Environmental Review Committee - Regular Meeting

I'd to call the meeting to order. Staff, today is April 17 at 04:03PM. Can you proceed with a roll call?

Yes.

Absent.

Vice Chair Hansen? Present. Commissioner Carter?

Present.

Commissioner Yang? Here. And Commissioner Feng?

Present.

Okay. So we'd like to get approval of the minutes or if we'd like to go over the minutes. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes, Sagalayton?

I move to approve.

Does anyone second? I second. K. Okay. Sorry. Give me one second.

Okay. Roll call vote. Vice chair Hansen?

Approved? Yes.

Commissioner Feng? Yes. Commissioner Carter?

Dang. Dang. There.

And commissioner Yang?

Okay. Do we have any postponements?

No postponements.

K. So can we move on to oral communications?

Yes. We have received no oral communications.

Okay. So this portion of the meeting is reserved for anyone wishing

to

address the commission on any matter within the jurisdiction of the commission and not on the agenda. Speakers are limited to three minutes. Victoria, are there any attendings wait attendees waiting to make public comments?

No. None in the room.

Great. Sorry. Okay. So since there's no members of the public present, I'll call close public comments if that's okay. Great. Okay. Do we have any written communications?

No written communications. Okay.

Do we have any

staff reports? Yes. We have a

couple staff reports. Do you like to start? Yes, please.

Sure. I'm Ursula, environmental programs and sustainability manager, and we are still working on garbage post collection services agreements, to bring to council, possibly still on May 20. K. That is the update on that.

Can I talk about

the CEC approval? Sure. We as you may remember in the end of last year, commission not commission. Council approved a reach code for new buildings. Right? It was a pivot after the Berkeley ruling, and it requires increased building efficiency for new buildings. Yes. And that was approved by council, but then it had to be approved by the California Injury Commission and the CVSC, and that just happened last week. We finally got our final approval, so now we can actually enforce that through our building permit department.

Wonderful. That's good. Okay.

And then other smaller updates, the compost site just opened, for the summer. So it's open Friday and Saturday. We did have a successful or it's next weekend is our environmental recycling day.

Don't have that handy.

Next weekend, I believe, is our environmental recycling day at DeAnza College from eight to twelve. And you are all up to date with our events that we're tabling at. So those thank you for your participation with that.

If I may ask, how many people showed up to their birthday event? That was such a great start out.

I don't know for the total event. We didn't do drone photos and estimates this year. But I know for our booth, we had 42 virtual reality participants and 210 survey responses. That's great. So thank you to all the effort. I believe that concludes staff updates.

Okay. Great. Are there Commissioner updates? Any commissioner updates? I think I I went to Earth Day, and it was really fun. I think all the commissioners showed up, so we were all there at different times. And it was really fun. I saw many former students, some who I didn't recognize. So that was quite fun. Great. K. Jeff, do you have any updates? Anybody? Okay. No more commissioner updates. Alright. Is there any old business?

No old business.

K. So we'll proceed to item number two. Chair and vice chair elections. Do we have presentation?

Just a brief one. So this is an exact repeat from last year. I just want to go over why we're doing this. It's required that we elect a new chair and vice chair once a year. Your term is until the January thirtieth.

What are the responsibilities of the chair? Is to facilitate the commission meetings, work with liaison, and present the commission updates at the mayor's commission meeting every or the second Wednesday every other month. They rotate between in person and virtual, and then the role of the vice chair is to support the chair if they are absent. So if you want to go into questions and discussions, the order of operations is to make nominations. You can nominate yourself or another member on the commission, and then you can accept or decline the nomination, nomination. And then someone will make a motion to elect the chair and vice chair.

Okay. Are there any clarifying questions from the commissioners? Any questions about it? Good. Okay. Do we have any members of the public that wish to speak?

No members of the public present.

K. Can we move on commission discussion? Does anyone need oh, wait. That's Yes. You're doing great. Does anybody wanna suggest wording, or do you does anybody wanna make any nominations?

Can I nominate you as chair?

Yeah. I'm so good at this.

Sorry.

Okay. That's fine. I accept.

Okay. And any nominations for vice chair?

Nominate, nominate, chair. That's okay.

It's a husband like mine. Mhmm. And I accept. Yeah.

Okay.

K. And

then you have to make a formal motion.

Somebody wanna make a formal motion? I'm trying to be It will be weird for me to make a motion,

I think, because

Focus is one action. Right? And it's weird for you and I to become

You can make motion. You can absolutely make motion. Do you want me to pull up wording? It's pretty simple.

Try it. Wanna do it?

Okay. I motion that we just to vote for the chair and vice chair of the commission.

I'll pull up some suggested wording for you.

K. Thank you.

Yeah.

So the you would say, I move to sorry. I don't actually have the wording up. I move to nominate Susan Hansen as our chair and Alex Fung as a our vice chair of sustainability commission in 2025. You have to repeat that.

Flip your name card, please.

Oh. Alexander Fung. That's one lip.

Why I did not say anything right now. Okay.

I

you were dealing with the person who has the least brain for today. I moved that we vote for Alexander Funk as the vice chair and student Hanson as chair of the sustainability commission.

K. Is there a second for the motion? A second. K. Can we do a roll call vote for the motion? Yes.

Chair Hanson?

Aye. Commissioner Fang

or sorry. Vice Chair Fang? Aye. Commissioner Yang?

Aye.

And commissioner Carter? Aye. And commissioner Pat Bunkar absent.

K.

Alright.

I'm going to stop sharing if

you want to move on to the next item. We have a guest speaker on Zoom.

Okay. So item number three, is that capital improvement? No. Item number two. Right? Item number three. Item number three. Fiscal year twenty twenty five capital improvement programs and a five year plan. That one? Yes. Okay. Hello.

We have, staff member Susan Michael on Zoom to give the presentation.

Hello, commissioners. Thank you for having me. I'm sorry I'm not in the room with you today. I'm the CIP manager, Susan Michael, CIP manager, and in the room is director Chad Mosley. He's the director of public works, and he's there to support if we have any additional questions. So I have a short deck I'm gonna go through, and then we can have questions at the end. So, hopefully, you can see my screen okay?

Yes. Great.

Get all my windows in order. So tonight tonight this afternoon, we are, here to just bring you up to date on the CIP, the capital improvement program for fiscal year 2025, '26, and the five year plan that comes along with it. So there's the action is simply to receive the presentation and provide input if you wish. There's nothing that's required, so you don't have to take a vote on anything. Okay.

If you wish to support, we welcome that as well. Whatever input that you'd like to receive or provide and whatever format that that needs to be in, but we'll get there later. So, this is a good time to mention that this year when the city updated the web pages that we have, we, added some content to the CIP web page. You can see the blue tabs. There's, list of some of our projects, the major projects projects that are underway, the dashboard that shows a little bit of information on all the CIP projects, the link to engage Cupertino, which we've used for some of our projects for public, input, The years past year's CIP prod books and, the new tab really is the other resources at the bottom, and it it gives you a link to things like the parks and rec system master plan and other things that we've referenced in developing the CIP.

So it's a great resource. So tonight, we'll go through the achievements of the last year, the existing CIP projects, a little bit of update on those, what we're proposing for fiscal year 2025, '26, and the five year plan, and then some, short mention of what the next steps are. So our achievements for the last year. We completed a couple projects. We did work on the McCollin Road, De Anza, And Pacifica Intersection.

This was part of the McCollin Road bikeway project, and we actually added, some we improved pedestrian and bike access and actually vehicular accessibility at this intersection as well. We also did some repairs to the Vi Avenue storm drain outfall. Outfall is the last portion of a storm drain before it drains into a creek. So, some of our outfalls are in bad shape. We did, with this, the state of this outfall was brought to our attention, so we did a quick repair on it.

It's still an active project because we do need to replace the outfall, but that's a environmental permitting endeavor, and that will be ongoing for a little while. And we're trying to work with Valley Water to have that happen. We also completed restriping of De Anza for by improved buff buffered bike lanes. You can see those. And we did work out of the Blackberry Farm pools.

We replastered the pools. We also upgraded some of the accessibility features of the site. And one project that's nearly complete is the all inclusive playground at Jollyman Park. It's looking great, and we tentatively have a grand opening for June 10. So mark your calendars. It's gonna be great. It looks really good. And so a little bit information on the existing CIP program. We've got 28 active projects. So some of these projects are, like, they're the color coding is just a, it helps to see what types of projects.

So the blue projects are bike, ped, transportation projects, and, like, three of these are Tommy and Inu, the trail. There's nine projects total, but three of them are Stevens Creek Boulevard Bikeway, and three of them are Tommy and Inu. So, we have to do that in order to keep the accounting clear. So there's facilities projects, parks projects, infrastructure, basically streets and infrastructure projects, and the bike ped projects. And then we added a new category this year, which is sustainability, which is very exciting.

The projects are being broken to these different types simply to facilitate seeing where our energy and time is going, but it doesn't have a fiscal impact. But we did think that it was worth adding this category of sustainability projects just because it does reflect our, values as a city that we are trying to push forward with our climate action plan and doing more sustainable projects. So three of the projects that were, for the most part, previously in facilities are now in sustainability. So the EV charging station expansion at service center, the photovoltaic systems project, and the Silicon Valley hopper, so our shuttle service, the EV parking that we're trying to implement for that. So those are three projects that are already, underway.

Alright. And so the '20 fiscal year twenty five, twenty six CIP and the five year plan. Wanted to mention how we develop or how we prioritize projects. Typically, CIP projects, capital improvement projects, are repairs and, improvements to our existing assets, the things that we capitalize, and things those are things like facilities and whatnot. And so it is our first priority is always gonna be the projects or the things that need doing because it protects the public health and safety.

So health and safety is always our first priority. We also then take do take in feedback from the council commission and different and community input. We, have also consulted with the master plans and general plans that are in place, like the climate action plan, the parks and rec system recreation parks and rec system master plan and other master plans like a storm storm drain master plan. And then we also con consider take into consideration projects that are already underway. There might be a phase two like the Stevens Creek Boulevard, bikeway project.

Phase one was already done. We're now working on phase two. And we also, when we're considering our projects, need to be fiscally responsible. What money do we have and what staff do we have to do the projects as well as other resources? So this year, we're proposing these are the new projects.

There's one new project and two projects that we are asking for two existing projects that we're asking for additional funding on. The first project is our storm drain outfall repairs. So we had the major problem with this an outfall under Stevens Creek Boulevard last year where it meets Calabasas Creek, and then the Viya Avenue outfall came to our attention. So public works realized that we needed to do a survey of all of our outfalls. So we did a report, had a report done, and that report came back and said there were 51 outfalls that need significant repairs.

