Transportation Board - workshop

An order ticket.

So somewhere there's a stop.

Okay. I will call to order this 05/06/2026 meeting of the Board of Public Utilities. Thanks thank you everyone for being here this evening. We do apologize for the, alternate quarters. Couple chambers of normal disease, which seems for voting. So, good night and appreciate the staff setting this up in a way that I think will actually work out fairly well. I guess we'll find out. First time we've done this arrangement. Anyway, if there are issues, we apologize for them. First order of business is public comment on any items that are not otherwise on our agenda this evening.

Is there any public comment in the room? If not, is there any public comment online?

Thank you, chair Gibson. If you are online tonight on Zoom when chair Gibson is out for public comment, you can use the raise hand function. And if you're participating by phone, you can press 9 to raise your hand. If you would like any public comment right now, please raise your hand on Zoom. No one has their hand raised.

K. Thank you very much. That takes us to approval of the agenda. And there was a revised agenda issued that, you should all have on your took place of seating, and it was published in adequate time, Kathy, Saturday morning. And, however, I would like to amend it one step further, and that is item four c to make sure that we get the right motion in place.

I'd like to pull that off the consent agenda and then just act on it immediately after the consent agenda is set. Could be straightforward, but I wanna make sure we hit the right one. Right. Okay. So is there a motion to approve the revised agenda as amended?

Do we okay. Yeah. In other words, and including the action to suspend procedures. We'll do that separately. I move that we board of you to approve the revised

agenda for tonight's meeting as amended.

Second. Okay. Move to second. All in favor? Eric, I see Eric come up. Okay. Motion passes four to zero. Now we need to a motion to suspend the procedural rules of the work session so that we can take action this evening.

I move that the Board of Public Utilities suspend the procedural rules for the 05/06/2026 work session so that formal action may be taken.

Second. Okay. Seconded. All in favor? And, Eric. Eric votes yes. Motion passes. Four to zero. Thank you. Now the consent agenda minus item four c. So it'll be the consent agenda as amended.

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

I second.

Okay. And seconded. Is there any comment or discussion? Shouldn't be on a consent agenda. K. Seeing none, we will vote on the consent agenda. Abby, are you doing the honors tonight, or is it Kathy? You're doing the honors. Okay. Kathy, would you please co roll?

Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Nochley? Yes. Member Gibson? Yes. And member Stromberg?

Yes.

K. Motion passes. Four to zero.

That

will take us to item four c, which is on oh, no. It's it's on page 83, but the correction is in the handout, the CT. And that will have the correct motion in it when you're looking at item agenda item four c in the handout. So I'll ask first if there is any discussion on the item just as we normally would. I don't see any, but someone wants to make motion.

Okay. You're me. That's fine. The motion is on the next page after that cover page. Yep. Perfect.

Under the the recommend

Yeah.

Actually think it's under this one.

Either Either one works. Oh, this one. One.

Move that the Board of Public Utilities recommend the award of bid number 26Dash31 for the Trinity Drive, New Mexico 502 ADA and safety improvements project in the amount of $1,200,500 plus a 10% contingency in the amount of $120,050 for a total project amount of $1,320,000.550 plus plus applicable NMGRT and, four two h a s s e, HASSA, Contracting Company Inc, and forward to County Council for approval. Second.

Any further any discussion? If

not Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Knockley?

Yes.

Member Gibson? Yes. Member Stromberg?

Yes. K. Motion passes. Zero to zero. That takes us to public hearings.

And we we have one this evening, and that's on page one forty two of our agenda doc where it starts. And that is, incorporated county of Los Alamos code ordinance number zero two dash three seventy nine, an ordinance amending chapter 40 article three sections 40 dash one five one and forty dash one five two of the code that we quote for the county of Los Alamos, but they need to get service rates. And before we get going, Joanne, I'll just explain how public hearings work here. We'll have a staff presentation first. That'll be Joanne Gentry, our deputy utility manager for finance.

And, well, then the board will have opportunity to ask clarifying questions. Then we'll go to public comment. If you have comments to make, appreciate it if you'd stand at the podium there, state your name for the record, and, please limit your comment to to three minutes. We'll do though we'll take comment from those in the in the room first, and then we'll open it to, folks who might be online. Hard to stand at the podium, but otherwise, the rules are the same. Then we'll come back to the board for discussion and possible action. So with that, Joanne, if you'd like to make your presentation.

Good evening, chair and board members. I'm bringing you the gas ordinance o two seven nine tonight.

That

was the overview. So our gas rate consists of three components. We have a monthly surface charge. We have a fixed charge per therm, and then we have our cost of gas pass through per therm, which is our variable rate. We also get a median discount of 0.586. That's part of an

agreement that we have with them.

This next slide is showing our customer base. I have it split it's a five year average. Everything with this gas rate has a five year average, whether it's customer count, usage, revenue, projections. So this one is splitting the residential, commercial, county, and schools between Los Alamos and White Rock. And then the second box below is our meter size.

We have, obviously, large amount of our residential customers, our meter, and then we have our commercial, our county, and our school count. So the, this is our consumption versus our actual. So the blue is the amount that we budgeted. So we started in f y twenty one. We're showing through f y twenty six.

And then the orange is the actual, sales of therms. So in f y twenty six, that's our projected sales. So we budgeted for 8,400,000 therms this, fiscal year, due to some warm weather and different factors. We're projecting only about 6,600,000 therms sold this this fiscal year. With that said, our projected sales have obviously been lower.

So we budgeted for about 8,360,000, of revenues. It's projected that we will only make about 5,900,000 in revenue. So that's about 2.5 2,450,000 less than we had projected at the beginning of the year or at the beginning of last year. When we completed our audited cash was projected for f y or I'm sorry. Our audited cash showed in f y twenty five a loss of 489,000 when we finished f y twenty five. Let's see.

Let's go to the next slide.

So here comes the proposed rate. So the first graph on the top is showing our service charge. So that's our monthly service fee. Right now, we charge $4 I mean, $14.25. We're looking at an 8% increase for those.

And so for the for, small, it's going to $15.53 starting in July and $16.93 in July '27. The, large meter is going from forty one twenty five per month to $44.96 and then up to $49.01 per month. And our fixed, charge is going from 34¢ to 48¢ to 58¢. Keep in mind, this is the fixed charge. The variable is based on the cost of gas, so that depends on how much the cost of gas is each month that we settle.

For the county and schools, again, it's showing the $14.25 and the same percentage for the small and large meter. And then the fixed charge for, our county and schools is 30¢ currently. It's going up to 43¢ in July and then 53¢ in July '27. So this is a present like, what we calculate for a typical bill for a residential customer. Now everything that's above the blue from fiscal year twenty seven above is being calculated at 75¢ per therm for the typical bill, through our five year projection I mean, our five year looking back at five years, it's showing that the average customer is using more about 70 therms per month.

So 2728, we're calculating those based on the 70 therms and not the 75 therms as we had previously. And so the estimated cost of gas at 70 therms, assuming the cost of gas is at about 42¢ per therm, currently now the average bill would be $53.20 at 70 therms. Or the cost of gas would be $53.20, $63 in July, and $70 next year. Your bill will go from $67.45 to 78.53 and then 86.93. So this is our our ten year forecast.

This is what we brought to new board, and we presented to council a couple of weeks ago. So so the current proposed 27% increase is to help restore the gas funds because we did end '25 in a negative cash, and we're projecting 10/27 in negative cash. So we're trying to bring that up to a sustainable level to maintain our operations and also fund essential repairs, replacements, and our long term cash reserves. Now in '27, we're project we are proposing a 27% increase. In '28, a 5% increase.

And based with those two proposed rates increases, we're looking at a 3% from '29 to '36. And with this, rate increases, we're looking at getting our reserves fully funded in about 2032. So this is our ten year forecast based on our budget, and this is showing our operations, our interdepartmental charges, our capital improvement projects for the gas fund, projected cash balances, our revenue transfer, the cost of gas, and then it includes our revenue and proceeds and any any, cash reserves. The next slide, we we look at our neighboring communities and do some comparisons. We look at New Mexico Gas Company and, the Zia National Gas Company.

And so and then we have a set at, like, fifty, seventy five therms, a 100 therms, and a 150 therms to kind of show where where where would we be at and, our neighboring communities. So that is the end of my presentation. Some questions?

Thank you, Joanne. Questions or clarifying questions?

So if if you go back to the previous slide, the last with the neighboring communities, just to to make sure I'm understanding that so so blue, red, green, that's the current the '27 proposed and the '28 proposed for county on different usage bins. So our neighboring communities, Zia Natural Gas and and New Mexico are are where the line rates where the lines are substantial well, not substantial. Somewhat lower than Eight. Than all three of those columns. Right? So

Yeah. The blue is indicating what we are what it'd be now. '28 '27 is a red for us, and the green is 28. And then the top blue line is Zia Natural Gas, and the purple line across is New Mexico Gas Company.

Okay. So just to be painfully obvious, like, so in '28, the green will be at 60 or something. And then Zia would be or let's say Zia New Mexico would

be somewhere around 45. Yeah. Okay. Got it.

Thank you. And if it's staying on the slide, though, something like this, you commented that we don't know what Zia and New Mexico Gas are planning to do. They may be increasing their rates as well.

These when we when we calculated these, these were based as of June. So these were the rates based as of June 2025. It was possible those that Right. Right. We get our rates from our neighboring communities usually around their June rates, and so we kind of use that when we're doing our budget preparations. So, yeah, so they're they're off they're a little almost a year old for rates. I so I don't know what their current rates are the moment. So those two

Yeah. Exactly. Do

you have any insight at all into what, they're thinking of doing or communities are thinking is everybody kind of looking at rate increases of one kind or another or what? Just any sense of that.

