 Try it again. Make sure the volume is all the way up on the top there. Testing. Good morning. It looks like we don't quite have a quorum yet. So. We'll give it another few minutes until we have at least a quorum. Good morning. So we now have a quorum. Do we want to give it another minute or two or. I believe we have everyone. Said they were attending. Let's give it a start, Jennifer. Want to give it a start? Yeah. I like the executive decision. All right. Situated. So. We'll go ahead and. Oh, good. We'll go ahead and call the meeting to order of the sub tack. Secretary Reyes, can we have a roll call please? Hi, good morning. City of Santa Rosa. Here. City of Katari. Here. City of Rona Park. Here. So the water. You can see him. City of Sebastopol. So normal water. Mike, you're muted. Okay. There. Hello everyone. And I'm assuming you're taking roll call. I just heard. Like Sonoma water and I'm assuming you were cut that was. That was my, when my audio started. So I'm assuming you were doing roll call. Yes. Great. Okay. Now I'll read the staff's present and the members of the public public present. Andrew Allen. Tracy Playborn. Elise Howard. Emma Walton. Joe Shavoni. John Stinson. Lori Urbanik. McHarvey. Roberta. Sean McNeil. Tonya. And so far, no members of the public. Thank you, Secretary Reyes. I just wanted to remind all sub tech members, if you could to mute your phones and your microphones. When you are not speaking, we also do ask if you have the ability to have your camera unmuted so the public can see who's actually participating in the meeting. And with that, I will see if there as a motion for approval of the minutes. So moved. Second. All right, we have a motion from runner park in a second from Katadi. Secretary. Oh. Before we accept the minutes, I have to open for public comment. So we are now taking public comments on the minutes approval. If you wish to make a comment by a zoom, please raise your hand. If you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Reyes, do we have any live email or voicemail public comments? We have none. All right. Thank you. So if you could do a roll call vote, please. City of Santa Rosa. I. City of Katadi. Yes. City of runner park. Yes. City of Santa Rosa. Yes. City of Santa Rosa. Yes. Okay. Thank you. So those pass. With four eyes and a substantial absent. Do we have any announcements? I think so. So we'll go to item four public comment on non-agenda items. Item four, if you wish to make a comment by a zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Reyes, do we have any live email or voicemail public comments? And for agenda item four. We have none. All right. Thank you. So we'll move on to a new business item 5.1. Okay. So our first item is a presentation. On our catastrophic reserve and fiscal year 2021, 2022 budget update. And we have deputy director engineering resources, Lori Urbana and administrative analyst, Nick Harvey making the presentation. All right. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. And nice to see you all. I'm not seeing the slideshow. I'm not seeing the slideshow. I'm not seeing the slideshow. I'm not seeing the slideshow. Yeah, it'll be up in just a minute. All right. Thanks, Priscilla. So good morning. Nick and I are here to talk a little today about the catastrophic reserve draft report. And the 2021, 22 budget update. Next slide, please. Nick will be talking about, excuse me, I'll talk a little bit about the catastrophic draft report. I'll talk a little bit about that. I'll talk a little bit about that. I'll talk a little bit about this update, provide a little information on the preliminary CIP budget and the debt service allocation. And he'll also provide a timeline. Next slide, please. So as part of the, uh, catastrophic draft report, I'll talk, just this is going to be really high level. Um, because we just received this report last month. And so I'll share a little bit about the background. Um, I'll talk a little bit about, um, how we can find the basic level of service and, um, a little about how, uh, the methodology associated with predicting failures. Next slide, please. Since the city is in the process of reviewing and updating our financial reserves, um, we decided that we'd go ahead and hire GHD, um, to update prior catastrophic reserve reports. And, um, I'll talk a little bit about that. Um, I'll talk a little bit about that. Of course, these reserve funds would be used to repair parts of the reuse system and, uh, LTP in an effort to restore basic services, um, following a catastrophic event. Next slide, please. Uh, catastrophic events. Haven't we seen most of them already? Um, the report, uh, takes a look in, uh, a number of reports. Um, of course, the cost of returning and restoring basic service after a catastrophe would certainly depend on. The type of magnitude of the event. And the level of repairs that would require restoration. So the report, considerized, um, flooding and determined that, um, in most flooding events, it's localized to the in an inundation area. And primarily affecting the operation of, um, the, um, leaving structures and pipelines intact. The same would be true. It's considered, uh, of terrorist attacks. Um, it's considered the report at least has considered it a localized event and would most likely affect, um, above ground facilities. And the same is pretty true with wildfire. Um, it would likely do less damage to below grade infrastructure than an earthquake. So for this planning scenario, um, an earthquake was considered the worst case event for the purposes of disaster planning. Um, primarily because it was felt that this would be, um, a regional event and the consequences of an earthquake would severely impact most of our water and wastewater utility services. Next slide, please. So living in California, we all know that there's many different earthquake faults running through our great state. And so this, the USGS, um, did some updated studies and in fact a, a special study that's noted in this report that the Rogers Creek fault has a 33% chance of, um, experiencing a 6.7 magnitude earthquake in, uh, the Bay Area before 2043. It sounds like a long way of ways, but it's, um, it's really not. Um, um, the same study also concluded that there's, um, a 72% probability that at least, um, a magnitude of 6.7 along the San Andreas fault would happen before 2043. So next slide, please. