there's a lot going on in our community and certainly at the holland board of public works very excited to be able to share similar information about energy about this facility and how it fits into our long range energy plan for our community as well as what other things the b p w is doing to help meet the communities future needs a little bit about what's going on you know we'll talk about the context of the community plan what are the its goals over the next forty years what are the certain what are some of the things talked about peter bogart and his work with the house home energy retrofit program and the work that the community has done to put a financing mechanism in place so that homeowners can energy retrofits right on their utility bills in the nice easy way of receiving financing and making improvements in their home how how energy part fits into the plan as well how it is also are the b p w is also provider of broadband here water reclamation or waste water and water services and so we're there are things going on in all of those areas that i'd like to share a little bit of information about as well tonight for those you that don't know the board of public works is actually a division or a department within the city how we're actually owned by the city again managing those four utilities i mention providing service to the city how in the four surrounding areas got about twenty eight thousand electric customers and an interesting fact that people don't know a lot is that eighty two percent of that power goes to commercial and industrial customers actually there's a very vibrant strong economic base here in holland and certainly their power provide their power reliability and cost is a huge factor in keeping business here and promoting their growth and so that's an important factor to know we w as michelle mention the city how and about about five years ago now or about a five more than five years ago started a community argy plan to identify over the next forty years how could we transform holland into even being a more energy efficient city how could we look at the way that we produce and use energy in our community to move the needle to be attractive to business to be competitive in our energy supply but yet protective of the environment and so in doing so they stablish some goals in mind including moving the needle on our carbon intensity so carbon means your carbon dioxide if you look at all the uses in our committee from transportation power consumption gas consumption we were sitting at about twenty four metric tons per capita your world and we look at communities like copenhagen and others that have a nine metric ton per capita number and how do we move from a trajectory which was moving up higher and turn that and actually move down towards that our goal is to reach that ten metric tonnes per capita or lower by twenty fifty i'm very pleased to say with this facility in the work that's been done to date i think we're well on our way to being probably more than half the way there at this point just with the changes that we've made so far but it takes more than how we produce energy it's how we use it in our community as well and so we had seven different task forces out there investigating strategies on how we can move the needle forward on our energy use and on our energy production some of those task forces we're looking at home energy retrofits which now we have an operational program in place we have some incentives that are in that are available peter can talk to you tonight about what those incentives are some in the community have already taken advantage of that many homes have put in upgrades and i think our average investment performance somewhere around fourteen to fifteen thousand dollars that's gone in for energy improvements  and those homes are seeing thirty plus percent change in their energy usage and they're getting a much more comfortable home as a result of that we've helped facilitate that through our on bill financing program  we've also worked with our commercial institutional buildings in our community to try to promote energy efficiency there we have a bill program so if you're one of the people that have done a home energy retrofit you get a new label for your building that tells you what your score has improved we have some great success stories michelle had a picture of one that or the article that was in the sentinel the other day where people have moved their score from say a four on an energy rating a with a maximum of ten they move that all the way up to eight we have some that have moved up to ten in our community so great things happening in our housing stock in some of our institutional buildings as well but we're also looking at our supply and a big part of that  we actually let me back up first the other thing that enables all of this to happen is that the city hall and also put together a fun it's called how an energy fund it's a trust essentially or amount of money that has been put aside to do these incentives for home retrofits to help be a loaning institution to allow the homeowners to do the upgrades with their homes the b p w is partnered with how an energy fund by actually pledging up to three million dollars of seed capital to be part of that that loan fund that goes into your home improvements and is repaid  and then as i mentioned the how manager retrofit program has the incentives i think up to ten percent now for the improvements that you make in your home under the home energy retrofit program so how energy fund is a key catalyst to helping that pat happen within the power generation side of things though we knew that we had to look at what we needed next for our community how it has been a power generation provider for sense eight hundred ninety three if you go back to eight hundred ninety three there was  gas lamps in the downtown area that were insufficiently lighting our public areas and