Chair Angela. I'm here. Vice Chair Sanchez. President. Councilwoman Anthony is absent.
Councilman Eskenoll is absent, and is absent. We have two present and three absent who do not have a floor. Okay. We will be joined by any in and out. We'll start in traffic.
But so thanks, everyone, for being here. I'm Sarah the board chair of the committee. It's a regular March 12 meeting, calling order 05:37. I'm virtual only until definitely next year. But I am really excited about today's meeting, and I also wanna celebrate Tuesday.
We have two big milestone to celebrate. One is oh, good. Yeah. One year ago today, we signed our the mayor signed our carbon neutral for all the buildings legislation, and here we are, which is exactly one year ago today. And here we are today with the office of sustainability to talk about energy efficiency and electrification and how they're moving along with that.
So I'm just really so grateful to this team for all their amazing work. So we're gonna hear about that from this amazing team, and we're also gonna hear from Alice Ellis from the department of planning who has been working on our plan for how we're gonna achieve vision zero, which also passed last year in February. So just really excited for this progress, and this is a committee that gets things done and then gets implemented. And this is the team that's implementing it. And so as part of the celebration, I also brought and in celebration and expression of gratitude for all of your amazing hard work, I brought treats for everybody.
So I'm gonna pass them this way, and while we read items of loyalty agenda, please. Progress on energy efficiency and decarbonization policy implementation presentation by Priscilla Dale Cruz, director of sustainability. Yeah.
And David Bergero, also our energy and resilience initiative center.
Also, everybody's well, do you wanna sit over here? But that works. Oh, no. No. Said it's simple for him.
Is it okay if we sit here? Yes. Okay.
Yeah. But, no, is that your house? We have the tree here. We celebrate. How are you?
Good. We have a great day to have you guys. Thank you, compliment. That's really nice.
you're gonna be starting with the panel.
You might do want me to bring
Yeah. That was a great. But thank you guys really so much for getting situated. I think you guys have worked so hard on this. I mean, you worked so hard to help get both build the smart neutral and also benchmarking path.
We've all come in tonight at the State House. They're clearing the benchmarking and standard regulation. They're they're approved, submitted testimony in support. And I think this is a really good example of of city leading the way. So while the state's trying to think about, hey.
Can we do that? What did it look like? You guys are just already doing it and just rocking it. And the number of people I told that you're amazing to in the last, like, a year, but, like, especially the last week, you know, Providence is doing it. It's Priscilla, David, and Kevin, the whole team.
It's so nice. So thank you from the bottom of her. But we'd love to
hear how it's going and how it will be helpful moving it forward.
Thank you for cheering us along the way, Councilwoman, and also for your leadership on all this work. And now we get to share with you how we've been working hard to implement. Yeah.
And she's gonna need a treat. I brought her to you guys. She's a really Okay.
So oh. Oh, great. And then make sure alright. You go to the right. Okay.
thank you again for the time. We're excited to talk to you about the work that the Department of Sustainability has been doing to really achieve cost savings for the city through energy efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization. So you have myself, Priscilla here, director. You also have David, a very talented and experienced energy resilience initiatives administrator. And in the audience, you also have our energy manager, Andrew Brokolo, and also our URI energy fellow, Dylan, who are part of the team in in helping make this work happen.
Today, you don't have with us Julia, Kevin, and Sophie. We are six in our department and now seven with Dylan throughout the year, but they're also very essential for us being able to carry out this work. Alright. So we'll get into what we'll cover with you today. We wanna make sure that we can give you the high level view but comprehensive enough in terms of the role that the Department of Sustainability plays in your city operations and how we contribute through essential, responsibilities, like how we manage utilities for the city, how we procure, that energy for for those utilities, but also, like Sue mentioned, the big milestones like us launching our building energy reporting program and the decarbonization road map we are developing to phase out fossil fuels from our municipal buildings, and we'll get more into that.
The second thing that we wanna make sure we achieve throughout this presentation is making sure we give you insight as to our approach of really being able to do this work that we see as cost effective investments for for the city. And welcome, compliment.
Yeah. Just thinking of that compliment where it's supposed to a point. We just got started here. Have you did miss if there are treats, though, to celebrate the hard work at the Saint Louis apartment at Alex? They're doing all this stuff.
Just trying to cut down on calories, but but in the if they demo my show, it just speaks to me. I might
They're vegan. So they're like Oh,
that maybe makes them feel better.
They could feel better about it. Yeah. So,
yes, it will get into some of those cost effective investments that we have been guiding for the city through energy management efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization. And then lastly, we'll get into the opportunities where the city can save more administrative time, energy, and money and also generate revenue. So what we will talk to you about today is how we've created the framework and how we are planning to scale that up for you all. So we'll start off with utility management and getting into what we see as a basis for good energy management of our buildings and how we procure our energy and what that means. So I am I have to say I am extremely proud of the work that the sustainability department, in particular, David, working with our new energy manager, Andrew, have been doing to really bring our utility management and energy operations in our buildings to the twenty first century.
So really thinking about what are the digital capabilities of being able to not only do they bring the skills and the knowledge, but then being able to really execute that more efficiently because we have the right tools and the right software. So one of the things that David has shepherd through his division of energy in our department is really making sure that we have the right tools, like a cloud database, which we refer to as the energy intelligence suite. So we, the city, are one of the biggest customers, or would we say the biggest customer that Rhode Island Energy has?
accounts, not so much the most consumption.
So imagine, like, managing on an antiquated way a thousand utility accounts. So that's what we inherited when we took over the process coming from finance and public property. And we said, you know what? We can make this run more efficiently if we just use the right tools and want the right scales. So now we have a system where we can, you know, track information, do budget analysis.
And we started off with our utility and electricity accounts. Those accounted for about 750. And off the bat, we were identifying areas where we could save the city money Mhmm. Or where things did not seem right in terms of the the energy usage and the way it was fluctuating in a building. And now we're taking that on because we've been successful taking that on for sewer and water.
So we're gonna be able to open up more opportunities in that way. And then the one thing I wanted to highlight here because we had really an approach that wasn't, right, in par with with what I'm talking about, this twenty first century digital age, it was slowing us down in terms of the as to how we were paying our bills. Mhmm. And one of the things that David overhaul in the system is making sure that we weren't incurring utility late payment fees.
my. You know? And and thinking about saving $35,000 a year in those avoided costs. Right? We can just aggregate Please.
It's a three year average. That's a
big difference. David? Oh my gosh. Incubated. Sorry.
I don't need to actually wait till you're done. But I what were was the Citi recurring late fees because of the how many account utility accounts there was? It sounds like the from what from what I'm trying to interpret, the cloud database helps combine the accounts?
