 after we've started, just so you know. Okay. Are all the board members here? Yes. Oh, okay. I just wanted, this is Molly, everyone. Hello, welcome to our second virtual meeting. I know it's awkward, but I think we're all doing really well. I just wanna remind everyone that the same protocols apply as to any normal meeting. The Brown Act still applies as to any regular meeting that we would hold. And no one on the board should be accessing outside email or text during the meeting, just like during the regular meeting. So hopefully everyone's comfortable with the process. I'm here if there are questions. Thank you, Molly. With that, my computer says it's 131, so I will call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities for the city of Santa Rosa to order and ask Secretary Perez to please do a roll call. Yes. Chairman Galvin. Here. Vice Chair Anoni. Here. Board Member Baden-Ford. Here. Board Member Bannister. Here. Board Member Grable. Here. Board Member Watts. Here. Board Member Wright. Here. Thank you, everyone, for being here or being there, I guess is the case may be. I wanted to make it clear that item 14.2 is off the agenda, so we will not be having the second closed session. Also, I want to remind you to please mute your phones when you're not speaking. And as Assistant City Attorney McLean mentioned, please put away your personal computers and your cell phones during the meeting. This is a lively, streamed meeting. You should be following the presentations on your iPad and staff will follow on the BPU's webpage. So with that, I will ask the director to please introduce our study session. Thank you, Chair Galvin. And I apologize, you needed to go through item two for any statement of abstention before we go to study session. Now are there any statements of abstention? Mary Nutt, now we'll move to the study session. Thank you, Chair Galvin. Our first study session today will be an overview of the 2020-2021 fiscal year water, local water and sewer budget. And we will have Deputy Director Kimberly Zanino making the presentation. Good afternoon, Chairman Galvin and members of the board. Today we will be looking at the local water and wastewater ONM and CIP budgets of the study session. We are currently looking at the budget as it was previously planned and approved by the BPU budget subcommittee. We do realize that with the current situation that adjustments may need to be made during this coming year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the path forward as of now for the entire city is to review the budgets outdeveloped. I will say that staff worked very hard this year to reduce expenditures where possible and to find efficiencies. So the budget coming before you is overall a flat budget, which also really helps us move forward as previously planned. I'm going to have staff in the chamber switch now to slide number two, which says our mission. And just as a piece of housekeeping for those people who are watching the presentation on live streaming, there is at times a delay. So even though I'm calling out the next slide, you may not see it quite yet, but it should be coming to you. We always like to start with slide two here, which is our mission just to remind everyone that really our mission is to protect public health by sustaining water, resources, infrastructure and the environment. Please move to slide three. The following is an overview of the presentation and what we will be discussing today. We will talk about some COVID-19 considerations. I want to give you a little update on FEMA projects. We will also look at local water and wastewater operations budgets, revenue versus expenditures, UV bond funding updates, reserves, CIP review of all funds and then the budget schedule as well. We wanted to first address the current pandemic. We understand the need to analyze financial impacts from this emergency to not only our city to the city and center of the water, but also to our customers. So we are working very hard to evaluate the usage and the revenue data and to look for ways to assist our customers through this time. We are not currently far enough along into the shelter-in-place order to have the data that reflects the effects to water usage and revenue. So we are in the midst of developing reports now that will help us to quickly understand the implications when the data is available to us. So that's a little bit more understandable as of when the shelter-in-order or the shelter-in-place order went into effect, we haven't even until just this week build through the full eight cycles. And those eight cycles have 21 days after their billing to pay. So we really need for us to get through all eight of those cycles before we can really start collecting that data and see how it is affecting us. We have already turned on all customers that were disconnected prior to the shelter-in-place and we have suspended all disconnections for nonpayment as well as suspending fees for delinquency. In addition to that, we are also offering payment plans for our customers to help them through this situation. In addition to that, we are also closely looking at options for modifying our H2O program so that we may be able to provide assistance to those most affected financially. We are also following very closely federal and state regulations that may ease the requirements that limit our ability to help those customers that are most in need. So those are really the considerations on the customer side and what we need to get put in place and be working on. But as for