Governance & Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council. Thanks for joining us for the discussion. The Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee starts now.

Alright, we are on air. I do need a gavel. Okay. That was my gavel. How'd I do? Great.

Good job.

10 out of 10. All right. Good morning, everyone. It is Tuesday, June 30th. We have a special, normally our committee, Gov Committee meets monthly. Today we have convened a second meeting this month. So thank you very much, all of you, for joining us. I'm Amanda Sawyer. I have the honor of representing the residents of District 5. I'm also chair of this committee. We have two action items today that are blocks. The first one is a vote on a charter change amendment that we had presented on the budget that we had presented two weeks ago. What's happening? And so we are gonna wait and do that at the end so that we can do kind of all of our votes at the same time. So we are gonna start with our Excel franchise agreement, which is three action items that we are gonna be moving in a block. So if, I don't know who is gonna be doing the presentation, sorry. We didn't do introductions yet. Sorry, guys. Let's do a round of introductions first. We'll start with you.

Good morning. My name is Flora Lideres. I serve the fine residents of the Lucky District 7.

Good morning, Darrell Watson. Fine, District 9. I thought you were going to say the lucky residents.

I almost did.

Good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Delos District 8.

Good morning, Stacey Gilmore, District 11.

Good morning, Diana Romero-Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver, District 2.

All right, sorry about that. Okay, now we're ready to start with the three action items that we will do in a block for the Excel Franchise Agreement. So is it you, Cindy? Yeah, please come on up, grab a seat at the table, and then introduce yourselves. Dom, you want to start? Sure. Okay, go ahead.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the Governance Committee. Thank you for your time today. In hearing the XL franchise agreement... Hang on, you got to introduce yourselves first. Oh, right. Thank you.

I know, I messed that one up too.

Dominic Moreno, Deputy Chief Operating Officer in the Mayor's Office. Thank you again for your time in hearing today the XL franchise agreement, the energy partnership agreement as a companion to the XL franchise, and then the DEN operating agreement, which are kind of a package with the franchise agreement being the only one that is necessitates council referral to the ballot. Before we get started, and if city council will indulge me, I do see some people who really contributed to this work. And so just want to acknowledge their presence. We have some members of the working group here, Jeff Ackerman, who represented Together Colorado and brought his significant PUC expertise. So thank you so much, Jeff, for all your work. Keith Meyer from INC is also here, member of the working group. I saw Jeremy Ross, a member of the working group at IBEW. Thank you for all your help. I think that's everyone. And just want to acknowledge that John McGrath and Chuck Solomon from the city attorney's office really supported us in this work. So thank you so much and are here to answer questions. So some of these slides will seem familiar to you because they are similar slides that you've seen in policy. But we do have updates based on negotiations with Xcel Energy. You also hear directly from Xcel in this presentation as well. Okay, so going all the way back to a year ago, if you recall, that it was proposed to refer the XL franchise agreement to voters last year. City Council did not refer the measure to the voters. And in that process, we heard a very direct request that there be more community involvement and more City Council involvement in the process. That caused obviously Excel to initiate a really a community engagement process where they went and conducted a number of R&O presentations, stakeholder group convenings, had a lot of interaction with you all on city council, and you will hear directly from them about their efforts on that front. And then on the city side, we launched the working group. So composed of the members that I just mentioned that represented a broad community perspective, everything from labor, environmental justice, housing, affordability, consumer interests, and really three main themes came out of that process. that people wanted us to focus on affordability, reliability, and sustainability. And so in that, we have proposed that the Energy Partnership Agreement, which was last year referred to as the Energy and Infrastructure Agreement, updated name, new provisions. We will walk you through those. That is a companion to the franchise and then really a commitment around how are the city and Excel going to work together to advance the city's climate goals, which are very well established. We also wanted to make sure that we advanced certain community priorities. So. A few things came to the forefront. One being shareholder contributions. So how much is Excel going to contribute from shareholder funds to advance some of this work? Energy assistance support. pilots, so what is the process going to be in which we develop, implement, fund pilots over the life of a 20-year agreement that will actually allow us to respond to community feedback and input. substation design, how can we make substations a bit more consistent with neighborhood characteristics? And then reporting and transparency, what are the reporting and transparency mechanisms that are going to be included over the life of a 20-year franchise to make sure that the partnership is still working as intended? This is a newer slide and actually was informed by some of the input from the working group members. So want to just review quickly kind of what is generally the highlights of the energy partnership agreement. As I mentioned, the pilots that are contemplated over the life of a 20-year agreement to fund, implement, report on those pilots, there's a structured process contemplated in the energy partnership agreement for how those pilots come about and how do the city and Excel work together to advance community-informed pilots over the life of the 20-year agreement. Shareholder contributions we have reached agreement with Excel that they would contribute an upfront donation of 2.5Million in 2027.

Stop you really quickly to say, if you are a city staff member, if you could come and sit these chairs over here, so that there's some room for other people to join us in the room. We've just got a packed house today. That would be great. Thank you. I'm sorry.

No. And thank you, Madam Chair. That actually provides me an opportunity to also welcome Adair Andre, who is also a member of the working group and contributed significantly from her expertise at the Colorado Energy Office. So thank you, Adair, for joining us today. So, 2.5M contribution in 2027 with a specific dedicated use of energy assistance bill bill payment assistance. And then you might mention, you might remember that in the last iteration of the franchise agreement, there was this 100,000 dollar a year contribution that Excel made to the city that has been proposed to increase to. $125,000 a year. So it's a little confusing because the $2.5 million figure is the upfront contribution one time in 2027. If you add up 20 years of $125,000, it is also 2.5 million. So we will walk you through that and make very clear what those are each dedicated to. But $125,000 a year to go to energy assistance to help Denver residents. We also secured some specific energy assistance navigators specific for Denver residents. So these will be navigators that help connect people to energy assistance to assistance programs, which was an exciting development and is new. transparency and accountability obviously, so a city hosted dashboard that demonstrates what is in the energy partnership agreement and how are certain metrics being met, when the meetings are, all of that will be hosted on the city website, as well as specific five-year interval evaluations that basically say, is the partnership working for both parties still? And then specific to community voice and oversight, we sought to essentially align the Denver Energy Partnership community advisors as much to the representation that we had in the working group. Because we really felt the broad representation we had was the right mix of folks to offer feedback over the life of a 20-year franchise and the life of a 20-year energy partnership agreement. So you won't see too many differences between what is contemplated in the community advisory group and what representation we had in the working group that helped to inform the negotiations here. And then lastly, mentioned substations before, but specific 1% dedicated amount from construction budgets that will be dedicated towards facade treatments, improvements, making sure substations are consistent with neighborhood design. And the precedent there was obviously the 1% for public art on capital projects. There was some precedent for that, so we mimicked that. I will just say here, the working group recommended 3%, and that is one of those things that just in negotiations, there was precedent for that 1%, and we ultimately agreed on that figure. So as I mentioned, the actual contributions can be a little bit confusing. I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Cindy Patton, who will actually walk you through specific dollar amounts, where they're coming from, and what they're dedicated to.

