 Okay, mics are live, just want to make that clear. No, end of oral communication. I'm a proud to remember before the end of the interview. Thank you. Drive back up, put back up. Welcome to SoCal Creek Water District Meeting for today, November 19th, 2019. It's a good day. Roll call, we'll find all of our board members present and we have no public hearing. So the first item on the agenda is the consent agenda. I'd like to pull, let me get to my notes here. Minutes of November 5th, I think it's 3.1.1. Okay. 1.2, 3.1.2. 3.1.2, okay. And that's it. Okay, and nothing else, all right? Any motion to? So moved. I'll second. To move the rest of the consent agenda. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? None. So motion carries and then you wanted to look at the minutes for? What? Go ahead. Did you find it? I was not looking at that, but let me get to the history of business. It was on the ADUs. What page? I guess it would be on page four or six of the minutes, which is nine of 100. Okay. And I'd just like it to be noted in the comments in the minutes that I supported the smaller ADUs, but voted against it because concerned about not a limit on the ADU size. And I thought it was an issue of fairness. Okay. And did you have something to do? No, I think I decided it wasn't a type of, I was confused when I read what the motion was, but I think it's right. Okay. So I'll make the motion to approve. I will second that motion. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Great. So thank you. And so the next item is our oral and written communications. So this is to be the time for the public to address the board on any item not on tonight's agenda. Seeing none, we'll move on to some board comments and then maybe any board. Well, actually, can we just start with a little announcement for Ron? Yeah. Well, it's a press release. I can read it now or after the board speaks. This is a good time. Yeah. So this is a press release that went out on Friday and I'll just get a read it. I think it's a well done press release. So on November 15th, Friday, Superior Court Judge Timothy Schmal in Santa Cruz County ruled in favor of the Soquel Creek Water District on all elements of a legal action brought against the district earlier this year. The legal action alleged insufficiencies in the Environmental Impact Report, or EIR, for the Pure Water Soquel Groundwater Replenishment and Sea Water Intrusion Prevention Project. The district's board of directors certified the EIR and approved the project on December 18th, 2018. Judge Schmal wrote a well-reason 17-page point-by-point decision which denied the petitioner's request rid of mandate, which is a court order to a government agency to correct any agency's prior actions. This is a quote. We're very happy that we can continue to move forward in our efforts to protect our groundwater supply from sea water intrusion, providing a safe, reliable, drought-resistant water supply for future generations, said Dr. Tom LeHue, president of the district's board of directors. The judge's decision clearly showed that our Environmental Impact Reporter, the EIR, was thorough, compliant with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, and protective of the environment. The lawsuit challenged the district's certification of the EIR and approval of the project under CEQA on a number of points, some of which were procedural in nature, those being the district's public noticing, the time limit for the EIR public comment period, and notifying of appropriate agencies. The judge notes that the district was, in fact, compliant in all those instances. Among several others, the two primary challenges in the lawsuit centered on whether the district adequately analyzed the project alternative of water transfers only, and whether the district provided meaningful analysis of impacts on water quality as a result of the project. The court found that the district did, in fact, comply with the requirements of CEQA in conducting its alternative analysis, including water transfers only, and that there was adequate analysis of groundwater quality with conclusions of these issues, supported by substantial evidence. The judge found all other assertions made by the petitioner in the lawsuit similarly insufficient. In short, the judge ruled that the district's EIR in the certification slash adoption process were compliant with CEQA. Period, thank you. So good news on Friday, and then more good news today, and I'm gonna read actually just a portion of the press release that actually came out just today from the state water board since we were just there. Seeking to clean up and prevent contamination of aquifers that supply millions of Californians with drinking water, the state water resources sources control board announced today that it has approved the last of 13 grants totaling $367 million awarded since July. This funding has filled a huge need to bolster groundwater cleanup efforts in numerous key areas, said Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the state water board. The projects implemented under this program will support the state's water resiliency and sustainability efforts by encouraging protection, restoration and utilization of valuable local water resources. The state water board today approved $86 million in funding for the Soquel Creek Water District's Pure Water Soquel Groundwater Replenishment and Seawater Intrusion Prevention Project. The funding includes $50 million in grants and a $36 million low interest loan. The project is intended to address severe groundwater overdraft in the area and to combat seawater intrusion that has been detected in the underlying aquifer. So, I'm not gonna read the rest, but I will say that I am honored and I was very proud of our district and our customers that came up there today. And all of the staff is amazing. And so I wanna just mention that all of the state board members said something positive about our project, that it's a showcase, that it's a model for the rest of the state, that it's exactly what the state wants to be doing and needs to be doing for resiliency in the long term. And I think obviously this is gonna make it much better for our customers, but I wanna just also, the staff put in a huge amount of effort. And Melanie, I wanna just point you out a little bit for spearheading an incredible effort to get this done and never giving up. And just, I mean, when we are producing water at the end of 2022, you need to take the first step. Okay, so I, anyway, that'll be enough for me. Anyone else? Any other? I know how hard it is and this is probably five times bigger than what I had to do and I totally knew you guys had it. I was already planning. I never once doubted you. And I'm so proud. Thank you for all your work. Anyone else? Okay, so we'll move on. Oh wait, forgot. Let's celebrate. And I just wanted to take a moment to recognize those that came up today. So the item was on the State Water Resource Control Board agenda this morning. So we did go up to Sacramento and many of our project supporters as well as partners also attended. And I just wanted to take the time to recognize them and let me know if I forget anybody. But in this picture here, I just wanted to kind of call out that in the back behind the dais are the State Water Resources Control Board members. We had a four-year-old Firestone director talk. Is that how you say talk? Tam Dudak. Help me with a walkie vice chair. Let me see if the names are right here. Sorry, I should have done this. Oh, I don't have it. Doreen and then Sean McGuire along with those that spoke on behalf of the district. We had Larry Freeman there who is here in the audience tonight speaking on behalf of Rape Pairs. Robert Singleton from the Santa Cruz County Business Council. We also had Toby Briggs from Friends of the River. We had Sierra Ryan who spoke on behalf of the Santa Cruz City Water Commission and also as a staff who assists with the MGA. And we also had Mark Deddle who spoke on behalf of being the Public Works Director for the City of Santa Cruz. We also just want to recognize also in the picture that we did have other Pure Water Soquel team members as well as staff from the Division of Financial Assistance. So it really was a team effort. In addition to those who spoke, there were over 100 letters that were submitted to the state. So, you know, a shout out to our community who really prioritize the environment as well as our customers' rates. You know, we've been hearing that from people and this is what this is all about is to ensure a seawater intrusion prevention project as well as being mindful and respectful of our Rape Pairs and where we can get funding assistance, we want to get that. So with that, Ron, did you want to say anything? I think you did an excellent job. I think it's time to toast. Yeah, so if we could have anybody in the audience who would like to join us in a toast of preventing seawater intrusion to the groundwater basin and also, you know, making our water affordable and reducing local rate payer costs by getting grants and loans, I'd like you to come up please. Oh, yes, just we're toasting with Apple Cider. Yeah, just so we know. And soft out the cider, if I have a minute. Local. Okay, we got, let me know. I think everybody can come right up front to get a glass, don't be bashful, right? All right, we're good. It's okay, we don't need to be seen. You guys can go up there. I want to toast to our customers, to our staff, to all of the people on the board and all of the people who will benefit from a safe water supply in the future. And the environment. Thank you very much. Great, so nice job and thank you so much. Good job. I guess I thought it was good. Oh, very sweet. Best cider I've ever had. Good job. Yes, it's local. Local cider. Excellent. All right, so thank you everybody. The next item on the agenda is the management update. I don't have any additions to the Conservation Customer Service field report, but if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Sure, Carla. Just a couple of, just one or two customers just in passing come to me and ask about the accuracy of new meters. And so I thought, well, maybe the meter that you had before was inaccurate. And yeah, I couldn't understand what was going on. It was beyond me to figure that out or whether they had a leak or they just had unexpected water use after. Sure, is this in relation to the AMI upgrade? That's what they thought. It's hard to pin. Yeah, there's a lot of basically over-watering going on as we were in the irrigation season and moving out, and a lot of people were surprised by their high bills because their