 Okay. I have 630. So I'd like to convene this February 17, 2022 meeting of the Board of Directors of the San Lorenzo Valley Water District. Holly, would you take the roll please? President Mayhood. Here. Vice President Henry. Here. Director Ackman. Here. Director Fultz. Here. And Director Smalley. Here. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda? That was not sure. Okay. At this point, we are at this time for oral communications from members of the public on items that are under the purview of the district that are not on tonight's agenda. Are there any oral communications from the public? I see we do have seven attendees. So go ahead. If any of you would like to address us now, please raise your hand. I don't see anybody. So with that, we'll go ahead and move to the president's report. And I would like to call on Jamie to give a short report in my stead. Thank you. I just wanted to share with the board that recently I had an opportunity to meet with Congressman Jimmy Panetta on a separate issue. But while we were meeting, I invited him to come to the water district and take a tour of the fire damage facilities and the progress that we've made in terms of recovery and today he came out and took that tour. I'm really pleased to host him at the Lions Water Treatment Facility where we talked about everything under the sun from what we are doing in terms of fire recovery and the burden that we are facing to the mergers that we are taking on with our local smaller water utilities that are also devastated by the fire. You know, we had a really good opportunity to talk about the issues that San Lorenzo Valley Water District views is sort of critical in the next couple of years. He was a great listener. I know he's been, you know, out making the rounds in the valley trying to sort of understand our issues because we are going to be part of the district he runs for in 2022 so we're really pleased to have him. Rick, you and Carly and the rest of the staff that was out there supporting it did a great job. I really appreciate that and Gail thank you so much for making the time to be there I know it was a little last minute. That's the way these things usually come together but your presence there to talk about Santa Margarita was really important. And in fact, I heard from somebody that he met with later that he was still thinking about the Santa Margarita when he was talking with them so thank you. All right. And thank you, especially for organizing it. If there are no objections. When we move to new business I'd like to reverse the order of the two items and take up the revenue stabilization rate. First, because that's much shorter and Kendra after we have that discussion and we can excuse Kendra so she doesn't have to spend the rest of the evening with us. If that if that's okay with everybody. So, Rick, did you want to start on that. Sure thank you chair chair we're kind of continue to analyze the district expenditures and revenue forecast, which have been changing as we consider the timing of capital projects water consumption trends grant funding scenarios and the like. As a result staff is not ready to present this item to the board and make a recommendation at this time. We continue to analyze the fiscal impacts of the low water consumption, and we would like to revisit this analysis with the budget and finance committee or coming back to the board with any recommendations. Okay. There is here also to answer any questions and fabric any members of the board want to ask about this. Are there any questions from members of the board. Go ahead Bob. Yes, I might be confused I thought this was voted on already in the budget committee and unanimously recommended that we move forward with it. Or did I read that wrong. So, what changed what what's what's different now what are the financial items that have changed between the budget committee meeting which was how long ago couple weeks, three weeks. And today, I'm not sure I'm following. Yeah, I'll take that gale. Since the budget and finance meeting. Whoa. The consumption is increasing. Some projects have been put on hold by the state agency, like how trans. We are also looking at some late grant funding. It's almost changes daily Bob with, you know, putting together and reviewing our projects consumption. We're just not quite just not quite ready yet to come back and we want to look at it again before we take that final step of raising rates. So yeah we're we're usually probably a month or two behind you guys in terms of behind staff in terms of seeing consumption trends as you know we just get the reports and rears. Well, we're seeing production we're seeing an increase in production because we don't have those consumption reports in either Bob, but we're seeing an increase in production with this warmer weather. Okay, yeah, I mean it has been warming. In terms of the grants. Are those grants then able to be used to offset regular operating expenses. Not operating. Are these capital projects going to be going away or are they just being delayed. Being delayed. Cal Trans is delayed the two bridge replacement projects. So, if you let me just jump in here, Rick, these are, these are just the kinds of delays that because of Cal Trans or other things that are, they're not our choice. But because they're being delayed, they're not going to hit this fiscal year. And so, rather than come through with a recommendation to implement revenue stabilization rates right now. The thought was to do a thorough budget review. The second year of the biennial budget and reassess at that point, but largely this is triggered by the fact that we had a very dry January and a warm February so we're sort of hoping that consumption goes up a little bit, and that we will be able to meet those revenue losses that we've already experienced which we can't do anything to get the money back. By things that we've already discussed already. I will say that Rick did run this by both Lois and I. So, it's not that this is a surprise to us, it's just that some things changed. Maybe not others. So, just last question before I know Jamie and Mark want to go and I'm, I'd like to come back after them. Are we still in the middle of a drought? I mean, do we really want consumption to go back up given we're in the middle of the drought. We are still in a drought condition. However, at this time there is available water, especially excess surface water. We are not we are still 100% on the district surface water throughout from our entire system. We do have water that is just going down basically to the ocean that, you know, we feel that it would be better served if our customers could get a break from, you know, the heavy drought program and we were planning to reevaluate our drought contingency and most likely come back with a change in that to a more voluntarily program. But that could change. I mean, you know, this is very fluid. The finances in our project status almost changes daily. We didn't we had more information came in after the budget finance meeting. We felt it would be better to regroup do a more thorough budget review and then go back to the finance committee and then bring it back to the board. Mark. So, when are we going to talk about this, because it was significant enough to put it on to the agenda for tonight. But now we're go reevaluate is this at the next board meeting for March. Were you thinking further than that Rick. I'm thinking, most likely the second meeting in March. So a month a month from now. Correct. Okay. I would encourage that, rather than continue to hope think I'm hoping things are going to get better. So I'm going to delay discussing what is the potential negative news that we need to discuss as a board then. So, thanks. I just want to sort of try and encapsulate what I'm hearing. I think what I'm hearing from you Rick is that, while we acknowledge that we're in drought conditions and we certainly don't want to encourage over consumption. Right now there is a certain percentage of water that if not used is going to be lost to us anyway because we don't have a way to store it. If consumption is going up and people are using that and that is a way to offset the need for revenue stabilization or at least put it off for a bit. Then we're going to allow that because we want to one, you know delay increasing people's rates to stabilize the rates if we have to and to we want to try and use water that we would lose anyway. Is that is that what you're trying to say Rick. That's that's, you know, that's probably it in a nutshell. So to speak, you know we we targeted our drought program to outside water use. There isn't a lot of outside water use right now, although we have seen an increase in production and we haven't seen the consumption records for for February yet. We're facing this on an increase in consumption. So, and with the reevaluation of projects from other sources not the district staff, you know we didn't pull back any projects on our own accord Caltrans has made these changes. We're looking at our budget and where we should be if all the projects were moving forward. We're still have a very healthy capital improvement program. We're still moving ahead. I'm just not ready. I mean I believe we should look thoroughly and if things change between one meeting in the next. We should take a very close look at that before I recommend a rate increase. I'd like to go out to members of the public. Well, Lois did you want to say something I'm sorry. Lois did you want to comment. I want to say something. Sure, please do. I really didn't want to do this. Rate stabilization, because I know how unpopular was in 2017. And, but I, I looked at all the numbers that we were given and having worked with with people and their deaths and that type of thing. I realized that if we get in a hole, it's hard to get out. I said that at the meeting. I don't know if that influenced people, but I'm glad we're not doing this right now. And, but I think we need to be careful. And I absolutely know how angry people were in 2017. That was the wildest meeting I've ever been to. And let's just be careful here and make sure we're taking the right path. I'm worried about the drought. Also, thank you. Thank you. Let's go to the members of the public. I see Cynthia has her hand up. Let's allow Cynthia to speak please. Good evening. So my understanding, I think, is that if we use more water now when it's available, because we're on septics that water will go into the ground so in effect it's being stored in our septic systems are in the ground and gets recycled back into our surface water sources, rather than just flowing down the river. I know that we can't pump raw water up to the northern system is that correct that we are treating the water first and then sending it up to Boulder Creek. But it seems like that's also a strategy for keeping the water in the valley, rather than letting it go to the ocean. I know it's not efficient, but I think that's what I understand Rick saying. Thank you. Rick, did you want to give a quick response to that? To clarify, we do have Forman Creek back in the system after the fire we immediately went in and did an emergency installation of the pipeline. So our lion water treatment plant from Forman Creek is producing the bulk of the water and then Fall Creek is supplying water more towards, you know, supplying all of Felton and then some of Ben Lohman. But predominantly right now we are on Forman Creek. As you know, Clear Creek, Sweetwater Creek are not being utilized at all right now due to damage from the CZU fire. It's just that 10 inches of rain, you know, really gave us runoff and San Lorenzo Valley water does not really have any raw water storage. We have aquifer storage in our aquifers, but as far as surface water storage, we treat and goes right into the distribution system. We have no real storage so to speak for surface water. And we don't move raw water up the valley. We can only move treated water. Thank you for that clarification, Rick. Are there any other comments from the public? Okay. Seeing none, I'll come back to the board. Bob, did you want to comment further? Yes. Thanks. Just a couple of things. So it sounds, Rick, if I'm hearing you right that what you may want to do is refine our ordinance to perhaps suspend drought or conservation during times when we are on predominantly water, completely surface water, or at least amp it down a little bit. So in other words, our community would sort of get into the mode of, well, if we're on surface, we know we can use more water if we're on wells, we know we can. Is that kind of where I'm here you're going? You know, that's what you're hearing, but that's a very tough, that's tough to get that word out to your customers and get your customers to switch back and forth. People get into a pattern on their water use. And then it gets tough to know when we have surface water or when we don't. You know, under normal rainfall, you could take, you could definitely take, you know, the winter months and easily do that, but then we wouldn't be in the drought on a normal rainfall. It's very difficult to try to have to get the message out and have your customers and it gets really confusing to customers if you don't stick to a water use pattern. And what we should be doing is evaluating and rolling back probably to what we call a phase one. It was just, you know, always use water wisely and conserve and then go back. And it's good that we move this around a little so our customers, you know, that our customers, as you know, Bob, do a tremendous job in water conservation with very little reward. So this would be a time we have to surface water that people could, you know, use some more water if you be. But as you know, people get into patterns and once they get into a strong conservation, they usually stay even so water is available. That's a tough message to get across to your customers. I understand we could we could put something on the website, you know, up in the top right or something to indicate or for social media. But I understand your concern because historically, our customers once they conserve water, they don't really go back to the old patterns of consumption it might inch up a little bit but it doesn't go up very much and so I think the other question is this 10% reduction that we've seen going to be permanent. Another question I wanted to ask was about impact on fish. So I think I'm also hearing you say that if we pull more water out of foreman. That's sort of offset by the fact we're not pulling any out of clear creek and so there shouldn't be any real impact to the fish and environment that sort of thing this time of year. And we're not pulling all the water out of format either. There's a lot of water. I know, I know. So, yes, we believe so. Okay. The last thing I want to mention is that, you know, the lays in spending capital if the project doesn't go away is not a savings. It's a, it's a deferral. The number that I look at in terms of our financial health is our operating margin. And if our operating margins going down because expenses stay the same or go up and operating revenue is going down. We are not doing anything other than taking the can down the road on those capital expenditure. That is something that previous boards have done for decades and it has gotten us to where we are millions of dollars in the whole unfunded capital obligations not to mention projects that should have been done over the years we're now trying to catch up on. I would strongly urge staff in this board to not allow us to continue down that same historical path. That is, that's sort of not a very prudent thing to do relative to our infrastructure and capital obligation and financial help. So when you're looking at it over the course of the next month, please take that all into account and see if we can work on getting our operating margins back up to where they need to be. And Bob, I agree with you and on the operating side, we do have one position vacant that we are not planning on filling. So that is a true savings. And we still have not hired the project