And you can thank Councilman Watson for this slide, because as we went through this yesterday with the working group, like Don said, and he very aptly went over all of the contributions and the achievements that we made through the Energy Partnership Agreement, but it's just very confusing. So we wanted to lay it out here in a table for you. We heard very clearly last August that y'all did not want us to come back to you with an agreement, specifically a companion agreement that just kept the lights on. No pun intended. It was really about creating this long-term investment in Denver's residents and neighborhoods. So this lays out exactly what those things are, what the dollar amounts are, what the intended use will be, and then the funding source, because those all vary, as well as the cadence, because that also varies. So hopefully this is helpful to you, and I'll just go back over it really quickly. $2.5 million, that's a one-time lump sum for utility assistance. That is a shareholder contribution. It does not come from ratepayers. That is one-time. 2nd, the 125 that is also shareholder contribution that is annual. And that will go to income qualified energy affordability programs. We will couple that with the 2Million, which is a carve out from the franchise fee. And right now we're looking at what those income affordability programs might look like and what's going to be most useful. So it could be programs for energy assistance. It could also be programs to make different heat pumps available or electric bikes available or EVs. We're running the gamut, working with our partners just to see what will be the most fruitful and helpful for our population here in our community. Next is that 250 a year which goes towards the energy resource navigators. Those navigators will be dedicated to Denver and we will work with the company to do an RFP to find a third party service to provide that. So that won't be initiated or managed through Excel. It'll be a third party that does that as many of them are done today. Um, and then finally that, uh, I mentioned the 2.2 point, the 2Million, um, that's the carve out and then the 1% of substation, um, will also be dedicated to neighborhood compatible design improvements as Dom said, could be enclosure landscaping things that help those substations fit better into surrounding communities. What's really important to say there is in most cases, most of those will come before this body. There are a few places where there won't be a zoning activity associated with that, so this body will have, say, some involvement in how that zoning works as part of working with CPD. You'll be approving that. So, when you step back, it's not really a single funding commitment. It's a portfolio of different things that hit at different times. And I think I really want to underscore that transparency and reporting piece that a lot of this has felt like a black box. We sat here last year and we were asked by this body for some of the pilots completed from the last. agreement and we looked at each other and said, I don't know. So that will not happen again because you will know at any point during this next 20 years where something is and we expect other things to on ramp and we'll be tracking those things there too. What this does not include is the financial contributions and the benefits that are associated with the franchise agreement itself, the franchise proper. That includes, and Shannon will go over some of this, the general fund contribution, the huge significant benefit of the relocations, both at Den and in the city, and that 1% to undergrounding, which Councilwoman Gilmore and others have said that also is quite a black box. So we want to make sure that those decisions, where that money is being spent, is also available on that reporting page.

Council, great to see you all again. Jonathan Rogers, call me Johnny, the Deputy Executive Director in Denver's Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency. I'm really thrilled with the result that we have here and what it means for the people of Denver, for the city of Denver. It really sets us up for success. for the next 20 years of ongoing collaboration and advocacy to ensure that we can meet denver's needs with affordable reliable and pollution-free energy both where and when it's needed the things that you know we have accomplished in this partnership agreement through the franchise are available to no other colorado community it sets us up appropriately for ongoing collaboration related to things around infrastructure planning and piloting different approaches to serving our neighborhoods and taking a neighborhood scale approach on that transition away from aging gas infrastructure or things that are misaligned with our climate goals and pushing them towards those more affordable, reliable, and sustainable options. We benefit from the collaboration on pilots and other activities that have already been discussed. And we'll have a process where ongoing on an annual basis, we'll be talking with the community, with council members, with informed experts about what are those highest impact problems that we're still striving for solutions. Can they be tested in Denver? Where are the resources going to come from? And how do we report out on the progress and successes related to those things? In some cases, they may already be underway in other jurisdictions around the state, such as current programs on installing battery storage and solar for customers who have medical equipment that needs to stay on through potential wildfire outages and planned safety shutoffs. you know we hope to learn from those things and see is this a cost-effective way to really support that type of a customer in need and how can we bring it to denver if proven successful or do we need to demonstrate it ourselves and then bring it to the public utilities commission where we can really advocate for these things at scale two big accomplishments we'll see filed tomorrow with the puc a rate that will reduce the cost per kilowatt hour of electricity for customers who install heat pumps. This will be a pilot that will be made available to Denverites and across Xcel's entire service territory in Colorado that we'll be able to learn from and then inform a permanent rate that will be filed with the commission in 2027. Denver will have a key role in really understanding the impacts the cost effectiveness and the customer experience through this program so that we can ensure that we do something that is ultimately successful and ensure that it is cheaper to go cleaner. That is the direction we hope to bring the people of Denver. Additionally, by August 14th, we will be filing an application with the Public Utilities Commission for the Downtown Ambient Loop District Thermal Network, connecting multiple city facilities and working with partners to ensure that as we think about aging steam infrastructure, the energy demands of our urban core, and how do we make sure that we have the most attractive place to site your business or your headquarters. We think that can and should be Denver. We're working with other partners such as the Metro Wastewater Recovery District and doing a combination of sewer heat recovery, geothermal, sharing heat between buildings, and this can truly be a model that is being looked at by other cities around the globe. how do you meet the energy needs of a dense urban core in a cold climate environment? Denver is already a national leader and globally recognized, but being able to continue forward with this type of project and the partnerships that we have will demonstrate what a sustainable thermal energy business model can be that really serves the utilities who provide the service as well as the customers who are receiving that service. um we won't run through the entire list because so many of these things have been touched upon already by my colleagues we're really proud of the work that we've done i think the last time we came and spoke to several of these were still comment bubbles that the negotiation was ongoing and we firmly believe we landed in a place that is truly the gold standard in terms of what we can accomplish for our community and sets us up for success for that now 20 years of partnership and ongoing work to really implement these ideas in pragmatic ways and to bring them forward at scale to truly serve the people of Denver. And I believe some of you were in the room last time. The only one up there that's not a check mark is a little Satan House, is related to the data sharing provisions. That is because we've gained access to everything that we were looking for through our participation at the Public Utilities Commission. We have staff with highly confidential access to the power flows across every wire transformer and substations that we can anticipate. When are we going to hit capacity thresholds and how are we working with the company and state regulators to ensure that we make sure we're proactively investing in the system to provide energy to folks expediently as it is requested to meet our growing energy demands? and likewise the age, location, material, diameter of every gas line in Denver so we can look at the pipes that are 100 years old and are due for replacement and do we really want to pay for more gas lines or do we think some of these sustainable alternatives such as thermal energy networks or neighborhood scale electrification approaches such as what we're piloting in the Val Verde neighborhood. How will they work? How will they be successful? How do we ensure that this is most cost effective for the customers who are receiving that benefit as well as for the overall rate payers who need to make decisions in terms of how their dollars get spent on infrastructure and meeting their needs?

franchise agreement, this is probably the easiest slide to work our way through because not much has changed in the past year. In fact, the franchise agreement negotiated Last year is what we have before you again today. We're very proud of it. We also think that's the gold standard agreement, certainly for the service territory in terms of agreements with Excel. And there are certain kinds of financial benefits and then certain non-financial benefits. I think probably the non-financial benefits are a little bit more. was visible um in terms of what we're all aware of but excel over the last you know five to ten years has evolved has developed a boilerplate standard franchise agreement and ours varies from that in many ways specifically with respect to how um how our city council interacts with Excel. The standard franchise agreement at this point says that the franchise agreement, any franchise agreement entered with a municipality that its provisions would prevail over subsequently adopted ordinances. It's a little technical and we said that we really couldn't do that. We spent a lot of time arguing about it and finally Excel saw things our way and understood that in fact council retains the right to legislate about how Excel operates in our territory. So that was pretty important. In terms of the utility facility location, it was very important to Excel that many of our rights of way are becoming quite crowded, and it can sometimes be difficult to find places to place new facilities in our rights of way. And they were hoping to obtain a provision whereby Excel could use other city property, non-Rights of Way property, to locate their facilities. And we said that if there were individual circumstances where the Rights of Way wouldn't accommodate them, they should come to us and negotiate about that. And we would work things out on an individual basis, also something that we spent a lot of time talking about. Probably more important particularly as you're going into budget season are some of the financial pieces. As you know, going forward, we expect about $34 million in franchise fees next year. And that's the part of the budget that's actually visible to you. Because that is part of the general fund, and you see it in a tight budget situation. It would be difficult to figure out how to work your way around not having that. Less visibly, but actually much more substantial in terms of the financial benefit to the city, is the benefit in terms of our capital projects. Both the bond projects for Elevate, Rise, and Vibrant, and our capital improvement projects. almost all projects have some aspect of utility relocation and under the franchise agreement those utility relocations in almost all cases would be paid for by excel and that's true not just for city projects and city bond projects but also for in our rights of way but also for projects being undertaken by other governmental entities that are undertaking projects to benefit our citizens, including RTD, including CDOT, Denver Water, other governmental entities, including JIDS, BIDS, and the full land mass of the airport, which is an unusual provision, but we argue that the airport serves the whole state, so it was a reasonable provision to ask for. And finally, part of the franchise agreement is the undergrounding fee, 1% of electric gross revenues. That amounts, at this point, to a little over $10 million a year. It doesn't provide for as much as we might hope. It costs about $1 million a block to underground the overhead wires, but it is a benefit that is very important in connection with some of our other projects.

