 Good afternoon. Before we start the formal meeting of the Board of Public Utilities, we'd like to take a moment to swear in our newest member. Welcome, Glenn. We look forward to taking advantage of your many years of experience with the Water Department. It is past 1.30. We have a quorum, so I will call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities to order for the City of Santa Rosa. If we may have a roll call, please. Chairman Galvin. Here. Vice Chair Arnone. Here. Board Member Badenfort. Here. Board Member Bannister. Here. Board Member Grable. Here. Board Member Watts. Here. Board Member Wright. Here. So good afternoon. We are going to reorder the agenda a little bit because we're only going to have a limited amount of time with a quorum. So at this point, are there any statements of abstention by Board Members? Hearing none, we're going to move next to the Consent Calendar. Then we're going to do the minutes and any public comments. And if we have time, get to at least one of the staff briefings. So at this point, the Consent Calendar is Item 6.1. And it is the approval of the amendment of the Professional Services Agreement for Legal Services with Downey Brand. We have a recommendation from the City Attorney's Office. And I'll entertain a motion. Second. Motion by Board Member Wright, seconded by Board Member Grable to approve Item 6.1. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Great. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Next the minutes for December 19th and January 16th of 2020 will be approved and entered. At this point, we'll move to Item Number 8, which is public comments on non-agenda matters. Anyone wishing to speak? Seeing no one rise, we will move to the staff briefings. We're going to start with Number 5.2, which is the recycled water supply update. Deputy Director Schwall, welcome. Update on the recycled water storage for early February 2006. I'm sorry, 2020. And just talking a little bit about recycled water management. Just to reiterate what our goals are for managing water each season. The goals really are to maximize water reuse and to minimize our discharge. So in order to do that, we store water during our wet months and we irrigate that water then during the dry months. As you're well aware, we started the season much higher than normal. And we've been hovering about 800 million gallons or more ever since the Gadgers pump station started operating again in early December. As you can see, the trends have been flat since early December. And we are here at the very beginning of February. Still above average, but much closer to our average than normal. And so we're still looking at a number of things in part, or I think primarily, I think, to the dry weather that we've been enjoying this early in the winter. If we were to project at this point, though, where we would be if we get a normal February and normal March, we still are looking at meeting or exceeding our operational upper limit. And so if February turns wet as it can and usually does each year, we still could very likely be discharging sometime late in the winter season. There's a couple updates or one update from Calpine. They have been struggling. They continue to struggle to provide power to our pump stations due to the concave fire damage that they suffered and their deline suffered up there. They have lowered us to four pump operations instead of five pumps instead of 17 and a half million gallons a day or closer to 15 million gallons a day. They may be able to bring us back up to five pump operation shortly. Geyser's coordinator, Mike Sherman, is informed that he's working closely with Calpine to see what they're able to do. They, at this time, it's a little too early to tell. It could be a couple weeks at four pump operation, which would mean about a 50 million gallon more increase in our storage between now and the end of the month. It's not a huge impact and certainly not as much as weather would be. Still, it's a concern. On a better note, our water conservation program seems to be taking hold. And the number of indoor water audits that has been scheduled for February and completed in January of this year, there's four and five times higher than was completed in January and February of last year. So the, I think the advertising campaign is bearing fruit there. And that completes my update. Are there any questions? Any questions from the deputy director? Great. Thank you. I think we have time to move to 5.1, which is the regional operations overview. Excuse me while I figure this out. So just to help buy a little bit of time. Oh, there we go. We thought it would be really interesting for the board to get some information about all the activities that take place out at the regional system. So Joe's going to walk you through basically a day in the life of the operators. So Joe. Thank you for that. So regional operations is the workgroup in the department that handles the wastewater that comes in from the sub regional partners. So in the course of their work, they take that wastewater and they convert it to recycled water and biosauce that has a positive impact on our community and our region as a whole. This wastewater is converted into valuable commodities. And that is, and so I think you're all, we're all aware of that, but I wanted to give you kind of an insight into what it looks like to be for each of those work groups and what they do on any given day. Regional operations is, you may be aware, is divided into five different work groups, wastewater