Ojai City Council Special Meeting

Okay, welcome everyone. Wonderful. Welcome to the Tuesday, August 5th special meeting of the Ojai City Council. Mr. Montgomery, roll call please.

Okay, great. Actually, I'm going to hand this over to Ms. Macaluso and Mr. Wells. So, Mora, would you like to tee things up for us, please, tonight?

Yes, thank you, and thank you, Mayor and Commissioners and Council Members. I'd like to introduce myself, Mora Macaluso. I'm the Principal Planner here at the City of Ojai, and we have Walker Wells across the way here with Rameen Associates, and we also have Myra Vega online, and she is with TRC Companies. And after my presentation and after public comments, I'll be handing this over to those consultants.

So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about, well, I already did tell you about myself and about these people, and we're here to talk about the energy efficiency approach that is on the agenda this evening. We've invited the public and construction professionals to this community meeting slash workshop regarding the proposed single-family flexpath energy efficiency approach. This is an educational opportunity. And just as importantly, it's an opportunity to answer and respond, to listen to and respond to questions that you may have, as well as the the council. Your questions and our responses are going to be included in a landing page that's already up online. The landing page is on the city's website. It's a very long name. And so instead of telling it to you right now, I want you to know that I did put It's not that

long.

Well, okay. Let's hear it. I'm going to say it anyway. No, no, no. It's all hyphens. Oh, go ahead. You say it. www.ojai.ca.gov slash 597 slash single-family-energy-efficient-ordinance If there are no more little pieces of paper at the back, you can always contact Community Development and we can guide you to that.

We'll also promote it. We'll put it out on social media. It'll be linked from the front page of the City website, so we'll make it as easy to find as we possibly can.

Excellent. Today's presentation materials and the agenda reports and other Flexpath energy efficiency materials and upcoming meetings are all going to be provided on this landing page. This workshop is not meant to provide a decision on this proposed process this evening. It's to, again, gather your questions and respond to them this evening and also perhaps on the landing page at another time or following the meeting.

and the next step moving forward will be a public or in a public hearing realm is a City Council meeting on August 12th and that'll be a further discussion on the Flexpath and also to consider a draft ordinance. And so with that, I'd like to hand it over. Oh, I'm sorry, are we doing public comments first?

Well, I want to hand it to the Mayor. I know that the Mayor and Mr. Wells discussed an approach for the presentation. So, Mayor, do you want to trot that out?

I think my thought would be that we hear the presentation as it goes on, take questions from staff, and then once there's something to respond to, possibly public comments at that point. Does that seem reasonable? Okay. Does that seem reasonable to my colleagues? Okay. Let's proceed. So just to reaffirm, if one of us has a question for you, you're okay with us interrupting and asking a clarifying question?

Absolutely.

Thank

you. Yes. Okay, well, good evening. Thank you for this opportunity to share a little more information on this energy efficiency Proposed Ordinance, and again, this is set up to be a sort of workshop format, part of public engagement, so it's a little more flexible, maybe, in format than a conventional city council meeting, and that's the intent. So what I want to present tonight is just a little background on the development of this ordinance, kind of where we've been, some of the main building blocks that go into putting it together, how we sort of arrived at the square feet and triggers, where the points come from, where the measures come from, the relationship with the state in the cost-effectiveness programs.

How we're not getting into exempted appliances at the federal level, and we're responding to things that happened with Berkeley with the gas ban, all to put something together that hopefully is straightforward to implement and meets all of these other checks and balances. So with that, I'm going to jump into it. Some of these slides you will have seen before, but we have some more chance to talk about them.

Last time I presented, I think it was 11 o'clock at night. Okay, so here we are. Got to get dialed in with the mic. So purpose, give stakeholders and the community a chance to learn about and provide feedback on this ordinance that's being proposed. We have been at this for a while, and even not on this slide are things like the Climate Emergency Ordinance that was adopted, and, you know, there's a whole history to the left of other things, bans on lawn mowers and weed whackers and these types of things. So Ojai has been involved in the sort of sustainability Dialogue, and sort of Climate Action Dialogue for a while. This particular effort, you could say, started with the Council entering into this agreement with Clean Power Alliance, your electricity provider, to have the group that I work for, Ramey Associates, we're a sub-consultant to the main contractor, TRC Companies, and that's who Myra is with.

