 What I'm going to talk to you about today is the implementation of our regulations in New York City. And I'm going to talk to you, I'm going to tell you a little story about how that played out. And unfortunately, I do have to make a presentation tomorrow, but I need to get out of here before rush hour. As you can see in lunch, I got my dinner, right? So I am going to do my presentation, I'm going to make my way out. My last slide here is, you'll see my e-mail address. You can forward me questions, you know, work with our team to get those answered. Bruce is here, he's my colleague from the Bureau of Communicable Disease up in the city. He may be able to answer a couple of questions also. And if he does it, I think he's very good at taking notes and he can catch those numbers immediately. All right, very good. So what's the problem? Well, the problem is cooling towers below air slide region on the air, causing illness. There's our cooling tower, and guess what? It looks a lot like a smoke tag, right? Thank you guys. In the 70s, with the Clean Air Act, you know, they passed regulations trying to deal with NOx, SOx, PM10. So what is that all about? It's about internalizing a negative externality for those of you who remember your economics from way back when, right? Well, the cost associated with this formal pollution, right, is put out of the health of the people that may breathe in the air slide region, right, just like the cost associated with smog and smoke, what are the chronic health effects associated with those things. This is kind of a very similar thing, at least in a regulatory world, in an economics type of world, right? And so how do we deal with that? Well, just like the Clean Air Act sends a signal to the market with regulations, New York City decided to do the same thing. But before we get into New York City's example, here are some of the different types of signals that you can send to a market. This is also a story about knowledge dissemination, right? This is also a story about knowledge dissemination. Everybody here in this room will understand the risks associated with Legionella, but building in cooling towers. But building orders don't necessarily understand that, right? And they're not going to do something about it unless they do understand it. And so the first thing you have to do is identify the risks through subject experts. You can imagine back in the 1970s, the Clean Air Act, and also in the 1970s after the first Philadelphia Legionella. By the way, I was alive in the 1970s. This job could give me even more gray hair. So back then, you know, you had the first signal coming out. Where's Jen? Jen talked a little bit about legal exposure. Is she here? She talked a little bit about legal exposure. And that's another great market signal, right? For people to start to do things. These guys are going to talk to you about standard setting, right? Again, once you have knowledge disseminated through a community, that community begins to look at that knowledge and say, this is a good thing to do. We need to set some standards, right? And then what's the public thinks it's a good thing to do? Right? So everybody in this room, we all know about it. Most of us think it's a good thing to do, I would assume. What's the public hears about it? That one, legislation and regulation gets developed. So what happened in New York City in 2015? Anybody? Come on. We're in an outbreak, right? The public heard about it. We mobilized, right? And that's when regulation happens. It's the same thing with the Cuyahoga River setting on fire and the Clean Water Act being passed, right? Public outrage, right? That gets me going. So what actually did happen in New York City? Well, the outbreak, August 2015, local law was passed, updated the city administration, administrative code. And then three ways, three things happened there. There was an update to the administrative code in the Department of Buildings. The Department of Health, the Department of Buildings has the power to start a registry. And we're going to check on annual certification of cooling towers. I'm not going to get into the details here, but there's a self-certification that cooling tower owners have to send in every year, saying they're trying to be in compliance. And they also handle decommissioning. So these are all very much record-keeping type of things, right? Registration, annual certification and commissioning, all Department of Buildings type of stuff. And then the Department of Health, we handle the big stuff, right? Well, I shouldn't say the big stuff, but we handle the details. And the details are the rules and rights that were passed or promulgated. And these are commissioners' rules, and there are many different types of rules, but these are commissioners' rules, and they were promulgated in May of 2016. And they apply to all cooling towers in New York City. Now I say cooling towers because that's how the local law is written. And I'm not going to get into the details here, but we actually inspected a cooling tower system basis. Okay? So a cooling tower system could have multiple cooling towers. And there's a whole crazy definition argument that we have or discussion we have about some of these things. Again, registration and certification, and that's from the Department of Buildings. The biggest thing is the Maintenance Program and Plan, which consists of a risk management assessment. These guys are going to talk about plans, right? And all those plans, Jen mentioned it earlier, they're based on identifying the risk. Identifying risks and figuring out what to do. We require a maintenance program and plan in place for cooling tower systems. And this is the building owner telling us what they're going to do to manage that engineered system, right? So