Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Discover how Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West in our new podcast, Western Watts!
We'll dive into the heart of energy issues, from reliability to wildfire mitigation, and share firsthand insights relevant to rural, agricultural and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
This podcast may contain certain forward looking statements concerning Tri-State's plans, performance, and strategies. Actual results may differ materially because of numerous factors, and Tri-State undertakes no obligation to update these forward looking statements. We urge you to review Tri-State's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of these factors.
Chris Reichard:It really comes back to the three prongs of our mission, reliable, affordable, and responsible. Compliance helps us maintain all three of those things. And it protects the communities we operate in. This is really important because this is often where our members and their members live and work. It's their backyard.
Chris Reichard:In addition to the Tri-State piece, it's protecting the local community and environment as well.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thank you for joining us for the Western Watts podcast. I'm Elizabeth Schilling.
Julia Perry:I'm Julia Perry.
Elizabeth Schilling:And we are here today with Chris Reichard, our Senior Environmental Policy Analyst here at TriState. Chris, thank you for being here.
Chris Reichard:You're welcome.
Elizabeth Schilling:So you are a, as I just said, Senior Environmental Policy Analyst. What does that mean? It does sound a little complex.
Chris Reichard:It can be a little complex, but environmental and regulatory agencies are required to publish draft versions of rules, guidance, handbooks, things that they're going to eventually make final. Those have to go out for public review first so that the public can comment. In general, that's a good thing. We like it because it gives us a chance to see things before they're final. And my role involves tracking and analyzing a wide variety of these kinds of policy changes.
Chris Reichard:So what do we mean by policy? That can vary quite a bit. It can be formal rules, it can be agency guidelines, handbooks, and general permits. We pay attention to the ones of relevance to us and often comment on them with our ideas and input. I do periodically assist our government relations group on legislation, but that really isn't what I focus on.
Chris Reichard:It's more on the rule making and the guidance steps of things. Environmental policies can come from a variety of levels of government, federal, state, and even county levels. The broader environmental compliance space consists of kind of three main policy phases. The first one is often where legislators pass or modify laws that either give or take authority away from environmental agencies. That's followed by a rule making phase.
Chris Reichard:And then ultimately there's a compliance phase. I focus on the latter two of those. The compliance phase is often where agencies create guidance documents, and sometimes these phases can blend together. They're not always linear. Sometimes they go in reverse or in circular format because, for better or worse, litigation can drive changes in things over time.
Chris Reichard:And there can be a tension between what agencies do in formal rules versus less formal guidance. My role involves a lot of reading, a lot of stakeholder meetings, writing comment letters, and the point of it is really to distill down complicated subjects into the essential aspects that are relevant and important to us. There could be a 50 to 100 page agency proposal, and I attempt to boil it down into what could be three to five key points to allow other departments and our senior leadership to more easily digest it and understand what's important to us.
Julia Perry:How much of your job is reading and ingesting complicated legalese?
Chris Reichard:I would say that's a good part of it, maybe even 50% of what I do.
Julia Perry:Do you read for pleasure anymore? Or you're just like after work, you go, nope. That's it for me. No more reading ever again.
Chris Reichard:I don't read for pleasure, and the rest of my family does, and they think I'm an oddball. And then I tell them what I did all day, and then they understand.
Elizabeth Schilling:It sounds like you have to create the Cliff Notes version of these really complex documents and then help Tri-State be able to understand what it means for us, what do these policies mean, where are we impacted. Is that accurate?
Chris Reichard:Yeah, that's a good explanation of it.
Elizabeth Schilling:So you have a background in natural resources and environmental science. What drove you to pursue this kind of career?
Chris Reichard:I think a lot of it formed in my childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up, lots of roaming around, a lot of unstructured exploring neighborhoods, fields, open spaces, that kind of thing, with friends. And I think through that, I developed a love of the natural world. And I lived in Colorado for twenty five years, but my childhood was in the Northeast where there is a lot of water compared to the West. I spent a lot of time in swamps, creeks, ponds, plenty of soaked shoes and socks.
