Green Island Ice Arena Negotiating Committee - Regular Meeting

Okay. Good evening, everyone. It's Monday, May 12, 04:18PM on call to order this meeting of the Climate Action Plan Steering Committee. Let's see. We have all members of the committee except Natalie Hennigan, Casey Meehan, and Adam Jacobson, which I believe are all excused. Okay. Next, we have approval of the minutes. I need a motion unless there are any questions. So moved. Motion by Dorothy Leonard, second by Andrew Erickson. Any discussion on the minutes? Seeing no discussion, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. That is unanimously approved.

Now on to notices and discussion. I'll hand it off to staff first. Absolutely. Updates on grants, outreach, grow solar lacrosse, and direct pay application.

Okay. Well, just because I have this in front me too, I had another thing. I got an email from Amy Smith from the Habitat for Humanity. They just put out a report for their dumpster diversion effort from this spring, and I can share that with you all. One of the things grant related I wanted to share is that after getting direction from you all to pursue the Great Lakes thriving communities program, I sent a letter of intent or interest and heard back that they had already had 500 applicants.

So too late getting to that. So I don't think that's gonna be a possibility. But in terms of other grants, I'm meeting with my colleague in the planning department, Julie Emzley, to talk about Wisconsin's economic development commission or corporation, grants available through them. And, yeah, gathering data for the microgrid study with the county and Western, and we are progressing with the home energy audits. One of the things we're looking at is working with my colleague, Mara, on who already works with low income homeowners in the city and piggybacking on some of her group's projects.

And then what do they have after grants?

Mhmm. Sorry. It was

no

worries. Let me grab it. Outreach, Grow Solar, and DirectPay.

K. Oh, Outreach related, but also we can talk about this during the implementation planning process. I I've got money to do a workshop, so I have an idea for a workshop that I'd like to pitch. And then and then Grow Solar, we had a solar power hour last week, a virtual one, and then we're gonna be scheduling an in person one. I'm thinking either the main library or the south neighborhood center.

And then, yeah, I think that's about it for me.

Awesome. Andrew. Questions. Yes. We can ask questions.

Is there any marketing material, like, pamphlets for Grow Solar?

Yeah. Thank you for asking. We will have some available soon, and I will forward them to the community members to help promote that program as well.

Follow-up question, Lewis. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation grants, do you know which one Julie's working on? I know that the Green Energy Fund. I'm not actually sure if that's launched quite yet. And then there's also one other funding opportunity, Main Street and Connect Communities programs. I just wondered if you had spoken with Julie about the specific funds you were looking at.

No. I had worked with our grant services consultants who brought up the idea of going through WDC, and

I knew

that Julie was already pursuing, I think it's like a I wanna say vibrant community grant for the parking lot on Caledonia Street to kinda spice that up. So I knew that was one thing she was going after, but I guess just looking at them, making sure that she wasn't going to apply for something or if she was going to apply for something, how we could add a sustainability aspect to that. I was gonna bring something up about direct pay as well. We're, you know, gathering data for for, you know, getting that filing, so that's still in progress as well. And then we had a presentation from Forward Together Wisconsin talking about direct pay last week that was very informative and, yeah, just interesting to hear how what what certain communities are doing and how we can, keep taking advantage of it while we can.

Excellent. Thank you, Lewis. Any others for notices and discussion? Alright. Let's move on to the agenda '25 dash zero five five three, election of the chairperson and vice chairperson. I've also proven that I am not an amazing chair today, but nevertheless, we'll be entertaining nominations for the chair first. Andrew.

I would like to nominate council member Mackenzie Mendell as the chairperson of the Climate Action Plan Steering Committee.

And I will second that. Thank you very much. I will accept the nomination. Are there any other nominations for chair? Any other nominations? And for the third time, any other nominations? Okay. I see no other nominations. That means that we do not need to vote. Thank you all very, very much for the nomination.

I will accept chair of the climate action plan steering committee. Thank you. Promise I'll never do what I did today again, and I promise I was at a council meeting. So embarrassed when in when Lewis called me. Then we need to elect the vice chair. Are there any nominations for vice chair? I'll nominate Nat Natalie Hannagan.

