question? I Yeah, we don't have an icebreaker. Do you have an icebreaker question? I can't say, yeah. What's your favorite winner? I
city. Hi, Leslie Jackson, my favorite winter activity is going outside.
And are you a green zone member? I am
a green zone member. I'm also on the board with Hi, managing,
are managing gardeners,
and my favorite thing
to be in the winter is Read through seed catalogs and think of spring winters i
over here, my favorite
winter thing is Looking at
my rainwater garden, making sure that planning for
Midwest building organization. I time windows,
so I like to sit there in the
wintertime. Watch this later under the
noted, and so I'm here
to kind
of explore whatever you're up to my
favorite watching children sled and
everyone. My name is David. I am now working for the city as a state south favorite
winter activity is eating food,
good to be with you all. My name is Luke Colin camp. I am with the City of Minneapolis as well. So my new colleague, colleagues, I'll be presenting a little bit later on, franchise agreements, partnership with the utilities and my favorite activities is quite a tie between also watching kids let up three young kids. I'm
hoping for snow this weekend. So everyone,
I'm Megan, I'm pronouns, and I'm on sustainability team, supporting the green zone, and my favorite winter activity is going on watch outside and also staying inside. Hi
everyone, my name is Kia. He can piss I'm from Northside Green Zone Task Force. I will say my favorite winter activity is ice fishing, but most of the time I just say the catching, no fish. So kind of ice fishing? So,
good evening, everyone. My name is Tashawna Williams. I'm a documenter with Hillsborough United communities. And I would say my favorite winter activity is, I would say, to see in the holiday lights, like doing the drives and doing the tours and stuff with the holiday night.
Hi. I'm with the green zones. And my favorite winter activity is probably sitting inside somewhere with drinking hot chocolate or something, looking outside, but not outside.
Alice fairly seen there for the City of Minneapolis with sustainability manager supporting green zones and other initiatives, and I like making
soups and stews and braises
braces, like low heat with
lots of juice and like a piece of meat, it's like a good it's kind of like a stew, but like, slower, longer, I guess I don't know the difference, technically,
but Michael and Michael change project, Sweetie Pie game zone, one of the originals, the old Jesus, the young people like to call it. And working on this envisioning, mark your calendar, read the word envisioning a food focused future. So we're going to be putting together a panel of food champions from North Minneapolis as we create a food corridor on Broadway that I coined the North Star urban farm and food corridor. So my wintertime favorite is planning events. I'm currently working on a piece of legislation, League of Women Voters. It's going to be with through the Department of deed. Indeed, there's five career pathways. It manufacturing, education, health care and trade, buried alive, thrown in trunk like a mega kittens. Is horticulture, agriculture. So we want to pull it out of deed and give its own autograph, its own branding, its own revenue stream, so that we can elevate urban farmers and farmers across the state to their rightful place instead of second class citizens.
I'm Kabir he and pronouns, I'm with the city's program and well, I have a lot of indoor plans, but this year, I'm planning to conquer Hunter by doing at least one new thing a weekend. Last weekend was cooking, slow roasting.
So doing new recipes. That sounds
really good. I'm Michelle Harris, and I'm on the green zone. Plus favorite activity is the lake pot stand. I love to be inside. Currently with my dogs, I Okay, so I am Caleb Gabriel.
I'm the environmental instructor from Northside Minneapolis Health Department. I Health Department. My favorite winter activity is snowboarding. My two boys taught me how to do it when I was 40 years old. I don't do any fancy trips. I just go side to side down.
Get some good reasons. Okay?
At this time, over to the presentations, and the first presentation is going to be for the utility franchise.
Thank you, thanks again for having us again. My name is Luke, and I just wanted to come to Yes,
we now have quorum. So I wanted to see if there was a motion to approve the minutes on the agenda. Second,
thanks. Oh, sorry. Georgiana, what was it? Yeah, January 15,
yeah, I think there was a motion and it was approved. There all those in favor. Okay, minutes are approved agenda motion to approve the agenda for today.
Second all those in favor approved.
Okay, back to you. All right.