Chris Reichard:Finding and collecting frogs, toads, and especially turtles was really my passion. I had a pretty big collection of tanks with fish and various critters in my bedroom, in my basement.
Julia Perry:How did your mom feel about that?
Chris Reichard:I think my parents were a lot more tolerant of all my little experiments than I might even be with my own kids. I attempted to build my first constructed pond for my turtles at about that age. It failed miserably. My suboptimal design consisted of digging a hole in the backyard, turning on the hose, filling it up, and then hoping that would be it. It wasn't it, and the collection of turtles that I put in it had fun for about ten minutes until all the water drained out, and I now know that I should have used some kind of clay or rubber pond liner to make it work better.
Julia Perry:I was a bug kid growing up. I loved rollie pollie's , and I built I had one of those LEGO mats, and I built a whole, like, castle system for the rollie pollie's . What I didn't realize is that even the pegs in the Lego bricks were a little too slick and a little too high for them to crawl up. So I walked away from my castle. You know, as a kid, you just feel like, cool.
Julia Perry:Did it. Done. And then move to something else. I come back, and they'd all died in the spot that I'd locked in because they couldn't get up my drawbridge into the
Chris Reichard:Oh, no.
Elizabeth Schilling:Poor turtles and poor rollie pollie's.
Julia Perry:Turtles is such a Midwest thing. I went to school in Michigan. The difference in water is really amazing.
Chris Reichard:Yeah. It's really a a whole different ecosystem. Pretty much starting a little bit East of Colorado.
Elizabeth Schilling:I just made mud pies, so there was no animals.
Chris Reichard:I did have a snapping turtle once.
Julia Perry:How big are snapping turtles?
Chris Reichard:Oh, it I mean, it depends, but the adults can be like a foot in diameter. Keep your fingers and toes away from the mouth and
Julia Perry:I think I have a rational fear of getting my finger bit by a snapping turtle, honestly.
Elizabeth Schilling:So you're part of our environmental services group. What is that group's role as a part of Tri-State?
Chris Reichard:We provide environmental compliance and policy analysis services in support of our various other departments. And we help them maintain compliance with the numerous environmental permits and obligations that our system requires. We end up with a lot of air permitting and compliance needs, particularly for our generation stations. I am not as involved, but we have a whole group that focuses on air. We also have water and waste compliance issues, which I am more involved with.
Chris Reichard:We help run and staff a spill phone. This is where any Tri-State staff at our facilities can report spills twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. This is important because some types of spills require prompt action and trigger compliance obligations of their own, depending on the details. We also maintain a list of approved waste disposal vendors which Tri State staff can use. We do this because Tri-State, as an industrial business, we can't just throw anything in the trash.
Chris Reichard:There are rules and regulations about how we have to dispose of things and other businesses as well. There are specific requirements about things like batteries, petroleum products, other chemicals, demolition waste, that kind of thing. We go through this check process with these vendors to make sure that the waste disposal facilities we use and the companies that we use follow the proper procedures on their end.
Julia Perry:How do you actually vet those vendors? What's the process for that?
Chris Reichard:It's a multi step process. We start off calling them and doing usually a phone interview and just ask them about their processes, what they do with things, do they have any permits, what those permits are. It's almost like an initial interview, and then we follow it up with a check of a couple of different online sources where we can check to see what their compliance looks like. We check those, we check an EPA database and various state databases, and then if the vendor also does trucking, we check DOT compliance to make sure that their trucking activities are safe as well.
Julia Perry:I think too, and I'm sorry, I'm just going Until off I came to Tri-State, I didn't realize as an industrial user how much resources you actually need. You know? How much water does a generation plant need to use for cooling and that kind of stuff. So when you're operating with this much territory, with this scale of industrial things like turbines and generators and stuff like that, you can actually make a difference when you're able to add environmental conservation and policy and compliance. You actually can make a difference since the scale of what we're doing is so large.
Julia Perry:Know?
