Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Welcome to the June 30th, 2026 meeting of the Cambridge planning board. My name is Tom Senevich and I am the chair. Pursuant to chapter two of the acts of 2025 adopted by the Massachusetts general court and approved by the governor, the city is authorized to use remote participation at meetings of the Cambridge planning board. All board members, applicants, and members of the public will state their name before speaking. All votes will be taken by roll call. Members of the public will be kept on mute until it is time for public comment. I will give instructions for public comment at that time, and you can also find instructions on the city's webpage for remote planning board meetings. This meeting is being video and audio recorded. and is being streamed live on the City of Cambridge online meeting portal and on cable television channel 22 within Cambridge. There will also be a transcript made of the proceeding. I'll start by asking staff to take board member attendance and verify that all members are audible.

Thank you, Tom. This is Jeff Roberts from Community Development Department. H. Theodore Cohen, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Ted. Mary Flynn, are you present, and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Mary. Mary Lidecker, are you present, and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Mary. Diego Macias, are you present, and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Diego. Ashley Tan, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you? Ashley is absent. Carolyn Zurn, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Carolyn. Associate Member Dan Anderson, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you? Good evening, Jeff. I can see and hear you. Thank you, Dan. And back to the Chair, Tom Senevich, can you confirm the meeting is visible and audible to you?

I am present. The meeting is visible and audible. Thank you.

Thank you, Tom. So that means we have six planning board members present, one associate member.

Great. Thank you, Jeff. The first item is an update from the Community Development Department. Please also introduce the staff present at the meeting.

Thank you, Tom. Jeff Roberts. I'm the director of zoning and development here with Swathi Joseph on the zoning and development team. As always, we have well, we have several other city staff were really part of the main program of the evening. So maybe I'll let them introduce them all when we get to that point. But from the planning side, it's really just the two of us. This is a very special episode of Planning Board. This is something that started a few years ago as there was interest from the Planning Board and the City Council and many in the community. to get more regular updates on um the state of uh utilities and and plans for um future future utility working utility service within cambridge so this is an opportunity to hear some presentations from key both city departments and um private companies that that operate uh public excuse me public utilities in cambridge um TO HEAR ABOUT THAT. SO THAT'S GOING TO BE TODAY'S MEETING, AND WE'LL GET RIGHT TO THAT IN A SECOND. WE HAVE SOME ADDITIONAL MEETINGS COMING UP. IT WILL CONTINUE TO BE PRETTY BUSY AS WE MOVE FROM THIS LAST DAY OF JUNE INTO JULY. ON JULY 14TH, WE HAVE A PUBLIC HEARING SCHEDULED ON A ZONING PETITION BY DOUG BROWN AND OTHERS. regulations for housing development. It's a petition by at least 10 people registered to vote in Cambridge. We also have scheduled on July 14th some general business related to development at the Cambridge Crossing or PLANNED UNIT DEVELOPMENT. SO WE'LL BE DEALING WITH SOME DESIGNER VIEW AND SOME USE APPROVALS FOR THAT DEVELOPMENT. On the following week, July 21st, we also have a public hearing scheduled. This will be for a development proposal at 9 and 25 Birch Street and 30 to 36 Bay State Road. It's one site, but it has many addresses, which you'll see as we get there. And it's a residential development that exceeds the new threshold for project review special permit. So that's the main item that brings it to the planning board. That's July. In August, we plan, I don't know if it's advertised, maybe it is or will be soon, but at this point, we're looking at August 4th for a public hearing on a new city zoning petition, city council zoning petition, having to do with short-term rentals. THE PLANNING BOARD HEARD A SIMILAR PETITION PREVIOUSLY THAT WAS DEVELOPED BY THE INSPECTIONAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT AND LAW DEPARTMENT. AND THIS IS A REVISED VERSION OF THAT. IT WAS THE CITY COUNCIL ASKED FOR MORE WORK TO BE DONE ON THAT. SO WE'LL BE HEARING THAT. That's what we currently have on the schedule. We'll have more updates as we move along. Just flipping a little bit to items of interest at the city council, there will be next week on July 8th, a follow-up ordinance committee hearing on the active use zoning petition. That's the one that the planning board set a recommendation on. WITH SOME COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS. SO THEY'LL BE PICKING THAT UP. AND THE ORDINANCE COMMITTEE HEARING ON THE DOUG BROWN ZONING PETITION WILL BE JULY 21. AND LAST WEEK THERE WAS A DISCUSSION WHICH I MENTIONED OF A JOINT COMMITTEE the Housing and Neighborhood Long-Term Planning Committee talking about zoning for multifamily housing. That's another one that will be continued. The date is yet to be determined, but that discussion will continue. I believe that is all the updates I have for this evening.

Great. Thank you, Jeff. Any questions for Jeff from board members? No one seems to indicate such. So we'll move on to the agenda for tonight. Agenda item number one, the next item, is a report on utility planning from the Cambridge Department of Public Works, the Cambridge Water Department, Vicinity Energy, and Eversource Gas and Electric Utility. The board will hear brief presentations from representatives of each utility, followed by public comment, And after that, the board will have an opportunity to discuss and ask questions. So city staff will begin tonight, as usual, with the background and overview of this process, and we'll give a presentation on the city's sewer and water infrastructure. Please introduce yourself and anybody else on this staff who will be speaking.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Jim Wilcox. I am the city engineer at the Public Works Department.

Great, thank you.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Rich Hawley. I am the Director of Engineering and Distribution at the Cambridge Water Department.

Okay, so I guess we would start with your presentation. We're going to do them one by one.

So I'll go ahead and get started. I'll show my screen.

There we go. Mr. Wilcox, we can see.

Okay, great. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to present this material tonight. I'm going to talk about projects that the Department of Public Works is working on in various areas. This first slide here has a couple of pictures here. The first picture there on the left is the recently completed stormwater holding tank at the Tobin School site. And then the photo on the right is some stormwater drainage infrastructure improvements that are happening on Broadway and Kendall Square.

So excuse me, I'll interrupt just for a second. Maybe you could put it on display mode. There's a... icon on the bottom. How's that? There you go. Perfect. Thank you. It makes it a little larger for all of us.