water staff, we also just wanted to point out that we are doing all we can to increase the protections for our staff. We are increasing cleaning in common areas, providing PPE for all of our staff that are still working in the offices and in the field. And we are adjusting shifts so that we have less interaction between staff and it prepares us for the possibility of any of our staff who might unfortunately get sick and we need to cover that period of time when they are out. Please move to slide five, water FEMA projects. We wanted to give you an update on FEMA projects just because these have been our main focus from one of our most recent emergencies. And so we're just giving you a quick overview of where our projects are. The list that you see before you provide a list of all of our PA which are our public assistance projects. These are projects that are in direct response and recovery to the actual emergency itself and damage that was caused. It shows you at what stage all of these projects are in and we currently have eight projects that are obligated. And we, you can see at the bottom what the total water obligation would be or estimated obviously project cost change as you build and you go through them. But this is what we're estimating as the total obligation for the water, for Santa Rosa water. Please move to the next slide, sixth mitigation grant. In addition to working on our public assistance projects we also have the opportunity to apply for mitigation grant different than public assistance which is actually responding to and recovering from the actual disaster. These are funds that become available after disasters occur and emergencies occur that allow us to prepare for and mitigate for future disasters that may come along. And so we have submitted several projects and these three have been deemed eligible and are in various stages of the process with one of them actually already being approved the backup generators for water and wastewater facilities and it's an approved grant at four million, 4.5 million dollars. That project is actually underway under one of the CIP teams who is now starting to work on that project. Please go to the next slide, slide seven. Just the title slide, local water wastewater operation and maintenance for 2020, 2021. And the next slide, slide eight, fund changes. As I mentioned in the opening water has been able to achieve an overall flat budget this year. Following changes are changes to specific funds department wide we are flat. The administrative fund is increasing by about 0.7%. The water fund is down by about 0.9%. Water wastewater funds is basically flat and the regional fund is up 0.6. Please move to the next slide, nine budget changes. We like to highlight every year some specific budget detail. Salaries we're highlighting here are down by about 2% in the local water and wastewater. Benefits are up about 1.5%. Water billing is down by 5.8%. This really is a result of a decrease in staffing. We have been able through attrition to remove some positions based on the AMI project because we don't have meter readers in the field every day reading every single meter in the city. Electricity we are expecting and estimating to increase. And this is solely based on the fact that we are moving to Evergreen. Sorry, I shouldn't say solely. There actually will be also an increase on top of the fact that we would be moving to Evergreen. So these are the estimates based on that. Vehicle expenses are running flat and the IT allocation is up about 5% for the local fund. Please move to the next slide, number 10, water operation. With this chart we're just giving you details on line items in the budget and changes that are occurring. We have enough carryover to not increase funding for our O&M projects this year, which is why you see a large decrease in that uncategorized area. We fund those and we put funding into those on a yearly basis. However, we, as I said, we had enough carryover this year that we didn't feel we needed to add budget to most of those projects. Electricity is up, as I mentioned before, based on Evergreen and also an increase from PG&E. And then also our insurance premiums have increased, which we really don't have any control over. So that you'll see as quite a bit of an increase as well, although the dollar amount is not huge. Please move to the next slide, slide 11. Which is the, it just says water funds. This is basically a chart that is just showing you the distribution of the proposed budget by expenditure types. I'd like to just give you a visual presentation of this as well. Move to the next slide, slide 12, wastewater operations. This is the same detail that you saw on the local water side. Most significant change here being that our insurance premiums went up as in the previous one that really just has to do with, you know, it being a smaller dollar amount. So it looks like a large percentage, but it's not a large dollar increase compared to the rest of the budget. Please move to slide 13. This is the same chart for the wastewater, just how all of the budget is distributed amongst expenditures. Please move to the next slide, 14. Purchase of water. This year we are projecting water use to remain flat for budget purposes. We have not seen a large fluctuation in water use over the years, so we're going to keep that number flat. We will however be watching closely for revenue purposes based on the pandemic. Currently we are not seeing any large changes, but we do expect a shift in where the water is being used, residential