Transportation Board - workshop

Good evening, everyone. It's not April fools, even though it's April 1 here at the BPU. So I'll call this April 1 meeting to order. And the first item on the agenda is to open the room up for public comment. I don't see any here in chambers. Is there any online, Richard?

If there's anyone online that would like to give public comment, please use the raise hand function at this time. No one online, chair, and no one in chambers.

Okay. Great. Do we have chair Gibson online at least? I haven't checked checked the role. Okay. Great. Welcome tonight, Robert. The next item is approval of the agenda. And I'll just note that we do have some actions to vote on. So after approval of the agenda, we'll have an action to suspend as well. Can I entertain a motion to approve the agenda?

I move that we approve the agenda as presented.

I'll second.

Thanks. And show of hands, right? Great, thanks. Show of hands here. I don't see Robert online. Can we see a thumbs up or hear a yes from Robert?

Yeah. Can we We should test his Good idea. Steve here. Can we do

a mic check with you, Robert?

Test one, two, three, four.

Excellent. We hear you now.

Okay. And I do vote to approve the agenda.

Great. Thank you.

I've been hearing you, but for like I said, I've been having technical difficulties.

Okay. Great. Well, we'll we'll check-in with you every now and then if you go silent for too long.

Okay. Thanks.

Thank you. And then I'd entertain a motion or on the action to suspend procedural work rules for the work session.

I move that the Board of Public Utilities suspend their procedural rules for the 04/01/2026 work session so that formal action may be taken.

Second? Great.

Thank you.

Does that one need a roll call? Yeah. Okay. We'll do a roll call for that one. Member Gibson?

Yes.

Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Nachele? Yes. And member Hefner?

Yes. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Alright. Up next is the consent agenda. Nobody pulled it when we approved the agenda, but last chance, if anybody wanted to discuss anything on the consent agenda. All right, entertain a motion.

Okay. Do we need another motion, or is it over

To approve the consent agenda items. Yeah. Okay. I think. Alright. Well, thanks for checking. Yes.

I move that the board of public utilities approve the items on the consent agenda as presented and that the motions in the staff reports be included in the minutes for the record.

I'll second that. Thanks.

And help me again, Thomas. That's a roll call vote as well, or

Let's do

roll call. Perfect.

Member Gibson?

Yes.

Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Knockley? Yes. And member Hefner?

Yes. Thank you.

And we are on to item number five, the presentations. And, we're gonna introduce Yes.

Chair, Kathy had to leave for family reasons. So what I would like to do is introduce Kathy Catherine Volmer. And I wanna see if she's online and the microphone's working before we turn the turn over the presentation.

Yeah. Hi. I'm here. I'm actually my colleague, Sofia, who's who's online as well, is gonna be running our presentation this time around, but I am here as well.

Okay. Great. Thank you. So, Sofia, we're gonna pull up your presentation, or are you sharing it online?

I have it pulled up. I can share it, whichever works best for you guys.

Hang on one second. I'm looking at Richard and Kathy Casado's on desktop. Okay. We're gonna run it, and then you can tell us to advance the page.

Awesome. Sounds good with me.

So we can't see you concurrently with the presentation, just so you know.

So Okay. Sounds good. As long as you can hear me, that's all good.

Yeah. The other one wasn't working. Okay.

Here we go. Alright. We're ready on the first slide now.

Oh. Great. Okay.

Sharing screen. Okay. Good. Thank you.

Okay. Now I can see it. Awesome. Perfect. Well, thank you guys so much for having us today. As you guys already stated, my name is Sofia Vujan. I'm with Great Blue Research. I'm joined by my colleague, Catherine Bulmer. It's like it disappeared. Okay.

Now I can see it. But, again, thank you guys for having us this evening. We're really excited to walk through the results of the 2026 voice of customer study. So, if you wanna go to the next slide, we can jump right into the project overview. So here, as if you guys are all familiar, we usually keep this pretty standard and go over some of the same, areas of investigation and research objectives year over year, for some really great benchmarking.

But if you're not familiar with the study, the purpose of the study is to understand the DPU's residential and commercial customers' perceptions of the utility and the services, that you guys provide. And then when looking at the areas of investigation, we usually go over the ratings of the DPs organizational characteristics as well as satisfaction with the quality and reliability of services received as well as some customer service and field service satisfaction ratings, as well as rates paid for the quality of service received. And then we also go over satisfaction and customer perceptions of the different communication methods, the quality of communication, and all that fun stuff. But the one thing that we did add this year included, the customer support opposition for some environmental sustainability initiatives. So we saved best for last with that one.

They'll be at the end of the presentation, but we're really excited to go over that as that was added to the survey this year. And we can go to the next slide whenever you're ready. Thank you. So here we get into, first off, we have the residential research methodology snapshot. So for the residential customers, we use a digital methodology, and then this led to a total number of 400 residential completes.

This was really great to see on our end as we almost doubled the number of completes this year compared to 274 total completes in 2025. So we're really excited to see more residential customers wanna participate this year and get their feedback. And then with those 400 customers that led to a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7%, which if you're not familiar, that basically means if we were to conduct this survey a 100 more times at that 95% confidence level, then, 95 out of a 100 times, the percentage points that you'll see throughout the presentation will fall between plus or minus 4.7 percentage points. And with this, we usually like to aim for under 5% to really have confidence in the integrity of the data as well as just those overall themes that we see, no matter how many times you do the survey or who takes it. So really great to see this year, with that number of completes that we got.

And then when looking at the research dates, we fielded this from January 13 to February 24, giving, those customers just over a month to have opportunity to take the survey. And next slide. Now looking at commercial, very similar story here. Although we did use a digital and telephone methodology for the commercial customers just to give them plenty of opportunity to take the survey through different methods. And then this led to a total number of 40 commercial completes in 2026, which, again, was doubled compared to last year where we only got 21 commercial completes.

So, similar to residential, it's really great to see the feedback from the commercial customers as well. And then when looking at that margin of error, we saw the commercial margin of error come out to plus or minus 13.8 percentage points, which is really great to see on the commercial side. We usually see that a little bit higher just because it's such a small sample of commercial customers that we're trying to reach out to. But this is right in line with what we like to see with commercial customers. Next slide, please.

Thank you. And now looking at the residential demographics. So this was right in line with what we usually see when it comes to the, DPU's residential customer and their, demographics. So we saw it lean a little bit more towards 65 to 74 with, nearly a quarter indicate themselves as age 65 to 74. And then when looking at household size, we saw mostly two person household, with nearly half indicating that's their household size.

And then when looking at income, we saw, more lean towards that higher income bracket with a third indicate that they, take home 150,000 or more, and then a similar percentage indicate that they would prefer not to say, which usually to us just means that they're also in that higher income bracket as well. When it came to rent versus own, we saw, a pretty big lean towards homeowners with nearly nine out of 10 indicating, that they own their home. And then when looking at education, we saw, nearly half indicate that they have a postgraduate professional degree. And then length of time as customer, we saw over half indicate that they were 20 or more, a more tenured customer. So this was what we saw in 2025 as well.

So this wasn't a big surprise, but kind of right in line with what we usually see. Next slide, please. And now we just, I'll touch on this briefly, but this is just the guide to the footnotes. We really like to include this just in case anybody, you know, isn't having this presented to them and they're just kind of flipping through and have any questions about, those footnotes that we include on the slides. So this is a great reference point if you are just kind of flipping through the report and have any questions.

And now getting into the actual key study findings. So here we have the full key study findings, which again, I won't touch too much on. This is really just if somebody needs a really quick overview of the key findings of the report. I'll go through these in more depth throughout the presentation. But here we go over, the customer satisfaction ratings, as well as those, communication methods and their satisfaction with the frequency of communication and different methods that the DPU provides.

And then we also touch on that environmental sustainability section that we added in this year. And now getting into the body of the report, starting out with the satisfaction with services. So here we have the organizational characteristics. And we saw that in 2026 when rating the DPU on a series of organizational characteristics. We saw that residential customers did provide decreased average positive ratings compared to 2025, although that was a slight decrease of only 2.5 percentage points.

We did see that this was driven mostly by residential customers reporting lower ratings for the DPU responding promptly to customer questions and complaints. Although we did see that residential customers gave higher ratings for the DPU when it came to helping customers conserve electricity, gas, and water this year. So there's definitely some areas to keep an eye on, but there weren't any significant decreases that really raised any red flags for us on this side. And then when looking at the commercial customers, we saw that commercial customers actually provided an increased average positive rating in comparison to those residential customers. And then when looking at the organizational characteristics that really drove that, we saw that commercial customers provided higher ratings for the DPU being transparent about company operations and policies, as well as the DPU helping customers conserve electricity, gas, and water, and their overall community outreach.

