City Council - workshop

Thank you.

so much for joining us. We have two hot items today on tonight's agenda. The first one is the Xcel Energy Partnership Update, and the second is Enhancing Boulder's Wildfire Resilience through, one, the development of a comprehensive wildfire home hardening implementation hub, And two, assessment analysis of current or planned city wildfire-related programs, projects, and actions. Both of those are a mouthful. Before we go into our work item, I would like to outline how the meeting will be conducted. We will review the steps, presentations, and then we'll have time for questions. For questions, since these are both topics we are all very interested in, let's ask one question each first, and then if we have time, we can do a second round. At the end of the presentation, we will conduct our council discussion with staff, and if you have questions, please wait for the staff to complete their presentation first. For comments, I won't be timing anyone if I don't have to because we all care so much about this topic. But let's try to be as succinct as possible because we want to stay on schedule and end on time. We will now turn to our city manager, Nuria Rivera-Vandermeij, to introduce our first item.

Thanks so much, Mayor Pro Tem. And because we've got a pretty heavy night, I'm going to send it over to our Director of Climate Initiatives, Jonathan Cohen, to open us up with some introductory remarks.

Excellent. Thank you, Nury. I'll take that hand off. Good to see you tonight, Mayor, members of council, and good evening to community members who are watching tonight. As Nury has said, I'm Jonathan Cohen, and I'm honored to serve as the director of the Climate Initiatives Department here at the city. So we have a pretty big group for tonight's update, but I do want to welcome and thank our Xcel colleagues for being here. You can see them on the screen. Robert Kenney, the president of Xcel Energy's Colorado operating company. Andrew Holder is a director of community relations and local government affairs for Xcel Energy. And Nicholas Cole is our Boulder area manager at Xcel. So totally appreciate your willingness to have this conversation with us tonight. So really great that you're joining us. We can go ahead and pull the slides up and I think we'll get rolling. So just as those come on up, you can go on to the next slide if you don't mind. Just to give you a sense of where we're headed tonight over the next 90 minutes or so, we'll spend a few minutes up front providing a little context from me. I'll turn it over to Excel for the bulk of the presentation. And then once Excel is done with their slides, Carolyn Elam will jump in and give a short update on the Energy Resilience Council priority that came out of our conversation with Excel last year. And then we'll bring it back to Council and the questions that we have for you. I did want to note that the first question is really an opportunity for Council to have a dialogue directly with Excel. And then Carolyn's going to tee up a more specific question related to the resilience priority. So, since we don't do these updates all that frequently, I thought it might be useful to start with just a little bit of background, particularly for folks in the community who might be a little bit newer to this conversation. But I would start by saying I think most people are likely to know that Xcel is an electric and natural gas utility that serves Boulder. And Boulder and Xcel have had a pretty complicated history, we all know that. For more than a decade, the city... explored the possibility of creating our own electric utility in large part because of the community's desire for greater local control over our energy future. In 2020, the Boulder community voted to enter into a new franchise, an energy partnership agreement with Xcel. And that agreement established really the framework for how we work together around a number of shared priorities. So at the center of that partnership is a commitment to work together on things that matter a lot to Boulder. So accelerating our emissions reductions, improving the safety, reliability, and resilience of our electric system, advancing innovation, and making sure that the benefits of that transition are both accessible and affordable to our community. You go on to the next slide. So we are continuing to work towards 100% emissions-free electricity supply by 2030, supporting Boulder's broader emission reduction goals, really focusing on how we improve reliability and safety, how we center equity, how we engage the community and how we work together on projects and investments and help us get there. So this slide really lays out the areas of focus on the left side and then how we work together on the right. So the what and a bit of the how. And I just really want to acknowledge the incredible work of our advisory panel has really helped shape how we have advanced a lot of the priorities through the partnership. And I also think it's important that we have to recognize and celebrate that there are some really great examples of collaboration that wouldn't have happened without this partnership. But it's also fair to say that we have a ways to go. And I know that that's particularly true for the issues that I think are going to be on a lot of people's minds tonight that are watching at home. So reliability, recent outages, wildfire risk, infrastructure resilience and cost. So we're six years into this agreement and a lot has changed since 2020. I think it's easy to say that climate risks facing our community are becoming more immediate. We're seeing more extreme weather, more increased wildfire risk, and the reality of an aging electric system. At the same time, our dependence on electricity is increasing. So as we electrify our buildings and our transportation, reliable electricity becomes even more important to just about every aspect of our lives. So tonight is really that opportunity to look honestly at where we've made some great progress, where we haven't, and what we need to do differently or better going forward. One of the things that we heard pretty clearly from council last year was that along with a clear focus on emission reductions, wildfire protection and infrastructure resilience needed to be a major focus of the partnership. And I think that's exactly right. We know there are concerns in the community about recent outages, about reliability and about the balance between reducing wildfire risk and maintaining reliable power. Those aren't simple issues and there aren't always simple answers, but they're incredibly important issues for us to be working on together. And I know Excel is here tonight prepared to talk about what they are doing, what we're doing together, where they're seeing progress, and where there's still work to do. And again, just to take a minute of acknowledgement to all the people who actually make this partnership work, there are a lot of folks from both the Citi and Excel teams either watching tonight or possibly here. Our team spent a lot of time together working through these issues, and I really do appreciate the expertise and commitment that everyone has been bringing to this work. So to wrap, these are important conversations. We appreciate the opportunity to have them, and I'm looking forward to the discussion. With that, I think I'm going to turn the presentation over to Nick.

All right. Appreciate it, Jonathan. And again, thank you, city council members and city staff and citizens listening today. Definitely appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all about the different things that we're doing in the community. So definitely looking forward to this experience with you guys. Can I go to the next slide, please? So today, kind of as Jonathan teed up, we'll be going over our wildfire mitigation plan. We'll start from a wide view and then get more granular on the different things that we're doing in Boulder. Then we'll highlight some of our underground projects that we currently have in the works as we speak, speaking on those projects and the reliability that it will serve in the community. Then we'll highlight a transmission rebuild project that we have broken up into two phases in the community that we're proud of mentioning to you all today. Then we'll get into some of the system reliability upgrades that we're doing in the community to not only increase capacity, but again, increase the reliability that we have in the area. Then give you a sneak peek of some of the future initiatives and projects that we have that we're looking forward to. And then we'll wrap things up with going over our Boulder emissions targets through our energy partnership agreement. So next slide, please. As I mentioned before, just taking a very wide view of what we do in the community. So these six priority areas are what we cartel our wildfire mitigation plan around. So system maintenance and upgrades, again, With anything, technology definitely needs to be upgraded and improved upon. So making sure that we're maintaining our system and making sure that we are upgrading and hardening the areas that we can. And then going into preventative measures, we have EPSS settings, enhanced power line safety settings. We use these for any contact on our power lines just to ensure that our assets are not causing any damage in the community, keeping our customers safe. We take a lot of pride in that. Our vegetation management team, take a lot of pride in making sure that areas that we have identified as vegetation areas that have caused contacts to our power lines that our crews are out there proactively and working with community members to make sure that that is not an issue and getting to that a little bit more once we get granular with Boulder in particular. Again, making sure that we're good partners with our first responders and community outreach partners again. We do a lot of things on our side, but we're nothing without our external partners in the community. You guys have eyes on the ground. So relying on those contacts is very valuable for us as a company and what we do, making sure that customers are safe. Our advanced technologies. Starting to get a little bit more granular on what we do in Boulder in particular. Different things that we have implemented are AI panel cameras. We have a couple of those spread out through Boulder County and the city of Boulder in particular. In a couple instances, these have caught wildfires. So this has allowed us to turn off power when it was necessary to avoid any damage in the community. So again, we take a lot of pride in that. And that also kind of coincides with our enhanced power line safety settings as well. And to wrap this up with our strategy before getting into more details of what we're doing in Boulder. Safety and preparedness, again, making sure that we're getting out into the community, letting folks know what we're seeing on our side and the different initiatives that we might need to do if it is necessary for us to do a PSP. whatnot and just making sure that we're keeping our customers informed. More granular on the different things that we're doing in Boulder, as I mentioned before, we have our AI panel cameras that we have. We also have weather stations that our meteorologist team uses just to get an idea of the weather in the area because that is one of our metrics that we do use. And we do feel that a PSPS is necessary to keep our customers safe. We also have a good relationship with Boulder Forestry. Our vegetation management team works with them just to ensure areas that have been identified, explaining what a PSPS is, explaining what EPSS settings are. Again, with the acronyms, I know they can be confusing for a lot of folks. So we do a lot of different events just this year alone. I believe we've already done like 11 different events. I've done a couple with the Boulder Chamber being on the board of directors. And getting out of the community, talking with other chamber members, especially as you guys will know on this call, business community is a large part of what makes the city drive. So making sure that they have the most information that they need to understand the different things that we're doing to not only protect citizens, but also they can understand what we're doing to make sure that their businesses are thriving and also residents as well to make sure that their day of life can continue as it should. So next slide, please. And getting more specific, so currently right now through our WMP plan through 2025 and 2027, we have three underground feeder projects going on in the area. Currently, we already have one that is kicked off already. And this feeder in particular serves the water treatment facility and we're very proud to be able to get this one started first. Just understand the importance of this critical infrastructure in the community. And so this project is already started and we anticipated to be done in Q1 of 27. And then the other two feeders we expect to be done in the Q3 of 27 and then Q4 of 27. So again, these feeders roughly serve 9,000, a little bit over 9,000 customers. And again, With that critical infrastructure on the first one that's already in the construction, we're very proud to be able to get these three feeders through our WMP. And then as we do look to go to our next WMP plan in the future, identify other projects along with the city to make sure that we're looking at different feeders in the community that would support reliability. And these projects and future projects, again, they help with increasing, decreasing feeders. wildfire ignition and increasing system hardness with underground in these infrastructures. Again, even though underground feeders are not bulletproof and they are susceptible to outages, these have been identified working with the city to make them underground to improve reliability and prevent any issues that could be associated with wildfires. So again, these projects are just the first three that we have in the pipeline. Again, working with the city currently now, and then obviously our operations team does their own scoping. We'll continue to identify different projects, and as we go into our next WMP plan, wildfire mitigation plan, we'll work with the city to identify other projects to make sure that we're looking for projects that we can't underground to harden the system in Boulder.

And just to zoom out real quick, we have 50 miles that were approved in our wildfire mitigation plan. This represents a significant portion of this project. And I think it highlights the partnership we have with the city of Boulder in particular, the team that was able to help bring that voice to the commission when we were going through the regulatory process to advocate for these projects and understand and and bring that community voice really helped bring these to the forefront to ensure that they got approved by the commission. And this represents a significant portion, like I mentioned, this is close to about 12 miles of the 50 miles that we're targeting here in the state of Colorado here over these three years. It's generally about a $70 million investment between these three. Nick touched on the amount of customers that we're going to be able to help kind of insulate from when we do potentially do future PSPS events while also ensuring that we keep system hardening for critical facilities. I know Mike Shard, I saw him earlier. The partnership we have with the emergency management teams across the state that have helped us identify critical facilities in the community, elevate this onto our system so that we can make the strategic investments to ensure that we're keeping our community safe. I think these three projects kind of highlight the three confluences of those coming together, get these moving forward.

Yeah. And just to add on that, I appreciate you reminding me of that too. Then definitely a big shout out to Mike and his team. Again, that goes into our wildfire preparedness as well, having an open dialogue and communication with his group so we can see what's on the ground and Again, making sure that we're assisting where we can to make sure that he's able to provide the assistance that is needed in the city of Boulder and Boulder County at large. And then the last thing I'll add to this slide before we move on as well. We are planning on trying to leverage some of our social media channels to highlight some of these projects. We're still in the works on what that will look like, but the idea will be to try to have, in certain aspects, try to have stakeholders like yourself, city council members, to potentially come out to some of these sites as we do them. And then from a social media standpoint, for the larger customer base, just give an idea of what these projects take. You can see our crews and our guys who work on these projects on a day-to-day basis. This is still in the works. We had a media event where we kicked off the first one, but we're still working out a couple other things. But definitely wanted to highlight that as, you know, trying to be as transparent as we can with our customers, we definitely have targeted these projects and some of the ones that we want to highlight through our social media channels, just knowing how big social media is. And again, just knowing customers want to see what we're doing in the community. So we feel like this is something that would be very beneficial. So more updates to come on there. So next slide, please. Transitioning to a bigger project, so as you guys can see on the screen, we have a transmission line that runs from down in Boulder County, Boulder Open Space, and runs through a couple neighborhoods. For example, to name some, it will go through eventually Folsom Street, Edgewood Drive, just to name a couple of the lines that it will cut through. This is a transmission rebuild line. This is a 100-year-old transmission line. This has been in discussion with the city staff and our staff for a while now as a project to be redone for reliability purposes. And we're glad that we were able to get this kicked off the ground. This project will be broken into two phases. If you can see on the screen, the blue line will go through mostly Boulder open space. And then the second phase will go through the city of Boulder and go through some of those areas that I mentioned before. We understand that phase two will cut through the city and we have been working in conjunction with the city and have made a commitment that we will be lock and step with making sure that full communication is given before and during the construction of the building. of this project currently we do have this project labeled on our transmission project page at the moment as we get closer to phase two with more scoping exercises we will have more details on that there will be a standing email that customers can send questions or concerns about with this In conjunction with the city, we have agreed to making sure that we are working with the city to make sure that the communication package that we do is fully fleshed out. We will be doing virtual and in-person open houses. This is still in the works working with the city, but the biggest thing that we do want to tell everybody with this project in particular is it was a very collaborative project. Again, getting it kicked off the ground. And again, when this project is kicking off more so with phase two, just because it does cut through some of the city, we will be fully engaged with the city, making sure that the public messaging is very heavy and both sides are agreeing that the communication pathway is the best for the city. So again, more to come on this, but this is definitely a major project that we're glad that we were able to get off the ground. Again, this will provide reliability. Also going to more system hardening, just the way that we're rebuilding this line. And then again, this is just another example of the great collaboration that we do have with the city because it did take some time to make sure that we were doing it right, making sure that we found the right pathway to get this project done. And we're definitely glad that it's going to go forward. And as you can see on some of the dates that are on the screen, we're hoping that we Well, yeah, end of November 26. And then phase two, we're still in the scoping exercises to determine when we will be able to break ground. There's some more scoping that we need to do. But our target completion date is March of 28. So Again, more information to come on this. It will be updated on our website page, and we will be working in conjunction with the city to make sure customers in the area are notified about this project.

And just to add real briefly, as we start to, and we still have time before we really get our construction sequencing all put together, we do want to make sure that we're obviously working with the staff, Caroline Elam, and the rest of the team has been fantastic in regards to putting together a communications package that we can roll out. But we also want to take feedback. I think that we can always get better at communication here at Xcel Energy. So if you have any tidbits as we start to roll this out, please feel free to reach out to myself or Nick and we'll be able to adjust and change our communication strategy prior to that construction kind of kicking off. So we want to make sure that this stays collaborative and meets the needs of the community in particular.

Next slide, please. And getting more into reliability in that same target. So through our distribution system plan that was approved by the PUC at the end of 2024, we anticipate to have an extra 120 megawatts added to the city of Boulder. What that means in particular, this helps with electrification efforts in Boulder, getting away from gas. Also, again, increasing reliability with some of this increased capacity. This also comes with new equipment, so newer equipment just increases the reliability in the area. Also, this supports EV charging. We've done projects in the past, especially since we have started our partnership with the city, but this also allows us to explore different projects. And also community solar. This also helps different customers be able to take full advantage of this. So again, adding this extra capacity just allows us to be able to help Boulder meet their goals as a city and also just provide more opportunities for citizens to take part in the different initiatives and programs that we have at Accel. And again, through 120 megawatts, just for reference, one megawatt generally could serve 750 to 1,000 standard US homes, just to give you a ballpark of what that could look like. So we're definitely proud of that. And by the end of 2030, all of our system upgrades will have taken place. So we're definitely proud of working on this. And again, even get into our distribution system plan for Boulder. That was a collaborative effort with the city staff as well, just identifying some of the areas and some of the needs that were needed in the community. So we're definitely glad that we're able to get that kicked off. And on my next slide, I'll be able to kind of get more into the weeds of that. But Overall, we're definitely glad with the collaboration. And speaking on that, we have a weekly meeting that we started with our staff earlier this year just to identify some of the outages that we've been experiencing in some of the areas through the city. And through this collaborative meeting, we've been able to identify nine feeders out of the 35 that serve the city. And through these exercises that we have done with the city, we have noticed that some of these issues range from vegetation management, wildlife contact, vegetation contact, and just some system upgrades that we need to do in certain areas. And we're definitely proud that we've been able to work with city staff and to be able to identify these things. Because as we've been harking on since we started this presentation, the collaboration is very big for us. As Jonathan mentioned, the history between Excel and And Boulder has been tricky. But again, there's a lot of people who are going to this with good faith, trying to make sure that we're making our system in the Boulder area work as best as possible. So this collaboration, just being able to identify these nine feeders, we definitely appreciate that collaboration. And as we work through these, we definitely have work orders that are currently open to mitigate some of these issues that we've identified. And then on the internal side, we're doing some scoping exercises on some more challenging issues. issues that we found with some of our feeders. But overall, we're definitely glad that we're able to start this conversation and continue it as we continue to make sure our system is more reliable in the city of Boulder. Next slide. Oh, do you have? No, go ahead. So this slide in particular, this slide more or less highlights the initiatives that I mentioned and how we're going to actually get to the 120 megawatts And to kind of break it down a little bit more granular, with new feeders in the area, this will allow us to shift load better in the community, just in case if we do, for whatever reason, have to turn off a feeder, whether that's due to wildfire concerns or if there's contact to the line. Having these new feeders in the area will allow us to be able to shift load so we can get customers turned back on if they were to be cut off. And again, adding transformers, just allowing us to have more power in our substation. So again, we're definitely glad that we're able to have all this planned out and we are on track. And even in that 120 megawatts, we've already started this process. This is just the remainders that we have. And again, with all these different, um, upgrades, whether it's the substations or the transformers, this is new equipment. So new equipment just equals reliability and then it allows us to harden our system a little bit more using newer technologies that we're more aware of. So again, this is more of a granular look on what it's going to look like between 26 all the way to 2030. And again, as we do get through the middle of some of these projects, we will start our own resource planning on our side that's already kind of in this infant stage at the moment. But we'll continue to look at different areas where we can improve our system and add different equipment and different ways that we can increase reliability and increase capacity, just knowing that the city of Boulder wants to grow and we want to be supporting that as much as possible and not being a hindrance to that. So next slide, please. And then on the horizon. So again, that public messaging piece, we definitely want to be more transparent with our customers. We hear you guys. There's definitely been a lot of conversations about how does Excel do this? What projects are they doing? Where are they going to be? And again, working with our social media team, you guys might have seen more of a social media presence this year just with some of the increased marketing that we've done. That's just not a 2026 thing. We intend for that to continue as we go along. And again, highlighting some of those underground projects that we're doing, highlighting just different projects as well. So we're definitely looking forward to doing these. And again, as Andrew mentioned, that there's different ideas that constituents have, city staff has. City Council, please send that over to us so we can get our social media team engaged with that. But we definitely are looking forward to leveraging our social media channels more, just knowing that's just the era that we're in. So just lean into that more as a company. And we're also working on our second voter report. City Council members, if you can recall, report got sent around, I believe, end of October, November timeframe of last year. And basically, our first Boulder report highlighted a lot of the projects, initiatives, and different collaborations that we have had with the city since 2020, since we re-entered our franchise and started our energy partnership agreement. In our second Boulder report, we intend for this to get released closer to the end of the year, so in the November-December timeframe. The idea for this is another channel, just to highlight some of the different projects that we're doing again. Currently, our border report can be found on the city's website. I forgot which page, but on our website as well. We have a web page dedicated to our partnership with the city of border that we were able to stand up, I believe, in the summer last year. So that's been up for almost a year now. So. The current border report can be viewed on that just to get a preview of what the second one will look like. But again, this will be another opportunity for us to highlight the different projects and great collaboration that we have with the city. And then again, we're definitely looking forward just to continue to work with the city staff on different public messaging and projects that we have in the area. Because again, we have a team, we have our operations team that finds different projects, but city staff has a pulse on the city, city council, you guys also have a pulse on your constituents. So being able to keep that open line of communication, we're definitely looking forward to making sure that we're hearing what you guys are hearing and making sure that we're messaging those properly. So we're lockstep and everybody has a full picture of what we're doing as a company. And then to highlight one of our projects that we have currently in the pipeline, our clean heat pilot program, we were able to kick this off. The PUC approved us for a neighborhood scale clean heat projects in June of this year. And we're definitely looking forward to exploring this with Boulder. Boulder was one of five communities that were picked for this. Again, we take our partnership with Boulder very seriously. And again, this is just another example of being able to bring you guys along in the different pilot programs that we do have. Again, this pilot program in particular just gives a different opportunity to look at different opportunities to get rid of some of the gas in Boulder. But again, just a pilot program that we're happy to have. And again, right now is very early in the scoping phase at the moment. So we only had a couple of meetings with city staff to identify projects, but we do have a list that we're definitely proud of. So As we get further into this program in particular, we'll definitely keep city staff and citizens in the loop on that, but definitely glad that we're able to get Boulder tied into this pilot program.