manager, although we have some hopes that we're going to move forward on that. So there are some real savings in operating costs currently. And you know, grant you I, I, I'm very aware of past budgets and getting further and further behind on maintenance and, and replacement. But we do have a very strong capital improvement program in our budget still moving forward, not just a CZU, but a lot of capital improvement, much more than I think then any passboards have moved forward, and we are moving forward as the board knows with a lot of projects. Jamie. So, thank you to two points of clarification there I just want to. The, the, the deferred operating costs that are related to, you know, any any grant spend that we have not spent down any project related spending I'm assuming that you what's happening there is that we, when we are not moving forward with projects. There are also attendant administrative and operating costs that we're not spending to support those projects and so we're seeing savings on both ends is that a fair way to sort of characterize that Rick. It is Jamie but it's a small percentage of the project. You know it'll be the operational crew assisting a contractor and tying over to new connections and working in the existing distribution system, but it's a small percentage. You know, and we are looking at operational costs it's just so tough when our operating costs are fixed costs power. You know gasoline for vehicles vehicle maintenance I it's you know internet services I mean it's, I wish we had, you know, operating costs that we go in and just cut that wouldn't impact our abilities to supply water. You know, and that in my opinion, that's what the problem is if we did start making, you know, up large operational cuts, it's definitely going to impact our abilities. Right. And then, you know, my second question and that was really related to your comment about the the increase that we've seen in water consumption. Do we have any sense because it is interesting that we're seeing an increase in February even though it's been a warmer February because as you said there's not a lot of outdoor water usage at this time of your typically so I wouldn't think people would just like run out and turn on their sprinklers because it was a couple of warm days but maybe they do that so I'm wondering is that what is that what the increase in usages or or you know is there something else that we can point to when we see increased usage like at this time really can't you know put my finger on any one but I can tell you our water consumption is directly related to the to the weather. You know these sunny days people are using more water here and there it's not obviously not like the summer season, when people are putting gardens in, but you know as we drive around the valley we see a lot of people out working in their yards are cleaning all and there's when you know people are out doing things and when they're outside they do use water. So, you know and that could change we got rain coming next week. And you know director folks, possibly could be right on by thinking our water usage may not come back to our projected never going to have to do some serious hard decisions. Bob. Yeah, just one other question for Rick on the on the production side. I think in the past you'd mentioned that when we get into a drought or very dry situation that we tend to see a little bit more increase in water loss due to shifts in the infrastructure. Is that a possibility here as well. I'm not sure about that Bob, I had to think about that one. I know when the ground dries out leaks tend to surface. We find more leaks but I'm not sure if that we know we're going to look in the engineering committee is going to look into water loss on account for water and connection. On that you know we definitely know that and we haven't took a good look we definitely know that taking the redwood tanks that we take an offline probation Lampico etc. I have reduced that water loss. You know so. We still have several redwood tanks in the process. None of our redwood tank projects that are in the budget. They're still moving ahead in the engineering stages, etc. And there'll be more water savings there. But we haven't really pulled those numbers to get into that and we will be doing that mid year. Okay. Let's go ahead and go on to our next order of new business which is a presentation on the alternatives for cross country pipeline replacement. Rick. Yes, and I'm going to turn it over to Jeff Tarantino to introduce a fabulous engineering team and present this presentation to the board. Great. Thank you, Rick. And thank you, Directors. I was here to kind of walk through what we've been doing for the last several months with the team. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. And then we'll get into some introductions here. Bear with me for a second. I'll do this. Again, I'm Jeff Tarantino with Friar and Moreta. We are the lead engineer for the team that has been supporting the district and performing the contractability study. I have three key members of our team with me tonight. I'm going to go ahead and have them introduce themselves and so I'll just call your name and introduce yourself and just provide your role in the project. First, Justin. Hi, everyone. Justin Simeon with WRA, I've been helping with CEQA and permitting. I've been doing this work for about 20 years in the Bay Area now, so. Thanks. Mark. Hi, I'm Mark Myers with Cal Engineering and Geology and some help with geologic and geotechnical interpretation along the pipeline locations and then also just have experience with retaining walls and other stuff that I'm helping the team with. Great. Thank you, Mark. And finally, Aaron. Hi, everyone. Aaron's SMUD. I'm with Alpine Summit Development and my role in the project has mostly been focused on constructability review, you know, kind of means and methods as well as, you know, kind of preliminary budget cost estimating for construction. Thanks, Aaron. And so this team here has been working together, you know, looking at all components of the project and really trying to leverage our team's experience working in the Bay Area, really defined and all that kind of alternative that seems to be the rectal alternative to restore the cross-country system. So, first, we wanted just to kind of do a quick look back at history. So as the board's aware and I'm sure many of the members of the public are aware, the operation of the cross-country pipeline system dates back to before 1914. And then the district was formed and continued water use throughout the valley, you know, the creek diversions then began the boom system around 1914 and, you know, continued to operate for several decades. You know, the system was then improved in the 1930s with the construction of the stove pipe to, you know, within the flume and then the 90s and the 80s, we saw the construction of the cross-country pipeline with the HDP pipe laid on grade, constructed over several years. And the point of kind of talking about that is that, you know, the cross-country system always changing, changing the technologies to gain a range of pipe materials and really was operating reliably for nearly 30 years before the catapult bed season 5. And, you know, we need to continue to learn and see the benefits that the system had throughout the last 30 years, but also obviously be very mindful of what we have learned in the CCU fire and, you know, continue to look at other potential natural disaster impacts long-term operation of the system. So the CCU fire obviously was a very catastrophic event to the valley. And it was something that was a hard lesson for all of us to learn about changing the environment. So, you know, the sentiments about what a district team was working in real time with the first responders to really understand and react to the intense things in the fire. What we learned after the fact is that there was irreparable damage to the cross-country pipeline. Unfortunately, the pipeline was lost. Unfortunately, the pipeline was damaged and essentially the system was not controlled. We talked about a previous item, you know, the district has restored the foreman, the foreman diversion structure, the foreman pipeline to allow the district to actual operations, but, you know, our study really focused on how can we restore both divine and the pipeline. You know, as a consequence of the CCU fire, there's a substantial vegetation enforcement. This is, you know, the immediate term, the immediate aftermath, you know, was, you know, pretty dangerous situations, you know, allowed limited access to the watershed, really understand the extent of the damage that occurred. But it will also lead to long-term challenges and risks that, you know, not only in the next several years but maybe in the years to come that we need to understand and recognize and plan for as we think about reconstructing the cross-country pipeline system. So, you know, tree falls, landslides, brief flows, you know, these are all hazards that the team with the district have thought through and really tried to develop alternatives to think about all those potential risks that face the long-term operations and resiliency of the cross-country pipelines. One of the first things we did with district staff is we really sit down and think about, you know, overall goals of the project. Obviously, what's critically restoring the convenient system. That's the goal number one in order to bring the sea water, clear green, and pee by diversions back online in the regional time frame. But like we talked about, we also needed to apply lessons learned and experience from this easy fire and the aftermath to inform what other goals, what other project criteria should we be thinking about as we develop alternatives. Jeff, could I interrupt for a minute? Your sound is a little fuzzy. Oh, it is. I think for some people it might be cutting in and out a little bit. I don't know if you have to move the microphone or do something different. Yeah, let me stop the video. I agree. I think it's a microphone issue, maybe whatever you're using. Is this better? A little. It's just, it's not the best quality, but that is louder. I mean, I'll stop my video now. Hopefully that helps, you know, hold the microphone closer a little bit better. Not really. We're just going to power through it though. You're doing great. Okay, apologies for that. I could take a break here and try to call my phone. So, you know, one of the things that we also want to think about is the overall operation resiliency of the systems and thinking about what enhancements or improvements with the reconstruction system that we should incorporate in order to improve the overall resiliency and reliability, thinking about changing environment, changing, you could see a wildfire, those types of conditions. We also have to recognize that, you know, today is a much different in time for construction and permitting of work than it was, you know, even, even 10 or 20 years ago. So, thinking about the stakeholders, whether it's FEMA, whether it is California fishing game, you know, the other agencies that are going to have a very high interest in the reconstruction of this project so that we are meeting, you know, a multitude of stakeholder requirements when delivering the final project. And finally, we have an opportunity to incorporate green energy, so you know, thinking about hydropower, how can we continue to improve the overall operation, thinking about operating costs and where there may be opportunities to take advantage of green infrastructure to offset to some extent. So, one of the first things we did was working with district staff as we spent several days walking both the divine and five miles thick. We wanted to really kind of get firsthand eyes on what what the existing conditions were, take the opportunity to talk with district staff about the experience both, you know, immediately as the fire is happening, you know, the math of the fire but also kind of learn about what challenges the operation staff had even before the fire in just accessing and operating, both divine and five miles thick. So, one of the things that we did walking through was kind of observe that divine segment, what we found was, you know, generally, you know, reasonably wide benches, reasonable access to the watershed there was, you know, obviously damage and damage to the water. But what we found was that the divine branch was going to probably pose your challenges than the five mile branch and so we really wanted to kind of think about, you know, as we as we develop the solution and develop the phasing for the project, you know, what opportunities does the existing conditions, the divine segment would provide for initial success of the project. So when we visit the five miles and maybe, you know, we found much different steeper hillsides along along the five mile we actually found the damage pipe that was still in place that you know something that will have to be considered during reconstruction of portions of the system. And we found, you know, generally more challenging conditions for reconstruction, the five mile segment. So when we have just some more photos again steep hillsides, sloughing, you know, a lot of different conditions that we wanted to really kind of get our arms around it better. So as we think about, you know, not only just what can we do selecting alternative that proves overall hardening for fire, wildfire protection, but also thinking about other natural natural conditions that that we want to make sure that we accommodate in the desire to improve the overall hardening. So with that, Justin is going to talk a little bit about some of the environmental view that we've done today. And some thoughts on access in terms of. Justin. Yeah, thanks Jeff. So as part of that existing conditions review that Jeff mentioned. We went along on that site walk and review the entire alignments for both the pee vine and the five mile pipelines and for things like special status species habitat presence. There's not only sensitive habitats wetlands creeks but also sensitive habitats as they're defined and designated by CDFW for sequel purposes. The first things to go over is just the list of agencies involved in permitting a project like this. These are all agencies that we've identified as having a stake in the reconstruction of the two pipelines. This is a pretty typical suite of agencies for the Bay Area, especially when it concerns water projects. I did want to note that we included cow fire in the assessment, as well as FEMA, as well. These are the primary agencies here listed on this slide that are going to have the most to say about the project. So you can go on to the next slide. So the key factors when it comes to the environment for these pipelines are schedule stream crossings and redwood forest impacts schedule. The list of agencies on the previous slide, it's pretty typical to for those to require at least a year for all of those agencies to get through their respective permitting processes. We also have breeding birds and other seasonal restrictions that will need to follow so that we're making sure that we're minimizing impacts to the environment as the construction is proceeding. Stream crossings. There are many stream crossings along the alignment. I think we totaled about 17 or so creek crossings with both seasonal ephemeral and perennial streams all along the alignment. And then with those stream crossings and the agency permitting process, you bring also some risk of potential for operational impacts related to diversions and the amount of water that can be diverted through those, through those different existing diversions that would be reconstructed. In addition, we have the potential for redwood forest impacts. Nobody wants to see redwood trees removed. In this case, we would be limiting the tree removal to trees that are really necessary in order to facilitate the direct construction access and then also for safety purposes as well. It's important that we don't have a tree falling, especially after recent fire