the community got together and said we need to electrify holland and we had a choice to make we could either outsource that and let somebody else do that or we could take control of our own destiny develop our own power supply utility and actually move forward in that regard there was a big discussion about that in eight hundred ninety three and there were some challenges because our charter didn't originally have the right language in it to enable us to do it but what we did is we took control of our own destiny we changed our charter and we established the how on board of public works in one thousand nine hundred three and from the from that time on we've been a power generation provider for our community so we've had the power generation assets in our community to help drive our growth as a community to help provide affordable energy for our community over the over the years we started really with a plant located much in this area right now if you look back at the around the area fifth than college actually in fifth and columbia it was a big center for the b p w s assets we had a power plant you can still see the water intake structure along the window on the waterfront at that of demand happened in holland over the years we added on to those generators and eventually in one nine hundred sixty eight we built our last unit there so from one nine hundred sixty eight to about twenty ten those units service very well but they were reaching end of life there were environmental regulations that were that those units were facing where we'd have to put a lot of investment in those and frankly when we looked at our goals for the community in terms of its carbon intensity and some of the other environmental goals you know there was a question about whether that plant would best meet you know our future needs for the community so what we did is we actually step back and we engage the community through a unique process it's called the sustainable return on investment analysis and what it does is many power plants will go through a financial analysis what is a cost to build this plant what's going to cost to operate it and they try to find a least cost alternative for their customers over the life of that plant what we did in holland was a little bit different from that because we considered a lot of factors that aren't normally considered for example the james the young plant sits on the the waterway and we got coal boats in every year and because of the amount of usage that the harbor the corps of engineers would fund the dredging activity there what if that one away because we stop burning coal would that be a community cost that would be face and how would that be paid for and does that need to go into the entire equation the b t w since one nine hundred eighty eight has been providing waste heat from its power generation for the snow melt system in the downtown area one of the options we looked at is not doing  anything letting that plant retire or not building anything new where we would rely upon buying all of our power from the grid what we did that how with the snow melt get provided in this at a cost that has to go into the equation so these are other factors you know the and there were many more that we looked at we looked at the emissions from the different power generation resources and we found data out there that was talking about hospitalization visits due to particulate matter emissions or acid rain impacts own impacts from action oxide emissions all of these things were factors that work would not normally be looked at in terms of power supply but through a community process we brought in education we brought in business we brought in government we brought in special interest to the table to frame a problem to actually come up with all the different buckets of costs and benefits that we want to look at and it's called sustainable return on investment and through that process we came up with i think a very good product when you look at the things from an environmental economic social impact you're able to see the picture in its totality and in the end we ended up with a lot of squiggly lines a century but what it says is that nothing is for sure about the future we don't know what the cost of natural gas versus coal is going to be but we have projections on that we didn't know it for absolute what the different  intangible costs of the different emissions were but there was peer reviewed literature that suggested there was a range of that so we put all of that in the equation and we got a probabilistic output from that the next the next slide has a little video that shows how that process went and i'd like to show that you know holland has always been a community that works hard and for more than one hundred years the holland board of public works has supplied the power to keep our town growing as our community grows such as our need for power by twenty sixteen the increased demand for power for our homes and businesses will exceed our base load generating capacity over the past several years we have considered a number of ways to meet our communities need for more base load power it's a complex question blast year we hired h d r a global independent consulting firm to help us conduct an exhaustive sustainable return on investment study it looked at affordability and reliability but also at the social economic environmental and health impacts of a variety of options the h p p w belongs to the community our process included people from all across our city to make sure their voices were heard their input helped keep us on track for integrating  power generation with holland's community energy plan we looked at a lot of options everything from state of the art solid fuel generation during knoebels to purchasing primarily from the grid one of the most promising solutions comes from combined cycle natural gas technologies natural gas is plentiful affordable