Climate Action Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning, and welcome to the Napa County Climate Action Committee meeting of Friday, 08/22/2025. May I have the roll call?

Member Lomitina? Present. Member Joseph?

Present.

Member Eisenberg?

Present.

Member Lopez?

Present.

Member Painter?

Here.

Member Narvaez?

Here.

Member Gallagher? Here. Member Daisy? Here. Member Reeves? Here. And member Tripp? Here.

Thank you. Alright. Thank you very much. Please stand if you are able and join me in the pledge of allegiance. All right.

Thank you. We are now at public comment. And during this time, anyone in the public may address the Climate Action Committee regarding any subject over which the committee has jurisdiction but is not on today's agenda. Is there anyone in the audience who would like to come forward to the podium and make public comment?

Hello, Ms. Bieginski. Good morning, Climate Action Committee members. Nice day today. I'm here to just kind of update you on the Napa County Wildlife Habitat Conservation Coalition.

It's been a year since we all came together and listened to a consultant give us a presentation on developing a wildlife conservation plan for Napa County. And we have been meeting every single month, and we launched our website this month. It's nappaconservation.org. And we are planning to remain as an ad hoc committee as the county moves forward with its general plan. Our primary goal is to ensure that there is a conservation plan in place.

However, as you know, the development continues, the land use issues continue, and the beat goes on. So while we work for the general plan and inclusion of some kind of a conservation plan in that, we are also looking at areas in the community where we could become more involved in not just educating developers, but lining up our resources to be able to provide support for the different developments and the EIRs and the different plans. I know that sometimes that we've been sometimes environmentalists excuse that term because it seems to have a negative connotation and developers seem to be adversarial. But this really is an effort to bring everybody together at the table so that we could see what could be made differently, what could become an ideal development in this community. So I welcome any of you to join us.

We are meeting today. We meet the end of we meet the third Friday of the month at the Gasser Building from two to four And we have about 25 people who attend on a pretty regular basis. So I just want to update you on that. We are going to continue moving forward. And if you'd like any more information, please feel free to contact me and be sure to take a look at our website. Thank you.

Thank you.

Kevin Miller, City of Napa, Napa City resident. I just wanted to give a little quick snapshot for the City of Napa. We had our SB thirteen eighty three compliance visit from Calvert Cycle. And so I don't have the report. We've heard Valeo had one last year and is still waiting on the report, but I know we're very prepared for it.

I think two items that show our progress is when we submitted our plan, I guess three years ago now to the state, we identified multifamily as being one of the areas that we needed to make progress on and we identified 47 multifamily complexes representing about 2,500 units, that had no organic service whatsoever, we're down to five. So we've done a lot of pound on the pavement and training, both particularly in English and Spanish. And our plan was that we would complete that by the end of this calendar year and we're definitely on pace to accomplish that. So I think that was one area that we knew we're following our plan and we will complete it. The other is there's a section of the law that's about organic procurement, So you're supposed to either buy compost or do something like that.

It's kind of silly for us because we sell out regularly on all the organic compost that we produce, but we've put all our efforts into if you make renewable power or you make renewable fuel out of organic project products, then you would fulfill that requirement. So I've been working NAPA Recycling and the city have been working on either anaerobic digestion to renewable bio fuel or a biomass conversion, biomass gasification system. Both of them are coming very close. We're in hard negotiations right now. We've only been working on that for fifteen years.

So we hope that, that can come to fruition, but it's coming very close. It would be a 1.5 megawatt biomass plant and the anaerobic digestion to RNG would be enough to fuel the entire Napa recycling fleet as well as the Napa County recycling fleet. So we're crossing our fingers that we can come we're getting very, very close on deal points. We hope to take those deal points to our council in October. Cross your fingers, we'll see if that really happens. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Mr. Miller. That's really exciting about the multifamily collection.

Yes. I really want to shout out one of our staff members, Maria Truffrin. She really led that effort. We've got a team of four to five people, Spanish speakers going out to complexes all over town to make that happen.

Great. Thank you so much.

Kevin reminded me Chris Bence with NAPA Climate Now. I have another exciting project that's happening at NAPA Recycling, which is they are getting permission to do a pilot where they burn wood waste in a biochar furnace and then that wood waste the biochar that's produced will be combined with a compost so they can make a more enhanced product. Yay, Napa Recycling. Great.

Thank you, Chris.

Morning, committee members. Jim Wilson, NAPA. Good to be here. Nice to see you all. Just want to say that a couple of weeks ago, MVUSD Board of Education had a meeting.

A number of us went to hear Rob Mangawala, Operations Assistant Superintendent, talk about the activities in the schools to make their carbon footprint less, thanks to funding they have from their bond. All that is good. What really stuck with me is the way they presented and a little like Kevin comes here frequently to update us on what the action is here at Napa San and Recycling. These department heads are passionate, they know what they're doing, they own the process and they work together. And so it was a very nice format to see not just an assistant superintendent addressing the Board of Education, but the department heads coming to talk about what they all are doing and bringing some of their employees.

You can't do it all the time, I understand that, but once in a while to get the actual owners out in front and hold themselves accountable for that. I just want to give a very brief history of where we are today. We're in 2025. In 2019, Napa Climate Now came around and asked for a climate emergency declaration in the form of a resolution. We didn't get that.

We got proclamations. We did not get an emergency a climate emergency declaration and we did not get a commitment to achieve net zero climate pollution by before 2030, but we got this committee going. The schools, however, made that commitment and they're still working strong. After 2019, we came back around and in 2021, we began to get some traction, first of all, with Calistoga, then we went to American Canyon and then we went to St. Helena, we went to Yountville, we came to Napa and we came to Napa County, we came to the RCD.

Now everybody has that commitment. We have declared that we're in the early stages of a climate emergency and we have pledged to do all we can to prevent 2,030 from coming along and are being in overshoot. I'm very grateful to hear Member Joseph say that our 2030 has already happened. We are in overshoot. We have overestimated the carbon budget and we're scrambling now to do all we can to catch up. All good stuff. It is 2030. That's the important part. And we have a gap to basically address and we need to do that honestly and we need to do it, say, repeatedly for the community and the good of the planet. Thank you.

Thank you, Jim. Is there anyone on the phone?

No public commenters.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you to all our public commenters today. All right. We have one consent item. This is the approval of the minutes from the regular meeting on 06/27/2025. Do I have any public comment on the consent calendar? Seeing none, I will entertain a motion.

So moved, Joseph. Second, Heisenberg.

All right. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed or abstentions? I abstain. Okay. Lopez Ortega is abstaining. All right. Thank you very much. All right. We're moving on to 5A, which is we have two, I believe, administrative items. This is a presentation on the draft NAPA Regional Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. So we will turn this over to staff, Melendez and Sure. Ms.

And I will introduce we have our consultants here with Ascent Environmental, Eric DeCock, project manager, and Honey Walters, the principal with Ascent. And I will hand things over to them.

Great. Thank you so much for being here.

Morning, Chair and Committee members. My name is Honey Walters. As Ryan said, I'm a principal with Ascent. I'm overseeing the contract. We have been working closely with staff from your jurisdictions to prepare the Regional Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. We are thrilled that it's out for a public review. And today we're here to present an overview of the public draft in addition to talking some about the next steps and schedule. So thank you.

Well, good morning, Chair Geller, members of the committee. Eric DeCock with Ascent. It's great to be back here. I was just here a few weeks ago presenting to the Board. This is the second of what I hope to be many public presentations between now and sort of the September, the public review period, talking with you all and your boards and commissions and councils about this project. So again, yeah, the focus today is on that draft cap, and we'll talk about next steps and schedule. And we're very interested in hearing your comments and question as well as what the public has to say today about the plan. So what is the RCAP? It is the comprehensive long range climate plan for this region, for this whole county. It's comprehensive in scope.

It addresses your carbon neutrality and greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and goals, both short and long term. And it well, is it a plan to meet those goals, which we're excited to share more about shortly? It also is a plan that provides a strategy for adapting and building resilience to the impacts of climate change. We know that's already happening, and so it's important that we have a plan for that piece as well to what we call the climate adaptation section of the plan. And really importantly, do want to emphasize that this is a comprehensive plan.

It's dense. There's a lot of material in, but we've worked really hard with staff and many others to make sure that we're building on the great work you're already doing here in Napa County on, you know, advancing sustainability and resilience and climate action. So, that's really important to emphasize and we'll touch on various aspects of that today. You all know this, but just for the record, this is a regional coordinated plan. All six jurisdictions have engaged in the preparation of this plan, so that's exciting.

And that follows through on your commitment through your joint powers agreement and this committee's commitment to do this work. And as we talk about the measures and actions today, both greenhouse gas and adaptation, it's important to remember that many of these measures and actions apply to everybody, but that's not universally true. There'll be some things that, of course, only apply in the unincorporated area. Some certain issues like sea level rise might only really touch the jurisdictions that have coastal presence, and so that's important to remember as well. Why is the RCAP needed?

Hopefully, we don't have to remember this, but I do like to just once again ground us in the reality of the urgency of our climate crisis and that we need to take action swiftly. And while we know there's some tension and frustration about, you know, 02/2040 We know that we need to get on the path and moving now and it's going to take a lot of work. What we can accomplish really depends on, you know, our coordinated action to do this work. And of course, as you see on the slide here, just the facts about climate change. It's good to get grounded in the fact that it's real, it's us, it's bad, scientists agree, but most of all there's hope and that's why we're on this path to preparing a detailed plan and beginning the work of implementing that plan very, very soon.

I also wanted to share a little overview of just some surveying work that was done. The Yale Center for Climate Change conducts periodic national surveys that are very detailed, and we happen to pull data from their most recent survey conducted just a few years ago, and this is data that was gathered from responses from Napa County. And so you can see on the slide here, 71% of residents and adults in Napa County are worried about climate change. About 67% of them believe that climate change is already harming people now or will within the next few years, and about half or a little more than half either believe climate will harm them personally, climate change will harm them personally or have personal or they have personally experienced effects of climate change themselves already, right? So there's no question that your constituents are concerned and they're worried and they're aware of what's going on on this issue.