Chris Reichard:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the one of the positives about our power plants because of the arid climate is we do a lot more water reuse and recycling than similar kinds of plants in the East that do this sort of once through method. So we don't actually discharge wastewater from Craig Station, from the power plant itself, whereas that's very different than a lot of utilities in other parts of the country are taking in massive amounts of water and then discharging massive amounts of water. It's a function of water rights and arid climate, but
Julia Perry:You don't have the luxury of discharging the water, essentially.
Chris Reichard:The original thing was probably scarcity. Our system is what they encourage eastern utilities to move towards, not necessarily from a quantity scarcity standpoint, but just a useless water standpoint.
Julia Perry:That's awesome.
Elizabeth Schilling:You talked about waste disposal, little bit about air and water. Are there other types of environmental policies that apply to Tri-State that you guys are tracking?
Chris Reichard:Yeah, we track a pretty wide variety of things, both at the policy stage and the compliance stage, in addition to waste disposal. There's also environmental policies related to water discharges, endangered species protection, drinking water. Construction activities in general are often regulated in a bunch of different ways. One of those is related to stormwater management. There's a whole set of environmental rules, policies, and guidance related to coal mining that we have to comply with as well.
Chris Reichard:And agencies also develop their own procedures for how they're going to do things. We pay attention to those too to make sure that their own processes are reasonable for us as well. It's really pretty numerous and diverse, the types of policies that are relevant to us. In terms of agencies, that's pretty varied too. Many people are familiar with and have heard of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Chris Reichard:That's probably the best known federal environmental agency, but there are many others. Most states have an air and water regulatory agency. There are federal and state wildlife agencies, federal and state land management agencies, state health departments have their own programs, various counties have their own programs. It's a pretty diverse set, both of topics and the agency from where they come from. And a function of our geographic footprint, the multistate service territory, that also just brings in a lot more different jurisdictions compared to say an electric utility that only serves one main metro area or one urban center.
Chris Reichard:They have just a smaller universe of environmental agencies that apply to them given the footprint is smaller, if that makes sense.
Elizabeth Schilling:It's not like you come to work to do your job, and there's one book of rules that you consult. You guys are pulling from so many different sources, combining all of that into something that can make sense so people can do their jobs properly, effectively, and compliant.
Chris Reichard:That's right.
Elizabeth Schilling:That's a lot.
Chris Reichard:Yeah.
Julia Perry:I'm curious, off the top of your head, what are some of the endangered species we have to work around?
Chris Reichard:A couple that come to mind are the greater sage grouse is one that applies in Northwestern Colorado. It's not fully federally protected, but it still has a lot of attention put on it. The lesser prairie chicken is another grouse species where it intersects our projects in Southeastern Colorado and Eastern New Mexico as well. There's also an aspect related to water use with some endangered fish in the Yampa River. That's another touch point there.
Julia Perry:What are endangered fish? I didn't know Colorado had endangered fish.
Chris Reichard:Yeah. There's a number of endangered fish in the Colorado River Basin. One is called the Colorado Pikeminnow, which is a misnomer because it can be really big, like, as long as us. Razorback sucker is another one. Bonytail's another one.
Chris Reichard:Those tend to apply when projects are using and taking water out of rivers. That's a pretty common issue there.
Elizabeth Schilling:I was stuck on the razorback guy, got a cool name, and the lesser prairie chicken. I just feel bad. Why did it have to be lesser? That's really too bad.
Chris Reichard:Well, there's a greater prairie chicken.
Elizabeth Schilling:Because okay. That's so somebody's gotta be lesser.
Chris Reichard:And and as a size reference.
Elizabeth Schilling:So Oh, okay. Okay.
Chris Reichard:A lot of the grouse species have interesting mating rituals that including Greater Sage Grouse.
Julia Perry:They're just cool. They dance. They have a mating dance, and they have those fright what are they called? The things that puff out at their neck.
Chris Reichard:I think there's called air sacs.