And this one's driving to a clear deadline. We have a June 1st filing of 2027. Once we go through the scoping, like Nick mentioned, within partnership with our communities, Once we get a couple of the projects identified that we want to propose, we have to drive those towards approval by the Public Utilities Commission. And that filing date is June 1st. So it is, though we've had a couple of meetings and we're still working through exactly which ones we want to explore with the City of Boulder, just driving towards a very concrete date that we're going to have to drive towards here within the next nine, 10 months, which is going to come up quick. So I know this is going to pick up steam and we'll make sure that we're transparent and communicate with all you all as we work through this process. Yep.

Next slide, please.

All right, that's me. Andrew, thank you both. I'll just start by saying thank you to Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and members of the City Council for having us here tonight. I'm looking forward to going through the next few slides, but then I'm more importantly, I'm excited to hear your questions and be able to answer them. I'll also just say thank you to Nuria, Jonathan, and all the staff at the City for their ongoing collaboration and partnership throughout the process. So I think this is not a new slide, and I'm going to just reiterate that we were the first electric and gas utility in the country to make really bold emission reduction goals. And our overarching goal is to be net zero by 2050, and that's across the provision of electricity, natural gas, and then building the infrastructure that allows for the electrification of transportation. And so we're well on our way to doing that. And so in Colorado, we know that we're going to meet our state mandated carbon reductions and we will be able to achieve net zero methane emissions reduction by 2050 is the goal. And that goal remains unchanged. Next slide please. So this is a slide of which I'm extraordinarily proud. And what this really shows is that by 2030, we will be 85% carbon free. That means our customers will be receiving electrons from us, from wind and solar, and we will be 85% carbon free, which equates to a 90% reduction in carbon emissions measured from 2005 levels. I think the main takeaway from here is the steep reductions that we're seeing, as well as the steep increases in renewables that we're providing. At the end of 2025, we were actually 46% carbon free. And we'd also reduced carbon emissions by 60%. We expect by the end of this year to reach a 70% reduction in carbon emissions. And these numbers that you see here are industry leading. And our customers in Boulder significantly benefit from these numbers as well. So every additional amount of electricity that we generate from carbon-free resources is another less carbon emissions that our customers in boulder are are receiving as well and so we're just very proud of what we've been able to accomplish thus far um move to the next slide please so this is illustrative i'm not seeing any of these slides is anyone else

Oh, golly.

You haven't seen any of them thus far?

No, I just stopped. We see them.

Oh, sorry. Okay. I don't know what's happened. Did you see them? Were you seeing them before? And just now you're not?

I saw some. And then you said it was when you was like, Hey, you might've seen these slides before. And I haven't seen any slides since, but if it's just me, I don't want to interrupt. I'll figure out a different way to grab them, but I don't know if anyone else has had that issue.

So remember, we can send you the slide deck, um, by email as well.

So I think this slide reads Boulder Agreement Progress and Forecast. And this slide is intended to illustrate the progress that we've made in meeting our emission reductions as compared to the Boulder Agreement targets. We acknowledge obviously in 2022 and 2024, we did not meet our targets. I will say, while we didn't meet the targets, we were awfully, awfully close. 2026, we expect to be below the 27 target. And the reason it's noted as not applicable there is because there's not a 26 target in the agreement. But what this shows is where we expect to be this year. And then moving into 27 and 30, which are the commitments that we've made in the Boulder Agreement, we expect to be well under the targets for both 27 and 2030. So I think we will ultimately by the time we get to 2030, we will have exceeded the targets set forth in the agreement. Next slide, please. So what we're illustrating here is again, another view of the journey that we've made in reducing our coal capacity. I mean, a significant component of our commitment to being net zero by 2050, includes not just adding significant amounts of renewable, but retiring our coal plants as well. And this is illustrative of the journey that we've made starting in 2005 and where we expect to be by 2030. And this is across our eight state footprint. The next slide, please, illustrates where we are in Colorado from 2010 to 2030. And what units remain are the two units in Pueblo, Comanche 2 and 3, Craig 1 and 2, and then Hayden 1 and 2. And those will all be retired by the end of 2030. So you see the 2030, we'll still have the 500 megawatts, but that just reflects the fact that we will not retire Comanche until the end of 2030. Next slide, please. So you don't get to talk to me as much as Nick and Andrew. But what I will also note here for your future reading, we've produced a sustainability report every year for the last, I don't know how many years. And the sustainability report contains a lot of detailed information about our journey in sustainability. across all eight states, but you'll find information in there I think that you would find useful specifically related to Colorado. And then our Colorado impact report, you'll see the QR code there for that as well. We started producing this in 2024, 25. And what the impact report is intended to illustrate are all the ways in which we add value to our customers and our communities. And so it has a lot of detail about our economic impact, our job creation, what we're doing to reduce carbon emissions, how we're mitigating the risk of wildfire, and a whole, it's chock full of a whole lot of detail and information about how we positively impact our communities. And so we added these two QR codes for your future reading opportunities. And if there's other questions that come out of that, feel free to follow up with us as well. I think at this point, we're just going to open it up for questions. Nope. You pass it to me. Okay. Well, right on. There you go.

Thanks. And good evening, counsel. And thank you. I'm currently in my minute. senior manager in the climate initiatives department. I'll be really quick. I know we're a little over and I want to make sure we have time for council questions. But I did want to take just a moment and really acknowledge, you know, I think you heard from the Excel team quite a bit about a lot of work going on in our community. And it really does take a village. And I just want to appreciate my colleagues across the city. who are playing such an important role in making this happen, from our forestry team who were out marking trees to make sure that the right ones got trimmed and the important ones were protected, our right-of-way team who's dealing with just a tremendous volume, our open space team, especially Bethany Collins, who's been working to navigate work in the county, Our attorney's office who's had to do some unique agreements, including, I think, our first helicopter permit inside the city. So just really want to appreciate everybody who's really been helping. So this is just a reminder of our council priority work plan item for this year, which is the power, reliability and resilience. Just wanted to touch on this. We've been working through the summer with Excel on data collection and what we will be presenting this fall. is the more detailed project by project outline that Nick summarized in his presentation. So we'll have a lot more detail about what each one is and its specific impacts, as well as the risk analysis that staff have conducted. And then we will be bringing that back again as a Q4 milestone, as a roadmap. And I'll talk about our engagement in a second. And I just wanted to reiterate, we've gotten a few questions. Our We don't anticipate this project stops after this year. Our plan is to complete the roadmap and then come back to Council in early 2027 to further dive into this topic. So just wanted to say that. Next slide, please. So we have been doing engagement, and I just want to note you've gotten an opportunity to hear from us here tonight and the Excel team. We also think it very important for councils to have a similar conversation with the community, and that is coming up on October 8th with our community council forum. From that, we'll be wrapping up our engagement from window one and providing a summary report of our survey results, our workshops, and everything ahead of that October 8th. Study session or it's it's the forum. So you'll have all the results from our surveys We had really good response to our survey We have two final actions a plug in for our Forum next Monday at the Boulder Chamber with the business community as well as we have a small business survey out and then as I mentioned more work in 2027 next slide and I figured Council would be very interested in our Resilience Hub grant program. That did close in the middle of August. We got 20 applications and just amazing. And we learned so much from the applications. We've been reviewing those and we plan to start to make those announcements to those that have been selected. We're anticipating a tiered approach. So we definitely have different nonprofits in different stages. And some are ready to hit the ground today and some not. we'll need some more support advising. So we're planning probably more than just five or six selections, but selections that provide different types of resources. So we will, once we make those announcements, certainly share that with council and provide more detail, primarily, I think, in our memo packet or separately. So with that, I believe the last slide is the questions for council. I won't read them, you have them. And so I think back to you, Mayor Pro Tem Weiner.

Okay, so let's leave that up for a minute. I'm going to read it real quick. Is the partnership delivering the outcomes council expected? And are there areas where council expects Excel to change course or accelerate progress? So let's see. We can remove this and maybe put in the chat. And then we can have everybody raise their hands if they have, if they'd like to comment on this or actually just combine your questions and your comments. So We can see if we can go a few rounds. So who wants to talk to Excel or our climate department? We have Nicole Speer up first.

Awesome. Thank you. And I just I just have a what I hope is just a quick question for Excel. Thanks so much for being here tonight. Given increases in electricity use data centers coming in, and the resource plan you recently submitted to the commission, showing that you're still going to be quite short of your forecasted resource needs for next year, is Excel going to going to start implementing rolling brownouts in 2027?

No, we don't have any plans to implement rolling brownouts, and we wouldn't. And just to give you maybe just a brief overview of how, and I prefer to call them controlled outages, but you don't actually know whether you're going to do that until the time comes to actually have to do it. So we wouldn't even know sitting here today if we're going to be doing that. But I will say we don't have any reason to believe that we would need to. So the shortage that you've seen in our load and resource tables, which is what I'm assuming you guys are referring to, We will be able to use market purchases. That's typically how we are able to shore up any shortages that we see. For 26, 27, we do see our load and resource table where we're deficient, but that's also deficiency against a planning reserve margin. We plan for a peak load, plus a planning reserve margin. And most days of the year, you're not at a peak load situation, and so it's not an issue. On the days where we do see tightness in the system, what we will do is make market purchases of power within the market, and we see that there's ample depth and liquidity in the market in 26 and 27 and then if it gets to an extreme circumstance we can also do public calls for conservation in the most extreme circumstances if we did have to do controlled outages or manage load share there's a variety of different terms for it it's usually 15 minute increments in specific locations on the system we we drill on this as every utility in the industry actually does And so we know where hospitals and other critical infrastructure are located. And so our system operators will do the managed load shed or managed outages in 15-minute increments. And it cycles through our system in 15-minute increments. So nobody's ever out for more than 15 minutes at a time. But the short answer to your question, just to answer it again, I'll end where I began. We have no reason to believe that we'll be in need of doing rotating outages or load shedding.

Okay. Thank you, Robert. We're moving on to Erin.

Tara, can I call a quick, because I had sort of the same question.

Yes. I feel like I didn't quite get a full answer to that one too, but.

Well, it was no.

And I also heard you say that you don't really know until you get there, right? So I guess, you know, why are you doing things to make sure that they aren't necessary even?

We are. We do. That's why our resource plans, again, when you see a load and resource table that shows a deficiency, that's a deficiency against a peak load and a planning reserve margin. And so we've had that before. It's just that it's gotten more attention lately because everybody's concerned about the data centers. Data centers aren't even going to be online. Most of the data centers we're bringing online are going to be later in 2028 and beyond anyway. And so it's not data centers that are driving the resource deficiencies that we've seen in 26 and 27 because those data centers aren't even online yet. So So the answer is we don't have any reason to believe that we're going to need to do any rotating outages. The only reason I said we won't know until the circumstance arises is because I don't want to sit here and give you a definitive answer that we're never going to do a rotating outage, because I don't think any utility would say that. But we don't have any reason to believe that that's going to be necessary.

Okay, thank you. Do you still have a colloquy, Tina? I do. Okay. So I just want to clarify that when you purchase energy on the market, does that impact our rates or is that factored into the budget so that that doesn't change the cost to our consumers in Boulder?

So it depends. This one, I am not probably going to be able to provide you a satisfactory answer because it depends on what the market prices are at the time. I mean, typically, if we're making market purchases in real time, it's going to be more expensive energy. And so and then that gets passed through. There's something called the energy. We have an ECA. There's an adjustment process that happens at the commission where we pass their energy costs through. So I can't definitively say no, it won't, but I also can't tell you by how much.

Do you, so when we're thinking about, um, bringing on new energy users, including things like switching to heating and appliances and stuff like that, are we, are you asking us to moderate how much, how many new energy users we're bringing on in order to avoid what Nicole is asking about? So do, do we need to cap things for the next couple of years or, um, just keep doing what we're doing and we should expect the same outcomes with similar rates.

I'm not entirely sure that I'm understanding the question. Are we asking you not to bring on more customers?

I mean, can we service, I guess, are your forecasts right now for the next couple of years, assuming things are more or less the same in Boulder or could energy use go up in Boulder and the surrounding areas?

Yeah, so when we do load forecasting, it's and we have a whole department that does load forecasting and And it's an art and a science, but it's more science. And so I can't tell you exactly how they do it. But we do project what we think energy use is going to be. Some of it's based on historic patterns. Some of it's based upon conversations that we have with offices of economic development that tell us that they expect to see new subdivisions being built, or they expect over this time horizon to see new manufacturing facilities, whatever the case may be, coming to that particular jurisdiction. And so as we're planning for both distribution capacity and for generating capacity. It's based upon our load forecasting. So 2026, when you've looked at a load and resource table, what we're projecting in 26, 27, and this gets updated several times throughout the year, but we've been predicting what we think load will be in 26 and 27, 28, 29, 30 and beyond. Sorry.

Okay. We're going to move on. Is that okay, Tina? All right. We're going to move on to Aaron Brockett, Mayor Brockett.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate you taking the time. A couple quick questions. One is during the PSPSs, one of the things that has been challenging and frustrating for our residents and the residents in nearby areas has been how long it's taken for the power to come back on after the incident. Are you all looking at any technological solutions to being able to re-energize power lines more quickly?

Yes. And so several things to the extent that we were able to put power lines underground that avoids having to do a PSPS in the first instance. We're also adding sectionalization devices at more frequent intervals on our distribution feeders so that you can be more surgical when we have to do a PSPS. So if you have a hundred foot feeder and right now we might have one device on the line at the 50 foot mark, we're trying to add more at shorter increments so that you end up having to de-energize fewer customers, which then means you have fewer customers that get de-energized, which then means we have fewer customers to, or fewer lines to have to inspect, and we can make them shorter, make them smaller in scope, and then that makes restoration times faster. We are, so, and we're looking at other devices that we will be piloting that can give us greater visibility into So that we can avoid having to de-energize the line in the first place. And so we have other devices that we're looking at to put on the lines that will allow us, rather than having to make the decision to de-energize, say, five or six hours before, we can make a more real-time decision based upon the actual weather showing up, which then allows us to make more rapid and nimble decisions in real time. And then just in terms of inspections, we use drones, we use helicopters, we use human beings to foot patrol on the ground. The challenge with drones and helicopters, as you might imagine, we can't fly them in the dark and we can't fly them until the wind stops. And so that's just a matter of the safety of the aircraft. But those are some of the things that we're doing to be able to restore power more quickly.

Thanks.

I appreciate that. Mayor, I know this wasn't part of your question, but I wanted to just add real briefly as part of the frustration that we've heard very specifically from our community members is not only the frustration for the duration of the outage, but the information lacking on the restoration progress and getting a real-time point of when the restoration would actually take place. So there's two things that I really want to point out. The first one is the communication updates that we've been able to undergo and what we have on the forecast that our teams are working through. First is we are allowing customers to self-register so that one of the challenges we've had in previous PSPS events is customers who are renting aren't necessarily the account holder from an Excel meter perspective. So customers can opt in so that we can get information to the renters, to the facilities managers, but also to folks that are wondering if their kids' school is going to be out. You can put in an address to get real-time alerts on that aspect. So that's on our PSPS web page. And that went live back here in February to make sure that our customers can get that information. Additionally to that, we've done a number of outage update maps. You've probably seen the latest iteration that went live about two weeks ago if you visited our Xcel Energy outage website. But that's also giving us more real-time information and updates from the crews that can update through the control center to give us more up-to-date restoration times based off of damage that they've assessed in the field so that we can pinpoint, hey, it's actually going to be another two hours or if it is going to take a substantial amount of time to actually get the equipment repaired so we can give our customers more real-time information. And lastly, we're starting to explore what type of communication channels we can utilize through that outage map. Instead of just getting an outbound call or an email, we're looking at text exchanges and then also doing micro-targeting through their social media platforms so that we're hitting a number of different channels with restoration progress.