event on in the middle of a construction crew while they're doing work out there. So those were the key environmental concerns that we identified as part of that jurisdictional assessment. We also reviewed potential sequel options and Jeff you can go on to the next slide. And I'll start out by saying that this, you know, we've had preliminary discussions with the district about all of these options. We haven't made any decisions yet in terms of what the preferred pathway forward might be for sequel. We did review the emergency statutory exemption under sequel and it could apply to either of these projects. It's applicable to projects implemented in response to natural natural disasters and does allow for time needed to complete technical studies construction drawings and the like. To get to make a project move forward. Our intent that we've in our recommendation, I guess is to move if we if that pathway was selected move forward with the technical studies that would be done with either of the other two. If you want to follow the sequel pathways, follow all of the avoidance minimization measures that you would otherwise need to follow if you went through those other pathways. The primary advantage for that statutory exemption is a schedule advantage. You can see down at the bottom of the slide, or if we're looking at a goal of reestablishing the p vine alignment by with construction starting in 2023. The statutory exemption could get us there. The main reason for that is because the statutory exemption would not require any public review. And that that in itself does carry some risks. It's not always a very popular thing to move forward with a project without allowing the public a chance to comment on the sequel document but it is that process that that is the reason that that that the exemption could move forward more quickly than the others. The public review process is valuable but it's also time consuming. And so the statutory exemption gets the project to construction sooner than the other two pathways. The other other two being the initial study and mitigated negative declaration pathway. This is applicable of impacts. All impacts can be mitigated to a level that's less than significant. It's more easily legally challenged as compared to an environmental impact report. I should say that all of these options, including the exemption do have the carrier risk of litigation. The environmental impact report is the strongest defense against potential litigation. So those, those are all factors that will be continuing to review with the district and, you know, if it's a decision that is going to have to be made relatively quickly to meet if we want to meet the desired construction dates. So that's last last is the bullet down at the bottom that I should definitely be sure to mention is that both the P vine and the five mile alignments are separate projects for sequel purposes they don't have to be reviewed together and they don't have to use the same sequel processing pathways equal compliance pathway. We could process one under a statutory exemption and do an ER or the other. It's there because they are separate projects they have independent utility they both function independently and don't rely on each other. So that's the summary of the sequel side of things. Great. Thank you, Justin. Hopefully everybody can hear me better. I have switched to a different microphone. So hopefully that's better. Yeah, I see Mark. She can have. Okay, great. Apologies for the audio issues. So, but you know, one of the reasons why we wanted to review kind of the, you know, for early part of our of our efforts, the, the jurisdictional assessment thinking about Sequa was it's going to, you know, it was going to be a formative process as we think about, you know, alternative development and evaluating those alternatives for for constructing a replacement cross country system. And so we had proposed the district under our original original proposal to to follow what we call the gold based risk evaluation process. So we wanted to think about how how can we best develop an alternative, evaluate that alternative's ability to deliver a project that meets the overall needs of the of the district of restoring to, you know, the Robert fan system, providing a more resilient, more hardened system and do it in a timely manner. And so as we as we think about the process to kind of get to a preferred alternative. The first thing that we did with the district was we established evaluation criteria wanted to think about, you know, in the context of overall goals of the project, what type of criteria would would allow us to best evaluate each alternative thinking about both, you know, potential for success and associated risks with any given alternative. The following this process of kind of developing this evaluation criteria that informs the development alternatives and ultimately feeds into the overall evaluation and recommendation process. Is it it allows us to kind of do a great job of documenting what what we've been doing a document the process that we go through as a technical team with support with the, you know, heavy involvement of district staff, as we thinking about going into the secret process that that we'll talk about kind of, you know, some more during the question and answer sense of session. So, so it's really important as we develop these alternatives and come up with a with a preferred alignment for for consideration by the district that we have a robust documentation and kind of a detailed process that supports the the recommendation recommendation proposal. So, we, we met with the district after our site assessment and after jurisdiction assessment to to really kick off this this gold based risk assessment process. One of the things that was important as a group, both the technical team and district staff was really kind of talk about the overall goals of the project you know we think about when we think about the the goal of the project think about statements, you know, kind of concepts, you know, three to four words or ideas that really would influence the overall goal that allows to kind of evaluate whether we have identified a special project and once we established those goal words, thinking about what the potential success factors what what part of a project component would would allow us to meet successfully be a meet that goal, but also what are the challenges what are the risks associated with any any given alternative alternative that would you know adversely impact the successful completion of the project. And, you know, we, we use this process to really, you know, engage district staff to learn more about you know what what they're hearing from the board level from the members of the public from other stakeholders about what's important to for us to consider as we develop potential alternatives. And so, once we think about establishing goal statements establishing risk and success factors, that then allowed the technical team to kind of go back in and develop potential alternatives to present to the district for their feedback before we started performing the evaluation process. So, you know, the first step of that I said was we met as a group we spent a couple hours as a team with district staff established goal statement so on the left hand side there are you know in discussions with with the team about kind of the key criteria and we thought he concepts I'll say of what would be a goal or project you know, safety, you know, knowing that that's a real critical goal and focus of the board and everything that the district does, but also thinking about constructability, how can we develop an alternative and implement a solution that, you know, minimizes construction risks I mean we're never going to eliminate them but minimize those risks, but also not just be focused on what we are doing to get the construct cross country pipeline system restored, but also, you know, through working with the operate with the operators, you know, what are the challenges that that that they had operating the previous system, or the challenges they proceed moving forward, you know, thinking about all those challenges so that we can develop a solution that that, you know, really considers not only the construction phase, but quite frankly the important part, the operation phase, you know, the long term operability and resiliency of the system. And definitely not last least is, you know, potential stakeholder impact so thinking about stakeholders, you know, again, this is FEMA, this is the public, this is the customers, this is the environmental agencies, you know, kind of thinking about what what is important to each of those stakeholders and really considering that when when thinking about, you know, how we can have a successful project in the act of a permitting agency but also thinking about, you know, what risks are associated with some of the environmental process and permitting and costs and things like that that we're going to have to go through in order to develop a successful project. So, so once we have a group, we established these concepts, we actually broken the four separate workgroups so a district team member, and then two or three technical team members, we work together and we established the goal statements here that you see on the screen. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, as a technical team, we weren't just kind of off and doing our work and coming back and and just presenting it to to Rick and his team for kind of feedback. So we wanted Rick and Josh and Carly and James to be part of the process we wanted to, you know, involve them throughout the process so that we knew we were developing, you know, goals and kind of focusing on delivering a project that would be successful from from the district So once we established the goal statements, the next the next fact the next step that we followed was thinking about those success factors, thinking about the factors that we could use in an evaluation process to determine how well an individual alternative can need any any one of the four success factors here. And so that required us to go through and start selecting success criteria. So thinking about, you know, for for each one of these goal statements, you know, what are the criteria that we can use to evaluate a potential project. And we wanted to make sure it was, you know, a process that was in numerical so we developed a ranking system so, you know, the ability of a potential alternative to meet an individual success criteria on scale so one to 10 scale just, you know, one being, you know, a very low likelihood that a particular alternative would be a high likelihood. And we wanted to think about, you know, these individual success criteria to think about different parts of the project thinking about hardening in the system thinking about improving operations or system and knowing that as you look at each component of a particular alternative, you know, one alternative would would would do well in one category but now may not be do well in another category. So, for example, thinking about varied versus above ground HDB pipe, you know, HDB pipe installed above grade from a probability perspective, it was going to, you know, be better at achieving the goal of restoring the project with a more straightforward construction process. But when you compare the varied HDPE versus the above ground HDB when thinking about natural disaster and obviously the above ground HDPE has a high risk of damage during a fire and other, another natural disasters. And so really thinking about how each potential project component ranks in terms of meeting those goals really allowed us to evaluate effectively how successful a particular alternative could be. So, once we establish the success factors, the workgroups then thought about risk factors. So, you know, what are those criteria risk criteria that would adversely impact a project. And so when we think about those, you know, again, in the context of the goal statement, what are different risk criteria that would affect a project's ability to meet the the success. So, for example, thinking about team of funding was an important component of the constructability. You know, thinking about, you know, projects that restore as best you can to similar conditions, but also thinking about, you know, from a safety perspective, you know, what are, if we're not hardening and improving the project, what are those potential safety risks that we may be introducing over time. So, it really wasn't important for us working with district staff to kind of really establish kind of a range of those risk criteria to allow us to really think about, you know, the different risk that an alternative should try to address so that we could develop a series of alternatives that address each of these risks in a different manner to allow us to kind of understand and rank an individual in terms of ability to address a risk. You know, some one would be better than the other. So, once we established our risk factors and our success factors, we then went through a process of looking at individual project components. So, first component we looked at was potential pipeline materials. So, you know, standard raw water conveying systems, you know, and then really kind of four different pipe materials that we look at PVC, polyvinyl chloride is another type of plastic pipe similar to HDPE in that it's plastic. And it is, it's a commonly used material in raw water conveyance. But we also wanted to think about other hard and more hard materials like ductile iron, metal pipes, something that would be more resistant to fire if it was installed above grade, but also welded steel. You know, these are, these are materials that, you know, our team has used in a lot of different environments before. And as we, as we think about each one of those materials, we also wanted to think about the, you know, the pros and cons of those materials. And so looking at the individual, you know, pipe materials, one of the things that we found pretty quick, once we grouped them into kind of two plastic materials and two metal materials, you know, looking at PVC and HDPE first, we found that, you know, there really wasn't a lot of difference between PVC and HDPE. And quite frankly, you know, their, you know, HDPE would be a more appropriate material for the environment, given the, you know, the narrow benches, the kind of varying topography. PVC, although plastic and light, it's a step product, it's not something that would really do well in installation within the watershed. So we kind of looked at both PVC and HDPE and said, okay, we're not going to continue forward to PVC. That's that material kind of, you know, fell out of the evaluation. So any alternatives will, you know, HDPE will be part of the kind of the menu of project components that we'll use for developing project alternatives. We did the same thing with, with ductile iron and welding steel. The district uses ductile iron pretty routinely in your distribution system, so it's a material that district staff was really familiar with. There were portions of, you know, the cross country pipe that used ductile iron fittings, which had gaskets and things that were rubber. And what we saw out there was the ductile iron fittings, the fittings themselves, didn't appear to be damaged, but the rubber and the gaskets that really rely on when you put two pieces of pipes together or material for providing that seal was burnt and was gone. So when we think about using a pipe material that's an alternative to a plastic like HDPE, so the pipe material itself is inherently more resistant to fire damage, we found that the ductile iron actually would likely not perform as well as welded steel. So welded steel is, you know, is a pipe that joints are welded together. There's no gasket, so it's a material that if it were installed within the watershed upgrade would generally be more, we believe would be more resistant to firing. And, you know, had lesser risk to fire damage than ductile iron. So, you know, through this kind of