Next slide, please. Thank you. And now looking at some of the reasons for dissatisfaction. So on this slide, I'll just touch on residential because as you can see, there are only three total commercial customers that, were dissatisfied or reported any poor ratings. But on that residential side, we did see one of the top reasons for poor ratings were, just due to general cost or their rates being too expensive.

And then that was followed by a smaller percentage of residential customers who just cited poor customer service and or billing issues that they were having. Next slide, please. And now getting into the customer satisfaction with the quality of services that they receive. So as you can see, we did see, really high ratings across the board here. We saw that more than 85% of surveyed residential and commercial customers were satisfied with the quality of all services that they received from the DPU.

However, we did see that residential customers reported lower satisfaction ratings for the quality of electric and water services compared to 2025. However, that is still over 80% that were satisfied with those services. So, not a big red flag, but, just something to note this year. And then when looking at the commercial customers, we saw that, you know, all commercial customers reported being satisfied with the quality of natural gas services that they received. And we also saw an increased frequency of commercial customers being satisfied with the quality of water service that they received.

Next slide, please. And now looking at the price paid for the quality that they receive. Among those residential customers, we saw satisfaction with the price paid for the quality received, specifically for the DPU's wastewater, natural gas, and water services did remain consistent, with 2025 ratings, while satisfaction with the price paid for electric service quality received slightly lower ratings compared to 2025. And then when looking at commercial customers, we did see a slightly higher percentage of commercial customers reported, being satisfied with the price paid for the water services that they received, with just about four percentage points indicating satisfaction with that in comparison to 2025. Next slide.

And similar to the, quality of services, we saw really strong ratings when it came to the reliability of service that the customer receives. Here, we saw approximately nine out of 10 or more residential customers reported satisfaction with the reliability of all services that they received in 2026, with nearly all reporting satisfaction with the reliability of the DPU's natural gas and waste water service. However, we did see slightly or we did see significantly fewer residential customers were satisfied with the reliability of the water service that they received in 2025. However, that was still over nine out of 10 customers indicating satisfaction with the water. So I think, the bar was pretty high in 2025 with 96.6% indicating satisfaction, although that was a significant decrease when it came to the 92.4% in 2025.

And then when looking at those commercial customers, we saw very similar there. Just, mostly all of the commercial customers being satisfied with the reliability of all services that they received, especially when it came to reliability with the water service. Next slide. Thank you. And now looking at the n p plus s score or otherwise the customer's relationship with the DPU.

In 2026, we did see that the DPU scored a lower net positive score, which is just the combination of customers reporting themselves as either a satisfied customer or an advocate of the DPU. Among residential customers, we saw that this decreased to 70.8% from 79.9% in 2025. And we saw that this was largely due to a significant increase in residential customers self reporting themselves as a less than satisfied customer compared to 2025. But we also did see a slight increase in those indicating themselves as an advocate of the DPU as well. So we did see some customers kind of funneling out of that satisfied customer, more so on the less satisfied side, but we also did see it on the advocate side as well.

And then when looking at the commercial customers, we did see that they also scored a slightly lower net positive rating score, with fewer commercial customers self reporting as a satisfied customer. But on that side, we also saw, a little bit of an increase in advocates as well this year. And lastly, for the satisfaction section, we get into the, customer satisfaction with the DPU's organizational citizenship. So here we saw about three fifths of residential customers and over eight out of 10 commercial customers reported being satisfied overall with the DPU's organizational citizenship or otherwise the DPU being environmentally, socially, and financially responsible. This did mark a decrease in satisfaction among residential customers.

However, we really attributed that to the fifth residential customers who reported just being unsure of their satisfaction with the DPU's organizational citizenship, which was similar to 2025. We just attribute this more to an awareness gap versus customers actually being dissatisfied with the DP's organizational citizenship. And as you can see on the commercial side, we see a lot less in that don't know, unsure category, and that's where we actually see the increase in satisfaction. So when it comes to those commercial customers that are a bit more attuned to what the DPU is doing on that environmental, social, and financial side compared to the residential their average residential customer who probably isn't in tune with that information. So it's it's less about them being dissatisfied, just more about kind of getting that awareness out to the residential customer.

Next slide, please. And now getting into the customer satisfaction, the customer service satisfaction section. So here we start out with the, customer service department, and we look at the residential and commercial customers who have had a contact with the DPU in the last twelve months. When looking at the actual purpose of contact, we saw that the primary reason for contact was water service, a water service problem followed by a billing question and or a trash or recycling concern, while a half of commercial customers reported contacting the the DPU for a billing question. When looking at the residential customer satisfaction with the customer service department that they interacted with, we did see that ratings declined slightly in 2026.

Although eight out of 10 surveyed residential customers reported being satisfied with the service provided. So still pretty strong satisfaction ratings, but a slight decline when you compare it to 2025. But as you can see, when you look at the national average at 80.4%, the GPU is still outperforming that. So we can just attribute that to possibly the uptick in those water service problems or trash or recycling concerns that were cited in this iteration of the survey. And then on the commercial side, we also saw a decrease in customer service satisfaction on that side as well.

But, again, we did see more billing questions this year as well as more commercial customers in that water service problem category. Next slide, please. And then when looking at contact resolution, we saw that nearly two thirds of residential customers and nearly three fifths of commercial customers indicated that their questions or issues were taken care of the first time when they contacted the DPU. And then on the commercial side, we did see that this was a decrease when it came to their contact being taken care of the first time. However, we also saw a decrease when it came to those commercial customers having repeated contact.

So we really attributed that to having that uptick in commercial customers indicating that their issue resolution varied upon contacting the DPU. But on that residential side, we did see a slight increase when it came to contact resolution. And when looking at the national average of 60.3%, the DPU is outperforming that as well. Next slide, please. And now getting into the field service and the customer satisfaction with the field service representative that visited their home or business in the last twelve months.

We did see that satisfaction with the DPUs field representatives increased among commercial customers with over nine out of 10 commercial customers reporting satisfaction in 2026. However, when it came to the residential customers, we did see that they reported decreased satisfaction with the DPU's field service representatives, with just over three quarters of customers being satisfied with that interaction. However, when looking at the actual purpose of the visit of the field service representative, we did see that over two fifths indicated that the field service representative visited for some other miscellaneous reason that wasn't listed in the survey compared to just over a third who had a visit due to a meter reading or a service problem or repair. So because of that satisfaction decrease, we really, wanted to look a little bit closer at that, miscellaneous reason. We wanted to at least have a little bit of a note that this could be due to a field representative visiting a home due to a reason that they might not be familiar with compared to those more routine visits, such as a meter reading or an outage restoration.

So, again, it's not a significant difference, but just something to keep an eye on in the future. And now getting into communication and awareness. So here we look at the customer's awareness of the DPU's community ownership status. We saw that three quarters of residential customers and four fifths of commercial customers correctly identify the DPU as a community owned municipal utility. And then we did see that awareness that the DPU is a community owned utility did decline among both residential and commercial customers.

However, still over three quarters indicating awareness of that, especially when looking at the national average, which is 43.3 percent. Still really strong ratings, but a slight decline when it came to comparison 2025. And then when looking at the actual importance of community ownership, we saw that over eight out of 10 residential customers and commercial customers indicated that it is important to them overall, that the DPU does maintain all control of their municipal utility, although Pursuit's importance also decreased slightly among both of those customer audiences. Next slide, please. And now getting into satisfaction with the frequency and quality of communication that they receive from the DPU, We did see that four fifths of both residential and commercial customers indicated that the frequency at which they receive information from the DPU is just about right.

And then similarly, saw a majority of residential and commercial customers report that the they are satisfied with the quality of communication that they receive from the DPU, with more residential customers actually being very satisfied with that communication that they receive compared to 2025. Next slide, please. And then when looking at the customer's current versus preferred methods of communication, as you see here, we have comparison to 2025 for the current method, but we just have 2026 when it came to the preferred method of communication. And this was mostly due to the question format changing in 2026. So, in 2025, this was a multi select question.

So customers were able to select, multiple different preferred methods of communication. But this time around, we switched it to a single select just so we can really hone in on that number one preferred method of communication. That's why you won't see the comparison to 2025 in that chart specifically. But when it came to the most common methods of receiving information among those residential customers, By a significant margin, we saw that bill inserts were the most common method, and that was followed by email. And then, which was great to see on our end, those were also the top two preferred methods of communication among residential customers.

