so once we're done with the formal presentation will be more than happy to take questions comments concerns about the project we want to make sure that everybody walks away with a very clear understanding of the project so if anything if you see anything that isn't quite clear to you please flag that for us as well we really appreciate it so with that here is what we'd like you to take away from tonight's discussion and same if i could next slide belmont facing three major issues with its life with its electric delivery system first of all we are running short on capacity second of all we've got sun aging infrastructure issues and thirdly we've been having some power quality issues as well the problems are getting more acute with time we've been talking about them for several years now and we're at the point where we really need to do something about them and quickly the solution that we're proposing is to upgrade the delivery system from the l wife substation in cambridge with the new one hundred fifteen whole transition line and substation incidentally we are in belmont are one of the few remaining massachusetts municipal utilities that are still served at a low voltage in our case it's thirteen point eight k v most of the other municipals in massachusetts get their delivery via higher voltage one fifteen and similar voltages like  proposing for this project so this is in fact the same solution that we propose many of you will remember back in november of two thousand and nine we brought this project to town  meeting but since then we've got some important updates to the project to share with you and we are going to be bringing the project back to town meeting in january for two things one to get approval to buy a site for the substation and two to get authority to bond to pay for the project we're proposing the solution because it's the lowest cost and the longest term solution for belmont we're we're at a point where to do nothing is not a viable alternative and this is the best approach we want to be perfectly clear that you know this is one set of issues with the infrastructure that we've gotten place choosing to do this project and investing the money on in this project in no way compromises some of the other initiatives that we have going on at the white department including you know demand response efficiency and renewable options and if i could have the next now of course a lot of you remember that we did bring this to town meeting in two thousand and nine the project did not get the votes necessary to pass we needed two thirds and we were short by about twenty votes we did get a majority though now since november of two thousand and nine after that rejection by the town meeting we basically started at the drawing board again with this project  we found some unfortunate mistakes that were made in the original cost estimate for the project that from the initial proposal but i want to emphasize here that what we did not find we did not find that we that we put the wrong project forward the answer is still the same we still feel very strongly that the one fifteen k v is the way to go there were just some execution errors that happened that were unfortunate at the time so as a result the light board replaced the general manager and were pleased to have jim with us here today and then we also ended up hiring an independent consultant to do a fresh cost estimate for the project now the firm that we hired was a firm called mcdonald's they're very well known and reputable in the industry by taking on the assignment of doing this you know fresh estimate in design for us they knew that they would be precluded from getting any more work on the project so that so they truly had no axe to grind we did get their fully independent view on what the project should look like and what the costs really would be current owners engineers estimate so we did recently hire a new owners engineer to take us through the rest of the project that firm is called p l m and the gentleman in charge is alan reiss now both alan and p l m come with a really solid resume for doing this type of work they recently designed and built a similar one fifteen k v substation for the town of norwood and in fact jim palmer angelo frenzy and bob forrester just visited that site this past spring and they spoke with the general manager and norwood and and just got a really close up look at the design and so forth so in addition to rechecking all the numbers on both options we also entertain the possibility of selling the light department the numbers first of all did not favor a sale if you just said that hard numbers what what we've got in place today what we might get for selling like department the numbers didn't make sense if you looked at what this asset is really worth to town but then if you look beyond just the numbers and look at some of the more intangible things the things that are tougher to quantify it really starts to not make sense and one of those things is reliability now from my own perspective just a couple weeks ago with that big snowstorm there was definitely quite a distinction between how we were served in belmont and some other towns fair and i happened to work with a couple people who live in the town of harvard mass they were without electricity for six days so while these events don't happen all that frequently when they do happen it sure is nice to have a line crew that's dedicated to the town of belmont the other thing that we realized of course and entertaining the possibility of a sale is that our electric rates would likely go up it's actually really hard to imagine who but and star would be interested in buying belmont's like department and we know that their rates are currently higher than ours and then finally if we did sell the light department that does not solve all of our infrastructure issues we still need to make there somebody still has to make an investment in the system because of the problems that we're facing today and selling the light plant does not solve any of that so for those reasons we're not here tonight recommending a sa white department so now we've got our new project team we've got a new approach we've got some checks and balances in place that we didn't have before and jim can speak to all of that in a moment and as you can see the total and ok so what we're looking at here this is the capacity issue that i was speaking to a little bit earlier what we're showing here is a few years of history of  and then a few years of forecast as well so we've got twenty fifteen twenty five and thirty five in forecast and the red line that you see is the maximum capability of the current system to get power into belmont and that's about thirty four megawatts my takeaway from this slide is that we've been incredibly lucky we've we hit our peak capacity our maximum capacity in two thousand and six and we came awfully close to it several times this year as well now i want to just emphasize first of all i am talking about peaks so this would be the hottest day of the summer and the hot the highest observed usage in belmont but i'm also talking about that thirty four megawatts is the maximum now no operator of an electric power system likes to come anywhere near the maximum that the system can take and what this also assumes is that everything is operating perfectly in this situation if we hit thirty four megawatts with the current system like we've come dangerously close to in the past and something happens and we get a problem at a substation or a line goes down we're looking at rolling blackouts if we exceed the maximum capacity we're also looking at rolling blackouts so this is really not a great situation for any power system to be in and going forward as you can see our projection is that by peak load in belmont is going to continue to increase and we're not unique in that that throughout the country road just grows you know of course we do have our conservation and efficiency efforts but what ends up happening is that the new uses of electric power the h d t v s the i phones the computers that we all enjoy those all add up and they overwhelm any efforts to actually cut back so what happened with the one fifteen caveat action that would actually increase our maximum capability to import power into the system  from thirty four up to sixty megawatts so it's a very significant change now the next thing i did mention that we've got some aging infrastructure issues some of our  substation equipment dates back to the one nine hundred sixty s and we also have some very old cable in the system as well and on the power quality issues we've had some issues that have been coming from outside of belmont system so from cambridge from the l y thirteen point eight k v system when they have a we can have a problem and we've seen some voltage transients in our system as a result of things happening on their side and basically some of belmont's customers have had problems and damage