approved. >> the actual approval was to happen at our commission on february 12 and i think it might slip to march, early march instead of early february. >> so we need the rate fairness board make a determination before the puc board. >> yes. we like for them to be comfortable to provide advice to our commission. we are at the same time pursuing our polling of customers with those not to exceed rates, with that mix of resources to see -- to test the customer comfort with the overall program offering. we won't have those results as quickly as we thought we were going to have them so that is another factor, and they're interested in knowing what the results of that polling effort is, and we've certainly told our commission that we won't bring the not to exceed rates to them

until we have that comfort level up. >> when you say "polling" are you talking about an actual poll to survey by phone? >> yes. the phone survey of customers. it's refreshing of the same survey, same type of survey we connected earlier on in the program to make sure we still have good data to base our expectations of customer opt out and acceptance of the program offering. >> is that something you can share next time we meet? >> yeah, we should be in a position to share the questions. i think we're going to preview the approach with you informally. i don't know if that preview can happen in the public setting given -- i don't think we want to wait for that until we launch it. >> i think it would be great to share with you as members of lafco. >> yeah, sounds great. >> [inaudible] >> i can wait.

>> thank you. so we did have as i said our commission meeting on tuesday did address the cleanpower sf. we did get a presentation from local power, our consultants that are advisingous how to structure the program to accelerate the local build out. that presentation involved quite a bit back and forth and questions from the commission and we're compiling the questions and working with local power to provide the commission specific questions and i am happy to share those with lafco board members as interest is expressed and with respect to california public utilities commission activities on the cleanpower sf front it's really at this point a focus on direction by the california public utilities commission to engage the parties interested in pg&e's green tariff option and

settlement discussions so we have been participating with those parties that expressed interest in meeting the commission's direction on that. the commission -- the california public utilities commission has set hearings on that request by pg&e for february 15 and so that's pretty much the deadline if there is going to be agreement as to what this program will look like it will be known by then and that's all i have to present to you up front. i am happy to answer questions or anything that the staff wants to augment what i said. thank you. >> commissioner campos. >> thank you chair avalos and again congratulations on your election as chair and i also note with a new board of supervisors coming in there are a couple of vacancies on the commission i hope will be

filled shortly and we have some pretty talented newly elected members of the board they hope will serve on this body and we look forward to that. i wanted to ms. hale to follow up on a couple of things and thank you again for all your work. thank your staff. in terms of the rate setting process one of the concerns i have and maybe you can shed light on this, if i may through the chair, in terms of recouping the amounts of reserves that are going to be used here my understanding is there is some flexibility in how much is recoupd and depending how you use that flexibility that could impact rates so i am wondering if you could say something about that and what the thinking is around that issue? >> yes. you will recall when the board considered the program in august the board directed us

to -- i can't quote the language, but the basic message was to the extent feasible let's try and recover the dedicated funds. excuse me. what we presented as staff to the rate fairness board was full recovery of all of the funds during the first four and a half years of the program. of course the quicker you recover those funds the more a rate bump it has on the program, so the board dialogue has been around can we extend out how long we give ourselves to recover those funds? and i think under the adopted board direction, yes we can, and then the issue is. okay. if we want to by how much? and those are some of the questions we're addressing with the rate fairness board and we will present it to our

commission similarly to say the rate that we are proposing to you is a not to exceed rate. the ultimate rate that we charge customers will not exceed that so we see it as a ceiling. one of the factors that influences that ceiling is how quickly we recover that appropriate fund. >> thank you for that. i think the language that was voted on by the board of supervisors purposely flexible and i think it's about striking the right balance because if you tried to recoup the amount as quickly as you can possibly can and which is something some members of the board wanted and you could under mind the success of the program and that is not

something the board adopted as a rule so i certainly would like to see the timeline extended to a period that is reasonable because we obviously wants the money to be recouped, but not to the point it actually under minds the success of the program because then you're going to use more money anyway, so i would hope that that there is flexibility in that and that it's not a hard line rule that we have to recover it by four and a half years or whatever the timeline is. i hope there is a longer period of time and that is one point i think is important. i also think it's important that in the near future that we also have a follow up joint meeting with the san francisco public utilities commission on where the program is. >> sounds good. we would be happy to work with your staff

to check calendars and make that work. >> and the newly elected chair and i think it's good to do that and i have a final question and i am wondering if you could tell us about what is happening with the status of the hiring of a new community community choice aggregation director at the puc? as you know mr. campbell left last year and i think it's important to get a permanent replacement as soon as possible. >> thank you. yes. we do have an acting director at this point so we have a funded vacancy. we have taken that request to fill that vacancy through the city's process and i understand that we're awaiting word from the mayor's committee that releases request for filling such vacancies so it's pending. >> and do you know what the

