Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. Welcome, everybody. It's House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. It's Wednesday, April 29. And last week, we met with BGS to talk about SEMP and we didn't finish their testimony that they prepared so they are back. Thank you so much for rescheduling and returning to talk about Merck. So we'll just go around the room and introduce ourselves. I'm representative Kathleen James from Manchester.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Scott Campbell from St. John's Barry.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Richard Bailey, Memorial two. Chris Morrow, Windham, Windsor, Bennington. Michael Southworth, Caledonia two.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Christopher

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Howland, Newmont four. Dara Torre, Washington two.

[Rep. Bram Kleppner (Member)]: Graham Kleppner, Chittenden 13, Burlington.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Right. For the record.

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: Good morning. I'm Emily Kosicky. I'm deputy commissioner of Buildings and General Services.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Brian Sewell, state energy program manager for Buildings and General Services. Morning.

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: And I am going to be very brief, just kicking things off this morning, and then turn it over to Brian, who is truly the expert in implementation of this program. But just as a refresher, and I'm sure you all are familiar with this already, the MERP was established through Act 172. In 2022, it allocated $45,000,000 of ARPA funds to BGS to establish what is essentially a expansion of our SEMP program that we discussed last week to municipalities. And so this is done through a number of grants within the overall program that Brian will walk through in more detail, but it's designed to support municipalities in their energy resiliency efforts. Just as a reminder, we talked about last week the number of staff in our office. We have Brian, the program manager, a coordinator with him in the office, but then through the Merck, there's three limited services positions. So just sitting where I sit, I think they've done pretty incredible work with a small team to roll this out. The program also relies heavily on partnerships with RPCs, Brian will talk about in more detail. Some other key partners include the League of Cities and Towns, Efficiency Vermont, and then the Energy Action Network. And then for prioritization, it was targeted at communities with the highest energy burden and the lowest resources to address that. So that's just a high level drive by overview, and then I'll let Brian get into the more detail.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: That's great. Thank you. So we can move to the next slide. So I just wanted to give a brief timeline of what we're looking at really for the the project phase. As deputy commissioner mentioned, past act one seventy two in 2022, spent really the first year, year and a half getting the the first phase to set up, the partnerships, the payments to the regional planning commissions, and then starting to roll out mini grants, which we'll talk about, this the first direct funding to towns. But, really, what we're looking at now is we, awarded our implementation grants in the 2024, signed contracts with all 126 awarded towns in December 2024. So '25 to now has been the project implementation phase. So looking at the timeline, January to June, so the first six months of the project phase was the historic review process. So wanna give a a shout out to Department of Historic Preservation and their team for being really on the ball working with all a 126 awardees and the 246 buildings that were associated with those those town grants, to help walk these towns through the the process. And I think there was, some initial, trepidation about, oh, like, how difficult is the review gonna be. And and, again, they really understood the intent of the program knowing that this was targeted at some of the the communities that have had the hardest time accessing funding and being able to follow all of the, you know, strict restrictions and guidelines and all these different things about prior funding resources that have made them essentially skip some of these funding resources in the past. And so they were really pleased to see how how easy it was to negotiate with historic preservation and make sure that we could still do things like heat pumps. Right? That's a core measure within the program. You're changing out fixtures. There's, you know, windows. Anytime you're talking about building envelope, windows and doors are involved. So that was really helpful. And then starting in the 2025, we began a quarterly check-in process, and that's really between BGS staff on the Merck team and the 11 regional planning commissions because we wanted to just get a sense of, like, okay. Now the towns are moving through their historic process, how many bids are out, where are that where are they with the implementation process? And these have been really helpful. It's, I think, helped us work with the RPCs and the towns to kind of walk them through step by step, in some of the cases where they needed a little extra, assistance and capacity.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Sure. And yes.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Would just like to do a little commercial here. I when I was on the conservation committee of Weston, we got a Merck mini grant, and the process was easy. The documentation was not onerous. It was very flexible program. We used it in a variety of ways to pay for a structural engineer and see if we could put solar on top of our salt shed, which didn't work out. But, otherwise, we wouldn't have had that opportunity. I'll go to look at heat pumps in the, town office and, and one other thing as well. So it was, from my point of view, was a great program. Sweet to hear that.