with appliances and t v s and computers and the like now we've mitigated that to the degree that we can by changing out some step up transformers but this problem will never completely go away where off of that thirteen system from cambridge so in order to solve the problems that we face today needs to increase the transmission capacity address some of the old equipment issues get ourselves into a better power quality situation and we need to do it all quickly and efficiently as possible now in revisiting the potential to solutions to belmont's issues we look we did look at conservation and so demand side management for those not familiar with the acronym we looked at expanding the current d side oh and before i go there though the big difference in general speak to this as well between the one fifteen and the thirteen eight is the fact that with that higher voltage option we are eligible we're not guaranteed but we're to pursuing the programs that we that are possible for the town we've got several programs in place already and we're also kicking off a smart meter pilot project with smart meter is ultimately will be able to change the rate structure a bit so that we give people more of a price signal to conserve at peak times and and kind of flatten out the load help us to manage the peak a little bit better but just to be clear though we cannot conserve our way out of the current problem the most successful demand side management programs actually occur in places where you have some large industrial customers where you've just got a handful of those large power users that you can rely on to shed load whenever you need it when you've got residential customers it's just a lot more difficult we just have fewer options we're pursuing the options that we do have but it's not nearly as successful as  as it would be if we had a large customers to lean on but just to be clear though that pursuing the one fifteen j v project in no way forecloses any opportunity to keep pursuing demand side and we fully intend to do that just back to back on that capacity slide we are projecting growth the growth rate that we were showing on that graphic was about one percent it is very similar to what i also know england projects for the rest of the region to are aware that what ends up happening is that even when you do have pretty aggressive conservation and efficiency measures the new uses the development in town is like is liable to just overtake any savings that you're going to get so you will end up with growth in the system and with that i'll hand it over to jim palmer who's going to tell us a little bit more about some of the technical details and the project team itself for thank you  skilled people that i've worked with in the industry so with that being said we have what we've done differently this time as the a team that we put together  put to put together a team that augments our staff because this is a project that we build every day we contracted with a company called eight com and a comms role is to oversee the project schedule the costs as well as the document control and with these measures it is designed to help mitigate any any risks that we could have and  formed so that they could outsource some of that talent and the talent that they at the braintree brings to belmont is the technical experience from building a one fifteen station down in in belmont and we done a braintree as well as oil line construction as well as a power plant that they that they completed and the project management methodology that we're bringing in is the general manager down there and that was that was because it was very well managed and that's the same methodology and brought here and also we can lean on the technical support of the engineering staff down in braintree that had visited china and inspect all the transformers and the equipment for the new substation on the new generating plant they built down braintree but with that being said it wanted to just give you a little bit of background of where we are with that and  the current system that we haven't gone now these boxes represent substations the one fifteen in the thirty eight substation that you see up here in cambridge and the forty one  sixty substations other belmont stations ok and i think something happened to us like should be perfectly honest with you because this isn't the same drawing that i used last time but give you an idea what's going on here these these six lines that come out of the station feed the stations and dolma ok this is where our capacity problem is all these lines combined give us thirty four megawatts of power that's it can't get any more out of it and has about twenty other twenty other lines coming out of it and you may see it in your hand don't you have don't have may have these other ones coming out of the side of this and that's why you transit voltage problems coming from  if any of these lines any line not just the ones that feet don't have a problem and they have a failure which we happened to have last monday night when i wasn't around but the fault was so significant that to have a break is that i mean station opened under separately to put the trip now that causes transit voltages in the town of belmont that's where it's coming from we have no control over got hundreds of events and the majority of these disturbances are not on the six belmont lines they're on the other lines of come out of the station so with that being said these lines some of these lines not all of them but some of these lines are over forty years old much like that picture that was shown earlier of the lead paper into a table that was shown earlier on throughout the show  eight option which really isn't an option but we're showing it because we have a contract with then start right now we have what's called the transmission service agreement and they have to provide us with power to meet the load of the town of belmont right now our contract is for thirteen eight and so this is a design that would serve the town of belmont at that voltage the problem is you still have to put it right now you've got the six lines coming out of thirteen a station to a new substation in belmont because we can't we can't land those cables anywhere in town we have a for new station and so this would be with this is that these lines some of them are still over forty years old so it doesn't solve the infrastructure problem it it could solve the capacity problem and could solve the transit problem because in the town of belmont we'll be putting in thirteen eight to thirteen a transformer which is not a standard transformer that these companies manufacture so it's a special water  very unusual type of transformer but nonetheless it would solve the problem now a fault that happens on any other any of these other lines which still affect the lines coming into belmont and the one side of the transformer would still see the light it does today now with that being said this thirty eight option yes to me the cost for this is seventy one to seventy five million and the reason that we have a range is because we're still negotiating the site and we're still negotiating the route the rate impact is sixteen to eighteen dollars per month and this is based on  of five hundred kilowatt hours for a month and so that would be the impact the rate impact was the thirteen eight option and like you said once again the reason that we show this to you is because we have an existing contract but it's a very expensive option that does not solve all problems one fifteen option is bring in a new one fifteen lines directly to same this same location the substation new substation in belmont but it will be at one fifteen to thirty eight substation much like much like the one can set up in cambridge but we're off of all of these transients  get away from that these cables are all brand new so this solves all three of our problems this is the cost of this option is fifty to sixty million now once again it's a range it's based on the site and the route negotiations that were in currently in the rate impact on this one is eleven dollars to fourteen dollars per month and that is based on five hundred kilowatt hours per month which is the median median usage this slide i like this slide to give you an idea of a good side by side comparison which you can tell by looking at just looking at it this is much less complex looking number one but not only does it look like it's less complex it is the least expensive and it is the most reliable and this is a forty plus year solution so this is the sixty megawatt output with the expansion possibilities we have an additional expansion possibly to add another transponder which would bring us up while the on the sixty megawatts that that we design it for the lines that come out of this are the thirty eight lines these lines would would connect temporarily to these four k v substations but as you can see there are some of the lines that are already existing