So yeah, I wanted to come by here at the invitation of Jada and others to share a little bit information on what is my finance topic. May find it to be a boring topic, but it is very important to the city, and that's the price. First of
a little bit of background,
then talk a little bit about negotiating
agreement with utilities, and then give you the next legislative process. And you should have a few hand ups in front of you. That first one, this one that
has our LMC in the top left corner. Left.
This is an information from the Minnesota city, and I won't go through it too in depth, but it's maybe a good takeaway if you're interested in really learning more about this subject. This talks about what franchise agreements are, and I'll give you kind of a 30,000 foot view of what that what those things are. So in Minnesota, the utilities are granted certain territories to serve, and you're granted that by basically the state. And in the case of where we are, Minneapolis, those utilities are cell energy is given electricity rights, certain energy is given gas rights, and those are both regulated anomalies. The idea being that they're regulated then at the public utility. So we at the City of Minneapolis, we don't get to choose who our energy providers are. We do have some choices, though, in how we work with utilities, and that's where the franchise agreements. So franchise agreements and agreements that stipulate how we as the city will work with Excel or center point in using the right of way. So the right of way mean items like the land under the streets, Boulevard, sidewalks, the areas where the utilities basically have most of their infrastructure. I should also have alleys, because a lot of power lines that go down alleys, and that's also an area right away. So the financial agreement just kind of sets rules on how we will coordinate with each other in those right of ways. And in these agreements tend to be kind of sleepy affairs. For many decades, we would enter the 20 year agreement with Excel and a 20 year agreement with centerpoint. And then in 2013 or so, there was a number of organizations and individuals in the city that wanted to look at new options for energy sources. And like I mentioned, the city, we see grants Excel and center point Indianapolis, with the exception that legally, we would have the right to create municipal utilities. I
remember that I was there for that. Yeah, and they were black, pretty much. I was on SEAC, and SEAC was blocking the people at the time who are working on that political vote, because they wanted people to be able to vote in the city on whether or not a municipalization, you know, like, I think Boulder, Colorado did it, and I know they went through success about it, but it was an opportunity. At least some people are bringing it up politically. Now. They never thought they were going to win, from what they told me, but yeah, they definitely, and I advocated for them to come speak to SEAC, but SEAC people blocked it.
So there's a long history of going back
10 years. We should bring it back, though,
of these being agreements that are seen as a way to leverage the city as climate and energy goals. So back then, as you mentioned, 13 ultimately, the city does not vote to proceed with municipalization, but it did get some concessions out of utilities, kind of the threat of municipalization.
How did their equity hiring go? Because I remember that was something I added on my first day I joined FIAC, and they were really kind of frustrated by that. But then Did anything come of that the equity hiring of the utilities? Yeah, like, did they end up hiring in our communities like we asked them to?
I'm not sure
if he could. Also, if you could get that information for us to see if anything changed from that. Sure.
Thanks. Thank you,
but thank you, Roxanne. I mean, because has anybody? Was anybody else around for that? That's why I'm speaking up for the group.
