Rifle city council heard an update from Holy Cross Energy during the Nov. 6 city council meeting on how the company is doing, how they’re supporting Rifle and their plans for the future. 

“The more we can be efficient, the more energy services we can get for each unit of energy, each kilowatt hour of energy, each BTU (British thermal unit) of natural gas, each gallon of gasoline,” said Bryan Hannegan, the President and CEO of Holy Cross Energy. “We are transitioning to cleaner, wholesale sources of power.”

Holy Cross Energy is working to achieve carbon-free power supply by 2030 and either carbon-neutral or better across the enterprise by 2035 where they don’t sacrifice affordability, safety or reliability for the sake of sustainability. 

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“Tonight, Holy Cross is 76% carbon-free, renewable resources, year-to-date,” Hannegan said. “The other 24% has to come from somewhere and that comes from the regional grid, our partners at Xcel energy and Black Hills and comes sometimes from out of state. Those resources are predominantly fossil fuel, coal.” 

Hannegan said that when they add a new resource, the affordability and reliability of that resource is very important and that sustainability is not the only criteria they need to satisfy. 

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“In order to keep the lights on, an electric utility has to balance supply of energy with the demand for it in all places at all times,” Hannegan said. “It’s a really wicked hard juggling challenge.” 

Hannegan said that Holy Cross Energy is not the only utility company in the state to decarbonize their electricity mix, including Xcel Energy and will be at or above 80% carbon-free in their resource mix by 2035. 

He also said that their system reliability for an outage is 60 minutes per customer, per year, which is twice as good as the national average. Their retail electric rate has gone up five percent in the last seven years, whereas inflation, he said, is 30-40%, and that it’s enabled by investments in technology, wildfire mitigation, cyber security and grid modernization. 

“That’s all occurred even as we’ve kept our rates relatively flat in real terms, because that transition to clean energy that I’ve mentioned has avoided over $30 million in power supply cost that we otherwise would’ve had to pay if we relied on the wholesale market,” Hannegan said. “That’s $30 million…let’s call it $100 per member, per year that wasn’t on the electric bill.”

After listening to Holy Cross Energy, the council listened to Journey Home Animal Care Center and whether they should approve a new $150,000 contract for the shelter, which comes out to $679 per animal, which is consistent with other shelters, with the highest from Colorado Animal Rescue at $800 per animal.  

Since Journey Home’s start in 2012, the city of Rifle has paid $72,000 to the shelter, regardless of whether the animals came from Rifle. Journey Home services Rifle, Parachute, New Castle and Garfield County. 

“We really do try and not be just a place that does adoption, but a whole community resource,” said Heather Grant. 

Journey Home Animal Care Center does neutering and spaying, surgeries, adoption, pet surrenders or even caring for a pet when someone has to go to the hospital and doesn’t have anyone to help. The city staff worked with the Center to come up with a contract.

“Yeah, just put the pictures of the animals, staring right out at you, works every time,” joked councilor Clint Hostettler before he moved to approve the contract for Journey Home Animal Care Center. 

The council also approved the purchase of two radar speed trailers for the Rifle Police Department through a mini grant for $25,000 from the Garfield County Federal Mineral Lease District, which is not a match grant and the other $5,325.57 will be funded from the budget. 

A revocable license to encroach the property at 1761 Anvil View Ave. in Rifle was considered Nov. 6 as well, since Patrick Waller, the city manager is applying for the property and Jim Neu, the city attorney is working on this. 

It was discovered that Matt Sturgeon and Tommy Klein, previous city managers for Rifle, also lived in that subdivision. After some joking about it being city manager hill, the councilors approved the license. 

Waller said in the report to the city manager that a construction survey is being released so they can get feedback on how better to communicate with the community about their construction.