ISLAND COMMUNITY BOARD
P.O. Box 371, Fishers Island, NY 06390
Email: ficommunityboard@gmail.com
ICB Monthly Meeting
Tuesday, August 8, 2023
5:00pm
Zoom Only
Total Participants:
Meeting minutes will be approved at the September 12 meeting.
ICB Monthly Meeting – August 08
VIEW RECORDING – 80 mins (No highlights)
AI SUMMARY:
- ● John’s, Fishers, April, George, Jim, Richard, and Elizabeth had a discussion about various topics including the competition with an event at the library, the need for a quorum, the presence of elected representatives, the AI-generated meeting summaries, the approval of board positions, the sale of the Coast Guard building, and the update on the DMV office setup on Fishers Island. – PLAY @10:35
- ● Elizabeth discussed the progress of setting up an office, hiring staff, and training them. John’s expressed gratitude for the accomplishment and introduced Ned to provide an update on Walsh Park, where Ned mentioned the community’s support for the purchase of the school property and the decision to focus on investing in existing properties before further development. – PLAY @21:00
- ● In the conversation, John’s, Ned, Fishers, and George discussed the value of the portfolio, estimated to be around $8 million, and the need for significant investments and repairs in the properties owned by Walch Park. They also mentioned the possibility of applying for funds from the Community Housing Fund and the importance of the Island Community Partnership in addressing energy costs and supporting the island community. – PLAY @32:35
- ● John’s, George, and richardturnure discussed the Inflation Reduction Act, which waspassed almost a year ago. They talked about its impact on the economy, the promotionof electric vehicles, and the expected increase in electricity consumption in the future. -PLAY @44:35
- ● Richard Turnure and John discussed the potential benefits of the new federal bill that allocates a trillion dollars for transportation and energy, including subsidies for heat pumps, solar installations, and infrastructure upgrades. They also emphasized the importance of hiring someone with strong contacts in the state government to apply for these funds and ensure Fisher’s Island receives its share. – PLAY @56:33
- ● Richard Turnure discussed the sourcing of electricity on Long Island, mentioning that most of it comes from Connecticut. He also expressed concerns about the size of the bill for promoting decarbonization and the need for skilled individuals to navigate the application process for funding. – PLAY @1:07:24
- ● John,, Richard Turnure, Fishers, and George had a discussion about government subsidies and grants for renewable energy projects. They talked about the availability of funds, the importance of applying early, and the various ways to take advantage of these programs, including tax credits and cash incentives. – PLAY @1:13:28
- ● John, Fishers, Richard Turnure, and George had a conversation where they discussed various topics, including a reminder about nature days at the demonstration garden tents and a performance workshop for children. The conversation ended with John’s thanking everyone for participating and saying goodbye. – PLAY @1:19:02
First thing I want to do is welcome new board member April White, who was elected last month to be a year-round representative and April brings a lot of perspective on Fishers Island because she actually grew up here.
So we will value her perspective going forward. And George de Menil also came back in one resounding vote. So I think our board did propose that I remain the president, the treasurer, Staley remains the VP and secretary and George remains a VP.
Last month’s meeting minutes were approved.
I got a text from Dave McCall this morning, who sent me a picture of the sign of the Coast Guard building at Silver Eel Cove that says it’s for sale via GSA (government auction site).
So we were not surprised because we were warned that this was going to happen. We just didn’t think it was going to happen so quickly.
But the good is we have a lot of people who are focused on this and Louisa Evans has been on top of it.
We’ve contacted Peter Ganley, who represents LeLota’s office. And we met with all the town fathers last week and they’re all aware.
In fact, they took a tour of the property. So we’re just hoping, I mean, what we’ve told them is that we just don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.
And there is definitely interest, certainly from the ferry district, because they’d like to use that dock in front of the building.
Lighthouse Works is interested. Perhaps the fire district is interested because they need housing. And they haven’t really gotten approval for the housing annex that they have proposed.
And the police department also needs a new barrack. So anyway, there’s a lot of demand for this property.
But we’re all working on it diligently. I thank everybody for working together on this. But in the meantime, let’s have Beth.
We’ll keep you posted on what happens. And Beth Cashel, could you, are you there to give her your report, please?
@19:25 – Elizabeth Cashel
Hi, I’m going to do an update on the DMV because that is coming.
Some people were wondering, will this be happening? So the first statement I would like to make is it is happening and it actually has happened.
It is official, Fishers Island has its own DMV site. To that end, we have set up the office from an equipment basis.
And that office is going to be in the Community Center. The network and the wiring has all been completed.
Albany has sent people to install and to check and also secure the The has been down to see where we will put the equipment.
We’ve had the first installment of the equipment. The rest of the equipment is coming this week. This includes a camera, computers, storage security and cages to put network systems on the wall.
So the office is done, the equipment is in. The next step, which is going to be happening now is the hiring.