Julia Perry:They have these really brightly colored air sacs. So when they're doing their mating dance, it's a whole thing.
Chris Reichard:Yeah. If you hop on, YouTube has probably many videos of what Greater Sage Grouse the males look like. It's bizarre.
Elizabeth Schilling:I know what I'm Googling later. What does a typical day look like for you?
Chris Reichard:That's a little hard to describe. A lot of what I do is pretty varied. That diversity is actually something I enjoy, keeps things interesting. I've often thought of my role as a succession of special environmental projects rather than focusing on sort of one thing or one facility over time. A great thing about my role is I get to think about how these various environmental policies and compliance topics affect all of what we do, not just one plant or one aspect of our business.
Chris Reichard:I tend to take an enterprise wide view of things, look at it through different lenses. And this is really because of our diverse operations, where we're almost a bunch of different companies rolled up into one. We have to think about things through a variety of perspectives. Sometimes there might be a topic that's irrelevant to our transmission system, but highly relevant to our generation system, and vice versa. Sometimes our topic might be important only to just one facility, or many different facilities we have.
Chris Reichard:If I had to paint a picture of kind of a hypothetical day, it could include things like a couple hours of reading an agency environmental proposal, taking some notes, formulating possible comment ideas, talking with one or more colleagues to get their perspectives on the topic. Sometimes we consult with external experts where something's really specific. There might be an external consultant or sometimes external attorneys that we work with to get their perspective on how something might be relevant and important to us. That might be followed by a few hours drafting a comment letter, and then say a one or two hour stakeholder meeting to a variety of things.
Elizabeth Schilling:You're comfortable with the idea that certain parts of your work might be predictable, some might be a whole new project that maybe you didn't know was coming, but now it's impacting us and you have to be ready to go.
Chris Reichard:Yeah. It requires a bit of flexibility moving things around. We try to know when an agency plans to release something, but sometimes things come out either much later or sooner than we thought, and then we have to readjust and prioritize things.
Elizabeth Schilling:Can you share an example of a policy or initiative that you worked on that had a significant impact for Tri-State or for our members?
Chris Reichard:I had the opportunity to help review the many proposals that we received on our path to renewable energy solicitations. Mostly I was looking at whether the bidders had addressed environmental issues adequately and at least had a plan to consider those in the future and make sure those topics were covered. This was rewarding because these projects are really important to Tri-State as we shift towards renewables, and it's really important to our future. More generally on the policy side, there's so many things going on that the significance is more collective significance rather than an individual item.
Julia Perry:You were working on what are the policies when you go to put in renewables, specifically solar, are you looking at just generally?
Chris Reichard:To see if they have at least a plan for the typical permits that would be required for constructing. Some of it's looking at maps of known resources that are in the area or at that site, and seeing if they've considered that as well. And it was a little bit more general than what we might do if a project was fully ready to go. These are proposal phase projects rather than, We're going to start building this tomorrow. It's a little bit less rigor than, say, something that was going to be happening immediately when we're doing that review of a proposal.
Elizabeth Schilling:It sounds like your job has to stay pretty collaborative, both with developers we might be working with and internally with the different departments across Tri-State. Are there other external groups that you have to collaborate with on a regular basis?
Chris Reichard:Yeah. And we really choose to collaborate with a lot of external groups because they help us do our work. We do a lot of work with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. They have a variety of environmental focused groups that get together and have meetings. We participate in the Colorado and National Mining Association and their groups, State Chambers of Commerce.
Chris Reichard:There are water quality groups that focus on water permitting and water quality standards. There's also clean power groups like American Clean Power that are focused on that sector and relevant environmental things there too. It's both internal and external collaboration with different groups.
Elizabeth Schilling:How does working with some of those different groups help us accomplish more?
Chris Reichard:It can be an efficiency thing. When we all get together and talk about a particular issue, we get to hear what other utilities are thinking on a topic, and we get to share with them what we're thinking. There can be some mutual benefit there to expand the collective understanding on something. It's really great when we come out of those with a different perspective than when we went in. And it's also a cost efficiency thing.