And so we are asking for funding to address the three most critical outfalls. And it's expensive, as you can imagine, because we do get into environmental permitting things. And sometimes just access to the outfalls is difficult. So the other two projects we're asking for funding for are the ADA improvements. So every year, we are making improvements to our accessibility in our city.

That is a federal, mandate, and we are continuing to chip away at that wherever we can. And the facilities condition assessment implementation. So a couple years ago, we had reports done that surveyed the condition of our facilities, and I believe it's well known that we are we have a number of things on our facilities that need work. The for the funding for the coming year that we're looking for, we're needing to replace five fire alarm systems in five different buildings, and we're also looking to replace three different roofs, flat roofs. Sports Center, Quinlan, and Senior Center all have flat roof that we need to do work on.

So that's where the money is being spent. So this is that same information in a table form to show that the cost, the nine fifty, one ten, and nine forty is $2,000,000. $2,000,000 is the number that our finance departments realize that we can afford to budget $2,000,000 each year for the CIP for the next coming years. So we're trying to stay within that budget. It's a back to the basics.

These are not really thrilling projects, but they're very important projects. And we are trying to work on our infrastructure. These are critical projects for us, so we're trying to put those at the forefront. And the five year plan. So the five year plan also reflects us back to the basics.

We're trying to stay within our $2,000,000 budget every year, and I'll get into a little bit about that. But we will ask to continue to fund the ADA improvements that we do throughout the city, and we also will ask to continue to fund improvements to our facilities that are need done. Then year two is a slightly larger number because we hope to replace the fire alarm system at the library, and that in itself is 1.3 1,500,000 project. So that year, we'll have to either find funding or see how this proposal will work within the city's fiscal means. We also hope to continue funding projects for the outfalls, because there are so many that are in, critical condition.

So those are the things that are gonna keep us busy in the coming years. We also, did do the study that shows that the Blackberry Farm Golf Course irrigation needs replacement, and we received direction to keep that to minor, you know, repairs as much as we can. But even that is still a major project. And for staffing reasons, more than anything else, we're looking to do that in year four. So, it's worth noting that, there's more information in your packet on projects that aren't funded right now in sustainability and that, like electrification of buildings, for example, but that we are hoping to get more information on what those project scope and cost might be so that we can work them into a five year plan more effectively.

And I will say that Tory and Ursula are definitely working on that. And I it's a great, development, I think, for us to have that capability and focus. And so the next steps for us, we're going to all the commissions this week, and, I have one more meeting where I'm going to the planning commission. Next week, the CIP every year goes to the planning commission, and the reason is to review the proposal with for conformance with the general plan. So it's pretty straightforward in theory, but, it's always a good discussion.

And then we're gonna go the CIP then generally will become part of the budget discussions that happen in May and June. When we did go to council a couple weeks ago now, the council did ask us to return on May 6 to review some projects, for defunding. And in in in your packets under the the I think it's attachment a, You can see that each project that is active, at least in the tonight, we're just talking about the sustainability projects. But, what are the pros and cons of defunding active projects? And that is, part of what council wants to just have more time to discuss is the pros and cons of discussing some projects.

And the PV project and the EV parking for the Silicon Valley hopper are two of the projects that we'll discuss on May 6. And that is it. I'm available if you have questions. Cool.

Are there any questions? Any clarifying questions from I

got a couple, but after you all.

I have one, year two year four where you're talking about the golf course. Were they gonna look at recycling irrigation water? That was one of the things that I've always heard discussed. Is there any, discussion about recycling when we do that?

We recycled, water feasibility study this this last year. And based on the information provided at existing recycled water facilities, we're actually just way too far away to tap into reasonably at this point in time. We did look at the possibility of an on-site storm water or a wastewater treatment facility for recycled water, and the return on investment for that was something like fifty years. So it was just not really feasible, and you're looking for facilities to have thirty to eighty, forty year life cycle, fifty years just kinda out of that. So it didn't, make full sense.

No. Because, well, year four, you were talking four years out, and I was thinking down at the bay, they have the oil plant. So I'm seeing

It's about if if it's possible for Cal Water, who's currently the company that's got recycled water facilities closest to Cupertino, If they were able to extend their existing recycled water services somewhere close to Blackberry Farm within that time period, we would look at that option.

Yeah.

But right now, the they're up around Wolf Road and Homestead. The estimate's about 40 to $50,000,000 just to get it down to about Highway 85 and Stevens Creek, which is a lot of money. We just don't see that happen just four years or so. So with this project, we're just looking to upgrade the existing irrigation system so that we utilize less water. So that would be kind of the sustainability aspect of it is is the reduction of water use for that.

Got it. I now had a couple of questions. Is that okay? So with the outfall, is there gonna be any monitoring? Is it only storm water, or are we monitoring the quality of the outfall or anything that's going into the main like, this out to the bay since we're putting an outfall new outfall registers or whatever?

There's not any plans to monitor the quality of that water. A lot of the I wanna say a lot of the our efforts from the city are upfront. Let's make sure that water is clean before it gets into the storm drain system. Ursula and her crew are doing a lot of work to put in trash capture devices, sweep the street, try and keep stuff from getting out of there. They monitor for illicit discharges. And if we find that somebody has illicitly discharged in the StormBreak system, we go in and have them clean the StormBreak system. So Okay.

We try and we try and,

clean it before it gets into the StormBreak.

Right. Great. And then one last question. With the library, fire alarm system in doing that, has the county done a note mention?

Our intent is to reach out to the county and have them help facilitate that. Consider the CIP project for the county. Is typically well, they're they're helpful when it comes to CIP projects.

Okay. Fantastic.

So we've been working with them on that.

Thank you. Because that that's like, a slight increase is 2.3 times the existing budget. So thanks.

On my end, I'm assuming your ADA improvements are funded by CDBG. Right? Is that correct, or is that not correct? No. No.

The c d CDBG funds?

Yeah. It says annually funded. So is that through general funds?

Yeah. General funds. The CDBG funds, we do have some grant money going towards, the some of the work that we're doing at the senior center. Because the CDBG funds are housing related, typically, the those grant funds that we we receive or are received typically can only go towards particular communities. And for the city's facilities, as far as I know, only the senior center is applicable.

Some of the ADA work we do is for sidewalks, curb ramps, facility exterior facilities around various city facilities. We have used CDBG funds in the past for that work, and we kinda have got

a little bit of a

hard time for it. So we kinda backed off it, and we're focusing on other areas. Senior center work with senior centers, one of those that's been, hasn't received that sort of criticism.

Got it. Got it. I know you probably were or depending on the structure that the city goes with on the CDBG management, coordination plan, but that makes sense. In terms of the amounts for year two and year four, that's above the $2,000,000 a year. So staff doesn't see any concerns with that since I know the current annual CRP funding is 2 mil a year. So even though for the next year, it's 3 it's a little bit above 3 mil. Is that a concern, or it will be fine?

I I can answer that, Susan. Yes. It it is a concern. One of the reasons we call it out, we're above the $2,000,000. We'll be looking for external funding sources to kinda cover that gap where possible. And if we're unable to do that, we'll go in hand in hand to city council. We have a little bit more general fund money for that. Mhmm.

You know,

for the library, do hope to get the county involved to kinda help cover some of that gap so that we can get down to the 2,000,000. And then we do believe that we can find some grant funding for, golf course

to kinda

help bring that down. So we we have some plans to try and bring that down, but we don't have that those funds secured yet. So it's one reason we're calling it out.

Yeah. And forgive me. It's like I'm in my staff mode right now, so I'm just thinking of different ideas. In terms of the unfunded projects and I know that when it comes to asking for grants at the federal level or even in steer marks at the state level, if the state has money, a lot of the times, they fund shovel ready projects. Is that an option in terms of, seeking funds from the federal congressional level or even at the states, through our representatives?

Some of those are possible. At this point in time, we're trying to focus on existing projects that council's already approved to find that external funding where possible. We have had, in the past, some luck getting funds for other unfunded projects that may be with ambassador plans, but we would need to work with city council on whether they want us wanted us to pursue these efforts.

Yeah. Any money coming going to come from the federal to California? I mean, right now, there

there is the question. At this point in time, the federal grant monies that we do have, we don't believe they're in jeopardy, and we haven't we we don't have any evidence that they are taking those away at this point in time. A lot of the funds we have are more infrastructure related. I think the biggest concern right now are regarding the IRA funds, the reimbursements for sustainable projects like this the solar solar voltaic project. There is some concern that those may be at risk, but from the information we've been able to ascertain, the federal government has not touched those yet.

They are requiring that they personally approve them all, but they haven't touched those because our understanding is about 60% of that money is going towards red states. And the representatives of the red states have said, please don't touch it. So with respect to the project, we are hoping to be able to get part of the that that budget or that funding reimbursed from the feds. With that stated, if it weren't reimbursed from the feds, there still is a return on return on investment for that project of about sixteen years. So it's still a good project fiscally to move forward.

We're able to get those IRA funds. The return on investment is reduced to about nine years. So we're hoping to get that fund.

K. Questions are now popping back when I first read this thing. I understand that we're waiting for the county to help us with the, electrification of the library. And, also, the Blackberry Farm is a little bit higher, so we're putting that off. But we're losing, is it neem? Get a look at that.

M two. Yeah. Yeah. M two,

which I'm super aware of because I I had to deal with it at home. And that's a big deal because that takes away a lot of the benefits of getting the photoelectric.

Maybe Susan can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't believe Nem2 has been taken away yet. There's discussion with that at the state level. Our understanding is we are still within the period to be able to receive those funds.

So we were grandfathered in from an earlier request, but that's gonna be the cutoff date is the end of this year, I believe.

04/16/2026. Okay.

Okay. This this We we are So I'm just No. I mean, since this is city business is really close to our own business, and so I've gone through all. And that's why when I was reading this, I'm going because I read the whole thing, and I agree with what we put off, what we embraced in for the current electrification. But the rates are going to change, and they're not it's it's I don't know. It's the devil's choice for it.

Yeah. And so, Susan is working diligently on our photovoltaic project. The the consultant, the contractor is committed to having these systems up and running before April 16 deadline. So we're not we are worried about it, which is why we're working hard to get it done, but we do states. We have looked at the return on investment if you shift to NEM three, and, of course, shoots it out a little bit further, but still stays within a reasonable timeline to where there is still a benefit.

