March 17, 2026 – Energy and Climate Committee – Video & Transcript
March 17, 2026 - Energy and Climate Committee
So, I am going to call the meeting to order. This is Ellen Tohn, Chair of the Energy and Climate Committee.
This meeting is being conducted by remote. They changed the intro here, Julie.
It's being conducted by remote access only. The meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, will be made available to the public on Wacom as soon as possible after the meeting, publicly excluded from executive session.
So, pursuant Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, the meeting will be conducted by remote access in accordance with the applicable law.
This meeting has remote access, which we do. No in-person attendance by members of the public will be permitted.
If this meeting has remote access, one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the town website. When required by law or allowed by the chair's person wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting, maybe do so via remote access. Public comment limited to two minutes, although on this committee we are more flexible and you can speak to a reasonable amount of minutes. Is anyone from the public on? Can you guys see?
I can't see, but Olivia and I can see. No, no one is here. That's not on the committee. No public. Okay. So, I'm going to note for the minutes that we have in attendance committee members, vice chair, which I'm thrilled about, Neil Gordon, Steve Garone, and Ellen Tohn, and associate members Clovis Schaff and John Harper, and town staff Julie Gagin and Olivia Zardo? I feel like I haven't gotten your name right correctly. Zardo, you got it. I got it. Great. So, it sounds like Kavi is not joining us tonight.
It looks like she's not here. All right. So, I'm going to just, on the agenda, hand it off. In looking at the agenda, Julie, I sent you guys a note about the MVP project, the letter of support, Julie. So, that was not anticipated when we wrote the agenda. So, I just want to make sure you kind of cover that when we get to that. And, let me just say, I'm also a little delinquent and replying to Marlena on some emails. So, I'm hoping you can catch me up and I can jump into that. So, I'll hand it over to Olivia.
Okay. Hi, everyone. I was just going to give you an update on HomeWorks and having a guest speaker from HomeWorks come to our meetings. Obviously, no one's here tonight. The representative I'm working with, her name is Rachel. She actually just got married as well. So, I haven't talked to her in about two weeks. So, I just touched base with her last week. So, I felt like it would be a little short notice to have her show up tonight. So, she is coming to our next meeting to answer any questions that we have about HomeWorks or their process in comparison to the past home energy audits that we had done in Wayland. So, I was going to kind of extend an offer to the committee to just send me some questions. Obviously, day of when she's here at our next meeting, if something comes up, we can just ask her. But just so she can prep, if before the next meeting you could just send me your questions, I can forward those to Rachel and then she can prepare and kind of answer those a little better on the spot. And then, as far as HomeWorks goes, they are sending out a mailer within the next couple weeks, which is exciting. And there is a town newsletter statement going out about it so residents know it's like a legitimate mailer and to look out for it. So, that's exciting. And that's kind of it on the HomeWorks front. I don't know if anyone has any questions before I move forward. Yeah, I think you could just put in your own notes. When we've done this before, it's been helpful to just get updates. What did they do? How many people have reached out to them for an assessment? How many people are scheduled? We just kept regular tallies. Number that reached out, the number that conducted an assessment, the number that moved forward with any insulation or weatherization. And if they didn't, sort of why not? Sometimes there were just no opportunities identified. So, that, and they track all that stuff from assay that's not asking them to do anything they're not already required to do. Okay, perfect. No, that makes sense. I'll definitely let her know that that's what we want to hear. And then, she can get those numbers for us. Right. And I'll send you the questions, Van. But the basic question is when someone asks me, I had this done five years ago. Why should I do it again? Are they looking for any different? That's the basic question I get over and over again. And Neil's not, we just had someone do it just to test it out. And they're like, they just didn't find anything else. They're not looking for anything. So, I want to be able to understand that because I thought they were doing more around heat pumps than they had in the past. But I don't really understand that. Okay. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. So, I'll make sure she gets that. And then anything else, just send it my way, please, before the next meeting and I'll get that to her. Um, and then the other thing I wanted to bring up, and I actually have, like, a short one-pager to share. Um, Julie and I were getting ready to apply for the Mass EVIP grant. Um, we are going to be playing for it. You might want to, wait, you might want to remind that everyone's up on the jargon. Like, what is EVIP? What is that? Sorry. Um, electric vehicle incentive policy. Is that what it stands for, Julie? I'm not even sure. I guess I'm not up on the jargon either. Sorry. Basically, it's an EV, it's a pot of money to help subsidize electric vehicles. Yeah. Okay. Um, thank you. So, um, we were planning on applying for a new, um, fully electric facilities vehicle for one of our, um, head facilities maintenance men. Um, and then we were also planning to apply for a new EV station at the public safety building for non, um, emergency responding vehicles. Um, so I'll just share my screen quick so you can see what I'm talking about. It'll probably make more sense. Just give me one second.
Okay. And then can you, sorry, can you see my screen? No. Not yet. Okay, what about now? Now we can see it. Okay, perfect. Um, so as I said, um, we're going to be applying for a new, um, fully electric facilities work van, which is exciting. Um, and then just like the, a little description about what, oh, sorry, did you lose me? No. It's like grayed out. It says no network connection was lost. I'm sorry. Um, but, um, so the mass EVIP grant, which we're applying for, um, provides incentives to buy or lease electric vehicles up to 10,000 pounds. Um, and then the maximum funding would depend on the type of vehicle. Um, and because we're applying for a fully electric vehicle with no, no gas power, um, we have an eligibility of up to $7,500 for this vehicle. Um, so we're going to be applying for the full amount. And on top of that, after we apply for the EVIP funding, we can also apply for green communities funding on top of that and put that extra funding towards our electric vehicle. Um, and that'll look like, you know, completing the extra, um, cost to fully buy the vehicle out, but then also putting in customizations like, um, racks and shelves for our maintenance people. And Julie, I don't know if you have anything else you want to add to that. Yeah. I mean, we have budget that will cover the cost of the vehicle, but when it comes to, you know, like this work van is going to be in service for a long time. It's replacing a van that is, um, older than Olivia. So, so we're, you know, we're trying to get it customized in a way that functions for the long haul. So it's not just about getting an electric vehicle, um, but it's also about having something that's really highly functional for our, um, our custodial crew. So we're hoping that the, um, by having the extra funds, we'll have a little bit more leeway to be able to get, um, a good setup in the back. Um, the customizations that we're finding from the Ford dealership aren't great. So we will have to figure out how we use budget and incentives, but, um, we should be able to really like make that those dollars work and get, get a good work van for the crew. And then for the, um, public safety building, we had the, we had the electrician come today to see if we had capacity for charger chargers at public safety. And we have more than enough. Um, so he's working on a quote for the electric, electric piece. Um, and because we work with him on a number of buildings, um, he's a very fair, fairly priced person. We don't have to hire a third party vendor to do all this. Um, you know, typically like when I, when I worked in Weston, we had to hire like a third party Voltrek. It's one of the names of the companies or Vertex is what we've used here in the past. Um, and then they have an upcharge on top of just buying the equipment and doing the electrical work because we have a great electrician. And that's, has installed a number of these around in the area. We are able to save on cost, which should get us the charging stations that we want. Um, Hey Julie, just, just a question. So I'm a little confused. So at the public state, we've talked, we talked about this before you came on board. So I'm just trying to reconcile these two kinds of, this is a charger at the public safety building just for municipal vehicles. I assume it's a dumb charger, right? Like we're not trying to buy, so you pay a bunch of money also for software and things like that. Are we just, or is it, what are we installing? Sure. So we are going to have a typical charger. It's just not going to be publicly accessible. The same, it's not going to be advertised. So, um, that's why massive, it may or may not be able to cover the cost, but I think green communities will, um, at least partially cover the cost. If it's not publicly accessible, the, you might not know this, but I did get a recently get an electric vehicle. Um, and so I'm now very familiar with the charging stations in town and like our town building chargers are not listed publicly on the charge point website. Like you can't find them. Um, I know that they're there and I use it on a routine basis. And I'm, I'm fine with it, not being advertised because I'd like to be able to get my spot and off and, and actually they are used pretty often by our municipal vehicles. Um, when I spoke with the city of Cambridge about what they do for their municipal fleet chargers, they do the same thing. So they still have a charge point charger. They're just not making it publicly accessible on the website. I think we had, we had thought about, do we really need all the charge point software for just charging our own stuff for the so-called dumb charger, which is a terrible word for that. But I don't know, John, do you remember this conversation that we had this? I remember us thinking about this. Yeah. I don't know if they still offer that. I mean, all these companies change their offerings on a regular basis. I'm kind of pleased to hear that in some respects that if it's primarily focused for town vehicles, those should have primacy and maybe this is a nice middle ground. Yeah. And, um, and like I said, city of Cambridge has, you know, a pretty significant fleet expansion of electrified vehicles. And so like, if anybody's going to have this down, it's them. Um, and they're kind of establishing best practices and best practice is to continue to use charge point. Cause you also need, you need an established relationship with it, with the vendor. You're still going to have software with it, even if you don't, you know, it's not going to be plugged into the wall and our fire chief would never allow that. Um, so they want it removed it on a standalone, they call it a ballistic baluster, a charger, you know, like you'd see anywhere else. Um, and also I should say, Olivia got us in with another company. Um, and so we're exploring using blink instead of charge point. Um, the cool thing about blink and they did, they totally cold called us and Olivia took the call, which I really appreciated because, um, they, as you know, as you know, if you have an electric vehicle charger, electric vehicle, the charger, the capacity of that charger will influence how fast you can charge your vehicle. Um, and the charge point chargers that we have are only 6.6 kilowatts, which for somebody with a car that has a hundred kilowatt battery is very, very slow. Um, it takes me almost two full work days to charge my car up to 80%. Um, whereas the blink chargers have 16 kilowatt, um, charge capacity for each port, which is almost triple what we're getting, you know, it's definitely, it's a function also of what the grid, um, will support what that site will support. So we may want more capacity, but sometimes the utility will charge more for that higher capacity because you're pulling down more electrons from the grid. Right. So, um, it just depends. The other criteria that kind of militates in favor of bigger companies, they're just more likely to be around. Um, uh, Julie, I don't know how often you go over to the stop and shop, but there are some chargers right there and there have been chargers there that have been out. Not as of today. Most of them. I've never seen them. Yeah. Well, they were out of commission for months on end type of thing. They still are. Yeah. It's just a, when you get an orphan to charger, it's not good. Yeah. I'm, I'm happy. I think blink is doing a good job getting into the market and we've, we have some frustrations with charge point because they are so big and they have, they own so much of the infrastructure right now that they don't have the same, you know, they kind of have a corner on the market and the result is that the service doesn't need to be there. They can be really slow to respond to things. It can be difficult to get in touch with people. It's just, it's a dynamic market. There's low barriers to entry. It's a wild west land grab, whatever the metaphor you want to use. So companies are going to go to the wall here, even despite our best efforts to find the survivor, but the chances of finding the survivor are low. John, are you saying be wary if blink is new to the market? And the question is, will they be around charge point? We'll probably be around. I don't know enough about the others. I think it's more in the sense, just looking at the terms of the contract, because if whoever we choose, you know, ABC go, if they fall apart, how easy is it for us to get out of the contract? Maybe we just don't do a 15 year contract, but we do a five year contract or a two year contract. Yeah. I don't know when I'm just thinking about the possibilities, because we know that technology is evolving. They'll, they're going to pair them up with a storage capacity. I'm seeing proposals now where companies for fleets, corporate fleets will put in storage batteries and EVs so that you don't have to rely on all the power coming from the grid. So this stuff is just evolving quickly. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing about, again, like having a, a charger that has software is that we can start to optimize the electricity use. We can set our charging cycles and schedules and stuff like that as well. But again, when it comes to a fleet vehicle, I can tell you for a fact that like, it's not sustainable for us to have a 6.6 kilowatt charger dedicated for our fleet. You know, like we need faster and to have, we're not going to get a level three this year. Um, we don't need it yet, but when we do need a level three, um, you know, that'll help us to really expand our fleet for now, having something that is faster than what we have available will help kind of make that bridge. Although the police will have it for the, just themselves. But I did see a proposal from a company, um, wearing my day job hat for corporate fleet type stuff. And I don't know, we're, we're still sort of the one by ones sort of phase, but if I can find the name of the company again, I'll send a link to it over to you. And then you can decide. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those, it's the same thing as having that third party vendor. It's going to cost more money for us. And we just don't have the volume yet to, for it to make sense. That's the problem. We're one by one sort of install. Yeah. Go ahead, Steve. No, I was just going to mention that, um, there are some high speed charger options. Um, one of them I became familiar with because of the car, at least was electrify America. Um, they have, they're, they're not, there's not as many of them as I'd like to see, but there's some in Marlboro and there's some in, um, I think Medfield. Um, and, uh, they charge, they, they claim up to 350 kilowatts and they're, they're, you know, they're public. Yeah. We, um, what you said, we're just, we're not quite ready for that yet, but I think there would be an option. Yeah, I agree. I, it would be great to have a publicly accessible one because then we don't have to worry about one, installing it on our property to will be, it would be easier to get it funded, but then we wouldn't own it either. And we'd be paying retail costs for the charging that we use there. Um, blink has level three chargers that we can purchase from them. So it really is just a matter of us having the lines and the capacity within the lines. And that's where we run into a lot of issues in Wayland because we were kind of at capacity and don't have a lot of, um, extra space in our, in the grid. But it almost most of Wayland is in the red zone. So that's where the level threes become a little bit tricky. Um, I'm not sure that that's going to get solved anytime soon, but for now, this is a great in-between space.
Okay. Yeah. And we'll see, we are, we're going to look at the contract. We're not going to put ourselves in a position where we're stuck with something that we can't, um, get out of anytime soon. But I do think, you know, like when I look at the different companies that are available and that are offering like good quality chargers that are serving more, what we're looking for, which is that higher capacity. Um, I think Blink's working hard to get into the market. ChargePoint just doesn't have, at least from what I've seen, one, I asked for a quote days ago and Blink has already given us the fact sheet and is getting us the, the quote. Um, and we haven't heard back from ChargePoint yet. So yeah, fair. Yep. Okay. I think there's- One very small comment is, um, uh, the state's, the, the, um, EV or state's reimbursement program, they do have a list of approved vendors. It's a pretty long list, but before you go too far down the road, just do a quick check to make sure that Blink's in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point.
Likely they are. I mean, they wouldn't start proselytizing until they got that, you know, gold seal of approval, but good to confirm. Yep. Um, and I think that was all for me. I just wanted to mention the EVIP grants, like we just talked about homework. So I'm good to turn it over to Julie, if you're ready. Sure. And the, the EV charger was sort of on both of our dockets. So yeah, yeah, no, we're definitely, we're still getting quotes from both ChargePoint and Blink. So to be determined. Yeah. Um, so Ellen, I'll start with the MVP project if you want. You're, you're, you're in charge. Okay. Um, and then I'll go through the electrification projects that we're doing around town. Um, so last week DPW reached out to me because they've applied for MVP grants a few times and have not received them. Um, and so it's been a number of years since you might, um, I think I know, but I'm not sure Steve and Clovis who are new to the committee know what an MVP grant is. Sure. And Bill is raising his hand. Is he in the, um, I don't see him. Cause I, I don't see him. Can you look in the, I don't see him. You got to, I think only the managers can see that Steve there now, but he's there twice. I don't see him at all. I see him twice. Can you hear us? Yeah.
He's raising his hand. So you're on twice, Bill. That's why. Okay. That's interesting. I wonder how that happens. All right. Well, let me, let me go back out and I'll see if I can come back in. Okay.