and cleaner than other alternatives with local generation the h p p w can expand the services that make downtown great things like the snow melt system that keep streets clear during winter and district heating that could heat hundreds of homes and businesses claiming affordable power is essential to the success of holland's innovative community energy plan and we are well on our way there's work left to be done that we're excited about the direction we're headed as we move forward you can count on the holland board of public works to keep  it was certainly an interesting process to go through and certainly we you know it and i've mentioned it to others that it's sort of like sausage making a little bit you really don't know and it didn't look great you know at times you know through the process of coming out the back and when you bring the community together when you have the input from a number of different areas you do see you know a clear path and we did in this case to it was very clear that coming out of the back end of this that the environmental performance see the affordability of combined cycle natural gas technology coupled with an enhanced renewable portfolio was the best option to help how and move in the direction of its in meeting its community energy plan goals and so there are three main recommendations that came out of that study in the first is to improve our renewable portfolio and we did that by adding thirty two megawatts of wind generation through purchases of two wind  indiana and the other one in michigan that transmit across the system to us and then we also supplement of that with the landfill gas generation that we already had under contract with all of that we have now moved collins renewable percentage of its portfolio so the power supply if you're a b p w customer fifteen percent of your power supply is coming from renewable generation we also have a green pricing program that allows you to elect up one hundred percent if you'd like your built in your power entirely come from renewables and we actually retire renewable credits from these assets you know on your behalf when we do that in terms of the james young plan we found that it was not going to be economical to continue to invest in the james young plant given the age of it given the size of the capital investment and given what the relative performance would be an environmental standpoint compared to new baseload generation we decided to let the assets retire and so bought a year and a half ago in april we burn coal for the last time it james the young and we have now sold off the coal that was remaining on the dock there was a little bit now we started cleaning up the site so one of so you might be wondering what's happening with the young now we are in the process of going through a full decommissioning at this point we started with the last year of keeping them on standby on natural gas because we had natural gas plumbed into the facility we could actually run the boilers on gas not very economically and when this plant was done now that wasn't needed anymore but now we started the actual decommissioning you probably have noticed if you go by the incline that brought the coal into the plant is gone and we took that structure down the whole yard has been essentially pulled up we've been cleaning up the site removing all the ash from the site again we saw loft the coal that was there there was some old coal that was sitting in the ground that we actually pulled up as well and now we are selling that not a lot of money for it but we are instead of disposing of it we're getting some value and some use out of that and then the third recommendation was about building our new base load resource again it was decided that owning and operating power generation served us well over the years and it would do so again by building the natural gas combined cycle technology some of you i see you have some brochures there are in the back that explain combined cycle technology what makes it wonderful is that it's using the energy over and over again the fis the cycle is really what makes that special it starts with two jet engines on the front end of the same thing that hang under the wing an aircraft but instead of creating thrust you're making the rotational energy to drive a generator we actually have some on the southeast side of town across from hayworth next to the old lifesavers building that's used to make to meet our summertime peak demand but for a base load resource that's not as efficient as we really need to be so we now capture the waste heat from that exhaust and we make steam to drive a steam turbine and for no new fuel being burned we're getting fifty percent more outboard electricity by capturing that waste heat and if that wasn't  what we're able to do is instead of in the wintertime sending the leftover heat from the steam turbine through a water supply to the cooling tower to exhaust the heat we take that water at ninety five degrees send it and we're up closer to seven hundred thousand we're just under seven hundred thousand square feet of heated area the amount of heat that we have available from this plant could snow melt up to two and a half million square feet of area or what we're also doing with the vailable heat is when that goes out at ninety five degrees it actually comes back at seventy five so instead of losing that he what we do is we're she take that in this building right here in the administrative area we're driving a heat pump to heat this building at the west end of town at the civic center that's being renovated they're going to use the snow melt water there for the heat source the primary heat source at that location so again taking that same energy source and the natural gas using it over and over and over again is really driving the efficiency of the cycle beyond that natural gas has virtually no software in it and so you've we've eliminated software