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: That's great feedback, and it was designed really to be not owners for municipalities because sometimes grant opportunities can be so complicated that they're difficult for municipalities to tackle when they have limited resources. So this program, I think, had a lot of advantages and designed to be simple, accessible, and using support of RPCs who are really familiar with those communities. And in later slide, Brian will go into some of the lessons learned from our survey attempts where we've gotten feedback about the program and some of that is reflected in that. And just one other thing about this timeline I wanted to note, it started this image is starting in 2025, but the work began before that. And so despite the flooding that occurred in 2023, impacted not only our operations heavily, but also many municipalities. We did start assessments back in September 2023. The first visits were up at Canaan and those assessments concluded in October 2024. So there was, you know, work preceding the timeline that you see on this graphic as well. So

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: the date that's highlighted in red is sort of a safety backstop for us that we wanted to put into the agreements with all 126 awarded communities. Knowing that there there's a lot that still needs to be done for a number of towns, this requirement is that they have signed contracts for the work that they were awarded to get done. If they don't have that at that point, it makes it difficult for us to cut the final checks. Right? As you note in the the timeline, 12/31/2026, that was the date in the bill where BGS has to have the funds expended. We are confident that we're gonna get to that goal, but we wanted to just put these quarterly check ins in place and then this other, you know, marker to try and give some boundaries and make sure that we were in a good place by the end of the year in getting all the final project dollars out. And there will probably be some work that, continues into 2027. The RPC contract, you noted, goes through 2028, so they're there to still assist these towns as they wrap up their project work. Deputy commissioner already kinda covered the the core partnerships, but just to see it on the screen, act one seventy two partnered us with the regional planning commissions. That was a key partnership. BGS had never worked with municipalities before. So having them involved was a great way to be able to communicate and coordinate directly to towns in a way that we just hadn't had experience doing that. Efficiency Vermont worked with us on the program guidance, working with us on the RFP for the energy audit contracts. Vermont League of Cities and Towns helped provide a lot of guidance around what was originally ARPA, state fiscal recovery. And I do wanna note that that was later designated revenue loss replacement. Why that's really important is because we would have been heavily restricted in the measures we could award, when it was under ARPA's state fiscal recovery because that's COVID response. So you're really dealing with air ventilation circulation. That's about it. So no no LED lights, no solar, none of these other, you know, heavy fuel switching and envelope measures. So by getting the revenue loss replacement designation from the administration, that was really key. It opened up a whole chunk of new measures that we could award to the program. And then BCAM also came in, and they were great in setting up webinars to communicate directly with towns when we had big program steps to announce.

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: I just wanna offer one little plug here. Brian had said BGS has never worked with municipalities before that's specific to the energy office. And we do work with municipalities, through our building communities grants programs, which is funded through Capitol Hill and your communities might be interested in exploring that. Just if you're not aware of those, those are also a great program that we work with local communities on.

[Rep. Bram Kleppner (Member)]: Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. Yeah.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: So our phase one was partnerships. Phase two mini grants. These were up to $4,000 direct disbursement to towns. It was noncompete, so any town that wanted one could get one. We carved those out of the project dollars. It's about 1,100,000 we set aside to make sure that if every town wanted one, they could get one. They were really great because it helped, as you heard directly here this morning, helped town set up plans, hire consultants to investigate measures, ADA compliance, a whole host of different, items. And then we have some some photos of community forums to discuss resilience in general as well as some town energy fairs where members of the public could come and learn about energy efficiency at all different levels, including what they could do as homeowners, right, to make their their homes more energy efficient, which is really great. At this time, we have about 377,000 that, still we need we're waiting to hear on reports back about how it was spent. And we know part of that, it seems like a lot when we awarded about 700,000. What we've received in feedback is a lot of towns are trying to integrate the mini grant into the overall project goal. So because we know that many of these projects are ongoing, right, part of that is they're they're holding those funds to try and assist the project development in some way. Phase three is the energy resilience assessments. So act one seventy two had budgeted 5,000,000 to conduct energy assessments across the the state. We received applications from 237 municipalities, applying for a total of 665 buildings. Of these, 531 were assessed, over the course of a of a year, which is a a pretty aggressive pace. For some perspective, the SEMP program, we would typically audit maybe five to seven buildings a year, like, in a in a busy year for energy audits. So this was a lot.