I have no clue. Not sure. Just do you have anything? No. Yeah. We just look at the rates and use as a as a neighboring.

Benchmark. Okay.

Yeah.

Do they also just out of curiosity, do they have a it partitioned into a fixed charge, a charge, and a variable charge as well?

Yes. They all have, similar kind of structure as we do.

Do you know in a percentage basis whether their fixed charges are kind of this the same percentage as hours of a total bill and of higher or lower?

I don't have that information offhand. I can pull it from my computer, but I don't have it with me. I'm sorry. Like, I'm happy to do that if you want me to. Okay.

You want to ahead? So

back on the consumption slide, so the number four in this slide deck. So in this case, for 2122, '23, the actual is, higher than the budget. Right. Also it is for the more recent years. But then if you look at the next slide for sales, all but one year, all but 2021, the sales are are failing to meet. Okay. And I'm just wondering if that so if we're trying to understand why we need to do such a big jump Mhmm. In our rates. Right. The just looking at comparing these two slides, maybe help us understand that.

So to basically, you know, our consumption was higher than the budget. But if you look at the next slide for '22 and '23, the, sale revenue sales revenue was actually lower, more akin to the more recent years. So we weren't getting the right sales. I mean, so maybe we weren't charging the right rates. Is is that one way to look at it? That our rates were not high enough. We had adequate sales, but the the value the the amount brought in by those sales were not adequate, and this it's just, like, snowballing down the line.

Think that it's, yeah, it's kinda showing that. And I think sometime when we budget our sales, it's it's almost like a a mix of all of the different rates. And so sometimes it's not and I'm sorry. I I should have corrected the slide. I realized when I got up here that I did that before. So there so the, members of the public, there should be additional three numbers after the last comma. Sorry. Forgot that that was wrong, and I didn't update it this month. So, yeah.

I believe that's okay. Just looking at the bars. Yeah. Yeah.

Or zeros at the end. Yeah. Yeah.

No. It just seemed interesting to me that even in the years where, you know, the consumption was good in the sales sense, the budget weren't weren't getting some dollars in. Right?

Say something about that. Yeah. So we've been going through all of the budgets, you know, and looking at where things are spent and what we're doing. And gas is kind of an interesting utility because no matter what, we have to do work on it. It's in great shape.

And and because it's a regulated utility, it's like owning a nuclear facility. We no matter what, we can't turn our back on it. We have all these procedures and things we have to do, whether we know it's in perfect shape, but we have to do it, and it has to be done by our top senior. So no matter what, we have to use the most expensive people within our department to do these things. So, in the past, we were we were constantly chipping everybody around, and we'd have waterline break.

You just, like, grab whoever was avail and then you'd kind of turn your back on the gas system a little bit because it wasn't, it wasn't presenting any problems, but we can no longer really do that. So every day, there are our top paid guys working on the gas system. So that actually started to to show up in our budget numbers, I think, significantly like last year. And we don't have fewer nobody's really getting off of gas. So just people there's this kinda myth that there are fewer gas customers paying for it.

That's actually not the case. We've actually added customers. And so, you know, there's meters and all of that kind of stuff. It's the same deal. The top senior pipe fitters have to do all of that. That actually hits our budget more within these past two or three years.

Yeah. That's a big part of it.

What about let's take just to follow Jen's point on '23, you got it up here.

We

actually consumed, you know, a million and a half more therms than was predicted. Right?

Yeah.

And yet if

you go to the next slide, you can see we brought in we actually spent more, you know, $3,000,000 more, 3 and a half million dollars $3,000,000 more, right, than was or sorry. No. We

Sales are lower than

Yeah. Our sales are lower. So sorry. How does that turn how does that relate, Clay, to what you were saying?

So so this is actually an interesting thing. We also talked about this. What what is happening here? And, really, it has to do with, you know, over the past few years, our guys are seeing a lot of people actually replacing old furnaces and boilers with more high efficiency, gas appliances. Now there are there are some shifts within people's homes.

Like, people are using more induction stove, so they're getting off of off of gas cooking. So that that's a big change that's occurring across the board here in town and nationwide. But, you know, it's just, you know, our original government built houses had hardly any insulation. Roofs barely had any insulation. And, you know, it was just like gas was super cheap, so they just heated them with whatever.

And now people are are making big attempts at at energy efficient homes. You know, you just see a lot more window replacements, roof replacements that have more insulation insulation being actually pumped into the walls of the home and things like that. So energy consumption per capita is going down, and we've had a lot warmer winters. So the warmer winters is really a big part of that.

No. Right. So, again, sorry. I'm I'm I must be being thick here. Right? Like, in '23, though, we actually consumed more therms. If you go back to the consumption side, f y '23, actual consumption was a million and a half about therms higher. Am I reading that? Let's be is

that right?

You are reading that right?

So we're actually consuming more therms.

Sales are Sales are less than Yeah.

So so I guess I guess since tonight we're talking about rates, I was wondering if that has something to do

Were the rates too low?

Rates too low is the question.

In '23.

'23 and maybe '22. So

Joanne, is it the cost of gas? Because that's so variable.

We've gone through, and there are there are some meters that have cut

the wires. You know, a little color on the cost of gas. In '23, if you remember, we had the the super freeze in Texas, that supply disruption, the cost of gas skyrocketed five to 10 times what was normal. We actually spent the whole year's budget in one month of of the cost. So I think paying attention to the budget part as

we see the big spikes,

we made some adjustments in the budget thinking, oh, that's gonna be what we're gonna see going forward. And then if we didn't realize that everything destabilized and cost gas with them. We're budgeting for the commodity purchase as well as the fixed cost within these these bars. So I would when we look at budget, it's it's that was just projections at the time, the best information we had. When you look at the orange, the actuals, that's really what's important.

And then what Joe and Joanne had mentioned, what we're doing now is let's look at the actuals of what people use over the last five years. Instead of trying to project forward what the market could do, we said, let's just do our budgeting based on what people use over the last five years. Realized this year, the average winter day was 10 degrees warmer throughout the whole year, and so we sold very little gas. Right. The gas fund makes all their money during the winter.

We make very we sell very little gas for hot water heating and cooking throughout the summer. So majority of all our gas consumption's on the six months of the winter season, and that's that's it. So in this case, we lost, this year, we lost a season of gas revenues. That's why Joanne mentioned the projections are was it two two minute? You had it up there. What we're projecting to be short. Yeah. That's the issue is

About two points.

Still had all the operations to do that Clay mentioned. All that fixed o and m costs, we never recovered it through the commodity. So that's that's our challenge.

So can you go through this chart then? Maybe that's the key thing. So the bottom line is where it's warmer, people are not consuming and doing the improvements that Clay mentioned, so they're just not consuming as many. Right? Right. They just are making less money for a given rate structure. So maybe talk through

Yeah. So

slide a little more more detail.

So yeah. So, yes, the revenue is lower, but we still have the cost to operate, maintain the system. We have our inner department charges from the county. We have capital improvement projects. A lot of these are we've got the cost of gas in there. We have revenue transfers. So some of these things that we can't cut cost necessarily because we still have to maintain the same size of system. And like Clay had mentioned, you know, that we've we went through with the new budget. We went through every single item, and it it wasn't something we were spending. We took it out of the budget.

We were trying to see where we could save some money. But in these ones so, like, the blue line, it's kinda just showing how much of, the budget is covered. So, like, the bottom blue, just because that's easier to see Yeah. That's how much we spend of our budget on total operations and maintenance. And so that's kinda just showing, like, where our budget is going to.

That's looking pretty constant, maybe with slight increases.

Yeah. Most of the times, especially when we do budget, generally, if we're not really sure and we're projecting budgets, we usually do about 3% projected every year. And so that's kind of what this is showing. Unless we know we're gonna have a huge expense, a huge capital project, we budget for that. But something like the operation maintenance cost, those never go down. Those go up. And usually right? So so we take we take in a fact that, you know, that those expenses are coming. Inflation's coming. So we take an account for inflation costs every year.

3%.

Usually, about 3%. Unless we know that there's something else bigger coming, most of most of them are flat costs, and so we just increase.

What about let's just say you go up the little thin orange slice total revenue transfer, it seems.

Yeah. So our revenue transfer is we we we take a percentage of our revenue from the gas. And in the past, that revenue transfer would go to the county. Right now, we're doing the revenue transfer, and then they're passing it back to us, and we're using it on capital improvement projects with the with the gas fund. So we're working with, like, Public Works. So Public Works is doing, like, a road project. We'll go into that area and do some maintenance or repairs into that area while the the road's torn up. So we go in and do that kind of stuff. So we're kinda taking

like adding is that almost like a subset of capital improvement, and is it just pull

It is. It is. Accounting. Yeah. We just we just it's a revenue transfer because we are, we have to transfer our revenue, a certain percentage of our revenue to the county. And so we do separate it because if they stop doing that, then we give that to the county. But right now, when we budget it, we budget here's our revenue, and then we take that. And when we take our budget to council in April, they they approve it, and then they approve it back to us to spend on some capital improvement costs for the gas fund.

What about the total interdepartment charges administrative, the gray band?

Okay. So those are our costs, that we pay the general county. Those are to pay for our services for our attorneys, for, payroll, for anything else that the the general county is doing for us. Fleet? Yeah. Fleet is a big one on that one. I always forget that one, but Fleet is a big one. Does that also go up at 3%? That the interdepartmental charges, we we don't calculate that. That comes from our finance department. They give us the percentage, and we we plug those into our budget.

When when they're looking forward in time, do they also adopt sort of a 3% in average inflation rate or something?

I'm not sure how they do, but that's how we do it when we're we're we're doing our budget. I'm not Okay. Miss Florent. Yes.

Yes. That's okay. Yeah.

Very hard to see. The

cost of gas is based on our consumption. Is this is this is for the consumption for the next five years?