All right. So Olivia, I'll let you be on it. Um, so MVP stands for municipal vulnerability preparedness. It's through the state's executive office of environmental affairs. Um, MVP in your 2016 to 2020 was funding a lot of climate action plans and, um, planning grants, um, for, or basically big dollars to get a climate at local climate action plan. Um, they're now in the phase of, they also do funding for hazard mitigation plans, which I think we're in the process of updating hours. Um, and they offer a variety of things adjacent to climate change, mostly focused on stormwater. So Bill, you made it. Hi, Bill. Um, so the MVP grant that they are applying for is for some green stormwater infrastructure around Dudley Pond, um, and they wanted some help with writing the grant. And, um, I've worked with MVP quite a bit in the past and I'm familiar with what they're looking for. So I've been working with their engineering team on design concepts that will help be more palatable for MVP. And also the grant writing, um, is Melissa involved in that DPW and our town engineer. Okay. The site there's, she works with the Dudley Pond association. So like, yeah, yes. Very knowledgeable. Oh, she's great. And she does a lot of really cool projects. And I think this for her is like, she really wants to see this happen and she's been trying for a couple of years to get it. So, um, we're, I'm, I'm helping write the grant, um, and get, you know, a better, better language around the, the benefits, the climate impact and the benefits around, um, you know, why we want green infrastructure and that kind of thing. And one of the, some of the cool things that we've added since I got involved with the project is they're doing a little bit more like, um, demonstration, like rather than it just being a, um, vegetated area that captures stormwater and in, you know, does some infiltration ahead of the pond. So this is looking at an area that has an, in part of a neighborhood where the, the water runoff goes right from somebody's yard, like basically into the pond. And so we want to create some barriers, some natural barriers and vegetated areas to capture their water, to slow it down. Um, and to also improve, uh, water absorption, water quality before it enters the pond. Um, and so they're planning a demonstration area, a potential, like, you know, small walkway where you'll be able to walk through it, um, to access the pond and also to look at the various demonstration plants that are in the, you know, like a rain garden type of, of planting. We'll also have some signage and some, um, educational materials on how you can put, you know, what plants to plant in your yards and how to basically install your own vegetated barrier, which I thought was pretty awesome. Um, and so they asked for a letter of support from ECC. They've asked for a letter of support from different town departments. So, um, I'm working on one from Olivia and I sustainability, I don't know, sort of like a subset of facilities, but, um, you know, we'll focus on like the climate, climate change benefits and stuff like that. We'll be referencing the, um, camp plan. Um, and we're also getting a letter from our partners in Framingham because it is near the Framingham line, um, and the grants do Friday. So Julie, my question is, um, in the past, I've written a letter as the ECC chair. Do we think that would also be helpful to have a letter from the committee in addition? And if so, I, I think I need a vote on that, that it's okay to do that. And I would love template language. Yeah, we have a draft already. So, um, I would love to get a vote. Uh, I've just, I've asked you guys before and we've done it every time, but, um, um, um, are people comfortable with me, us sending a letter from the committee as we've done before in support of this? Any concerns about that? Sounds like a great project. We should support it. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if we need to vote. We've talked about it. I think. Okay. Great. Yeah. Also, I'll get you some language, Ellen, tomorrow and we can go back and forth and get it. Okay. That sounds great. Ping me. You know how to reach me if I'm unresponsive. Great. Yeah. Um, all right. Thanks. We talked about the EV charger. Does anyone have any questions on that before I move through the next? Okay. Um, so just a couple of the projects that are sort of ongoing and where they're at around town. Um, we are doing a handful of small scale electrification projects. Uh, the, in the middle school, we're looking to replace the domestic hot water with a heat pump. Hot water. Um, and we may have, we have some extra capacity in our natural gas boilers. So we may be creating like a, a backfeed loop in the event. I don't know how they're going to work this, but they're talking about having that as backup if needed. Um, but we should be able to electrify the hot water in the middle school because there really isn't a ton of water used in the middle school that is hot right now. Um, and we have a quote for it. And I think we're waiting for town meeting for the funds to get released, but we also applied for the green school works grant to cover the cost. Um, I reached out to the green school works because after we submitted the application, I want to say a couple of weeks ago, a green school works emailed everyone that had applied and said, thank you all so much for your interest. We have $19 million. We received requests for $120 million. So it will be a very competitive grant round. And so I asked them if they were going to partially fund projects and, or fund pieces of projects because we requested funds, not just for the domestic hot water, but also to replace a bunch of rooftop units on the middle school, which are also very much overdue to be replaced or air handlers. Um, we're looking at finding other ways to fund that. Um, but we have a lot of units like in the middle school ceiling, um, almost every classroom and walkway, especially in the older part of the building, um, has these air handlers that are loud and clunky and very old and very much overdue to be replaced. Um, and so we're trying to find an opportunity to use some efficiencies and replace a lot of the, the components of that, of the air handling, um, and also the heating and cooling because it is kind of a clunky system. So we'll see if we get that. I think we applied for $2 million total for a handful of rooftop units and the domestic hot water. Um, we'll probably wait until we hear back from green school works as to what, um, as to how we fund it, but we will probably do the replacement this summer, um, while school's out of session. So I'm hoping that the timing works out well for that. Um, we are also doing, um, as I said, I think last time we had rise engineering come and do a sweep of all of our buildings. Well, not all, but the three lower schools, the middle school and town building in the library, um, for lighting replacement projects. So we have, um, the end of our lighting incentives finally from the mass safe program coming to. So we have until October 1st to get our projects done. Um, and we are, we should have a final quote from rise this week. He said he was working on it this week. Um, we had to get some additional pictures of the light fixtures and the bulbs and stuff like that. So he could one-to-one replace, you know, provide like reasonable replacement and do the calculations necessary to prove that like there is value in, you know, energy savings to be had. Um, there's a lot of lightings to be replaced in the upper level of town building. I didn't realize how bad it was up there, kind of feel bad for the school department. Um, so, you know, when they're a little snippy, if they don't respond to something you request, just know that they have some pretty ugly lighting schemes up there in their offices. Um, so we should have a quote soon and that, that will, that quote will include all the incentives. Um, rise is expecting to hear back from the mass safe program. They'll have the incentives layered into our final quote. And if all goes well, fingers crossed, we will have the quote and the incentives available in time for us to apply for green communities funding to cover the remaining cost. Um, green communities is due April 10th. So we're hoping to incorporate some electric vehicle incentives, right. For that, um, for the charger, for the police station and the, uh, work van, and then also the sliding project. And we'll keep that all contained within the green communities grant. And that should be fine. So that even though we are applying for the green communities grant, um, we'll still be eligible to apply for climate leaders funding for separate, a separate project. Just on green communities, we were getting pretty close to the million dollar cap. So I assume you're applying for sort of what gets you to the cap. I forget what our headroom is on that. Sure. So even once you get to the cap, you can still apply for up to $125,000 for your grant. Um, and because we are, just so you know, we're going to be a climate leader soon. Um, and we're actually going to hear about that probably about a week after I finally finish, there's a table I need to update. Um, so we should be hearing about that soon, but because we are going to hear about that before the green communities funds are released, we can only apply for up to $125,000 for the green communities program. So that's part of being a climate leader. So technically we lost out on maybe like $125,000 of green communities funding, but, um, We're going to apply for the bigger pot being a climate leader, so that's okay. Okay. So you're, you, you understand the headroom you got to get within. Um, we, you know, the last time we applied, we did not get the money. And I think maybe it wasn't enough of a fitting their criteria. Do you feel that you're hitting the right notes or you've talked to Dylan about this? And yeah, and we're, we're due to talk with him. I, like I said, I have, I owe him something and I keep getting these new things like the MVP grant kind of came out of the woodwork. Um, so as soon as I get that, the MVP done, Dylan's getting all of our attention. We'll talk with him about it before we apply, because he wanted to know ahead of time who was applying and what we're requesting. Yep. Um, so I'm kind of anxiously waiting on rise to get us this information. We'll deliver all the things we owe to Dylan and, um, and then we'll hear back before we, you know, go through the grant process. Bill? Yep. Uh, how does, uh, all of this affect both the operating and the capital budgets of the town? In other words, are these projects already in those? In which case, if we get a grant, the budget gets better. Are these projects over and above what are currently in the, uh, the current, the operating and capital budgets? Um, yeah, sure. So that's complicated because the budget's still in process right now. Yeah. Well, sort of. I mean, it's been, it's been signed off by the select board and by the finance committee. So it's pretty, it's pretty firm at this point. Yeah. So it hasn't been voted on by the town, obviously. Right. Um, I mean, some of it is part of the capital request. So, you know, it's a conversation. I think there is a lot of, um, like in the last two weeks alone, we've had a lot of new things crop up that were not part of the budget that we're scraping to find funds for like the library roof leak, which was a major, major problem. Um, this is what happens when you have a really snowy winter and then a very fast melt, uh, the high school roof, ton of water leaking. Um, the, yeah, I mean, I'm talking about FY 27, but sure. Yeah. I'm, I'm just saying that like, when it comes to capital expenses and budget, if there's available dollars, there's projects that need to get done. Um, I mean, I, I can't imagine. Yeah, that's a little different than my question and we can talk offline, but you know, every time we have a finance committee meeting, it's, it's disgusting, you know, either even $50,000 line items, you know, is this in or out and do we keep it or not? And so if I can come in and say, look, you know, we've got a million dollars in the budget that we may not need if we get this grant, that's a really, really important thing to bring up with the finance committee. Yeah, I think, I think the way to look at it as we are offsetting what would be future expenses in future budget years by funding it through grants. And that's critical. If you can provide me with those numbers, because yeah, I mean, we're, we're scraping to find, you know, even a half a million dollars. And if, if you got, you know, it'd be a lot of credit to our committee and to, uh, you know, the whole sustainability, if we can say, look, in fact, you know, a million dollars might be the difference between doing a two and a half override and not. So, I mean, in theory, you know, it's probably not, you know, it's hypothetical, but in theory, your grants could keep the town from going to a prop two and a half next year. So, yeah, you know, that's such a good point, Bill, because it's not even just the grants. It's also, I will say that this facilities department under Mike Fea, he's so efficient with, and, and proactive with the work that he's doing in the town built. Like there's just a lot of need across our building portfolio, and we've been able to get a lot of stuff done. Um, and the fact that we have leadership across town, like I said, the, um, Mike is like, where else can we put a solar canopy? Where else can, you know, like we install EV charging and we've got a police chief that is asking for electric vehicles and asking for EV charging. And he's wanting a solar canopy there. So, you know, like we have a lot of really good support, um, from leadership in town, which is honestly a breath of fresh air for me, because that's not, that was not my experience in Weston. So, um, there's a lot available and yet to your point also, and I think this is something that we've talked about in the past, Ellen. Um, and we might've mentioned to talk about at some point soon, um, to get a sense of how much we're gaining from our solar canopies. And the value of that is a hot topic, not just for our budget and for FinCom, but also because we've got the solar bylaw conversation coming up in the not too distant future. So, um, I think quantifying all that stuff is really, really helpful and you're right. Like this is a good time for that. Uh, you guys can talk a little more offline bill about what, uh, I think basically it's not trying to offset something in the upcoming budget, but by doing these things, we will avoid future costs in the budget, uh, looking at the next few years, but we usually keep a running table bill of all the grant funds we've brought in and that, that might be a good, you know, FinCom hasn't seen that probably. So me, you, you know, you and Julie can talk about what you think would be most helpful. Yeah, it's less helpful to offset future costs. I mean, it's, you would think, but it doesn't have the same impact because that kind of gets taken for granted. But if you can say the current budget, we're not going to spend something, that would be really good. Well, it's kind of like it's in the budget, but I've also applied for grant funds. And if those come through, then the, then what we actually, you know, we'll have some headroom in the budget. Perfect. And that's, that's what I'm looking for. So, so I think Julie, you got some of those, right? They're in the budget, but we're concomitantly applying for grant funds. We'll know by X date, if they come through. Then we, that's exactly a hundred percent. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Okay. Julie, I'll let you, I'm happy to work with you on that. Sure. Good. Oh, and then just one quick thing. Smart meters are getting installed all over Wayland in the near future. If you have an Eversource bill, I'm sure you got that letter already. Um, I reached out to Eversource because obviously we're, we have concern about losing power for our public buildings and what that schedule would look like. Um, so I'm in conversation with them. Once they start working in Wayland, they'll be working all over Wayland. So as soon as I have a sense of what the timeline is for that, I'll just give you all a heads up. Um, it shouldn't affect our public buildings, but for your homes, you may lose power for five minutes while they do the meter change out. Um, but they should notify you two to three days ahead of time about when they'll be there. Um, and I think that's, oh, and then the last thing, Ellen is Wayland power choice. And, um, I'll make it brief. Cause I think we're just going to have to touch base. You and I just need to touch base. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so Marlena gave us a draft website. So guys, Marlena works for, uh, Peregrine. There's our consultants on this. Uh, and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we just to, yeah. And again, just to remind everyone, we're moving from those three choices, including the one that's a hundred percent green down to a single one base rate available to all, um, our Eversource customers through the community aggregation program. Um, Marlena has a bunch of draft language that she pulled from the city of Newton when they made that change and it seemed to work well for them. So Ellen and I just need to review it. Um, there's also, she drafted letters for everyone that's on currently subscribed to the hundred percent green. Yeah. Um, so we have a letter specifically to them and then a letter to everyone that's, you know, like your basic service subscribers. And I think a letter also for the people that were in the standard green as well. Um, and so we just have to review all that, make sure it meets, I'm sure we'll want to make a couple of minor changes and corrections. Um, and then also we have a draft website that we need to look at review and provide comments on and she wants all of that.
Like within the next couple of weeks. So that's fine. Next week, more challenging for me. So if you and I can find a time offline this week, just, um, some, this is a good week for me. Um, one other thing I would just request for her, she's very good at this. If she could also produce some language that would go in a newsletter, like energized Whalen newsletter goes to 900 people. My guess of the 138 people signed up for a hundred percent green. A lot of them get that newsletter. So that's a nice, sometimes people need to hear it a couple of times and, and also for the town newsletter. And, um, so it's slightly different text in the newsletter format. You know, less words. Agreed. Yeah, that's a great idea, Ellen. Yeah. Quick question. If 30 seconds, maybe others already know this, but why are we going from three to one? Uh, we talked about this in the, uh, an earlier meeting at length. Julie, you want to summarize? You want me to do it? Sure. Um, so the, the way that we purchase our electricity, um, through the bill, bill, bill was on the committee that's selected. He knows this well, right? So we use recs to, to, to offset the cost. The rec market is currently, um, because of federal permitting issues and projects that would have been funded through that, that rec fund, not coming online and not being. Like currently coming online anytime soon. Um, the funds that are in that rec, basically bank account are now being used to offset rate, bear rate, payer costs. So they're just getting put as credits on people's bills rather than being invested into green energy projects. And so, uh, the city of Newton was the first to pull the three options and, and move down to one until that rec market stabilizes out and, or starts being utilized for what it was originally intended for. Um, and we just felt like it was, um, false advertising to suggest that you were paying for a hundred percent green option. When in reality, you're paying for a discount off somebody else's bill. So basically the rec, the class one recs aren't, the utilities are having a hard time meeting the RPS because the wind products got pulled bill. And so the market is, there's really no value across one recs. So the money's going to ACPs, alternate client, alternate compliance payments. And the governor has twice now used the ACP money to lower rate payer, uh, bills across the state. And we just felt in good and conscious. We couldn't say to people, you're a hundred percent green. So what is the one, is the one a hundred percent is the one? No, it's the RPS. It's the RPS. Okay. So then why are we doing it at all? We'll get a better price than basic service. All right. Yeah. We'll get a way better price. Okay. And more stable. Cause as you know, it, it'll essentially, it'll essentially be Wayland economy, what we used to call Wayland economy. And we, we set it for a little more than two years, uh, two years and a couple of months to put us on a better cycle when we bid next. We hope by then the federal situation is different and the market will be different. Okay. All right. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no worries. No, you're fine. It's good to know. It's good to understand it too, because people will ask. And Clovis has had his hand up for a while. Yeah. Clovis. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Muted Clovis. I lowered my hand, but I did not unmute. So it's kind of related to that limit, more limited choice. Um, so you spoke about smart meters being hold out. So I'm thinking about time of use coming next, right? Is that going to come on a consumer per consumer basis? Or is that going to be discussed between the source and the town? How does that work all out of time of use rates? So, um, Olivia and I were talking about this today because she, um, has a smart meter. Olivia, you look frozen. Um, she's moving. I can see her move.