We also need to remember that even though we're going to be talking about a lot of very difficult things for implementation today, that there are some strong co benefits for taking these steps, right? Some of these steps will cost people money, but many of them in the long term will save people money by reducing how much it costs to just live and consume energy and other things. But there's also a great opportunity to create economic opportunity. We're promoting ecosystem health and the restorative work we do in the landscape and in our lands here in the County. There's an important need to advance energy security, and we'll be talking about that as well.

Public health, quality of life, and of course just the community and social cohesion in our community, all our great co benefits from this plan and its implementation. The plan also really does emphasize partnerships and collaboration. If you look at the individual if you've looked at the plan so far, you'll see that there's individual pages for each measure. And in that introduction to each measure, there is sort of a discussion of who are our partners, who are our collaborators that we need to work with to make this happen. Each individual city or the county alone often can't make the progress needed to truly implement the measures.

Sometimes it's partnering with our residents and our property owners, the community itself, if you will, the institutions in the community. In some cases, it's working with energy utilities, water utilities, water districts, fire districts, whoever it takes. Sometimes it's not just you as the municipal agencies and you know that. Regional agencies, the state of California and even some cases the federal government. But of course, the need for partnership and collaboration and action, everyone plays a part and has a role in this, and that's really important to remember as well.

So we're going to dive in a little bit. We'll first talk, I'll give an overview of the strategies and just the work we've done to date on the technical side to get to the climate, the greenhouse gas mitigation part of the plan, if you will. I've shown here a nice fancy graphic that's also in the plan that talks about the five or six steps that we take when we do a greenhouse gas focused climate action plan. So it starts with establishing that baseline emissions inventory. You all might remember that, that was completed a few years ago for the baseline data gathering year of 2019.

There's a projecting future emissions phase where we project what will happen with these emissions as things grow, as things change in the county over the short and long term. We talk often about setting targets or goals, and so we'll cover that today. We've identified strategies to meet these targets, and of course, you've been presented in the past with some of the working drafts and the preliminary findings from our analysis of what we believe the feasible measures could be and got your feedback, so we'll give you an update on that as well. Of course, once we wrap this all into a plan, we adopt it and we implement it and we monitor it over time, and we'll talk about that as well when we get to some of the overview of the implementation pieces later. So just again, that inventory, just for reminder, you know, we're showing on the pie graphs the total emissions profile in the county broken down both by jurisdiction and by the sector, which is really the sources of where those emissions come from.

And as a reminder, about 43% of emissions in the county in 2019 were in the city of Napa, about 31% of the unincorporated counties, 16% from American Canyon, 5% Helena, Calistoga,

and

then Yountville at about 23%, respectively. So and then by sector, you'll see that the largest wedge in the pie, it's the largest single wedge. It's not the largest in the majority sense, but it is on road transportation at about 39% Energy at about 23%, solid waste at 16%, and the other categories you'll see are all below 10%, and that's off road, ag, wastewater and imported water. That work we did, as a reminder also to understand what would happen if we do and do not take action moving forward in the future, was that forecasting work that was done. You can see the stacked bar on the left on this graph shows that baseline emissions broken down by sector, again, the sources of where emissions come from.

And then you look at the years 2030, 2035 and 2045, and you'll see two bars. The bar on the gray bar on the left shows sort of a no action taken scenario. And then the bars on the right show the effects of this plan in helping to achieve the targets that we've set out for the county working to align with the state's targets. You'll see in those gray bars that even if this region doesn't take action,

there's already a lot of progress being made because of state and federal regulation to drive down emissions in certain sectors, especially in transportation, but also in the way that we generate and source energy, especially in the electricity grid. So if we take no action, there is some reductions, but you'll

see see those in gray gray bars don't get us to those targets that we need to be hitting to be on the path to meeting aggressive reduction goals and then eventually net zero or carbon neutrality in the long term. So all the calculations we've done based on the measures in this plan, which I'll present shortly, do get us to at or below your targets that we set for you for the years 2030 and 2045. And that's really exciting to know that what we put on the page, actions you can take and lead in partnership and in collaboration as a region will get you to 85% below 2019 by 2045. And what's not shown on this graph is with some additional work to do some really important work in the agriculture and open space sector, we believe that the carbon sequestration and storage benefits from those measures will get you to carbon neutrality by the year 2045, if not sooner, depending on how fast we can all move and make progress in securing the funding, the staff and the resources needed to deliver on not just net net emission reductions but also neutrality. So what's in the plan?

We're going to start with those greenhouse gas reduction strategies. There are 21 strategies that kind of cut across all the different sectors in that inventory. And what we do is we call those the big bold strategies are kind of the big ideas. Then there's 46 emission reduction measures that are more specific ways that emissions will be reduced. It's sort of the policy and the measurable targets set according to that policy in terms of we want to electrify all buildings would be a measure or we want to get solid waste emissions and landfills down to a certain percent.

So that's what we call a measure, right? It's very specific and it's measurable. Those implementing actions are the really specific actions that need to be taken to implement the measures. Call those implementing actions and there's most of them are short term, but we have a few long term as well, knowing that there's some things that you'll need to phase as you begin implementation, the short term actions will be finished and you'll need to look longer term at ways to adjust the measure, adjust the program, sometimes new technology or new types of money arrive and we need to kind of change course. So that's what we call long term actions in the plan.

So diving into the first sector, we start with building energy strategies. And you'll see I've highlighted the kind of the core strategies here. We have clean and energy clean and efficient use, energy use in existing buildings. A lot of this sector really does depend on decarbonizing the existing building stock that we have. And what that means is getting natural gas or other fossil fuels out of this energy we use in our homes and businesses, right? We call that electrification or decarbonization. There's a lot of work we can do there through codes, standards, incentives, education. There's a lot of mix of actions that are on the table to make that happen. There's also zero carbon new development. Moving forward, every new building built in this county should be zero carbon.

And the way to do that is, again, through codes, through standards and, of course, leadership in our developers and builders in terms of like meeting those standards and demonstrating proof of concept as we think about ways to build efficiently, whether that's zero net energy homes and businesses or, you know, carbon free, all electric buildings, that's those are the ways to go. We also have energy education awareness and behavior change, and of course that threads through all of the above, right? We need to empower our community members to really reduce their building energy emissions, and there's a lot of ways that that can be done, but we really need partnership, right, in the community. We can set codes and standards. We can partner with Bayron or MCE and others on programs and incentives, financing.

But at the end of the day, we need everyone to be in the community to be motivated and be partners in this. The next sector is transportation. And here we're talking about both on road and off road. I've done some lumping together for the sake of brevity, but, you know, we start off with, of course, the first place a lot of us go with climate action and transportation is we think electric vehicles. And you'll see that is a strategy as well.

We definitely need to do our part. We don't have jurisdiction at the local government level over what kind of cars manufacturers are producing, but we can be partners, right, in getting more charging on the ground, you know, making sure that when we're building new developments or retrofitting major facilities that we're getting that charging in where it's needed and where it's appropriate and also in people's homes and their garages and in existing parking lots. We also need to be thinking about transitioning fleets that we own and operate. And of course, of you are already doing that. It was exciting to hear Kevin's presentation or short remarks this morning about the cool work that can be done to sort of decarbonize and reuse sustainable and renewable energy harvested from waste, and that's awesome.

That's part of the solution. Then, of course, reducing how much we drive, right? VMT, vehicle miles traveled, you've all heard it before, right, in the CEQUA context and the planning lingo. It's very wonky, but, you know, the reality is that reducing how much we drive and finding more efficient ways to get around and really giving people mobility options is what we're talking about, whether that's increasing transportation, active transportation choices, walking and biking, transit where it's appropriate, you know, looking at even very specific measures and actions like reducing winery wastewater hauling, right? We've calculated the VMT and the carbon footprint of having to haul a lot of wastewater out of the county for treatment.

Of course, if we can capture more in county treatment, look at ways to do that, that's a way to also reduce vehicle miles traveled in that specific sector. There's also opportunities, of course, to expand how we're providing zero carbon fuels in the county, and, you know, we're both looking at banning fossil fuel, but also thinking about, you know, looking at places to provide, you know, clean hydrogen when maturing, when that technology begins maturing. We know you're already doing some of that here in piloting efforts, but, know, as the technology matures and then investment opportunities come, we can scale up those opportunities here in Napa. Solid waste, again, we start with both in this sector, it's really about reducing the sources of waste. You know, the waste that we produce does go to landfills and it decomposes inorganically and produces methane, a very harmful, powerful, potent, short lived climate pollutant.

So this strategy first and foremost is about reducing how much we're sending to the landfills that decomposes in that way, right? So that's well, the technical way to describe it is solid waste diversion, right? We want to divert more waste to reuse, recycling, composting, and that's important. Construction and demolition also, and we know that's already in the codes and standards that we're enforcing, but there's a ways to kind of begin to build some momentum on that and expand the reach of the effectiveness of those diversion programs. Waste education, of course, is super important and this is where the community is our partner, right?

It's all of us in our homes and our businesses figuring how can we do better and find opportunities to reduce how much we're consuming, making sure that when we are having to throw something away, we're putting it in the right bins, but also there's the market demand side of that, too, and making sure we're providing opportunities for reuse of that ways. Of course, the amazing work that's already being done, I've always loved to hear Kevin's comments just about the great work that's already happening here in the county and in the city is really, really great. It's also the reducing emissions from landfill side of the equation, and of course we know there's a lot of progress being made. Not all your waste, of course, ends up in landfills in this county. Some of it gets shipped out to Perturo Hills, as you all know, in a different county.

So some of the challenges here and the opportunities as well are to really kind of build the partnership, the cross county partnerships to figure out how do we get both the landfills here, but also outside of our county where we're exporting some waste, how can they increase their methane capture of capacity and efficiency? You know, we have to cap and closed landfills are regulated, but there's always more opportunities as technology matures or different strategies come along to think about how to, you know, capture and destroy that methane either through flaring or putting it to productive use through biogas capture and other methods. So that's really important, and the measures in the plan do speak to that as well. Really quickly, water and wastewater, it's not a huge part of your emissions profile. We know that, but it's also really important to kind of look where we can, no stone unturns approach.