thirty nine lines in town so we would connect some of these through our regular capital plan that we have to feed them directly out of that new station it would be set up so that when the station is built so the one thing with the one fifteen option that needs to be noted and pallies touched on it and it's the fact that the one fifteen has the potential for reimbursement not reimbursement but regional cautionary so there is a regional benefit we've done load flow studies on connecting our line connecting these lines to the existing grid and it shows that there is a regional benefit for the boston area which which translates to being eligible for a pool transmission facility which we are connected to it we with this are in cambridge right now this is pool pool transmission facility which means they're all connected together and serves the region now we view we would be connecting to that so this would be a pull transmission facility what that means logon to technical on it is that it's eligible for our cost allocation and what cost allocation translates to is about thirty four  million of our of our project cost would be offset by some of these cost sharing benefits that translates to less than one dollar per month for the median customer five hundred kilowatt hours per month per month is very significant there's no guarantee that we call it fifty fifty but we have a very good team in place and we have a lot of experts on this project that feel that we would be eligible for it but we still try to be conservative will say it's fifty fifty so the worst case scenario for the one fifteen is going to be the eleven to  n to fourteen dollars per month arca could be as little as less than one dollar per month so like i said it's this is what we're dealing with here and i guess the other part that i really want to stress and get the point across heavy body is that we are at a critical stage we are not coming before the town with a project that can wait because it can't wait we we need to do this there is no solution right now that we have looked at more than any stars proposed that is less than fifty million so you know that there's no there's no least cost lucian that we have you know to get out of this problem that we have the problems immediately we are bumping up against our our maximum capacity we have got properties coming online that are going to affect affect our raw capacity already we've got the only real property be a compact which is which is coming up that's three megs of load up there we've got the mclean property which is this talk that they're going to restart that development and if they've built that mclean it was another three megs load up there and then you've got the question square development the potential development down of that waverly square and of all these developments materialize then the town of belmont number one is going to have a lot more tax revenue coming in but the like the palm is going to have a very very challenging time trying to serve that that low and you know first and foremost we care about the future of of belmont power supply and that's why we're here tonight to to work with you and then try to give everybody as much information and  could say i can't stress enough how critical this is to get this project done it failed in two thousand and nine and we're back again and hopeful that that people will get the information they need to make the right decision and leave it up committee up the hall here so we can join us tonight and i can't begin to talk about this process with anything like bob's persuasive virus charm but i'll try for me as a consultant persuasion often has a certain meaning for my client persuasion to them is a process of involving their customers and decisions that will affect them that's why we're here tonight we're all customers of the late to part and we need to make the right decision together we have a vote coming up in about two months and we need your help by this point i hope you'll agree that doing nothing is a poor choice if we want to continue to receive power on a hot summer night as jim said whether we go with the preferred solution of one hundred  fifteen kilovolt or we go with fixing up the current system of thirteen eight we're going to need a new substation and behind me is an architect's rendering of what the substation would look like now we've been searching for a place in belmont for this substation for over three years we considered the suitability of the site we considered the price we considered the terms on which we could obtain these these lot in all we considered over twenty sites in town and we narrowed that down to five there are some severe limitations on our choice here  first of all we need just shy of an acre for the site if you're interested i can show you some figures from allan rice our intern era as to why the second the cost of the cable is thirteen million dollars a mile so we got to be close to you know what we can put those up at the old incinerator site except for another twenty six million dollars you can't cross the tracks because the n would require giving us an easement to cross the tracks and they would require us to leave that easement vacate the easement within ninety days if they needed it crossing the tract so is on the south side of the tracks so we're pretty much limited to the south side of town now the options we studied over another fifteen out there but i would get into them over the years we've had a handshake deals on three of these sites now mary sandler dropped out early it's too small it wasn't appropriate for a number of reasons there was a proposal after the town meeting in two thousand and nine to use one of the old tennis courts next to the high school but we found after a lot of work that that just wouldn't work it's too small and the school committee needs the land to meet regulatory standards now the site of the old white building on concord avenue would be free to list because it belongs to the town but it's too far from milwaukee and it's too small so for the latest two years we've been dealing with two sites your coat on hit your street right here and twenty flinders didn't do that if we weren't able to negotiate with the m b t if it didn't pan out we'd have to hook up on fresh pond road that's problem number one if you can imagine we'd have to build up concord ave tear that up again town of cambridge where the city of cambridge would not be too happy about that then we have the other alternative would be to try to go through somehow to go through the  industrial park there you can imagine what we'd run into when trying to get easements there but let's let's talk about the two sites for a minute let's start with it and your street appraisals one from last year one from this year both of them came in at about five point six million dollars now over a year ago we had a handshake deal with the owner for six point three million plus one hundred thousand dollars for every quarter that he kept the property off the market while we were waiting for approval and permitting so that he could close the deal now in our negotiations with the owner to date he's sticking to that amount and he also wants another eight hundred fifty thousand to tear down the building he'll leave us with a site that's at industrial standards with an asphalt cover on it now there are a number of problems site the site has been under the supervision of the department of environmental protection we've not been able to come to closure yet with the order on the due diligence that we would require on the environmental issues on this site and also who pays for any problems once the site is transferred to its further there'd be a delay in building since the owner has a thriving business there and he would take at least eighteen m move out of his sight in addition hit your street is about a mile from alewife it's really close to a mile and that's the threshold for seeking approval with the energy facilit siting board so we might have to have their approval and that would cause a lengthy process it would cost us about a million dollars it's father from alewife not by much but a thirteen million dollars a mile every foot counts and so the cable would cost more we needed to build something that was more elaborate to fit in with the neighborhood than what i showed you on the orders rendering before so for those reasons as of right now pure code is coming together for our committee is  and again it's on the other side it's on the tracks but it's on the other side of brighton street and here is now the substation which fit into that site that's the site we presented to the town meeting in two thousand  now one might be concerned about presenting the same site to the same people and expecting different results but things have changed since two thousand and nine first the owner is willing to sell us the property and we've been dealing upfront with the tenth grade escapes and with the owner we're