Yeah, I think she, I think she might be frozen. So there's, there's like a whole program available for, for residents. Um, if you, if you have a smart meter in your house and you have a smart thermostat, um, you can get credits on your bill. It will automatically adjust based on the amount of use in the grid, um, demand pricing, basically, and lower your usage and, or essentially like increase your thermostat during like peak cooling use in the summer, that kind of thing. Um, or lower your thermostat during peak heating in the winter. Um, if you enroll in the program, then you get a credit on your bill at the end of the, of your, of the season, basically with as, as a participant on the municipal side, it's a very different animal because we have building management systems and, um, protocols and some old equipment that is not so easily manipulated, like a, you know, like because of the scale. Uh, so we can participate in demand pricing and we will over the summer. Um, but it's going to be a lot more like setting protocols, um, setting, uh, you know, like what are we different call mechanisms and stuff like that within our building management system and also checking our sensors and stuff like that. But we should also see a financial benefit for participating in that, um, at the municipal level, hopefully at scale, because I'll tell you, I just paid our electric bills for last month. And I think we spent over $130,000 in one month on electricity bills. So it's not fun. You know, Clovis is a good point. I, I, I was on a webinar where they were talking about this program, which I'm now, it's basically a demand response program. I forget what it's called, but only certain, you know, thermostats qualify. It would be, Olivia, I think an interesting, once people's smart meters come in to put that in the newsletter and, um, certainly the energized Wayland newsletter could taste. Now that you have this, you might qualify for this program. Here's the link. These are the kind of, these are the four thermostats that qualify. You know, we're just trying to educate folks and it'd be a great thing also for COA and you could do a little briefing for COA. So it's all good community service. Sorry, I cut out. Um, but I did look on the, the website on Eversource's website and I can forward you all the information, but I think there's about like, I think there's 12 thermostat brands that qualify. One of them is Honeywell and my apartment has it. So I will be enrolling and I can report back how that goes, but definitely, yeah, definitely I'll promote to everyone. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's good. Yeah.
Olivia is available to do it because they've already done these smart meter upgrades in her community. So that's why she's ahead of the curve, which is great. Um, yeah, I live in Framingham and they just did the switch like last week. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to comment. So I, I, I registered for connected solutions. I think that's the program. That's it. Yeah. Via ECO, ECO B. Yeah. It's my thermostat. Only one of the two. And it's, it's, it's a bit convoluted, let's say, uh, one to get access to information and then two to understand what's happening because I registered, I think just for events, but then now ECO B is telling me, Ooh, there is time of use right now. So we are going to put your thermostat down to maybe 50 or 40, 50 Fahrenheit. So it's a bit confusing to me as an, as a consumer, I might have a smart meter because I got solar panels, but that's not what I signed up for. So it's feels messy. Ah, well, it'd be good. You and Olivia be a use case before we promote this a little more substantially. Yeah. That would be great, honestly, because I'll tell you connected solutions also means something different in the municipal space. So yeah. So I'll let you know, Clovis. Yeah. I think it'd be good. You guys do it. And if you have a good experience, then I really think not the program, but actually your story is what gets people to do stuff. So Clovis, let's think about that for like Energize Whalen, Olivia, like in the newsletter, like this available. I did it. Here was my experience. I think those kinds of things are what people respond to. Julie, before I forget, because I'm not, because I already forgot. Yeah. And it's in like, I want to put it in your bucket. Sure. The Whalen Post, you know, I'm on this all the time. I think if we get the climate leader designation, I'd like to think about that as a story. Yep. And the other thing I still want to bug you to do, and let's bug June for you to introduce yourself to the community. Oh, yeah. She's already bugging me about it. Yeah, we're talking. Oh, good. You're talking good. All right. So let's do that. And then I also proposed to her, they're trying to get on a more regular schedule, guys. So they would want something like every two weeks, which is actually a lot of content. So I was proposing that maybe we would do once a month, just highlight a person in town that's done cool green things. We did this at our temple. We called it, Steve, you'll appreciate this. We called it the climate mensch of the month. And we would just highlight, but we could, you know, call it, you know, the climate champion of the month and we could just pick different people. And mostly you need pictures that that's what people like pictures and a few words. So, you know, if you're in touch with her a bunch, I asked her that question. She didn't respond. But if you're talking to her, you know, see, see about her, her, her interest. And we, we can certainly, Michael Delman just gave me a great video testimonial about his induction cooktop. So, you know, it could be, um, not just words, but a link to a, you know, a fun video, because a lot of people read that electronically, the post. Great. Okay. Okay, good. I'm glad you're doing that. I think it's, uh, you know, we get chastised a lot and it's appropriate that we do a bad job of telling our stories. So we, it's one of the things I'd really like us to continue to work on. Well, and also it's hard to understand from the outside. I I'm, I'm finding this as a new EV owner. I understand things that at such a greater depth now that I own it. Um, because I'm living it every day and it's, it's just so different from somebody who might've heard about it, but hasn't invested, um, at the same level. And so it's helpful to have that contextual information. Um, there was one other thing that I've wanted to bring up because it is a very hot topic. Um, and we don't have to talk about it in depth, but I wanted to bring all of your attention to it. And that is the, um, climate bill at the state level. I don't know how familiar you all are with it, but, um, Jamie Eldridge has her, has green advisory council meeting. Are you planning to go, Ellen? I am planning to go. Yeah. Great. Olivia and I will also be there. Um, and I'm, I'm really rallying everyone to go because I think that it's really important that we, um, are, are loud about it. Um, my state representative for my, for my hometown voted for the climate bill and is like proud of it. And I, I had a lot of words about it because it was very like tone. Um, her response was very tone depth, but, uh, deaf, but I think that it's important that we communicate on what the, what the important parts are, um, because they are talking about cutting mass saved by a billion dollars. And that, I mean, they did in the house bill. So we had a story about this in Energize Whalen, Paul Dale wrote that, um, so that went out to that, um, Julie, if you have, um, the invite from Jamie feel if you maybe forward it around to the committee in case anybody else wants to go. Jamie has this Eldridge has this green advisory council. Julie went in the context of being from Maynard. Um, and, um, I think we actually met there earlier on and, um, I've been going when I can for a long time and they have someone from the Sierra club coming to talk about what's happening. I mean, I do Mike Barrett's leading the charge on the Senate bill. It will not have a billion dollar cut. So the cut is a $13.8 billion budget. I think the house cut a billion, the Senate bill. So the compromise will be somewhere between zero and a billion. That's the way it work when it goes to committee, but I don't know. Mike is still working on his bill. I think one of the things that is good to do is to reach out to Jamie and say, thank you for supporting, um, good clean energy stuff. We're grateful. You're our state Senator. Like, I think they mostly hear when people are frustrated. So I think it's, it is important to say to Jamie, we really appreciate your support on this. And if you do the same for Mike Barrett, if you, if you feel that you have that kind of relationship with Mike. Yeah. He said that it is really important to hear from the community around this positive, negative, neutral, um, any feedback is, is helpful and you're right. Things like appreciating his support because he is such a, uh, uh, an avid climate advocate. Yep. And that's all I have. Okay. So I think it's to me now. I'll try and go reasonably quickly. Proposed solar bylaw update. The good news is the vote we took urging the planning board to withdraw their Tommy article has, uh, the situation is they have withdrawn the article. I want to thank Bill for playing a role in this. Um, um, and, um, they've, they've sort of stepped down understanding the state is doing a million things. It's just the wrong timing to do anything. So we'll take this up next year. Um, Julie and I worked really hard on this and a lot, a lot of hours, and I appreciate that. Um, and Bill again, appreciate Bill as in his role in the finance committee, just asking questions on where we were on this. So I think we got the right outcome. I think it was just a frustrating process for me. Yeah. Um, and I, and I think we'll have to, you know, be, give some thought to what we wanted to look like next year. Cause the idea isn't that this is dead. The idea is that, you know, the compromise was, Hey, if you wait a year, we'll help you. So we need to think about how we want to help them mature. Not that it's a bad idea. Right. Exactly. Um, and I think, you know, Ellen, cause I don't think that this made it to you. Um, Annette has requested a meeting with Michael as the, as a mediator between ACC and planning board to discuss this. So it's not dead. Okay. But Michael McCall. Yeah. Michael McCall. So we, we, we, we have offered that many, many times. And we'd be happy to do that. Yeah. That was my response as well. Yeah. So we're planning that soon. We will have to come up with a local permitting process and implement it by October 1st at the earliest we can implement it July 1st, but we don't have any, we don't have the guidance documents yet to be able to effectively do that. Yeah. So they just closed comments this week, um, today, I think was the last date for comments on many of the guidelines on the technical aspects. So they have to turn those review all the comments, et cetera. So, you know, sometime this summer we'll actually get a guideline, but you know, we, it's not there. I will just put a, uh, emphasis on the work that you did, Julie and Ellen. Um, it, it was, substance was the easy part. It was the politics and working with people and figuring out how to go about doing that. So kudos to you all for navigating that. And, uh, we're starting the process. So that's good. Yeah. And I, I would work, I think it was Jesse is his first name. Yeah, he's a good guy. He's a good guy. I would work with him. The surprise that I had was that his thing was, Hey, we, you know, we reached out to the energy committee several times and we never get any response. And he sincerely believed that. So there was some, you know, I don't understand who he was reaching out to, but, uh, they, they apparently were trying to get in touch with us. And then from our side, it's like, we never heard about it. So there was a really significant communication issue. And my sense going forward is, is work with Jesse. I mean, I think Jesse has a pretty clear sense that we're quite responsive because I've had a bunch of emails. Yeah, he does now. But I think before they said, we don't understand why this came up because we've been communicating with you guys. Yeah. I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to air the re rehash the dirty laundry on that. Let's just move forward. Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I agree. Yep. So happy to have a joint meeting. I think it might be better than a joint meeting. Julie would be just a few of us to just sit down with Jesse and Annette and just talk about it. Just for people who went in the last meeting where we talked about this at a significant level of detail, these new state regulations and new model bylaws and guidance. We don't have to do anything as a town. We just have to follow the state process, which is trying to expedite the permitting of solar to meet our state goals. And there is a process they're setting forth that will make it harder for communities to basically delay and push back on things unless there's a reasonable issue. So we will be implementing that if we come up with a bylaw. In addition, we'll have to be consistent with their model bylaw. And we can do that. We just have to be consistent and within the guardrails of what they're allowing. So that's the work we have to do. All right. So that's the bylaw. Plugin update. Any questions on that? Sorry, didn't mean to ramrod that through. All right. Plugin updates. Three things. One and two is that plugin. Remember, that's our sixth community effort with our neighboring communities. There are two webinars. There's induction cooktop webinar this week on Thursday, the 19th at 7 p.m. Andy Krasner is a fantastic speaker. I've worked with her. She did the report with Rocky Mountain. And so just in my professional life, I work with Andy. She's awesome. And we usually get a great turnout. So it's been in the Energize Whalen newsletter. Didn't make it into the town newsletter. I don't do. Olivia, I think you reached out to COA. I can't remember, but it's on that Excel spreadsheet. You love you. And you've got to turn your cells green when you do your task. We gave you some. So you're supposed to let us know what happened. So I just posted again in Whalen Community Forum. We've posted in Whalen Bombs Group and posts on Nextdoor. If you're on Facebook and you're in Whalen Community Forum, I just posted the reminder. It's always great if people comment on it because it bumps the post up. Steve knows this, and I'll send it out to our volunteers at Energize Whalen to bump it up. My last post included the testimonial for Michael, who's very funny, actually. So it's a fun one. The next one is the next month on heat pumps. Bob Zogg, who's a terrific guy who's done our heat pump hot water heater ones from the Heat Smart Alliance, is doing it with Kit Wu from the Laminar Collaborative. And Laminar has always been getting competitive pricing on heat pumps. So like Clovis, you would find this super interesting. They go out with sample homes and they get prices. So he's trying to create transparency around pricing. And that one is the next month. And Olivia, I think you you got that one into the town newsletter. I gave you sample text and that will be in the town newsletter, you told me. Yes, that's correct. And the other one was sent to the COA. So I'll update the cells with that. OK, that'd be great. And then the COA takes a, you know, has a long time for the monthly one. So get them the heat pump one early. So we're publicizing both of those. And when we do that, we get the list of who attended from our town from Plugin and the MassEnergize support. And then Ann or Clovis, Ann or I usually follow up with the people who attended and said, hey, you attended. How can we help you? Remember, we have coaches, yada, yada, yada. So that's good. That's one and two. We've been doing these once a month. I will say it takes a fair amount of, you know, a little bit of energy for us to do it. But super good to do. I think for the heat pump one, Olivia, we talked about, Julie, before you were here, through Plugin, we got these plastic A-frames. I'm making it A. A-frames. I knew what you meant, yeah. Yeah. And they have a slot where you can just stick a flyer in. So they were purchased for us by MassEnergize. And we were thinking, like, in the snow, it's crazy. But you could put it right outside the entrance to the COA or whatever entrance to town building that you think gets the most traffic. We have them. And Fabiana usually creates from Plugin a sample flyer. And if it's not what you want, like, Olivia, just reach out to her. Like, within a day, she gives you what you want. She's incredibly responsive. And so we just thought we'd try it. You know, it's just, and then, you know, we own these A-frames, Julie, moving forward. So you have them now. Like, frankly, you, Olivia, you could put stuff in there about get a MassSave energy audit. Like, we have them get homeworks to create a flyer that fits there with a QR code. So when someone's walking by, they can scan it or get the tiny, you know, the Bitly link that's a tiny URL to go to the right website. So these are assets we have. The third thing on Plugin is that we were, and it kind of relates to the multifamily property outreach. One of the things we were trying to do is reach to multifamily property owners. And Olivia got us a great list, but it turned out to be like less helpful for contacting. So MassEnergize and Plugin, through just some AI research, found the condos in town and the multifamily property owners and phone numbers for us, for the multifamily. So Ann and I have been making the calls. Ann's reaching out to the two or three senior living facilities that we need ones that are built before 2015. That's where RISE thinks there's the most opportunity for installation. And I, um, for condos, this should be incredibly satisfying guys. Um, I, uh, uh, uh, really felt good about it. Um, Gene Mill, uh, we had an Energize Whalen meeting and I was like, okay, who knows people living in condos? Gene was like, I know lots of people. Um, and I knew some people, so we, we pretty quickly got to people on the boards of the condo associations, um, without actually having to, there's a state registry that tells you on the condo boards and we could have, that's a route you can also go. So I've, I've had good conversations with two of them, Greenways and another one. I don't have the sheet open and both said, yeah, fine. You know, we'll, and I put them in touch with Todd at RISE, they're talking, they're going to have someone come out to an energy assessment. But the thing that was so also interesting was I said, like, we also do these webinars. Should you guys be willing to promote those to your condo members? And they said, sure, shoot it to us. You know, like, um, depending on the topic, it may like gardening may not be interesting, but like induction cooktops. Yeah. Interesting. Everyone places their own appliances. Sometimes the heat pump one may not be relevant to them or EVs, but they said, yeah, we'll, we'll send it out. Um, so that was great. And then they, um, they, they also something else they said, just for future, you know, consider us part of your extended outreach efforts. So it was like, really, we had trouble reaching people. So if we can get these intermediaries that are regularly reaching people to also be carrying our messages and they were just, I would just say they were kind of into it. They were like, yeah, this sounds great. We love that you guys are doing this. So it also, Julie struck a chord for me on having people understand what we're doing. Um, so it was, they were like very pleasant, delightful conversations. I have to follow up and Olivia, I'm keeping track of all of that in the Google doc that Fabiani created for each community on the condos and the phone numbers. And I'm keeping track of what's happening on all those. And I think Julie, it's just good information for you guys to have about people at these condo boards. There may be other ways we want, we want, I mean, um, you know, we could be communicating also about the mass save individual assessments, right? Those condos, you know, that's how that works for them too. So it'd be interesting, you know, for homeworks, we now have a way also. So I have a couple more to do this week. Um, so one of them said, so do you know people on other condo boards? And she said, oh yeah, I have a list of all those people. So I got the heads of the condo boards for two other ones. So it was just like a little bit of groundwork. It wasn't that hard and we pretty quickly got to some interesting stuff. So I'm hopeful we'll get, we've learned some things about how to reach people, which I think is also, it was good learning. I think, uh, really, um, really good learning. That's awesome. Cause that's definitely something that's come up in the past, um, in the work that I've in doing this work. And we don't have a lot of that from the town side, as you know, we have great, like building data, but we don't have people data. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So Olivia, that sheet is shared with you, Julie. And if you don't have access to it, you can reach out to Fabiana and make sure it's shared with you. But you'll see Anna, my notes in that. And, you know, Olivia's part of her job is sort of outreach. So, you know, this might be things that people, she should be in touch with also to, um, send messages out, maybe out the homeworks and energy safe stuff. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I was going to add one thing, cause I feel like I, we keep, um, missing the timeline for this, for the town newsletter. Yep. We're writing it on Monday. Yeah. You have to, you need it. Right. So I figured I said by the 15th of the month before is when you need it. That's safe. Yeah. But it, yeah, that's what I'm using. It's really like the last week of the month. I know, but I'm, I'm trying to, I build in a buffer in case I miss it. So we're trying for that. Sometimes we don't know, we don't know enough. Um, I mean, you could put something in and about, you know, that, that we have this relate relationship with the mass state vendor doing multifamily energy audits. We're reaching out to condo owners. Um, um, and, um, you know, if you're on, on a condo board, please reach out to, I mean, you can send them to me, um, and, uh, I'll, I'll do the song and dance to put them in touch with rise. I don't want the order directly to rise. Cause like, then we don't know what they've done it or not. Sure. Yeah. Well, let's put some, let's plan to put some language in, um, and whatever you guys have, we can, Olivia and I can format it into the town newsletter. I think that would be great. Okay. But, but, uh, I will try and do something for you tomorrow afternoon. Great. Okay. I get it. Send me a, just somebody send me a text. Yeah. Um, um, um, I think Energize Whalen updates, the, uh, the website mass energized software support is changing the backend. So we have up, we're just on a different platform. So the new website will go live basically April 1st, Clovis. We have like a, uh, a thing with the Ariha on the 30th to do some final step. Um, it, it will look much the same. Um, so I don't think people will feel that much of a difference. It integrates better with Mailchimp. So, um, we've had this thing in the past. Clovis is intimately familiar with this annoyance. We've had like a list for Mailchimp and then some people register on the mass energized website. And then Clovis puts them all into a master list. That problem is going to go away. There's just going to be one list for the newsletter and you'll, you'll sign up through the website. I'll get you right on the Mailchimp list. And the Mailchimp functionality we have to play around with. It's going to send people nudges about upcoming events. So if there are Julie and Olivia events that the town is doing that you want to make sure get in there, then we'll be able to nudge people. The other thing is the Mailchimp functionality allows us to segment users. So if we started to know who had done what, or like one thing we're going to try and segment on is you've attended a webinar. So that's some level of interest. And, you know, we, I did a follow-up. I know we had like, I can't remember 20 some odd people had been to heat pump webinars. I sent an email saying, you went to a webinar sometime in the last year. Just curious what you've done. Could we help you more? I only got two responses, but one said, I could really use a coach. That was great. And the other one said, actually, I did it. I'm done. I did it. So like that continued engagement was good. Also, that was one of my ones for the condo association. One of the guys said, I can actually use a heat pump coach. It was a very unique and specific thing. Clovis on a heat pump water heater, super nerdy. So I sent him to Bob Zog because it was like super, super nerdy. Like I was like, oh, I can only think of one person who can answer this question. So he and Bob are talking. But like Clovis, I missed that in our counting then of coaches. I'll, I'll submit it. So, so it gets it. So Clovis has been working on coming up with a better way when you're on the website for Energize Whalen. We now have, if you want a solar coach, click here. If you want a heat pump coach, click here. If you want an EV coach, click here. Clovis is working on one Google Forms for all our coaching. And that's, I'm hoping sometime in the next few months, Clovis will have something that you feel good about. Do you want to say more about that?