Chris Reichard:Sometimes these groups retain technical consultants, and we do it as a group rather than as just one utility hiring either a technical consultant or sometimes an attorney. But it's a sort of information sharing and cost efficiency benefit to work with these groups.
Elizabeth Schilling:Sounds like a big benefit to not working in a bubble.
Julia Perry:Having a lot of voices, weighing in, especially for Tri-State when you have such a diverse territory. Having diverse groups being able to weigh in on a bunch of issues does seem like it's more efficient, and you get to the solution faster.
Elizabeth Schilling:We talked a little bit about policy being one part of your job, but you also mentioned compliance. Can you go into a little bit more about what that side of your job means?
Chris Reichard:I would explain the difference between policy and compliance using the analogy of a box. Compliance requires us to operate within an environmental policy box as it presently exists. In other words, what do the rules and regulations currently require of us? Policy work is more future focused. It provides the opportunity to shape and mold the details of that policy box that we'll have to operate in down the line.
Chris Reichard:It also gives us the opportunity to change current policy boxes if we don't like them or if they are impractical. Another way to describe it is compliance focuses on meeting present requirements, policy focuses on seeking the future that we want.
Elizabeth Schilling:That's great. Again, where we have that involvement and can be a voice that's considered as those policies are being created makes sense. Give a little bit of space within that box we're gonna live in and not be too cramped. Maybe it's not space, but at least have it be an appropriately sized box for the work we need to do.
Chris Reichard:That's more of a creative phase, if you will. And when we're doing the policy work, we don't have to bound ourselves by how things are done today. That can be part of it too.
Elizabeth Schilling:What is Tri-State's role in maintaining compliance? Or essentially, what does it mean to be a 100% compliant company?
Chris Reichard:It's really important, and I think of it like safety. We do what we're required to do. We don't cut compliance corners. We operate very complicated facilities with literally thousands of applicable environmental requirements, and we have many people who are working daily to make sure we comply with them on a continuous basis. Compliance also comes from our board policy and legal requirements and regulatory requirements as well.
Chris Reichard:They protect our members' investments in all these facilities, which are substantial. They build and maintain our public reputation. We avoid penalties. And it's just the right thing to do.
Elizabeth Schilling:How does that help members?
Chris Reichard:It really it comes back to the three prongs of our mission: reliable, affordable, and responsible. Compliance helps us maintain all three of those things, and it protects the communities we operate in. This is really important because this is often where our members and their members live and work. It's their backyard. In addition to the Tri-State piece, it's protecting the local community and environment as well.
Julia Perry:I think that is really important too because with our members' territory and footprint, a lot of their businesses rely on both agriculture and outdoor recreation. So they also have a vested interest in Tri-State following these environmental policies and keeping everything up to code.
Elizabeth Schilling:Yeah. So the next kid who's out there collecting turtles isn't in any danger.
Julia Perry:Yes. We need turtles there to collect.
Elizabeth Schilling:Yeah. What is the cost of being out of compliance if we look at that side of things?
Chris Reichard:The cost can obviously be with financial, but they also can be reputational. Violations of environmental regulations and permits can carry steep penalties. In some cases, it's tens of thousands of dollars per day per violation, which can really add up. Certain types of violations are even considered criminal offenses, and we definitely want to avoid that. And there can also be long lasting reputational costs depending on what happens.
Chris Reichard:These can linger years after the initial incident. You could think of it almost like a social cost of noncompliance or name recognition. There can also be indirect ways that noncompliance can affect us. Sometimes we get, it's not very frequent, but sometimes we get questions from our insurance companies about environmental topics. So there can be that outside indirect angle as well, not necessarily from a regulatory agency per se.
Elizabeth Schilling:Between building and maintaining relationships and also embedding compliance into the processes that Tri-State follows as we approach work, it really makes us more efficient overall. Can you speak to that?