Okay, great. So the first thing I want to share tonight is sort of a preview of our five-year sidewalk and street reconstruction plan. This is a document that we'll be publishing in July. I'm going to share a few pages from that. This is a document that we use to plan all of our sidewalk and street reconstruction work. There's significant coordination with this plan with the city's Department of Transportation. as well as the water department and also the private utility companies that have facilities here in Cambridge. So the basis of our Complete Streets program is that when we're looking to plan and design these facilities, we're keeping in mind all users, particularly pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and people that are using public transportation, buses in the subway system. And the goal is to make these public spaces easily traversable for all users. A particular emphasis over the last several years has been building better facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. And that is something that we're going to be continuing to doing throughout our next five years as part of this plan. One of the things that we look at when we're planning projects is pavement condition, and this is the condition of asphalt paving in the publicways in Cambridge. We did a survey in 2024 of 119 miles of roadway in Cambridge, and we have a scoring system that's called a road surface rating in each segment of roadway block by block was given a score. And this is information that we use for planning future projects, both for full reconstruction, but also for maintenance type projects. um so the scoring is zero to 100 with obviously zero being the worst condition and 100 being a brand new paved street and we're able to assign different types of maintenance maintenance methods based on these scores so um Starting at the bottom, major rehabilitation for road surface ratings from zero to 50. These are probably the most extensive reconstruction projects where we're doing what's called full depth reconstruction of the roadway, where we're removing all the asphalt paving and regrading the gravel base and then putting a full thickness of asphalt paving back. And then moving from there minor rehabilitation is probably what people are most familiar with which is mill and overlay paving where we remove the top two inches of paving and put a new wearing course of pavement back down and then in our Minor rehab, I'm sorry, preventative and routine maintenance categories. We really use two methods there. One is called crack sealing, where we're using an asphalt in motion to fill cracks in roadways. Those are defects that can lead to pavement quickly deteriorating. So we want to take care of those. And then we have another method we've been using in the city for the past several years called a fog seal. which is very similar to what people do for their driveway where they seal the entire width of their driveway. So we're sealing the entire width of certain roadways with a sealer that extends the life of the pavement. And this is just some statistics on that 2024 survey. The city's current rating is 76.4, which is right where we want to be. And just looking at this, we have 46 miles in the preventative maintenance category and 40 in the routine maintenance category. And this is right where we want to be. We want to have about 70% of our roadways in those two categories. Another map that we show in our five-year plan is where we have upcoming construction. And we have upcoming construction in various contracts and other work that's happening in the city. So on the city ends, we have our street reconstruction projects and also our routine roadway paving that's shown here. We also have shown here sewer and other utility projects where we're doing more extensive work and where we typically see that full depth restoration just because of the level of disruption due to utility work. It also included here is surface restoration projects that are related to private development. So some of the larger developments have commitments to do reconstruction of sidewalks and roadways. ADJACENT AND IN THE FACINITY OF THE PROJECT. AND THAT'S ALL SHOWN HERE ON OUR FIVE-YEAR PLAN. Another piece of data that we use, again, based on a 2024 inventory is sidewalk condition and assessment of accessibility criteria for the city sidewalks. And this is information, again, that we use for planning projects, both large capital projects, but also our maintenance projects as well. We've made really good progress over the last couple of years since this inventory was done addressing various issues throughout the city. I just want to show you one example. THIS IS SOME RECENT SIDEWALK MAINTENANCE WORK THAT HAPPENED IN THE HAMPSHIRE STREET AND BROADWAY AREA WHERE WE DID SOME FULL BLOCKS OF SIDEWALK RECONSTRUCTION. WE HAVE A $3 MILLION CITYWIDE MAINTENANCE CONTRACT FOR SIDEWALK WORK. AND WE DO PROJECTS SIMILAR TO THIS WHERE WE DO FULL BLOCKS, BUT WE ALSO DO SPOT REPAIRS BASED ON THAT SIDEWALK INVENTORY. AND AS PART OF ANY ROADWAY PAVING PROJECT, We do make sure that the pedestrian ramps are accessible, so we reconstruct quite a few of those pedestrian ramps in conjunction with our paving program. Another method of reconstructing roadways that we have been implementing in recent years is the concept of a shared street. And we're looking at specific criteria for doing shared streets. Probably the biggest criteria is streets that have very narrow sidewalks, that have utility poles, existing street trees. have grading issues where we are not able to construct sidewalks in compliance with the state's accessibility standards. So the concept of a shared street is we use the entire width of the public way as a shared space for all people that are using it. driving, people walking, people riding bicycles. And this gives us some sort of unique opportunities to make these spaces look very different. So you can see from these photos here, this is Fairmont Avenue that was a shared street that was constructed as part of the River Street project. Pedestrians have a compliant accessible path that is shown in the tan colored asphalt. That is a coating that we put on the asphalt to reflect heat, but also to indicate people driving cars that this space is different and not a typical street. The approaches to shared streets are constructed more like driveway aprons rather than a standard intersection. We also do a brick band at the entrance again to indicate that this space is different. Also with these shared streets, it gives us some opportunity to maintain some on street parking. So you can see the areas where we don't have that tan asphalt sealer. Those are areas where people can park their vehicles. and these shared streets are also an opportunity to do a lot more green space so you can see the bottom photo there where you would typically see a sidewalk we have plantings and some of the the residents in this area took an opportunity to put some nice seating out there for themselves We also have a 10-year sewer and drain infrastructure plan, and we are planning a major update to this plan in 2027, and that's particularly related to the ongoing planning efforts we have related to combined sewer overflow controls. So I wanted to go through some information on our new combined sewer overflow control plan. This is really one of the biggest things that we're working on right now at Public Works. This is planning for infrastructure work that will be done by the city for probably the next 30 years. And we are going through a process right now to solicit public comment and also approval with the United States EPA and the Massachusetts DEP. so the the current updated long-term control plan is a joint effort between the city of somerville the city of cambridge and the massachusetts water resources authority the work is being done in three water bodies so we have cso's that are along alewife brook Cambridge Arlington and Somerville we also have combined sewer overflows along the Mystic River that are maintained by the Massachusetts Water Resource Society and also the city of Somerville and then there are combined sewer overflows along the Charles River in both Cambridge and Boston with various jurisdictions so this map shows Combined two overflows that have been closed, the orange ones with the X through them. These are overflows that have been closed in prior CSO control work. And this current plan that we're working on now is to address the ones that are still open. So we had a major milestone earlier this year on April 30th. Our draft updated combined sewer flow control plan was due to EPA and DEP. This is also published and available to the public. And this really represents about four years of planning work between the three partners in putting this plan together. Some of the highlights of the plan are. This plan accounts for increased precipitation due to climate change, this is the first CSO plan in the United States that incorporates climate change into the planning and we identified the year 2050 is our planning horizon for climate change as part of this plan. As part of all CSO control plans, we're required to develop what's called a typical year. And because there's no such thing as an average year of rainfall, we've done some extensive statistical analysis and modeling to develop what would be a typical year in 2050. And that typical year is used as a benchmark for determining the success of the plan. The current plan that we're proposing would eliminate all rainfall events in the 2050 typical year. The largest rainfall event in the 2050 typical year is 3.3 inches of rain in 24 hours. The plan substantially reduces CSOs in larger storms. um another aspect of the plan that is different from others that have done in the past is it will incorporate green stormwater infrastructure which is stormwater wetlands biobasins and infiltration systems where we have the space to do those and we've done some extensive analysis on the impacts of potential projects including affordability and most importantly impacts from construction THIS IS A BIT OF A BUSY GRAPH, BUT THIS SORT OF SHOWS THE TIMELINE THAT WE'RE ON. STARTING AT THE LEFT, THE DRAFT PLAN WAS SUBMITTED APRIL 30TH. WE HAD OUR SEVENTH PUBLIC MEETING ON THE CSO CONTROL PLAN ON JUNE 2ND OF THIS YEAR. AND WE ARE NOW IN A PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD AND A REVIEW PERIOD BY THE REGULATORS. PUBLIC COMMENTS. ARE BEING SOLICITED THROUGH THE END OF SEPTEMBER. AND PRIOR TO THE END OF THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD, WE'LL BE HAVING TWO PUBLIC HEARINGS IN SEPTEMBER ON THE 17TH AND THE 24TH. OUR FINAL CSO PLAN WILL BE DUE IN EARLY 2027. WE'RE STILL WORKING WITH EPA AND DEP ON THE EXACT DATE FOR THAT. And then project implementation, as I mentioned, this will probably be 30 years of construction in the region to address these CSOs. And we'll be paying for the debt on those projects into the 2070s. And just a brief history of stormwater and sewage control. So really prior to 1950, Basically, the entirety of the Cambridge sewer system was built by that point. Much of it was built as a combined sewer system where sewage runoff from buildings and stormwater were combined into one pipe. Initially, when the city sewer system was first built, that was discharged completely untreated into the Charles River, Alewife Brook, and Boston Harbor. As time went on, wastewater treatment plants were constructed and real major changes happened in the 1970s with the Clean Water Act. That coincided with the city's sewer separation started in the Cambridge Port neighborhood in the 1970s has been an ongoing program for the city since then. There were major improvements in the late 1980s, 1990s and through the early 2000s with the Boston Harbor cleanup case. The MWRI was created out of that court case. The Deer Island Treatment Plant was built and there were major improvements to the wastewater facilities in the region, including many CSO projects in Cambridge. Which takes us to now where we're sort of in the next step and CSO control part two. And we'll be going through that process over the next year. So there are multiple sources of pollution to our water bodies, and it really comes in three different ways. Starting on the left, in dry weather, there's always potential contamination from leaking sewer pipes, sewer connections that are incorrectly connected to stormwater pipes that we are constantly looking for and correcting stormwater so we do have separated stormwater facilities where they just discharge runoff from roadways and from private property Those discharge to water bodies every single time it rains and contain various pollutants in different concentrations and then we really have the most concentrated pollutions, which are CSO discharges, which for the most part are untreated sewage. Which does not happen every time it rains, but in large and intense storms, we do have those activations. So while CSOs is a big part of cleaning up the waterways, it is not the only thing that needs to be addressed. So I do want to share the draft recommended alternatives for the Charles River and the O.F. Brook and I'll start with the Charles River. So this is the draft alternative that we have proposed in that control plan. It involves construction projects in both Cambridge and Boston for the Charles River. So starting up at the top left, Each CSO outfall is given a designator. The first three letters indicate the responsible party. So CAM is Cambridge. For MWR, those are MWRA CSOs. So, we are proposing for the CSL fall at CAM005, a 2.5 million gallon storage tank. This would be located in the area of Mount Auburn Street and Aberdeen Avenue. For the CAM17 CSL outfall, 80 acres of sewer separation, and that is in the area in and around Hampshire Street. For the MWRA 201 CSO, this is related to MWRA's Cottage Farm CSO treatment facility that is located at Magazine Beach, and MWRA is proposing a 10 million gallon storage tank to be located at Magazine Beach. And then in Boston, 366 acres of sewer separation work in the Back Bay, and then some smaller storage conduits in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. And then the draft plan for Alewife Brook. And Alewife Brook has CSOs for all three parties, MWRA, Cambridge, and Somerville. So starting at the top to address the CSOs at Camp 401B and Somerville 1A, a 2.3 million gallon micro tunnel storage conduit that would be nine foot in diameter. And that would extend from the intersection of Mass Ave at Alewife, Brook Parkway to the area of Dillboy Field in Somerville. For CAM001, eight acres of sewer separation, again in the area of Mass Avenue, Alewife Brook Parkway. And then two holding tanks, also in Cambridge. One that would be constructed by MWRA at the 003 CSO. That is in the vicinity of the Alewife T Station. and then a storage tank of at least 1.5 million gallons at cambridge's 401a cso location and this is just a summary on the cost and duration for these draft alternatives um total of 1.29 billion dollars and again roughly 30 years of construction So we're definitely looking for public comment. The more comment, the better. And there are a few ways people can do that. We have an online portal where you can easily view the document and comment as you're reviewing it. Comments can also be submitted by email and also by mail. And we will also be accepting comments at the two public hearings in September. I did want to touch on a specific project that's part of the CSO plan, and this is the Sherman street tank, this is the project that would address and control CSOs at the CAM 401A regulator in Cambridge. THIS IS A PROJECT WHERE WE HAVE ALREADY STARTED DESIGN WORK. THIS IS THE MOST ACTIVE AND THE GREATEST VOLUME OF CSO DISCHARGE TO AIL LIFEBROOK. SO WE ARE MOVING THIS PROJECT TO THE FRONT OF THE PLAN, AND WE'VE ALREADY BEGUN DESIGN WORK, AS I MENTIONED. AND JUST TO ORIENT YOU, STARTING AT THE RIGHT SIDE The image here, the KM 401A regulator is located where the commuter rail tracks cross Sherman Street. There is a regulator structure at that location where we have high flows that allows an overflow into a pipe that runs along the railroad tracks and then takes a turn to the north. when it gets to the back of the properties at Cambridge Park Drive and then it discharges into the Little River and Alewife Brook behind the Alewife T Station. So the city had an opportunity to purchase a piece of property close to the CAM-401A regulator back in 2023 and we took advantage of that. The storage tanks are most efficient when they are located as close to the regulator structure as possible in this piece of property that was available is located less than 100 feet from the camp for one a regulator. This is just a closer view of the site so that cam for a one a regulator again is is located just to the north of the railroad tracks in sherman street. WE PURCHASED THIS PROPERTY AT 135 SHERMAN STREET WHICH IS A PARKING LOT THAT WAS MOST RECENTLY USED FOR PARKING FOR THE MONTESSORI SCHOOL IN THE AREA. AND WE HAVE SOME OF THE COMMUNITY RELATIONS AND PRELIMINARY DESIGN PROCESS FOR THIS PROJECT. So we are trying to build a good-sized tank on this property, 2.1 million gallons. This would be the largest tank that the city has constructed. It would be our first CSO holding tank. We have previously constructed 14 tanks in the city that are for stormwater. retention but this would be our first for cso's so if you look at the image on the left sherman street is at the top of the image and then you have the railroad tracks on the left the majority of this facility would be underground it'll be about a 30 to 40 foot deep excavation to build the tank and then the image on the right would show what that project would look like once the tank construction is finished. Again, most of it being underground, but we would have a small maintenance building for equipment. If you look at the bottom left of the image, we show a potential future building footprint. A future project would be to construct a DPW operations building on this site, co-located with the tank. And this would be the layout that would show the tank location and also that proposed proposed future building that would have a public works use. And this is a rendering of of the building, this is still very much in progress as far as programming and design, but our initial thoughts are that this building would house our urban forestry and park maintenance group. With the concept being the first floor would be garage and storage space and the second floor would be offices and conference space. Another project that we're continuing for major infrastructure renewal is the Port Infrastructure Improvements. The first major project in this program was completed with the construction of a large stormwater holding tank in parking lot 6 on Bishop Allen Drive. This is the next project in that program, which is reconstruction of utilities and a series of roadways. The project that's just starting now there is shown in this the bluish green streets. being boarded by Harvard street to the north Bishop Allen drive to the South Essex street to the West and Columbia street to the east so we'll be doing complete utility reconstruction in these in the streets and then. Rebuilding all the the roadway and sidewalks that that project has a three year duration. IN CONJUNCTION WITH THAT PROJECT, LATER THIS YEAR, WE'LL ALSO BE STARTING A PROJECT TO RECONSTRUCT CLEMENT MORGAN PARK IN THE PAYA LITTLE TOT LOT. THAT IS ABOUT A TWO-YEAR PROJECT, AND THAT WILL BE STARTING LATER THIS FALL. AND ONE THING THAT WE WILL BE IMPLEMENTING AS PART OF THE STREETS PACKAGE WORK IS CONSISTENT WITH THE CITY'S GOALS TO PROVIDE ON-STREET EV CHARGING FACILITIES, WE'LL BE CONSTRUCTING EIGHT LEVEL TWO CHARGING PORTS AS PART OF THE UTILITY IMPROVEMENTS. ANOTHER PROJECT WE HAVE IN THE PLANNING STAGES, AND WE'RE COORDINATING WITH EVERSAUCE ELECTRIC ON THIS PROJECT, IS AN EXTENSION OF TERMINAL ROAD. And just to orient you here, on the right side of the photo is Alewife Parkway. Terminal road sort of loops around behind an office building here. You have the Trader Joe's and the CVS and also Shire Pharmaceuticals. And then you have Eversource's substation facility in the building associated with that. And the concept here is to provide a new connection from Alewife Brook Parkway and from the Fresh Pond Mall into the quadrangle area of Alewife. And you can see on the far left some of the recently constructed residential buildings in that area. So this is a concept that we have in mind for this terminal road extension. It would be a section of roadway that would connect from the current terminal road to Wheeler Street. Right now we're looking at a two-way street. that would have a shared use path for um for people riding bicycles and walking and another opportunity that we're looking at is part of this project is the city currently has an easement on eversource's property that wraps around the back of the building on the north side and we have water sewer and drainage pipes in that easement If we would go ahead and construct this terminal road extension, we would be moving those utilities out of the easement and into the new roadway, and that would free up space for Eversource on their property. some recent planning work that we're doing related to stormwater management and development is making some modifications to our stormwater management requirements related to development and we really have three categories for stormwater management that we're looking to make changes A FEW REASONS FOR THESE CHANGES. ONE IS STORM WATER TREATMENT REQUIREMENTS TO MEET OUR EPA PERMITTING. AND IN ORDER TO MEET THAT, WE NEED TO DO STORM WATER MANAGEMENT NOT ONLY ON CITY PROPERTY BUT ALSO ON PRIVATE PROPERTY AND REQUIRE THAT THROUGH REDEVELOPMENT. WE'RE ALSO MAKING THESE CHANGES TO BE CONSISTENT WITH ZONING CHANGES AND THE DIFFERENT NATURE OF DEVELOPMENT RELATED TO THOSE ZONING CHANGES AND ALSO TO PROVIDE MORE CLARITY WHEN WE'RE REVIEWING BUILDING PERMITS FOR SMALLER PROJECTS. SO FOR LARGE PROJECTS AND THIS IS THE TOP SET OF BOXES THERE, we have stormwater management requirements that need to be fully met. Those are for both quantity of stormwater and quality. And these are projects that typically go through planning board, some by right, but they are still required to meet the full requirements of our stormwater management standards. The big change for this category is the previous trigger for a stormwater control permit related to parking was 10 or more vehicles. And with reductions in parking requirements, we have now reduced that trigger to five parking spaces. The next category, so building permits with a stormwater site plan review. This is probably our biggest category, the largest number of projects that we see at Public Works We review about 300 projects per year, and I would say the majority of them fall into this category. So what we're proposing here is that these projects meet the city's stormwater management standards to the extent that they can based on the space that they have, but they will be required to provide a minimum of at least one inch of retention of rainfall on site, and also to reduce phosphorus discharge from stormwater on the site. And the triggers for that are parcels that are greater than 5,000 square feet, building additions of 150 square feet or more, or any increase in impervious surface area on the parcel. And then we just wanted to clarify which are very small projects that don't need to perform any stormwater management. So projects would need to meet all three of these requirements, a project parcel less than 5,000 square feet, a building addition of no greater than 150 square feet, and no increase in impervious surface. Just one interesting thing to sort of wrap this up that I wanted to share with you, something that we recently found on a project that we're doing on Sharapa Street, and this is some photos from what we found in the intersection of Sharapa and Otis Street. We're doing some trenching for a water main installation there, and we discovered this very large brick structure in the middle of the intersection. We weren't quite sure what it was, but we did find an access hatch. In the photo on the left, you can see the worker leaning on the structure. It was basically a 20-foot diameter brick structure in the middle of the intersection. You can see a metal tube extending down into the structure. We vacuumed some soil out of it so we could have a good look and see what it was. And the picture on the right is the inside of that structure. So we really weren't quite sure what this thing was. It was, again, a 20-foot diameter brick structure, and then it had this funnel-like brick structure in the middle of it. So we consulted with Charlie Sullivan at the Historical Commission to see if he had any information on what this was. And he knew exactly what it was. So I have down here at the bottom the information that Charlie provided. So before the introduction of piped water in the 1850s, the city of Cambridge constructed wooden brick reservoirs under major intersections to provide water for firefighting. These were essentially large wells that depended on groundwater to provide a source for hand pumping of water to fight fires. um i've been doing construction in the city for over 25 years this is the first one of these i found but charlie was able to provide the uh annual report from the cambridge fire department from 1873 and they had a whole list of these things um in the city that they were maintaining at the time so again never know what you're going to find when you're doing these types of projects in cambridge so we thought that was quite interesting to share So that wraps up my presentation. Thank you for the opportunity to share this with you tonight.