All right, so to wrap up, we are very confident that we have finalized a very good deal for Denver. It gives us a stronger voice in utility matters. At the end of the day, it is about becoming a franchisee and having a seat at the table, because that's where the discussion happens, the evolution happens over the course of the 20 years. That will evolve far beyond whatever we contemplated this season. That'll give us a place at the front seat of that table. It will allow for that efficient delivery of city projects to ensure that that utility coordination that we do so often excels one of our top two permit pullers remains both predictable and efficient and will have fewer delays, lower costs. and smoother delivery of those projects that are so important to the public. Access to innovation and investment, it'll create opportunities for new pilot projects that we can transition into a stable state, evaluate, make sure that they respond to the community needs and make them part of the offering. And it positions us as a better partner of choice for programs that can benefit our community, which is unique. That $30 million annual benefit to the general fund does not need to be understated. It should be overstated. That's very important to us right now. So at its core, this franchise is helping us maintain our influence at the table at the PUC and provide these essential city services and essential projects and help us maintain that fiscal stability without requiring alternative funding sources and then has provided all these new funding sources for new programs to move forward that we can offer to the public. So our next steps are to finalize this action, put this forward to this body today, and then move to the ballot referral and meet the deadline of August 3rd, which would then, if successful, will move into a community vote on November 3rd of this year to the general public. And then we will have a long-term partnership with Excel after January 1st through 2046. That agreement may still be under consideration by the POC at that time, but we don't imagine any problems. We'll move into 2027 with both agreements moving forward. So that is the action today that we are requesting. Thanks for your time.

All right, fantastic. Thank you so much. So before we get to questions from members of Council, we do have public comment. I also want to welcome Councilwoman Gonzalez Gutierrez, who has joined us online. Sorry, go ahead. Yes.

Madam Chair, Excel also has a deck and presentation. Would you like to, I wasn't sure how you want to do questions all at once or separate?

Why don't we do that? Let's do both decks together and then we will, we're going to need more chairs at this table. Yeah. Why don't we go ahead and do that? We'll have Excel do their presentation and then we can do everything together.

Yeah. I've got you in the queue. Thank you for flagging for me.

Does anyone else want to join the queue while we have a hot second? I'm looking at you, Louis. Thank you. I knew that was coming. House Member Flynn, really? You're not joining? I'm just going to put you down. Okay. Okay.

Thanks you guys, can you just introduce yourselves and then we'll go ahead and get started. Yes. So, Holly Velasquez Horvath. I'm a regional vice president at Xcel Energy here in Colorado and I'm joined by two of my leaders on my team.

Hi, I'm Iffy Jennings. I'm the director of strategy outreach and advocacy. And I'm Grace Lopez Ramirez. I do local government and community affairs for Xcel here in the city and county of Denver.

So they're here with me in case we've got questions around some of the subjects that both of them do work and lead. And so I brought my subject matter experts just in case I wasn't able to answer something in regards to some of the work that we've done with the Energy Partnership Agreement and the Franchise Agreement. So I will, before I start, I just want to say thank you for the city of Denver working group, the team that worked with us over the last several months in negotiating the energy partnership agreement, long commitment, and just really appreciate all of their work that they've done. put together an amazing PowerPoint presentation and did a great job in outlining all of the work that we've done in representing what we've agreed to in the energy partnership agreement and the franchise agreement. And I also just want to extend a huge thanks to the working group that worked with the City of Denver. I know that that's a lot of time and a lot of commitment and so just appreciate getting that community feedback and that feedback from the working group. so that it was then fed back to us as we continue to negotiate the energy partnership agreement. We landed on this agreement because of that work, because of the work from the city team and also the community in making sure that we understood what was important for the city of Denver as we move forward with our franchise agreement.

And Holly, I'm going to time check you that you have about 12 minutes and then I have every single council member in the queue. So we've got to leave a lot of time.

I don't think I'm going to cover as much because the city of Denver did such a great job. So I think I'll be okay. So the one thing that we feel like we wanted to represent really quickly along with what the city team did was some of the work that we actually did outside of the working group and working with the city of Denver. As you saw, major themes came out of your guys' feedback a year ago, and one of the biggest themes for us was we weren't talking to council and we were not talking to our community. So even though the city of Denver went and established the working group and did their work around community engagement and community feedback, we did the same thing. And over the last six months, we have worked directly with neighborhood organizations, bids, jids, done franchise 101s in community and getting feedback about what was important to the citizens of Denver. Some of the major themes from both you and from the community said, you know, I'm confused about streetlight outages. I don't know how to report them. Can you figure out a better process online for us to be able to do that? Better notifications for when we do planned outages. That's when we do infrastructure upgrades and people need to just prepare and plan for those planned outages so that they're not a disruption to their daily lives. There's a little, you know, we can always improve on customer experience. It's something that we continuously think about and improve on and are actively doing. Making sure that we're thoughtful about vegetation management. Yes, keeping branches and leaves away from our electric lines is very important, but we also know that that's also a disruption because most of those trees are in our customers' backyards. And so just doing more work around that notification, the reason why we're doing it and when we're doing it. Undergrounding distribution lines, this is probably one of the most important themes that we heard from when we were meeting with community. They really like this benefit. It's all about beautification and making sure that that infrastructure is not visible. And how can we continually approve that infrastructure and think about putting that underground? And then substation landscaping. As we start to explore construction, build out of substations, we need to just make sure that they're pleasing to the eye and they're not an ugly piece of equipment that is an eyesore to community. So here's a quick shot at what our community engagement to date looks like. So you can see here that blue is our meetings directly with neighborhood associations and bids. We also did community events. We have our red truck, which is a truck that actually goes out into community directly in partnership with nonprofits. And we have customer agents on site that then get to talk to customers in the community about challenges or issues that they've got with customer service or their bills. So in all in all, we've roughly reached a little close to 4,000 different community and citizens and customers in the city of Denver. We've had a total of 35 different presentations and engagements with organizations, and we've done 53 Red Truck events over the last six months. I'm not going to go over this slide. City of Denver did an amazing job covering already franchise agreement and the energy partnership agreement. So I will skip this. And just again, when you think about the Navigator program, when we think about community engagement, I just want to, again, quickly highlight our red truck. It's our Denver Community Outreach. It very much has established the way in which we think about outreach and engagement in our community and better understand what our customers' challenges are. A lot of feedback from our customers is just access and understanding. I don't understand my bill. I need access. I'm frustrated when I call a customer care line. I need to see somebody in community and in person. And so this is work that we've done. We launched the red truck two years ago because of community feedback, and we've now expanded to five. So we've got five of these trucks, customer care agents on site with their laptops doing direct engagement with our customers. We also have a partnership with the Latino Community Foundation of Colorado. And this concept and this work really stems from the Energy Navigator program that is now proposed in the Energy Partnership Agreement. So the Latino Community Foundation of Colorado, we call it the Power Together in Denver, This is where we are in partnership with the organization. They have hired community action partners all across the state, and they go into community, they're from community, and they learn, they talk to residents, they talk to their neighbors, and they learn more about the work that we're doing at Accel, how better to access programs, What things are we doing? What things are we not doing well? And we get quarterly reports back to the company directly from community on giving back so that we can then continuously improve our programs and our processes to better serve our customers. So we see this as an opportunity to expand what we're doing with Empower together in Denver with the energy navigator program, not only talking about the programs that we at Xcel Energy do and facilitate for our customers, but then matching it with the city of Denver and the state of Colorado. So we are maximizing benefits for our customers and access for our customers on all the programs and payment plans and payment support that we can provide to our customers. This is again just to highlight turning community feedback into action and what we've done over the last year and staying very focused on community. Wanted again just provide this highlight about the beautification of substations. We totally understand this is an absolute necessity and obviously are committed to ensuring that we are working with our neighborhoods to better improve the visual beautification of substations as we move forward. With the 1% commitment that we have given, it's a minimum of 1% by the way, we were certain that we could provide that as a minimum of 1%. It doesn't mean that we're not willing to go in community and learn more about improving the visual, whether that's vegetation, wall art or anything around our substations as we build more substations in the city of denver and so we've actually totaled with the beautification commitment and the estimated substations that we have planned to build in denver to ensure that we continue to serve the citizens of denver the beautification commitment actually totals roughly around 6.3 million dollars So that is the financial commitment that resides with the 1% beautification commitment that we now have in our energy partnership agreement.