And of course, any work we do in the water and wastewater side, especially in water conservation, is also a climate adaptation strategy, right? In a water constrained future with more increasingly severe or unpredictable drought periods, we need to be mindful about the co benefits of water and wastewater for both know, reducing our carbon footprint, but also thinking about water sustainability over the long term. We definitely have, you know, measures that build on what you're already doing to, you know, reduce waterways, to conserve water, improving water conservation efficiency is a big part of the equation. Creative solutions and really kind of native nature based solutions like bringing back natives in our drought tolerant landscaping is a great opportunity, and that's something that the community and obviously can connect with and how we landscape our homes. It's something you can do at the local government as well and thinking about landscape medians, parks, open spaces that you manage or control.

So that's a great opportunity as well. Reducing methane emissions from treatment plants, and obviously a lot of progress already being made here and a lot more can be done as, again, technology advances and opportunities arise in that sector as well for treatment. Lastly, I'm going to cover agriculture and open space. In this sector, it's a mix of emission reduction measures where we're actually reducing emissions that are already happening or avoiding them, but it also includes really important solutions for improving carbon sequestration and storage in the landscape. So we'll start with reducing fossil fuel use and farming equipment.

Obviously there's a lot of work that can be done. Some incentives are already available to help farmers and operators really reduce the carbon emissions and the equipment they're using. And of course, the plan calls out some of those opportunities to expand on those incentives, partner or scale up those efforts. There's also increasing carbon farming, and this is more on the carbon sequestration side. Again, the plan recognizes the great work already being done here by NAPA RCD and NAPA Green and others who have really piloted and tested the results of carbon farming.

So we have some proofs of concept, lesson learned, a lot of data available, and that was very helpful to us in trying to hone in measures in that space. Of course, increasing sustainable vineyard and grape growing certifications. This is really important, and we recognize all the hard work that some of the certifiers and growers are already doing here in the wineries and building on that, right? How can we improve that? How do we get more participation?

How do we incentivize that? And also just nudge the industry along in reducing carbon footprints and improving sequestration through those certification efforts, which sometimes those are very well aligned. Sustainable livestock practices, you don't have a huge amount of livestock in this county, but where we have it, there are some recommendations and measures in the plan for how that can be done. Expanding the urban forest, obviously, the more we can get tree cover that really helps to, again, healthy mature trees as they grow do sequester carbon, but here's a great climate adaptation co benefit as they can also improve shading and reduce the urban heat island effect as well. We know you've had a lot of challenges over the last few years of wildfire.

I was just leaving for the American Canyon Open House last night and saw the picket fire breaking out over the horizon, so I'm sorry to hear that that's affecting your county, and my thoughts are with the community and the first responders there as they respond to that incident. But, you know, a lot of work you've done, you've learned from fire, and you've already done a lot of work to do forest restoration, to do landscape restoration. You're doing that work. And so as you think about the carbon sequestration and storage benefits of working more strategically on restoration work post disaster or even other disasters like flooding and thinking about how you've already done a lot of work to bring back the health of the Napa River watershed and the Napa River in particular, that's a great success. So how do you scale that to other parts of your watersheds in the county?

So a lot of opportunities to think about the benefits of restoration and stewardship and carbon co benefits that come with that. The last measure I'll group of measures I'll highlight are the work that we need to do when we make land use decisions on how to avoid or minimize carbon stock loss, when we're doing land use changes, right? So any time we think about land use change, where we're approving a new development or a new operation, there is sometimes is a net loss and where we're removing mature trees, mature oak trees, riparian woodlands and other things. So the way to do that is through mitigation. Sometimes it's through avoidance as well and being careful about how we're making those choices.

But the plan does identify some policy recommendations that are consistent at least with the county's adopted policies in terms of where we're seeing this happen in the unincorporated area. So that group of measures would be pretty focused, at least initially, on the county's responsibilities in the unincorporated area. Okay, shifting gears, I'll take a little bit of a breath here. We are now going to talk about the climate adaptation part of the RCAP. What I put on the screen here is just the kind of the multiphase process we typically follow when we're creating a climate adaptation plan or a portion of a regional plan like this.

You know, we begin with that exploring, defining and initiating. We gather a lot of data. We really look at what's already in hazard mitigation plans, and we really understand how climate and climate risk is kind of already being addressed by existing plans. So we did that screen. We took a look at a lot of the adopted plans here in the county.

Then we began to assess vulnerability, we prepared what's called a vulnerability assessment. We believe we, addressed a lot of the big issues with climate change and how climate change will exacerbate known hazards like flooding, wildfire, drought. And then there's new issues that are really not anything we've seen before, things like sea level, right? That's a unique slow onset disaster that's unfolding very slowly, but it will have impacts on our coastline and our estuaries here in Napa over time. So that's documented there.

We presented some of those findings to you last year. Now what we've done since then is worked on those adaptation strategies. We brought some of those to the committee for review in the past. And now we've done a more finder grain work, of course, in the plan. What you see in the adaptation section of the plan is really those specific measures and implementing actions, very similar to the greenhouse gas measures and actions for figuring out what's the goal, what is it that we want to accomplish at the policy or the measure level, and then what are the implementing actions it's going to take to get us there over the short and long term.

So again, I mentioned this briefly. Won't dwell too long here, but of course, climate change is affecting your county. We know there's an increased severity and frequency of wildfires. We have the increasing temperatures, both nighttime and daytime and annual averages that are documented in the literature and in the forecasting work, as well as extreme heat, extended or more severe drought, precipitation events, increased flooding risk, civil rise, and then of course we did also look at energy grid impacts. That's more of a system wide response to some of these climate change impacts and what are some of the risks or vulnerabilities there.

So when we think about the when we look at the adaptation and resilience strategy in the plan, there's sort of six big buckets of measures. The first one is measures that we believe are really good for building overall resilience and adaptation to climate change. They're not necessarily hazard or issue specific. We call that the all hazards approach, building overall resilience for the way that people are organizing, the way that we're thinking about connecting plans together and making sure all the jurisdictions are on the same page. That's what we call all hazards approach.

The next one really the next five are really focused on those five big climate hazards or risks categorically. So I'm not going to go over all of those measures in detail. I know time is short today and we want to get to a lot of your questions and comments as well as hear from the public. But I did want to close by focusing on a few things. First, we're going to talk about the implementation and monitoring section.

You know, this plan is a plan that will need to be adopted by all six jurisdictions. So there's some uniformity, we hope, in terms of support for this plan, adoption, and then as you begin to implement, there's really a need for a regionally coordinated implementation strategy. I'm not going to go super deep into that because we have a separate agenda item that staff will be leading, but the implementation and monitoring section of the R CAP does call out some really specific needs, and so there are we'll be building on that as staff does their presentation. But just know that that's we believe that's critical for the success of the plan, especially in the first five years of implementation. The implementation and monitoring section of the plan does call out some basic plan maintenance monitoring and reporting requirements.

Of course, we want to see periodic emission inventory updates. We believe that's powerful. It would be great to see that happen at least every five years, if not more frequently, but we know from experience that emission inventories, especially multi jurisdictional ones, can be challenging, But it is important to think about periodic inventory updates and make sure we're monitoring looking at the data, how we're doing. We want to see reporting on the plan success, looking at those targets and key indicators. We believe annual reporting is a minimum.

More frequently, like quarterly or monthly, might be appropriate, but of course, we know that that really has to be something that staff and decision makers need to agree in terms of that frequency of interval. So there's a minimum recommendation of annual. You're always welcome to monitor and report more frequently. One way that we do hope to support that monitoring and reporting is to create a dashboard and to identify some key target indicators relative to the measures and targets that the public can have access to at any time, so at least we have a dashboard that's showing how we're making progress, at least in terms of the data that we can gather with the staff and resources that we have. So that the dashboard will be really important once it's set up and be a tool that anyone can use to peer into what's happening.

I will say that you might have seen if you read the plan that the implementation monitoring section does. We did do some cost analysis and some analysis of funding and financing options, so that data is in the plan. I'm not going to give you a detailed overview today, but as a reminder, it was focused on a limited subset, but an important subset of the plan. We had nine greenhouse gas measures where we quantified at an order of magnitude level what the long term implementation costs would be, and then 10 adaptation measures of similar analysis done by all done by Jacob's engineering. It is not I just want to repeat, if you look at some of the data and the numbers in that part of the plan, it should not be interpreted as the estimated cost of the full plan.

It is really just that subset. But we chose those measures. You might recall, we asked for your input on prioritization because we believed, at least at this consultant and staff level, that those prioritized measures would probably be some of the most effective measures because they were quantifiable for greenhouse gas. Then on the adaptation side, we believe they were going to address some of your most acute or concerning climate risks in the near term. So those were really the criteria that you might recall we used for selection.

And so those cost estimates do did focus at least on those bigger measures that we believe would be most powerful or most effective or most needed. In terms of funding and financing, economic planning systems did assist us with an initial review analysis of the kind of the types of funding and financing mechanisms that would be probably most appropriate for supporting plan implementation, things like, you know, one time you know, what's the strategy around use of one time funds in general funds or capital improvement budgets, all the way up to competitive grants, newer, more innovative financing mechanisms like climate resilience districts, which were just authorized a few years ago by legislation. So it's sort of a review of all the ways that you could fund or finance implementation, and it's pretty broad. But obviously, one of their recommendations for a next step was to begin working on more of a near term implementation roadmap so that you know at least for the next five years or so, maybe five to ten years, what your real priorities are, how to match up, you know, applications for external funding sources, allocation of money you directly control, and how you stagger and prioritize and sort of phase those funding applications or those investments.

So we're glad to see that, and again, that next agenda item after this one, we'll dig into that with you a little bit more. So next steps. We did release this plan on August 1 for a sixty day review period. We're a few weeks into that now. The deadline for public comments on the draft RCAP is September 30.

Staff and consultant team, of course, will be reviewing all comments received and considering how to either improve the plan or change it or, you know, consider the input received. We will begin a process after that date of obviously preparing a final plan in addition to that comment response work. We are moving forward with the initial study that you authorized funding for recently. That's going well. We should have a rough draft of that sometime towards the end of the year, early next year, and have that out for review in the late part of the winter of next early part of next year.