The cost of gas is what we actually pay for the gas. And so, again, we we've looked at the history.

Yeah.

Are we seeing changes in the amount consumed and time assumption and the date, but cost increase? Or Yeah.

How do we get that number? Yeah.

What? I'm sorry?

The cost of gas.

Yellow. The yellow.

I I wanna say we did kind of the same idea. We looked at the what it is and projected out what we thought and based off also on what we were estimating we would sell as well too. And we use, like, an average of the cost of gas to kinda predict that we would spend.

The whole thing is kind of basically you take where we are, and then you inflate every most things by about 3%, and then you kind of wind up. Is that basically

That's basically Roughly about Yeah. That's kinda how you do projection or that's how we did the projections. And that's how we could we kinda knew so so, like, in previous summit, like, the what we expected to sell and we didn't sell. So that's why we went and we we really dug into the budget. And we're like, okay. This we're projecting we're selling 8,400,000, but that hasn't even been the case. Last year, it was budgeted 8,400,000, and we didn't do that either. So I'm not sure why it carried over that way. I wasn't doing the budget at the time. What we did this year is we took the last five years to kinda go, okay.

What are we what are we selling? Where are we really at? So that we could try to match our expenses to our revenue. Because we were initially saying our revenue is this high and we're spending this high, but we're not making much in revenue sales. So we were trying to bring it down to kind of a a closer projection of what we really sell.

And if we were to keep the same rate structure as we have now just as a thought experiment, like, where would our balances be?

With without any

the next few years. Without any adjustment.

If you wanna go without any adjustment

Yeah. Just just this No

rate adjustments.

Just trying to build the case. Like, why are we you know? Well,

I mean, we ended '25 with a negative almost $500,000. We're projecting at this end of the year, we're gonna be at about two a negative 2,300,000. So we do need some to start we need to kinda bring that up to a level that's sustainable and also be able to, fund our reserves that we're not funding right now that we've talked about. Yes. That's thank you.

I always have sorry. Voice. I always have these tables in the

I know.

Not just you.

Occupational hazard of being in finance.

Unable to win this battle in

the active discussions I've ever you're looking at your screen. I'll ask Eric if you have any questions.

No. I'm okay. I'm I'm, I really like this is very, very well done. I appreciate all the work that went into this.

Okay. No problem. I've got a couple questions here. I was pointing a different tack if if you could Go. Go. Go. Yeah. The staff report says the proposed rate increases for the gas fund are 29% in FY '27 and seventeen percent in '28, which are really scary numbers.

They are.

And when I look at the ten year forecast, it uses it says 275%. What I think is that I think there's a problem here, though, if you think, oh, it's a 27% increase or a 29% increase. That's as you pointed out originally, there's three components.

Right.

And I get and and you're only looking when you get I think you're only looking that's what I wanna confirm. When you use this 27 or 29% number, at the two components, the service charge and the fixed charge, you're not including the variable charge. So when a customer looks at his bill, he's not gonna see that much of a rate increase. Is that correct?

That is correct. So part of it is because the service fee, we're not raising 27%. We're raising that at at, like, 8%. It's the fixed cost of gas that we're rating to 27%. The variable cost of gas, we have no control over. That's just the cost of gas. Yes. That's the pass through.

So But I did the numbers, using the 70 therms per year. I got, percentage wise, about 16% in the first year and a little under 11%, 10 something for the second year, which isn't nearly as

too, because I did the same, and I have those same calculations. You're

But so, I mean, those are still bad enough, but they're not bad as as this 2029% or 17%. Yeah.

Again, like

So that I mean, so in terms of looking at it as a customer

Mhmm.

That's really the kind of rate increase we're talking about for the typical customer in the average month. Because it will be obviously more in the wintertime, which not everybody's a typical customer, but Right. Trying to have something to compare. Okay. That was my big concern here that we that the numbers are not quite as scary as they've as they're presented in some some some ways of looking at it.

And the cost average too. So I think we use, like, 43¢. So it could be higher, could be lower, and so that percentages could be a little bit different. But that was the average cost of gas. So Okay. Use that.

Are there other questions now from the board? When did

we last raise rates? I remember there was the whole Ukraine war problem.

That was a different thing.

When did when did we last look at the fixed, this, fixed rate?

It's four years.

Three years ago? Okay. So

We did a four four year rate increase the last time. This time, we're only doing two.

If there's no more questions from the board now, I'll open it up to public comment. Thank you again, Joanne.

Thank you.

So anyone who would like to make comment, we'll talk with the folks in chambers. As I said earlier, if you'll be just come to the podium and give your name and please limit your comments to three minutes. We appreciate it. So is there any public comment? K. I'm not seeing any at the moment. Going once. Going twice. K. Is there any public comment online?

Chair Gibson, there is public I think there's public comment online. Page r, if you would like to make public comment, I just did the allow to talk. So go ahead, and you have three minutes.

Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Perfect. So I'm Paige Ramsey. I'm just a little concerned about the huge rate increase. I have a great job at the lab. I work three jobs. I'm not worried about myself, but for, you know, the lower income family my sister has four kids. Her husband doesn't make nearly as much money that I do, and I'm just worried that we're pricing out these lower income families from Los Alamos because it's the point where everything's increasing.

Oh, you say 10 is not a big deal. Well, it's not when it's just gas, but when it's you know, my electric's gonna go up because of what you guys passed this year and the gas at the pump is expensive. It all adds up. So, you know, there is this possibility that families in a lower income bracket that don't qualify for assistance will freeze this coming winter.

Thank you. Is there any other public comment on that?

Chair Gibson, I do not see anybody else with their hand up.

Okay. With that, we'll close public comment and come back to the board for further discussion and eventually potentially action.

Can I backtrack a little bit? There was a comment in the chat, and I don't I'll just read it to you.

Sure, please.

Nina says, can you provide an average gas bill increase for winter months with this increase into 2027? I don't know if that it's a question rather than a comment. I don't know the proper response to that.

But I guess that could be done, but I don't think we can do it in real time here.

We could add that to a FAQ when it goes to board to council next.

And then it would also be on the website if

you have it there.

Does does the slide on the typical bill capture? Is is 70 therms usage standard for a winter month or a summer month?

Average usage for the customer. Yeah. It's yearly average.

Obviously, more in

the winter.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We'll thank Nina for that comment or chat comment. Back to the board for for the discussion. Everybody's thinking. I'll say a couple of things. First, of course, the obvious. Nobody likes to deal with rate increases. I mean, staff doesn't like them. We don't like them. Customers don't like them, and we're all customers.

So it's kind of having to deal with something we we have to deal with. There are, I can tell, about four different drivers for this rate increase. Like almost everything else, there's inflation underlying it. National issue that we're not gonna solve at this moment. As Clay mentioned earlier, and and I think it's significant, there are compliance issues that keep will keep having to meet ever ever longer lists of requirements that get imposed on us from, in this case, mostly the state or some cases federal.

Doesn't get you any more gas. I am not convinced a lot of it helps with the safety, but that's we're all familiar with that kind of a culture where requirements keep getting added, whether they're really caught whether they're they have a favorable cost benefit ratio or not. We have we have to comply. The reduced usage has been pointed out and well, the cost of operating system are basically fixed that gets spread over fewer terms of gas. And then finally, one that they're trying to fix here.

Working from the previous slide you saw, we've been behind. We have not raised rates as much as we should have over the years, meaning that our financial situation has gotten to be somewhat perilous in the gas fund. So we we've got to not only catch up and start charging sustainable rates, but we have to dig ourselves out of that hole, which will take a few years. Although, as pointed out, we raise the rates now. We shouldn't have to raise them significantly other than for inflation, going forward and and should be able to get ourselves out of the hole here.

So there are reasons. I know nobody likes it, but that's what it looks like we are dealing with. And and it's, yeah, it's a big chunk of the time. It looks to me we'll get it in dollars and cents for the this nominal seventy third rate usage average over the year. For the first year, the increase is about $11.

And for the second year, the increase is about $8.40. In really round numbers, it's about $10 a month, is the is the increase, which as, was pointed out in public comment earlier, yeah, that doesn't seem like much. But, you know, you're getting hit everybody's getting hit with those things everywhere. And, unfortunately, that is the cycle that we are all in. So I wish it were different, but that's we've gotta keep the system solvent and and run-in a in a sustainable manner.

And this is what it appears we are gonna need to do to to make that happen.

It seems that our tools are fairly limited. Right? Suppose we'll try to fix this.

Yeah. Well, we could squeeze on FILO harder to reduce costs. We can do that.

That's why I was interested in the the I think it I can't remember what color it was. The gray band was or no. The bottom band, the blue band, right, was operations and maintenance costs are not predicted to increase dramatically, but

they were inflated on the standard 3%. I

could read you some I don't know. Clay have This one, you

know, staffing is a fixed cost. And if you recall two years ago, we had a audit by the public regulatory commission, and they identified several things that we needed to do in becoming clients. And you'd have to staff up to do that. And have a budget that's been established over a four year term at 2% a year, which it was. We were we fell behind in

here we

are today. And and, really, the biggest issue was not selling much gas this winter. That that really put us behind it. Basically.

So I can give you some specific examples. Like, tonight, you you approved the purchase of the Vactor. So the Vactor, that's a that's that's a nice little, like, cross section of a of a thing that we're looking at. Back maybe three, four years ago, that Vactor would probably be a 150 to a $180,000 less than it is now. Just across the board, what everybody's having to deal with the reality of I mean, look at how much it costs to buy a car now.

It's so much more than it was just even, like, five, eight years ago. So same thing with the Vactor. And the Vactor gets spread among all of our budget areas, so gas has to pay for part of that too. So I had to we had or we all had to scramble to purchase this one because next year, they're gonna be even more. We see several things coming down the down the, you know, pike that's gonna end up cut causing even more expense.