treatment, biosolids, reclamation, geysers operations and maintenance. We'll be, I'll be talking about each one of those in turn. We'll start with the wastewater treatment because that's where the water starts. And obviously through the sewers, but also is trucked in, you know, septage and recycle high strength waste is trucked in to the plant each day, every day, 24 hours a day. And so the treatment plan is staffed by 25 treatment plan operators who work 24 seven to handle the water as it comes in. 100% of that water is recycled, reclaimed so that the reclamation crews and the geysers operations crews can distribute it to read for reuse. The pictures we're seeing there is we have an operator on the catwalk over top of a clarifier. He's in the process of monitoring the depth of the bacterial population that's, you know, settled into that clarifier. He's measuring the depth of the blanket to make sure that the pumping into and out of those tanks is appropriate for our goals. And the lower left, he's doing some routine maintenance, routine checks on the pumps, oiling up or topping up an oil reservoir for the, for a filter and flow pump. The lower right's an interesting picture. That's two operators standing at the bottom of a million gallon anaerobic digester that has just been cleaned. They're finishing up the cleaning operations. Let's say a 75 foot wide tank, 35 foot deep, and as I said, it holds a million gallons of biosolids. We have four of those tanks and we clean each of them about every eight years or so, eight or 10 years, depending on its performance. And so it's kind of a rare event for an operator to have the opportunity to go down there and see what's inside that tank firsthand. Regarding the volume of product, you know, it's just kind of the mass transfer problems that we have and the challenges I should say. In any given year, we might receive 7.4 billion gallons of water that's treated at the plant and handled throughout the distribution system. And I don't know what 7.4 billion gallons looks like. I could talk about how many Olympic-sized swimming pools we could fill and how much that looks like. But I think for our purposes, a better picture would be to think about a 48-inch pipeline, which is the size of the pipeline that the Geysers system starts with. If we built a 48-inch pipeline 15,000 miles, it would then be big enough to hold all the water that we produce in a year. That 15,000 miles would stretch from San Francisco to London to Kiev, across Asia to Anchorage, Alaska, and down the western seaboard to back to San Francisco before it reached 15,000 miles. So there's a lot of water that we're handling each year. Besides water, we also have biosolids. And the biosolids crew is comprised of nine school maintenance workers who in the summertime divert the or distribute the biosolids that comes from the plant to farm lands for as a fertilizer and soil amendment. And in the wintertime, when they can't do biosolids application on farmlands, they'll compost it at the facility. And that produces a Class A biosolids, which can be used for landscaping or vineyards, for instance. The upper left is a picture of a skilled maintenance worker on top of an agitator, which is the large machinery that mixes and conveys the compost through its rows each for processing. The upper right and lower left are the picture of the front loaders and the upper right picking up a load of biosolids to be mixed with the green waste to make compost. And in the lower right, an operator to control panel. Similarly to the water we produce, it's pretty impressive. I think the biosolids that we produce is also fairly impressive. In a year, we can produce 31,000 tons of biosolids. I don't know what that looks like either. It's equivalent to a million cubic feet. So figuring out what a million cubic feet of biosolids would do on a football field, if we were to stack the biosolids on a football field, sideline to sideline, end zone to end zone, the football field would be buried 17 feet deep. And of course the crossbar is on the goalposts of a football field or 10 feet high, so it would be well above the crossbars. The reclamation crew receives the water from the treatment plant, roughly about 3 billion gallons a year is what they manage wintertime storage, summertime usage. But really they're managing the water year-round, moving the water from pond to pond up and down the system so that the water is where it needs to be, when it needs to be for agricultural or urban reuse. These 10 employees will operate as well as maintain the system and the upper right, sorry, upper right and lower left. You can see maintenance workers maintaining the levee beds. We have eight and a half miles of levee banks around our ponds. And the work being done on the lower left is pump maintenance, they also, wintertime they'll maintain all the pumps and the sprinkler heads that they'll need in the wintertime. The upper left and lower right are operators adjusting valves to put the water where they need to go. And the lower right, an operator is calibrating one of our brand new data songs, which is an analytical machine that we place in the water upstream and downstream of our receiving waters, if and when we discharge so we can get accurate and timely results for water quality during our discharges. The guys' operations crew, the seven employees there take about 4.3 billion gallons a year, as you know, they send it into a 41 mile pipeline using 25 major pumps to push that water. These pictures depict maintaining the