dioxide emissions there's no heavy metals or particulate in i t so we've eliminated that and the nitrogen oxide which is a precursor to ozone formation we've actually cut that dramatically versus the rest of the fleet in terms of the power supply out there on the grid because the ultra efficient units and the additional scrubbing equipment we have here we've almost eliminated night you're not sides emissions as well carbon we've cut more than in half because carbon in natural gas is about half of what it is coal and then when you look at the cycle efficiency here our carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour is gone down dramatically so with this addition coupled with renewables that's why i can honestly say we are well on our way to meeting the the clean energy goals of the community and the clean energy or the community energy plan goals so it's very exciting to have that but it took a community process as well that community input was key to to helping us really visualize the best outcome for the community once we had decided what we were going to do we had decided where we were going to do this and we looked at about eight different sites around the community we landed on this twenty six acre parcel here and it was complex it looks great now it looks very clean and open and all that there were sixty one individual parcels of land in here that had to be acquired it was mixed use and here we had a large industry the old atmospheric processing building and if you look even further and how in history there were two furnace companies home furnace and how in furnace the location the home furnace was were at its very processing ultimately was built  there were some other small businesses in this area as well as residential full owner occupied and not owner occupied or rental properties we had to do a very what we believe was a very sensitive responsible process to more so we're able to acquire those sixty one parcels help people relocate i think the good news coming out of that too is for a lot of them it was at a point were you know the housing values were just starting to come up so for for those that were able to get out locate into a new one hopefully that's created some equity for them in that situation in looking at the site and putting that all together another key piece was the inner core under intergovernmental cooperation between the city how and how in township fair banks ave is the dividing line between how in township in the city how and and we actually worked with them to bring the entire area under the city hounds jurisdiction so that we didn't have multiple zoning areas so is another key point in that process so what worked well with a community effort before we thought we should engage again a community effort to decide how we were going to develop this twenty six acre area what were the site plans what was the architectural layout of this building and so we pulled together a blue ribbon panel made up of a lot of people that were very versed in planning we pulled in our neighbors from whole college the outdoor discovery center in freedom village and others to help with the process of vision you know what this could be and we didn't start with pictures we started with words we started with three main goals that emerge first and foremost we need to develop a world class resource for our community for decades to come but because it's on our eastern gateway we have an opportunity to clean up our gateway into enhance that visual that you come in on the east end of our downtown and then the third thing is you're going to see tonight in a lot of ways we've decided to create a destination as a community asset we believe we have a role to play in reaching out to our community letting them know about their utility provider helping to educate them on energy related issues and allowing them to connect and understand you know where they're where their power and where the utility services are coming from and so two ways that we're doing that outside the fence area is a pathway that circum navigate the entire facility you see that represented there by the path of this will work and these times the so that's this thing right here goes all the way around it's about two thirds of a mile and we're really excited because our neighbor to the north is the outdoor discovery center the outdoor discovery center has used that as a catalyst to do a fund raising effort to take those trails and move them out to the riverfront as well as creating a pedestrian tunnel underneath the sea a sex rail our project partners are h d r engineers have designed the bridge or under the tunnel for free and our project partners bart mallow have agreed to do some of the pathways out there so if you know the history of holland's interurban that brought people from grand rapids to the lake shore that you know urban actually ran right through this northern area of the property words down low and it went under the c s x rail follow the the entrance road into windmill island and into the downtown area so we're sort of opening up what was a new chord or a new way of of an old way of bringing people from between communities and making it part of the inner connected mactel a green way is really exciting to sort of revitalize an old way of connecting and so we're we're working with outdoor discovery center and we want all of you to be aware that as well that that's a big big effort going on and so we're very glad that they're that they're doing that for now you can still use the pathway it is open now so we encourage all of you to do that inside of the facility we decided to try to connect with students with community groups you know with education at all levels to try to develop a visitor center and tonight you'll have the ability to see that it's right up stairs and so along with that  talk about that a little bit but in terms of the actual site cleanup first we had to we had