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm behind a slide or so. Priscilla, I apologize. Could you advance the slide? And as I just mentioned, um, thank you. That's great. We could go to the slide seven. So for comparatives purposes, um, the USGS, they also modeled, um, they have an earthquake shaking severity model and they modeled the San Andreas North fault with a magnitude earthquake of 7.5. And with the same model, they analyzed the Rogers Creek fault with a earthquake magnitude of 7.1. The results of that comparison, um, determined that the Rogers Creek fault would likely result in greater damage within the area of Santa Rosa. In fact, um, part of their analysis compared, um, uh, an earthquake of that magnitude would be equivalent to the, what San Francisco experienced in the 1906 earthquake. And, um, it's assumed that within the fault zone of the Rogers Creek fault, there would be an average, um, permanent, just ground displacement of up to three feet. Next slide please. So for planning services, you know, following a major event, we would want to restore, um, basic services. Um, we've learned through the tubs fire that our, of course, resources would be very limited in part, um, in a scenario like an earthquake, it would be regional. And so resources would probably be even, um, more difficult to, to, to re, you know, to achieve and restore basic services. So we'd want to prioritize how we do that. For the planning purposes, we understand that, you know, the cost of, um, a significant damage to our infrastructure would be tremendous. And we'd have to plan for funding over a period of time. Um, and probably, um, use CIP funds. Um, and so the, for the purposes of this study, it only contemplates restoration of emergency repairs where significant damage has been observed and necessary to provide basic service. Next slide please. So the methodology that was used in the report, um, first we would need to make an estimate of, um, you know, what kind of repairs would we need to make? So what would that damage look like? And, um, estimate the number and type the, of repairs that would be needed. The study contemplates, um, two different failure types within the regional system and at LTP. Um, of course, there's pipeline failures and other facility failures. Next slide please. So they also had to look at the risk of Laguna treatment plant. And the risk is based on, um, of course, the construction of the facility, um, and the age, the equipment and or structure, um, the analysis because the plant is built over an alluvial playing, felt like that the reinforced concrete process tanks that are underground would observe, absorb the energy of the earthquake and then have, be it a lower risk and be able to survive that ground shaking. However, as we all probably know, um, structures that are multi-story and some slab based platforms or equipment that is, um, higher than 15 feet above the ground would experience, um, considerable shaking and therefore those, um, types of structures are at a higher risk. Next slide please. So the report did, um, segregate priority one, um, and priority two structures that would be addressed, um, following, um, an earthquake or some other catastrophic event. And those components that were considered important are for basic services, um, particularly at LTP that would include compliance with our affluent permits, um, protection of operator safety, public health and the environment. And the priority two, um, while those functions are absolutely necessary and essential at the treatment plant, um, they're deemed not necessary to restore basic services and would be restored over a longer period of time. Um, with that approach, we do anticipate that there would be, um, sort of a reduced reliability in the overall system. Um, but there are other methods that we are taking a look at such as, um, hiring contractors or having bypass operations to establish that. Um, they're to establish some sort of minimum, um, amount of treatment that would be necessary. Uh, next slide please. And this is a list of the repairs that the draft report, um, concluded would likely sustain, um, damage during this earthquake event. And our highest priority obviously for the regional system is to get LP LTP back up and operational. I won't go through this extensive list and it'll be provided to you, um, uh, later, um, with the slide deck. And next slide please. So here's a list, um, of the treatment plant priority two repairs that would likely, uh, need some level of repair depending on the damage. And again, these systems that you see here are a lower priority, not because they're not important. It just means that there may be alternative ways for us to achieve, um, putting them back into service, um, over a longer period of time. And so that's about the end of my report. But what I do want to leave you with is that, um, our primary message, um, for this part of the presentation is to let you know that we are working on this cat is a catastrophic reserve planning effort and trying to determine, you know, what amount of reserve funding that we need to have available for event sentient these. Um, we're working on the draft right now and we will certainly bring this back to this group. Once we have a final report prepared. And unless there are any questions, I'll turn it over to Nick to discuss, uh, the 21 22 budget. Yes. Thank you, Lori. Good morning, everybody. Um, as Lori mentioned, I'm going to do a quick, uh, update on the 2020 bond issuance highlights and, um, kind of inform you all of where we are in the next fiscal year, 21 22 budget process. Um, can we go to slide 15, please? So first of all, I want to do a quick review of our recent bond issuances. Um, we closed on two bond issuances in December. Um, but luckily because of very favorable market conditions, we're able to realize significant savings for our rate payers, especially on the 2020 series, um, the, the, which is the funding for the UV disinfection system replacement. Um, we, we anticipated. Carrying at least $60 million in debt for that issuance. Luckily we sold at a, it went to market an $18 million premium. So we got $70 million of bond proceeds while only taking on $52 million. So that was very advantageous. The other issuance, the 2020 bees, uh, which was essentially a refinancing, if you will, the 2020 L, the original 2020, 2012 a revenue bonds, excuse me. Um, we were able to take advantage of lower interest rates and, um, realize approximately $9.7 million in net present value savings over the life of the remaining life of that debt. Next slide, please. So this slide just the original numbers we preliminary, preliminarily planned for last year, um, when we were anticipating going off of the bonds, um, we anticipate, if you look at the bottom there, we had intent anticipated. The first column is what we anticipated our year over year increase from fiscal year 2021 to 2122 being, we anticipated, um, just over $3 million of increase in annual debt service. Uh, but due to how favorably our bond issuance went, um, we're only actually seeing an increase of 2.1 million, uh, in debt service for, for 2122 over the previous year. Next slide, please. So here's comparative CIP and debt service allocations for 2122. Um, as you all know, we're continuing on with our plan to escalate the, the regional CIP investment at $1 million per year. So we'll be appropriating 8 million, um, as opposed to the 7 million for the previous year. Um, that service as was just referenced on the previous slide, it is increasing 2.1 million overall. As we're now making payments on the new debt. Um, as noted below the, the O and M allocations are still outstanding. And I'll be talking a little bit about that. Next slide, please. As far as the overall budget process, uh, for 2122, the, as I just mentioned, the sub regional or the regional debt service and CIP allocations are established. Um, Jan Mazek, uh, cities, new CFO came on board in January. Um, so she's getting, you know, finance team up to