Just to interrupt for one second, we have a lot of questions and then we have double questions. So you do not have to feel like you have to have a long answer.

Good point. Terry, am I allowed one additional question? You are allowed. Okay, great. So I'm glad to hear you're taking notifications seriously. My one other question is when we entered into the partnership, one of the areas of interest and expectations was in innovations in the energy area. I know we had the exciting prospect for the virtual power plant, which unfortunately had to be canceled because the federal grant was canceled. Do you have any other things in the pipeline that you're looking at working with the city on that they're kind of different from day to day, um, operations, but that might deliver new and innovative ways of approaching our electrical system.

Yeah, I think the first one, Mayor, is we kind of highlighted that not only through the House Bill 1370, where we're going to look at a number of different projects to use alternative resources other than traditional natural gas infrastructure. So that can include a MPA portfolio, potentially a geothermal project. We're looking at all the above through that innovative process. Additionally, we still have the Pearl Street program that we're looking at for an aging gas line and what that looks like. I know Nick has been working with our team and the city staff in particular about how we engage those customers a little bit more frequently and with a little bit more earnest to make sure that we're getting some real-time adoption and energy efficiency turned around on those. So those are the two that I can point at, current state, but I think that we're going to continue to explore additional options and we're going to work with our community advisory panel in particular to help us inform what other innovative projects that we look at as well, because they've been really illustrative thus far.

Great. Moving on. Thanks for that. Okay.

And then Tara, shall I answer the question while I'm at it?

No.

Okay. That's it for me.

What question are you answering?

Well, the question from city staff about Excel for us.

Okay, sure. Well, Go ahead. Short, like you always do.

It's about whether, specifically about whether we're delivering the outcomes, the partnership is delivering the outcomes Council expected in the areas where we might look to change course or accelerate or ask for all the change. I'll just say real quickly that I do really appreciate how seriously you're taking the wildfire preparedness and undergrounding work and really glad to see that you're bringing in additional resources, not just from outside the Boulder system to do that. So I'm Claude that really glad to see the wastewater treatment plant in particular being the lines that being undergrounded. So please continue with that and more of that, please. That's excellent. I will say that kind of the innovations, more of that would be welcome. So I hope you can come up with some additional options there and we'll look forward to hopefully hearing from you about that before too long. And then the one thing I'll say in terms of where We really need work. It's just on the basic reliability of the system. We have neighborhoods in Boulder that are experiencing outages, some of the highest level of outages in the entire system. And we just really need to do better. I have residents who are just desperate because of the amount of times that they have outages. So just really, really want to see a higher level of reliability on the system is my biggest piece of feedback. Thanks.

Okay, I changed my mind that we're only going to have questions after errands because I'm going to lose control. Originally, I was going to have only one question, but I can see that that went out the window. So don't worry, Nicole, I'll come back to you. And now keep your questions to two, please. And we're going to rob or we'll never finish in time.

Thanks, Tara. And thanks for the presentation. I think this is an easy question, kind of yes or no. The Chamber has this new program helping businesses prepare before the crisis, which is this complementary role with the City of the County and Office of Disaster Management. And it's about preparing before the disruption, navigating the crisis, recovering more quickly, dah, dah, dah. Have they engaged you or have you engaged the chamber with the small business conversation?

Yes. So, Rob, I sit on the Boulder Chamber, Boulder Director, so I have a good relationship with John Traer. So the times that we can share information on outages and different things to make sure that businesses are disrupted as much as possible, sharing that information. And as we go through later on this year, working on trying to do another Q&A session. But we do have a good relationship with the chamber and supporting that manner of how we can support our businesses if plant outages are needed. Makes sense. You're on the board. Okay.

Anything else, Ruth? One other quick question. One snafu that happened during one of the PSPSs is there were some contractors that Excel had hired to re-energize the system and there was a bit of a communication problem or an operational problem. Has that been addressed? And if so, how? What was the problem?

No, it's a good point because I think we could have pointed to a couple of different issues. Obviously, those crews have been... 24-7, you know, we did have a miscommunication issue. It has been addressed. We have an ongoing RFP that goes out that our contractors respond back into. We added some more provisions in there to make sure that we mitigated this issue. We had another issue up in northern Colorado during a December event. So we had two different issues, both of them stemming around communication, but those have been addressed based off of the contract refinements we did with both of our contractors. Awesome.

Okay.

Thank you. You bet.

Thanks, Rob, for your succinctness. Next, we are moving to Matt Benjamin with his one or two questions.

One or two. I mean, it must be two. I appreciate you guys coming in and laying it to us straight. I appreciate it. I mean, candor is the best way for us to move forward. So my question centers around maybe less PSPS, but more recent events. Really, a week ago today, we had two fires in 24 hours. The first one... Though the investigation is still ongoing, it appears that the fire was started by either sort of faulty or impacted XL equipment or infrastructure in and around People's Crossing. And the second fire, which happened 24 hours later, was an underground electric vault over in South Boulder by Kohler Reservoir and behind NOAA. These are not typically these areas that we seem to focus on when we're dealing with wildfire or any other equipment. And so I'm trying to get a sense of this is just general infrastructure that seems to be failing or having challenges. I know that there's so much focus on the wildfire and those particular lines and the areas of highest risk. So How are we dealing with maintaining the regular infrastructure? Because sometimes that stuff might be actually what sneaks up on us and maybe actually causes the bigger problems in community rather than the big stuff that we've been identifying. So how are we maintaining the sort of almost day-to-day, regular, lower-level infrastructure that's clearly sparking fires and causing a lot of concern in community?

Well, I'll answer the first one first about the fire and people's crossing. It's still under investigation, so I can't tell you that we did start that one. The underground vault one, I can just respond, generally speaking, about how we are maintaining our equipment. And so we do do routine inspections, we do routine maintenance, and we're doing that around the clock all the time, as you might imagine. 40, 50, 60 year assets are going to fail. And so we do have an inspection schedule over the times over which we are inspecting all of our equipment. There's poles, cross arms, underground equipment. And so that's just normal course of business. And that just happens routinely. We haven't stopped doing that. in favor of wildfire mitigation work. So our teams are doing that work all the time. The specific vault that you're talking about, I don't know the maintenance, I don't know the specifics of that particular vault and what the age of that equipment was. I can say just as a general proposition, having equipment underground and historically why we haven't always put equipment underground except for aesthetic reasons. was because it is more difficult to find it and fix it when you have to go out and fix it. And so that's not specific to this underground vault that you're referring to. That's just as a general proposition.

I appreciate that. If I could add just real briefly. the other thing I'll just add is we're also putting our money where our mouth is. We obviously have our wildfire mitigation plan, but if you've seen our sustainability report over the next five years, we're projected to invest over seven and a half billion dollars into our distribution system across Colorado. So that's going to be poles. That's going to be cable replacements. We, you know, Nick kind of covered some of the investment in Boulder in particular, we're looking at the investment portfolio North of 500 million. So it's not only is it, routine inspections, keeping asset health on a clear line of replacement, but it's strategic investment to make sure that we're not just tackling one part of our business.

Great. Anything else, Matt?

Yeah, my last question is, There's just a lot, there's a lot going on. And so I think for folks in our community, how are we quantifying and measuring success for our community? I know we can measure in lines and other stuff, but I think it's really important for us to be able to like, how do we know that we're being successful? And how do we quantify that? Hey, by 2030, we're X amount safer from fire than we were in 2025. So how do we do that? And how do we do that in a cohesive way that combines what Excel is doing in partnership with the city, and our other partners. And so there's one place where community can be like, hey, this is how we're safer. How are we doing that?

So I'll say two things. There's the set of metrics that we use, because I think you're asking both about safety and just generally how do we know we're succeeding. So we do have the quantitative measures of replacing X number of poles, replacing X number of bare conductor with covered conductor. So that's just the quantitative. We also measure reliability. And, you know, even with the... enhanced power line safety settings in the PSPS, we've still achieved 99.95% reliability. And that's just a simple ratio of the number of hours that are available in a year. It's 8760. And that's the denominator, and the numerator is how many outages we have when we keep track of customer minutes out. And so that's another KPI that we keep track of. There's the SADI, which is System Average Interruption Duration Index. So we have several reliability-based metrics that we track. And then to your specific question about how do we know that we're X amount safer? Making specific investments and quantifying the risk reduction achieved by virtue of that is a lot of what's in our wildfire mitigation plan. So we've prioritized the various investments, whether it's system hardening and resiliency, putting up artificial intelligence cameras, weather stations, all of that is based upon a risk prioritized methodology. Our next plan that we will file in 2027 will have, an evolved risk-based methodology, and we will have a better way of quantifying how much risk reduction we expect to achieve by virtue of these investments. It's a new skill for the industry as a whole, quantifying risk reduction achieved by virtue of particular investments. And you might imagine some of it's a bit challenging because you're ultimately measuring the proof that you're proving a negative. Like had we not made these investments, might something have happened. And so, or by making these investments, can we definitively say that we avoided something happening because you're trying to prove a negative. And so we will continue to refine that in our next welfare mitigation plan.

Thank you so much. Okay, are we good to go on to the next person, Matt? Yeah.

All right, thumbs up. Yes, go for it.

Okay, Ryan, you're up.

Thank you. Hey, team. So I shared a memo in Hotline on Tuesday, which I understand Carolina team shared with Excel. I only have two questions for now, so we won't have time for all of it, but I will reference it in the next steps. But I do have a question on the, yeah, this picking up on what Matt discussed on outages. I don't know if it's possible for Caroline or John or the team to show... There was a graphic that Caroline worked up, and this would be... There's a few different metrics, but this one is the... I believe it shows the aggregated duration of minutes in town, in the city of Boulder, that were out of power. And it shows something like... Boulder residents have 20 times more minutes of interrupted power-ish than they did a few years ago. So, you know, maybe there's details here you'd comment on. Assuming this is more or less accurate, can the Excel team speak to the future? Like, what direction is this line going? And can you talk to what years we might see it return back to the pre-2023 period?

Yeah, so you said, can I comment on this? And so what I will say is I would say this is just looking at it, it's largely attributable to when we started doing EPSS and PSPS. And that's what I would say. That's why you see the steep incline. We've used EPSS and we use something called hotline tag, which is actually a more crude version of an EPSS. And as we add more reclosers and sectionalization devices and viper reclosers to the system. We would expect not to have to use hotline tag as a risk reduction methodology. So this stops at 2025 as the high watermark. As we are doing all the things that we've talked about, replacing bare conductor with covered conductor, replacing small diameter wire with larger diameter wire, doing the targeted undergrounding, putting on more sectionalization devices in the VIPER reclosers, we should expect to see these numbers, the high watermark of call it 20 to 25, I guess is what that is on the Y axis. I would expect that to start coming down in 27 and beyond. I can't tell you that we've quantified specifically um the impacts on sadie and simi did we create this did you guys create this

My understanding, since I have the floor, is this is based on Excel data compiled by the City of Boulder team in a way that's appropriate for public consumption.

I don't have any reason to doubt it. I just don't know what it includes because we also keep track of SADI, but we also have different ways of counting major event days and storms, etc. But your overarching question is when would we expect to see improvements?

Sorry to interrupt you. It's not when will we expect to see improvements. is when will we see a return to the norm that residents had in 2023 and before?

I would expect that we would start to see a return to something that we want too. It is to be clear, we want greater reliability for our system as well. in 27 and 28 and beyond, as we continue making the investments, I can't tell you explicit or particularly when we would return to either 2018 or 2022. And it's a fair question council member. And I just, I don't have an answer for you about when we will be back to either 2018 or 2022 levels, but I would expect that we would begin to see a downward trend and would expect to start seeing improvements in 26, 27, 28, and beyond as we continue doing the work that we're doing on system reliability and system hardening. The wildfire mitigation work that we will do, while it's primarily for wildfire mitigation, also will have reliability impacts as well.

Okay, and just to clarify, because just on the same question, it Will we return? Is this something you think is realistic?

I think it's a great point. If I could just add, the investments that we're making are going to sure up the system and harden the system from those day-to-day outages that we've potentially been experiencing. But I also want to just highlight... Going back to when the National Weather Service has been tracking over 75 mile an hour days here in Colorado, we've had less than seven or eight of these prior to 1996. And then post 2018, we've had over 11 of these, particularly in Boulder. Post 2020, we've had over five days that have had 90 mile an hour plus wind. So some of this is out of our control in regards to the weather that we're starting to experience. Some of that, you know, indication from your graph there does contemplate some of the large events that we've had since April of 2024. So the day-to-day outages are definitely going to be coming down with these strategic investments, but I don't have a crystal ball to see what type of weather we're going to continue to see over the next couple of years due to the effects of climate change.

Okay, thanks. I know that's all we have now for my first question. The second question is, That was your first question? Yeah. Well, hey, I only spoke for a small part of that time. So my second question is... That was on me. Thanks, Robert. What, if anything, has Excel done to understand and prioritize the disproportionately impacted communities and facilities in Boulder? Like, for example, medical and care facilities, homeless shelters, places with cold food stores, downtown businesses, residents who have higher medical, financial, and other needs. What has Excel done in this area? Yeah.

So we work with our offices of emergency management at the county level in all of the counties that we serve to create critical infrastructure and critical customer lists. That's codified in our wildfire mitigation plan, but we didn't, we started doing that after the first PSPS event. And so that process means what we've done is we've asked you, the county governmental entity, whether it's the Office of Emergency Management or otherwise, share with us their list of critical infrastructure and critical facilities and critical customers. We have a definition that's codified in our wildfire mitigation plan of what a critical facility is. And then we compare that list to our definition and we create that list and then we enter it into our system of records so that it's overlaid with our GIS system. So we know where those customers are on specific feeders. I was just informed today that we are doing this for our tier two and tier three zones. There's 23 counties. We've completed 16 of those counties. And so we still have to compare the list that we received from the county to our own definition to make sure that we agree on that. The other thing I'll say specifically to customers with access and functional needs or customers that are medically sensitive equipment, we do have our battery program, our battery rebate program that is for income qualified customers that are on durable medical equipment. They can receive a rebate to buy a battery to use in circumstances where they need, where we have to do a PSPS or otherwise.

Okay, but as far as like demonstrating results with respect to disproportionately impacted communities, I'm not hearing there's anything to say. Well, results meaning? Change against the baseline, you know, improvement against what otherwise we'd be experiencing in the experience, you know, the lived experience of people who are suffering power outages.

Councilman, so we have our red truck program that we have, and we rolled that out in the community. So basically what our red truck does, it has a multitude of functions, but a lot of times when we do bring our truck, if there are areas in the community that have experienced outages, we do work with city staff and the Boulder Emergency Management Group to identify areas that might need resources. So again, We'll go in and provide different needs, whether that's charging heaters in certain points. And then also, we also use our red truck to provide bill assistance for customers that might have disabilities and whatnot. So we have people on site that can help get some folks that need assistance, whether that's payment plan assistance or just understanding different programs that are available to them. So if they are medical device customers. We do have customer care agents on site that can help them. So our red truck program, we do get to disproportionate communities that might not be able to have the resources to be able to have the access to these programs. And our red truck has been in the city of Boulder most of the times this year. I can't name them off the top of my head, but I know we've at least done three in a couple of the Boulder programs. um, older, uh, I forgot the exact area. Oh, mobile homes. So we've done at least three of those that I, I've attended one of those. So we do, uh, roll out our red charts to help disproportionate communities.

Okay. Thank you. And I'll just get, I'll just answer the questions. I'll try to be brief. Oh, I thought you're doing that. No, no.

Okay. Next we have, um, Robert, just do us a favor, get somebody to send us that information on the battery so we can get it out to the community. Okay. Okay. Next question is gonna be Taisha. We'll do the very short comments at the end, I promise, Ryan, don't worry.

Okay, thank you. Ryan, thank you for asking my question around just the burden. And my question was really on who shares the burden. So I was at a meeting with our community climate resilience community members, organizations, churches, and unfortunately, nobody mentioned the items that you just shared. about the rebate program, about the red truck. So it would be very helpful to get tracking information around that as we rebuild the trust and have more transparency there. Because I believe you are on them, but when we talked to them, nobody mentioned this. And They actually were talking about the cooling centers. The cost is significant, so the rebates are appreciated, but if you're in a fixed income, that's not going to work. So just curious if you all have considered either zero interest loans or some mechanism where community members who are already vulnerable and on fixed income can be able to ascertain and get that. So that's one. And also, again, if you would be willing to use some of that $903 million profit, to help to subsidize some of that. And then the second question is on the, do you agree with the Public Utility Commission that with their staff that estimated a 50% rate increase by 2029? And just curious if you agree with that estimate that was created by PUC staff. So those are my two questions right now. Thank you for your great succinctness.

I applaud you.

I'll try to be equally as succinct. I can't validate the PUC commissions and the staff's analysis of a 50% rate increase by 2029 because I don't know what facts they based it on and it's so funny.

Thank you. Then if you wouldn't mind sending a response on what rate increases you do anticipate with the information that you have available to you, that would be much appreciated. As far as the burden on our community, and although again, we appreciate the rebates, we're talking about people who are living on fixed incomes. So just curious again, what can you all do? And would you be willing to use some of that $903 million profit to help support our community during these treacherous times? Thank you.

So we haven't considered loans, and I'm not sure that we could do that because that would, I think.

Or even just a checkout system, I could imagine, in partnership with our libraries, having generators that can be checked out or just some mechanism that can address these issues. I also just want to briefly say, you know, although I appreciate the optimism that The climate community, including CU Boulder, NIST, NOAA have all agreed that this is just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to these climate chaos that we're experiencing. So just again, in this instance, I can see this issue and this need continuing to escalate. So really curious. how we're moving beyond. And again, I appreciate the lists that you all are forming as well. But as I said, when we were meeting with the people that work with these people that you have lists on, none of them mentioned the incredible offerings that you provided.

So in terms of contributions to energy assistance, we have and we committed in our last our electric and our gas rate case to make a $10 million contribution for energy assistance, not specifically for battery rebates. And so we have made that commitment.

And then would it be possible to get a report on how that commitment has been allocated to our residents in the city of Boulder?

I don't know. Actually, I don't know that we can do that because it hasn't been allocated yet.

But you mentioned that you had been giving things and doing things. So can we get a list of that?

You mean like the red truck?

What you all have been doing to support communities that are burdened and vulnerable. Yeah, we can do that.

We can definitely follow up with you just to put awareness. Like you guys probably remember Ify Jenny. She's now our director of strategic outreach and advocacy.