timers were set to irrigate quite frequently. And so we have had people say, well, there's no way I could have used that much water. There must be something wrong with the meter and we were able to data log in most cases and pull the hourly consumption from those meters and basically show customers when that happened, when that water went through the meter. Yeah, so and then as far as the AMI upgrade goes for the majority of services, I'd say like 95% of the services are only having a register replacement as opposed to a whole meter replacement and so there should not be really any change in the reading on that meter and typically if you have an older meter that's when they start to lose performance and they read on the low side. So, you know, if you were to put a newer meter in there it might be more accurate and therefore record a higher consumption. But I'll add if you have a specific name or number, we're always willing to meet with them. I wasn't even sure how many of the newer registers have been put in or anything and they didn't know either but I knew more about the map the map of installation. Where they've been done. We can always go out and do a customer service call and take a look at things and make sure that the meters basically the correct register has been installed for that size meter check the programming make sure everything's correct work with the customer and show them what the data log says about when they use the water and then, you know, of course water wise house calls are always available to people for free for more detailed help. I was going to suggest the one thing that happens because we've had two big power outages and they reset and they reset to 30 minutes for each cycle we've been outreaching that I think in the last couple monthly e-blasts we've been trying to really let people know after the power outages maybe some people don't know about that still that's a great possibility that's why I didn't wait until I had a chance to ask about it and I just plowed into it sometimes it's just simply a leak we've been finding quite a few cases where people have left hoses on and we've, with our new AMI technology as we've rolled that out we've been able to let people know like within a day or two your your hose is on or your hose was left on we've had a couple people say thank you so much for letting us know and go out and turn it off so that's been great that's more of what I expected suddenly used too much water what happened so this might not be a question you can answer I'm not sure but on social media I've been told that there's people talking about higher bills because the billing cycles have changed that some things have been clumped together differently is that I'm not I haven't heard that we'll check into that but I don't think we've changed that so still monthly yeah I think our billing cycles should be the same I would think it would if it was it would be a one time change I was wondering if there's something strange with meters being used or something of that nature I'll look into it then I had one more question about AMI will the harmony software and the access for people to look at their own water use so we have access to master meter that's the AMI vendor to their portal called My Water Advisor and we recently went back and took another close look at that with master meter and there's a couple things associated with the program we feel don't really meet our needs and our customer's needs and so one example would be per email login that email customer can only look at one account through the portal and so you have to have a different email for each account and so that is somewhat of a limitation that master meters said they're working on their software development to fix another kind of issue that concerns us is they do a comparative consumption by month and they look at the particular account as compared to all of the accounts in the district divided like an average and so that includes commercial use and irrigation use that just sends the wrong message and so I think what we want to do is go back and look at some other products and see if those best meet our needs and so we'll be coming back to the board I'm sure with more details on that kind of a one thing that we don't want to just roll out something and then have it not work we were talking with another local agency that's doing AMI to use the manufacturers portal because it was free and they rolled it out and they found that it didn't meet their needs there were issues with it and so then they pulled it and they started using WaterSmart and it's confused people because now they have to go and create a second login to use the portal and some other concerns and so we want to roll out something that is good from the start and not have any confusion and issues and provide the best service to our customers I was thinking master meter kind of touted that as one of the advantages to their system and a little bit misrepresenting it if it's not an effective product there's some good things with their product compared to some of the other meter manufacturers products in fact they did work with WaterSmart on some of the graphics which are really nice but it's just those details on how they put together their metrics and so we'll be checking back with them and also looking at alternatives and coming back to us so I just want to say that I've been approached by members of the community who have volunteered to be beta testers and there's the roll out but there might be beforehand because I'm sure we'll find other things that are wrong with software etc etc and so we'll definitely reach out to you when we get closer and see if we can collect that contact information I will too of course but I think it would be wise instead of having a total roll out to have a beta test and you'll probably find that anyway yeah and we've worked with WaterSmart in the past so I think a company that provides a portal is going to provide also more services in terms of the roll out and the outreach to customers and things of that nature then we would be doing that at a staff level if we go with the master meter product so I just think it might be a smoother transition and start up alright any other things for our conservation alright engineering well pardon me for not being able to get you a written report it was a busy week so I'll just give you a couple updates Bryce Dahlmeyer our associate engineer has routed plans around internally for the Soquel Drive main replacement project to refresh your memory that's from Cabrillo to State Park and so we're hoping to roll that out early next year Mike Wilson our other associate engineer is also wrapping up the Granite Waywell project at the corner of Cathedral in Trout Gulch Thursday we're anticipating the pump to be installed it's been a long process for that and then we got word from PG&E that we won't get our electric service but between now and then of course the well pump will be installed the coating will be applied on the above ground piping and then the site can get paved so there's still some work that can be done but we anticipate by early next year we'll be operating that well and then I've been involved in all the procurement steps for Purewater Soquel the one that's been making its way further along is the conveyance pipeline effort and also I've been involved in the treatment teams that have been interviewing with our team as well and so that's moving along and we anticipate bringing you some actionable items early next year in January for the conveyance Any questions? I did have a question the recycled water tertiary treatment plant in Santa Cruz is that moving along in parallel or Yes, that was the other part of the procurement that we've been working on is interviewing design teams design build teams to do both it's a package for both tertiary and advanced Okay Operations and maintenance Public comment will be after the management report is done The only thing I have to add is I'm sure you've all heard last night PG&E called another Public Safety Power shut off and we were notified that 27 of our facilities would lose power sometime tomorrow and then about 130 today they actually cancelled it for us and all of Santa Cruz County so another good piece of good news today Anything Anything and questions for O&M? I have actually a question that came up at that summit I went to last two weeks ago around October 30th and it was about one of the talks of the summit was about fire preparedness and I just wanted to had this is the plan shutdowns came on kind of suddenly and I just wondered if you'd ever had a chance to plan have a real emergency approach if there was an actual fire whether that has been done here in the district If there was an actual fire Because we're in that fire interface I guess you can call it Well the district itself hasn't been doing any fire response emergency preparedness but we our emergency preparedness focuses on basically keeping the water running and the water to the hydrants that are going to be fighting the fires I think one of the was Dave Peterson from Don's in California it was one of the fires I think in any case it was adjoining their district but they were near the fire and they regretted extremely they didn't have an emergency operation center because they had been they were required to shelter on site at their water district all of the entire the entire staff was stuck in this thing and the only thing that brought it out is that some battalion chief was fighting fires and the force there drove up through the smoke and they were just looking out their glass glass doors and they said save this building and they went yeah sure no they didn't save that they said yes and so they saved it but they realized that they didn't have they hadn't that was one thing they hadn't actually prepared for was their own building might you know prevent you know prevent emergency response and so there were a couple other things but that in particular it's probably a good idea because we are in a fire like that but we are in as these shutdowns show us that we are in a fire prone area well we have been doing some defensible space clearing at some of our sites were which was it's triggered also by our sanitary survey and then also we had an arborist go to every single one of our sites a couple months ago and yesterday we took some contractors around to give us bids on addressing those trees and some more defensible space around our facilities so we will be proceeding with that probably taking that to the board in the next month or so great since we are talking about emergency preparedness at one point and I don't