Energy Advisory Committee

MEAC Minutes 6-17-2014 Location: Memorial Room, City Hall Members present: Tim Shea, Andrew Stein, Anne Watson, Alison Hollingsworth, Dan Jones, Dan Costin, Barry McPhee, Barbara Conrey, Geoff Fitzgerald Others present: Hannah Reckhow, Alex Prolman, Amy Nixon, Bill Chidsey, Cara Robechek, Jean Rekol 1. Call to order, approve minutes: Meeting called to order at 7:03. Minutes from 5/20/14 were approved without discussion. 2. Projects Update: Solar RFP: New draft of RFP has been sent to City staff who have made some comments for incorporation. Staff may meet with Anne/Alison. MEAC will formally approve the new RFP before it gets sent out. July 3rd parade: VEIC already has a slot reserved in the parade; there is a proposal for MEAC to partner with Dave Roberts (VEIC) on that. Alison will follow up with Dave Roberts and Joey Miller. Document sharing and repository: A Google Drive folder has been created and will be shared with everyone on the committee for internal document sharing and editing. City consumption data and benchmarking: Scott and Andrew have begun to track down baseline energy info for the municipality's energy consumption. They hope to have info to share with the committee by the next meeting and be able to establish targets for the City. Meeting with Thom Wood (Montpelier School District Facilities Manager) soon. A few years ago, some of the MEAC members (it was then the Montpelier Energy Team) established a very rough sketch of what the baseline would be—how many people use biomass, etc. Barry will send the documents around, and they will be uploaded to the Google Drive folder. A man named Norm Etkin with SEMP (Superintendent's Energy Management Program) has data for many of the schools, perhaps he has it for all 3 schools in Montpelier. Strategic project planning: The Goals & Objectives document that Barry created is a useful place to start; perhaps a small subcommittee of at least three, to take each sector, could look at it and develop some sort of strategic plan for us, to look at the big picture and develop something. Barbara, Dan J., Barry and Cara are interested. 3. Outreach/Community Engagement Update: Calendar Discussion: Alison: A subcommittee met a few weeks ago to talk about ideas for events MEAC could host. We've been talking about these things for a while, so I put them into a spreadsheet and uploaded it to the Google Drive. I also spoke to some people at EVT, one person named Li Ling Young is highlighting existing buildings on how to get your home to net zero. She's happy to do a series of presentations in Montpelier explaining how it works, whenever we want. The idea is to have at least one event each month that brings attention to the NZM issue, something that educates and engages the public, that we can support and promote—whether it's our event or if it's someone else's event that's happening as well. The calendar that currently exists is far from a finished project; we could have any number of events in there to be promoted. Dan J: I advise that you contact ORCA for these events because they get shown for a long time afterwards, and a lot of people watch them. Alison: Currently, the events are very much focused on residential energy use, around energy efficiency and renewables; there's not so much on transportation. Tim: We have a problem where there are a lot of interested citizens that want to stay abreast, but aren't necessarily committee members. At the end of this meeting, I'm going to send around a piece of paper for your names and email, and I'm going to create an email list. For information distribution, volunteer recruitment, etc. If we do recruit non-committee-member volunteers, we'll need to involve them with specific tasks to achieve and time frames within which to accomplish them. Alison: The calendar has an initial draft out there. We need to solidify where and what it is; there should be a link from the City webpage to the calendar. To the committee: Send any events or event ideas to Alison. Alison: EVT can start this series on residential net zero buildings at any time. When should we start? Tim: Sooner rather than later. Survey for Community Discussion Tim: We had talked about an initial education event for citizen buy-in for the net zero concept. Here is a fairly succint survey that we look to get citizen input from and see what we should be doing, and if they're interested in participating and trying to leverage that in the future. Geoff: How are you thinking of distributing this? Tim: Any means possible. Thinking of creating this as a survey monkey and just sending the link through our different channels. Anne: Will there be hard copies? When will the survey be done by? Tim: Timing is not critical; we probably won't just do this at one time. This can be open ended for us to change/adapt/promote (etc) at any time, especially as the calendar events get going. We can do it through Front Porch Forum, the neighborhood forums, perhaps at the farmers' market. Cara: You may want to be able to link people back to the main website after the survey so they can engage more deeply if they want. Andrew: I think one of the keys to NZM is that it's in an order. I think that section explaining what it is can be smoothed over. I can take a look this weekend and try to come up with something. Alison: A simple definition we've been using is that it's first deep efficiency, then supplanting what's left with renewables. Andrew: It's got to be local renewables, too, though. When I talk to people on the street, it's too vague for them. Tim: I don't want to really dig into the details at this point yet; I want to be able to send them to our website at the end where they can go learn more. This survey can be shared, if anyone wants to redline it with their comments. It'd be nice to have this available in the next few weeks. Let's get comments by June 24th, then once that's done we'll close that out and I'll look to get it created for the July 3rd parade, if we do that. 4. Reorganization of MEAC Discussion Tim: What I'd like to do is create 3 buckets for this committee, but I'll offer some thoughts first. What I want