Thank you, Mr. Wilcox. And what a great way to finish. I hope Charlie landmarked it right. And you're not allowed to disturb it. I suspect that.

Well, well, he's, he's going to allow us to fill it in. It's a little bit vulnerable leaving that big of a void. But we're not going to, we're not going to, we're going to disturb the brick structure as little as possible. And we have it documented.

Oh, thank you. Okay, at this point, are there clarifying questions from many of my fellow board members for Mr. Wilcox? Wow, that's a measure of your thorough presentation. I have a few questions that popped up as they were talking just for my own information. Just can you give us like 20 seconds on how the holding tank on Sherman Street is supposed to work. Does that hold the combined effluent until there's no longer a surge? How does that work? I understand the groundwater storage tanks, but how does a CSO tank work?

Yeah, so again, the regulator structure is located right about here, off of the tracks. So rather than that regulator structure overflowing into that pipe that discharges into the river, it will build some piping and new structures that will allow it to overflow into the tank. Okay. It'll overflow into the tank during the rainfall event. There'll be a pump station associated with the tank. And then we will install sensors in the city's combined sewer system. So when the level in the combined sewer system goes back to sort of a dry weather condition after the storm, the pumps will be activated and will empty the tank out. And then that will take it out to Deer Island for treatment. So in the wettest year, in 2023, 20 times so that would probably be probably the maximum number of times that this tank would need to be used in any year is about 20 times more typically this is you know in the range of five to ten times a year that this tank would be needed great thank you mary yeah can i just piggyback on this particular topic just out of curiosity because it's a it looks like a great looking building

Did you consider putting the building on Sherman Street as the primary street, or was it the connection to the CSO that prevented the building being on the frontage?

Yes, so as I mentioned, having these tanks as close as possible to the regulator makes them most efficient. And that's really the biggest reason why we pushed the tank to the front of the postle is to keep it as close as possible to the overflow structure.

Okay. I have another question, which is how, how do we know when there is an outflow or an overflow to the river? How do the citizens of Cambridge know that so that they can exercise caution either with their pets or their own persons around the Charles River? How do we get notified that there's been a discharge?

Sure. So there was a state law that was passed about four years ago that requires a MUNICIPALITIES THAT MAINTAIN CSOs TO NOTIFY THE PUBLIC ON WHEN ACTIVATIONS OCCUR. SO CAMBRIDGE, SOMAVA, AND MWRA ALL HAVE METHODS THAT events occur. It is a subscription-based service, so if you want to know when Cambridge CSOs activate, you can go to the city webpage and you can subscribe to that service. The state law requires us to notify the public within four hours of us being aware that an activation has occurred. We're typically providing those notifications in less than an hour. And if we have a CSO discharge in any of our locations that lasts for more than two hours, then we are required to provide people that subscribe the public health advisory. um that an activation of two hours or more occurred we also post temporary signage at four public access locations along the charles river and two along the alewife brook when we do that public notification and that public signage is up for for 48 hours after one of those two hour events

Wow, okay. I know the community boating has a flag. I love that idea that you should run a flag up when there's a danger, but thank you.

Yeah, we don't do any signage at the boating locations because, as you mentioned, they do a really great job of notifying their users themselves. On public notifications are where there are more formal fishing and kayak canoe launch locations.

Okay, great.

Dan? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jim, great presentation. I was particularly pleased that our rating is good for our city streets. Do you have a similar rating for our sidewalks?

So we do have a similar rating for sidewalks. It is not sort of a numerical-based method. It's much more simple. It's good, fair, or poor condition. The biggest concern we have with our sidewalks is making sure they're accessible, particularly for people with disabilities. And that's a big part of the inventory is identifying those locations where sidewalks are not wide enough, where the cross slope is too great, where things like utility poles or street trees or even overhanging shrubs on private property create access issues. But we do have that good, fair, and poor rating. And we have specific criteria for where certain segments of sidewalk fall in that criteria.

Great. So as an aggregate, where are you guys rating overall sidewalk capacity and condition?

I would say we're in pretty good shape, similar to asphalt paving, that most of our sidewalks are in the good category. The particular challenge where we have difficulty with sidewalk conditions is where we have brick sidewalks. Those are much more difficult to maintain, much more difficult to rebuild, and obviously much more costly to rebuild as well. That is a particular focus for us. We are trying to incorporate more concrete sidewalks than brick just because it definitely provides a better surface, a smoother surface for people that are using them and is much more simple and less expensive to maintain than brick.

Understood. Thank you.

Thanks, Jim, for that presentation. It's really awesome to hear so many cool things about the city that are taken for granted, I think. Follow up on the CSO question, something I'm not sure is true, so forgive me if I'm misspoken here, but I was intrigued by this alert system to the public. And I've heard that the Watertown Greenway What a ton Cambridge Greenway that's off the life or fresh pond gets flooded and there's some, you know, hazardous water there that gets flooded on the path. And I wonder if that's a situation that could be, you know, useful to have some sort of alert if that is what happens there.

yeah so i i think what you're referencing is um the pathway system that runs along alewife brook parkway um because that that does that does get flooded um in big rainfall events it's actually um part of the uh the fema floodplain um so we would expect flooding there but um yes there is definitely cso discharges that happen when they get flooded Two of our notification temporary sign notifications are adjacent to the path, we have one along the the path behind the station, we have. there's a permanent sign there that that has information that there could be. contaminated floodwaters in the area. And then when we do have that public health notification, we attach a temporary sign to that permanent sign saying, hey, listen, yes, a CSO activation did occur and there are contaminated floodwaters there. THE OTHER LOCATION IN CAMBRIDGE IS AT MASS AVENUE. THERE IS A PERMANENT SIGN AND A TEMPORARY SIGN THERE. THE TOWN OF ARLINGTON ALSO HAS SIGNAGE ON THEIR SIDE OF ALE WIFE BROOK INDICATING THAT THERE COULD BE CONTAMINATED FLOOD WATERS. AND MOST RECENTLY, MWRA HAS BEEN PUTTING OUT TEMPORARY SIGNAGE AS WELL DIRECTLY ON THE PATHWAY. when there have been CSO notifications and they have made a commitment to continue doing that.

And lastly, you referenced it actually in this rendering that this is a proposed potential building for urban forestry. And DPW is, I don't think this is a question, I think this is a point of fact that DPW is in charge of the tree canopy in the city. I would say not for tonight, but for future years, I know there's great interest amongst the planning board members here. On the condition of the street canopy how it's maintained our removing dead and decaying trees and it would be great to get into a discussion about that, so we have a broader understanding of what the city's role is in terms of maintaining inventory and and. stewarding the tree canopy in a in a world that's heating up it's. Increasingly important and of interest to not only the planning board, but I think everybody in Cambridge so.

Sure yeah that's definitely something good good topic for my presentation next year, we are currently going through an update to the urban forestry master plan now. And i'm sure that that would will be in place by this time next year.

Terrific, thank you. I understood that that plan was underway, so I'm not pressing you to come up with the answers tonight, but it would be great to spend some considerable time on that next year. Any further questions for Mr. Wilcox tonight from board members? No one seems to indicate. Oh yes, Mary.

Well, maybe just on that topic, I think I understood also there was an update and maybe a recommendation if that could be brought to the planning board as a not you. You don't have to do it, Jim. You have others who could present that, that it might be a separate standalone presentation to us all about the status of that process.

So you're saying you'd prefer not to wait a year, and I think I'm with you. If the data is there, we could get smarter about... We can hold maybe applicants' feet to the fire to make sure we're supporting you in your efforts to maintain and grow the canopy.

Yeah, it would be great to talk with the planning board about this. Even for the smaller projects with the new zoning, trees are a challenge on both city street trees and also trees on prime. We're trying to work with developers to allow them to proceed with their projects, but also to be respectful of the city's existing tree canopy as well.

Right. Okay. So there's work to be done there, Mary. Thank you for suggesting that maybe we jump the queue and get it in front of the board before next year. I think it's that important. So if you could communicate that. I will do that. To your department, that'd be terrific. Okay, well, thank you, Jim, very much, and you have the advantage of going first. The next presenter is Matt O'Malley, I believe. Oh, no, I'm sorry, Cambridge Water Department. Rich. Yeah, yes. You've got a few slides, as I understand.

Yeah. Not as many as Jim, but we're going to go through this real quick. All right, can everybody see that? Yes.

Okay. There you go.