remember how many years ago was there was talk about what if there was an earthquake and so I think it you know we will touch on this but I think it would be good to refresh because some of the board members weren't here at that time refresh the board on what the plans are and if there are any gaps things that need to be taken care of sure we have an emergency response plan that is updated as necessary and I can bring some more information about that that would be great okay thank you thank you Christine we are working on special projects nothing to bring I don't have much to say other than what we said at Oral Common except just that the special projects outreach team is also assisting other departments on some of the outreach that's underway right now we are still assisting for the water transfer when that becomes available we were gearing up for that early November and we're Once that valve is open, once the rain comes and the city says yes, we're also assisting with engineering on some other outreach and we are still focusing on the youth outreach and education. Becca and I continue to work with some partners that are taking over some of the outreach to the schools and assemblies and we are also starting to evaluate what we're going to be doing in the next fiscal year. Vi was so instrumental. We just had a car ride with Sierra Ryan and she was just talking about the Water Conservation Coalition and they as well are kind of going through identifying the needs. There's big shoes to fill on many of the aspects so we're focusing a lot on that as well. And then just as Taj mentioned, we are going forward with some of the procurement for the Pure Water Soquel Project. Are there any questions? Well, I just want to comment on you. It would be great to get an update on that sometime in the near future. It's happening with procurement. Okay. Okay, thanks Melody. All right. Finance. I can do it, yeah. No, for finance. Finance for finance. She had anything I don't have. Nothing there to report. She's still out but if you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them. But nothing to report out at this time. Okay. And I'm just here to answer any additional questions you might have on our report. We don't want to take up too much time. We're good? All right. Thank you, Tracy. And general manager. Yeah, I'll just say we were up in Sacramento. One of the things that struck me, we met with one of the environmental organizations and they talked about, you know, why they supported our project and that sort of thing. But what struck me is they talked about how they've been always kind of focused kind of on the negative and defensive against things and that sort of thing. And that's common of a lot of environmental organizations, you know, some of the ones I belong to, but what they've tried to do is take what they call a point positive. And that's when you're going down a river, you don't point to the way not to go but the way to go. So, you know, it's very clear. You don't want to head toward the rapid that's going to take you out, you know, and so that's what they do. And so they've shifted their thinking and approach to try to be kind of proactive and take a positive approach instead of always a negative. And I think they're starting to see results with that. So that was kind of heartening to see that. Can I add? Just a note, because one of the speaker from Friends of the River, when she was talking, started her comments to the state water board was like, I know it's not common for us to be up here, you know, supporting water infrastructure. Because a lot of times they're fighting dams and things that are affecting rivers. But this is the kind of project we want to support that's going to protect our rivers and increase groundwater and increase flows into the stream. So that was really kind of cool to see that focus on positive. Yeah, I spoke from the heart. And so with that positive, you know, I was thinking I have 86 reasons to be very grateful today. And actually, it's 86 million reasons to be grateful today to the state board and their staff. And I think, you know, I know that y'all don't get recognized. But what I saw up there today was true professionalism at the state board level, the staff. And so just an expression here and now of gratitude to them for watching out for our water supply flooding, all that they do, the funding, the whole bit, they've got a big task. And I know they're dedicated and they care. That came through loud and clear. So just a shout out to them. OK. So let's see. No other management reports. So now would be a time if anybody wanted to make comment to the board on that item only. Good evening, Becky Steinbruner. I was late in arriving. Traffic out there is pretty amazing. So I would like to comment on the management update, just noting on page 59 of the report. I'm really happy to see that you're flushing the lines getting ready for the water transfers. It says it's just in service area one. My understanding is that your district is expanding the water transfer pilot project this year to service area two. So I'm wondering why service area two is not also being flushed. I have a question for the conservation district. The conservation department also on page 59, it talks about the water demand offset bank status as of this month. And from 105.8 acre feet, it's now down to 55.5 acre feet. My question is, does it stay at that or will it sort of roll over in another at the beginning of the year or the water year and will that number be increased? I also want to comment a bit on Mr. Dufour's oral report. I have written your board about what I find very objectionable structuring around the new granite way well. It isn't at all what I was told would be there when I took action in the Aptos project in 2016. It is very unsightly. And I feel like I've written the board. I've gotten no response. I'm not the only one that feels this way. And I would like your board to somehow address this issue because it is not at all in keeping with the character, the visual character of the area. And not at all what people were told a couple of years ago would most likely go in there. I also note that although Mr. Dufour has promised the results of the Twin Lakes pilot recharge injection well, a critical part of Pure Water SoCal project, it's still not here. And it was promised to your board by the summer. And I haven't heard him present it yet. So I would like something about that if at all possible. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Only on the management update. That was over when you got here. Yes, it was. That's not true. Excuse me, do you want to be removed? There was public comment. You were late. No one was here. So if you have something to say about the management update, that is all that you can talk about right now. Well, yes, I do as well. That's the only thing. I add inclusion into your records, the comments regarding the management update. And I'm providing a public information request to Mr. Basso as well so that nobody can say it wasn't delivered to you because no one would sign for it. On the management update, what she's responding to, frankly includes Becky's comments regarding whether you complied with the California Environmental Quality Act. No, where's that? And you haven't done that. Where is that in the management update? It's part of your obligations. No, not in the management update. Well, I would ask for an opportunity to make my public comments. You missed that. You evaded it. As usual, you're trying to keep the truth from the public. Excuse me, sir. We opened public hearing. We opened it and we closed it after people were allowed to speak, and that was you were not hearing. I was told it didn't occur. No, it did occur. You jumped. No, we did not. We didn't. We called for people. We went straight through our agenda, sir. You were just not here. I'm sorry you were late. Go look at the video. I'm sorry you were late, but you were. So we're moving on now. Thank you. I'm going to answer a question about the Waterman Offset Bank. The offset balance doesn't change. That is what the balance is. As it is used, it goes down, period. And when it gets to a certain point, we're going to reevaluate. So that's all. It doesn't change other than that. Okay, so next item is district council. The only thing I wanted to report was there was a decision of the California Supreme Court in the spring, late spring, called Ramona Woods, part of here or somebody like that, versus Ramona Woods, which was a case involving a water, a municipal water and sewer district. And the sewer, in their sewer analysis, they changed the way they evaluated different entities in terms of how they would charge them, based on square footage instead of what they'd used before. And then they went ahead and had a rate hearing under 218. And the restaurant involved did not protest at the 218 hearing. They then filed a lawsuit challenging this analysis. And the trial court said because they hadn't protested at the 218 hearing, they had not exhausted their administrative remedies. The district court of appeal disagreed, and the Supreme Court also disagreed, saying that the analysis of the sewer requirement was not the rates and therefore it would have been futile for them to even appear because they weren't challenging the rates that were challenging this early analysis. The reason I bring it up is that a number of agencies now in Northern California have received a letter all from the same law firm, challenging their rates based on that case. There's been like, I think, from what I can gather from the legal affairs committee, something like 15 letters that have gone out to different entities. We have not received one. I don't know of anybody else in this county, but somebody is going to be arguing that that case stands for the basis you don't even have to protest at a 218 hearing. I don't think that's what it says, but that's obviously where it's going. So we'll keep an eye on it. Okay. Anything else? That's it. Okay. Great. Thank you. Next, we'll move on to administrative business item 6.2. This is to do with discussion on getting board input on, there's nothing like no decision to be made. It's just getting input on available groundwater based triggers. Really very preliminary and kind of a follow up to past board discussions about curtailment declarations and trigger conditions that we use for making those declarations. So I want to start by giving a little bit of background on our water shortage contingency plan and how it fits into the state's regulatory requirements and its purpose. Due to our size, we're considered an urban water