speed and figuring out the budget strategies for this year. Um, the third, the third point there says financial screens have not been open. Uh, however, we just received word on Monday that the systems are in fact open as of Monday for the, all the, um, enterprise funds, including, uh, the regional waterfront. Um, so the staff is currently working on and putting on M budgets. Um, while, while we'll be able to get a good start on that, we won't actually be able to finalize anything until the formal direction is given from the city manager's office in the finance department as to what the final city-wide budgeting policy is going to be for the year. Next slide, please. So Lori spoke, spoke to the work going on around catastrophic reserves. Um, so we wanted to show you the current regional reserve levels and our target balances. Uh, Santa Rosa water as a enterprise, we needed to define, define at least a placeholder value for target reserves as we're, uh, well into the process of bringing right recommendations to BPU and city council. Um, the defined catastrophic reserve levels will be determined through the process. Lori discussed and wants final targets are determined, uh, as a result of the study, we're going to take a measured approach to building those reserves towards the target level over time with the sensitivity to the impacts on rates. Um, and that's all of our rate models. Uh, Santa Rosa's as well as the partner agencies as we realized it, you know, year over year, multimillion dollar swings can have quite an impact on, on everybody's rates. So we're very cognizant of that. And we want to take a collaborative approach to building towards what those target balances end up being. Now next slide, please. So here's the timeline of the regional budget. Um, as mentioned, we're still awaiting official work from city manager's office and finance on budget instruction for, but we're still expecting to get our budget input, uh, by the end of February. Um, we'll review the regional budget with you on March 11th and schedule a second meeting for the month of March, if needed. And we will be seeking your budget recommendation on April and from there. We'll be on track to notify you of all of your budget allocations on May 1st, as usual, if, if all goes to plan. Um, and with that, I'm more than happy to answer any questions. If anybody has any. Thank you, Lori and Nick. Uh, Do any of the sub-tech members have any questions? Comments. Uh, Craig. Found the raise hand button. Finally. Um, Yeah. So. I know it's speculative, but, um, how does the COVID potential COVID relief funding play into this. Budget scenario is. Um, anticipated to have. You know, an impact on the budget. That's a great question. Um, in terms of COVID relief funding, we're continuing to follow a couple of different initiatives. Um, one that is through the treasury bill that could potentially help customers. Um, we, there's some information through the stimulus bill. There's potentially some new funding available. That was announced, I think on Tuesday. We're following all those initiatives. But as of right now, in terms of our budget. Uh, that we're looking at, I, we're not anticipating receiving any of that funding at this time. So it's not, not. We're not looking to incorporate that into the budget at this time. But as Nick mentioned, we have just. Open screens and we need to get some more direction from our city manager's office and, uh, Um, CFO. There are other questions. I'm Mary Grace. Um, yeah, I. Following up on Craig's question, you know, I know in our own budgeting, we're looking at deferring some capital expenditures because of COVID. And the, um, concerns about our rate base, including way payers who can't pay their bills. Um, I know regionally we're pushing Sonoma water on the same issue. Um, what. Is sub regional thinking about, um, You know, the need for rate increases, particularly this year for. Capital activities that perhaps won't occur for quite a while. Um, so I'll go ahead. I should let staff answer, but, um, so yes, we are definitely, uh, Absolutely. Understanding the need to, um, The impacts to our customers. I think we are experiencing that in Santa Rosa. Uh, anything we do with the regional budget is also going to impact our wastewater, uh, fund as well. So we're really looking at ways to, we can have the least amount of impact as possible on our budget. So we're, we're hearing that, um, from you. I think we're, we're seeing that ourselves on the wastewater fund side. And so we are taking that into account as we're budgeting. So we're going to look at all options and we'll, we'll bring something back to you guys very soon. Um, we don't have a lot. Like I said, details at the moment because, um, Things are open. Our, our, we also know there's a lot of, capital need out there and our projects are going, um, well out at the treatment plant. So it's not an initial thought to back away from the increase in the CIP allocation, but taking a look and see what other, what else is happening through the O and M fund. But I hear you, we hear you. And we're looking at all of our options to have the least amount of rate impact as possible. Thanks. And, and Jennifer, too, with that end, do you have a kind of a target in mind? Or what you're trying to get to on the rate increase? I don't think we do at this time now. Can I. Yes. Switching to, yeah, switching to catastrophic reserves. And I know you're on the part way through your state. Will you be taking into account the likelihood that if we see a disaster of the magnitude you're predicting with a 7.1 earthquake on Rogers Creek fault, that there's likely to be some outside funding sources available to help. But I know there will be cash flow issues that you can't argue that point at all. But, um, the likelihood that we would be taking into account the likelihood that if we see a disaster of the magnitude you're predicting that the likelihood that we would have to bear a hundred percent of the cost of a catastrophe is probably pretty low. Yeah. Um, I, we completely agree with you that, um, that's part of what we're trying to look at is really how much money do we need for the first, say two to three months to get us back up and running and then looking at other, um, options for funding, short term, you know, that's exactly the things that we're contemplating. Um, because one of the things that we did learn with the Tubbsfire is that we had plenty of money and money wasn't at the time our limiting factor. There are many different factors associated with how much money one agency can spend and the drawdown on resources during an event like this would be tremendous and there would be a lot of competition. And so we're, we're really more concerned about those resources than financial resources at this point. Thanks. And just a quick follow-up on that. Would this fund be available to, um, for cash flow and that if there is a catastrophic event like this, there may be a significant drop in and flow to the plant and in, um, in rate pairs quite honestly. Um, and is this fund also be part of a, of a, essentially provide cash flow so you wouldn't have a huge rate spike, so to speak, right after a disaster similar