Great. Can we nominate someone who's not here?

They can't defend themselves.

I I don't I haven't heard of any Rules against it. Rules against that necessarily.

Okay.

I guess we could have asked her in advance. Mhmm.

She is going to be on maternity leave at some point in the nearish. Okay. I'll re withdraw my nomination of Natalie and give her a break, and I would nominate Andrew. K. The nomination, Andrew Erickson. We have a second.

I'll second that.

Okay. Andrew, do you accept the nomination? Yes. Okay. Are there any other nominations? Any other nominations in by parliamentary procedure? Are there any other nominations for the first third time? Seeing none, Andrew, as you have accepted the nomination for vice chair, you are now elected as vice chair.

Congrats.

Alright. Thank you all for that. Moving on then. 250539, report on citywide and municipal greenhouse gas inventories for 2023. Anders is here. I am so excited that you are here to review this. This has been much anticipated.

Testing. Testing.

Thank you. Before I get started, may I ask how long would you like me to to speak for? I know you're under a timeline.

I appreciate you asking. I personally would like to hear more on this than I think the rest of the agenda items are not slated to be super long. Lewis, can you give input on that, though, knowing that we wanna have votes by 04:55?

I'd say aim for ten minutes.

Okay.

We can also move around items, but ten minutes should certainly be.

Okay. I mean, I typically say, like, if we have someone in here in person, get them to do their thing. Then Yes. But, yeah, we we I think we should have time if

Wonderful. Hopefully. Yeah. Sounds good. Okay. Take it away, Andrew or Anders. We have all the Anders and Anders people. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. It's nice to be here and to see all of you again. I'm trying to start my slideshow here, but there it goes. Okay. I think I need to back up a little bit. Okay. Yeah. And I guess I'll I'll just stay sitting here. Is that okay? Okay. Yeah. So thanks for having me.

I am happy to report on the 2023 greenhouse gas inventory, which the report was published relatively recently. If you've had a chance to take a look at it, please feel free to ask any questions that may have come up about that. If you haven't yet, then, yeah, I encourage you to do that, and I'd be happy to to, you know, contact me later with any questions that might come up. So, just a little background. As you all know, the baseline, the first community greenhouse gas inventory that we did here in La Crosse was, for 2019 in association with the climate action plan that we created.

So 2019 is kind of the year that we compare back to when we're assessing our goals and things like that. And the report that just came out was an update for 2023. So that's the year that we looked at for the inventory that just got finished. And in that greenhouse gas inventory, we did both a community wide and a government operations, assessment. And you can see here listed the various sectors or categories underneath each of those.

And they're very similar except, in in terms of what they include, except in the government operations, we do have a, employee commute category, which is actually something we haven't done before. So that was an exciting thing to add as well. Okay. So so the rest of it makes sense. The standard unit of measure for greenhouse gas emissions, the metric ton of carbon carbon dioxide equivalent, you'll see it in this presentation as m t c o two e.

It's basically how much carbon dioxide plus a little bit of other other greenhouse gases such as methane that also figure into to greenhouse gas inventories. And in case it's of interest, a metric ton of carbon dioxide is about as big as a house, in case you're trying to picture it. So I'm just gonna focus on kinda high level results here in the interest of time, but I do have more information if you sort of wanna dig into particular categories and things. So in 2023, the grand total was about 680,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for the community wide inventory. And you can see the pie chart on the right side of the screen.

Transportation was actually the single largest sector with 38%. After that was natural gas usage. At facilities, 31%. Electricity, a little over a quarter. And solid waste and wastewater round out the total.

And looking at how that compares to the previous years that we've measured greenhouse gas emissions for the city community wide, That's actually a 12% decrease from the total in 2019, which was about 773,000 metric tons. 2020 was actually lower than 2023, but, I'm comparing back to 2019 because that's a pre pandemic value and and things changed a lot in 2020 because of the pandemic. So, my comparisons here are based on back to 2019. So a 12% reduction overall. And then in this table on the right, you're seeing the percent change for each of the sectors.