to acquire properties and we had to do a lot of cleanup effort i'm very pleased to also say that in this process of developing the plan because of the committee and gauge that we had because of the sustainable practices that we engaged in we did come across an opportunity to apply for a certification for this plant many buildings have a lead certification you've heard of that in buildings that do the extraordinary things to make sure that they prove out you all the energy efficiency things we were actually well on our way to doing a lot of these things naturally but coming across this rating system and i give a big shout out christ sitting up in the balcony right now but chris is fundamentally the person who made sure that all of the data was collected all the information came together that allowed us to apply for it what's called  invasion rating the institute for sustainable infrastructure has a rating system for infrastructure projects that consider key things in along the way that demonstrate sustainability goals and stay in the building measures and in doing so we made sure that we tried to follow that framework and to it's very similar to what the city how it is engaged in terms of their sustainability framework now as well so you see the kind of the before condition here but things that we did in terms of community engagement you might not normally think about well maybe we should have the swat teams come in and drill maybe we should have a fire department light one of the roofs on fire and figure out how to fight one of those fires we did all of that we had all these structures here  was a great opportunity to bring in a number of different groups to do that did a lot of recycling and reuse efforts christian doctrine we went through and tagged trees within here that we wanted to keep we relocated some that had to be relocated because of the fact they would be in the way of the construction and that we could move back later on chris grabbed a lot of the perennials that were around and made sure that we had those identified and we could keep those going where there were crushed concrete or aggregate you know we were able to reuse a lot of that we recycled a lot of tires as well that were fortunately disposed of in this area was sort of her got an area in some some aspects that hill that's on the north side of our property is sort of good and bad because once you pitch it across the the hill it's it's out of sight out of mind but it's not really it's there and we did a lot of work to to restore that we worked with holland youth connections a group of at risk youth to help them understand the value of a job and what it meant to actually you know get a paycheck and actually you know do solid work to do that they helped us with the trail systems they helped us with the area on the north side of the property by planting myrtle another berm protecting species out there and so that was a great experience to be able to do that as well i'm going to play this next slide sort of highlights all of the restoration efforts that we did over most of a century a twenty six acre district in holland michigan existed largely out of mind bordering on a scenic wetland area had for decades stood in contrast to the communities expanding sense of environmental responsibility in two thousand and thirteen the holland board of public works concluded a two year energy planning process with the decision to build a clean burning natural gas plant on the eastern edge of the city in the same district that had long been environmentally neglected and the site of the holland energy park is a part of our community that for a long time was sort of unknown to many of us in many ways it was a part of our community that maybe have had been neglected for some time one of the exciting things about what we're doing there now is it not only will be a focal point of our community but it's going to be a part in a place that we'll all be able to look at enjoy and really take pride in the holland energy park was envisioned as a showcase for sustainable power generation clean burning efficient and affordable the facility would allow the b p w to retire aging coal burning generators that had long power the city not only is it going to be a world class power resource for the community but it's going to be a destination for people to be able to calm and view the facility in a number of different angles we're going to connect to a lot of different natural trails and systems that are around the park give people views of wetlands get people  point to really tie into hopefully an eventual back to a green way system first there was work to be done some of the contamination we found was threatening to the environment because the soil contamination could threaten groundwater resources by you know it had concrete rubble mislead us soils tires and things of that nature that we found a lot more extensive than we anticipated as the cleanup and demolition began the team started removing waste from the site it included five hundred ninety tons of metal over twelve thousand tons of concrete eleven tonnes of this best is containing materials in over three hundred fifty discarded tires we believe the conservation of resources should be a part of every project so as we got into this and started doing the demolition work we have cleaned that up and picked it up and disposed of what needed to be used both of properly if it was metal review cycle that if they were tires we recycle all the tires that we pulled out of here went to a recycling facility on concrete those foundations we ended up with twenty five thousand cubic yards of crushed concrete all of the concrete recovered at the site will be reused in preparing the site for the new park also the b p w repurposed any remove trees by donating them to local nonprofits or by mulching them for the landscape however not all plant life at the location was fit for reuse the