versus commercial. So with all the non-essential commercial businesses being closed, we are obviously going to see a drop in water use in that area, but more people being home, we're likely to see a shift with increased water use there. Nomal water is proposing an increase to their wholesale rates of 5.3%. This should be going, I believe, soon to the Board of Supervisors. That rate will pass through to our customers, our typical customer, at about 2.3%. So our typical or average residential customer is a household of four people, and that would equate to 96 cents a month on that average residential customer bill. And then next slide, please. Slide 15, the five-year rate schedule. This slide just provides you with a reminder of Santa Rosa's currently approved five-year rate schedule for water and sewer charges. The current increase, which would go into effect on July 1st, is on water usage, only the passenger rate from Sonoma Water. On water fixed, it is a proposed 5% water fixed increase, and then on sewer usage and sewer fixed, it is 2.5% on both of those. Based on that average bill of a family of four or a home for residents in it, total typical water bill would increase by about $1.62 per month, and total sewer would increase by $2.24 a month. Please go to the next slide, number 16, water funds. This slide is just portraying the projected expenditures to revenue so that you can see that we are able to cover our proposed budget. This one is on the water side. Obviously, we are not yet aware what our revenues, although we are looking very closely and coming up with projections on possibilities for what our revenue losses or decreases in revenue could be based on the pandemic. Please go to the next slide, 17, the wastewater fund. This is the same picture for you of the wastewater fund revenues versus expenditures. Please go to the next slide, which is slide 18. We have a stopping point here, but I might actually, this was originally, I think uploaded when or prepared before we were in the virtual meeting. So I'll ask Chairman Galvin if he would prefer that we wait till the end of the entire presentation or if you want me to take questions in between. I would say we should wait until you complete your presentation. Okay, then let's move to the next slide, which is slide 19, reserves. We like to provide you each year with the reserves that we have for the water department. This is always a reflection of the reserves at the end of the previous fiscal year because reserves fluctuate throughout the year depending on expenditures and revenues as they come in. So in order to really have a complete picture of where reserves are, we take a look at the previous year, the end of the fiscal year to determine what those end fund balances are. The operating catastrophic and rate stabilization reserves you see here are all required based on the current reserve policy. I would like to mention that we are evaluating reserve levels and expect to be reviewing those with the Budget Subcommittee in the future. We discussed in this past year that after the emergency and after the fires and the damage from those, but it was time for us to really be evaluating those and we're continuing to work on that even through what we're going through right now. Please go to the next slide, number 20. This is just the title slide for Capital Improvement Program. Next slide, 21, Santa Rosa Water Assets. We always just like to give a good depiction of the number of assets that are in our system. There is a lot of infrastructure for us to take care of and this just kind of gives you an idea of all of the different infrastructure that we have. Please go to slide 22. So slide 22 is the proposed CIP funding for this year at $13,390,000 for water, $12,360,000 for wastewater, and $7,000,000 for regional. On that regional piece, it is in this presentation because Santa Rosa's portion of the regional budget does come from our wastewater funds and so I've added it in here. I do wanna point out here that we typically provide you with what we call a budget book and that's done at the live meetings. However, because we couldn't do that this year, what we did instead is we provided you as an attachment to your agenda, the CIP funding sheets. So that came with as an attachment, I'm sorry, to your staff report, so that you can review projects that are receiving year one funding. Those sheets do show you year one funding, which is the only piece of CIP that is approved during the fiscal year budgeting process. The rest of the information on those sheets just gives you more information about the projects and whether they've been funded before, whether or not we expect to put future funding in them. So it's just a broader picture for you, but the only piece that would be approved would be the first year funding. If there are any questions that come up about any of the CIP projects, we do have staff on the line who could answer some questions, but you are always welcome to reach out to any of our engineering staff to ask additional questions if you need to. Please move to slide 23. Generate the water 2020-21 CIP proposed water. These next slides are showing you just a distribution of the CIP funding by project type. Your funding sheet is also separated into these categories. So if you were to go to one of these categories, you would see all of the projects that are receiving year one funding under that project type. Please move to the next slide 24. Generate the water 2020-21 CIP proposed wastewater. This is the same chart for the local