So again, we will be hiring three to five people who will be working very part time because we believe that the office will be open approximately once a month, and we will need three people to man the office every time it is open.
The office actually will be stationed in the bowling alley during the opening hours. And we will probably hire five people because we need to have people who can, if people get sick, they will be trained.
So once the hiring is done, the training has been set up, DMV has created a training for us at Fishers, that’s only been made for Fishers, and that is going to be over a two month period, and it is going to entail one, we have to have 10 days of training, about six hours of total of 60 hours.
They will do all of it online here on the island, except one day we will need to go to White Plains.
Anybody who’s interested, please reach out. We’re working with the town right now. To do the necessary civil service announcements and titles, and then the hiring will begin.
We hope, this will be done done by September, the training September, October, and then by winter have the office up and running.
So again, I want to thank the Community Center, a huge thank you to Assembly Woman, Jodi Giglio, who has really been instrumental in doing that.
And an incredible staff at the DMV office in Albany, they have been remarkable to say the least. So that is my announcements for today, John.
@23:09 – John’s iPad
Thank you, Beth, and great job getting this accomplished. big contribution to the island. So
thank you. I’m looking for next up, have Ned Carlson.
Ned, are you there? Ned’s going to talk about Walsh Park. And I asked him to just give us an update on anything going on with Walsh Park.
Please, Ned.
@23:39 – Ned Carlson
Great. Thanks, John. I’ll be pretty quick, but did want to take a minute before I jump into a couple updates.
I don’t think we’ve actually had a chance to formally address this group since the referendum in the fall. And so just wanted to take an opportunity to thank the community at large for the tremendous amount of support we received in approving the purchase of the school property on the parade grounds.
Obviously, it was a long process. And when I went back, we actually started talking to Karen Goodwin almost five plus years ago about potentially proceeding with a partnership with the city.
And so, a long process, hopefully, people think it was a thoughtful process to this point.
We have to work out approvals with the health department and different parts of Southold and getting signed off and all that, we are hopeful that we will be able to formalize, fund and purchase in the next 30 days or so.
And, but again, I just wanted to thank everyone on the call who supported that and certainly the ICB for facilitating some good dialogue during that process.
That’s a good segue into our next update, which is during the process of seeking feedback from the community and gathering input and trying to solicit support for the purchase of that property.
We did receive, I think, a lot of valid feedback from the broader community concerning the concern or thought that Walsh Park also needed to be focused on investing in updating, taking better care of our existing inventory.
And we heard that loud and clear. And despite the fact that, you know, over the last five to six years, we’ve invested upwards of a couple million dollars in maintenance and in capital improvements, in repairs, and think it’s certainly a valid point of view that there’s much more work to be done in that regard as it relates to our existing properties in the portfolio.
And so as a Board, we’ve had many discussions about that over the years and certainly more recently over the last couple of years.
And we’ve made the decision in the short term to focus on making those investments in our existing portfolio in several different ways that I’ll outline.
And taking just a bit of a pause on pursuit, actively pursuing in the short term, the further development of the school property.
This should not come as any surprise to anyone. We certainly have always said that this would be a long process.
We wanted to make sure we were very thoughtful in how we did. And that it’s going to be expensive and take a significant amount of capital.
And so we want to make sure we’re prepared to do all of those things. You know, I think some folks would say we’ll do both.
Well, we certainly considered that and will continue to consider it. But we also have solicited some feedback and have had some provided to us about, for lack of a better term, the donor base on the island, a lot of the fundraising that’s happened recently, the need to be able to not just depend on the same ten, or even less, three to ten families who have supported Walsh Park in the past in a very significant way, and also other fundraising efforts on the island.
And so we’re certainly open for the discussions about that, but our short term focus will be on investing in our existing portfolio.
We’re going to do that in a couple of different ways. The first one is I’m happy to announce that as of August 1, Walsh Park has hired its second full-time on island employee, Dirk Harris, who many of you may know has joined Walsh Park as our first full-time property maintenance, property manager, capital improvements, check any box, any title you want that has to do with taking care of our properties, repairing our properties, improving our properties.
We were able to do that thanks to a multi-year, significant multi-year financial commitment from a long-term supporter of Walsh Park, and so we have taken that step.
Dirk is in week two, and he is actively working with Matt Edwards and the property and maintenance committee of the Board to assess, identify, prioritize, and make plans to fall through on the capital improvement plan and priorities that we’ve developed.
Obviously, Dirck won’t be doing that by himself, and we will still be heavily relying on island contractors for larger projects and bigger infrastructure improvements, etc.
But I do think it’s a very significant step in the organization’s history, and hopefully the community sees that as an acknowledgement of that WP is open to feedback and heard the feedback and is taking that feedback to heart and changing some of our strategic focus in the short term to make sure that we are being a good neighbor, being a good landlord for lack of a better term, and looking to take good care of our properties and make sure they are livable.