So that's right in line with what residential customers are receiving and what they prefer to receive. And then when looking at the commercial customers, we saw that the most common method of receiving information was through the mail, which was followed by email and then bill inserts. Although one half of commercial customers did report a preference for email communications in the future. Next slide, please. And now getting into some of the, DPU self-service tools and the customer's utilization and satisfaction.

We start out with the Los Alamos Now app. So here we saw that over two bits of both residential and commercial customers were aware of the Los Alamos Now app, which was an increase for residential customers, but a decrease among commercial customers. And then among those customers that have used the app, we saw that over seven out of 10 residential and all commercial customers reported being either very or somewhat satisfied with it. Next slide, please. And looking at the bill and payment portal, we saw that nearly three fifths of residential and one half of commercial customers reported using the bill payment portal.

This was a slight increase for residential customers, but we also saw a decrease for commercial customers utilizing the self-service option as well. And then among those customers, that have used the bill and payment portal, we saw that over four fifths of both customer bases reported being satisfied with their experience using the portal, while satisfaction decreased slightly, among residential customers. But still really strong, nearly nine out of 10 were satisfied with the portal. And lastly, we get into satisfaction with the automated metering portal. Here, saw that over a quarter of residential and nearly a fifth of commercial customers reported using the automated metering portal, which was an increase for both residential and commercial customers compared to 2025.

And then of those customers who have utilized the portal, we saw a nearly nine out of 10 residential, and all commercial customers, reported being satisfied with their experience using it. And lastly, we get into the environmental sustainability questions that we added this year. So here we have, support for a few different, the DPUs initiatives in environmental sustainability. And we saw that over two thirds of residential and three quarters of commercial customers would either strongly support or somewhat support the DPU taking on the objective to reduce portable water use by 12% from 143 gallons per capita per day to a 126 gallons per capita per day by 2030. And then on the other end of things, we saw that over one half of residential customers would either strongly oppose or somewhat oppose the DPU, supporting phase out of natural gas service by 2070 with at least a 10% reduction in usage by 2030.

Although we did see that over two thirds of commercial customers would support this initiative, this was definitely, for the residential customers, more of less popular initiative for the residential customers. And then when it came to the, net carbon neutral electric provider by 2040, we did see that, just over three fifths of residential customers would support this, but this was actually the most popular among commercial customers with over eight out of 10 commercial customers supporting this initiative for the future. And now getting into the considerations. So here, just based on everything that we went over in the presentation today, we wanted to touch on a few, actionable insights that we thought would be helpful, just based on some of the ratings that we saw this year. So first, we started out with just strengthening perceived value to improve that customer sentiment that we saw, declined a little bit in 2026.

Specifically, with that slight decline in the 2026 NP plus S score, we wanted to suggest an opportunity just to strengthen customers' overall perception of value, particularly among residential customers. When we look at those lower ratings for responsiveness to questions and complaints as long along with, cost and billing concerns among dissatisfied customers. Those both indicate, service experience and cost perceptions could be slightly influencing that sentiment, especially when it came to the relationship that the customer had with the DPU. But we did see satisfaction increase when it came to the DPU's efforts to help customers conserve, electricity, gas, and water among both residential and customer and commercial customers, as well as strong support for water conservation initiatives. So for this, we wanted to we wanted to recommend that, improving responsiveness to customer questions and complaints by just reevaluating that response time standard with the customer service department, as well as training customer service employees to be better equipped to resolve issues on first contact if not already doing so.

So this again, you know, those customer service ratings weren't super big red flags, you you know, just making sure that those customer service representatives are equipped to handle any, you know, water quality issues or some of those more, popular points of contact this year, just could help, in resolving, those issues on the first contact, especially for commercial customers who indicated that it varied a little bit more in 2026. And then we also want to recommend, you know, strengthening, messaging that connects conservation efforts to direct customer benefits, such as cost savings and long term rate stability, and just things of that sort. And then just tying this out, we also want to recommend just aligning environmental initiatives with customer priorities. So, you know, as we saw customer feedback on environmental initiatives revealed a pretty clear divergence in support, particularly between those residential and commercial customers. While there was more broad support for water conservation goals, there was a little bit more opposition when it came to natural gas phase out efforts among residential customers, although commercial customers did show stronger alignment when it came to those long term sustainability goals.

So for this, we would just wanted to recommend doing some, you know, targeted education campaigns that would clearly explain the timeline and customer impact, of these environmental sustainability initiatives if the DPU were to move forward with them in the future. And then that is the last slide. And then, just towards the end of the presentation, we have, our contact information. So we have, my name and Catherine's as well and just everybody who worked on the study this year, as well as our emails. I can open the floor to questions or feedback now, but if you all have anything that comes up after the fact as you're, you know, reviewing the report after today, please feel free to send us any questions as well over email.

Great. Well, thank you very much for the presentation, Sofia and Catherine. We'll open it up for any questions from the board, maybe starting online. Robert, do you have any questions?

A couple maybe. The the customer service ratings were generally a little lower than they have been, but I was wondering what exactly was the time frame when we were either short staffed in the customer service area or had brand new people in those positions such that they may not have been able to address the issues as quickly as more experienced folks have in the past. Does that is that a possible explanation for the lower customer service ratings or not?

I would say if it did line up with that time frame, that that could definitely be a really great explanation for that, especially when it came to the the actual reasons that customers were reaching out were more when it came to issues, you know, as we saw with the water quality or, you know, billing issues that they had, you know, sometimes newer customer service representatives or having a lack of customer service representatives when customers are calling in with those issues, it can definitely create some frustration and then, you know, a slight decline when it came to satisfaction. But if that was the case, I would definitely say it didn't have too drastic of an effect because we didn't see that, you know, over eight out of 10 were so satisfied. So, you know, it wasn't a a really big difference, but I would definitely say if if that lined up, it it would explain a lot more when it came to the slight decline.

Well, we wanna catch things while they're small Yeah. And not let them grow large. Should see a couple of their comments to the department more than to Sofia directly since you can't do a whole lot about them. But one is I think we need to try to figure out how we might diversify the demographics of our responses. We seem to get the same distribution, mostly higher income, mostly older folks, mostly higher incomes, mostly long term customers year after year, and that doesn't tell us what other folks who are not represented by that or at least as well represented by that demographic profile might be thinking.

So I would just pose the question, how we might how might we diversify and get a broader base of of responses? Not not necessarily looking for an answer right now, just looking for or just putting it out as a comment. Of course, every nobody likes higher costs of anything, but it does dissatisfaction with our costs give although they're generally in line with or even in some cases lower than the folks with whom we compare, we may need to do some more, as you point out, more education there to help people understand it. People aren't going like it, but hopefully they can understand it better. And that's all I have for comments right now.

Great. Thank you, Robert. Questions?

Yeah, Jen. So I have three quick questions related to one of Robert's comments. So how well do the demographics of the respondents match to the demographics of the community? I forget if we've ever tried to map that one to one. And then in the questions that pertain to sort of how well educated our customers are or the respondents are, you know, like organizational citizenship, community ownership, and the Now app knowledge, do you know who answered those questions a certain way?

Like, could you tell us, you know, it's only this bit of the demographics that didn't know the answers to those questions? And then we would know that what communitypart of the community we need to target with respect to increasing knowledge in those areas, for example. And then, last, so I assume you don't educate with the survey, right? So there's no when you ask the question about satisfaction and costs come up, you're not telling them, Oh, by the way, our costs are actually quite comparable to the rest of the, you know, New Mexico or anything like that, right? That kind of education is not part of the survey, correct? So and sorry. Three three questions. Sorry.

Mhmm. On that last one, no. It was not included to have education, but that's something we have done in the past for other utilities that have wanted to tie in that education component more into the survey. So that's definitely something we can add in.

It could be a a curious experiment to send half with the knowledge and half without and see if you get a higher positive rating when you educate but Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. No. Definitely. We're we're really data curious people, so that would that would definitely be something we'd be interested in. But, yeah, we could definitely look into adding that in in the next iteration of the survey because, like I said, we've we've done that before with other utilities, and and they've really liked the fact that, you know, not only were they able to get this pulse check with the customers of, you know, how much awareness they had, but they were also able to educate customers and kinda kill two birds with the same stone.

Alright.

And just on your second question when it came to running those specific, I think you indicated, you know, the organizational citizenship, Los Alamos Now app, and one other that I can't recall. But we can definitely run those by different demographics and see if there were any specific demographic groups that had more of a, you know, lack of knowledge than others.