And that is it. So just wanted to give a few additions. Fantastic. Well, thank you guys so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Citi, guys, do you want to come back over? Or do you want to so we can do questions? First, we're going to go to public comment. We have seven speakers signed up. And normally I would say, you know, I will ask anyone else in the room if they would like to come and sign up, but given the number of council members I have in the questions queue and the time that we have, I am gonna just stick with these seven. So we're gonna start in person with Jeremy Ross. Jeremy, are you here? Fantastic. If you just want to come up to the mic and introduce yourself. Are we going to have a two-minute timer on the screen or do I need to? All right. There will be a two-minute timer on the screen for you. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Jeremy Ross with IBW 111 and representing the working group as well. I just want to thank everybody's hard work and commitment on the working group. There was a lot of conversation, and I think we got to a good place here. I know from IBW 111's perspective, we feel like our concerns were heard and are met in the franchise and companion agreement, and would just like to say that we're in support of that. And we'll give you your time back.

Awesome. Thanks so much. Next up, we have Jose Ovalle. I might have messed up your name. Did I get it, Jose?

You got it.

Yes. Come on up.

So my name is Jose Ovalle. I work for Xcel Energy in the Electric Meeting Department in downtown Denver. I believe that the franchise agreement is very important because we work in the public right-of-ways and we need access and we need to do our job as safely and as efficiently as possible. So therefore, I am in favor of the franchise agreement and I hope that everybody can see the benefits that having this in place is how we can provide our communities with reliable energy and quick responses to any of the troubles that happen out there. So with that, I'll give my time back.

Fantastic, thank you. Next up, is it Joseph Lopez? Joseph, come on up.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Josef Lopez, and I am a vice president at Servicios de la Raza. So Servicios de la Raza is a Chicano-founded and led organization. We're 54 years old, and our mission statement is to provide and advocate for culturally responsive essential human services and opportunities. One of our specialties is serving hard to reach communities, specifically folks that are living in the shadows of society. Our Servicios asks you to support the agreement between Xcel Energy and the city. Xcel Energy has been and is a great partner to Servicios, supporting our events in many areas. We will soon be partnering with Xcel Energy in a way that keeps our community safe. With this partnership, Servizos will help Xcel Energy identify neighborhoods and communities where sound the alarm events may have the greatest impact, including areas with older housing stock, multi-generational or high density households, rental communities with limited access to safety upgrades, neighborhoods with historically lower participation in STA events, volunteer and language support. Through this partnership, Servicios de la Raza enables Xcel Energy to extend wildfire mitigation, outage preparedness and PSPS readiness into communities that are often underserved by traditional outreach. The collaboration strengthens trust, improves preparedness and brings forward lived experience that can inform both operational improvements and regulatory reporting. We appreciate Xcel Energy's care and consideration of our Latino community. We hope you will recognize the good stewardship and support they've created for you. Thank you, everybody.

Great. Thank you. Oh, God, I gotta put my reading glasses back on so I can see this list again. Sorry, guys. Christy Kibler? Keebler? Christy, did I wreck it? I apologize. Come on up and tell us all what your real name is.

My name is Christy Kibler. I am the CEO of an organization called Lupus Colorado. We're an independent foundation that serves the 30,000 Coloradans living with lupus, which is a debilitating autoimmune disease. Our population is about 90% women, and 60% of those women are women of color. So we live with a lot of folks that are walking a really hard path. Most of our folks end up on Social Security disability by the time they're 50 years old. So limited income. And we're here today to tell you about the great work that Excel has been supporting in our organization. We are a member of the Chronic Care Collaborative and participate in their medical exemption program. So we're able to send our patients to Excel and get their bills reduced for those that are dependent on medical equipment. We're also an EOC agency, Energy Outreach Colorado. So we partner with EOC and help send out some of these assistance funds. My tiny organization, we just hired our third employee this week, was able to send out $280,000 already since October. This is just this program year. and help 467 Excel families in Denver. We would not be able to have that kind of reach without EOC and Excel's incredible partnership with our organization. So we would love for you to approve the franchise agreement and let us continue the great work that we've been doing with Excel. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Next up we have Adair Andre.

Hello, council members. I'm Adair Andre. I live in District 10. And I sat on the working group with various community members to help negotiate what are the priorities of the community in the companion agreements and the franchise agreement. I want to acknowledge that this agreement represents a significant step forward and represents a lot of the priorities that we've brought forward since January in the working group. So I would urge your support to refer this to the ballot. A few critical commitments I want to highlight are affordability, securing $5 million in shareholder investments over time, dedicated specifically to direct bill assistance, and various affordability measures to support comfort and affordability for low-income families. It also supports dedicated energy navigators, as they discussed, to help reach those programs, which can be hard to find. It emphasizes accountability and transparency by establishing public-facing dashboard for projects as well as periodic review processes to make sure that things continue to be implemented over this long 20-year timeline. And then on innovation and climate, it creates a structured community-informed process for pilot projects in the city and specifically commitments on downtown ambient loop and competitive electric rates for heat pumps, which will be really crucial in the city meeting its climate goals over time. So I wanna emphasize that maintaining this franchise agreement allows Denver to leverage its status to secure essential investments into the future and protect our climate goals. And it's a great opportunity for the city to work collaboratively with the utility to reach shared commitments and goals. So I urge your support. Thanks for your time.

Fantastic, thank you. Next up we have Dominique Gomez.