Chris Reichard:It's really inefficient when people planning projects find out about environmental requirements late. We have a variety of tools and systems where that's built into the project development from the beginning rather than becoming a later step where it can result in rework and going back to the drawing board or surprises. In general, in environmental services, we wanna help our other departments not be surprised.
Elizabeth Schilling:Feels like that works best for everybody involved. What's the cost difference between being reactive versus being proactive when it comes to environmental regulations?
Chris Reichard:It's hard to put a dollar amount on it. The saying an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure is a good description. When we find ourselves being reactive, it usually leads to hasty decisions, fewer options, less control of our destiny, and often higher costs. This also links back to the purpose of the policy engagement work, because that's future focused work, and it gives us the opportunity to know what's coming before it's final.
Julia Perry:It makes a lot of sense too, because in policy and government in general, if you're not a part of the conversation, you don't have any influence on where anything goes. So you can't complain when you get the result if you didn't participate when you had an opportunity to in the beginning.
Elizabeth Schilling:And it feels like that's an education piece too. No one individual can know all the details of all the industries that might be impacted by a policy to bring that education of, Okay, we're Tri-State. This is how it's going to impact us and our members. Here's a consideration as you move forward. That feels really, I don't know, good balance, good relationship.
Chris Reichard:And a lot of these agencies, they're operating within the bounds of their program when they're developing something new for the regulated public. But they may not be aware of all these other things and how their decisions interact with the decisions of other agencies that are maybe doing something a little different, but it has some influence on the two. It can help that the agencies understand sort of the bigger picture of what we're up against.
Julia Perry:Do you have an example of when you were working to develop comments on a policy with these groups when either they educated you in a really valuable way or you were able to educate them in a meaningful way?
Chris Reichard:There was a proposed rule related to an endangered species in Colorado, and they were gonna have some pretty season wide vegetation impact type restrictions. And we talked about our need to be able to do that during the growing season, and they added an exemption for utility maintenance in the final rule. It doesn't always happen, but sometimes we get the things that we ask for in our comments, and it's helpful.
Julia Perry:Yeah. Just being part of the conversation opened up that opportunity for that to be added.
Elizabeth Schilling:How do you stay informed about when those regulations are happening? Something's either going to change or something new is going to be introduced, especially those things that are going to impact rural energy providers?
Chris Reichard:Like we talked about earlier, we participate in a variety of electric utility groups, and they also track a lot of these things, send out reports, email companies on their email list. NRECA, again, is a good example of that. We also participate in a group called the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, USWAG is the acronym, and they're a great resource for this on the waste and some water policy side of things. We also monitor something called the Federal Register, and this is for federal regulations and where federal agencies publish notices of changes and decisions. It's published every day, it has a unique format of three columns of small font text per page, which is painful to some to read.
Chris Reichard:We sign up for a notice service through them based on keywords where they send out emails of policy matters with those keywords. So we get to be aware of things at the federal level through that. Some of it's just less formal too. It's talking with other people internally about what they've heard. The rumor mill kind of thing can sometimes be pretty effective both in these groups and with our colleagues.
Julia Perry:What type of policies have the most groups are the most complicated? Is that air policy? Is that water policy? Which ones end up being the most complicated?
Chris Reichard:That's hard to say. I think they're complicated in different ways, but I would say air and water are probably the two more complicated ones. In my mind,
Julia Perry:I just went, Earth, heart, Lord Powers combined. When did Captain Planet come out? I don't even know.
Chris Reichard:I've never heard of that.
Julia Perry:When I was growing up, part of the nineties, like, Fern Gully animated series kicked. There's a show called Captain Planet, and it was, like, a group of kids, and they all wore, like, magic rings and was earth, wind, air, fire, and the last guy was heart. And then they combined all their rings and it turned into Captain Planet who literally fought waste monsters like an oil guy or like an evil corporation that was mowing down the forest, Captain Planet.
Elizabeth Schilling:As of today, environmental services is rebranded Captain Planet.
Julia Perry:Yeah. They were called the planeteers. The planeteer. Really?