Okay. Great. And then have we mapped directly the demographics of the respondents to the demographics of the town? I mean, how far off are we? I mean, it's pretty far. But

I don't believe we we have in the past. Yeah. And we didn't this year. But that's definitely something we could take a look at just based on census data Yeah. And see how that mapped out when it came to the demographics of this survey, but, that's definitely something I I would need to follow-up on. Just kidding. I don't have that top of my knowledge. No worries.

Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. We we can absolutely do that. And the one thing that we just just say with any census data comparison, especially when you're looking at age, is that with, you know, our surveys, we're obviously only surveying people who are 18 or older, and the census data is all based on, you know, all age groups. So some of the comparisons are going to be a little bit off because, obviously, we're just not including those, you know, those 18 in our survey. So Sure.

But we can make some rough comparisons and just see, like, okay, roughly how close are we to hitting these numbers and how far off might we be. And, and I was gonna mention too, I know we were talking before about, you know, how we reach some of these other, you know, maybe more underrepresented parts of the survey. And we're, you know, actively looking at different ways to reach, you know, namely younger customers, renters, you know, newer customers versus longer tenured customers in a lot of our surveys because we do see the same pattern pop up, pretty much across the board. And so a couple of things we're looking at are, you know, how do we maybe leverage text messages to try to reach younger customers? Because we know that they tend to be a little bit more receptive, to text versus email communication.

How do we potentially introduce some kind of an incentive for taking the survey, which would not only encourage greater participation overall, but probably get more of those younger customers to take the survey as well. And and we've played around with using, raffles in a lot of different surveys where, you know, hey. Take the survey for a chance to win one of five Amazon gift cards for $20 or something like that. So you're not spending a fortune on it, but, it gives folks a little bit more incentive to take us take the survey because one thing we've noticed is that your your younger customers and and really speaking to, you know, anyone who's, you know, kind of going to work every day and doesn't necessarily have time to take our survey, you have to give them a little bit more of an incentive to, you know, spend that time filling out the survey versus some other folks who are just, you know, just have more time to take the survey, and they don't need that incentive. So those are a couple of things that we're kind of toying around with with some other surveys, but both of which are things we can definitely consider for next year survey as well.

Great. Sounds good.

Any other questions?

I just wanted to add, we did extend the survey deadline by a week because Los Alamos Daily Post did an article about the survey and tried to prompt our citizens overall, you know, to participate in the survey. And we did see an increase this year over last, so there was some improvement there. But, you know, the I'm curious about demographics too because we always challenged him to reach different age groups, especially the renters. Pretty much detached from what they can do. You know? So, but yeah, thank you.

Great. Well, thank you again for the presentation.

I don't

see any other further questions. So we'll move on to the next presentation, which is the overview of County Council's 2026 strategic

Thank you.

County manager is going to help me out with this so that she knows which pieces are most applicable to the board.

Thank you. And then then councilor Herman will help me with questions.

Perfect. That sounds like a fair thing.

So we'll tag team it. Okay. Well, every year in the fall, council does an amazing thing, which is they get together for a day to day strategic planning, and not all communities are able to or even willing to do that kind of discussion. And so we do it as early as we can, usually in October, September time frame, to allow us to it influence budget guidance, which comes out in January and put to the budget together for, March publication and then our budget hearings in April. But when we have an election year and new councilors coming on, we delay those strategic planning to just after the election, and then we invite the new councilors to participate in that strategic planning once we know who's been elected for the new coming year.

But this year, or last 2025, we didn't have an election, so we held it back in October. And, the first thing they do is kind of review, the current plan and vote and sort of decide how they wanna spend their time for the day and and how they want where they want to focus on making updates or changes. And this year, they really didn't make any changes to their five goals, but they changed the name to priority areas because we didn't. I think the discussion was around we don't necessarily we have a lot of goals outside of these, but these are focus areas that we want to put a little extra emphasis and discussion on. So that's quality governance, operational excellence, economic vitality, quality of life, and environmental stewardship.

And then under each of those priority areas, we have 22 different objectives total, 22 total on spread amongst all of the focus areas. And so under quality governance, we've got communication engine and engagement, intergovernmental, tribal, and regional relations and partnerships, and fiscal stewardship. And under those, certainly things that are relevant to the board and and the Department of Public Utilities are things like you what you just did, which is engaging with your citizens and getting feedback, coordinating projects, or informing the public of projects that are upcoming. And then also under the intergovernmental, just our relationships with serving the the labs and and the DOE and other partnerships of those of those manner. And then the fiscal stewardship, again, what you all are doing, which is balancing costs with services trying to keep that all in a plan that's feasible that we can actually mark the progress and kind of have marching orders that don't happen overnight but helps us do long term planning from a fiscal perspective.

The second one's operational excellence. It's really effective, efficient, and reliable services. You you know, you all do that already with SADI and other things. You have ways of measuring how efficient our services are, but we also do things like coordinate the utility projects with our road projects and other types of things. And I think we do a really good job on that.

And then we've also been reinvesting the the revenue transfer back into with the infrastructure, which is the next item, which is infrastructure and asset management. It's also been a priority across the county to prioritize our capital plans and investments around the assets we currently have. We rather than adding new assets, particularly in our recreation and ball fields, we've been doing a lot of improvements. But and that also goes hand in hand with things like providing gray water infrastructure and other things that coordinate with the with the utilities department. And employee recruitment and retention, that's an ongoing effort.

We we see ebbs and flows in different areas, but I think in the engineering and, electrical and some of these, trades, we're still seeing challenges in recruiting in some of those areas. Under economic vitality, we have housing, local business, downtown revitalization, educational arts, cultural, and historical amenities, tourism and special events, and community broadband. And all of those are areas where when we do every couple years, we do our national community survey. These are the areas that usually come out the highest that the community wants to see the county improve on or do something more or different in. I would say that, you know, we are at actually, for our community broadband, we're gonna be we've already ordered, and we should be receiving shortly big shipments of fiber that are gonna be stored at our airport.

And that project is gonna be starting soon. So that's an incredible project for the community to take on and the county to take on that'll affect everybody. And I think it'll help with all of these other topics that we have under economic development. And, you know, some of the projects like a eight a, which was just approved by planning and zoning, which is, you know, 300 plus new housing units we coordinate, and these are, part of what you all see in your electrical and service and infrastructure plans of expanding the service to these new developments. Under quality of life, health, well-being, social services, inclusion, access, and belonging, mobility, open space, parks, recreation, public safety.

And that's where I you know, that we have some few arguments, both internally and with counsel about whether some of these things like open space and parks, don't they lead to tourism? Aren't they economic development? But we did have to but we did decide that they should be kept in a category and not split over multiple categories just for the purpose of tracking and reporting on them clearly about where that information is. And, we've made some great strides, in all of these areas. We are working to find a site for our social service hub, or act action center.

And we just heard a great presentation at council last night on the pilot project we did with Saturday service as well as, we recently heard a report from the inclusivity task force on making some recommendations for ongoing trainings, and, and we're also working, towards deadlines for things like our, website and other places to be ADA compliant, because there's a federal law we're gonna have to comply with. And then there's also we I just heard that our community services department, they're working on getting certified in being an autism, specialist in recreation and parks and so that they can, advertise that and take, outreach to that population to provide services, and, for that for those folks. And public safety is one, where we always score extremely high in our outreach just because, we're just very fortunate that our community is viewed by our residents as a very safe place to be. We have a lot of a lot to be thankful for. Our fire department that is sized to serve the national laboratory that we benefit from, and then also our our police department as well.

We're very focused on community policing, and support. And then the last one is environmental stewardship, natural resource protection, water conservation, climate action, resiliency, and waste management. And, of course, a lot of those, tie into a lot of the board of public utilities, goals around water conservation and clean energy. And we just feel like we're well coordinated in those areas, but we'll continue to be well coordinated in some of those initiatives. We don't try to duplicate the Board of Public Utilities' sort of goals and priorities and, metrics, but we we're trying to just dovetail in with those.

So that's really it in a nutshell. It's it's fairly similar to what they've been in the past. There weren't any significant changes, but, I think we have a lot to report on, and we've been making a lot of progress. And so that's really our focus right now is trying to get those metrics up on the dashboard and doing a better job of getting the progress we're making on these out. And I think that's it for now, but happy to answer any questions.

Great. Thank you. Go online first. Robert, do have any questions?