to what we're facing right now with the pandemic. Or is it, my question is would it be used for operational reserve and also for cat and also for, for catastrophic projects. I can speak to that. I think, um, fire call correctly or the catastrophic reserve policy or formal policy. And I can follow up on this. Um, I do believe it provides for, um, liquidation of some or all of those funds in the event of severe impairment of revenues. Um, so I do think that financial catastrophes are considered as well. Okay. And I think that's important because again, I think in, in such an event, we'll be facing the same thing that we're facing this year with significant pressure on rates and, um, and being able to have a reserve like this to draw upon to help reduce some, some of those, those rate impacts, I think would be important. Um, one more note on that. Um, I would also add that in addition to catastrophic reserves, each the operating fund also has a significant operations reserve that would probably in such an instance be liquidated, uh, much sooner than in the catastrophic reserve. So we, we have backstops. Yeah. Nick, would you happen to know what the, um, operating reserve is? I don't have the exact dollar amount off the top of my head, but I can tell you that it is adjusted to be 15% of the total operating budget each year. Um, so I can follow up with a dollar amount if you're interested. I don't need that. That, that I just want, I was just curious if it's 15%, 25%, that, that's, that's great. Thank you. Yeah. And I'm sorry, I'll ask one more question by operating budget. That includes debt service. Does that, is that, that the operating budget would include debt surface and the, your normal like services and supplies, but not capital improvements. Correct. Yes. It doesn't include capital improvements. I believe it includes all on M keys, including debt service. I believe. Thank you. Uh, uh, see Craig, you have a question. Yes. And, and I don't intend to get into the weeds on this. It's just, um, how do the ponds figure in the priority one and two and. Um, The plan, or is the, um, geysers pipeline. System included. And if so, if it is, if it's a one or two. So I'm, I'm not an expert, uh, at plan operations, but the report. The only portion of the re-system that. Defining as a. I believe, and I may need some help from my operations team, but I believe it's the Delta Pond pump station that we would need to make sure that was working so we could pump back to LTP in the event of an emergency. That was the only infrastructure that we really would require, but the thoughts were that we could always pump into the Laguna with treated water. And so the geyser system becomes a secondary goal for the city to restore. And there's also a specific catastrophic reserve recommendation for the geyser system as well. Do you have any other questions or comments? I agree. Yeah, first of all, and I'm sorry I didn't say this earlier, you guys did a great job with that financing and refinancing it, you know, very, very favorable borrowed money. Are you gonna be looking at all at that trade-off because you're able to borrow money for almost negative numbers now. And are we gonna look at the opportunity to perhaps continue to do that and perhaps save cash? So I believe, and I apologize that Deputy Director Zanino can't be here today and she has more of the details. I think Nick has some too, but I believe we have sort of a moratorium and I'm not using the right words on when we can go back out for debt financing. I wanna say it was two years, but Nick, do you have that detail? I don't know the exact timeline off the top of my head. But what I would say is, you know, gut feeling is that we wouldn't go out for more debt unless we had a specific, significant capital needs, such as UV disinfection system replacement because we're already at such low interest rates, it's hard to believe that we're gonna be able to refinance it and more advantageous for being the future. I can have Kimberly confirm, but that's my best guess. Okay, thanks. Any other board or sorry, sub-tact questions or comments where we open it up to public comment, all right? So seeing none, we'll now open it up for public comment. If you wish to make a comment on item 5.1 via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Reyes, do we have any public comments on this item? We have none. All right, thank you, Laurie and Nick and thank you sub-tact members for the great feedback as we start into our budgeting process for this year. So we'll be back at our next sub-tact meeting with more information, all right? So with that, we'll go to item 5.2. So item 5.2 is a presentation on phosphorus, PFOS pathogens and the salt-nutrient management plan, our new permit compliance plan and deputy director environmental services, Sean McNeill will be making the presentation. Great, thank you. Let's see, I don't seem to have the share screen option. Priscilla, can you bring up my presentation? Can you check one more time? I think we just added you. No, yes, thank you. I don't know if anybody's had a chance to see the lawyer who had the cat as a filter on it is. Oh yeah. Okay, great. So today I just want to kind of give an update of the environmental services division for the water department and really just kind of focus on the part that deals with the sub-regional plan. So I'll be kind of talking about a various few things here. So the environmental services update will include a brief discussion on our phosphorus limit I'll dig into some of the special provisions in our new NPDS permit. We'll also do an update of where we are with our PFAS sampling. And then I just want to give a little window into what's new in our Laguna environmental lab. It's oftentimes forgotten, but they're the source of a lot of our data and information about our systems. So starting off with phosphorus, in our new permit, we were given two options for compliance. One was the water quality trading framework, which is a modification of the nutrient offset program. And another was this idea promoted by the city, which was an alternative compliance program where we would go out identify a project with multiple benefits in the watershed and agree to do that as a part of our compliance. And that's what we were hoping for, but the regional board put that we'd have to still control 44,000 pounds of phosphorus, which is greater than what we've controlled in the last eight years. So we just felt just out of prudence with our budget that we would need to go with the water quality trading framework. So we've officially given that notification to the regional board that for our compliance tracking, we'll be using the water quality trading framework over the next permit term. The currently what we have generating credits are the Pepperwood Dairy, or excuse me, Pepperwood, where we did a road stabilization project. Ocean View Dairy, we did receive credits, but none of those credits are extant. They're all either used or expired. We do have some credits coming in each year from the Beretta Dairy, which was an on-farm set of BMPs to help prevent runoff from the dairy getting into the local waterways. And then recently we partnered with Sonoma