japanese knotweed has been described as one of the world's worst invasive species deeply rooted in amazingly resilient the not weed has displaced native plants all across the site in presented an ongoing threat to the bordering wetlands we actually have two kinds of night we have japanese knotweed and we have giant know their insidious  roots that are fifteen feet deep and center rhizomes are ten rolls out over sixty feet who have engaged the outdoor discovery seana for the next three years to work with us to do both a chemical treatment plan as well as just physically removing and eliminating the not remove was an important step in restoring the site and adjacent wetlands in addition the project called for the reestablishment of viable populations of threatened endangered species of concern from plants insects animals and birds project biologists studied how to protect existing species and restore native habitat that would allow reintroduce species to thrive for a long time i had seen the plans for what was going to be happening in that location  i think even i was surprised that once the site was cleared and made ready for the new construction to take place really how open and beautiful location and i'm only now really beginning to understand what we are going to see for the next generation as we enter into downtown this site for the holland energy part is moving from neglected to natural with a strong vision the support and engage men of the community in an absolute commitment to best use and sustainability of public works took on a job that will benefit the community for decades to come yeah quite an effort and i'm very very glad to say and i would do we apply for that envision rating we're the first power plant to receive it we receive the highest rating possible which is platinum rating so it's very gratifying to be able to the to say that there are a couple of interesting stories actually from that clean up that weren't represented on the video there that you know one was just  the residents that were moving be able to dispose of things we wrote a lot of dumpsters out a lot of interesting things showed up from time to time very strange one morning member coming out to the area and there was a boat  which wouldn't be that interesting except that it wasn't on a trailer it was just a boat there and we don't know how it got there how they got it off the trailer because it was a very large boat and it just was there so  the other was that there was a peninsula as we call it affectionately pablo's peninsula problem martinez lived here in the in the neighborhood his company got most of the sidewalk replacement jobs in the city hall and over the last thirty years one of the reasons he got them all the sidewalk jobs is because he had a very inexpensive place to dispose of the concrete that he pulled up from the sidewalks as we found a very large peninsula about thirty yards wide about  forty or fifty yards deep and about twenty yards a twenty foot deep of crushed concrete behind his house so all of that again was cleaned up holed up and you know recycled as we want to long so once we had  cleaned as you saw that the picture that was part of the groundbreaking back in april of twenty fifteen we got going in the construction when it went along you know we thought about engaging the community in a lot lots of ways you see the observation platform there that was out on seventh street during the construction so you may have had an opportunity to come and check things out put a little placard there so you could see what was going on where people love to keep track of the boats that were bringing the large equipment in we had we had stuff come in from overseas that  one one trip came up through the panama canal the the port of new orleans up the mississippi transferred onto lake barge came to the verb point dock and then there were large pieces of equipment that came through town and it was a parade like atmosphere where we actually had people walking along side of it made the movers very nervous we had people lawn chairs sitting out there watching it as it came came through so very exciting to see the community connect in a lot of ways  construction activity was was very involved took us you know really two years of construction which really doesn't seem like a lot when you think about what we have here now and then the start of activities really over the last six months that have put us to where we are today and so this is some drone shot that you see the facility you see the storm water areas that have been put in place the park area where the parking lot outside that you can take advantage of the the grounds and walk that trail yes or oh thank you yeah absolutely that working for the t v too or does it just absorb that on oh awesome thank you so much  able to enjoy it you see it on the top photo as well so this visitor center you're going to get to see and i spent a lot of time out except that again we gauge the community we brought together education out of the area i'm a school district what we want to really impart is education on energy up there and we had some thoughts about one of the big visitor outcomes that we want people to come away with in the theme really throughout their is decisions good decisions that the community has made on energy you know over its life and you know everything from how those decisions happen within your home the decisions within the community in the decisions on the technology that we have here and so there's you'll see it broken up in that way we hope you enjoyed as designed to be more of  a self guided situation but certainly our staff will be up there to answer any questions that you have and help you with any of the exhibits that you want as we talked about we've started that with groups of larger than fifteen like yourselves last night i'm pleased to say our board did approve a position program coordinator essentially for that