I do know. I do know them. I look forward to that report.

Thank you. Yeah, so we can definitely take that up with you, Council Member Adams, and just make sure that you have awareness of the red truck.

And not just me, but I think our whole community would benefit from knowing the ways that you are supporting and doing right for our communities during these polycrisis times. Thank you.

All right. Nicole, you had one more question you said?

I do have one more question, yes. I mean, I got more than one, but I'll stick to one more. equal to everybody else. So as you all know, community scale resilience solutions like microgrids are something that our community has been calling for, honestly, longer than I've been on council. They were called out as a priority within the energy partnership agreement, and they seem increasingly essential for protecting vulnerable populations, especially during outages on high heat days, that sort of thing. So what's Excel's plan to support community scale resilience solutions?

So specifically to microgrids, I don't have an answer to what we've got planned specifically for Boulder. I know we do have a couple of pilots in our service territory, but I'll have to follow up. I don't know unless you guys know if we have a specific plan for microgrids.

Not necessarily right now with Boulder, but we've worked really closely with city staff to see what we can potentially identify. To Robert's point, we have a couple of pilots that we are potentially going to contemplate in our next upcoming wildfire mitigation plan, but Your point's well made, Councilwoman. We're definitely going to continue to explore to be strategic as possible about where we can keep our communities resilient.

Okay. Is that good, Nicole? I would really like a little bit more specifics, and I understand if you don't have them right now, but maybe you can include them with some of the follow-up information. I think this is something our community really needs and is asking for, especially right now.

Okay. We'll follow up with you on that, Councilwoman.

Awesome. Okay, so I'm going to have my turn. My first question, I don't know if it's for you or for staff, but most of my questions, the two that I have, are going to be the questions community asked me. So this first question is, is people are very interested in resilience hubs or resiliency hubs, I'm not sure what's the right term, because of course we're going to have more outages, etc., And if we had a resiliency hub at, um, for instance, the library or houses of worship, et cetera, then people wouldn't freak out so much because if you're working out of your home, which is a lot of people call me, I'm working out of my home. That's it. I'm losing money in my business. Then they could go to X place where they know they're going to get power and people who are on oxygen can get taken to this same resiliency hub, et cetera. So, I know that staff was talking about resiliency hubs. I'm not sure if that means that we're in charge of it or is Excel in charge of it or where are we with that?

Well, I'll take a stab at saying that if we think about in the course of a public safety power shutoff, we have stood up community resource centers. I don't know if that fits your same definition of a resiliency hub.

I don't think it does because I think what people are looking for is extra like, like it's really power oriented. So like you've already built into it that if everything else is falling apart, that these places are hubs for where people can go. Do you know what I'm saying?

Sounds like a hardened resource center with a micro grid attached to it or something. Awesome. That sounds great. That may be what you're describing. I don't know that we have, I'll just maybe provide you the same answer I provided with respect to the micro grids. I will say with the community resource centers. which are places where customers can go to charge their phones, where they can get cool if it's hot and warm if it's cold. We did have those set up during the December PSPS events. And those were in conjunction with the local county offices of emergency management. So for instance, I think in Boulder, we had one at the Boulder Rec Center in Evergreen, we were at the fire station. And so we have worked in conjunction with our county partners to discern where those are going to be. And then we staff them with our folks and in partnership with the Red Cross.

Yeah, it's probably not what they were talking about since if they lose power, then that's not a resiliency hub, is it?

Well, we work to identify the places in advance that we know will stay energized if it's okay.

All right, you can put that on your list according to with Nicole's question to whether or not we can have something like that for our future.

And if I could, as part of the, we had presented that idea in Excel's Renewable Energy Standard Plan and there is going to be a $5 million program available next year. It's still to be designed and we expect them to start the design work and engagement around what that program will look like this fall. So we're hopeful that that can bring some investment and then We're also using the city dollars to stand up several. I think that kind of meets some of the characteristics you described, but we'll follow up. And I think for, I just wanted to say for the questions to Excel, we'll certainly follow up and document these in the study session summary and get the responses.

Great. May I follow up on that, Tara? Yes, you may.

Just very briefly on the, It's really great to hear. And that's in conjunction, just to clarify, with the climate resilient hubs that the Boulder County and the City of Boulder are collaborating on. I thought I heard you say it, but I just wanted to get a double check on it.

Yeah, so we're certainly building on all of those models and learning together. And I think we're going to be providing that feedback to Excel on designs that are helpful and work. And then we would expect to apply for some of those dollars on behalf of the community for those very organizations.

Okay. And that would align with the 15-minute neighborhood design as well?

Yeah, that would be the goal. Thank you. All right. So the benefit of having this big team around me, we are apparently kicking off a resiliency hub project in the fall. This is, you know, to supplement what Carolyn just said. And so that will kick off in earnest in the fall. It is a part of our renewable, our res plan. So it's not a part of the wildfire mitigation plan, but part of the res plan.

Great. Community will be happy about this. Okay. My last question and nobody grown is A and B, but I'll put it into one. And you don't have to speak that long about either so that no one gets mad at me. Okay. There's two issues I've heard that you're having problems with that. If you could speak shortly about one would be, I hear through the grapevine that you're having billing issues as in overcharging people. And the other one is I hear through the grapevine that the PUC opened an investigation into your customer service and that you cut 400 seat customer service staff. And just real quick, there was a community member who, and I don't know, Nick, which one this is at this point, I'm confused myself, but that she had a few weeks ago or one week ago when we had the blackout here, I know in my neighborhood at the Hill, there was, that person kept getting power shutoffs for the next four or five days past just the four or five hour one that we had. So my question is, is she had a right to me because she didn't hear anything after writing a whole lot of emails and sending messages. I wrote to Nick. Nick thankfully wrote back that day. That's great. But that shouldn't be the way we do customer service. So those are my two questions, customer service and billing.

I'm going to put them both together because they're the same issue. Because when the commission opened its investigation, it was into customer service and billing. So we have had billing issues. It's a metric that I think every utility tracks. mistaken bills and rebills. So we track it because we know it's a measure of customer service. We did have some acute problems in late 24, early 25. The commission did open up an investigation. We had some longer than normal call times. We had dropped phone calls. We made a bunch of mistakes. And so I'm not even going to try to defend it because what we said to the commission was, yes, this has been an issue. We solved it by restaffing. We had, added more staff in our customer service department so that we, um, were able to answer calls more timely. We eliminated dropping our calls because what we would typically do is if there were long hold times, we would drop the call and tell the customer to come back. We've discontinued that practice and we're tracking on a relatively regular basis, the number of mistaken bills and the times that we have to rebuild. So, um, Your grapevine was right. I mean, the commission did open investigation. It was public. And we responded to it. And I think we've seen significant improvement. The last issue that you asked about was a specific customer. And having you have to contact our area manager, we agree that shouldn't be the way that it is. But we're not perfect. And when we have those issues brought to our attention, we endeavor to be as responsive as possible, which it sounds like Nick was. And I'm guessing that we probably apologize to that customer as well.

Well, no, you never got back to them. But that's okay.

You want to share with me their information, I can have somebody follow up. You don't have to do it now.

Yeah, I'll do it later. Thank you. That's great. Okay. So just, I think we're going to do next is even though we're out of time, I want to take, if we can do this council, there's eight of us. If we in 10 minutes can tell Excel, anything else that we want to tell them, each person gets one minute. I think that that will be awesome. All right. We're starting with Ryan. I'm not going to time you. This is a, I'm trusting you guys to time yourself.

Okay. Question one is Excel delivering. So a few things. First, it's really important that we have an effective relationship, especially with emergency operations and critical operations. And I do appreciate that we have a collegial partnership. And this is probably the most important thing. And we're having a lot of – discussing a lot of – difficult issues. So the first thing I want to say is I do really appreciate our relationship and it's really important that we can continue that to work well. In terms of answering the question directly, I don't know. When I look at this mechanically, I would like to see a scorecard, maybe a self-scorecard to provide to us on here's how you think we're doing with rows and columns. It's a little bit hard for me to see it to answer the question, so not enough information. But the third thing is, I think the big thing here is we have moved from a regime when this agreement started where the community took for granted that the electricity grid would work And that if it turned off once in a while, that would be a surprise. And now it is a completely different regime in which the thing seems not to work. And it's a huge problem causing a huge amount of stress, destruction and costs in our community. it's not sustainable. So we have to move towards some kind of equilibrium. And I know, Robert, that you don't know exactly what that is, or at least that's what I heard. But we have got to get to a place where we have a shared vision and a plan for that equilibrium. Or the assumptions that underpin this whole thing, they just don't hold together. Tara, I'll leave it at that, but there's a little more information. I'd love to see those questions answered in advance of the meeting. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. Next for your minute is

Tina, go with your minute. Yeah. And are we answering the second question about information ahead of the council community forum? I don't even know if we have time for that. Let's just do your last words to Excel. Okay. So thanks for being here and I do appreciate the partnership. When we're thinking about outages in the next few years, I hope that we can come together and support any option we can think of that would increase our supply locally. And I hope you'll be supportive of the ideas that are coming out of our community to those ends. So clearly local generation, microgrids, CCA, all those things I think need to be on the table so that we can weather these energy shortages together. The second piece is, you know, when we do have the Council Community Forum, I'm sure people will also be wondering about how we can not increase energy prices. So we're looking at a rate increase. This year, I think, was just approved. And if there's further costs due to the market not meeting supply and buying things on the market, I think we need to talk to that to the community. And I would encourage you to think about how to avoid that and minimize those impacts as much as possible. So thanks so much for being here. Okay, Nicole, your minute.

Thank you. So I just want to return back to something that Aaron alluded to and that I think is a foundational reason that Boulder entered this partnership. And it's really that our franchise agreement is unique. It was intentionally written so that our city would serve as a pilot and testing ground for new and innovative work that responds to a lot of the reliability and resilience concerns. concerns that are impacting communities all over the state. But when I look at the past few years and when I listen to residents who are frustrated by the persistent outages, the wildfire fears, and the limited transparency and communication during outages, it's really hard to see where Boulder is actually receiving the benefits of that pilot status. And our community has repeatedly asked for some very concrete things, and I'll just name two since we only have a minute. First is timely and clear communication when the power goes out. If Excel doesn't know why it's out until after it's resolved, that's fine, but there should be transparent communication as to why it went out after it's restored. For our community, it isn't enough to know that it's out and when it may be back on as partners, we do deserve to know why. Second is support for microgrids and other distributed resilience tools at the home and business level, especially if we increasingly can't count on reliability from Excel at times when we most need power. like 100 degree days. Resilience hubs are great, but when there are 90 mile an hour winds and 100 degree temperatures, I don't want people driving or walking around town, even if they are physically able to do so. Our community pays for reliable power in our homes, and if Excel can't provide it, then we should be empowered to create it, no pun intended. Energy is a lifesaving resource in 2026. It's not a luxury, and we really need Excel's partnership in building these localized backup power solutions, especially for older, medically vulnerable residents and frontline communities. And I just don't see evidence that these are being prioritized. prioritized or accelerated in a way that reflects our role as a pilot community. I normally don't like to lean on Boulder being special, but in this case, we literally are. It's in our franchise agreement and it's what was promised to voters. So how do we make sure that this partnership moves forward on Boulder's terms in line with our community's expectations for innovation, safety, and resilience, rather than defaulting to statewide constraints and timelines? Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, that was two minutes, but it was great. Yeah, come on. Okay, next we have Matt and your minute.

Matt's minute, that rhymes. Or something, it's close, it's alliterative. So first, just... Thank you for being here and thanks for taking the time to talk to us in community. I'm gonna sort of, I think there's just an echoing and a theme here and I think it's worth as many of us on council being unfortunately needing to be redundant. So it's super loud and clear what we're trying to communicate on behalf of the residents we represent. which is clearly that resiliency and protection from wildfires is of just absolute critical importance. And we see promises being made. We see glimpses that some of those things may be happening. But we need more than that. And it's not that we're saying give more to Boulder necessary than you already are, but we need to see that more concretely. And we need our community to have that faith that when they trusted us to reenter our franchise agreement, that it pays off and they say that was the right move. And that's really important. And we're getting calls to say, maybe you should go back to municipalization or exit the franchise. And those are not the responses we want to get. We want our community to think that this partnership is working for them. And I know and we heard tonight that you're doing great work, but we need greater communication and showing incremental change. pieces every time something's completed we need to celebrate that and we need to show that we're doing those pieces and we just need to do a more well-rounded holistic approach to protecting our community and those even east of us in that capacity so appreciate the work you're doing but we've got a long road to go and i hope that we can bend the curve and get back to a resilient and and and protected community great taisha your minute

I echo my colleagues' concerns and appreciation for the community meeting. One, I would love to have you all there in person. I think our community deserves that, too. I would love an energy dashboard with monthly, month-by-month information about the number of outages, the affected areas, so a geographic map. Support or the rebates and the red trucks basically just having more transparency on all the great things that you shared, we would like to see the evidence backing that I also have concerns about the 2027 2028 which is respectively 30% behind and 46% behind. And to my colleague, Matt Benjamin's comments on resiliency, I would also like to add costs. A possible escalation of 50% by 2027. See, I timed myself, Tara, is a problem. You see me smiling, don't you? It's a problem that we simply cannot bear. Thank you. In a relationship we don't want.

That's an example of a minute right there, counsel. Just good job. Okay, we have Robb.

I'll echo what my colleagues have said as well, but to bring to the table, you know, you talked about proving the negative and quantifying risk reductions and some of these metrics. I think if you tighten up that timeframe when we have the forum to the next 12 months, the next 24 months, that would be really helpful so we can have some pinpoints on those reliability projects and the wildfire hardening period. Done.

Well, great. Okay, I'll take my minute. First of all, I just want to say that when Excel fails, guess who gets blamed? City Council, that's right. We get a lot of grief. You need to help us by doing better. So that's the first thing I want to say is if you think you get grief, we get blamed. So I do agree with my colleagues. The other thing I want to say is nobody likes a monopoly because they're not good. Because competition is always good. It stirs up. you know, companies working harder and doing better. So in light of that, I'm wondering if you would consider comparison shopping. So I know you're probably going to say no, but I would like you to consider it anyway, comparison shopping for us who have this monopoly where we don't get a chance to do anything about it. And the person, the council member who said, yes, we're having a hard time convincing people that this is a good thing I agree with Matt. I really, we want that to change because right now the community's at their wits end and I'm hoping you can help us. That's what I have to say. Aaron, do you have any last words?

I don't mind it already. Thanks.

That's nice. I was giving you another opportunity if I cut you off. So that's it. And the last thing I want to say is staff, do you need us to answer this last question or should we just write to you? Just write to me. Okay. Last question is canceled. You can all write to Carolyn and Jonathan with your thoughts about the upcoming community event.

All right. Do you want me to respond to anything?

No. Unless you want to, you can if you want to.

May I?

I'll say a couple things if I might. I thought the scorecard idea is something that we really want to take into account. I also agree that more transparency and more communication is always good. We know that we have not been, we haven't met the mark with estimated times of restoration. That's a known problem that we're actively working to correct with better outage maps and better communications. So I just own that. The energy dashboard, I think that's a thing that we can take into account as well. And then just the last thing that I'll respond to is the monopoly and comparison shopping. And I'll be very, very brief. I promise we're not a monopoly. We're a natural monopoly. And it's distinct. It's a distinct economic principle. High capital costs act as a barrier to entry, and it's more efficient to have one entity stringing poles and wires than to have multiple entities doing it. In states where there has been some form of deregulation where you can choose your provider of electrons, it hasn't always resulted in better prices or better service. And so while we know that we have opportunities to improve, I do believe that the natural monopoly business model is working. We are making significant progress in reducing carbon emissions I would say arguably better than any other utility in the United States while maintaining bills that on average, and I can't speak to any specific customer, but on average, we're 39% below the national average, even with this next rate increase coming up and 27% below the national average. Having said that, we recognize that some of our customers do have challenges paying their bills. And that's why we started the red truck program. That's why we put a proposal in our last gas and electric rate case, for enhanced energy assistance to reduce customers' energy burden from 6% down to 2.5%. That's why we've started percent of income payment plans. And that's why we put shareholder dollars on the table to help bolster all of those things. So all of that to say, we very much appreciate the opportunity to be here with you tonight. And we always appreciate feedback because it's a gift. And we're constantly looking for ways to continuously improve. So thank you very much.

I know I'm a blunt New Yorker, and I was trying to move us along, so I hope that wasn't offensive. But I learned a lot tonight, and I appreciated everything you said, and I know that we all did. So really thank you for showing up and for coming, and I'm sure our community appreciates it as well.

Thank you.

All right. Okay, we are going to go to our next question. Who's taking over next for our next section? Which staff?

I'm happy to just sort of intro it. I just appreciate it. Our next item actually responds to a council priority that you gave us. And so because we know that this is a long night, I'm going to send it over to our assistant city manager, Pam Davis, but not without first just thinking you're going to see an extraordinary amount of teams and individuals from different departments. This is truly one of the best cross-departmental collaborations we have had. And so just really appreciate all the work that the staff has done, not just for this council priority, but working up to it as that has moved forward. So with that, Pam, I'll send it to you.

