 Okay, well, I have the time as 6 p.m. So I would like to convene this special meeting of the Board of Directors of the San Lorenzo Valley, what are district on May 12th, 2021? Holly, would you take the roll call please? Is Holly there? Yes, I'm here. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry, I couldn't hear anything and everybody's frozen. I'm having a lot of issues this evening. It's a little, it's, you're coming through but it's a little cut up. But let's go ahead and have the roll call, please. President Mayhood, here. Vice President Henry, here. Director Ackman, here. Director Fouls, here. Director Fouls, here. Director Smalley, here. Are there any additions? I'm not hearing everyone, but at least I can see that you're there. So. We'll try to speak up for you. Are there any additions and deletions to tonight's agenda? Then we'll move on to oral communications, which is the portion of the agenda that's reserved for oral communications by member of the public. On any subject which is within the jurisdiction of the district but is not on the agenda tonight. And let's see, do we have attendees? I have four. Do any of them want to make a comment at this point? Hearing none and seeing none, we will go ahead and move on to new business. And there's only one item on our agenda tonight. That's a workshop for conjunctive use plan and the CEQA review that is associated with that. And I will just remind people that workshops are slightly different than regular meetings. They're basically designed to educate the board and members of the public. I've been asked by the people that will be presenting tonight to hold any substantive questions until the end of all the presentations. If there's something that's burning that it's just a clarification, you think something's really confusing, go ahead and raise your hand. But it should be some kind of question that could be answered in just really, really briefly. Otherwise we'll hold all questions to the end. So now to our district manager, Rick Rogers. Thank you, Chair Maynard. I will ask the environmental planner, Carter Blanchard to kick off the presentation. Great, thank you, everyone. And thank you for joining us tonight for this special meeting. As you all heard and hopefully all know, we are here to discuss the conjunctive use plan for the San Lorenzo Valley Water District or also referred to as the CUP. Tonight we'll go through a brief overview of what the plan is, why the plan is going to exist and how it started, along with what will be within the plan and its associated scenarios. And then the upcoming sequel analysis and process. The goal of the conjunctive use plan was to identify opportunities for improving the reliability of surface and groundwater supplies through conjunctively managing water supplies while also increasing stream-based flows for fish. The planning for the conjunctive use plan itself started in 2017 as part of a grant win partnership with the County of Santa Cruz. As part of the conjunctive use plan and the grant funding, the district has completed two reports, initially starting with the water availability assessment for the San Lorenzo River Watershed Conjunctive Use Plan created by Exponent in January of 2019 and then followed by the fisheries resource considerations for the San Lorenzo River Watershed Conjunctive Use Plan completed by fisheries ecologist Mike Podlick in November of 2019. Both of these reports are on the district's website and available for public review. Currently, the next step in completing the conjunctive use plan will be going through the sequel analysis and then finalizing the conjunctive use plan itself. Right now, the district believes we'll have both the sequel and the draft of the conjunctive use plan ready for public review along with the actual sequel and by the end probably of the next month. So probably within the next couple of months, the board and public will see these documents. And the idea of tonight's meeting is to give everyone a good background. So when those two documents are available, they will be understood. The district and the county, as mentioned earlier, did receive grant funding and I'm going to go ahead and pass this off to Sierra Ryan from the County of Santa Cruz to go a little further into the background of how this grant partnership was entered with the county. Thank you, Sierra. Thank you, Carly. All right, good evening, everybody. I'm going to provide just a little bit of history about the funding behind this project. As background, the county has long been involved in efforts to monitor and enhance various aspects of the local environment. That's a role that we have. We've been involved with the seal head monitoring program for several decades. Water quality monitoring we've been doing since the 70s and we help to write and enforce some of the many riparian protections in the area. In environmental health in particular, which is where I work, we consider the environment and environmental users of water to be some of our constituents. So with that in mind for the past decade, the county has been partnering with local agencies, local water agencies on projects to optimize the available water sources by maximizing surface water use during the winter and spring and groundwater use during the summer and fall. The type of water management, as you I'm sure are aware, is referred to as conjunctive use. And the idea is that it benefits both the streams and the little critters that rely on the streams by leaving water in the streams during the low flow times of year. And it benefits the groundwater basins by allowing them to recharge better during the wet times of year. In 2016, the Wildlife Conservation Board released a solicitation for projects through their stream flow enhancement program. The district was interested in using these funds in particular with the hope of being able to do more routine water transfers around the district systems. But at the time, they didn't have the capacity to apply for and manage the grant. So they reached out to the county and we stepped into partner and moved the project forward. And together we were awarded $330,000 in 2017. So the Wildlife Conservation Board saw this as a particular win because it offers both water supply security and to their priority which it offers benefits to fisheries resources. And that really is the focus of the grant. Since then we've been working in partnership with the district. The county is really just the administrator of this grant or kind of the administrative lead but it's more of a pass through. And we provide some technical support and obviously have been reviewing all the documents but the district is really leading the activities and the priorities of the plan. And all the subcontracts have been through the district. So as the work is advanced, we've been able to additionally integrate it into some of the work that's happening through the Santa Margaret groundwater agency which has been another real benefit of the fact that this project is a partnership. That's really all I have to say about the background but I'll be here if there's some questions after the rest of the presentation. Mike, I believe you're