What do you recall what that return on investment was for the NEM three? Wasn't it pushing it out to I wanna say it pushed it out to fifteen or sixteen years. But then if we also didn't get the IRA funds, it pushes out to about twenty. And with the with photovoltaic systems Twenty years is a sweet spot.

I mean, anything resolved earlier than that is is extra. Yeah. But twenty years is is a sweet spot because after that, then you're starting to look at reduced.

Yes. Reduced efficiencies. We are looking at, I think it's a thirty year life cycle for these. So we you know, at twenty years, we still believe there's a good fiscal benefit.

There is. There is. Just it but it's sort of like me. I'm starting the dwindle. So I'm just it's all good. Okay. So the Blackberry Farm is just basically is it just are we sort of gonna write that off?

It's it's, mostly redoing the irrigation system.

The existing I meant in terms of electrification, the whole volt

Yeah. We're not in the volt tank at Blackberry Farm.

Okay. The

council came down to

That's basically what I was my concern was that, okay, the others are gonna rush and get done.

Yeah. So we're looking at Quinlan, the sports center, and community hall. Those are the ones that were were directed by council.

Yeah. K. And then were are we concerned and I'm looking at my leader here. Are we concerned about what the library working with the county of missing our deadline there?

So we're not putting photovoltaic on the library at this point in

I understand that, but we were with the idea that we would work with the county. Right?

We we are going to miss the NEM two deadline for the library. The hope with the library to do more of a battery storage and photovoltaic system, which would disqualify us from the NEM two anyway.

Okay.

So it's a bigger project.

Okay.

And I'll just remind you that all of our municipal facilities are on a zero emissions electric plan, so it doesn't actually impact our greenhouse gases.

Okay. So I'll just

Just our pricing.

I just worry about this. Yeah. Thank you.

K. Is there any members of the public that have questions? No question. Can we move on to item number four?

Discussion. If there's any Oh, I thought the question was discussion. Okay. That was clarification. Sorry. Okay. Discussion. Session.

Okay. Is is staff seeking any specific recommendation? It's just input. Right? So

He just wanted to

Go ahead.

Well, you can Go ahead.

We we're just looking for if there's any input or thoughts on on what's being proposed at this point in time. Kinda providing you also an update on where we are with our

existing projects forward.

Again, I think concerns regarding federal funding and whatnot, it's gonna give everybody an an idea of where we're at. City council has requested that it come back. I think it's the first meeting in May to discuss defunding six projects. Two of those projects are considered in our sustainability category. They're looking at the photovoltaic system.

There are concerns about federal funding or concerns about not hitting the n two deadline. So they wanna talk about that. And the other one they wanna talk about is the Silicon Valley EV charging stations. You know, Silicon Valley hopper runs on an all electric fleet. Right now, we have the good graces of DeAnson College.

They are providing electric charging spaces, but it's for all intents and purposes, that handshake deal didn't tell us to get off at any time. And at that point in time, we'd be looking for places to charge them. We are coordinating with city of Santa Clara to see if there's options over there, but it'd be nice if we did have our own charging. That is, one of those projects that'll be discussed about defunding.

School district is putting in some chargers at each one of the sites, but I don't think it's enough locations for you to charge a fleet. But the school district is doing some also.

Worth talking to them. We only have 13 vehicles.

It's not like we have a 100.

I know there are sites going in on my school campus, and they're electrifying on all the campuses and putting in solar.

So

The discussion period is when you can speak up say, I 100% support not defunding these, or I'm okay with defunding these.

I'm excited about this. This is Yeah.

It's may I ask another question?

Yes.

Why does it cost so much money every once we get the systems installed, the both the bus the $2.20, and the whatever it is, 7 something. Okay. The DC fast chargers. Yeah. Once I get in, I understand that you have the the initial you have to get the infrastructure in there. You have to build it. You have the equipment in it. But yearly upkeep seems to be really high. And it did and I don't want it to go long term. I just wanted you guys understood what the why these systems need so much upkeep.

And I understand that when we used to have eight years ago, we had a electric car, and every place we went, they were broken. So I'm just wondering. It seems like there's a lot of nonmoving parts.

And I could probably talk with you a little bit more offline about that. I don't know that necessarily it's expensive. It's just a lot of the older chargers were under different agreements, and the agreement terms are strange.

But we have a when I was looking at yesterday, when

I was

looking through the the the yearly maintenance costs. It seemed high to me.

I have to look at it.

It might just be because I don't understand how we do things here.

I might need to look here, but I'm not necessarily Okay. Go ahead. Come on.

K. Then alright. Thank you. Shall we move on to item number four? Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. So item number four is policy options and electrification for existing.

Great. And we have two representatives from Remy Associates on the line. If you want to come off mute and turn your video on, I will pull up your slides for you.

Thank you.

Feel free to begin and introduce yourselves.

Okay. Great. New story. Hi. I'm Walker Wells. I'm a principal at Ramey Associates, and we've been working with Tori and Ursula for a while now on this question of what are the decarbonization electrification strategies that could be considered for commercial buildings, and we're gonna share some information and some just suggestions about that this evening. Then with me tonight is my my colleague, Sammy. Do you wanna say hi, Sammy?

Sure. Hi, everyone. Sammy Taylor, senior sustainability planner with Raymond Associates. Really excited to hear your feedback on on these options.

Yeah. Great. Okay. So here's our agenda that we wanna provide some some sort of general background, kinda where this work originated from in the work plan and the climate action plan, and then talk about a couple of different options. Replacement of of older equipment with new efficient heat pump equipment, what's called a flex path approach for promoting energy efficiency and electrification, and a third option of benchmarking, which can lead to something called the building performance standard.

And this idea of benchmarking and building performance standards is in the climate action plan, which is why we've been spending time on this particular effort. And then, of course, some time for questions, comments from all of you. K. So a little bit of background on decarbonization. As I mentioned, the fiscal year 2425 work program includes this item, public outreach policy research, coordinate with regional efforts to look at policy options for electrifying Cupertino's buildings, and then to do that in light of this decision by the California Restaurant Association in the city of Berkeley that determined that local agencies, public agencies cannot supersede the federal government's authority to regulate certain appliances, like hot water heaters and HVAC equipment or air conditioning, heating equipment.

And to date, work has already been completed. That's why you see the checkbox for new buildings. And so tonight, we're really focusing on existing commercial buildings, and then I think later, there's a presentation about existing residential buildings. Then moving into the the climate action plan, there are a couple of items, the building energy dash one and building energy dash three that provide direction on this topic. So building energy 1.3 speaks about establishing an energy benchmarking program that requires large commercial entities over 10,000 square feet to report their energy use annually.

And then BE dash three has a couple of items, develop a commercial building electrification strategy, doing outreach to the commercial building sector. And then it speaks to adopting an electrification ordinance that would ban natural gas that has since been determined to be illegal, that you're not able to put in a direct gas ban or even an indirect gas ban because that would be setting a standard that is higher or than what the the federal standard is because federal energy standards allow equipment that has the efficiency level of natural gas, whereas most electric equipment is is much more efficient. So that's determined to be not an option, but we still have some options. And then, again, talking about doing outreach and engagement to get input from property owners. So there's a few considerations just to reiterate a little bit of what I've said is California cities do have the ability to adopt local requirements that are more stringent stringent than the state.

This isn't the case in all states. I was talking to a colleague this morning who's in Massachusetts, and she says, you know, cities can't adopt a standard more stringent than the state. So we have a unique ability to do this in California, which is good. We just have to go through a couple steps to do it in sort of the the right way to meet all these requirements. So these amendments would touch on the building code title 24, and there's two pieces that it touches, which is the energy code part six and then the Cal Green code, which is part 11.

To adopt local standards, the energy commission does require that a cost effectiveness evaluation is completed, and they determine cost effectiveness as being that any incremental cost for the efficiency measures need to be paid back over the life of the equipment. So the whole equipment doesn't have to be paid off. That's a different financial calculation. It's just if there's an incremental cost for the efficiency measures, you need to make sure you get that money back over the life of the equipment. So that's state requirements.

And then at the federal level, this energy policy and conservation act gives the federal government the authority to regulate certain appliances like I've already talked about, and local governments can't supersede those requirements. So a local ordinance has to include things that are cost effective and doesn't preempt APCA. And that's sort of the how we have to thread the needle these days. Just a little more information on the evolution of building codes. Go to the next slide.

Can just see there's some context for all of this work on electrification. So we get a a new building code that goes into effect on the 01/01/2026, and that code uses electric heat pump equipment as its baseline. It's baseline for efficiency. So it's gonna be quite difficult for projects that decide they still wanted to use gas for whatever reason to achieve that level of a comparable level of efficiency through other measures like insulation or windows or whatever. So the state is definitely moving everybody towards electrification.

And then we see some local initiatives through the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Bachman is Bachman is interested in oxides of nitrogen because this is part of smog, and it can convert into low level ozone. So they're not really focused on the energy part. They're focused on the air emissions. But these emissions occur when you combust natural gas or methane, then you get these oxides of nitrogen.

So you can see that water heaters will no longer be sold in the Bay Area, gas ones in 2027, and space heaters in 2029. CARB, the state air resources board, is looking at establishing zero emission appliance standards by 2030 or has established. And then there's a long term goal, again, tying back into your climate action plan of the state achieving carbon neutrality by 2045. You can go to the next slide and look at some of these options that we wanted to share with you. So I'll walk you through this.

So over on the left, you see a couple of options, replacing conventional air conditioning with a heat pump air conditioning and replacing a conventional gas water heater, either electric or well, replacing a conventional water heater, either electric or gas, to a heat pump water heater. That could be a first step that could happen, as you see up here on the top, at time of replacement. So when one of those things breaks, replacing it with the heat pump option. And then we have this second option of what's called flex path, which typically happens when people are doing renovations or remodels of significant size, say, 500 square feet or greater, that you can ask for kind of a a constellation or a group of energy and electrification measures as part of their their permit process. And just to go a little further, the heat pump and space heating and cooling replacement is already identified in the 2025 Cal Green code as a allowable voluntary action that local governments can adopt.

So that's already been vetted and something that you can move forward on. And then you can see some of the other advantages of as you go through that you know, it's fairly straightforward to to implement. Many of these pieces of equipment have been determined to be cost effective. And then you see with the flex path, it's larger projects, more opportunities for replacement, moving towards more efficient equipment and appliances, and therefore more potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can go to the next slide.

