Transportation Board - workshop

Progress.

All right. Well, I'll call the February 4 meeting of the Board of Public Utilities to session and to order. I talked with Eric beforehand. I'm not quite sure I'm brave enough to set the bar to fun and frolic tonight. I'm here in my first chairing and hoping for a well run meeting. And I'll ask for everybody's patience and help. Please give me gentle nudges if I skip anything or mess anything up. But we do have a full board here tonight. A couple folks are online. Chair Gibson's online, and we agreed that it's hard to chair a meeting from online, so I'm stepping in to do that.

And then we've got Philo Shelton and Rian Herman also online. First thing to do is ask and see if there's any public comment. I don't see any in the room. Is there any online?

Thank you, vice chair Hebner. For members of the public who are joining us tonight on Zoom, when we call for public comment, please use the raise hand function. And if you're participating by phone, you can press 9 to raise your hand. Does anyone want make public comment right now? I see no one.

Okay. Thank you. And then the third item is to approve the agenda. Hopefully, everybody had a chance to review it. Any modifications or motions to approve it?

Let's see. I will move

that we suspend our procedural rules for this work session so that formal action may be taken.

Perfect. Thank you, Charlie. Any discussion or second? Second.

Great.

Thank you. I think Jen just beat you to it, Robert.

So That's fine. And I

guess that's procedural. So I guess we do a roll call vote? Or a show of hands good enough? Hand. Hand? Okay. Everybody in favor, please raise your hand. And Robert, looks like a thumbs up. Yep. So that's five-zero. Thank you. So we are able to suspend the procedural rules for the work session and move on to item four, help. I think we still need to approve the agenda, though, right? Okay.

So I'll move that that the Board of Public Utilities approve the agenda as amended.

Perfect. Thank you.

Second. Perfect.

Thank you, Charlie. All those in favor, raise your hand. And I see Robert Slum, unanimous. All right. Now on to item four, the presentations. This is approval of a short term power purchase agreement. Ben? Thank

you, chair, members of the board, and people on the audience. So I will keep this brief. All the information related to this matter is in the staff report. I will summarize very quickly here that this is for a one month power purchase agreement on the order of 22 megawatts around the clock from, Tonasca Power Services Company. The ballpark amount for the, value of the contract is $566,000.

That includes a 25% contingency as is the nature for the short term power contract, power purchase agreements. The price of the resource is not fixed until the moment of signing. So we would have to fudge the numbers a little bit so that we have some headroom in case prices change. They're not expected to, and it's difficult to forecast what happens in the next two weeks. But we built in the contingency to allow for that so we don't have to come back to you if the prices do fluctuate. With that, I'd like to stand for any questions.

Great. Thank you, Ben. Since we're gonna vote on this, first, I'll call for any public comment. I don't see any in the room. Let's check and see if there's any online. I don't think anybody's here.

Thank you, Vice Chair Hebner. We do have one person who would like to make public comment. Ms. Arons, I'm going to fix it so you can speak. You may have to unmute yourself. Go ahead. Whoops. Try again. There we go. You may have there you go.

Thank you.

I'm my name is Joni Arons, and I am with Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. And I am concerned that I was unable to review. First of all first of all, I don't know what WPSS means in terms of the document, the attachment a, the PPA for Tenesca Power Services Company. So I couldn't open I could open that document, but when I was trying to find out what www what is it? Wspp.org stands for, I couldn't access that document.

And I was wondering if you could let me know what that means.

I think this is just an opportunity for public comment, so we're happy to take your public comment, but we can't engage in a question and answer session. Okay. We could follow-up via email if you need some help accessing.

You. And the other part of my public comment was when I went to the wpss.org, as you saw in my email today, it said I didn't have access to the document. I was concerned about it said a server error 50403 forbidden access is denied. It seems that when the county is going to spend over a half $1,000,000 for thirty days or thirty one days of of power that there should be access to all of the documents, readily access to all of the documents. So, thank you, and I look forward to seeing your email.

Thank you for your comments. Are there any other comments online?

No, Vice Chair Hefner, there are not.

Okay. Thank you. Any questions from the board? Let's go to Robert first online. We'll start with you.

Okay. Thank you, mister chairman. Actually, I was curious, even though there's a a long document attached here, this WSPP agreement seems to be fairly new. And maybe I missed something, but I'm not sure what it is. So I would appreciate a brief tutorial on what WSPP actually is.

So chairs, members of the board. So WSPP is the name of an organization of which both Tenaska Power Services Company Corporation and the Incorporated County of Los Alamos are both signatory members of. What it and the attached document is the WSPP master agreement. I should say WSPP is the name of the organization. It was formerly Western Systems Power something or other, and they changed their name just to be the acronym a number of years ago.

So this is a new version. The last first time we did this, we looked at this document or had access access to it, were was when we signed up with our Mercuria PPA, which we're currently working under through the end of this month. That was an earlier version dating from 2023. This 2025 version updated their master agreement to include some mandatory FERC requirements in it. That was the substance of the changes.

This gov this what this document does is it provides a framework for all of the member organizations, including the County Of Los Alamos and Tanaska, to engage in power transactions. It outlines all the normal things you'd see in a typical power purchase agreement such as, you know, the terms that you're operating under, the types of power, how how you describe that damages, how you deal with lack of delivery and resupply. All those details are built into that agreement and both parties are subject to them. So it allows the county and to NASCAR or other parties to the WSPP master agreement to engage in expedited power transactions. We're both parties to the agreement.

And so under the agreement, we can simply say, yeah, we'll buy some power. They'll sell us some power. Here are the terms, the price, duration, whatever the blocks of power are, the price, and we can sign it off with a letter, a confirmation letter. I don't have a confirmation letter attached to this document or to this agenda item and staff report. However, that is forthcoming. And it is similar to the one that we saw with Mercuria, a one or two pager simply outlining those terms of the agreement and a sign off from both parties.

Okay, Ben. Thank you. That that was that was helpful. Tied it to some things that I actually do remember. So I do appreciate that those tie ins. Related question, if we do not have a some follow on to the ECA by the April 1, or even if we do, what do we do next assuming we're not yet ready for a long term thing? If there's another short term extension of the ECA or we simply don't have one, what do we do for power purchases to cover the bridge up until Foxtail Flats comes online?

Good question. Depending on how things flow out with the ECA, whether it's an extension, approval of the new 2026 ECA, or worst case, no ECA to work under, although I don't see that as a feasible outcome, We would buy either come back before this body for a approval for April or whatever terms that we can get, duration of power. Similar to what we're doing here now, we'd go through this process again next month, get additional power. Alternatively, if we didn't have a PPA lined up, we would continue to buy power on the market on a daily basis as we do currently to fulfill any needs that we have. It would just be a larger purchase on a daily basis than we typically have.

Now we do like to buy in advance and lock it in as we're doing here for the one month that we are allowed to under their current ECA simply to hedge the risk of prices increasing. But prices are volatile, especially this time of year. They could go up. They could go down. So we'll find out what the daily prices are when they happen.

K. Thank you, Ben. That's all the questions I have, mister chairman.

Great. Thank you, Robert. I see you have a comment, Philo. Or

Yeah. I just wanted Ben, can you let the the board know the cost per megawatt hour? It wasn't in the staff report. We just did the total contract amount.

Sure. But it's

lower than our prior agreement.

So for people who recall what we're currently paying under the Mercure agreement, it's in the area of $78 a megawatt hour, which was what the prices market prices were at the time that this that deal was struck. Prices have subsequently dropped in that time. Now we're looking at anywhere in the plus or minus $30 per megawatt hour range for a one month purchase. So substantially less than we had been seeing. Forward curve prices indicate a gradual rise in prices up into the $50 range come this summer. So that's where we're sitting at right now. And this one is in that $30 plus or minus range as well.

Great. Thanks for that additional information. Other questions from the board? Yeah, Charlie.

Given that, does it make sense to try to go for more than a one month extension? Is that not possible? They're not interested in it.

So we're still working through the ECA. If we get in another extension and it looks like we may need to head in that direction, Philo can elaborate on this as well, then we would order up the power as we can under the terms of whatever extension we get. Prices are good. We're not seeing any indications that prices will climb. However, we can get surprised.

Another work would break out in Europe or something like that. It drives gas markets into uncharted territories. Who knows? So we'll hedge as much as we can given our current contractual limitations. And beyond that, we're at the risk of the markets.