Julia Perry:We're the planeteer. You can be one too. Saving our planet is the thing to do. Ingrained deeply in here.
Chris Reichard:I know it. I didn't look up on YouTube tonight.
Elizabeth Schilling:Where do we go from there? Okay. How do you work with other departments, like for example, engineering or operations, to make sure environmental compliance is built into their everyday decisions?
Chris Reichard:As a service organization, we work with our operations in a variety of facilities on a daily basis. Meetings, phone calls, emails, all the typical ways. And we're talking about environmental obligations and compliance requirements, and making sure that they're planning for them early. That's a key theme. We use something called an environmental impact checklist, which is something project managers, when they're starting a project, go through, and it asks a series of questions that start people thinking about identifying what kinds of permits and requirements would be needed on that particular project.
Elizabeth Schilling:Are there any environmental policy trends that you're following right now?
Chris Reichard:I would say a present trend and one that's in the news pretty prominently are all the various changes coming out at the federal level. These are important to track. Many of them are relevant to us. There's a theme of reducing environmental regulation there, but there is an interesting consequence and reaction to that federal trend that can lead some states to decide that they're going to step up and do more when the federal government might be deciding to do less. And a good example of that is this long debated topic of which wetlands and streams are federally protected.
Chris Reichard:This is a subject that's been debated for decades, even before I started working with many swings back and forth. We could do a whole podcast just on that topic and this term waters of The US, which is policy lingo for wetlands, streams, and rivers. But anyway, reductions at the federal level led Colorado to decide to pass a state law last year to create a new state wetland and stream permit program. Last year was the legislative phase. We had some interaction with our government relations group during that phase.
Chris Reichard:And now it's in the rule making phase where the state is developing the rules and the permits on how to implement this new law. We're expecting wetland regulations and more permits to come out largely next year in 2026. That's an interesting dynamic of sort of the push and pull between what a federal trend might be and how states react to that.
Julia Perry:Are there a lot of wetlands in Colorado?
Chris Reichard:It depends on where you go. There can be a fair amount of more in the mountains, and we've actually done, as humans, a pretty good job of creating new wetlands where they historically may not have been due to irrigation practices. That's another complicating factor in the West is how water is moved around in ditches and canals. A lot of them not lined. They're just earthen canals.
Chris Reichard:There's a lot of wetlands that they might be little, but they're in some unique places rather than perhaps directly along a river or stream.
Julia Perry:When they're considering federal environmental policy changes, what's the timeline for that? Is a federal environmental policy something that happens quickly, or they start talking about it and maybe they'll come to a decision in fifteen years or something like that?
Chris Reichard:Fifteen years, that's a little long, but in general, I would say between when a federal agency puts out a proposed or draft rule, it's usually about a year before that might be final, generally speaking. The phrase it depends is a common theme in environmental policy and compliance world because each situation is unique. Sometimes there are legal settlement driven deadlines by which an agency must act. Sometimes there's a regulatory requirement that they have to act in a certain amount of time. It can be slow, and going back to something I said at the beginning, that can result in this sort of circular nature of things where something comes out, it becomes finalized, it gets challenged, the agency has to go back to the drawing board, they re-propose something else, and then that has to wait and go through the process to become final.
Chris Reichard:It can take multiple years depending on the level of interest and the level of, I guess you could say, controversy around a particular matter. And it's a tricky piece of this work in that agencies sometimes attempt to do things through guidance, where those don't necessarily have to go through the formal rulemaking process. Sometimes they do anyway, but that can be an easier, quicker way for agencies to try and do something that isn't in a formal rule. That's another twist to this saga.
Julia Perry:Your job seems like cascading dominoes of calendar dates.
Chris Reichard:Yeah. That's true. And it's actually something Melissa said years ago is don't get married to the plan because it often changes. We can make a prediction of what we think is gonna happen, and then surprises show up on the timelines and things change. It's sort of predict the schedule and the timing and then probably re predict it again in six or eight months and be flexible.
