For the record, my name is Rutsi Louis Gen at large city counselor, and I am the vice chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations.

And I will be conducting today's hearing in the chair's absence.

Today is August 4th, 2026.

The exact time is 10 a.m.

In accordance with chapter two of the acts of 2025, modifying certain requirements of the open meeting law and relieving public bodies of certain requirements, including the requirement that public bodies conduct this meeting in a public place that is open and physically accessible to the public.

The city council will be conducting this hearing virtually via Zoom.

This hearing is being recorded.

It is also being live streamed at Boston.gov forward slash Ford slash City Council dash TV and broadcast on its Finity Channel 8, RCN Channel 82, Bios Channel 964.

Brand comments may be sent to the committee email at ccc.go at Boston.gov and will be made a part of the record and available to all counselors.

Public testimony will be taken at the end of this hearing.

Individuals will be called on in the order in which they signed up and will have two minutes to testify.

If you wish to sign up for public testimony and have not done so, please email our central staff liaison, Megan Kavanaugh at MEGHAN dot KAVANAGH at Boston.gov for the Zoom link and your name will be added to the list.

Today's hearing is on docket number one two two three, message in order for your approval and ordinance authorizing the city of Boston acting through its environment environment department to amend the distributed energy resource revenue revolving fund.

The current language for the revolving fund is limited in its use, and the change proposed will allow for proper usage of the fund while maintaining its original purpose.

The amended language will allow the fund to properly capture revenues and expenditures, ensuring an enhanced and seamless financial process for current city energy activities.

These amendments will properly capture demand response revenue and allow for the further development of the city's demand response program, increasing energy savings and reduce the city's greenhouse gas emissions produced by the emissions not addressed to the city's distributed energy resources.

This matter was sponsored by Mayor Michelle Wu.

It was referred to the committee on June 24th, 2026.

Today I am joined by my colleagues in order of arrival, Council President Braden, Councilor Murphy.

And as of now, that's all.

I would like to uh I would like to now introduce uh today's panelists testifying on behalf of the administration.

We have Oliver Sellers Garcia, Commissioner of the Environment Department, and Chris Kramer, director of the municipal energy unit, environment department.

I will now turn it over to you, the two of you, for your presentation.

Thank you so much, Counselor.

Um my name is Oliver Sellers Garcia, as stated, I'm commissioner of the environment department.

And um Chris Kramer is the director of the municipal energy unit, which is part of the environment department.

And um I thank you for um scheduling this hearing.

And frankly, if I may, the recap that is part of the submission is pretty much covers it all.

So what we'll do is just keep it very simple.

Um, and we're available to answer questions.

But what I would like to say from the start is that this is um uh in our view, essentially an administrative matter, just doing some tweaks and updates to a um named revolving fund um that was recently reauthorized as part of the budget process.

So um, Chris, if you can move to the next slide, um, just very quickly.

Um I am giving my introduction right now, and then Chris is going to go over the um existing um fund and the um proposed tweaks.

Um and so then I will just ask for the next slide.

Just a little bit of a framing of um what where this fund sits in terms of the city's efforts.

The municipal energy unit is the team inside of the environment department that actually works across the whole city and schools to manage energy usage from procurement to new energy projects, and um a big part of what we do is um continually look at ways to take advantage of programs or changes in technology that can um save energy costs and also can create um some revenue that we reinvest into further energy savings.

So this is something we've done in a variety of different ways over the years, and as part of our um housekeeping, um we see um a need to make a few tweaks to this revolving fund, and that is what this is all about.

Um so I'll turn it over to Chris who can walk through um the fund and the proposed changes.

Yeah, thanks.

Thanks, Oliver.

And like Oliver said, my name's Chris Kramer.

I'm the director of the municipal energy unit.

Um, or rather, the way as I was introduced, uh, thank you, counselor.

Um, just some quick definitions.

So demand response is uh a program um that uh or kind of a series of actions that reduces electricity use during um times when there's a lot of stress on the electric grid.

Really, how this plays out is turning down air conditioning, dimming non-essential lighting, for example.

Um other definitions are renewable energy certificate.

You may have heard of a rec before, um, and that's just an uh a certified kind of unit of electricity generated by a clean resource.

And a distributed energy resource is any kind of decentralized, um, think of anything that's not a big power plant, uh anything that's generating electricity close to where it is um used.

Or and um I shouldn't include in their batteries are it are considered a distributed energy resource.

Um so that the the fund that was reauthorized for fiscal year 2027, um 30396E.

Uh the um and this is a current kind of fund overview.

The purpose originally, as conceived in the early 2010s, was to receive revenue generated from the sale of renewable energy certificates as well as demand response program revenues.

Um those revenues came uh from kind of a discrete group of buildings and kind of generators.

We have two city owned solar arrays uh that at the time were generating um some revenue from energy certificate sales and uh what we call combined heat and power plants um uh or units in schools.

So the expenditures matched the revenues as is required with uh with revolving funds.

Um essentially, we use those funds to offset greenhouse gas emissions and to monitor, maintain and um operate existing uh city owned solar arrays and combined heat and power units.

The proposed changes are uh frankly minor and um aimed at expanding the participation of city buildings in demand response programs so that we're not only constrained to uh schools um and school combined heat and power units specifically and so city-owned solar rays.

So, what are the proposed amendments specifically expand the revenue source uh or potential sources of revenue to include all city buildings, not just Boston Public School combined heat and power units.

The expenditures uh, in addition to the ones that already exist in the ordinance, um we would add this first one, which is to specify that funds can be used for measures that expand the city's enrollment in demand response programs.