Good morning. My name is Dominique Gomez and I'm a Denver resident and I'm also the deputy director of the Colorado Energy Office. We are the state agency with a mission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to benefit all Coloradans. And I want to be here today to speak on behalf of this franchise agreement. In my view, it goes along with our mission by supporting decarbonization and affordability. It is a huge step forward for Denver. And a few things that I just want to point out that I know have already been mentioned today. So one is all the stakeholder-funded affordability support and particularly the inclusion of an energy assistance navigator program. It's also really important that Denver remain a franchisee of Excel so it can continue participation in some key pilots. One is the gas planning community pilot, which was established in HB 241370, which will do free energy upgrades to low income households and enable residents to switch from gas heating to clean, efficient heat pumps. Denver would not be able to continue participation in these programs if it were no longer a franchisee, and we view this as being a really important part of meeting our overall state climate goals. The agreement also establishes that long-term pilot review process, which we know is really important. It's important to know and track how these things work so that we can incorporate them in our future planning. Lastly, the relocation benefits of $3 billion for 20 years for major public works is huge. For both Denver Water and the airport and RTD, that's huge savings for those organizations, which are such an important part of the fabric of the city of Denver. On that note, I also want to know why I'm here on behalf of the Colorado energy office. I also sit on the Denver board of water commissioners, and it would be remiss if I didn't also mentioned that we will be looking to continue to support a long term agreement. I think since 1987, I believe it was where Denver water can relax a portion of the. water that we send to Excel's Shoshone plant during times of historic drought. That is certainly the case this year. And while that is not part of this agreement, I would just mention that we have heard from Excel that we will continue to make that a long-term agreement later this fall. And so I want to mention that as an important piece. I urge your support for this franchise agreement. Thank you.

Thank you. And then our last speaker is Kate McKenna.

Good morning Madam Chair and Committee. My name is Kate McKenna and I'm the CEO of the Ballpark General Improvement District. We represent over 10,000 residents and property owners in downtown Denver and I'm here today to express our strong support of the proposed partnership and the franchise agreement between Denver and Xcel Energy. As shown in the presentations, this agreement delivers substantial value to Denver and this is funding that Denver desperately needs. Throughout my 15 years of service in urban community development, I've actually worked with several major companies in energy, including ComEd, NRG, Reliant, and DTE, and none of them have matched the level of community partnership, engagement, and assistance that Xcel has offered to us as a community throughout this revision process and the creation of their companionship terms, especially when adding this to an already substantial financial contribution. As an organization that's focused on the public environment of downtown, which is actually home to multiple Excel facilities ballpark, the proposed 1%, $6.3 million of substation project budgets being dedicated to neighborhood compatible design means the most to us. In addition to maintaining a standard of excellence around their ballpark property maintenance and community beautification, Xcel is partnering with us on a green infrastructure project on 20th Street between Blake and Larimer. This is a gateway not only to our neighborhood but to all of downtown Denver and is being fully funded by Xcel. This is being fully informed and led by our community and this funding exists because of these current agreements. Oftentimes utility companies treat community engagement and partnership as a checkbox, but what Accel is proposing is different. It's real commitment backed by real dollars, real accountability, and real opportunities for neighborhood organizations like ours to have a voice in how utility providers impact our daily lives. It brings direct, tangible improvements and cost savings to our district rate payers and allows us as an impact organization to grow and move from supplementing city maintenance to actual enhanced programming, which is our intended purpose. On behalf of our Improvement District Advisory Board and our community, I respectfully urge the referral of this agreement to the ballot. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Great. Thank you.

We do have time for maybe two more speakers because you guys all went so fast. Is there anyone in the audience, I'm gonna let you find out who those two speakers would be. Is there anyone who would like to take two minutes to speak? Yep, Jeff, come on up.

Never pass up an opportunity to speak. Jeff Ackerman, Together Colorado. Thanks for all the work on the working group. Thanks for what the council's been doing the past year. Everything sounds great. You do have a great piece. I think there's also a need to go a little further and dive a little deeper into what you don't have. Because on behalf of Together Colorado, looking for human dignity and the rights of those who aren't always there, you're dealing with a very large corporation who's got great standing, but it's a corporation we created, and we need to make sure we have them saying, What is a really reasonable amount of shareholder involvement? Going from 100,000 to 125,000, one hand looks great, other hand, maybe embarrassing kind of thing. So what's the right amount to build that relationship that says, we really want to work for 20 years with this utility? Because this is your one chance to do a relationship reset and say, how could you really build a 20-year commitment now? So you've got some good pieces you're playing with. is that the right amount should that amount today be the same 20 years from now or could it be increased because 125 000 your pocket today versus 20 years from now is a lot less money how do you put that into the conversation as well but at the same time and how do we really uh you know a lot of this at the end of the day is human dignity and civic engagement how can you build good process here Because you've got to realize we're living in a place and time, and you heard in the presentations, you've got a company doing good work, but you've got people who don't really understand the company and don't understand, are you looking out for me or the shareholder first? And so how do we build true, overplay that side of the commitment to say, we built a public process that designed projects and improved those projects every year and said, We as a utility and we as a city and we as citizens want better projects. What would that look like? How could we really create that as a commitment? Those are the little details I think we're trying to add on to what we have to just make it feel like a really great relationship going forward. Thanks.

Great, thank you. We have time for one more speaker. Anyone? Yeah, why don't you come on up?

Hi, everyone. I'm Keith Meyer with INC. And I just wanted to come up and say a couple of things. I don't have a whole lot that I can add to discussions on the pilot projects. I can echo what was just said by Kate, I believe, from the JID in terms of community participation. That's kind of the lens I see things through. And I just wanted to say thank you to the folks at the city and Excel. I think you all did a really good job listening to the working group members that came, and especially myself, I think, that brought up community engagement and trying to build in community engagement processes moving forward and also I believe the substations weren't even on the radar when we started so I really applaud you all for the effort that you put into making making livability an issue for Denver residents moving forward so thank you for that and the work that's going to go forward in in terms of involving community members in this process over the next 20 years so thanks

Fantastic. Thank you. All right. We have every council member in the queue. So I am going to limit everyone to two questions to start with, not sub questions. And if you guys can keep your answers to those questions as concise as possible, we would appreciate it. Start with Council Member Watson.

Thank you so much, Committee Chair. I have zero questions, but just one quick comment. I wanted to elevate the entire working group because I think we've seen a few of them. So I want to thank Council Member Perry, who joined me as City Council Member on the working group. And if you're here in the room, stand up. Joe Levy, Adair, Andre, Jeff Ackerman, Sue Powers, Jeremy Ross, Aaron Martinez, Keith Meyer, Luke Johnson. Thank you all for being here. Give you a round of applause. And I'll sit back and listen to questions from my peers.

Fantastic. Thank you. Councilwoman Alvidrez.

Great. Thank you. I do appreciate all the work that's gone into getting us this far. I think it's exciting. I do have a couple of questions. I'll just start with the 1% for facade question on slide four. I'm not sure what the funding source is for that. When you say normal Excel infrastructure dollars, those typically are coming from rate payers. So is that the source, the ratepayers?

Yes, that is the intent. It would follow the same as the undergrounding. It is an investment in infrastructure that is regulated by the Public Utilities Commission and an appropriate use of ratepayer dollars.

Okay. I am curious about the 2.5 million that is going straight to Trua, as well as the talk about the 125. For the dollars going into Trua, I'm curious, you know, there's a pilot project in Ruby Hill, for example, that will go to rate payers to pay for. And so curious if some of those dollars could go to those infrastructure projects, which provide a long-term benefit and a long-term cost savings for residents instead of

temporary assistance I'm curious about where how we're thinking about those two things and I think clarification true is identified as one potential opportunity of a high-impact program but it is not specified as exactly where those dollars would go they were still going to be discussing with you know the various experts and folks as to where the highest impact investment can be made at your point we agree I think we need both the dollars that are set aside to help with that acute affordability, I'm struggling to pay my bill, how do I get addressed in this crisis situation, as well as the longer-term infrastructure improvements that need to be made that really result in that systemic affordability. So it's a yes and in looking at, well, what resources do we have to support each initiative? We think it's a very appropriate use of this $2.5 million and the support for our bill payment assistance programs that certainly can always use the funding. And then we are very well resourced with the Climate Protection Fund, with other ratepayer-sponsored programs and grants and other opportunities that we've brought in to make those infrastructure investments and always have an eye towards the 20-year solution.