And all of the good things that our participants should rightfully deserve. That said, I will say, this is when our initial assessment of the needs is probably a two to three year project minimum with capital needs of probably two to three million dollars to do everything that we need to do.
So we will also be doing, at some point in the relatively near future, capital campaign specifically to support those investments in our existing properties and direct work, etc.
We are fully aware that raising money to fix up old buildings by water heaters, repair roofs, put in new windows, shore up foundations is probably good, but probably not quite as interesting as it was to fund and support building new apartments above the freight office, but we are hopeful that the community that gave us feedback on the need to do this will also be willing to step up and financially support those efforts in the weeks and months of years ahead.
So those are the major updates, John, I have not been looking at the chat, but certainly happy to answer any questions or clarifying.
@32:35 – John’s iPad
Well, Ned, I have a question. What do you think the value of the portfolio is? You have how
many units altogether now?
Give us a perspective on if you have to spend a few million dollars, the portfolio must be worth quite a bit of money at this point.
@32:53 – Ned Carlson
Yeah, I mean, the portfolio as per our findings, I believe is around $8 million. I don’t have the filing right, I think that understates it to a large degree given that we invested, you know, three plus million dollars just in the ferry apartments.
Keep in mind that their value is not market value because all of the properties are owned by WP and, you know, with the limitations of what can be done to them, etc.
I wouldn’t think of a lot of stock in that number and Ellen Harvey may be on the call. She may be able to pull up the filing and say exactly what we valued it at.
And, you know, some of the properties are in better shape and are in need of more cosmetic repairs. Some of them quite frankly, we’re going to have to do some analysis on can we actually repair them?
Or do we need to think about kind of scrapping and rebuilding? Obviously one of our big challenges, well, it’s a positive negative.
You know, all of our units are currently full and we have a wait list. And so one of our challenges that we’re looking at ways to potentially navigate is if we need to do large scale investments and repairs in a property, what do we do with the folks that are living here?
We’re there to help them navigate that. Can we do it in the off season and potentially rent some space for a family or individuals, this case may be while we do those repairs?
Can the repairs be done depending on the nature in such a period of time that the tenants can either live through them or move out temporarily?
So there’s lots of different factors we’re trying to navigate. And the two to three million is that would be a full update that would be both materials, contractor fees, multiple years of work, investment in Dirk and his resources.
And so that’s a bit of an estimate certainly. But we have a 10-page spreadsheet, property type property of everything that we think needs to be done at some point either in the very near term, the mid term or the longer term.
And we all know that doing things on Fishers Island has only gotten more and more and more expensive. And so it’s certainly going to be a significant investment to get all of these properties to where we think they should be.
@35:58 – John’s iPad
It’s probably a good economic decision. Dirk, I would think, full-time, right?
@36:03 – Ned Carlson
That’s… Yeah, it’s something that we’ve talked about for years. There’s certainly gonna be more
than enough for him to do on an individual contributor basis.
One thing I would, I should say is… As soon as it’s already happened just in the last week where, you know, people reaching out directly to Dirk and saying, Can you do this? Can you do that? We can’t fix things that we don’t know need to be fixed, but I would just please ask everyone to have a little bit of patience as he works through, and we work through a prioritization of what we can get to when and in what order.
But yeah, I mean, we have no question about how we keep him busy. And frankly, the only reason why we hadn’t acquired somebody like Dirk before, or somebody in that role was because we did not feel comfortable making the financial commitment without having committed financial resources.
So in conversations with one of our donors in particular, they said, if that’s the barrier, then we’ll just make a commitment for the next three years to make sure that WP feels comfortable making that commitment to those new employees.
So we’re obviously incredibly grateful for that support.
@37:44 – John’s iPad
We’ll go to Staley, you might have some questions from the couple of questions, Ned.
@37:49 – Fishers Island (finy.southold@gmail.com)
A couple of people are asking if you could elucidate what improvements were made to WP over the past couple of years that came to a couple of million dollars.
@38:00 – Ned Carlson
We’ve done windows, we’ve done painting, we’ve updated bathrooms, we’ve replaced water heaters, we’ve replaced furnaces, I mean it’s kind of all of the above, over the course of five to six years. We’ve essentially spent on the neighborhood of $200,000 plus or minus depending on how you categorize certain things, and then made some significant investments on top of that.
So it’s some years have been more, some years have been less. We kind of spend as much as we can every year based on our annual fund raising and allocate whatever we have above our fixed expenses to invest in those improvements.
@39:02 – Fishers Island (finy.southold@gmail.com)
Also, another question, will Walsh Park be applying for funds from the Community Housing
Fund, which will use the monies from the new additional Peconic tax? @39:12 – Ned Carlson
Yes, Ellen Harvey, our board has been the Walsh Park person kind of monitoring that and most involved in that. But I think there’s probably others on this call that have a more informed perspective on how many dollars that may actually be and how significant impact it may have.