evaluation of pipeline material, we decided to just move forward with HDB and welded steel. So once we kind of narrowed the types of pipe material that we were going to use for developing alternatives, we then looked at construction methods. So, you know, one of the things that we talked about as a team during our initial proposal development was, you know, how can we leverage the use of trenchless psychology. You know, as Justin said, you know, working in the watershed, thinking about impacts to rivet forest, we really wanted to carefully look at technology that would minimize surface disruption within the watershed. So on the left here, you'll see kind of standard construction methods, which is just a very typical excavation, you excavate a trench, you prepare the bed, you put the pipe in, then you backfill it, or, you know, above ground, we just create the bench and pull the pipe material on. So the standard construction methods of open trench and above ground, those were both seen to be pretty reasonable options that we could care for for the alternatives evaluation. There's several different types of trenches technologies that could be used in a project like ours in terms of pipe diameter and typical use horizontal directional drilling for Jack micro telling these are all kind of different details. There are different types of trenches technologies that that are commonly used in pipeline construction, but each one of these trenches that this requires a reasonably significant area flat work area. There's a lot of equipment so the image here on the screen here on the right this is a horizontal directional drilling example so you have you have a pit where you have dug a pit. It's where you're going to be pulling your pipe product in and then you have on the other end of the of the of the run the the directional drilling machine that's actually drilling an initial hole, then pulling the pipe back through that hole. And so that there's a lot of challenges with it, you know, lay down area for stringing out enough pipe to make the operation efficient. Like I said, you know, flat areas for for the equipment to be able to get in. There's also different ways to materials that that are generated during some of these processes that would have to be handled so. So when we really thought about the potential for success for using trenches methods we really found that, you know, using it widely throughout the project was really not going to be effective. You know, it's going to, you know, quite frankly, in order to set up for any one of these trenches methods would probably require a significant amount of site prep and clearing that, you know, it would essentially be creating an impact that we're trying to avoid by moving to a trenches technology so looking at and comparing these two methods we felt that trench list is really not going to be something that's going to be successfully use widespread. To be looked at focused and we could talk about that a little bit more at the end of the presentation but thinking about what provides the best opportunity for success for construction we're really focused on open trench and above ground installation of the pipeline. So once we determined the best methods moving forward for construction, we looked at, you know, the actual installation method so really focused on, you know, two options, buried or above grade. So when we think about the buried option, we really only focus on HDPE so the purpose of burying the pipe with to to provide additional resiliency to the pipe from primarily from from wildfires. So as we as I talked about a couple slides ago when we think about what the field pipe, the pipe itself was inherently resistant to fire as compared to HDPE so we said okay, you know, if we're going to look at options for burying the pipe we're only going to focus on HDPE but when we think about potential opportunities for installing above grade. We wanted to consider both HDPE similar to what was installed with the original system to as well as above grade steel so but again, each has their advantages and disadvantages. You know, there's still the buried HDPE just require excavation a little bit wider bench to facilitate that construction versus an above grade on HDPE the lighter pipe, it's something that would require smaller equipment. But again, it's going to be potentially at risk of damage again if there's another wildfire and then welded steel, you know above ground and get the wood, although it's above ground, we're not going to be generating excavation spoils. It's a heavier pipe material the equipment required to actually move the pipe set it well did it was going to require, you know, significantly wider benches. So, so we wanted to identify kind of the installation techniques and the kind of the details, but we did carry forward all three of these, all three of these options for for considerations part of the alternatives. So, one of the, and this is a discussion we have with the engineering committee was, you know, thinking about, you know, what is the right depth to bury pipe. So, you know, the goal of bearing a TV pipe is to provide additional protection against wildfire so the technical team the staff at WRA did did a lot of research and we found some studies that provided the kind of the relationship between potential temperature and soil, and at given depths, and what this chart the blue line is plotting is the, the temperature and measure temperature and soil at varying depth so at the on the left hand side there it's a very shallow berries, you know, it's an inch, you know, you're seeing very elevated temperatures, you know, 750 degrees Fahrenheit. But what the studies that that the WRA team reviewed and found was because soil is not very efficient at transmitting heat, we really see a significant drop off. As you get deeper and not very deep in and you start to see some really significant insulation from from from elevated temperatures. And so marked here in with the red axis are proposed very depth of 18 inches. So at least the studies we found the literature that's available through through through internet research, you know, the, the, the estimated temperature at a depth of 18 inches from a from a wildfire is, you know, on the order of about 100, 160, 170 degrees Fahrenheit. The other component that we did was we spoke to pipe htp pipe manufacturers really want to understand what are the potential performance in risk associated with pipe htp pipe being within fires and so got two things first I'll start with the kind of the top with that red dashed line that the temperature which htp pipe will melt. So, we found that the published information from the from the pipe manufacturers and talking to manufacturers is the right around about 400, 480, 490 degrees Fahrenheit so at that temperature we get above that temperature pipes going to melt it's going to form it's going to, you know, basically, you know, what happened and what we observed it within the watershed is going to happen. But the other key component and this is what what temperature do we start to see the potential for off gas and so, you know, htp pipe being a plastic, the materials it's constructed it, you know, when it gets too hot, it has a potential for for releasing the overseas. And so the research that the manufacturer shared with us that a temperature of about 400 degrees is when they have documentation that the pipe material is starting to smoke so we kind of use that as our, as our kind of baseline that that's when we're going to start seeing off gas and that's when there's a potential for introducing gases and vapors into the water supply so. So, looking at preparing the proposed 18 inch very depth and the temperature of the soil that that would be predicted, you know, we're seeing between the, you know, two and a half times safety factor when compared to the off gas and temperature to up to almost a three times safety factor. When looking at the the the temperature when htp pipe would be predicted to begin melting so but that's pretty reasonable safety factors based on industry standards and so we felt comfortable moving forward with that 18 inch very depth for for buried htp pipe. So the final component that we looked at before developing the alternatives was looking at potential alignments. So, you know, one of the things that we talked about as a team with the district staff is that, you know, from a constructability perspective, you know, reconstructing the cross country system within the existing alignment would be, you know, less challenging from a right away and land ownership perspective. The district owns all the land where where the pipad previously existed existed. So that was something that we wanted to make sure we carefully considered. But when thinking about the goal of providing a more resilient system, we also wanted to look at what what opportunities there were to reduce the length of pipe that's within the watershed and we'll where we're in the next several slides after this will start looking at some of the alternatives we develop. But when we start thinking about diverting and rerouting portions of the, in particular the five mile segment that results in some additional infrastructure that would be required. Either pump stations be able to pump water, but normally flows by gravity the line treatment back, you would, you know, you would have to actually pump the water back to line treatment plan. We also looked at, you know, opportunities of a potentially second water treatment plan. You know, instead of pumping raw water back to the to the line treatment plan, would, would there be a benefit overall to the district to construct a new treatment plant as a secondary treatment plan is a redundant treatment plan for at least treating clear water from sweetwater and clear tree. So with that, we'll look at the seven alternatives that the team developed and then the ultimate use for the valuation. So the first alternative here is the above ground ACPE. So this is basically reconstructing the cross country system, similar to the to the previous system. So when we think about the different site conditions that we're going to encounter, both along the p line and and along the five mile. We're going to find a lot of different topography. There's going to be areas in the top left corner there where we're going to be able to build a bench to be able to install the type of the ground, you know, with just some grading, but the top right corner there is we are going to encounter some areas where, you know, it may not be feasible, even with smaller standard construction equipment, many excavators, be able to build a bench and be able to safely reconstruct even above grade pipe. So there is that potential for having retaining systems that would be required to facilitate construction. But we also wanted to acknowledge that, you know, in the bottom left corner there that we could potentially, you know, still, even in some of the deeper topography still safely build a bench that because we're, because we're going to be just installing a pipe above grade that it would be capable of dealing with some of those diversions. So thinking about where we can, you know, minimize the bench with, you know, don't, you know, we don't necessarily want to, you know, make the bench with as wide as possible. We want to make it the right way to facilitate construction in a safe manner. And then finally, thinking about creek crossings is, you know, there were mostly creek crossings that existed. We're all above grade at varying elevations, but for restoring the system and thinking about potential for debris flow, or other other kind of just, just, you know, nature, potentially damaging the pipe, we would elevate at those 17 or so creek crossings above the creek so that we are, you know, protecting the pipe from damage from water flow debris, you know, anything that makes, then they come down the creek. So that was alternative one. Alternative two was in alignment same concepts, but what would it take to do it with above ground welded steel. So, in this case, we would, we believe we would be using primarily the top two details, they need a much wider bench. And as I mentioned a couple slides ago, you know, dealing with welded steel pipe, it's heavy. The, the, you know, we're going to be able to move fewer pieces of pipe in at a time. And after weld, it's going to, it's going to be a really extensive and invasive process in order to, in order to construct, construct the project. We did, you know, still have on here, you know, where we could, you know, where the topography was just so challenging, we would try to minimize the bench with but you know, that would be probably used on a very focused area. And then similar to alternative one, it would be above grade crossing the steel pipe, steel support. So it's something that would be, you know, a pretty, pretty robust construction system really resented to fires, but you know, provide a lot of challenges on the flexibility side. So alternative 3a is still within the same alignment, but now we're bearing the HDB pipe to feel a little asterisk here, I'll explain that here in a second. Again, we still believe that there's going to be areas even when we're bearing pipe or we're still going to need to create larger spaces, especially where, you know, in particular along pivine, we already have, you know, wide roads where we're going to take advantage of those. Where we are really challenged, topography still introducing some retaining systems, but where, you know, the bottom of the corner there, where we have some narrow benches, we also will look for opportunities not necessarily to dig a trench and place the pipe in a trench, but how can we use the grading that we're going to be doing for some of these more narrow benches to place the pipe kind of next to the up slope and then use some of the material, the spoils from the grading operation and actually use that to cover the pipe. So again, trying to minimize disturbance within the watershed, but still providing the inadequate level of protection to the topography. And you'll see here called out for a half a foot of cover what in the concept that would be used this narrow shallow trench here is that, you know, over time, materials would slip off the side and provide additional cover on the pipe. Finally, for 3a we would still be using above ground crossings. And in this case, we would transition to a welded steel. So, again, above ground HDB pipe crossings, you know, get them high enough, you know, no damage from debris. But it's still that high risk during a fire event that the pipe could be damaged. So, by transitioning to a weld steel pipe for the above ground creek crossing, we're providing that additional fire hardening as compared to HDB pipe. The next alternative 3b. We'll have to spend a lot of time with this. Essentially the same as alternative 3a, except in this case, we wanted to kind of consider if we buried all of the creek crossing. So in the bottom right image there on the left hand side, where we would bury the creek crossings so that we would reduce that risk of debris flow or damage at the creek crossing. But the risk here is it increases some of the permitting requirements potentially for the construction activities. So, the next several alternatives are looking at realignment. So, we developed and thought about how we could potentially reduce the total length of pipeline within the watershed. And in looking at that, what we determined in working with district staff is the p-vine alignment, given its current conditions, the reasonably wide benches, the less debris that we found, that kind of easier, you know, quote-unquote easier working environment. We didn't believe there was any benefit to trying to look at options for rerun the p-vine alignment. So for the next three alternatives, the p-vine alignment remains the same. It will be buried HDB pipe with below grade creek crossing. But where we saw opportunity for potential realignment was to look at the sweetwater and the clear creek intakes. You know, when you got downstream of