Feb 28, 2025 Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee on 2025-02-28 1:00 PM

Okay. All right. Good afternoon. This is the Friday, February 28, 2025 meeting of the Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee being held here at the work session room of the Denton City Hall. Our first item on our agenda today is approval of January 24, 2025 minutes. Any discussion? Any motions? I move to approve. I second. All right. We have a motion to approve and a second. Dr. Meyer and Mr. Richter, all in favor of approval? Aye. All opposed? Nobody's opposed. Okay. Our next item is to receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding Electric Lawn Equipment Incentive Pilot Program. Captain Barnett, I'm the Sustainability Manager, Environmental Services and Sustainability. If you can't hear me, just let me know. I might have to give Julie City Yell for me. So we're going to talk about the Electric Lawn Equipment Incentive Program that we proposed in the work plan. It has some general requirements. We reviewed several programs, different states, and it seemed to be pretty consistent. General requirement, battery powered equipment. Then we have some rebate levels that we're proposing, some options, and then a question about disposal of gasoline equipment and the options for that. So the program would be available to DIN residents. It's not going to be tied to DME customer status because this would be framework funding, so it would be all DIN residents. It would be a new battery powered lawn equipment would be eligible. The application, similar to the Green Sense Program, would have to include the detailed receipt, the type of equipment, which is price. Again, like Green Sense, submitted within 90 days of purchase. And then we were considering an additional $50 step up with proof of disposal of a gasoline powered lawn mower, which would be disposed of through the City of DIN. So just the incentive options that we proposed. We saw rebates as low as $50 for lawn mowers, and then up to $100 or more for the string trimmer tool type equipment, with your other few options. So one would be a max of $500, and you can get up to a $300 rebate for a lawn mower with turn in. $250 for one without turning in the gasoline lawn mower, and then up to $100 for the string trimmer lower spas, and $50 for an additional battery. And it would be a combination of rebates up to $500. Second option would be the max of $300, and you can see the 50% and just the lower rebate levels on that option. And then option three would just be a flat rebate, not a 50% of an invoice. It would just be a flat rebate of $100, 50 for the string trimmer, 50 for the mower without turn in, and then 25 for the additional battery. Do y'all have any questions or thoughts about any of those options? I have a question and a comment. So this program involves only battery-operated lawn mower, not the ones that have a cord. Correct. And the reason is, you said, for ease of use and range. But I think if we think better about the environmental impact and sustainability, I think using the battery-operated one does more damage to the environment than just plug it in your lawn mower. So are there any incentives to continue this program with the cord-operated? I have one, and I'm not going to go on about that with me. I'm just thinking. I think that the programs that we've reviewed, I didn't see any that were corded. There's nothing to say that we couldn't have a corded equipment rebate. I understand the concern about the materials and the batteries and the recycling options for the batteries. I think that it's probably more practical, maybe, for the battery for some folks when they're going out with a lawn mower. I think a corded string trimmer is probably a little bit easier for folks to look at, but not opposed to considering it corded. I'd like to echo Dr. Meyer's concern, because I did dig around a little bit on Lowe's and Duplo's website, as I'm sure the staff did too. And there are corded electric lawn equipment. And if I feel the motivation under the sustainability framework is to get something in an incentive program shifting from gasoline, I think we still check that box with corded electric equipment. So I would agree, I think, at least, to adding it to the program could be considered if it still meets the goal of reducing emissions and pollution from gas-powered lawn equipment. I guess to add, though, I was looking at City of Dallas' recently closed incentive program that's similarly structured. And they kind of went with a little bit separate categories. It seemed like they were hitting $100 for a push mower, $200 for a riding, $50 for trimmer and other lawn equipment, and $25 for batteries at flat rebate, which kind of falls largely into our option 3 category. So I looked at that and kind of thought we were doing pretty good, but our base option was matching what Dallas is processing through right now. But then I did go a little bit further and looked at what are the top offerings that your large box retailers offer. So I just added up the top 10 most popular lawn equipment for mowers and trimmers and whatever. And the price gaps for the mowers between electric and gas came out to about $80, electric being a little bit more expensive. And then for the trimmers, most of the electric powered equipment was already anywhere from $50 to about $75 cheaper than the gas powered equipment. So that kind of told me maybe something we look at is structuring a little bit heavier of a weight where there is a larger price difference between the electric and gas power to push that incentive a little bit more if the market's already there in a lot of places for the handheld equipment. So that could be just something to discuss and consider. But given that little dig around, I was leaning for option one or option two in our pricing structure. One question I did have though, knowing that Dallas did have a differential between their types of mowing equipment, do we split a riding versus a push versus a self-propelled mower? Are we kind of capturing that all in one bucket? It's all in one bucket. And then I was wondering too, for the trade-in option, what the implementation of that would look like, how we're recording proof of disposal through the bulk curbside collection. So that's on a future slide that I can tell you. So the City of Denton can pick up a lot more as a bulky item curbside right now. It just has to be drained of all the gas and oil. They could also be dropped off at our home chemical collection