Under the current ECA, we're limited to one month increments. Is that right?

The current ECA extension goes through the March.

Oh, so that's the limitation.

That's that's the stop on why we're only looking for power for the March.

Other questions from the board? I had one or two that I just wanted to I think they're quick questions to making sure I read this correctly. I tried to read through the entire document. I think a lot of it doesn't apply. I just wanted to make sure. So there was 30 pages on REX and Schedule R. None of that applies. And then I also looked through to just see, Okay, we're in this big WPSS pool. Who else is in there? And I saw PNM is in there. So this is a pretty broad okay, I just wanted to make sure. I guess my question is, did I are both of those correct?

Yes. So it's WSPP. And there are as far as I'm aware, I go to their twice a year, I go to their operating committee meetings, and they're generally in the order of three to 400 attendees representing at least 200 member parties.

And PNM is one of PNM.

PNM is one

of them.

Yeah. It doesn't they're not all power marketers. There's also a a number of people affiliated fields in industries, but it's a well represented body.

Great. Thank you. Any other questions? Or I entertain a motion.

Okay. So I move that the Board of Public Utilities recommend approval of a short term power purchase agreement with Tenaska Power Services Company in the amount of $423,112.80 and a contingency additional amount of a $106,000 for a total of $529,112.80 plus applicable gross receipts tax for the purpose of buying power and energy to serve the Los Alamos power pool's electric load and forward to counsel for approval.

Thank you, Jen. Is there a second? Second. Great. Thank you, Charlie. And this is a roll call. Member Hollingsworth?

Yes. Member Stromberg?

Yes. Member Nochley? Yes. Member Heffner?

Yes. Member Gibson? Yes. Great. Passed 50. Thank you very much, Ben. Thank you. Now we're on to presentation four b, which is distribution electrification plan implementation. Do you believe it's you, Dennis?

Matt, before you move on, mister chairman, our usual practice is to ask for board questions for clarification after the presentation and before public comment. Then do public comment and then go to board discussion.

Great. Thank you. Thank you, chair.

Yep. The good news is I'm not here to ask for money. Ben asked for enough already. This is informational to let you know how we are working toward meeting the goals and objectives of the distribution system electrification study that Burns and McDonnell presented last year. So I put this slide back up to remind you of the actual cost that were estimated in the electrification study to maintain the reliability of our system and that the asset replacement cost are considered to be much more significant than the system improvement cost because we have a lot of old infrastructure in the ground out there.

And that our system improvements have a similar financial impact with the substation upgrade that we have in White Rock and the new substation forecasted for what we call Eastgate currently because those are in all scenarios and major cost. But, that your system actually is a very strong capacity system. It's just got a lot of old conductor in the ground, and that stuff has a an average lifespan of twenty five to thirty years. And we've gotten 40 or four out of some of it already. So it's holding up well.

And our electrification efforts, I look at it as primarily focused on the residential meter, which is predominant in the Los Alamos County area, such as conversion of space heating to heat pumps, conversion of the water heating from gas to heat pumps, conversion of automobiles to electric, which would in result in increased electrical usage by our residential consumers. But we also need to take into consideration that in the last ten or fifteen years there's been a lot of energy efficiency in our electrical usage such as LED and CFL light bulbs replacing the old incandescent light bulbs that some of us grew up with. And LED televisions use a lot less power than the old, very bulky cathode ray tube televisions. A lot of people have put in double pane windows that may have had single pane windows. We've added more insulation in attics and new construction has better insulation in the walls.

Heat pumps are even more efficient than in the nineteen eighties. So all of those efforts would normally decrease the average residential electric usage. But we, over the last ten years, have seen an average increase of about 2% per year in residential home usage. So in spite of all the energy efficiency that has been put into the market, we're still seeing our residential users increase their electrical usage on a average annual basis. But needed to look at is there a corresponding reduction in natural gas usage in our service area?

And with the spikes that we see here, overall, there seems to have been a decrease in natural gas usage. So are people converting from gas to electric? Possibly in a slow manner. So maybe the public is actually doing this on their own over the last ten years. And we had some suggested improvements that we should consider by Burns and McDonnell such as increasing the depth of the electric distribution department.

They thought we needed to have more employees to help structure our workload. And so we have added a line superintendent to the team. He was a line crew supervisor, been here approximately twenty years, very knowledgeable of our system, which is critical in that role, and is doing a wonderful job with the crews. They suggested we work with MILSoft to improve the power flow model to align with our GIS. That is pretty common in the industry.

We weren't quite there. And our GIS administrator and IT team are working on it. They actually upgraded my version of GIS yesterday. So we'll see how that moves forward in the next month. They recommended that we implement volt var control for the new photovoltaic consumers, which will require an update to rule e five that you will approve.

And we anticipate having some revisions for balcony type plug in solar systems as part of that process in case people actually want to do that. And we need to construct the Eastgate Substation to increase capacity in the Los Alamos town side area, And we have budgeted the design of that substation in next year's budget, but it's also gonna require negotiation of a transmission line source across the canyon from the transmission line serving Lantel. And you know more than I do what kind of process that is, but I anticipate it to be lengthy. And so we probably wanna try to do that starting next year as well. They did recommend an upgrade of the EA four overhead line that goes from PCS to Rendia Canyon.

That actually has been in process. We have the design for it. Gotta make a modification to it because of a no dig area that came up last week. And I'm playing phone tag with a designer to let them know we need to move a structure on that line. That line is at the end of its useful life, and it's a much lower capacity line than we're gonna need for our future.

So this is timely. And they also recommended the upgrade of the transformers at White Rock Substation due to capacity limitations. You were generous enough to agree to that back in September on what we call t one, and that process is in the design phase. We're still working on getting the foundation to go under the transformer built, and hopefully we'll have that going within the next few weeks. So we're making progress on that.

Of course, the failure didn't seem to affect us too much, now did it? But they also suggested we investigate demand side management programs. The management team will be looking into this after we get our residential demand rates in place this summer. And we'll need to make sure that we can structure an incentive program for the public that makes it worthwhile for them and for the utility as a whole. They recommended we develop a holistic asset replacement plan that aligns with our needs and our budget.

This is under review, and it will be performed with the assistant of our new line superintendent in coordination with our broadband make ready needs, which I will just go over further in a few minutes. They're also recommending an integrated resource plan. I believe that will come up with your ECA. And perform an organizational assessment for cross departmental synergies, meaning we've got engineering that serves gas, water, sewer, but they operate pretty much independently from the electric side. We are actually working with them and they may take over one of our projects for us this summer.

We've got a lot of work going on for us this year. They recommended we recruit an engineering project manager. Still have that posted. Don't know if there's anyone who's applied for it yet. So since it's still posted, I assume not.

Underground cable replacement projects were identified as a concern due to many of the circuits being at the end of their useful life, thirty, forty, fifty years on twenty five to thirty year cable. And most of that cable is direct bury, which means it's not in conduit. We can't pull it out and pull a new one in. We actually have to dig. And that gets difficult when you've got telephone, cable, gas, water, and sewer all in the street right away.

But we work with it, and we have to do it slowly. Underground switchgear or those big green boxes out there was identified as a problem due to many of them being at their end of their useful life. We replaced three of them back in the fall on San El Difonzo. We've got one that we're looking at that we can change out without causing an outage to the community, and we're planning to replace three more near it in the spring. So we are working with our line crew identifying switches that need to be replaced that have problems and try to minimize the impact on the consumer.

But we don't want to do that in the dead of winter, so we need to wait till the temperatures are mild because those can take several hours to do. And we'll have all three crews working at the same time on three different switches to minimize the impact. On our system improvement needs, actually, the bulk of the improvements are from the transformer to the consumer's meter, the secondaries, the transformers. And so a lot of the services here were undersized for the electrification needs when they were installed and have been for many years. I had never heard of a 30 amp service on a home until I came here, And I've seen a lot of services in thirty five years.

So there's a lot of people that I'm wondering, do they decide whether they run their hair dryer or their toaster or microwave? Because I don't know if you can do two or at least all three of them at the same time with some of what we've seen out there. A lot of our transformers are undersized. I have seen that in the past. And I call them ring buses per but if you got more than one transformer serving a secondary wire, the impedance is such a low level that you can melt down the wire and never blow a fuse.