wastewater CIP and the spreadsheets that you received also show in the same way. These different categories broken down by the actual projects that are receiving year one funding. Please go to the next slide 25 CIP project location. This is just for the water and the wastewater projects and where they are located throughout the city that will be receiving funding in year one. It's important to note that projects are not selected by location though. We have an entire team that works on asset management and asset management plan and may identify projects based on priorities and asset condition and risks. So while they are quite spread out amongst the city, the locations are just here for your information but that is not what is used in order to determine the priority of projects. Please move to the next slide 26. As I said previously, the funds for Santa Rosa's portion of the regional system come from the wastewater funds that we received, the wastewater revenue and therefore we included this information in this presentation. So on the regional side, you can see that we have split up also for you by project type where the year one funding will be applied. Please go to the next slide 27. And this is a map for you. Most projects are in the middle of the plant. So there's just one big map there with the plant but on the right hand side, actually we do have the locations also showing a little bit of a location you can see of where the offsite projects are. And the next slide is questions that we'll move down to the budget schedule first. The recommendations for water and wastewater, the local budgets and funds will come before the board on May 7th. I'd like to take a minute here though to talk about some meetings that we are hoping to schedule with board members and their respective council members. We have been doing this yearly and they were previously scheduled but then were removed from schedules based on the current emergency but we really feel that it's important this year to continue and go forward and have those meetings. And so you will be hearing from Gina and Gina will be reaching out to you and the council members to schedule these meetings and we would really like to get them done before May 7th. So we're just asking for your assistance and helping us to get those meetings on the calendar. The rest of the budget schedule is as follows. On May 19th, or sorry, on April 28th we will be taking the preliminary budget approval to city council. And then on May 19th, there will be a study session. This was previously planned for the 5th and the 6th of May. They are turning this into a one single day study session instead of a two day study session. And we have been told that this will be an abbreviated version of what would be the typical study session. The current direction even for the general fund which will be the main focus of that study session is that all departments bring a flat budget as previously directed. So I just wanted to point out that water's budget is directly in line with the rest of the city's direction. And then budget adoption is still scheduled currently for June 23rd. And with that, I will take next slide which is 30, any discussions or questions that you may have. Thank you, Deputy Director Zanino. At this point, I'll pull the board to see if they have questions. So Vice Chair Arnone. No questions here. Board Member Batenfort. Just a quick appreciation and question on our COVID response with water users in the city. It sounds like you, that staff has done a tremendous job of trying to anticipate and ensure that everyone, that nobody has to worry about their water service in the city kind of approaching it from a different direction. Are we confident that all users in the city will be able to ensure that their water service in the district regardless of their financial situation at this time? Yes, we will not be disconnecting any of our customers for nonpayment at this time. Fantastic, thank you so much for your foresight on that. Board Member Vanister. Yes, on slide number nine, Kimberly, a couple of points. One, salaries being down 381,000, but benefits up 216,000. You would expect those two things to move in the same direction. Any comments on, because if we have less staff or we're paying them less, then usually their benefits would be less. Any comments on why that divergence here? Sure, so salaries are dependent on what level or what step our labor force is at. So a specific position could be at a lower labor or step in their salary increases. And currently we have had a lot of long-term employees leave and we've brought on a lot of new employees. So we are estimating that that change really has to do with the fact that there's a lot of new employees that are hired. On the other side, benefits are really based on the cost to the city for the various benefits that we have. And those can also change as well pretty significantly and completely unrelated to an hourly wage because I'll give you one example, which is health insurance. If you had a long-term employee who was at top step and only one of them was covered or maybe two of them was covered by health insurance, their cost for benefits or the city's cost for benefits is much less expensive than somebody who has an entire family. And so really those shift around based on who works for us and who is being covered and also by any increases that might come to the city for any of those benefits. Okay, in terms of budgeting for salaries, I guess you said earlier that the coronavirus impacts are to, well, we