close to an agreement with greater skate we have a recent appraisal for two million two hundred ninety thousand dollars and the owner is willing to sell us the property for what we offered him to two years ago two million six and he said it would be free of tenant and he'd like a friendly taking by the town not one that was contested like we would have done two years ago now we don't want to be accused once again of being unfair to a belmont business that serves belmont customers with belmont employees so we've been meeting with the and the to the tenant would prefer not to leave belt that's understandable under the law if the site is taken reimburse them for those improvements and other costs that they would need to incur as they move now we'll need to share that extra cost with the owner now we sincerely hope the tenant will say yes we want to treat them fairly but at the same time we could scotti and stewards of the public money film so right now flanders road looks like the likely choice of the committee it has a number of advantages and it's free from some of the factors that constrain other sites this is a little choice that i put together that shows that a plus means that that's a positive zero mean to it's neutral and negative is u straight the cost of the site is a potential constraint in that we'd have to ask a town meeting to give us a lot more money a couple of million dollars more at least for that particular site also concerned about potential in the environmental side if we can't reach an agreement on the due diligence on the environmental so that's a comparison of the sites the cost of flanders road is significantly less it's closer to l wifely cable cost would be last it's al away we wouldn't need to build the same structure we'd have to build in a residential neighborhood where your street is so in our for our handshake agreement and that's what we negotiate we have a comparison here of the cost of the two sites the first line is the purchase for demolition we certainly have some demolition cost flanders road but it wouldn't be as great for building cost would be more in st as i said because of the nature of the structure that we have put up there so that would be an increase so you can see the potential difference here is five point nine million dollars that's quite significant to us as a as a committee could we sell or use the excess oil and through the industrial port and we need to go before the energy facilities siting board to that would all cost money and there may be some other costs that pop up between now and the town meeting so that's why i would said that the range between fifty and sixty million dollars for the one fifteen or turn it will have a fixed amount that we can put in the wire for the town maybe we'll have these negotiations completed by then and pretty sure so t onight patios told you about the issues and the options gemma spoken to bit about the solution the one fifteen and the alternative thirteen eight and i've spoken to bit about so thank you john for the opportunity to present tonight and we welcome your questions comments on how we can better explain this situation and post the choices to the town meeting an ok keep going down ok so that third one that one that one there there is one that shows the sale so so explain me why are we talking about the sale at on the slide why are we talking about left there was a feeling in the town that we should explore whether providing electricity is a core function of the town and whether we should be continuing to do it and also whether the like department with whatever assistance was capable of managing a big project like that and so there were a number of people in town who said to us want to we just sell but like so what the question is so i guess my what i was wondering is if we sold the light department then to and start presumably presumably there was a buyer then they would assume the cost of doing the one and not have to have to pay fifty million for one fifteen and that's certainly a question that people posed at the time would say why should we spend fifty million dollars seventy five million on something like this when we can sell it and have somebody else spend fifty or seventy five a couple of answers for you one is and we have our expert here  v in case we need some explanation of this but when you and store encourage a dollar and some that they decide to spend fifty million dollars and do this it comes back to us in the charge that they charge to us and it comes back at a factor of two point six so we spend fifty million dollars and charge our customers fifty million dollars they'd spend fifty million dollars to charge the customers one hundred thirty nine because they have a cost of capital and they have taxes so that was one reason or another reason and the analysis i went through with roy eckstein who's who's on the mark committee so two of us worked for months trying to iron his out the present value of the pile of payments that come from the electric department plus the retained earnings the profits put makes plus the difference in rate which there's there's a difference or greater i reach lower than their rate the total value of that would be somewhere around thirty million dollars and that would be six seven times the book value of the asset and the typical sale is one or two times book so we did not think that the town would realize the real value sale and so we presented that to develop that presented the word committee have not heard a lot lately particularly in light of what patti mentioned about the service the other component of dealing with an investor told ya on that point it's not exactly fair to talk about service disruptions out in western mass a more comparable thing would  e to to look at a town like watertown that is and star or lexington which did not do so well as i understand it well water ten did perfectly fine and was an at and star so i don't think it's quite fair to make well he has and jim collects routinely statistics on the frequency of service interruption and the duration of service interruption and the difference between our experience looking for a gas station but i'm going to run out so what you're saying is for those those intervening years it was lower than the redline that's correct ok yes we believe that the two thousand and eleven one that's  there is showing that we came close we don't exceed it but when you run a system like this we run it's called in and minus one one large piece of equipment out transformer line and miles one for this town is twenty eight here we're running well above the and mine is one that's a problem so that's running basically with your yellow light on where we're ready to run out of gas we've already committed ourselves to say you know what i want to start right now bike walking because ok well it's i think if this if one is called before town meeting i think it would be good to to show a slide the shows all the years because then people are going to be a little curious about why yours  the very first mailing that we sent out has a different graph than this we changed this because we got a lot of complaints to be honest with you because it was two it was very different choices one point in time which was we wanted most current which was this year and it was very difficult to read and people had a hard time with it and so we want to do is say listen what do we try to what are we trying to get the point across to the point we're trying to get across to you is we're here we're pumping up against the line that we should be bumping up against and this is not good industry practice to be doing this and what we're trying to do is you know and stock can not they cannot solve this problem without putting a trench from cambridge to bell is a transmission problem not a belmont problem is the transmission problems arose from point a which is cambridge point b is belmont they got to put a trench an infrastructure in the ground in order to get any more power  and the cost of that is no less than fifty million we've done all the numbers we have all the data are willing to share all that with you but we've done all the analysis on this and you know so it's just you know like i said it's one of those things where we're trying to communicate the best we can hopefully we do communicate but when you put all that data up there really sam we do have a slide number twenty four in the supplementary deck and supplement transformer at the top of our street blew up which like a roman candle everybody was out there in their pajamas it was ninety degrees and eleven o'clock at night and it was it was quite a community experience and it wasn't a whole lot of fun for the  thirteen eight solution would do this is what the one fifteen would do in terms of capacity dealing with that issue but i agree with you we could we could certainly present this this way future  thank you yes or a recent event was the announcement of zephyr photo going out