Okay. So thank you for having me tonight. Again, my name is Rich Hawley. I am the director of engineering and distribution at the Cambridge Water Department. I've put a little quick presentation together with a brief history of the water department, you know, why we replaced water mains and some current and future projects that are going to be going on in the city in 2026. So quick presentation. History of the Cambridge Water Department's public water service in Cambridge dates back to more than 150 years. Early residents, relied on local wells, ponds and some smaller water distribution systems, which actually would have been wooden pipes back in the day. During excavation recently on Dana Street, we actually found a piece of old wooden water pipe and it was about 10 inches round with a two inch hole drilled in the middle of it. And that's how the residents received their water in the city and was all gravity fed. So rapid population growth in the 1800s made it a little harder for the residents to maintain their water system here. So the city government approached all the residents and they bought the system from them. They bought the system and they acquired Stony Brook Reservoir, which is up at the 95 Route 2 corridor there up in Waltham, up in that area there. And they constructed a 63-inch aqueduct from that point. They made it all its way down to Fresh Pond here. So that goes through numerous cities and towns and feeds the city with raw water. So getting to today, today we have a total of about 225 miles of water main, 16,000 plus service connections. 9,500 water service valves, water gate valves, and hydrant valves, and to include 1,800 fire hydrants. Our department takes very seriously water quality, infrastructure renewal, and our water main replacements are a lot in part with DPW. When they are going to be doing some street reconstruction and other projects that they're doing, like the stormwater work, we kind of piggyback with them to get in there at the same time and make sure everything's fairly new as it's going in. So why do we replace water mains? So the picture on the bottom left there, that actually is a picture of an old active water main, and it probably doesn't look too good, but... that is what the city is dealing with right now there's probably over 30 miles of that pipe within the system and that's what we're trying to get rid of keep in mind that what the water is still safe to drink that is just a natural reaction of iron manganese with unlined cast iron pipe that perform that it creates little tubercles that make it look like that So aging infrastructure is one of the bigger parts of why we like to replace water mains. Things get old. Things get brittle. They break. And the next thing you know, we're out there at 3 o'clock in the morning in the winter fixing that type of stuff, and we want to try to keep that to a minimum, which brings me to leakage history. We do a lot of research on leaks themselves. You know, is there a history of leaks on a certain street? Have we had... A LOT OF LEAKS ON THAT ONE STREET IN A WHILE. RECENTLY, WHAT'S THE CONDITION OF THE MAIN AND HOW CAN WE GET THIS DONE QUICKER TO KEEP THE RESIDENTS HAPPY? AGAIN, WE LOOK INTO PIGGYBACKING WITH DPW ON THAT TYPE OF STUFF AND TRY TO ARRANGE EVERYTHING ALL TOGETHER. ANOTHER PORTION IS WE'D LIKE TO IMPROVE THE FIRE FLOW CAPACITY. We all know the city is growing. There's some bigger buildings coming in. There's a lot of distribution system that needs to be upgraded. And with that upgrade comes fire protection for these buildings. The more buildings that come in that need this with the new fire protection laws, there's more water that's going to be needed. And these older tuberculated pipes just can't handle that. So it makes sense for us to go in there and replace all that. Improve water quality. The biggest thing that we get is the color of the water, the smell of the water, and the taste of the water. So there's a couple of different things that make that happen. And it's typically when there's a large use of water, such as the fire department doing a fire hydrant test. When they open that fire hydrant up and they flow that pretty good, you're loosening up all those tubercules inside the water main and you're going to get you know, a rusty colored water, you're going to get a little bit of an odor and the taste is going to be off. It's going to be a little bit of an iron taste to it. But again, even when your water does look like that, it is safe to use. A lot of people don't understand that they call it mud, but it's not actually mud. It's not actually dirt. It's actually chemical reactions within the water main itself. And we also want to support both current and future developments within the city. You know, all that stuff that Jim talked about earlier, we are in constant communication on, hey, we're going to be doing this. What do you have for a water main there? You know, we try to keep up with this together because the more we can get done at that one time, the better everything will work out in the future. So one current project that's going on right now as we speak here tonight. This was a very unique water main project in itself. Inman Street from Hampshire to Broadway. That is currently the oldest active water main within the city. It was put in in 1898. We were approached by the gas company a few years ago that the gas company wanted to do their cast iron abatement. And we looked at the history of this water main itself on Inman Street. And we said, you know what, we need to get in there to do it ourselves. Problem was these poor residents had just gone through that whole Inman Square reconstruction project. So we tried to we're trying to do now with this project is we're trying to alleviate a little bit of pressure from them so this project being unique is we're going to do inman street in three different phases and by doing it in three phases we're leaving a lot of the residents there parking we're not disrupting the whole street at the whole time the whole time and we're trying to give them a little bit of sense of that we're here for you we're going to work with you you know we know you've been through a lot we're going to do what we can We had a public meeting and there was a lot of residents that showed up to the public meeting. And once we explained everything we were gonna do, why we were doing it, I think everybody was pretty receptive of it and things have been going well. On the pictures there, that picture on the right hand side is an actual picture of that water main in that street right now. That was cut out of the main. they first started the work you know it doesn't look too good but you know we're going to be putting in some nice eight inch ductiline water main in there and everything will be fine the picture with the fire hydrant there that is how these residents are getting their water at this point in time that fire hydrant was brought off of hampshire street off of a brand new 12-inch water main So we're going to feed the residents from that fire hydrant individually with a bypass system, which you can see in the top left picture there. There's a pipe running down the gutter line. So as we pull out that old six-inch cast iron main, we're able to still maintain full service for these residents. And again, that's going to be done in thirds. As stated, another reason we replaced these water mains are for fire flows. And there's three hydrants on Inman Street, and currently they were flowing at 300 gallons per minute. All said and done, when this water main project is done, each hydrant will be bumped up to about 1500 gallons a minute. So the improvement of water quality and for the firefighting will be tremendous down in this area. And that was another thing that the residents had a lot of questions on and they were very receptive on why we were getting this done. ANOTHER PART OF DOING A WATER MAIN PROJECT LIKE THIS, WE AS THE WATER DEPARTMENT, WE WERE mandated by the DEP to have all lead service lines removed within the city by 2030. So in doing a project like this, we're able to get all these houses and there's currently 12 houses on this street that do have lead service lines. We are replacing those free of charge for those homeowners. And going forward on these water main projects, that's how we're going to handle it. um we need to try to get everything out right now we have about there's about 1100 documented lead line services within the city and we do have a lead service line replacement project coming up in october that's going to be What we did was we took the city and we put it in different sections and we're going to put each bit each part out to contract and we're going to you know concentrate in one area at a time, and you know, hopefully. By 2030 2035 they really want to have everything out we were on good pace, we have been working on this since 1992 was when our first lead service line replacement plan went into effect. um so another some more streets that will be done over here under the dpw complete streets contract 26a chetwin road there's an old six inch ductiline pipe in there we're going to replace that and give those residents some nice cleaner water and Our in-house crews here will install that, which will save a lot of budget money, and we're fully equipped to take care of all that. Gray Street, about 500 feet of 6-inch ductile iron pipe will be replaced with a few fire hydrants. Haskell Street, which was already replaced by us in 2025, that was about 600 feet. That was in between Mass Ave and Rindge Ave. north fox street which is probably the bigger part of the complete streets project which is about 1400 feet of six inch that is that is a vintage water main as well and that's a good one to get get upgraded and get everything where it should be for the residents um Again, hydrant flows dramatically increased down there, and the fire department is thrilled to hear that this is going to get done. The other road that was done recently, Kirkland Road, which is another dead end off of Kirkland Street, there was about 250 feet of 4-inch cast iron pipe in there, and I didn't happen to get a picture, but when they cut that piece of pipe out there, the hole that was feeding that pipe That street was about an inch and a half round. So we gave them a nice new eight inch ductile iron pipe. And one gentleman actually said to me, I almost fell over in the shower. Thank you very much. That's the stuff we want to hear. And to piggyback on Jim with the port project, this is a very big project that the city is going to have going on this year. And not only with the sewer and stormwater, we're also getting over 6,000 feet of new water main to be installed there. The sizes range from 6-inch to 20-inch. The 20-inch is over on Portland Street. And that includes you know the install dates it's all vintage water pipe down here a lot of six inch online cast iron so we'll be able to get that replaced with a lot of eight inch and 10 inch and 12 inch by. In one of the biggest things that's going to happen down there is the elimination of 50 lead water services that's a big undertaking for this project and it'll be great to have those completed and off the books. Um, I, you know, I know mine was pretty brief, but you know, the importance of changing these water mains, you know, it's very important within the city and we try to keep up the best we can. And I think we're doing a great job at it. And if anybody has any questions, I'd like to open it up.

Great. Um, questions for Mr. Hawley board members. Mary.

Thank you. I was curious about trends in water usage, particularly given the drought conditions that Massachusetts and the Northeast have been experiencing. And obviously, there has been a lot of new development down through the years. Yeah, I'm just wondering how we're trending in terms of water use and reservoir level.

So believe it or not right now, the water usage is down. We have been promoting water conservation for the last 10 years and A lot of these buildings that are being put up, all these new fixtures, they're all water-conservating fixtures and everything like that. The trend is still going as level as it can be. It's looking good. But then on the other side of your question, as far as the reservoir levels go, yes, we are in a level three drought. Reservoir levels are low. Let's all pray for rain when we can. But right now we're okay and we do have an emergency connection to the MWRA if needed. Right now, as of last Friday, there's a 20% chance that we'll have to go on to MWA water by the end of the year.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I also appreciate the presentation. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks, Mary. Dan? Thanks very much, Rich. We're very fortunate to have our own watershed and water supply system. And, you know, my general sense is that our water quality is relatively high. How are we measuring that up against some of our, you know, I guess NWRI, I guess, is our immediate piece. But any metrics for water quality?

So I would have to defer you to the lab for that. But what I can say is our water, very comparable, if not chemically balanced-wise is some of the cleanest water around. We have state-of-the-art cleaning systems here at the plant, our DAF cleaning systems. We recently just started a DAF change-out, carbon change-out program that happens every year. What that does is it takes out a lot of the a lot of the PFAS chemicals and all the other stuff that can get into the water. But, you know, nationally speaking, I think we're, we're up there with some of the highest quality.

No, I appreciate that. And I think we all recognize that the fresh pond facility is a major asset to the city as well. I don't know how many people walk around and either look at it or just enjoy that as a, you know, very visible as opposed to invisible part of our system.

Yep.

Great. Thank you, Dan. Ted.

Probably a simple question that I should know the answer to, but what role does the fresh pond reservoir play in the entire system?

So the aqueduct that I was speaking of, that comes right into Fresh Pond here. And then this water at Fresh Pond is brought into the treatment facility. It's treated here. And then what we do from here is we pump it up to Payson Park in Belmont, where we have two 14-million-gallon storage tanks. And from there, it's gravity fed back to the city.

I see. So from Fresh Pond, it goes to the other reservoirs, and then it comes into the system.

So it starts at the reservoirs up in Waltham, and it comes down to Fresh Pond here, and then we bring it into the building to treat it.

Right. Are you still doing tours of the building?

Yes, there are tours. Every Monday at 6, there are tours. And we're also very close on getting self-guided tours. We made some monitors, and there's going to be some self-guided tours. Keep an eye out for those. But every Monday at 6 o'clock, I think there's a tour here.

Yeah, I did one a number of years ago, and it was really interesting, very informative.

It's a very good system we have going here.

That's great. Thank you. You're welcome. Any further questions for Mr. Hawley? Thank you, Rich, very much for your presentation. Okay. The next presenter will be Matt O'Malley from Vicinity Energy. So please start by introducing yourself and anybody else on your team who might be speaking. We ask you to be as concise as possible. Thank you.

Thank you, Tom. Great to be with you all. Thank you for having me. My name is Matt O'Malley. I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer and SVP for Vicinity Energy. I'll be giving the presentation, but I'm joined by several colleagues as well. Patrick Haswell is on the line. Jessica Rodriguez is on the line. And there's another Matt O'Malley apparently on the line who is not me.

So I don't know if that was an issue. We had an issue logging on.

That is Rick Smith. Rick, Matt O'Malley never looked so good. That's our colleague Rick Smith. Don't feel bad, Rick.