just don't know what they are yet, but do we have staff on layoff or is everybody still doing their normal roles? We do not. All of our staff is working as much as they can from home if they are at home. And then as you know, we are in operations that is 24 seven and is done a lot in the field. So we have staff also that are both coming into the facilities and working in the field. Any, I mean, you see any like, I don't know how many people actually come in our offices and pay their bills, but it seems like nobody would be doing that now, right? We actually, I mean, we have several customers that come in and pay their bill, but we provide many other options for bill payment. And so we are not seeing an issue from that direction at this time. Okay, so basically as far as the, whatever shelter in place goes, we're not seeing much impact either on the revenue or on the expense side. Okay. Yeah, we don't know what those are yet, but we will be watching very closely. Right. Okay, back to this slide nine, you know, okay, salaries here are down 381,000. And then if we go to slide 10 salaries in the water operations budget are down 320,000. And then if you go to 12 salaries in the wastewater operations are up 162,000. So totaling those two does not equal the amount that they were down on nine. Is there some other segment that's not reflected here or something of those spreadsheets? Hi, board member Bannister. This is Jennifer Burke. I did hear someone just get disconnected. I'm wondering if Kimberly got disconnected from the call. I did get disconnected. Sorry about that. So I'm here now. Can you hear me? Yes. This is Jennifer. I didn't hear the question though. Okay, Kimberly, you can please respond. Thank you. It's possible that I have other salaries in there because I do, and it could have just been an error on my part. I do have calculations that do all three funds, not just water, wastewater. It also includes the sub regional, which we're not looking at right now. So that is probably a number that includes all of them, not just the two funds, because we do have three funds, not just two. But I can follow up with you on that. Thank you. Thanks. That's all. Thank you. Board member Gravel, no comments or questions. Thank you. Board member Watts. Hi, thank you. No major questions. We've seen in this in the budget subcommittee and really appreciate your flexibility with the budget, especially during all of the COVID-19 considerations and also just keeping us familiar with everything that the water department is doing to help our community at this time. And I know that I think all the board would love to see the usage data for when you do start seeing how if we're seeing late payments or no payments coming through and to brainstorm whether other ways we can do to support our community. So thank you guys. And I think that is all for now. Thank you. Board member Wright. No comments. I see this to be a strong, a good budget. Anyway, that's my own comment. Thank you. My thanks to the budget subcommittee and to Deputy Director Zanino and her staff. Everything looks good. I don't have any specific comments or questions. Anybody have any further questions or direction to staff? Very none. Secretary Perez, did we receive any public comments? There was no public comment received for this item. Okay. Thank you very much. Then that will close the study session. The minutes for the February 20th meeting will be approved and entered. We have no staff briefings. We have no consent calendar. We have one report item, item 7.1. Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin. This item will again be presented by Deputy Director Zanino. This is our report item on the fiscal year 2020-2021 regional water reuse system budget and allocation of costs. Deputy Director Zanino. Thank you, Director Burke. On this presentation, we provided you with a study session at the last BPU meeting about the distribution of the costs for each one of our partners in the regional system. We need to provide those numbers to our regional partners based on our agreement by May of each year, which is why we do a preliminary approval and why this is coming before you today. Please go to slide two overview. We wanna talk about the budget drivers and changes for the budget on the sub-regional system. We will talk about revenues versus expenditures again, which is that wastewater slide that I showed you previously in a previous presentation because our portion of the contribution comes from our revenue on the wastewater funds. We will talk about expenditure distribution, the total contribution. We will also talk about the UV bond funding. We have an update on that, CIP, and then the budget schedule again. Please go to slide three, budget drivers. We think it's important to talk about what the major drivers are for our budget and the regional operations system, labor being one of our largest expenditures as we are a 24-hour operation that is treating over 7 billion gallons of wastewater and delivering recycled wastewater to the geysers and our urban and agricultural users. So we obviously have a large chunk of our budget that goes there. We have several permits that we are required to comply with and the direct work that goes into complying with those permits. I list a few of them here. We also have the geysers system and are required to deliver specific amounts of treated wastewater to the geysers per the agreement with the geysers. And then in addition to that, the treatment plant is now 51 years old. So we will be seeing increasing