We also, again, like I mentioned, hope each jurisdiction will take action to adopt the plan. Of course, we can begin implementation anytime, but definitely full implementation would begin next year for the next twenty years or so. I did want to quickly report back on the outreach and engagement just really quickly and then we'll close here. We had two open houses, one Wednesday night in Yountville, one just last night in American Canyon, fairly well attended and just rich conversations. This was open house format.

So we had an array of boards around the rooms. We had four stations, one talking about what is the plan, what is climate change, why are we doing this. We had a station focused on greenhouse gas measures and actions and had a nice sticky note exercise where folks put sticky notes with different colors on whether they liked it, had questions, or didn't like it. So it was a nice exercise. You could quickly see where there was energy or concern on certain issues and then an adaptation strategy section.

And then there was a station really highlighting what can people do, what can I do? And the staff brought a lot of resources to the table as well and brochures and just information about rebates, programs and things that people can touch and feel and be part of the solution. So that was fun too. So I believe there's one more open house that staff will be facilitating in the city of Napa next week on Tuesday night, so we'll forward to more one more open house to talk about the draft plan there. Concludes my long presentation. Thanks for your patience and happy to take any questions or comments when it's time. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Unless anybody has any pressing questions right now, I'm going go ahead and get public comment first, and then we'll bring it back for discussion. All right. Let's go ahead and do public comments. So if you are in the room and would like to comment, please come forward and feel free to stand in line and wait your turn. Good morning, mister Gilardi.

Hi. Randy Gilardi. Sixteen o one Lincoln Avenue. I live at 3323 Hagan Road in Napa. I am a realtor. I am not representing the real estate industry. This is only my personal comments. Second of all, I do represent developers, many of them. A lot of the homes you probably live in, I've helped develop. I'm gonna be devil's advocate here.

I have some rare concerns about this plan. And first of all, I'm I'm looking at the chart, which was on the screen, and it shows that by 2045, we would have about a 45% reduction in emissions if we don't do anything. To me, that is great. Why are we adding more costs to everyone in our community for trying to reduce it even more? My concern is is that I represent homeowners.

I look at the little Westwood house that is built in 1945. I read the report that says that you are deciding the plan. Excuse me. I shouldn't say you. The plan is asking for everyone to retrofit their homes to all electric by 2045.

We have about 40,000 homes in Napa County. If you divide that by twenty years, that's 2,000 a year. Divide that by 03/1965, you're talking six houses a day needs to be retrofitted. Our staff, our government staff is not large enough in order to even do the inspections, let alone the electricians, the converting a westward house that has gas stoves to electric stoves, that's a cost. Wall furnaces into electric systems, That's a cost.

You could be anywhere from 15 to $50,000 for a conversion of this. We will get the numbers for you. My concern is as you look at the Westwood homes, you look at the homes that were built before 1970, that's a major cost. Now you can say, yeah. We can get grants for people. You're not gonna get 40,000 grants. You're also gonna say, oh, you can do low interest loans. You still have to pay them back, the homeowner does. They're barely making ends meet, let alone turning around saying, oh, I'm required by a certain date to convert. I like the idea of choice.

If you believe in this, climate change, etcetera, here's some grants, Here's some low interest loans. Go for it. Congratulations. It makes you feel good, etcetera. I have solar on my house. And I gotta tell you, the only reason I put it on, because of the tax credit. I didn't do it because of what I believe. I I'm I believe there's climate change. I don't think it's drastic. I see what's going on in our community and in our world.

Okay? I just believe that we are heading down this road of we need to do this or else the whole world is gonna collapse at what the Napa Register said over $1,000,000,000 of cost. Who's paying for that? The four the 100,000 people that live here are gonna have to fork out that kind of money in order to pay for this.

Okay? Mister Glardi, can you wrap up?

I thought I had three minutes. The clock?

It went off a little while ago.

Didn't even hear it.

Yes. It's

okay. Point of sale. I think it's very important to understand. Point of sale is mentioned in the report. It does not even hit the basic of what you're trying to accomplish. It may you may get 300, 400 houses a year at a point of sale. Okay? There are just a lot of issues in here that I have concerns about forestry. Insurance companies are requiring us to take trees out in order to get insurance. Also, I'd like to mention about open enrollment started about fifteen, twenty years ago in Napa Valley Unified School District.

Now we have drive through cars that are lined up going to VICI school or Browns Valley with the major emissions. And everyone's no take no longer taking the school bus, riding their bikes, walking to school anymore because they're across town. So you talk about ways in order to improve, go back to the school district and say, maybe we shouldn't do an open enrollment. Sorry. Again, I'm I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. I thought I had more than three minutes. Thank you very much. Good luck.

Thank you. Chris

Bens, Napa Climate Now. I was at the open house in Yountville on Wednesday, and it was very nice to see member Reeves and member Tripp there as well. There are some benefits to the plan that aren't really apparent, And one of those is all of the items or actions, ways of looking at things that is in the adaptation plan. It lines out in what will be a regionally adopted document ways when we are building or paving or landscaping or farming, approaches that we can take that will give better climate resilience to future hazards. It provides a climate lens for looking at what we're doing.

The other thing that's really great about this whole process is the formation of a working group that's made up of staff from each jurisdiction. So people have a direct way people on your staffs have a direct way to talk to each other about how to prioritize, what strategies to take, funding sources. So I think that will help eliminate silos. It will make things easier to accomplish. And setting priorities is really important, and I think that will help with that. So there are wonderful benefits to this plan, I really am grateful for all of the work all of you have done on it. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Benz.

Jim Wilson, NAPA. Password. I'd like discussion on following, please, if possible today. Black carbon, we had an inventory on short lived climate forces, and that was a major component of our overall emissions and they are related primarily to burning, either internal combustion engines, diesel, wildfires and control burns. I'd like to hear more about black carbon.

The cost, we heard $1,100,000,000 There's a lot of great discussion in the Board of Supervisors meeting we had earlier this month for this presentation. That was a very thoughtful conversation here at the dais. And so what is that? How do we do it? To Mr. Gilardi's point, what is it annually for the 2,045 target? And what is it to meet the 2030 target? What does it take? And that's for the 19 items that we heard about. What about the others?

So do we have an estimate of what the rest of it is going to cost Us, 1,100,000,000.0 plus? I'd like to hear some discussion about this dashboard. I would like to see it to be a time ordered graph similar to the one we saw today. It could be a line graph with a target drawn all the way through year by year by year. I'd also be okay with stacked bar charts like we saw today. But I'd like to see the frequency of those reviews to be every sixty days, like the locally declared emergencies we have, tree mortality for example, we have a report back to the Board of Supervisors every sixty days. Let's please consider that. And that's it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Wilson.

Yvonne Baginski again. I recently converted my house to all electric. And I was very nervous about doing it because when I attend these meetings, I get a lot of mixed and confusing messages. I also worked with contractors who had no information, who did not know about heat pumps, did not know about mini splits, did not know about how to remove gas fireplaces and replace them. There was a tremendous amount of education needing just with these people who do this work.

This is a concern of mine because in going all electric, I was afraid it was going to cost me as much as Mr. Guiardi said it was going to cost me, and it didn't. I removed my gas stove. I replaced it with an induction stove from Costco for $750 I love it. Best thing I've ever done. I can't believe how efficient it is, how wonderful people said you're going have to get rid of all your pots and pans and replace them. Not true. All my pots and pans are cast iron. I didn't have to do any of that. I moved all my gas fireplaces.

I went to the fireplace guy in Cordelia, and I asked him if I could have electric fireplaces. He tried to talk me out of electric and put my gas back in. He said it's going be too much trouble for me to have to go and replace that gas. So what I'm saying is there's an entire industry that needs to be convinced of the efficiency of this. And that's where the lack is. I shut down my furnace. I'm putting in a mini split. My mini split's costing me $1,500 It's going to take my 1,300 square foot house and be efficient with heat and electricity. When they did my HVAC, they told me it was going to cost me 23,000 So you have to shop around. The market will carry this forward.

And I do it because it's the right thing to do and not because there's tax credits. Thank you.

Thank you, Yvonne.

Hi. I'm Linda Brown, NAPA Climate Now. And I wanted to thank the Ascent team and the city staff and the county staff and everyone who showed up, RCD staff, other people at the open house on Wednesday in Yountville. That was a great event and a really great opportunity to talk to people one on one and to brainstorm ideas and to introduce people who haven't been part of this process to the important work that's going on. So thank you for putting these on.

The couple of things I points I thought I would make is, one, when we talk about electrification, I'm always a little bit reserved when I see terms like zero carbon and so forth. If it's coming off the electric grid, it's not zero carbon. It just isn't. It's just displacing emissions. Now, maybe it's a reduced emission load, but there's still natural gas plants operating, pumping out methane, and there's still coal plants and there's still the whole grid.

And so really, it needs to be coupled with conversations about renewable power. It should always be coupled with that and how are we supporting renewable power to power this electrification process. Secondly, I wanted to respond to the gentleman who started off the public comments. I think that there's a really important point in what he had to say, and that is that we have limited resources. I mean, a large budget item and limited resources.

And so the most important thing we can do is prioritize, prioritize, prioritize the projects that we select and go after. And as you've heard me say before, one of the most important things we need to prioritize is not simply for the metric that is used in the study, the RCAP study, and in general use, the carbon dioxide equivalents using a one hundred year time frame because that doesn't give us any information about what's the actual heat reduction that we're going to get from it, the actual impact on climate. We need to start moving this conversation from emissions to heat reduction and really identify which of the projects have the greatest heat reduction benefit for the dollars spent so that our community can feel comfortable that every dollar we're spending is really going toward maximum impact. And that gets back to that 2030 objective, which we have all had, which we're this is very far from that, very, very far from that. And it really needs to open up the conversation to offset credits, which is not which is beyond the scope of this R CAP.

So I think it's a discussion that yet needs to happen. Thank you.

Thank you, Linda. Is there anyone else in the room that would like to speak? Anyone on the phone?