I'm your doppelganger, and I'm shrunken. I'm in the grass.

great to be with all of you um and thank you again uh mr chair and members of the planning board you know i truly look forward to uh uh this exercise every year it's it's a great progress report so uh we have a brief presentation but please ask any questions that if i can't answer it or if my colleagues here can't answer it i will be happy to furnish uh you all with the answer in due time and I'd like to actually begin by answering I think Ted's question to the prior speaker and that's to open up we would love to I'll get through their presentation but we'd love to open up a tour to the planning board perhaps sometime later this summer or early in the fall because some really really exciting things are happening at Kendall Square Once again, I want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to provide Vicinity's annual update. Over the last year, we've continued making meaningful progress in decarbonizing Cambridge's district energy system. And tonight, I'd like to briefly cover three things. Where the system stands, the progress we've made on electrification, and what's next as we continue investing in infrastructure that supports Cambridge's climate goals. And I wanted to give a special shout out to two people. One is Chief Julie Warmster, who I know is on this call. She has been just an amazing leader for not only Cambridge, but the Commonwealth and the region. And she's really worked extraordinarily well with us as we figure out how to make Butteau just the incredible success that we know it can be. And also, and I don't believe she's on the call tonight, but wanted to acknowledge the incredible work uh work uh and legacy that uh susan rasmussen will leave us many of you know she's transitioning into her next chapter and she's just been a dynamo uh and uh she'll be missed although i know she'll still be involved and still be uh working to make cambridge uh such an amazing city um patrick if you wouldn't mind advancing to the next slide please So very, very briefly, Cambridge District Energy System, it's a quick snapshot. We serve 7.6 million square feet across 15 buildings. Our typical portfolio or typical profile of our customers are life science, healthcare, commercial properties, all of which are connected through four plus miles of underground piping. What makes our system unique is that we're able to decarbonize many buildings through one centralized investment, and that's rather than requiring every building to solve the challenge independently. That allows us to use existing infrastructure and new technology at scale to have a profound impact. We're already leveraging renewable electricity. We're working and we'll get into in a little bit how we're using the Charles River as a renewable thermal resource. And we're already delivering carbon-free e-steam to customers throughout Cambridge and Boston. And as I mentioned, what's most appealing and exciting, what brought me to this company after working a decade plus in local government on the other side of the river, as that we can really meet this moment of the climate crisis while providing our customers reliable and dependable thermal energy solutions. Next slide, please. So one point I'd like to emphasize is that this transition did not begin overnight. We heard from Rich earlier in the water department talking about the old wooden pipes. If you were to go before this 1900 start date on this continuum, You'd get to the late 19th century, late 1800s, where Birdsall Hawley, who was a contemporary of Thomas Edison, built a coal-fired boiler in his backyard. He ran a wooden pipe to his house, saw there was very little line loss, and heated his home quite nicely. He knocked on his neighbor's door and said, would you like free heat? The neighbor said, it's 1873. Of course I'd like free heat. And the first district energy system was born. The evolution is continuous. The one sort of, the one status fact about district energy systems is they are continuously upgrading and improving. And we've seen this evolution from a central plant that was fueled by coal, to oil, to natural gas, to combined heat and power, to renewable energy sources and new technology. And that's precisely where we are right now. I want to be clear, our strategy isn't to rely on breakthrough technology, it's to continue integrating proven technology as they mature. And what we're doing now is nation-leading, but we are very proudly emulating successful transitions that many leading sustainability cities throughout Europe in Asia have been using for 10 plus years now. It's essentially doing a heart transplant of the central plant with new innovative technology and the benefit then that our customers and the buildings that we serve is felt almost immeasurably. So how we're doing it, next slide please, is four major steps. The first is the development and installation of a 42-megawatt electric boiler, the largest in North America. It is currently underway, and it is doing extraordinarily well. The service went in was November of 2024, and it allows us to convert renewable electricity directly into steam where it makes sense operationally. The second leg of our four-legged chair is the Gen 1 heat pumps. This is the largest, when this is built, at least for a little time, it's going to be the largest industrial-scale heat pump in the world. It's going to be right on the Charles River in the heart of Kendall Square in Cambridge. This will be operational by the beginning of 2028, which I've been saying now for several years, and it seemed like it was so far away, and now we're 18 months away from seeing this operational, which is just extraordinarily exciting to me. and my colleagues. After that is built, we'll be looking at Gen 2 heat pumps, which is the next generation technology, which provides even greater efficiency. You can see several colleagues and I standing in front of one in Esburg, Germany, which leverages energy from the Atlantic Ocean to the western part of Denmark. I said Esburg, Germany, it's Esburg, Denmark. It's a German company that's building it, however, and it's heating a city of 150,000 people, and it has been working incredibly well. And then the fourth leg of the stool is thermal storage. This allows us to take advantage of our direct interconnection to the grid. It's pacing offshore wind. We've had some great conversations with many of the leading offshore wind developers in Boston and New England. Obviously, it's a surprise to no one on this call that there have been some significant delays. But nevertheless, we are bullish on offshore wind. New England is the Saudi Arabia of wind. And once we're able to hopefully have an administration that values both affordability and sustainability, which are two tracks that are very much complimentary of one another, in my opinion, and I think many people's opinion. And once we see more and more offshore wind come to development, it's going to allow us to procure that, help develop more offshore wind turbines, and at the same time, being able to procure it at the middle of the night when there's very little demand for the grid, and then essentially shift our peak by a couple hours to 6, 7 a.m. in the morning. That's really our peak when we start heating our buildings before the humans arrive. Together, these investments create a flexible system that supports both decarbonization and electric grid reliability. So first, we wanted to really celebrate the fact that stage one is complete. You'll see in 2022, Mayor Wu is taking a sledgehammer to some old gas infrastructure that we had. And then several pictures down, you see Mayor Simmons speaking at the ribbon cutting, and really the turning on of our boiler. We've seen the growth, you know, the numbers speak for themselves. It's 1,800 m pounds. That's how we measured our steam volumes on 2025. To be fair, it was only about six weeks of 2025, but that number grew dramatically to 1,300 m pounds that we will... sell. That's a baseline this year. That number will likely go higher. And then next year, we're looking at double that. So I think what we're demonstrating is that customers are looking for practical, scalable solutions that will reduce emissions. It's really encouraging to see the market responding just as this and other technologies become available. And I think it sort of underscores the fact that when we talk about the high cost of energy costs, the high cost of energy, which we are all feeling acutely, we need not ignore sustainable solutions because so often, and I think it's one thing that we're proving at Vicinity, Affordability and sustainability are two key drivers that, again, really do support one another. And I think that we're proving you need not pit one against one another. We can and we should be striving for both.

Next slide, please.

So building on the momentum of the e-boiler, our focus now shifts to stage two, which is design and installation of our 35 megawatt industrial heat pump. The design is well underway. The construction has begun. Obviously, these projects take a lot of time. And it will represent the largest district energy in the world. You can see on the left-hand side, there's a great column from the Financial Times. The headline reads, Boston to house world's largest heat pump. I took the liberty of changing it to Cambridge, since technically this will be in Cambridge. And the work is well underway, and we're targeting, as I mentioned, a commercial operation start date of early 2028. And this investment will significantly reduce reliance on traditional fuels while positioning Cambridge as a leader in large-scale building electrification. And what's really interesting about this is that I know some of you folks are familiar with how we measure efficiency with these heat pumps. We use COP, which stands for coefficient of performance. The COP of these large-scale heat pumps, it's not quite as good as a smaller one like I have in my house, but it's still north of two, which means for every unit of energy that we use to run it, we're going to be able to develop two units of energy back in to serve our customers. So again, it makes sense from a financial point of view. It also makes enormous sense from an emission reduction point of view. And what I find especially gratifying about Cambridge, the city of Cambridge, is of course you have the driver of Butoh, which is a great local ordinance, which is mandating that these buildings show reductions. But Above that and beyond that, and perhaps in concert with that, you have many of these customers that have their own internal ESG goals. They might have subscribed to the SBTI. There might be some goals that, particularly in life sciences and the medical field, that folks want to show. And so it has underscored the fact that sustainability development and governance often solves for two different greens. It's a good financial bet. It's also obviously a very, very important sustainability bet as well. Now, the next slide I'd like to talk about, and I know we'll hear from some colleagues and friends from Eversource. This is, you know, one of the biggest questions that face cities is how do you electrify buildings without overwhelming the grid? And Eversource noted in their ESMR several years ago that district energy electrification can reduce the need for every building to install its own heating electric equipment. and reduce the amount of new electricity distribution infrastructure that's required. In other words, district energy isn't just another decarbonization option. It can make the broader electrification of Cambridge more efficient, more affordable, and easier to implement. And this is important because you would think that utilities might, you know, 10 years ago be in conflict with one another. And this shows that we work extraordinarily well, you know, together. And there's an opportunity for us to use every arrow in the quiver as it relates to decarbonizing cities. So it's been wonderful to work alongside colleagues from Eversource, whom you will hear from shortly. And then I'd like to close just by thanking you all again for the opportunity to provide this update. We really appreciate the planning board's continued partnership and look forward to continuing to work with the city as we advance the next phase of Cambridge's clean energy future. As I mentioned at the beginning, we would be delighted to host you all for a coffee and a tour of the facility at some point later in the summer. It's really exciting to see how we're leading in the nation And it's gratifying as a Bostonian to see how Boston and Cambridge are pioneering. It's also unsurprising when you think about how our cities have led so much in the past. So delighted to be with you all. Thank you for taking the time and happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Mr. O'Malley. I'm going to suggest that the planning board should take this tour. I've been inside that plant. It's the most amazing place. thing to witness. It looked like Batman's kind of headquarters. It's unbelievably cool place to be. So we will be in touch about that. Are there questions for Mr. O'Malley? Carolyn.

Thank you, and thank you for the presentation. I'm curious about the buildings that are on the system. My understanding is that district energy systems benefit from a diversity of building types, but I don't see multifamily or residential or campus Something that would kind of have use at different hours than the typical commercial building, maybe less so lab. But I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about that. And then I have a follow up question, I think, for Julie.

Sure. So it's a great question. And the beauty is, is that we are a good fit for highly, highly dense areas. So downtown sort of urban city centers, urban cores. We also have several of our customers, the reason I mentioned lab space, hospitals, health centers is because they often use process steam for humidification or tool sterilization. College campuses, as you mentioned, are other great fits for a district energy system. MIT has one, Harvard has one. You get out west to Amherst, for example, you're going to find most of those campuses, even though they're in much more rural, less dense areas, it makes sense to sort of have that when you've got a continuation of We do do some residential, not as many, to be candid with you. And as I should have said earlier, we're in 12 U.S. cities. Our big three are Boston, Cambridge, Philly, and Baltimore. I know we do some affordable housing developments in Baltimore. you know it kind of it's it's it's a number of factors that sort of play into where our pipes are located we'll often run lateral pipes or extensions of the pipes for project that makes sense but that can be quite costly as you know putting a new pipe in so sometimes that would not necessarily make us an ideal candidate for more residential areas that sort of are outside our service center but you know to put it sort of broadly you look at the Boston skyline probably Two out of every three buildings are customers of ours. Cambridge, we're a little bit more constrained to Kendall Square, but we certainly have, as I mentioned, most of the buildings that have grown up, have developed quite nicely there in the last decade plus and beyond.

And I'll just add to what Matt was talking about. We do have a significant number of multifamily residential, we're talking 10, 12, 20 story tall apartment buildings and whatnot that we support. And to Matt's point, most of them are on the Boston side of the system because of the location of our Cambridge system. However, one of the things that we are seeing and kind of trending, right, is that this interest in buildings that have formerly been you know Class C office space and looking to transition over to residential and looking and talking to us and we've had many of these conversations and are in different phases of those projects where we're assisting those building owners and trying to decrease their total upfront capital cost and be able to utilize steam and e-steam in particular as a path to decarbonization. in their buildings. So it is an area where we see that there's going to be future growth. It certainly is dwarfed by the amount of service that we provide on the commercial side and with laboratories, especially in Cambridge. But I think you're going to see a lot more in the years to come here.

Great, thank you. And I look forward to the tour whenever that happens. Julie, a question for you. As the Illaoi Quadrangle, as that is getting redeveloped, knowing that, well, one, knowing that there's a financial feasibility question that no one on this call can answer, and knowing that Cambridge has adopted the specialized opt-in code, Would you, in an ideal world, push for district energy in the ill-wife quadrangle, or are you comfortable with the opt-in code, the specialized opt-in code? Where do you, do you have a horse in that race, so to speak? Yeah.

Well, facility, and we have actually talked about, like, would you do another district plant here, cogeneration plant here? Eversource's substation is right there, and Jason and others might talk about that. There's a real opportunity because the Alewife Quadrangle is... 45 acres of redevelopment to do something really major and fossil fuel free, whether it is clean thermal, you know, it's going to be full electrification, except for we have some exemptions for labs. But I think the short answer is our commitment is to helping Cambridge move off fossil fuels and support the most cost-effective ways to do that. And the fact that Eversource is right there with a substation that is nearing capacity, the fact that it's a full neighborhood being redeveloped, it's very exciting opportunity, something really exciting with fossil fuel-free thermal, which is much harder than fossil fuel-free electricity. So I'm not going to say this, not that, but we see that as a very exciting opportunity.