So if you wanna try to figure out, like, well, what actually changed to make the overall go down by 12%, you can see that over here. Almost everything went down, at the community wide level. The thing that went down most was electricity. And since that's a pretty big it was over a quarter of the total, that's actually the most influential category. So I wanted to take a brief look at that in the next couple slides.

So again, it was in 2023, it was electricity represented 27% of the community wide total. And electricity usage and, therefore, emissions, about 80% of it is is nonresidential. That's businesses, municipality, anything that's not a residential customer. That would be almost 80% of the total, And residential makes up almost all the rest. There is a category here for streetlights that's very small.

And this data, by the way, comes from Excel Energy's community energy reports that are available annually. So trends this is kind of what I wanted to get to here. Trends in electricity usage and the emissions from them, that was actually a 30% decline. And I just wanted to explain a little bit what's behind that. So there's sort of two factors that go into emissions from electricity, and that would be how much electricity is used, number one.

And then what is the emission factor or or how many emissions per unit of electricity produced and delivered to customers. And you can see from the information on the right side here that community wide usage was actually just about exactly the same as it was in 2019. So that actually doesn't explain the 30% reduction. But the Excel's emission factor went down 29% over that period of time. So that results from more electricity being produced from things like wind and solar, renewable sources, and then less from coal fired power plants.

It's a little more complicated than that, but to a first order approximation, that's what's happening, I think. And then sort of the big question to ask is, is La Crosse on track community wide for that goal that we set in the climate action plan, 50% reduction by 2030? And so to to try to answer that question, what I have here is a graph showing, basically, each year, what would emissions what should emissions be in order to draw a straight line down to 50% reduction in 2030 starting at 2039. Right? So this is kinda what that would look like.

And if we're at 2023, the this year's target would actually be 18% below 2019 levels, so 632,000 metric tons. And community wide, what actually happened, these are the data points that we have. Again, we were at 12% below 2019 levels. So we did make a reduction, but I guess you could say not quite on track if you were if you are thinking that we're going to reduce the same amount every year all the way until 2030. Now, of course, we don't expect that's exactly what will happen in the real world, but it's some kind of a benchmark to say, are we on track or not?

Okay. So that's community wide. Turning to government operations. So this is the emissions by the operations of the city government, which have, again, most of the same categories as we have for community wide, but we also include the employee commute because we collected information on that. And here, we see the grand total was a little over 14,000 metric tons, carbon dioxide equivalent.

And that kinda breaks down a little bit differently where electricity is actually the largest share for the government operations. After that, transportation, natural gas commute actually comes in right after that. And then we again, we have wastewater and solid waste rounding it out. How does that compare, the 2023 results? Well, it's 21% below 2019 levels.

So a significant reduction there. And, again, if you're looking at what sectors actually contributed to that reduction, it's really electricity and transportation. Both were significantly reduced. Again, I'm gonna focus on electricity because it was the biggest mover, the the most influential. 36% of the government operations total again.

And you can see that these are the uses of electricity by the city government. You can see that wastewater is actually the single largest. About a third of the total is just to process wastewater. Water, pumping fresh water, you know, supplying water to our residents and businesses would be 23%. And then you can see La Crosse Center, it kinda goes down from there to our biggest facilities.

So, again, that 33% reduction is actually explained in this case, there was a reduction in grid electricity usage by the city, about a 6% reduction. And contributing to that reduction was efficiency measures that have been taken in some of the facilities between 2019 and 2023. And then also, by 2023, we have operating solar arrays, at various facilities, and that actually represented about 7% of the city's total electricity usage in 2023. So that definitely made a difference. But, again, sort of the the biggest thing was, cleaner electricity from from Xcel Energy.

And so looking at is La Crosse on track in terms of government operations for that 50% reduction? And same idea here. And the answer is yes. Actually, we're kind of ahead of schedule by a bit, because we have a 21% reduction, and then the target was really 18%. Yeah.