Every dollar counts and to the extent that we’re eligible and have the opportunity to apply, we certainly would do that.
@39:55 – John’s iPad
Ned, how long is the waiting list?
@39:59 – Ned Carlson
Uh… That’s a good question. I think it’s indefinite right now because we don’t have any empty units and we do not have any indication from any of our existing participants that they intend to leave the island.
So, you know, I don’t mean to be, you know, kind of cute about answering, but the answer is right now it’s indefinite.
@40:36 – John’s iPad George, something else? @40:39 – George de Menil
Yeah. We’ve been hearing about a lot of new government incentives and Richard Turnure is going to give us some more details on that from transitioning to renewables and to gain more moderate energy costs, Walsh Park is obviously an important potential beneficiary, but the questions are general interest to Fishers Island and to the community at large.
As you look at these issues, would you see ICB as a natural agent to help islanders in general? And in particular, those who might not act alone take advantage of these opportunities.
@41:41 – Ned Carlson
George, that was a question specifically for me.
@41:44 – George de Menil
Yes, yes.
@41:50 – Ned Carlson
I think from a Walsh, I’ll answer once from a Walsh Park perspective and then secondly from a personal perspective.
So from a Walsh Park perspective, the energy costs are costs that are largely born, if not solely born, by our participants.
And most of our housing units are not particularly energy efficient. And even the newer ones are quite expensive given the form and fashion of heating, etc.
And just the costs that those are as we’ve seen in the past, as we’ve seen in the past, WP would certainly be interested in supporting, discussing, etc. I think we’re also very sensitive to the fact that the utility company has a very challenging role in the community, aging infrastructure, seasonal usage, to balance affordability to year-round residents with not over-curdening
summer residents, all of that is the fact that we feel, as I’m sure everyone on the call does, that the utility company needs to remain a viable long-term entity on the island.
And so I think the ICB taking a leadership role and trying to solicit, collect perspective information and figure out how the entire island community, not just year rounders, not just summer folks, not just the utility company, but everyone navigates this issue going forward is certainly, I think, very appropriate role for the ICB to fill going forward.
And, you know, I said I would say from a personal perspective too, I think my personal perspective is probably 100% aligned with what I just said from a WP perspective.
@44:35 – John’s iPad
Ned, very well expressed because I think you’re right, the issues are complex and the answers are not obvious. And I think that George with your Fishers Island Fund, he wants to promote energy conservation and I know he’s been, he and Jim Ingram have been focused on energy
@45:05 – George de Menil
And I would just add that the more expensive this is, and the more generous the potential incentives and subsidies are, it seems that it’s got to be in everybody’s interest that we take advantage of. The utility company, the renters, the owners, it’s a kind of win-win situation.
@45:51 – John’s iPad
Well, I agree, George, and Ned, thank you for your presentation. That was very helpful and I
think these issues now, we can segue very easily.
Our next guest here, Richard Turnure, who has studied the Inflation Reduction Act, which he calls a misnomer, but nonetheless, he’s going to tell us about the ramifications of this legislation coming out of Washington.
And Richard has a lot of experience in renewables, and he has studied government financing for years. Richard, welcome and please begin.
@46:28 – richardturnure
Good evening. My presentation tonight is really, you know, I would not say I’m an expert by any
stretch of imagination on federal law implementation.
I’ve always been extremely fascinated, and I’ve made a few bets in my career over the last 30 years regarding these large movements of these really big government programs and how they course through the veins of the United States, so it’s fascinating to see how they come through and looking back on how they affected. I mean, I remember as a high schooler at Salisbury School in Connecticut, we used to swim on a pond lake on the top of Mount Riga.
And in the 1980s, it was Caribbean blue. You could see all the way to the bottom 20 feet down.
You could see old mining equipment, people’s sunglasses, things like that. It was dead because of acid rain. And then the Clean Air Act came through, which was big, everyone went crazy.
They’re going to make us scrub the sulfur out of smokestacks and it’s going to bankrupt every utility. And it ended up costing like $20,000 per smokestack and it worked like a charm and the paint on our cars stopped peeling.
And, you know, a few years ago, I was fishing up on Mount Rega and it’s got trophy bass and all these other things, it’s a real ecosystem all over again.
So I guess the long story short is this: I’m not an expert on these programs, but when the programs are really enormous and they have these tangible effects, you don’t feel them very quickly because, nothing about the federal government moves quickly, except for in my case the IRS.
But it’s really fascinating to see how eventually the things do come through and when they come through, they’re often completely misjudged by the experts like CBO and everybody who put out scores and what’s going to cost everybody.
So let’s get to the inflation reduction act which was passed last August 16th, so it’s not even a year old, it’s almost a year old.
And the couple of fascinating things that have come up that I’ve listened to and recommended and really been intriguing to me is that the Inflation Reduction Act has nothing to do with inflation whatsoever.