costs over the years to maintain and replace aging infrastructure. Please go to side four, which is the COVID-19 consideration. These are the same considerations that we discussed in the previous presentation. We are analyzing those flow rates and those revenue impacts. We're suspending delinquent fees and offering payment plans to our customers. We have reestablished service for all of our customers and cease doing turn offs, revisiting the H2O program, following those federal and state pieces of legislation that may come through and then our increased protections for our staff. Please go to slide five. This is our fund changes slide, which shows you the various changes in the budget in the fund itself. Staff, as I have already mentioned, did an excellent job this year reviewing each of their individual division budgets. They reviewed six years of previous expenditures to make sure that they were budgeting accurately, as well as specifically to the plants analyzing wet weather expenditures, which is very important for the operations there. And then they carefully reviewed their O&M projects so that they would only budget where they needed funds instead of adding funds if they already had enough existing carryover. Overall, the budget in all funds is flat. In the regional fund, it is at 0.6%. We do expect expenditures on the electricity side to increase. And there are some increases based on the application for NPDES permit process. Please go to the next slide, slide six, budget changes. So you can see salaries are down here as well for the same reasons that we talked about in the previous one, likely we have had a lot of long-term employees that have been retiring from not just the water department, but from the city. We do expect that electricity costs will be up for that move to Evergreen and for the planned increase by PG&E. Vehicle expenses are flat and our IT allocation cost is up about 6.5% on the regional side. Please move to the next slide, seven, wastewater funds. As we discussed previously, we just wanna show you that on the wastewater side what our revenues, projected revenues versus expenditures are and that we are on target. Of course, as I did mention before, that the pandemic obviously could create some revenue losses and so we will be watching that closely. Next slide, slide eight. Once again, showing you just the distribution of the various expenditures in the regional funds for 2020-2021 and the various categories that those expenditures are going to. Please move to the next slide, number nine. This is the fund summary slide. This slide is really an overview of the entire operations and maintenance and CIP budget. It gives you what our total operations and maintenance expenditure is. It shows you the $7 million in our cash funding that we'll be going to our Capital Improvement Program and then a little bit of extra budget for that increase to the operation and maintenance funds since in our reserves we are required to have 15% of our operating costs as an operating reserve. Then in the lower right-hand corner you are seeing that total and then you are seeing a reduction which is there are some revenues that come directly into the plant or into the funds for operating the regional system and those are removed from the total prior to determining what the contribution is by each of our five partners. If you move to the next slide, number 10. This is the total allocation. This shows you the total distribution for each of our partners that is proposed for this year. O&M is being distributed by actual flows, previous actual flows. That's how we determine how much of the O&M each partner is responsible for. The CIP is distributed based on capacity and that is defined, those are defined numbers in our current agreement and then debt service is distributed based on the time that was incurred and the corresponding repayment schedules. So this shows you just the totals for each one of our partners for this coming fiscal year. These moves to the next slide, slide 11. The title slide for the capital improvement program budget and move to the next slide, number 12. The regional 2020-2021 CIP. This is once again the distribution for year one CIP funding. This sheet was also provided to you. So if you were to look at that sheet, any of the types of projects that are here, the specific projects would be listed under that category. And then the budget schedule again, the budget recommendation to city council would be today. On the 28th is when the preliminary approval for the regional budget will go for city council. On the 19th will be that new revised budget study session which will now be a one-day and sort of a two-day budget study session and then still scheduled for adoption on June 23rd by the city council. These moves to the next slide, number 14 recommendation. So it is therefore, it is recommended by Santa Rosa Water and the regional technical advisory committee that the Board of Public Utilities by resolution recommend that the city council approve the preliminary fiscal year 2020-2021 regional water reuse system operating and maintenance, capital improvement and debt service budget and the allocation of cost for the purpose of notifying the participating regional water reuse user agencies of their allocation by May 2020. And with that, next slide, number 15. I am happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you, Deputy Director Zanino. We'll pull the board again for questions. Vice Chair Arnone. No, thank you. That's a very complete presentation. I have