supplier and as such every five years, we're required by the state to submit an updated urban water management plan. Those plans require an assessment of our water supplies and how we'll best meet water demand over a 20 year planning horizon under both best cases, meaning we have plenty of water to meet demand and worst cases, meaning we're facing some sort of supply shortage. We currently operate under our 2015 urban water management plan which was submitted in 2016 and we'll fully begin working on our 2020 update in the spring of 2020 with that plan being due in July 2021, so that's kind of the timeline. So the next plan will be from 2020 to 2025 which will overlap with some different supply situations at the district with pure water soquel coming online in 2022. So that's one thing to think about too as we move ahead and update this plan. We're seeking to get a jumpstart on a big component of the plan which is the water shortage contingency plan and we want to get input based on past discussions with the board indicating changes might be desired particularly related to the trigger conditions. We also want to get ahead of this because as time goes on, the state comes up with additional requirements and that increases the complexity of completing the plan and again with our change in supplemental water supplies that we're expecting in a few years. So the purpose of the water shortage contingency plan is to conserve and protect the available water supply for domestic use, sanitation and fire protection and to protect and preserve public health, welfare and safety. And it defines specifically how we respond to supply shortages due to longer term conditions and in our district that means groundwater overdraft and sea water intrusion and also reduced groundwater recharge due to drought. And then there's also more short term or catastrophic conditions due to loss of power, fires, earthquakes and that sort of thing which impact our production capacity and require us to take immediate actions to keep water flowing for important domestic purposes. So our discussion tonight really focuses on the shortages due to the long term conditions namely overdraft and sea water intrusion. So in general, the severity of a water supply shortage determines the declaration of a corresponding shortage stage that calls for a desired level of curtailment for customers and the actions or requirements needed by customers but also by the district to meet those curtailment targets. And so our current water shortage contingency plan here is shown as attachment one. This is the basic guts of the plan and it identifies a stage zero meaning we always need customers to use water efficiently as well as stages one through five with curtailment targets ranging from five and stage one up to 50% and a stage five and those curtailment targets are compared to a 2013 pumping baseline which was kind of our pre-drought peak in consumption. Currently those trigger conditions are basis for declaring for the board to declare a shortage stage due to long term conditions are rainfall totals over a five year, the past five year period as correlated to estimated recharge amounts. And then the second condition is the presence of a groundwater emergency and that was what we went through in 2014 with hydrometrics and then the peer review of that report showing that we did indeed have severe overdraft in a groundwater emergency. Historically we've presented to the board this information every year after the end of a water year which ends on March 30th so generally in the April May timeframe we bring that to the board and ask you to declare a shortage stage needed to address the long term conditions affecting our supply and over the past couple of years when we've evaluated this information you've asked some really important good questions about whether there may be more specific measurable conditions that might provide a better indication of basin conditions than our current rainfall and recharge trigger condition. So in our preparation for our next urban plan revision we thought we would, our idea was to basically get your input and come up with some potential new groundwater based conditions or set of conditions that could be used as a supplementary piece of information when you go through this exercise in the spring and then be further refined after that and rolled into our next urban water management plan. So in essence we're really asking to pilot some new conditions and see how they work out compared to our current ones. We've been working with our hydrologist Cameron Tana of Montgomery and Associates and have come up with a couple potential options for those groundwater based trigger conditions for your discussion and input and those are briefly defined in the memo. Cameron will be elaborating in a lot more detail tonight about how they would work and the pros and cons to facilitate that discussion. When we went through this process it became clear to us that there were some bigger picture questions that it would be really important to get your feedback and clarity on before we launch into really specific things and because those will help inform which direction the board wants to go. And so those questions are really related to curtailment and what you view as being the goal or purpose of curtailment both now and as well as looking into the future with supplemental water supply. In past historical time conservation and curtailment has been seen as a insurance policy toward preventing worsening of seawater intrusion conditions and overdraft. And so we want to I guess just make sure that that's still how you're looking at it as we move forward. The level of curtailment that we would need to do more than that to say restore the basin we know that we can't do that with conservation curtailment alone and hence we desperately need supplemental water supply. So that was one of the big questions. The second one was just the using of the groundwater conditions with the board typically we've looked at data over periods of time recognizing that things don't necessarily change that fast in our groundwater conditions. And so we've looked at say the five-year rainfall and recharge totals. So we're assuming that you would probably want to continue with that as opposed to looking at things over like a one-year period or a two-year period. And then just get your feedback on what measures of groundwater condition do you think might be most useful in informing water shortage stages, declarations including chloride concentrations, percentage of wells of protective elevations, percentage change in well levels from previous years. And I'm sure there's probably more options to that as well. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Cameron and he can give I think kind of an overview of the first the two options that we've come up with. There could be others or variations on these and then possibly circle back and talk about those goals and then jump back into the options and see where we land with that. So this is more of like a workshop and open discussion item on trigger conditions. Thank you Shelly and thank you board. So I will go over the two options that are listed in the board memo. Basically with illustrative examples these are not specific proposals for you to consider as Shelly alluded to but just kind of ideas for you to consider in your discussion and hopefully build upon and give us feedback on whether either these options are in the right direction and fit what you would want to accomplish with these additional triggers in the water shortage contingency plan. So option number one focuses only on observed groundwater levels in general and what is suggested is to evaluate the observed groundwater levels relative to the predictive elevations which we in the past have estimated are necessary to prevent seawater intrusion over the long term. The figure that you see on this slide I will be returning to throughout discussion of these options because this figure represents what groundwater levels say about the risk of seawater intrusion when compared to those protective elevations. Quick question, this is still going to be like the 70% of the runs? Yes, so the protective elevations and then the minimum thresholds in the GSP that is up for approval this week are based off of 70% of the cross-sectional runs for preventing seawater intrusion and because at some wells in the basin coastal monitoring wells are still below that minimum threshold and because of that the over-traff conditions that were the technical basis for the groundwater emergency declaration in 2014 are still in place. What we have expanded upon in evaluating the groundwater elevations is not just to evaluate whether it's below or above 70% but show the relative percentage risk for what the elevation is and how many percentage of runs are protective. So in these figures that are repeated here larger dots mean a higher risk of seawater intrusion because of lower groundwater levels so the biggest dots mean greater than 50% of long-term seawater intrusion based off of the groundwater levels and then the smaller dots are less percentage risk of seawater intrusion. And what the suggestion of this option is is basically to compare the groundwater levels at the coastal monitoring wells in the district with those percentages and try to come up with an average amount of seawater intrusion risk and set the curtailment stage based off of the average seawater intrusion risk. So do I understand this correctly that a circle with the size of 30% is essentially equivalent to a 70% protective level? Right, yeah, so this is the inverse you could say of the protective level. So the 30% is the medium-sized circle 20 to 30% so anything that's above that medium-sized circle wouldn't be protective at the 70%? Correct, yes. And so there are a few wells that are below 70% and even below 50% in this figure. This is using 2017 data in any evaluation we would use updated data we would likely use the five-year average as stated in the GSP for evaluating these groundwater levels but using this as an illustration of these options. So if we have these numbers... Oh, go ahead. We can go ahead. I was going to ask about, given all these numbers, how would we... Yeah, I mean, I think there are definitely different ways to do it and this is, again, just an illustration of possible way to do it to assign different curtailment levels and stages to the different risk levels that we observe in the groundwater levels. I think there are... Notice there are some curtailment level assigned to risk levels that we consider protective that there's more than 70% out. So that