of business that  provides possibly a land site very close to the ones you're looking at have you looked at it and what's the ramifications we did not play to mention that we did take a look at that when we when we heard about it and we found that that site was too small for the for the substation it's a smaller site than twenty flinders road which is which is around the corner you're just talking the worry engineer that the format of the meeting was not conducive to what we just did with this line this would have been impossible in that town meeting and cell i believe that we were we were not able to share the facts that we have in that meeting and there was an emotional appeal which was very understandable one from the tech so i think that's why i think it is great escapes the dog training yes they are the dog chose the dog training place over the the transmission capacity is what you're saying that that's that's right that's the that's what happened secondly i think the most powerful argument for doing this  and i'm not an engineer but i think you're talking about transmission you're not talking about generation right yes and if i look at the the graphs that you provided basically what you're doing is substituting the two one fifteen kill the lines transmission lines for about six or seven thirteen point five kill about one inch right i mean that's basically what it is because connecting those to the new substations to the existing something that no understand my point is you have to do it anyway you're going to you're going to have to build to according to this chart i don't know if you actually truett but you're going to you're going to have to build new thirteen and a half lines in the reason this adds more capacity for the future is that if you need more power you just build more thirteen and a half coal boat launch right i mean that's basically what you're doing right on the belmont side yeah exactly yeah so really the only question is it has to do with the first question that was asked here and that is you know how does the net present value of this work out and there's no charge here for that and i think you would improve your case you know if you if you just came out and said look if we sell this thing you know we're going to get three times book value or something which is fifteen million bucks and we can put that in the city coffers i'm generally opposed to doing that because people governments will spend it you know so you're just kind of it's kind of wasteful from that standpoint i don't know whether or not crude but what i'm saying is that you know let's say it's fifteen million bucks then you don't have to spend fifty so you're up sixty five million and then you're saying that they're going to charge people you know two point six times the fifty million which would be a hundred and thirty or something i'm sorry six so you're basically looking at having sixty five but paying you know one thirty yes and so you'd be down sixty five million if you don't do the one fifteen right now it seems to me that if the dog problem was was the issue that you could carve out some money for them they must be willing to take some amount of money to go someplace else but i think i think that's your most powerful argument because from a technical standpoint it's just transmission that's all you're talking about and it's clear that the two one fifteen's are the best long term solution so the only issue is the present valuation that's the way i see it well that's that's a very good observation because you could actually argue that the that the town board would be irresponsible not you know not to pick the proposing like the city of harrisburg west virginia just went under so what you're proposing is that if this bond is issued it will be paid for by the users lock stock and barrel meaning interest rates yes right so the other point i would make if you're trying to sell this to reasonable people is that interest rates are at historic love so in two thousand and nine you couldn't issue these bonds my guess is you're going to issue them at less than three percent you know and three percent money if i were you i'd bang it out forty years of i can do it and you and that will definitely improve your net present value comparison that's certainly a good not only what we have to spend but it's the net present value i mean i know people you could go to who would underwrite it and take a proposal to the meeting you know and i mean you know i mean i'm sure you can find people  mean it's not a hard thing to do you know to get it together a great search for a town like that and just say look if we finance it here's our forty year bond underwritten and here's the deal you know i'm sure you and so we're we're along that path a little bit if i may just one more point and then i'm going to sit down what is the risk of having the electricity come in in this it one line or two what is the risk of having the electricity the power that's generated delivered is it one line or two lines it's too long so how do you how do you you know what if somebody  don't know what the tech what if somebody cuts the two lines you know they can't cut the six but what if they cut the it's actually a double loop that's coming into town so what is the is going to come in from cambridge right between lines coming from cambridge pass through and go off t sitting in that town meeting and there was the emotional appeal i think there was also the presentation included a section on how maybe this thing could cost a whole lot less perhaps we could get really really lucky and then the discussion rat hole on whether we would get lucky or not and is this credible luck or not and do we trust your guys estimates or not and it went on and on and on and on and on and i think it helped sink the proposal and stead of focusing on no matter what this is a good idea as a and so they say it because it created this distrust because there was a place where it wasn't a slam dunk but that wasn't important how do you feel we dealt with that the issue is the same tonight how do you feel to deal with that tonight i thought you did pretty well because you said fifty to sixty fifty is lucky sixty is unlucky  by any i mean you might want to say we will pursue chances to save a lot more money but we were not betting on that it doesn't have to be a good you don't have to do that for it to be a good deal  tell meaning before it was it was you go speak right into the put puts but i think the door was just it was very confusing at the last time the presentation with and also the thing that you did better this time i think also has made it really clear that a lot of the infrastructure needs to be replaced which wasn't made really clear last time so so it's good i didn't catch what you said about future capacity i didn't hear what he said what the projected  did you did you mentioned like a percentage per year or what i didn't catch what that was towards the future capacity that you're expected but the growth in the in the load is one percent an average of one percent  and i experience yes from one nine hundred ninety nine to two thousand and eleven was one point seven percent at a time that belmont itself to don't have a lot of construction projects going on that was just the kind of growth that so if you're if you're projecting one percent going forward and we have all these additional developments that are expected right now how do you how do i am not quite back that has not necessarily been factor sixty and match and minus one so even if one of those one fifteen winds was out we'd still have sixty whereas now if one goes out we're e programs that you might be rolling out and when to help to help us with that should we do that now or truly finish up with the presentation and then go on with we'll have another fifteen minutes maybe you could go back to the overhead map of the twenty finders road do you know that the whether there's a building is going to be put up for sale someone mentioned earlier in advance that they were selling there was an article in the newspaper recently that zephyr photo is going out of yes yes it's rate of somebody else is already buying it you know with the prices is it well is the price less than two point six or seven that you it is because it's a smaller building irrational about like right ok so that i guess was my point if you look right  the right i guess the question is is there a is there a way to acquire additional land adjacent to zaf either by taking it from a lot of the either those adjacent to buildings or we don't see enough at the bottom of the map to tell what's what's below there but if you could in others if you could buy that building for last and cobble together enough land to do what you need to do i understand we're very close to the end and you don't you don't want to go through again you've already been in discussions no no i'm not talking about getting all three buildings i'm saying ok well the one