Water, thank you, Mike, and Neil Lasseter on the Laguna One and Two Sediment Removal and Restoration Program. And this project was very successful in removing quite a bit of legacy sediment and phosphorus in the Laguna, creating a low-flow channel that directs that water in the drier season into this low-flow channel, which is drying out the flood plain and hopefully reducing the regrowth of all the Lidwigia in that section of creek so that we can get better health benefits and greater flood control and really stop the phosphorus pumping of the Lidwigia. And as we're moving forward, developing new projects, we're working in coordination with the town of Windsor, Sonoma Water, and a number of other entities who might have opportunities for phosphorus removal, just to make sure that we have the right amount of credits for our discharge. Right now, we have about 14,000, our estimate is we have about 14,500 credits moving from the nutrient offset program into the water quality trading framework. And we'll be getting another 4,500 from the Laguna One and Two next year added in and then so we feel like we're right now, we can cover one big discharge or two minor to medium-sized discharges and we'll be working with the town of Windsor. We are still trying to understand from the regional board the life of each of these credits and how long they'll last and we're trying to fight to make sure that once we purchase up credits and remove that phosphorus that we get to use those credits in our bank account, it just would allow us to invest wisely in these phosphorus programs. So that's still under negotiation. Other issues in the permit are some special provisions in the permit. This is where a lot of the changes in our MPDS permit come with each new revision. So we have a whole host of re-opener provisions. I'll focus on one of those today, the salt and nutrient management plan that we've put forth and I'll talk about some of the special studies and technical reports that are required in this permit. This is kind of the part of our permit that has us looking at the impacts that we might have or parts of our system to prevent further impacts but also might be a signal for future regulations. So we'll be, I'll talk about many of those today. So starting off with the salt and nutrient management plan. This is a plan that's required by the state in order to manage salts, nutrients and other significant chemical compounds on a watershed basin wide basis. Santa Rosa is partnered with Katadi, Sebastopol, Roanupark, Windsor and Sonoma Water on our 2013 plan, which we provided to the regional board. We also recently submitted a monitoring and reporting plan for this salt and nutrient management plan. This is for groundwater monitoring of wells in the watershed and next week we will be receiving some feedback from the regional board on our salt and nutrient management plan and a number of you have been invited to that meeting so that we can understand any needed revisions and concerns that the regional board has with what we've submitted. Another project that's coming up, a special study is a pathogen special study. This is added into our permit because of the Russian River TMDL, Total Maximum Daily Load established a bacteria water quality objective for E. coli which is this 100 clump forming units per 100 milliliters. Where we monitor this is through a rolling six week geometric mean. So you can't exceed 100 for that and not to exceed 320 clump forming units or 100 milliliters for no more than 10% of the samples collected in any calendar month. Why we don't believe that our current ponds would be higher than these numbers. We've done a little bit of an analysis a couple of years ago and the highest we found was about 55 clump forming units but in our study, we wanna make sure knowing that the regional board is gonna use this for a reasonable potential. And if we do get a hit, we wanna make sure that we are able to explain it. So our plan is to be not only quantifying the amount but trying to figure out the origin of any E. coli so that we can take out any E. coli from environmental factors like birds and fish. That might also be in our settling ponds. I wanna mention that Windsor also has this same requirement in their permit. And so we are working with them so that we create one study for both of our agencies or at least that the studies are comparable. We're working with the same consultant on this and our work plan is due August of this year. And once we get that work plan approved by the regional board, we'll be collecting data and submitting that to the regional board on or before July 31st, 2024. We also need to be doing an engineering evaluation of our recycled water storage ponds and discharge outfalls. Recently, the city had a number of unauthorized discharges in relation to some discharge valves that we hadn't used a lot because this infrastructure isn't used frequently and leads to a discharge when we open our exercise valves. We had a few valve stick slightly open in 2017 after discharging. So we went in and repaired those but the regional board has concern about some of our other infrastructure. So we're permitted to discharge in some other locations that we haven't discharged in over 20 years. There's sort of emergency relief discharge places. So they're wanting us to review that infrastructure and give them an assessment of the quality and functioning of some of that infrastructure. So we've already completed our initial work plan which is really we're gonna be hiring a consultant to support our staff and look at a number of these key pinch points in the system and then we will be submitting a final report due July 31st, 2024. Also in our permit, while we just completed a local limits study and sewer use ordinance evaluation in our last permit term, this is something we're gonna need to do each permit term. Our hope is that as we do this much more frequently than we have in the past, that there'll only be minor changes to the local limits and may or may not require changes to our sewer use ordinance. But we'll be doing that evaluation. It is due in February of 2024. Our plan right now is we're trying to map out when we would be able to do all these special studies because we really wanna get this done maybe or get started late next year on that so that we would have plenty of time for back and forth on that. Another requirement in our permit is that we have a disaster preparedness assessment report and action plan. The first bullet point is straight out of our permit which highlights that there is concern, many wastewater treatment plants are located at low elevations just so that the lowest elevations in the area in the Laguna treatment plant is no exception to that. So we are have a threat of flooding. Obviously we have threats of it seems like I can't say that we don't have a threat of fire but we have a threat of implications of fire which is power, safety, the power shutoffs and loss of power. So we'll just be building a whole disaster disaster preparedness assessment report which makes sense, identify the control measures needed to protect this infrastructure and this final report will be due to the regional board by August 