muted. How's that? Better. Good evening, everyone. My name is Mike Potlik. I'm a fisheries biologist based in Santa Cruz County and I've been working with the district and the county on the conjunctive use plan since 2018 and I'm happy to go through some of the ways that the plan was developed and the components of the plan. The first thing that the district prepared was a water availability analysis prepared by exponent, Nick Johnson, you may know. He worked with the district for a long time. Nick Johnson designed and simulated a total of 22 alternative conjunctive use scenarios basically thinking of different ways of how to move water around to improve district water sustainability as well as improve stream flows and fisheries habitat. These scenarios basically fit into four broad categories. First, Nick Johnson looked at opportunities to simply optimize the current sources that the district has. Either with existing or modified infrastructure by a modified infrastructure would be something like increasing the capacity of an existing diversion facility. Now the category was to evaluate options for the district to use its existing but currently unused allotment of a portion of the Lopblom and Reservoir water. A third category was to increase the yield of the Olympia well field with an aquifer storage and recovery program supplied by surface water diversions during the winter from some of the existing diversion facilities. And when we can get more into aquifer storage and recovery later on. And the final category was an evaluation of opportunities to if there's remaining available surface water to deliver that to Scots Valley to use as in lieu recharge to substitute for groundwater. Out of these 22 scenarios, district staff selected a total of three to evaluate further. And then as I'll mention in a minute through that evaluation, we developed one additional scenario that was subsequently analyzed to the same standards as the rest of the water available the assessment alternatives. Can go to the next slide. I wanna quickly take a step back just to make sure that everyone's fully familiar with the different largely independent service areas that the district manages and the sources of water for each one of these districts for each one of these service areas. The largest of the three is the North service area on this map kind of outlined by the dark blue line. And the North service area includes primarily Boulder Creek, Brookdale, Ben Lomond, as well as now Lompeco. The North service area supplied by surface water diversions from Pevine Creek and Foreman Creek, Clear Creek and Sweetwater, which is a tributary to Clear Creek, as well as some groundwater wells in the Quail Hollow area. The second service area is the Felton area outlined in kind of the orange down at the bottom of the map. The Felton area only has surface water sources. These are Fall Creek, Bennett Creek and Bold Creek, all flowing into Felton. So Felton does not currently have any groundwater supplies. Last but not least, the South service area, which is outlined in purple down in the right bottom hand corner of the map. And right adjacent to Scott's Valley. The South service area does not have any surface water sources, but relies completely on groundwater primarily from several Pasad-Tiempo wells. The three systems are currently, as I mentioned, largely independent, but there are, the district does have intertized between them, but these are currently only authorized for emergency use. So under a current injunctive use program, those intertized would need to be authorized for more regular water transfers between the different service areas. And I'll go to the next slide. As I mentioned, when district staff selected three conjunctive use scenarios to move forward and evaluate further, I was tasked to evaluate the fisheries effects of those three scenarios. And then through that analysis, we identified one additional scenario that also ended up being selected by staff as moving forward for the conjunctive use plan. I'll go to the next slide, please. All right, so I'll go through these four selected scenarios and provide a pretty broad overview. I'm gonna try not to get too much into the weeds, but please, if you're free to ask questions about it later on. The first scenario is, it's a mouthful, the San Lorenzo River at Big Trees low flow requirement modification scenario, which in the water availability analysis, abbreviated WAA, was identified as scenario 1B. The background to this scenario is that the Felton system currently, the water rights for the Felton system has two separate requirements for in-stream flows. One of those is that in Fall Creek downstream of the Fall Creek diversion, certain bypass flows need to be met during, and these vary between dry years and non-dry years. And you can see here on your screen what those requirements are. So these are amounts that must be bypassed, i.e. not diverted and left in stream in Fall Creek. Under this scenario, the district would propose to continue fully complying with these existing Fall Creek permit requirements. However, there's another set of requirements that relate to flows in the San Lorenzo River itself downstream of the Felton diversion at what is known as the San Lorenzo River at Big Tree USGS stream gauge. Now, according to mine and others interpretation of the water rights, the entire Felton system is subject to these low flow requirements on the San Lorenzo River. You can see here in September, that is 10 cubic feet per second, October 25 CFS in November through May 20 CFS, meaning that at any time that the San Lorenzo River flows are lower than those, no diversions at all would be allowed for the Felton system, meaning that the Felton would not have any water. And just to give you an example, the 25 CFS requirement for October, well, for the historic record, 65% of the time natural flows in the river were below 25 CFS in the San Lorenzo River. So you can see that that is a significant constraint on the Felton system and water availability for the town of Felton. And it's a poorly kept secret that the district has not always been complying with these, but because of public safety concerns and typically the state water board accepts those types of reasons for exceeding diversions. Nevertheless, one of the goals of the conjunctive news work plan was to find a way to meet all existing requirements. However, the water availability analysis found that that would only be possible with considerable, with new sources of water to the Felton system. So this scenario is basically requesting that the state water board relieve the district of its San Lorenzo River at big trees, in stream flow requirements under the permit. This would not require any changes to the existing operations or infrastructure of the district because everything is already in place. It would simply remove an onerous requirement that as I will mention on the next slide, next slide please. I won't go into this in great detail, but again, feel free to ask me questions later. But essentially this requirement was not based on fisheries needs in the San Lorenzo River and in my professional opinion does not add much to the