process for that determination is? and how long are we talking about? and is there a specific concern that maybe keeping it from moving forward? >> i'm not aware of a specific concern having been expressed about frankly i'm not in the conversations directly. the public utilities commission and my group in particular has a number of vacancies that are in a similar movement through the process, so it's difficult to sort of read the tea leaves how soon that position might be released. concern about the fact that the vacancy remains a vacancy was expressed at our commission meeting on tuesday and our commissioners shared the concern, and i understand that's being communicated to the

committee that do that as well. >> i appreciate that and i understand it's not in your control for that issue but if i can ask whether there is anything we can do to expedite that process and communicating with the mayor's office or any other way and i think it's important that they understand how significant it is to fill this position and we have a program by the board of supervisors and to do that you need a permanent replacement there and i hope that happens as soon as possible. thank you very much. >> okay. ms. hale thank you for your presentation. if there are no other questions

we can go on to ms. miller. >> i will add on to what was reported on there are continued meeting with the sfpuc staff and the stakeholders and meetings with the technical review process which is a peer review process and those meetings have been interim. as you expect there is some level of discussion about how -- i call it phase two, but the local build out is going to occur, when it's going to occur, how it will be funded, the timing of that, and the siewnchs made under the model and those are not always discussions. first of all just to try to get to understand where we are, and second what is needed to move forward so i wanted to let you know those are ongoing. i think they have been productive. i think while there is some

difficulty in those that at least your lafco's staff has pledged to see if we can figure out a common path to get the recommendation before you as soon as possible. i just wanted to bring that to your attention. thanks. >> great thank you. commissioner campos, we talked about joining puc lafco meeting. do you have a certain time that you think is most appropriate for that. >> you know i think a lot of it depends on the availability of both commissions, and in the past we have sort of left it to lafco and puc staff in terms of surveying i guess different members of the commissions to see what would work. i don't know if it's possible to do it

next month, but i would leave that up to staff in terms of knowing what would be the best route. >> and perhaps today leaving it open -- actually schedule a joint meeting for next month but the possibility could be there? >> yeah. >> okay. we will leave it at that. let's open up this item for public comment. any member of the public would like to comment on this item please come forward. >> good afternoon again commissioners. eric brooks. my clock started at two minutes and 15 secondses. can i get that adjusted? thank you. so eric brooks san francisco breen party and local grass-roots organization "our city". i wanted to speak to the issue

that counsel miller raised yes as to how we're going to do the build out there have been consider contentions shall we say in recent meetings and hammering that out and getting that right, and i won't go into details about all of that, but the main thing i would like to impress on the lafco commissioners is that there's been a new development in this dialogue that looks to be pretty problematic, and that is you know two years ago we the advocates and the lafco staff and other staff began work on earnest work for a build out and that model depends large numbers for the most part small local renewable instalations,

efficiency installations. most importantly behind the meter in customer's property and what that is about is -- it means it's after the meter that pg&e has on the house so what you're doing by doing small diverse local installations like that behind the meter you're avoiding a lot of cost of transmission and distribution that you would otherwise have to pay pg&e, and so that's the key to that model, and along with that you get the benefit that because you're installing a lot of small renewables and efficiencies installations you're creating a lot of jobs. right now the model that local power put forward looks like 3,000 a year, so it's very important that we keep on that model, but what we saw in the last week is that

because of some of the critiques of that model we have been working on for a couple of years the staff has proposed going to a completely different model that is building large solar farms at a distance in front of the meter so they have go through pg&e transmission and distribution lines and these would be sold the more expensive way to do renewables and all of this is going to roughly double the cost of the rate on energy to the customer, so it's vital that we get the lafco to send a strong message to the sfpuc hey that's not good enough. we need the local distribution and the local jobs. we need to get back to the other model and make it work. thanks. >> thank you. any other member of the public would like to comment please come forward.

>> david mc cord. i am the chair of the energy committee and san francisco has a great opportunity here now to develop really first class community choice aggregation system and right now there are two models presented. one by puc staff. they have been working diligently on that and also they -- the plan, the model being

presented, developed and explained by the commission's consultant of local power. we think that local power is much better. it has the robust build out behind the meter, and lower premiums, price premiums especially in the first year. that will help people to stay opted in and not opt out, and as mr. brooks said lots of jobs for san francisco residents, so i would like the commission to

send a strong message that for puc staff to work with the local power to develop the best cca that is possible. thank you. >> thank you very much. and next speaker please. >> good afternoon folks. alwine from the clean energy alliance and i have the great opportunity to be chairing those stakeholder meetings that take place, fairly contentious of recent time. i wanted to address two questions quickly. one is a question of the rates and the high rates that i think everybody concerned about it at roll out time which according to the proposals that have been put before the rate fairness board are roughly

somewhere depending on your tier between 18 and 30% above current bills, and it's really important that we feel, the advocates, and the commission itself feels to really lower those rates and i wanted to say we encourage every effort to do that. that the proposal you're putting forward supervisor campos would not make a huge difference in those rates. i mean looking at the numbers is that the rate recovery is roughly in the order of 10% of the rates themselves, and so if you shave a little bit off of the rate recovery it's 10% of a very big number so we need to have a more aggressive approach i think. it's important to do that but we need a more aggressive approach. that won't quite hit it. and