I do. A couple of them. First is on page one ten of our agenda doc. There's a item about core versus noncore activities and it wasn't clear to me where that dividing line was. It it seems like it starts with core and ends with non core, it isn't clear what's which is which. Can you can you tell me where the dividing line is or what you consider non core? What whichever way you wanna put it.

Thank you, chair Gibson. I think the the that was really capturing and summarizing the discussion that council had at their work session. And they talked, they had a discussion about core versus non core. They also had a discussion about what was in and out of direct control of the county, where we may be in an advocacy or an influence mode, but not in a we can just make it happen mode on some of these topics. And that's where we talked a little bit about things like where we have barriers to achieving some of these things, like maybe it's a state law or maybe it's a restriction on the funding we have available or things like that, that don't match up necessarily to where the community, would like to see us do something in these areas of focus.

So, it was really an exercise, and I think this was just a report out of the highlights of what, the different counselors they did a survey on I don't know what you call it on your phone when you sign up to yeah. You know what I'm talking about. And this just talks about how they came out of of those results. But I I think we do not have a definition of what's core or non core or essential and nonessential. And we debate this even with our emergency operations about who's not what positions are essential and nonessential.

And then we we always come back to, well, it depends on what the emergency is and what the emergency requires. So, for the most part, it is a lot of gray area on these. But the discussion what we're hoping to get to on our metrics is to be a little bit clear more clear about what the county's actions are in these areas and clarifying that so that, we find that there's a lot of maybe misinformation about what the county is in county's control. And it doesn't mean that we don't care. It doesn't mean we aren't trying to advocate or do something, but it may not be something that is only up to us. And we wanted to work that maybe into some of our metric discussions or descriptions.

Okay. Thank you. Second question on, the environmental stewardship priority area, page one sixteen, in particular under climate action and resiliency, it says implement the road map. And do I assume correctly that what is meant is by the road map is the climate action plan?

That is correct.

Okay. The statement there talks about achieving carbon neutral energy supply, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's a more general statement, a good deal more general than what was than what it replaced, which was pretty close to the board's more specific goals for carbon neutral energy supply and natural gas phase out. What was the reason behind making it more general? Was it yeah. What was the reason behind that?

Chair Gibson, I might have to get back to you and go back and look at my notes. I I think there was some request to not duplicate what the board of public utilities already had on their goals. And maybe we there was a discussion of having a separate climate action plan dashboard that just talks about all the different things in the climate action plan because there there's a lot of different topics covered there. But I would have to go back to my notes for that one.

Okay. Thank you. That was all I had. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Great. Thank you. Any other questions from the board?

Okay. Just going back to your to Chair Gibson's first question. For the activities identified as non core, do you define somewhere who is primarily responsible for those items? And if so, are they explicitly active partners with the county?

Mr. Valero, could you go back to that description page so I can look at it one more time? It was yes. There you go.

So the bottom half are basically noncore. Right? Where is it at? It's hard to read this. Starts with most felt, right? Right. Doctor. Non core. I'm just curious if in those cases, because, you know, even though they're on the county's list of 22 objectives, Do you have partners involved that would be the ones primarily responsible for those

less core objectives? I think the answer is there still are responsibilities. We certainly alreadywe have an economic development staff. We also have a contracted partners Right. Defined.

We have tourism staff, but we also have tourism defined partners in a working group. So the answer is just because they're maybe noncore. I think it was posed to counsel, like, if you had a $100 and only a $100 Uh-huh. You know, what would you have to fund first? And, you know, and it I think that's where it was like, you know, the the classic thing is parks and recreation are the ones that quickly get if if when a community gets into a funding crunch, those are almost automatically the first ones to not get funded because we can live without our parks.

The problem is we love our parks. And so I don't want this to be interpreted like these aren't core services and functions the county still does. We still have a full functioning library and everything else. It's just that when usually, what happens is you have to make sure you have your public safety first. Usually, you have to make sure the utilities are running first, the roads are safe. Those are usually come first before these other ones, but they're still core function of what we're currently staffed and operating to do. And then then some of them, do have to find partners. I I just don't wanna

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. But we're not in that situation where we're having to make that choice, which is the good news. Yeah.

Alright. Thank you.

Go ahead. Go ahead. You. Sorry.

Anne, you mentioned metrics briefly, and I wanted to come back to that. So how do you propose to measure some of these very key things? And when are those metrics going to be determined? And where is

the data going to be

kept and accessed and so forth?

So a couple years ago, we launched a dashboard on our website around these similar things. We're just we're just trying to get better at it and refine it. And right now so it's up there, and we just wanna re we wanna we're actually wanting I want to kinda narrow it down to some of the key areas that relate directly to these. And then some of the other information and data we gather that is important to different departments, maybe put those in different places. Because right now, we have too much on our dashboard. But we're hoping to roll that out before before the end of the month as an update to our dashboard.

Great minds, I guess. Maybe I'll expand, though. My question as I read through it was how are we holding ourselves accountable? The dashboard is a great part. And I think there's the annual state of the county report is another one. And I think you said you're working on even more. Are there are those do you want what are the places to look for accountability on this?

Oh, sure. Well, I would also say the county manager monthly report, just like you received one from mister Shelton, you know, I give one to I've written one with a lot of pages from different departments to the council. And then I we do we do a lot of quarterly we also do a presentation on each of these priority areas throughout the year to counsel to give some updates. And and then we also do quarterly updates on a variety of topics like intergovernmental or small and local business, climate action plan. All of those council asked us to come and give quarterly updates too, and that's what we use. A lot of that information is what we use then to do their our end of the year review. Yeah.

Great. Thanks. Yeah, there's a lot of accountability. Think it's hard to distill it down to the dividend. Improving the dashboard even more would be great. Thanks. Any other questions? All right. Great. Well, thank you very much. Moving on to the next section of public hearings. We've got one public hearing that we want to introduce this evening. And I just wanted to review the procedure for introducing ordinances. For us, we just need one of the voting members to introduce the ordinance. We don't need a second.

We don't vote on it because we'll see this again brought the date at the next meeting, which is the public hearing, May 6. So this will come back before us. And when we introduce an ordinance, we can make changes still. When that happens, when council makes an ordinance introduction, they can't make substantive changes. So this is one place where the council and the BPU is different. So we can still modify it. Got that right, Thomas?

Think. Perfect. So just

to check. So we

can like, I'm looking at it here. This ordinance that was we can, if we want, change some aspect of it here tonight as part of the introduction. Is that right? Or is that later when we comes back to us?

I think anything's fair game. But we wanna introduce it and then we can still modify it when

we come back big red pen. I was just curious.

Yeah. I Right.

Yes. Both. You could you could make a minor change today if you want, but substantive substantive changes come next to next at the public hearing.

Basically, today is to get

it introduced and okay.

Yep. Thank you. Then we can put it up for public notification. Yep. And let's see, we've got a presentation to guide us through that. You're all ready, I'm not. Thanks, Joanne. Go ahead.

Okay. Good evening. So I'm bringing our introduction for our gas ordinance, which is code ordinance 2,379. Today's our introduction on May 6. I'll bring it back with any changes or anything for public hearing on May 6. Council introduction is scheduled for May 19 and public hearing with counsel is on June 6. So overview. So our gas rate consists of three components. We have the monthly service charge. We have a fixed charge per therm.

And then we have the cost of gas, which is our pass through per therm, which is a variable rate. So that's based on the cost of gas from NEEMEA. So we also have the NEEMEA discount, which is point five eight six, and that's part of our NEEMEA agreement. So I just did a customer base. This is based on our five year average.

I differentiated between Los Alamos and White Rock. And I also split out the size because we have small gas meters and large gas meters for both residential, commercial, county, and schools. Okay. So here's our consumption. So this is what we budgeted for consumption is in blue.

And our actuals are in orange. Keep in mind the FY26, the graph says actual, and those are projected numbers right now. So you'll see that starting in '24, what we budgeted, what we actually sold is a little bit less than in '26, the same idea, and also in '26, '25 and '26. And then in this page. So first I'd like to apologize.

I didn't realize when I created the graph that it cut off some of the zeros down at the budget and actuals. So I apologize for that. So these are projected sales and we projected our sales for '27 and '28 based on a five year average. And that came out to 6,800,000 therms, which was shown in our budget books. So for '26, we budgeted 8,300,000 in sales.

And it looks like we're projecting about 5,900,000 sales when we end this fiscal year. So that's about 2,450,000 less dollars than we had anticipated for the year in sales. We started '26, our audited cash when they did the FY '25, we were at a loss of $489,000 And we're projecting a loss of 2,360,000 by the '6. Some of the reason for lower sales, the warmer weather, and just overall lower usage for our customer base. And we used to project 75 therms per customer, and it's looking more about 70 therms, 69 to 70 therms per customer.