[Rep. Bram Kleppner (Member)]: Yeah. So you went up by, like, a hundredfold. How in the world did you do that?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Great question. So, again, I wanna shout out the regional planning commissions. There's no way that we would have gotten through this many without their help. A lot of that was actually just making sure that someone was there with keys when the contractor was gonna show up on-site. So if we go to the next slide actually, maybe skip ahead two slides, Paul, if you don't mind. Let's see one more. Yeah. So in terms of how we got this done, there were two assessment types, level one, level two. Just briefly, level one was to help some of the towns that couldn't come up with the utility bill history, the building drawings. Some of them had been impacted by the flooding and and had those documents, but then they were lost. And so this allowed them to still participate in the program. So we did about 200 level one. That would qualify them for the grant, but not a loan, which is a later portion of the program. Essentially, we set this up in a way where I think this is a first, if I remember correctly, but BGS was able to contract directly with, energy assessment vendors. So we went through an RFP process with Efficiency Vermont. We hired four initially. We needed to hire two more later on in the year to try and keep pace with the workload. And, essentially, by doing that, which normally you wouldn't do that for a building you don't own. Right? So this is a little tricky dealing with towns that they own the building, but we're gonna send in our contractors. But, essentially, the reason why that worked is it took that burden, that that workload of trying to go out and hire somebody on their own off their shoulders, and all they had to do was show up and make sure that somebody could let them in the building that morning. And I think that is a key piece of why we got through so many because BGS could look at the whole state picture of all the, assessments that were awarded and make sure that we weren't sending a contractor to Brattleboro and Newport in the same day. Right? We were able to kinda take advantage of regional, scheduling so that we could get through as many site visits in a day as possible.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Do you think it kept costs down at all to be sort of negotiated at that statewide or regional scale?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Yeah. Thank you, manager. I think I think that's another key piece because they knew that they were going to get a volume of work that they wouldn't be clear on if they're going town by town through an RFP process. I think it definitely helps, make sure that we had funds left over. So I think on the previous slide, it said 5,000,000 allocated, about 3.2 was spent on the 530 assessments. So we averaged about 44 per month, and that's through the winter with people calling out sick, snowstorms, everything. So, again, just big shout out to the RPCs, to the towns themselves, for everybody pitching in to get through this volume of of work. So if we go to the next slide. I highlighted the first two. You can kind of see the square foot buckets, of building size. Not gonna come a surprise to anybody here that over 80% were in the 5,000 to 10,000 square foot range. We're talking about a lot of small municipal offices, community centers, libraries, things like that. So you can see just some of the summary statistics about average, min, max, cost per square foot. We have a couple of, examples of drawings and and work that was put in by a couple of the contractors. So in general, we're, you know, we're looking at, let's see, 530 it's 2,002 total municipal buildings around the state. I think that's a rough approximation. So to complete over 531, that gives us a pretty good insight into the state of municipal infrastructure. And, again, as you all know, this is a program really designed to help some of the most critical pieces of town infrastructure become more cost effective, more comfortable. And as floods and other emergencies happen over the years to come, a lot of these are gonna be places where, it's the the citizens only access to reliable Internet or emergency shelter. So if we go to next slide, phase four, implementation grants. This is the fun one. It's where we are right now. Out of the 45,000,000 that was allocated, 35.9, so almost 36,000,000, was set aside to go towards energy resilience projects. As I mentioned before, we awarded a 126 municipalities for a total of 246 buildings. We were able to obligate every single penny of that $35,900,000. That was a big goal of mine. I didn't wanna leave anything on the table. That's a big process to go through as well. And we'll talk in the program survey and feedback phase. There were some pieces of feedback about how quickly we had to move through the obligation phase. But, again, we were bound by these dates of December 2024 and December 2026 to try and get through all this work. It's a lot. This is a lot of of work to get through in a fairly short amount of time. Just generally, we're looking at about 285,000 per municipality on average and about a 146,000 per building just kind of, across the the scope. As I noted, we have six towns that have completed so far. Those are Fairfax, Fire District, Grampy, Highgate, Plymouth, Stanford, and Berkshire, which is really great. We have a lot that are, very close to wrapping up, this spring. I think moving into the spring construction season, a lot of feedback we're getting is we're gonna see some some projects wrap up pretty quickly here, which is great.