We do have someone on the phone.

Okay. Great.

David, you'll have three minutes when you're ready.

Thank you. This is David Graves calling from, 459 Randolph Street. I have some, reservations about the, that they're not fundamental reservations, but I do think the, the greenhouse gas inventory has got some, fundamental errors that have persisted. So I'll be addressing those in comments. The, the other thing is that the implementation, which mister Gilardi discussed, Linda Brown just discussed, there are there's a whole social ecosystem, miss Pugetski mentioned.

There's a whole social ecosystem that has to be encouraged. There's a the gatekeepers of electricians and plumbers need to be convinced that this is in their interest, that they can succeed, their small businesses by being part of this, not being opposed to it. We need to have more creative financing. We need to have some on bill payments for, you know, so that the costs are not upfront but are paid over time from utility bills or with utility bills. So there's a a great deal of work to do that is sort of there's a lot of hand waving in the plan so far.

I think that's appropriate, but there's a lot of hard work that needs to go into the next phase of implementation. And I look forward to seeing the actual implementation plan be discussed sooner rather than later. Thank you.

Thank you, mister Graves. Is that all on?

No more public comment.

Okay.

Great. Thank you so much. Alright. Well, I'm gonna bring it back to the committee and see if anyone has, first, any questions for our consultants or staff. I did want to mention the issue of cost.

I know that we have discussed this, and it's been reported, the $1,100,000,000 but what we don't talk about is the cost of business as usual. And I don't think we have an estimate of that from our consultants. I'm not sure. But I was in a recent meeting where we were discussing sea level rise, and it was noted that the cost to adapt to sea level rise in the Bay Area is predicted at about $100,000,000,000 by 2050. However, the cost of business as usual is $230,000,000,000 So I think it's really, really important to understand that we are probably looking at at least double the cost if we don't do anything.

So that's an important factor. This was really, really informative. It's the second time I've thought through this, but I think it's good to sit through it several times. I think it really clearly lays out our priorities and where we should be focused. I like the idea, of course, that we have the a near term implementation road map.

I think that is great for us to be working on across jurisdictions. And it seems very well laid out in terms of where we should focus. I think for the different jurisdictions in the county, it's going to be a matter of looking for that low hanging fruit in terms of things that don't cost a lot to implement but will have impact and then also looking at where we can have the greatest impact for our dollars. So yes, there are a lot of details to work out, especially around the financing and, of course, an ongoing educational campaign helping people to adapt and change behavior and all of that as well. But I do think that this is the first the precursor to our road map, and it's a great way to get focused and understand well where we need to take action as our as a group and as jurisdictions as well.

Just wanted to make those comments. Anyone? Director? Committee Member? Eisenberg.

Sorry, I

never remember what would be on.

I can't remember who I am either.

You are a member at this point. Okay. Vice chair, Just

one very, very quick comment. I think if you had done that survey about the 71% people who are concerned about climate change and the amount of fuel it directly affects them. I believe if you pulled up Valley today, those numbers would go up.

How true. Thank you. Amber Painter.

Mike is. Yeah. I can just sort of give my overall comments. Obviously, we're sort of in the middle of our public review period. We haven't completed the sequel process yet.

So this is sort of the beginning of our comments, I'm hoping, and not the end. So a couple of sort of global big picture comments. First of all, I just want to acknowledge that it's a real huge task to create a twenty year plan in an environment where the tools that we use to address climate change just change so quickly. And that and it's kind of built into the plan to have us look at what we might do in two years or five years because it might be very we might add to it in a way that we are not even thinking about today. I certainly hope so.

So I think that's something to really bear in mind that this is different than some other plans that we develop like a general plan because we have to be mindful of those changes. I'll give one specific example that to me is really important and that has more to do in a global sense with how we deal with carbon sequestration. I think it's a real critical piece to particularly address what I think Linda Brown was speaking a little bit to, I hope so, in terms of heat reduction and what we can do even on a global or international basis around carbon sequestration. I want to personally learn more about that. I think our community needs to learn more about it, what we can do locally, but also what's happening not just regionally in Bay Area, but what's happening around the world to assist on that effort, I think is really critically important to how we address climate change.

So sort of back to what we're doing locally and the purpose of this plan, which, know, listen, I've only served on this committee, I think, for less than a year. This has been in the works for a long, long time. But I think it's really bringing giving each of our jurisdictions tools to be in a better position to look at that grant funding, to look at various projects that we might have been had on our radar anyways, but in a way that puts us in a better position for grant funding. I see a lot of examples that align really well with the City of NAPA programs. We've just recently updated our general plan, 40.

I know others have done that as well. The county is beginning that process. Most general plans now are including like ours, an element around climate change and sustainability. We have an urban forestry master plan that's in the work. We have a lot of programs that are really in strong alignment with what is in this plan.

And if it puts us in a better position to try to achieve those goals, I think it's terrific. We just got a presentation on Tuesday night on a new sort of vision and proposal for the Napa River called the River Line Project. It's a project that has multiple benefits, including reduction of VMT, including getting people to be walking and biking. And now we can maybe assign some metrics to that to say how it might benefit. So these are kind of global and big picture comments.

I am fairly certain that our counsel is going to be getting a detailed presentation from Ascent and others on September 2. So I wanted the audience to be aware of that. For me, it is important that I hear and I know we have Councilmember Narvaez and I are here on Climate Action Committee. I think each of our councils should really have an opportunity to give us the feedback we need to give any specific sort of comments, if you will. But a couple of just and to just add a couple of additional comments, I think the Chapter one introduction really sets the stage as to why we are doing this and why it's important.

I think we need to really focus some of these early efforts in terms of the short term, what Chair Gallagher was talking about on that education and outreach, not only to our community, but as it's been mentioned by several of our public commenters, construction community, the business community. I serve also as Chair Alessio on the Board of MCE. There are a lot of resources and tools out there for contractors, but we have a ways to go to really create a local construction community that embraces and will go to a homeowner and say, no, I don't think you should replace that gas water heater with another gas water heater. I think you should get heat pump water heater and here's why. And I don't think they're really quite saying that yet.

Hopefully, they will and whatever we can do to encourage that, I think, is really, really beneficial. And lastly, I will just say, you know, and this is more so from my serving on the MCE board. It has really taught me a great deal about what zero carbon really means. And even through the MCE program where you're looking at 100% renewable, it's not really 100% renewable if you are using power in the middle of the night and that solar is not there. So that's an education piece, I think, that we all need to really be working on.

I do want to be really mindful of the costs. I think we need to be really careful of that. We'll get into that as we talk about implementation during the next item. But I think we can do a lot in terms of the education and setting the stage through this plan. So those are my sort of global big picture comments.

Thank you. Member Joseph?

Yes. Real quickly, I think the RCAP plan is a very good comprehensive plan. So I don't have any objections to most of the elements. I would certainly be an advocate of doing routine greenhouse gas inventories at least every five years because that really is the definition of are we succeeding or not. And then lastly on costs, Chair Gallagher has already pointed out there's a bigger cost if we don't do anything.

I'm reminded of the billions of dollars of losses that PG and E and others are incurring because of these fires that sure, that's a lot of money and undergrounding wire, for example, would be an incredibly expensive ordeal. But we're going to end up paying a lot more because we didn't. And one of the things I've learned over the years is it's real easy to say we can't afford to do the right thing. And it's miraculous how we come up with the extra money to cover when we did the wrong thing. And then lastly, on the actual savings, I don't know, three or four years ago, we went all solar with a battery backup.

We pay about $200 a month for the leasing expense. I don't know what a PG and E bill would be anymore because all I do is pay for gas in the winter and relatively nothing the rest of the time. So when I'm hearing people say they pay 4 or $500 a month for their PG and E bill, we pay $200 and a few bucks because we've had solar with battery backup. So as far as I'm concerned, I don't even know how much money I'm saving on my bill, and I apologize to Mr. Van Gorder that we're not helping out PG and E as well.

But I think it's the opportunity that if more people made that investment and paid $200 a month or $300 a month instead of 500 or $600 a month, they'd probably see that as a real positive thing. And I think that's part of the educational process, too. Thanks.

Member Olesio?

Just some broad comments. First of all, I want to say, like, be amazed that we're in this moment. We have waited a long time for there to be a regional climate action plan. So this is actually a very historic moment, and the county coming together and having something that we can actually create a path forward. So I just want to say thank you to Ascent.

Thank you to the public comment. This is a big moment. I think that the comments both public and here on the dais have been really good feedback, really good comments, and I really appreciate everybody, you know, speaking up. A couple of things I do, you know, in terms of contractors, I'm married to one, and so I have a bit of a bias here. He makes money by building green, and he has for years.

It's actually he has a better product at the end of the day when he flips a house, if you will, or builds, you know, all the electric. And so yes, it's a little bit of an investment, but there's a bigger return at least for him. And I do think that there's a lot of opportunity for us to engage with our contractors and our labor, you know, trades and to do more work on that. It is an ecosystem shift, as Dave Graves has said. It's a bit of a mind shift and behavioral shift.

And I have to think back, it wasn't that long ago, and I might have shared this before, where in our local hospitals people smoked inside the hospital. And then when there was smoking huts just outside the doors of the hospital, there was this big revolt. People were so mad that they have to go outside and, you know, walk 10 feet away to be in a smoking hut to smoke. And then those smoking huts were removed. We can help change behavior.

There is a monetary impact. But as also that's mentioned, you know, just this last year with the, you know, with the atmospheric rains that hit Napa and what it did in District 2 in the Mount Veeder area and the slides and the taking up the roads and the $911,000,000,000 it's gonna cost just to repair that that damage. Just that. The fires. I mean, I do think it costs a lot more in money and in life and just in general, the human experience as we continue to nationwide have these disastrous climate change events.

So it's I just say we just we continue to lean forward. I do want to see us at some point, and it was a little bit too late as we started this path in terms of the greenhouse gas metrics. There is a really serious point about being able to measure heat, what Linda Brown has brought forward, about the impacts of black carbon, the short lived climate, you know, pollutants that are impacting us. But I do think that we need the next conversation, and then the next look is really including that heat element as part of the metric in terms of what we can do. What else do I have here?