There’s not a single line of it that has anything to do with inflation. It’s almost as if they chose the name to sort of save Senator Manchin’s skin when he was trying to vote when he voted for it and also to a certain extent to collectively create amnesia for the the American public, as soon as you say inflation, it’s sort of like, oh, you know, there’s basically nothing worse that people really want to talk about at a cocktail party.
So no one’s really been talking about this bill for the last year. It had a big impact on me as private equity came into my space almost immediately and bought my company and forced me out of a job like that because of how big this is because they were placing bets almost immediately, seeing what the bill will probably do over the course of 10 years. And so back to the collective amnesia, I call it.
When a huge bill gets passed, know there was a lot of talking about this. I don’t know if you guys can remember a year or so ago, but everybody was going crazy and there was a midnight deal with Schumer and Manchin and all of a sudden it got passed and people were like, wow, it got passed.
That’s awesome. Well, what was it?Just know, the Inflation Reduction Act is really, really enormous. I mean, it’s, you know, some of the so far aggressive estimates have come out saying it’s a trillion dollar plan.
I personally think, due to the way some portions of it are structured to come off of for-profit capitalist taxes, that it’s actually going to be a lot bigger than that.
It also has some tales in it in that after like 10 years it automatically renews unless there’s, you know, a super majority votes it down, which if anybody’s seen to play Hamilton, you know that that never happens once something becomes part of the federal government, it just continues to grow.
So that’s another big thing, but getting back to what they pass, they pass something that CBO and these are all rough numbers because they’re all just federal funny numbers.
So I’m just giving you rough numbers. What CBO and Biden and everybody said they passed was about a $400 billion bill.
That itself, which I think is an absurdly low case, is incredibly large. If you think of something that have most certainly impacted your lives getting to Fishers Island like the 56 Eisenhower Federal Highway bill, that had lots of hullabaloo out of it.
It’s price tag initially was 25 billion, which in today’s dollars is about 280, 300 billion dollars. And that put a highway everywhere in this country, you know, supposedly to stimulate the economy, but really to move around ICBMs.
At the end of the day, it did stimulate the economy in a really fantastical way. It destroyed all our train lines, but you know, it really had a massive, massive impact.
If look at this, this low case is larger than their actual. The high cases, which are two times this, have to do with tax rebates that essentially go towards primarily decarbonizing the United States.
And what that means is it really promotes two, two big sections. One as a follow on to Ike’s bill is transportation.
You are not going to have any more of a situation where anybody of any type of large auto manufacturer is going to put any bets down on the internal combustion engine or the ice engine.
No one’s going to. They are what you’re driving today is a dinosaur, the electric cars you see propping up here and there are not.
Some new adopter thing. They are everything that’s going to happen going forward. And you know, a lot of people don’t understand this, but it’s hitting real time.
I just read in the paper yesterday that Porsche, big fan of good engines, showcased their last spider convertible with an internal combustion engine ever.
And that’s next year’s model. They’re going away. Your 2025 and onward Porsche Spider is going to be electric if you want it with a gasoline engine, it’s not going to happen. They’re not even about making it.
@54:12 – John’s iPad
What effect do you think this will have on electricity consumption in the future percentage wise? Do you have any idea that between the electric vehicles and the heat pumps and the decarbonization?
I would think there’d be a drink, an increase in demand for electricity in the evening.
@54:35 – richardturnure
I believe there is going to be a very large increase in electricity. You’re going to see, if you guys have stock market portfolios, I always tell people that the way I think of it is the market cap of the Exxon mobils is going to migrate to the utilities.
Utilities are going to become more and more valuable whether they’re generators or just transmission authorities. A big reason for that is the utilities have had a very tough go of it for, say, the last 20 years, because all our energy hogs in our homes do another government program, Energy Star, have dropped their electricity usage massively.
If you have one of those 30-year-old TVs in your home, especially with a 20-year-old cable box, that’s using more energy than all your refrigerators, even if you have the beer one in the garage.
It’s just that cable box alone can use as much as a refrigerator. So those things have been disappearing on the mainland for a while.
Also, relamping into LED lights has absolutely plunged electricity usage. Now, as we’re coming out of that, we now have very energy efficient LED screens and all these things.
The screen I’m talking on is OLED, which uses almost nothing. But coming out of that actual transportation, the first electric car is a lot easier to start than everything else, but that’s besides the point.
So I do think electricity usage is going to go up not as much with heat pumps. Modern heat pumps were designed in countries with absurdly high electricity, higher than fishers island electricity.
And therefore, they’re enormously efficient. You can heat and cool buildings with Mitsubishi heat pumps just with a trickle of electricity.
I heat an entire warehouse with Mitsubishi heat pumps. It’s got really good insulation.
@57:18 – richardturnure
But getting back to the size of the bill. So we’re talking about, in federal speak, let’s just say, this
is a trillion dollars of spending over about 10 years.