Transformers are designed with an impedance to minimize the fault current that a consumer can see on the secondary, and that negates the benefit of the impedance of the transformer. So those are not necessarily the safest construction style. We're gonna eliminate those as we find them. But the positive side is we've been contacted by the broadband department and they're asking us to do some improvements to the overhead system for them to install fiber on our lines. And they're calling it make ready.

They're asking for some pole changes. They're asking for some anchors to be put in the ground. And while we're out there doing that for them, we're gonna do a lot of our own maintenance that needs to be done. So we'll make use of the efficiencies, we hope, by doing both at the same time, and the cost will be split between make ready and maintenance and do it fairly. We're all one happy family.

So we're gonna try to do that in White Rock over the next couple of months, probably through the end of the year. We'll just have to see how fast it goes. But I suspect that some of the pole changes that they were calling for may be avoided because we're gonna remove what we call open wire secondaries where you have a transformer on a pole and they just run wire both directions off of it and attach that to the homes, it creates a lot of secondary run which reduces voltage at the home. Not what I consider really good quality voltage service and creates a lot of problem with birds, squirrels. So we're going to try to clean up a lot of the open wire secondary, which will free up space on the pole for the communications, including our fiber.

And we hope that we can provide better quality service to the consumers when we do this cleanup and get rid of some rotten cross arms. We have some post insulators on order that should be here next week that will allow us to improve our construction as well. So think about what's on the poles. We've got our overhead bare conductor at the top. We frequently have transformers.

We have the secondary service wires between the poles, in many cases, underneath the transformer. We have telephone. We have cable TV. Now we're adding fiber. The only thing is National Electric Safety Code says we need 40 inches between our electric wires and the communications. So sometimes we do need to put in taller poles. And we started that today yesterday, actually, on South Monterey. We had to replace a pole. Didn't leave enough clearance actually when that transformer was installed on our lantel tie line. We had to have the trucker back up because he couldn't make the loop.

He would have ripped down the telephone line and the pole if he had tried to make the loop. So we told him back up, get back on forward, get out of here. But they have identified a number of items just in the White Rock area so far of noncompliance that we need to correct for them to start installing fiber. And so we hope to make use of that efficiency, as I said before. And we're it'll be a test to see if there's an advantage to do both at the same time.

And I think there will be. But it'll give us an opportunity to inspect the condition of the overhead equipment while we're up there and increase some of our transformer sizes, maybe some of the secondary sizes to get ready for electrification and improve some of the old secondary wires. In my years, I've actually seen wire that had been in the air for so long cooking in the sun that the insulation was falling off. So we'll be able to find that as well. And I thought you might be interested.

This is one of your pieces of equipment. We call it a backyard unit. It's remote control on track, it doesn't dig up yards with, the tires. It's got outriggers, and it's got a digger and a bucket. So if we can get anywhere close to the pole, this allows us to get there without putting a 26,000 pound plus truck in somebody's yard.

It's a pretty cool piece of equipment. And here's your ten year capital improvement plan. We're still hoping to get Piedra Loop done. That has been sent to procurement to go out for bid, and hopefully it will be out on the streets soon. We have Los Pueblos underground replacement scheduled for next year.

Camp May Road overhead to underground paralleling the water project that's been going on. We hope to be putting that conductor in next or this coming fall on next year's fiscal budget. KamaZone, that's how I've been told to pronounce it now. New York or North Road, the underground replacement, the following year, the substation design there. Then Aragon, Ridgecrest, Garver, Catherine, underground replacement in fiscal year twenty seven, Sandia, and then forty first to forty seventh, underground replacement in fiscal year twenty eight.

Then Grand Canyon, Bryce, Richard Court, and Rover in White Rock in fiscal year twenty eight. Hopefully, EA four power line in '28. We're gonna try to get grant funds again. We're going with a different grant application if they offer it this fall. Then La Cenda is a continuation of Piedra Loop that we're planning to do this summer.

That'll continue on around the loop on, Piedra and La Cinda. Los Pueblo's phase one is in fiscal year twenty eight. Actually, I think I was supposed to take the top Los Pueblos out because we're matching it with a street project. Then Tiwa, Ottawa, Nambe Loop over by the airport, fiscal year twenty nine. The second half of Los Pueblos in fiscal year twenty nine.

Then SCADA, we hope to do in fiscal year twenty nine. I think we had a question about that last month. Oakwood Loop, Nugget, Opal, Pinion, Spruce, Nectar, fiscal year thirty. Then Rover and Ridgecrest, underground replacement in fiscal year thirty. Then hopefully construct Eastgate Substation in fiscal year thirty if we can get a transmission line to it.

Sage Loop in fiscal year thirty one, Kimberly Loop in White Rock in fiscal year thirty one, then get back on Trinity, which we have some construction scheduled for half a mile of line this year, and Diamond, the Oppenheimer underground replacement. Pristin Place, Brighton, Paul Place, Todd Loop in White Rock, fiscal year thirty two. Guahe Canyon line replacement, which will be the end of EA four back to, is it Barranca Mesa in fiscal year thirty three, then we're estimating about a million dollars a year in Los Alamos Townside and White Rock after that. That's what we currently have planned. Might change next year based on where we see failures.

And that should be the last one. So open for questions.

Great. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'll try to do this correctly. Any clarifying questions from the board?

Yeah, Eric. Thank you, chair. Great presentation. I had a lot more questions. But as you presented, you answered most of them. So thank you very much. I'm still wondering, Los Alamos distribution network, I'll just call it that, gets its power from, of course, Norton and Reeve. And I'm wondering how has anyone figured out how much more power this distribution system is going to give us? Is it 30 megawatts, a 100 megawatts? I mean, how much capacity is in the future?

I believe that we were looking at a total of, like, 60 megawatts in townsite in the electrification plan. I think we're pretty much land constrained. It's gonna be hard to get any load other than what we pretty much have with a little bit of expansion on residential. So large commercial that would bring in four to 10 megawatts is pretty minimal likelihood, but it all depends on what people want it to do. And if they're gonna bring in something, on a single site that uses a lot of power and if we have to upgrade the substation that Llano has or build one or upgrade the transmission lines, that's normally have has to be paid for by the commercial or industrial consumer doing it, such as a data center.

But those one fifteen lines, I believe they're probably four seventy seven conductor. My estimate is they're good for about a 100 to a 150 maybe a 125 megawatts each. And I think that's actually been determined by Lantel, but I I don't know for sure.

Yeah. I believe the EPCU is supposed to add 200 megawatts to the to the network. And I'm wondering I keep wondering how much of that is being reserved for the town site. And I'm I don't know if anyone actually knows that number, but I'm curious.

I don't know. But we're running somewhere between seventeen and eighteen megawatts summer and winter peak now.

And you're looking for 60 megawatts, which may be an increase of around 40?

Yes. And that's part of what Eastgate is supposed to offer us.

And that's coming right off the 115 Gabe Eti line.

That would have to come off that one fifteen. And if Llano were to get a data center, there's going to be less capacity available for us going forward. And at that point, between us and Lantel, we'd probably need a third transmission source. I have my idea where I think it should come from, but that's just my ideas.

Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Are there clarifying questions? Charlie?

Dennis, if you look at the capital improvement plan for ten years, vast majority of them seems to me are URDs. This is basically replacing underground distribution cables,

Right?

That is correct.

Digging up these nonconduated cables and replacing them.

That is correct. We are going to do some overhead maintenance, but that's much easier to do. Yeah. And we're gonna be doing that as part of this make ready. So all of the focus in the capital dollars was on the underground cable.

Sure. How did you choose? I'm just curious. How did you choose which ones to do first and which ones to put off to later? Was was it just oldest first, or what was the rationale that

was used?

Pretty much, Steven Morris, he developed this while he was still here, and he knew where the problem cables were Mhmm. What's caused the outages that drove a lot of it is he would remember, well, we had a failure on this one five years ago and again this year. Well, it's probably time to replace it. So he did that, but it was primarily based on seventies vintage installations along with where are we seeing failures.

Oh, okay. Alright.

Is there any way I'm

just curious. Is there since we have so much to be done, as you say, and it's gonna take a long time for it to get finished, Is there any way to do relatively inexpensive surveillance on a section of line and say, This looks like it's prone to break in the near future? Or can we get any data or that helps us?

Is that at all possible to do?

Most of it is on our outage reports on where have we seen the cable and the linemen remembering where they've had the failures. As far as trying to extend the life of the cable, there have been some technologies that are out there.

Mhmm.