protection of fisheries resources. What the requirement seems to have been pretty clearly, the intent behind it was to protect the city of Santa Cruz's water rights in Felton which are senior to the district's rights. But in a matter of fact is that most of the time, for example, in October, so the city does not divert and therefore does not use its right at that location. And when it does, flows are usually so high that the diversions from the district don't really affect whether or not the city can or cannot exercise their rights. Clearly, asking or requesting relief from an existing bypass flow requirement from the state water board is not a true conjunctive use project. No water will be transferred, no water will be saved in one place and used in another place. But relief from this requirement will provide the district with greater management flexibilities and including for the implementation of other conjunctive use projects that I'm gonna go through next. So rather than, I don't wanna say wasting but I will say quote unquote, wasting water on a requirement that has limited benefits. We feel it is prudent to relieve the district of this requirement and use the water more wisely in other locations. Okay, the next scenario is the North System Diversion Scenarios, Water Availability and Analysts Scenario 1F. This project would promote in lieu groundwater recharge of the Santa Margarita groundwater basin by supplying the south system, remember that's reliant only on groundwater, with imports of North System Unused Potential Diversions. Let me quickly explain unused potential. The North System Diversions are pre-1914 rights. So there's no specific permit attached to those. And what the Water Availability Analysis did was to look at available water during the winter, during the high flow periods, when there's enough water flowing down the streams. And at the same time, demand for the district is lower because people aren't watering their yards, et cetera. So there would not be any increases in the existing diversion capacities or anything like that. The only thing that would happen is that rather than the district reducing the diversions because of reduced demand, the district would continue to operate at its existing capacities in the winter and spring and transfer that water to the south system and the south system therefore would be able to reduce groundwater diversions during that time, thereby helping to recharge the groundwater aquifer which is what we call in lieu recharge. Another scenarios, an average of 115 acre feet per year and a maximum of 300 acre feet per year would be transferred from these unused potential diversions down to the south system. The only infrastructure that would be required for this is already present. And as I mentioned before, this would use the existing intertized which are currently only authorized for use during emergency situations. So to implement this, the continued use or the more extended use of those intertized would need to be evaluated and authorized under the CEQA. Next slide, please. The overall effects of this north system diversion scenario is that A, there wouldn't be any significant adverse effects to winter flows because they would only occur when there's higher flows anyways. The S, there would be an estimated decrease in south system groundwater pumping by up to 32%. And this decrease in pumping would result in recharge to the groundwater system that would in turn is estimated to raise drought minimum base flows in some of those eastern tributary streams that the flow across the, flow through the Santa Margarita basin such as Bean Creek, Xayanti Creek and the San Lorenzo River itself by approximately a 10th of a cubic foot per second. Now, a 10th of a cubic foot per second is modest. It's not a great increase, but at times when during drought flows when portions of, for example, Bean Creek going entirely dry in the summer, the addition of a 10th of a CFS is very much meaningful. So as the slide says down here, during these critical times, every little bit helps. Next slide, please. The third scenario selected by district staff is the Loch Lomond Scenarios. As many of you will know, the district has an allotment to up to 313 acre feet per year of Loch Lomond water. This allotment has not been used since the 1970s. So it's essentially district water sitting in Loch Lomond and currently not being used. Using some of that water to promote in lieu recharge again of the Santa Margarita groundwater basin by supplying it to the South system for in lieu recharge is what this scenario is essentially about. Some new infrastructure would be required and then there's a design map of an overview map of that on this slide. Essentially, the district would need to tap into the existing into the city's existing pipeline and extend a pipeline to the existing curvy treatment plant and then perform some upgrades within the curvy plant again as well. And again, the existing emergency entities would be used to transfer the water to the South system and again, these are currently only authorized for emergency use. So they would need to be authorized for continuous use. Next slide, please. The estimated effects of this scenario include, first of all, this is what I'm calling environmentally free water. What I mean by that is that this, that water in the city's existing water in Loch Lomond Reservoir is diverted by the city of Santa Cruz pursuant to their existing water rights as well as more recent agreements with National Marine Fisheries Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in the Habitat Conservation Plan. So any water that ends up in Loch Lomond Reservoir is already, has all potential adverse effects to fisheries resources already mitigated for. So once it's in the reservoir, it's environmentally free water meaning the district would not be under, would not have new requirements imposed on it for in-stream flow requirements. This project would decrease this Paso Tiempo groundwater pumping by 67%. So two thirds of pumping and would result in an estimated increase in drought minimum base flows again and beans anti-creeks and the San Lorenzo River by seven to eight percent, which is approximately 0.15 cubic feet per second. So stacking the previous increases from scenario 1F or the North System Diversions scenario onto this, we're getting to a quarter of a cubic foot per second of increased drought flows in those Eastern tributaries. Which is a significant fisheries benefit during those times. Altogether the three scenarios I've talked about so far provide modest but meaningful fisheries benefits. But we worked to identify whether there was maybe another scenario that isn't as, maybe not as easily implementable as the previous three, but would provide an even greater benefit to in-stream resources, fisheries resources as was envisioned by the grant funders. And the scenario identified is called the Aquifer Storage and Recovers scenario. Just to take a little step back to do conjunctive use effectively or to utilize winter water abundance or what used to be winter water abundance effectively for summer use, one needs to have significant storage. Which other than the Loch