So we're also using that moving forward. The next page shows our proposed rates. So residential, multifamily, and commercial are in one class, 7A and 7E. And currently, the small service charge is $14.25 We're looking at eight percent increase to $15.53 and 16.93 And then this large is 41.25 to 44.96 to 49.01 per month. And then our fixed charge is moving from 34¢ to 48¢ per therm and then 58¢ per therm.

County schools, the service charge for the small and large meter are the same, but their fixed charge is about 4 or 5¢ less than residential, commercial, multifamily.

Go ahead to the next page.

So we broke down typical bill. So on the right hand side, that's what was presented in the budget. And keep in mind, everything that's on the right hand, that's not highlighted was calculated at 75 therms. The two in blue, we use 70 therms. So then the chart on the left is assuming 70 therms per customer and assuming the cost of gas, which is a 42¢ per therm, which is the five year average for the cost of gas.

Currently now, if we bought 70 therms of gas, your bill would be $67.45 In 'twenty six, starting in July '6, it would be 78.53, about 16% more. And then in July '7, 86.93, which is about 10% more. Okay, so our current proposed rates expected to restore the gas funds cash flow to a sustainable level to fund essentials, repairs, replacements, operations, and long term cash reserve targets. With this proposed rate, we can start funding our reserve targets in 2030 or expected to start funding them and fully fund them by the 2032. And also with this increase, we're looking at large increase in '27, 5% in '28, and we're kind of projecting 3% out for the rest of the eight years of this ten year forecast.

The next slide is similar to what was presented with our budget, but this is what is included with the additional cost of gas. And then this chart is looking at our neighboring communities. The bar in blue is our current LAC rate. Red is the proposed for 'twenty seven and the green is proposed for FY 'twenty eight. And they're kind of split up 50 therms.

If you bought 50 therms, 75 therms is the next block, 100 therms and 150 therms. The bar lines that's going across the blue is looking at ZEA natural gas companies at that same level of sales and their cost of gas. And then the purple line is New Mexico Gas Company. And that is the end of my presentation. So I'm open to take questions.

Great. Thank you. Any questions from the board? Let's start online with Robert.

Thank you, mister chairman. Not really any question right now. I do have a comment, and that is it appears that what's going on here is very similar to what happened over time with with our electric rates and with the same result because there were no rate increases for natural gas from at least 2015, and I'm not sure how much before that, until October 2022. And, of course, costs kept going up in that time. And we're still we started increasing rates then modestly, but we're still in catch up mode here.

And this proposal is would get us in two years or three years out of catch up mode and where we ought to be. We have to do something. Right now, our cash flow is negative, our cash balance is negative, and our reserves are about 40% of what they should be. And that's obviously not a sustainable situation. So our customers have had the benefit of rates that were too low for a number of years, and now it looks bad because we have to increase them rather dramatically.

But the that's what we have to do to catch up here. And nobody likes rate increases for utilities or anything else, but they're inevitable, particularly in this inflationary environment that seems to have become normal and accepted, which is even scarier. And we this appears to be probably the in the long term, about the least painful way to do it that we can think of. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. Other questions or comments? Charlie.

Yeah, a couple questions. Joanne, do you know can you break it down a little bit for me in the sense of is it, I mean I think Chair Gibson pointed to a really important thing like we just, you know, we need to raise rates steadily in order to keep up with expenses. That makes sense. Are we also seeing just a decreasing user base? Are people starting to switch more to electric to complement and then moving away from gas? Are we seeing that at all? And are we seeing increased infrastructure costs? I know we've talked a lot about moving costs around to fix the infrastructure. Are those two things also part of the equation or or not not much?

I'm not sure about customers moving from electric to or from gas to only electric.

Or even just like, you know, going to induction cooktops or something, you know, just where they sort of decrease if not fully move.

That information I don't have to provide. Do we do you know, Phil, if we

I think conversions from gas to electric is minor in the scheme of things. I think the larger issue when you saw the graph the last few years, We've just been selling less gas because our winters have been

because warmer. Getting warmer.

And unfortunately, our operating crews rely on that fixed cost increment of gas, you know, cost per therm, the 34¢ today. So that's that's the largest impact to the fund. And then, obviously, our capital expense, you know, we had last year, we presented to the board that we had a state audit and, you know, we had to make some adjustments to our staffing. So we, ramped up a little bit in that area and also some capital improvements that we're doing. Okay. Okay.

This is not gonna help our customer satisfaction survey next year.

A quick Depends on how well we educate people.

Yes.

Just a quick question. Sorry if I missed it. But on the neighboring communities graph, so even before we implement these potential increases, we're above the rates of our neighboring communities. So usually we like to say we're equal or better than. Can you remind me why that's not the case for gas?

That I'm not sure. And I I'm not sure if that's been the case prior to 2026 or if we've we've stayed steady and now we're increasing. I don't have that information, but I could.

Yeah. I guess we've been in a catching up mode since, what, '22. Yeah. But more minor you know, minorly relative to what we're talking about now, it looks like. But did you know,

Kyle? This also doesn't show any increases. The only thing I can competitors. This is just their fixed ones. Right? This is just the fixed cuts. So, like, the red and green bars are our rate increases, but this doesn't show any of the neighboring communities' potential rate increases. Some

somehow, they're well, okay.

That's easy.

Yeah. We don't know. That's true. I suppose. But okay. Looking at current, we're yeah.

Yeah. Chair and member Hollingsworth, one of the challenges too with our community is our pipeline network. We don't have a gridded street system and, you know, so our our network runs along basically a spine of of these canyon tops. And so they they don't have efficiency that you would have in a gridded community down in Santa Fe where New Mexico Gas is. That that's part of it. You you have a scale there with New Mexico Gas, thousands tens of thousands of customers versus just our 7,500 customer meters. So it it's a lot of it's scale.

I had two quick questions for you, Joanne. The first was when we talked about this in a previous meeting, we talked about option one, two, and three. And I think this is option three. This is option three. Just making sure. Okay. Great. Yes. Perfect. And the other question was I wanted just to ask, is any of this And

this is the one line diagram of the transmission system serving in circuit three two days ago, and they're still at hurt. It's our what the tells them which to for without them. Helpful. But there's apparently, I should say, solar and don't tell systems in general present, reduce their metered consumption and which reduces when we have charges for fixed infrastructure costs, labor and whatnot built into the consumption charges that bypasses those costs from them and effectively transfer it to other types of customers. Not different rate classes, but other customers who don't have solar.

Is it substantial? Not really, but it's some it is there. We could, you know, come up with some rules and say we're gonna limit the size of and that's not necessarily a utility thing. It could be a county thing. Limit the size of plug in systems per, you know, structure and premises.

We could do something where we you have to enable the AMI meter function to if you wanna do this, you have to go and enable AMI because we have some people opt out. And we may want to say, you're going to have to do this if you want to use one of these things. So at least we can monitor for exported power, things like that. And the last thing, and this is important, regardless of whatever decision we decide, you know, down the road to take with these sorts of systems, it probably is in our best interest as the utility to engage in a public safety education program at least to get people aware of what the potential issues are and maybe the benefits of these plug in solar systems are. I won't go over these each of these except to point out the last one, considering portable solar generators an alternative.

And what I meant by that was there's nothing, regardless of whether someone buys a plug in solar system, there's nothing to stop anyone today that I'm aware of, and I could be wrong, correct me if anyone knows otherwise, from going and getting a solar panel, mounting it, you know, somewhere out of the way where it's not requiring permitting, and hooking it up to a portable home energy storage system, basically a battery system, plugging those solar panels directly into it because most of these solar most of these portable battery storage systems allow direct panel inputs. You don't even need to get a microinverter. You just hook the cables straight up into the back of your battery system. And you maybe you put it in your garage and you go plug your garage fridge or charge your EV with it. There's nothing I'm aware of under the current permitting structure or the with the state inspection, construction industries division that would prohibit anybody from doing that.

So people could just do that on their own anyway. So you just thought they would buy a battery and you can do it. Next slide, please. Last thing is all these sources. This isn't all of them.

This is some of the most important ones and most significant ones and informative ones that I ran across. UL, obviously, Underwriters Laboratory, Bright Saver, which was a program in sorry, California that started up last year to kind of explore the opportunities that these sorts of system present to the local California utility customers and a bunch of other stuff. I've heard many times people talk about the Volts podcast, so I got that on there. There's actually a couple of things related to it. What's the deal with Balcony Solar, which is their podcast that got everybody talking to me.