2023. So moving out of our permit into some orders that were issued by the state board is this sampling for PFAS and PFOA. As I mentioned, it's not currently a part of our MPDS permit but it was a special order because these chemicals also known as forever chemicals are used in many consumer products including lotions and body washes and various types of clothing and waterproofing that you have to have special sampling protocols. Here's a picture of a special sampling device to sample our biosolids and we have completed our first round of results for the treatment plant and that was a measuring of our influent effluent and biosolids we've sent off our samples for the second round. So we do this every quarter for a year and we've produced a report to the regional board and monitoring plan for how we would sample our wells on our recycled water properties and our biosolids application sites. So that we will need to do one time over the next year. And so far results, we don't really have a lot of benchmarking but it's they seem relatively low but eventually I could see that this will grow into us needing to look into our pretreatment program and seeing where the potential sources are for PFOS into our system. So I'd like to just kind of conclude with our updates on our Laguna Environmental Lab. As I mentioned earlier, these are the eyes of our operations, they're providing us information about how the treatment plant is operating and removing constituents and monitoring and meeting our requirements as in the permit. About 17 years ago, we expanded our Laguna Environmental Lab and added a new lab where our principal lab analysts sit. That's where most of our sophisticated instruments are. We've been budgeting for replacement of the instruments in that lab which oftentimes have anywhere from a 10 to 15 year life. And we've been able to have really good maintenance on that, those instruments. So we've been able to extend their life but now is the time we're starting to replace them. We just got a new gas chromatic graph mass spectrophotometer. This is probably our most expensive unit measures volatile compounds was a great for us to be able to bring this into our lab at this time is our old GC MS is starting to cause problems and fail that will bring this online. It'll let us do some new methods giving us greater operational flexibility. So we'll be bringing that online and it's not easy to bring a new instrument online when you are in environmental lab, there's a bunch of tests and demonstration of capability that we need to do and reports that we need to submit to our accrediting agency before we can start gathering data from that instrument. So we're working on that for this new instrument. And then the big change that's happening statewide is that the environmental lab accrediting program which sits underneath the guidance of the state water resources control board is switching over to the new TNI standards which is the NELAC Institute standards. It's a national standard. And what it's doing is it's creating a need for us to add 885 new requirements into our lab and we're seeing this requirement, as I mentioned across the state, many small municipal labs are really struggling with this. We're in the medium-sized lab. So it is a challenge for us but we do have a quality program already that's in-house and we'll be looking at any changes to our workload of our staff to make sure that we can meet these new requirements. And we have three years to come into compliance with this. Our goal is to come into compliance within two years so that we have a year to work out any kinks that might need to be worked out as we're trying to meet these new requirements. So with that, I'll take any questions. Do we have any questions or comments from sub-tact members? Yeah, Sean, just real quick with regard to the additional requirements on the lab. I mean, how do you, could you describe those a little bit? You said 800, I can't remember the number. Could you describe the complications with that? So many of these new requirements are based on the quality assurance program. So there, for instance, we will need to have with all of our tests and our limb system, every time we use a pipette to move an aliquot of a sample to a vial, we'll need to log which pipetter we used for that. We'll need to, and with that, we'll come all of the calibration logs for that. So it's really delving into a lot of the quality. We also need to have, because right now we have one full-time person doing our quality for our entire lab, but it's gonna increase the amount of work that individual will need to accomplish. So we're looking at some of our principal lab analysts being able to help with that workload and make sure that all these details are tracked. So for instance, we would need to log every kind of auger that we get for growing any bacteria or coliform and make sure that we have that information logged in. So when you track that sample, everything is kind of, it comes in the lab on this day, it was used on this day, it was tossed, so you basically have a manifest for all of the consumables that go into the data analysis and tracking them. So those are just some examples. I see Craig, you have a question as well. Thank you, Neil. Really good presentation, very informative. Thank you. I did have a question just generally, there's a leapfrogging effect with updating these permits in the Bay Area just to get a sense of how many of these permit requirements are already embedded in other permits and how many are really, we're being the bleeding edge, if you will, being the initial ones to have it being housed in our permit. If you could just give me a general idea for that. Sure, I could speak about a few of them. The Pathogen Special Study is directly related to the Russian River TMDL. So it's unique to us for that. We also have the way that we do our bio-assay requirements and that's where we gather water during discharge and ship that off to a lab and they grow fish and water fleas in them and then they give us a report. It's basically, it's not a pollutant, but it's what is the impact of this water on organisms that that was a big change in our permit. I didn't really talk about that here. They're changing the test of significant toxicity it's called and that is being adopted in Southern California. It was adopted into our permit, how it was done. Just generically, I'll say what happened before the way the statistics work. You were assumed that the water was good unless it was statistically negative to those organisms that you grow in the water. Now it's, you have to prove that your water is good. So it's assumed that the water has a negative impact and it's just gonna increase the amount of potential receiving water violations or a need for us to do further studies on that. So we are challenging that one provision. We put that into advance. I think you've probably heard our phosphorus is no net loading for phosphorus is unique throughout the state. We did gain a partner in this last revision with the town of Windsor in that requirement. But that is also a unique provision to us. And then a lot of the other things are pretty standard. There were things that they tried to put into our permit that our comment letters were able to negotiate out of. We shared the logic of it and how it was against that. So we protested 36 different items in our permit. 