site, also drained, talked to Solid Waste about creating just a freedom of disposal that they could give the homeowner to submit whenever they turn one in or have one picked up. Any other discussion? A couple things. One, I echo the coordinate comment. I think that's good. Is there a disposal program for gas-powered leaf blowers? Not that I'm aware of. I think there's going to be a lot more plastic in the house. I have with the multi lawn mowers that are going to start recycling for destruction. And my other question, well two, one real quick, I just don't follow. What does it mean by those max figures? There doesn't have to be a max calendar year or program year that somebody could receive so they couldn't go get three lawn mower remains. I see. All right. Thanks. You probably said that. I just missed it. The other is does the staff or will you at some point get a sense of the, some way quantifying the benefits of this incentive with others in our offering? Because my general sense is this is a pretty good deal because I know a little bit there's a lot of air pollution and noise that comes off of these things and it has a lot of co-benefits that come with it just locally. Is that? And there's some calculators that we can estimate emissions reduction. We can bring that back and we'll talk about the great sense reductions as well. That's coming up next month, I think. I don't think it'll be super precise, but maybe just to see general comparison. Just some estimates, yeah. Catherine, if I may, I was taking around on that because I was interested too and I did find a resource that showed the annual emissions equivalent of lawn usage for Denton County was the particulate matter equivalent of 522,000 cars operating normally in a year. And then another resource was saying the typical emissions of lawn care equipment are often 100 to 120 times higher than a vehicle or a combustion engine vehicle or truck. So this is a really targeted program if the motivation is emissions reduction. Air quality improvement. I mean that that was my general sense. Thank you for the numbers. This could have a real big impact. I'll send you that paper, yeah, that came from there. Thanks for doing the research. Very good. Appreciate it. Any other comments or questions? I think it would be advantageous to add cordage. I've started out with a corded lawnmower and a corded trimmer and got tired of juggling the cords and so we've got the battery and it's a dream. So with that in mind, I would also hope that we could use the largest incentive that we can give, option one. And to back up a little on what Adam said, I think when this program is communicated to the public that we really make a very detailed list of benefits of using electric lawn equipment as opposed to combustion engine. The marketing program. Are there any ideas yet about that? How is it going to be, you know, information in bills or and website? We can use all of the tools that we currently use. Citizen connection, resident update, website, social media. Does the Parks and Rec, I know they got one lawnmower last year, one electric lawnmower, I think. One electric return. Yeah. And then they're using a lot of the battery power hand tool equipment. So maybe in terms of promotion, some videos could be made of staff actually using big smiles on their face. Absolutely. But I think this is great. And the figures that Bran just gave us really gives even more impetus to to implementing a program like this, I think. One follow-up question I had because it does kind of sound like the general approval of this type of project. But looking forward, I remember we had a discussion when we first thought about putting this type of program in the rebate program, looking at commercial entities and incentivizing a transition from gas to electric. And we kind of had mixed signals there. I suppose from a staff perspective, looking at this first year implementation of this type of program and depending on its success or not, if I'd like to return to that discussion maybe at next fiscal, if we want to renew this and consider expanding it for commercial entities since it's not tied to D&E customers exclusively. But I think that's maybe a future discussion to follow up. I think we can leave that on the list for a future discussion. Does anyone else have any feelings about that option? What level? Option one, two, or three. What's the total amount of money that's available? We have $50,000 earmarked for this right now for the pilot. I mean, I lean towards option one. That's kind of why I asked that question just because my general sense is this could have a real big impact. Me too. But I honestly don't know enough. I would also say option one and maybe we treat it similar to the Evike program where we maxed out and we had to do some reshifting if the program was really successful. But maybe we cross that bridge when we get there. We can revisit absolutely if we find we're bumping up against that. Yeah, that's what I mean. That's great. I will let you know that in my conversations with Lowe's about their bond equipment, about 75% of what they have on the shelves now is electric. So that market uptake has really started to make a noticeable difference. Any more discussion? Do you need any more from us? Okay, thank you very much. Let's see what we have next. The next item is to receive a report and hold a discussion regarding State of Texas energy efficiency rebate programs. From me again. So just a little bit of an update. So we're just going to talk a little bit about the energy efficiency rebates that the State Energy Conservation Office has been awarded. There's two programs, the Home Efficiency Rebates or the HOMES program and then the Home Electrification Rebate program or the HEAR program. So HOMES incentivizes whole home retrofits. It's for single family or multi family. It's available to any income level. But this is where the low income, moderate income hasn't benefited. The readout amounts are doubled for low or moderate income households. And this program does stack with our Green Sense rebates. So you could qualify for a Green Sense rebate and it wouldn't reduce your HOMES rebate. So the readout amounts are determined based on energy savings calculated or modeled. And for the energy savings between 20% up to 34%, low income will receive a $4,000 dollar rebate or up to 80%. All other is $2,000 or up to 50%. And then the $200 for multi-family. So there is a benefit for multi-family with these as well. And then energy savings greater than 