Great, thanks so much, Nuria. And good evening, council. I'm Pam Davis. I serve as assistant city manager, as well as executive sponsor for our cross-departmental citywide wildfire resilience team. The purpose of our item tonight is to provide a progress check in on your Council priority project on wildfire resilience that was scoped in early 2026 as one of your priority projects, this is just one of two touch points this year, and we will be coming back to you at the end of October next slide. Before we turn to our tremendous project team, I do want to ground us in the bigger picture that is beyond the scope of our discrete priority project. Our city staff recognize the sense of urgency and community regarding the issue of wildfire and conflagration risk. And we do feel it ourselves as members of this community. We are working daily to keep our community safe. And while tonight we're gonna speak to you about programs and hubs and funding and fuels and buildings and data sophistication, please remember that our true north star of this work is the life safety of our community and ensuring that we are balancing prevention and preparation with emergency response and recovery. We choose to do this work in order to create a more resilient city overall, while using our resources wisely, because the city as a whole is responsible, as you know, for delivering hundreds of services in dozens of disciplines. Our current work is rooted in the 2024 update to the Community Wildfire Protection Plan, but it is also deeply integrated across many other plans departments, workgroups, partners, and our community members themselves. Tonight, you will hear a lot about communications and analysis efforts because of the priority project scope, but please also understand we are actively implementing on the ground projects. We are not waiting to take action, but we are continuously improving and enhancing our impact. Next slide, please. This next slide isn't easy on the eyes, but we did wanna just show an itemized illustration of the many initiatives that the city supports. And it's important to us to demonstrate the level of innovation our wildfire team has produced in a matter of three years after building on decades of a foundation. While tonight we won't be doing a deep dive across our entire portfolio of initiatives, we want to reassure council and community that thanks to your leadership, your priority setting and investment, and your consistently engaged voices, the city and its partners continue to be leaders in approaching risk of wildfire and urban conflagration. Highlighted items you see include significant enhancements put in place in just the last few years. Some of the work has seen more immediate results, while others are serving more long-term strategies for overall resilience. I'd call out several briefly, including creation of the city's Be Wildfire Ready homepage and the Anchor Point newsletter, acceleration and expansion of detailed home assessments in the Wildland Urban Interface and including homeowners associations and the complimentary Wildfire Resilience Assistant Program grant creation and its continuous improvement. We're addressing the role of landscaping and wildfire hardening, include recent code changes, planting guides and contractor trainings, Ignition prevention, early detection, and evacuation planning, as well as notification program enhancements. An accelerated and focused effort on reducing fuel loads on our natural lands within the WUI, including strategic grazing and perimeter mowing. The power resiliency work and influencing the Xcel infrastructure hardening that you just heard about earlier tonight. and amazing leadership in regional wildfire-initiated community conflagration partnership and workshops. Next slide, please. Given this breadth of projects, programs, departments, and disciplines supporting city wildfire resilience, the team has refined our North Star to ensure a common purpose. We envision that we continually work towards making the community safer and stronger by preparing for wildfire and reducing risk to life safety. Older stands as a model of comprehensive wildfire resilience where community awareness translates into proactive and meaningful action and advanced natural area management harmonizes ecological health with public safety. Through shared community responsibility and partnership, we seek to reduce risk and enhance resilience. The clarity of this statement is and will remain the foundation of all of our work from analysis and planning to communications to operational implementation. Next slide, please. Turning back now to the focus of tonight, our council priority project will come to you in two parts with the support of an incredibly talented team across nearly half of our city departments being available for questions. Those available are shown on this slide, along with a graphic that is a brief timeline reminder that this is our mid-year progress check-in with another study session scheduled for October 22nd as we are completing your one-year priority. Next up, you will hear from Mike Chard from the Office of Disaster Management to set the context of our wildfire risk and our current state actions. Then you'll hear from Jamie Barker, our Wildfire Resilience Public Information Officer, who will talk about Subproject 1, the creation of a home hardening hub. Then Brian Aniker from Open Space and Mountain Parks will walk through the second Subproject, on creating a data-driven framework for prioritizing our current work. And now my motion sensor saving us energy, you're welcome. And finally, I will turn it to Paul Dennison, who will share a deeper dive on our technical work to develop a local specific risk index for our wildland urban interface, which we lovingly call the WUI. With that, Mike, I pass it to you.

All right, thanks Pam. Greetings, Council and community. I'm Mike Charg, Director with the Office of Disaster Management, and my briefing tonight is about keeping fire out of the city and knowing the hazards, risk, vulnerabilities, and actions to reduce that risk. Wildfires is a part of Boulder. We all know that. It's always been here. It always will be. Our natural conditions at increased risk include drought, heavy fuels, steep terrain, low humidity, and high winds, which create a dangerous wildfire environment. These factors make the entire front range a high-risk corridor with the stretch from golden to lions facing a particularly elevated threat. The Marshall Fire changed our understanding of wildfire risk. The Marshall Fire was a wildfire for about 50 minutes before entering a dense urban environment. We face a similar risk here in the city profile and now must focus on preventing urban configurations now known as a wildfire-initiated community configuration or a WIC. We love our acronyms and disaster management. This is when structure to structure fires drives fire behavior and impacts in our community. If we go back in time before the Marshall Fire and look at the wildfire risk map for Boulder County, it showed a high risk in wildland areas around many of our communities and low risk in the built environment. And we all know what happened in that low risk urban area. It burned. Recent fires show exactly what a wick looks like. Lahaina, Los Angeles, Spokane, Reno most recently, and then of course, most importantly to us, the Marshall Fire, all demonstrate fires that grow or grew too fast for response systems to scale, overwhelm first responders, and cause multiple infrastructure failures at the same time. WICs create community-scale life safety risk, cause large-scale evacuations, overwhelm transportation infrastructure, cause significant structure loss, and economic impacts in challenging recovery environments. This is how that day will begin. A wind-driven, fast-moving, linear fire front is going to threaten our community while simultaneously distributing fire into the interior of the community through Embercast. These are the conditions of a wildfire-initiated community configuration, and we must address them, and we must be ready to respond. Today, the built environment is a major driver of risk. Where and how we build and how surrounding landscapes are changing directly influence whether wildfire will become a community-level disaster. The threat is no longer just the wildfire. It's how fire interacts with the urban environment, which includes structures, businesses, critical community sectors, and central infrastructure. These impacts occur on a scale different from wildfires impacting mountain residential neighborhoods. This threat is serious, but it's not unmanageable. We cannot prevent all fires, but we can influence and shape the environment to reduce a wildfire initiated community conflagration and their characteristics and impacts. If we continue to succeed in our efforts, that day will look differently. On this day, a wind-driven fire front is moving towards our community, but effective land management strategy will slow the fire's rate of spread, reduce its intensity, and ember production. Home hardening and vegetation management increases resistance to ember ignitions and reduces the likelihood of fires being distributed throughout the community. These efforts translate directly into more time for evacuations. more time for firefighters to deploy resources, and a better chance of keeping fire out of structures and containing it if it reaches them. We are leading at the regional level, and the reason why is because what came clear in our local work is that urban configurations require regional response. In August 2025, ODM and three partner counties expanded this work into the Front Range WIC Initiative, which is the Wildfire Urban Community Configuration Initiative. This now involves nine counties on the front range, more than 75 agencies, and has assumed over 6,000 hours of staff time to build out the work that we've completed and starting to implement. The importance of this work is that any community that experiences one of these types of fires will require regional response across the front range. As this work elevates into state, federal, and professional circles, one question keeps coming up that I hear frequently is, how are you getting this done? This has never been done before is what we hear. The answer is unprecedented collaboration and cooperation amongst the many communities, counties along the Front Range of Colorado. Many of the programs you'll hear tonight are truly unique to Boulder and now viewed as regional best practices. Tonight, you'll hear strategies that I believe will work. They will reduce risk, change how fire behaves as it moves towards or into the city, limit community impacts, and strengthen our ability to respond effectively. Thank you for your time. And with that, I'd like to introduce Brian Aniker with OSMP to continue the discussion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike, and good evening, Council. I'm Brian Aniker, Senior Manager for Science and Climate Resilience from the Open Space and Mountain Parks Department. I'm the overall project manager for this Council priority project, which has two tasks. Task one, we'll hear from Jamie Barker about the Home Hardening Implementation Hub project. And then task two is wildfire mitigation priorities, and I'll present on that task along with Paul Dennison. As mentioned, this is about a 10-month project with three community touches. We saw the Open Space Board in July of this year. We're here tonight for our first of two City Council study sessions, and we'll wrap up with you October 22nd. We look forward to that. With that project overview, I'm going to turn it right over to Jamie Barker.

Thank you, Brian. I'm Jamie Barker. I'm the PIO for Wildfire Resilience and Boulder Fire Rescue in the city. Good evening. The simplest way to describe the goal of the Wildfire Ready Hub is to get folks to start the work. We spent a lot of time giving our community really good information about wildfire risk, defensible space, and home hardening. We also have our detailed home assessments, which give property owners individualized information about their homes. but there's still a gap between the, I understand my risk or I have my detailed home assessment and what do I actually do from here? So that's the gap that we're trying to bridge with task one, which is the home hardening hub. We want community members to be able to jump into mitigation work regardless of their budget, their level of wildfire knowledge or where they're starting and find something tangible that they can do immediately that starts them on their wildfire journey. So the space isn't intended to replace our existing wildfire ready information it's designed to integrate with it and make that information actionable and accessible in a few different ways for our Community visually.

looks like we may have lost Jamie. Just checking.

Am I back?

We can see you and hear you now, Jamie.

I have no idea what just happened. Everything went blank. So it's designed to integrate our wildfire information so that this information is actionable and accessible for our community in a variety of ways. Visually, through video and written information, and eventually through physical examples on city properties. Next slide, please. So this is an example of what we have today. And I want to be clear, there's some really good information in our current wildfire ready hub, which is at bouldercolorado.gov slash wildfire ready. But this council priority that you've given us has given us an opportunity to ask a slightly different question in doing this work. So instead of asking what information do we need to provide for folks, we're starting to ask, what do we want people to be able to do with that information? So the hub isn't intended to become another giant web page full of wildfire information. We want it to function much more like a choose your own path tool or choose your own path opportunity. If I have $100, what can I do? If I have a free weekend, what can I do? I have my detailed home assessment. What now? What happens next? My neighbor isn't mitigating. What conversation do I need to have as a result of that, et cetera? Next slide, please.

Jamie, we see the next slide. I wonder if maybe turning your camera off, if that might be helpful.

I might turn my video off if it helps things move. Hopefully you can still hear me.

Yeah, loud and clear. We have slide 10 up for you, so we're ready for that if you're ready.

Okay, are you able to hear me.

Yes.

Okay. So what you're seeing now is our hub of mock up and the mock up currently has about 10 pathways, including instructional videos community efforts mitigation cost estimates price based projects weekend projects. Detailed home assessment and insurance guidance for conversations neighborhood support state incentives. resilient landscaping, and the existing wildfire ready webpage. This is just a mock-up, but it shows how we're thinking about folks having this experience. First, we have ways to learn and see what resilience actually looks like through instructional videos, community stories, and eventually examples of resilient landscaping within the city of Boulder. Then we have tools that can help people decide what work to actually do. We're looking at using the Headwaters economics tool, which is the calculator based tool to help estimate mitigation work rather than creating and maintaining a standalone city calculator. We're also building high impact project lists based on different price points that folks can engage with. So instead of wildfire resilience feeling like, I guess I might need $20,000 to redo my house, someone could select 50 to 500, 500 to 1500, et cetera, and see the highest impact actions available to them in that range. So we're also creating a very approachable entry points. The weekend project feature is intended to give someone one to five hour projects based on their property. Those aren't meant to replace comprehensive mitigation work. They're just a Kickstarter that gets somebody doing the work and hopefully started on their mitigation routine. There's also some barriers to the wildfire mitigation work that we've been hearing from folks. Like how do I use my detailed home assessment when I'm talking with my insurance company? How do I get my neighbor involved? What state incentives exist, et cetera. So those are barriers to action as well. So we're building resources around those questions and how the community can continue to have those conversations with the relevant folks. The idea is that there isn't one correct door into wildfire resilience, so we want to give people multiple opportunities and multiple doors to enter into trying to figure out what mitigation means for them and then ultimately making moves towards mitigation that help our community. Next slide please. So we're moving rather quickly on this, but since July, we've been working with subject matter experts across departments to help develop the content and identify what belongs in the hub. You're going to see some of these items on our next slide. What you're seeing tonight is intentionally a draft of that hub, because after this council work session, we'll continue development towards the soft launch of this at the end of September, where we can get feedback from anchor point subscribers, Frequent users, council, regional partners, as well as the public at some tabling events, etc. In October, we're planning the public launch for this, including an online recorded walkthrough and an in-person open house at Station 3, just to give folks really hands-on experience with this hub. Next slide, please. So what you're looking at is our hub asset slide, and I wanted to show this because the hub isn't starting from scratch. There's a significant amount of content either already existing, underway in development, or has been identified for development. We're organizing these assets that are going to live on the hub in several different buckets, videos, resources, handouts, tools, and incentives. We already have videos on defensible space, home hardening, and the history of wildfire. We are creating more of those videos though. We're also developing things like property owner testimonials as well as testimonials from some of our partner organizations. We do already have a video or two from UCAR NCAR related to this as well. We are also working on some RUI education videos for top five high impact projects and our weekend project feature. On the resource side, we're looking at insurance talking points, neighbor-to-neighbor resources, detailed home assessment and mitigation guidance for different type of residents, resilient city properties that people can actually see, and state incentives and other resources for insurance conversations and neighbor conversations. We're also thinking beyond the webpage. That includes handouts, budget-based project lists, signage of properties where wildfire resilience work is happening, and other ways of making this work visible throughout the community. Ultimately, success for this hub isn't measured by how much wildfire information we can put on a webpage. Success is whether someone leaves it, leaves the webpage, and does something about this. Maybe they spend $50 or five hours, maybe they talk to their neighbor, or maybe they finally understand what their detailed home assessment is asking them to do and have a next action item for themselves. Whatever our community's starting point is, our goal with task one is pretty simple. It's to help Boulder start the work. You can do the next slide. And also, that was all I had.

Team, just check in. Yeah.

And to hit the button five times. All right. Thank you, Jamie. We're on to Task two, we have a bit of breaking news here. Congratulations to Jamie Barker, the nationwide PIO of the year. Recently awarded to just now. Wish I could see your face. Hopefully you're smiling. OK, so task two, wildfire mitigation priorities. We've broken this down into three phases. As you can see here, phase one describes an inventory of our city's work on wildfire resilience. Phase two is work to prioritize everything into programs and geographically as well, as you can see in the packet. And then phase three is really asking, how do we know if we're making progress on risk reduction for the city of Boulder? So this task two is really implementation planning, but we just want to underscore that while we're doing this planning effort, the boots on the ground work is not slowing at all. In fact, it's accelerating and we're really proud of everything we're able to keep going while we run this council priority project for this year. When it comes to inventorying our work, we want to start by acknowledging some of the really deep roots we have in wildfire resilience as a city. All the way back to 1991, we had the origin of our wildland fire response team. In 1999, we published a forest ecosystem plan for the open space department and began a forestry crew to do important fuels reduction work in our forests. We published our first community wildfire protection plan in 2007, updated that just two years ago in 2024. We adopted the international WUI code in 2013 and updated that recently as well. As Pam mentioned, we stood up a really impressive 10 department wildfire resilience team. Many of those leaders are here tonight. Our initial estimates are that citywide across those teams, we're looking at around $10 million plus into wildfire resilience year over year. Part of that funding is coming from the climate tax fund as well, which got a specific earmark for wildfire resilience. So to more formally inventory all the work the city's doing on wildfire resilience, we conducted what we're calling a plan action review. We started with the community wildfire protection plan, which at its foundation on the right here, you can see includes these three strategies, fire adapted communities, resilient landscapes, and safe and effective response. Under each of those strategies, the CWPP lines out a lot of different project ideas. So our first move was just pull those out, put them in a list. Then we combed through about 20 other city plans and extracted more and more projects out of there. We then went to staff and looked at their annual work plans and project ideas, pulled those out, grew that list to be several hundred projects long, and we normed the project data, removed some duplicates. We're really happy to share with you tonight as Attachment A our current understanding of our project portfolio, which includes around 137 different projects. Now we can organize that work in a couple different ways. One is by project status, where you can see here we have 102 of those projects are active and 35 are in draft. We can also organize it by those national strategies that underpin the CWPP, fired up communities, resilient landscape, safe and reflective response. Again, to that you can see on the right, we've added a fourth area that we're calling responsibly governed, which we will define for you momentarily. So on top of that project inventory and below the level of these national strategies, we still felt like we were missing a scale that was the right scale to organize our work, to talk to our community and think about where our priorities lie. So we created the concept of programs and put all the work into 25 groups, which you can see in attachment B. Here I'll just illustrate those 25 programs for you, starting with fire adapted communities on the left. This includes programs like wildfire risk reduction for homes and property, wildfire building and landscaping standards, as well as community emergency preparedness and more. In the middle, resilient landscapes, that's where we have fuel management, fuel breaks, prescribed fire, and more. On the right, response-wise, we have wildfire response program, tactical evacuation, ignition prevention, and utility hardening, which is relevant to the power resilience conversation we just had. And to all of that, we added this fourth group below called responsibly governed. And you can see the programs under there really act as catalysts for all of the work above, things like communications and engagement and program administration you can find on there. So to demystify the programs for you a little bit and show how they connect to the projects, I pulled an example of one of our programs, which is the Resilient Landscapes 1 Wildfire Fields Management in the Wildland Urban Interface. And you can see an example of some of the projects here. There's 11 in total. We've got the project numbers here and just shows the range of work under this program. which includes perimeter mowing, which is mowing a 30-foot strip along the built environment, cross-boundary fields management in places like Sans Souci and Wonderland Lake, prescribed grazing, as well as reducing timber fuels, of course. So with our project and program inventory complete, we wanted to move on to phase two, which is prioritization, where we really wanted to take a dual approach here, prioritizing not just our programs, but also our geography. So starting with our 25 programs, we created the concept of tiers. And the idea is that tier one programs are those where we want to pay that most attention to now because we have the greatest opportunity to reduce risk here. These are also the programs that are going to move into phase three of this council project and get measures and more attention, especially in October. And then we have tier two programs, which are still important. They're on the list. They're priority. They're just not going to receive as much attention immediately as tier one. How do we determine which programs are tier one and which are tier two? We created a survey instrument which was completed by 34 wildfire professionals, including both our own city staff, as well as partners throughout the West who have communities with urban interfaces like Boulder's. We asked them a simple question. which of these programs reduce risk the most for communities like Boulder. And these are the results. And I'm just going to animate these in and show you that we have 10 tier one priority programs. And for fire adapted communities, you can see again, the top three look like that. Resilient landscapes, it's fuels management, fuels break, prescribed fire. Response wise, it's the response effort itself, evacuation and ignition prevention. And then to that, we added a 10th One, which was communications and engagement, knowing how important it is to not only conduct this work, but describe this work and do outreach to our community. So, on top of this great program prioritization, we sought to do the geographic prioritization. And for that, I'm going to turn it to Paul Dennison to tell you more about the WUI risk index.