So what we got, we ended up signing new French agreements with utilities, but the two things that then changed under the threat of municipalization is that those agreements that have 20 year terms are 10 year terms now. So that was a big victory. Also those there was a side agreement that made utilities referred to basically as our memorandums of understanding, and that's what created this cleanup partnership that's a standing body of elected as well as staff that try to find ways we can collaborate together to meet the city's clinicals. So in my day to day work, that's primarily what I work on, is trying to find ways we can collaborate with utilities via that connection. So without those franchise agreements are expired. There hasn't been a municipalization effort. Now, I think partly, you know, a number of things have changed, but there's a lot of focus on Excel Energy. Back then, our electricity system now is a lot cleaner, so there's a little bit less focus on electricity because of it being cleaner now, now we're actually focused a little bit more on gas emissions, also other issues, such as hiring Minneapolis residents that are still very important in the partnership. But what we have then done, led by the city attorney's office over the last year or so, is there have been negotiations to re up these franchise freedoms. And what that means is creating a new 10 year term or thereabouts, and seeing, in addition to what we were able to achieve 10 years ago, what more can we achieve now? And that's what I wanted to kind of go with, go over with you all today, is what the city went into those negotiations, trying to keep and then what was ultimately agreed, that that was before Council, before I continue. Are there any other questions on what branches agreements? Are a little bit of that history, or should I dive right into
that? Be very truthful, just what is it that you hope for the city, both through this agreement, basically giving them the monopoly, what would you see is what we received out of that effort? And
so that's I like to go over here. Then with this next document, just a clarification that we're not the ones that get the grant Excel center point of analysis that is granted to them by the state. The only other option we have would be if we decide to own a utility, and in that case, no utility, we'd actually have to buy and buy their assets. And in the case of progress, I mentioned the case of Boulder, Colorado, which is also served by solar energy. They spent eight years, if not more, trying to go down that pathway. And Boulder is a pretty wealthy community. They have a lot of money they can throw around at this effort. Ultimately, after, you know, a lot of legal battles in about eight years, they decided to essentially settle with Excel Energy. They came to new branches, agreements with Excel, and what they got out of that was basically kind of what we got 10 years ago, these new partnerships and these agreements to collaborate. So I will say, when I go through this document, that with what leverage we add, which is, it's really hard to move the utility out of our city with what leverage we had. I think we accomplished a good amount it is. And I just want to be clear, it is not perfect, and this is something that will we will continue to struggle again, and we'll try to make more improvements as well through the years, but we think that this is an important step forward,
and what is the entity for partnership, called fixing energy partnership,
basically legislation, and then the Public Utilities Commission has also given authority, by state legislation to sometimes kind of do, like Grant new territory, or I have a
question, and I was just looking over some of these ordinances and what their responsibilities are. I'm wondering, is there a passage or words about upgrading grid, because everybody's doing on electrification, plus we needed this to operate in our homes and businesses and so that increase and we, I was just wondering, because it has not been updated in the United States. Has not been updated since 1970 having really cloud information about Minnesota's grid and how that works, and who's I know, who's responsible. But is that included into this?
Yeah, good question. Leslie, there's some element to hear about grid reliability. Specifically, you know, when we're talking about moving to an electric future, we want to make sure that electricity continues to be on as much as possible, that's few power outages, and that it is not kind of precariously operating. And that's one of the elements that we want to focus on, and this particularly because in Minneapolis, we have some of the oldest grid in Minnesota. We were the first built out area, so we are very concerned that that the age of our grid could ultimately lead to the negative reliability. So yes, the question I will get into that
citizens that sit on this partnership, or review this partnership,
there is an energy vision Advisory Committee called energy vision Advisory Committee. We call it evac for short. So they've been, they have been a body that has been around 10 years ago when the partnership started. Leslie was recently at another meetings last fall for New Year's. And I know that's a body, and I know this body and SEAC have also talked about trying to cross pollinate more between all these groups that they are more familiar with the generous work, and if you can kind of leverage your resources, your voice, cooperate,
interact. Yeah.