could be... This all could be changed. This ranking can be changed but I just wanted to illustrate how the idea of how it would work. So basically the lower the groundwater level relative to the proactive elevation, higher risk of seawater intrusion at that location, assign a curtailment level and then look at all of it together and see kind of what the average curtailment would be based off of those assignments. So here we basically assign lower curtailment level to higher groundwater levels and when groundwater levels are well below the protective elevation that there's more than a 50% chance that there would be seawater intrusion over the long term, assign the highest stage, highest curtailment level. So I'm still not clear. So this is going to be different for each monitoring well. So how are those... So say for one particular monitoring well, are you talking about the number of runs that are protective out of all the monitoring wells? So we'll look at each specific monitoring well and the groundwater level at that monitoring well and how protective is that groundwater level at that monitoring well and we would assign some curtailment level to that monitoring well. And then we would look at all the monitoring wells and kind of average that curtailment level. I mean, you could argue that if one monitoring well is below 70%, then you have curtailment period. Right. Yeah, so those are the conditions of the groundwater emergency that lead you to curtailment. I think what we're trying to get at in this option is to provide a mechanism where you determine the level of curtailment. And so the idea is to get an idea of the relative situation with respect to the seawater intrusion risk and use that to set your stage of curtailment. So for example, if you have one well that is below but everywhere else is above and you're in the condition of overdraft, the conditions for the groundwater emergency are still in place so that the curtailment there is a basis for the curtailment, but how much curtailment, so maybe in that case there would be less curtailment while if more wells were underneath, you would have more curtailment. So this is just the concept behind that. And I think these questions are basically the questions we want to hear you ask and kind of expand upon and see if this makes sense is that really getting at what you want to get at with curtailment. And so how it would be applied is for each of these wells you would apply that curtailment level based off of the risk level so you can see the bigger circles with the bigger risk, the lower groundwater levels have a higher curtailment level while some of the wells are protective even at over 99% of the runs and then we would say that those should be assigned 0%. We would take the nine results in the district and assign them to all the wells, all those coastal wells in the district and then average this percentage. So in this case, based off of these data just for illustrative purposes it all averages the 12% which is in the range of the 15% stage two curtailment. So, see some spectroscopical looks but this is just the idea is if you had more wells that were worse it would have a higher percentage and you would lead yourself to a greater stage and this is just kind of get the relative situation of what the groundwater conditions are recognizing that it's still an overdraft either way and the pros of it is relatively simple we can just take the groundwater levels we have the information from the cross-sectional models the staff can make this calculation I think pretty easily the cons of it is that it's not really targeted to achieving some specific condition it's just set the relative conditions it's getting better so we will reduce curtailment it's getting worse so we'll increase curtailment So, yeah Go ahead So, the disconnect that I am seeing here is just because we have a curtailment stage first of all it doesn't mean that we are going to get that curtailment unless we are not enforcing it but the major disconnect is that unless we can manage the basin based on a lower demand that could result from the curtailment to effectively improve conditions at the coastal wells that have the higher risk of sea water intrusion then really the average number doesn't mean anything I mean, same here if you've got one well that's at 50% then you're in a groundwater emergency and you need to be at a reasonably high level of curtailment to try and protect that Just to be fair this is an illustrative purpose example conceptual, we're not recommending it we're just I'm just saying average is working somewhere but not everywhere and I think if you're not comfortable with an average you could also say the worst one, you could set that it doesn't have to be an average the idea here is that it's all just based off of groundwater levels by itself and I would recommend relating it to the protective elevations and the sea water intrusion risk level because that is the major reason why the basin is in overdraft and the suggestion here is used in average but if a minimum makes more sense that's what we want to hear but we also have another option that we can share with you as well One concern I have which maybe you can resolve for me is it's important to have immediacy and by that I mean if this is a dry year then you expect to have a fairly high level of cutback and if it's a wet year you don't and with this you could have a year when so much rain coming down and animals two by two into the arc and yet you could still have a groundwater emergency stage three, stage four and that would be very discouraging people basically stop ignoring all that because you're not saying anything about what the year is like and what people need to do and so I was wondering how could you I mean that's one of the nice things about what we do now every rain year says what the stage is for that year and the level with this that pretty much disconnects it because these change very slowly so you could have a stage four going on year after year after year after year even though the rain's going up and down and up or the opposite being you have a couple of really bad years with very little rain but since there's a delay it hasn't shown up yet well there was I was one of the people that was skeptical as a criterion for setting stages but it does have a relationship about transpiration that more rain means less drawing from the aquifer it's easier for customers to not use as much water they don't have the same demand as during a drought year the droughts are emergencies because there's so little rainfall that it's causing increased demand at the same time that we need to really curtail that because we're in overdraft so there's some relationship between the two would probably be there may be some combination I also want to know whether you could separate the acute emergencies for example what were we declaring for these planned shutdowns go back to the fire thing that's just the most immediate thing but that's another extreme it's a separate case all together from our general water emergency I was just wondering if we at the same time were working on this we could work on a short term emergency situation this is the long term one I almost think when we update our urban plan this component of it that we should almost kind of have two plans one for the long term shortages and one for those more catastrophic things because the condition or the requirements that we're asking of people to do and the programs that we're implementing to help people achieve those curtailments are completely different so it would be better if they're really two separate elements of the plan if you ask me that I'm finished with other ideas yeah that's just throwing it out the next slide is going to be the answer the next slide will be the answer well yeah the next slide is an answer I don't know if it's the answer I mean to try to address the question about user rainfall and that is part of the current water shortage contingency plan we did trying to design that as rainfall recognizing the groundwater system especially towards the coast and flying dock for reacts relatively slowly to short term changes in rainfall so that evaluation was kind of looking at kind of a more longer term rainfall trend with the idea that that if you had multiple years of low rainfall that indicates that the long term recharge might be decreasing which wouldn't really be indicated by any one dry year or not indicated by any wet year so that was the idea behind what is in place now the what we were trying to address is that there is the option of declaring curtailment based off of the groundwater emergency which is based off of groundwater levels the first option was let's just look at the groundwater levels relative to what is the basis for the groundwater emergency and try to give the district an idea of what level of curtailment to set it is based off of that relative but it's good to hear your questions about it because I think they're all very reasonable questions the second option going on to the next slide is to be more intentional about what kind of groundwater level improvement the district wants to or groundwater I shouldn't even say improvement just about what kind of groundwater levels the district would like to achieve with curtailment of having a supplemental supply that could achieve a full recovery so is there an interim goal until that supplemental supply comes online that the district would want to achieve and then based groundwater levels and then try to assess what kind of groundwater pumping could achieve that interim goal so it's a measurable goal for groundwater levels and also a measurable goal for pumping so this could be many different things it could be whatever you would like to achieve in preventing seawater intrusion I think it would make sense to focus on the coastal groundwater levels but it could be something simple the follow-up concept is to raise the groundwater levels where the risk is highest groundwater levels which are show that are less than 50% protective and so what kind of maybe the goal is to raise those higher to a certain level unlikely to be able to achieve a full recovery just with curtailment but what is there a level that is an interim goal to achieve at the coast with the groundwater levels and then having set that and this is where it takes a little bit more work more input from from us as your groundwater hydrologist what level of pumping curtailment could achieve that groundwater level goal and then set your curtailment which right now is based off of reduction from 2013 levels and what kind of pumping levels would achieve what you