So we, you know, hurried and hustled this through now for a budget adjustment in this fiscal year so we can purchase it. But if you think about, like, your lives and your work, think you know, the our guys also have to go to require training. They have to travel away. Right? So travel has just gotten way more expensive, especially on the gas system. We have to send them for training. They might we've we've lowered the number of people. And it's like, man, this is hitting our budget. How many of them get to go to a a gas conference? And that used to be a a set thing, and it's like, now we're like, send them two this year instead of four.

So we've had to do things like that, tighten their belts with stuff like that. Pipe, we put in carbon based petroleum based pipe now, so the cost of pipe is more. And just you spread that among every single thing we do, and that's up to what we're what we're looking at.

Not all inflation is is at the consumer price index. That's okay. Only consumer goods, a consumer basket. Utility, there's lots of different inflation indexes, and utilities is higher in general. Higher. Higher than the consumer price index. Yeah. Yeah.

Have the compliance costs grown? I know, finally, you mentioned a few years ago there

was an audit, and, you know,

that that was a that was a, you know, that was a step function. Have they have there been other step functions in the intervening time, or is it a continuous creeping growth of compliance costs? Or has it been does it just jump up and then kinda stay steady?

Yeah. So Philo Philo talked about the audit that we went through, and we had we had some probable findings, and then we had some actual violations because they were things that that we had kind of, like, we didn't prioritize them because that we they weren't things that were presenting a problem, but they are required. And so in order to do that, we have to dedicate staff that we had not done before. And so we had to we had to actually we had to bring in another senior pipe fitter and create a third supervisor position. We always had two.

We have a third because all they do is oversee gas, basically, compliance and gas o and m's and and preventative maintenance. So we have all these, you know, myriad of things that we have to do on every year, every other year, three year, five year, and things that we do. We even have to do, they make us go out and, you know, operate the system in reverse on purpose to make sure that we have just all these procedures. You know? And so like you said, there was a step function, after this last audit that we went through where we said, alright.

New gas supervisor and dedicated senior pipe fitters to always doing this stuff, whether we like, you know, chair Gibson talks about whether we it really is helping or it doesn't sell more gas, but we have to do it. Violation came. So for instance, one of the things that that we now have to do is go through and and touch, actually do something to every single piece

of pipe that that

comes up above the grid. That means every single home, somebody has to go back there and and do something to it every year. So we so this year, we're painting them all because, you know, any little bit of rust, most of rust all the way through, it just sometimes you get that little that can't be there. And so we're painting them all. We actually replaced several of the old meters, and they you know, it's just things like that. And and so, like you said, so we had a step function, and now it's just gonna, like, slowly creep up.

Yeah.

And, obviously Yep. Running two and a half million. That's just that's not gonna work.

That's not good. Any other board comments? There I is somebody brave enough to make the, make a motion? Am I stuck with that? No. I

will do that. We'll do that. Right. I move that board of public utilities recommend that council adopt in Los Alamos code ordinance number zero two dash three seven nine ordinance amending chapter 40, article three, sections 41 for the one fifty two of the code of the incorporated the incorporated county of Los Alamos per Yeah. Perfect.

K. The suggested motion has been moved and seconded. Any other final? Kathy, please call the

roll. Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Nochley? Yes. Member Gibson? Yes. Member Straubburg?

Yes.

I think you said I think you said yes. Do you wanna confirm that?

Yeah. I I said yes. I'm I appreciate what you said earlier about all the reasons, and it's a sad yes, but it's a yes.

We appreciate. We're all none of us like it. Okay. Motion passes four to zero. Thank you, Joanne. Thank you. Or Thank you. All the staff of working on this for quite a while. We actually discussed this quite a bit during our budget development process. This is the option three that we came up with in trying to deal with the, with the financial situation of the gas fund. Hopefully, we'll get that squared away over time in just a few years. Alright. Thank you. We'll move on. Alright.

On a much lighter note, close to twenty years ago when I was starting to track energy use in the community, needed to get data. And I was referred to Kathy who had a different role at that time in the department, but she was very helpful in not only digging up consumption reports, but explaining them to me very patiently. And after almost twenty years, I think I almost understand them. But, I wouldn't have without, without Kathy's help originally. And this is Kathy's last meeting with us.

But, so we have here a certificate of appreciation awarded to Kathy Diana in recognition of her twenty years of outstanding service in many roles within the county. Her expertise, professionalism, and vibrant personality have left a lasting impact. We are grateful for her contributions to the mission, vision, and values of Los Alamos County, the Department of Utilities, Board of Public Utilities from May 2006 to May 2026. That they were gonna miss you. Thank you very much.

You go. Thank you for all the service. You You've heard that many times over. Kathy,

I have some other things for you. Oh, we used to have a old award here in utilities. It's called essential peace. And isn't it a wonderful thing that we're all different? Each of us has strengths and skills to share. When you we link our individual strengths together, we're invincible. I can't imagine us without you. That's the piece I

Oh, yeah.

And then I wanna from the county, give you a leadership coin. Thank you. And leadership, we believe in all employees are leaders, that they lead best by example, taking initiative and inspiring trust while making things happen for the common good. You made things happen for this department. Oh. So thank you. Thank you.

Yes. Was nice weeks to get better. But I rather say I

love my county career, and it was not an easy decision. It's what I think I think I'm glad I made. Pretty true. But it wasn't an easy decision, and, you know, I would recommend recommend this job to anybody. And, you all are just fantastic workers. Yeah. Also, close your ears, General County people, but we have the best department. This is amazing. So

Thank you. Thank you, Kathy.

Thank you very much. For being here early tonight to help get this all set up. Had to happen. Well, when things have to happen, we it's great to have people who recognize that and get it done. And I know other people did too tonight. So alright. We move on. More fun stuff back to fun stuff in the oh, fun.

It's in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure.

The overview of the ECA budget process and presentation of the DOE LAC resource pool budget for fiscal years '27 and '28 based on the ECA that we don't have.

Ben. Thank you, chair. Good evening. The board. Not the start of the presentation, but that's fine.

Which one do you want, Ben? Slides. This is

all I have.

Okay. This is all we have. These are the corrected slides. I take it then. Yep. That's fine. I can I can link it? So we've been doing this for forty years now through the ECA, which kicked off in 1985 and has been extended ever since its first ten year term, I believe. Or is it thirty years? Fifty? Thirty

years. Ten and then months at a time. Yes.

So here we are. We're still working under the extended ECA, but we're getting closer to finishing our new ECA. But the new ECA will follow the same budgeting process, which have here. In the presentation, it shows a I believe it's got a 12 step process that we follow for getting through this Los Alamos power pool budget. I won't go into the details of that. Don't have it here.

But

I do wanna

It's coming.

Is it coming? Yeah. It's

coming. Okay. Just ramble for a minute.

Let's see.

The slide that was showing here is a corrected slide that was put in because of a error in two rows in this sheet here. Our pool combined resource expenditures both for FY 2027 and FY 2028, the two columns under the Los Alamos energy percent and the Department of Energy percent were carried over from the prior year's budget and not updated for this year's calculations. So those numbers were corrected. So '24 is 12 on this sheet changed, which changed the the overall total resource cost, but the allocations of those costs to the two parties under the ECA, the county and the DOE. We changed those numbers, which changed the cost shares for the oh, here we go.

Take my slides. Thank you. Yeah. So nine step process. I guess I added three steps. Getting more efficient

here. They'll soon be required.

Starts off with loads and resources. So the practical thing to do is to say, what are coming loads gonna be? What energy do we need to supply the critical loads and all the loads at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as well as all the residences and businesses in the county. The the residences, like, I don't change much over time. Historically, remained relatively flat.

It dropped a bit during, the pandemic, back up to slowly climbing, clear around half to 1% a year or in our bouts. So nothing really much to speak of. Although we are, based upon the studies we've done in the past two or so years, electrification, we do believe, of both heating and transportation is gonna be coming. It does appear to be a little slowed down. Lost the momentum here in the past year, but that's still coming.

So we're still planning for that. Not but more in a reactive sense. We plan for it, be ready for it, wait for it to happen, and then deal with it. So that's where we get our loads from. Resources are what the generation we have in order to supply the the loads, the electrical demands that our customers and the, Los Alamos National Laboratory puts upon our system.

We project those for ten years out. We don't budget necessary for a full ten year process. When we look specifically here, twenty four month budget as required under the terms of the coordination agreement or NCA. We also plan and budget for, supporting Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Lab as a scheduling agent for that. And we don't generally buy most of their power.

We buy just enough power to make up for where they didn't buy enough power through the Western Area Power Administration, or if they have a little bit of extra they need to sell, we'll handle those sales. Next step is the we take the adoptive. We create a county budget, which covers all of the expenses that the county will incur in buying power and supplying it to through the ECA to both the county and Los Amos National Laboratory.

That

prepares a we prepare the lack lack budget for that, and that ties in both with electric production on the generation side and electric distribution because electric distribution is one of electric production's two customers. That's how we get our revenue back to pay for all the electricity and services that we buy in generation. Next step is we get a resource cost and capital projections. They, under the ECA, have a share of costs that they incur directly for transmission lines and other systems that provide energy to the power pool and to the county. Next step is to calculate the county's resource cost and capital projections.

That is because the county buys most of the electric resources for the pool power pool. We need to know how much do we are buying, what assets do we already own that need capital improvements. The biggest ones are the two hydro facilities that we have, Abiquiu and Albato. Those get calculated together with, electric production with get together and come up with those values and a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into the capital projections. Then we prepare a budget based on operating procedures, ECA, power purchase arrangements to come up with the twenty four month budget that we're talking about today.