18 of those were changed outright and another nine were modified to benefit the city. Just trying to hold the regional board to science-based decisions. But yeah, I would say the North Coast board is different than many of the other boards and we're the biggest treatment plant in the North Coast. Even though we're of moderate size. And don't get me started in our discharge prohibitions. That's a lot of those are unique. Great, thank you. Any other sub-tact member questions or comments? All right, seeing none, we'll now open it up for public comment. So we are now taking public comments on item 5.2 If you wish to make a comment by a Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary Reyes, do we have any live email or voicemail public comments on item 5.2? We have none. All right, thank you. And thank you very much, Sean. That's a great presentation. All right, so we'll now move to item 5.3. And item 5.3 is gonna be a presentation on our regional operations and Deputy Director Regional Water Reuse Operations, Emma Welton will be making the presentation. Good morning. Thank you, Jennifer. I think Gina's gonna share my presentation. So I'll give her a minute. I guess just following up on Sean's comment about the cat filter. If you haven't seen it, you should definitely see it. I actually saw something in the Washington Post yesterday that suggested the cat should be the defense impeachment lawyers at this point. Well, and I actually downloaded a copy of the picture and I'm going to use it as my screen background when I'm not on it. I thought about using the filter this morning but I figured Jennifer wouldn't approve it. Oh, you're not using the filter then. Oh. Well, we're broadcasting live, right? Just a reminder, Priscilla or Gina, are you able to share the presentation? Gina's calling it up right now, just one more minute. Thank you. So I'm just gonna give a pretty brief update on what we have going on in regional operations kind of with a majority of the focus being on our recycled water production and availability as we're continuing to see very dry weather. So next slide, please. So as I mentioned, I'll go into some depth about what we're looking like for recycled water availability. I'll briefly cover some current and upcoming major projects that we have going on and then just wanted to give a brief update about where we are with the potential regional organics processing facility. Next slide, please. So a recap of what we were able to deliver in 2020. We delivered 3.8 billion gallons to the geysers steam fields despite some very, very challenging circumstances last year. We were able to meet 91% of our contract, which was just an amazing effort by our staff and just really impressed with their ability to recover from so many really unfortunate circumstances and get the geyser system up and running and make our contract. We also delivered about 1.5 billion gallons to our ag irrigation users. This was less than what we typically are able to deliver in an average year. And we heard from a lot of our ag community that the cutbacks were hard, but it's gonna be even harder this year. Just kind of a warning that we have very little recycled water available as we're moving into this irrigation season. We did provide our contract amount for urban irrigation and ended the year providing about 5.7 billion gallons in total, which is about 1 billion gallons less than we deliver in an average year. And the difference really was kind of split between the geysers and ag. We delivered about a half a billion less to geysers than we typically do and about a quarter of a billion less to ag than we typically do. And then the remainder is made up by our average discharge. So as you know, our discharge is kind of binary. We either do it or we don't, but if you average it over the years, it's about 400 billion gallons. So that's how you get to about a billion gallons less than average. Obviously, we want to deliver more. We didn't intentionally deliver a billion gallons less. We just didn't have the water. So if you move to the next slide, please. I wanted to show you kind of 35 years of data in kind of a simplified graphic. So you can see the light blue lines there show the average recycled water production per month over the last 35 years. You can see it's extremely variable and we have very high production years and very low production years, but on average, we produce about what is represented by the gray line in the middle there. And then looking at last year in the dark blue line along the bottom, that was our historic low over 35 years of record. And this year you can see we're producing even less than we did last year substantially. So the area under the curve is really what we're able to provide to our users. So if you go to the next slide, please. This shows kind of a simplified version of what I just showed you. So the maximum in the gray dotted line there and then the minimum flow last year with the gray in the average. So as I mentioned, what's under the line is what's available for our ag users. If you go to the next slide, on average, we have to keep about five billion gallons available for uninterruptible obligations. So this includes our geysers contract, our urban irrigation contracts, and then we do lose a significant amount to evaporation, so we have to account for that. So that kind of blue rectangle represents what we have to kind of keep in reservation for our uninterruptible obligations. Next slide, please. Anything above that, but below the curve is what becomes available for our agricultural irrigation or what were required to discharge. So on an average year, you can see we have about 2.1 billion gallons available for agricultural irrigation or are required to discharge. And this is just, as I mentioned, an average and it's obviously very variable. So if you go to the next slide, please. This is what we're currently looking at for availability for our agricultural users. So significantly less than an average year, significantly less than last year, which was in and of itself a pretty tough year to get through. So just wanted to kind of run through that to give you an idea of what we're looking at for availability. So next slide, please. So with that information, we are preparing for a little to know recycled water being available for our interruptible customers. We are, we have established an ad hoc of our Board of Public Utilities to start tackling some of these hard conversations in how are we going to prioritize this very limited resource. We are continuing to have ongoing conversations with our ag users, both with the Farm Bureau specifically and with all of our ag users in general, just to give them a heads up of what we anticipate is coming for the irrigation season. It is still very early in the irrigation season and we do have the potential to make up some water as you couldn't see from previous years. We have been in circumstances like this where we were able to make up water. We just aren't anticipating that occurring