Lomond Reservoir Allotment, the district currently does not have. Avery provides some of that. Essentially what Aquifer Storage Recovery is is diverting surface water, injecting it into the ground water when it's available and then pumping it back out, i.e. recovering it later, i.e. during the summer. The scenario would require significant planning and infrastructure needs. And aquifer storage and recovery is something that doesn't work everywhere. So pilot studies would need to be implemented that determine what the actual injection rates are and what the recovery rates are, whether the district would recover much of or most of the water that it's injecting or whether it's losing a lot. None of these investigations have been conducted and would need to be conducted. And so this scenario is somewhat of a kind of a long-term conceptual planning scenario. And Megan will talk more in a little bit about the implications for that under CEQA. If implemented or as envisioned in the water availability analysis, this scenario would use an estimated 190 acre feet per year of diversions from the North system, primarily Clear Creek, again, during the winter and spring high-flow periods, as well as 220 acre feet per year from the Felton system, also during the winter and spring high-flow seasons. And inject those into an aquifer storage and recovery system and then subsequently extract those in the summer and fall to significantly reduce both the North system ground water pumping, thereby again, promoting in-lure recharge, as well as reduce and or temporarily suspend surface water diversions in the summer from Foreman and Pevine Creek diversion sites to increase summer surface flows in Boulder Creek itself, which is an important steelhead stream. The estimated benefits to Boulder Creek, Bean Creek, Zandy Creek and San Lorenzo River are significant. I didn't include the estimates on that. We can go through those if you'd like, but the significance, I think, about this scenario, if implemented, is that the benefits would extend throughout much of the watershed from Boulder Creek down the San Lorenzo River, as well as from the East side, Bean Creek, Zandy Creek, and to a certain extent, Newell Creek as well. And still end up down at the San Lorenzo River big tree gauge where we're requesting to have our in-stream flow requirements removed. So we're essentially, as a whole, the program would move flow benefits up the watershed and that would then flow down the watershed and still kind of end up down in the lower San Lorenzo River. And I think that is it for me. Yeah. Thanks, Mike, and good evening, everyone. My name is Megan Jones. I'm with Rincon Consultants. We were retained by the district to assist with environmental review of the conjunctive use plan. I'm the project manager for that effort. So I'm here tonight to kind of pivot from Mike's presentation to talk about the environmental review, provide a little background, what it is we'll be looking at and kind of provide the status of where we are in the next steps and timeline. So for those of you who are not familiar with CEQA, the reason we're doing this environmental analysis is really because of the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA, which comes with a lot of acronyms. CEQA was passed into law in 1970 with several key purposes. First was really to inform decision making and disclose potentially significant environmental impacts of projects prior to this act being enacted. You didn't have to consider environmental impacts of a project before making a decision on it. So the intent really is to provide that information to disclose that to the public and decision makers to take that into account as part of the decision making process. CEQA goes a step further to identify ways to avoid or reduce those impacts. So instead of just saying what the impacts are, we take it a step further, we identify what's called mitigation measures to try to reduce those impacts. Some of the CEQA analyses also include alternatives to a proposed project which are again intended to reduce those impacts. And last but certainly not least, the intent of CEQA is to foster public participation and interagency coordination. There's various steps through the process during which the public can provide input review documents and I'll explain sort of when that will be for this process in a couple of slides. So the document we're preparing for the conjunctive use plan is what's known as an initial study and mitigated negative declaration or ISM and D again with the acronyms. I'll probably use the shorter term initial study to refer to this document moving forward. But this document evaluates environmental impacts to determine if a project would have a significant adverse impact on the environment. When an impact is determined to be significant, the initial study will identify mitigation measures to reduce those impacts to a less than significant level as I described earlier. And we use what's called thresholds to compare those impacts. So we're trying to get the impacts back below those established thresholds. An initial study can really only be prepared when all impacts can be reduced to less than significant or below those thresholds if it cannot because there's not available mitigation or the mitigation just isn't sufficient to reduce that impact. You have to prepare what's called an environmental impact report or EIR which is sort of better known in the CEQA world or some of the public is more familiar with the term EIR. Those are a more detailed analysis, lengthier document, lengthier process and what we're going through for the conjunctive use plan. The initial study will look at all of the 18 required environmental issue areas that are in CEQA. They're listed here from aesthetics to wildfire, everything in between. So there's a wide variety of issue areas that we look at. We follow a checklist format. So there's actually check boxes and under each of these issue areas there's a number of questions or thresholds that we have to look at and explain why the project would or would not result in an impact. Given the nature of the conjunctive use plan and the proposed improvements and operational changes we expect that key issue areas for this document will be biological resources, primarily the fisheries resource, hydrology and water quality as well as utilities and service systems which is where we look at water supply. As Mike mentioned the first two scenarios are primarily moving water around not constructing new infrastructure. The Loch Lomond scenario does include new infrastructure so we'll also look at construction phase impacts that could be short-term impacts to air quality, noise, that sort of a thing. So we'll look at the wide variety of impacts there. And Mike did a great job of providing a lot of background and detail on the scenario so I'm not gonna reiterate that too much here but I do just wanna be clear what the CEQA document will be looking at and what it won't. So it's gonna be looking at the first three scenarios that Mike described in some detail, the SLRBT Low Flow Requirements Modification scenario which is a mouthful but it's the best we could come up with. The