So entered into this agreement for us to help you, and that's what we've been trying to do. And then it was last August that we were here and did a sort of a roundtable discussion with some people involved in the business community and the building community. We had this information session in October, back in December. In January, there was the session where it was sort of intimated to be potentially a first reading, at which point we stopped because the Council was involved in this priority-setting effort.

And then now it's sort of been resurrected, and here we are tonight, which I'm very excited about. So what is this Flexpath approach? Well, it's supposed to refer to... Am I doing this wrong? I keep cutting in and out.

Yeah.

There we go. That's better. All right. Usually you want to get right up on the mic. Okay. So, here's this flexible pathway approach, and step one is it builds on or leverages your involvement, participation with Clean Power Alliance. So, you know, you have clean electricity, which means you would like to, at least in concept, power as many things as possible with clean electricity.

There's also a baseline understanding that you don't want to waste any kind of energy because it's all a resource that has to come from somewhere. So you want to include energy efficiency and then encouragements to electrify in the ordinance. And that's what this Flexpath does. It gives you different choices that you'll see in a little bit. To choose your pathway to compliance.

It does respond to the Berkeley ruling on the gas ban. So we basically said, well, we can't just ban gas. We have to instead encourage people to do things that are related to efficiency, or hopefully they choose to do things related to electrification. It also meets this federal EPCA Energy Policy and Conservation Act that says only the feds can regulate certain appliances like hot water heaters and like HVAC systems. So we can't create a local ordinance that would ask for a higher level of efficiency or preclude the use of those appliances. That's the federal government's job.

And then the state has requirements around cost-effectiveness. You see that on the second kind of indented bullet. And the state runs this program where all three of the investor-owned utilities support this statewide cost-effectiveness study for every single climate zone in the state. And that's what this ordinance is based on, is that state-level analysis. And then you can see it in a minute, too, but it basically determines how many British thermal units, BTUs, annually could be saved by adopting different measures, like upgrading your windows, riding insulation.

And there's a list of items, and it's the same list for every climate zone, and they go through their cost-effectiveness analysis and say these things are cost-effectiveness and these things aren't. Your local ordinance needs to have a pathway that only pulls from the cost-effective measures. You can add other things that people can choose, but there has to be a cost-effective pathway.

Multiple Pathways, we've talked about some of the administration in the past and how it's relatively straightforward to fold in compliance with the ordinance with your existing plan check and plan review process, basically a checklist where someone could say, I don't know, there's like 15 items, you just say these are the ones I'm doing and I get enough points and I'm done, that's in the plans and then it would go to the plan checker.

And then you can see that, you know, a number of other jurisdictions have adopted this approach. So you're a leader, but you're not first, which is kind of a good spot to

be

in. Why are we here today? Well, there is some urgency, and there was AB 306 that was causing a lot of consternation for many of us. It got turned into AB 130, but this was all of an effort to restrict local governments from adopting local codes up until, I don't know, sometime in the future, I think three years in the future. There are some provisions in what actually got adopted by the legislature as part of the budget bill, so this thing kind of got Accelerated, I guess, in how it got moved through the legislature.

So it says, if you have adopted a code before September 30th, you can keep it. And so we, this is why we are here tonight, to do more outreach, and then scheduled for next week for a first reading, and hopefully able to do the second reading, if whatever, if it does go forward next week. So it's approved and adopted before the 30th of September. There's some other exemptions.