the clear creek intakes all the way to the lion's treatment plant, you know, there are no more intakes. So there's, you know, disadvantage to rerouting the pipeline outside of the watershed in terms of, you know, not picking up all the districts intakes and maintaining the adequate supply of raw water. We wanted to evaluate the benefits and the risks associated with rerouting. And so we first looked at independent pipelines for both the sweetwater and the clear water intakes. So those are showing here in the blues. And we would route these to kind of the Brookdale area and then join them in either one, probably two pump stations because we would have to then pump that raw water all the way back to the lion's treatment plant. So overall, the total length of pipe as a system is similar, but we had a significant reduction in the amount of pipe that's within the watershed. So we're providing additional, a hardening of the system by removing it from the watershed and reducing some of the risks associated with some of the natural disasters, but increasing some of the challenges and operational inspection, operational costs as we introduce new pump stations and new facilities. So alternative 3B, again, the small variation on alternative 3A, 3A, 4A, one of the challenges with, you know, separating the sweetwater and the clear water is just the high potential for crossing land that's not owned by the district. So we said, let's just kind of look at a little bit of a hybrid alternative where we're still reducing the overall length within the watershed. So we're not taking water from sweetwater and the clear water intakes all the way through the watershed to lion's, but rather follow the same alignment. So we get down to the clear creek intake number one there and then divert the alignment into the Brookdale area. Single pump stations, but we still have that raw water conveyance system to pump water back up to line. The final alternative we had identified, building off alternative 4B was instead of pumping raw water back to the lion treatment plant, what would be the potential benefits and risks of if we were to actually construct a second water treatment facility. Somewhere along Highway 9 location to be determined, but we wanted to kind of understand, you know, what would be the overall benefit of having a second treatment plant within the service area. So that was that was really the last alternative that we looked at. So we talked about several slides ago the success and the risk scores and so once we developed each of the alternatives, we then gave us alternatives to each of the workgroups, the forward groups and each workgroup went off and independently evaluated each alternative for, you know, its ability to meet each of the success criteria for the goal of the workgroups or the safety goal, the constructability goal, but also what the potential risks are. And so plotted here is kind of how that each of the alternatives ranked and wanted to focus on, you know, the, the, the, the, the higher the risk of the higher potential that there could be a risk for not achieving success, the higher the risk number. The, the, the alternative that would be able to provide the best opportunity for success. So the, you know, meeting at a high level of a success criteria would have a higher success score here on the X axis. So, so what we found is alternative 3B, you know, had resulted in the highest potential success score and also the lowest potential risk score. So we then looked at each of the alternatives and so what I, what I've shown here on this table is the individual success scores for each of the alternatives as well as the individual risk scores. We also wanted to kind of circle back to A, are we still achieving the project goal of improving the overall reliability resiliency through the hardening of the system. And so what we found is, you know, mostly alternatives really do provide additional hardening of the system. So, you know, when you, you know, alternative one alternative to really do not fare very well in that in those categories. But when we think about the, the kind of highest scoring and lowest risk score alternative alternative 3B, which is installing HDB pipe below grade. Within shallow trench and with the below grade creek crossings that, that kind of started to show us that it, that it met all of, you know, provide the highest opportunity for delivering a project that meets each of the four goal statements that we established. So, when we start thinking about the alternative 3B being the preferred alternative, we also wanted to think about the phase, you know, Justin talked about this a little bit about the goal of starting construction as soon as possible. So, one of the things that, that we talked about as a team with, with, with Rick and his staff is, you know, he vine is a dome project. It's something that we can focus on and really start, start planning and developing a design. In our understanding is that that also provides a significant amount of additional water, raw water supply for treatment at the line treatment plan. So there's a lot of benefit to implementing the overall construction project actually in a phase approach. So instead of trying to build everything at once, how can we most effectively build a project. So the first, the first order of work that we're suggesting is actually true removal. So thinking about true removal, planning that out. It's a really a distinct operation. It's a different construction operations in the pipeline construction. So it's something that can be implemented first. And so under our proposal, first, you know, phase one would be p-vinyl and first focus on true removal to deal with any, you know, dead trees, nesting birds, things like that that could impact overall construction. And then once you've completed the true removal for phase one, we can begin construction of the p-vinyl and p-vinyl and aligning. While we're constructing p-vinyl, we can then turn our focus on the true removal of at least the first half of the five mile segment. And we would recommend starting kind of at the top of the watershed and working our way towards line. Once we start with a complete p-vine and we start, we can start construction of the other segment of the five mile and then as we're clearing trees for the lower segment. And when we think about this process, we, you know, our team's best estimate is we could likely finish construction within three seasons. So in about three years from now, being able to have a fully restored cross-country system for the district. So the other component that we looked at is green potential for green energy. So we looked at what we call microhydro stations. So there are really two primary options that we identified that would, could be benefited, used beneficially by the district. The first option one there on the left is an impulse turbine. This is kind of the standard, you know, wheel that you see at most, you know, dams where you basically just have water running through a wheel that's spinning the turbine. And it's generating electricity. It's pretty common technology used. Some challenges with option one, and it really requires a lot more infrastructure. You know, you can see here in the image there's control panels, building, it's, you know, kind of bigger equipment. But we also explored another option which is called an inline PRV. This is a product that's being used a lot in urban cities. So installing them within existing distribution systems. And what it does is it actually takes advantage of existing pressure reducing valves that systems typically have when managing high pressure and low pressure zones. And so it kind of hooks onto that PRV and takes the purpose of the PRV is to, you know, basically reduce the pressure physically, you know, cause turbulence in the water column to reduce pressure. And so you can take and harness the energy loss from that process and actually turn it into energy. So those are two options that we'll work with the district shop to continue exploring. The potential generation, depending on, you know, influence flow, basically the amount of electricity generated directly proportional to the amount of flow we're getting from the creek from the diversions. And so we can generate for both options anywhere between 10 to 30 kilowatts, depending on the level of flow within the creek. So, final slide I have tonight for us to talk about tonight is, you know, our team's initial opinion of probable project costs. So, you know, one of the, one of the things that, you know, we recognize is critical is the, you know, the potential costs for reconstructing both the PBI and the five mile. We understand that, you know, FEMA is going to be really focused on what what the potential costs are, especially when you start looking at, you know, implementing an alternative that might not be the exact same construction that they original system was. But I think one of the things that that the technical team recognizes is, you know, there's a lot of, you know, constraints that we have in today's environment in terms of what can be constructed what can be permanent. What what is, you know, what will a construction contract be willing to do in terms of operation and so when we start thinking about the potential range of costs. We really wanted to look at not only just the construction costs, which is the middle column there, but also what the, what the all the supporting costs are the permitting engineering costs, inspection costs, you know, everything that it takes to develop a project. And so a couple of things that we, we wanted to highlight is, you know, we are, you know, develop our costs based on a phase approach of multiple multiple year construction. You know, ultimately, the conditions and accessing and getting equipment in and out of the watershed, you know, really, really does, you know, influence the, the overall potential production rates that that our team estimates for for constructing the project. We did spend time Aaron spent time talking to contractors talk to the suppliers, you know, not just, you know, thinking about, you know, on a desk of how we this would be built but really kind of getting some some input from from experts to really understand production rates so that we can really inform the range of costs here that we're showing on the screen. But we've also, you know, thinking about some of the challenges of the site, you know, we talked about, you know, some of the some of the topography is going to require retaining structures. Those have a large influence on on the cost so as we advance the next phase of the project we start doing detailed. The alignment detail design, you know, the team will be focused on where are there opportunities to optimize the construction to reduce the need if we can, I don't want to over promise but reduce the need where we can have of using retaining structures. Because that will that will allow us to optimize some of these costs. We've also tried to build in, you know, allowances for, you know, mitigating, you know, geotechnical hazards things that we're going to come across as we're as we're constructing the project. And we'll plan for it as best we can, but recognizing that, you know, there's, there's going to be, you know, unknown conditions that we won't find. And so, you know, one of the advantages that we've talked about with the district staff about, you know, focusing on p vines first. You know, obviously shown here and then more affordable the two projects at this point. But we can focus on people and get that restored, you know, develop a design, engage a contractor, you know, see how things are going and that'll help us inform and optimize the five not design, not to say that we're going to do everything kind of sequential will still be advancing the design of the five mile but we want to make sure that we're, you know, taking advantage of once we get a contractor on site, you know, learning from from their their operations learning, you know, they'll learn as they go, and we'll probably find ways to optimize some of the construction on the five miles well. So, finally, next steps, you know, where we're completed our constructability study we've got a draft study we're working with Josh to finalize. We're recommending as Justin said that we begin advancing the sequel and permitting, along with design, but we also know, and we talked about this with Rick yesterday is you know really important to engage the FEMA right away now that we've got kind of a study you've got a, you know, an appending kind of board feedback. We believe we have a preferred preferred solution here. We can we can really start those those discussions in collaboration with FEMA to be able to kind of get to the funding process. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions and Justin Mark and Aaron are here to help as well so I will stop sharing my screen. I can always bring it back if there's any, any slides or want to look at so thank you very much for the time sorry for the long presentation but we just felt like we had a lot of information to share with the board and hopefully nobody fell asleep during this. No, that that was very thankful. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. It was very informative and entirely appropriate that link that you did and so thank you to Justin Mark and Aaron as well. Mark, would you like to begin by making a comment since you're, you know, the chair of the engineering committee. I would. To the, to the team that put this together. Jeff, thank you for this. It is informative. I appreciate the fact that you took the comments that you received from the engineering committee, in particular on the pipe. HDPE performance criteria and how deep we would need to bury, and you went out to researchers and got additional information, plus you put together the costs for us, which we have not seen before. So thank you for making those changes and additions. Secondly, I concur with the materials and the methods that this team is recommending I've used sort of all three types of of pipe on construction projects that I've managed, and I've used both open trench and directional drilling systems, and I agree with your assessment of, here's how we should proceed with this. So, given that, I do have questions though, on potential timing of this. In particular, on the slide that you show the secret compliance pathways. Page 11 of your presentation. Yeah. There were three options on that one was the emergency aspects. Yeah, let me get back to that mark bear with me. Okay, so the rest of the folks can see what I'm focused on with that. Yes, this one. So the emergency statutory exemption. This would allow us to be in construction for the pvine section. Next summer, but given the fact that we're dealing with FEMA on this. And the five or six different agencies that you've listed on the earlier slide. What's the likelihood of this succeeding. Should we be giving any weight to this option, or pretty much just rolling this out, and we need to go to the mitigated mega declaration aspects instead. That's a great question. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and ask Justin to jump in here because this is something that, you know, we've been talking about, and I know he has some thoughts on, you know, the probability and the kind of the the applicability of the temporary exemption for the for the pvine section. So, Justin, do you want to weigh in on this one first? Sure. Yeah, definitely. Those are very good points, Mark, and ones that will have to weigh when we're making the final decision in terms of what compliance pathway to to go down for sequel. In terms of the so that the driver of behind the schedule numbers was primarily tree removal. The approach to phasing the project is to do tree removal outside of the breeding bird window to avoid potential impacts to birds. And so in order to, and then so you have to do that in the fall ahead of construction the following summer in order to avoid those impacts. And so to, we have to do tree removal as part of any CEQA documentation that we were to go through the permits that I listed on the other slide. The majority of them are driven by aquatic resources impacts. There are a few exceptions to that. We need the Fish and Wildlife Service and endangered species protection. We need to end and to assess the potential for that act we have we have recommended that as part of the jurisdictional assessment that surveys be conducted for marbled muralette, which would be the bird that is potentially impacted it's we're kind of on the margins of the range for that species. It's unlikely to be within these alignments but it is still within, you know, we're operating on that margin so there is still a potential for that species to be present so that's one factor to weigh into that decision as well. And in order to be able to remove the trees this fall we also have to have negative survey results for marbled muralette nesting. There are definitely a lot of factors involved in in making this decision in on top of the, the fact that the exemption doesn't require public review. It's definitely feasible to get through these processes for tree removal in 2023 and construction in summer 2024. There are even if we were to pursue the statutory exemption you're right though there are still some risks that we don't make that schedule because of the things that I outlined. Okay, and is our contract with your team. At this presentation, or do we have you involved through this process to at least help us in the next several steps to get to the decision points on which one of these environmental regulatory pathways are we going to take in particular the other five miles segment. I have no hopes of the emergency statutory. At best it's the mitigated declaration I think it's probably going to be the environmental either in that report or statement that that matches our assessment as well. Yeah, so what do we have how long do we have you engaged under your current contract to assist. Yeah, that's a great question. No, we are engaged to kind of get to the spot of kind of choosing the sequel path forward. So that that's part of our existing agreement. Once that path forward, you know, the next phase actually completing the studies that just was talking about in the first phase that that would be part of a of a of a next agreement that we're we're already working with staff on to begin kind of outlining until we don't lose time there but no we are intended to help the district get to selection of the secret pathway and then we can, you know, move hopefully right into actually implementing the sequel. Okay, and I see later in this agenda, the Environmental Department report, we do have the trees. We have a survey scheduled for spring 2022. So coming up in the next several months. And do I hear you saying, Justin that if we don't come up with the the the birds that are of impact, we could potentially go ahead with tree removals. That's right. Yeah, we need to be careful about one other aspect of the permits and that's for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. They also regulate riparian trees and so as part of that part of the field work that would be part of the tree surveys. It would include evaluating the areas around the creeks to determine if any of the trees that could be removed would be considered riparian species a lot of the riparian zones were kind of taken out by the fire. You know, they're so we may not encounter that situation but we will be double checking that as we do those surveys. Okay. Well, I'm glad to hear that you're on on board to help us through this figure out the pathways to the regulatory aspects. Good. And we look forward to then to this, the tree surveys and for the results from that. I do have one other more technical question and Jeff, it's on the graph that you presented for the minimum pipe depths with the temperatures and the rest of that. Just so that I'm clear on that. I think that's page 17. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, yes, this, this one. Okay, great. You're showing here the proposed 18 inch berry depth. Is that the total depth of the trench. So that the pipe is then because the slides you're showing us previously yeah are showing 18 inch. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's the depth of the top of the pipe. Right, that's what I want to know. No, no, you're, you're, you're correct mark it would be depth of cover needs to be 18 inches to meet this so our trench would need to be deeper and in my the estimates and kind of work plans that I worked through included an 18 inch depth of cover, not an 18 inch depth of trench. Okay, your slides don't show that then on the evaluations. Yeah, yeah, we will yes update that for the for the final for the report and I was hoping that those were correct and I was misinterpreting this. A less digging, but okay. Okay. Thank you. That's all the questions that I have. Great. Thank you. Bob is the other member on the engineering committee would you like to comment or ask a question. I do have some questions I wasn't on the committee at the time this was being evaluated. So, but I do have questions. Okay, can I just ask a question first of them. The class that you showed us was for the buried HDPE pipe and obviously there's a bunch of there's pretty serious sticker shock I think for many members of the board. This is a lot more than we had anticipated. And so one question I have is, how does that number change if we have HDPE that is not buried. So one of the questions we'll have to face as a board is deciding which way to go and part of that is dependent on what FEMA is willing to reimburse us for so in other words they they will reimburse what we had there, which was above ground to reimburse some costs, some part of the cost of, you know, bearing it we may have a hard, hard decision to make so one part of my question is the difference in the costs and then the second part of my question is, is, how does making a decision to bury it versus have it above ground affect the kinds of secret pathways that we've talked about does it make any difference. Yeah, I know that. Thank you for those questions so I think we'll take the first one and I'll start and Aaron's going to jump in. So one of the ways that Aaron developed the cost of Smith we we really looked at what that incremental cost is for for installing the pipe so we have that number that we can we can share. It's not a significant number. You know, we think about a lot of the costs associated with with the construction, the retaining structures and access those are those are large drivers so I mean Aaron do you want to talk a little bit about kind of the I'll call it the premium for bearing the pipe that that we that you developed. Yeah, no I this this did come up in the engineering committee meeting and so I had, you know, kind of specifically broke that cost out to try and analyze it. And as I think everybody could understand it's going to vary based on the trench type that we're using I mean it's more costly to dig and bury it in the narrow trenches in the areas where we have a lot more distal working restrictions maybe retaining the walls. So there's, there's, there's definitely a range of what we'd call premium cost. And I would say that range is somewhere between 60 and $100 for linear foot of direct costs now that does not include markup and contingency. But given the total footage of the alignment that's somewhere in the you know in the million and a half to three to $4 million, not including if we're going to put risk contingency escalation on top of those numbers. It does increase the cost. But you know I think as to Jeff's point, you know, given the size of the project. It's, I shouldn't say it's insignificant, but there's not massive savings. And the other thing that I think should be considered is if we put the pipe above ground, it's probably going to still require some type of anchoring system, there's you know I know they had staked it to the ground and maybe that would be acceptable. Best practices, it would probably necessitate, you know, some better type of a support or anchoring system. So there would be some costs to to leave it on top of the ground. I mean, especially if the pipe selection changed to steel, because steel can't rest on the ground for corrosion purposes. So it would have to be elevated on some type of pipe support, you know, probably a concrete support if we went with steel. So, I don't know if that fully answers your question. I mean, obviously, that helps. Yeah. And, and I think just kind of as Aaron mentioned, you know, kind of best practices, what are current requirements. I think that's the other thing that, you know, Rick, Josh and I talked about a little bit yesterday was hey, you know, at some point, there's only the regulations current regulations are all going to allow us to do certain things. And so really, you know, when we think about best practices, you know, is it even regulatory, you know, allowable to put pipe above ground. So those are things we're still exploring in anticipation of these questions from from FEMA. You know, this is Mark and nothing to even contractor efficiency. You know, if it's on the bench, it's in their way. You know, if they have taken barrier then you know they can get access over the top of it much easier. So I mean, it may actually, you know, a lot of it go away just because of their efficiency on what they however they decide to work. Yeah, yeah, that's right, Mark. Thank you. And so, Justin, maybe you can help answer the second part of that question about impacts that to the kind of sequel pathways and we talked about, you know, buried versus above ground. Sure. Yeah, the that decision wouldn't affect the sequel compliance pathway decision. It, you know, there could be some differences in some of the analysis that might be done as part of the initial study mitigated negative declaration and the EIR, but it wouldn't affect the decision on which of those pathways to take. Okay. Thank you. That was all. Go ahead, Bob. Oh geez, Gail, you took my first question. See, sometimes we think alike, Bob. More than more than more than some time. So the. Yeah, so I have to recover here a little bit. So the next question I wanted to ask about was. Hybrid. I like to think out of the box. So, you know, we've been talking about either all HDP or all welded steel, what have you? Well, what if in certain areas we put welded steel on top of the ground and in other areas we put HDP underground? Is that a possibility as well? If it if it made it easier to do certain construction in certain area. I don't know. Bob, the short answer is yes. I mean, I think there's still, you know, by selecting a preferred alternative at this stage doesn't, you know, from a from a the technical team's perspective doesn't mean that's it. That's all we're doing. What it allows us to do is it really allowed us to try and kind of quantify kind of potential costs and strategies. And then as we get into the next phase of the detailed design, the topographic survey, we're going to take a hard look. And what is the kind of the right solution if there's opportunities to to use well and feel if that's going to minimize impact or there's, you know, cost saving options, whatever it may be. That's something that we're going to value. We actually talked about this during the engineering committee meeting about, you know, you know, widely using trenchless technology doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem to me, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be part of our toolbox when we get into the detail design that might, you know, we may find as we do detailed design it. And there's a there's a spot where trenches would really, you know, benefit us in avoiding potential impacts from a, you know, kind of a chronic resources perspective. And so maybe worse the investment. So I think the kind of the short answer is, yes, I think I think everything's still on the table. It's just trying to focus us on what the kind of the right alignment and majority of the of the installation is was the purpose of kind of not kind of refining yet another alternative. Is that a question? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Um, you may have talked about this in the committee and maybe I didn't hear it here but did we also consider earthquake resiliency since we actually could get an earthquake. Maybe before fire. Yeah, and yeah, and that was in the constructability, so we provide some kind of detailed tables. Weld and steel would not perform well, as well as HDP in an earthquake. So that was something that we looked at from an operations perspective and success and risk criteria. That was something that we did look at as we have the anticipated performance with a with the individual pie material. So HDP being a much more flexible material would be expected to perform better. One of the things that we will look at as we get into detailed design, if we're finding geohazards, landslide areas that, you know, maybe, you know, trigger during a seismic event if there's, you know, localized improvements such as they have something that's been done and it's called an eba flex 10, which is this basically this piece of pipe that has two balls on each side and they kind of lose and lose around. You know, if we want to use that to improve additional side screw zones, we will but overall, you know, it's it's the technical team's opinion that you know the HDP pipe is going to be a better performing pipe and you know, following a major seismic event as compared to Weld and steel. And when you're working on the cost that you come up with relative costs for all the different options that you evaluate. I just know just the one, just the one. Okay. So, you know, I thought I had heard in the wake of the paradise fire that their system got contaminated with outgassing even at a three foot depth. Did we did I hear that wrong or is that just urban legend. I do not. I think Rick needs to answer that. I can, I mean, I can answer that when we talked with paradise and depth. Yeah. Yeah, they're very pipes three foot depth did have contamination, but it was from steam entering into the distribution system. It wasn't fire reaching down to the depth of the pipe. It was above ground boiling and steam went back up into the system and melted and release those VOCs. Okay, great. You know, one of the things that I wanted to dive into a little bit more again thinking out of the box is what percentage of water we're getting from each of our surface sources. And that's a, you know, percentage of water average here. And whether or not the ROI on a particular water source is significant, significant. So, you know, I hate the concept of not doing pre 1914 water sources. This five mile pipeline is is an enormous left as as Gail was pointing out there. There's a lot of sticker shock. I mean I was anticipating it was going to be big. And you know in the order of 40 million. But hey, we're we're talking about a significant number over that. Have we looked at, have we analyzed that and if we have we looked at whether or not that percentage might change given the regular, the regulatory world. We're in right now, which doesn't always deliver better results just more regulation relative to construction what we can put in that sort of thing. FNL wasn't tasked with that exercise, you know, we can look at those numbers but you know we do know that our surface water is about 50%. I know that what we would be doing is most likely we would be transferring over to the wells, and we don't have a number today or what Santa Martina groundwater agency well water extraction is going to cause I think we'd be shifting the cost and the water quality as well. I mean we could look at that, but they're unique numbers because certain times of the year when there's adequate rainfall like there is right now. We shut down sources, pvine, sweetwater, third creek would be shut down. We would have to look at the summer months and you look at that amount of water and it's a valuable amount of water and you know we're looking to shift more towards conjunctive use