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: Brian, will you just explain about the 2,000,000 partnership?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Thank you. Yeah. So of the 10.1 that we have, dispersed out, 2,000,000 of that, as deputy commissioner mentioned, is in hardship funds. That's really critical because, sometimes we're impacted by flooding. Others just do not have a budget to start paying some of these heavy invoices that they're getting from contractors up front. So getting the flexibility to provide, a hardship, which means they get the funds up front. They send us documentation. Sometimes that include the town budget showing that, you know, this one invoice would be half of what their entire town budget would be. And so making sure that we could keep the work flowing meant being able to issue hardship payments. What they have to do then is show us how they spent that hardship before they can come back and apply for another, but it allowed for up to 20% of their total award, which is really great for getting these projects started.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: what we have here is a general summary of the measures that were awarded under the implementation phase. So ACT one seventy two really focuses on awarding sort of in priority order, which starts with the building on the. Right? You don't wanna put heat pumps or other equipment in a building that's really leaky. Those motors will burn out. The measure will fail. People will be upset, and you won't get all savings that you need. Plus, you need. So the reason why I highlighted the thermal envelope and the heat pump, right, moving from kind of envelope work, heating and cooling systems, and then the last table there being the resilience measures, solar, EV chargers, and battery backup systems. The fact that that we have those numbers so close to each other really shows the the work, both on the programmatic administration side, but also on the town side that they understood the goal here of you're gonna apply for envelope, work, insulation, weatherization, air sealing, and do, mini splits or other HVAC components, so that those two can go hand in hand. What I have on the right side of the slide is some notes about where things are working right now. We love to see the amount of applications that were submitted and awarded for solar and battery backups. The reality on the ground is the insulation, the the core shell work, the HVAC systems, those are all coming back way more expensive than what we were able to award as part of the grant program. So that arrow moving back is really showing that in a lot of cases, towns are needing to move some of their project budget away from the resilience measures in order to make sure that they complete the foundational work of building envelope bare ceiling, and then moving into infrequently. Sibilia?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Just the data, everything that BGS has learned here, is that being incorporated into the broader resilience implementation strategy and the states the states' broader work on that?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: So the data for all of these projects is gonna be tracked in GRIDS, which I think we mentioned last week. We use some of the administration funds to, get a new license so that we can put all of those measures that are getting installed, and that allows us to generate reports that will show all of the work being done across the towns.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I I guess I'm thinking about the learning. Like, you've learned a lot about what towns need, what their challenges are on the ground. Like, is that how is that being shared within the administration for other resilience strategies and kind of facilities work?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Yeah. Great question. I participated in a couple of workshops between, partner agencies. We love going down to regional workshops as well, talking with towns. There was the, the rural technical assistance conference or or meeting last fall, which is a great opportunity. So we're gonna continue to do the work of reaching out and talking with, all the other partner agencies that are involved in a a statewide resilience plan as well as the regional, partners. Yeah. Actually, this reminds me one partnership that has been helpful on the start has been talking to the Department of Health. They reached out to us during the program design and and assessment phase, because they were really curious if the work we were gonna award for new mini splits and other types of electrified heating and cooling, will that be able to overlap with their work to try and identify the gap areas in the state for heating and cooling shelters? We know that we're seeing more extreme temps in both directions, and so there are going to be more days where the town needs to provide, where citizens need access to heating and cooling shelters. And so by sharing with them the work that we're awarding and then as we wrap up the project phase, being able to share where those measures were installed, I think that will also help, Department of Health identify some of these areas. So there's a lot of collaborative information sharing that I think can still be done after we wrap up the project phase, and we'll know, like, to the to the measure what was installed.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Regarding just in a on the right there, where you mentioned that many towns are keeping their backup heat.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Yes.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: I'm also aware from work in this committee that people aren't using their heat pumps as well as they could be. I wonder, is there any opportunity that's a lot of heat pumps to kind of educate and maybe pilot some of the things?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: That's a great question. So part of the Efficiency Vermont partnership, and the regional planning commissions has been a big, effort to educate and make sure that we're working with these towns so that when they install these measures, they know the appropriate collaboration with their existing heating systems. I again, I don't think it's gonna be a huge surprise that some of these towns are not willing to completely replace existing infrastructure if it's in good condition. But we wanna make sure that and we'll there's a couple of slides later on where we get into some of the feedback, making sure that they understand how to set correct set points so that you're heating your existing system really is back up. It only comes on below 10 degrees. Right? And the rest of the time, you've got a a building that is more, insulated and air sealed, and so you're really meant to rely on the heat pumps. So that that is definitely an ongoing piece. That will get harder. So when the program, concludes the grant phase next year, I will be losing those limited service staff positions. So I know there's there's a lot of work in the years ahead, especially every town meeting day, you might need to go message again, right, with new municipal staff. This is what you installed. This is why. Here's how to operate it. So I think that's where we may need to lean on some of those partnerships with VCAN as well, right, hosting webinars. And that's something that I'm happy to to go and, you know, talk with with regional groups and towns if anybody has questions in the years to come. So part of the way the program was set up, and all of this, I think, was designed in the best way possible to meet these rural communities, especially with small administrative staff, part time staff, trying to get through all this work. By doing an an energy assessment initially, right, it helps us identify some of the measures. It's not a design built scope of work for a construction contractor to come in. Right? There is and I think in prior testimony, we had talked about there's gonna be a gap that we need to bridge between, an energy assessment report and an actual request for proposal. This is a design built, get all this work done. So what we're seeing right now and what I'm highlighting here are the scope of work amendments that we're going through, and there are a lot. So, I really cannot thank my staff enough for staying on top of, we get usually several a week, sometimes every day. Requests are coming in, and that's just part of the process. These towns are going out to bid. They're hiring architects and designers who are then coming back and saying, well, this is actually how I think you need to accomplish these measures. It goes into more detail than what an energy assessment is really meant to. And so we're going through a lot of processes of amending, especially as they get budget estimates back and are like, okay. I don't know that I can pay for a battery, a solar system, and be able to cover the cost on the installation. In some cases, towns are willing to chip in because this is, some of the easiest funding that they're gonna see in a long time, and I think they know that. And so there are a lot of towns trying to match with town dollars to get the full scope done. Some just can't do that, and we know that as well. Right? So we're working with them to try and stay flexible. What we're looking at is really town contacts us with a proposed scope of work change based on attachment a in their contracts. We take a review. We might have questions. We'll schedule office hours. We do office hours for towns and RPCs every Wednesday. And then if we say, hey. You know what? You can't drop your insulation and all these other measures to try and, like, buy this one big system. That's not really in the intent with the bill. How about we do this instead? Can we adjust? So we work with them, and then once we have a scope that we can approve, we make the changes, send it back out for signature. And, in a lot of cases, it can be that simple and done in a day or two. Again, we wanna make sure that we're staying on base with the work. So now we're into the field notes phase, which is really fun. Our project manager has been out on, I just wanna say, almost 60 site visits at this point. We committed to doing at least 5%, of site visits across the 126 towns, 246 buildings, and we're way ahead of that. We're really able to meet a lot of these towns where they're at, check-in in person. Sometimes that's the best way to get a sense of where, some of these scope amendments are coming from. So I wanted to note that, you know, we talked about an increase in costs. Right? Demand for materials, labor, all of these things have gone up. Some of these assessments were completed in early fall twenty twenty three. Lots happened since that point, when we awarded in in 2024 as well. So we're trying to work with them as much as possible. The the goal here again you'll hear the word flexibility probably a thousand times. Right? By staying flexible and being able to work with towns, we're gonna ensure that this work gets done, and we don't have, you know, huge chunks of dollars coming back to us because counts throw their hands up and say, I can't deal with all this anymore. I just need, you know, to turn it back. It's too much. We have a lot of involvement of professional designers and architects, as I mentioned, who are helping them get their projects designed, ready to be built. In some cases, there's a little bit of a push and pull. Right? You're hiring a professional to assess in one way. They have a scope for work and a contract with the with BGS to get certain measures done. So there's a whole amount of of back and forth that has to take place in order to walk them through step by step to a completed project. But I think they know that that having this grant and the fact that it's revenue loss replacement being flexible, it's helping get work done that has been long deferred, and that they would not have been able to do on their own. So that feedback has been clear. It's also a really great chance for them to make sure that they can do it right, right, by looking at the building holistically, not just piece by piece saying, you know, we're gonna start with envelope, and we're gonna work our way through heating and cooling. That's a big component of making sure that we set them up for success. So, Rutland, you talked about heating systems. This is where we wanted to mention that there's a lot of education around how to optimize when you're blending heating and cooling systems that are now electrified with existing infrastructure. I think for a a lot of towns, the the goal there are some that are removing completely and moving to electrification. We actually have a couple that are looking at geothermal, But the vast majority, they don't really feel comfortable pulling out their entire existing, you know, infrastructure. But there's a lot of savings that can be generated by making sure that they're really running that, only when necessary. So there's a lot of of ongoing work to make sure that they understand, how, you know, smart thermostats can help them do that. A lot of these times don't have regular, you know, maintenance staff that would mean, you know, going in and checking it day to day. So we wanna try and make sure that they can operate these as as turnkey and and hands off as possible.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: For a