If your general plan speaks about environment or climate, or if you have a climate action plan, both of those things are in the works by the firm that I work for, but they're not done. So we felt like we couldn't use those other exemptions and it would behoove us if we're taking, if this is something you want to do. to get these key steps completed before the 30th of September. It doesn't have to go into effect immediately on the 1st of October, it just needs to be adopted. We can give a bit of a pause to educate contractors and building owners about what's entailed and how it works, and then it could If all this goes as planned, it could go into effect on the 1st of January along with all the other building code updates. We just happen to be in the triennial building code update cycle.

So these can be local code amendments just folded in, which I think is preferred because then the community gets all the new code at once rather than getting it piecemeal.

If I may, that is actually what's being proposed and I believe the date is closer to January 31st for implementation to allow for staff and your team to educate the community and the space for everybody to get up to speed.

Okay, just to point out, and there's also a typo that is known already, but on page 5 of 6 in the staff report of this item, you look at the bottom of the page under next steps timing. It's already known, I'm just highlighting. If adopted at the August 26 Council meeting, the ordinance would take effect on September 26, 2025. However, the ordinance would apply to applications submitted to the seat on or after January 31st. It should say 2026. Okay.

Not 2025. All

right. We were going to time travel. I know. We're working

on it.

Thanks.

I was like, that's why you're going to time travel?

I know, right? Yeah, I would. And there are better reasons. Yes.

Okay. So that's why some of this urgency. So what are the benefits? So these are the benefits to homeowners in the community. And, you know, obviously, this is tied into your environmental goals and your climate goals. That's sort of citywide action, and then there's sort of regional and global benefits to all of this. But, you know, we also need to think about the people who are doing these projects, the homeowners, and, you know, what they get out of this. So they will save energy, and that should reduce their bill. There's some issues, just to be transparent about everything, that moving from gas to electricity sometimes can result in higher utility costs. It depends on the cost of gas, and gas fluctuates quite a bit.

So you may come out cost neutral, which is typically what the analysis shows. But you will be saving energy, and ideally, and most likely, you will be saving on your bill. A number of these measures, like adding insulation, do improve comfort. So it means you will have a less leaky house, a better insulated house. It should stay cooler or warmer, depending on what you're after in the time of year.

Removing gas appliances, which are known to leak to some extent, and releasing methane into the home, which can be an asthma trigger, is a benefit for public health. Combusting natural gas produces particulate matter. It also produces carbon monoxide. Those can also be asthma triggers. So it's good to get the combustion of natural gas out of the building. So this is a benefit of electrification. You can see things are safer because we don't have things that are literally on fire in your house.

And then there are some connections that we've been drawing kind of based on what we heard back in January about seeing, you know, where there is a nexus to fire hardening with some of these measures. So, you know, higher performing windows like a double pane window is more fire resistant than a single pane window. And so that's just one example of sort of a mutual benefit across these two ideas. And then, kind of thinking of the big picture, improved outdoor air quality. So, you are in an air base and that is in non-attainment for oxides of nitrogen, NOx, people will call it. And when you combust methane or combust anything, there's a chemical reaction with the atmosphere. Remember, most of our air is an oxygen, it's nitrogen. And so it'll produce oxides of nitrogen, which is a respiratory irritant and also an asthma trigger.

So you're kind of helping in a modest way with regional air quality. And this is why a number of the air quality management districts have also looked at regulating or restricting the sale of gas-fired appliances. It was in the Bay Area and then South Coast Air Quality Management District. They're looking at electrification from a pure air quality and health standpoint, not a climate standpoint, but the health benefit is there.

Okay, so we're going to kind of jump to the conclusion and then maybe go backwards and fill in some of the rationale behind these things. This is effectively the meat of the ordinance. Who is covered? What size of projects are covered? And then what is the list of things that people can choose from? And Myra and the folks at TRC looked at some of your permit data and were able to see some coalescence around sort of modest-sized projects being around 300 square feet, and then some larger projects at around 1,000 square feet. So this is how we created those thresholds, looking at the Ojai-specific permit

data.