Thank you, Brian. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I'm Paul Dennison, the Wildland Fire Senior Program Manager with Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks. Tonight, I'm sharing the City staff's work to more clearly define the Boulder Wildland Urban Interface, the WUI. and analyze relative risk across it through a project we're calling the WUI Risk Index. While wildfire resilience work continues to accelerate across all parts of our city, this risk index gives us the data to prioritize our resources and set more aggressive mitigation targets in our most vulnerable areas. Staff began by defining the WUI through the existing ignition risk zones one, two, and three within the built environment based on building proximity to wildland fuels. These zones are shown as building footprints in red, orange, and yellow on the map shown on the slide. We then established a newer concept, WUI natural areas, by drawing a 1500 foot buffer into adjacent city, federally, and privately managed open spaces. These areas are shown as blue on the map. Based on long range ember transport research, this 1500 foot zone represents the concrete distance where landscape hazards directly impact home and neighborhood risk in Boulder. These natural areas are shown, excuse me, already said in blue on the map, and include the areas of greatest importance to neighborhood level risk, which are areas within 100 and 300 feet of homes. Next slide, please. With our boundaries established, staff assessed broad risk patterns across the city, keeping human life, community safety, and home survival at the center of our assessment. This map displays one modeled risk factor, potential wildfire intensity, and shows how potential fire intensity moderates as you move from west to east in the areas in and around Boulder. By analyzing fire intensity, likelihood of fire occurrence, and neighborhood exposure to burnable areas, Our landscape assessment confirmed that our highest risk is concentrated in the western parts of Boulder, west of Broadway. Compared to the predominantly agricultural lands to the east, the western WUI features denser forest fuels, steeper terrain, higher potential fire intensity, higher likelihood of fire occurrence, and neighborhoods directly interfacing with wildland areas without major roads or waterways to act as a barrier to fire spread, and with these neighborhoods situated directly downwind of areas where wildfire could occur. Next slide, please. To move from broad landscape patterns to actionable neighborhood level wildfire risk information, we subdivided the western WUI into 12 separate sections. These sections are bounded by major roads and waterways as their north and south breaks, extend 1500 feet into the natural areas to the west, and capture ignition risk zones one and two to the east. across these 12 Western movie sections staff evaluated three wildfire risk factors home susceptibility to wildfire impacts neighborhood exposure to burnable areas and potential fire intensity. likelihood of occurrence as you've already mentioned, is a fourth risk factor, but which is best interpreted at the landscape scale and so that factor was helped constant in our analysis of the 12 Western movie sections next slide. To see how the risk analysis works in practice, this map compares two specific western WUI sections. In the map on the top left of the slide, we have the Dakota Ridge section, which sits at the north end of residential Boulder. And in the map on the top right, we have the Knollwood section, which sits between Mapleton, which becomes Sunshine Canyon Drive to the north, and Boulder Canyon to the south. Staff evaluated 11 specific risk indicators across our three core risk factors. These two neighborhoods present different risk profiles and the text beneath the maps summarize a sampling of the 11 risk indicators evaluated for each of the Western Louis sections. Dakota Ridge on the left map has higher building density, which puts it at greater risk, but it benefits from newer construction standards, less tree canopy overhanging roofs, lower potential fire intensity, mainly consisting of surface fire, and indirect home exposure, given that the neighborhood is surrounded by roadways. Whereas Nolwood on the right has lower home density but higher overall vulnerability due to older legacy construction, heavier canopy overhang, higher potential fire intensity consisting of potential tree torching and some crown fire, and direct structural exposure to wildland fuels without a significant barrier between the neighborhood and the natural environment. Next slide, please. By evaluating all 11 risk indicators across all 12 Western WUI sections, we generated a relative risk rank for each section and grouped the sections into three categories, highest risk, very high risk, and high risk. You'll notice the risk scale does not go lower than high because every section in our Western WUI carries significant baseline risk. And to reiterate the purpose of this work, the WUI risk index will allow staff to establish ambitious timelines and direct high impact mitigation to the most vulnerable parts of the WUI first, while maintaining continuous wildfire resilience efforts across the entire city. As a final note, this map is currently March draft. We are continuing to vet and refine the underlying risk analysis, and we look forward to bringing the final WUI risk index report back to council this October. Thank you and back to you, Brian.

Thank you, Paul. Okay, so we're ready to move on to our third phase, which is measures. As we reviewed earlier, we've got these 10 tier one programs. And the concept moving forward is that we'd have one or more measure for one per program or more to give us a final batch of 10 that we would use to tell our story on making progress on risk reduction over the next four years or so. To guide this work, we started with a measures template. And what we're doing is during staff workshops, we take one program at a time We start by listing out what our high-level outcomes are that we'd like to achieve. We then brainstorm as many different measures as we can think of and filter that list down using some criteria, keeping the ones that are really closely connected to our outcomes, measures that we can actually control and move the needle on and are also feasible to measure. Once we've pulled or selected our favored measure and assigned a target to that, we add definitions to make sure that measure is as legible as possible to our community. And we also identify the challenges inherent to doing the work to move the needle, as well as some of the things that aren't under our total control. Because measures is a work in progress, what we have for you tonight is one worked example. It's the same one you can find in your packet. I'll walk it through here following our template. So for the RL1 program area, which is wildfire fuels management in the wildland urban interface. Our outcomes are we want to keep fire flame lengths low and keep fire as close to the ground as possible and out of the canopy. We want to slow the spread of fire across the ground, and we want to manage the vegetation in a way to hit these outcomes while maintaining or potentially even improving our ecosystem health. We don't want to have a trade-off there. The measure that was selected by staff is printed on the screen here. It says 100% of city-owned acres in WUI natural areas, which Paul just defined, across those 12 priority WUI sections going north to east, are treated to wildfire risk reduction prescription by the end of 2030. So you can see this is a quantitative measure. It's geographically specific and it's time bound. You can also see mentioning of resourcing, so the plan is to hit this measure in our target using existing resourcing and we note that enhanced resourcing we could potentially get there sooner if we were to decrease resourcing we would push that date of completion out. Final detail there is that, of course. Fields management is not a one and done, especially for grass. The grass grows back. So even if we hit this ambitious target by 2030 in four years time, we're still going to have ongoing work in this area. Now to fully understand the target, we felt like we needed to define what we meant by woolly natural areas, treatment, and prescription. So these definitions would roll out with this measure. We also wanted to make a note about the amount of acres here in our initial tabulation. We've got around 2,383 acres represented across the maps that Paul had shown you in natural areas. So we have that to work on now. And then for challenges, the main one here, and you could see in the measure that we mentioned that we're going to manage city-owned acres, which is to say that We don't own and manage all the acreage, but we do own and manage about 70% of those acres. We have direct control there. Another 15% of those acres is owned by NCAR and NIST, who we have got great partnerships with and even management agreements with, but that does leave 15% of those acres in privately owned management responsibility. And so to get those acres managed, we're gonna need, cross-boundary projects, or voluntary compliance. So to wrap all this up, this slide shows our three phases, inventory, prioritization, and measures, and the deliverables that go with them. So for phase one, we've got a project inventory, 137 projects long, And for programs, we've got 25 programs. Prioritization, we have now 10 Tier 1 programs out of that list. And we also have a geographic prioritization scheme called the WUI Risk Index. And then for Phase 3, we now have a handful of measures that are in draft and a promise to develop the rest in time for October and our next touch with Council. And a commitment to track our progress year over year as we attempt to move the needle. I think I neglected to mention that we're having a default time horizon here of 2030, which gives us four years for implementation. And we picked that because that's when we will be due to do a six year update to our community wildfire protection plan. So most of the measures are going to have that 2030 target. So what this analysis has shown is that program prioritization coupled with geographic-based prioritization to reduce our risk is really the best way to prioritize all of our resource decisions going forward. And as we develop our remaining measures, it's going to give us the ability to refine the exact actions and ways to focus our work that we're going to have the biggest impact on behalf of our community. And we're looking forward to giving you even more information in October. So for next steps on task one, as Jamie mentioned, she's going to keep driving on asset development. There's a planned soft launch of the implementation hub planned before October. And for task two, we're going to keep building these measures and thinking about how to build a system to track our progress over time. And just one more time, I want to say that while this planning project continues, the ongoing boots on the ground work for wildfire resilience is also continuing. So to wrap up, we're going to just put the list of questions as we wrote them for Council tonight. We covered so much material here. We've organized these three questions, kind of aligning with task one and task two, and then a more open-ended question is our third question. And at this time, I think we're ready to open it up for Q&A.

Fantastic, Brian, and thank you so much. So I think what we're going to do is we are going to do one and two together. Is that what you think is the best? Yeah.

Okay.

Okay. So question one, does council have questions or feedback on the wildfire and home hardening implementation hub and its approach to connecting homeowners to resources, guidance, and incentives too? Does council have questions or feedback on the proposed wildfire resilience framework progress? to date to prioritize resources and measure progress, including the inventory of programs and actions, Tier 1 program designations, geographic risk groupings, and measures and targets. Does any of my council members disagree with doing one and two at the same time? All right, no one said anything. That's great. So who wants to start us off? It looks like Rob Kaplan is the winner.

Yay. Thanks, Tara. How many questions did we get? One, two.

I can't hear you. Oh, how many questions do you get?

Yeah. Is there like a first round of just one question, two questions?

I don't know. Let's see how it goes. Just ask your questions. You don't have to ask both questions. One and two is what I meant.

Okay, thank you for all of this hard work. And Matt and I were on a council walk and talk and it was really informative and I do appreciate everything that OSMP is doing. And the rest of staff and specifically to the home hardening, or I'm sorry, the home implementation hub, the information hub. I asked a question initially about having a list of contractors, and then I kind of redacted it because I actually found a list of landscapers, but I only found that list of landscapers through searching it with an AI tool. uh, tool. It's not, um, search engine optimized apparently, but I'm going to go back to my first question. Can, it seems like it was 30 some percent of people. Um, that's where they get hung up just finding like a general contractor to do all of this kind of stuff. And this is what I hear consistently. Um, I went to the County site, um, and they have a list of contractors and and how to apply, a contractor to apply for a renewed septic professional license. So they've done it. Somehow they've made it through legal. My first question is, can we do that?

I don't know if anybody wants to take that question. Oh, Brian, I see you coming.

Yeah, I was just going to pitch it over to Jamie to see if she had an initial reaction. Otherwise, I can jump in.

Sure, yeah. From the legal perspective, I think somebody is probably better off speaking to whether or not we can have a contractor list or not for the home working aspect. We do have a contractor list for landscapers, which is currently linked off of our Urban Resilient Landscapes webpage. Now, that list can also be added, our Urban Resilience landscaping list and web page can also be added to our wrap page, if that makes sense. But in terms of having contractors, I'm assuming that if the folks that are in charge decided they wanted to have some sort of training, it could work very similarly to that of our landscaping list. Though I do want to note that the city attorney's office was very specific in how they crafted the language about our landscapers list in that They made sure that folks were aware that they had taken the city training, but were not being referred or referenced as a contractor by the city of Boulder. So I certainly, I might not be the authority in saying we can do that, but I think that if we've done it for landscaping purposes, there's probably a good opportunity based on our conversations with the city attorney's office that that could be a potential as well.

Yeah, this might not have been a fair question for you guys.

It's all right. And I'm happy to just say we can always look into it. Our concern always is that anything that appears on an official city website may appear as an endorsement. And so we're thoughtful about what does that look like? And the fact that some folks have gone through a certification or a training process that we bet gives us more confidence to do that. If there are other ways in which we can think about that, happy to lean into that, but we usually do not endorse particular companies or individuals, but for folks that perhaps have been trained, and I believe the county does something similar, but happy to take that back.

Yeah, that would be great, and I can send you the licensed septic professionals that the county has. Can I ask another question, Tara? Yeah. I'm going to keep going until she tells me not to.

I'm sorry, can I colloquy on that one before you move on? This is Taisha. Yes. Would it be possible to prioritize those companies that are in the city of Boulder while we're vetting the list? Thank you.

So the first thing I heard is the North Star is life safety. And then thank you, Mike Chard, for your presentation. I mean, what we want to do is keep the fire out of the city, influence and manage the fire. OSMP is doing a great job of keeping it on the ground. I still didn't get a great answer for why certain areas are high and not very high. Because I know right in my backyard, we've had some fires and there's a lot of standing timber and a lot of dead and down. But it sounds like they're going to come back with another round of this and it's preliminary. All this to say, I think SMP is doing a great job. I would love to, you know, empower them, whatever they need budget wise or FTE wise, if they need, you know, more people for grazing, more people for Sawyers, more people for burn bosses, whatever that looks like to manage that 1500 foot barrier, to give responders time to get there before it hits the built environment and to allow evacuation to get people out. Once it's in, the built environment, if it gets into the built environment, this is where I'm seeing the gap. And that North Star is life safety. And I would love to see a statement just like Affordable Housing has a statement, 15% of all homes permanently affordable by 2023. Climate Initiatives Department, reduce emissions by 70% by 2030. and become carbon positive by 2040. And OSMP has a goal of 2030. I would like some, a policy statement on our built environment and what that looks like for home hardening. And yes, this is where I'm going. I'm going to retroactive home hardening. I'm seeing Lions do it. And it's kind of like we're, we're not talking to both sides of this equation. And also to Excel is like, we're measuring things that haven't happened. I wanna measure so many things that haven't happened. And if we can just at least look at the five foot perimeter, the non-combustible plants, screening and whatever else staff comes up with. I don't wanna get operational here. I'm just throwing some ideas out there. And then maybe have where people that can't afford to do that, they apply and maybe they get some funding. But if we could do also a 1,500 foot perimeter of homes within the built environment, whether that's two rows or more, just to start, I think that would be a true North Star for the life safety of our city. I would love somebody to speak to that.

As the team sort of thinks about some of the additional evaluation that they are working on, I'll say, Councilmember Kaplan, that you're hitting on some other work that we're doing in the city right now as we think about citywide KPIs, those numbers that you were talking about with affordable housing and our climate goals. That's the very thing that we are working on that will be attached to the strategic plan, in addition to obviously all the measures and metrics that project initiatives and departments do all the time. But we are on that and actually we're thinking about how do we bring some of that performance, holistic performance management to council to throw some daylight onto it, because it is not one of the things that you usually see. But I know the team is also thinking about a variety of metrics as we're moving forward. And so, Brian, if there's something you want to add, feel free.

Yeah. Yeah, Rob, we're definitely talking about that. And the 10 priority programs, if each one's going to have a measure, then that's going to be looking directly at fact one, which is home hardening and landscaping around homes. So we're actively talking about how to measure that. What do we control? It's a voluntary space. So within that space, we can set an ambitious target, but if we're never going to reach it, how do we kind of balance that with those kind of trade-offs and Stay tuned. We don't quite have it ready for you here tonight, but we've got a lot of great ideas and clay on the wheel, and we'll definitely have something for the October packet in that area.

Okay, thank you. I'm going to let some other people ask some questions.

We can come back to you, Rob, since you are the actual fire person. Okay, so let's go next to Matt.

I thought Tina was ahead of me.

Okay, Tina. Tina dropped out and then came back, but it's fine. Go ahead, Matt. Tina, you can be next after him if you'd like.

Go ahead, Tina. I'd like to hear your question. Go for it.

Sorry. Okay. Just a couple things. The first is thanks for doing all the work and also thank you for explaining how you created the risk areas. I'll also just be looking to understand a little bit, and just kind of that incarnist area. I thought it looked a little bit like the others, but I'm also not someone who's well-versed in all of this. So I'd love to, at some point, hear more about how we got to that because I think community will be curious how we got there.

And then my other question is, in the final report,

We might be looking to add funding at some point to try to get to some of these goals that we're defining faster. Will there be a way, for instance, if I'm looking at two priorities, one being the wildfire fuels management and the other one being the home hardening in the WUI, how will we be able to frame that to say, well, I think it's going to be the home hardening one that we want to do first versus accelerating the wildfires? management? I think we're kind of at top 10. But even between there, will there be a way for us to like clear direction on what would be sort of the best thing to invest in and accelerate if we have the opportunity?

I love the question on prioritization. And as you can see, we sort of a top one, two, three for three different areas. So how do you compete the top one across the separate three? Programmatically, you know, those are run by different departments, different work groups. So they're not actually can't take the OSMP staff and put them to work on home hardening per se. So those programs kind of have a life of their own and can be accelerated in parallel without trading off one thing for the other would be my initial response to that. And we sort of intentionally built it that way that there wouldn't be a way to prioritize FAC1 over RL1 just because we think they're equally important. And it's maybe a losing battle to try to put one over the other. They're all pretty important and by really different complementary pieces of risk reduction. So that's my initial thought if others want to add to that.

Yeah, thanks, Brian, for that start. I might invite, I'm looking at Mike Charter or Chief Calderazo as well here. You know, both of these mitigation opportunities exist on a spectrum. And so, Charter, I saw you smile. Do you want to jump in here?

Chief, if you're ready to go, I'll defer. If not, I'll jump in.

Yeah, no, I was just actually going to speak to I was going to build real quick on what Brian was saying about going something's going in parallel. So it's the answer to that question is probably a little more. I hate to be vague with nuance that some are general funded. projects and programs and some of course are funded by open space funds and so they can go in parallel. So it depends on if we're talking about doing this project that a lot of general fund money is spent on or not or other kinds of funding sources. So I think that has to be part of the conversation, not just part of the question. But then in just purely if we're talking about trade-offs, then we can start talking about, all right, which one of these is more important with the limited resources that we have? So I just wanted to throw that out there just to build on what Brian had said, because there are some things that even if they're not quite equal in terms of value to the prevention, we would do in parallel anyway. Okay.

If I could just jump in one second, just to build on that, Dan Burke, Director of Open Space and Mountain Parks. I would also add that even though we've identified the top 10 and we know the geographical prioritization is the Western WUI, and even within that WUI, there's some higher areas of risk than others, even though it's all high risk, that in terms of the 10 programs, some may have capacity levels that are pretty adequate right now. where one of the other ones may be a little bit under-resourced. So we would also wanna be looking at what are the current capacities of all of the 10. And there could be, for instance, our WUI fuels management, we feel like right now is a pretty well-resourced program area, but our prescribed burn program may be a little bit under-resourced. So it's also looking particularly at those that are, how they're right now resourced versus, what that enhanced level looks like. And Mayor Pro Tem, I'm sorry. I forgot to identify myself.

Mike Calderazo, Fire Chief. Just to get that in there for the record. I apologize.

Okay. So was that good? I already forgot who that last speaker was.

I think Director Chard wanted to say something.