no questions. Thank you, Board Member Batenford. No questions. Thank you. Thank you, Board Member Bannister. Likewise, no questions. Thank you, Board Member Grable. No questions, just gratitude. Thank you. Thank you, Board Member Watts. No questions. Thank you, Staff. Board Member Wright. No questions. Very good. Thank you, Deputy Directors Zanino. I think very thorough presentation. I think we all understand where this budget's headed and the type of CIP projects we're looking forward to completing. So thanks for a job well done. At this point, we have a resolution. So I would ask that Secretary Perez do a roll call vote on approving the resolution. Yes. I'm sorry, Chair Gallagher. I'll move it. I'll move the resolution. This is Assistant City Attorney McClain. Do we want to identify whether there were public comments received on this item prior to moving the resolution? Oh, thank you. Secretary Perez, did we receive any comments, emails, or voicemail? There were no public comments received for this item. Okay, now I'll entertain a motion to approve the resolution. So moved by Bill Arnouni. Seconded by Mr. Arnouni. Okay, we have a motion and a second to approve the resolution. Secretary Perez, if you would do a roll call vote, please. Can I confirm the second was from Board Member Grable? I believe so. Thank you. All right, Chair McAlvin, Vice Chair Arnouni. Aye. Board Member Badenfort, Board Member Bannister. Aye. Board Member Grable, Board Member Watts. Aye. Board Member Wright. Aye. Thank you. The resolution passes unanimously. That'll take care of that item. Secretary Perez, do we have any public comments on non-agent items? There were no public comments for non-agent items today. Thank you. We have no referrals. We have no written communications. Do we have any subcommittee reports? Very none. Do we have any Board Member reports? I would like to report that Board Member Bannister is resigning from the Board and that this will be his last meeting. We wanna thank him for his service to the Board and wish him much success in his new job. We hope to properly honor him once we're back in regular session. Council Member Dowd has appointed Matt Mullen to replace Board Member Bannister. He'll be sworn in hopefully at our next meeting on May 7th. So again, Board Member Bannister, our thanks to you for your service to the Board and much good luck to you out at Safari West. And if there's any other Board Members that would like to comment, now would be the time. I would just like to thank you, Chairman Galvin, and the rest of the Board. It's been a pleasure serving on the Board. I have been very impressed with both the dedication and professionalism of both the staff and my fellow Board Members and I feel that the City is very lucky to have all of you in these roles. So I've enjoyed my participation on the Board and you never know, I'm noticing that there's some trend towards Board Members coming back on the Board and some future things. Never know, never know. You're always looking back. Thank you very much. That concludes my comments, Chairman Galvin. Thank you, Board Member Bannister. Again, much good luck to you. Thank you. Anybody else? If not, we will move to the Director's Report. Thank you, Chair Galvin. And I would just also like to thank Board Member Bannister. We greatly appreciate your service and your leadership on this Board and you will be missed. And just thank you for your time. We appreciate it. I wanted to give the Board just a couple updates. Again, just reminding the Board that as the Water Department, we are an essential service providing a 24-7 operation. We continue to make sure that we are in compliance with the health order and focusing on our essential services, providing necessary protections to our staff and ensuring that they have what they need to either be working in the field. We are also, and to make sure that we're meeting all of our regulatory requirements, we're also continuing to look at and work with the team to provide opportunities for folks to work from home and continuing to look at our staffing plans as well as what we need to do to provide our staff to continue to provide this operation. So again, I just really wanna thank the Water Department staff. They're doing an incredible job to continue to keep this operation going and I'm greatly appreciative of all the work they're doing. I wanted to give the Board an update on an essential capital project that we have going. As the Board may recall, we are working on a repair to our lano trunk, not too far from the wastewater treatment plant. The contractor SAK has evacuated a trench through Lano Road and installed the necessary bypass pipe under the road surface. We expect the bypass system to be complete by tomorrow, which is April 17th. And we are hopeful that SAK will start lining the pipe on Monday, April 20th. They will also complete some work on a manhole by that bypass prior to removing the bypass and expect to reinstate flows to the lano trunk either Wednesday, April 22nd or Thursday, April 23rd. And they will be notifying regional operations prior to removing the bypass so that they can be prepared for potentially large amounts of rags and debris to reach the plant once the line is back in operations. I do wanna say a big thank you to the capital projects team, although they are in a different department, they do provide about, or they do all of our capital projects. I think the water department is roughly three quarters or so of the work that they do. They are working very hard to keep