Just to highlight, you're still going to the ratepayers and trying to find ways not to continue to do that and use these dollars in that way is my point.

But I know I only have two questions, so go ahead and I'll get back at the end if there's time.

Okay, great. Council Member Cashman.

Thank you, committee chair. Thanks to Excel and the city and certainly the community members. I do think this is better than we had. It's exciting that we won't just sign this and go to sleep and in 20 years some council will look and see what's going on. Back to the substations. Participation will the community have in the design of substations?

Yeah, good question. And that was something that we did not highlight, but we agreed in the energy partnership agreement along with the minimum 1% for beautification for the substations. To also negotiate a citywide good neighbor agreement and that good neighbor agreement is will establish our protocols and our requirements for going into community, the neighborhood that at which we would build the substation and work with the neighborhood on what that beautification would look like. So it will be solely. at the discretion of the neighborhood at which we would place the substation. And they get to decide the wall, does the wall need to match a community building next door or vegetation or graffiti art or what would be unique and a characteristic that they feel is important in their neighborhood.

And Cashman, I'll add very quickly, most of those substations will go through our community planning development process that will be required to leverage some level of community input, and that adds to the GNA as well.

Thank you. I just also wanted to thank Mr. Ackerman for his comments. And I do think it would make great sense, while I don't think the $125,000 should be, I certainly think it should have a cost of living attached to it since this is a 20-year agreement. And there's still time to do that before we vote on this. That's all I have, Madam Chair. Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you. Council Member Gilmour.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for everybody's work on this. On slide four, I would really appreciate a little bit more clarification on it. You have the 2.5 upfront donation. That's from Excel. Excel, Excel, but then you have the Denver franchise fee set aside. And so I'm trying to see exactly what ratepayers are going to be responsible for and what Excel is going to give in this agreement. That is not clear at all on this. And then I agree that 125K in 2026 for inflation to 2047 would be 240,000 a year. That seems logical because the cost of living over those 20 years is also going up for our residents who we're hoping that this is going to help out. So we can't start out at a deficit. We need to plan to get out of that deficit. And so I wanted to make that point. The question that I have is, do you have a map of the substations that will benefit in the agreement that you can provide?

Point of clarification, are you referring to slide four on the Excel deck or on the city's deck just so we can read the Excel? On the city's deck.

Okay. Or the city's deck.

The city's deck.

Yeah, the city's deck for that one.

Real quickly, we do have a map in the slide deck. It had the location of the substations and then also the map on which we have identified they would need to be placed.

Okay.

So we can just make sure that you've got the deck and it's got it in there.

It's right there.

Yeah.

Perfect. Okay. Yeah. Looking at it from an equity standpoint, it sounds really great to put 6.3 million towards beautification. That's not going to do anything in my neighborhood. It's out at the airport. Like that's not going to be a benefit. And so from an equity standpoint of what is being provided across the city for this franchise agreement, it would be wonderful if there could be the consideration of the cost of living increments. We're in a negotiation right here for it because We need those dollars to help my residents stay housed right now today and so would like that cost of inflation on each one of those line items as a consideration because from an equity standpoint, it's not going to serve anything in District 11 for us. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Great, thank you. Council President Romero-Campbell. Thank you, Madam Chair. It's great that we're on this slide. I had a specific question around the Cherry Knolls substation and maybe what that address is. Because I don't, is that in Denver? We don't have it built yet.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. No, no, no, it's okay. Thank you so much, Council Member. And I can refer to Holly as well. So this is a map that we showed you all when we came to Budgeting Council back in January of this year. This is our distribution system plan investment in Denver, which is over... a billion dollars in the next five to 10 years. These have not been built yet. And it's kind of looking hard to read right now, but the Barker substation is there. We've just been literally turning it on to the ballpark JIDS point. And then there are, you'll see that not all of them have numbers connected to them because those will be on the customer side. Thank you. To your question about Cherry Knolls, we do not know exactly where it's going to be yet. We just know we need one in Southeast Denver somewhere. And so we will be conducting engineering studies and studies to see where, from an engineering standpoint, it would be best to place one. But this is the investment that we have been approved for, for one in Southeast Denver at $69.4 million. So 1% of that, again, is $694,000. Thank you. So we would be working with community as well to try to identify a location, knowing that from an engineering standpoint, it needs to meet certain standards as well.

And land availability.

And land availability, which is important.

Yeah. I always give a pitch for Cherry Hills Village. The other question that I had was kind of going back to, and I'm not sure if I heard this correctly, during the five-year evaluation portion, what criteria is set for the City and County of Denver to cover in regards to the continuing community engagement? Like do we have a measurement of that? Like how are we tangibly going to evaluate?

The common metrics that we look at at the city are obviously energy affordability. What is our rate per kilowatt hour and how are we comparing to other Colorado communities? How are we comparing nationally? And right now we're 37% below the national average. And what is that pace? Are we staying below inflation or are we seeing spikes? And is that meeting our expectation from our energy service partner? And what do we do about it to make sure that we stay in that positive territory? We also want to look at our decarbonization trends where we're on track with an approved plan at the Public Utilities Commission to have an 88% emissions by 2030. Are we still tracking for that? Are we exceeding that? By 2032, are we hopefully exceeding 90% and on our way to 100? Also looking at reliability metrics. There are a number that are reported to the Public Utilities Commission related to the number of times a customer might experience a disruption, the duration of those disruptions. Are they localized in specific census tracts or feeders? How do we look system-wide? I believe the number is over 99.7% reliability. But then you get these pockets where you hear people are constantly dealing with power outages and how do we make sure we go in and address those problematic feeders so that we can really support all members of our community and not say, what are you talking about? Our grid is fine. So really looking across affordability, reliability, and decarbonization as three primary metrics. But then, of course, hearing from you all in terms of, well, what are the other expectations that we have from our elected leadership and from our community members who expect a certain quality of service?

I'll just add to, there is a section in the Energy Partnership Agreement about community advisors. So we will be establishing community advisors. The profile of that group will look very much like the working group in terms of the representation and who is selected there. We will put that as part of the boards and commissions process once there is a successful vote in November. I would imagine those call for applications will come in the December timeframe early next year. And that would be an early action item for that team to kind of develop Metrics for themselves, because they are charged with going out to the community, providing information back to the committee that's established as part of the API to provide input. So we make sure that we're constantly having that cycle of input. So I think that's an early action item for them to define.

What I would hope is that we would also maybe get more frequent updates or cadence for that, not five years, but maybe every year or every couple years.

And there is, Councilwoman Romero-Kembell, there is a provision in the Energy Partnership Agreement that does say either the mayor, city council president, or the president of the company of Xcel could... essentially make presentations to either mayor, city council upon request. So there is that contemplated that we would be reporting back in greater frequency than just every five years.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Great. Thank you. Council Member Flynn.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Johnny, when you responded to Councilwoman Alvarez on the 2.5 million lump sum payment, I just want to make sure I understand, because in the agreement itself, it says that the one-time contribution will provide bill payment assistance. So it seems to be very restrictive. And I thought I heard you indicating it was more expansive. It appears in the in the agreement itself that it's restricted to bill payment assistance only. Is that not correct?

My clarification related to TRUA specifically, because there are multiple ways to provide bill credits on a bill.

But yes, helping to reduce the- So what happens to that two and a half million? We're not going to spend it all in one year, although we could because we had true of one year was $30 million. So how are we going to conserve that $2.5 million so that it can spread over a 20-year period?