So brief summary here. You saw that greenhouse gas emissions were lower in 2023 on both the community wide and the government operations levels, which was great. Cleaner Excel electricity production was an important factor in that, but not the only factor. Community wide, 12% was not quite on track for a 50% reduction by 2030. But on the government operations side, we're actually a little bit little bit ahead of that.

So, again, I've got more information in this slideshow. If there's time for questions, I'd be happy to to dive into whatever you're curious about. But maybe I'll stop with that as my starting presentation in the interest of time. So thank you.

Thank you so much. Yeah. It's fantastic. This is a highly anticipated inventory. I'm so relieved to see it, and, also, never has an animation on a slide felt so gratifying. So thank you for that. Questions? Go ahead. Yeah, I got

a couple of questions. Great presentation, thank you. We could talk about admissions for days. So one, just top of my mind, wastewater treatment plant, largest use of user of electricity for municipal operations. I'm wondering when did the the natural gas capture start, and this Would that count as renewable natural gas? I I'm not sure, but I

was wondering the same thing. So maybe next meeting, we can have a a summary of the waste what the wastewater treatment plant is doing. Okay.

I don't believe that would have been that would have been anything would have been happening that would have affected these results. But when because a lot of those those biogenic emissions from wastewater, a large amount of that would be the methane that's, I believe, starting to be captured. I'm not sure exactly where that stands either. But, yes, it should make a difference if that methane is captured and used to produce electricity rather than flared off or escaping to the atmosphere. So when that goes online and becomes active, we should see a we should see reduction in wastewater treatment plant emissions.

My other question I don't want to get super granular about employee commuting, so maybe I'll ask you later. But my take on what we're seeing across the state is that transportation seems to be this kind of stubborn emission source. And is that kind of what you're seeing? I don't know how if you have done greenhouse gas inventories for other communities or other entities, Are you seeing transportation as the stubborn source?

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good point because it is heavily reliant on fossil energy. Electric vehicles are starting to make it, you know, a larger presence in the marketplace and what people are driving, and that that certainly will make a difference. But at this point, it's a pretty small fraction of what of the transportation that we see and measured. We actually did as far as the commute for the the the city government employees, we did a survey.

And I think maybe there were two electric vehicles in that whole survey, and we had a couple 100 respondents. So, you know, it's not big. I think I may have if I've got time, I might have made a slide that has some commute stuff in it. Yeah. I do.

Yeah. So you can see, you know, we have approximately 90% of respondents respondents drove alone to work, which, I mean, not surprising. That mirrors kinda what national surveys I've seen that's not really different. A couple percent of people are carpooling or finding alternative means of transportation, like walking and biking. And not to put you on the spot, but, Lewis, you are you are, like, part of that, the gray and yellow there.

You because you put your name on your on your response. So and you may have been the only person to take the bus. Anyway. So, yeah. I think, if we can move the needle on the percentages of people who get to work in various ways, that will help.

As far as the overall transportation category, not just commuting is concerned, there actually was an uptick in the efficiency, like kind of the fleet average vehicle efficiency from 2019 to 2023. So community wide transportation emissions went down, I think, 3%. That actually was not because people are traveling less. In fact, they're traveling a little bit more. But vehicles are, on average, a little bit more efficient or less emitting. So and that electric vehicles play a part in that. Probably, you know, more efficient combustion engines as well. Difference. But it is it is moving slowly, it's, like you say, kinda stubborn.

Alright. I would suggest if any you have any more questions, email me. I'll pass it on to Anders. Otherwise, you can email Anders directly. But hopefully, we can get stuff out of here.

Thank you so much for being here and for presenting this. I might suggest, too, maybe we focus on a sector at a certain meeting would be interesting to hear more and help that inform our policy decisions. Thank you so much. That was wonderful. Thank you so much. Okay. With that, we're gonna move to twenty five dash zero four two seven, Youth Climate Action Fund micro grant application review and selection. We have nine minutes to make a vote. Nine minutes or less.

And Caitlin's here if you have any

I'm sorry. I'm waiting on you.