Also, you know, as we talk about, you know, the innovation that we can't even, you know, we don't even know what's coming that's going to help us through AI. I think there's going to be a lot of a lot of benefits of what AI and that technology and what's going to roll out from there. That's going to be very exciting. I could talk more, but I just think I hit my really high points. This is a big lift.

I think that as a community, I've seen a lot happen already since we even started this discussion. The greenhouse gas measures that we looked at today are from 2019. You know, if you look at those measures in 2019, they did 2019 because when COVID happened, which is horrific, everything stopped. And all the transportation gases, all those, you know, all those emissions kind of halted. So they had to go back to 2019 to get more of a standard.

But I'll tell you, I know in our wine industry how they're building green, all the work that they're doing in the wine industry. I see the hotels are starting to engage. It's exciting to hear the schools are starting to do this. Even mentioned the restaurants are going, working on green and compostable. We've done a lot of work already, and I just continue to see that momentum.

And with this plan, we can even do more. It's not going to be free, but I think in the long run, it's going to save us in a lot of different ways. And I'm going to end with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies, Remember the Titans? And there's a moment that one of the football players says to the other captain, attitude reflects leadership. Thank you.

Thank you. Does anyone else have any questions or comments? Member Narvaez?

Thank you. On the presentation, I just want to bring up I have a couple thoughts, but I want to clarify something because on the open space, there was the urban let me get back to it. Open space agriculture, there was the urban forestry expand urban forestry forest. I was just curious why it was on agriculture and open space, but not in the building energy and transportation. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because in the city of Napa, we as someone mentioned, we have our urban forestry plan being implemented and worked on.

And we're doing a lot of paving now and we have construction trees is a very much a part of the plan, not just in agriculture and open space, but also within the jurisdictions and where we develop. So I'd like to make sure that we implement that part into the other sections, not just in open space and agriculture. And I'll say that I say it's two sections, where the city with the jurisdiction works with the transportation network to add more trees along next to where we have heavy traffic and also close to neighborhoods where there is heat islands. So those are really great way to reduce some of the to address some of the climate challenges. I will say that there was a comment about insurance companies and trees being removed.

That is very real. There are homeowners that are facing conflicting priorities with removing trees and getting insurance. That's I see that on a regular basis for people looking at having a certain kind of coverage versus jeopardizing coverage. So that's something that we have to address because it's not being addressed recently. It's not going to be addressed in the near future with the Department of Insurance and the California Legislature. That's going to take years to really address. So that's something that the people that want to implement are going to have to face. So that's one thing I wanted to mention. You know, there's a lot of conversations about cost. You know, cost now versus the cost later.

And really, way I see it is when we present this plan to our community, right, and the cost to electrify, I see that cause as an obstacle for many people in our community, right? We know that people are paying more than 30% of their income to rent or mortgage, right? Those are challenges that we've seen our committee face on a regular basis. Whether it's a landlord, that's on the cost for renters that further increases the cost or, you know, as we try to bring young families to the community that has one or two children that barely afford and qualify for a mortgage, now how do we help them electrify their home? Because we know, at least in the city of Napa, many homes are older homes.

The majority of our housing inventory are older homes that need to be, you know, electrified, they need new windows, need new HVAC, they need painting and a lot of things. I bought my home in 'seventeen, we've done significant work on that home, some through grants, some through our money, some through financing, and that is extremely expensive. And I really worry about some of the families that are on the lower income bracket and how we're going to be able to address that. So I see it more as an obstacle that we need to face. The plan here is really good.

We want you know, we want to be able to make this a success. And in an emergency, one of the most important things to address is how do we expand the resources we have to be more effective, right? So I just don't want to sidestep. The other part of the cost is the cost that people will take on. And, you know, there's not just a stove, it's not just the AC, but the paint, the windows.

It's a lot. It's a framework. You're really overhauling the whole home. And for somebody that wants to purchase a house in Napa is already extremely difficult. So I want to make sure that as we have this conversation, we need to be able to look at the end of this plan with the people that we're looking to really take this on and how we're going to help them overcome the obstacle because it's going to be I don't want this to be something that's going to take us by surprise at the end when we really want this to be successful. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Oh, member Reeves.

Thank you. I appreciate all the the other comments. I think we're all in charge of doing the cost benefit analysis on these on our individual houses and as a community together. I appreciate the building environmental retrofit discussion especially, but I think when we look at the pie chart of what causes the most greenhouse gas, it's transportation. And while I support the electrification of cars for sure, I also really support the idea of the cost benefit analysis of getting people onto bicycles and other, small ways of transporting themselves like scooters, electric scooters, or whatever that might look like.

Active transportation is really important to get people to places they actually want to go where maybe more broader bus transportation is a way to get you most of the way, but other people might want to use active transportation in addition or instead of. So I feel like there's a little bit of lack in the plan talking about the idea of really expanding separated bike and pedestrian pathways that will link up lots of areas in the county so that people can make those trips efficiently and safely. I think if we look at European style, and especially Amsterdam style ways of getting people on bikes around town and eliminating car traffic, it would behoove us to do that because it would not only benefit our population but bring a different kind of visitor to the Napa Valley who appreciates active life style, and I think we could make a win win out of that, and but it requires will on the part of the community to say it's important enough for property owners to dedicate or give land that would be used for that kind of a use. So that's just my thoughts on that.

Thank you. Okay. Alright. Well, I don't think you asked for a direction on this one. This was just a presentation, but we are gonna move on. I did wanna say, you know, we have roughly a half hour left, and so I'm not gonna call for a comfort break. But if you need to take a comfort break, please just do so. Okay? And we'll just work it that way. I think that'll be easier and save us some time.

So we're going to go ahead and move on to five b. And this is a presentation on the proposed implementation plan for the Napa Regional Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. This does come with a staff request that we direct project staff to proceed with solicitation of a scope of work for a regional implementation plan and prioritization strategy. And I think Ryan?

Yep. Yeah. You for the intro Please

go ahead.

All right. Great. I think we teed this up really well with the overview of the R CAP to date. And I will be presenting on kind of the next steps on moving forward with implementation and really starting the discussion. We're right at the beginning of thinking about implementation and how we want to accomplish you know, really ambitious goals.

And so today's presentation will be discussing that and requesting endorsement of our recommendation for implementation moving forward. So as mentioned, we'll talk about the proposed implementation plan for the RCAP and wanting to receive direction from the committee to move forward with a regional implementation and prioritization strategy and plan. So the RCAP implementation, this is a regional plan and we will leverage regional like already established regional collaboration and localized action. And as mentioned in several public comments and a discussion before, we've started the all jurisdiction staff level working group and this has been a great strategy for having these discussions and how we will accomplish these measures and start to take action moving forward.

So

the regional implementation plan that we're discussing today can help clarify the coordination needs, define roles and responsibilities, estimate implementation costs, develop funding roadmaps, and create detailed prioritization strategies. So we're asking for directions to direction from the committee to endorse our recommendation of taking a region wide approach to the implementation of the RCAP. This would yield specific implementation plan, a specific implementation plan for all jurisdictions which would identify for each RCAP measure the type of measure, whether this involves developing a study or analysis, planning action, a code change, identifying funding sources, building partnerships or other categories, which jurisdiction or jurisdictions and which department or departments would serve as implementation lead identifying any potential partnerships, whether they're already established or need to be established estimating costs by the year or subset of years moving forward, and the current status of the measure. And lastly, this implementation plan would help assist jurisdictional staff with the working group and city council and board members in prioritizing each measure for implementation based on these above inputs. The plan would also help to identify and create a framework for moving forward with funding and financing mechanisms.

So as mentioned in the previous presentation, you know, comes with a high price tag. Just the 19 priority measures alone with a $1,200,000,000 price tag over the course of about twenty years is a high cost. And that's just for the implementation of these measures, not necessarily the full weighted cost of to industries, building you know, all the sectors and the community at large. But the total these represent the total costs region wide for implementation. Not all of these measures will and actions will require new sources of funding.

We will be able to help leverage leveraging funds to accomplish some of these. But this implementation plan as presented would help to identify some of those already existing funding mechanisms as well as helping us brainstorm and create a structure for creating new sources of funding. So what would the implementation plan look like? We would develop a phased funding roadmap, and we would prioritize actions that can be implemented easily, some of those low hanging fruits that were mentioned before. And then for the non low hanging fruit in the upper canopy, we would find these funding mechanisms and kind of have that roadmap to fund those actions in the long term.

It helps us identify, you know, can general fund revenues fund actions or establishing new funding mechanisms if dedicated local funding isn't readily available as well as leveraging those other outside funds. Also leveraging some of those funds, pursuing state and federal grants, identifying public financing tools like climate resilience districts as we see in Sonoma County, leveraging public and private partnerships, and aligning local funding priorities amongst the joint powers agreement jurisdictions, matching funding, joint applications for these outside funding sources. So this strategy would help us to identify those funding sources and really put us in a great position, as Member Painter mentioned in the last presentation, to put us in a great position to be ready to apply for those funds if and when they do become available. And I want to highlight the importance of community engagement and equitable outcomes in these processes. So the implementation strategies should also prioritize the needs of our most vulnerable and lower income populations and other equity considerations.

It can't just be us doing the work. We need to leverage the partnerships we've already developed with local organizations, the workforce, engage with community members, regional and statewide agencies, and the highlight on the workforce that can help us get this work done. And with this implementation plan, we want to highlight the importance of ongoing monitoring and updates to the to the plan itself. The RCAP is meant to be a living document, not a plan that sits on a shelf and never gets implemented or thought about again. As these implementation actions continue, we can continue to improve our processes.

And as our understanding of the science and technologies moving forward relating to climate change grows, so too can our strategies, our implementation strategies. We need to grow and adapt to better suit the needs of our communities. So as mentioned before, we would look to a minimum of annual reporting, but we would also have the creation of that dashboard which would be a more live update to the public that would present the progress up to date of the R CAP implementation of the R CAP measures. And the monitoring efforts should track the status of the measures to achieve near and long term targets. So the next steps where we're at today.