So this flex path approach, not surprisingly, the goal is to give people flexibility in how they wanna improve their homes and reduce energy use and and move off of gas. Trigger is usually a larger renovation. You have to have one pathway that complies with EPCA that doesn't, you know, exceed federal standards. It has to be cost effectiveness. And then the way this works is the different measures, as you're seeing on the table, are given point values, and those point values are based on the associated energy savings on an annual basis.

So one point is equivalent to 1,000,000 British thermal units of savings. And then the amount of savings is adjusted by climate zones, so it's reflective of of where you are. And so the way this works is there needs to be a pathway that is, again, EFCA compliant, cost effective. And as long as you have that one pathway, you can put other things on the list that people could choose to do voluntarily. So just to give you an example, say you needed 10 points to comply with this flex path ordinance, if Cupertino adopted one. You could go to the table and say, I'm just gonna do my heat pump water heater. I get 12 points. I'm done. I think from our perspective, that's a great outcome. It's more efficient.

It's electrification. We get everything we want. But someone could say, I don't wanna do that. Instead, let's see. I'm gonna do kind of in the middle here, new ducts, duct ceiling, upgrade my wall insulation, and change my windows.

So right there, I think we're at 14 points, well above what's what's needed to get to, say, a a 10 minimum. And you could start to see how an applicant could puzzle together the 10 points in a way that meets their needs, provides the greatest value to them. And this next slide just provides a bit of a summary of this. We got some permit data and did analysis of, you know, how many permits go through the city that are of sort of substantial in nature such that this type of flex path approach could be sort of would be reasonable to apply and came up with a number of, you know, slightly less than a 100 projects. So, you we're not capturing, you know, hundreds and thousands of buildings in your city every year.

It's a it's sort of a slow trickle of upgrade and incremental process, which means that the GHG reduction potential is relatively low, and the cost of the property owner can vary. They may be able to do things that are, you know, affordable. They can do themselves, not or they could choose to to do things that are that are more expensive. There is an equity concern that the higher you know, the cost would be the same if you're sort of higher income or lower income. So there may be a sort of regressive nature to this if incentives aren't provided.

We think it's fairly easy to implement, so the impact on staffing would be relatively low. And then we can see which parts of the code are are touched on, which is typical. We do not have an example of this being applied to commercial buildings, but there's many examples or, well, several at least examples, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, San Luis Obispo that have taken this flex path approach for residential buildings. So this basically would get you all the little projects, and then this next approach gets you to the bigger buildings. This building performance standard, it's called.

And what it does is it requires property owners to gotta catch my slides up with your slides. Require property owners to submit annually a report on their energy use. And then over time, you can get data in the city to understand what energy use looks like and use that to to set a standard of performance, building performance standard that typically steps down each year moving towards that carbon neutrality by 2045 level. And so we have a few more slides on on what this energy benchmarking looks like. So the way this works is you pick a square footage that needs to comply or would be covered.

It can go down as low as 10,000. In our state, buildings over 50,000 square feet already have to report to the state. And pretty much everybody uses this energy star portfolio manager. It's developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, free, and people will put in their energy data and their water data on an annual basis. And you can see how you're doing.

It lets you compare with other buildings in your climate zone, and it's climate adjusted. And so you can determine if your building is doing well or poorly. And, hopefully, with that information, you know, decide to make some some adjustments. So this benchmarking, just establishing where you are is the, like, the first foundational step in this building performance standard process. And we can go to the next slide.

Okay. And then, again, the building performance standard, the BPS, then establishes a target that you need to reach, you know, on an annual basis, a certain amount of energy use per square foot per year or a certain amount of greenhouse gases per square foot per year. This, gets generated by putting your information into Energy Star Portfolio Manager. The reals results for buildings under 50,000 square feet would be sent to the city, over 50,000 city and state. And then over time, the standard gets to be increasingly stringent as buildings improve efficiency and switch off of gas and onto electrification, which is what you see down here in the arrow, which is starts with benchmarking.

There's a benchmarking plus, which is what the phase that San Jose is in now of saying, now you've done benchmarking. We want you to follow that up with energy audits or retro commissioning to understand how you could equally improve performance of your building. And then a number of cities have used energy use intensity as their initial standard because it's a little more comprehendible. It's looking at kilowatt hours and therms and BTUs, things people are more familiar with. And then ultimately moving to a standard that is based on what we really are interested in, which is carbon dioxide equivalents per square foot.

Then the diagram on the right, it's kind of tiny, but it's just showing a number of things that can be done, changing equipment, adding solar panels, adjusting thermostats, educating people about how to use the building, updating equipment, making sure it's running correctly. All strategies that can help buildings achieve that standard of performance, which is a core part of the BPS. Next slide. This gives a couple of examples to show you a little more about how this works. So the the table is from Denver, and it's just showing that the standard isn't the same for every building.

It's not a a one size fits all. And so there's a sort of a number of building types that are included and referenced in the Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and then the software and Portfolio Manager lets you compare yourself to buildings around the country, and it will also give you this number of energy use intensity. And so what Denver did was use the benchmarking data over several years to then determine what those numbers should look like, sort of what the average is for each of those building types, and then they figure out what the you know, at what pace they need to step down energy use or increase efficiency to get to their ultimate goal, which you can see on the right is an illustration of what's happening in Cambridge, Massachusetts is they're saying nonresidential large properties, the blue line, you know, between 2025 and 2030, need to have a 20% savings. The smaller properties, they're asking for 40% savings. And you see how it just steps down over time with that ultimate goal of getting to neutrality.

Next slide. Okay. Impact in Cupertino through the building performance standard. So it depends on what ultimately gets selected. So our starting point is the total number of commercial buildings in your city.

So there's 3,280 commercial buildings in your city. That goes from, you know, a 100 square foot building up to the biggest building that you have. So that's everybody. And then we've kind of sliced it up and determined that the number of buildings that are larger than 50,000 square feet already reporting to the state, a 127, and then you can just see it sliding down. So if you pick 20,000 square feet as your threshold, there would be 300 buildings ish that would need to report every year.

And if we go to 15,510, which is the number in the cap as a guidance, 923 buildings that we need to report every year, and their reports would need to get sort of reviewed and verified by by staff. And then what happens is, you know, by capturing a relatively small number of buildings, but the big buildings, you can also capture a a good chunk, you know, at least 50% of the square footage in the city, and therefore, about 50% of the energy use and emissions related to commercial buildings. So you'll see on the next slide, I think. Yeah. So this talks about benchmarking only and building performance standard, but the number of buildings would be the same, you know, depending on where the threshold is, a 127 or 923.

But if we're only doing benchmarking, it's informational, so the impact on GHD is is low. But if you move into the for building performance standard, the impact is quite high. You know, we're not getting a 100 small remodels. We're getting consistent energy efficiency and electrification among the larger buildings in your community. So really able to take a big bite out of the annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Benchmarking only is relatively cost effective. It's sort of a reporting process. Could be, you know, $750,000 a year if people aren't able to do the reporting themselves. On the building performance standard, you know, it'll depend on the state of the building. But if the building is in poor shape, it may need to make significant investments to reach those performance standards, particularly as things step down, or it might require replacing equipment, placing gas equipment with electric equipment to improve efficiency and clearly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Similar equity considerations. Either benchmarking or building performance standards would require more staff, and, certainly, the building performance standard to verify, you know, those numbers of properties, you know, could require, you know, additional full time equivalent staff. A good thing with this approach is we'd be modifying the municipal code, so we're not touching the building code and don't need to go through the cost effectiveness test or have it reviewed by the building standards commission. It also makes it less exposed to some of these ongoing efforts to limit local government's ability to impose local efficiency standards or concerns about outlawing gas. So kind of exist in a different place.

It's a little more protected. There you can see on the bottom some information who is doing benchmarking and then who is looking at building performance standards. Number of them are big cities, but we are seeing more smaller cities getting into the building performance standard arena. Next slide. Just a couple more to go.

So we just wanna share with you the public outreach that we've done today and some of the takeaways. So back in September, we had a couple of roundtables with representatives from retail office in larger multifamily properties. City staff participated in a small business resource fair in December, did a survey in December, and we tried unsuccessfully to reach out to some of the strip mall owners, small commercial properties, you know, trying to understand this issue of equity or really their ability to comply with an ordinance once you get down to, say, the 10,000 square foot level. Now this could be small properties, mom and pops, you know, not a full time property manager. You know, we need to be reasonable about who a program like this would would, you know, apply to, make sure that they can they can actually follow through.

Some things we learned, number of people are already doing portfolio manager, quite familiar with it. You saw that 64% of the people we talked to were supportive of having an annual energy reporting requirement. About 30% of the people had already been doing things related to energy and then, you know, a concern about meeting the performance requirements if there's concerns about fixed budgets for operations and maintenance. So a number of the ordinances in other cities say, you know, if you can't hit the standard, you know, then there's other things that you can do related to energy audits or coming up with the three year plan to bring down your energy use. So if you can't hit it in exactly the compliance here that they'll kinda give you a backdoor to to do some analysis and figure out a plan for getting back on track.

That's the last slide for me. So we we had one more slide, I guess. Just had a few questions about, you know, interest in pursuing the flex path for the smaller projects where people have, you know, choices in how they're they're gonna achieve the number of points needed to to comply. Again, this would be for the modest size and up remodels. Is there interest in energy benchmarking?

What size might be appropriate? And then should we continue to pursue this exploration of a building performance standard? And and then the the final final slide has the recommendation from staff, but maybe we'll leave yes. We can we can read this one and then maybe go back to the question. So the recommendation is to receive this presentation and recommend the city council direct staff to pursue adoption of FlexPath and develop an ordinance establishing benchmarking for buildings of 10,000 square feet and larger with the intent of phasing in a building performance standard.

And the reason for doing this is to support the climate action plan and sort of broader sustainability goals of the city. Okay. Thank you. And then maybe we'll go back to the slide with the the questions on it.

Okay. Thank you. We'll proceed to clarifying questions at this point. Does anyone have any questions?

Oh, I got one, but, Jack. Okay.

When I was looking at your example for the FlexPath for a lot of alternative, I'm not quite sure if that a a cookie cutter set of alternatives with the same weights, or is it customized for that particular building?

So the the list is up to you to make. So you can maybe we can go back to that slide, I think, that has the FlexPath table on it.

Because I'm looking at I was looking at it and going like, well, I don't really use hot water, but I can buy a hot water you know, electric hot water heater and gain the system.