second one is the North System Diversion scenario and then finally the Loch Lomond scenario. So as we've described the first two scenarios don't require any infrastructure improvements it's utilizing existing infrastructure and just changing when and how and where water can be moved around. The third scenario of course has some infrastructure improvements that we will be looking at. The fourth scenario Mike described as he sort of alluded to is this Future Aquifer Storage and Recovery scenario. It's currently quite hypothetical the location, the size, operational details the level of infrastructure where that would all go that's really unknown at this point. So it's really speculative and hard to analyze in a CEQA document. It's also has what we call independent utility which means it could be implemented on its own it does not rely on these other scenarios so it really is a standalone project. So for those reasons the current document that we're preparing will not look at the Aquifer Storage and Recovery project. If and when that is pushed forward by the district and proposed and additional studies are done there will have to be a project specific environmental review of just that scenario could be another initial study like we're preparing here or could be a full blown environmental impact report just depending on the level of infrastructure needs. So where we are in the process right now is that we are preparing what's called an administrative draft initial study which is our internal draft to submit to the district staff for their review. That's in progress now as I mentioned we're doing the analysis. Once we submit that the district will review provide their comments we will address those and prepare a public review draft which goes out to the public for a 30 day review period. So during that review period the public agencies and organizations have a chance to review the document submit their comments and writing and that is estimated to be happening in July 2021. So just about a month and a half or so from now. Once that comment period closes we take all of those public comments and we respond to each of them in writing. Sometimes the responses to those comments results in revisions to the analysis and so the final initial study will include those revisions as well as all the responses to comments and that becomes what's known as the final initial study or ISM and D which is what will go to the board for consideration and approval prior to approval of the conjunctive use plan. Our current schedule anticipates that we will be providing the final initial study in September of 2021. And that is it for my brief presentation. Now I will pass it to Rick for some final thoughts. You're muted there. Thank you very much. Really a good presentation. As you heard the conjunctive use project for the district in San Lorenzo River watershed is really important. Through conjunctive use it will allow the district to manage our water sources system wide achieving our goals by identifying opportunities, improving the reliability of our surface and groundwater supplies and also our stream based flows for fisheries. These projects are not only important in that aspect but they're also important part of the Santa Margarita groundwater agency. They're part of the groundwater projects and management actions. Although these projects won't solve the issues in the basin these projects are moving us in the right direction demonstrating that we have identified multiple ways in which the basin could reach a sustainability and also operationally these projects give the district so much flexibility moving surface water from one end of the district to the other as experienced during the recent CZU fire using water when and where we needed it during that emergency. And then after the fire was out we still had residual issues with water quality from sources and so forth until we could get our analytical VOC sampling completed to assure our water was acceptable water quality. So the flexibility is so important. And with that I would like to thank the team for the presentation. They all worked hard on it and right up to the, almost to the last minute thank Mike and Sierra and all for all their hard work. And with that I'd like to turn it over to our chair for questions. Well, I'd like to second your compliments Rick to the team that put this together. I thought that was a great presentation and I learned a lot watching it. So thank you. I will suggest that we just kind of do our normal thing where we go through all members of the board one time and with questions and then I'll go out and ask if any members of the public have a question and then we'll come back to the board and see if there are any more. So we'll go ahead and start with director Ackman. Thank you. Thank you, director or president Mahood. I am, I hope I'm not asking things that are kind of remedial in nature since I'm new to the board. So forgive me for that. But I have been following the issues related to Santa Cruz's request to change their water rights as they relate to Santa Rosa Valley River. And I just wanna know what do we anticipate in terms of a comment from Santa Cruz regarding the conjunctive use plan and our potential request to modify our Fall Creek water rights. And do we see our request to modify our Fall Creek water rights as would that foreclose their ability to change their Santa Rosa Valley River water rights and does that create a problem? Who wants to try to take that? Yeah, so we are expecting the city of Santa Cruz to comment when we do go to petition this change and the water right there. However, we would like to try to work with the city prior to actually filing the petition for those permanent changes. And we hope that we can resolve those concerns or issues there before actually moving into the petition itself. And Brick might have something to add to that. I know he's been working with Rosemary at the city of Santa Cruz a bit and they are aware of this projects and they are aware that we wanna pilot these positions moving forward. You know, I think they're waiting to see the documentation and you know, they've made it clear that they're going to protect their interest and as we would with the city, not anticipating anything that would derail that we couldn't work with the city on because as Mike said, we really don't believe that it will impact the city's operations. And I think that's our number one concern. President Mahood, if I could ask one follow-up question about that, when would we, if we are adopting the conjunctive use plan in September 2021 based on the timeline, if I've got that right, when do we anticipate that we would file that petition to modify the Fall Creek water rights or do we know? We're currently working with our water rights attorney to figure out when we can get those petitions filed. You know, we don't have an exact date. Ideally, we'd like to do it before June, the end of June coming up here and that is a quick window. So it may end up going beyond that, but you know, we are working with the water rights attorney right now to get a better idea of that. Okay, thank you, Carly. Okay, Director Fultz. Gail, I'll go ahead and