We still have the RCAP out for public comment and public review. Again, deadline is September 30, so we have just a little over a month left to go. And we are asking direction from the committee today to endorse the staff to move forward with Ascent, engaging with Ascent for a scope of work for this regional implementation plan and prioritization strategy, which would build upon the implementation chapter of the RCAT.

All right. Thank you so much, Mr. Melendez. Do you have any public comment on this item? All right. Great. Anyone with any questions or comments? Member Joseph?

I've got a few. Clarifying question. The dashboard that's been talked about, which I think is exciting, is that something we're getting with the RCAP or is that something we'll get with an implementation plan?

The dashboard creation was in the scope of work for the plan itself. I think the implementation plan would mostly be at the benefit of staff at the jurisdictional level to help implement the plan and help us prioritize the plan. But the dashboard should be created regardless with the creation of the plan itself, the R CAP.

So the R CAP may just give us, here's what the dashboard will look like, here's the metrics. They don't update automatically because that's the implementation plan. Okay, that makes some sense. Second point is, what are we talking about in terms of costs? Are we paying Ascent to come up with the scope of work?

Are we talking about using Ascent to do the implementation plan? Are we going out to bid? I'm getting a little concerned that we're beginning to invest in a particular company and maybe I'm just cynical, but after a while, if you know you're the only person, you'll come up with a reasonable cost, but it might not be as sharp a pencil as if you knew there were two or three other companies out there that could outbid you. And I think we have a fiduciary responsibility to recognize there's got to be other people out there that can give us a different perspective or can build on the RCAP. I recognize the person who wrote the plan knows it better than anybody else, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best bargain for us.

And then the last one is really kind of a comment. I think we should monitor and adapt it over time, but you're going to have to convince me that that's something that staff couldn't do rather than go back out and have a very comprehensive read or update. I think over time, we need to remember this is a very expensive project and the less we spend on consultants and studies and the more we spend on actual insulation and solar panels, I think we're doing a better job. Thank you.

Thank you. Member of Lacian?

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Question, again, just kind of clarifying. When we look when it says the JPA, creating a JPA, we've talked about creating or joint powers of agreement, which is nonbinding. And that was a good way to start in terms of the formation of this committee on a formal level countywide.

We've also talked about, at some point, making transitioning this to appoint a joint powers of authority, so therefore it is more binding. We see this in our transportation through NVTA. And through that model, we're able to leverage, you know, able to leverage more funding for transportation using that model. It's the next step. It's a big step. But I'm wondering, is that what you're talking about when you talk about a JPA? And have you relooked at the benefits of that?

So that is one strategy that we can take to accomplish these these goals to, you know, and to implement effectively. There's been some discussion among staff and about the creation the formation of a joint powers authority. It is an option. We are also with the formation of the staff level working group, moving forward, you know, I think there's also an importance of of the jurisdictional staff themselves also taking ownership of this plan and and implementing, you know, in our own communities rather than the formation of a new authority, a new agency to go and and tell the jurisdictions, telling residents and and the workforce, you know, what to do and implementing the plan. So there's there's drawbacks and benefits, I think, to both approaches, but it's open for discussion.

But this this plan would help identify, you know, what the needs would be to form to form the joint powers authority and a new agency and kind of what that would look like moving forward as well.

Thank you. And it's great to hear that the jurisdictions are working together at a staff level. I guess my only concern is when that happens, you don't have the elected there who are representing the residents. You've got staff versus those who are here to represent our constituents in that in terms of the direction of leadership. So I'm sure there's benefits on both sides of it, and there's also the negative aspects, the shadow side of that.

So I think that's something I want to see explored and really for us to vet to see if that's going to benefit. The concern is as we are now, as how we have it, and member painter brought this forward as a recommendation is to make sure this is presented to all the jurisdictions so each jurisdiction gets to see this in totality and have their own comments is that this takes a lot of time. The way we have this now, you present it to us, you know, the staff has conversation, it's then somehow hopefully trickled to the rest of the councils, and then it comes back. And there's just a lot of time. And we don't time is also a factor here.

It's something that we want to be we want to be able to respond and do things in addition to being able to work together and garner more more funding and grants. But that time factor is really important that we kind of tighten that up too. So I just want to put that out there. The updates every five years on the RCAP, we talked about in the previous presentation, there would be an annual update. Am I confusing the updates? Because I do think an annual update is very important. I don't know with, you know, sixty days. I think that'd be too much. There's staff time and everything. But I do wanna see at least an annual update.

So yes. We're talking about kind of two different updates One is the annual, you know, a minimum annual progress report that we would staff would present on the progress of implementation of the CAP to the various councils and boards. So that would be more of a progress report update annually. And then the five year plan update would be kind of the living document side of things to the actual R CAP document itself and the strategies and measures just to kind of take a step back, think about how the implementation of the measures has been going over the last several years and whether or not the measures themselves need to be tweaked or adjusted to better serve the needs of the community. And that would be the kind of overarching plan update.

Update.

Okay. And then it does seem a little bit a cart before the horse. We haven't even finalized the RCAP. We're still out for comments. We still need to finish the RCAP, you know, put our put the seal on it that it's done before we start the we start deciding on the implementation. So I guess I'm a little confused about why we're doing this now versus waiting for the RCAP to be really finalized.

Can I address that? Yes. I completely hear your comments and agree. I think what we're doing is trying to ramp up so that basically really in sixty, ninety, 100 odd this fall, when the plan gets implemented, we'll already have that scope and cost in hand for, okay, here's what it would take to do the implementation plan. If we wait for the plan to get fully adopted before we even seek

out that scope or do

an RFP for an implementation plan, we've lost time. So we're trying to kind of double up so that when the plan's done, we're

ready to go. Perfect. I love that. Thank you. Thank you for that response. And in terms of what Member Joseph just said, I really appreciate the work that Essent has done. I understand what you're saying. I think that's a really good point. And I really hope Ascent will come back with a really competitive bid. We can continue doing this work. I think the continuity is really important, and I think you've done a great job for us. So thank you very much.

All right. Thank you. We have four members who want to speak, so we're going to start with Member Tripp.

I'll make my comments very quickly. I wanted to thank Mr. Melendez. I thought that was a good overview of the implementation plan, which I think is really important because we have a lot of high level policy. But, you know, we're down to where the rubber meets the road and or the devil's in the details.

So I really think that's an important step. And I also think being able to actually specifically assign or get commitments based on the jurisdiction, based on their particular parameters, limitations, resources will be tremendously helpful. And also for the policymakers to know at a staff level who will be accountable and responsible. So I think that's key, and sooner is probably better than later. Also, I wanted to compliment Ascent on the R CAP, and the meeting we had in Yountville was great, and it brought to mind that a lot of good working relationships have been established.

And that's what a lot of this is about, knowing the people to talk to when you're developing these measures. So all things considered, if the continuity can be retained, I think that that's really important. And finally, two final points. I'm not sure Yountville in particular would be in favor of making this a more formal JPA. I know there are advantages, but also it involves a lot more administration, a lot more structure, and this seems to be working pretty well as we are.

I So just wanted to say that in general. And then I would also just say as a policymaker, comments in writing are super, super helpful. And so anybody today that didn't get a chance to say everything they want to say, it doesn't have to be perfect. Just write it out and send it in, Because actually a lot of that gets looked at when we're at home and we have time to read stuff. So I would really encourage everybody to write their comments. I've seen a lot of stuff on Nextdoor, and I've thought of know, I wish people would actually send it in because it's some of it's negative, but I you know, that's also very important to hear what the community thinks. So again, I really want to thank we had a great meeting in Yountville, it made me feel very optimistic. So thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. Vice Chair Eisenberg.

Thank you. First on the JPA issue. There's one critical difference between NVTA and the Climate Action Committee, and that is NVTA has its own funding through a sales tax. This committee, everything we do is dependent on the jurisdictions signing on and financing, And and we really have to recognize that we are we need all the jurisdictions on our side. And that's one of the reasons why I think that having staff involvement from each of the jurisdictions is absolutely vital as we develop this big picture prioritization.

Also, because in the end, and bringing up the electeds, every last expenditure that happens in a jurisdiction is going to be passed by the elected representatives. So this the prioritization implementation plan has got to be broad enough to include all our jurisdictions. I mean, I know that my particular jurisdiction, Calistoga, really wants to be at the forefront, but we have to but we also know that we have somewhat limited capacity, and we want to do the very best we can with the capacity we we have. And that is where what brings me to what I see as the most important part of this plan's of the implementation plan, and that is to be able to bring jurisdictions together so that they can collaborate, save money on planning, save money on CEQA analysis by working together and to most efficiently implement the RCAP, and which is our goal for that is our goal, that this RCAP gets implemented in the best way possible, in the most complete way possible, and that means bringing all of our jurisdictions on board. Thank you.

Thank you. Member Painter.

I'll try to be brief as well because you took quite a few of the words out of my mouth. Thank you, Chair Eisenberg, for that. I think, you know, you mentioned the all jurisdiction working group. For me, I think the conversation about implementation should really start with that group. I would like to I don't see an urgency, quite honestly, in giving authorization today to move ahead with the scope of work that I think is, unfortunately I mean, it's defined in some ways, but I think there's still a lot of work to do.

My personal preference would be that at the next meeting, we hear back from whatever we hear from our councils at presentation. And we also hear more specifically about the all jurisdiction working group and what those thoughts are on all of the components that should go implement into implementation. I think the very last thing we want to do is to see this fall apart because of things we haven't anticipated around cost and equity and all of the things that we have a little bit of concern about. And while I think Ascent can help with that, for me personally, I would like to hear from our staff and fellow council members and through this all jurisdiction working group about framework of implementation and what it means to each of us. Similarly, the notion of the JPA discussion, I think there are pros and cons.

I think you've articulated that well, so I won't go into that any further. But to me, I'm feeling a little bit like it's premature to move forward with the work needed to obtain that proposal until we hear back more from our working group. So I'm not ready to move forward today personally, but I do want to move forward with it based on the feedback that I just described. Thank you.

Thank you. Member Lopez Ortega.