Yeah. So that's

that's why I was looking at that. I need to figure out how that is going to be I can see if someone's approaching it. Honestly, it's really nice, but I'm also looking at this, like, buying energy credits with Brazilian, nut farmers, in order so I can use more Bitcoins. That's my full fire thing. Mhmm. So there's that. And the other one a couple of questions on the BPS.

Okay.

I'm assuming from the way we're talking that there the the meters are of smart meters. Right?

Mhmm.

Okay. And does PG and E help itemize stuff for the property managers?

Yeah. So

Well, at least

I guess one quick will they be going? I'm a property manager. I'm also the owner. I'm also, you know, like, know, run the business and everything like that. I'm not a I'm not like the apple where this is you know, you hire somebody whose job it is to do this. And I'm this is once again another thing that I have to deal with. How complex is it gonna be? How much help am I gonna get from the city and some PG and E to do due diligence? I wanna do the right thing, but at the same time, I'm I'm on my wits end. It makes sense?

It totally makes sense, you know, which is, I think, why it's really important to think about where that square footage level is set. You know, once at what level is it a investment property with professional property management and and staff to do these types of things. And, you know, so we think you can go as low as 10,000, but you can't go lower than that. So, you know, keep in mind that 10,000, it's, you know, a 10 unit apartment building just to give you a sense of scale. You know, these these measures are looking at commercial buildings, but, you know, it could be like a small medical office.

You know, you get up into the 20,000 square foot range. It's a more substantial building, and there's more it's more likely that there would be capacity to to deal with this this reporting regime. And then to your other question, you can request from PG and E the aggregated energy use in the building. So that's how it works. So you don't have to go and get the information from everybody's meters. They'll they'll bundle it up and give it to you as a block. So the individual tenants' energy use is continue to be made private. So those privacy concerns are addressed.

That would be especially good for an apartment owner.

Mhmm.

Okay.

And I can add to that answer. I have to do the city's reporting to the state on behalf of the library. It's over 50,000 square feet. And the first year I did it, it took me a while, like, better part of a day to read all the instructions and figure out how to get PG and E to give the authority to send my information. But after that, when I helped create a little cheat sheet, it's much more streamlined the second time.

K. I'm just I'm a beekeeper. Every year, multiple agencies want me to fill out an extensive detailed, survey. I have to roam every time it happens. So I'm I'm just getting the pain. We need to do this. K? I think all great. It's just I'm really I want us hopefully, the city will find ways to guide Yeah. Or for business owners to be able to do this as pain as soon as possible.

And, Commissioner Carter, I'll just remind you we're in questions right now on conversation. Sorry.

And we may wanna go back to the questions that we'd we put on that next to last slide.

This is clarifying questions for you, Walker, and then we go into answering your questions in a minute.

I also have a question. Yeah. Let just verify.

Well, I don't know if this is a place to talk about it, but I'm curious. Does the city have the capacity to be able to implement some of these or take on additional responsibilities with this? Love these ideas, but I don't know if the city manager has plans to give you more staff or, more funding to hire consultants to help with some of this. That's my clarifying question.

Would you like me to answer that one?

Yeah.

Okay. So that would be part of our requirement when we bring the proposed ordinance language. So at this point, to complete the city work program, we are going to plan to do a memo to council and say, direct us to pursue the actual ordinance language. And then when they, if and when they they approve the ordinance language, part of that would say, hey. You need to hire extra staff.

Got it.

I will add that there has been conversation about doing a regional approach to this. The there's pros and cons with that. So if, like, Silicon Valley Clean Energy came in and helped do the reporting and streamlined the requirements, they would probably do it on behalf of all their jurisdictions, and then the threshold might not go to 10,000 square feet. They might stop it at 20 or 30,000 square feet and try to hit the larger businesses. So it wouldn't be tailored to Cupertino, and it would probably take several years, to get all the cities to adopt an enforcement ordinance and to agree to work with SVCE on their behalf and trying to get all of the city councils in the region to agree on something.

So there's some pros and cons.

And are there ongoing regional activities from BACnet or SBCU right now? Or

Two for super building performance standard. I just did a presentation to the regional sustainability managers last month to try to get some action on this, but at this time, there's no appetite. It's coming soon, hopefully. They they are attracted to the idea, but nothing's, in action.

Senator Townsend?

This was to the, SVCE jurisdictions.

Alright. Well, any more clarifying questions? Quick question. So this was mostly focused on commercial. Yeah. What is the residential segment? Is that

or

is Coming that next. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay.

We don't have any members of the public.

Would you like to comment?

Okay. Alright. Can we move on to commission discussion then? Yes.

So we have these questions to kind of help shape the conversation. But, ultimately, I'm gonna pull up a Word document and ask you guys to wordsmith a sentence or two to then I'll put on the memo when we give that to city council. So I can leave these questions up here, or I can switch over to the word document, when we're ready.

Switch. Okay.

And so, ultimately, I put this here for recommend or for you if you wanted that as your base starting point to Wordsmith. But I will type in whatever you want to nominate so you can totally change it. But to help shape shape the question, it's I guess it's two parts or three parts. One is, do you wanna do FlexPath? And then put that in the sentence. And then do you wanna do energy benchmarking? And then do you wanna do these other pieces? So it's kind of four different conversations.

But they're all contained in that statement.

But they're all gonna be contained in a statement.

K. So benchmark. What was the last one?

Building performance standard, and then if you want to make a recommendation onto what building size. But you also don't have to make those recommendations. If you just say, yeah. We wanna move forward and figure out the building size later, These are just discussion questions to help state raise that statement. Recommendation that I Yes.

To direct staff to pursue adoption of a FlexPath reach code for commercial buildings and develop an ordinance establishing an energy benchmarking requirement for buildings 10,000 or larger. The intent to phase in a building performance standard to support the city's climate action plan two point zero? Yes. Existing commercial buildings emission reduction goal. That's all.

Is that It's a long sense. Tell me about it.

Two point zero, have to put climate action in.

We can make that correction in your guys' recommendation.

Does anybody have any input? Do you wanna

I mean, I am actually in favor more of a 20,000 square foot or larger facility rather than 10,000. I would love to get the 10,000 involved, to be honest, but, that so you're above 20,000 square foot, you have 314. Above 10,000 square foot, have 923. So

I will add in our calculations about half of the 923 are owned by one business.

Uh-oh. Oh.

Okay. I know where they are even. Right?

Yeah. Oh,

it is cool. Alright.

Well, okay. I Ben, I'm fine with 10,000. Okay.

That was thank you for the extra information. So the wordsmithing, I mean, as opposed to us saying, do it.

You could not recommend FlexPath and put all your energy towards energy benchmarking. You could say the city is not in a fiscal alert place to try to pursue an energy benchmarking. Let's just do FlexPath.

This commissioner is I've read the arguments, heard the arguments. The arguments made sense. I brought up two questions about length of path, maybe, you know, whether run around, but that would be probably a lukewarm anyway. So I'm I could not see any holes in the argument of giving to us.

I I actually like what's that. That seems like shopping. You know? We get a menu. It's good.

But but the other part of it is getting a picture of your your your guilty and what you know, where the needs are. Right. It's really important.

But as a consumer, what I like is I can see where I get the big bang for my buck. Because you put a dollar in that store. Yeah. You can see what's going on there. So I really like that.

But I think you need, in some ways, I feel it needs the benchmarking. It's gonna be fine. Right? Is it what was the one where we got the the the picture? They have the

That's FlexPath with the numbers?

Oh, no. No. No. No.

That's building

performance standards.

Yeah. Building performance standards that tells you where

which

one of these flex mark. I mean, because I'm guessing that the the flex path is going to be customized. But they you know, maybe not the first round, but they'll find very quickly they'll it to where, you know, yeah, you don't have any oil. You don't need any oil. Can't even sell. K? You're you're most of your energy is. For this thing. So you gotta get the Thanks. For this thing. And that's where you're

And that's why they're doing the reporting too.

Yeah. So that's why I think together, they work.

Yeah. Okay. Do I have a motion?

Do have to make the motion?

One more clarifying question. So this is to not wait for the regional endeavor, I'm assuming, since we are developing our own order. That's okay. Alright. Yeah. Then then I'll move staff's recommendation forward.

Wanna go? So, Alex

Alex. Have to read the whole thing.

Okay. I will move to direct staff to pursue adoption of the FlexPath for each code for commercial buildings and development ordinance establishing an energy benchmarking requirement for buildings 10,000 square feet of or larger with the intent to phase in a building performance standard to support cities, climate action plans, existing commercial buildings, and mission reduction goal.

Do you wanna change it to two point o?

Two point

o. Sure. Thank

you.

You.

My pleasure.

Pretty good. You always slowed down at the end then. That's because you ran out of air.

I did.

Is there a second?

I second.

Commissioner Carter seconds.

Alright. We'll go to a roll call vote. Chair Hanson? Aye. Vice Chair Feng?

Aye.

Commissioner Yang? Aye. Commissioner Carter?

Aye.

And Commissioner Pad Gwangkar absent.

Okay. Well, it looks like we're gonna go ahead and move on now. Thank you for your presentation and your time. Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That was a hard time talking to

Thank you.

You.

Good luck.

Okay. Can we move on to item five, policy options for electrification of Cupertino's existing residential buildings?

Wonderful. I will be giving the presentation tonight. I'm Victoria Moran, sustainability specialist at the city of Cupertino. So this bill looked pretty parallel to commercial buildings with a few exempt exceptions. So your background is the same city work program item, but now we are moving on to the next circle.

Our climate action plan does call out residential buildings separately, but the terms ultimately look pretty similar. There is a larger focus on equity with low income seniors, etcetera, etcetera, making sure that we are really considering the greater population in Cupertino. But 2.4 does have the same language that it it bans the natural gas infrastructure at time of replacement or renovation. So we are pivoting that approach, and that's why we're exploring other policy options here today. So same regional and state context for electrification applies to residential.

We just went over a lot of this, but I will talk a little bit more about the energy code as it applies to residential in a second. And then BACMed is banning the sale of water heaters, and space heater requirements coming up soon. So we are doing some contractor training to educate contractors on how to install those new appliances, and then there will be more progress in 2030 and 2045. So going on to the state building code and what that looks like. So the state is making progress from 2022 standards to 2025.

They're moving in the right direction, specifically calling out now they're allowing heat pumps for space or for air conditioning and space heating. They were allowed before, but now they're they're progressing. They're but they're not progressing as far as electric readiness or, again, this flex path menu approach that parallels what we were just talking about. And then what I'll dive into today are these additional add ons. Right?