No, no. So it's town specific. And it's about also trying to have it more streamlined with other towns. And the heat smart alliance, for instance, if that's specific coaching for heat pumps. Because majority of the towns have the common form on heat smart alliance. So it's those kind of tweaks to be fine-tuned. And it's, well, it's also to measure more easily, I guess, the coaching requests coming in, our visibility on that. And I want to thank Clovis for diving into all these lists and all this stuff that can get overwhelming. So the last thing I want to talk about is planning for updating our climate action plan. I want to put out to the committee that I would like us to update it in the fall. So I want to think about what's the process we go through to update it. And I was particularly reminded of this by an email that Julie and I both got from Margie Lee and Tony's doing something at the COA. And they said, like, what has the town done on, you know, municipal buildings for, you know, decarbonization, a bunch of stuff. And I thought, wow, Margie and Tony know a lot of what we're doing. They're really involved in Energize Whalen. And I'm like, they don't know how many solar things we have or how much we're saving. So I also thought an article for the post on where we are and our climate plan, like just things we've done, even just, you know, a little quick scorecard and how we're doing, even before we update the plan, Julie. Like that's an article I could write with you. But I would love to hear from the committee about, I have my own thoughts, but many of us wrote chapters. Bill wrote a chapter. John wrote a chapter. I wrote a chapter of the plan. And we, some of the things have been done. Some of the things probably don't make as much sense anymore. And some of the things were partway along. And I think it would help us strategically. So before Julie and Olivia speak, I'm just curious, Bill, Neil, who were somewhat involved, like thoughts about the process and how you might think about this? I mean, including clubs. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good idea. I think, like you referred to, I would start by learning what we've done with respect to the current plan, because it's hard to do an update if you don't know what's been done. So that's definitely data we need before we can actually do an update.
Feedback from others? Neil? Is there a role for soliciting opinion and other perspectives in doing that plan? And how might we go about doing that? I think that would be useful. Because, you know, if you start asking a lot more people's opinion, you draw more attention to what you've already accomplished. Can you say a little bit more about, we tried to do that the first round, and we really didn't get much engagement. So I can think of two spheres. Like we actually have town employees, you know, whose departments are affected is one little sphere. But I think you're thinking more about residents. And I'm curious how you might think we could do that engagement in a way that would be meaningful, productive, and actually engage people. So, yeah, I mean, that's always a tricky question is how to get people engaged. But, you know, you perhaps have a series of small forums and specifically invite people to come rather than putting out a broad sort of, if you have an opinion, let us know anything. You say, you know, Annette Lewis, why don't you come talk to us about, you know, the future of solar in Whale? And that, for example. Okay. I mean, just brainstorming. The other thing that occurs to me now that I'm sort of, I guess, involved in the budgeting process is to have for each section, you know, is there something that needs to be in the capital budget? Or is this something we hope to fund through grants? That would be useful because there has to be a linkage between what's in the plan and what's in the five-year capital budget. Yep. Okay. Julie, I can see you're taking good notes. I am not. But, you know, that's true, Bill. And it also, though, so much of what's been accomplished has been on the town side. And, you know, we've got to figure out how to move the dial on the resident side. True. Yep. One of the things we do now actually have is some decent data on some of the things where there's okay state data on PV, EV, and heat pumps now. Um, so I do think, um, we might be able to get, there's a lot of years missing, but, um, we, we at least have, at least we have more than a complete wild ass guess. We have something a little better than that. Um, it would be really helpful. Well, and I, Julie, I think you and Olivia were endeavoring to do this, a way to kind of get Olivia also grounded was to do that. Where are we first cut? Is that something the staff could do? Yeah. Olivia has been working on it. Okay. So we're, we plug away as soon as we have some free time and then we get caught up in other things. And, but she's, she's gone through and we're looking at like, what are the goals? Like just a quick list of just of the goals outlined in the plan mentioned anywhere in the plan and then, and then segmenting them and then looking at, okay. You know, based on that, do we have a metric that we want to attach to that? What metric exists now based on the data that we have, that kind of thing. Obviously, I think you're going to have a lot of, um, a lot more input into, you know, like what are the data metrics that we're going to use? Cause I think a lot more exists now than it did then. So yeah, but we're, she's kind of framing it out and we're looking at different sections. There are probably two dozen communities that are in the exact same boat. We are with looking to update their plans and come up with some kind of annual reporting, um, that gets done. Even if it's just like a three page memo that says, oh, this year we got X number of dollars for our solar installations, or we got, you know, like this level of product, that kind of thing. So that we're standardizing it in a way that's easy for us to, you know, maintain an update. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean, these are, I love it being for the fall. Cause I think it's a nice long conversation to have. Yeah. And I think that would give you guys some time. Like I would love at maybe not the next meeting, but the meeting after that, just give us what you got, wherever you are in it. One of the things that we had looked at, Julie, I think before you came was sort of a, like a visual dashboard in little, which is sort of, you know, red, yellow, green, like this one we've made no progress on. So we should ask ourselves, is it something we can do? Is it, you know, just in the future, some have been done. And I'd, I'd like to celebrate that success since they've been done. They really come off the plan. We're done. We did those. And maybe there's an appendix to the plan. Those, these are all the things that were on the plan that we've gotten done. But for the public, I would, there's us. We're in the weeds. We are really in it deep in the weeds here. That's great. But for the public, I'd like to think about something that would show up on our website that would just be a dashboard on where we are on these things. So we're going to have to roll some of them up because they're too many. Yeah. Yeah. Have you heard anything about the update to the town website? Yeah. Okay. All right. I wasn't sure if you were getting information. I wasn't. No. I know that it's being updated. It should have been, it should be done by now. Yeah. So we'll see, but that will definitely. But I think for this, so if we plan two meetings from now and it'd be helpful to send something out a couple of days in advance, just so you know, I wrote the section on buildings. John wrote the section on solar. Tom wrote the section on the natural world. Did Anne write the section on EVs? I can't remember John who wrote. Bill, what did, Bill was an over, Harvey wrote the intro. Bill, what section did you write? Did you write a section? Yeah, I don't know. I think I was sort of the editor, you know. Yeah, I think you were the editor. I think Anne wrote the EV section then. So, you know, if you have questions about those, the person who wrote it could also be helpful to you. Helen, what is the work product? What's the goal of this exercise? I hear the word updating, but that can take a lot of different forms. And Julie mentioned that other towns are doing annual reports. Are reports different from the update of a plan? So when I suggested the update, this was a plan written years and years ago. We need to have a new plan that's the updated version. So it lists the actions we want to do and our timeline for them. There could be another section on, you know, we could say, I would like to have the things we want to be doing and recognize the things we accomplished. So it's an updated plan. It's an updated plan. I think an annual accounting of where we are could look like a lot of different things. So that's not my intention. I think that's also a useful thing. But it's like that Margie could ask me, well, what have we done? And I had to like, literally, I just kind of threw out the things I knew. But if I could have sent her to a red light, if I could have sent her to a doc, that would have been perfect. Yeah. Yeah. And Olivia did do a pretty comprehensive list of replies to her. I don't know if you got to see that. I did not see it. Yeah. She did a Google doc and answered the questions in depth. So that honestly is a great start. It was a great start. Really great questions from Margie. So. Yeah, it was great. Committing to an annual report would be a big, a good outcome. In and of itself of this is doing an annual report. Yeah. I think it legitimizes us. Yep. It'll work. It creates accountability that, you know, that's visible. One of the things we had done annually, Neil, was more like a, like an Excel sheet of the amount of grant money brought in and energy savings per year. And I think that could be part of the, that's an important part because, you know, taxpayers are paying your guys' salaries. We need to show some value that, you know, so what the value is for the taxpayer. So. Yeah. Bill is a spy for the finance committee now. We'll really appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's exactly. I mean, in an entire year, I don't think the finance committee once talked about money that we're getting through energy and climate. And, you know, so, yeah, they're, they're completely uneducated and yet we even have two, you know, energy climate professionals on the committee. Yep. And one other thought and just back your mind book for both Julie and Ellen is when we had the other plan, ultimately the select board adopted it or the board of selectment back in the day. And so will there be, it seems like at some point here, earlier and later, we start building political support for version 2.0, that they'll be excited that, you know, we're likely to get adoption of this thing. And obviously they'll want to know what's in it, et cetera, but we, we don't want to surprise them and say, Hey, we have version 2.0 without any sort of warmup act. Yeah, I mean, I think it will be a process that, as Julie knows, with the select board, it's always a two-step process. I think first we would say, here is the plan, here's what we've accomplished. And now this is, I would like to. Yeah. Yeah. It's just concomitant with our internal work. There's some external spade work that will be useful to do. And yeah. That's my wheelhouse. That's one thing that I'm pretty skilled at. And yeah, I agree. Carol had mentioned that she wanted to see certain things in the plan that weren't there. And I think it's just a matter of calling out information in a way that she can readily see. And, and I think that, you know, again, the, the red, yellow, green status is one way to do it. But it would be great to get feedback from them and a little sidebar so that we get more clarification on what they're looking for so that we're integrated with their plans. And I agree also get planning's feedback and get conservation's feedback and get, you know, information from the schools and have everyone do some goal setting because then it, then they have some skin in the game when it comes to seeing it come to fruition. When we went to the select board the first time we, we told them we had been to all those departments and they were on board with these things. So that's also part of the process for us. Okay. I'm down to 4% of my battery. So if I die, I'll come back on my phone. So I think that that's a good plan, Julie, like two meetings from now, give us a sense where we're at and let's come up with some kind of schedule and plan. The summer's not a good time for us to doing a lot of work on this, but, but in the fall, and we could, you know, commit to an in-person meeting if we want to do it on a big strategic planning thing where, you know, we have paper up and whatever, we can figure it out. It's a great idea. All right. Those were all of mine. Oh, Julie, one other thing I wanted you to just comment on. I sat in on the presentation by HMFA, you know, the school architect guys talking about this whole, you know, do we want to knock down the elementary schools and just build new ones? I, I assume in the meantime, we're doing a whole bunch of decarb stuff in there. They did say it's probably a 10 year process to get from A to B, but I'm hoping, I'm assuming and hoping that you guys are engaged in that process in some way. They are currently in the service side of, of this process. So we will be, we will have somebody on the design team. Okay. I think, I think that's required for, I would assume so, but I, I, I wasn't sure. I was, I want to make sure that sustainability, I mean, they won't get funded by the SBA unless they're doing certain sustainability things. We got a question at an Energize Whalen meeting saying, when you knock stuff down, like what's the, about, you know, you're building something new. So that's fundamentally using a lot of resources, you know, so, um, and oftentimes that is right choice because with the way we start, we're teaching fundamentally differently. So anyway, that question came up. I'm not, I don't want to address it now, but I just would like to make sure we understand what your role and is, if there are any role for the committee in this process. Yeah. And being in the facilities department, we, I mean, we have legitimate, legitimate claim to be a part of that conversation because we're going to have to come up with the maintenance plans and, you know, be part of the design team and stuff anyway. Yeah, I agree. It's, it's on my list. Um, I haven't seen anything, but I will, I'll keep paying attention. Okay. Any other items not anticipated by the chair, really by Olivia, but the agenda together. Thank you, Olivia. Anything, anybody else wants to bring up? Okay. Can we, um, there are minutes to approve. Were those sent around? Yeah, they're in the, yeah. Okay. Um, so I need to make a motion from someone to approve the minutes.
Neil, a second. Second. Thank you, Steve. Discussion on the minutes. Okay. Then I'll take a vote. I usually do a roll call for this. So Neil, Steve. Yes. Bill. Yes. Ellen. Yes. So that's a four zero. Okay. Now, um, our next meeting, and I think we are on a regular schedule, but somebody please remind me when the next meeting is. I was just looking at that and then I minimized my schedule. April.
Uh, we are, we are delayed a week in April because, oh, you know what? I don't have it on my list, on my calendar. I don't have it on the 17th. Or no, 28th. 28th is when I have it. It's 28th because of spring break. But then after that, we'll be on a normal every second Tuesday. Okay. All right. Um, hopefully maybe someone could look into why I didn't get the panelists invite. I don't know. Um, and everybody else, uh, I know Clovis and Steve, sometimes you guys have missed meetings and I never know if it's that you're like calendar didn't work or you didn't get. Julie's also sending out a calendar invite or Olivia somebody, but it's going to all our town emails. So make sure your town email is forwarding to another email or you're reading your town emails. Um, and we can also, I mean, because the invite that I create, it has the agenda in it, in the minutes. Usually I always make sure that that's in there. If you want me to add a personal email to make sure that you see it in your own personal calendar, just email me and let me know. Yeah. I'm happy to duplicate it. And I don't, we had a few back and forths with this particular meeting tonight with IT. So I'm not surprised that you didn't get a panelist invite. It took like three requests to get the right time, date, zoom. So thank, thanks. Sorry about that, but it's okay. Thanks for working in the problem. Appreciate it. All right. Uh, can I have a motion to adjourn?