Elizabeth Schilling:What's a new initiative you're working on right now?
Chris Reichard:There's a new one. It relates to the monarch butterfly. And because populations of monarch butterflies have declined significantly over the last several years, the species may become federally protected under the Endangered Species Act at some time in the future. In recognition of that, as well as how widespread monarchs can be, even though their numbers are declining, we decided to join a monarch butterfly conservation program known as a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances in 2024. And that name, that title's a mouthful.
Chris Reichard:CCAA is the acronym that's used. And it's an incentive based voluntary program that benefits both Monarchs and energy companies like us that choose to participate before things are required of us, once the species gets listed. The program provides regulatory assurances to us. It has a cost savings benefit as well. And what we have to do in exchange for those benefits is we have to perform some conservation measures for monarchs that maintain its habitat.
Chris Reichard:And we're doing that on some of our own lands in Southeastern Colorado. I will point out, this is importantly a group effort internally. It's not just me working on it. It's involved several transmission departments like land rights, the siting and permitting people, and our GIS group. It's been a team effort there, and it's really an interesting blend of policy, compliance, and conservation, which is actually what I find really interesting about it.
Chris Reichard:The CCA tool is something that exists within the Endangered Species Act. It did get a new name recently, but that's another matter. It's also compliance because it provides us with regulatory coverage, essentially a permit for activities that might accidentally impact monarchs when we're going about our various activities out in the landscape. It's also conservation because we're offsetting those impacts through maintaining habitat and participating in the program where we do field monitoring and report on it. So it's a really good incentive based approach under the Endangered Species Act that after we looked at it really for several years, we felt it made sense for us to join and really trial it out.
Chris Reichard:We haven't enrolled our whole system in it, but we've enrolled a good chunk of our system in Southeastern Colorado and Northeastern New Mexico. I mean our transmission system when I say system. That's a new initiative that I've been working on really over the last year, and it's, yeah, it's really interesting.
Julia Perry:What are some of the measures we will be doing to help encourage the monarch habitat or protect them?
Chris Reichard:The main thing we're doing is we're leaving our lands idle, and we're doing light and controlled grazing on those lands so that flowering plants, including milkweed, which is a key plant that monarchs need for their life cycle, as well as other flowering plants, which provides food for them. It's a national program, and a lot of what it's focused on is doing less mowing in general and less maintenance of vegetation and doing it at better times of the year to avoid impacting monarchs.
Julia Perry:What is our preferred grazer? Is it a cow?
Chris Reichard:Yeah, it's mostly cattle.
Julia Perry:Oh, and PSA, tropical milkweed is bad for monarchs. Make sure you get kinds that are either native to the area or actually good for monarch butterflies.
Chris Reichard:That is true. It's interesting because milkweed grows in a wide variety of places. On like the side of the road On next to the my walks in sidewalk cracks around headquarters. It's not a particularly challenging plant to get to grow or rare, which is good.
Julia Perry:They're really interesting structurally too, especially the pink ones that get the big pink balls of flower and the very upright growth. I think they're cool looking.
Elizabeth Schilling:Gonna go out on a limb and say if you have a need for more field monitors for your monarch habitats, I think Julia would
Julia Perry:Oh, I'll I'll get out there.
Chris Reichard:There's lots of interests.
Elizabeth Schilling:Overall, it sounds like business and operations just run more smoothly when we are compliant. But why else is compliance important to Tri-State?
Chris Reichard:I think as a member owned cooperative, we focus on and care about the quality of life where we operate. This is our members and our member owners' communities, backyards, playgrounds. It's really important that we're a good steward of those environments where we operate, and it's really to protect where our member owners live and work. Yeah, I think it's important. We have a pretty big footprint on the landscape as humans, so trying to manage that and reduce it where we can is really important.
Elizabeth Schilling:I think it's safe to say we've learned a few new things today. Thank you, Chris, for joining us. Thanks for giving us your time, and thanks for everything you do for Tri-State.
Chris Reichard:Yeah. You're welcome. This was great.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.