two of our essential projects going, one of which is the lano trunk lining and also working really hard with the city attorney's office to determine how they can continue to move capital projects forward during this shelter in place order. So really appreciate also all the work that they're doing, phenomenal job to keep capital projects going during this time and looking to the future for how we can continue to implement capital projects going forward. I also wanted to update the board that we continue to push out information to the public to remind them not to flush wipes, paper towels or other products as they have the potential to clog the sewers, not only their own personal private labarole that connects to our system but can cause backups in the sewer system and potentially overflows. And it's really something we wanna ensure does not happen because we don't wanna create any additional public health risk while we're going through this pandemic. So just we're continuing to push out information to remind the public and our customers that nothing should be flushed except for pee and poo and toilet paper. And we are even reminding them that wipes that are labeled flushable should not be flushed and have the potential to clog pipes and interfere with our system. We have been proactively, the local operation staff has been proactively cleaning the sewer system and we did, I believe last week pulled out one of the biggest balls of wipes possible that we've seen. So thankfully we got that out and it didn't cause any kind of backup or overflow but we do know that we're seeing some increase. So we're reminding folks, we're pushing this information out through all of our social media channels and we also have a radio spot that's running on all the wine country radio stations. And then last, I did want to let the board know that next month is water awareness month. So we will still be taking a proclamation to city council to remind everyone that it's water awareness month and it's a good time for folks to be using water wisely. We think that unfortunately, because of the pandemic we can't do our typical poster contests and Water Smart Expo but we are working on messaging to push out to folks to just remind them now's a good time since they're home to look for and fix any leaks if they have any, remind them not to let the faucet run while they're doing dishes or brushing their teeth. And it's a good time to inspect and tune up your irrigation system as we're starting to get into these spring and summer months and irrigation systems we'll start resuming. So that is my report and I am happy to answer any questions that the board may have. Thank you. Any board member questions from the director? This is a board member Bannister. I continue to wonder why these products that are labeled flushable are even sold. I mean, is there no legislative fix for this at the state level or somewhere? We either ban their sale or change the labeling? Yes, there has actually been some work at the, I believe it's the federal level and we have been following that closely to create new legislation to define truly what is flushable and ban the ability to be able to label products that these wipes as flushable if they're not. So we are following that closely and are working with that sort of group. So there is some movement there. That seems like that's the ultimate solution. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions for the director? Very well, thank you. At this point, I'll ask Assistant City Attorney McLean to announce our closed session. Yes, thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. We only have one closed session item today. I'm gonna remind the board as Chair Galvin announced at the beginning of the meeting, we're no longer holding 14.2. We will be proceeding with our separate phone call to 14.1, which is initiation of litigation, one potential case. Thank you, Secretary Perez. Do we have any public comments on the closed session item? There were no public comments for the closed session items. Very good. Then I would ask each of the board members to go ahead and disconnect from this call and go ahead and reconnect via the closed session call and number, and we will start the closed session as soon as we are all on the call. Thank you. Welcome to my teleconferencing. Please enter a participant code, then press pound. All right, Gina, have you joined us on the call? I have. Okay, great. Chair Galvin, turning it back over to you. Thank you. We've adjourned our closed session and we're now back in open session. I would ask the Secretary Perez to please do a roll call to make sure we're all here. Sure. Chair Galvin. Here. Vice Chair Noni. Here. Board Member Badenfort. Here. Board Member Bannister. Here. Board Member Grable. No, no, Board Member Grable. I think he needs to remember to unmute his phone. Okay, I'm gonna move on to Board Member Watts. Here. And Board Member Wright. Grable, are you with us? At this point then, I would ask Assistant City Attorney McLean to report out on our closed session. Thank you, Chair Galvin. We did hold a closed session. Staff did receive input from the board. There is no action to report, however. Thank you. Thank you all for attending, especially to staff and the consultants and outside counsel for their input and responses to the board questions and comments. And if there's nothing else, we will adjourn in honor of Board Member Bannister and we will re-adjourn in a couple of weeks. So we are adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.