And then you can see the list here and the points. So, you know, these are the measures. Since we're doing this very deliberately, I'll just go through them. So the water heating packet is insulating the pipes that go to and from the water heater. And if it doesn't have it, they call it a jacket, but it's like a sort of a blanket. They call it a blanket as well that goes around the water heater that just adds insulation to it. So that's what that one is. You put this blanket around the water heater, you insulate the pipes, that would save you, that would get you one point. And then this little box over here on the left, it says one point equals one million BTUs saved per year. So there's the logic to the points. So it's not like somebody said, feels like a one, feels like a seven.

The state, again, in their cost-effectiveness studies, have gone through and said, in this climate zone, this measure will result in this many BTUs of savings, and that equals one point in this case. Switching to an induction cooktop. As other benefits, getting rid of combustion has a relatively minor efficiency benefit, but there's some in there. They are slightly more efficient than electric resistance or gas, just in how they generate heat with magnets, basically. Heat pump close dryer is just a close dryer that uses heat pump electric technology instead of combusting gas or electric resistance.

Air sealing is just going around with a caulk gun and sealing up all the leaks. Duct sealing is checking to see if, you know, a lot of times that gray goop is called mastic that goes on the ducts. It can get old, it can crack, or sometimes there's still ducts that were put together with duct tape. and so those just need to be sealed. And then adding attic insulation, R-19, R stands for resistance and a bigger number means more insulation.

So that amount of insulation would be unusual to have in a conventional attic. You might have R-32 or something. Upgrading your windows, likely to double pane, also with low, low, lowy glass and solar reflectance on it. So just a better, better window. Adding insulation into the wall. You can see the R again, the resistance R13. Then you see the points go up. Putting in new ducts and ceiling or plus ceiling what's there worth six points. Then we go down to the insulating in the floor if you have a crawl space with R-19 or R-30, heat pump hot water heater, it's electric. And then we get into adding on solar photovoltaic and then pre-wiring things for electric heat pump space heater, which is your HVAC.

And finally, these three mandatory measures as they apply. So if you're in the utility room, the kitchen or laundry, we want you to pre-wire for the electric appliances, which is basically putting in the sort of capacity for 220. When you eventually upgrade your appliances, so it's saying you can keep what you have, but if you're gonna open up the walls and do work, we want you to put in the infrastructure, basically, for your future electric appliance.

And then to leave space in the electrical panel for that future 220, and also to leave space in the electric panel for a future electric vehicle. So that's the list. I talked about the 300 square feet and the 1,000 square feet. If you have a 300 square foot building, you would need to get eight points. And if you have a 1,000 square foot or larger project, you would need 19 points. And these next slides just give an example of what the kind of things you would need to do. And then there's some more examples of what this might look like.

Can I stop here for one second? Yes. Ms. Macaluso, I want to check a couple of things. In the past, at least earlier in the year, on the 300 square feet or less, were we talking about at most one project a month at most? Is that your rough estimate?

Yes, that's a rough estimate of the projects we've had.

So

one

project at most, and then of 1,000 square feet, Mr. Seibert said something like a handful at most. And it does not apply to businesses.

That's correct, single family houses only.

Okay, just clarifying. Thank you.

Then I forgot to mention something. You see the asterisks to the left of air sealing, duct sealing? These are all measures that have some correlation to fire hardening. So if there's more insulation, there's more resistance to the fire moving through the wall. I talked about the better windows. Also, if there's gaps in the ducts, it's also a pathway that fire could come into the home.

Yes.

Yeah, just following up on what it addresses. It also, I understand, only applies to existing construction that is being modified. Yes. So a new construction is going to have its own set of

It would, yes. Yeah. And some of the thinking is that the energy code that will go into effect on the 1st of January, the building code, is pretty stringent. And so it might be enough for new single family. And the real opportunity, if we're connecting this back to climate action, is with your existing building stuff. So I didn't say this before, but You know, most of your emissions are going to come from transportation, which you don't regulate. Like, you can't pass an ordinance that says everybody has to buy an electric car and charge it with clean energy. You know, you can put in charging stations and facilitate it, but you can't regulate the purchase of private vehicles. But you do have regulatory authority over the built environment in your city.