So in this document here, this lists out A through J with the city's priorities for going into these negotiations. And some of them are, honestly, to me, at least a little boring method, both public works type of items, but I'm here mostly to speak with the climate elements of it, because that's again, this was negotiated led by the city attorney's office, but then one of my responses last year has been to Bring that climate lens to these negotiations conversations. So in particular, I'll touch briefly on Item A, which is the duration of these agreements. Item F, which is franchise B, that's a common topic that'll come up in a lot of our advisory committees. And then items h, i and j, at the end there, which are the items within this separate documents, these memorandums of understanding, so down the list in order flexible duration agreements, as I mentioned, the expiring agreements are 10 years for the new agreements. We knew we didn't want to do any backslide. We know that the facility wanted to let me hard or want to fought hard to get longer agreements. They don't like having battles every 10 years, and they want to lock us into a longer future. So not only did we not want to backslide, we wanted to add more, and we largely were able to have these agreements now are basically 10 years. They're nine years, 10 and a half months. But the biggest change is that previously, if we wanted to get out of the franchise agreements, so let's say there was a conversation again about the initialization and that the free Minneapolis wanted to get out of the agreement. We had early termination language, but we had to wait five years, up to 10 years before we just put that in effect, and it also required a super majority voting council. So what has changed now is that instead of having to wait five years, we can basically, if we wanted to terminate these agreements as soon as they're signed, and just get a 12 month notice period. So that gives us more flexibility if things really get bad within utilities. For there is a big push for municipalization Again, or there's other alternative energy sources that you know, in some ways, in place of these utilities, we do have an avenue to get out of the agreements in months. Essentially, we could get out of them in as early
as I got a question about that. Yeah, so I put that
into that where things get very complicated, and that's the we basically, if we want to get out of these agreements, and wanting to do that, let's go, we'd have to have some other plan. One other plan could be initialization, but that would be a blank battle to resolve. Another possibility could be something called, could be changes in state law. So if there was a change in state law, we might be able to then say, well, we don't want to tell anymore. We want great river energy, or we want a co op, or something that requires that,
that would be the city lobbying through the state legislation to change that. So are your lobbyists
to change what? To change
the municipality now, I think it's with what's that group? I don't know if it's the group at the city the community power group. Well, there's somebody who votes the charter. I think it would have to be put on the on the ballot. If Minneapolis, me residents could decide this, we would have to put it on the ballot. That's what the that's what we were trying to do back in the day. But, you know, like, as I said, that group, community power didn't actually intend to pass it. They were more doing it for political reasons, to bring it up. And I also just sent, I'm about to send something out to you, Jada, and to you, Alice, and you Luke, about a sheet that we made about XL and all the other facilities and the emissions that they cause, as well as PM, point two, and XL is pretty high on the list. I think it's the top on the list of carbon emissions. Which I have a question about that, because you said, if Can I ask question,
Sure, I'm happy to take kind of
question, something about what you said, that XL is cleaner.
Now the carbon emissions have reduced.
I want to talk about that real quick. So what? And I'm not the same on you. I'm just saying, What proof do you have that the carbon emissions have decreased, and does this have anything to do with the carbon that were sold to excel?
Should we go to i The decarbonization goals, or do you want to or the
carbon kind of set? Thank
rock, get to that. So just
to close out the franchise agreement duration, now it's a little bit less than 10 years, but it's more flexible city. If it had an alternative it wanted to pursue could get out of these agreements earlier, and that applies for both Excel Energy and center point energy applies to them both the same and then item F, generalized franchise fee language, I believe this has probably come up in The agreement cabins, but there is this fee that, because of these rent agreements, the city can levy on utilities now, they don't pay it out of circle the money. We wish they did, but they don't. So this fee, though, that we can levy the utilities they put on city bills, residents and businesses bills as a line item, what the city is doing now, and what they've been doing as part of the climate lights initiative, is they're using that money that's being brought into the city to reinvest out into the community. So that's to help provide grants for weatherization and more installation for homes or free home energy squad visits or energy efficiency improvements for small businesses. So this is now a critical tool. This franchise fee in the city, creating more programs are going to help residents and businesses. And what we've accomplished with this new franchisee language is we're not changing the rates. Those are going to remain the same right now, but we have more flexibility now in how that is levied. And some of the some of the political and advocacy, advocacy conversation on this is, you know, is there a way to increase these fees a greater amount on gas than on electricity, since gas is hopefully this now would open up the possibilities, or are there ways to make this a more progressive taxation system? This new generalized language now provides us with avenues to look into those innovative ideas in ways that our old language that we're replacing actually tied our hand. It said all the things we cannot do, and that really limited
possibilities for language.
So we there were multiple paragraphs of language in the older agreements that are expiring that stipulated basically the only things we can do. It basically said, this is a container total worth of it. So then we and our negotiating team, which are mostly city attorneys, with the city attorneys, and then I was part of that conversation that cross out the language, and just instead, it's been replaced. The City retains its rights under state law, so no longer our hands tied unnecessarily. We now have all of our rights.