want to achieve in the few years before a supplemental supply comes online so that's the basis of the second option that we suggest for consideration but there's sort of the other options that we would be glad to consider more and come up with more detail as well Cameron do you want to talk about the pros and cons of that option right yeah so thank you for the reminder so I think the pro is that it does it is measure it kind of sets a measurable goal it really it's more intentional about what you're trying to achieve with the curtailment the con is that it will take more upfront effort potentially more and I think more effort from year to year in assessing in kind of estimating what kind of pumping would achieve that goal which could involve some groundwater modeling to evaluate that and then from year to year assessing whether that goal was getting you to that goal so I think the con is more on the effort side of things and the cost side right and effort equals cost right something we would need to rely on I think you could get a mixed strategy by using option one but instead of just using a regular old vanilla average you could use a weighted average and that's kind of what this is doing for the weight is for the two circled ones there is 100% and everything else is 0% but you could have a mixed strategy where the distance away from protective levels indicates the weight that gets applied to that and that would be basically the same effort it would do for strategy one right and so so I think we're getting at that where your percent risk 100% protected could lead you to that weighting but the question was what curtailment stage do you assign to what level you end up with there and so that is I mean that's something that the board would need to weigh in on but that's where that's where we kind of came up with assigning specific curtailment levels to specific levels of risk and averaging based off of that with the genesis of that I also had some concerns when you were mentioning using the pumping and that isn't a fixed thing because Taj every year decides you can pump more here and less here so that can change even from month to month and so if you were to try and incorporate that and that would get complicated pretty well but half of this one and two thirds of that one so I think trying to use pumping would be very complicated yes I mean it would become I mean because you then have a goal to reach it would become more of a management challenge to try to reach that goal the idea is to set the overall pumping goal that puts into place the possibility with some kind of pumping distribution that you could achieve the groundwater level goal which is what you are going to need to do with pure water soquel I mean that is part of pure water soquel is a pumping distribution to raise groundwater levels throughout the district so it is going to be a management challenge that the district will need to implement at some point that's a good point Michelle I'm like a believer and keep it simple stupid and I'm wondering if we could do a hybrid where drought conditions will still trigger what they trigger now but when you get to the borderline that's when you start to delve closer in to see if you need to go one way or the other because that's where I was kind of concerned before is when we were borderline you know we had almost enough rain and we were kind of going back and forth what level of severity we wanted to use so could we do something like that why does it have to be all one method it does not I actually think the district staff was thinking that the rainfall criteria that are in there now I mean they could be modified but that would not be necessarily replaced by looking at the groundwater level conditions there was just there was thinking that we should also look at groundwater level conditions especially in years when when the curtailment is based off of the groundwater emergency and not on the rain so it was to put that in to have that in there as well but it is I think all options are on the table to replace the rainfall would be an option but it's not it's not something that we're suggesting okay then I just misunderstood so since the Pure Water Soquel is designed to combat or prevent sea water intrusion I mean what about how workable would that be to use that as a criterion if that's the we would have a state of the well the recharge effort as part of our criterion too or how would that fit in if we put this five year plan in place and assuming right in the middle of it perhaps they may even have a project line I think most of these curtailment items especially related to groundwater emergency but even related to the rainfall I don't think I don't think you would apply with the project line meant to achieve basin recovery and a sustainable basin and that will take years according to the modeling it will take a little bit of time and with your new project also have curtailment when it's making progress I don't think that would be necessary but that's an option for for the district if they wanted to make sure that they have in progress even on top of the progress from the project I think you would want to let the project work and solve the issue without this additional curtailment at that time I really view these questions as what do you want to do until that project comes online so that you protect the basin as much as you can how much is reasonable and given that the conditions are in place for the groundwater emergency I have a scheme I came up with that I'd like to throw out and you can mull it over if you want I think it's important to have this based initially on the rainfall data because we get that every year and that would give us the immediacy that I think is really important so that a wet year it would be better and a real dry year it would be real worse and that's kind of a thing but you're quite correct all of you that the important thing is recharge and then even more important than that is the protective levels and what's the best tool we have to connect rainfall data to those things it's our groundwater model so basically we take our model which we have all the data for up until this year and then we put in this year's data and try it and in fact we want to then run that data out for several years because it might take several years for that change to make it down into recharge and then into the protective levels and then try and see how long that goes but basically we're saying okay if the rainfall this year was 28 inches which is a little below average and we kept doing that for the next 5 years 10 years whatever what would happen to a protective level would they get better, would they get worse if they're getting better then I'd say we wouldn't do much in terms of these emergency rates because we're actually improving things if we're getting worse then we'd really want to crank up those levels and so that's what we use it would be both the immediacy and the connection to those levels that I think are fundamentally important to us I just want to make one other point as I think about it is that I agree that some kind of hybrid would be a good idea but to me as long as you have any of the monitoring wells that are below protective levels we have to have some level of curtailment because that's what we're doing now so when are we going to lift a groundwater emergency when we've reached protective levels at all our wells so this kind of needs to be to me that fall back position where you know I don't think you can let up until you feel like because if you have one well that's below protective levels seawater intrusion can happen while we're waiting around so I don't know about that but that issue you might be able to solve that without doing any cut back at all just by changing your pumping route I agree and I think Cameron you make a good point we need to get used to this new adaptation of using the modeling to maybe change our pumping because we're going to need to do that anyway any other comments? questions? so I do like rainfall as part of the criteria I love rainfall and I like that we have it multi-year not just single year because that's how the system responds and as a pragmatic matter we are in a groundwater emergency so all these stages can be declared so what I see is what I would like to see is some evaluation of whether our rainfall criteria is correct and perhaps modify it and the model could be useful in that I like director Daniel's idea of also using the model in kind of a forecast mode to kind of let us know what's happening which we don't have when we're looking historical so that would help me with determining the stage and I agree with with director LaHugh as well that the when you have one well that's below those levels if sea water intrusion is happening you're losing storage space in the aquifer and potentially endangering production wells which are not cheap to move there's another strategy which is as you pointed out when we have a supplemental supply and it's up and working we don't need this at all and so that may be just down the road after we get this thing built which is a few years down the road so why even spend time doing this our current scheme works okay and it's pretty decent because it does try and connect to recharge and so forth and just use it where we go rather than spend a lot of time and effort doing something that may or may not help us really thanks Cameron I think I'll open it up to see if there's any public comment and then we'll come back to the board if any questions are being made we're just giving feedback thank you thank you Mr. Tenna for that great presentation I wonder if it will be part of the minutes I know you've rearranged your website so you have presentations separate from other things but I really think the public needs to see this information I will note that Mr. Tenna said that the pumping rates in the model would be based on and correct me if I'm wrong here would be based on your 2013 pumping levels that is much higher than what you actually are seeing now thanks to your good customer conservation and your very high rates so actually you know I think it's interesting to look at the map there that shows two out of 13 monitoring wells that are below protective levels SC5A and SC8 I will point out that SCA4 is not in the mid county basin and the Mr. Tenna's report of the mid-year water report that actually stated that and also that the SoCal Point which is the other big circle up there is not in your service district what I note is absent here is discussion about cooperative efforts with Santa Cruz City and they are also aggressively looking to raise groundwater