that's what must be done. And in the operational record, this is another big requirement. This is proof that what you said you were going to do and your plan, you're going to do. You got to write it down, right? We all know that basis for management. What gets written down gets done. What gets measured gets done. So you got to show us. And our inspectors are out there doing this. So those were probably the two biggest things. The other thing that the ranch did is it provided some minimums. It provided some minimums. Minimums with regards to inspection, operation and maintenance. Probably the biggest minimum, which is treatment. It requires systems to have treatment, cooling tower systems to have treatment. Before the ranch into place, I can tell you there were cooling tower systems that probably had no treatment to kill bacteria and legionella. It required validation sampling and corrective actions, okay? Legionella and heterotrophic bacteria. It also requires verification, right? So that's that record keeping stuff a little bit. Tell us what you're going to do, right? These are all the minimal requirements. Now let's think about this for a minute. We're bringing in minimums, right? What are the minimums going to do? They're going to raise the floor, right? They're going to raise the floor. Everybody's got to meet the minimum. So a little bit of the side effect on this is sometimes a minimum can actually lower the ceiling, right? Because now we have a market and we just got a signal from our regulatory agency that said, you got to do this, right? Everybody's got to do this. So if I'm a business owner, right, and I'm looking to see cost is important, I may just try to do the minimum. And because my regulatory agency just said, you know, we all trust the Department of Health, right? We said minimums must be protected. The Department of Health is saying it must be protected. So that's the minimum. So now if I was doing more than a minimum, I might be coming back down for cost basis down to those minimum standards. So while we're raising the floor, there's a potential for those folks who are doing more that we could actually be lowering the ceiling. So let's talk a little bit about our market. And I just told you a little bit about what happened in New York City. Here's our regulator market. There's about 1.4 million buildings in New York City, bigger than a lot of cities, population, right? 4,000 cooling tower systems, lots of different interesting ownership and management relations, okay? Tenants and owners, lots of different interesting relationships. The regulation holds the owner of the building and the cooling tower responsible, okay? Not a lessee, right? Not a lessee. And so that's changed some of how the leases in New York City have been getting written, right? It's very interesting. We have varying resources and knowledge across these buildings, right? I talked a little bit earlier how about this is all about knowledge dissemination, right? And we use a lot of different languages. That makes things difficult. We had our Russian community, our Chinese community, and all of these buildings are used for different things. Varying usage can make it difficult. That's our market. So I told you earlier we regulate building owners and buildings, okay? Anybody here a building owner? No. How much do you think a building owner knows when you know a building water system? Probably not a ton, okay? Now, who here might be a water treatment vendor? I know we got some of them. Raise your hands if you're kind of on the consulting side of things. Oh, come on. I know I got more. Come on, get them up. All right, don't be sad. You guys are the knowledge, right? You're building owners you're talking to, right? They're going to you guys, right? And there are many different types of folks here, right? There's labs, there's engineers, there's industrial hygienists, right? So we've got lots of different folks and lots of different market businesses providing lots of different products and lots of different services. Here are some of them, okay? Now before the race, this is it, right? Fenders out there looking and trying to sell their products and talking about the risk, right? All of that, oh, now the rigs come in. They've got to do that all the time through the filter of the regulations for cooling tower systems. Remember those regulations are the minimum, okay? So that is, although we regulate the building owners, we certainly understand that those building owners get their knowledge from the vendors, right? This area in red, this is where that knowledge gets disseminated, all right? And this is where there's an increase in knowledge and there's a sharing, all right? So those rigs mediate that relationship. What are we trying to do with this? We're trying to move the market from point A to point B. And what does that mean, right? What does that mean? So you can imagine back in the 70s, right? You might have had some folks doing building water system plans. Who was anybody here in the 70s, right? Building, don't raise your hand. Okay? Tell me about that. I'm getting gray hair, so I'm getting there. But you can imagine back then when you first saw people talk, the knowledge on this was very limited. I mean, the Safe Drinking Water Act didn't even really came out. There was poor communication, right? Because there wasn't a whole lot of knowledge like the right complainers. There was any plan that was written, certainly kind of written based on a perceived risk. You can hear even today some folks talking about, oh, we don't quite know what the risk here is. What's the right number for the standard and all those kinds of things. And certainly you have that passive management or implementation from the building side. When you don't really know what's