And they also have a legislative bill tracker and utilities opposition page where they go and track who's doing what on a statewide basis. And the last thing was an article from next to last thing is the wired.com story about why balcony solar hasn't taken off in The US. And then an interesting one is from solar power world online, which is kind of a existing PV roof grid tied rooftop solar kind of industry related one saying why you might not wanna do this. So it's it's an interesting perspective from a different viewpoint. That's why I included it.

I think that's it for these slides. Can you scroll and see? Yeah. I'm done. Oh, I did include as an attachment the UL solutions paper on interactions of plug in PV with protection of existing power systems. Very information dense. Lots of stuff about all the topics I talked about, breaker masking, the safety considerations, detailed discretions of the GFCI issues, and a whole host of other safety related topics. So I won't go into that. But with that, I'd like to conclude my presentation. And if anyone has any comments or questions or anything else they'd like to discuss, please.

Great. Thanks for the really good perform good presentation. First of look online. Robert, do you have any comments or questions?

Yes. I do. First one, obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is is safety. And I was not clear going through all the UL stuff how extensively they are is prepared to approve or to give their stamp of approval on particular items, particular products. You know, in the good old days, you know, UL had their label on just about everything, and if it wasn't there, you didn't buy it.

But it wasn't clear whether that's the case here or whether that's the direction UL was going. And that would certainly give both customers and us probably more confidence if it had a if thing if products had a stamp of approval from a recognized lab laboratory like that. So what what is exactly is there this 2700 that you mentioned, even though I read through the description here, it's not clear to me how far that really goes.

Chair, board members, I haven't had an opportunity to read through it myself beyond what UL has said about it at a high level. So my understanding of the landscape is that a lot of these components, there's component level UL certifications that address each of the pieces of the system if you were to put one together. However, they don't have a comp didn't have a comprehensive overall certification for one of these if you were to get it off the shelf. It's a totally integrated system. I'm hopeful that that's what 3,700 UL 3,700 addresses, but I haven't had a chance to validate that myself.

Okay. Mean, I I was glad to hear you say that the experience in Europe has so far not indicated any really substantial safety issues with these things. Being a practical person, that that's if that's really the case, that would be a big would make me feel a lot better either as a customer or as a as a utility person. When it comes to this big question of how should we, the utility, treat these things, it seems to me this is just initial thinking because this is obviously something that's going to be we don't know how big it will become, but even if there's only a few of these things, we need to get in front of it and have some policy for how to deal with them. The original idea really of even solar on the roof was to serve you for a customer to serve their own loads.

And it seems that here, this if we really pushed in the direction of this being right sized for a customer to meet their own loads and not trying to export power back to the utility, it simplifies things both technically and contractually, I think. The first place, they're, you know, they're obviously gonna be generating during the day when in another year or a year plus, we'll be generating a lot of cheap power during the day. I don't know that it makes a lot of sense for us to be paying more solar customers for small amounts of power exported from them back to us. And if we could just convince people to, hey, generate power that you're going to use, but don't try to sell it back to us, that would, I think, eliminate or greatly reduce the need for a formal interconnection agreement like we have for the bigger systems today. That might be a direction to go.

It also hopefully would substantially reduce utilities liability if if they're not supposed to be exporting power back to us. And if of course, obviously, would have to have equipment that is sensitive to whether they the feed into the home or whatever is energized or not. The that said, whatever permitting requirement we come up with, if any, I think we really need to try to minimize it. Trying to do a full blown interconnection agreement like we do for the larger existing systems, I think, is probably overkill. I hope it is because one of the benefits of something like this is it's small.

It's relatively inexpensive. It's relatively simple. If it can be done safely without a lot of paperwork, I think we ought to try to do that. That won't be our goal anyway. That's most that's most more common than question. As time goes on, there'll probably be a lot more questions as we try to understand this relatively new thing and deal with it safely and economically. Thank you, mister chairman.

Thank you. Other comments and questions from the board? Got a couple, of course. I'll jump in while you guys think. First, just a couple of comments. From the customer survey, we heard that not everybody realizes we're municipally owned. And so I just wanted to make the point that since we're municipally owned, I believe that whatever New Mexico decides to do doesn't apply to us anyway. And so we really do need to figure out how to address this issue as a board of public utilities. And so I'm really glad you brought this forward to make us think about it, but that's the blessing and curse of being municipally owned. We gotta figure this out.

I really appreciated, you know, the safety the importance of the safety of this. And I think looking at, you know, engineered solutions and just not catastrophizing, but looking for worse you know, making sure we we protect the customer is really important. But then I think that point you made that that chair Gibson mentioned about real world data is is a great way to look at it too. And since there's been nothing in in Europe or very minimal issues in Europe. But then reading through that appendix in the UL one that talked about the differences, I kind of sorted it out and you really clarified that it's not quite apples to apples.

But Utah now has been online for a year or so. And if they had any fires or injuries associated with their deployments, I haven't heard of any. I've sort of been keeping my ears open for it, but I haven't gone looking. Have you heard of anything in Utah?

I haven't heard anything, but the Utah law applies to investor owned utilities, not publicly owned. So there is a distinction. But got me this white paper that you saw at the end of Ben's presentation that

Okay.

About the UL and all the challenges with it. I you know, I think some of the concerns they had is, what if someone plugs in two of these into one recept acle and, you know, obviously overloads their circuits? And but I haven't heard yet if any fires

fires or yeah. Yeah. We'll have to keep an eye on that for sure. It's glad they're they're being the guinea pigs for us. I was gonna make the point. I did go to Amazon just before the meeting today, and they're willing to ship 1 to 87544. If I hit, I didn't hit to to really test them to say, what state are you in? What utility are you with? But they are ready to to send send me one. It would be here next Wednesday. So before we had a chance to think about this anymore.

It's okay. Ben said he's got one already.

That's right. Just don't tell me.

Could have. May. If I wanted.

I guess if you could could you go back to page two twenty? And this was the sort of the three concepts that you were pitching to us. And my question was wave interconnection agreement for plug in solar. I think that's closest to what Utah did of the three. Is that your understanding? I mean, I haven't not sort of at the at the gut level, not in the detail level. But I think Utah waived interconnection agreements.

I I think it's more nuanced than that. I think the U Utah statute says that you can't prohibit these systems, people from using these systems. Again, like Falo said, if you're a investor owned utility, you can't ban them outright as long as they meet certain requirements, including safety requirements, which may or may not be achievable currently.

Okay.

I guess did you have you heard any stat how many systems are there in Utah since they passed the bill? More than zero, I guess. Okay. Oh, one other point I just want to emphasize that you made was the motivation for getting these types of systems. I'm speculating that in the county, it would really be the second bullet that you didn't talk about as much, which was the renters and the transient population.

Potentially, homeowners with roofs that didn't have a good south facing view that they could optimize with moving systems or something. So but I think making this available to renters and and folks that couldn't get a full blown rooftop is is probably the bigger motivated folks in the county.

It it that's true, but it also there's also the cost aspect. If if these things achieve scale in The United States, the cost projections are expected to be somewhere on the order of 50¢ a watt installed as opposed to a rooftop system, which is anywhere from 2 to $5 a watt Mhmm. Installed. So it's It really is. Looking at potentially a tenfold reduction in the cost to implement it. And I guess a lot of

that is if you don't have the 50% cost addition of licensing and interconnect agreements and everything.

So yeah. And getting a professional electrician and paying for permits and Design. Yeah. Okay. Engineering stamped approvals, putting your panels on the roof.

Yeah. Great. I guess I just offer my final thought for now as I think what what chair Gibson ended with, which is just if if as we're thinking about this, minimizing regulations around this would be preferable, simplifications.

I'll add one thought. I have not followed this development at all. But just listening to Matt talk about it and you talk about it then, I mean, if it's on Amazon and it gives you tenfold reduction in cost, we're gonna be flooded with them. Right? It's inevitable. Forget about it. It doesn't matter what you say.

And people are going to buy

it and plug it in. Right? They're not going to think about, do I have to go get an inter what's an interconnection agreement? What what are you even talking about? Right? So, I mean, we're gonna have to if that if those are true statements, we're gonna have to figure out how to deal with them pretty rapidly. It it really almost regardless of what we we say we're gonna know, we're that it's gonna be a near and present problem if those two things happen. Right?