to do with the stakeholders is that I feel that there are key non-vendor specific stakeholders that participate with this committee but aren't members of the committee. I want to legitimate this further by figuring out that structure. Potential stakeholder list: EAN, GMP, EVT, Montpelier Alive, Public Works, the State's building & general services, Montpelier Business Association, and the school district. I want them to have a representative on the committee, to have someone that's assigned to this committee and have a seat at the table as voting members. The Council will need to approve these members. We'll need to sort through this and figure out how it will work from a governance perspective. Alison: I'm surprised we want them as voting members. Tim: The idea is that a representative from the stakeholders would be on a committee—not the whole organization itself, but an individual representing their organization. Better to get them to have skin in the game. Perhaps they need to be a resident of Montpelier? Jessie Baker will know. Maybe we'll have to change something at the Council level to let this happen. Geoff: At some point, you're going to have this become pretty unwieldy. Tim: I share your concern, and want to decouple the work that gets done overall from the work of this committee. I don't want this to become 35 people on a committee. Maybe we can do some research and come back with something on that. 3 buckets: a community engagement bucket, a project bucket, and a catch-all bucket of financing/grants/policy/technology/economic development. My thoughts are that these meetings might not necessarily be the whole committee, but can be all the interested partners to report back on existing projects, make decisions as needed, and leave most of the work for outside of these meetings. What I think that gets us is, 1, many meetings we have we talk about the diversity and expertise by the people at this table, and this gets us to use that more efficiently. 2, we have stakeholders at the table, and 3, it creates opportunities for volunteers to get involved and start doing some of this work. What are people's thoughts for how this might work? Andrew: I think we need a structure for how the work will get done outside this committee. Tim: We'll get some of that going with the document sharing, virtually, or just small meetings at the coffee shop among a few members whenever they can, we'll get a lot more done than meeting for one Tuesday a month as a whole. Barry: I think what it's going to take to really do that is a bit outside our scope right now. It'll take more than just a document library—maybe Sharepoint or some platform that can house documents, working groups, group discussions, etc. I don't know of a free version of such a thing, but that's just my first thought to that. Perhaps Google Docs can work for some part of that. Anne: My concern is that what these subcommittees are doing needs to be perfectly clear. Tim: My thought is that, for example, there's a person or persons that gets assigned to grants. Not necessarily always looking for new funds, but is there and willing to search when we need them. I imagine some of these things will ebb and flow depending on how things work; there's a certain flexibility to these buckets. Dan J: What's happened in other places is that the energy committee says they're about saving money, so that when they undertake projects that realize cost savings, a certain proportion of those savings gets attributed back to the committee as seed funding. This is a policy-level conversation that that respective bucket would need to take on. Tim: I'm thinking each of these buckets can be relatively small, maybe 4 people to mature some of these ideas somewhat. Look at the government bylaws and figure out the details about membership and try to come up with a proposal for our next meeting. Dan C: I'm concerned about giving non-residents, like GMP, voting rights on this committee? Their presence on the committee is incredibly important, but having them as a voting member is a little tricky. Mike: You can have an ex parte seat, where they would sit on the committee for their input, but not necessarily vote. It can be defined how you want it to. Dan C: Something to be worked out is the dual interests of someone that's trying to make money for GMP while simultaneously representing the best interests for the City. Tim: So we can discuss this, certainly with GMP, and others, let's come back and discuss this at the next meeting. Follow-up on this governance issue: Mike Miller, Dan Jones, Dan Costin, Paul Markowitz, Geoff Fitzgerald 5. What else should we be doing? Tim: Not a lot of other things we need to be doing. There's the calendar of events, upcoming community events, the governance issue. What else should we be doing? Barbara: I've been attending the Planning Commission meetings because the zoning update is happening. Tim: I'll add that to the list; there's also the Taylor Street project that we should be keeping involved in, and can add that to the next agenda. Dan C: Late last year Onion River Exchange asked us to help out with some home energy visits, there will be about three more that I will help out with over the summer. Anne: I'm interested, as to policy, some kind of energy labeling for the City of Montpelier if you're going to sell your house. Alison: That system is getting put in place for all of VT. I don't know the timeline for when it's going to happen. Let me find out more details about it, but it's moving along. There's a national movement to put some standards in place and VT is moving in that direction and EVT has a team working on that. I don't know what it means for the roll-out but they're working on the technical nature of that right now and should have it completed in the fall. Geoff: There's nothing yet on the seller disclosure form that says anything about it; that would be the appropriate place for it. Alison will find out more. Barbara: Because there's so much uncertainty about NZM and what we are, I'm thinking about handouts that we can put around town and explain some things about us. Meeting adjourned at 8:30.