going on, you tend to manage it. So think about your car, right? We're all supposed to get that driver's manual, right? We're all supposed to do a schedule maintenance, right? But nobody really knows why you do it. It's just in the book, right? So you don't. And that's passive management implementation, right? And you might have inconsistent records and all that. You'd have a very high variation. So go to point of view. Oh, I'm sorry. So why did they even do this stuff back then? Well, it was mostly for equipment protection and plumbing protection, right? Scaling, corrosion. There was a cost associated with that. We knew how to protect that, right? So we would treat our water systems to prolong their life. Now, they might have had a little bit of legal exposure and certainly the time went on and certainly today there's an understanding that there's a responsibility to potentially manage Legionella and there's some legal exposure associated with that and finally moral suasion, right? That's the economic term for doing the right thing. So back in point A, all of that risk and cost was externalized, right? Most of that was not internalized. We didn't have a lot of plans. Instead, at Legionella, it was queuing up to the air through these cooling towers and that's how things happened in Philadelphia. Now, point B is where we were to go. Oh, shoot. I went ahead. Oh, shoot again. We want high understanding, all right? So we got that. Everybody in this room understands or will soon understand after talking to the panel the importance of water management plans, right? You need formalized communication between the plan writers, the plan implementers. People need to know when to act and why to act. You have control measures based on identified risk. That's that passive approach, right? You have active management implementation. Now let you know what your car can do, right? You know a little bit about cars and you might actually follow that manufacturer's recommendations and you might make sure it gets done. Consistent records informing implementation, right? You can track the things so we know when to do things. And looking at that data, right? To manage your system better. And low variation. So the plan, if everybody's sort of knowledgeable, you would expect the plans to start to look at least conceptually similar, right? Sort of the same general approaches, certainly customized, you know, by the different buildings. And now they're doing it more because they understand the risk and there's some legal exposure involved. Certainly the right thing still. You want to protect your equipment. In the end of the last session, somebody was talking about all the different trade-offs. One of the questions. Well, the trade-off here is a trade-off with health and a trade-off with protecting your equipment. There's also a trade-off potential. If you do it right, it's okay. So here the risk and cost is internalized, right? So this costs a lot to do from point B. So if you think about our market, we talked about lots of different resources, right? Big ANC buildings in Manhattan, small modern-day pop grocery stores in the burnt. That might have a cooling tower. It costs money. So how do we move from A to B? Again, story about knowledge dissemination. Standard setting. These guys are going to talk about standard setting, right? Regulation. That's what we're doing. We've got that public signal now. One thing I'm not going to mention about is technology. I'm just going to briefly mention about it. Technology is, I'm trying to think of it as embodied knowledge, right? We know what is embodied knowledge for a purpose. We're using technology. And technology is developing, and it can lower costs. So moving measures. So in moving from point A to point B, right? That team composition, that's your understanding of knowledge. We're trying to get that knowledge out. That's the understanding of knowledge. That's your team composition. And so with our cooling tower rates, we require that you have a team, right? And those are the people that not only know how to manage regionality, but also know the building, the building system. I think even more importantly, they know the people who are working in the building and how those people work, right? That management component. Understanding and knowledge is part of that team. You take that knowledge and you throw it into a plan. And that plan quality is the documentation of all that knowledge, right? So everybody on that team needs to look at their plan, understand their plan, know their roles and responsibilities. And that needs to go into the plan. And then plan implementation, is that knowledge applied, okay? This is not easy, right? This is not easy. We're all pretty educated folks, I would imagine, in this room. And it's not necessarily the folks in the small, mom-and-pop grocery store who are doing this work, okay? This is not easy. Communication issues, when you go from the team's knowledge to writing it down, right? Institutional development issues, that's slightly easier than the institutional development issues that goes into that implementation. That's hard. It's real hard to do that well. Where are we here with New York City and the Cooling Tower, right? Well, like I said earlier, we have the minimum standards for team competition. We have some minimum standards for required elements. I talked a little bit about them. We also have standards for proof of implementation, all these different records that need to be kept. And there's an institutional capacity that needs to be developed to do all of this. This increases knowledge and awareness. It reduces risk, potentially. More importantly, it internalizes that externality. Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, well, we all want to be at point B, right? Point B is great. Point B is expensive, right? Point B from a regulatory standpoint is, do I as a regulator want to be prescriptive? I certainly don't know every Cooling Tower system in the city and what should be done with it. I certainly don't know all the different management styles and management complications associated with these systems. It was very difficult for a regulator to be prescriptive. Instead, we go with sort of minimal requirements and allow the market to do what the market does, right? Try to find the best way to meet those requirements. So, flipping the switch. And it is kind of flipping the switch, right? I mentioned earlier how regulations tend to get started. They tend to get started after a major event, right? And then there's public concern about it. And sometimes those regulations can come kind of quickly. And that's what happened in New York City. And we flipped the switch in May of 2016. And our program started to ramp up and our violations started to be issued. Not a lot in 2016. Just so you know, it might be a little different. I'm going to briefly touch on our violation system. So what we've done here, not only do we implement these regs, we sort of took a different approach from a technology standpoint to do all of this. We have over 5,000 cooling tower systems in New York. We have closed in on about 15 inspectors out there every day inspecting these systems. And the only way we could do this with the resources we had was to automate this process. And so we do have a software that our inspectors use that go out and they make observations. The violations are actually determined through the logic of the algorithm and the software based on the observations of the field staff. And then those get processed through our compliance unit and get automatically sent over to our administrative trials and hearing. So it's all automated. And trust me, that was a bit of a nightmare, but we did make our way through it. So building orders to try to comply and granted the time that they had, I think they did quite a good job. We have her anecdotally that the water industry was overwhelmed at first, okay? I said 5,000 cooling tower systems. These plans got to be ready quickly and implemented quickly. And I think it was tough for some of the industry to get up to speed quick and rough. And frankly, it wasn't easy for our department to get up to speed either. I really didn't have as much gray hair for years ago, where I did say I was coming from the Rural Upstate New York Health Department. And life was easy in the Rural Upstate New York. And there was some uncertainty in the regulated community, right? Certainly a lot of uncertainty on what was going to happen. So in the late fall of 2016 and early 2017, violations started to be heard. And we were starting to get a fair amount of feedback from both building owners, to our building owner management association and our real estate board in New York, as well as water treatment vendors. And they asked us, especially the vendors, asked us to look at their plans and provide some comments on their plans. And we did. And those were some of the things that we saw, lack of specificity, lack of logical organization, some missing required elements, and little customizing to specific systems. And we also got a lot of feedback with regards to... You can imagine from any regulated community, why are you doing this? This is non-protective and we're getting violations. Nobody likes to get violations. This has eventually dropped off. We also got a lot of feedback, also very much in support from the regulated community. We had some software changes in early 2017, which really streamlined things. At that point, we had finished about 1,500 inspections. Yes, five minutes, just about done, perfect. Second iteration, the market has had some time, plans have improved. We're still getting feedback from the regulated community. It's getting better, it's getting better. And now I'm going to show you how it's getting better. So, in 2016, these are some of our major violations. Does a plan exist? Does records exist? Does systems have daily automatic treatment? They're not required to have daily automatic treatment, but it does make it easier. And here's what we see now. Lots of improvement there, right? Things are getting better. Anything with the risk assessment? Did they have a risk assessment with the proper elements? And then they have a record of all four of the previous 90-day compliance inspections. And there they are, and we've gotten improvement. The number for the compliance inspections is probably a little low because remember, we're looking back at all four years, or I'm sorry, all four quarters, and probably those first quarters would have been missing. But I expect that to improve even more. I think this is the most telling graph, and this shows the number of violations found for inspections by type by quarter. And you can see from the very beginning to today how many violations there are for inspection. And it has dropped significantly. And what I anticipate will happen is we'll kind of level off here. Just briefly, and I don't want to go into too much detail here. PHH is our public health hazards. We do have 30 different violations we can issue. Three of them are considered public health hazards. 14 of them, it could be wrong, 14 of them are critical, more severe, and 13 of them are general, less severe violations. But regardless of what category, they have all dropped. That's my name, that's my email address. Feel free to send me an email with a question. Bruce, raise your hand, Bruce. Bruce, my colleague at BCD, he can potentially answer some questions during the session, but he'll take good notes and give them back to me if he can. So with that, I'd like to thank you.