And it’s for transportation, and it’s for energy, basically to the home that decarbonizes your home. So if you have a hot water heater, especially propane one, they’re going to give you a massive subsidy on a heat pump electric hot water heater.
So it’s going to be much cheaper, let’s just go over some of the things. They started off giving you $2,000, I think they’ve now upped that to $4,000. That’s essentially a free Mitsubishi heat pump for a normal one-story ranch.
There’s subsidies for crazy things that they don’t even make yet, like green hydrogen, which is made from seawater. They have to use it in airplanes and certain refining industries.
That is such a large subsidy that you can actually make it and have zero cost. Whatever you sell it for is profit.
It’s an unlimited margin business. It’s absolutely fascinating. I think it’s three bucks a kilogram delivered. You have subsidies, massive subsidies for nuclear power.
I would not expect anyone in the country to shut down a nuclear power plant since this bill was passed.
Then of course, you have huge subsidies. These are for solar and wind. The subsidies are so large that I think one podcast they talked about, the largest solar installation in the United States is about a 2,000 acre site.
They plan the first iteration of this bill, not what I think it’s going to be, but the first iteration of this bill asked for 4,000 more of those.
And they’d like them within 10 years. So you’re talking, you know, huge, huge amounts of acreage, megawatts, dedicated, and that’s just a solar component, and that’s just a best guess.
I think it can actually be like three times that size, and there’s no cap if it’s profitable for people like my old company to build out those large solar planes, they’re going to continue to do so until the last bit of margin is wiped out in that instance.
@1:00:00 – John’s iPad
Do you have a perspective on how Fishers Island gets online for these subsidies and what kind of government connections do we need or what should we cultivate to make sure that some of this money comes to Fishers Island in all kinds of big tranches of money to spend within their state.
@1:00:35 – richardturnure
So the first avenue is New York State and they are, to my knowledge, aggressively applying for
everything they can under this bill. The state is going to apply for a huge chunk of change.
It’s probably going to take a whole other year before Albany figures out where to allocate that money. If you look at the ARPA Act, which was signed during COVID, it was like $100 billion for infrastructure. That trickled out to Southold, I think, late last year, and they got like $3 million.
They bought some fire trucks and some other things. So it takes a very long time for these things to get through the system.
What is very important is that Fisher’s Island really be working with the town of Southold on its major needs and applying through the the New York state structure for grants backed by the federal government for free infrastructure upgrades, because there’s a lot of money available for it.
For instance, if someone wanted to put in 50 electric car charges down at the ferry dock, boom, it’s free.
They can get all the money to do that if they want. They could put 100. They could put 300 in.
It’s an unlimited spigot for certain categories, and that’s one of them. Unlimited. I speak about it for heat pumps, for instance.
Everybody on the island could switch from propane to heat pumps overnight. And that would stabilize a lot of the power infrastructure on the island as well.
So, I mean, it’s huge…
@1:02:16 – John’s iPad
So what kind of people would we need to hire or what kind of advisors to actually get, as I said,
to get in line and succeed in getting this money?
Is it… We’ll just go directly to our representatives in Southold and in the state government. Last week, we had quite a few people over from Southold and met with Scott Russell.
We met with his potential successor. His name is Al Kropke. And they’re all interested in helping us.
In fact… the utility company has asked if we know anybody on the island itself who could help us in this endeavor because the money that you’re talking about does sound enormous and it’d be a shame if we didn’t get a piece of it.
@1:03:16 – richardturnure
Well, I think it’s absolutely critical to, I would almost think that given some of the infrastructure challenges that I’ve heard about on the island, I think it would be critical to hire someone with strong contacts in the state government to really be a point person to apply for as many things as possible because this is so much larger than anything you’ve ever seen come down the pike here.
It’s sort of like if you were back during COVID and the PPP came out and you had 50 employees and you’re like, yeah, I know, should I go to my local representative and my local bank account?
You can apply for a million dollar loan to backstop my business. If you don’t do it, you’re sort of saying like, nah, let the federal government keep the money.
My business is good enough. I don’t need it. I mean, are you crazy? This amount of cash. If it doesn’t go here, it’s going somewhere else.
So if you don’t apply for it, you’re not going to get it and someone else is going to be the beneficiary.
Oddly enough, right now, it looks like most of the applications for the Inflation Reduction Act money have come from pretty strong red states.
Most applications are from Texas. So right now, the bill looks like it’s going to end up with its payouts being about 60% to Republican dominated states and 40% to Democrat-oriented states.
To the exasperation of a lot of people, I think one podcast I heard about Gavin Newsom like stomping up and down about.
How could this be possible? It’s that you have a trillion dollars come out and over $600 billion of it’s going to register that they wanted to vote against it.
But the fact is you’ve got to hire somebody with the contacts to move things from Southold to Suffolk County to Albany to get those applications in for large dollars because they are out there.