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: lot of times, this is gonna be the first chance they've had to cool in the summer. Right? Either they're not putting heavy window shaker units in and out seasonally. This is a chance to have a really comfortable, space rerunning. While I mentioned that the resilience measures will end up being lower than what we awarded, There are a lot of towns that are still working to keep them in scope, again, because they recognize that this might be their best chance to complete a full building project, not knowing when the next grant opportunity like this would come along. So we're pleased to see how many are really working to try and keep that in their scope, and then dealing with, you know, the budget realities that they're all facing. The other piece on the education component has been trying to make sure that understanding the connection between heat pumps and solar. Right? If you're putting heat pumps in by themselves, you will see your electric bill go up, right, which is meant to be balanced by the reduction in your oil or gas, whatever you're using on-site currently. But being able to include a solar array really helps reduce the impact overall of that electrified heating and cooling. So we, I think, last year, had a a request from you all to think about doing a survey, which we were able to conduct last fall. The survey really focused on the first two years of the program. It's our first opportunity to hear directly from towns and RPCs. So we looked at 2022 to 2024. How did these first, you know, three phases of the program work for everybody? We sent it out to our program email listserv, which is about 430 recipients. We received 88 responses. And of the 88, 85 reported participating in at least one of the three phases. Right? So this was a survey that went out, and it included feedback from folks who didn't get awarded anything, which I think was important because we wanna understand if we have an opportunity like this again, how can we design the program better? Right? There are lessons to be learned here. So just briefly, you know, we noted that some of the RPC responses were lower on average than the municipalities. I think there's a component of this partnership, which I don't believe RPCs are partnered on the community grants. So this is a first for BGS as well. And I think in any type of new partnership like that, there's gonna be some some growing pains and challenges that we work on together. Several cases, right, it's it's hard to work around to co administering to the towns that are your members. Right? So that dynamic between RPCs and the state, I think, is one that we've we've learned a lot from over the past couple of years. Municipalities responded that they couldn't have done this without RPC help, and I do wanna make that really clear that we just would not have been able to be on the ground in communication with this many towns. And in a lot of cases, I think I stated before, our PCs were the ones who showed up with the keys to let contractors into the building for the assessment phase, and we would have had way more canceled assessments. I think we had one, actually, through the entire year, only one instance where a contractor showed up and no one was there to let them in the building out of 05/2031. That's pretty good. Another key piece, and this gets back to how we designed the assessment phase. Over and over and over again, people stated that the ability of the state to, coordinate contracts, right, which is what BJS has, the Office of Purchasing Contracting, it takes that burden off their shoulders in a way that they had not experienced before. And I think some of them were, like, kinda surprised it was working this easy that, no. No. You can just show up. Our person's gonna be there. And so if there's opportunities to incorporate that type of program design going forward, I think we would see, especially for the lower capacity rural communities that are are so stressed, would really help them take advantage of of other funding opportunities as well.