No. I didn't have any I didn't really have anything to report. The only issue is we wanted to make sure from a Bloomberg standpoint is that the project was substantially different than the if than the first round project project. And in discussion with our coach from Bloomberg, they felt like this was. And I talked to Caitlin about that in in advance too. So she was well prepared to with her proposal. So overall, I think it's it's meets all the eligibility requirements.

Okay. Excellent. Sorry. No worries. Questions for Lewis or accept the grants as applied for. Okay. Motion to approve. I'll second. Second by Dorothy Leonard. Any discussion?

Seeing no discussion, then all those in favor,

please say

aye. Aye. Aye. That is approved unanimously. Wow. That was, like, one minute. Thank you so much for being here, Caitlin. Excellent. Alright. Go back to my agenda here. Now 25Dash0 February, climate action plan implementation update.

The primary purpose of this on the agenda today was to think about what changes you would make to the implementation plan going forward. Prior to the meeting, Andrew brought up a really good point in that since we're going through our zoning code update, we could focus this year, we could specifically focus on tasks that are to the zoning code. And I think that's worthwhile and then definitely something we could do probably in less than a year because possibly our consultants could take on this stuff. But I think any work that the committee could do to, aid in in that help would be beneficial, like, you know, typical request of looking at it, finding examples from other communities and best practices and, sharing those. So, I had reviewed the climate action action plan for zoning related recommendations and found about 34.

Some of those are likely to be redundant. I know there are a few on transit oriented development. So I think I will I I sent those all to you. I will, synthesize those a little bit more and then, have something ready for next meeting if that's what you want. Otherwise, feel free to discuss any other possibilities.

Thanks, Lewis. I am glad that that was brought up. I definitely want to prioritize that as the climate action plan. Appreciate you going through the plan. Couple things.

Could you provide the dates and times of any engagement or just forward engagements, with regard to zoning to us so that we can make sure that our steering committee members are present if able. Also, maybe just high level overview of, like, the timeline when we hope zoning update will even be, like, adopted. Also, through our Lead for Cities process, it's a perfect time to make sure any of those, like, standards and thresholds are in in included in the zoning update, which was done by the city of Middleton in Wisconsin just two months ago. So I'd love to see how we can fold in really any opportunity that we're aware of in all of our initiatives to go into the zoning update.

Great. And then one other thing I wanted to mention that I had alluded to earlier is with the workshop, I thought that would be a really great opportunity to have our business community share examples of how they're adopting or how they're updating their fleets to electric vehicles. Adam gave a few examples, and I'm sure there's even more. And we can even talk to groups like the county, who are planning to or, UWL who are planning to adopt e EVs and see where they're at. So other businesses can emulate that.

And I think if we had a series of short presentations, we could get more participation in person. And, also, we could more easily post videos about those in from those presentations for people to share. And I I I think to, my biggest issue was that the city isn't really, in a position to lead by example at the moment, but there are a lot of other businesses that are. And I think, hopefully, with my intention was to work with the city hall's parking lot redevelopment to install conduit for electric vehicles, but that hasn't been in the or that is has gotten pushed back, I think. So I I'm going to be working with parks and on that.

And I think that using our inflation reduction act funds for EV charging stations and conduit could be a really good opportunity. So I'm going to do more work on getting pricing for that and seeing how how how that'll interact with the with the redo of the parking lot because digging up doing the trenches and everything is really expensive. So timing it with the already existing con construction is gonna be crucial in in saving money.

Easy to argue too seeing as we have all those commuters who are likely not driving electric vehicles. I know for sure I would be plugging in my mom van out there if there was a charger. No doubt. Other ideas, comments on implementation? Andrew?

I'm wondering if now might be the time to add something related to organics diversion. It seems like there is some motion in the community, and I think the city and county will be important partners. And so including that is just to explore collaborating with compost processing facilities because we have an ambitious goal of achieve 50% organics landfill waste diversion, including food waste reduction by 2,030. So that's that could be a big one.