Bill, Bill. All right. I assume we're all good with the journeying. Good. Um, I just.
If this meeting has remote access, one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the town website. When required by law or allowed by the chair's person wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting, maybe do so via remote access. Public comment limited to two minutes, although on this committee we are more flexible and you can speak to a reasonable amount of minutes. Is anyone from the public on? Can you guys see?
I can't see, but Olivia and I can see. No, no one is here. That's not on the committee. No public. Okay. So, I'm going to note for the minutes that we have in attendance committee members, vice chair, which I'm thrilled about, Neil Gordon, Steve Garone, and Ellen Tohn, and associate members Clovis Schaff and John Harper, and town staff Julie Gagin and Olivia Zardo? I feel like I haven't gotten your name right correctly. Zardo, you got it. I got it. Great. So, it sounds like Kavi is not joining us tonight.
It looks like she's not here. All right. So, I'm going to just, on the agenda, hand it off. In looking at the agenda, Julie, I sent you guys a note about the MVP project, the letter of support, Julie. So, that was not anticipated when we wrote the agenda. So, I just want to make sure you kind of cover that when we get to that. And, let me just say, I'm also a little delinquent and replying to Marlena on some emails. So, I'm hoping you can catch me up and I can jump into that. So, I'll hand it over to Olivia.
Okay. Hi, everyone. I was just going to give you an update on HomeWorks and having a guest speaker from HomeWorks come to our meetings. Obviously, no one's here tonight. The representative I'm working with, her name is Rachel. She actually just got married as well. So, I haven't talked to her in about two weeks. So, I just touched base with her last week. So, I felt like it would be a little short notice to have her show up tonight. So, she is coming to our next meeting to answer any questions that we have about HomeWorks or their process in comparison to the past home energy audits that we had done in Wayland. So, I was going to kind of extend an offer to the committee to just send me some questions. Obviously, day of when she's here at our next meeting, if something comes up, we can just ask her. But just so she can prep, if before the next meeting you could just send me your questions, I can forward those to Rachel and then she can prepare and kind of answer those a little better on the spot. And then, as far as HomeWorks goes, they are sending out a mailer within the next couple weeks, which is exciting. And there is a town newsletter statement going out about it so residents know it's like a legitimate mailer and to look out for it. So, that's exciting. And that's kind of it on the HomeWorks front. I don't know if anyone has any questions before I move forward. Yeah, I think you could just put in your own notes. When we've done this before, it's been helpful to just get updates. What did they do? How many people have reached out to them for an assessment? How many people are scheduled? We just kept regular tallies. Number that reached out, the number that conducted an assessment, the number that moved forward with any insulation or weatherization. And if they didn't, sort of why not? Sometimes there were just no opportunities identified. So, that, and they track all that stuff from assay that's not asking them to do anything they're not already required to do. Okay, perfect. No, that makes sense. I'll definitely let her know that that's what we want to hear. And then, she can get those numbers for us. Right. And I'll send you the questions, Van. But the basic question is when someone asks me, I had this done five years ago. Why should I do it again? Are they looking for any different? That's the basic question I get over and over again. And Neil's not, we just had someone do it just to test it out. And they're like, they just didn't find anything else. They're not looking for anything. So, I want to be able to understand that because I thought they were doing more around heat pumps than they had in the past. But I don't really understand that. Okay. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. So, I'll make sure she gets that. And then anything else, just send it my way, please, before the next meeting and I'll get that to her. Um, and then the other thing I wanted to bring up, and I actually have, like, a short one-pager to share. Um, Julie and I were getting ready to apply for the Mass EVIP grant. Um, we are going to be playing for it. You might want to, wait, you might want to remind that everyone's up on the jargon. Like, what is EVIP? What is that? Sorry. Um, electric vehicle incentive policy. Is that what it stands for, Julie? I'm not even sure. I guess I'm not up on the jargon either. Sorry. Basically, it's an EV, it's a pot of money to help subsidize electric vehicles. Yeah. Okay. Um, thank you. So, um, we were planning on applying for a new, um, fully electric facilities vehicle for one of our, um, head facilities maintenance men. Um, and then we were also planning to apply for a new EV station at the public safety building for non, um, emergency responding vehicles. Um, so I'll just share my screen quick so you can see what I'm talking about. It'll probably make more sense. Just give me one second.
Okay. And then can you, sorry, can you see my screen? No. Not yet. Okay, what about now? Now we can see it. Okay, perfect. Um, so as I said, um, we're going to be applying for a new, um, fully electric facilities work van, which is exciting. Um, and then just like the, a little description about what, oh, sorry, did you lose me? No. It's like grayed out. It says no network connection was lost. I'm sorry. Um, but, um, so the mass EVIP grant, which we're applying for, um, provides incentives to buy or lease electric vehicles up to 10,000 pounds. Um, and then the maximum funding would depend on the type of vehicle. Um, and because we're applying for a fully electric vehicle with no, no gas power, um, we have an eligibility of up to $7,500 for this vehicle. Um, so we're going to be applying for the full amount. And on top of that, after we apply for the EVIP funding, we can also apply for green communities funding on top of that and put that extra funding towards our electric vehicle. Um, and that'll look like, you know, completing the extra, um, cost to fully buy the vehicle out, but then also putting in customizations like, um, racks and shelves for our maintenance people. And Julie, I don't know if you have anything else you want to add to that. Yeah. I mean, we have budget that will cover the cost of the vehicle, but when it comes to, you know, like this work van is going to be in service for a long time. It's replacing a van that is, um, older than Olivia. So, so we're, you know, we're trying to get it customized in a way that functions for the long haul. So it's not just about getting an electric vehicle, um, but it's also about having something that's really highly functional for our, um, our custodial crew. So we're hoping that the, um, by having the extra funds, we'll have a little bit more leeway to be able to get, um, a good setup in the back. Um, the customizations that we're finding from the Ford dealership aren't great. So we will have to figure out how we use budget and incentives, but, um, we should be able to really like make that those dollars work and get, get a good work van for the crew. And then for the, um, public safety building, we had the, we had the electrician come today to see if we had capacity for charger chargers at public safety. And we have more than enough. Um, so he's working on a quote for the electric, electric piece. Um, and because we work with him on a number of buildings, um, he's a very fair, fairly priced person. We don't have to hire a third party vendor to do all this. Um, you know, typically like when I, when I worked in Weston, we had to hire like a third party Voltrek. It's one of the names of the companies or Vertex is what we've used here in the past. Um, and then they have an upcharge on top of just buying the equipment and doing the electrical work because we have a great electrician. And that's, has installed a number of these around in the area. We are able to save on cost, which should get us the charging stations that we want. Um, Hey Julie, just, just a question. So I'm a little confused. So at the public state, we've talked, we talked about this before you came on board. So I'm just trying to reconcile these two kinds of, this is a charger at the public safety building just for municipal vehicles. I assume it's a dumb charger, right? Like we're not trying to buy, so you pay a bunch of money also for software and things like that. Are we just, or is it, what are we installing? Sure. So we are going to have a typical charger. It's just not going to be publicly accessible. The same, it's not going to be advertised. So, um, that's why massive, it may or may not be able to cover the cost, but I think green communities will, um, at least partially cover the cost. If it's not publicly accessible, the, you might not know this, but I did get a recently get an electric vehicle. Um, and so I'm now very familiar with the charging stations in town and like our town building chargers are not listed publicly on the charge point website. Like you can't find them. Um, I know that they're there and I use it on a routine basis. And I'm, I'm fine with it, not being advertised because I'd like to be able to get my spot and off and, and actually they are used pretty often by our municipal vehicles. Um, when I spoke with the city of Cambridge about what they do for their municipal fleet chargers, they do the same thing. So they still have a charge point charger. They're just not making it publicly accessible on the website. I think we had, we had thought about, do we really need all the charge point software for just charging our own stuff for the so-called dumb charger, which is a terrible word for that. But I don't know, John, do you remember this conversation that we had this? I remember us thinking about this. Yeah. I don't know if they still offer that. I mean, all these companies change their offerings on a regular basis. I'm kind of pleased to hear that in some respects that if it's primarily focused for town vehicles, those should have primacy and maybe this is a nice middle ground. Yeah. And, um, and like I said, city of Cambridge has, you know, a pretty significant fleet expansion of electrified vehicles. And so like, if anybody's going to have this down, it's them. Um, and they're kind of establishing best practices and best practice is to continue to use charge point. Cause you also need, you need an established relationship with it, with the vendor. You're still going to have software with it, even if you don't, you know, it's not going to be plugged into the wall and our fire chief would never allow that. Um, so they want it removed it on a standalone, they call it a ballistic baluster, a charger, you know, like you'd see anywhere else. Um, and also I should say, Olivia got us in with another company. Um, and so we're exploring using blink instead of charge point. Um, the cool thing about blink and they did, they totally cold called us and Olivia took the call, which I really appreciated because, um, they, as you know, as you know, if you have an electric vehicle charger, electric vehicle, the charger, the capacity of that charger will influence how fast you can charge your vehicle. Um, and the charge point chargers that we have are only 6.6 kilowatts, which for somebody with a car that has a hundred kilowatt battery is very, very slow. Um, it takes me almost two full work days to charge my car up to 80%. Um, whereas the blink chargers have 16 kilowatt, um, charge capacity for each port, which is almost triple what we're getting, you know, it's definitely, it's a function also of what the grid, um, will support what that site will support. So we may want more capacity, but sometimes the utility will charge more for that higher capacity because you're pulling down more electrons from the grid. Right. So, um, it just depends. The other criteria that kind of militates in favor of bigger companies, they're just more likely to be around. Um, uh, Julie, I don't know how often you go over to the stop and shop, but there are some chargers right there and there have been chargers there that have been out. Not as of today. Most of them. I've never seen them. Yeah. Well, they were out of commission for months on end type of thing. They still are. Yeah. It's just a, when you get an orphan to charger, it's not good. Yeah. I'm, I'm happy. I think blink is doing a good job getting into the market and we've, we have some frustrations with charge point because they are so big and they have, they own so much of the infrastructure right now that they don't have the same, you know, they kind of have a corner on the market and the result is that the service doesn't need to be there. They can be really slow to respond to things. It can be difficult to get in touch with people. It's just, it's a dynamic market. There's low barriers to entry. It's a wild west land grab, whatever the metaphor you want to use. So companies are going to go to the wall here, even despite our best efforts to find the survivor, but the chances of finding the survivor are low. John, are you saying be wary if blink is new to the market? And the question is, will they be around charge point? We'll probably be around. I don't know enough about the others. I think it's more in the sense, just looking at the terms of the contract, because if whoever we choose, you know, ABC go, if they fall apart, how easy is it for us to get out of the contract? Maybe we just don't do a 15 year contract, but we do a five year contract or a two year contract. Yeah. I don't know when I'm just thinking about the possibilities, because we know that technology is evolving. They'll, they're going to pair them up with a storage capacity. I'm seeing proposals now where companies for fleets, corporate fleets will put in storage batteries and EVs so that you don't have to rely on all the power coming from the grid. So this stuff is just evolving quickly. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing about, again, like having a, a charger that has software is that we can start to optimize the electricity use. We can set our charging cycles and schedules and stuff like that as well. But again, when it comes to a fleet vehicle, I can tell you for a fact that like, it's not sustainable for us to have a 6.6 kilowatt charger dedicated for our fleet. You know, like we need faster and to have, we're not going to get a level three this year. Um, we don't need it yet, but when we do need a level three, um, you know, that'll help us to really expand our fleet for now, having something that is faster than what we have available will help kind of make that bridge. Although the police will have it for the, just themselves. But I did see a proposal from a company, um, wearing my day job hat for corporate fleet type stuff. And I don't know, we're, we're still sort of the one by ones sort of phase, but if I can find the name of the company again, I'll send a link to it over to you. And then you can decide. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those, it's the same thing as having that third party vendor. It's going to cost more money for us. And we just don't have the volume yet to, for it to make sense. That's the problem. We're one by one sort of install. Yeah. Go ahead, Steve. No, I was just going to mention that, um, there are some high speed charger options. Um, one of them I became familiar with because of the car, at least was electrify America. Um, they have, they're, they're not, there's not as many of them as I'd like to see, but there's some in Marlboro and there's some in, um, I think Medfield. Um, and, uh, they charge, they, they claim up to 350 kilowatts and they're, they're, you know, they're public. Yeah. We, um, what you said, we're just, we're not quite ready for that yet, but I think there would be an option. Yeah, I agree. I, it would be great to have a publicly accessible one because then we don't have to worry about one, installing it on our property to will be, it would be easier to get it funded, but then we wouldn't own it either. And we'd be paying retail costs for the charging that we use there. Um, blink has level three chargers that we can purchase from them. So it really is just a matter of us having the lines and the capacity within the lines. And that's where we run into a lot of issues in Wayland because we were kind of at capacity and don't have a lot of, um, extra space in our, in the grid. But it almost most of Wayland is in the red zone. So that's where the level threes become a little bit tricky. Um, I'm not sure that that's going to get solved anytime soon, but for now, this is a great in-between space.
Okay. Yeah. And we'll see, we are, we're going to look at the contract. We're not going to put ourselves in a position where we're stuck with something that we can't, um, get out of anytime soon. But I do think, you know, like when I look at the different companies that are available and that are offering like good quality chargers that are serving more, what we're looking for, which is that higher capacity. Um, I think Blink's working hard to get into the market. ChargePoint just doesn't have, at least from what I've seen, one, I asked for a quote days ago and Blink has already given us the fact sheet and is getting us the, the quote. Um, and we haven't heard back from ChargePoint yet. So yeah, fair. Yep. Okay. I think there's- One very small comment is, um, uh, the state's, the, the, um, EV or state's reimbursement program, they do have a list of approved vendors. It's a pretty long list, but before you go too far down the road, just do a quick check to make sure that Blink's in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point.
Likely they are. I mean, they wouldn't start proselytizing until they got that, you know, gold seal of approval, but good to confirm. Yep. Um, and I think that was all for me. I just wanted to mention the EVIP grants, like we just talked about homework. So I'm good to turn it over to Julie, if you're ready. Sure. And the, the EV charger was sort of on both of our dockets. So yeah, yeah, no, we're definitely, we're still getting quotes from both ChargePoint and Blink. So to be determined. Yeah. Um, so Ellen, I'll start with the MVP project if you want. You're, you're, you're in charge. Okay. Um, and then I'll go through the electrification projects that we're doing around town. Um, so last week DPW reached out to me because they've applied for MVP grants a few times and have not received them. Um, and so it's been a number of years since you might, um, I think I know, but I'm not sure Steve and Clovis who are new to the committee know what an MVP grant is. Sure. And Bill is raising his hand. Is he in the, um, I don't see him. Cause I, I don't see him. Can you look in the, I don't see him. You got to, I think only the managers can see that Steve there now, but he's there twice. I don't see him at all. I see him twice. Can you hear us? Yeah.
He's raising his hand. So you're on twice, Bill. That's why. Okay. That's interesting. I wonder how that happens. All right. Well, let me, let me go back out and I'll see if I can come back in. Okay.