So we're here at step six, presenting the twenty four month budget to the power pool op oh, I actually did that, yesterday to present that twenty four month budget to the Power Pool operating committee for approval. We're still working through some details. As I said, we made a revision to the energy allocation factors, so that's gonna take a little longer to get through the Power Pool operating committee. So that's why we're presenting it to you at this time, not for approval, but simply as a presentation and introduction. The next step will be to present you you for approval in our next meeting here.

And then that goes to the county council approval, and then it gets submitted to DOE, an NSA contracting officer, to implement on their end. That gets us through the signing process, the approval process, I should say, to implement that budget and move forward. So all the approvals are in place through step nine. Next slide, please. If there's any questions, please speak up and ask them. Feel free to

So four of those nine steps are, formal approvals. Right? I I guess nine is a submission, but that results in an approval or

or a rejection. Right? Yes. Hopefully, not a rejection. Don't

Has it has it have these budgets ever been rejected by any of these people in the past? I'm just curious.

I'm not aware of that, but I've only been doing this for eight years. And I've I've seen changes to the in from input, corrections to errors such as we've done here. I'm not aware of, outright rejection. That would be a difficult place to be in given the high importance of the getting this budget approved in order to maintain the electric power supply to the county and the national lab. Chair Gibson, are you aware of any?

I don't often remember any, but I haven't tracked it all for since 1985.

There may have been some dissenting votes along the way that didn't prevent passage. It's awesome. Next slide, please. So the following tables are all under the term will be happening under the term of the 2026 ECA, which is planned to be infected 08/01/2026. It's a little fuzzy there on the last month of July. Typically, our our fiscal year starts in July, but we've got our last extension under modification 26 to the ECA, covers us through July 31, so partly into our fiscal year, one month into our fis FY '27 fiscal year.

Ben, before you leave that slide, you're making apparently, an assumption about the terms of the 2026 ECA, which, you know, is still a work in progress. What some are you what changes from the current ECA are you assuming, if any? You gotta be using something. And I asked, what would are you using current ECA or some draft of the old ECA, or where what is what are you using?

As you know, I can't speak to the specific details of the new ECA's negotiations and what's to happen. So but I can generalize it to say that largely the accounting practices that are being followed under the current ECA will be retained and continued in forthcoming 2026 ECA. So all the way we handle the cost allocations between the county and the side will remain roughly the same. There is additional language in the new ECA to intended to address specific concerns about, future resources and risks associated with those future resources and markets and where those go, but those don't affect the cost allocation practices from an accounting standpoint.

Jared, this budget does include the Foxtail Flats project, and that is in the new ECA. It's not in the old ECA. That's a new resource. The county procured the Port Of Los Alamos power.

Did it did it recognized as a group of resource and always get your credit?

And not in financially. This budget this budget recognizes

Well

Is it the the DOE will only pay for services rendered. But, yes, you're right. As far as, they approved us pursuing that resource, but this budget represents Okay. Foxtail Flats and the energy storage.

Well, since we're talking Foxtail Flats, you you didn't mean to do my next question. We don't have a business plan for Foxtail Flats yet. We're waiting for the ECA to do that. But, presumably, some assumptions some some assumptions are made about how much power are is coming to us, us meaning the pool, how much power is going to Sandia Kirtland, how much power is going someplace else. What assumptions are made there about a business plan that doesn't exist yet?

The assumptions under this are that we use as much of the solar well, first of all, we use all of the energy storage capacity between Los Alamos County, the DOE, NSA, and for Lantel in the power pool, as well as for Sandia Kirtland and their pro rata share of the battery system. The energy storage system is fully distributed across the three parties that I just mentioned. The PowerPool, two parties, and Sandia Kirtland as well. That's the three parties that handles the battery side. Talk about the photovoltaic energy side.

Sandia Kirtland has signed up for a share of that. Not to say they can't take more if they have a need. We, as their scheduling agent, provide them additional power when their generation is not sufficient to meet their needs. A piece of that could be additional energy from Foxtel Flats that they haven't signed up for. And and, that also applies to the county and the national lab under the power pool.

If their if our load rises during the summer, heating's really hot and air conditioning loads skyrocket, we'll use as much PV as we can to supply that before we go pursue other resources. So that's that's built into the calculations and forecasts of this loads and resource chart here about how much energy we anticipate being able to use from the Foxtail Flats. You'll notice in the pink block there, the first row there, PPA Foxtail Flats PV total, it doesn't actually start until, May 2020. Is that May? It's April.

April 2027. That's when phase one, the 50% capacity of the four zero four system is anticipated and scheduled to come online. So prior to that, we don't have anything. And then it kicks on, and we start getting the energy from that resource. Will you at that point, we can use as much of the PV as is available.

We need the power, and we'll take it all. It depends percent capacity of the PV is absolutely usable by the power pool and at that point. Come, July, so the following fiscal year, f y twenty twenty eight, that's when 100% of the capacity of the Voltaic system and the entire capacity of the battery system will come online. And we'll see that when we get to the FY twenty seven or '8 slides. And that's when we get potentially more PV than the county and Sandia alone can use, which is where we have persons in the position of needing to dis sell, essentially, excess power.

Most of that power will be occur in the summer just because longer days in the summer, you get more energy during the summer, and the PV system just works better than it does in those short winter months. You get a lot more energy, summer than the winter. So we even in the winter, there's not that much to sell even with the full capacity of the project. So when we get to the summer, there there will be months when we anticipate, especially if the, come Lynel's combustion turbine generator is running, and we'll have to, you mentioned in a business plan, come up with an approach to most cost effectively sell that additional power. There are other approaches that we are considering.

If we could find a advantageous long duration storage system or even another type of lithium based shorter four hour storage system at an effective cost, we could actually procure that and save store more of our daytime power. In fact, we could store enough daytime power to sink the entire 170 megawatt capacity of the facility of the Foxtel Flats PV facility. So that is one approach that we are looking at exploring as well under the business plan examination.

So, Ben, can I ask you just to get hope we're not being too dense here? Just let's let me let's walk through this chart and make sure I'd like to make sure I understand it. So every number is megawatt hours. Right? On this sheet, yes. Okay. So the first two forecasts, land load forecast, LAPP, lack load forecast, LAPP. And I looked through these numbers. Tell me what those rows mean. Say so land will load for this is what the laboratory is forecasting for the whole power pool load to be forty seven five zero zero one in July and so forth.

And then what and and the second row is what the county is forecasting for the same load. So this is they're they're making estimates of the total load each party, and they come up with these different numbers.

So so our the first row, the land and load forecast for the lap is Los Alamos Parpool. That's the county plus

The land.

Land and loads. DOE and I say loads depending on what look at it. That's what we get from the DOE. They go and they say, these are all our Estimates. Estimates for the coming ten years. And they add in our estimate for that, and they come up with a combined total load forecast.

K.

As a sanity check, you know, just validate that their numbers are in the ballpark of where we expect them to be. The county looks at historical recent historical gains, from one to three years depending on how the loads have changed over the the past. And we look at an appropriate time period, average it out, and we say, okay. This is what we've used in the past as just as a baseline and say, does do your numbers make sense? So that's what that second row is, lack load forecast megawatt hours for the pool. Mhmm. That's the county's my organization, electric productions validation of the

It's your methodology for validating total load energy needs, and then the laboratory has its method.

Right. Okay.

And then we say, yeah. They're pretty close. For the most part, they're not that far off. If we look at the total for the year, they're only off by, you know Yeah. Less than a percent. So we're like, good. That works. And then we use what we were provided with from Lantel as our baseline load forecast.

You always use the Lantel forecast as the baseline?

I can't speak to the past. I've only been doing this for three years now, and, yes, we have. We I do believe in the past, there have been some reasons to where some perceived inflation in the forecast where they didn't necessarily match reality as we went forward. I believe that has been largely taken out of their estimates. And, again, as we see here, the historical comparison, the validation against their numbers is pretty close, so we are comfortable and confident in, using their numbers as a baseline.

So that's what you need. And then each then subsequently below that is what each resource you anticipate. Is this is this you, sorry. By you, I mean, the county, the department, anticipating the generation, or the lab, or who who gets to choose on this one? It's it's both.

So we, the county, says, here's the resources we have. The hydros, Laramie River Station, we have historical data. We use that as a baseline. Some of it's kind of, based on a validated estimate of what the past said and what we think future is gonna be, especially with the hydros. Just a little bit of a of a Yeah. Moving target. Estimation there based upon what the other patients were for last year, how much snowpack did we get, what are we expecting in the future, that kind of thing. So those are fuzzy, but we use historical data. For example, for this year, we said, it's been a pretty pretty poor snowpack. We're probably gonna have another bad year like we did last year.

So that last year's data was our baseline for this coming the coming years. And we'll adjust that if we need to as we do our budget process next year. Laramie River Station, that's pretty straightforward. It's just based upon what we had in the past. Pretty reliable numbers there. Well, that PV landfill, that's kind of a placeholder there until we get that fixed. Yes. Effectively zero, but it's still a resource there, an approved resource. Foxtel flats, that's the new one, and this was the new wrinkle in the way we handle it because now we have a Cynthia Kirtland involved as an off taker in that project. So it's changed our accounting and load forecasting practices significantly for this round this year.

We can see it kicking off in April there. The remaining several items, WAPA WAPA LAC firm, that's the hydropower allocation that, the county has. Following line, WAPA DOE firm, that's the DOE's hydropower allocation. Again, we're assuming that based upon the poor water flow through Glencaynen Hydro Plant where that energy comes from. It's been terrible, and it'll probably be terrible again this year.