levels and are doing a lot of aquifer storage recovery projects in the Beltswell field to expand those this year so I really would love to hear more discussion about the cooperative efforts and also note that again things don't look all that bad two out of 13 wells showing some problem and in this report again the mid-year water report most of the wells state result state there is no indication of seawater intrusion I will also say that your rainfall model is a good way to go but on page 62 of your packet you have never left stage 3 even in 2016-17 when water rain levels were very high and even though groundwater levels have risen since then your production levels have decreased your service connections have increased but people are staying with their low levels of conservation so this is all very interesting to me that you stay at stage 3 which is I think a way to bring in extra money thank you any other comment on this item any other board comments I hope we've given you some input I don't know that we all agree too much yes Michelle I forgot to state but Becky reminded me when we set what levels we're at even when we're groundwater maybe we do have higher but we're also prepared to help the city if they need water the groundwater sustainability plan clearly shows that in the modeling that their efforts are greatly enhanced by the pure water soquel project because they want to put water in but then also pull back out so by having a steady source of recharge it reduces their impact that's not exactly what I was saying but what I was saying is that when we decide if it's a water emergency or not it may be that we have pretty good groundwater levels but it's not raining and we need to recognize that some of that water we may be wanting to share with the city rather than say well it's it's not raining but we have plenty of water so we're not in an emergency right and yeah that's a good point and the other thing I think that is that I've kind of rediscovered I think especially listening to the state board and the bigger picture things to get focused on two years things are you know okay at this moment it's a long term that they're concerned about really that's what we should be to right and I just I guess I've made it clear that to me if there's any any if there's one well that's not protective we're at risk so till those are all protective levels I'm not going to relax alright so let's move on to item 6.3 approval agreement for Best in Krieger right this is about the approval board request for approval of the agreement with BBK Best in Krieger for general legal counsel as we know our current council 1969 landing on the moon maybe Bob Basso 50 years strong but everybody has to retire sometime and so we've been preparing for that and we went out solicited RFQ's we had 11 responses to that RFQ's a request for comments yes thank you a request for qualifications so ask firms to put forth their best foot how well qualified they are to suit our needs and 11 really good proposals there's a lot of good legal firms out there so that was exciting we called that down to 6 interviewed those to some extent and there was board and staff input on this several communities and then down to 3 and then there was also interviews in a closed session reported out the outcome of that and that was selection unanimously by the board to select BBK and with that I'll just add right now we have the general counsel Josh Nelson right here who would stand up and assistant our deputy general counsel so thank y'all for coming tonight yeah thank you and going through the process so there's a couple things in the agenda you can are in the packet that I'm sure you read I won't go into that it's a waiver from BBK to the city because they do represent the city on some issues not related to water and the draft agreement for BBK general legal counsel for general to be our GC so staff recommends the district board enter into a new agreement which is attachment 3 with BBK and continue in full force and effect until terminated the agreement will be reviewed at least annually for performance and compensation and a couple things I'll add on just logistically I think that are important and maybe questions the idea is to keep Mr. Basso he's agreed to stay until January 1st and potentially if we need his services later we can contract back out with him periodically if this team thinks that's a benefit and we do and then the other thing is at the start the contract as you can see is envisioned to be hourly you can see the hourly rate and then if we go down the road potentially move into more of a retainer situation so trying to work what's best for our customers in the firm because it's a partnership okay questions from the board okay I just going to make quick comment just that I appreciate Bob being willing to kind of overlap a little bit because there's a wealth of knowledge there and I think anybody coming in could benefit from the wealth of knowledge that you have and so as needed in the coming year so it would be nice to be able to contract out for help and give advice so that would be appreciated happy to do it alright so any public comment on this item thank you resident of Aptas I've been curious to see who you would select and I think you've made a good choice with Best Best and Krieger I think it will save your customers a lot of money not to have to because of their companies excellent environmental law expertise so you won't have to contract out with their firm whenever you are legally challenged in that arena I have a question so it will be $270 an hour for attorneys and $170 for paralegals what is the hour hourly how many hours a month do you think that they will be signing on to help you what can customers expect to see in terms of the legal bill you've been paying Mr. Basso $8,000 a month plus medical benefits what change will you see your customers see in this legal change and I note that in certain instances there would be specialized legal counsel such as Mr. Latt who has been leading your challenge against the pure water so Cal she charges $325 an hour so what would be the trigger that would bring someone of her higher fees into the picture and what can your rate payers expect Best Best and Krieger is in well I see they have several offices but the closest being Walnut Creek is that where these people would be coming from would they travel as Mr. Latt has done every time from Riverside or would they be able to somehow do a teleconference and thereby save your customers some money thank you very much thank you anyone else wish to comment on this item Colonel Terry Maxwell a rate payer and customer and a concerned one first of all you've been paying Mr. Basso $8,000 a month you're a water district you're not a multinational corporation you're not a university campus with 100,000 students you could have had a competent attorney who taken a few environmental law courses represent you perfectly adequately there was no reason for Mr. Basso to intrigue or invite or solicit Best Best and Krieger to come in here and for you to budget several hundred thousand dollars of your rate payers customers money needlessly to defend a lawsuit against a little old lady who's amply nice little old lady but miss a gray haired lady without a law degree and you have had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars what were you paying Mr. Basso for for all these years wasn't his return and why did you fail to stick up for your rate payers and customers and hold Mr. Basso responsible for performing that which you were paying him for what negligence on your part profligate negligence if you were in a corporation why did we pay Mr. Basso well he's supposed to provide the legal services frankly a first year law graduate could have represented you and would have told you if he was with integrity and ethically you should settle with Mr. Steinbrenner and comply with the California Environmental Quality Act and look at all the alternatives and not have to spend 130 million dollars you could have jumped to $23 million locker for alternative another reason why there's no need for you the state of California can't come in here fast enough and take over this water district and consolidate the rest of the region speaking of and we would need best best and Krieger to pay them half a million dollars next year or a half a million for prior work that Mr. Basso was incompetent to perform unable to perform what is going on here have you know why did any of you ever say to Mr. Basso in one of your meetings Mr. Basso why are we paying you if you can't defend us against Mr. Steinbrenner in her pro say college graduate efforts to have us comply with the California Environmental Quality Act apparently wasn't up to it he should refund that money in fact speaking of it you should all be held accountable for the money you have wasted in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been removed by the customers and ratepayers here in a recall effort and thirdly you should probably be investigated in fact you should be by the California Attorney General and other authorities to see if you should start refunding that money it's pathetic it's just pathetic how you failed your obligations to your customers any other comment all right I would like to respond to one of the comments sure and I have heard the comments yeah but I would like to say yes of course we had discussions about meet the possibility in the future of doing things remotely to reduce the travel costs but I want to point out part of the contract on page 83.7 0.8 Best Best and Krieger are only billing for one way travel with a maximum of two hours and so that to me was key just driving from my house to here could be one hour I just wanted to make that comment okay thank you all right any motions I move to accept it's been moved and seconded all in favor aye opposed great motion carries unanimously welcome thank you I was wondering if I could just make a brief you betcha just on behalf of BBK Sam Chan and I just wanted to say how excited we are for this opportunity to work with you the board Mr. Duncan and his staff and while we know we have very big shoes to fill we're very excited to get to work so thank you very much all right let's see now item 6.4 annual election of vice president do you want me to do a quick intro or do you think you got it? I have a deal does anyone have questions on the routine for this? I don't I just want to say that I want to thank Tom for being the president and Bruce for being the vice president I personally am too busy with my work to take on the vice president role and I'd like to see some of the newer directors