pumps, operating valves in the pump stations, maintaining the switchgear and monitoring the control panels. These 25 major pumps are big pumps, and the horsepower of all those pumps totals more than 20,000 horsepower. And again, I don't know what 20,000 horsepower looks like, so I went to NASCAR and I said, okay, each NASCAR engine has about 750 horsepower. And 20,000 horsepower divided by that is about 27 race cars. This picture here is about 22 race cars. There's a few more than is in the picture. But there are 27 race cars, and 750 horsepower is about the same as our 25 motors. So each one of our motors is about the equivalent of one of those race cars. And I'll say from experience that our motors are a lot quieter than those engines are. The last work group I'll talk about is regional maintenance. Their last was certainly not least. I came up through the operations ranks, and I learned pretty quickly that operators merely operate the plant. It's the maintenance crews that keeps the plant running. Without motors that run and pumps that pump, the operators really don't stand a chance. So the maintenance crew really are the heroes of the facilities. There's 26 maintenance workers currently representing four trades, mechanical technologists, instrumentation technologists, electrical technicians, and skilled maintenance workers. They're responsible for 534 rotating assets, so pumps, motors, blowers, whatever. I'm sorry, pumps or blowers or compressors. 678 circuit breakers, anywhere from 480 volts up to 12,000 volt circuit breakers, over 100 PLCs, which are programmable logic controllers, or many industrial computers that manage our systems operating effectively and efficiently. And they achieve maintain these equipment through, you know, by performing over almost 1,300 corrective workers in 2019. And that's on top of the couple thousand preventive maintenance workers that they do to keep things from breaking. So some of these pictures we're seeing here on the upper left is two electrical technicians racking out a large 12,000 volt breaker. They're wearing the arc flash protective equipment that's required for such work. The mechanical tech in the upper corner is maintaining a pump. And that's, I could have taken that picture any day of the week, any day of the year, just about there's always some pumps that are in need of repair and being repaired. The lower right is interesting and just that it's painting, it's coating. It's the kind of, these painters, it's almost like the Golden Gate Bridge where they're constantly painting the plant, keeping the equipment protected from sun rain and the moisture that's always in a waste for a plant and always wants to attack the equipment. Our plant looks very nice and I think it's great that it looks nice, but the coating really serves a, really a vital role in protecting the equipment. The lower left is an interesting little story. We have a, we have a lot of old equipment. We have a 30 year old pump that failed, the bearing failed on it several weeks ago. And the bearing, the replacement bearing was almost the right size, but not quite. And so we were able, and the perfect bearing was simply not available. So we were able to procure the next best thing and put it on our lathe and our skilled mechanical technologists were able to shave down that bearing so that it fit just where it needed to be and how it needed to be so that we could maintain our equipment properly and then keep it operating. I had one more, going back to the geysers, I had one more fun fact. And since 2004, we have, when the geysers started, we have delivered over 68 billion gallons of water to them. And 68 billion gallons, I'm going to give you a little picture. If we poured that water on a city of Santa Rosa, 41 and a half square miles that encompasses the city of Santa Rosa, 68 billion gallons would be 8 feet deep. So that's the, that's the regional operations work groups, 70 very skilled employees that I think do a fantastic job keeping the plant running, keeping the facilities going, delivering the water, reusing the water, delivering the biosauce where it needs to be, how it can be used, reused to its highest potential. And I'll just say I'm very, very proud to be able to be part of that group. And with that I'll open up to questions. Thank you very much, Deputy Director Schwal. That was very, very interesting. We don't, I think, appreciate the scale of the operations out there. And I know the general public certainly doesn't. So thank you for enlightening us. Any questions? Board Member Grable? I just wanted to echo those comments. I really appreciate the presentation and the levity. And it reminds me of like three to one contact growing up some of the science shows where they'd say, you know, just for reference, it's like, this is how many fish fit inside a killer whale or how many cheeseburgers? That's, I really like that, you know, telling a story with with the science. I have to apologize. I have to, I have to leave now. I am involved in the homeless emergency response. I came here from the West Kilikos village and now I have to go meet with city and fire about another homeless emergency strategy and response. So I apologize, but I have to leave. We appreciate you making the effort to be here so that we would get the quorum before Board Member Grable leaves any other questions for the deputy director. I think we will suspend the meeting and adjourn at this point. We will be doing the closed session at our meeting on February the 20th. So we are adjourned. Thank you.