So same legal limitations apply as what we were just talking about that we can go above and beyond the state requirements. So but this looks a little bit different. We have the AC to heat pump. So that's at time of replacement when you buy it or not when you buy. Sorry.

When you install a new or replace an AC unit, we would require it to be a heat pump, which ultimately means that it could heat your home as well. This is part of the CalGreen, voluntary pathway, we wouldn't have to do that cost effectiveness study. We could ultimately adopt it. But the electric readiness and the flex path, those are both triggered by time of renovation and would need that cost effectiveness study to go in them. We would adopt either the electric readiness or the FlexPath because the FlexPath does allow for that electric readiness to be part of that scoring criteria.

So considerations, hopefully, isn't too much on one slide, but the point here is that there are some pros and cons with each one. So if we wanted to be the most ambitious, we would do multiple of them. And the biggest, we would do the AC heat pump and the flex path approach, but it might come with upfront high costs. You know, it could lead to bill savings, and we know the FlexPath has a many of options. So depending on which of those standards they chose, it could be more or less effective, and it could be more or less costly.

And then just requiring the electrical upgrade would be a lower impact, but it would be more of that equitable equitable not making a lot of progress, not forcing a lot of change. And the intention with the, electric readiness, which we didn't talk about with commercial as much, this would apply and we all know how hard it is to upgrade just your electrical panel. Right? So that would be step one. And the hope is that if you upgrade that panel, then it would be a no brainer when your appliance dies that you would make that switch. But you'd have to have good faith that the people would make that switch because they're now capable to do it. I'll give you a second to read the slide before I go in.

We can come back.

These will be posted today.

Oh, okay.

So there's a big caveat with this. There is new a new bill coming down that was introduced in February that supports streamlining new housing processes by not updating the building standards. This is a big problem for us because it means that we can't adopt anything that we were talking about today. I will say no more changes to your building code until 2031 building code, which would go up into effect at in 2032. So this has passed the assembly floor and will need to be voted by the senate for consideration.

There is a lot of effort coming from everyone in California. Our SVCE, all our providers are making big oppositions to this saying, hey. Will you make an amendment to existing building code? Right? You can keep the streamline for new construction, but please allow us some flexibility for existing buildings to help move our efforts forward. And I have been told that it's optimistic. We have not given up hope that the senate will make this exemption or change in the code in the language of the bill. But that being said, this would squash all of our policy

options and leave us with no path forward for

that residential decarbonization electrification at this point. In light of that, this we had started doing a survey before this bill started, and we're going to continue with our city work program as directed to do public outreach. So, hopefully, you are aware as you all tabled to help get the public outreach going with this survey. It is translated into Chinese and Hindi now. We are doing specific outreach door to door to do low and fixed income housing, working with our RISE housing.

We did go to the senior center as well as, working with the forum and other senior facilities. We have talked with youth groups in the Rotary Club to try to get the word out, and we have a couple more weeks. For those of you who are tabling at Cherry Blossom Festival, you'll be working on this again, and so in the Farmers Market. So we are doing quite a few as much as we possibly can. We have about 300 survey responses so far, so we're looking pretty good.

And then I believe this is my last almost last slide talking about programs and affordability. Although this isn't directly related to policy, no matter what our policy outcomes are, we will continue to promote programs and educate residents on how to make these changes. On the left, I we mentioned back in our last commission meeting and and that some announcements, but this Go Electric advisor is really a turnkey program. They walk residents through step by step, talk from technical assistance, virtual audits. We actually, like, go on Zoom and show them your water heater and show them your panel, and they give you recommendations on how to develop a plan and find a contractor and apply for the rebates.

So it it is a program that is live and running and has no expiration date at this time. So if you know people, we're really trying to push it, but it's one of those things that people don't even know it exists yet. The SBC also released a cost effectiveness return on investment to learn if switching will save you money on your PG and E bill and found the average was between 19 and 20 or $19.20, $29 depending on your changes, but that went up to a $150 per household depending on your usage and what you were doing before versus after. And then the last one I just threw on here, the switch is on. If you haven't heard about that one, that is the best resource to find rebates, federal assistance, all of the things residential, you put in your ZIP code, and I believe there's 20 different programs out there to help residents make the switch.

With that, some next steps for staff, analyzing the survey results. We're gonna write this memo to city council. Hopefully, it will be completed with our recommendations and your recommendation in June. We're gonna have to find out how the senate votes in order to move forward and wait for city council direction to move forward. So we have a few hurdles, but in the meantime, as I mentioned, we're going to continue with our education and outreach efforts as much as possible.

There is a public webinar coming up. I believe it there's a couple dates early May that SVC is hosting virtually educate residents, and I can send that information to you if you haven't seen it in our upcoming social media. And I believe that was it. So I will take clarifying questions.

Does anybody have any questions?

Comments from members of the public?

Alright. Discussion? No discussion then. Discussion. Yes. Yes.

Without Commissioner Park. Expedited permitting, we're not going to get the electrical power. Is that the biggest issue? It's

Yeah. The

so on that's something the city can do.

We do offer over the counter permits same day. Wow. So it is just about as expedited as it can. Indeed. That's just for for upgrading on a single appliance. If it's a home renovation, it would be more of a process. And so but, yes, there are some technicalities. Technicalities if you're applying for the rebate. They do require you to go through that permitting process, and we have calculated that a lot of people don't apply for the permits. So we don't have fully accurate statistics on how many people are gas versus electric right now, which adds some challenges for us to have accurate reporting of how much work this would be. But the policy would do what we can for the people who follow the legal permitting process that's required.

Were you speaking to PG and E delays with electrical panel capacity or just When

I did the when I did the standing out in front of our booths, that was one of the issues that people were talking about. It's like, how do anything seems that Cupertino have reputation, not as bad a reputation as San Francisco. San Francisco is purgatory or further. But with how turnaround on on Burnley, whether it's true or not, at least the perception is there.

And We just did my mother in law's house, so we converted. We doubled our amperage on our electric panel, and it wasn't bad. But I had a contractor that grew up in the area, knew the people from where they counter. Pretty much the big hiccup was getting PG and E out to flip the switch once they flipped it off to flip it back on. And that was a week.

Receptionist out there.

But that was a week.

I'm being told that from contractors. I mean, told that. I'm getting told that from the people. And then in there I mean, I understand that I keep being comic forward things about the DMV being slow. And every the last time I went to DMV, I got this they were No. Hurtful to me. But that receptionist there, and that's gonna be it's gonna be something we have to hurdles we have to get over right now.

I think that's great feedback because it's probably not advertised, but it's a over the counter process.

Yeah. And it's it's actually not that painful. I know other cities are painful, but that's because do on the fly design changes and expect changes in the because there has to be code updates and that kind of stuff. So if your prints aren't ready, then you have a problem. But if it's something as simple as a break, get an electrician in, they drop the lines, they do the runs. And

so all done. Maybe when we put out verbs about things, we could throw in a sentence about how easy it is

Yeah.

What to do.

Great feedback.

Yeah. And that's a concierge thing. So this is we talked about the concierge. So this is Silicon Valley And Clean Energy's answer. Mhmm. So it doesn't have to be just good, you know, there would be anybody that uses Silicon Valley And Clean Energy? Correct. Good to know. Alright. Thank you. I think it'd be good at the the Go Electric advisor too. That'd be good to push out during our next few events. Yeah. Thank you. Code along with the survey. I agree. Because like what Victoria said, because people don't know about it, it's not Well, and then the QR code one stop shopping for permits. Do you know what I mean? The permit will process another QR code to the front desk or something.

Okay.

So you can do that. And then an induction lock so we can you know, it's a change in process. We can maybe call

it candy or something.

It's actually that's important.

And so unpopty yet. I don't show it in person.

We were very afraid. I had to buy or or get in a a kitchen remodel.

Uh-huh. That's

why all these things are very gervaning to me. So a year two years ago, I bought a portable induction K. For my wife to try out. It's important for people to get over the fear of

That's why the work. That's why the Martin Mann thing was really awesome for me, but I don't think everybody that wanted to go could get in because you were sold out like that. Right?

We're hoping to do another one by the end of the fiscal year.

Or maybe bring them to the to the Cherry Boston Festival. But, yeah, I mean, just to have an induction thing there, not with something else that'll do.

Not to go off on a tangent, but to Jack's point, think part on the permitting side of things, I think sometimes the residents or even the moms and pops businesses, they hire contractors who don't know what they're doing.

Yeah. Well, don't get me started on that.

And that's complain about delays in the process. Don't think that's the city as well. You know? It's like

It's not. Because I had a contractor who was born and raised here. He's like, screw it. Like, we're all waiting for cabinets, you know, before we but we had everything else.

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Those yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're that's that's a that's a side which should be it's like yeah. We've had permitted stuff that tripped out really. That's what because that's those people probably need to retire now. Yeah. I can walk. Yeah. It's forever, so you should not.

So we're not looking for recommendation today because we want to wait for our public feedback before staff makes a formal recommendation, but just keeping those policy options in your head of, you know, requiring the AC heat pump conversion on time of replacement or requiring the flex path or electric ready paneling. Hopefully, if it passes in the senate, we can recommend those to counsel. And if we have some left, then it will be on our side, and we can move forward.

Did the city provide, like, a support letter or something to whichever committee it is in the senate right now?

Yes. You can do a letter of opposition with your suggested wording changes. The city council would have to send that. There are some templates, and we have Stupid. Passed that on to city council and our city manager's office, but it would be up to them if they want to pursue that or not.

Do you need a permit to change out your to get a new hot water heater? Really?

Yeah. Yes.

Okay. Because the past, it was it's leaking. Go down our you know, get funds put in. So I I don't that might be another educational point.

Yeah.

Because if I don't know it, I'm on commission.

It's not the rebates you can get. You need a permit. So that makes But

you don't think of rebates when your water heater is you're not getting rebate if you're replacing it with another gas. Right?

Right.

All you know is all you know is gas, and yours is currently leaking or about to leak, so you replace it. And now you have a new water heater that we're going to try to convince you to change.

I'll just pop in that SPC did develop a an emergency Okay. Low voltage, I guess, you know, that can just operate on a regular outlet heat pump water heater. So a smaller one kind of tide people over if they need to do something to get ready for

I get it. I guess my point is if I'm not educated to knowing the stuff Sure. It is. Would just you know? Yeah.

On that line of thought, would it be would it be overstepping our our jurisdiction or whatever if we had a list of approved contractors that knew all of the codes that we like like, the certification from the sustainability positions.