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: And to that point, the bullet on here about, benefiting from state assistance and identifying and securing contractors to complete Merck funded projects. I mean, that's a little different because with the assessments, we were able to flow through BGS contract. For the actual work, that wasn't the case. So we did hear some requests for assistance in that. And I believe we created a resource guide on our website that provided information. However, we weren't directly involved in holding the contract or sort of, being an intermediary in those relationships. We were just providing information.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. And

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: then overall, we heard, from respondents across the board that this was overwhelmingly a popular successful program. They talked about the the outcomes, for the town that they had long had in their planning process or on the back burner hoping to get that done at some point. And it's been really heartwarming. The chance to go talk to towns directly has been one of the best parts of this work. It's where it all kinda meets the road for me. And so we were really pleased to see that also come through from the survey responses. So lessons learned. I wanted to kinda summarize some of the the key pieces here. As the deputy commissioner mentioned, if we had an opportunity to, extend that state contracting that we did for the assessment phase to actual project work, I think there's a lot of things that need to happen there. Right? We don't own the building. We've known through this process when they start opening up walls to add new insulation, we're finding a lot of problems, which, you know, this is some of the oldest municipal infrastructure in the country. So that makes sense that you're gonna see some mold or some structural issues. Right? And, we've been able to incorporate as much of that as we can into the project work because we don't want that to block all this other good work from getting done. So we would need to figure that out, but they have called for that repeatedly. Flexibility. So being flexible, being able to process scope of work amendments to work with towns based on the reality that they actually see on the ground has been huge. I think it's why, you know, we're probably on track to only have maybe a handful that will really be in any sort of, you know, concern state towards the the later part of this year. Right now, you know, we're checking through every quarter, and everybody is committed to getting this done. They're all in different phases of work, but it's been really helpful to see them commit to getting this this full scope of work done on the building. The gap between assessments and the design build RFP, that that's been a major challenge. And I don't don't know that I have all the answers at this point of how we could have set that up differently because you don't know what you don't know in the building until you do an assessment, and but then the assessment is not the same as getting a full design right. There that was going to happen, but it's still the reality that that's a hard gap to jump. So lesson for us to try and think about going forward in terms of similar programs for towns. Towns without dedicated staff oh, yes.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. So I have a question. So, I mean, this was this program, you ended up happening because we had a lot of federal funds. And how can we and we had to spend them quickly. And so, gap is a real thing. So, do you have some sense of how we can be more ready for a future program like this? Have you thought about that?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: The last time that I thought about that directly was, I think, at the BRDA conference where we were talking about how to set up the systems of technical assistance that towns can tap into. So I think there's an avenue there, taking advantage of a lot of the existing regional structures and partnerships, but I don't know what that looks like, at this point. I think that would be a focus after we conclude the project work, sifting through all of the all of the data that we've collected and understanding how we can set a program like this up and be ready if we get additional funds, which I think is what you're asking. Right? If we're

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yeah.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: I mean funding.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. If they're, you know, had some pretty significant federal shocks, I mean, it wouldn't surprise me to see some pretty significant federal shocks in the near future, and potentially more federal dollars. Would we, you know, have we thought would we would that gap exist? Have we learned anything to stop that gap or mitigate that gap?