Thank you.

Daniel, please, if you had a question. Yeah, thank you. Sorry, just getting myself unmuted. So a couple questions maybe were already answered, but some very low hanging ones. What's the difference between steam and steam? I didn't quite capture that. And just a clarification, I do have some more substantive questions, but that one would be great.

Oh, it's a great question. So STEAM, sort of when we use the term STEAM, we talk about sort of the product that we offer that comes from cogeneration, our CHP, combined heat and power, and eSTEAM is electrified STEAM. So right now it's STEAM that's created. With our electric boiler, we then match the megawatts that we use to run it with Class I mass RECs to make sure that it's both Berto and Buto compliant. And once the heat pumps on board, that would also be an e-steam, similar to the way that we would match it with RECs. So essentially, it's a decarbonized product that's recognized as such in local regulations and e-steam, and then sort of the traditional steam. So it underscores that I work with better engineers than marketing folks.

Great. Well, thank you for that. So the second, I think that you kind of answered, which is thinking about expanding capacity. You've mentioned that, and I think I saw from your graph, maybe there's some new pipe being laid along possibly a couple of extensions maybe around Albany Street. Obviously that's a more expensive investment in infrastructure. How much more capacity with let's just say your existing piping system is there? Are most all the buildings on? Are you anticipating, I guess I'm getting towards, you know, you're projecting doubling your capacity here in 2027. Do you have the capacity to, you know, to triple that? Where's your

We have significant capacity. The number that I showed, the m pounds of e-steam that went from 19 to 125, so that's primarily a mix of existing and new customers. So the way it works is that a customer can elect to have X amount of e-steam for their portfolio to keep them in line with either Berto or Buto products. sort of targets. But in terms of growth, it's something that I'm happy to turn over Rick, Rick's sort of our VP of sales and growth. But it's something that's happening at a pretty good clip, as has been mentioned. I think that we can offer a practical, affordable, sustainable solution. I think Carolyn had asked the question or referenced the Specialized Stretch Energy Code, so much so we've worked extraordinarily well with DOER and the state to make sure that we're recognized as a pathway of compliance. And in fact, there's language that they put out that gets to just that several months ago. So it's a good mix of densification. So existing buildings who are close to your own pipe, that might be a good fit for us as well as some new developments. And in terms of the laterals and the extensions that we'll do, I mean, we will do an extension if it makes sense for us, if it makes sense for the customer and there's opportunities along the way.

Okay. So sort of in lay terms, your market share in that area is there's a lot more capacity for new customers just generally. Okay. So the last question goes to, I guess, the Gen 2. So you're targeting and maybe starting to plan for where that technology is heading. Would that replace your existing? And is it kind of in a timeline? Or would you be able to, within your physical plant, be able to build a second Gen 2 heat pump plant?

By the middle, our plan is by the middle of the 2030s to probably have three heat pumps and then go beyond that. So there'll be several that we're looking at. The Gen 2 one's an interesting one. That would likely be on the Boston side of the river. I can't get into too many specifics, but we don't have the direct water access there that we obviously do in Cambridge sitting right on the Broad Canal. But there's an opportunity that we're looking at that would allow us to sort of anchor the district with our first two heat pumps. But the Gen 1 is happening now, literally being built out now. You'll see the construction and sort of some of the build-out when you folks tour. So that will be the first of several heat pumps because, again, it's – It's proven technology that makes the right financial sense. These are clearly very, very, very expensive pieces of equipment, but we're owned by a French infrastructure firm that has been very bullish on what we're doing. It's helped us sort of navigate some of the challenges that the federal government and the DOE, quite frankly, have faced. created over the last two years. So no pun intended, we are moving full steam ahead. First heat pump will be up and operational in Cambridge in the next 16 plus months. Second one will be several years after that likely on the Cambridge side. But we also have the capacity to build several at Kendall while working within confines of our current water intake permit. So that's been another way that we've been able to move quickly and efficiently.

Fantastic that those are my questions very inspiring keep the great work. I appreciate that.

I have a quick hopefully a quick question we spent the first about hour and a half of our hearing tonight talking about water quality, both in the river and in drinking water. With the heat pumps now extending into the Charles river, of course, the basin is historically had an issue with overheating. and the spreading of growth of – I don't want to – it's the same problem the president has in his reflecting pool of algae in the basin. With the heat pumps there, does that have the capacity to lower the temperature of the basin and help with the historic environmental issue?

Yeah, no, very astute observation, Tom. It's fascinating. And I admittedly, I'm a recovering politician, so I'm not an engineer, but I've had the master class of education, particularly from our CEO, Kevin Haggerty, who's also the quarterback of this, or the architect, I should say, of this plan. So what happens is as we take the water in with the heat pump, we extract five to seven degrees. So not a huge number, but it allows us to obviously keep the temperature above freezing while taking some energy. And there's tremendous power packed in that energy. And then when it's sent back, as mentioned, depending on the time of year, it's sent back five to seven degrees cooler, which is actually much, much, much preferable for the marine life, for the flora, fauna, everything there. one of the reasons why, and I won't put them on the spot, but we've worked very closely with the Charles River Watershed Association. We've worked very closely with the Conservation Law Foundation. And to a person, every environmental group that we've encountered has been very, very supportive of these efforts and what this is going to do. So it's going to make the Charles River a little bit cooler.

You may be a recovering politician. I'm a recovering president of the Charles River Watershed Association.

Believe me, I talk to Emily once a week and happy to do so. She's been a great partner in this.

Great. All right. Thank you. Any further questions for Mr. O'Malley? If not, we'll move to our fourth and final presentation, which will be from Jason Wright. who's going to talk to us from Eversource. So please start by introducing yourself and please anybody else on your team who might be speaking or answering questions tonight. And we urge you to be as concise as possible given the hour, but thank you.

Absolutely. Sure. Thanks. Wanted to make sure before I get going that we can see my screen? Yes. Thank you. Awesome. Fantastic. So again, Mr. Chair, members of the planning board, certainly appreciate your time and opportunity to be here this evening to provide our annual update. My name is Jason Wright. i'm the episodes community relations specialist coming covering for the city of cambridge i have a few of my colleagues with me here this evening as well sarah hamilton from our energy efficiency team danielle botch from our advanced forecasting and modeling team rick bronca from project engagement as well as amza manga from our system planning team and Last but not least, Catherine Horry from our distribution engineering team. Our objective today is to provide the board with an overview of our efforts to help the city as well as the Commonwealth achieve the clean energy and decarbonization goals. AS WELL AS TO HELP THE PLANNING BOARD UNDERSTAND WHAT'S DRIVING THE ELECTRICAL DEMAND IN CAMBRIDGE AS WELL AS TO PROVIDE AN UPDATE ON CAPITAL PROJECTS THAT ARE CURRENTLY PLANNED OR UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN CAMBRIDGE. BEFORE WE GET GOING, I ALSO WANTED TO GIVE A SPECIAL THANKS TO CITY OFFICIALS AS WELL AS THE CITY MANAGER AND THE CITY COUNCILORS WHOM WE interact with and collaborate with almost on a daily basis. I think we're fortunate to have a great working relationship with them. We certainly don't take that for granted. I would also like to extend an invite, not to be outdone by my friend Matt O'Malley here, but I would like to send an invite to the planning board to tour our Greater Cambridge Energy Project. I'm sure it's a project you're all familiar with here. First in the nation underground substation, 107 feet to be exact, in Kendall. So happy to work through the logistics of that. That being said, I did want to take a moment to highlight our sustainability report for 2025. It includes initiatives, AND ILLUSTRATES HOW WE'RE EXECUTING ON OUR SUSTAINABILITY COMMITMENTS. ADDITIONALLY, IT ALSO PROVIDES KEY UPDATES ON ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND GOVERNING PERFORMANCE FOR EVERSOURCE. COMPLEMENTARY TO THAT REPORT, THOUGH NOT PUBLISHED YET, IT WILL BE SOON, IS OUR CLIMATE ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION PLAN, OR CAMP FOR SHORT, AND THAT HIGHLIGHTS HOW WE MANAGE CLIMATE MATTERS INCLUSIVE OF OUR EFFORTS TO STRENGTHEN BOTH SYSTEM RESILIENCY AS WELL AS SYSTEM RELIABILITY. AGAIN, WE INVITE THE BOARD TO VISIT OUR SUSTAINABILITY PAGE FOR REGULAR UPDATES AS WELL AS TO REVIEW THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED REPORT. SO THAT BEING SAID, I KNOW WE HAVE A LOT TO COVER HERE. I'M GOING TO PASS IT OFF TO MY COLLEAGUE, SARAH, WHO'S GOING TO GO THROUGH A FEW SLIDES ON ENERGY EFFICIENCY.

THANK YOU.

ALL RIGHT.

This first slide is data that was pulled from the Mass Save Data website and more specifically the DNB website that is tied to this. So these numbers are representative of years 2024 as 2025 is not yet published. So this is the commercial and industrial versus low-income electric annual usage. energy savings, electric incentives, and then vice versa for the gas side. Just give you a minute to take that in, then we'll move to the next slide. This is a slide that's representing our large commercial and industrial projects by sector for years 2025 and 2026. Most projects here in combined 2025 and 2026 years are for higher education, followed by commercial real estate and municipal projects. Small business projects were not included in the butto graph, which where there are additional butto projects. Here we see the savings versus project count numbers as displayed on the previous slide. When you move to the next slide, sorry. So the higher education numbers are providing a lot of therm saving and some kilowatt hour savings. So like a lot of weatherization and electrification projects, and also there are a lot of savings that are seen in commercial and real estate municipal projects, which showed a higher percentage of project numbers while we see a lower demonstration of savings. Next slide. So this is a representation of small business projects. Small business projects are ones that count as projects that are less than 1.5 million kilowatt hours or 40,000 therms annually. So the highest building type here falls under other, which is buildings that does not meet the classification of any other aforementioned building options. So you'll see that religious buildings here are the other segment that stands out largely as we offer the highest level of incentives for religious buildings. Trailing behind this is restaurants and small offices and fast food establishments and grocery stores. On the savings side, we see that kilowatt hours showing the highest savings in other again, but with also showing savings in small offices and large offices, as well as multifamily high rises also. While the therms we see that savings in other and religious buildings, because again, we have like really great incentives for weatherization and religious buildings showing at little to no cost. Next slide. This is also again, publicly available data from the DMV or Mass Save Data website. So this shows fully displaced homes IN CAMBRIDGE AT 120.25 FOR YEAR 2025. FULLY DISPLACED INCENTIVES AT 1,176,000 ROUGHLY. PARTIALLY DISPLACED HOMES AT 109 AND THE INCENTIVES AT 409,603. AND THEN THE WEATHERIZED HOMES AT 371 WITH WEATHERIZATION INCENTIVES AT 1,244. And I'll pass it off.

Thank you. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Daniel, who's going to walk us through the electric sector modernization plan, as well as some of the demand triggers or demand in Cambridge. Basically talk through what we're seeing, what the load forecast looks like. Daniel?

Yes, thank you. I'm on the advanced forecasting team and my team is responsible for part of the load forecast and I want to start on the regulatory framework driving our long term grid investment strategy in Massachusetts, which is the electric sector modernization plan. So the ESMP is a 10 year plan mandated by Massachusetts law. And it's a vehicle enabling the Commonwealth's climate goals. Massachusetts has set one of the most ambitious carbon reduction targets in the country of at least 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. There are interim milestones of 33% by 2025, 50% by 2030, and 75% by 2040. And at its core, the ASMP does four things for Cambridge and our broader service territory. It upgrades and expands infrastructure to handle increasing electric demand, enable large-scale clean energy. It strengthens the distribution system against more frequent and severe storms. It modernizes the grid with smart technologies that gives our customers more visibility and control over their energy usage. And it requires formal stakeholder engagement, which is exactly why we value opportunities like today. Next slide, please. We're projecting a 20% increase in peak demand by 2033 and a 150% increase by 2050 driven by step loads, transportation, and public building heating electrification. Let your vehicles alone are projected to add 1.3 gigawatts of winter demand across our service territory by 2035 zero carbon heating primarily heat pumps displaces gas and oil is projected to add an even larger 3.5 gigawatts of winter demand by that same year and looking at the chart, you can see that today's base load of roughly six gigawatts growing to potentially 16 gigawatts by 2050. i'll go to the next slide please. So let me bring this down specifically for Cambridge because this is one of our most complex and fastest growing surface areas in our entire footprint. New commercial buildings remain the single largest driver of infrastructure needs here. Our peak forecast shows 12.2% total growth between 2025 and 2026 alone and 23.2% total growth over the full decade to 2035. Those are significant numbers for a city that's already dense and heavily loaded. The waterfall chart on the right shows how we get from our 2025 base load of roughly 414 megawatts to a projected 510 megawatts by 2035. Step loads large discrete new customers like biotech facilities and major commercial developments is the dominant driver, accounting for 57% of load change. The trend component adds another 55 megawatts, while EV contributes modestly, and energy efficiency and solar offset a small amount of that growth. So one important flag is the biotech development, and it's critical to our forecast, but it also carries some real risk right now. We are closely monitoring whether projects in that pipeline actually convert to planned, from planned to energized, And a meaningful slowdown in biotech development would change that step load picture considerably.