All right. So Olivia, I'll let you be on it. Um, so MVP stands for municipal vulnerability preparedness. It's through the state's executive office of environmental affairs. Um, MVP in your 2016 to 2020 was funding a lot of climate action plans and, um, planning grants, um, for, or basically big dollars to get a climate at local climate action plan. Um, they're now in the phase of, they also do funding for hazard mitigation plans, which I think we're in the process of updating hours. Um, and they offer a variety of things adjacent to climate change, mostly focused on stormwater. So Bill, you made it. Hi, Bill. Um, so the MVP grant that they are applying for is for some green stormwater infrastructure around Dudley Pond, um, and they wanted some help with writing the grant. And, um, I've worked with MVP quite a bit in the past and I'm familiar with what they're looking for. So I've been working with their engineering team on design concepts that will help be more palatable for MVP. And also the grant writing, um, is Melissa involved in that DPW and our town engineer. Okay. The site there's, she works with the Dudley Pond association. So like, yeah, yes. Very knowledgeable. Oh, she's great. And she does a lot of really cool projects. And I think this for her is like, she really wants to see this happen and she's been trying for a couple of years to get it. So, um, we're, I'm, I'm helping write the grant, um, and get, you know, a better, better language around the, the benefits, the climate impact and the benefits around, um, you know, why we want green infrastructure and that kind of thing. And one of the, some of the cool things that we've added since I got involved with the project is they're doing a little bit more like, um, demonstration, like rather than it just being a, um, vegetated area that captures stormwater and in, you know, does some infiltration ahead of the pond. So this is looking at an area that has an, in part of a neighborhood where the, the water runoff goes right from somebody's yard, like basically into the pond. And so we want to create some barriers, some natural barriers and vegetated areas to capture their water, to slow it down. Um, and to also improve, uh, water absorption, water quality before it enters the pond. Um, and so they're planning a demonstration area, a potential, like, you know, small walkway where you'll be able to walk through it, um, to access the pond and also to look at the various demonstration plants that are in the, you know, like a rain garden type of, of planting. We'll also have some signage and some, um, educational materials on how you can put, you know, what plants to plant in your yards and how to basically install your own vegetated barrier, which I thought was pretty awesome. Um, and so they asked for a letter of support from ECC. They've asked for a letter of support from different town departments. So, um, I'm working on one from Olivia and I sustainability, I don't know, sort of like a subset of facilities, but, um, you know, we'll focus on like the climate, climate change benefits and stuff like that. We'll be referencing the, um, camp plan. Um, and we're also getting a letter from our partners in Framingham because it is near the Framingham line, um, and the grants do Friday. So Julie, my question is, um, in the past, I've written a letter as the ECC chair. Do we think that would also be helpful to have a letter from the committee in addition? And if so, I, I think I need a vote on that, that it's okay to do that. And I would love template language. Yeah, we have a draft already. So, um, I would love to get a vote. Uh, I've just, I've asked you guys before and we've done it every time, but, um, um, um, are people comfortable with me, us sending a letter from the committee as we've done before in support of this? Any concerns about that? Sounds like a great project. We should support it. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if we need to vote. We've talked about it. I think. Okay. Great. Yeah. Also, I'll get you some language, Ellen, tomorrow and we can go back and forth and get it. Okay. That sounds great. Ping me. You know how to reach me if I'm unresponsive. Great. Yeah. Um, all right. Thanks. We talked about the EV charger. Does anyone have any questions on that before I move through the next? Okay. Um, so just a couple of the projects that are sort of ongoing and where they're at around town. Um, we are doing a handful of small scale electrification projects. Uh, the, in the middle school, we're looking to replace the domestic hot water with a heat pump. Hot water. Um, and we may have, we have some extra capacity in our natural gas boilers. So we may be creating like a, a backfeed loop in the event. I don't know how they're going to work this, but they're talking about having that as backup if needed. Um, but we should be able to electrify the hot water in the middle school because there really isn't a ton of water used in the middle school that is hot right now. Um, and we have a quote for it. And I think we're waiting for town meeting for the funds to get released, but we also applied for the green school works grant to cover the cost. Um, I reached out to the green school works because after we submitted the application, I want to say a couple of weeks ago, a green school works emailed everyone that had applied and said, thank you all so much for your interest. We have $19 million. We received requests for $120 million. So it will be a very competitive grant round. And so I asked them if they were going to partially fund projects and, or fund pieces of projects because we requested funds, not just for the domestic hot water, but also to replace a bunch of rooftop units on the middle school, which are also very much overdue to be replaced or air handlers. Um, we're looking at finding other ways to fund that. Um, but we have a lot of units like in the middle school ceiling, um, almost every classroom and walkway, especially in the older part of the building, um, has these air handlers that are loud and clunky and very old and very much overdue to be replaced. Um, and so we're trying to find an opportunity to use some efficiencies and replace a lot of the, the components of that, of the air handling, um, and also the heating and cooling because it is kind of a clunky system. So we'll see if we get that. I think we applied for $2 million total for a handful of rooftop units and the domestic hot water. Um, we'll probably wait until we hear back from green school works as to what, um, as to how we fund it, but we will probably do the replacement this summer, um, while school's out of session. So I'm hoping that the timing works out well for that. Um, we are also doing, um, as I said, I think last time we had rise engineering come and do a sweep of all of our buildings. Well, not all, but the three lower schools, the middle school and town building in the library, um, for lighting replacement projects. So we have, um, the end of our lighting incentives finally from the mass safe program coming to. So we have until October 1st to get our projects done. Um, and we are, we should have a final quote from rise this week. He said he was working on it this week. Um, we had to get some additional pictures of the light fixtures and the bulbs and stuff like that. So he could one-to-one replace, you know, provide like reasonable replacement and do the calculations necessary to prove that like there is value in, you know, energy savings to be had. Um, there's a lot of lightings to be replaced in the upper level of town building. I didn't realize how bad it was up there, kind of feel bad for the school department. Um, so, you know, when they're a little snippy, if they don't respond to something you request, just know that they have some pretty ugly lighting schemes up there in their offices. Um, so we should have a quote soon and that, that will, that quote will include all the incentives. Um, rise is expecting to hear back from the mass safe program. They'll have the incentives layered into our final quote. And if all goes well, fingers crossed, we will have the quote and the incentives available in time for us to apply for green communities funding to cover the remaining cost. Um, green communities is due April 10th. So we're hoping to incorporate some electric vehicle incentives, right. For that, um, for the charger, for the police station and the, uh, work van, and then also the sliding project. And we'll keep that all contained within the green communities grant. And that should be fine. So that even though we are applying for the green communities grant, um, we'll still be eligible to apply for climate leaders funding for separate, a separate project. Just on green communities, we were getting pretty close to the million dollar cap. So I assume you're applying for sort of what gets you to the cap. I forget what our headroom is on that. Sure. So even once you get to the cap, you can still apply for up to $125,000 for your grant. Um, and because we are, just so you know, we're going to be a climate leader soon. Um, and we're actually going to hear about that probably about a week after I finally finish, there's a table I need to update. Um, so we should be hearing about that soon, but because we are going to hear about that before the green communities funds are released, we can only apply for up to $125,000 for the green communities program. So that's part of being a climate leader. So technically we lost out on maybe like $125,000 of green communities funding, but, um, We're going to apply for the bigger pot being a climate leader, so that's okay. Okay. So you're, you, you understand the headroom you got to get within. Um, we, you know, the last time we applied, we did not get the money. And I think maybe it wasn't enough of a fitting their criteria. Do you feel that you're hitting the right notes or you've talked to Dylan about this? And yeah, and we're, we're due to talk with him. I, like I said, I have, I owe him something and I keep getting these new things like the MVP grant kind of came out of the woodwork. Um, so as soon as I get that, the MVP done, Dylan's getting all of our attention. We'll talk with him about it before we apply, because he wanted to know ahead of time who was applying and what we're requesting. Yep. Um, so I'm kind of anxiously waiting on rise to get us this information. We'll deliver all the things we owe to Dylan and, um, and then we'll hear back before we, you know, go through the grant process. Bill? Yep. Uh, how does, uh, all of this affect both the operating and the capital budgets of the town? In other words, are these projects already in those? In which case, if we get a grant, the budget gets better. Are these projects over and above what are currently in the, uh, the current, the operating and capital budgets? Um, yeah, sure. So that's complicated because the budget's still in process right now. Yeah. Well, sort of. I mean, it's been, it's been signed off by the select board and by the finance committee. So it's pretty, it's pretty firm at this point. Yeah. So it hasn't been voted on by the town, obviously. Right. Um, I mean, some of it is part of the capital request. So, you know, it's a conversation. I think there is a lot of, um, like in the last two weeks alone, we've had a lot of new things crop up that were not part of the budget that we're scraping to find funds for like the library roof leak, which was a major, major problem. Um, this is what happens when you have a really snowy winter and then a very fast melt, uh, the high school roof, ton of water leaking. Um, the, yeah, I mean, I'm talking about FY 27, but sure. Yeah. I'm, I'm just saying that like, when it comes to capital expenses and budget, if there's available dollars, there's projects that need to get done. Um, I mean, I, I can't imagine. Yeah, that's a little different than my question and we can talk offline, but you know, every time we have a finance committee meeting, it's, it's disgusting, you know, either even $50,000 line items, you know, is this in or out and do we keep it or not? And so if I can come in and say, look, you know, we've got a million dollars in the budget that we may not need if we get this grant, that's a really, really important thing to bring up with the finance committee. Yeah, I think, I think the way to look at it as we are offsetting what would be future expenses in future budget years by funding it through grants. And that's critical. If you can provide me with those numbers, because yeah, I mean, we're, we're scraping to find, you know, even a half a million dollars. And if, if you got, you know, it'd be a lot of credit to our committee and to, uh, you know, the whole sustainability, if we can say, look, in fact, you know, a million dollars might be the difference between doing a two and a half override and not. So, I mean, in theory, you know, it's probably not, you know, it's hypothetical, but in theory, your grants could keep the town from going to a prop two and a half next year. So, yeah, you know, that's such a good point, Bill, because it's not even just the grants. It's also, I will say that this facilities department under Mike Fea, he's so efficient with, and, and proactive with the work that he's doing in the town built. Like there's just a lot of need across our building portfolio, and we've been able to get a lot of stuff done. Um, and the fact that we have leadership across town, like I said, the, um, Mike is like, where else can we put a solar canopy? Where else can, you know, like we install EV charging and we've got a police chief that is asking for electric vehicles and asking for EV charging. And he's wanting a solar canopy there. So, you know, like we have a lot of really good support, um, from leadership in town, which is honestly a breath of fresh air for me, because that's not, that was not my experience in Weston. So, um, there's a lot available and yet to your point also, and I think this is something that we've talked about in the past, Ellen. Um, and we might've mentioned to talk about at some point soon, um, to get a sense of how much we're gaining from our solar canopies. And the value of that is a hot topic, not just for our budget and for FinCom, but also because we've got the solar bylaw conversation coming up in the not too distant future. So, um, I think quantifying all that stuff is really, really helpful and you're right. Like this is a good time for that. Uh, you guys can talk a little more offline bill about what, uh, I think basically it's not trying to offset something in the upcoming budget, but by doing these things, we will avoid future costs in the budget, uh, looking at the next few years, but we usually keep a running table bill of all the grant funds we've brought in and that, that might be a good, you know, FinCom hasn't seen that probably. So me, you, you know, you and Julie can talk about what you think would be most helpful. Yeah, it's less helpful to offset future costs. I mean, it's, you would think, but it doesn't have the same impact because that kind of gets taken for granted. But if you can say the current budget, we're not going to spend something, that would be really good. Well, it's kind of like it's in the budget, but I've also applied for grant funds. And if those come through, then the, then what we actually, you know, we'll have some headroom in the budget. Perfect. And that's, that's what I'm looking for. So, so I think Julie, you got some of those, right? They're in the budget, but we're concomitantly applying for grant funds. We'll know by X date, if they come through. Then we, that's exactly a hundred percent. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Okay. Julie, I'll let you, I'm happy to work with you on that. Sure. Good. Oh, and then just one quick thing. Smart meters are getting installed all over Wayland in the near future. If you have an Eversource bill, I'm sure you got that letter already. Um, I reached out to Eversource because obviously we're, we have concern about losing power for our public buildings and what that schedule would look like. Um, so I'm in conversation with them. Once they start working in Wayland, they'll be working all over Wayland. So as soon as I have a sense of what the timeline is for that, I'll just give you all a heads up. Um, it shouldn't affect our public buildings, but for your homes, you may lose power for five minutes while they do the meter change out. Um, but they should notify you two to three days ahead of time about when they'll be there. Um, and I think that's, oh, and then the last thing, Ellen is Wayland power choice. And, um, I'll make it brief. Cause I think we're just going to have to touch base. You and I just need to touch base. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so Marlena gave us a draft website. So guys, Marlena works for, uh, Peregrine. There's our consultants on this. Uh, and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we just to, yeah. And again, just to remind everyone, we're moving from those three choices, including the one that's a hundred percent green down to a single one base rate available to all, um, our Eversource customers through the community aggregation program. Um, Marlena has a bunch of draft language that she pulled from the city of Newton when they made that change and it seemed to work well for them. So Ellen and I just need to review it. Um, there's also, she drafted letters for everyone that's on currently subscribed to the hundred percent green. Yeah. Um, so we have a letter specifically to them and then a letter to everyone that's, you know, like your basic service subscribers. And I think a letter also for the people that were in the standard green as well. Um, and so we just have to review all that, make sure it meets, I'm sure we'll want to make a couple of minor changes and corrections. Um, and then also we have a draft website that we need to look at review and provide comments on and she wants all of that.
Like within the next couple of weeks. So that's fine. Next week, more challenging for me. So if you and I can find a time offline this week, just, um, some, this is a good week for me. Um, one other thing I would just request for her, she's very good at this. If she could also produce some language that would go in a newsletter, like energized Whalen newsletter goes to 900 people. My guess of the 138 people signed up for a hundred percent green. A lot of them get that newsletter. So that's a nice, sometimes people need to hear it a couple of times and, and also for the town newsletter. And, um, so it's slightly different text in the newsletter format. You know, less words. Agreed. Yeah, that's a great idea, Ellen. Yeah. Quick question. If 30 seconds, maybe others already know this, but why are we going from three to one? Uh, we talked about this in the, uh, an earlier meeting at length. Julie, you want to summarize? You want me to do it? Sure. Um, so the, the way that we purchase our electricity, um, through the bill, bill, bill was on the committee that's selected. He knows this well, right? So we use recs to, to, to offset the cost. The rec market is currently, um, because of federal permitting issues and projects that would have been funded through that, that rec fund, not coming online and not being. Like currently coming online anytime soon. Um, the funds that are in that rec, basically bank account are now being used to offset rate, bear rate, payer costs. So they're just getting put as credits on people's bills rather than being invested into green energy projects. And so, uh, the city of Newton was the first to pull the three options and, and move down to one until that rec market stabilizes out and, or starts being utilized for what it was originally intended for. Um, and we just felt like it was, um, false advertising to suggest that you were paying for a hundred percent green option. When in reality, you're paying for a discount off somebody else's bill. So basically the rec, the class one recs aren't, the utilities are having a hard time meeting the RPS because the wind products got pulled bill. And so the market is, there's really no value across one recs. So the money's going to ACPs, alternate client, alternate compliance payments. And the governor has twice now used the ACP money to lower rate payer, uh, bills across the state. And we just felt in good and conscious. We couldn't say to people, you're a hundred percent green. So what is the one, is the one a hundred percent is the one? No, it's the RPS. It's the RPS. Okay. So then why are we doing it at all? We'll get a better price than basic service. All right. Yeah. We'll get a way better price. Okay. And more stable. Cause as you know, it, it'll essentially, it'll essentially be Wayland economy, what we used to call Wayland economy. And we, we set it for a little more than two years, uh, two years and a couple of months to put us on a better cycle when we bid next. We hope by then the federal situation is different and the market will be different. Okay. All right. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no worries. No, you're fine. It's good to know. It's good to understand it too, because people will ask. And Clovis has had his hand up for a while. Yeah. Clovis. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Muted Clovis. I lowered my hand, but I did not unmute. So it's kind of related to that limit, more limited choice. Um, so you spoke about smart meters being hold out. So I'm thinking about time of use coming next, right? Is that going to come on a consumer per consumer basis? Or is that going to be discussed between the source and the town? How does that work all out of time of use rates? So, um, Olivia and I were talking about this today because she, um, has a smart meter. Olivia, you look frozen. Um, she's moving. I can see her move.