go last, if that'd be okay. That's fine. Director Henry. Lois, you're muted. I'm concerned about injecting water and whether it actually works. You know, some of the things I've heard about have been pretty negative and if you only get half of it back, to me it seems like a big waste of water. Even to lose a third of it to me, it seems like a waste. And if I was listening correctly, it sounded like that since Felton has no ground, no surface water. They have, or they didn't know groundwater. They have no groundwater. And so from the North System, 190 acre feet and from Felton, 220 acre feet to be injected into the ground, it seems like a lot of water to me. And that's my big concern. What kind of, I guess we don't really know how much we'll get back, but if that worries me. Sierra or Carly, would you respond? You wanna go, Rick? I was gonna say, it's on the presentation. It has been excluded from this document. So I think we recognize there's a lot more information needed before we would move ahead. And I do believe this is also one of the projects of the Santa Marta River Groundwater that I think they've modeled and they've done a lot more background on. I think this one was modeled. So there's probably more to follow or more to come, Lois, from the Santa Marta River Groundwater Agency. Yeah, I would just add to that Lois that one of the reasons this hasn't been followed up is that when you talk about amounts of water, the city of Santa Cruz has a lot because they've got the water rights to the Santa Lorenzo River. So if we're going to do one of these aquifer storage and recovery efforts, it's very likely that it would involve storing water that the city of Santa Cruz has. So that's one thing. The other is that we all know that we don't actually know whether it would work to put inject water and get it back out of the La Pico, just as you said. And there would need to be some kind of pilot studies that would be done similar to the ones that have been started between the, tell me if I'm right Sierra, the Soquel and at the Beltswells and the city of Santa Cruz, is that correct? And they have some additional problems with arsenic on the water coming back. So these are things that are gonna be really expensive and we're gonna have to think a lot about them. But my guess is that the team put this one aside because they realized that if you're gonna do this, you go to the people that have the water. Which is us. Well, we have plenty, but the city of Santa Cruz has even more to say. They have the river, but so is there any reports out of, have they tried this with river water? Injecting. Sierra, you wanna answer that? Yeah, well, I'll do my best. And it wouldn't be a bad idea at some point to have someone from the city speak more about their pilot testing, but they have been injecting treated river water into their Beltswell system, which is in Live Oak for the past, the pilot studies started about a year and a half ago. And there's a lot of data that's come out of that. As Gail mentioned, they've had a little bit of concern with higher arsenic levels, but that doesn't seem to be unusual with aquifer storage and recoveries. There's also similar pilot projects happening right now in the Peninsula area through the Monterey One Water Project. And they've been doing much larger scale injection wells that there's also a lot of data to glean from. So you're correct that there's still a lot of uncertainties, but there is work being done right now that can benefit this effort. Yeah, and if I may just add one thing is that you're absolutely right again. The thing with aquifer storage and recoveries is that it's very, very site specific as to how well or how poorly it performs, which is why pretty much every water district or water entity that is considering it is conducting their own pilot studies. I mean, I've seen instances where a injection well was constructed in one side and did not produce the desirable results yet a mile away where the groundwater conditions are different. It worked very well. So it's very site specific and oftentimes other studies from other areas don't really apply to your area. And just one other quick thing regarding the amounts of water, again, the analysis used the quote unquote unused winter diversions. So for example, the 220 acre feet from Felt and this is winter water that is currently not being diverted and doesn't need to be diverted because there is no demand for it. So again, it's that water during those high flows would go down to the river and down to the ocean. Those would be captured and injected. Director Smalley. Yes, I think I have three questions. Mike, on slide eight, you showed dry versus wet years. What's your definition of dry versus wet? They're not my definition. It's the state water boards definition. And I don't have it in front of me, but it is dependent on the cumulative flow in each month, again, at the San Lorenzo River big trees gauge. So essentially during the month of October, I think is when it begins. If cumulative flows are less than 900 acre feet during that month, that means you're in a dry year. If it's more, you're in a non-dry year. And then in the next month, more cumulative flow gets stacked onto that kind of threshold. And again, if you're below that, it's a dry year. And if you're above that, it's a wet year. So the water I had permit goes through that specifically what those thresholds are. Okay. And staying with this slide number eight, you gave us the metric for when we're out of, when we're not meeting the criteria for the October's from historical. And since the November through May periods are close to that CFS, do we have a feel for how often historically for those other periods that we're not meeting that flow requirement? Yes. Okay. And I don't, I'm not looking for those now, but I think it would be good for us as directors to be able to understand the rest of that metric since I think you've probably compiled it. Yes. Yes. Those are in both of the reports that we mentioned. Oh, okay. If it's in the report, I can look there. Yeah. And, you know, I have to admit, for effect, I chose the largest month. Understand. The biggest effect month to show you, yeah. And, you know, as you may guess, once you get to November through May, natural flows in the river are higher. So it's easier to, it's more common for those flows to exceed 20 cubic feet per second than it is for October flows to exceed 25. Right. Okay. And the aquifer storage and recovery, we're not going to be looking at that now as part of the secret process. I think that that's a good thing given other concerns expressed with that. But is it suffice to say, for now, the district isn't doing any further work or expending any further monies on evaluating or looking at aquifer storage and recovery. That's correct. Okay. Good. Thank you. That's the answer I was looking for, Rick. Yes. Good. Okay. That's all of my questions. Thanks. Thank you. Director Fultz? Yeah, it's just following up on Mark's question and comment about that. I wholeheartedly second that these injection wells are simply unaffordable for a small district like us. We don't have to scale for it monetarily or with a number of