And sort of the place that's leaking the most energy or inversely has the most opportunity for benefit is the existing building stock. And that's exactly what we're looking at.

I have another question too. The modifications that we're talking about to earn these points, these could be done anywhere in the home, not just in the area that's being renovated, is that correct?

My understanding is they would need to be done everywhere in the home. You wouldn't just put a little piece of better insulation over your kitchen if you redid your kitchen. It would need to be the attic.

Great, thank you. That's what I meant.

For clarification, you're going to get to this slide, but modification can't be more than 20% of the value of the

addition. Right. If it gets too expensive, then they would be exempt.

So just to follow up, if you were going to do floor insulation, you would have to do your entire home in floor. The entire home would have to be insulated, which means you'd have to pull up your entire floor.

My understanding is this would be in the crawl space. You'd go under the house and you're stapling the insulation from underneath.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. So you wouldn't have to tear up your floor. Yeah. Okay, so then here's just a couple examples. And like I said, there's other examples. So this would say for a 300 square foot project. And this is only looking at things that have been deemed cost effective, you could do duct sealing, and add insulation to your attic, and you would get eight points and you would be done.

or you could do duct sealing and do wall insulation and you would be done. Or you could jump down to the 17-point item, which is to put up a solar photovoltaic system and then with the pre-wiring to the panel. And those are examples of choices that to me make sense, things people might actually do and that kind of go together.

I'm gonna, um, so maybe the floor was a bad example, but if you were gonna do wall insulation, for instance, that's a different story.

That is a different story.

Yeah. Let's see, wall insulation is three points, but you would have to...

You have to blow in insulation, probably, to your, all the walls in your house. Okay. Yeah.

That's not obvious. That, I, I, this is, I've read it many times, that was not clear to me, but I'm glad we're talking about that now.

Yeah, I asked this question a couple days ago, I'm like, would this apply to just the area of work or the whole building? And they said, well, this Energy Commission is assuming that it's an upgrade to the whole, the whole structure. And so, you know, the Energy Code went into effect in 1978, or 1979, I think. And so houses built before that might not have any insulation in the wall.

Because some of the issues, like a heat pump, clothes dryer, you would only have one. Those are easy. And but on so for example, if you said, let's say you, you're going to build another room, and you decide in the room, I'm going to put the double pane glass, then the owner would have to put double pane glass throughout the house.

Yes, which is why there's other ways to do it. So you could do the duct sealing and the attic sealing, or you could choose items that aren't considered to be cost effective by the state. And you know, again, cost effectiveness is that the incremental cost of the item gets paid back during its assumed lifecycle. So you could just jump down to the heat pump, water heater, or the heat pump HVAC system, and you would get all of your points in one fell swoop.

Must it be this way?

In which

way? I'm asking you this question. So let's say if somebody were to say, I'm building a guest bedroom, and I want to do these things, must it be that they have to have windows replaced throughout the home? Or could they just do it in the guest room?

My understanding, this is maybe where I'd like call a friend, but Moira has, I've asked her this question and been told it's the whole building, which is, again, why we like this system, because it gives you choices.

I believe you mean Myra.

I

know we have a Myra. I meant Myra. But if there's a cap at the percentage of money, and let's say you have 10 windows, and you meet that cap with 5 windows, would replacing those 5 still count as the credit, or would you have to do, if the cap is the dollar amount?

How I think it would work is someone might say, well, if these windows are so expensive, maybe you might look at some other options that could get you your eight points that are less costly or better aligned with your project.

So tell me if I'm understanding you. If you said, Oh, I'm ready to do the double paying glass, but 20% of the value of the guest bedroom means I could do half the house, not the entire house. Would that suffice?

if cost were an issue. I mean, obviously, the ideal would be if cost wasn't an issue, you'd have all the great benefits of the fire-hardening benefits, you'd have the benefits of the double-pane windows, but if you are looking for ways to get points, and you're on a tight budget, then, I mean, one of the things I like about this is that it is flexible, that you can look at what, you have a choice, But I'm wondering if, instead of looking at the house as the cap, like you have to do all or nothing, if the dollar amount would suffice for someone who's on a tighter budget.