Yeah, I think she, I think she might be frozen. So there's, there's like a whole program available for, for residents. Um, if you, if you have a smart meter in your house and you have a smart thermostat, um, you can get credits on your bill. It will automatically adjust based on the amount of use in the grid, um, demand pricing, basically, and lower your usage and, or essentially like increase your thermostat during like peak cooling use in the summer, that kind of thing. Um, or lower your thermostat during peak heating in the winter. Um, if you enroll in the program, then you get a credit on your bill at the end of the, of your, of the season, basically with as, as a participant on the municipal side, it's a very different animal because we have building management systems and, um, protocols and some old equipment that is not so easily manipulated, like a, you know, like because of the scale. Uh, so we can participate in demand pricing and we will over the summer. Um, but it's going to be a lot more like setting protocols, um, setting, uh, you know, like what are we different call mechanisms and stuff like that within our building management system and also checking our sensors and stuff like that. But we should also see a financial benefit for participating in that, um, at the municipal level, hopefully at scale, because I'll tell you, I just paid our electric bills for last month. And I think we spent over $130,000 in one month on electricity bills. So it's not fun. You know, Clovis is a good point. I, I, I was on a webinar where they were talking about this program, which I'm now, it's basically a demand response program. I forget what it's called, but only certain, you know, thermostats qualify. It would be, Olivia, I think an interesting, once people's smart meters come in to put that in the newsletter and, um, certainly the energized Wayland newsletter could taste. Now that you have this, you might qualify for this program. Here's the link. These are the kind of, these are the four thermostats that qualify. You know, we're just trying to educate folks and it'd be a great thing also for COA and you could do a little briefing for COA. So it's all good community service. Sorry, I cut out. Um, but I did look on the, the website on Eversource's website and I can forward you all the information, but I think there's about like, I think there's 12 thermostat brands that qualify. One of them is Honeywell and my apartment has it. So I will be enrolling and I can report back how that goes, but definitely, yeah, definitely I'll promote to everyone. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's good. Yeah.
Olivia is available to do it because they've already done these smart meter upgrades in her community. So that's why she's ahead of the curve, which is great. Um, yeah, I live in Framingham and they just did the switch like last week. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to comment. So I, I, I registered for connected solutions. I think that's the program. That's it. Yeah. Via ECO, ECO B. Yeah. It's my thermostat. Only one of the two. And it's, it's, it's a bit convoluted, let's say, uh, one to get access to information and then two to understand what's happening because I registered, I think just for events, but then now ECO B is telling me, Ooh, there is time of use right now. So we are going to put your thermostat down to maybe 50 or 40, 50 Fahrenheit. So it's a bit confusing to me as an, as a consumer, I might have a smart meter because I got solar panels, but that's not what I signed up for. So it's feels messy. Ah, well, it'd be good. You and Olivia be a use case before we promote this a little more substantially. Yeah. That would be great, honestly, because I'll tell you connected solutions also means something different in the municipal space. So yeah. So I'll let you know, Clovis. Yeah. I think it'd be good. You guys do it. And if you have a good experience, then I really think not the program, but actually your story is what gets people to do stuff. So Clovis, let's think about that for like Energize Whalen, Olivia, like in the newsletter, like this available. I did it. Here was my experience. I think those kinds of things are what people respond to. Julie, before I forget, because I'm not, because I already forgot. Yeah. And it's in like, I want to put it in your bucket. Sure. The Whalen Post, you know, I'm on this all the time. I think if we get the climate leader designation, I'd like to think about that as a story. Yep. And the other thing I still want to bug you to do, and let's bug June for you to introduce yourself to the community. Oh, yeah. She's already bugging me about it. Yeah, we're talking. Oh, good. You're talking good. All right. So let's do that. And then I also proposed to her, they're trying to get on a more regular schedule, guys. So they would want something like every two weeks, which is actually a lot of content. So I was proposing that maybe we would do once a month, just highlight a person in town that's done cool green things. We did this at our temple. We called it, Steve, you'll appreciate this. We called it the climate mensch of the month. And we would just highlight, but we could, you know, call it, you know, the climate champion of the month and we could just pick different people. And mostly you need pictures that that's what people like pictures and a few words. So, you know, if you're in touch with her a bunch, I asked her that question. She didn't respond. But if you're talking to her, you know, see, see about her, her, her interest. And we, we can certainly, Michael Delman just gave me a great video testimonial about his induction cooktop. So, you know, it could be, um, not just words, but a link to a, you know, a fun video, because a lot of people read that electronically, the post. Great. Okay. Okay, good. I'm glad you're doing that. I think it's, uh, you know, we get chastised a lot and it's appropriate that we do a bad job of telling our stories. So we, it's one of the things I'd really like us to continue to work on. Well, and also it's hard to understand from the outside. I I'm, I'm finding this as a new EV owner. I understand things that at such a greater depth now that I own it. Um, because I'm living it every day and it's, it's just so different from somebody who might've heard about it, but hasn't invested, um, at the same level. And so it's helpful to have that contextual information. Um, there was one other thing that I've wanted to bring up because it is a very hot topic. Um, and we don't have to talk about it in depth, but I wanted to bring all of your attention to it. And that is the, um, climate bill at the state level. I don't know how familiar you all are with it, but, um, Jamie Eldridge has her, has green advisory council meeting. Are you planning to go, Ellen? I am planning to go. Yeah. Great. Olivia and I will also be there. Um, and I'm, I'm really rallying everyone to go because I think that it's really important that we, um, are, are loud about it. Um, my state representative for my, for my hometown voted for the climate bill and is like proud of it. And I, I had a lot of words about it because it was very like tone. Um, her response was very tone depth, but, uh, deaf, but I think that it's important that we communicate on what the, what the important parts are, um, because they are talking about cutting mass saved by a billion dollars. And that, I mean, they did in the house bill. So we had a story about this in Energize Whalen, Paul Dale wrote that, um, so that went out to that, um, Julie, if you have, um, the invite from Jamie feel if you maybe forward it around to the committee in case anybody else wants to go. Jamie has this Eldridge has this green advisory council. Julie went in the context of being from Maynard. Um, and, um, I think we actually met there earlier on and, um, I've been going when I can for a long time and they have someone from the Sierra club coming to talk about what's happening. I mean, I do Mike Barrett's leading the charge on the Senate bill. It will not have a billion dollar cut. So the cut is a $13.8 billion budget. I think the house cut a billion, the Senate bill. So the compromise will be somewhere between zero and a billion. That's the way it work when it goes to committee, but I don't know. Mike is still working on his bill. I think one of the things that is good to do is to reach out to Jamie and say, thank you for supporting, um, good clean energy stuff. We're grateful. You're our state Senator. Like, I think they mostly hear when people are frustrated. So I think it's, it is important to say to Jamie, we really appreciate your support on this. And if you do the same for Mike Barrett, if you, if you feel that you have that kind of relationship with Mike. Yeah. He said that it is really important to hear from the community around this positive, negative, neutral, um, any feedback is, is helpful and you're right. Things like appreciating his support because he is such a, uh, uh, an avid climate advocate. Yep. And that's all I have. Okay. So I think it's to me now. I'll try and go reasonably quickly. Proposed solar bylaw update. The good news is the vote we took urging the planning board to withdraw their Tommy article has, uh, the situation is they have withdrawn the article. I want to thank Bill for playing a role in this. Um, um, and, um, they've, they've sort of stepped down understanding the state is doing a million things. It's just the wrong timing to do anything. So we'll take this up next year. Um, Julie and I worked really hard on this and a lot, a lot of hours, and I appreciate that. Um, and Bill again, appreciate Bill as in his role in the finance committee, just asking questions on where we were on this. So I think we got the right outcome. I think it was just a frustrating process for me. Yeah. Um, and I, and I think we'll have to, you know, be, give some thought to what we wanted to look like next year. Cause the idea isn't that this is dead. The idea is that, you know, the compromise was, Hey, if you wait a year, we'll help you. So we need to think about how we want to help them mature. Not that it's a bad idea. Right. Exactly. Um, and I think, you know, Ellen, cause I don't think that this made it to you. Um, Annette has requested a meeting with Michael as the, as a mediator between ACC and planning board to discuss this. So it's not dead. Okay. But Michael McCall. Yeah. Michael McCall. So we, we, we, we have offered that many, many times. And we'd be happy to do that. Yeah. That was my response as well. Yeah. So we're planning that soon. We will have to come up with a local permitting process and implement it by October 1st at the earliest we can implement it July 1st, but we don't have any, we don't have the guidance documents yet to be able to effectively do that. Yeah. So they just closed comments this week, um, today, I think was the last date for comments on many of the guidelines on the technical aspects. So they have to turn those review all the comments, et cetera. So, you know, sometime this summer we'll actually get a guideline, but you know, we, it's not there. I will just put a, uh, emphasis on the work that you did, Julie and Ellen. Um, it, it was, substance was the easy part. It was the politics and working with people and figuring out how to go about doing that. So kudos to you all for navigating that. And, uh, we're starting the process. So that's good. Yeah. And I, I would work, I think it was Jesse is his first name. Yeah, he's a good guy. He's a good guy. I would work with him. The surprise that I had was that his thing was, Hey, we, you know, we reached out to the energy committee several times and we never get any response. And he sincerely believed that. So there was some, you know, I don't understand who he was reaching out to, but, uh, they, they apparently were trying to get in touch with us. And then from our side, it's like, we never heard about it. So there was a really significant communication issue. And my sense going forward is, is work with Jesse. I mean, I think Jesse has a pretty clear sense that we're quite responsive because I've had a bunch of emails. Yeah, he does now. But I think before they said, we don't understand why this came up because we've been communicating with you guys. Yeah. I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to air the re rehash the dirty laundry on that. Let's just move forward. Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I agree. Yep. So happy to have a joint meeting. I think it might be better than a joint meeting. Julie would be just a few of us to just sit down with Jesse and Annette and just talk about it. Just for people who went in the last meeting where we talked about this at a significant level of detail, these new state regulations and new model bylaws and guidance. We don't have to do anything as a town. We just have to follow the state process, which is trying to expedite the permitting of solar to meet our state goals. And there is a process they're setting forth that will make it harder for communities to basically delay and push back on things unless there's a reasonable issue. So we will be implementing that if we come up with a bylaw. In addition, we'll have to be consistent with their model bylaw. And we can do that. We just have to be consistent and within the guardrails of what they're allowing. So that's the work we have to do. All right. So that's the bylaw. Plugin update. Any questions on that? Sorry, didn't mean to ramrod that through. All right. Plugin updates. Three things. One and two is that plugin. Remember, that's our sixth community effort with our neighboring communities. There are two webinars. There's induction cooktop webinar this week on Thursday, the 19th at 7 p.m. Andy Krasner is a fantastic speaker. I've worked with her. She did the report with Rocky Mountain. And so just in my professional life, I work with Andy. She's awesome. And we usually get a great turnout. So it's been in the Energize Whalen newsletter. Didn't make it into the town newsletter. I don't do. Olivia, I think you reached out to COA. I can't remember, but it's on that Excel spreadsheet. You love you. And you've got to turn your cells green when you do your task. We gave you some. So you're supposed to let us know what happened. So I just posted again in Whalen Community Forum. We've posted in Whalen Bombs Group and posts on Nextdoor. If you're on Facebook and you're in Whalen Community Forum, I just posted the reminder. It's always great if people comment on it because it bumps the post up. Steve knows this, and I'll send it out to our volunteers at Energize Whalen to bump it up. My last post included the testimonial for Michael, who's very funny, actually. So it's a fun one. The next one is the next month on heat pumps. Bob Zogg, who's a terrific guy who's done our heat pump hot water heater ones from the Heat Smart Alliance, is doing it with Kit Wu from the Laminar Collaborative. And Laminar has always been getting competitive pricing on heat pumps. So like Clovis, you would find this super interesting. They go out with sample homes and they get prices. So he's trying to create transparency around pricing. And that one is the next month. And Olivia, I think you you got that one into the town newsletter. I gave you sample text and that will be in the town newsletter, you told me. Yes, that's correct. And the other one was sent to the COA. So I'll update the cells with that. OK, that'd be great. And then the COA takes a, you know, has a long time for the monthly one. So get them the heat pump one early. So we're publicizing both of those. And when we do that, we get the list of who attended from our town from Plugin and the MassEnergize support. And then Ann or Clovis, Ann or I usually follow up with the people who attended and said, hey, you attended. How can we help you? Remember, we have coaches, yada, yada, yada. So that's good. That's one and two. We've been doing these once a month. I will say it takes a fair amount of, you know, a little bit of energy for us to do it. But super good to do. I think for the heat pump one, Olivia, we talked about, Julie, before you were here, through Plugin, we got these plastic A-frames. I'm making it A. A-frames. I knew what you meant, yeah. Yeah. And they have a slot where you can just stick a flyer in. So they were purchased for us by MassEnergize. And we were thinking, like, in the snow, it's crazy. But you could put it right outside the entrance to the COA or whatever entrance to town building that you think gets the most traffic. We have them. And Fabiana usually creates from Plugin a sample flyer. And if it's not what you want, like, Olivia, just reach out to her. Like, within a day, she gives you what you want. She's incredibly responsive. And so we just thought we'd try it. You know, it's just, and then, you know, we own these A-frames, Julie, moving forward. So you have them now. Like, frankly, you, Olivia, you could put stuff in there about get a MassSave energy audit. Like, we have them get homeworks to create a flyer that fits there with a QR code. So when someone's walking by, they can scan it or get the tiny, you know, the Bitly link that's a tiny URL to go to the right website. So these are assets we have. The third thing on Plugin is that we were, and it kind of relates to the multifamily property outreach. One of the things we were trying to do is reach to multifamily property owners. And Olivia got us a great list, but it turned out to be like less helpful for contacting. So MassEnergize and Plugin, through just some AI research, found the condos in town and the multifamily property owners and phone numbers for us, for the multifamily. So Ann and I have been making the calls. Ann's reaching out to the two or three senior living facilities that we need ones that are built before 2015. That's where RISE thinks there's the most opportunity for installation. And I, um, for condos, this should be incredibly satisfying guys. Um, I, uh, uh, uh, really felt good about it. Um, Gene Mill, uh, we had an Energize Whalen meeting and I was like, okay, who knows people living in condos? Gene was like, I know lots of people. Um, and I knew some people, so we, we pretty quickly got to people on the boards of the condo associations, um, without actually having to, there's a state registry that tells you on the condo boards and we could have, that's a route you can also go. So I've, I've had good conversations with two of them, Greenways and another one. I don't have the sheet open and both said, yeah, fine. You know, we'll, and I put them in touch with Todd at RISE, they're talking, they're going to have someone come out to an energy assessment. But the thing that was so also interesting was I said, like, we also do these webinars. Should you guys be willing to promote those to your condo members? And they said, sure, shoot it to us. You know, like, um, depending on the topic, it may like gardening may not be interesting, but like induction cooktops. Yeah. Interesting. Everyone places their own appliances. Sometimes the heat pump one may not be relevant to them or EVs, but they said, yeah, we'll, we'll send it out. Um, so that was great. And then they, um, they, they also something else they said, just for future, you know, consider us part of your extended outreach efforts. So it was like, really, we had trouble reaching people. So if we can get these intermediaries that are regularly reaching people to also be carrying our messages and they were just, I would just say they were kind of into it. They were like, yeah, this sounds great. We love that you guys are doing this. So it also, Julie struck a chord for me on having people understand what we're doing. Um, so it was, they were like very pleasant, delightful conversations. I have to follow up and Olivia, I'm keeping track of all of that in the Google doc that Fabiani created for each community on the condos and the phone numbers. And I'm keeping track of what's happening on all those. And I think Julie, it's just good information for you guys to have about people at these condo boards. There may be other ways we want, we want, I mean, um, you know, we could be communicating also about the mass save individual assessments, right? Those condos, you know, that's how that works for them too. So it'd be interesting, you know, for homeworks, we now have a way also. So I have a couple more to do this week. Um, so one of them said, so do you know people on other condo boards? And she said, oh yeah, I have a list of all those people. So I got the heads of the condo boards for two other ones. So it was just like a little bit of groundwork. It wasn't that hard and we pretty quickly got to some interesting stuff. So I'm hopeful we'll get, we've learned some things about how to reach people, which I think is also, it was good learning. I think, uh, really, um, really good learning. That's awesome. Cause that's definitely something that's come up in the past, um, in the work that I've in doing this work. And we don't have a lot of that from the town side, as you know, we have great, like building data, but we don't have people data. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So Olivia, that sheet is shared with you, Julie. And if you don't have access to it, you can reach out to Fabiana and make sure it's shared with you. But you'll see Anna, my notes in that. And, you know, Olivia's part of her job is sort of outreach. So, you know, this might be things that people, she should be in touch with also to, um, send messages out, maybe out the homeworks and energy safe stuff. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I was going to add one thing, cause I feel like I, we keep, um, missing the timeline for this, for the town newsletter. Yep. We're writing it on Monday. Yeah. You have to, you need it. Right. So I figured I said by the 15th of the month before is when you need it. That's safe. Yeah. But it, yeah, that's what I'm using. It's really like the last week of the month. I know, but I'm, I'm trying to, I build in a buffer in case I miss it. So we're trying for that. Sometimes we don't know, we don't know enough. Um, I mean, you could put something in and about, you know, that, that we have this relate relationship with the mass state vendor doing multifamily energy audits. We're reaching out to condo owners. Um, um, and, um, you know, if you're on, on a condo board, please reach out to, I mean, you can send them to me, um, and, uh, I'll, I'll do the song and dance to put them in touch with rise. I don't want the order directly to rise. Cause like, then we don't know what they've done it or not. Sure. Yeah. Well, let's put some, let's plan to put some language in, um, and whatever you guys have, we can, Olivia and I can format it into the town newsletter. I think that would be great. Okay. But, but, uh, I will try and do something for you tomorrow afternoon. Great. Okay. I get it. Send me a, just somebody send me a text. Yeah. Um, um, um, I think Energize Whalen updates, the, uh, the website mass energized software support is changing the backend. So we have up, we're just on a different platform. So the new website will go live basically April 1st, Clovis. We have like a, uh, a thing with the Ariha on the 30th to do some final step. Um, it, it will look much the same. Um, so I don't think people will feel that much of a difference. It integrates better with Mailchimp. So, um, we've had this thing in the past. Clovis is intimately familiar with this annoyance. We've had like a list for Mailchimp and then some people register on the mass energized website. And then Clovis puts them all into a master list. That problem is going to go away. There's just going to be one list for the newsletter and you'll, you'll sign up through the website. I'll get you right on the Mailchimp list. And the Mailchimp functionality we have to play around with. It's going to send people nudges about upcoming events. So if there are Julie and Olivia events that the town is doing that you want to make sure get in there, then we'll be able to nudge people. The other thing is the Mailchimp functionality allows us to segment users. So if we started to know who had done what, or like one thing we're going to try and segment on is you've attended a webinar. So that's some level of interest. And, you know, we, I did a follow-up. I know we had like, I can't remember 20 some odd people had been to heat pump webinars. I sent an email saying, you went to a webinar sometime in the last year. Just curious what you've done. Could we help you more? I only got two responses, but one said, I could really use a coach. That was great. And the other one said, actually, I did it. I'm done. I did it. So like that continued engagement was good. Also, that was one of my ones for the condo association. One of the guys said, I can actually use a heat pump coach. It was a very unique and specific thing. Clovis on a heat pump water heater, super nerdy. So I sent him to Bob Zog because it was like super, super nerdy. Like I was like, oh, I can only think of one person who can answer this question. So he and Bob are talking. But like Clovis, I missed that in our counting then of coaches. I'll, I'll submit it. So, so it gets it. So Clovis has been working on coming up with a better way when you're on the website for Energize Whalen. We now have, if you want a solar coach, click here. If you want a heat pump coach, click here. If you want an EV coach, click here. Clovis is working on one Google Forms for all our coaching. And that's, I'm hoping sometime in the next few months, Clovis will have something that you feel good about. Do you want to say more about that?