Yeah. Great point. Also, while you were talking, was thinking, like, meth methane is a very potent greenhouse gas and but also a short lived one. So it's kind of a a thing we could do to help you know, something we can achieve by 2030. However, I don't know if Anders has much input on this, but I don't know that we measure it in our greenhouse gas inventory necessarily.

Yeah. With respect to waste diversion and solid waste management, we are measuring the quantities of of waste that get composted or trying to. It's not we do the best we can, but it's not comprehensive because there's no, like, centralized data source for it. So we kinda ask waste haulers individually and things. I also think that's all that is done at kind of a, I believe, at a county level.

Solid waste is information is available mostly at a county level, and we're using that information and sort of prorating it by population size down to the city for the purposes of our our greenhouse gas emissions estimates. So it's not perfect, but, you know, we are we are quantifying waste in those ways.

Yeah. So Andrew's raised up a good point. We can also improve our measurement.

Yeah. I wonder, based on that, most local governments are using county level data and proportioning it. But is there a policy tool we could leverage to require? Yeah, go ahead, Luis.

Yeah, again, something to look into.

Another thought so we are we measuring I mean, we'd probably be measuring the weight. I'm just thinking, like, when we talk about organics diversion, a lot of the things we talk about is how much weight you are transporting and utilizing and creating greenhouse gas emissions with the weight of transporting waste to the landfill. Are there recommendations that you would have Anders, like the specific actions we could potentially take? You know, like, would a curbside organic I mean, I know that these have to be sort of vetted, right? But I'm just thinking about what we use.

We have a sector of the community that would say, Yeah, want to do backyard organics composting. We have a section of the community that doesn't even have green space on their property. They're in apartments. So I'm just trying to think of, like, if we frame up a proposal for organics diversion over the next however long, what components would you think about?

Yeah. That's a it's a very interesting question. I'm not I guess I'm not a solid waste expert, so I'll I'll start by saying that. But I do think you bring up a good point that transport is it's heavy stuff, and and so there's emissions associated with transport. So promoting backyard composting, I mean, I think the, you know, the campaign with leaves to, like, leave them in place rather than have them collected and moved around is a great is a great campaign.

Another thing I this would have to be I don't know the extent to if wastewater treatment is set up for this, but in some places, they actually advocate for garbage disposal and, you know, sending organic waste to to wastewater treatment because there it can be handled essentially, like, broken down organically rather than landfilled and and methane generating. So maybe another thing to think about.

Lewis, did you wanna comment on that?

Well, yeah, I had been talking to Sammy and the parks department about different funding ideas, specifically the the like, an energy saving tree program we we had talked about before. But one of the things that she had brought up was looking at, I believe it was the city of Sun Prairie who did a group buy for, composters. So that's definitely something this organization could fund. So I think I might might have Sammy talk a little bit about that next month, and then we could fund that and and do probably an education maybe do an education I don't know. Support her in her work, I guess.

Yeah. Sun Prairie, by the way, is in the '20 25 Lead for Cities cohort. We could invite them to talk on that too as we could we could always invite other communities to speak at our our meetings too. Did see Caitlin have her hand raised. I think, technically, I need to have a public hearing. Is that should I open a public hearing? With

the size of committee, I don't think it's an issue.

Okay. Okay. Hello, Caitlin. Could you turn your mic on? Hey.

Okay. So I don't wanna speak for Sammy, obviously, because she's the one with all the information in her brain. But the group buy of the composting was going to be coordinated with the leaflet event in the fall, because normally we do some sort of giveaway at these sustainability events. I love that we're talking about organic waste diversion. I love it.

And so I've been trying to kinda get ahold of Brandon from Hilltopper, because he's kinda the expert on that, and loop him in and kinda clue him in on like, if there would be some sort of deal we could work out, because maybe if we did a group buy for all of these composters, potentially maybe he would be interested in giving a discounted rate for these people that are doing. But I'm just throwing this out there. I've had no conversations, but this is where my brain is going with this. Based off the size of the events that we hold, it would probably be about 35 people attendance, and we would love to jump on to any sort of larger event where this could be possible and we could get even more people in on it. So yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Caitlin.