It depends on the kind of cable that you have on whether you can actually extend the life of it by putting a very high pressure injector of a silicon type gel on it and trying to force it down the conductor and fill in the voids that have created based on the age of the cable. It's expensive. I don't know how successful had it has been. The only time I have known that it was being used and I would have encouraged them to do it was on a cable across eight miles of Lake Erie to Kelly's Island that a utility did that on. That's the only place I've ever seen where I thought it might be worth doing.

But as far as trying to determine statistics, really, it's just based on outages and knowing where we've had problems.

Okay. Yeah, Jen.

So I have a question regarding your, what's happening with residential usage for both electricity and gas. Are you reflecting sort of per capita changes or is this just total Los Alamos County changes? And I asked just because the population is, you know, changing and increasing and with new building and so forth going on.

This is per meter. The which does break down residential, but I've only been looking at the total over the years. And total electric usage has been basically flat for almost all of that time. And it it's hard for me to believe that the residential usage is going up this much. If the total usage is flat, that would mean that nonresidential is going down a lot. So you said this came from our accounting department. Did it come from consumption reports, or where did it come from?

This is directly off the consumption reports.

Well, that's that's very interesting. I certainly would like to confirm that before we make any policy decisions based on it. Looking at the gas usage, that could well be varying that much. But if you want plots of against the heating degree days, I think you'd find that the the gas usage is per heating degree day has not changed very much. That would be my my guess because I've done that plotting over years.

And, again, the there has been change, but it's been very slow. So I don't know that it is that this decline is a result of people changing what they do versus just the climate changing. Have you have you looked at this relative to the the heat requirement, the heating degree days?

I have not. I do not have easy access to that type of data, and I've been focusing efforts on other projects. I just the consumption report had the data, and I graphed it along with the electrical consumption data. And that's actually just all I had. And, I presented it for you as an indication of how it might actually be reducing the average gas consumption by the residential consumer. But it is strictly residential on both graphs.

Well, that that's helpful to break it down. Like I said, I've only been looking at totals over the years and just haven't had the time to try try to break it down or see if we can get somebody to do that. But okay. Moving on to next slide. I'm glad to see that there's work being done on MILSoft. We've been hearing about that for quite a long time. When do we expect that to actually be available for use?

We actually used it in the electrification study. I worked most of my first six months on the Millsoft model correcting a lot of problems in it, getting us something useful that we could run voltage drop studies on, and that's what they used in the electrification study. It's not perfect. It's not tied to GIS accurately yet, but we do have a workable model that we can allocate load to and run voltage drop studies on and fault current.

Okay. I'm glad to hear we have a workable model because we've needed that for a long time.

I agree.

Okay. The next bullet on that slide talks about implementing volt var control for new PV customers with a new e five rule. Do we have a, at this point, kind of a ballpark guess as to what the cost to our customers would be to do that?

We do not. It would, for the most part, probably require them to use the programming of their Tesla Powerwall control system to reduce the potential for back feed and possibly, tell some people that they cannot install a PV system because we anticipate our entire circuit being to the point of back feed. But that's just speculation. We don't have really good data for that and have not put a lot of effort into it. About the time I started looking at that, had a transformer failure, and that's where I've put a lot of focus, honestly.

Understood on the on that point. We still got our fingers crossed until we have a redundant supply there. Correct. They I would not so far so good, but I don't know that I would say we're out of the woods yet. Moving on to to broadband and their requests, desires, evaluations of our system, whatever, the is what they to what extent is are their asks consistent with what we would have done anyway?

The or is is broadband starting to drive what we do, what utilities does?

We were planning to do a lot of our own system improvement, probably not as quickly as we're going to do in order to keep up with their request. So they're probably just going to accelerate our efforts, and we may be forced to put a second crew on some of the work rather than have a single crew focus on our overhead system maintenance. But the mobilization will help us spread some of our maintenance cost out because we can make ready at their expense while we're out there. So maybe five hours a day instead of eight hours a day on maintenance versus the full cost of eight hours and of our crew. But it will accelerate our efforts considerably, but it needed to be done.

Will it be changing might it be changing the order in which we do things, changing our priorities, or being at least pressured to change our priorities?

I think so. I don't know that we would have been changing some of these poles on North And South Monterey at this time, but they're calling for it. It needs to be done. We don't have the equipment that we're wanting to use when we start in the backyards up by Highway 4 and Rover. So we have actually started changing some poles and looking up at the conductor that it looks like you could almost reach up and touch it if you walked under it.

Really needed to be done. And maybe we will save a long outage by not having a moving truck rip down the overhead line, much like we had when, we had the outage last year near the school because we had a low sagging communication line. So it all needs to be done. It's just a matter of was that our priority? Not necessarily before, but it is now.

Well, it becomes our priority if we accept it as our priority.

I agree.

Okay. Question on the Eastgate Substation or the proposed Eastgate Sub Eastgate Substation. It's proposed to design that in '27 FY '27. What would be the shelf life of a design for such a substation? The reason I asked the question is if we don't see a lot of increase in demand, we it may be premature to build that substation in '30 as currently envisioned.

Maybe we need to wait till we see the increase in demand that justifies it. And if the design if the shelf life of the design is likely to be long, then designing it and having it ready to go whenever we determine that we we need it is fine. But if the that designs might get stale before we build it, then it's not so fine. So what is the shelf life of a substation design?

Probably the tenure of the engineer leading the team because I would do it different than Rafael would do it, and I would do it different than Steven Mares would do it. And whoever comes after me might very well plan to do it different. I I have to be honest, but

I appreciate that comment. I I understand it.

Quite honestly, the design I was looking to have done, I forgot to go and get pictures of it. It would be something that I would probably do ten or fifteen years from now. The equipment might change, but the equipment's not gonna be specified in the design necessarily. It would just be a recloser, a relay, not a specific model and brand. But the layout is going to be something that would definitely be applicable for a lot of engineers, but probably not for someone who prefers a different style of substation.

But, what I design or have designed is redundant and, safe to operate and safe to work around and very easy to maintain and upgrade as necessary. But, probably, if Rafael came back, it'd be different.

Okay. That's that's the that I appreciate the honesty in your answer as to the real world experience here. That's all my questions. I'll have a couple more comments when we get there. Thank you, mister chairman.

Great. Thank you, Robert. Follow?

Yes. Chair and members of the board, one thing that we're considering with the Eastgate Substation is all the development that we're gonna have on DP Road as well as in the downtown. That's gonna have increased demand on our current system, and I think it's definitely warranted that we get started on this project knowing that these projects, one of them right across from a municipal building, they're planning to start construction next spring. I know entitlement process are working at 20th And Trinity and DP Road has a large apartment complex on the A8 site as well as, we had, I believe it's a Ubiquiti's also expanding their manufacturing footprint at Eastgate and there's, demands for additional energy there. So I think in totality it's a, we should at least get some of our initial designs done and review of system demand, you know, our future system demands.

So I think it's a prudent to, to begin that process. You know, when do we cross that threshold? We probably will know better in about a year once all the entitlement process are done on those large developments. But they're coming. They're they're under contract so that they, we can't ignore that fact.

And then I do think our partnership with broadband's very important. You know, to work closely with our county partners, you know, implementing this large bond project. Council just approved getting bonds, 40,000,000. And it is a it's a opportunity for us to get improvements on our overhead system. It won't impact our underground planning.

But yeah, our staff resources will need to look at it. And Dennis and Jerry Smith have met and we've discussed, you know, we need to do a few of these and see what kind of effort it's gonna take. Obviously when you raise a pole another five feet, we have our alignment need to be involved with that, but that, those areas there that Dennis mentioned on Monterey Loop are necessary to have that height and get the clearance of lines. So I think what I would recommend to the board is that we do a few of these projects. That's what we offered to do and if we need to contract some work, we'll look at it.

But I think there's a synergy that we can take advantage of while we're in a backyard with that special digger truck and make those improvements to, you know, rotted cross arms or bad secondary lines, etc. So I just wanted to add a little more color to some of the electrification occurring. Then speaking to the plan, what we're seeing in growth of our consumer use of electricity as a residential level is the low case scenario, and maybe even half of that amount because the electrification plan was looking to double electric usage in the, by 2040, and if you think about where we're at, we're in '26, add fourteen years and go at 2% per year, we're not getting close to that growth yet. Now as people electrify their vehicles and homes, you know, may, may we'll start seeing that. But when we do our rate designs, we, there's, we have to be a little cautious of how quickly we grow.

