year that has Gone up that went down and now starting to come back up and in the AI space And I think AI is gonna be one of the hottest sectors for the next five to ten years So keep your eye on arm. I'll be watching them very closely next year. All right, that's what I'm watching in the markets Those are the hottest plays of The day I'm your host of the most your board rich or rich TV if you're not winning probably not watching Bringing the winners CEO interviews breaking news trending topics and we bring it to you first So right now the hottest stock of the day SS NT up a hundred and ninety five percent HA up a hundred and eighty six percent EYPT up a hundred and seventy percent ATHE up a hundred twenty three percent view still going up up seventy two percent and Kscp a deal that I brought you guys at the bottom here said I thought I was at a bottom It's climbing up thirteen percent on the day and then crypto stocks Bitcoin related stocks micro strategies up seven percent Coinbase up seven percent Uber which is kind of like AI up five percent and GBTC my number one Bitcoin related stock up five percent and then Bitcoin up Four percent at forty one thousand six hundred and looking really really bullish is Bitcoin so get your popcorn ready, we'll keep you updated on everything that's happening and Wish you guys all a great day and a great week as we are getting closer and closer to Christmas Literally three weeks away. Can you believe that Christmas is three weeks away? Have yourselves a great day. I'm your boy Richard Mitch TV, and I'm out. Peace


Designed to treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, Pegaspargase is an important and effective treatment option for both pediatric and adult patients. Pegaspargase is a modified form of the anti-ALL enzyme therapy L asparaginase, derived mainly from E. coli. Unlike the native enzyme, Pegaspargase is conjugated with polyethylene glycol, or Pegalated, which offers various advantages, such as providing Pegaspargase with a prolonged circulation time, allowing for less frequent administration every two weeks, and it may reduce immunogenicity compared with native or non-pegalated L asparaginase. Extensive evidence shows that in adults and children newly diagnosed with ALL, intramuscular or intravenous administration of Pegaspargase is an effective first-line treatment as part of a multi-agent chemotherapy regimen. It is also beneficial in patients with relapsed ALL, who have hypersensitivity to E. coli L asparaginase. Regarding tolerability, Pegaspargase showed a manageable profile in pediatric and adult patients with newly diagnosed ALL. The most common adverse events were generally consistent with those observed with E. coli L asparaginase. A similar tolerability profile was observed in patients with relapsed ALL and hypersensitivity to the native enzyme. Given its potentially reduced immunogenicity and more convenient dosage regimen compared with native L asparaginase, Pegaspargase remains a valuable treatment option for both children and adults with ALL.