thing that's changed since two thousand and nine is a number of the metrics of the project have changed so in two thousand and nine this was described as a ten thousand square foot building with the understanding you would need some space around that ten thousand now i'm hearing you know forty four thousand it's kind of a difference that the amount per miles is also were changed since two thousand and nine but anyway i guess if there's any chance of putting together a parcel that includes not buying the other two buildings which are for sale but perhaps carving off part of the parking lot i don't know there's i don't know exactly where the lot lines are for zaf and and yeah i see why not but do we do it do we actually do actually know that photo there's a triangle there of where the we can see a row of cars parked behind that building and then at the bottom of the map off of the map i don't know whether zephyr owns it up to the well exactly so you have to see whether they could whether you could be ok if it's time to save a million dollars and we could buy it without putting two without moving two businesses i don't see why that isn't something that the committee shouldn't consider the line would have to come in and go down there and it doesn't look like it's very far bit of thirteen million dollars a mile every four count and once we accumulated all three of the and got similar apply to this would we have the same right i mean i guess the committee spent this site selection committee spent considerable time looking at sites that you're now telling us are the building itself for this so there's some of the nation is probably not going to be a whole lot different from ten thousand square feet but there's a lot of stuff around and there's a need for space around the building in order to would have to a communication between the power company and and each can each user is this is the design of that type of system incorporated into this project or is that something that the m l d is going to have to consider adding later on where you can read the meters that without having a person get out and walk up to it and eyeball it yes we have right now but not two but not not two way communication is we have two way communication through a mesh network that has collectors and they'll be collectors in the field in the pilot program yes well of collectors out on our system that's different transmission you're talking most of my critics are smart meters smart grid that right there where my understanding of it is that and maybe there are multiple ways to accomplish this but one way is to be able to  send radio frequency signals over the power lines and so you can both send information to houses for example about what the status of the l d s with prices are or how close to meter on the side of your home right and if you called and said i have half hour and also my lights road i could ping the meter on the side of your home and i could get instant data that would tell me whether or not we had full voltage at the meter you could ping it from where from our office from from prince tree ok and is that it how many houses there is that rolled out to what's that how many houses right now we think we only have ten homes ten houses so i guess then i could reframe my question is it more economical and in the same type of capabilities to scale that system that it's currently piloted at at this at the scale of ten homes versus considering an alternative system that might be incorporated into the  substation we could certainly look at i'm not familiar with the technology that you're talking about so i would have to i would have to look into that the only systems up seen the mesh networks that's what everybody's installing i have seen the ones you're talking about years ago when i worked downtown boston that we had collectors on the sidewalk faults but i haven't seen that technology or of the voice of time maybe maybe it's out there i'm just not familiar with ok let's talk about the how we might be able to help you five minutes i'm intimately familiar with that with that agreement how it works and and the facilities for cables as it was back then sort of the town and did a lot are so many factors particularly now that have nothing to do with the past when you know the kind of forecasting that i've always done the kind of metric forecasting is basically saying that the future is going to be essentially the same as the ication technologies that will help reduce carbon within the boundaries the ability to support electric vehicles plug in hybrid cars  past and that forecast doesn't capture that and i don't know any forecast that that's ever going to capture that you know one thing i can say is that i've worked with now the last fo conservation programs i think he actually means it and and and and i know he has an awful lot of institutional support now from from the advisory board and  very very soon and which is going to allow an awful lot of community scale renewable energy to take place there was a mention there about using their reverse nine one one system for load shedding and and i'm sure that you all received those calls this last summer and i'm sure that we all did the same thing when turned off everything in the house and when those calls came in  that you know i have to say it's probably a work in progress that requires probably maybe even a little more policy support from the town because right now that ha cost associated with it and i think that absent the sort of policy support for spending the money that's that's going to be hard but the important thing is that with the with the municipal like department you have that ability to make those decisions within the within the municipality and so you have you on the distribution network that's capable of brings your zero carbon electricity to your homes and and you know that's and important thing to remember when people start  selling the system is that you'll never have that ability once you lose control of the distribution network there are there are a couple of other items that were in their staff incentives communicating to the town that i think you know frankly those are work in progress but you know there's a lot of potential i think there's a lot of we'll hear that and that can really make that happen so i think in terms of where b l t is now you know down down the road towards meeting those those goals but again importantly you have you basically have the control because you have the so any any questions or pacific questions that i or probably jim is going to be able to answer better than i can about specific plans i know well jim mentioned also the rate incentives the  metering aspects of what they have in their rolling out you know of a program to get those meters in place and not far behind that will be the rate structures that will allow people to take advantage of the don't know whose best is his but i know another one of the suggestions was to institute some sort of a block rating system so that people who go over certain amount would actually be charged at a higher rate right there  anything happening with that that would certainly help encourage people to use your answer that will block rates we we do have we do charge more people use we do roll it out would it just to be just to be clear we only have ten meters installed this time that's what we want two thousand but we're only install ten at this time because we have to make sure that we can communicate and everything is working and make sure we get the  work the bugs out of the system before we start putting them in to the to the rest of the homes but with that being said we have to collect that data and and and we're trying to get folks that are interested in load curfew on all the major electricity but then at that point like like maybe it said we'll be looking at the rate structure you know starting to look at what others do know trying to make some predictions the customers to ensure that they know how to use it properly and sort of make the most yeah well i mean to be perfectly honest with you at this time there is the the customer does not have access to the data that's being produce collected at this time and the reason for that is is basically the because we are the town town wide we're doing an id security suite if you will and that these applications to make sure that everyone's privacy protected so there's been a little bit more of a strain put on the vendors that are supplying us with the software so we haven't rolled out that that portion of it yet we don't have a there were people from all over new england that already had instituted smart meter programs and from somewhere from a municipal like carmen's most of them were from investor owned utilities but one of the issues that they had all run into problems with was the fact that there was an education barrier in the fact that people just you know just i guess it's similar to things like people not being able to program