We need to see, we need to see some upward momentum because we're not, you know, we can't build out the whole electric system based on the current usage and we need to be thoughtful as we move forward. So we're just projecting the 2% growth rate now knowing we have a lot of residential development in the pipeline. I do think it's a reasonable number for us to use and set rates as we look into the next couple years, but that's something we're going to have to watch every year to see if we're going to see some additional growth down the pipeline. So I'd stand for any additional comments or questions. Thanks.

Great. Thanks, Hilo. I did have one question, Dennis, with regard to the make ready work with the broadband. The slide talks about first seven segments and just shows that area in White Rock. Is it the potential that it would be additional areas?

Yes. There are 20 different sections that they plan to release to us. And right now, they're focused on the White Rock sections. The balance of them will be actually, I think we just got number eight early in the week, And the balance will be in Los Alamos town site after that.

Okay. Thanks. I don't see any other questions. Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Jen.

Sorry. Just to ask Philo. I want to clarify a point. I thought you said that 2% is a reasonable number to use for deciding on rates and other decisions. But then, previous to that, you said that there's a lot of new construction that's going to happen. So how do we fold those numbers of the anticipated growth in population and building space into that 2%? So 2% without considering that doesn't seem to Right. Be sufficient. Right?

Yeah. What I what I meant by that is we we need to monitor the growth every year and see if we're seeing that increase.

Okay.

You know, it's difficult to say because we had, for example, the Hills development. We thought that'd be online two years ago and it's finally coming online.

So Right.

It's very hard to say, okay, let's when we establish rates, we kinda look back at our trends to move forward so we don't overshoot

Mhmm.

That. But we do need to look at it from year to year and see how if we're meeting the mark or if we make adjustments. So but it's it's I wouldn't wanna plan on seeing a residential project come online until it it is online.

Okay. Okay. Thanks.

Any other questions? Not seeing any. Let me call for public comment. I don't see any on in the room. Are there any online, Kathy? Nope. No. Alright. Any other board discussion?

Yes. I do.

Yeah. Please, Robert.

First, to follow-up a little bit on comments just made. Our fundamental problem in planning here for the next several decades is anticipating the growth because, obviously, we you can't build things. You can't provide electric service, or you you wanna have the electric service there when before the demand develops, not after it develops so that it isn't constraining it whether the demand is growth of the community in one fashion or another or electrification by individual customers. And that's something we're gonna be we and our successors are gonna be dealing with for a long time is trying to figure out what where are we gonna be in five or ten years and being ready for that, but we don't wanna build too much too early for a variety of reasons. Going back to this presentation, my first comment is will sound like a semantic comment, but it I think there's it's it's deeper than that.

And that is the subheading on the on the initial slide. It says goals to meet the objectives of the distribution system electrification study. And I think we need to be careful that we are not setting our objectives based on not setting objectives to satisfy a study, but to set our objectives more basically that is to provide adequate, reliable, and and economical electric power to the community. That's our objective. The study, which was a very good one, so there's a lot in there that we can use and we'll continue to use, I'm sure.

But it we I I've certainly seen cases where there are studies and people say, oh, we gotta do something because the study said we should do it. That's not why you do things. That's you know, this that gives you an eye that gives you ideas to work with, but there are more fundamental things more fundamental reasons for doing things or there should be than just satisfying a study. So keep it we we need to keep our eye on the on the real goals here, is providing service to the community. Second comment I would make, we talked quite a bit here about our overhead system.

Several times the question has been brought up, should we be looking at undergrounding more of the system? And I think in general, the response from the department has been unenthusiastic. But I'm wondering this is really a question to the board if for potential discussion. Do we wanna have a formal policy discussion and decision about undergrounding? Wouldn't be everything, of course.

You know, there it'd be looking at each individual circuit and saying, what would it cost to underground it versus leaving it on the poles? And the answers will be different in different cases. But to just say everything that happened to be on poles twenty five years ago, we're gonna leave on poles. I don't know that that's a a very very foresightful that's not a good word. Not a not a very good answer because what we do now upgrading this system is probably gonna set the tone for the rest of this century.

So if we want more lines underground, this is the time to be thinking about it. So I asked the board or throw out for discussion to the board whether we ought to have a better discussion of that than we have had just kind of here and there when this question has come up before and and make a more deliberate decision about policy decision, which has got economic components and everything else about whether we wanna pursue more undergrounding at this point. End of comment. Thank you.

Thank you, Robert. Anybody wanna take the bait?

Yeah. I'll take a few comments. I'm reminded of a survey that just came in that in the survey, is talking about electrification. And in the survey, it said that 71% of Los Alamos respondents, there was about a thousand respondents in the survey, 71% had no intention of electrifying, going from gas to changing their gas to electric. That's a pretty high percentage.

So I echo what mister Gibson says in terms of being in touch with the community. I would like to in terms of undergrounding, my immediate answer would be no. But simply because I don't know what the cost has gotta be at least 10 times as much. It's probably 20 times as much. It's a Dennis, do you have any idea of a multiplier? Because it's gonna be huge. It'd be stratospherically expensive.

I would say it's at least five times as much, but the primary hurdle you're going to face, I've already seen in another muni, that is the secondaries to the homes, their overhead. Are you going to make the homeowner upgrade to an underground secondary service? If not, then the utility's gonna bear that cost. And then the other rate payers are going to be subsidizing what other people, maybe last year, when they undergrounded their service to get it out of the air, had to pay themselves. And it's gonna come down to, who's gonna eat the cost and is it a fair cost.

That's a bigger issue than actually, I think, the cost of bearing the primary, which in White Rock could be very difficult due to the basalt because we want to try to be four feet down. And I didn't realize how bad basalt was until we started doing this project with the tile line and the lanel. So there's a lot of hurdles, but I think you're gonna find the secondary service to the homes to be the bigger hurdle on the homeowner says, I can't afford it. I don't want it. I don't need it.

And then the other rate payers are going to have to bear that cost if you wanna force it. And that may not be necessarily fair. We didn't think it was in Muscatine, Iowa. Thank you.

Other thoughts from the board? I think I'd pick up what Robert brought up was I think maybe a little bit deeper discussion and thinking about undergrounding, because I think those are great points, but really understanding what would the long term benefit be versus the upfront cost. So I propose to the board, you know, sort of supporting what Robert was thinking about, maybe a deeper under a deeper understanding and deeper discussion for by the board on on undergrounding questions. I think that'd be interesting.

What we how would we do that practically?

I think just as we we need to talk to In file particular, yeah. So it's more just a discussion of do does that sound do we wanna talk more about undergrounding? Yeah. Me Seeing nods. So we will

talk Especially with all the new construction. Is there something one can do related to new construction that's different than, you know, just the rehab on old stuff? So

Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll take that with Philo and Yeah. Feed that in. Yeah, Philo?

Yes. Chair, we we can add that to the, tickler. And also just so you know, new construction does require, the developer to put in underground circuits. The channel I've done a lot of underground conversion work in my career too, and, we can talk about that and further in, at an, you know, future session.

Great. Okay. Thanks. Alright. Thanks, everyone. Any other comments from the board? Going once, twice? Okay. Thank you very much, Dennis. Moving on to agenda item number four point c.

James and James are gonna walk through the asset management team capital improvement plan budgets. Or just James? Not mine. James. Sorry.

Good evening, chair and vice chair and members of the board. This is our follow-up from our January 14 board meeting. As mentioned, we'd come back to you and give a overview of our 10 well, our CIP list for the next two years, fiscal year twenty seven and twenty eight. We have been working on preparing our ten year CIP plan, but what I'll present this evening is a overview of our planned projects for the next two fiscal years. I'll go into it.

Dennis gave a good introduction into the electrical distribution system, but I'll I'll touch on it real quickly as we go through. If you wanna follow through on the CIP list for fiscal year twenty seven, and I'll go through kinda giving a brief overview from the narratives that we had prepared that are also in the packet. So I'll start with fiscal year twenty seven for electric production. So this one, we have kind higher on the higher priority list, and this is for our Abiquiu wicket gate hydraulic servo motors to replace. Right now, we have a leaking hydraulic, on two of the on two of the servos that produce 6.9 megawatts, of power, and these were installed in 1987.