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: I mean, one driver of the gap being such a challenge may have been a result of the time, the compressed timelines. Right? And so if, you know, if there was a future opportunity for a similar program, like the timeline might look different. Right? And like, that would be one way if we've developed one, a lot of lessons learned from this experience, built those partnerships, and could continue to build the technical expertise. But I think there'd need to be some continued thinking about how the state, like again, if we were administering this program again or a similar program, like how could we collaborate or figure out a way that we could help address that gap within municipalities directly.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: This kind of goes back to my question that I was asking before about the resilience implementation strategy, which I think is it's been crafted through ANR and the treasurer. Yep. And, you know, there's additional work on kind of quantifying what are the impacts that we're seeing here related to climate. And so, know, just wanting to make sure that we don't miss an opportunity to connect the learnings here to that broader overall strategy. The end. Thank you so much. Sure. So

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: I think the the next one I was jumping into, again, probably not a surprise. The communities that have really key personnel, who stay on through town meeting day, those have been some of the biggest successes so far, and it's it's wonderful to see it when towns have it. And it's it's so, like, almost wanna say heartbreaking when they they don't have that same capacity, because it really does make a huge difference. And so, you know, that can show up in other ways of, you know, excited energy committee chairs needing to work with the select board and DPW, right, Department of Public Works or whoever is actually maintaining these systems to make sure they're all speaking with the same voice, and that doesn't always happen. We you know, even state agencies, right, we're not always aware of what everybody else is doing to your point about, integrating in resilience planning. So those have been instances where, again, we we try and, rely back on the regional planners to try and talk with them, build that that trust, and and carry that work through the different town staff. But, that's a that's a big challenge, and I don't know how much BGS can play a role in fixing that going forward, but it's definitely something that I think the all the regional groups should, should continue working on.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Yeah. I'm gonna ask you to speculate a little bit. And there's a bunch of us in the building that are, concerned about the lack of, capacity at the municipal level and if the task force on regional government governance, whatever that might be, not to create a other bureaucratic layer, but to facilitate, you know, the ability for for towns to

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Take advantage of things like this or coordinate easily a common firehouse, whatever. I mean, there's so many different levels of how this could work. Do you have any further comments on that? I mean, the RBCs obviously play a role in that, but there are limitations there as well.

[Rep. Bram Kleppner (Member)]: There

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: the example that comes to mind was from one of the workshops that I think was actually hosted, here in Montpelier, and perhaps it was the one where I we they were talking there was a Rutland Regional Town Champion program. I I might be misremembering some of the the title of that, but they had this idea of taking regional town champions, which are towns that either have capacity or have figured out a way that works, and then having them almost, like, big sibling, little sibling to some of their towns close by that needed more help working together in that capacity. You know, that might be one way that doesn't add another layer of bureaucracy, but just takes advantage of some lessons learned from towns that have been successful, and then sharing that in a way that hopefully starts the wheels going with some of these other towns that have have been looking for areas of success. It's pretty vague. But Yeah. It's nice.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Thanks. It's a yeah. Yeah.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: It's a challenge.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. It's a challenge.

[Rep. Christopher Morrow (Member)]: Yeah. I know I learned that there are some areas of the state where, I guess, it's on the RPC level. They're hiring an energy co coordinator to do grant writing and all of that kind of stuff. And then towns are kind of going in and sharing those services. Mhmm. Did you encounter any of that in sure? Did you come across it? I'm thinking, like, Hartford area.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. I guess one.