to lower our extraction from our groundwater wells. Well let me give you an example. Okay, let me give you an example. I think sweetwater delivers relatively speaking less than Clear Creek or Foreman Creek. And so would we be able to take more out of Clear Creek or Foreman Creek to make up for if we didn't do sweetwater? Not in the summer, not in the summer months. In summer months we're taking all water that we can take. There isn't you know more water in Clear Creek or more water in Foreman in the summer months. The summer months are all reduced down to minimal flows and we take from all those sources and there's not more water. Fall Creek is a stream that puts more water but we have very stringent fishing game bypass requirements. Yes and certainly I think what factors into this is also what happens with our water rights where we can send water from any source to any destination. I mean that's definitely what we're working on to get to. I think it would be worth while, I'm assuming we have some of these numbers of what we pull out of each creek historically and it might be something I can come in the office and kind of go through the files and pick that up. I'm curious, I really am curious as to what those numbers are. If you look in the Director of Operations Production reports, those numbers are by the month and have been for many years in the report to the board. Yeah, I was hoping they might actually be in a file somewhere a little easier to pull up, but we could do that. Mark, do you want to pop in there? It looks like you have something to say. I do concur with Bob's thought of should we be putting all of these surface water intakes back in, because as he was asking the question thinking the same thing, are we spending a lot of money for a minimal percentage of our water at one of these sites. I think having that sort of summary information for each of these intakes would be important to help inform. Do we put all of these back in? Do we go after or to the question that Bob's asking, do we, for some period of time, not put all of these back in? We can definitely get you that information. Keep in mind, putting them all back in as they were will be covered by FEMA. And also keep in mind, if we don't take that water from surface sources, it will come from groundwater. And grant you our customers are doing a great job on conservation and our water use is low, but we don't have a good idea of what the cost of groundwater is going to be three to five years down the road. But we do know it's going to be astronomical on the Santa Margarita Ground. Well, and I think also Rick, another consideration I'd like to throw in here and it's still early on, but does the possible big basin consolidation have any impact on our determination in this given there they do have a surface water source. I don't know exactly how far it is from the treatment plan or what the terrain is is like exactly. But that that is another potential source. And we're looking to bring the big basin source on we don't we don't have the water to serve big basin without a source. I would not recommend taking big basin on without a water source. Yeah. So, and what is and so I guess the other question would be is there any water out of that source that it would be considered surplus beyond just serving the current big basin water customers as is the case with fall Creek for example where there is water and supply more. And you know the short answer is yes during winter flows can consume your views. But when we hit the summertime especially in times of drought, there is no excess surface water. And that's why we're all right. Yeah, we're looking at a lot. I get that and that's my next question about you know factoring in the lock loman water and where the money would be best spent to get the biggest bang on the buck for the water source that you're looking at. I mean in a lot of the summer months and drought months are surface water effectively goes away anyway, right or goes down to such a minor percentage that it's, you know, you're going mostly well anyway. Well, we and keep in mind, you know, are all the surface water that you're getting from these sources are all gravity. Once you start moving over to groundwater, not only do you have the groundwater extraction but you have power and operational costs that we're trying to reduce. I mean, I think I think the exercise would be good to get this information to the engineering committee of our water sources. Yeah, that's an easy exercise that we can put together. But there's a lot of I guess for lack of a better term aspirates to have to go by, because those sources, you know, in the wintertime are not all in. You know, it's it's March, March, April, you know, through November is when we drastically count and look at fit surface water is about 50% and we're trying to increase that because it's a cheaper water. I have one other question. I'd like to like bring what let's let some other people in on this and I think I finished my one question one question. Well, I really would like to go and give some other people a chance I think that Rick got your point about this and he can take it back to the engineering and I will come I will come back to you. Let's just get people in Jamie. Jamie. Thank you. Excuse me, thank you. I'm fine to let Bob finishes one question I just my question is relevant to this this discussion that Rick and Bob are having which is why I raised my hand because I think that it's, it's important if we're going to look at the amount of water that we're likely to take, we need to also understand what is the actual cost to us what are we saving and if we were to foreclose our opportunity to have that intake in the future, because, you know, obviously, if it's a if it's, you know, a de minimis in terms of the actual savings and we're foreclosing another raw surface water intake, you know, even if it's a small amount I'm not sure that you know that's a wise thing to do so I just think that if we're going to investigate the one number we also need to understand what we're savings and what the savings are in terms of the capital project. Lois, Lois, did you have anything that you questions it's so so more involved that I hardly know what to ask. It just got going off here going off there, and I had been on the engine engineering committee when this was first talked about, and, and what they presented tonight. It had some new stuff, but with all the questions. I don't know where to begin. Well, okay. Bob, you want to go back to you now. Yeah, my last question had to do with rerouting of the pipe. So for example, if we pumped the water up to a higher elevation, would there be an easier, less costly path to get down to the lion treatment plant. I, I don't have an answer for you director folks we did not look at that. The distances the distance, you know, and if you pumped it up higher, you probably be starting to get off district property and then you would have to, you know that we already have to break down the pressure, reduce pressure for the treatment plant because the water comes in moving those and you would look at, you know, reconstructing pipe trail. We already have a trail on basically a 1% grade across the empire grade mountain to bring that water 100% gravity to the the lion water treatment plant. If you moved it, I think you'd be looking at much more increased cost and trying to find a location and cut new trail. It's a little higher, but I don't think you shorten it Bob. And the higher you go in the watershed, you know, there's no power at the intake so higher you go in the watershed the less power there is, then you're talking at a big regulatory permitting process to change the point of intake. Yeah, I wasn't I wasn't talking about changing the point of intake but perhaps where the intake goes. And I do agree with Jamie on that part of the ROI calculation is looking at both the savings and the costs and the trade off between those two. But I think in order for us to make sure that we are because of the costs that are involved here and because it's likely. Well, I'm anticipating FEMA may say no we're not paying to go underground. You get to pay for that. We'll come up with a percentage and it depends you know that's our next step after you know hopefully the board will you know give us some type of indication tonight of what scenario they take a recommendation of FNL. And then our next step is to sit down with our our secret team which includes our secret legal legal team to talk about permitting because a few other issues that we're permitting intakes and so forth. And we'll want to bring the sequel legal team in and then we will also simultaneously talk to FEMA and see what they will pay to harden the pipeline. Now we just start getting into the percentages and a big question will be how much the difference is putting it back like it was and then burying the pipeline. And then we look at current codes and standards and see if we can come up with some type of current code and standard that says that pipeline should be buried and that changed the percentages. This could last six, eight months to get through FEMA on this. I'm not going to call an alternative project on a hardening of the project because part of what FEMA's money and FEMA's program is is that they want you to put this back and protecting it from future fires. They pay for it once and they say hey we'll help pay for hardening so this doesn't happen again but now we got to find out what that percentage is. And then you know what they'll take FNL's numbers to look and they'll come up with a number of what we can all agree on what it would take to replace and then we'll look at what the difference is. And then the district would have to make some decisions what that percentage and how much the district is willing to spend, or we fight with FEMA to get more there's a process here that's going to take a while to get this. I understand. We went through it before. I know we've done it before where they've actually given us a lot of upgrades because of standards and practices, like the two inch above ground suspended from the tree water pipe over a creek. Right. So those. Gail, I may be misunderstanding the agenda item. It says no action recommended. I agree. I was a little surprised by what Rick has said either. I thought that we're we're we are not making a recommendation tonight and certainly. I, I thought that what I heard was that some of these things are going to go back to the engineering committee. That's what I thought too. And I mean, I think that, well, let's put it this way. I don't think anybody's jumping up and down and saying we should put plastic pipe above ground right. I mean, I think everybody agrees with the general assessment that HDB below ground is the logical thing and maybe some of the river, the creek costing should be steel above ground. But I don't think that's going to be plastic about that. But I think that seems like a fair thing that you've convinced us all of that. If that's what you need, Rick. And maybe I misstated because I am looking to take this back. I'm not looking for a formal board act and I'm trying to get a feel from the board. So when we go back to the engineering committee, we can drill down. There's no sense drilling down on, on putting in additional water treatment plants if that's not what we're hearing from the board tonight. But if I heard you all say that hey, that's great. Let's put in two more treatment plants. You know, we would spend more time. I don't want to spend at the NL's time or the engineering committee on a scenario that the district really has no interest in doing. And that's kind of my point for tonight is to kind of get an idea of the field of the board. Hey, Mark. Is it time for Rick to begin to have the discussion with FEMA? Yes, that question. I believe it is. Okay. I'm, I'm comfortable with that, given these preliminary cost numbers that we have from FNL for you to begin to have the discussion with FEMA with ears, the likely preferred alternative. It's most, most of the pipe being buried HDPE. There's probable costs and start to get a feel from FEMA. What questions they're going to have about us doing this work. I'm not expecting an answer from them anytime soon. Right. We'll also get some indication from FEMA FEMA has their own internal environmental and we may not have a choice of what they want to see for environmental. I mean, we have great choices. That's a great discussion tonight. The environmental team may say, hey, this project, because of the scope of this project, this is what you're going to do and they'll pay for, you know, we'll have to include them in. We've had some great environmental discussion and the environmental team that FNL has has met with our, our council and we've talked and, you know, it's been a great exercise. But we now have to go to the next step. Okay. So I'll ask one more question to the board with Jamie, but then after that I'm going to go out to the public. Sure. Thanks. And actually that's a, this will be a good transition because I was just going to acknowledge that in the timeline for having the conversations with FEMA, one of the things that came up today in the conversation. Chairman Mahood that we have with Congressman Pineda was that they are seeing some really unusual delays in the bureaucracy in terms of just processing, you know, any kind of, you know, project through the the administrative process right now and they it's because of the COVID and delays that they're seeing in the administrative process throughout the agency, but we should really anticipate. I would say, you know, very significant delays on that front and so I just, you know, want us all to be mindful of that and, you know, and patient as we go forward in this process and chair if you'd like to take public comment, that would be great. Yeah. Okay, let's go out and are there any comments. April. I think you can hear me now. Yes, we can. I'm just considering the buried HDPE in the diagram of the narrow bench, where there was an idea of putting some fill across it, but I believe that it was only about eight inches of fill, which makes me not so comfortable given that 18 inches is much safer in here. So that makes me wonder and maybe you have a rough idea and maybe you don't. How, what percentage of the pipeline would end up being in a narrow bench shallow fill situation, like how much risk are we exposing that pipe to along its length. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we do not have a distribution of how, how often we'll be using each one of those details. The purpose of those details was really to kind of provide us with a with a menu of options. So we'll be, you know, during the design phase, we would be really looking carefully at, you know, where we're using that the idea of that narrow bench was an opportunity to reduce potential disturbance of the watershed. But to your question about the, the fill, yeah, no, we, the idea with that narrow bench place in the pipe and then placing a small amount of fill over it is in that narrow bench we would expect, you know, reasonably soon after some sloughing to happen to that, you know, we basically would get some additional soil from the uphill slope to slough down. It wouldn't be used in an area where we would be concerned about, you know, unstable slopes and like that, but where we can take a benefit of reducing the amount of work being moved to take advantage of if we kind of cut in that bench and then allow kind of natural soil movement and in my case to provide that additional, you know, 12 to 14 inches of cover on it. So we would be very careful in selecting that option, because I concur with you, we don't want, we don't want to, you know, be providing just six inches of cover we want to provide something that's close to the 18 inches of cover where we find that we're going to provide, you know, reasonable safety factor to project the pipe. I think that answered the question, hopefully. Any other questions from the public? Rick Moran. Rick, did I see your hand go up? And then it went down. One more, one more chance with the public. Anybody want to ask a question? Okay, Rick, you definitely want to talk to us this time. Okay. I hope they emphasize that. All right, there's a lot of different terrains up there, and they can adjust to above ground, below ground, if the terrain can call for it. So I'd like them to focus in on that. The, the other thing I'd like to say is I know we haven't talked much about this hydro energy station, but I know that in the water district they've talked about it before, but I think that's really up on Bennett and Bull at the Fall Creek tributaries and never really took off. But I would love to see this be part of the project. And I just wonder how, you know, so it's about a million dollars. I was wondering how much, how long would it take for us to save a million dollars in electricity? Or when do you think we'd get our return on investment to use Bob's term? All right, thank you very much. But that is something that will be coming as we move ahead. Okay, so yeah, go ahead. Yeah, and I didn't catch the first part of Rick's comment, but it sounds like just being aware of the topography as we get into design, looking for opportunities to use a combination of above ground and below ground. Yes, I agree. We will do that. And did you want to comment on the hydroelectric? I guess what I was really struck by is that it's pretty small, 10 to 30 kilowatts. I mean, that's what it takes to power a house. And if it's going to cost us a million dollars, I kind of think, well, thank you very much, but no. You know, and unless it's putting electricity in a place that we otherwise don't have it, and we need it, but that that doesn't seem like a very good investment. Yeah, you're correct. Yeah, the ROI on it's not great. We'll just leave it at it. It's, you know, the facilities in particular with the impulse turbine are just, you know, expensive. There's a lot of infrastructure that goes into making those those hydro stations work well. I think I think we could, you know, look a little bit closer to the in line PRD solution that we might know ways to optimize it but again it's it's not, there's not a lot of potential there. It's not jumping out at me is a great. Any other comments by board members. Bob. Yeah, my dad worked in all the dams on the Columbia, most of the dams in the Columbia and he always said scale is everything when it comes to. And you know, yeah, we can certainly run the numbers that probably take you 15 minutes to do a quick spreadsheet and you'll see that you're, you're being very kind. The ROI isn't going to be there I don't think I did also want to raise the topic of financing. And that is how we're going to finance the balance so you know one of the reasons I pushed for 15 million for the project as I had this sneaking suspicion that these costs were going to escalate pretty rapidly. I think we've actually gone beyond that depending on how much FEMA will will pay for. And so we also we're going to have to talk about financing on this and and whether or not it might be better to look at p vine coming into the 15 million but five mile going into a separate financing type of arrangement whether that's a bond special assessment loan what have you I mean, but I think it's worthwhile discussing that at the finance committee level at some point. I also wanted to say very, very strongly though and in the end, giving Rick guidance from my personal perspective. I think one of the first things I said in the wake of the fires that we will not rebuild at least I didn't want to rebuild what we had before because it was not resilient to fire. And we certainly still have fire danger danger up there. So, above ground HPP from my point of view as a non starter above grounds welded steel, I can get with that but not above ground HPP period. Okay. Rick, do you go ahead, Mark. One last comment since we're already pretty much rolling out this, the electrical generation aspects and the potential of that. For now, Rick, I would recommend don't even bring that up with FEMA. Well, the hydro part of this is not FEMA. But I don't want to rule out hydro yet till we take the full look just like kind of everything else because there is carbon footprint there is other, you know, there is other aspects to creating, you know, and of course, we don't want to spend a an enormous sum of money for very little in fact, but we need to look at this from start to stop and get some good numbers. You know, we're a rough engineering costs now and take a good look at it. You know, this is the time to look at when we're replacing the pipeline. And let's take a full look at it just like you want to do with with the intakes and the amount of water that we get in. I agree keeping it in our evaluation at this point, but don't confuse FEMA. This is not eligible. It would come late in the project so we had time to budget if we were so to move ahead and there is still a lot of engineering to be done with this. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, that's that's a good point that it is not FEMA eligible. And, you know, to Bob's point, and the financing and the costs, you know, we need to get through this exercise with FEMA, find out exactly what the district's costs are. You know, realistically, they should be minimal. Even with an item minimal on 20 or 30 30 million could still be a lot of money. There's no doubt about that. But we need to lock down FEMA on numbers, and that may take two or three appeals. You know, this is FEMA is not an easy process. Their first answer is no. And then, you know, you keep fighting the process until you get the answer you want. And it's going to take a while. But at the same time, hopefully we can move ahead on environmental. We do have permitting to do with fish and game on the intake structures that are going to come up as part of this process. So there's there's a lot of work to do here. And that's why we got Forman Creek back in, because we are relying on the wells more. And there's no doubt about it. We're taking more surface water. Yes, out of Belton. But right now, we are not in compliance. We're working on an emergency temporary allowance to take more water. We're staying in the fisheries requirement. We're not violating fishery bypasses. We're shifting around where we're getting our water and we're more reliant. And you will see the increase in the Lompeco and the Santa Marga Rita aquifers this year because of CZU fire. So, you know, we'll get this information together back to engineering production data from the different sources. We'll open up dialogue now with FEMA on we're leaning towards, you know, talking to FEMA about an HDPE line underground. No decisions have been made, but we need to start the conversation. And we'll bring this back to the engineering department. I think that's what I heard tonight. Yeah. I guess one thing I would just add from my own standpoint is I would disagree with Director Fultz about the welded steel and this is just as a geologist speaking that I think that the hazards that that presents in terms of landslide hazards and earthquakes. I mean, I know we're focused on fire because that's, you know, most present in our mind, but we also have these other issues. And of course, that whole mountain is just one landslide after another on the east side of Bedlam and mountains. So, and the environmental impacts of putting in that is greater and it's also harder to fix. So my own personal take is I personally much favor the underground HDPE. And I hope that that's what we focus on. And even my HDPE pipe is a great product for this type of application but yes, it needs to be buried. You know, earthquakes and we've been through earthquakes we've been through landslides it's a very resilient pipe, especially because the joints are well done. You know, there's no fittings for it to pull out. And when you go to steel pipe, or was the pipes with valves and fittings they have gaskets. And that's where you get your VOCs from the melting rubber gaskets and the plastics. And once, you know, and, you know, there's some great points made tonight about, you know, use steel in some locations in the underground river crossings and use HDPE and others. One of the real problems is you have to be careful of if the VOCs release into the water in the pipe travels through the pipe, most likely we won't be able to get those VOCs out of the pipe. So, contamination is a concern going down the road, but that's all that will work. From my perspective, I really, really want to thank FNL, Japanese team, they assembled a very professional team of engineers, and a lot of great discussion went back and forth with the Director of Operations, the district engineer, Harley, our environmental planner, engineering committee, it was a group effort, we have a lot of experience in operating that pipeline and we installed that pipeline back in the day. But their team was great and we appreciated working with them up to this time and look forward to continuing. Bob, looks like you want to final word. Well, I want to make sure that I'm clarifying things because I still don't know that we're disagreeing. But my point was, is that if we had to go above ground and there was no other way to do it at particular places, then we would use steel, right? But yes, otherwise, you're absolutely correct. We want to go underground as much as we possibly can. Okay. We are in agreement then. Okay. All right. Again, I want to thank you, Jeff and your team for a good presentation and great discussion tonight. And I hope, as Lois says, it was a lot, and I hope that the public also gained a lot from listening to this. This is the beginning of what I'm sure engineering will be bringing back more for us to discuss in the future. So that I will let you guys go home. Thank you very much for coming tonight and we will continue on with our unfinished business, the first of which is the thing that allows us to continue to operate remotely. So we have a motion to ratify and re-adopt the... Do you think you're on a game show there, Jamie? I mean... Yeah, Jeopardy! You've got to listen up now, right? We know what this is. But the seven attendees may know. We have to ratify and re-adopt the attached resolution number 2122 so that we can continue, in effect, for another 30 days to meet remotely. So there's the motion. Do I have somebody that would move the motion? I'll keep the club for the second. Can we have a roll call vote, Holly? Mayhood, could you take public comment if there is any? Public comment. I don't see any. Good. I guess they all want to stay home in their PJs too. Their PJs with a glass of wine. It's much more fun. I don't see any comments from the public. So Holly, can we now have a roll call vote? President Mayhood. Yes. Vice President Henry. Yes. Director Ackman. Yes. Director Falls. Yes. Director Smalley. Yes. The next item on the agenda that passes, so we will continue to meet in our remote manner. The next is the consent agenda, which is the board of directors meeting minutes. Does anybody want to pull this from the consent agenda? Do I have to ask the public whether they want to pull it? Pursuant to board policy, that's appropriate to ask. Yeah. I think that's, I agree with you, Holly. I think that's something that we could discuss in the future. I think a lot of other places do not have the public pull things from the consent agenda, but I think the practice has been that they can. So I will turn. Yeah. I will turn to the public and ask whether they, there's anything that they would like to comment on here. If not, and nobody wants to pull it, then the consent agenda is approved. Next we have district reports. Are there any questions or comments on district reports by members of the board? Bob. You know, I have a fairly lengthy list, but in the interests of time and with the indulgence, Gail of yourself and Rick, I can send those to Rick by email, except for one question that I'll ask tonight. That'd be okay. Yeah. Okay. The one question has to do on the engineering report. With the. Fulton Heights tank project. I did not see this project on the newsletter project listing. And it's been in this sort of, you know, meta-state here for quite some time. And I'm trying to get a handle on whether or not this is something that's actually going to proceed anytime soon. I don't understand what the holdup is at this point. Right now. I'll answer that. Josh, right now we're having difficulty receiving correspondence back from the property owner. We had good correspondence district council and myself. And he had some questions. We responded. He was seeking legal counsel to help with him. I've sent several emails to him and we have not heard back from him. I don't know. Is the property owner sort of remote? That is remote to us does not live here in the. That's correct. Well, he, he doesn't live here. He lives up there. I do believe Palo Alto. And we're still trying to contact him. I haven't given up on it. He's a busy person. He works in the Stanford athletic department. And he's very busy. This isn't his top priority, but obviously it is ours. And I will step up the emails to him and try to get a definitive yes or no. And we may have to go back to an alternative site. Yeah, you know, he was very positive. We, he had a list of concerns. We thought we met those and had responded back to him. And that's the last we heard from him. Yeah. I mean, as you know, this has been a project that's been outstanding for many years. And I know the folks up in the Felton Heights area kind of want to see this. Draw to a conclusion one way or the other. You know, this project is more than just a tank because also a raw water source. And it lowers our, our staff time. And it's a great project all the way around. So we will step up additional emails. See what we can get from this gentleman. Or even a personal visit if that's necessary. Yeah. It's kind of out, but I can, I can call him. I do. Okay. Thank you. Mark. I will follow Bob's lead with the several questions that I have also and just email those to Rick since we're beyond nine o'clock at this point, but a comment that Rick just made triggered another thought. Do we know anybody who worked at Stanford previously that might be able to twist this athletic director's arm? Guess who was looking that. Yeah. And I know somebody else too. Yeah. Okay. But that would be inappropriate. Let me, let me continue to try to reach out because he's, you know, he's a, he's very easy to work with, but you know, you're not going to push him. That's for sure. Let me reach out. And as the last resort, I will come back. I used to have links with the athletic department, Rick. So I can, I can do this in a nice way. If it's somebody I know. Right. I think actually his caretaker, Gail, reach out to you. We can talk about that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Lois. I just have. It's, it's just kind of a comment. I like to look at the bill pay. And I see that in this bill pay. We had, we paid Ernie's auto center. $13,644 and a few cents. And it just seems like. Did we, we go on a rampage and do a lot of work on the trucks. Or what is it? Because there, most of it doesn't say some of the little things. Were like wiper blades or something. And so I don't know. I'm just curious. Why it would be so much all of a sudden. Director of operations will see what he can. Inform you Lois and if not, we'll get back James. Yes, we had a big ticket item and it was a transmission replacement on one of our dump trucks. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. It would have been nice if it was said, you know, transmission replacement. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for your answer. Are there any questions from members of the public on the district reports? I do want to point out something in my report that the flushing notification to the board is in my report. That we will be starting flushing in March. Okay. All right. Okay. Well, I guess that brings us to item 10 adjournment. So if there's no objection, I will declare us adjourned. And good night. Thank you all for good discussions. Thank you. Thank you.