No, no. So it's town specific. And it's about also trying to have it more streamlined with other towns. And the heat smart alliance, for instance, if that's specific coaching for heat pumps. Because majority of the towns have the common form on heat smart alliance. So it's those kind of tweaks to be fine-tuned. And it's, well, it's also to measure more easily, I guess, the coaching requests coming in, our visibility on that. And I want to thank Clovis for diving into all these lists and all this stuff that can get overwhelming. So the last thing I want to talk about is planning for updating our climate action plan. I want to put out to the committee that I would like us to update it in the fall. So I want to think about what's the process we go through to update it. And I was particularly reminded of this by an email that Julie and I both got from Margie Lee and Tony's doing something at the COA. And they said, like, what has the town done on, you know, municipal buildings for, you know, decarbonization, a bunch of stuff. And I thought, wow, Margie and Tony know a lot of what we're doing. They're really involved in Energize Whalen. And I'm like, they don't know how many solar things we have or how much we're saving. So I also thought an article for the post on where we are and our climate plan, like just things we've done, even just, you know, a little quick scorecard and how we're doing, even before we update the plan, Julie. Like that's an article I could write with you. But I would love to hear from the committee about, I have my own thoughts, but many of us wrote chapters. Bill wrote a chapter. John wrote a chapter. I wrote a chapter of the plan. And we, some of the things have been done. Some of the things probably don't make as much sense anymore. And some of the things were partway along. And I think it would help us strategically. So before Julie and Olivia speak, I'm just curious, Bill, Neil, who were somewhat involved, like thoughts about the process and how you might think about this? I mean, including clubs. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good idea. I think, like you referred to, I would start by learning what we've done with respect to the current plan, because it's hard to do an update if you don't know what's been done. So that's definitely data we need before we can actually do an update.
Feedback from others? Neil? Is there a role for soliciting opinion and other perspectives in doing that plan? And how might we go about doing that? I think that would be useful. Because, you know, if you start asking a lot more people's opinion, you draw more attention to what you've already accomplished. Can you say a little bit more about, we tried to do that the first round, and we really didn't get much engagement. So I can think of two spheres. Like we actually have town employees, you know, whose departments are affected is one little sphere. But I think you're thinking more about residents. And I'm curious how you might think we could do that engagement in a way that would be meaningful, productive, and actually engage people. So, yeah, I mean, that's always a tricky question is how to get people engaged. But, you know, you perhaps have a series of small forums and specifically invite people to come rather than putting out a broad sort of, if you have an opinion, let us know anything. You say, you know, Annette Lewis, why don't you come talk to us about, you know, the future of solar in Whale? And that, for example. Okay. I mean, just brainstorming. The other thing that occurs to me now that I'm sort of, I guess, involved in the budgeting process is to have for each section, you know, is there something that needs to be in the capital budget? Or is this something we hope to fund through grants? That would be useful because there has to be a linkage between what's in the plan and what's in the five-year capital budget. Yep. Okay. Julie, I can see you're taking good notes. I am not. But, you know, that's true, Bill. And it also, though, so much of what's been accomplished has been on the town side. And, you know, we've got to figure out how to move the dial on the resident side. True. Yep. One of the things we do now actually have is some decent data on some of the things where there's okay state data on PV, EV, and heat pumps now. Um, so I do think, um, we might be able to get, there's a lot of years missing, but, um, we, we at least have, at least we have more than a complete wild ass guess. We have something a little better than that. Um, it would be really helpful. Well, and I, Julie, I think you and Olivia were endeavoring to do this, a way to kind of get Olivia also grounded was to do that. Where are we first cut? Is that something the staff could do? Yeah. Olivia has been working on it. Okay. So we're, we plug away as soon as we have some free time and then we get caught up in other things. And, but she's, she's gone through and we're looking at like, what are the goals? Like just a quick list of just of the goals outlined in the plan mentioned anywhere in the plan and then, and then segmenting them and then looking at, okay. You know, based on that, do we have a metric that we want to attach to that? What metric exists now based on the data that we have, that kind of thing. Obviously, I think you're going to have a lot of, um, a lot more input into, you know, like what are the data metrics that we're going to use? Cause I think a lot more exists now than it did then. So yeah, but we're, she's kind of framing it out and we're looking at different sections. There are probably two dozen communities that are in the exact same boat. We are with looking to update their plans and come up with some kind of annual reporting, um, that gets done. Even if it's just like a three page memo that says, oh, this year we got X number of dollars for our solar installations, or we got, you know, like this level of product, that kind of thing. So that we're standardizing it in a way that's easy for us to, you know, maintain an update. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean, these are, I love it being for the fall. Cause I think it's a nice long conversation to have. Yeah. And I think that would give you guys some time. Like I would love at maybe not the next meeting, but the meeting after that, just give us what you got, wherever you are in it. One of the things that we had looked at, Julie, I think before you came was sort of a, like a visual dashboard in little, which is sort of, you know, red, yellow, green, like this one we've made no progress on. So we should ask ourselves, is it something we can do? Is it, you know, just in the future, some have been done. And I'd, I'd like to celebrate that success since they've been done. They really come off the plan. We're done. We did those. And maybe there's an appendix to the plan. Those, these are all the things that were on the plan that we've gotten done. But for the public, I would, there's us. We're in the weeds. We are really in it deep in the weeds here. That's great. But for the public, I'd like to think about something that would show up on our website that would just be a dashboard on where we are on these things. So we're going to have to roll some of them up because they're too many. Yeah. Yeah. Have you heard anything about the update to the town website? Yeah. Okay. All right. I wasn't sure if you were getting information. I wasn't. No. I know that it's being updated. It should have been, it should be done by now. Yeah. So we'll see, but that will definitely. But I think for this, so if we plan two meetings from now and it'd be helpful to send something out a couple of days in advance, just so you know, I wrote the section on buildings. John wrote the section on solar. Tom wrote the section on the natural world. Did Anne write the section on EVs? I can't remember John who wrote. Bill, what did, Bill was an over, Harvey wrote the intro. Bill, what section did you write? Did you write a section? Yeah, I don't know. I think I was sort of the editor, you know. Yeah, I think you were the editor. I think Anne wrote the EV section then. So, you know, if you have questions about those, the person who wrote it could also be helpful to you. Helen, what is the work product? What's the goal of this exercise? I hear the word updating, but that can take a lot of different forms. And Julie mentioned that other towns are doing annual reports. Are reports different from the update of a plan? So when I suggested the update, this was a plan written years and years ago. We need to have a new plan that's the updated version. So it lists the actions we want to do and our timeline for them. There could be another section on, you know, we could say, I would like to have the things we want to be doing and recognize the things we accomplished. So it's an updated plan. It's an updated plan. I think an annual accounting of where we are could look like a lot of different things. So that's not my intention. I think that's also a useful thing. But it's like that Margie could ask me, well, what have we done? And I had to like, literally, I just kind of threw out the things I knew. But if I could have sent her to a red light, if I could have sent her to a doc, that would have been perfect. Yeah. Yeah. And Olivia did do a pretty comprehensive list of replies to her. I don't know if you got to see that. I did not see it. Yeah. She did a Google doc and answered the questions in depth. So that honestly is a great start. It was a great start. Really great questions from Margie. So. Yeah, it was great. Committing to an annual report would be a big, a good outcome. In and of itself of this is doing an annual report. Yeah. I think it legitimizes us. Yep. It'll work. It creates accountability that, you know, that's visible. One of the things we had done annually, Neil, was more like a, like an Excel sheet of the amount of grant money brought in and energy savings per year. And I think that could be part of the, that's an important part because, you know, taxpayers are paying your guys' salaries. We need to show some value that, you know, so what the value is for the taxpayer. So. Yeah. Bill is a spy for the finance committee now. We'll really appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's exactly. I mean, in an entire year, I don't think the finance committee once talked about money that we're getting through energy and climate. And, you know, so, yeah, they're, they're completely uneducated and yet we even have two, you know, energy climate professionals on the committee. Yep. And one other thought and just back your mind book for both Julie and Ellen is when we had the other plan, ultimately the select board adopted it or the board of selectment back in the day. And so will there be, it seems like at some point here, earlier and later, we start building political support for version 2.0, that they'll be excited that, you know, we're likely to get adoption of this thing. And obviously they'll want to know what's in it, et cetera, but we, we don't want to surprise them and say, Hey, we have version 2.0 without any sort of warmup act. Yeah, I mean, I think it will be a process that, as Julie knows, with the select board, it's always a two-step process. I think first we would say, here is the plan, here's what we've accomplished. And now this is, I would like to. Yeah. Yeah. It's just concomitant with our internal work. There's some external spade work that will be useful to do. And yeah. That's my wheelhouse. That's one thing that I'm pretty skilled at. And yeah, I agree. Carol had mentioned that she wanted to see certain things in the plan that weren't there. And I think it's just a matter of calling out information in a way that she can readily see. And, and I think that, you know, again, the, the red, yellow, green status is one way to do it. But it would be great to get feedback from them and a little sidebar so that we get more clarification on what they're looking for so that we're integrated with their plans. And I agree also get planning's feedback and get conservation's feedback and get, you know, information from the schools and have everyone do some goal setting because then it, then they have some skin in the game when it comes to seeing it come to fruition. When we went to the select board the first time we, we told them we had been to all those departments and they were on board with these things. So that's also part of the process for us. Okay. I'm down to 4% of my battery. So if I die, I'll come back on my phone. So I think that that's a good plan, Julie, like two meetings from now, give us a sense where we're at and let's come up with some kind of schedule and plan. The summer's not a good time for us to doing a lot of work on this, but, but in the fall, and we could, you know, commit to an in-person meeting if we want to do it on a big strategic planning thing where, you know, we have paper up and whatever, we can figure it out. It's a great idea. All right. Those were all of mine. Oh, Julie, one other thing I wanted you to just comment on. I sat in on the presentation by HMFA, you know, the school architect guys talking about this whole, you know, do we want to knock down the elementary schools and just build new ones? I, I assume in the meantime, we're doing a whole bunch of decarb stuff in there. They did say it's probably a 10 year process to get from A to B, but I'm hoping, I'm assuming and hoping that you guys are engaged in that process in some way. They are currently in the service side of, of this process. So we will be, we will have somebody on the design team. Okay. I think, I think that's required for, I would assume so, but I, I, I wasn't sure. I was, I want to make sure that sustainability, I mean, they won't get funded by the SBA unless they're doing certain sustainability things. We got a question at an Energize Whalen meeting saying, when you knock stuff down, like what's the, about, you know, you're building something new. So that's fundamentally using a lot of resources, you know, so, um, and oftentimes that is right choice because with the way we start, we're teaching fundamentally differently. So anyway, that question came up. I'm not, I don't want to address it now, but I just would like to make sure we understand what your role and is, if there are any role for the committee in this process. Yeah. And being in the facilities department, we, I mean, we have legitimate, legitimate claim to be a part of that conversation because we're going to have to come up with the maintenance plans and, you know, be part of the design team and stuff anyway. Yeah, I agree. It's, it's on my list. Um, I haven't seen anything, but I will, I'll keep paying attention. Okay. Any other items not anticipated by the chair, really by Olivia, but the agenda together. Thank you, Olivia. Anything, anybody else wants to bring up? Okay. Can we, um, there are minutes to approve. Were those sent around? Yeah, they're in the, yeah. Okay. Um, so I need to make a motion from someone to approve the minutes.
Neil, a second. Second. Thank you, Steve. Discussion on the minutes. Okay. Then I'll take a vote. I usually do a roll call for this. So Neil, Steve. Yes. Bill. Yes. Ellen. Yes. So that's a four zero. Okay. Now, um, our next meeting, and I think we are on a regular schedule, but somebody please remind me when the next meeting is. I was just looking at that and then I minimized my schedule. April.
Uh, we are, we are delayed a week in April because, oh, you know what? I don't have it on my list, on my calendar. I don't have it on the 17th. Or no, 28th. 28th is when I have it. It's 28th because of spring break. But then after that, we'll be on a normal every second Tuesday. Okay. All right. Um, hopefully maybe someone could look into why I didn't get the panelists invite. I don't know. Um, and everybody else, uh, I know Clovis and Steve, sometimes you guys have missed meetings and I never know if it's that you're like calendar didn't work or you didn't get. Julie's also sending out a calendar invite or Olivia somebody, but it's going to all our town emails. So make sure your town email is forwarding to another email or you're reading your town emails. Um, and we can also, I mean, because the invite that I create, it has the agenda in it, in the minutes. Usually I always make sure that that's in there. If you want me to add a personal email to make sure that you see it in your own personal calendar, just email me and let me know. Yeah. I'm happy to duplicate it. And I don't, we had a few back and forths with this particular meeting tonight with IT. So I'm not surprised that you didn't get a panelist invite. It took like three requests to get the right time, date, zoom. So thank, thanks. Sorry about that, but it's okay. Thanks for working in the problem. Appreciate it. All right. Uh, can I have a motion to adjourn?
Bill, Bill. All right. I assume we're all good with the journeying. Good. Um, I just.