their d c r s that they just couldn't get past that as far as being able to use the technology to to its to its best advantage so that was one of the that was one of the things everybody on the panel just repeatedly said that you have to do a lot of education and be able to basically peoples hands and work with them to really get them to be able to understand how to use the technology so just to offer that one one just last quick comment i remember from with the previous town meeting when there were a few people there and just you know this might be something to consider when you present a town meeting there were a number of people there that had got up and said that they would like to see you know specific measures that the that that the town that the b m l d was going to roll out with timelines you know five to seven actual conservation energy efficiency types of programs that they were going to be rolling out so that might be something that could help kind of sweeten the deal if you actually have an actual plan with timelines right you definitely get hit the sore spot there because that's that's what we're trying to that's why we're trying to hire a full time person to fill that role like department because we do recognize that even though we are putting out a lot of a lot you are doing a lot  analysis and the measures and the impacts of all the conservation we are weak i'll say that we are weak and that's something that we are working toward in improving on and that's why we had posted their position and had a few candidates and then we felt at that time that we didn't really have the right candidate so we look for looking at that job and maybe economics maybe you know for the information the data needs to be analyzed and you to be able to show the results do you do you have any timeframe for when you hope to have that person on board because i've experienced it to make sure that we get it right and we want to make sure we do it right because you know like like me you mentioned earlier you know this is something that i i do take is probably realistic ok thanks  jennifer page and have several questions first of all thank you for agreeing to do this with us and for letting us extend the time a bit so that we can get into some of the environmental concerns that we have  first question is a fairly straightforward one it has to do with the construction of this building and i want to know whether there are specific things that you're doing above and beyond showing up a new building that would reflect your interest and environmental conservation and having a building that was another example of being a really good tight building and it would have one would probably two bathrooms two to maybe one or two laboratories but out of the year i mean it's not anything but it's a building that people will be working in  right only they would be dressed for outdoors when they're in there so wouldn't be it wouldn't be a manned building would be occupied space so there won't be somebody there twenty four hours a day no no no any and your conditioning necessary so it's really kind of a low use building to begin with because there's not much you can do it i mean for the building envelope there's no there's no heating system is really no way a condition system  take this work to be done this is scheduled to to be commissioned by two thousand and fifty by one two thousand and fifteen two thousand and fifteen so am i right that up until then we will still be at the mercy of of the not rising above the electric levels that you have been that's that's correct can you tell what's coming you have been doing some work in the cable was shown on talk it out that was from one nine hundred twenty nine that eighty year old cable that cable what we're doing is the only thing that we can do to try to keep the lights on until the station is built is to is to move float around inside this is what it is that tells us inside about territory so we're replacing cables on our distribution system so that we can switch the the peak that peak usage yes that we must be sure not to go over because either will crash part of our system yes that or if we buy a like tricity a great rates to get us you know above that then affects our rates for next year so they peak the peak rate is a really critical thing and i gather that when where when we're on to the new system that will not be a problem that's correct he on your part about this and about how important it is you know not to go over it partly because it raises our rates almost immediately and it is seems to me to be a sort of a no brainer so much pressure ok so otherwise it will explode that's what happens with the cables fail and but as we were at very close to it now yes it just seems to me as though we need to continue one calls to try to get people to listen to us and say you know this is a serious problem please you know turn your conditioner up a little bit and the reason that two thousand and eleven we didn't go over was because a lot of people have second homes and on and on fridays i watched a load drop off this this happened to be the end of the week so this is the only reason why we go over this because a lot of people left town on vacation in july i think you know if you if you you know if this had been midweek we would have been big trouble and you know so but it is a you're absolutely right i i i can't stress that i try to stress as much as i can joe when when when i'm up here to let people know that this is we are ready for the state you know the only other option is you have to bring generators in there would be the other option to try to offset you know what's happening normally would spend and go through the actually that those at those peak times it's hard to get the generators you know have a contract it's very difficult to get them to come in but it's pretty extreme and here's my third question first of all i get a number of people my neighborhood have mentioned to me how much they appreciate the really good work that the amount he has done both irene with irene and with the snowstorm that throughout throughout belmont and lots of people are saying you know is it a good thing that we have in a simple way and by and large i concur but i would have to say that when i look at the possibility is that might be available to the town if we were part of the green communities act there's a lot of wishful thinking there and i'm wondering whether you would support  town making a commitment to apply for the green communities which would bring us a lot of of help and resources and if not is that do you think that b m l d would be able to provide comparable help and resources if we don't try to become a green a so called member of the green community i'm glad you asked that question we we as an advisory board spent some time at a number of meetings discussing we we had a presentation from the people who run the program the he ad of that agency is a good friend of mine i think as i recall our concern with that was that money went into a pool that we would have to sand and we would have  no assurance that we would get a proportionate in our pool back in terms of projects that that would be funded and so as as you suggest we thought we're we think we can do better than this internally and so that was that was our aim i think we all recognized that there were some benefits to the green canoes from patty if you have anything  do you recall the discussions of it yeah that was it yes so so i'm glad you reminded i really ever played reminded us of that because we we need to keep that in front of us as we go forward and i really think that that that would be a standard that we might guess would like to us to aspire to if we can't join them then we ought to be able to find a way to get the same kinds of resources and energy and commitment yet in this town i think that's that would be a worthy goal f no back on the supplemental value of our that's on our books now the town's going rate not three percentage would said we use four and a half in particular calculation very important here is what we did a buyer recognize as a cost to capital and and storage we did cost a capital published on their website it's eight point five two percent lot more than ours so inflation is three percent and we said the valuation period would be twenty five years i thank the gentleman who commented before about combining this w dash repay a pilot payment of six hundred fifty thousand dollars or fifty percent of our net income whichever is more so that's an annual payment the town gets a pay to end store and the value of that after some calculation i think sam was involved in this is three hundred eighty two thousand dollars on an annual basis and we'd lose that we'd also for the last five years we've had a profit in in excess of that six hundred fifty thousand that we've received vested in the business particularly in the in the system in town as jim was describing and that profit is