There are large dollars. You know, people say, oh, there’s only $70 billion for new water pipes. That’s still $70 billion and they’re not all going to go to those towns in Mississippi that got screwed over 30 years ago with crappy pipes or Flint, Michigan.
They’re going to end up in other places as well. If you can get $5 million from the feds to redo all your water pipes, why not?
It’s an application that’s out there. And I think it’s for the same reason that the island water infrastructure is in its state.
It’s in Flint, Michigan. It’s all over.. No one intended to build a bad system, and it’s not a bad system.
I think the systems have held up really, really well, but it is extremely old, and to renovate these things cost money, and here’s free money just out there.
It’s just a pain in the ass to apply for it. And given the summer versus winter nature of the island, I think you guys should think about signing up someone with a proven track record in the state governments to apply for it.
But otherwise you’re just leaving silver on the ground.
@1:06:33 – John’s iPad
What would you call this first person or what would his background have to be, or her
background have to be?
@1:06:41 – richardturnure
I have zero experience in politics, so I have really no idea. I mean, in my old business, we hired
lobbyists to push our renewables agenda in various states and in the federal government.
But this is a different case. You have for sure the money going to New York State. Probably $50 or $100 billion dollars is going to New York State alone, given the size of the state.
This is one of those times where being part of New York State is much more beneficial than being part of a tiny state like Connecticut.
@1:07:13 – John’s iPad
But does this complicate our life here in Fishers Island where we get the energy from Groton and not from New York State?
Have you thought of that?
@1:07:24 – richardturnure
No, that’s not the problem. That’s just who you purchase electricity from. Most of the electricity
on Long Island is from Connecticut as well, on the outer tips of Long Island.
@1:07:34 – John’s iPad Oh, is that right?
@1:07:36 – richardturnure
Yep. They’ve got three cables called the shark killers that go under the water right next to
Fishers Island and go all the way out there.
So it’s, it’s, you know, if you’re from Sag Harbor on up, your electricity is coming from Connecticut as of five, six years ago, that’s for sure.
So, I mean, I would not say that where your generation is getting dispatched from is really a factor.
So it doesn’t have lots of those complicated nuances. If you can just apply, get the money, get the infrastructure done at prevailing wage, which I’m sure the island’s on way above anyways, and you’re good to go.
It’s just really the application process. And it’s multifaceted. It’s not just one thing. I mean, it’s infrastructure. It’s roads, charging stations, it’s electric vehicles, it’s anything that promotes the decarbonization of the United States is paid for as much as possible in this bill. It’s ridiculously huge.
It almost makes me want to vomit because I intend to have grandchildren someday, who is going to pay for this?
It is so big. Hopefully it creates the follow-on jobs that create the taxes that do the CBO estimates of not being such a deficit inflator.
But it is really, really big.
@1:09:30 – John’s iPad
So we as a community can encourage individuals to apply for these credits and encourage the utility company to apply for these credits.
@1:09:40 – richardturnure
I think any organization, any organization, any individual, there are caps on certain things like, for instance, my pickup truck, my income happened to be high enough, in the year I bought it, so I couldn’t get the credit, but there’s ways around that using leasing companies and other things that are very easy to do.
But not for profits applying for heat pumps and things like that. 100% you should be doing it because average heat pumps cost between $4,000 and $6,000 and you’re getting a $4,000 rebate for it.
That’s cheaper than any other source of heat you can put in right now. By far.
@1:10:29 – John’s iPad
Well, that’s very interesting. Richard, that I think gives everyone a perspective on this and makes us realize the impact of what’s ahead from the government.
But let’s open up the chat room here. Staley, anybody, any questions there?
@1:10:46 – Fishers Island (finy.southold@gmail.com)
Let’s see. Oh, yes. Does Richard have any thoughts about funding for water infrastructure?
@1:11:00 – richardturnure
The only thing I’d say there is that the infrastructure portions of the IRA cross borders with several other bills, the infrastructure act, the IIJA, and ARPA, the one pastor in COVID.
So if you add non-electricy infrastructure together, the amount allocated to it for projects, federally is $700 billion. That’s what CBO scored that out.
That’s a lot of dry powder that’s still out there. Remember, these things have been passed one, two, maybe three years ago.
Just a trickle has come out so far. So that money is still out there. I mean, I believe Southold has, even the town of Southold has over a million dollars from one of those programs.
There might be ARPA, the same program that helped pay for the fire trucks, that’s just sitting in their bank account.
I mean, that was in the Suffolk Times last month, I think. So I mean, there’s so much money sloshing around in the system for these things.
It’s really just taking advantage of applying for and getting them. So something like large infrastructure, there with that much, that many billions out there, there is money to apply for infrastructure.
It might not be compatible with, um, some of the for-profit nuances, I don’t know. That’s something for, like I said, you to find someone with those contacts in Albany or Suffolk to really find out.