area to develop more of an open hours type of situation to bring in volunteer docents to assist and to reach out to the education community and to engage on lesson plan development and really kind of intentionally working to bring school groups in from all over the area to experience and to learn about learn about energy so that was exciting process again stakeholder process that we  did in the long run we plan on addressing the trail because there's a lot to learn out there as well in terms of sustainable practices on storm water management and there'll be other interactive exhibits and interpretive signage that will go out there over the long run want to touch on just a couple are things briefly before we set you free that and that is that the b p w is also moving forward on broadband in a lot of different ways in our downtown area we are growing our fiber business to try to reach out to residen and small businesses in our immediate shopping district area eight street one street seventh street and so it's a very exciting project we actually launched a pilot in three buildings last year bringing gigabit service saw a thousand mega second the kind of speed that you need for you know done downloading very high definition content if you want to download videos very fairly fast the more and more our houses and our businesses are getting the internet of things and we're in or interacting with the web in lots of different ways you know we're trying to build a world class futureproof infrastructure our plan is to try to do open network so the number different providers can bring content services across that we also will provide internet service ourselves if you cannot find a supplier that brings something that you like but we are offering transport service on wholesale so others can bring in we don't want to stop competition we actually want to promote competition and  there was an article i know in the paper the other day talking about how cities should be doing this we actually think in terms of creating roads and that's what we think we're doing here is we're creating the infrastructure we do that really well we're not we might not be the best to provide the content we don't want to do that over the long run but we do want to provide a differential experience here in our community in terms of that infrastructure and gigabit services fiberoptic is really what's going to make that happen and so the downtown project is underway right now we have a number of businesses and some residents signed up in that area and this will be the next step in what we call our pilot and growing into this area have a short video that shows experience that collective idea one of our businesses in the pie all area was able o the idea as a small twenty five person software development company we do custom software for fortune one hundred companies small startups both locally and in silicon valley and all over the world we don't have servers in our office our servers are in cloud whether that's somewhere on the west coast or somewhere overseas or a client's office we have to be connecting to those from here so that we can do it is efficiency we don't really think about the times we're waiting for websites to load for downloads to can we really saturate this thing and put it through its paces and we couldn't do it we couldn't fill it up and we couldn't saturate that connection just didn't happen and we do a lot of video communication like clients whether they're in california or in bahrain or anywhere we need to be able to see them see reactions and so much better to have a face to face conversation that makes us look better and we can do things faster you're having problems you're apologizing for in the convention holland both to attract businesses but really to help the ones that are already here we are so much more efficient today than where we were and we haven't had to worry about any sort of outages or slowdowns a lot of times we're connected over a secure connection to the west coast you know can we make that go a lot faster do software updates download a lot faster the answer's yes everything everything yes it's so much better so much faster and completely reliable over the last year year and a half to address that we're able to do it within the same footprint at about thirty five percent additional treatment capacity out of that plant that plant is a regional cooperation not a city home but there's actually five there townships  that's in the wastewater into that plants what's a great example of regional cooperation again you see some of the numbers that we had with the increased percentage here in the power usage also because of the process more efficient and so we've actually been able to lower our power usage for treatment down twenty six percent some of the other quitman again some the bigger users in our area hudsonville requests food heinz for example are just a few of those food processing organizations in our community in the last thing i'm going to touch on is that in water we're also working care closely with other neighboring communities the city of wyoming has a water plant on the north side of town we have our water plant on the north or side of town city wyoming that added significant amount of treatment capacity to their plant but both utilities would like to have more redundancy and so the thirty inch line was actually constructed between the two systems along the hundred sixtieth avenue which allow either plant to go down for short periods of time and  other facility can help serve it in the long run because of the additional treatment capacity that's been put in city wyoming's plant we can use this connection line to supplement you know our water production out of our facility so that we don't have to put major capital investment you know into and in new intake structure in a new plant for hounslow is another great great example of that community collaboration