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Yes. So when we had the application phase of the program open 2024, a lot of towns had their applications submitted by, regional planners, which I think helped get them over that hurdle because they just were like, I have too much to do with especially after flooding two years in a row, right, and three years in a row last year. I mean, it's on July 10. I don't know what is going on with that date, but, like, everybody go, like, hunker down somewhere. But they a lot of them needed that help, and so that was a a great way to get them get them through the door. And then because we're flexible, we're able to work with them to still see some project work get approved and done. So, yeah, we did see that. I don't know about any, I have to look at the data more specifically about who replied and if they were an energy one of the new energy coordinators. So RPCs have been essential for coordinating on the ground, especially during assessment phase. We've talked about that. You know, again, designing the program as co administrators with BGS, I think that was a it's a new relationship. That's one that, I think we're still trying to figure out how if we get a chance to work with them again going forward, how do we make that better? And I think there's always gonna be communication challenges, as staff turnover, and there's some towns that, you know, won't work with their re their regional planning commission, and so they work directly with us. And it's just a it's a mix, but I think, overwhelmingly, it's been part of the reason why we got so much of this work approved and and underway. And then lastly, the, survey response showed that, of the towns not awarded implementation grant, 21% said they would still pursue some of the work that was recommended in the audit, which is great. And about a quarter said, no. They couldn't. And, you know, that's to be expected, but we were pleased to see that, a chunk of them are gonna move forward, and a lot of them are working with Efficiency Vermont on how to get rebates, how to work with their utility to make up for the fact that they didn't get a grant. We have about 90 towns that applied, and we we ran out of funding. We weren't able to award them for a total of about 33,000,000 in unfunded energy resilience work. So we know there's lots more to tackle, and that, I think, will partially be served by the loan phase of the program that we're hoping to stand up soon.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yes. I wanna hear about the lone phase of the program. So this sounds like this is a lot of work to be very sure about the time, and it sounds like you guys did a terrific job, and it was very successful. And congratulations, and thank you. I guess I wanna I I I'd love to hear that there were that there was plans to, maybe for BGS to recommend bonding to continue something like that. It might be it might be a lot less money, but it it would enable you BGS and and and Denmark program to continue building on the lessons that you've learned and the success according to your survey results that everybody felt like it was very helpful and a great program. So I guess that's my first question. Is there any thought about and BGS recommending you to do this to continue building on?

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: Yeah. Currently, no. I mean, that's a conversation we can have. You know, we do We've been working very hard on the capital bill right now and know that there's a lot of need and limited dollars for our bonding capacity. So this extension of this program through bonding has not been a topic that we've discussed recommending, but can certainly, you know, discuss that your question.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Well, because we're getting we we get more money back. You know, this this is a classic example of investing up front to save money in the long run. Right? And it just helps municipalities to share in that in that, you know, way of doing things. Municipalities that don't have capacity to do this kind of work of rain on their own. And so you mentioned that 90 municipalities that that applied that did not were not not able to fund. I'm I'm sure there are others. I'm thinking of Saint John's that is looking at the build new or or or do rehab renovation of buildings in order to house police and and fire and and dispatch. And that's that's not renovating old buildings, but it's a it it's it's equally critical for controlling costs into the future, and certainly they can get some help from a deficiency you want, but it sounds like this program could also provide more sort of focused and hands on, assistance to to towns like like to be able to do that sort of thing with new construction. So, anyway, again, I I guess I would encourage BJS to consider bonding this and adding this at the Capital Bill recommendations from actually here in order to be just continue the work that you've been doing and and and and what you've learned in this in a sort of crash course the last few years, it seems like it would be a horrific thing. Great. Thank you.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Brooke Bailey.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Can you give me an approximate if I'm looking at this correctly, and I may not be the admin cost that there's, like, 10,000,000 in admin, 9,000,000 in admin. 1,000,000

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: was set aside for administration out of the 40 five in our.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: So you said you had 45,000,000 and only 36,000,000 have gone out in project. Is that correct? Am I reading?

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Yeah. So $40.45 is the total allocated to the program. So back Cole, I don't know if you can flip back to the thank you. Slide two. Across those four phases, had 2,400,000. That was the phase one, distribution to the regional planning commissions. It's what allowed them to start building their infrastructure for supporting towns. 1.1 was carved out for the mini grants, 5 for assessments, 1,000,000 for BGS to administer the program, so that was to hire the three staff and myself. And then 35.9 is the project dollars. So that's all money that's going out has gone out to towns for all of the work that we uncovered under the assessment phase.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Okay. Is it

[Brian Sewell (State Energy Program Manager, Buildings and General Services)]: Does that help clarify? So it it

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: doesn't no. There's still a gap there. I just didn't

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: So it's the roughly it's the 39 the 35.9 is for the actual construction of the projects. All of these phases underlying it had different pots of money for essentially pre work. So to fund the RPCs who are supporting the program for the mini grants and then the assessments, had to be done in order to fund the construction. So just the 1,000,000 was for administrative expenses and the gap is just covering again, total. Those all were, like, going to projects. Then the RPCs, I I guess you could categorize as some level of administrative or technical support as well, but it wasn't coming to us.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Good. Thank you.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. Any more questions? Right. Yeah. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for the walk through. It sounds like it was a really effective program. And sorry if I called you building in grounds earlier. I it's a permanent break glitch It's

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: that I'm very confident.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: It's it's shared.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. We do grounds as

[Emily Kosicky (Deputy Commissioner, Buildings and General Services)]: well along with everything else.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So we are back at 11:00. I don't know if many members had a chance to see the updated agenda yesterday, but Ellen's gonna be here at eleven to walk us through s two zero two. So