So we used the same numbers last year, and that should be fairly close. The new items here at the bottom, the PPA day and PPA night, those arose because of our the nature of our new PV resources. Obviously, the sun doesn't shine at night, so we have to buy some power. Our battery isn't big enough to handle all that yet unless we get more storage. So we've calculated on a monthly average basis how much energy do we need to buy during the day. We'll have to buy some power during the day in certain months. You see all the way up through April when Foxtel plants kicked on, we're buying a lot of power. And at night, we're always gonna be buying power until we get worse nighttime generation. Any more questions on this?

Well, until until Foxtail Flats comes on, I mean, the majority source of resource that we have for power is our is our PPAs by a pretty good margin.

Yeah. After losing, San Juan General New Station in, August or September 2022, there was a 30 megawatt resource that was intended to be replaced by our Uniper deal. Our Uniper PPAs went away, subsequently, and so now we're on the market. That's why I've come to you, at least a couple of times in the past handful of months to seek short term PPAs. And I'm gonna be coming to you again in ten minutes. Month or two at the latest for another PPA to cover us until Foxtel Flats is operational.

When you've done that in the past, I don't recall distinguishing day and night. Is that gonna be an issue? Or

That's entirely new because of the nature of all of our resources all of our resources, except for the PV landfill, which is tiny anyway, are around the clock resources in general. Everything runs just twenty four seven. Once we start generating, it keeps on until in the example of the turbine, it's planned to run for six or seven months straight, assuming it doesn't have any trip off trips where it fails. Because of the nature of Foxtel Flats PV, we had to go and calculate this day and night calculation. And that's where I said that so there's a lot of you don't see here, but there were a lot of forecasting and calculations that went into that, calculating, differentiating how long is the day each month, how many hours do we have, how much generation do we have, looking at the hourly generation for the, projected for the solar field, across an entire year, hourly.

So 88,760 different data points for generation and looking at that and saying, okay. The battery can take this much. How much do we have leftover that we need to either sell by both day and night?

I just came up with PPA purchasing. There's no issue doing specific nighttime per

No issue whatsoever. We can get the the markets are flexible. They'll give us blocks however.

Twenty four hour block is by these

And buy twenty four around the clock blocks. That's what we've been buying under the latest two PPAs we got. But marketers are they're more than happy to sell you, generally, call it on peak or off peak energy, day or night box. That's not an issue.

This is including some of the on peak and a lot of the off peak. Right?

Yes. So this includes everything we need based on our forecast to be whole twenty four hours a day throughout the entire year. Again, there's some averaging going on when we get to this level here because it's the nuances, we don't know what day what the weather's gonna be on a daily basis. Temperatures affect, energy consumption. So there's averaging going on here, but this is a a good representation of where we expect to be.

Any other questions? Does Eric have any questions? No. I'm I, you know, I keep looking at Foxtail Flats. I hear that the groundbreaking is ain't that ain't the groundbreaking supposed to be next week? That's correct. On the fourteenth. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to it. Give you a report. Alright. Let's move on to the next slide then.

You leave Sure. And it sounds like we're getting into anticipating business plan for Foxtail Flats. And it sounds like from what you say that we're counting on Foxtail Flats very heavily during the day. Before we've really looked at whether or not we want to diversify our daytime power more than that, because we're putting a lot of eggs in that basket, Why this would be this would be a big part of a discussion for our business plan, but we're not there yet because we don't have DCA yet. What are you are you anticipating dealing with the diversification of sources issue in the daytime in particular, which is part of our of our objectives, you know, of our strategic goals is to be at diverse sources.

This looks like it's concentrating Disconnecting source a lot. How are you dealing with that or thinking about that at this point? Great question. Thanks, Richard.

So I've been presenting to the board every six months approximately for the past two years, I believe, now where we are in, we've called it our IRP, integrated resource plan implementation status updates. We've called it that. But what it is is it's my division looking at what generating resources can we get that will help us, one, both diversify and provide additional energy at night when the sun doesn't shine. Those resources could be generating resources, or they could be energy storage resources. So we've been looking at everything available under the sun, small modular reactors, microreactors, geothermal projects.

We are currently looking at three different geothermal projects, and we have looked at least at at least three others in the past that have fallen to the wayside or been rejected. We are also continuing to look at, thermal resources even though they don't necessarily meet the spirit and intent of our carbon neutral 2040 goal. They still may be financially advantageous, from a perspective, especially with the emerging coming extended day ahead market that we're gonna be entering next not this next fall, but in the 2027. That's gonna inject a lot of uncertainty into where we are and how things are priced. Has been been talking with me about, UAMPs, one of we are a member of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems.

They have entered into EDAM, I think.

Yeah. Yeah.

April, I think. Yeah. It was their kickoff for that. And so they're getting some some lessons on how that actually works. And one of the lessons is that having generating capacity, not just power, but actually the ability dispatchable capacity where you can turn it on and off when you need to as a as a resource has value, and it can potentially impact large impacts on the costs of resources under EDAM and how that is handled.

So that's one thing we're looking at closely, and that's why we might need pushed into, well, looking at thermal resources even though, I guess, I said they don't fit in with the necessary with the spirit of a carbon neutral goal decarbonization. They may be necessary simply to provide that capacity to avoid capacity penalties and charges under the extended data head market. So that's a long answer to your question. I hope it answers it. So we are looking at all these other resources.

We recognize that we need to diversify. This is a big egg in our nest here, and it's and we it was necessary in order to secure that. That's the resource that was available to us. It was either take it or leave it, and we elected to take it because it was a huge step towards our carbon neutral goal. And we'll point out under the description of the way our carbon neutral rule is written and what carbon neutrality means, Austell flats any energy from that that we resell counts towards our carbon neutral goal as offsetting thermal energy from natural gas or coal, typically.

So under that measure, which I don't generally use generally, I look at how much energy can we use, and I with Vauxhall Flats, it's estimated to be approaching 50% of our energy will come from Vauxhall Flats. So it'll be 50% Never mind the not including the hydros or with the hydros, about 50% carbon free energy. If you start throwing in the excess power, that gets us much closer to 80 plus percent towards our carbon neutral goal, which is a huge step up. And that was recognized by both the board members at the time and the council members at the time when Foxtel Flats was approved as a project to go forward. So did I answer all your question, or is there some additional color I can give to that?

Well, it's probably as far as we need to go now. We'll we'll eventually have the major dis a big discussion about that, I'm sure, and look at all the various options and so forth. And we're well aware that you're busy trying to research alternatives, geothermal, SMR, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. Let let's go on. Thank you.

I have a quick question. Oh,

I'm sorry.

Is there anyone at EDM who specializes in storage that we could sell our daytime stuff to without investing ourselves directly in storage? I'm just curious.

I'm not aware of any opportunities to

somebody else's.

Get that sort of resource. Storage is still expensive. There are emerging technologies that are expected to be once they come become commercialized to lower the cost of storage, but they're not at that commercially commercialized point yet. Yeah. So I've been hearing for the past

scale and maybe did it better.

Yes. There are there are a number of promising technologies. Iron flow batteries, iron air batteries, gravity storage systems, compressed air storage. But even pumped hydro is still a thing. Though the cost is a diff it's difficult to make those costs come down. But we are continuing to track the pumped hydro storage pro there's a couple of pumped hydro storage projects using tank thermal tank storage that are ongoing in California that we're monitoring.

Do you have a sense of the I mean, what what you would know now pretty well what the finances are, what the when you would decide to build batteries, to build more storage, or to buy a nighttime PPA.

I mean, that's a pretty definitive number. What do you what do you think

likely to come for a false bed? Getting

some battery, the cost is still high. When we bought our storage with Foxtel Flats, it equates to approximately an extra $111 per megawatt hour just to store the energy.

So you

add on the roughly $40 a megawatt hour from the PV, and you're up to a $150 a megawatt hour, which sounds high in our market. And it is. Until you start considering the alternatives of buying a natural gas turbine, and those are in the same ballpark of a 120 to a 140 plus dollars a megawatt hour.

What's the nighttime cost you?

Nighttime PPA right now is the same price as what we had in our last two p a PPAs in the we first one we got for March was $27, I think, a megawatt hour, and the next PPA was was low thirties right now. Now that's not to say the prices now are atypically low. Hey, Ben. Not Prices are low? Eric.

It's Hey, Ben. So you're saying a $150 for for storage and right. I I I get that. Now and you're saying the natural gas is about the same, but does that take into account the fact that a natural gas plant is gonna last about forty years and battery storage has to be replaced every twenty years? If we got into a natural gas unit either through, say, as a owner, a share owner, or through a PPA of some sort, I don't really see that mattering, the lifespan.

Yes. Natural gas turbine may have a longer lifespan, but unless we actually own the resource ourselves and are paying all those o and m costs and the cost of financing and decommissioning that aren't built into a PPA. To my mind, it's a wash. It's just another dollar for another resource. They're they're swappable as far as I'm concerned.

Okay. Any questions? This, by the way, should have said at the beginning. This is just a discussion item tonight. I'm not taking any action this evening, but we are scheduled to act on this in two weeks. So please ask any questions you need to get the priority you need to make a decision on our next meeting.

If I don't have any questions on this slide, we'll move on to

Spent twenty minutes on it.

These are all fairly similar. This is the same loads and resources similar loads and resources calculated for fiscal year twenty twenty eight. We'll see the significant difference is in the purple boxes where Foxtail Flats is now fully operational. So those numbers have grown. And you can see the seasonal variation across them, bigger in the summer, smaller in the winter as one might expect.

WAPA, again, is just carrying forward our recent historical values, and you'll notice that PPA day pretty much goes away across the year.

You'll have

more than enough power to, during the day unless we get more storage, in which case we can use that and reduce our PPA night values. Any questions? Alright.

Let's move

on to the next slide. The next slide is where we I do have a question.

Sure.

Just back on the forecast. No. Yeah. To the '20 eight. There seems to be an inverse divergence now between the Lantel load forecasting methodology and the Los Alamos County methodology. '63 versus May.