Next slide, please.

So this brings me to this slide highlighting how economic conditions are actively reshaping our forecasts. So the upper chart tells the story clearly. Cambridge Square footage under construction peaked around 2021 at over 7 million square feet and has since trended down to roughly 3 million square feet as of early 2026. There's a real and significant shift driven by rising construction costs and softening demand in the office and lab leasing markets. So, as a result, large loads in our 2026 forecast have decreased 9% compared to our 2025 forecast vintage. The 10-year compound annual growth rate for total Cambridge load has come down from 3.3% to 2.1%. The lower chart shows what this means for step load specifically our 2026 forecast is running below our 2025 forecast across the three year planning horizon.

Next slide please.

So this slide captures Cambridge commercial real estate landscape across four sectors. Multifamily, it's a tight market, 22.5 million square feet with a 4.5% vacancy rate. Office is the area of greatest concern for a demand risk standpoint. There is 36.5 million square feet with a 17.3% vacancy rate, which is 6.3 million square feet currently empty. And that's improving from an all-time high of 18%, which is encouraging, but office remains the largest vacancy challenge in Cambridge. Flex space carries the highest vacancy rate at 28% and specialty is the outlier basically zero vacancy there. The citywide average vacancy is approximately 14.9% and that number has a direct implication of for how we think about planning and it leads directly to this next point. Next slide please. So inventory risk. Buildings can transition from a vacant to fully occupied building quickly, often with little or no advance notice to us. So a single large tenant signing a lease in a building creates immediate substantial power demand. And current vacancy is not a reliable indicator. It's a snapshot of a moment in time. Vacancy tracking models, we are actively developing analytical tools, leveraging commercial real estate data sources to monitor unoccupied buildings, building inventory and tie occupancy trends directly to our load forecast. And this is an area my team is investing in specifically. Capacity readiness, if we slow investment today and demand rebounds, we risk capacity shortfalls and then are very difficult to solve quickly. And lastly, EV and commuter load link. Lower building utilization today is dampening inbound commuter traffic and suppressing EV charging load. But that is a temporary effect. As occupancy recovers, both building load and EV charging demand will rebound simultaneously, and we need to be ready for that. Thank you, and I'll turn it over to my colleagues.

Thanks, Daniel. Appreciate that. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Rick from our project engagement team. He's going to provide an update on the Greater Cambridge Energy Program, as well as going to give a high-level overview of what we refer to as the Underground Cable Modernization Program. There were a few proposed routes that traverse underground in Cambridge that Rick will speak to. Rick, I'll hand it over to you.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH, JASON. I'M GOING TO JUMP RIGHT INTO IT. I KNOW WE'RE COMING UP TO THE END. SO AS MANY OF YOU MIGHT KNOW, WE ARE CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR NORTH AMERICA'S FIRST UNDERGROUND SUBSTATION. WE HAVE MADE ALL FIVE OF THE DIVINGS THAT SPREAD OUT THROUGHOUT TINDALL SQUARE. And what that means is everything's been restored. Sidewalks are back. It's as if we were never there. The work that we have upcoming that we will be filing is part of our UCMP program, the Underground Cable Modernization. But that is Eversource's efforts to update the existing As things stand, we have 115 kV high-pressure fluid-filled cables. These cables are coming to the end of their productive life. They're older, they're starting to deteriorate, sprays leaks. What you can see here on this map shows two of the three proposed replacement lines. Specifically, it looks like that it's North Cambridge to Woburn. process but we're hoping to file this and stay EFSB the energy facility setting board in Q1 2027 let's start construction in Q2 2028 hopefully and then an ideal in service date of Q3 2023 the full restoration of you know painted lines sidewalks by 2034. what you see on that purple line is our mystic to North Cambridge line, which goes through your neighbors over in Somerville, through the heart of Cambridge, down to the North Cambridge station. We're hoping to file that in Q1, 2027, the start of construction in mid to late 2028, and an ideal in-service date of Q1, 2033. And we'll be doing open houses in the city of Cambridge, specifically shooting for this fall. And the last item I do want to mention that I see is the planning for, if we go back real quick, is the enhancing control house upgrades. That is just internal work that takes place at the North Cambridge station, station 509 and 808. of land uh that's just updating the facades fencing in the area increasing our security uh and upgrading the physical capacity control house on the site but all that takes place within the station uh and has a minimal impact uh to the surrounding community however we do try to notice and notify the surrounding residential buildings there's a few communities in the area we try to keep uh informed specifically the fresh part of lines in that I know that was a mouthful, but if you guys don't have any questions on this, we can jump to GSEP. GSEP is our big fancy project that Jay invited you guys to. I actually used the word for vicinity energy. I have seen the inside of their plant. It is awesome. But I'm a little biased. I think the underground substation is fantastic. And if you have the opportunity, please come join us and see. So this underground substation, if you're not familiar, is only because The local neighborhood in Cambridge, they organized opposition regarding a above ground substation in Fulkerson Place, right around that area. So we put our heads together with the city of Cambridge, Jim Wilcox, neighborhood association and BXP, and that yielded the result of an underground substation in the public park. As things stand right now, we're in the middle of construction. We are on schedule. We are projected to have that substation energized by 2029. And as things stand right now, all five duct banks are under construction. We're performing construction both in the city of Cambridge for this, the city of Somerville, and the city of Boston as of a few weeks ago. So we're really happy to be, you know, at budget, on time, and are hosting regular meetings with Ted Bulger from DPW. And I have a bi-weekly construction meeting with Jane Wilcox to hear about any city issues, upcoming construction through you. any day-to-day operations that are impacting businesses nearby, residents, and any nature of that specifically catering to MIT, who, if you look on that map, you can see the red and orange lines run right through the heart of the campus. All right, jump to the next slide. So the UCMP, the Underground Cable Monitor Zoo, the underground people modernization plan um just real quick i know i kind of touched on it by pace plus replacing old infrastructure uh it's reached the end of its useful life and we're going to be replacing them with the solid crosslink polyethylene technology uh benefit to that environmental and um it doesn't leak it's just a solid pipe type cable and the best thing about during the construction phase uh pending approvals is that residents don't lose power Once we build the line successfully, we then go into the old line that was made of the HPFF cable. We remove that cable and we keep that space. That'll be for future utility use, whether it's by the city or Eversource, but that'll be a pipe that will exist and maintain for any future electrical needs or utility needs the city and the area might need. And again, this project is being undertaken by the city, by Eversource to keep up the constant energy demand you can jump to the next slide here's a better map showing the three ucmp projects that we are proposing with the city we've done some routing analysis for all three projects uh with jim wilcox you can see in the yellow line it's that north cambridge to lubrin line that i referenced uh projecting the file was stating we feel like it's a good set of lines we'd like to propose to the state. In the green, you see that Mystic to North Cambridge line coming in from your neighbors at Somerville. And then at the bottom, the kind of the younger of the group, we haven't completely set on a name yet for the Belmont underground cable modernization plant. It might not end up going into Belmont. It might stick at that North Cambridge station. We're a little ways away with that project for right now, but we are, hopefully looking to file Q1, Q2 of 2027 with the start of construction in Q4 of 2028 and an estimated in-service date of 2033. And similar to its counterparts, that infrastructure has reached the end of its life, its useful life, and we'd like to get out ahead and replace that line before something breaks. And again, each of these projects with each of these filing dates, we don't file until we've met the states the neighborhood association we're meeting with business owners and we're doing in-person field visits to see how and what we might impact whether it's a new bike lane a newly paved street a local park we take those in consideration when we do our analysis i think that might be my last slide jump yeah thank you very much everyone

Sorry about that. I will turn it over to Amza who's going to speak to some of the interim as well as long-term system planning solutions in the pipeline for the company. Yeah, you're muted as well.

Nope.

So we've got some complication with the audio.

Yeah, I can try to walk through this. So again, short term and long term solutions, we have After years of permitting, we've successfully brought online an additional transformer at Station 402. Station 402 is located in Union Square in Somerville. As far as longer term capacity, we are in the process of implementing interim solutions Those solutions are inclusive of modifications within our existing substation located in Kendall Square, as well as continued distribution street work from 2025 to 2028. As Rick had mentioned, that work is inclusive at GSEP of both transmission and distribution. 2029 and beyond, again, as Rick had mentioned, will be when GSEP is in service, and that will certainly help to alleviate some of the constraints on the system that we're anticipating. That being said, I think it's also important to note that, again, being forward thinking, that the Greater Cambridge Energy Program allows or is being built with three 90 megawatt transformers, but an important note to that is that we're, in essence, building the house, if you will, for an additional transformer into the future. So there will be room for four transformers there. Currently, we're in the process of installing the three. I don't want to talk out of turn on arms if your headset's working, but I think that's the highlight for this slide. Is that accurate? Oh, now she's frozen. Okay. Fair enough. If she comes back or any questions specific to this, hopefully her audio is on. That being said, one thing I did, I know we've kind of highlighted the large scale transmission projects going on. But one thing I thought it was important to discuss, and I know the planning board has some interest in, is bringing that down from the higher level. to basically street level distribution work. And that in essence is when you look out your window, you see the telephone, you see the wires on the poles going into the homes and whatnot. Catherine's going to walk us through, in essence, the work order lifecycle, if you will, from, you know, when somebody makes that first phone call saying there's a new development coming to basically when that project is electrified and elaborate a little bit on more. Again, knowing that the planning board is interested in this, you know, what goes into, you know, the placement of transformers, whether that's in the public right of way or more often than not. where it needs to be situated on a development, which, as I'm sure you're aware, can often be in front of the property, given some of the constraints in the street, as well as the tight lots that we see in Cambridge. So again, I'll turn it over to Catherine.