And that's an excellent point, one that was also raised by Councilman Watson and our working group members in discussion yesterday of being really strategic in the disbursement of those resources. We don't have a great year. We spent a lot, but then the rug gets pulled out. So we do want to be mindful of how we're using and investing those dollars to really support the long-term needs of the community.

Okay. And Holly, on the map that we discussed just a second ago on slide four, um i have had over the last few years multiple inquiries and complaints about a lack of capacity in the grid in southwest denver and i notice there's nothing west of the river nothing so do these substations serve Denver only? Or does my district, the little one that looks like a crushed spider on a kitchen floor, does that get served by substations outside of Denver and just not shown there? Because I'm concerned about increasing the capacity of the grid west of the river and particularly southwest. Housing providers waiting.

Sure. Great question. So in current construct with the existing substations, the electrons are being pulled from wherever the load is at with the existing substations. As you add substations onto the system, it alleviates the capacity constraints on the existing substation. So what we're doing is we're connecting these new substations onto the grid. It will then relieve the capacity constraints on the existing substations to allow for those existing substations to continue to absorb load where they're located, while then spreading it out with the new substations.

So it's not just the ones that, like I have one near my house. So it's like pouring a cup of water into a bathtub. It just spreads equally.

Exactly. And what we do is our engineers, the way that these have been tentatively identified right now at this moment is we heat map. So we understand and can see the load requirements and what the pressures of the system look like and we heat map it. And then what we see is, okay, this location over here has an enormous amount of heat based off of the load demand versus maybe in the neighboring neighborhood. And so what we decide is, okay, these are the pressure points that are absolutely necessary for these substations to be located here. And like I said, once we put those in, that heat map and that load then relieves from the other areas. All right. Thank you.

Thank you for the science lesson, too. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Great. Thank you. We are going to go online to Councilwoman Gonzalez-Gutierrez next. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. My two questions. One is with regard, I'm going to bring up the $125,000 as well here, and wanted to know if there was any conversation about that. I've heard everybody talk about inflation, and this is a 20-year agreement. Would there be, is there conversation happening about increasing that amount or escalating that amount annually in this agreement, right? So it's not just at a flat 125,000 because of the issue of inflation. And I don't know who wants to answer that.

Yeah, sorry. I will start. This is Holly, council member. We did discuss potentially an inflation. What our decision was as a company was to establish something that we are certain about. I understand the inflation for living and the expenses for folks, but it also is coming from shareholder dollars. And we just don't have the certainty of what... um what we how we are going to perform every year i'm not saying that it's not something to consider if it is important to the council we can bring it back with the city and discuss what that inflation rate could look like and establish that a little differently it would require me to go back and just talk to the company but i'm happy to do that

I think I've heard it from a couple of my colleagues or a question about the 125,000 here today. So I think it would be helpful for that conversation to happen. But also, you know, if there is a concern about the shareholders. What also may be helpful to bring back to us as we move forward is to know what has that what is that amount been over the last 20 years for the last agreement to see what is that increase been and are we keeping up with it here? So my second question real quick is around the 2.5 million and CONVERSATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN MAYBE HAPPENING IN THE WORKING GROUP AS FAR AS, YOU KNOW, AND MAYBE I GUESS, YOU KNOW WHAT, I'M GOING TO LEAVE THAT QUESTION BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE YOU GUYS HAVE ALREADY TALKED A LOT ABOUT THAT, ABOUT THE, HOW EXPENSIVE THAT FUND COULD BE USED FOR, AND I WILL PASS IT TO THE NEXT ONE.

COUNCILWOMAN GONZALES-GUTIERREZ, ARE YOU SURE? BECAUSE THIS IS YOUR TIME. YOU'RE WELCOME TO ASK YOUR OTHER QUESTION IF YOU'D LIKE TO. ALTHOUGH IT DOES SAY YOUR INTERNET BANDWIDTH IS LOW.

I'm good.

Okay, great. Thank you. Council member Lewis. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. You're up next. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it. So the 125 is a really low number. And so I'm just curious of the formula that you all use to arrive at that number.

It was, you know, what we had decided and discussed was that $100,000 was not enough of what we've already been giving in contribution over the last 20 years. And so we needed to increase it, and we decided that it was to match the $2.5 million that we're doing as a one-time shareholder donation in 2027. So that was what was established for the 125,000.

So it's not based on specific factors in terms of like. Population are the number of folks who may have requested funding in the past. Like, you all didn't take any of that into consideration. You just kind of threw a number out and said this work.

One of the things that we did evaluate as we were discussing the donation was better understanding how many low income customers are in the state and our service territory, and then how many in the city of Denver and what that percentage was. And so one of the things that we did look at was we have 760,000 customers in our service territory that qualify for payment assistance. And of that, 167,000 of those are city of Denver customers. And so if you divide that by the 760, you get around a 22, 23% of our total amount of low income customers. And so we said, okay, well, let's round it up to two and a half million. So we did look at numbers and better understood how many customers in the state of Colorado are low income and how many of those customers are in the city of the county of Denver.

Thank you. The second question I have for you all is regarding the pilot projects. Can you help me to understand if you are a resident, if there are projects that serve folks specifically in Denver, what's the process that gets a project either selected, funded, accepted, supported by Excel? What is that process?

I will have Johnny actually answer first the process that the city will go through and then we can talk about what that partnership is with the company.

And it depends and we're extremely fortunate to have the climate protection fund. It is what makes us such an attractive place where additional dollars flow in to really enable our initiatives to be brought forward and then to be scaled. in meaningful ways. So we've been able to launch heat pump rebate programs that have provided heat pumps to thousands of Denver customers working with qualified contractors. We've worked with council members to send out information in newsletters in terms of how to participate in those programs. And then we've been able to take what we've done successfully and bring it to the Public Utilities Commission and show how programs can be successfully adopted and scaled. And now really Xcel Energy is the leading entity to provide things like heat pump rebates that are differentiated for whether you're income qualified or market rate customers and ensuring that we're getting this important technology. installed in people's homes and done so in a high quality way. So it's going to depend case by case whether or not this is something that the city says, hey, we can design and do this ourselves. We can work with our community members and our elected leadership to figure out what is that problem that we need to test? How do we do it with the resources that we have and then bring it to scale? Alternatively, it may be something that truly requires the Public Utilities Commission to either fund or sign off on the construct. We can't change somebody's rate for what they're paying per kilowatt hour, but the PUC gets to rule on that. And that's where we have extensive conversations with the company and with other stakeholders because collectively, we're really able to compel action. And in partnership with Colorado Communities for Climate Action, mountain communities such as Town of Frisco and Breckenridge and Winter Park, advocacy groups such as Western Resource Advocates, Sierra Club, and others, we're able to really come together and think about, you know, what are the appropriate discounts that you could provide to make sure that a heat pump customer is still paying their fair share but are not being overcollected from. So you have that mix of affordability and clean energy adoption. The company ultimately has the ability to file it. through various programmatic opportunities in cycles that happen at the puc or if not proposed by the company denver and other stakeholders can raise things to the commission's attention which in several instances we have been successful in seeing advanced such as which of the ambient loop which kind of originated with us first and now is a true partnership that we are embarking on together so then it sounds like the puc is the process and if so then what are the

guarantees of success?

I'd say it's yes and. It is the process to bring something to scale. They are entrusted by state law and really the Colorado Constitution, I would say, of having this jurisdictional oversight. And if we can't convince them that something is a good idea, they have an obligation to ratepayers to maintain just and reasonable rates and system reliability. So I think our ultimate goal is always to convince those folks who are the regulators that something is worth really implementing at that scale. But we have a lot of discretion in terms of what we bring forward independently or what we invest in in our community. And that's where the process that is really laid out through the Energy Partnership Agreement focuses on Denver addressing community issues and crafting solutions to those problems and investing resources accordingly and then working with the company as a partner for when something is ready, you know, for prime time at that larger scale.