Other comments on implementation, adjusting implementation. Let's see. I mean, obviously, the highest emitters right for so let's just think about community wide for a second because that's what our climate action plan is on. So the highest emitters, right, were buildings, transportation, wastewater in particular. Like, I'm just thinking, like, what is the highest target? And also knowing, you know, I'd like to have the committee more educated on the updates happening at the wastewater treatment plant so we can understand how the changes there will be, you know, changing the metrics that we're seeing.

Yeah. That sounds good. I think we do have data from Excel that differentiates between commercial and residential and then institutional, which is just the city. And then, in our greenhouse gas inventory, it wasn't really it was separated differently. So it's just like electricity and then natural gas, and that's, you know, because that's what the, protocol is looking for.

So, yeah, there's different ways we can slice it to to get a little bit more, to get a better idea about building energy use targets.

Anders, did for when you collect data on emissions associated with solid waste, recycling, landfilling, do you actually have the quantity in, like, metric tons? Do you have that information updated with this greenhouse gas inventory?

Yeah. We do. We our we make estimates. I mean, like I said, prorating from the the county level Yep. Quantities of solid waste going to each waste stream, whether it be incineration at French Island, going to the landfill, recycled, or composted. Okay. Those are the yeah.

Excellent. Excellent. Cool. All right. Lewis, sure. Caitlin, come on up. You can comment on that. Sorry, I wanted

to provide an alternate a very small suggestion, which would be quite easy to implement, but if you wanted to do some sort of policy, a lot of the businesses in LaCrosse leave their lights on after hours and things like that, and so you could just simply make it illegal for them to leave their lights on when there's nobody there. Especially because if we're looking at IRAs basically dead, there's still funding trickling down, but Excel basically got all of this support and I don't know the word, influence, to go and reduce their coal usage and renewable energy usage, but now with the current administration, we're looking at reinforcements for using coal. So in the greenhouse gas report, we see that the actual usage of residents and businesses hasn't changed, but it's really Excel's usage that's going down in the way that they're using it, so making direct impact on the way that residents and businesses are using their electricity rather than relying on Excel to change where they're getting their energy from.

Yeah. So in other words, incentivizing businesses and commercial entities to decrease their usage and emissions. Yeah. Thanks, Caitlin. We do we are extremely lucky to have Xcel Energy in our community. Any local government that I've worked with that is covered by Xcel Energy is doing way better than other utilities, so it's pretty pretty pretty lucky. Thank you very much. Okay. Lewis, any other comments on the implementation? At least have a good start.

Yeah. I will since we're down a few members today, I'll just, you know, try to send out the minutes as soon as I can and then kinda leave the door open to make suggestions for the next meeting while still, bringing this stuff forward.

Excellent. Thank you. Alright. So I know we do not have quorum, but we are able to still discuss.

Yeah. Did you wanna well yeah.

Is that okay? Okay. Alright. Last item is 25Dash0529, Department of Energy's energy savings performance contract campaign case study on La Crosse.

And this was just sort of a receive and file kinda situation. I just wanted to share this work that I've been doing with the Department of Energy, at their energy savings performance countries. They wanted to do a case study on La Crosse. So this is just sort of a outline of what we've done so far.

Pretty outstanding. Yeah. It's pretty outstanding. I would like our counsel to know more about it. I feel like I sometimes jabber on about it, and they're like, what? We've done what? And I know we have a lot of new council members too who aren't aware.

Yeah. And we've got a measurement and verification report from the first two phases that I will, you know, bring forward once the intention is to bring that forward when we get the other report from phase three so we can do all the phases all the reports for all the phases at one time.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. So I don't think we can technically have a vote to receive and file. Do we even need that, Lewis? Okay. Cool. Any questions on this? Alright. Alright.

Okay. Okay. That is the end of our agenda then. Next meeting, second Monday of the month at 4PM, council member Mendel. Agenda items can be sent to Lewis. You can also copy me, but primarily Lewis. Lewis will be in touch with next steps for next month. If there are no objections, I'll adjourn the meeting. Seeing none, we are adjourned.

Thank you