They're originally manufactured by Orrenco, which is a Chinese company. And we had actually rebuilt these ten years ago when they had started leaking. And more recently, they've they've started leaking again. So that's become a a high priority issue in the environment that they're in. So we're looking to just replace with new companies that we've been talking to have actually shown that they have no interest in rebuilding them as they may not be able to be rebuilt at this time.

So what we have budgeted is 200,000 in order for them to get installed in the '27. This next fiscal year the fiscal year that we're currently in, we're actually gonna look at procuring those and purchasing them and then getting a contractor onboard in order to install them. Next, I'll move to our electric distribution. Dennis gave a good overview of our underground residential distribution replacement project and overhead replacement project. A lot of this infrastructure was from the nineteen seventies.

It's buried infrastructure. And based on how we prioritize this project is if we have, like, three or more failures in in the infrastructure, that requires some attention. So what we have in the project is White Rock white for White Rock, Aragon, Ridgecrest, and Garver and Catherine, and that we have 1,500,000 that we're requesting budget for that, and that will be a year round project. Then we also have our overhead replacements, which will also include the make readies. At the same time, we'll utilize the same mobilization to tackle two things at this at one time.

A lot of that infrastructure is probably more than 50 years old, so we'll we'll tackle that as well. We're looking at 450,000, in budget in order to complete those, cross arms and the conductors and transformers in that area in, for the overhead system. And that's also a year year round project. Next that we have on the list is actually a cross departmental funded project, which it'll be a shared cost between the various departments. This is the DP Road staging area.

We currently have a staging area near the Sycamore Water Tank. In that area, we actually have, like, a where our GWS folks, when they do potholes and such, they go out to that area, there's a an area that's actually blocked off where they can dump their their spoils there and, you know, the water could dry off from, you know, their hydro excavation activities. So we're looking to create a a shared staging area for both DPU and public works, where the field crews can have an area to do, some of this either staging of material or, like I mentioned, the pothole and some of those spoils, maybe some areas for piles of base cores, millings, and things of that sort. So we're looking to budget from each one of our DPU departments, a 175,000. That'll be spread across let's see.

One, two, three, four. Like, four four departments, I believe. Five departments? Five departments. So that will occur.

We're we're actually working with some consultants to come up with some scenarios on what would bet be best, to fit that area. So that's forthcoming, and that'll probably be, come to fruition in '27. Next on the list is we have, for the electric distribution, the Eastgate subdivision design that Dennis spoke on. And, we're looking to procure services for a consultant to design the new substation to support the increased demand that was identified in the electric electrification study. So we're anticipating about a $500,000 budget for for procuring those design services, and we'll probably kick that off in '27.

Next, we'll move on to the gas distribution department. This is mainly our pipeline repair and replacement of equipment. Our gas distribution system is actually we've refocused efforts from large improvement projects and, rehabilitating, or we've already replaced a lot of, steel lines to PE in a lot of the areas. So, we have a really sound gas distribution infrastructure. So our focus has shifted now to, mainly maintenance of the system.

We do hold a budget here. We're planning a proposed budget of 100,000 just in for unforeseeable stuff that do does come up. You know, a contractor hits a line or we come across a valve that may have been left behind from previous projects that is a steel body valve. So we've come back and have a small project in order to tackle those those areas. And then as I mentioned, we also have the DP staging area, which is a shared cost.

Next, I'll move to water distribution. This here, we have Denver Steel's phase three. I don't know if you're aware, but we just currently kicked off phase two. I think it was last week. Last week, we kicked off that project.

So phase three in fiscal year twenty seven, we'll we'll, look to replace the remaining, nineteen fifties vintage water lines, and we're gonna look to see if, we have any clay sewer beneath the roads that will also need some attention. So we have a hon 1,200,000.0 in water and a 150,000 in wastewater that will be shared cost there. The 1,200,000.0, we actually have this is the profit transfer. I know this, we have the

drinking water state as well.

That's correct. Thank you. The drinking water state drinking water loan on this one. So we actually are utilizing some of those funds now for phase two, but we'll go back to the finance authority, and we'll actually request an increase because we chewed into a little bit of the the budget that we currently had. So we'll we'll probably ask for a little bit of an increase to cover the water portion for this project.

DP road staging, this is also be sharing a cost for for that improvement. Next, we have our water production department, and we are planning to repaint the Pajarito tank four a. So this will complete any structural repairs and recoat the 4,000,000 gallon steel tank that's located on the lanol side. And by re recoating the tank and doing some of these structural fixes, you know, we're hoping to extend the the service life of the tank. That we have a proposed budget of 1,600,000.0, and that one will probably look at going we're currently going after water trust board funding at the moment in order to have it ready for fiscal year twenty seven.

We are also have proposed the Parito Road transmission line. This is to replace a corroded 16 inch concrete cylinder pipe. It's about 4,500 linear feet, and we'll continue from the new ductile iron that we installed a couple years ago near the T A 50 area. And we'll we'll head south from there heading down towards our Barito Booster 2. So we'll we'll probably get about halfway through that project.

This will be in two phases, and we're actually going after water trust board funding at the moment. We're anticipating that, that'll be 1,700,000.0 for phase one, and we'll tackle that in '27. Next, we have Parito Well Number three replacement design. So we're looking to design a new water supply for the Overlook Park. This is due to taking off one of our wells due to the the chromium plume.

We'll probably go after federal funding through our congressional delegation in order to fund fund this part of the work. So we're anticipating that the design for the new well will be around 300,000, and we'll hope to kick that off in '27. And then also, shared cost for the DP Road staging area. Wastewater collection. This one here, Denver Steel's phase three, as mentioned, we'll tackle that in fiscal year twenty seven.

This is actually hold on just a minute. I wanna check something. Okay. Yeah. This one, to replace the nineteen fifties waterline, and we'll take a look to see if the sewer beneath the paved roads needs to be re repaired or replaced. Phase three, one one hundred and fifty thousand for wastewater.

Sorry to interrupt you. I'm not sure who has the controls. Can you just scroll up on the perfect. Thanks.

Yep.

Wastewater. So as you see there, Denver steels, that portion, a 150,000. And as mentioned before, it'll have a portion 1.2 from for our water distribution. Also on the list of projects is Fairway, Sycamore, and North Community. This will be to replace, failing vitrified clay sewer mains, in some of the service lines.

These have been problem problematic areas, and we're actually shifting some of our efforts in order to correct these clay clay lines which run under people's homes, and we've actually received several tort claims. And we wanna start focusing our efforts to to relocate some of those lines, get them out under from beneath the homes and and or if we need to, you know, jack and bore or find other methods of repairing these vitrified clay lines in order to stop these reoccurring issues. So we're looking for Fairway, 800000, Sycamore, 600000, and North Community, about 300,000. And we'll actually be applying for a a rural infrastructure loan in the amount of 2,000,000 in order to tackle those those projects, and that will be hopefully in the '27. And then I have here a placeholder for the DP Road staging area as well.

Next, our wastewater treatment department. We have a project here to convert our effluent wash water system to a gravity system. And then just by doing so, converting from our effluent wash water continuation to replace that corroded 16 inch concrete cylinder line, That's about another 400 or sorry, 4,500 linear feet. We'll just continue from where we left off in phase one, and we'll get us all the way down to Booster 2. That's around $22,200,000.0 that we're estimating for that that project.

And we'll also go after water transport funding for for that work. And we'll tackle that in the '28. North Mesa out tank altitude valve. This will be to install the altitude valve just for more efficiency of of filling the tank. Right now, we utilize a PRV in order to to fill that tank.

So we'll convert that to an altitude valve. That's budgeted at $606,170,000. And, likewise, we'll go after water trust board funding in order to complete that project. Booster station upgrades phase one. This is to begin the design, and this will this design will help us prioritize any mechanical and electrical needs that are required within our our booster stations.

So that'll give us a a list of priorities prior prioritizations. And we're looking to budget 350,000, for that, and we'll actually apply for water trust board funding for the design portion of this work. And that will initiate in the '28. And then we have, booster station building renovations. So we currently have now in '26, we're actually gonna tackle a couple of our booster stations in order to repair some of the, roof envelopes, windows, doors, and just, making sure that we keep the structure sound.

And we'll continue that in fiscal year twenty eight. We'll do some more booster station renovations just to, you know, maintain our facilities, keep

them

from leaking water into the structure, any, you know, structural improvements, HVAC improvements, roof roof repairs. Yeah. These are old facilities from the nineteen fifties and sixties, so we'll we'll look at tackling that. And we have here budgeted 500,000 in order to complete that. That will kick that off in the '28.