Yes. Thank you. This is the first time I'm attending these meetings and I'm covering for a council member gift, but I had a a couple questions. There is, check I was checking the website and there is upcoming events happening informational events, educational events that are happening mostly here in Napa, American Canyon and Johnville. Calistoga is so isolated, we are too far away, but we need to have the information for our residents.

So basically, I'm requesting a workshop happening in Calistoga where our residents, our constituents can get to know this and what's happening before we can adopt this. Also, I was checking the website and there is information for our Latino community, basically Spanish speaking members, that they are homeowners and they have no clue that, you know, this is happening. So I would like to request also more information in Spanish, and our workshop will be great in Calistoga. Thank you.

Thank you. And Member Narvaez?

Thank you. I would echo that. Great on the bilingual outreach to make sure we reach more of our community. A lot of what I'm hearing is the importance of working together within our jurisdictions. And the question here is to solicit scope of work.

And what I'd like to see first is instead of trying to hire a consultant for this, and I think somebody mentioned that, is can the jurisdictions start the scope of work first, what the feedback is, how far they can get before we go after a third party to do that work. I don't know if that's something that we can handle internally with the jurisdictions, but I think that will get more buy in within the working group because we're not an authority. We depend on each other to make this happen. And I think this will be a great way for us to follow through that commitment of working together, is trying to develop this group of work through our jurisdictions before we spend some resources on the third party. So and I do think that we need to take it back to counsel.

I agree with that. We have to because this has conversations of cost, of implementation, and each jurisdiction is different. Not just to hear from my fellow council members, but I want to know what concerns other jurisdictions have that I may not familiar with because I'm not as familiar with their communities as I am with mine. So those will really help me understand how to move forward with this, is hearing back from the other cities. So I don't know if that's something that is a normal work of process for our staff to do scope of work initially.

I don't know if they've done some of that. I've kind of looked through the draft to see if I can identify some of that, but I'd like to see if we could do that first before we hire a third. Thank you.

All right. I just wanted to check back in with staff. Have we heard from the that councils have yet met and explore this? And which councils have and which councils haven't?

I'm so glad you asked because I wanted to bring that up before the meeting ended. So we did make a presentation. Eric Ryan made a presentation on the August 5 Board of Supervisors meeting. On September 2, we're scheduled to do the same for City of Napa. And on September 23, we're scheduled to do the same for City of St. Helena. But we have not heard from Yountville or Calistoga. So we would be happy. We have it in the budget to make for Eric Ducock and Ryan Melendez and other staff to make a presentation to one, you know, board meeting of whatever kind you choose at each city. So Calistoga and Yonville, please reach out to us.

We can set that up. And same to Calistoga on the question of the workshop. We'd be happy to do a public workshop on the RCAP there. If you can help us identify a location and a date, we'll be there. And anybody else?

Did American Canyon do a city council presentation?

Sorry. No, we didn't. I think we put the pitch out, so we're happy to do that at your request. Yes.

And we were scheduled to do one with the open space, active transportation and sustainability Commission in American Canyon. That fell through. But we're happy to do it at the City Council or whichever commission or committee or subsidiary of the council you choose.

We'll make sure that we take advantage of our opportunity.

Yeah. And I will note that, yeah, we added in the scope of work and budget to do a few of these workshops. We did the two kind of one Mid Valley, you know, in Yountville that was to kind of congregate the the Up Valley communities as well, and then one down in American Canyon. We added the one in Napa next week will be on Wednesday, and that is just led by staff that was not in the scope of work for Ascent to participate in, but staff is leading will be leading that one. And so any future workshops may be staff led as well, but we can't we've we made sure that we had Spanish translators on-site, and we had information available with flyers and all of our social media posts as well, both in English and Spanish.

When's our next meeting, actually?

The Climate Action Committee?

Yes.

September 26.

Okay. We've got so Saint Helena on September 23. We need to get Callisto, Yonville, and Amcan. You know, I don't want to delay too long your ability to develop the scope of work. And so I think if if we could do our best to try to get these done and have the ability to have some report backs from the cities and then move forward with the scope of work, think that's going to be really important.

I don't believe that we can depend on the working group to actually do the implementation planning. It's we don't have staff dedicated to this. We're going to have to use a consultant. I think that we certainly can have the working group work with the consultant that can we can broaden that group. Right now we've had city of Napa and Napa County working closely with the consultant.

But we can certainly, now that we have brought in the other jurisdictions, have those staff members from the other jurisdictions working with the working group. And that's great. It'll be a much richer conversation, and I'm sure we'll get a lot further. But I don't think we're going to be able to depend on our working group actually doing that. So we are going to have to move forward with this and create a scope of work. So I think it's incumbent upon the cities and the town to get this discussion happening quickly at their city councils and get that feedback as soon as possible Because I think we've been talking about this for a couple months now.

Yeah. And I would note, too, that there's an alternative to a region wide approach to an implementation plan in that each jurisdiction could then create their own implementation plan. And that's not to say we couldn't still collaborate in the working group, but it would be up to each jurisdiction to create this kind of implementation strategy, whether a formal plan or just you know, kind of informally prioritizing measures and implementing those. But then, you know, with progress reports and updates semiannually or annually, we would want to see the implementation work actually getting done. So the Right.

The region wide collaboration and implementation plan kind of, I think, helps streamline streamlines that. And so that's that's the reason we are taking this approach. And I I do believe that for the the scope of work, you know, it's not binding. We're not saying, Oh, we are for sure going with this region wide implementation plan. It's just kind of developing a cost estimate and scope of work for what we would want the plan to look like.

Right. And I agree with you that having a regional plan is a streamlined approach, and you could have jurisdictions do a sub implementation, right? They could dig down even further and say, this is the plan, And for this near term and set a time line, these are the things that our particular jurisdiction are going to focus on. So I think many of these things can happen at the same time. But I think we need to kind of move ahead with those discussions at the councils and make sure we just get that feedback so that we can take the next step. Because I agree that we don't want to take any more time than we need to. We want to get moving.

And I'll also note that by the next time the Climate Action Committee meets, the working group will have met again on September 10, so we can also begin the discussions of what the implementation plan might look like and what the jurisdictions each want to pursue.

Okay. Thank you so much. All right. I think we are done with this item, which means we are done. Does anyone have any reports or announcements?

I do have a few, if none on the diocese. I have a few. I'll try to be quick. I know we're over time. Announce that we've held six sustainability workshops and one induction cooking demonstration in the city of Napa.

The workshops have been at the library main branch here and we've had about 200 people come to learn about new technologies and strategies to help reduce energy usage, and save money all while making homes healthier and more resilient. We will have another workshop coming up on September 10 at 6PM at the Napa County Library main branch. This topic will be solar, battery, and home resilience. And I can send out flyers to digital flyers to everyone to help spread the word. And again, we are just doing the NAPA library as of now because it's close to our office and we have established that partnership.

But if there if there's a request for these workshops to be done up valley, down valley, we are happy to do that as well. I'll announce MCE Clean Energy also has a new project funding stream for adding battery backup systems to jurisdiction owned buildings that either already have or plan to have solar systems. Dollars 250,000 is set aside for Napa County jurisdictions, jurisdictional owned buildings only with a focus on critical facilities like fire state police and fire stations, community centers, healthcare and public health facilities. And these funds must go towards battery portion of projects only. So they must be paired with existing or planned solar, but the funds have to go towards batteries only.

And the deadline to submit the interest form is on September 5. And I can share the interest form and a blurb about this to all of the members and staff as well to start thinking about this at your facilities. And then along the lines of some of the discussion today with the cost of updating making building upgrades, I'll announce Bayron is launching a new single family residential program aimed at improving the energy efficiency of one to four unit homes. This will be a turnkey program designed to take a lot of the complications and guesswork out of making these upgrades. So you'll have a project manager who engages with the homeowner and with contractors directly to help take a lot of this guesswork out to make energy efficiency upgrades to your home.

The program is income limited up to 120% of AMI, so we're kind of focused on the low to moderate income range. But participants can receive energy upgrades of up to $8,000 project scope for things like insulation, air sealing, and other energy efficiency for a 20% co pay not to exceed $1,000 So you could project scope for no more than $1,000 And they do all the paperwork, rebates, And then similarly, just quickly, the MCE has a similar program but for that low kind of low 80% AMI. So very similar and that one is no cost. So there would be no copay to the homeowners. And yeah, I'm happy to send flyers.

Have information I'll to send it out to everyone as well.

Thank you, Ryan.

Sorry, one last thing. There's a in partnership with the Farmers Market on September 16, I think. September 16, eight a. To twelve p. M, there will be an electric vehicle car and bike show. We'll have some EVs out there, some the bike coalition is bringing e bikes, we'll be able to show them off and answer questions. So come on out. Share the word.

Thank you. At the risk of going too long, we'll have a member

of Alethia. Do we have are we on the agenda items? Are we on the future agenda items?

We are now.

Okay. Perfect. That's why I got my light on. On. Really quick, that was a great update. We all we want that in writing, not just flyers. I want your verbiage so I can like, you know, steal it and share it, if you will. Not to come up with it myself. And then also, I don't know, know, chair. It's up to you to decide.

But the reports and announcements are really, really great. I'd like to have them in the front of the agenda versus at the end of the agenda. Some of this information would have been really helpful to know prior to prior discussion. Just consideration maybe changing up the agenda a little bit to have their reports and announcements earlier. And then because we lose people around public comment, and it could impact what we're being presented.

The last is that I would like to request to bring back is that discussion and analysis looking at a JPA, looking at what Sonoma County is doing, what Marin County is doing. When this group was first formed, we looked at that. I think it's really time. It was mentioned today. It's been requested before and mentioned here before by Member Gift and myself.

And at some future time when you think it's appropriate, I really think it's important that we really know the facts and the benefits. It doesn't have to look like NVTA, I want you to know. It could look very much like just like what we're doing now, but it could also benefit in terms of the authority aspect. So I think it's important for us to really know what the pros and the cons would be of going to that next level. So I'd like to bring that back to a future item, please.

Is there anyone else with future agenda items? Okay. Well, we are going to adjourn to our next meeting of September 26 at 09:30. Thank you everyone for attending.