So,

can you all hear me now?

I was having some audio

issues. Can you all hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah, so, I might have missed the last couple of comments. I was figuring out the audio issues, but this question about the windows. You'll notice on the slide that for a target score of eight, we didn't select windows because it's unlikely someone with that small of a renovation is going to choose that measure. It is a very expensive measure. It is cost effective, but it is very expensive.

It's likely for that higher threshold that we're gonna talk about here soon, where they're replacing at least 1,000 square feet of their home, where they might consider that measure. It's more likely they're gonna take some of these smaller efficiency upgrades or choose to Electrify one of their appliances, either a heat pump space heater or, I'm sorry, a heat pump water heater, which would meet all the points, or a heat pump space heater in one of the one-point measures.

And so in terms of, I think, Council Member Lange, you were suggesting having the trigger be on a dollar value instead of a square foot trigger. Is that what you were suggesting?

Yes. Yes, I was wondering if in instances where you do have a budget, if doing the entire house isn't feasible, then could you meet that cap of the percentage of the overall reno and have that count for the points?

Yeah, so it wouldn't be the trigger, Myra, it would, would more be a, you'd say it's a $50,000 project. And so if the upgrades are more than $10,000, I need, I can stop doing them. You know, and

yeah, so there's, we do have an exception as part of that 20,000 20% cost threshold, you would just need to achieve whatever Points get you to that 20%. Does that answer the

question? If I can follow up on that, another way to look at the question that was asked is, if there's a, you know, kind of a presumption that you're going to do the entire house, because that's what the default for the rules is, but you've already met your financial cap, You get to stop at, say, five windows instead of doing all ten.

That's

what I thought she was proposing.

If you've done other measures in the past, you can get credit for those retroactively when you go to do these types of amendments also.

Yeah, and to Council Member Lange's proposal, I don't think if that detail would work for the CEC. I don't think, I don't know if that would get through CEC approval, because in order to get the points, you kind of have to follow the methodology that the assumptions that were in the cost-effectiveness study, which, again, those savings represent whole home savings.

But we do have, you know, a variety of exceptions, which Taylor brought up another one that are meant to kind of, because we can't predict every situation, but the list of exceptions should be able to cover a variety of scenarios where it is financially infeasible to meet the target score or technically infeasible to meet the target score. And then also granting, as Taylor mentioned, granting people credit for doing some of these efficiency measures.

Voluntarily, before this ordinance took effect. And I just wanted to point out for the, we talked about the wall installation as an example. These points are based off vintage of pre-1978. And so looking at Ojai's building stock, that represents a good portion, the bulk of Ojai's building stock. So that, just to put that in perspective, that a lot of these homes might not already have these existing Measures, which is where these energy-saving benefits come from as well.

Thank you. And just for clarification, I wasn't proposing that we have that cap. I was just asking for clarification. Yeah, sure. I mean,

that's why we're here. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for clarifying. So let's hold this sort of as a conceptual issue, and then we have a few more examples of real projects, and then maybe that'll say, okay, in practice, what would likely happen? All right, how do we go back to the slides? Christian, could we please put the PowerPoint back up? Thank

you.

All right, so this was an eight-point option. And as you can see, Council Member Lang, we didn't put in windows because, I mean, yeah, I thought, well, that's expensive. So there have to be sort of reasonable pathways through this so it's fair. Okay, so this is the larger project, 1,000 square feet or over, and then the target score here that's being recommended is 19.

And so you can see that those four boxes kind of towards the top. Could go together. And these are, again, all items considered cost-effective by the state. So insulating the attic, changing out your windows, adding insulation to your wall, and putting in new ducts or sealing the ducts that are there already. So it's, you know, it's a pretty big project on energy, but it's also a pretty big project in general. Or you could put up solar and then pick one of the above or a couple of the one-point options.

