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fter Boulder voters approved Ballot Issue 2C tin November 2020, which entered Boulder and Xcel Energy into a 20-year franchise agreement and paused the City’s pursuit of municipalization, several community members reached out to Boulder Weekly with concerns that the process wasn’t as transparent as it could’ve been. So BW filed a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request for communications between City Council members, City staff and Xcel from the middle of July 2019 through the election. As is often the case in Colorado, our CORA request came with a hefty price tag: $1,050 for the City’s time to locate and review the documents for sensitive material. Unable to devote that kind of money alone, BW launched a GoFundMe online fundraiser and within three hours, the funds were raised by you, the community, to get the records. After receiving and reviewing the hundreds of documents in our request, BW spoke with Council members involved in the negotiations, state lawmakers, citizen activists and Xcel representatives to put the documents in context. You can see all the documents at boulderweekly.com. Together, the documents and our conversations depict a clearer, if not definitive, timeline of the City’s and Xcel’s negotiations. We also got a better sense of the motivations of City and Xcel officials at various points of the negotiation process. And, we got a sense of the questions about the agreement that still remain if Boulder is to reach its 100% renewable energy goal by 2030. Here’s what we’ve learned so far. Thank you, again, to those who donated to help make this investigation possible. Boulder Mayor Pro Tem Bob Yates first met with Xcel Colorado President Alice Jackson on July 19, 2019. Jackson assumed her position at the energy company in May 2018. The two were introduced by Tim Wolf, a Boulderite and Xcel board member, whom Yates says is a friend of his wife’s. Yates says “nothing substantive” was discussed at that meeting — it was a meet-and-greet more or less, as he just stopped by the Xcel office on the way to a Rockies game. “It was a very short meeting,” he BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
says. “I met her in her office and it was very cordial.” Jackson agrees, adding, “At that point in time, I know we had said, ‘You know, it’d probably be good to visit with a broader group just to continue to get to know [each other] and build relationships.’” Yates then followed up with Jackson a few days later, looping in fellow Council member Sam Weaver and suggesting the three of them get together. Nothing came of it until later in the year, however, when Yates again emailed Jackson, letting her know Weaver was about to be elected mayor and that, “Sam Weaver and I believe that it may be constructive if the three of us meet.” After several rounds of back-andforth scheduling emails, eventually the three did meet, on Jan. 9, 2020 — Yates and Jackson at a restaurant in Boulder, while Weaver, who was sick at the time, called in. Yates’ notes from the meeting indicate plenty was discussed. Yates writes that Jackson was “desirous of continuing dialogue, even if in parallel with litigation,” and that she expressed she had the authority to “commence discussions.” Topics at the meeting included community choice energy (CCE), local network distribution systems planning, and a mention of “time constraints (e.g. ballot measures).” Weaver says his motivation for the meeting was to communicate with Jackson the sticking points, from his perspective, as to why earlier negotiations in 2017-18 with Jackson’s predecessor at Xcel ultimately didn’t amount to anything. This included Xcel’s secrecy around distribution planning and grid modernization, as well as his skepticism of the company’s ability to reach its goal of 80% emissions reduction by 2030. Yates and Weaver both say this discussion was “non-substantive,” and that it didn’t include talk of a potential settlement agreement. The “discussions” outlined in the notes were about distribution systems planning, Yates says. None of the three could remember any talk of ballot issues, even though it’s in Yates’ notes from the meeting. “Some of the collaboration around network planning and grid I
modernization that Alice and Sam discussed at the Jan. 9 meeting sounded potentially expensive to me and so I may have been considering whether it would be necessary to ask the voters for funding for that,” Yates says. “I really don’t recall.” Of the meeting’s content, Jackson says, “I asked a lot of questions to try and get perspective. ... It was really getting their take on where things were [and] why the relationship was where it was at.” It was the first time, she says, she had even heard of Boulder’s goals of decarbonizing, decentralizing and democratizing its energy future, which became key factors in later negotiations. She doesn’t recall any mention of a settlement agreement at that meeting either — Weaver says she may have mentioned it offhand — but did say the end result of that conBOB YATES versation was to set up further meetings with City of Boulder and Xcel staff “to have a deeper conversation on distribution planning and how we move together on that one.” Yates adds, “Sam and I asked Alice several times at that meeting whether the collaboration that she was proposing was conditioned upon the City slowing down or stopping the municipalization litigation and she said that it was not.” After the meeting, Yates emailed Jackson on Jan. 11 telling her that he and Weaver would brief City staff on the meeting on Jan. 17 and that they would reach back out to her “to discuss next steps.” The next meeting between the parties didn’t occur until April 20, according to both a review of the emails and comments from Yates, Weaver and Jackson. The meeting was arranged at the request of Jackson, according to emails from City Attorney Tom Carr, with the discussion to be focused on distribution planning. It included City staff members within the Climate Initiatives department, Steve Catanach and Jonathan Koehn, along JANUARY 7, 2021
with other Xcel employees. Weaver says the point of this conversation was for City officials to learn about Xcel’s distribution planning and how Boulder could have a seat at the table in the process — a key provision in the eventual settlement agreement and a major reason why previous negotiations with Xcel had fallen apart. According to all three, Jackson asked Yates and Weaver to stay on the virtual call after this meeting, which is when she first explicitly mentioned the potential for a settlement agreement. “I simply posed the question and I said, ‘OK, you’ve now heard how we approach distribution planning. If we were able to find a pathway to get you more comfortable with the decentralization conversation, we’re obviously making dramatic moves on the decarbonization side and that’ll be taking place at the Public Utilities Commission, should we open the door to having a conversation on how do we do this together again?’” Jackson recalls. Yates says he and Weaver were “shocked” that Jackson “mentioned settlement, because we thought this was all about network planning and distribution.” Weaver says select members of City staff were notified the day that Jackson had proposed settlement discussions. City Council was notified of the discussions on April 22, via a confidential memo from Carr. And a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between the City and Xcel was executed on April 30; it included, among other items, ways the company could meet its 80% carbon emission reduction target by 2030 and an agreement not to use the proceeding negotiations in the ongoing municipalization litigation between the two parties. The NDA prohibits the City of Boulder, however, from publicly sharing any confidential information from Xcel, including the company’s emissee MUNI Page 10
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