35%. It's a double readout amount, so $80,000 and $4,000. The measured savings pathway, it's for proven kilowatt hour reduction equivalent and that would be $4,000 for 20% and $2,000 for anything below that. The HEAR rebate program is the Appliance Rebate program that we've talked about before. This would be available to low or moderate income. The owners of multi-family units could also use that with greater or equal to 50% LMI. So any government commercial or non-profit entity carrying out the qualified project on behalf of the event can also qualify. The income eligibility determines the percentage of the cost covered and it will also stack with rebates. And these are the rebates that they hope to have point of sale so there wouldn't be the initial cost to the homeowner or to the applicant. And the rebate levels are listed there. So it will get into the appliances in the home. It gets into the breaker box improvements, wiring. So it gets into the home improvements necessary to have more electric appliances. So with this program, the state was hoping to have them launched and applications available this summer. These have gotten caught up in the funding freeze. So we are monitoring the state. We're monitoring the federal level of funding. We saw some funding was released just this week for some Pennsylvania projects. So we're hopeful that these will be funded. These are direct to homeowner, property owner improvements to lower energy bills. So I'm very hopeful that these will be released and can start being paid this summer. And with that we can, I can stand for any questions. Question? Sorry if I missed this, but it's a state program, but is this federal funds coming through the state? Yes. States were allocated funding through for these programs. They had to submit an application and a plan for how to use the funding. Texas has been approved. It was approved in December I believe. And so we're just waiting on funding to be made available. And was this through the IRA? Yes. Okay so when you said it's caught up in the funding freeze, it's the federal? The federal funding freeze, yes. There was an allocation to each state. Some states chose not to use the program. And so right now we're kind of limbo as we. Yes. But do you know of any campaigns on the part of municipalities or states that are lobbying for the unfreezing of these funds? Or is it just a wait and see situation? I don't know if there's one specific to these funds. I've seen several other programs with very specific requests for release of funding. I have not seen one specific to these two programs. I thought that I didn't know if that would tie in with another item that was going to be discussed regarding lobbying in Austin. Perhaps I don't know the niceties of it. But if that were made a part of the city's ask for the legislature the importance of stuff like this. Yes I know some of the states are definitely involved with asking for those funds to be released since it's going directly to the state and not to the cities. A little bit of a go-between there. Thank you. Any other? That's anything. Okay thank you very much. Okay next we have staff reports. Do you have some memos from your backup and the matrix? Do you have any questions on any of those? So you're including all follow-up memo, the 89th state legislative program, and the matrix. Do you want comments on that? Yes if you have any questions or comments. Anybody? Oh I do have some questions. On the memorandum on the matrix follow-up, I was just curious as to whether since the city has not done its own risk assessment of city infrastructure, are there plans for the city to do such a risk assessment rather than under the umbrella, large umbrella that it is now under the Denton County Emergency Management Department. So I would like to know if there are any potential plans to do our own risk assessment of our own infrastructure. And we can ask our risk management department. Okay. The other thing that I wanted to mention is the need for more educational outreach on climate change and I think also the community information meetings. Well I'll cut right to the chase here. When I went to our website, as we all know under air quality and greenhouse gases, there's a link to the Department of Energy climate change resources. And I don't think it's the website that we want as a resource now. Climate change is couched simply in terms of its dangers to the fossil fuel industry. Any links to renewable energy that are on the site take you back to the welcome to the website page. All of this stuff has been scrubbed. So I think it's imperative that we get that off the website and put up some useful information. And along those lines, there is a I don't know if you've seen this, it's called the world's littlest book on climate change, which can be downloaded for free off the website. It's just facts. Very easy, very educational. There's another book which I neglected to bring which I can send you all in an email. But I think this it's imperative that you start looking at some good information about climate change, what people can do, frequently asked questions, situations like that. And I'll finish this up with when the city decided to resurrect its integrated pest management plan to use as much organic pesticides and herbicides in the parks. We went to Austin's IPM program and a committee was formed to do this under Laura Behrens. And Ms. Behrens said we're going to use the Austin plan as a template, but the difference is going to be that our plan is going to be better. And it is. So I would also suggest using a template such as Austin's or San Antonio's, especially Austin's in terms of community outreach for information about climate change. I think we should use that as a model and make it better just like we did with the IPM plan. So that's my all I have to say. You know obviously this is one more thing, pardon me, tying this in with the climate action plan. I mean how many people know we have a climate action plan and what it's hopefully going to do? Putting out as much information as we can that is going to help Denton reach its goal of net zero by 2050. That to me is the target date and everything that we put out should be geared toward reaching that. Now I'm finished. Okay. So does that bring us to anybody have anything they want to add to the matrix? No? Okay. Well that brings us to the end of the meeting. So there are a motion to adjourn. May, motion made. Seconded. Motion made and seconded to adjourn. So we'll see everyone next month. Thank you.