You know, and I don't know the average of you have some very large homes, but then you have some not super large homes. But I mean, 1000 square feet could be like a quarter to half of a house depending on, you know, where it is. So I think it's of a scale that this level of investment in energy isn't disproportionate to the size of the project. Okay, and then I talked about this already, but just these two rules, things have to be cost effective, and we have to have a pathway that does not require electrification, and so we showed that on those previous slides.

Again, people can choose the electric appliances. You can see they're worth a lot of points, but we can't make people have to do that. And then these target scores were selected. It's a little tiny on here, but this basically goes back to the cost-effectiveness studies, and each point is worth a million BTU saved, and so this is sort of pulled out of the cost-effectiveness study for Climate Zone 9, which is the climate zone that the vast, vast majority of Ojai is located within. I think the point here is if you added up all of the possible points, you would get to 37.

So that might be like the worst case that we could ever imagine imposing on people. And then we're coming, we're sort of backing off of that to get to a level we feel is meaningful, but also achievable and reasonable, given the kind of the size of projects in your city.

So I have a question. Yes. So on the cost effectiveness, has that been calculated on how long it will take a homeowner who meets either the 8 or the 17 or 19 to recoup? How many years will it take for them to recoup the money that was invested in those energy efficiency?

Yeah, I mean the short answer is yes, for each measure. So it says what's the effective life of each measure, what's its incremental cost compared to a baseline? So say a regular gas tank water heater costs, I don't know what it costs, say it costs $1,000 now, and the heat pump hot water heater costs $1,500, then it would say over the life of that product, would it recoup, would the owner recoup their $500 investment, then it would be determined to be cost effective.

So it does say you get all your money back that you spent, but it's saying if you make this investment in energy efficiency, you will get your money back, and that's the cost-effectiveness test.

Based on the life of that unit.

That unit, right. So windows, you know, 40 years, you know, water heater, probably 15 years, air sealing, I don't know what it is, five to seven, because caulk dries out. Yeah,

okay.

It's basically saying the state does a whole bunch of stuff that we rely on. And that's the source of the, really the score for each of these measures. So it's not something that we can really tinker with at the local level. If, and Myra brought it up, if we want to have this be reviewed and sort of validated by the Energy Commission, which is an important step that has to happen before it can go into effect.

And we've talked about some of this already. You know, you get to 300 square feet, they may already be doing some things that are included in Flexpath, like upgrading the water heater, upgrading the heating and cooling, or adding insulation. And then we see it's about 10 projects a year.

They're having an open house over there. Okay, a little more to

go. Just

some

exceptions.

So

if you're just repairing

things, that's exempted. We've talked about this 20% of the project valuation, so I think you would need to say there is no pathway I can take that doesn't result in me spending more than 20% of the total value of the project, and then you would be able to get an exception. But you couldn't just pick the most expensive items and throw your hands up. You get credit, Taylor mentioned this, for things that have been done in the past.

We know that historic buildings have unique requirements, particularly around windows, sometimes about exterior materials, so it'd be exempt. If you're doing things around fire hardening or seismic retrofit, that wouldn't count, because we're thinking you're doing proactive, smart things. You know, if you're bolting your foundation or, I don't know, changing your roof to something that's less combustible, that shouldn't really trigger this requirement.

Can I go back? So the question is really the leeway or flexibility that our planning department will have. So for example, let's go with the bedroom example. And you exercise some of your choices and it comes to 18%, but it doesn't get you to your points yet. So then if you take any next item to get you to the number of points, it will take you over 20%. What would happen then in that scenario? Would the person have to spend more or would they spend just enough to get to as many points as they can get but not exceed 20? But if you were talking about something binary, like doing something or not doing something, would it be sufficient to say you're at 18% of the cost but you don't have all your points and go ahead?

And anything else would make you spend 22%?