And we're bringing before you the Bajarito Well number three test drilling. So this is the replacement well that we're looking to drill at the overlook area. So this will mainly be for test drilling and hydrological studies for the new water for the new water source to kick off the the design portion. And then that's 300,000 is what we anticipate that will cost, and we'll go after federal federal money for that. And we'll kick that off in '28 if we can get some funding.

Lastly, we have our profit transfer for our water distribution. I think that might be on the is that included in the packet? Profit transfer might be on the very last page or next page. Is that on in the pocket?

It doesn't look like it is. Let's see what Kathy has. K.

It'd be the next page. No. We have a profit transfer, which we normally I think 900,000 is what we normally we have that option.

Let's see here.

Yeah. We we have funds that are provided to the DPU as a budget option during the county overall budget approval. So this is for completing some additional waterline replacement projects, and I think it's a reoccurring amount, right, for the ten year. So we're looking to propose a project here to complete work on Fairway, and that will be to replace the old cast iron water lines and and also apply for a RIP loan in order to tackle some of the vitrified clay, sewer lines in in that area as well. So we'll look to tackle that in the '27.

And with that, I think that summarizes our project list for the next fiscal years '27 and '28. So if you have any questions

Great. Thanks for running through that. I know, Robert, without putting your hand back up, I assume you still have some questions.

Thank you, mister chairman. First on this DP Road staging area, do we is there not adequate space at the Pauwrito site for that kind of work?

So around town, there's limited space, for our contractors and our the county crews itself. So I think the the property that we looked at on DP Road is probably the best available site in order for us to conduct our operations. Currently, think Public Works has their staging area for the millions and base course, but other other than that, Sycamore, where current our currently, the location that we utilize there for our GWS field crews, we've had some complaints being that it's so close to the residents' homes. The noise of the Vactor at all hours of the night, the lights, you know, it raises some some complaints. So by moving it here to a more industrial site at the far end, I think we feel that that's a more appropriate spot, and it's centered as well in the within the town site.

So I think you're telling me that we don't have enough space at the Pauarito site that you're already operating satellite sites. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Okay. A a question related to that that's a little bit outside the utilities lane. Hopefully, somebody knows something about it. One of the one of the several drivers in the community for the high construction costs is the shortage of lay down space for contractors, for private contractors. Is there any thought given to creating some space that we would lease to private contractors on DP Road?

Because that that seems like a really good place for this kind of thing. And if it's good for the county, it would seem like it's also good for might be good for private contractors.

Chair, that is part of the analysis that they're we're currently working on is we'll have dedicated spots for both DPU public works, and then there'll also be shared space for contractors where there'll be fenced off locations in order for them to store their materials and have them in a safe location.

Okay. That that's what I was after is whether there there would be an area for the private contractors too down down there in that area.

And Anne had something to add to this.

Thank you, Chair and Member Gibson. I just wanted to add that there are some initial concepts that have been developed that have included utility staff and those comments as mentioned. However, we're going to go through process and we're going to have to go to counsel to approve a master plan. That is that discussion is in the works, but that request and that need has been identified as part of the process.

Good. Glad to hear that after a long time that it's been needed. Thank you. Second question has to do with the the new well. You're showing the county funding the if we don't get federal funds for it, the county funding at least the initial design work, and then hoping to get looks like federal funding to do the initial test drilling and so on.

But the need for such a well is largely, if not entirely, driven by the loss of, powerito number three, which is entirely due to DOE activity. Why do we think that our customers should be paying anything for that for that new well since it's it's replacing something that DOE fouled.

Okay. I think I'll take that question, We only proposed doing the initial design so we could get cost estimates and, the concept in place so that we can utilize our San Juan Chama water rights. But going forward is a big discussion on who pays for construction of the well. But I need some documents and proof of concept to present. And that's what the initial investment is next year proposed.

So for example, you know, how where should we put the well? We did have some studies done in the past at Overlook. How do we pipe the water back into our system, etcetera. So, you know, and what does that cost? So the estimates we have are over ten years old and they were really conceptual estimates, not not actually some engineering estimates.

Has there been any discussion with DOE about, at least sharing some of this cost for the, initial study?

We are in discussions. I would say, you know, as far as sharing, we we don't have any anything yet, but I would anticipate going forward we need to. But I we do need it. We need information to present, and we don't have good information to, you know, counter.

Well, it's true. We need information, but this is for DOE's benefit. I would think they should be paying for for a good chunk of that information rather than us. Okay. Looking at F Y 0 excuse me.

'28, Several maintenance items at Alvaro are proposed. And do we think we're likely to have any better insight into the future of the Alvaro Dam and hence our power plant by a year from now when we have to be actually making budget decisions about that investment? Or are we gonna be in the same place, same level of uncertainty that we have now?

Chair Gibson, I think with all of our federal projects, there's always uncertainty right now. That's the environment we're in.

Well, it the

There's nothing in the federal bill to fund the dam reconstruction, for example. It's still under study.

They and maybe for several years. The sometime before this comes well, before this comes up for real decisions next year, we should pull that item off the tickler file and actually have an agenda item to discuss

Mhmm.

In more depth Alvaro and what our options and possibilities might be there. The to to that is, I think, all the questions I have for now. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Robert. Other Clay, is your hand up? Yeah. Thank

you, chair Hevner and member Gibson. Those are some good questions. I think James Martinez covered most of everything I I was gonna say about the Sycamore site. It's a really tight space and it backs right up, you know, it's on that little north tribute territory to to Pueblo Canyon there. And people in in the Esperanza area of Quemazon, they get all of the flashing lights and noise every time we have a waterline break in the middle of the night.

And so we do get those complaints. They're pretty understanding mostly, but they're you know, they've been asking for years, is there a better place? And then we have had some issues with, you know, a lot of the we don't dump raw sewage there or anything, but we have wet soil that comes from the waterline breaks. So they're with the Vactor, they're pulling out wet soil. And people see that water running off into the north tributary to Pueblo Canyon there.

And so they, you know, think we're putting in raw sewage to the to the waterway. And so we've been reported to the NME d over that. We've had to had you know, had to bring people from NME d out to see to see it and everything after reports like that. So those are the issues we've had with that particular site. So that's all I had to say about it. But good job to James Hortinas. Thank you, explaining the situation.

Great. Thanks, Clay. Other questions from the board? Yeah, Jen.

Well, just a quick follow-up to chair Gibson's inquiries regarding Elvato. I mean, should we say that as long as it remains under study in federal level and there's no plans in place that we shouldn't proceed with these repairs and upgrades and so forth. I'm a little, you know, I mean, that's a degree of uncertainty that's somewhat under our control, right? We need to see what I mean, unless we think that if we do these repairs and upgrades that that somehow will prompt response at the federal level, which I doubt. But so anyway, I just, you know, was putting the cart before the horse if things were just sort of stymied at the federal level.

Right? So why spend a million dollars if, yeah.

Thanks, Jen. Other questions? Maybe I'll just pile on, but maybe add a little bit more to Robert and Jen's comments about the hydro. I think we do need a deeper dive. And I guess I tried to look through FY '27, the hydraulic replacement. Sounds critical to me. Like, I think that that that we need to do. But then looking out in '28, some of the cost, the controls upgrade I tried to read through it. Looks like they're at end of life. But if we put that off for five years, could could we put that off for five years?

And so I think digging in, it looks like all of the CIPs in electric distribution are to hydro. And so I I don't know if that's I think it's piling on with Robert and Jen. We need to dig into that and think about that a little bit. So I think that's a discussion we'll have to pick up on. Yeah, I think those were my only comments.

Oh, I will. Yep.

Yes. The only thing I wanted to add is it is on our tickler to to review the hydro plants. And so we will explain a little bit more in detail, what we anticipate getting for electric production. Keep in mind, we need an ECA in place because that's a cost share

project

when we do these projects, especially the maintenance items, you know, when you get some maintenance needs, it's split based on power that's, you know, done from each plant and proportionally. However, if we're not generating a lot of power, there's the cost of power goes up substantially at those facilities. So so we'll try to do some projections, but I think we won't really have a good idea until, you know, roughly April is when the bureau gives us estimates of of the anticipated runoff. It it's gonna be dismal this year so far. So I don't know. Can't sugarcoat that.