the other thing i wanted to mention is that the work that local power has done is -- first of all it's preliminary and secondly it's really a framework for talking through all the issues and it's fairly complex as everyone who has encountered it has recognized and there are a lot of assumptions made that have a lot of implications in the way things turn out but it's a framework where we held the discussion and pull out the issues of different approaches, different scenarios and what not, and that's been a fruitful discussion to have, and we would like lafco to urge that that kind of discussion continue to sort of pull out of those deliverables the types of information and analysis that's richly embedded there as opposed to start thinking automatically of alternative approaches which initially don't seem to be as

comprehensive and to help you think about this a little bit we put together a short six page paper that captures the essence of the features of that model in general so you can get an idea of basically what it's about without having to read through tons of pages so i have a few copies i can make available. i think everybody here received it but i'm not sure to the excent members of lafco have. >> yeah. you can please share that with the commission. >> thanks a lot. >> thank you and next speaker please. >> hello. i am michelle myers and the director of the local sierra club. i want to piggyback on what was said and address the fact that the stakeholder and the technical review meetings that we have been auditing really more than

participating have become a bit contentious and i want to call on lafco to take an active role and moderate and find proactive solutions. i think two people that have the best interest of the program are two agencies i guess -- one consultant and the puc, have the best interest of the program at heart, but are having a hard time getting to a place where we can get the maximum amount of community benefit we need. this gets us to a place we have 51% renewable generation in the city. that is amazing. we should look at that and wow how they doing that and still competitive with pg&e rates? and i think it's different from the enabling legislation for the contract it's hard to wrap our heads around t i was happy to hear ms. miller to come up with

solutions and look at other things and this is a larger program and looking at others to come up with a solution is a great idea but i would like to hear more things like that from lafco. i think it's the role of the agency to serve as the positive, to move the paths between complicated and sometimes opposite opinions and i know it's challenging and we need to rely on puc for experts on the program but there is value what we're paying local power to do and i think it's a way to get beyond the arguments this is just doubling the rates. this say program for people that can afford to pay the premium cost. the work is innovative and i am start to appreciate looking at other national models. they're really in the forefront of what is going on and co-generation facilities

and combine heat and power. people are starting to take a serious look at and i understand the reasons behind coming up with a simple program which is a purchase power agreement but i know politically san franciscans are going to decide if this is really their program in the beginning phasing and if they're not seeing benefit until four and a half from now they're going to opt out and not participate in the program and i hope we innovative to come up with a program that has community benefit immediately so that's it. >> thank you. any other member of the public who would like to comment and seeing no one come forward we will close public comment. thank you for your comments and i think from our point of view as commissioners on the committee we really want to see us get to the build out phase as quickly as possible. we want to maximize jobs as

much as possible and minimize the impact to rate payers and that is a a major challenge going forward. with negotiations between them i think there are tools we can bring to bear with that as well. perhaps another expert can come in provide some peer review. i discussed that with supervisor campos earlier and maybe look at other ideas that might be out there as well and i appreciate the work that local power is bringing forward and i think that we need to find the best path way and do it together. that's going to lead to the success of the program so we're committed to making that happen between now in the next month i think we will look at ways to bring harmony to the proposals coming forward. colleagues,

any other comments or questions? okay. this is an information item. is that correct? so we can go on to the next item. >> item number five work plans and goals and objectives for 2013. >> okay. we have jason fried who will present. >> thank you. jied jason fried brief staff. we had a meeting and went over six items that the commissioners brought up and a item from the public and since then we got an eighth item to look at from a supervisor's office and working with supervisor avalos we looked at what is good. the first one started out as appointment to commissions. in discussions with supervisor avalos there was interest to expand that and possibly turn this not just appointments to commissions but

how -- when elected positions become open how does the process look compared to other jurisdictions and places around the country? so we expanded that topic. that is something that can be done in house by staff on this. the next item was jobs in the tech sector. after further discussion with supervisor avalos who brought this item up it was determined maybe hold off on this and revisit it in the future if something new comes up on that subject. >> i believe supervisor kim on the board of supervisors is looking at that issue and holding a public hearing on it. >> correct. so we will wait until something comes out of that process. tree maintenance and landscaping performed by the city. there is a meeting next week of a bunch of different stakeholders between city government and community groups. we're going to attend -- supervisor avalos is attending

that meeting and invited me to go and we will come back to you if something from that meeting and lafco work on and we can present it at that time. municipal bank is something that we will continue to work and monitor it. work with the stakeholders on that item. they're occasionally giving questions they ask. i know miss miller answered super of zoo some of the questions and we will come back to the commission at this point and inform you of that and get direction which way we want to go should we get to a point lafco play a role in that item. the next is the enrichment fund. after discussions with supervisor mar there is stuff going on with that right now. lafco doesn't have a role right now