Yes. That's because our forecast take the took took the historical data. And so that's kind of our baseline, and that's what we'll work to refine next This is coming the coming year. However, in f y twenty eight, Lyle is forecasting standing up a new supercomputing facility. Simultaneous, they will be operating their existing supercomputing facility.

So that adds additional 10 plus megawatts around the clock until they get their news. So they stood up and take the old one off. That's what that's what drives that big increase in the forecast. For planning purposes, we use their forecast again with the understanding that we'll replan next year if the appropriations scheduled for that don't hold. It's a good question. Thank you. So let's see. Can we scroll this a little bit up so we see the whole there we go. So what this is now we're looking at dollars here. So the previous two slides were megawatt hours, energy.

Now we're looking at dollars. So everything here is in dollars even though the units aren't shown. So we take those loads and resources, and we say, what is everything gonna cost us? Then we look at all the different charges under the terms of the ECA and accounting practices for utilities and electric electric utilities. Everything comes as either a demand charge or an energy charge. Steve resources, Elvato, Abiquiu, Linerary River Station, Waba, Other purchase power would be the big blanket for all the that includes the night and day PPAs in there in that bin. Economy sales, if

we have

excess power, need to sell. LRS sales, we're projecting to sell all of LRS because it's in a different regional market right now. That could change as we move forward, but that's our current plan. And then you just drill down below. Foxdale Flats.

Battery storage is there just to get the numbers so we can see what's the cost per equivalent cost for that storage capacity itself. You see on the very end there, per cost per megawatt hour is, like I said, almost a $111 mounted. And then Energy, which is $37.88. And this is FY twenty seventh, it doesn't kick on until April. And then transmission cost, we have to pay to get the electricity here from wherever the generators are.

LRS, if we have that, P and M Wheeling, Laura, Jimenez, Tri State, those are all in there. And then all the other costs that go along. And this is similar to what we just talked about gas. There's administrative overhead costs from the county and the utilities department. There's some costs associated with the landfill and having our our dispatch center, which is where our power operations happens, both primary and the backup, where we do our scheduling services for the pool and for Sandy or Kirtland.

We add all those all up, including the summary at the bottom where it brings out demand charges and any charges separately, customer charges, which is a funny term. I won't go into that, but you'll see it's zero here. And Los Alamos but that sometimes shows up with there. We don't have anything this for this fiscal year. And Los Alamos resource total. So your total's there, and then going down the last column, you can see the equivalent cost per megawatt hour for each of these pieces that go into this calculation. So this is on the county side. This is what the county's county's expenditures are for FY '27. If there are any questions, go ahead.

35 let's just say bottom line, $35,700,000, 514 change megawatt hour, $70 per kilowatt hour. That's what county. Seven.

And as I mentioned, this is one half of the expenditures. This is what the county expects to spend. If you go to the next slide, we see what Department of Energy expects to spend. Department of Energy has transmission lines, pads that provide the electricity through their system into the county systems. And so there's things that they pay in at such as, the SCADA system. They own and operate the SCADA system and other things listed on here. And they have their own piece of WAPA energy that they get. That's at the top there, and then they have their combustion turbine. Generally, we don't pay the they don't pass any of those costs on to

the county because the has a behind

the meter unauthorized, so it's a special purpose approved resource that doesn't impact the pool. Lowers their load, but it doesn't the cost of county is not handled under the pool. And then same summary statements at the bottom and the same cost per totals and cost per megawatt hour for the DOE and what they they are spending and contributing towards the pool.

They generally fire up the turbine when the accelerator's going. Is that

That's generally the plan. So, emotionally, that's July through December, I believe. But that's not gonna happen this July. Any questions? Not hearing any.

Let's move on to the next slide. This is where we take those two prior slides for the county expenditures and the DOE expenditures and combine them. And then that's at the top, all of us pulled added together for both demand and energy. You see the two line items, Los Alamos, Department of Energy, and totals. And what we do is we take those totals for demand and energy, and we apply demand and energy allocation factors. We just write under the ECA,

a little ECA, clear ECA pan, the forthcoming ECA.

And that says how those total pool costs get split across the two parties, UAE and the county. And that's what the revision that I produced today changed was two of those rows, the Los Alamos energy percentage and the Department of Energy energy percentage. That sounds weird, but that's what it is. Those two rows, the cost allocation percentages were misinadvertently retained from the prior year's calculation, so we had to update them with this year's and f y twenty seven and f y twenty eight's allocation factors. And that changes the totals in the total column, all the dollars, as well as the cost per megawatt hour.

Numbers are there. If anyone has any questions, please. Otherwise, we'll move on to the next slide.

K. So the bottom line here is if I go back two slides in my head, don't go back. The county expects to spend $35,000,000. Right? And then now we're expecting to get about $26.25, $26,000,000 back. That's 20 oh, I'm looking at the wrong ones on my screen. 26. Oh, it's different. Sorry. 26.7. So it's, 27,000,000. We expect it so we expect the lab to give us back Right. 700,000 out of the 35. The rest that's their share. Yes. Okay.

And the balance is what county is is paying. And I shouldn't say the county. I should say that's what EP pays and then gets revenue back from electric distribution. Yeah. For that. Sure. It's nice.

Next slide.

So this is the same. Right? We'll go through the same slides. There's two resource expenditure slides for FY 2028 for the county. Same same calculations.

And then the next slide is yeah.

It pops up some energy storage. That that is one important point is this July 2027 is when Foxtel Flats on the fifth fiscal year 2028 is scheduled to have full 100% capacity commercial operation for both the PV and the battery energy storage component. And so those costs those full costs are now reflected in here. And you can see they are substantial, but the cost of our energy is substantial regardless. Again, you can see the cost per megawatt hour for the storage at a 110 and 96¢ and the cost of the PV at $37.88 per megawatt hour.

Any questions? Alright. Let's move to the next slide, and we can go back if anyone has any questions. Likewise, a similar sheet for the DOE resource expenditures for FY 2028. This one's almost identical. The numbers change just because of, the forecasted costs with their escalator built into it. But they don't have any different resources. So for the most part, it looks the same or similar, I should say. Next slide, please. And here is the combined resource expenditures for FY 2028.

Board member Nachin, as you mentioned, the numbers the same sorts of numbers apply here. The total cost to the Los Alamos for the total resource cost in yellow that yellow highlighted box, the portion that is borne by Los Alamos' customers, and the portion that is on through energy.

Yeah. I was just fiddling around the number. It's basically point 75% both of these years. Flat

flat. So, like, 75% customer. Right.

You can see the the energy if you look on the Los Alamos energy percent and the less DOE energy percent, those two rows there for July 27 is 20.29%. And then for Department of Energy, it's 79%. So that's the energy. Then you can see the demand sort of there. If you look at the total at the end, it's 8217% for energy.

While that information's in here, Many more other questions, please feel free. Otherwise, I think that's the end of this presentation.

Ben, you corrected some numbers from what was in our agenda doc here. Could you provide those updated charts in in either electronically or hard copy or both, whatever? Yes. I did send them. Believe in this packet. And they're in the packet. Alright. I apologize. I apologize.

Reading the

old ones as well. Yeah. You're right. I apologize. Thank you. Disregard.

So

this is done every every fiscal year, basically, though? Just the year. It goes through that nine step process. Yes.

We do

it every year and calculate a new twenty four month budget. Even though it's called twenty four month budget, it really only applies for the one year, and then we redo that second year of the twenty four

month Taking into account. Yes.

Taking into account the additional knowledge that we've gained in the subsequent year.

So in two weeks' time, we'll be asked to vote

on this. It's it's great.

Have any questions? The new resolution? Fire away.

You'll have to do this for tonight. Thank you.

My pleasure.

Alright. Both in two hours, but I think we're close enough to the end. So I propose we could find volume results. Anybody actually needs to break quite anything. K. We'll move on to the biennial vergender of the rule and regulations. That's the schedule, which is on page one seventy three of our agenda doc. And this too is a discussion item tonight with action anticipated. Joanne? Small. Small.

That's

okay. So I'm gonna go ahead. It's we're gonna do the rules and regulations, but before, I'll start with the EV charger presentation, and then I'll kinda go over the changes with the that we're proposing or introducing, I should say. I'm sorry. So every six months, we've been asked to bring, some updates on EV charging stations.

So what they're doing here so we have our two level three EV chargers. One's here at the Municipal Building, one's in the White Rock Visitor Center. We did, the installation of the two, the six level two chargers here at the Municipal Building. I think it started in, like, November, and it completed in December. And it went live on December 31.

So that's I think from December 30, we saw the first chart. The next page. This is showing our level three. So this is, includes both White Rock and Los Alamos. The blue box is our the DPU meter and then the charge point kilowatt hours. So it's just kinda showing the difference. They're not exactly, but this one's showing pretty close based on what we build and then what we were charged by charge point. Oh, I'm sorry. That was just lost all. I thought I could put them together.

This is White Rock. White Rock is kinda holding steady with their customer usage that previous to the charger two or the level twos being installed. Again, this is just showing what we build on the DPU to DPU meter versus what the charge point shows as kilowatt hours. On the next slide, we're showing the level two. And when I was pulling this graph together, I know that January and February looked kinda off.

And I think that had some timing with the billing and when the meter were read for our BP meter. So instead of changing on the graph, I just left it exactly how it was charged, in the billing. But if you take the two in the green, the 3,700 and the 8,500 in average, it's about 6,100. So I think there was just a a timing error with when we read the meter here at the deep at the municipal building. So I just kinda wanted to point that out. It looks really off, but I think connecting the two months kinda makes a little more sense.

They both look like March is what

you're thinking.