If I could, I'd like to- Quickly. Okay, I would just add- We have three council members in the queue and like six minutes left.

Once a pilot is approved and we've identified the neighborhood in Denver, so to council member Alvina's point earlier about the Ruby Hill project that we're doing right now, geothermal project, we, in partnership with the climate office, have been doing the community engagement in Ruby Hill. So we did presentations at the Registered Neighborhood Organization. We went door to door. We had an open house, working with a church in the neighborhood. So we have done a combined community engagement effort for projects once they're approved. And I think that this just lays out a more specified kind of framework by which we will continue to do that in partnership with the city and county of Denver.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Great, thank you. Before we get back to a second round of council members, I have a couple of quick questions. The first one is around the Leedsdale substation. It's very rare that there's this many District 5 residents in the room, and every single one of us knows what I'm talking about. So I really appreciate your slide that talks about future substations. That is not even on the radar for the residents of District 5. What we care about, as you know, because you live there too, Holly, is the Leedsdale substation. That has been a significant eyesore and challenge for the residents of all of District 5 and part of District 6 because that's our border, Cashman.

Well, I would throw in the University of Denver station as well, south of I-25.

Yeah, so while I appreciate the conversation that's happening around future substations, I think what my residents really want to know is what are they going to get that's going to fix what's already on the ground that hasn't been maintained by Excel.

from a notification standpoint, is that correct? Yes.

I mean, yes, I think, you know, we all know and are living with the five mile Leedsdale and Lottie project right now that you guys have been doing a fantastic job on and we've gotten almost zero complaints. So I want to acknowledge that, but yes, I think living with a substation in your neighborhood is a unique challenge that we experience. And so I think that's what my residents really want to know.

Yes, I think we owe that back. What we can do, and what I'm even comfortable in committing to do, is if we do have upgrades in those substations, we do have an opportunity to then find funding or advocate for funding and get funding for improved beautification. We're actually doing that again for Terminal over by 13th and Zuni. And so I'm gonna take it back as an action item and better understand what our upgrades are for Leedsdale, what our upgrades are for the university substation. I know exactly where that one is at as well. And let's just see what we can get for upgrades. We owe you that back on if we are doing upgrades within the next five to eight years, which I do suspect that we probably are. Grace is nodding her head. We owe that to you as an answer on what we can do to do those upgrades for beautification.

That's fantastic, Holly. I really appreciate that. And I will just say, I would like to have that answer on the floor if we are going to move this forward. I think that that needs to be clarified publicly for our residents before we vote on this. So that's fine. We can do that for you. Second question, I have heard a number of people say, we should just municipalize like Boulder. What would something like that cost? I mean, I don't think there would be a benefit, but I think more than that, what I don't understand is what would that involve?

So I have been at the company for 15 years. I came into the company at the last half of the Boulder municipalization process. I was also the one on the ground that renegotiated the new 20 year franchise agreement and energy partnership agreement with the city of Boulder in 2020. So I don't have an entire context of the decade-long municipalization that we did with the city of Boulder. What I will say is that the city of Boulder has roughly 69, 70,000 meters. And a franchise agreement, as you all know, is not to delineate Excel from actually serving Denver customers. Whether we have a franchise or not, we serve the city of Denver. So the franchise agreement is an operating agreement in right of way. It helps us with certainty to make sure that we are operating efficiently, communicating, doing relocations, all the construction that goes on in right of way. We serve you all whether we have a franchise or not. So with the city of Boulder, we still served the city of Boulder as they were going through municipalization. They have about 70,000 meters. They had four substations in their city. What a municipalization is, is to purchase the distribution system and then start your own utility company. And so through the agreement, through municipalization, they needed to buy and serve all the meters, all the poles and wires, and two of the four substations. That was roughly, on an estimate back in 2019, 2020, not considering inflation, roughly around $460 million. So city of Denver is 330,000 meters and currently 11 substations. So if you do the math, you're multiplying and roughly sitting anywhere between $4 to $5 billion.

Okay, say no more. Councilmember Alvidrez, time for one more question in the queue.

Great. I just had a question on one of the slides that the city had. I think it might be slide four. It talked about a more transparent reporting process. Can you tell me what that was and what that's about?

Yes, we committed and worked with the working group to creating an online dashboard to really articulate what are the key priorities that we have? What are the pilots that we're working on? What is the timeline? What are the expected outcomes that will be achieved? What are the dollars that are going to be spent? What are the source of those dollars? Then how do we actually take the lessons from those things and apply them going forward? I think some of the attributes that Councilmember Campbell spoke to as well. Instead of waiting for that annual or that five-year update, we can also look at things like our affordability trends and reliability trends. The exact details of that, we want to work with you all and our community advisors to help make sure that we get the website right. And I expect it will evolve over time, but we want to be as transparent as possible across the things that people care about so you can see how dollars are being spent and how problems are being solved.

I appreciate that.

I always hope we're done. Thank you. Thanks. Council Member Flynn, you have time for one more question.

You're the last one in the queue and then we need to vote. Thank you. 6-3-A in the same energy assistance section of the partnership agreement. refers to Excel's obligation in case the laws change about the income qualified energy assistance program falls below an annual contribution in Denver of $250,000, then the company makes that whole up to that. So that's entirely separate. That's under your state obligations, the state pool. Is that correct?

No, that is actually an additional shareholder dollar donation. So as you all remember, that was in the original partnership agreement and the franchise a year ago. We made the decision to just leave it. We felt like we could make that one time donation if for any possible reason funding would go away for bill pay assistance for customers in Denver.

So that's for 20 years, any time it falls short.

Any time.

You would make up to the $250,000. That's in addition to the $125,000 annual and to the $2.5 million lump. So, okay. In fact, I just needed that clarification.

Yep, absolutely. All right. Well, thank you all very much with that. We have five items we are putting on today in addition to all of our items on consent. So we will start with the three action items for the Excel Franchise Agreement, which are the Excel Franchise Agreement itself, the ballot measure. That's 970, 973 is the Energy Partnership Agreement, and 974 is the DEN Operating Agreement. Do we need to separate those or can we move them in a block? And just a reminder for council members, even if you are a no on the floor, our threshold and committee is, is this ready to be considered by the full council? So I'd like to move this forward to the full council because we have a deadline on ballot referrals as well. So do we need to separate this out? Do we need a voice vote? Okay, I need a motion and a second, please. to move these in a block. You're not a voting member. You're not a voting member. All right, Councilmember Flynn, seconded by Cashman. You're not a voting member either. Thumbs up from voting members. Councilwoman Gonzalez Gutierrez, I'm a thumbs up as well. Just confirm that you are as well. Great, and then our second vote, two action items. This was from the presentation two weeks ago on the budget charter change. This is 26, 864 and 867. This would be the ballot measure and companion ordinance. Are these ready to go as well? Any final questions on them?

I'm a no.

Okay, great. So we'll do a voice vote. I do need a motion and a second on this one. Moved by Council Member Gilmour.

Second.

We need a second.

You're not a voting member.

No, seconded by Councilman Gonzalez-Gutierrez. On this one, we'll do a voice vote.

Council Members Flynn?

Nay.

Gilmour? Nay. One more, one more time. Aye. Aye. Sorry. Gonzalez-Gutierrez?

Aye.

Rashman?

Aye.

Madam Chair Sawyer? Aye.

Four ayes. Great. All right. These pass. We also have a number of items on consent, seven items on consent that haven't been called off. So those will move forward as well. Thanks so much for joining us, everyone, especially for all of our public commenters who came out today. And we are adjourned.