customers. And when you start talking about the pipe to get to an injection well at $500 a foot, we're looking at millions of dollars in piping. I had a few questions and then a couple of comments. On the first scenario, 1B, I may be confused. In fact, we're looking at it right here. I may be confused about this is what we're looking for a result in a period of time where we would no longer extract water out of the Felton diversions. So if we had like a really dry year like now, would there be a point at which we would, we're basically saying to the state, hey, we won't take any more water out of the Fall Creek, Bennett or Bull Creek? It's kind of works the other way around. Your water right permit states that you cannot divert from the Felton sources unless flows in the river meet at least that threshold. So we're removing that restriction then. So we're planning to request that the say water board remove that restriction because we feel it doesn't particularly benefit fish or the city. I understand. So I mean, I know that there are times when we're not in compliance now, but and this isn't an excuse, but my understanding is that no entity has ever been 100% in compliance of this water right. And that predates San Juan's Valley Water District ownership of this facility. So this isn't something that our district is uniquely bailing in some way. And I think that's an important thing to make. The next scenario in diverting surface water to Scots Valley, how much water per year does Scots Valley use our system? Is that the nature of 130 acre feet a year? So first of all, this is not Scots Valley. I understand it's not, it's our section of Scots Valley. I understand. Right, okay, okay, yeah. Yeah, I don't have the numbers in front of me, that those are described in great detail in the water availability analysis. Okay, it gets over 300 acre feet a year than our South System uses. Yeah, I think they use more than sort of average and they're about 10 or about 12 to 15% of our subscriber base. So I was guessing so. Well over 300 acre feet a year that Scots Valley uses. And what we saw at one slider that it was like 67% if we did, sorry, but. Yeah, and so the next part of this is if we stack this with the next one, effectively what we're saying is in as many years as possible, Scots Valley is 100% surface water. That is, we're really not taking any more well water out. Is that the objective? No, I think the objective is to try to balance use available surface waters that we can without impacting fisheries. Maximize our sources using groundwater last, using our lock moment water first and our surface sources and then well water last. I don't think you could ever get away 100% with not using the South System wells. Yeah, so I was a little confused then by the 32% and the 67% that were on the two scenarios. I wasn't sure it would be additive or just possible maximum. I think it's possible maximum. Yes, it's possible maximum because again, those transfers would only be occurring during the high flow season or the winter and spring season. The neither the north system, well, I guess the lock moment would be available during the summer, but no, that's a total reduction. And then you have certain years during drought where there's no water, no surface water to move down. You'd have to rely on the wells. But I mean, conceivably in a wet year you could be stacking these, taking surface water from the north in the winter time and then lock moment water in the summer. Correct. And be virtually 100% surface water at that point. There are times possibly when you have adequate rainfall. Sure, not this year. I get that. Or last year. Or last year. So just on that lock moment situation, just another question, the water that we would get from lock moment, do we have to pay anything for it? Yes, we pay a, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what it is, but we pay a raw water rate. And so that's already been negotiated. A long time ago, you know, I haven't looked at those documents and couldn't tell you if that would be the price today. The Santa Cruz wrecked that rate, yeah. Say that again Bob, I'm sorry you broke off. Okay. I don't know if you can hear me or not. So that's still an open question then. That's still an open question. If you go to our website under projects and looked at the lock moment study that we did about 20 years ago, it had the prices at that time, that the last time we purchased water and had some estimates. Okay. Most likely, you know, as prices went up, that we'd probably have to renegotiate that. Bob, did you have any other questions? One more question and then a comment. So I can't hear you. I don't know if anybody else can, but if I do, I do have another question. Can you hear me now? I hear you. I can hear you Bob. Sorry. Yeah, so during the Fulton acquisition process, was there any indication given to the Fulton residents that those water sources would be used exclusively for Fulton? That is they would never be shipped anywhere else? I believe that that was specifically addressed just due to the fact that we had water rights that stated in place of use. It was always our intention, staff discussion, to, you know, do what we're doing now and have that big trees lifted and to be able to point of use to be in the Santa Rosa Valley water district. Yeah. That was always the indication and to bring Lachlan water in. We thought that was a strategic location to treat Lachlan water. Okay, great. So, you know, as I've indicated in previous things that I've written, it's strategically imperative for the district to be able to manage its facilities as a unified whole, as opposed to three separate entities. So, this is a really great step in the right direction. Mike, thanks, and Megan, thanks very much for working on this. I am really anxious to get this going and finalized. I think it'll help our district tremendously. Is Gail frozen? Can we lose Gail? You know, it's possible. I know I was having problems. Good night for Zoom. Well, Gail is at a remote location as she indicated earlier, being somewhere in Mammoth. And if we could go to public comment if the board doesn't have any more questions or comments, we could go to go out to the public and see if anybody in the public would like to ask a question. Until Gail comes back, I guess, Lois would be the chair of the meeting. Okay. Concur. We have five attendees. Is there, okay. Alina, you have your hand up. I had a question. If you're taking these extra surface water for in lieu recharge, how are you gonna deal with fish attraction flows? With the San Lorenzo River being regulated, their flows being regulated by Loch Lomond releases, flows are already attenuated. And then when we start relying more on surface water, it'll further diminish these attraction flows, which are important for signaling juvenile outmigration and adults returning to spawn. And then also, I just wanted to say that question besides that, the county says that San Lorenzo is the lead on this, but how do you effectively review all of this with no biologists on staff or on the board? Thank you. Cynthia, you have your hand up. Yes. I just, if I understood Rick Rogers correctly, he just