So still SPCE already has a contractor training and has a list of approved contractors who know how to do this. K. It's out there. That's it's on their website under that that image I showed you. It says find a contractor in the list.

Okay. Good. Yeah. Alright. Alright. So any other questions, discussions? Can we move on to the final item, item six? Thank you. Okay. That is electric vehicle charger, the study providing a prioritized list of locations.

And we have two representatives here from ZeroQuest. Charles is online. If you'd like to go ahead and introduce yourselves, I can pull up your PowerPoint.

Go ahead, Charles.

Can you hear us, sir?

We can hear you now.

You can hear me?

Yep. Yes.

Okay. Great. Thanks. So I'm Chuck Trollka, and as, Victoria mentioned, my business partner, Nizim, is there in person. I had, planned to be there in person, but, some unforeseen circumstances came about, so I'm presenting remotely. I'll just start by saying, one of the great benefits of being the last presenter is that people tend to be anxious to go home, and so it usually goes more quickly, the last presentation. So we'll we'll see how things go today. And with that, let's go ahead and get started. Victoria, if you could go to the next slide. So I just wanted to, set some objectives.

We're not gonna review the full study. That's actually available to everybody to read, and I think it's probably been, previously distributed. What we wanna accomplish today is to just talk about the basic approach we took, the flow of the information that we're providing, and the content. And then at the end, we'd like to talk about some next steps relative to implementation of the recommendations. Next slide.

The, specifically, action item that we're we were given to address is tr3.1 from the climate action plan, version two dot o, which is to conduct survey of existing publicly accessible vehicle chargers, identify a prioritized list of locations for new vehicle charging stations, and provide that list considering an equitable distribution of chargers, across multiple populations of the city. And so we'll we'll get into that a little bit during the presentation. And then I would say a secondary parallel objective was not to complete action item, TR three dot two, but really to lay the groundwork for it. And, and that action item had identified a target of 719 new publicly accessible level two and three chargers. And so, we kept in mind that second objective, and, you'll see our final recommendations come pretty close to that number.

Next slide. I won't go through this in detail. It's just the outline of the study, but we provide some background and context information, relative to EVs and the climate action plan. We talk about the methodology that we go through, and then, really, the bulk of the information is in section five, the results and recommendations. And I'm gonna present a a brief summary from section six in the presentation today.

Next slide. So I think people are aware that, there's been a pretty significant shift towards electric vehicles. About 26% of new vehicles sold in Cupertino or to Cupertino residents in 2024 were electric. And that, as of the end of calendar q three, equated to about 24,000 EV and plug in hybrid electric vehicles in the city of Cupertino. And, of course, that's driven by tax and rebate incentives, the fact that there's a tech savvy population.

EVs are becoming more available and more affordable, and the state has a mandate to get to a 100% sales. So we're roughly a quarter of the sales today are electric, but the goal is to get to a 100% by 2035, which is only ten years away. So that transition will happen fairly quickly. Next slide. We worked with Victoria and her team to prioritize list of potential EV charging sites according to various criteria.

The number one priority locations were grant eligible or tax credit eligible locations for the obvious reason that, you know, anytime there's money available, it makes it easier to get something done. We'll talk in a little bit more detail in a future slide about the NEVI program, given some of the administration changes at the federal level. Our priority two was accessible to the general public, which is generally desirable locations on, it could be city, county, or state. But since we're doing this for the city, the priority, of course, is on city owned sites. Priority three was, what we call private sites, private property, but accessible to the general public.

So these would be things like, shopping centers, restaurants, and so hotels. Category four or priority four was privately owned sites that are not accessible to the public. So this is primarily employment locations. And then priority five is ensuring that we're meeting the needs of a variety of different communities. And these are could be age related.

It could be income related, physical capabilities, and also multifamily. And then the last one, CalEnviroScreen, is a kind of a combination of pollution and income levels. And so we'll we'll talk about each of these categories briefly in the presentation today. Alright. So we started by looking at the location of existing chargers, which was part of the the scope of this report.

I've gotta give a lot of credit to Nazeem for developing some really nice mapping tools that sit on top of Google Maps that allowed us to import data, in this case, ex locations of existing chargers, which with the exception maybe of some employment locations was generally publicly available. And, and then drop that right into the map. So you can see, level two charging stations, of course, are more numerous. That's typically 240 volt, relatively slow charging on the order of tens of miles per hour of charging. And then level three, also known as fast DC charging, this is much quicker charging on the order of ten minutes to thirty minutes and at much higher voltage and current levels.

One of the things you'll see in addition to the fact that, naturally, there are more level two charging stations, primarily because they're much cheaper to install and maintain. You'll see that, but you'll also see that the locations of the chargers in the city tend to fall along two horizontal axes, the 280 Corridor at the top, and then Stevens Creek Boulevard kinda running through the middle of the slide. So part of what we looked at in addition to the priorities that we saw earlier were was ensuring that we got a reasonable geographic distribution of charger locations. And so, hopefully, you'll see that as we go through. Next slide, please.

For each of the maps that we provided, we also provided the same data in tabular form so that you could see specific addresses, for example. And in the tables, it's a lot easier to see the number of chargers and also the number of level two versus level three chargers. So we we tried to provide that data. This is a a snapshot of the table for existing chargers, but it's only a partial snapshot. It it actually continues on.

It's a fairly large table with a lot of good detail. And, yep. Thanks. So, our priority one, if you'll recall, was, this, had two categories, NEVI program formula and the IRS ten thirty c tax credit. NEVI program is a federal program for fast DC charging along major corridors of which two eighty is one.

And so, we looked at, and there are certain requirements for the chargers to be located within a limited distance of the corridor in question. Again, in this case, two eighty. We identified, multiple locations where we felt that there was both room for the chargers. We also checked to ensure that there was a a level of, PG and E service available to support the high voltage requirements of the, fast chargers and also ensuring that we meet the NEVI program requirements. Unfortunately, at this time, it looks like, with the new administration, the NEVI program has been put on hold.

Any previous grants that were already extended are expected to be honored, but the the program, is not currently issuing new grants, that could change, or possibly with the new administration. So I think, you'll see at the end, we talk about just the need to continue to monitor the status of this program. But if and when the program comes back, we have a good set of locations to put those chargers. Next slide, please. And, this is the tabular summary of that same data.

So about 88 fast chargers, that we would recommend total, through that program. And then, the second part of priority one was the IRS 30 c tax credit. Far as we know, this program is still being supported. It's really intended to support lower income areas and also less populated areas. And so you'll see two categories.

In in the city of Cupertino, there's actually very little area that's covered, we'll say within the city proper. There's that little, tan area north of Homestead, and we found one apartment complex that's within the city that would that could potentially, apply for that program and receive support. By by the way, the IRS 30 c tax credit applies to private entities that are filing tax returns, but want to take advantage of, installing chargers. And then, so there's that one apartment complex in the Tan area, and then the rest is primarily very low population, area on the green, shown on the green on the left hand side of the slide. We're not really recommending, putting any charters in those locations.

Next slide. And, so the priority two locations, we we identified these as, city, county, or state. And so we did, for example, include schools, and we included county parks. But, really, our, primary focus here was on city owned parks. And one of the advantages of putting chargers in these locations is often they can be level two chargers, so they're much less expensive to install.

And you see if you do put them in, parks or other city owned properties, then, this is one way of addressing that issue of getting a good geographic distribution of chargers so that nobody has to drive very far if they wanted to, charge their vehicle. And then priority three was publicly accessible but privately owned locations. So, again, shopping centers, and hotels, and restaurants. And so I think the icons are are pretty straightforward for those. And you can see, coffee shops and also places of worship.

So, part of what the city could do is encourage each of these private locations to pursue, mostly level two charging, occasionally level three charging, as a way to, number one, support the city cap plan, and number two, to encourage people who have EVs to

Go for it.

To attend those, those establishments and give them business.

Slide,

please. Priority four is privately accessible and privately owned sites. And these are primarily employers. So you could argue about whether some employers may want to make their sites available to the public. In the case of Apple, for example, they actually do that at their visitor center for the headquarters location.

We we believe that most employers are not going to want to do that. However, we also believe that employers are incentivized to support EV charging for their employees, again, a quarter of whom probably are already driving EVs. And, unfortunately, the data for those locations is is difficult to come by. Cupertino, as everybody knows, has one gigantic employer, Apple. They have, kind of a a very large company, but really a I'll call it a second tier employer for Cupertino, and that's Amazon.

And then there's kind of everybody else. So this would take a greater effort to make that encouragement, but but we have seen other employers. And Nazeem and I, in working with some of our previous employers, have had that experience of encouraging EV charging and having had some success with it. So, we do think there's a lot of opportunity here, but it probably will take some work. And then priority five is equity priority, communities and all these other, categories that we saw, which include things like, again, income levels, physical ability levels, and so forth.

So if we start with income, there's not really good data for that, within the city of Cupertino. The closest proxy we could find was this thing called, the Association of Bay Area Governments Equity Priority Communities. So these are communities that the the Bay Area Commission has identified as, being underserved or lower income. And, again, you might see that little purple square above two eighty. That's actually right above Homestead.

It's the same location that was identified as a a target for the IRS 30 location and probably for the same reason. So, so there's overlap in that sense, and the overlap really, the opportunity there is a single apartment complex, which we've identified in our report. Next slide. We also identified senior living and multifamily locations throughout the city and and looked at how much space, how much parking space each of these sites has available and made recommendations for a number of chargers for these sites, a a benefit of encouraging charging at senior living and multifamily. Not only do you get a good geographic distribution as you can see, from the map, But, also, typically, these chargers can be level two because people are charging overnight while they sleep.

And, so the cost of installation can be significantly less than the fast charging. So, so good geographic distribution and typically lower cost, and you get the added benefit of, charging at home convenience, which, Nazeem and I are both EV charging or EV owners, and we both charge at home. And so we really appreciate the fact that you can do that. And once you have that benefit, you'll realize that it it's actually more convenient to charge an EV than it is to gas up a non EV vehicle because you don't have to take it anywhere. You drive it home, plug it in, and you wake up in the morning, and it's ready to go again.

Next slide. So the last, that really covers the the category fives. The very last priority five item was this CalEnviroScreen, which, again, is a combination of environmental and income, kind of an intersection of those two things. The the group that provides this data, which is a state sponsored group, ranks each area in the state according to a scale from zero to 100, with 100 being areas with the highest need and zero being the areas with the lowest need. Cupertino, not too surprisingly, falls either into the the lowest or the next to lowest need category.