Awesome. Thanks, Daria. Mike Chard, Director of Ops Disaster Management. Councilperson Marquis, I want to be very direct here. For me, it's about keeping it out of the homes. Once we start getting structure-to-structure transmission, home hardening starts to lose effectiveness because that's an ember resistance tactic. So I feel very strongly that a lot of the land management, especially with the way that Paul and Dan and his team have really kind of identified this 1,500-foot multilayered strategy of reduce embers, helps us out immediately with the home hardening because it will take time to get there by percentage. And then the 300-foot creates that fire reduction zone that really takes, I think, a lot of the wind, so to speak, out of the fire in ways that lets then Chief Calderao's team and Chief Redfern and his team get in there, do the evacuations, do the fire control, and really try to do the structure protection plan that we've had a lot of years of DNA in building and implementing. So that's, I mean, I think by October, presentation, that's where I feel we need to bring you good data and advisement also with it to help you then set the table for that policy and fiscal distribution of where maybe those investments can give us the better return. And I think that with Paul's further risk assessment and detail, that's going to feed into being able to get the fidelity into that recommendation for you.

I'll just quickly add, I'm sorry, Mayor Pro Tem, just quickly add, I appreciate that and the candor of all the responses. I think what I'm hoping that you're seeing is that the team has really developed and continues to develop hard criteria to really... tell us what the greatest risk is, what is it time for, and that will always evolve. We are here for the marathon, not the sprint. So as we get more resources, as we continue to apply for grants, as the moment change and maybe we catch up with burn areas and there's another area, we will always be assessing what is it time for. And those conversations will come to you periodically as we move forward.

Okay, and then Tara, should I just complete two and three? No. No? No, we're going to have a second round because it feels long. Okay, can I just make a quick comment, though? The way Mike Char just talked about how the different teams deal with the fire at different stages really gave me, as a non-fire professional, Just a really good idea of how that works and how the different mitigation connects with the fire prevention. So just the way that was framed was really great. Everything's been great, but I just want to particularly call that out.

Yeah, I agree. I agree on that. Okay, let's move on to Nicole.

Thank you. I have one question and one area for feedback. So my question is this. So the Wildfire Resilience Framework that we're putting together organizes around 130 projects into 25 program areas. It establishes 10 tier one priorities. It uses a multi-layer WUI risk index with 12 model geographic sections. And it ties all of this to measurable targets and annual public tracking. And all of this is supported by an annual cross-departmental investment of about $10.5 million. Is this level of scientific rigor and geographic specificity and structure prioritization and dedicated resourcing typical for a city of our size? And how does that kind of position us relative to peer communities that are also at high risk?

and start with an answer. I think we're way ahead in many ways. The CWPP is a common denominator. Most cities have that and it helps them be eligible for external grant. And it really puts everybody together in the room to think about risk mapping and prioritization of your work. After we got through ours, we just felt like we had additional need for clarity and prioritization. terms of like an implementation plan for the CWPP. What we really didn't want to happen was for it to be a plan on the shelf. We wanted to make it really active and engage with a lot of different staff and keep it living. And then with this council priority, we really saw the opportunity to tell the community how we're doing and to do it in a measurable fashion above and beyond what a normal CWPP pp would would bring you which would typically just be a story map where we know those are useful we have one but we thought there might be a better way to storytell and engage the community and also then start to think about that 10 plus million dollar investment and where it's currently going and other kind of realignments or unmet needs that might flow out of it so this year has been a really interesting implementation planning process and without doing a formal kind of benchmark study my My feeling is we're well ahead of peer cities, and I'd be happy to hear what others on the call would say to that.

I would second that with Mike Char, Director of Disaster Management, Councilperson Spear. Definitely, I think in the scientific community, there's research going on that has been beneficial to help us build, I think, where we're current going with methodology too, but then also there's areas around implementation that is where I think we're stepping out onto that forefront. I'll just give you one example. With the Natural Resources College coming up September, they're calling it a Go Fast Fire Symposium. And that's their way of describing wind-driven type events, what we're calling that wildfire initiated community conflagration. I'm involved in that. So there's emerging science around it. So I think they're excited to see the work we're doing and contributing that space. And I think just anecdotally, just in the conversations we've had, I always like to say, who's doing this already? Who's the community that has the things that we're trying to do already completed so we can go to school on that? And I've yet to find anyone that can direct me to that community. So the work that, the more this gets sunlighted in my sphere of disciplines and peer, the more people are going, how are you getting all this done? And it's not, it's usually there's something that's either close or maybe a little bit ahead, but the scale of comprehensive work across departments and implementation and strategy and vision is the stuff that's really putting people kind of on their heels going, how did this all happen? So that'd be my sense of it.

Okay, good. Should we move on? Well, I had, aren't we doing, it's questions or feedback? Question one and two. That's answers one and two. Yes. Yeah.

So then I do have some feedback. Okay. So it's, One of the areas that I see some room for us to keep thinking about is in the long-term usability and the ongoing support for residents and property owners who are making and maintaining changes to their property. So just like with the mitigation on our own city land, mitigation for property owners unfolds over several years. It's not sort of a one and done situation. Even if you trim your trees, they have this weird habit of growing back. So for many residents, if they're able to do the mitigation work, that's huge. And it's already taken up a lot of their time. Maintaining it then takes up more time. Reporting it back may not make it onto the priority list, and I am guilty as charged in that regard. So how do we think about making it easier for people to not just do the work, but maintain it and then report it back to us? Because as a resident, you're sort of choosing between doing the work maintaining it and reporting back, I would expect that reporting back is maybe not going to get the highest priority there. So I just encourage us to keep thinking about and looking for ways to reduce that friction and make it easier for people to maintain the mitigation and engagement over time too, so that we're helping them think about mitigation as something that's really a sustained multi-year effort versus just something that you do once and then you're good and and you're sort of done for the foreseeable future. So it's just, it's the only place where I really just still see some friction between, you know, where we're community, where we're pushing community and making these changes and what they're able to do.

Thank, oops, I was muted. Thank you, Nicole. We are going to move on to Aaron, Mayor Brockett.

Thanks, Tara. And thanks so much to everybody involved in this. This cross-departmental work is truly impressive. And to Nicole's question and the subsequent answer, I think the level of engagement and effort here is really remarkable for any city, certainly one of our size. And I think what you've come out with here is what the community has been craving, is this set of science-backed priorities where we're looking at the things that are most important, doing those first, on a timeline and then giving people metrics on how we're accomplishing those. So I think this is top notch work. And now we have a really good answer when the community says, okay, how are we prioritizing our wildfire work? We have very clear answers to point them to. And I think everyone in the city who's concerned about this, which is pretty much everyone will greatly appreciate that. So just kudos and look forward to the implementation into moving forward to things in October. I did want to second Rob's comments and questions. So I thought those were spot on as well. So I look forward to the next steps in terms of metrics and looking at possible retroactivity options as we move forward to the next steps. But overall, I just want to say thank you for showing that we as a city appreciate the urgency of this work and showing how everybody is all hands on deck on addressing it.

Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Mayor Bracken. Next, we move to Matt Benjamin.

Thanks, Tara. A couple things. One, I mean, I think this is a great update. I think it's been said our community has been clamoring for some comprehensive information on this. I got to give credit to Rob for initially proposing the hub because one thing I noticed real clearly is when we went to Wonderland Lake, people around there know the great work that's happening, but people in South Boulder have no idea. And so they kind of go, what's happening? I'm going to assume nothing's happening. And maybe vice versa for people in North Boulder. So connecting the dots so people can know what's happening around the community, even if it's not right next door to them, I think is really helpful. In regards to the hub, I'm going to echo again where Rob was going. One of the biggest barrier of entries, and I've heard this from countless people, is just who to call once you get the recommendations to begin this. I really don't care about the legal mumbo jumbo, to be honest. I don't mean to be flippant about it, but yes and here's how is the mantra of this city and we have to say yes and here's how we're going to do it and not get caught up in in in the nomenclature or the semantics and just deliver the list that people need to have with the proper disclaimers and allow the training like let's just get it done and the fact that that wasn't already in there or thought of gives me a little pause as to why a clear barrier wasn't already being looked at and being sought after to be addressed and and that we have to sort of bring that up there. So that to me is a major priority for how to improve the hub because it's a known barrier of entry for folks. Regarding the second question, I wanna circle back to where Mike Chard was discussing a little bit. because it kind of comes also back to our goals. In the memo, it talks about outcomes, lower flame lengths, keep it on the ground, slow the rate, but there's no real functional goal here. And what Mike Chard was pointing at, I think is the actual goal of all of this work. And I think we need to be clear on that because it really helps us prioritize the limited resources we have. And that is to simply keep the wildland fire out of our urban environment. And so my question really comes around, you know, given that our resource maximum suppression capability is roughly 30 to 40 homes. And I know folks are loving that sort of sobriety factor of hearing that. And maybe Mike can take a few minutes to sort of discuss what that means and its impacts. But at maximum capability, we're protecting 30 to 40 homes as a fire comes into this town. and the fire enters. So how do we look at that as a maximum capability and then reverse engineer from that the practices and focuses of resources to prevent that from happening or by the most time so that we can get in front of the fire and prevent that from happening to begin with and bring the most resources to bear. So I was wondering if Mike could expand a little bit about that situation and how it impacts everything we do before that first fire enters our community.

Yeah, thanks, sir. Mike Char, director of disaster management. So one of the workshops working with the fire department was great conversation with Chief Oliver and others. And really what it was looking at three different ways that response happens. And Chief Calarazzo can jump in here if I'm misspeaking here. But this is where we started to look at some performance metrics around it. all-in capability of all first engine companies that we have in the city. What is the suppression ceiling capability of our units in the first 30 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes? So right around five homes, five structures. And then it leans into then how do we get county mutual aid? And so we're looking at those systems of how to do that, the agreements. And then that came out to be another 15 engines. So if you're doing the math, eight engines get you about five homes. So you get another 10, so now we're up to 15. And then the regional work that I spoke to in my opening comments was that's where we were like, oh my gosh, we got to get some regional connection here because that's where the next surge capacity comes in. So that mutual aid then is designed to be after that 30 minutes getting there in the next hour, 45 minutes to an hour. and then going regional with the next one to two hours, how many more resources can we get? And that then builds out to about 35, 40 homes. So that's predicated on sort of the scale of what's coming into the city and that fire front, those distributed fires, and how well we can effectively move at the scale of those impacts to contain. And ideally, the less that we have exposed, meaning if the fire doesn't come in fast and hit receptive fuels and start igniting things and doesn't start dropping embers and igniting distributed fires throughout and overwhelming our suppression capability at the time that we have it, that's the sort of scale of time, resource, and then application of those resources into the fire environment that they could encounter. So I hope that's what you're looking for there, Councilperson Benjamin, and that's what we were kind of working on in that workshop, and I think more of that detail will be coming out as you get into October.

Yeah, I mean, I guess to boil it down more simply, is the variable that we have any influence of controlling, it's just time, right?

It's time and then also some of the environmental. So the other side of this we look at, and we did this in the WIC, the Wildfire Initiated Community Configuration in the regional area. with all the fire departments in the region, was what do we think the ceiling capacity is to fight fires? If you show up and you have water, you still got to be able to get a fire stream on the fire. And if you get winds above 50 miles an hour, that prohibits then effective firefighting. And now we're shifting from a fire control strategy and evacuation strategy to a life safety strategy. And now we're moving into alerting, getting people moved out, fire departments defending in place structures that maybe can't get out, doing evacuation route protection and those sort of things. I'm getting kind of operational, but That's the sort of stuff that's happening at the discussion level about looking at these factors of the environment of risk that we're in.

Just because it's piggybacking and then I'll be done. Given what we're looking to do with regards to fuel reduction, do we have a way of measuring the amount of time bought, more or less, to say, hey, if we mow this 30-foot strip under certain conditions, we just bought ourselves five minutes. Or if we prescribed burn this area, we maybe gave ourselves an extra 15 minutes for those county resources to get in. Do we have a way of measuring how those efforts buy us that critical amount of time for resource implementation to meet or catch up?

I would defer to a couple things here. One would be Paul around his modeling. Two would then be looking at Chief Oliver and Chief Calderazo because this is not something where the fire is just going to come right in without any effort. So there will be efforts west of the city pushing, containing, controlling, and that will then create time or it will hopefully stop it there and we won't have to worry about that factor. I know working with the police department, we did come up with evacuation modeling to help kind of answer that question around time, which is what does it take to, we call it, you know, clearance time for each polygon, which is the area that we're evacuating. How long does it take to get them out? And we've done that level of assessment too. So to your point, I would have to defer to the fire experts on what they think that would look like. And more importantly, the fire modeling may be able to give us some criteria around that.

Yeah, and I can jump in on there. We can get the number of the modeled rate of spread, right? Fuel exists at this point. We do this treatment, and now the fuel is at this point. And you can model that out and say the fire will move X amount slower or burn with X amount less intensity. So we can measure that out, but we're still working on building those measures. But we're going to get there.

Okay, thanks so much. And it's nine o'clock, which we were going to be over, but we're not going to be. So we have Taisha and then Ryan. Aaron, is your hand still up for a reason? Oh, he took it down. And then we will think if we need to have a second round to answer question three, or if this is good enough. So let's start with Taisha.

Thank you. This is exceptional, as always, and just really appreciate this incredible work. Three things, I think it's in connections to both questions one and two. The first is around the geographic risk assessment. I know that that assessment was informed by qualitative and quantitative analysis, but I was curious if there was a consideration of of our water supply scenarios, if this is using the current trend data, or which level of this is stressed. And then just in general, if there's opportunities to do kind of scenarios on, okay, this is the trend, if it's worse than this, this is what we can expect areas one, two, and three to look like. I would imagine if we have another dry and warm year in 2027, 2028, 2029, That is, you know, uncertainty. We know we can guarantee that there's going to be uncertainty. So I was just curious about those levels. That's my first question and recommendation is to get more scenario planning around that. The second is around mitigation. This is very focused on what we can do to prevent with the home hardening, with the other approaches that are critical and important. And Mike, you and I have talked extensively about the need to balance both the preventative with the evacuation and recovery. And I'm seeing a lot of focus on how we're going to mitigate, but I'm not seeing a connection to the level of investments that we're making on and approaches and practices on evacuation and recovery and also possible relocation. And then my last is around if there had been considerations on a revolving loan fund at 0%, either working on a private-private partnership or with our local banks. To Council Member Nicole's point on, you know, we know that these costs are going to be iterative. It's not just going to be a one-time cost. And so we'd really love to know if that's something you all had been considering or if there's been any conversations around that. So those are my three comments slash questions. Thank you.

I can speak to the evacuation part of that. Monica Weber, disaster management coordinator, Mike Chard, director of disaster management for the record here, sorry. We have set our North Star around that particular capability as three out of four households in IR1 and 2 by 2030 to attend and go through our evacuation protocol of alerting, preparing, and evacuating. And that would include the evacuation drill environment.

Are there annual milestones or metrics on that?

It gets pretty detailed on it, and I can definitely share that with you. And Monica has been working to get that built so we can share if you're interested. The big thing it's predicated on community willing to engage and participate. So that's where we're doing further analysis on it. So as far as the recovery goes, yeah, that is definitely on my plate of getting into more detail of how that would work. based around my experience in dealing with many fires i've had to deal with here in boulder county over the last 18 years so uh the plus side is we do have a lot of uh anecdotal experience of how that would go uh we just need to get it based on a city boulder model and planning definitely appreciate that and again it's also from that investment perspective absolutely um yep and um anyone can answer that last one i actually have a something that came up

For me that I forgot to ask in and i've talked about this several times and i'm hopeful that this Council and previous ones really have serious conversations on what is the trigger or pick a non violent term for that. For accessing our resource reserves. At what point do we need to, I really feel strongly we need to accelerate these efforts. And I know that cost is going to continue to be a barrier. We're fiscally constrained right now. We know the feds are touch and go. They're not great at recovery. I haven't seen anybody go to Georgia, I'm sorry, to Indiana or some of the other places that have had significant issues. And so just really wanting to know from our, again, this is more of a council conversation on what is the criteria? I was hopeful that the long-term strategic strategies group was gonna look into this, but just wanted to make that comment as well. I think just the last thing is the scenarios for the different, for the geographic areas. If there had been, if there is a possibility to do scenario planning around that, instead of just having one map, this is like, you know, best case, worst case.

I came on camera here. Good evening, council members. Joe Tadeucci, director of utilities. And thanks for that question, council member Adams. I think when you first asked the question, I was thinking of the other discussion we had today where I was talking about the different water supply scenarios that we modeled and we discussed with council during the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan. And so I may have missed the intent of your question, but if it is, do we have enough water to fight fires in any of those scenarios? I can speak to that. That was not it.

But I do love that one. But this one was, I was just saying, you know, if there is less water, then we know it's going to be drier. which means there's gonna be an escalation to fire and fuel, which means those areas will be bigger. So have we identified different thresholds based on scenarios that we can anticipate based on the information our climate community is given? I was just using your example, Joe, of how you did different scenarios and if there was a complimentary version of that for our wildfire response and a geographic risk assessment map.

someone else yeah sorry about that but but the water one you had was good but that wasn't mine that's personally Adams about the uh scenarios clarifying question are you talking for the community or those scenarios used in the planning uh environment around the hazard or risk we're facing to identify the mapping and the different uh the different tiers

So there's only one map, but our climate community has been very clear that it's uncertain. So there's a possibility that it could be even drier than we're anticipating. And if so, what would that map look like?

And I would imagine, Brian, that as we continue to work, that map is based on data that is constantly looked at. So to your point, Councilmember Adams, if we are having a year that is particularly dry, that may change the modeling effort. And so we have to adapt accordingly. I don't know the frequency of that. So maybe Brian was going to jump in there.

Okay. I appreciate that. But what I'm saying is we know it is going to be uncertain. that the climatologists, Russ, our climatologist, our state climatologist, I've seen his presentation several times, and he's been very clear on the uncertainty and always gives kind of a different threshold. And so again, I'm curious if we can use the existing data that shows different highs and lows and probability to create different scenario mapping. Because again, I think that would also impact the level of investment, the speed of the investment that we need to make. Thank you.

I think I can jump in and try to clarify that a little bit. Again, sorry, I didn't introduce myself last time. Brian Oliver, I'm the wildland fire division chief for fire rescue. And we can do that. Like you said, the uncertainty, but we measure That fuel moisture is one of the inputs. So as you're saying, things getting drier and more drastic, we can measure that and add that into the model and create different scenarios based on what level of dryness we're seeing. We do that on a daily basis already within the wildland division as far as managing and measuring what those daily fuels are, light flashy fuels all the way to super heavy forested fuels and base our response accordingly. Does that somewhat answer your question?