another four hundred some thousand estimate but that's a factor you sesar told us he had no basis for an estimate but we made an estimate nevertheless so that gave us a million to here and then we we took that some of it inflated and then discounted it back to the present value and came up with twenty six million dollars our rates were at the time we did this analysis and i believe still somewhat lower not a whole lot lower but somewhat lower than in stores rates and that would add another seven million dollars so that would be thirty four million dollars or seven point nine times our book value or three thousand dollars for electric meter and we felt that given what the market was buying electric companies we're very unlikely to get that now one factor that we have to consider here is that between our pension obligation to our loyal employees and our other post employment benefits that fourteen million dollars that we would have to take out of these proceeds are mediately and funnel those let's say let's say we do it anyway we we sell it sell the like the department to and star then the town is denied that six hundred fifty thousand right because that money's going to end star so that's i would mess up the revenue stream for the town and the electric rates for the street lights and the town buildings like this would go up by three hundred the improvements would come as the gentleman suggested then we've got something that will eventually over time not on a discounted basis but eventually over time that they would bill  department is in a horrible situation of supplying power to a town providing revenue for the town and at the same time the town meeting and the board of selectmen have explicitly said that the light department should reduce encourage the reduction of on energy consumption which would have an adverse effect on on the the town revenue it's and and that's right in that there is sort of current conflict and i think our feeling jim you know the general manager is under chapter one sixty four that was jim has awful lot of power as the general manager here but i would think that that our view is that we could we can accommodate created that that the electric company retains enough to maintain its business because as you can see a lot of our infrastructure is old and we have been ploughed that revenue right that's the problem so it's yours at the at the end of the day you're always going to want to preserve that revenue stream right you're not you're never going to want to do anough energy conservation that you have to do any energy conservation that's going to hurt that revenue stream and and there's got to be and so i'm i'm proposing a suggestion what about changing the charter of the of the light department or adding something to the charter that explicitly says they've got to meet meet specific targets of of energy reduction so as to offset this implicit incentive to maintain the revenue stream rates if you decide as a community that that conservation that deep conservation is is the right thing to do you also need to make that decision in the context of knowing what it's going what impact it's going to have on the rates that you pay and the understanding is always there that the people who participate in conservation benefit because their cost goes down even if the rate goes up it's the people who don't participate who don't so one solution would be what about putting before the next town meeting at three options one option would be increase everyone's by a dollar a month and this is this is the kind of of benefit that the town would would realize option number to increase the the monthly rate by five dollars and  yeah it's it's just that yes there is an economic aspect to this whole debate yours also so there's economic and financial benefits and there are also social benefits and how can we get those social benefits more just like to echo a couple of things that have already been mentioned here but you know look at the climate action plan and what we have for it with a belmont like a pirate this is one of the few entities in town where we can really measure the carbon footprint from year to year where we're at and when you look at the difficulties of trying to analyze other sectors of the community this is a real gift and i think we really need to take advantage of that and the sooner we can really kind of get a road map to how we're going to get to this eighty percent you know just from electricity side the reduction and start to see three five year milestones and what's going to take to get there and start to publicize our success or failure is along that route you know i think it's just going to be a tremendous w and one comment i mentioned earlier on in the discussion was about demand side management where there's only so much that can be done there but i was recently  presentation on given by several economists on sustainable cities of future and one slide that really made quite an impact on me was they looked at the state of california this is going like from my one nine hundred fifty to present states increased in the red states were really increasing at a much more rapid rate and so i think there's a lot of opportunity here you know i wouldn't underestimate man management if done well power generation i know that photovoltaic is still not competitive with fossil fuels however during the two thousand and eight to two thousand and ten period there were both generous federal and state subsidies that together made it economically attractive and in fact a number of smaller towns cities and towns in massachusetts put in systems that you know that they didn't pay very much for because the subsidies covered so much of it i think it's not inconceivable that we could see it you know depending on who gets elected and so forth and other such train line in fact  maybe jim could comment patti i'm sure you have some views on this and our council will itself great hear from belmont serves a lot of the roof of the high school complex which is large you have the stance of parking surrounding that moving a little bit further down the tracks you have a large parking lot buildings that are lined up along pleasant street and then you get the star market parking lot on the roof of the star market i mean some would have to pull all all of that public so eventually it is going to be competitive and it might be and as i've mentioned even even though it's still not economically competitive now when you can get a big enough subsidy it  buildings and that's that's how we've developed the policy that we we have a place down for the mission distribute generation because we disapproves we're not eligible for the federal tax credits and yes rex so he had to enter into a purchasing power agreement and that's something that we felt threatened the  retail choice exemption that we have and so we did we still feel strongly that it does but we kept it out and and allowed entry and this time  it is five megawatts of her five acres from a go on back generally in the boston area those lots cannot be found the watts would have to be tied up for twenty five years to make it economic people don't want to part with big blocks like that if they exist there are saving them for commercial development or for preservation and what i could suggest is that as some of our long term contracts expire and there's more freedom in our supply plan we would logically then go with some other municipal utilities into some sort of consortium which is allowed under state law and look for the amount of land that's needed somewhere in the central or western part of the state and then just import the power and then you could get a five megawatt facility there's actually a limitation at six megawatts in order to qualify under state law for the huge so called solar rex state subsidies but if you have two parcels side by side you could even put in twelve megawatts and maybe three utilities would go together and buy them but that's something you have course i was not talking about open land i was talking entirely about parking lots and large buildings which which maybe would add up to ten ten acres something like that if you also included the railroad  maximal need and obviously a bunch larger fraction of its kind of average need so it's how like a small number on a you know kind of power system scale but on  that would actually be to get still the economics go down dramatically as you get these smaller spaces if you get units of one hundred fifty k w two hundred years and try to aggregate them the amount of infrastructure that you have to put him to put together a big project is so significant that the price in some cases doubles right now the wholesale price for solar electricity from these marginal rays that are being cited in different towns is is very very attractive and the economics go away when you get down to the smaller sizes even some of the biggest rooftops in town are considered from solar point of view small