So none of these meet the screening requirement area for for EV charging prioritization, but we included the data for completeness. Next slide. So this is a summary of our results. I won't go through it line by line. On the left hand side is the category that and we've talked about most of those during the presentation.

We've listed the priority, according to, Victoria and her team. And then, whether we're recommending any particular number of level two or level three chargers, for locations within those categories. And, then at the bottom, we summarize the number of level two and the number of level three chargers. So we we came up with recommendations for 518 level two chargers and 162 level three chargers. If you add those together, they're slightly below the 719 target, which we weren't a part of, determining that number and don't really have the data for how that was decided.

But it but it is, I think, reasonably close to that number and maybe even exceeds that number if you consider the fact that a number of chargers have likely been added within the city since the, since that 07/2019 figure was derived. So, and we feel we've also looked at the ratio of level two to level three chargers and whether that's a reasonable ratio given what other cities have done the existing ratio of chargers and also future needs going forward. And we believe that that's that's a reasonable number. So we're, I think we're we're pretty comfortable with the locations, the numbers, and the level two versus level three numbers. Next slide.

So, that brings us to the discussion topics. We're recommending we have five possible things that could be done by the city or by the sustainability council going forward. The first thing that we recommend is to track the status of the NEVI program. And as if and when, new grants become available, then, there should be somebody tasked with coordinating the application of, grants for the city. The second one, is that IRS 30 c, credit area, which you'll recall also was overlap with the one of the lower income areas.

And there's one apartment complex. It's the Forge Homestead Apartments that's located in that part of the city. There's a potential for them to add EV charging and get this IRS 30 c tax credit. There's also PG and E has a program for multi housing EV charging, and that's a grant program for installation of level two chargers. So there's a potential for that location to qualify for the PG and E program, potentially the PG and E program and or the IRS 30 c tax credit.

So that would seem to be a high priority. Number three, California Energy Commission Center for Sustainable Energy has a program that they've kind of activated and deactivated over time. It's called the CalEVIP program. It's the current incarnation is two .o. And two dot o is focused on fast DC, which is the level three charging sites, and it's a grant program.

So we would recommend pursuing grants for the fast DC charging. They also turn out to have some of their previous program, which was focused on level two and called their one .o program. So there is still some of that money available, and it's possible since the city could, pursue that, for some of the level two charger locations. Our fourth recommendation is to determine a funding strategy for chargers on city owned sites. We know that there is already some activity as discussed earlier in this meeting today, but there are many other opportunities to add level two charging on city owned sites.

And but, of course, that work has to be funded. And I believe one of the commissioners brought up the very good point of the cost of maintenance, which we do believe should be going down, as EV charging becomes much more common and and commoditized. However, it is a cost consideration that should be included. And then item number five is to develop a program to encourage the installation of chargers on private property. This is would include workplaces, which was our priority four, and retail establishments, hotels, and apartment buildings, which is a mix of priority three and priority four.

So these are the actions that we would recommend. We'd like to open, at this point, the topics for discussion and give people the opportunity to ask any questions that you might have. I realized a lot of data in a short period of time.

K. Okay. Well, commissioners, are there any questions?

I don't know if we would discuss I don't waste any discussion.

Miss Guffin? Okay.

One quick clarifying question, and this is not me picking up the methodology at all. I'm just more, like, me being curious. Does the Calendly file screen four point o account for CSP five thirty five, but also the a b 15 components when it comes to calculating, like, disadvantageship? Disadvantages community is based on environmental ownership.

I'm not sure I understand the question exactly. I could maybe explain a little bit more about that and and then see if see if I answer the question. So the CalEnviroScreen looks, I believe, at, primarily at air pollution and also income levels. So I believe what that program is intended to do is address air quality for lower income areas. And, for example, we know that lower income housing tends to be located more towards major transportation corridors.

We know that, the city of Oakland has an issue with, lower income residents being affected by traffic from the port, from trucking traffic, moving goods from the port. So I believe that those are the kinds of issues that the CalEnviroScreen was intended to address. And because Cupertino tends to not have many low income residents and and because there's not kind of these special circumstances like a a port with a lot of diesel traffic, or a diesel train corridor, or even necessarily a lot of, diesel truck traffic on 280. It it's that combination of factors that, made Cupertino not a target location for that particular program.

And, thank you so much. The reason why I asked that question is so I started my local government career in sustainability. And when I started, CalEnviroScreen three point o was just introduced. And when you look at CalEnviroScreen three point o, there are some communities that CalEnviroScreen doesn't categorize as disadvantaged. But when you look at s p five thirty five or a d fifteen fifty, then those communities are actually disadvantaged.

So where I'm getting at is I wanna make sure that, you know, Cupertino being a very privileged and, you know, high income community, I wanna make sure that the methodology does not leave out any parts of census tracts that are actually environmentally disadvantaged. But it's I mean, it's a very well done methodology. It's more of, like yeah. I was just curious.

K. Any other questions? Did you wanna say something?

Only that that's certainly something that we can just go back and take a quick look at to ensure that we didn't miss anything there.

There you go.

I did have a question because when I saw that green and you see a freeway running right through Cupertino, it sort of surprised me that those areas on either side of the freeway were were still green even though you had those emissions. Like, is Cupertino, because of its focus, put itself in green because we've been doing work that way, or is it some other factor that has made us green by the, by the map that was laid down?

Be relative. I mean, basically, getting pollution from the freeway, but relatives being next in two eighty versus 17.

Don't know. We have a lot of green space up against the hills. Right? Yeah. And that was always green space.

That was supposed to be green space for my mother-in-law built right up against that, and they said they weren't gonna build up in the hills. And as soon as that twenty five year window went, that that whole hill got covered right up against the mountains up here. But, you know, I think there's been a huge sustainability focus in Cucatino because of who we are as a community from the get go. But, again, I think to have us be discriminated against because and I know that we're not in a we're not in a space where we have to worry about being marginalized by where we're built, but still freeway running for our community. So, anyway, thank

you.

Discussion? I

discussion for me is the privately owned publicly accessible areas. I will not EV, cure EV, and level two is not gonna cut it for a restaurant. Level three would. And so for making it attractive for people to stop, level twos are not I mean, and having a dinner, level two, my mind, is not an incentive. What it would do is it would cause people to park the car, take up a valuable parking spot.

No. I'm talking I'm not talking about Walmart, which will they'll go have us in the area which but they're charging everything we got. But regular restaurant is not going to want to, in my mind, use up parking spots for people who are not really you know, spend this ten hours or nine hours it takes to charge their car to be shopping. That makes sense?

Yeah. I I

think this is something that we have looked at. Yeah. I totally agree. Level two charger, you really require, let's say, four plus hours. Yeah. But there are place we in our recommendations, we have a level three chargers in shopping centers just like today Target has it and things like that. Yeah. But there is a cost problem, which is level three chargers are significantly much more expensive than level two. So if even if you're not doing a full charge, let's say you're doing you you have you want 30 miles or 20 miles of range that you wanna do in a restaurant and you're there for couple hours, you're gonna get that. So that's why we try to weigh the cost versus where we put the chart at at level.

So I

guess and my counterargument for that and by the way, having it for the apartment buildings

Yeah.

And all those things.

Yeah. All part.

The only the only part of all this thing is you're gonna find that people are just parking the car there.

Yeah. So if we can

That's right.

Comes out to affordability. I totally agree. If you can get a a level three charger in a restaurant area, that's the ideal situation. But sometimes you have to compromise just from an economic point of

view. Yeah. I'm just wondering how are you going to get the the owner if I'm

the owner

of the small of the small That's

like, restaurant or whatever.

I want it.

It really doesn't have to file the

Yeah. Right. So we're not trying to pick and if you look at the location, it's more like shopping centers that have restaurants and and and grocery stores and other stuff. Think of, you know, various shopping to the

road Okay.

Valco and stuff like that. A single restaurant. I agree with you. They're not Okay. Yeah. That's why I was

Yeah. One one other thing that I'd like to point out is that these are all private property locations, and really none of us can dictate or or at least are trying to dictate what a particular owner, should or shouldn't do. We made some baseline recommendations, but I really think in the case of private property, it's up to the property owner, and they've gotta make these trade offs. Do I, you know, wanna take the chance on somebody parking for a long time? Do I wanna pay for a fast charger?

Do I wanna make a deal with a third party company to install fast chargers with some kind of revenue sharing agreement? So, again, we're providing general guidelines, but we're certainly not dictating anything. And and, really, ultimately, the private property owners should make that decision.

How much is a level two charger compared to level three? Significant. What does that mean?

Yeah. So go ahead, Vincent.

Go ahead. Go ahead.

We we don't have specific numbers, but to give you an order of magnitude sense, level two charging, can is typically a thousands of dollars type proposition, and level three charging is at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands depending on the size. So it's it's at least an order of magnitude more expensive.

And that's assuming PG and E has the ability to do that. PG and E has gotta put a new light for a level three charger, then it's it's probably very expensive.

That's right. The city is ready for level two charging almost everywhere. Level three charging often requires particular PG and E upgrades, is an, you know, a whole other consideration in addition to the cost.

I mean, I really love all the recommendations that are provided, especially the fifth one. I think that is a giant endeavor in terms of trying to connect with yeah. Even multifamily property owners, I tried that in my prior job. It was very, very hard. But I wonder if there are programs as the Bay Area brands, like the Regional Energy Networks that are able to, you know, assist assist city staff to do something like this.

But I know that a lot of the multifamily property owners are probably not you know? They are probably investors and developers from all around the country. So I know that that's gonna be a pickup in terms of the outreach.

Yep. Yeah. And, the other, challenge I think that's a very good point. And the other challenge is that, there's really no one person who has been tasked to do any of these things. So, I guess if there if there's an overarching recommendation, it would be to find somebody to take on all or part of the responsibility for pursuing these recommendations because without that, probably none of these things are going to happen.

Question for the group. As there, you know, discussion questions and ideas in front of us, if you could wave a magic wand and make one of them happen, which one would you want to see happen?

Oh, one.

Just one.

Oh, I would go with the apartment. K. Everybody every every unit has its own chart.

You mean number five? Or is it number two? Okay.

Well, number two is a specific one apartment complex where it's effectively low income housing. And that's a a low hanging fruit.

Yeah. That's low hanging fruit. I would think I mean, if I had walked, talking once, it's very difficult. Every apartment can

Yeah. And apartments have the lowest penetration of EV chargers today.

Today? Yeah. But