Yeah. I think I think if it would have been done properly with the DPU meter, it would have. And I could have done that for the chart, but I wanted to keep the consistency of what we we build in our system, our billing system, to kinda show the graph. So the next slide is showing demand usage, and it's showing the level three, for both Los Alamos and White Rock and the level two. And it's staying at about, 64 kilowatts for the demand on all of the units there.

Here's our customer count, and these are for January, February, March. You'll see the level two, how much, customer usage we're seeing. That's the customer count for each of those months. They could be the same customer,

but

I didn't look at that. I looked at the the count of each time it was used by a customer. So it could be duplicate. It could be Philo, who has a EV charger, he could be on there seven times. So but I didn't I don't know if he uses it, but he did. Okay. He he might be counted there more than once. So I didn't differentiate the different numbers. It's just the number of times that it was used. Yeah.

They call it charging sessions. The charging sessions. Okay.

Okay. That's a good one.

I'll keep that. So the

next page is kinda showing the financial results, which I think all of you are familiar with this. This has been presented before. We are showing a net income loss for our level threes, And this has been consistent with, what we've presented before about six months ago, and it hasn't really changed. It's it's averaging about $2,000 a month in in revenue loss.

Something's going in the right direction. It was March in particular.

Yeah. It's showing a little bit. It's not we'll see in the next few months how that looks. But, yeah, it's it looks that way. It's heading in the right direction.

That's just be that's because our fixed fees are pretty much constant.

Yeah. Our fixed fees are constant. So the, like, the gross revenue and, like, the service fee is based on the gross revenue. So that's always 10%. That's that's a contracted amount that we pay charge point. So that'll vary based on what our gross revenue is. And the electric expense is variable. Again, it's same kind of study, but it's dependent on what the cost is. And we go to the next page. This is looking at the level two financial results.

So this is the first three months of it. We're still also showing with the current rates that we have a net income loss. I think maybe, again, January, February might be a little skewed because of the electric expense that I kept in

that first

slide. So the 1,600 might be a little bit lower, but the net loss in January might be a little bit higher. So, again, the gross revenue, the 10% service fee is based 10% of the gross revenue, and then the electric expense is variable, but everything else is flat. And all of these, the replacement maintenance and cellular service fees were calculated based on the contracted amount that we have for these level two chargers.

Joanne, why is the cell service so expensive for the level twos? I mean, level three, it's only $28 a month.

If I remember correctly, when I

was Six.

There was six of six cellular services on this one versus the other one only has one.

Yeah. Was the question. Thank you.

Thank you.

Get out of these million dollar questions and start looking at No. No. I could. Yeah.

Yeah. This is, like like, small compared to what you've been looking at the last two presentations. So important. Almost lost in the noise. But Yeah. So this is just our pro form a level for the level three. So this is just kinda looking at the average kilowatt hour sold. The the rate that we have it now is monthly. It's averaging about 2,000, net income loss. And over the course of the next twelve months at this rate for the last three months, it's looking at a $24,000 loss in the next twelve months.

Remember, this is level three. The next slide will have level two. Not as big of a loss, but we're also still showing a net income loss for these ones as well. And so we're looking at, like, a loss about 1,300 a month and over the course of the next twelve months about 15,000. The next slide is question slot. So those are those are that's the presentation, pulling in the level two chargers. So I'll I'll take any questions, and then I can go over the rates, or I can go over the rates first real quick because I might stick with this.

Yeah. Why don't we Okay. Do this first. Yeah.

Okay. So first of all, one question might have been that we increased the number of level two, whether that would impact the usage of level three at the municipal building. Looks like it did not.

No. It actually decreased. Our the number the the customer count and the sales for the level three. Once level two went up, it decreased significantly the level threes.

Level three usage matter in the

From previous from previous prior yeah. From the previous quarter, it did decrease.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Months of March, for example.

Yeah. It stayed steady for those three months, but if we looked prior to Wednesday like the other. Right. Yeah.

I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That would be good to understand.

Okay. I can pull that in if we

And then the others, I just don't remember when we made the rate change. You know? So for the six month pattern of getting an update is to try to assess the impact of the rate changes. I

believe we changed it about a year ago with the, EV chargers.

The EV charger fees were adjusted in applied in January 2025.

So took it in November?

Yeah.

Yeah. That's what I

thought. Okay.

So it's only six months ago. Okay. Impact of the Yeah.

Fee change.

2025.

Oh, in 2025.

Okay. So do we know yet? Can we do we have enough data, do you think, to begin to understand the impact of the rate of the fee change on usage?

We didn't have that much data prior to the rate change. So Okay. It's it's more a case of we set the price to where it's comparable to the general market price.

Yeah.

And if we choose to change it, it's it will be because of the performance financials that we see if

we elect to change that.

I also think if I remember correctly, when these, probably when this first came out with the rates, the demand cost wasn't wasn't included. So projections at that time looked like it would be okay. Or I know when we when it came back and we started looking at the actual cost of the meter charges, the demand wasn't included in that. So I think that might have is where we're really seeing the loss because the expense of the demand is is a lot.

The questions on the recharging?

I just wanted to maybe point to the slide with the revenue and expense. You'll see here gross revenue. That's what we get from ChargePoint and electric expense. You'll see we're tracking instantly or if you like it, it's in the gross revenue, and I think that's and Joanne gets into our next slide. We increased the the b for the charting commensurate with the electric rate.

Okay. So that is that portion of that. So then here's our fee schedule. So, if you go, Tabby, to I think the third

One or the

Yeah. The red

lines. Okay.

So the first section that I'm bringing to you is the the level two and the level three rate. So I'm proposing to increase that by the 8%, which is what electric is approved for starting July 1. And so that's just an 8% increase to kinda bring that up with what we're doing with electric rates. And then the second section, when I was going through all the water rates, I noticed that we have nowhere in here where we we rent hydrant meters, which construction companies use, and they they hook it up to our hydrant meter, and they rent it from us. And then we charge them per month.

Well, we've been charging $25 a month, and we've been charging the current commercial rate, but there's nowhere in the ordinance or in our rate schedule it's been. So I'm adding that kinda match what we're currently doing. I'm sorry. There I made an error in the consumption. It should say consumption per thousand gallons, so I'll have that fixed. I didn't realize that until I walked up here this this afternoon. So that will be fixed when we bring it back in a couple of weeks. So I'm just trying to get that on, our fees so that we're charging accordingly, and there's something there that we can rep to. So those are the only two, rates that I'm bringing to you guys this month.

Thank you. Questions? Comments? Eric, you got it? If you have anything on this?

Eric? He's still there, but he's turned his camera off, so I'm not sure who it's

Hiding. Okay. Well, if he emerges from hiding, we'll be happy to have him back. Since there's no action involved, that's not too big a deal. If there's nothing more on this topic, we will still move on to board business starting with the need to reschedule or do something with our July meeting.

We don't. We only have one meeting scheduled in July anyway, July 15, and it looks like we will not have a quorum that night. So we need to move it one way or the other by a week, or we could cancel it, although I'm really reluctant to do that when you have one meeting. And That's correct. So and I know if winds up being reappointed to the board, he's going to celebrate that by being gone the first month of the midterm.

He'll be gone the whole month of July. So it doesn't matter as far as this rescheduling is concerned what night we do it because he won't be here at all. So the four of us are the the ones that need to determine which night works best for us. So who's gonna be here when?

So as I said, I wrote an email. I will be remote either day.

Is it remote? Either one. So you'll be able to attend. Okay. Good.

I will be able to attend the twenty second, but not the eighth. K.

And Eric, if Eric no. Eric's still waiting now. Well, if you can be here on the twenty second, Jim can be here on the twenty second, and I can be here on the twenty second. I can be here either day. That gives us a forum. No. We we will aim at. We should get Eric back in.

Text.

Yeah. Why don't we really like to have his input on this? Although all of you if he's if he's here, then both, then it's obvious. But he's only here on the East. That's kinda three one way and three the other.

Well, we're trying to get Eric back. Why don't we pull a switcheroo here and move on to the other item on the agenda and then come back? Sure. Anybody have a problem with that? Okay.

Well, then last substantive item is planning for the annual presentation to council, which occurs July 14. This the the purpose of this tonight is just to gather topic suggestions. Let's present I've made a first cut at that, which you'll see on page one ninety seven of the agenda dot. One thing I know I forgot to put in this is mentioning EDAM. Since that's a term everybody's gonna hear about, we might as well start mentioning it.

Oh, yes.

My basic philosophy here instead of the usual kind of review of all the wonderful things that have been done because reports exist and gave a good summary during the budget, hearings and so on, I really thought I'd focus on the issues that the major issues that we are, that we have in front of us and some of which will many of which in one form or another will wind up on council's plate also. So that's kinda what I have focused on. But if people have different ideas, I'm certainly open to that too. Otherwise, I would make up a presentation out of this out of the comics. If there's things here you don't think we can do, that too.

Costs. Right? Costs are just going up and up.

Well, you'll notice under organizational challenges at the bottom, there is finances. Yeah. That's costs. That's revenues. That's all that stuff.

I don't intend to spend a significant amount of time on any of these because it's only, you know, fifteen minutes or something like that. But I wanna keep people aware of the what's in the what's in the mill here or make them aware if they're not aware, which make it a case. And some of these, we don't know yet. We don't know there'll probably be something to say about Elkridge, but today, I couldn't tell you what it is, because it'll hopefully be a little further down the down the path than it is now. Same is true of ECA.

It's a minor thing under the electricity. Mhmm. Other potential carbon resources, you might say, and next gen storage solutions. Just to put them on the radar that I'm sitting in PV or sources that are intermittent, we need to consider also storage. Yeah. Just just to

I have it noted. Good. Good. Good. Good suggestion.

Others.

Eric, just wanted to mention. That'll make that work. Last action. Awesome.

Got it. Did you ever get Eric?

I called him. Didn't answer. I'll give him a text also.