It sounds like internally that is happening. And my question is, is if there are additional maps that can be created based on, let's say, if we know the temperature is going to continue to escalate, if it's more than 100 degrees, you know, five or 10 hundred degree days, this is what you can anticipate versus, right. I think that's more so the direction that I'm moving in. And I'm saying it because it helps us to do some of our budget planning as far as what the need is. Also, you know, that, that the red is looking not too bad, but if it's, you know, if we get a hundred days, you know, significantly more, 100 degree days, then that red is going to expand. And I just want to kind of know what the gap is so that we can kind of be adaptive before it, you know, I know you're doing it every day, but, you know, we have to plan two years, three years out and want to make sure we have the funds for that. Thank you.

Are we good to proceed or yes?

No, I think my last question, I didn't hear anybody on the revolving loan fund.

I believe, oh, I'm sorry, revolving loan fund, not reserves. I'll leave it to staff to think if that is something that has been thought of as a strategy or not. As we move forward, there are a lot of financial needs and don't know if that had come up.

That's not many in our community are house rich, cash poor. And these numbers are getting very big. I mean, eight to 10 to $12,000 is hard to get out of pocket considering some of the other competing priorities for many in our community.

And if they have not been thought of, that's okay to say as well. And it may be one of the answers to question three about what other considerations you'd like us to continue to take a look at.

Awesome. Sorry, Saterra, I went into three, but I won't have any questions for three. Thank you.

I can answer that last one on behalf of the team, which is simply to say, as we're shifting the conversation in the team, creative funding in general has come up at the executive team level. looking at other parallel examples of creative funding opportunities for other purposes like electrification of homes and community and things like that. We're looking at those lessons learned and how we might apply those in the wildfire space. We don't yet have a specific direction to propose necessarily, whether it's revolving loans or some other mechanism, but it's top of mind because we know that the diminishing availability of general tax funding for things will continue. And so we'll need to get creative about how to work together as a full community.

Okay. We're going to move on to Ryan.

Well, thank you to the whole interdepartmental, intergovernmental team here. This is quite a body of work, and you've come so far. And thanks especially to Mike Chard and Chief Calarazzo for being open to co-developing all of this, including the list of cost-benefit measures and priorities, prioritization. And I think I just want to say this is this is meaningful both in terms of presenting new paths to new types of community protection. But it's also clearly there's a new type of a partnership here that's emerging where you have a council, I think hearing a will of council, and I'm part of this, that is interested to both implement this work and then can figure out how to continue to compound it into more and eager for the next chapter too. So I don't mean to speak too much for others, but I'm just sort of observing a little bit of what I've heard. So we're taking some really, really important steps and I thank everybody for their work on it. So I have just one... question and I'd like to offer one thought for feedback. So the question is on a few council members have talked about the sort of how do you go from the resident having information about their home situation, how do you go from that to prompting action and investment like the workflow or the marketplace or whatever, like how do we really drive for that? And I wanted to ask about the renter situation. I noticed in the Home Hardening Hub, there was a reference to renter information for renters. So I guess there's two little questions. First question is, what's the percentage-ish of DHAs that are going to renter homes? Just like roughly.

Hi, I'm Danielle McNutt. I'm with the fire department senior program manager. Thank you for having me on the call today. For renters, we do have an option for a renter to sign up if they put in their property. They'll just say they're a long-term renter at that location. Generally, when we see that we reach out to the person who put the request in and let them know that we're going to need the homeowner's permission to go to the property, but they're welcome to be there or to receive the report. Normally, the landlord then reaches out and then schedules the appointment. I'd say out of over the 1,000 requests that we've had, we've only had less than a dozen renters request the assessment and very seldom are they following through with getting in contact again about their landlord. We do partner with some of the rental agencies. We have a good partnership with Boulder Housing Partners. And so we've done assessments for almost 30 of their properties in the WUI. So we're trying to reach renters by engaging directly with the rental properties. But so far, it hasn't been a huge demand from the renters directly into our program.

Can I qualify on that, Ryan? Thank you so much for asking as the only renter on our council right now. I would have never known that this was an option if I wasn't on council as a renter. This is the first after living here for 14 years that this is even possible. And I've lived in the WUI for five years. So there's that. I'm curious for our rental agreements, if there's anything explicit around requirements for homeowners that are interested or property owners that are interested in renting that they have these detailed home risk assessment as a part of their rental agreement.

Maybe I can help you, Danielle, there. We have heard this question too as I think it's really super important. It is, we do not currently have that because we don't control individual rental contracts.

There has been a question- I'm speaking specifically to the rental license. Don't they have to have a rental license?

Yeah, absolutely. There has been some question on whether or not we can compel some kind of action through the granting of a rental license. I don't believe that we have any- um, that we have finalized any conclusion on that, but it is a conversation that has come up and it is something that, um, we're thinking and considering as that moves forward. So I appreciate it.

Awesome. Thank you. Sorry, Ryan. Thank you.

No, thank you. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Tanya. Maybe that's it actually for my, my question. So then, um, I'll just offer a thought is I'll try to do this succinctly, but, um, It's on the just sort of building on some things others have said around the, yeah, just like the user experience and how do we sort of encourage action and investment by residents after they've got the DHA. And, you know, I remember earlier in the conversation there was a discussion about how we're actually like pretty We're doing innovative work in the city. There's not maybe a great roadmap for us to follow here. So I will stipulate that we're kind of out on the edges working on this. And so that's the spirit that I'm going to offer a thought. I did get a home assessment a month ago at our home, and I know many council members have done this. First, I just want to say what a great experience it was. It was so easy to sign up for. I chose my own time. They came. They're prompt. It was two hours. I think it took an hour. I was invited to walk around. during the process if I wanted, but I didn't have to. And there was sort of a short briefing at the end. And then a report came, a short version, a long version, a portal online with clickable maps. Like my whole house was mapped with all, I mean, it was totally beat expectations as far as what the kind of information I was going to get. And it's just really impressive what the team has been able to do. So that's the good news. The bad news is, you know, some people had pointed to, and now I'm sort of left like, well, okay, what do I do? And I And I'm looking at the list, and I'm thinking, OK, so there's bush removal. I could do some of that. Probably not all of it. There's some tree limbing that's up high. I'm going to need help. There's some siding. This is maybe on the technical side for me. Not a huge amount of money yet, but various siding that's going to need some help. There's some vents, including some on ladders. Then there's a bunch of debris removal. Anyway, this stuff is, on its own, pretty inexpensive, relatively. And it's not super complicated, but this is going to live or die right now for me on whether or not I personally am going to find those various – I don't know if I'll use TaskRabbit or what I'll do. But it just – I really want to endorse some of the comments I heard about if we – If we were able to help create a marketplace where there was a person who does this work, and it's not all six or seven of those, but it's like somebody who you, maybe I would pay them $500 or $1,000, I don't know. But to take the DHA and to understand it, to know what it means, and then they can contract and find the help or however they do it. It feels to me like you have a case here where there's you've got somebody who's ready to do this, to spend their own money on it, but it's this sort of friction of like, well, I don't have the time. So I don't want to use too much anecdata here. generalized bullet or just on my case, but I have talked to others who they've sort of said, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so I just, I really love some of the ideas I heard about like sort of taking this on and figuring out how do you define the scope of this, which is, it's an interdisciplinary affair with these various contracts, but how do you put it into a single thing How do we make sure that then these service providers who are offering the implementation of the DHA to make sure they understand the idea of it and there's some quality training? Maybe it's certification, maybe not. I don't know. But there's some level of giving them the – the education and the guidance. And then somehow it's on a platform or somehow the city assists to create a marketplace such that we know where to go to find those types of folks. And I would offer that if we somehow, just using my imagination, can create a lot of public funding for a program. If we don't have this figured out, I'm pretty skeptical that that public money is going to be used, at least the private residences, in an effective way. Conversely, I'm optimistic that if we could get this workflow figured out, you would have a lot of homeowners saying, I'm happy to do this. So I'm totally conjecturing here in the spirit that we said earlier, this is kind of new ground. But if we could try this, I think we're talking about a way to create potential new jobs or at least add to entrepreneurship in the city. We're talking about a program where residents are able to spend money that we're not asking the city to get at. And then finally, going back to the renter story, it feels to me like there's things we could do to let the owners, the landlords of rental homes to get in on this. We have a tenant, renter-tenant handbook. That could at least include, and maybe there's some way to prioritize so that the renters maybe go to the front of the queue if the landlord is going to do it. But it just strikes me that this is not inherently something that homeowners or landlords don't want to do. And in fact, I think a lot of us do want to do it. But there's a lot of friction in like, how do you do it right? So anyway, thanks for letting me say all this. And I'll just conclude by suggesting that the user experience and making this so that the person who's receiving the DHA, if we can take ownership in moving that to action and investment, I think that's where some of the most exciting opportunity is. And we'll probably unlock or have the chance to unlock a lot of exciting resources that I think we need. So thanks again, team. And thanks for listening to all that.

Okay, well, I think I've reached the end of what I can do on a Thursday night. No, I'm kidding. I will just end with a very small question. I'm so tired, but let me think if I can remember it. Yes. Do you remember that map that showed the high and the very high staff people? That map, and it was brown and yellow. Remember it? think we all know them yep okay can you tell me in the hill area what are those streets that are very high so i can visualize because i couldn't see any streets

Yeah, Mayor Pro Tem Weiner, I do want to, before other staff might respond, those maps are draft. And so you're going to be talking to a staff team who's really hesitant to start talking about street level detail until we finalize those. So if you're willing to bear with us, we do plan in at the end of October to bring back some of the background detail we've already heard that you're hoping for to really understand Why certain areas are higher risk?

That was my question, but it's a good question. So where I'm going is, and this has nothing to do with the subject matter tonight, but everybody else took so long. So I might as well just ask my thought. I'm not putting anybody down for taking so long. Nobody be insulted. Okay. The Hill community is very worried about wildfire and density. And so I particularly want to know how, what streets they are, because if that is the highest of the high, then that makes a big difference as to some of our other policies. So Rob, I was hoping you could talk about this, but you didn't. So I'm going to, because I only have this one question is, Right now we have wildfire, then we have planning and development. I mean, we have the different segments, but planning or like, how do I put this? Like when we discuss zoning and such, we don't, and building and increasing housing, we often don't touch on how that is going to affect. We try to, but we don't do it that much. how that's going to affect the neighborhoods that are in the highest of the high. So I'm very interested in bringing it all together and having some sort of a cohesive plan for the city where we decide we're not going to stuff more housing in the highest of the high unless we know that they could evacuate. So I kind of want to bring this together, and I was hoping, Rob, that you could add to it because it was your thought, not mine. I don't want to say it in the wrong way. So can you?

Yeah, I'm happy to. I mean, that was one of my questions about involving- Oh, you did ask it and I was just not listening?

No, no, no, no.

I asked it in my hotline for planning and development services.

Oh, yes. That's right. In your hotline.

But in fairness to that, I mean, I think I know what you're talking about. We do have some investors that are coming in and buying homes, single family homes that also could be considered middle income homes. And there's a specific one that's like a thousand square feet on grant and they're tearing it down and they have a duplex planned. And this is hearsay. I don't know that this is true, but I've heard that it has a total of 12 rooms, 12 bedrooms, six each side, which would be more student focused rooms. Again, I can't verify that. But yeah, it's the amount of traffic on a small one-way street up against the high or very high risk of the WUI and the consideration of the evacuation. I think that's what you're speaking to, right?

Yes. Nobody has to answer this now or even discuss it now. But since we're talking about it again in October, I just thought I would throw it out there that I would love it if we could think about this whole situation with the high and the very high from all different standpoints.

I appreciate that, Mayor Pro Tem, and I think what you're weaving into it, and Council Member Kaplan, you had some of that in your hotline, is this intersection between policy choices on density and growth and where that happens when they intersect with what we know is a wooey area that has additional heightened fire concerns. I think that's a little bit beyond what the team is presenting today, but I appreciate that we've been having the conversation about that and then weigh in whether or not rental density is causing a concern. So we take that note and I'm sure we're going to have future conversations, not just with this team, but likely with others as we move forward.

Yes, thank you. I was just bringing that up. Okay, so we didn't answer three, but probably a lot of us are tired. So let me answer the third question if they really have something important to say. Let's just say that.

So I'm just following up on that. Tara, I feel comfortable offering my feedback to number three in an email format.

No, you don't have to. I mean, we'll extend the meeting, but we can just be succinct and finish up with number three.

Or you could take people up on the offer to email.

It's possible. Or you can email. If you don't feel like the community needs to hear your story, you can email.

Okay. Am I number one?

There's five people. Let's do one or two minutes a person. Go.

All right. So I think I already expressed a lot of my thoughts and I really appreciate the specificity of this presentation. The one thing I'm interested in question number three is just we have so many active, engaged community members. The extent that we can lean on them and let them help elevate this issue in the community, I think would be awesome. I also wanted to shout out your, I used to be a juniper sign. That was adorable and I loved it. Thank you.

Okay, that is fantastic. Now we're moving to Rob Kaplan for his one to two minute answer.

It's just number three. Yes. I'm just wondering, and you don't have to answer this now, but to bring it back, obviously, the $10.5 million, does that enable us to deliver on the 25 projects? We've had a couple of times where we've missed a $9.6 million and a $9.8 million grant that went to Jeff Cohen Larimer County that we didn't apply for. And I am not pointing fingers. I can't imagine the stress load on the grant program analysis team right now with federal cuts. Do they need help? That's my question.

Is that your question for number three, or would you like an answer to that?

Well, in the spirit of time, I was going to let it go. That'll work. Okay. So no answer? Just move on? Just to bring it back in October. Okay.

Okay. Very quickly, one thing I did not bring up, and to Pam's point, I understand that the maps are drafts. and some of the comments of the team. However, I did notice and was curious what the overlap is with Area 3. I noticed that there was a section of yellow in one of it, and then there's also high intensity in that area. So I would love to just get more information about the Area 3. Thank you.

Great question. I love these questions that people can get back to us. They're my favorite. Okay, now we're going to go to Matt.

All right. Appreciate it. I'm going to try to be succinct with setting up for next week. I think one big thing that I'd like us to focus on is being prepared to not only price out what the enhanced model is. I mean, again, we're doing great work, but the community didn't rate this at 75% as a major priority if they thought the level of good work we're doing was still sufficient to meet their needs of feeling safe. So I think that I'm looking at that enhanced to be clear and not just price it out. Please come to us with where in the budget those trade-off conversations could occur. Where does it make sense within the budget for us to look at financial trade-offs to fund that enhanced proposal? So I think that would be really important for us in community to see on the 22nd. Brian Aniker said it was really clear that our main goal is centered around 2030 because that's when we're at that six-year update to our wildfire protection plan. So I think I'd like us to really set some clear goals, one of which is to say, why can't we say we're going to remove all junipers on city property by 2030? Let's just come out and say and do it. Let's lead by example. And then lastly, we have goals around the fuel reduction, which I think are really good. We have zero goals, it seems, around home hardening. So why not do another 2030 goal for home hardening? Say 30 by 30. We're going to harden 30% of the homes in IR1 and 2 by 2030. Like, let's go ahead and do that. That's only 750 of the 2,500 homes. So let's set clear goals and let's measure our success and let's put the resources in that need to do that. So I'd like to see us a little bit better on the goal front. Um, and, and I think ultimately, I think we have to set the stage for what a number of us are starting to talk about, which is mandatory home hardening. That will accelerate a lot of goals and bring a lot of buy-in, um, and, and of course need more resources to meet that. So I think we can do a little better on goals and really center this. So when we get out of the 22nd, we are, we are laser focused with the finite resources we have to, to get the job done.

Um, Nicole, do you mind if I colloquy on, um, Matt? Nicole didn't say anything. So she doesn't mind. Go for it. Okay. Agreeing with Matt, but I have a question for staff. Is it possible for you to bring back to us because we have been kind of skirting around talking about, um, home hardening, mandatory home hardening. And the last time we talked about it, our retreat, we did get a fair amount of pushback because I think, um, Chief Calderazo, you said that we really didn't have the resources to enforce, which of course, maybe people would do it anyway. And so I was hoping that we could have a discussion about that, not in the long run, maybe, but because whoever is on council next with our priorities next, some of us were bringing forth priorities. Some of us were talking about you know, when it would be good to put forth mandatory home hardening on the high, high, high, what do you call it? The ultra high, scary part of the movie, I guess. And so I wanted your input, I guess, and others input as to next steps with that. I mean, I want to do it, but if you say this is like the worst idea I ever heard. Council member.

And I assume you're talking about mandatory for retroactive.

Yes, retroactive mandatory. Yeah, that's right.

I would say this, that the last time we spoke about it, and I believe you've also received a confidential legal memo about it, but the last time we spoke about it, there was not direction to move that forward. If council wants us to do that, then I think that's a different discussion.

Okay. I mean, no, we did talk about it. And at that time we decided not to as a team. So, okay. That sounds good. All right, Nicole.

Yeah, thank you. I just want to thank you again for this work. I didn't get a chance to just fully commend the scope of it earlier. This is just really impressive. I really... is pretty extraordinary and that you've done all this in about eight months. So thank you for that. What I really want to do is just a plus one Ryan's point about helping to foster businesses that can help property owners implement some of these detailed home assessment recommendations. It's just such a big part of what we're having to do within the city. I think any way we can facilitate that will probably help get it done faster. I wonder about our Small Business Development Center, if there are any areas of overlap between some of our economic development work and facilitating these types of businesses. I can even see some models just in thinking about how we generate money for people who can't afford to pay somebody to do this work, where we have some fees on the use of those types of services that would sort of help supplement what lower income homeowners, to Taisha's point and points others have made, could have available to help pay for similar improvements. But I think that removing that obstacle for folks for whom it's not necessarily the cost that's an issue, but the time and the coordination could really help us move a lot faster through hardening the city. So just something to, I would love us to keep thinking about. Thank you.

Well, okay. It is 937 and I thought that I would do something unusual and ask staff if they have any last words as opposed to us. Staff, anyone?

It's been a long day and I will say unless staff has something super urgent to give out, then I'll say what we really do is appreciate the time and attention. You can tell this issue is not just community's first priority. We know it is a big priority for you and take into account particularly your thoughts about how do we reduce barriers to both action and to those that perhaps can't afford or don't have access to it like our renter community. So just appreciate it. And we will continue the work and plan a more fulsome discussion with you in October.

Okay, well, at 9.37 p.m. Can I offer a quick PSA real quick?

Almost peak lunar eclipse. So when you're done with this meeting, go out and stare at the lunar eclipse, look up, enjoy, and have fun.

Thanks for that, Matt. Okay, we are closing this meeting at 9.38 p.m. Go run a look at the lunar eclipse. Good night, everyone.

Good night, everybody. Thanks, Tara. Thanks, Tara.

Thank you.