Good afternoon.

I'm calling to order the March 24, 2026 Committee of the Whole for Parks and Environment Sustainability.

In attendance are council members, Council President Stewart, Council Vice President Nuwakamina, Council Member Forsyth, Councilmember Kritzer, Councilmember Parsi, and we have Councilmember Prakriya online.

And myself, presiding officer Mincasoni.

We have five items on the agenda today that has been already shared with all the council members in their agenda packet.

Let's get started with our agenda number one.

The first item is overview of the new Clean Buildings Incentive Program.

And we have Jenny Laibeck, Executive Department Manager.

Avidas to share.

Good afternoon, Council.

So again, I'm Jenny Leibeck, Sustainability Manager.

So with the adoption of the Environmental Sustainability Action Plan this past December, we've been shifting our focus towards implementation activities.

So this means expanding existing programs, but also launching new city-led services that advance our climate and community resilience goals.

And so today I'm pleased to introduce Micah Bonkowski, a sustainability program administrator, who will provide an overview of one of these new initiatives, which is our Clean Buildings Incentive Program.

Good evening, Council and audience.

As Jenny stated, I'm here to provide an update on the implementation of our Clean Building Incentive Program.

As we modeled our greenhouse gas emissions for our updated environmental sustainability action plan, it really reinforced for us our understanding that in Redmond, the largest emissions reduction opportunities are in the building sector through increasing efficiency of the buildings we have and transitioning of fuel sources for those buildings, which is why in the plan of the five big moves, big moves one and two are related to buildings.

Big move one being make existing buildings better, which is where this program fits in.

And then big move two build resilient and efficient buildings.

Additionally, in 2019, Washington became the first state to pass a clean buildings performance standard law.

This law aimed to increase the efficiency of commercial buildings by requiring energy benchmarking, planning for efficiency upgrades, and building maintenance and operations programs.

For this first year for Redmond's Clean Building Incentive Program, we've partnered with the cities of Issaqua and Bellevue.

Both of those cities have had a program running for about two years.

And we chose to partner with them to both increase the regional reach of our program, borrow from their experience and expertise, and increase the administrative efficiency by having one technical assistance contractor under one contract through all three cities.

And we use the model of the Energy Energize East Side program and that it operates under.

Additionally, we want to provide education and technical assistance to all buildings in Redmond and building owners and operators to raise awareness of the state requirements through outreach and trainings.

We've hosted three webinar trainings so far on the clean building performance standard.

And during those buildings, we learned that a lot of building owners and operators are unaware of the clean building performance standard law, its impacts on them, and how they are supposed to comply with the law.

Additionally, we want to direct Redmond building owners and operators to other resources and incentives that are offered by PSE and the Department of Commerce to leverage our program dollars to bring in more assistance for Redmond businesses.

There's a lot more detail in this memo on what technical assistance specifically we're offering and what is in an energy management plan and an operations and maintenance program.

But I wanted to highlight a few key items.

The memo, when we wrote it timing-wise, was written as if the program had already launched.

And what we have hosted, like I said, three trainings so far webinars for building owners and operators.

The technical assistance part of the program will be launching in the coming weeks.

There were some unforeseen delays in finalizing the contract with our contractor McKinstree.

Uh and we've now reached consensus and we're moving forward with that contract.

It's in the signature process with the city of Bellevue now.

Bellevue holds that contract.

Once we have launched that officially, there will be an updated website on the city page with intake forms for businesses to join the program, and we'll send an announcement through all the city comms channels.

For our buildings in Redmond, I wanted to just quickly spell out the clean building performance standards requirements without diving too deeply into the law and some of the other things that are detailed in the memo.

All buildings must get energy benchmarks and complete energy management plans and operations and maintenance programs, and those documents are required to be submitted to the State Department of Commerce through the Clean Buildings website.

For deadlines, you can see in table one of the memo, the law impacts all commercial buildings greater than 50,000 square feet or tier one buildings, with the first compliance deadline of June 2026.

So that means they had to start tracking their data and get benchmarks a year before all of their documentation was due.

So those buildings or for those are the buildings over 220,000 square feet.

Those buildings have been working on this program already.

For buildings between 90,000 square feet and 220,000 square feet, their deadline is June of 2027.

And for buildings 50,000 to 90,000 square feet, their deadline is June of 2028.

Tier 2 buildings, which are commercial buildings between 20,000 and 50,000 square feet, and multifamily buildings over 20,000 square feet, must report by July 1st of 2027.

The biggest difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2 buildings is that only Tier 1 buildings must meet an energy use intensity target for their building type.

Noncompliant buildings that don't meet that target can face fines.

It kind of reminds me of the old emissions standard testing for your vehicle.

For our technical assistance program, we've capped the per building costs from the city program at $10,000 for all services.

So that includes from the benchmark all the way through submitting your compliance documentation to the state.

The cost is really dependent on the type of building, the size of the building, the complexity of the systems in the building, and how complete their current records are.

So how far back the technical assistance consultant will have to go to create all of the right records and reports.

So we will be able to get, depending on the complexity again, between 8, 16, 20 buildings fully through compliance with this program.

And again, that's also really dependent on when we approach buildings and sign them up, how far they've already gotten, whether they've already got energy management plans or a benchmark.

And so wherever they start, we can move them on, or if we have to go through the whole process, it's that total cost.

And that's all for me, and I'll pause now for questions.

Any questions from the Gunsan?