said there were no assurances to Felton that our water would never be sent to other parts of the district. I believe that the contract between Felton and San Lorenzo Valley water at the time of the acquisition was that we would vote, we would have the right to vote on our water being used for any other purpose. We would have the right to secede from San Lorenzo Valley water district if our water were to be sold for any other purpose than use in Felton. Now, as a community, we may want to look at that and maybe as a community, we would change our minds now but I want to just state that my understanding is that Felton has the right to preserve its own water rights. Rick Rogers, do you want to reply in on that? I've heard that, especially lately. I have not seen that document and I'm sure you don't want to disagree with Cynthia without looking, but to my knowledge, I've never, we've never had that conversation or I'm not seeing that document. I'm not saying that does not exist, but we can do some. We do have, I do believe, I think it was like 15 transfer boxes with all the paperwork from the contracts of the acquisition of Felton and we certainly will look and try to review and find that. I would appreciate that. I think Jim Mosher is the one who was most involved legally with the contract at the time. And I, you know, I would feel very disillusioned if that were not in the contract because we were promised as a community that that was in the contract. I just don't see us doing that, tying our hands like that, but we certainly will find that contract period and put it out for review. Thank you. For public to review. Les, you have your hand up. Yeah. You know, I'm a local resident and a biologist and I thought the last question asked by Lena was very interested. Interesting. I'm wondering why you didn't answer her question when you're answering everybody else's questions. I guess we could have gone to Carly. I wasn't trying to cut her off. It's just that last question was something I'd absolutely never heard and turned it over to Rick Rogers, but I could ask Carly now to answer Alina's question if you're worried about the place. Right. So we do, we are working with Mike Podlick as our biologist on this project and he should be able to answer the flow release questions that Alina had. Yeah. I'd be happy to take a stab at that. We did consider that. But our preliminary analyses show that the, I mean, the diversion capacities of those north system diversions is very small and the idea would obviously be to not be diverting during those kind of low to moderate winter flows when attraction would be let's say questionable. These additional diversions would only occur during high flow scenarios. And while our analysis up to this point looked at kind of the comparative benefits of various scenarios, there would still be some more detailed analysis done with the regulatory agencies at some point in the future to establish exactly what those conditions are that would allow for those diversions. Currently those kind of restrictions do not exist because the district's water rights are pre-1914 rights. So they're kind of in this legal black area. But yes, it's definitely something that I recognize is a concern, but based on our preliminary analysis, this project is doable while still allowing for those attraction flows, migrations flows, spawning flows. And if I can jump in too, just to clarify, Rincon is preparing the CEQA document, the initial study, including biological resources. We have our now biologists reviewing everything and doing an independent analysis. And we also have Stillwater Sciences on board as a sub-consultant to specifically look at fisheries. So we will be doing our independent review of the materials that Mike and others have put together and looking at that in the initial study. Can I have that answer your question? You should really ask the person to ask the question. There she is. Alina, can you hear me? Did that answer your question? Yes, I appreciate you answering my question very much, thank you for your time. I apologize. No problem. Okay, all right. Any other comments from the public? Any more comments from those who presented this to us? And thank you, it was very clear and understandable. No more? Okay. So let me go back to the board and see if they have any more questions. Bob Fultz, sorry, Rector Fultz. Bob's fine too, Lois, we don't have to stand in ceremony. Rick, when do you think that that contract research might be completed? Would it be done in time for the vote that we expect to take place sometime this summer? Well, you know, I'll have to regroup with this team here and that may have to be researched as part of this process, but I'll have to regroup with Megan and seeing that was brought up, that she may want that research done sooner than later, I'm not sure. I had heard something similar. You know, that came up since the discussion, you know, with consolidation with Scotts Valley, that did come up. And then since we've been talking about conjunctive use, it's come up, you know, I never, I cannot remember any discussion whatsoever regarding that circumstance. The only discussion I knew about had to do with the redwood timber on the watershed that that was, you know, on an easement that the district, you know, couldn't touch, which was no problem. And I don't know of any other restrictions, but, you know, I've got, I can, I frequently talked to past district manager Jim Mueller who orchestrated that contract with council. And we have, like I said, we have the transfer boxes full that we can do research on and go through and I can get staff to research. I think that'd be great. I think it's important that we gather the facts and find out what that is and settle the issue as we can. And then depending on what that outcome is, we may have a further discussion about this topic. Fulton is a very important part of our system. They came into the system in very specific circumstances and I want to make sure we're sensitive to their expectations when they came in. I agree, I agree, we could put this to bed, but it's not a question of the way. Thanks a lot, Brett. I, since Bob brought this up, I have a question on the same subject. If Fulton says, okay, you're losing rights to our water because you're doing X, Y and Z, where do they get the facilities to take care of the water themselves? Because we have, we treat the water, we do all kinds of things. So what would happen? I don't want to speculate and get off topic. Okay. Until we can find contracts and so forth and agendize it. That's a bigger topic than what we're talking about right now. Well, I'm just trying to cause you trouble. Appreciate that. Okay. All right, any other board members have other questions? I don't see any, so seems to me that we can adjourn this meeting and thank you for everyone who's participated. And Lois, thank you for jumping in, filling in in a pinch. Yes, thank you, Lois. So it's been a while, you know. Okay. If you want to adjourn this meeting. Okay. I'll give it back to you. We're doing fine. You can adjourn us officially. Okay. The meeting is now adjourned. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.