taken on and I'd like to do you want nominations or how do you? Sure I'd like to nominate Rachelle for the vice president I would like to nominate Tom for the vice president okay so we got two nominations we need a second for one of them I'll second my own so we can vote now I will okay I'll second Rachelle okay so let's vote on let's vote on mine okay all in favor aye all opposed okay and then for Rachelle all in favor I second okay so Rachelle you'll be vice president okay thank you we'll go on and the next meeting is when we'll start that okay and that's great right it'll be the second meeting in December that the new configuration will start off that way and the next one is the scope of work for the O'Neill Ranch you're welcome to come up here if you want Tajer anticipate this being a long one I think we've been briefing the board over the last year or two on the ammonia challenges that the O'Neill Well has given us you know we've reached the end of staff's ability and so we are reaching out to get some support and we did interview and solicit statements of qualifications and we are recommending that we engage corona environmental consulting to help evaluate what we've done so far to see if we haven't missed anything you know the low hanging fruit but then also to do an alternatives assessment for what might be coming if we're out of options easy options they bring a lot of treatment ideas and we've worked with this group before for Chrome 6 and it was an easy decision for the selection group to make this recommendation to the board so with that I am answering any questions if you have any any questions I mean they were very good group okay so no questions any public comment on this item thank you Steinbruner when I recently attended one of your standing committee meetings and this issue was discussed I brought up the idea that instead of continuing to dump a bunch of money into trying to make the water that you want to pump out usable why not just use this well as in cooperation with the city as an ASR well injection well and let it let it help the groundwater levels by not only by not pumping from it but also by actively injecting into it at that point it's near the belts well field it seems like a logical spot that could be a source of cooperation between you and the city of Santa Cruz and I've I've watched this district struggle with what to do with this problem and maybe there is a solution but it will be so expensive that it will be cost prohibitive really for the amount of water that you would you would get forward or that you would want to pump from it in that area so I would like you to consider that idea to instead of dumping more water sorry more money into trying to make the water that you want to pump from this well potable instead just dedicated as an ASR injection well and study the impacts of that on the groundwater levels that we all are worried about thank you any other comment on this item okay seeing none maintain a motion there's two motions so yes I'll move both motions moved and seconded all in favor aye aye motion carries awesome thank you and then let's see we've got Tracy thank you good evening board I have an informational item for you tonight as I've reported in a couple of recent board meetings the district has been exploring reorganization concept that I wanted to present to you tonight in our operations and maintenance department I really want to thank Ron Duncan for always challenging us to think about new alternatives and develop efficiencies within our staffing not only for our current needs but also looking out for our future in taking a look at some of our recent recruitments we recognize that we had we have some areas where we could spend a little bit more time in developing some leadership and as my memo presents tonight the operations and maintenance department has been piloting for the last couple of months a concept for with a one management structure excuse me one supervisory structure as opposed to a two supervisor structure that we have had for a number of years so over the last couple of months we've really had a great opportunity for management staff to work very closely with our line staff in developing some of those opportunities and seeing some ways that we can develop some efficiencies within the organization and especially in that department thanks to Christine and Troy Adams and especially their staff for being open to exploring this kind of change and really looking at ways that they can work better and smarter and hopefully develop those leadership skills that we hope to take advantage of in the future the concept is the pilot concept is kind of run its course and we will be bringing an item forward in the December meeting to take a look at from a restructure standpoint we've got some work to do with our employee groups in the meantime and continue our level of conversation but because of this change I thought we would bring it to the board tonight as an informational item we are not proposing at this time to increase the number of FTE but we are looking at moving things around and developing those lead positions differently and maybe adding a staff at the water distribution level so we can provide more backup when we need it any questions? that was the action go ahead yes, one thing I am a little bit confused with and maybe concerned about is you have two water distribution leads and all of the water distribution sections report to both of them that sounds like a situation where it could be really confusing because someone tells you to go left someone tells you to go right that's actually our current model and that has been our model for a number of years and the reason that particular work unit has two leads is because that's our construction and maintenance crew and so they are deployed out they are not always deployed together and so making sure that we have the folks out where we need them to be and dealing with the types of work that we are doing out in the field that particular crew is out at different sites all the time what we are trying to do is enhance the duties and responsibilities so that it's not just providing lead work in the field which is how it has been but actually bringing some of that level of responsibility back into some administrative duties so that there is an opportunity for them to develop those types of skills that we haven't really taken advantage of over a number of years so that's our current structure that one is not we're not interested in changing that because it does work well for the types of deployment that we have out in our field what we would be doing is adding a lead to the operations crew which currently does not have a lead position again to try and provide some leadership development and to provide some offsetting responsibilities from the supervisory role so it really kind of creates that team flow when we have a supervisor who is out because we only have one now then it also gives multiple opportunities for folks within that work group or those work groups to actually work in the supervisory capacity in an out of class role and again develop those leadership opportunities so the two water distribution leads is our current staffing pattern well if it works for you it does can I rephrase it so because we've been working a lot on this there used to be two people not quite at this level so what we heard when staff came and told us was we need another person over here so two people up here were consolidated one these people all take on a little bit more responsibility but by the consolidation we gain another person down here so that's what we heard was needed from staff and it is that fair is that a fair way to describe it that was part of the dilemma and so by listening to the staff incorporating that feedback working with Tracy and Christine and Troy that's what and it seems to be working well the trial period has been quite successful so I don't know if that was helpful but we're very involved with it okay great any other questions okay so it's going to bring that back when you're making a thank you okay Tracy thanks a lot alright so we're going to be going into closed session shortly so if there's any comments regarding closed session thank you my name is Becky Steinbruner I'm a resident of rural Aptos and I am the petitioner in the legal challenge that is still before you because I am not going to give up um as you I'm sure already know and as Mr. Basso will tell you in closed session Judge Small did deny my request to move the action out of this county he did deny my request to amend my appeal he did deny my request for continuance on the hearing date in order to get critical information from the state that has been withheld with uh three delays in public records act request and he ultimately denied the writ of mandate and I will appeal and I am in the process of that doing now um what I want to say is that I hear that you've got a lot of money from the state today and I'm sure I mean it's obvious you're all very happy about that but what you're not looking at is the things that you have overlooked in the process environmental things that you have overlooked and that's really disheartening to me I know you all care but it seems like in the zeal to get this big pot of money that you've just been awarded today you've overlooked a lot of things including environmental concerns and if you do end up building this you're going to have a really hard time you're already having a hard time getting your encroachments permits and your customers are having a hard time paying the bills that are imposed upon them so that you could have a good picture to get this pot of money and that is only reimbursable so you're racing against the clock to get all the money spent Mr. Duncan's declaration has said the cutoff date is February 29th of 2020 at least that was in his declaration so I understand the race here what I want to say is that I feel a lot of people feel that you have not listened to your customers you have not listened to the public in general and you have overlooked some very very serious environmental threats both in what you hope to inject into the groundwater how you have overlooked safeguards in real time how you have not really consulted with the lead agencies to make the mitigations enforceable but you haven't listened to the people thank you I think we had a thorough environmental review reviewed by an independent judicial body and we have the support of both the federal EPA and the state we are now going to adjourn to a closed session our next meeting will not be until the third Thursday in December thank you Tuesday it's a Tuesday