Because at the end of the day, you’ve got to get that rabbit through the federal Python, then through the New York State Python, which is no easy task.
New York State tries to mimic the constrictions of the federal government. And then you’ve got to end up in Suffolk County, and then you’ve got to cross the water and get to Fishers.
So it’s quite a journey. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I’m saying it’s going to take a skilled person to put forth the reasons why I apply for these things.
@1:13:15 – John’s iPad
And what do you think the timeline is for a community like ours or when do you think this money
will actually be made available, how soon?
Because you said only a trillion comes out now, right?
@1:13:30 – richardturnure
Yeah, I mean, out of the $600, $700 billion that CBO scored the bill at, I think they’ve spent in their loan program about $20 billion, and half of that went to Ford to build a battery factory in Tennessee.
So nothing’s been spent. It’s a federal bill that’s not even a year old. It hasn’t even scratched the surface.
So you’ve got this helicopter type money going on for years. However, the juiciest returns in the biggest grants on any federal program I’ve ever seen, I go back to the telecom act of ‘86, are always at the beginning, right?
The earlier you apply for things, the greater the size of the grants you can get. As it goes on, it’s like a shrink, it’s a balloon that’s escaping.
There’s less and less oxygen to breathe. So apply early. I mean, And there’s some notable examples of people who did apply early.
You know, everybody likes to really harp on how Obama’s ‘O9 Act wasted so much money in energy grants. However, they tend to forget one of the things that they funded was a loan to a small company called Tesla, which it seems like everybody, I don’t have one, I’ve never driven one, but everybody loves those cars.
So that was a little bit of his success. These real world things are out there. Just have to really apply for him and go for him.
@1:15:05 – John’s iPad
Well, Richard, that’s really very informative. I think listening to you, we realized the sooner we
get moving on this, the better.
And I mean, I have to say already the utility company and FIDCO has reached out and asked if we knew anybody who might help with government connections.
Now I think the whole community is listening. And hopefully we’ll get organized on this and find the right people to help us.
But any other questions for Richard before we end it? It’s 6:02.
@1:15:40 – Fishers Island (finy.southold@gmail.com)
I had one question, Richard. I had heard that in order to get a subsidy to put in a heat pump,
your income had to be so low that it was practically below the poverty line. Is that accurate or not?
@1:15:54 – richardturnure
There are things like I mentioned with my truck where I couldn’t do it, but what most of my friends who wanted the same truck I have did is that they just found a warehousing entity to buy a bunch of trucks and then that company took the depreciation.
So as with anything, as with your taxes at the end of the year, there’s so much social engineering out of these federal programs that there’s a way to figure it out.
And the way you might figure it out is, you know, you might have someone buy it with your money and you lease it from them for a period of 10 years or your installer, you know, the HVAC guys on the island could potentially do this and have the rebate off the top on these machines.
So there’s a lot of different ways to skin the cat. Yes, you are calling up and asking for or putting this on your 1040 to get a deduction for $4,000 is probably not going to work.
I didn’t work for my pickup truck, but since then, the workarounds exist. It’s part of the American way. It takes about a year and then you figure out the workarounds to the way the code is written.
So I’m confident you can get those heat pumps for at least half, if not the whole $4,000 off those heat pumps.
@1:17:23 – George de Menil
Richard, how much of the help comes in the form of tax credits, which are not income gated at
all?
@1:17:36 – richardturnure
Most of the IRA is geared towards zero carbon energy generation and transmission. So most of them are not, however. So say someone wanted to build, like a let’s use round numbers, a $10 million dollar solar plant, which is, you know,they want to build a $10 megawatts solar plant for $10 million. They will apply and get $3 million cash from the federal government program.
And it does not matter what their tax situation is. If they only make $1 million of tax liability that year, they get to carry a negative two over into the next year.
So people in the power generation, or broadly in the energy business, if you want to put in solar, you’re going to get 30% cash back from the feds, snap your fingers.
That’s the way it is written. Unlike the old investment tax credit and production tax credit that built all those bird killing windmills all over the country, that was something you had to take off your taxes if you had the tax liability.
This just lets you carry a negative, which is incredible.
@1:19:02 – John’s iPad
Okay, I think on that note, we’ll end it.
@1:19:04 – Fishers Island (finy.southold@gmail.com)
From the chat, John, one of our residents wanted to remind everybody on the call that Saturday is Nature Days at the demonstration garden tents that are set up, and they’re welcoming children five or over to the theater at 3 p.m. for a performance workshop and a play.
@1:19:24 – John’s iPad
Anyway, Richard, you’ve given us plenty of food for thought and action. So, um, thank you so
much for participating and thank you everyone for listening and see you all next month. Have a nice evening.
@1:19:39 – richardturnure Thank you very much.
@1:19:40 – John’s iPad Thank you.
@1:19:41 – George de Menil Bye bye. Thank you.
@1:19:59 – John’s iPad you