given the kind of really dry forecast for a prolonged period of time. And we are also continuing to have ongoing conversations with our regional partners as well as the geysers. We currently are delivering less to geysers than contract because we want to kind of maintain some water and storage to provide us operational flexibility, knowing that we will have to over deliver in the drier months. This actually will work for us pretty well operationally as well as geysers. And we are confident that we will be able to make geysers contract by the end of the year, altering our scheduled deliveries. Also Windsor is pumping more to the geysers than their contract in order for Santa Rosa to retain a bit more in storage and pump less. So that's been really helpful in allowing us to increase in storage a slight bit day to day. And then we also have been having conversations with Sonoma Water about their availability and are very interested in moving forward with accepting water from Sonoma Water. So those conversations will continue as well. So that's kind of the information I wanted to share with respect to the recycle water. If anybody has any questions about that, please feel free to either ask now or you can wait till the end. But I'm gonna move on to kind of an overview of some of our upcoming projects. All right. Go ahead Gina. So just a really brief highlight of some of our larger projects. We are replacing the radiators on our emergency generators. We have found that we are using our emergency generators more and more as we continue more and more PSPS events. And we really need to make sure that our emergency generators are in very good working condition and reliable. So we're gonna be doing some major work to replace the radiators in the near future. We also are anticipating replacing the geysers expansion joints that have failed in previous years. We were, if you recall, we were originally scheduled to have this work completed last September. However, with COVID, the fabrication of the joints themselves was delayed as the factories were unable to do the production. So that has been delayed until this year. We are anticipating a construction start date of May 1st. So we'll have a geyser shut down for about a month starting May 1st to accommodate that work. And then as you all are hopefully aware, we are shooting to go out to bed for our disinfection and diversion improvements. So to replace our UV system and to add diversion, downstream diversion to our process. So that's gonna be a huge undertaking. It's been taking a lot of our staff time to review those plans and get ready for bed. But we're hoping, you know, we'll be able to go out to bed in the next, sorry. We're hoping we'll be able to go out to bed in the next few months and get that construction underway. The next slide, please. And then finally, I just wanted to give a brief update on the regional organics processing facility. I hope you all recall, we are looking to lease a portion of our land adjacent to the treatment plant that was previously occupied by our biosolids composting facility outlined in the green there to renewable Sonoma, to plan, design, construct and ultimately operate an in-counting organics processing facility. Next slide, please. So we are currently in an exclusive negotiation agreement with Renewable Sonoma and have been so for about two years now working towards the development of this project. Zero Waste Sonoma who's kind of the lead project agency or the lead for the project as well as the city have been working toward draft pre-development agreements with Renewable Sonoma to further the negotiations and further the potential implementation of the project. Renewable Sonoma did present to Zero Waste Sonoma at their board meeting on November 18th, basically to provide a project update and an understanding of where they are in the process. And they were hoping to bring an item back to Zero Waste Sonoma with more refined kind of project costs and finances, which has not occurred yet but they are working toward that. So next slide, please. They are Renewable Sonoma is currently in negotiations with their proposed equity provider and are hoping to come to an agreement with them in the near future. Once they are able to do so, they will then go back to the Zero Waste Sonoma board and provide the updated financials and project costs that Zero Waste Sonoma is really interested in receiving in order to understand how and if they're going to move forward with the project. Once that occurs, then Zero Waste Sonoma in the city will be able to kind of move forward on finalizing and executing pre-development agreements which will take us into the next phase of the project. We won't really know much more until Renewable Sonoma is able to go back in front of Zero Waste Sonoma with their updated finances and Zero Waste Sonoma is able to make a decision regarding how they want to move forward with the project. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Emma. Are there any sub-tact member questions or comments on this item? Yeah, real quick, just oops. Emma, with regard to the emergency generator, how much, you might've said this and I could've missed it. Do you, how much more are you running it or do you have a sense of how much more is it twice as often? With the, well, it's been a combination of PSPS events, outages to facilitate geysers work, fires and then kind of just other regular plant maintenance. But it really is dependent. I think we had two PSPS events last year, if I recall, I think the previous year we had like six or seven, so it's really dependent on how many PSPS events. Yeah, makes sense. But we definitely want to make sure that we have, we're maintaining our emergency backup generation power and really prioritizing that since it's a potential sewer operation. Any other sub-tact member? Questions or comments? Seeing none, I just wanna take a moment just to sort of reinforce and acknowledge the amazing work that staff did last year. We were very challenged with operating the system and ensuring that we met the geysers contract for a number of different reasons. And at one point really we're looking like we weren't gonna make the contract. And I just can't say enough about Emma and her team to ensure that we were able to meet the geysers contract. It was a really big deal last year. And we're going into dry conditions again this year. We're taking that incredibly seriously and looking at all ways that we can ensure we're meeting our contractual obligations, but if there's any opportunities to pre-upwater. So it's been quite a challenge. Very grateful that Emma decided to come over to the plant and stay there with all the emergencies that we've thrown at her. So just really wanna acknowledge the great work of the team. All right, with that, we'll now open it up for public comment on item 5.3. So we are now taking public comments on items 5.3. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Reyes, do we have any voicemail, live or email public comments? We have none. All right, thank you. All right, thank you, Emma. So that concludes our sub-tact meeting. So we are adjourned. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Bye-bye.