Good evening. My name's Catherine Horry. I'm the lead distribution engineer for the Somerville Area Works Center, which includes the City of Cambridge. Thanks for having us. We get a lot of questions in distribution engineering from the city, Cambridge and other municipalities that we work with about how we design and engineer the distribution system. So we bring all this capacity in with a new substation and how do we push it out into the customers that want to electrify and the customers that want to upgrade our services. So what we're seeing now, especially in the city of Cambridge with the newer zoning allowing six-story multifamilies, there is a lot of small... service upgrades that are now becoming larger service upgrades uh so the power needs of a single family or a small multi-family building are much different than a six family fully electrified building with ev charging so um i just want to walk you through a couple steps that we do as distribution engineering when we when we meet these um customer requests So they submit to us a new customer connect or service upgrade. Let's say a multifamily has an 80-amp service, but now they want to install heat pumps. Now they're going to be a 400-amp service. So we engineer their new service. We take a look at what's the existing infrastructure in the street, what's their load demand, what's their new service size going to be, their switch size. Some new services are service okays and we can upgrade them with existing infrastructure on the street. But oftentimes, especially if you're demolishing a smaller building and putting up a larger building, it's going to require transformer upgrade. If a single customer is demolishing what's on their property and putting in a new building, we generally require that they provide space on their property for their own transformation. So if they're going to be the sole beneficiary of that new transformer, they've got to find the space on their property for a private property manhole or a private property transformer. And then that goes through engineering and then it goes to construction and connection. If there's rights that we need to extend a circuit down a street, or we need to extend some phases or build a new riser, we work with the city to acquire rights. We install the public way infrastructure, the customer installs their private property infrastructure, and then we energize their new service. Okay. The other thing that I want to highlight on this slide is the types of questions that we get for developers about the equipment that we select. Eversource has an entire distribution standards department that selects equipment that we can put on the system. Standard equipment provides a lower installation cost and a lower maintenance cost. If we have the same type of equipment throughout the whole system, it's easier to maintain and install equipment. So we will sometimes get one-off requests from customers about installing specialized equipment, but in the long run, it's more expensive to install special equipment than to install standard equipment. So customers are required to install a manhole or a pad on their property, but Eversource installs all the electrical equipment and maintains it on their property. Next slide, please. This is just highlighting a couple of the standards that we provide to customers who are looking to upgrade their service. So the picture on the upper left is the manhole spec for private property manhole. This type of manhole will have a single-phase or three-phase transformer dedicated to that customer's property. Nobody else can tie into that transformer because it is on their own private property. We are currently looking at a smaller size private property transformer for single phase services. And that is something that's really going to help in the city of Cambridge due to the lot restriction. There's a lot of small lots that still need a private property infrastructure. So we actively work with our standards departments to come up with new solutions for customers that don't quite have the space required for one of these larger private property transformers. And then one last thing I want to highlight is what do we do when several customers on the same street come to us with service upgrades? So this is a job that we've had recently come through. The customer in the lower left and the customer in the lower middle, they both, they're separate customers, separate projects, but they came around the same time, which is great for us because then we can take kind of a global view of the street instead of an individual service upgrade type of view. So they both had space on their property. Customer in the lower left is installing a pad mount. Customer in the lower middle is installing a manhole. The problem on this street is that every pole on the street already had existing overhead infrastructure on it and we could not install risers, which is the piece of equipment that takes the electric line from the overhead into the underground. So we proposed to the city to clean up the overhead transformers, install one manhole in the public way, and remove some of the overhead transformers to give us space for risers, and then put one larger transformer in the public way in the manhole so that if any of the other customers on the street come to us for service upgrades, that capacity is already there. The other thing to highlight on this is the cost breakdown. So these individual customer service upgrades don't bear any of the cost of that system work. Eversource splits that cost. The customer only pays for the capacity that they're using to bring onto their property and then Eversource bears the rest of that as a capital investment for other service upgrades in the future. So we try to look at, you know, we try to look at the customer upgrading at that moment in time. And then also, is there any other work we can do in the area to enable other customers to upgrade as they come to us? Especially important in a city like Cambridge, where you guys are encouraging your residents to electrify. We know that we're going to have service upgrades coming down the pike all over the place in the city. And that's all I have for distribution engineering.

Right. You're muted.

Yep. Sorry about that. Thanks, Catherine. So I'm going to try to move through these last few slides a little quickly. I just want to be talking about January 2025. We began implementing our advanced meter infrastructure project or what's known as our smart meters. As we can see in the screen, our smart meters. open the door for a number of useful account features near real-time access to their data usage through the online portal or a free app reports of or on their energy use they can set energy usage alerts they kind of were also notified almost instantly regarding power outages i believe it or not a lot of the times now when lights go out we rely on phone calls or customers to call in to alert us to that. This will also allow for what we call remote move-in as well as move-out. Now we have to dispatch a technician to, in essence, turn the lights on and off when people move in and out. We'll also be able to monitor THE HEALTH DATA OF THAT SYSTEM ON THE STREET. IN ESSENCE, IT WILL BE A REAL TIME PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, OF THE EQUIPMENT AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE PULSE OR HEARTBEAT, IF YOU WILL. SO AGAIN, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CAMBRIDGE? THE NETWORK COMMUNICATION DEVICES ON THE UTILITY POLLS HAS BEEN RECENTLY COMPLETED. BEGINNING MID NEXT YEAR, WE WILL BEGIN INSTALLING THESE SMART METERS ON RESIDENTIAL HOMES AND BUSINESSES IN CAMBRIDGE. BEFORE THIS PROCESS STARTS, CUSTOMERS WILL RECEIVE NOTIFICATIONS IN THE MAIL, 90, 60, OR THE PREFERRED METHOD OF COMMUNICATION WITH US, 90, 60, AND 30 DAYS IN ADVANCE OF THAT. And then lastly, at Eversource, of course, our top priority is always the safety of the communities we serve, our customers, as well as our employees. And we are constantly monitoring our gas system to provide our customers with safe and reliable energy. To do that and deliver natural gas to our customers, we are vintage pipe materials, older pipes such as cast iron and steel. are being replaced with state of the art materials throughout the system to reduce these leaks. That graph on the left showcases the progress that we've made over the last few years. And the graph on the right shows the projects that have recently been completed that are currently in progress and that are planned to begin in 2026 or later. Alrighty, and with that, I will open it up for questions.

Thank you. Are there questions from board members for Eversource? They seem to have covered a lot of territory here. Very thorough presentation, I think. Okay, Ted.

I just have a simple question. What is the meaning of full or partial displacement?

I like that one. So full displacement is when a building fully electrifies. Partial displacement is when they partially electrify. So if you install heat pumps but you still keep your gas unit in place, you have partially electrified your building. But if you remove all gas and you switch over to fully an electric system, like a heat pump system, then you have fully electrified your building.

Great. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So first of all, thank you very much. A lot of dense and very helpful information. And I'm sure I'm not the only one to appreciate your close working relationship with Cambridge, particularly on these major projects, but also on distribution. A couple of kind of higher level, I know DPW presented hopes of terminal road extension I know that there had been some skepticism at one point of that but I'm hopeful that that has ever sources okay and that that trade-off of of easement for for access through helps us on some of our transportation and and planning So I guess there's a question that hoping that you're fully on board with that. The others are really around district energy. I know that vicinity talked about this. You guys have been working on pilot projects, I think, in Framingham on some ground source heat pumps, multiple well pieces. So I don't know, Jason, whether That's at play for whether that's something that we'd look at in the airwave quadrangle or whether there's a pilot that you guys are considering for Cambridge, but certainly I would highly support that and encourage that as a as an ongoing partnership. And then I guess lastly, maybe questions for for Catherine on the distribution side. You know, I think that getting service hookup is always a challenge for a new construction. I think you've touched on some of the highlights. I'm particularly intrigued by a possible smaller in ground vault or manhole for a single phase service. I'm very curious about what that timeline might be because I think there's as we're looking at changes in zoning and looking at encouraging infill development and housing production, any You know continued collaborations with every source about how to get that distribution to projects is incredibly important, and if there's flexibility on sizes obviously that makes a huge difference so. I guess that's three very large questions open to get. Your input on.

Yeah, maybe I can start off with the terminal road. I will say that it's still extremely early in the process regarding that extension. We've begun information shares on some preliminary designs of what that would look like. That being said, I certainly don't want to give the impression that it's a done deal and it's rubber stamped. As you can probably imagine, there's a lot of devil in the details, if you will. As we've heard, there are UCMP projects that are coming into North Cambridge at Alewife, and those are obviously on the ground. So we have to engineer ways both into that station as well as out of that station. There are also security concerns or security measures that need to be taken into place. As you can imagine, if you're putting A fence or a wall too close to the road in these trees is an opportunity for people to jump into the station. So that's something else to be cognizant of. Again, having a busy road next to our electrical infrastructure can pose problems as well, just from rattling and the everyday traffic going back and forth. ALL THAT BEING SAID, WE HAVE AND WE ARE ALWAYS WILLING AND ABLE TO, YOU KNOW, MEET WITH THE CITY. THAT'S, AS RICK ALLUDED TO OR MENTIONED, ONE OF THE REASONS WHY THE SUBSTATION IS UNDERGROUND IN KENDALL. SO, AGAIN, THERE'S A LOT OF EVERY INCH OF THAT STATION IS IMPERATIVE, BUT THAT BEING SAID, AND AS I BELIEVE JIM HAD MENTIONED, There is an existing easement that runs to that station. So if there's an opportunity to, in essence, lift that easement out of the station, put it into the street to be constructed, that may or may not allow us to move around some of the infrastructure within that station. I believe it also will require us to stack a head house or switch gear onto another level. Again, not impossible. It just requires a detailed level of engineering that we're not anywhere near at this point. As far as the geothermal discussion, as you had said, again, proud to just talk about the first in the nation geothermal pilot in Framingham. There have been preliminary discussions. I wasn't privy to them. Julie may be able to speak to it better, but about the potential of hosting something similar like that in North Cambridge. Again, I think that what makes North Cambridge or the Alewife area and the Health Peak development that I'm sure you're aware of entertaining is the fact that it's being built from the ground up as you can imagine there's a lot of challenges that come with the geothermal network um and instituting that with an older housing stock what that you know entails you know the abatements that go along with that um so again that's kind of high level maybe I'll turn it over real quickly to to Catherine to speak to the question on distribution engineering if that's okay

Yeah, that's definitely okay. And I think other members of the board certainly would support the continued conversation around terminal road. I think that unlocks a few key planning pieces.

So to answer your basic question, we're always reviewing new equipment and new, you know, customers will send us stuff to say like, hey, is this possible to install? In general, a distribution engineering standard review takes about six to eight months before we can start implementing something on the system, just to give you an idea about the timeframe. The smaller manhole has been under review since about February. They look at, does it fit with our existing system? Can we plug and play? Does it change any of our safety that we need to have in a transformer manhole? You need to have two means of egress in order to operate that transformer safely. It also has to be a certain size to fit the transformer and the cable. And then with all equipment reviews, we look at procurement and quality control for the companies that offer those pieces of equipment, and all of that goes into the standard review. So it's about six to eight months to review a new piece of equipment that we consider putting on our system. This review is already underway.

That's great. Just a quick follow up. Do you have a general sense about sizing and maximum transformer size?

It could fit a single phase 100 kVA transformer, which is appropriately sized for almost all of the single phase multifamily buildings that we come across. Where you need to get into three phases is like elevator service. Like if an elevator motor is more than five horsepower, you're required to provide a three-phase service. So the transformer that fits in there is sized well enough for the majority of our single-phase services that we come across.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome. Diego, you had your hand up. Your question's been answered. Yeah, it was. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. I think that's... all the questions we have for you at this point, but we are going to see if there's members of the public that want to make public comment at this point. So it's not a public hearing and the board has no official action to take tonight, but the board will take public comment or questions. So any members of the public who wish to speak should now click the button that says raise hand. If you're calling in by phone, you can raise your hand by pressing star nine. It says, as of 5 p.m. yesterday, the board had received no written communications. However, written communications received since that time will be entered into the record. So let's see. I'm going to ask Jeff if he's still on to help me with this.

Yep, I'm here. I see... I don't see any hands raised at this point i'll just repeat the instructions in case anyone missed the first time or is looking for the button if there's any attendees in the public who would like to speak, please push the raise hand button the little picture of the hand on zoom or star nine if you're connected by phone. Now's the time to do that. As we move ahead with the agenda.

I think this is a measure of how thorough the presentations were.

It doesn't appear that we have hands raised at this point, so I'll turn it back over to the chair.

Thank you. So board discussion, board members, do you have any further comments or questions for the staff or utilities at this time? So no further questions. So we're going to take a motion just to conclude the discussion. So and thank the presenters for tonight. So only full board members will act on this item. So is there a motion to conclude this agenda item tonight?

This is Mary Flynn. So moved.

Thank you, Mary, very much. And a second. This is Diego. Second. Thank you, Diego. We'll have a roll call vote on the motion as it stands, please.

On that motion, Ted Cohen? Yes. Mary Flynn?

Yes.

Mary Lidecker?

Yes.

Diego Macias? Yes. Carolyn Zurn?

Yes.

Thompson Avich? Yes. All six members present voting in favor.

Great, thank you. So that concludes the business on our agenda for this evening. Are there any additional comments from staff?

No, we'll have another meeting in two weeks. Everyone stay cool.

Okay, great. Board members have anything to add tonight? If not, we'll adjourn. The meeting's adjourned. Thank you very much to everybody for your patience and thank you to the presenters.