So Thank you. Question. So in Utah, the the kits have to be certified, but there's no approval process. So how do you confirm that what's used is certified? Is that an honor system, I suppose? Or if you're caught with an uncertified system, you're in trouble. Or

Excellent question. As far as I could tell, that is still things to be worked out. Like like I say

Even in Utah.

Mean Even in Utah. They just did this last last fall, I think it was.

Yeah. And I guess Virginia just passed a similar law. Right? They're the second.

Right. So these these types of laws don't necessarily enable people to do this. They just prevent the utilities from preventing customers from doing it. So different perspective. It doesn't it doesn't make it safe. It doesn't go through all the hoops. It doesn't eliminate that. You still gotta do all that safety stuff and have people that are informed and get systems that are compliant with whatever requirements there safety requirements there are. But it just says you can't ban these.

Lots of threads to pull. Interesting. Thanks so much. Let me just Robert, anything else come to mind since? Not seeing anything. Anyone else? Nope. Thanks so much, Ben.

Thank We look forward

to talking about this more.

For your time.

Alright, Failo. You're up next with the APPA financial and operating ratio presentation.

Yeah. Chair and members of the board, you know, obviously, it's a long report, but I had Richard put together the information. You know, we participated in this a couple years, and he put together a summary table that I thought would be helpful for the board to use where we looked at, you know, the median with APPA. That's a nationwide column. And then our median by customer count, you know, we fall between the five and ten thousand.

So you kinda, you know, like, it was asked that question earlier, scale, you know, what are we comparing ourselves to similar size utilities? And then our Western Region, and that definitely impacts, like, labor when we pursue labor that in you can kinda compare some of our labor costs with with our communities. And so we listed in, you know, our raw data for '24 and '23. Those are the fiscal years. And so you can kinda see over customer class between residential and commercial, how we balance out with our air various national our customer size or our class base, which if you look in the report, there is, like, 38 of of the of the utilities.

About a, you know, fifth was part of the same size as ours. So it's a pretty good number comparison around the country in Western Region. I think other things I thought was interesting, you know, was the uncollectible accounts. When you compare to our you know, we report on this quite a bit every month, and you'll see that ours is in zero numbers and, you know, other our other communities have more challenges there, so but that was interesting. And then the other thing is our O and M expenses per kilowatt hour sold is higher.

Right? So that is something we're challenged with our rates and I think a lot of it has to do with our remoteness and, you know, we're not tied together. When I go to meetings with UAMS, there's a lot of utilities of similar size as us, but they're more it's like a track housing development where they got gridded systems and, you know, they got a substation on each end of the community, and it's kinda all tied together, you know. It doesn't we don't have we have a separate community in White Rock. We got kind of our own system up here.

We're we're we're basically serving two communities when we when you look at our geography. And then let's see. The other thing was that I thought was interesting was the very bottom. Well, was labor expenses. You'll see our jump about $10.

If you recall back then, we were keeping up with our labor shortage with the lab and losing employees, and so we did have that 10% increase around our wages and then, you know, keeping up. So you see that jump there, but then when you compare to the Western region that we work out of, you know, we're still under that region. But I think a lot of that's California effect, little the wages are higher in that area. And then capital expenditure versus depreciation, you know, we we've been talking about we gotta increase our capital expenditure. The data shows that that, you know, we should be at maybe one one and a half, but definitely greater than one.

So when you look at the peers. And those are just some highlights I wanted to point out, but there's probably more things that we could talk about. I wonder if this

is just an error, but I was just looking over this. On line 12, it says, FY '24, the purchase power cost per kilowatt hour is point four, you know, $4.41 cents, and every other line is, like, 6¢. Is there just some error in that? It just seems like we got an order of magnitude. Yeah. I think

maybe, Richard, I can double check that one. I I love the Yeah. That's off by right. It is. So you know the root cause. Where is this?

I'd have to look at the survey and see what what the input was to

Yeah. We'll get back with you on that.

Well, was a great data dump to look through, I really appreciate the highlight tables and running through that. Open it up for other comments and questions with Robert first online, if you have anything.

Thank you, mister chairman. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Had a technical problem here, but okay.

Yeah. This is for for data mongers, this is great. You know, we spend a lot of time looking at our costs and this, that, and the other, but we tend to compare it to ourselves. What was last year? What was the year before that?

It's great to have something to compare us to the rest of the field. So I thank you for bringing this up, but it gives us a lot to think about. The first question I had is is a consistency question in line one, revenue per kilowatt hour. It shows, like, for f y twenty four, nine point seven cents. But with the exception of commercial, everything is a good deal.

You know, the retail, residential, the industrial well, industrial is a little different. But retail and residential are much, much higher. Are you sure that that revenue per kilowatt hour number is correct?

Chair Gibson, we'll have to get back with you on this. I I didn't do the data entry, so I just can we can double check that number.

Okay. It doesn't it just doesn't look like

the I see your I understand.

Weighted average would give you or appropriately weighted weighted total would give you that 9.7¢ number. Okay. Then there's a number of things that look like they're considerably different than the than the APPA medians. The debt, the line two debt to total assets is higher. The operating ratio is lower.

I'm not quite sure what that means. Don't don't understand that one completely yet. I'm surprised that we don't have our own numbers for line eight, customers per non power generation employee. That ought to be a trivial thing to produce. I could almost do that in real time sitting here in the room, I would think.

We know how many customers we have. We know how many employees we have. So that would be interesting because then we're trying to get to why our o and m expenses either per power sold or per customer significantly higher than the standard or I should say the the mean. It is true that we have some topographic challenges that many other places don't have, but there's also public power entities that are rural and have a lot of lot more mileage per meter than we have. So that's that whole question, what's where why is our o and m cost so much higher than what we see elsewhere?

I'd like to understand that better. The because we've talked you know, when we talk about rates, well, rates are set based on there's or talk about budgets. There's income and there's outgo. And there's, you know, what does it cost versus what do we receive. And this is looking at the what does it cost side, which we don't we don't have a chance to scrutinize very much.

We get numbers that says this is what it costs. This is telling us this is how it compares to the industry. And I would like to understand why we differ as much as we do in as many places as we do. It's not just labor cost. If you look at the labor cost, they're sort of in the same ballpark.

And already there was some discussion of capital versus depreciation on line 21. We'll go into that one further. The big question in my mind is why are O and M costs so much higher than the APPA medians are. And that's something I would like to, at some point, explore further. Thank you, mister chairman.

Thank you. Other questions or comments? Good. Jen, yeah.

Just to reiterate, totally agree with everything he just said. Because there are a number of places in this table where we differ significantly and more so than other graphs or tables showing differences in how much we pay versus other local communities. So just, yeah, they don't seem to jive. And then if it is the case that we're very special in terms of our location and and so forth, I mean, are there other comparables that we can look at that would be more closely related to our situation here? Or does this have something to do with our tie to the lab and that it's not showing up?

So just yeah. It'd be great to do a deeper dive on quite a few of these issues here.

Anything else? Alright. Thanks a lot, Paolo. Okay. Thanks. The last item here is the announcement of the Board of Public Utilities vacancy. And the partial term that I'm serving in is going to end 06/30/2026. Since it's a partial term, I am eligible to and have already applied for a full term. The current makeup of the board is two independents, two Republicans, one Democrat. And the county board cannot have a super majority of any party.

So given the current splits, it's open to everybody. And the proposed ad and brochure were attached for any review. I don't know if anybody had any comments on the ad or the brochure. They looked good to me. Anything, Robert?

No. I didn't other than I caught the fact that my phone number again is listed as and Kathy's phone number is listed as mine. So anybody calling would actually get her first, but presumably, if they've got questions, they can she can send them on to me. I'll be happy to talk with folks about it.

Good catch. And

Member Gibson, I wasn't sure if you wanted your personal phone number in the newspaper, so I listed the office.

It was intentional. Perfect. Intentional. Good.

Well, I thought it might be because you did that last year too, and I think we talked about it then. But I I don't mind. I mean, that's what I'm here for, to represent people. And if they can't reach me easily, then it's it diminishes that capability. But I'm sure if they wanna talk to me and they get ahold of you, you'll pass them along.

I can change that.

Perfect. With that modification, any no other comments? Alright. One last call for public comment. I don't see any here in the chambers. Any online?

If anyone would like to make public comment on Zoom, please use raise use the raise hand function at this time.

Not online. Alright. Well, I'll use the gavel for this one. Adjourned. Thank

you very much, Matt.

Yep. Thanks, Robert. Have a great time in Hawaii. Thanks, everyone.