Yep. Yeah. Thanks, Milo. Let me open it up. And I don't see any public comment in the room. Any online, Kathy? Nope. Okay. Final questions from the board? Thanks so much, James. Thank you. Let me just get a sense of the board. Everybody good? We're two hours in? Power through? Okay. We'll keep going. Item four. D, semiannual update on the transactional survey reports for July through December 2025 from Kathy.

Thank you. Give me just one second to switch the view. Okay. This is the report for the second half of calendar year 2025. Great Blue Research does our transactional survey year round.

It goes out I think it's it's gonna be going out for up to seven years under this contract. And this is our this is the completion of our third year, I believe. We used to do it quarterly. Now we do it, in halves because it doesn't change super rapidly. So, this report summarizes the half, but I have some a little bit of extra information for the calendar year because sometimes that a longer period might be more meaningful.

So we had a 136 completes, and our margin of error is 8.37%. So keep that in mind as we go through it. Not a lot of changes on the demographics. Not a lot of changes right here. I should remind you that we send this survey out by text to everybody that calls into the customer care center unless they're on the do not call me list or do not text me list.

I'm sorry. That's different. So we send it out, and we are now doing that every two months so to not, be overbearing with our survey because we have a lot of frequent customers, which is great. And almost always, you can see that they are that the response is it's it's people that called in over the phone. Part of that is that we get a lot of phone calls, and part of that is the way we distribute the survey.

We have our field crew crews give out cards if they remember, if they're visiting a customer's home, or they see them out in the field. And we also have a number of people that keep the link in their in their email signature. And we have signs at customer care. I will let you know that this week, we added some tap pads to customer care. So when somebody's sitting there transacting business, they can tap their phone or scan a QR code, kind of like when you pay at a restaurant or where you can just anywhere, an airport where you can tap your phone.

There are those kind of pads, and it takes you exactly straight to the survey. So we're hoping we can get some more in person responses that way. We'll see. The most recent the reason for the most recent contact for DPU doesn't look like it's changed that much, but I will tell you that over the course of a year when I compare all the past I guess this was actually the fourth year. When I compare '22, '23, '24, and '25, this is the first year that payments and pay arrangements have moved up above billing questions.

And to me, that says either our billing is so straightforward, people don't have questions anymore, but maybe also that it's getting harder for people to pay. So it's just a a little something to think about. This contact resolution, as you may might recall from the first half of the year, it was starting to look a little less promising than it had in the past, that people were having to call more times than they used to. And we had a very thin staff at that point, and we still have a thin staff. Honestly, Joanne, yes.

But they're doing so well. So I just feel like let's give them a little kudos there for that huge improvement over, the six month period. For the one year period, it was 68%. So still higher. Oh, wait. No. No. No. I'm sorry. I lied. 73% was the the one year average on that. So up to that top blue line from 2024, if if that makes a difference to anyone. And the last thing I'm gonna talk about is the positive ratings of our representative characteristics. We are very used to scoring high on this. And and the first half of the year shook us a little, but like I said, they're rock stars right now.

And look at these great scores all the way down this column. So that's it. That's all I have for you all. I can make it longer if you want me to.

No. Thank you, Kathy. And kudos to the staff. Questions from the board? No, I don't see any. I guess I'll check. Oh, yeah, Jen. Sorry. Sorry.

Great. Just a quick one. I think you mentioned the TAP approach to okay, as a potential way to increase the number of respond. But what about changing the demographics? Because we look at the demographics and over 50% are age 65 or older. Did I miss something there?

Yeah. Remember Hollingsworth? I get where you're coming from because I look at that every time and I'm like, jeez. I think part of that is probably an awful lot of the people that do call in are in that demographic, the older demographic. And those are the people that we're reaching out to. But we're seeing that in our other surveys as well. We're seeing some pretty heavy senior population responses. So I'm not actually sure what the true demographics of Los Alamos are, but it might be worth looking into. And I don't know if you have ideas on how to reach those younger people because they are the ones you expect to like look at their phone and go, oh yeah, me, and do the survey, but they're not the ones that are taking it.

Alright.

So It's a tough one. If you

have any ideas, please let me know.

Sounds good.

Thanks. Any other? I'll try to follow protocol and just check there's no public comment in chambers. None online. None online. All right. Thanks so much, Kathy. On to business. And we did suspend procedural rules, we can make a motion if necessary. We're on to discussion and possible approval of BPU member travel to the ECA Forum Filo.

Sorry. I got it on mute. So within the packet, ECA standing for Energy Community Alliance, they hold a conference annually. And I think, well, member Heavener, you you attended one of the sessions. So I just wanted to see if any board members was interested in attending this year's form. And it's definitely educational and brings you up to speed on the state of the industry for new nuclear developments. So so that's all I'd have to say.

Great, Philo. I'd just add to it, it was very valuable and worth my time. Learned a lot. There's advanced reactor companies there. So I don't know if you didn't have a chance to check out the agenda. Thought I'd add a little bit of flavor to that. Is anybody interested or able to attend the ECA forum? Robert, I can't see your face, but I assume you'll raise your hand.

Yeah. I'm I'm gonna pass again. Sorry.

Okay. Thanks. Rin, did you you have your hand up?

I will be there.

Oh, great. Yeah. There's a bonus. You get to hang out with a counselor. Alright. No taking.

Like to, but I'm coming back from Australia on the eighteenth for a work trip. Don't think I'll be mentally oh, yeah. Well, to do that. Sorry. I do apologize.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it, but I'll put it on the calendar and see if I can figure out how to do this.

Okay. With that interest, what's the timing on the do we need to approve the travel tonight, Filo, or do we have to still have time at the next meeting?

You could do the approval tonight or go to the regular meeting in two weeks. We could put it back on the agenda. But it, you know, that it doesn't mean we have to book the travel. If there's interest, with member Stromberg attending, you could just say, you know, approve, one board member to attend. And and if he can't attend, well, it just won't happen.

Okay. Well, it's up to board members. But with some interest, is there a motion? I mean, do you wanna or we have time for next session? Go ahead

and do

it now. Sounds good.

So I move that the Board of Public Utilities approve travel expenses for Member Stromberg to attend the twenty twenty six ECA Forum in Augusta, Georgia in April 2026.

I'll second.

Great. We have a motion and a second, and this is a roll call. Hands is good. Okay. All in favor. And I see Robert's thumb. Great. Thank you, everyone. Alright. With that, we're on to five b, which is schedule a selection of members to attend board board and commission luncheons for the 2026 calendar year. So if you haven't already looked at your calendar, please do so now. And I think I did see, Jen, you were interested in the November 12. Okay. And I didn't have data from anybody else ahead of time. I did get Robert's availability.

What Looks like I could do May 14

at

the moment. So Okay. Is there one that works or doesn't work for you, Eric? Let me look. Think you just got March

or September. March March 5. Is that the date?

It is.

Yeah. And I did note that got moved. It was originally scheduled for the fourteenth,

and now it's the fifth. I can do that.

Okay. Great. So we have the September 1. And Robert, I think you said you were available for that one?

Well, I was I was looking at March 5 being the most most promising. September, I'm less sure about.

Okay.

I can put it down tentatively, and we'll see.

Let's do that. Alright. Did you catch that, Kathy, or someone in charge here? Mhmm. We've got

Yeah.

Eric for March 5, Charlie for May 14, Robert for September 10, and Jen for November 12. Great. Thanks, everyone. See if we can do just as well for the farmers market, which is our next item, five c. And let's see, Jen, I think you said you got the information back May 21. Thanks. So we've got September, July sorry, June, July, September, and October.

Let's see. July.

And that's, like what time of the day is that? 10AM to noon ish. Nine nine Nine to eleven. Okay. Go and put me down for the July 23 if

I Okay. I'm good.

Nobody else is jumping at it. I'll volunteer for June.

June? Okay. Great. And both of the other ones work for me, Eric. I don't know if you have constraints for September. First. June's got that. So it's September 24 or October 22.

I would have to do October. Let me see. Let me look at that. October 22?

Yes.

Yeah. We can do that.

Okay. Great. Eric for October, and I'll take the September one. So we've got Jen for May, Robert for June, Charlie for July, me for September, and Eric for October. Thanks, everyone. One last shot at public comment. I don't see anybody in the room. Nobody online. Thank you, everyone, for helping me have a smooth meeting. Thanks for your time tonight, and we are adjourned.