 Now Mark Halsman, who's never seen a mayor, is probably bad except under the court. And then there's a couple people I know up on the table. And I'm honest with you, yeah, I used to do it on those little rollers, those rockets they called me, I laid on them, it was like a commodity. I used to do it on those, I used to do it on roller skates. I mean, bikes, you name it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh. That's pretty good. Yeah. No, I'm sure they would have told me. Well, they told me. Oh, yeah. And there's nothing in my notes or anything similar that you have to recuse yourself, so I think you're good. Good afternoon. I'd like to call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities for the City of Santa Rosa to order. If we may have a roll call, please. Board Member Wright. Here. Board Member Walsh. Here. Board Member Borthalow. Here. Board Member Baden-Fort. Here. Vice Chair Anoni. Here. And Chair Galvin. Here. All right, let the record reflect that all Board Members are present. Thank you. Any statements of abstention by Board Members? Seeing none, we have no study session. We have the approval of the minutes from October 19th, so we'll take public comment on the minutes approval. If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium and wait for the time or to appear. Seeing nobody moving, then there's been no additional comments, correct? No emails received. All right, then the minutes will be approved and entered. We'll now move to Item 5.1, our first staff briefing. Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and Members of the Board. Our first staff briefing will be the 2023-2024 Capital Improvement Program update. And James Jensen, our Deputy Director of Engineering Services with the Capital Projects Team, will be leading off the presentation as well as a number of his staff joining him. Good afternoon, Chairman Galvin, Members of the Board. I'm James Jensen, Deputy Director of Engineering Services for Transportation and Public Works. And before we start to hear the chuckles of why we have so many people here for a staff briefing, the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to start by going through just some statistical information about what's generally happening for utility projects in capital projects. And then when I get done with that, we're going to have our project managers give a little bit of additional detail and insight to some projects we think you might be interested in that will involve action by the Board in the near future. But without further ado, so just a brief overview of the project process. Starting left to right, the planning and scoping processes typically happen with our client departments in this case, water. They get ushered into our hands where we start the design process. They go through the design process, which will have various steps of percentages of completion, which we'll talk about here in a minute. Then we release them out for bid when they're ready to go. They get into construction when construction completes. They go into a warranty period where we're just looking for failures that are an indicator of work that's not adequate, that's covered under warranty. So to get things like that fixed before we accept the project and take over maintenance responsibility. So active projects, for the purpose of this data, we're defining an active project as a project that is in design, construction, or warranty. Currently we have 53 projects that are active. As you can see on the right-hand side, seven of them are in warranty. So 46 of them are being actively worked on. Currently feet of water that's in design is just over 5,000 feet, feet of water that's in construction, just over 4,000 feet of sewer in design, around 6,500 feet of sewer in construction, just under 10,000, and much more in planning and scoping that is anxiously waiting to get to work. So left to right on this data, the 40% and less column is the stage of a project where we're starting to, we're understanding the details of the project. In many cases those projects will be subject to an environmental document so we get to a certain stage of work and we pause at that point to allow the environmental document to complete just because that document can bring a little bit of risk to the project so we don't go too far ahead of that stage because the environmental document could reveal a mitigation measure that would require us to back up and start over again so we look to avoid that. Many of our projects are CEQA-exempt which is nice so we always enjoy when we get that benefit. So the projects that are at or less than 40% are going through that stage, projects that are at 40% are coming out of that stage and then 75%, 90%, and 100% are just different stages of work progressing and opportunities to perform some quality assurance, quality control on projects, get them reviewed, develop the plans and specs, make sure our stakeholders are seeing how the projects are advancing and really keeping everyone aligned with how we expected to deliver the project and that the project's advancing and being delivered the way everyone's expecting so there are no surprises. So looking at this flash of data in a whole you can see that there's a lot of work that's in design, it's slowly working its way through. Some projects can go faster than others so these columns can change on six month intervals. We don't currently have anything out to bid right now. We have 16 projects that are in construction and in six months we'll look at this again and we'll just see how it's changing and keep you up to speed on that. Projects in design, this is really not to read down this list and overwhelm everybody with words, this is really just so that you've got something that you can look at at your own convenience to see the projects that are currently in design. There are a lot of cool things here, booster stations, creek restorations, flood protection at the treatment plant, well rehabilitations so a lot of technologically interesting work happening with these utilities. You'll see on this page the elite well rehabilitation is highlighted in red and that's red because that's one of the projects we'll get a little window into in a few minutes and this is just the rest of projects in design so we'll be hearing more about the Santa Rosa Water Consolidation Project and the Lanoa Trunk Rehabilitation Phase 1. Current construction contracts, we have 16 construction contracts in place right now for a total value of approximately $106 million and yes that is a large number but we want to keep in mind that $68 million of it is the disinfection project out of the treatment plant that is a substantial incredible project. Didn't have the data in time for this briefing but and in the future I'm going to be trying to include it but these numbers here exclude the cost of design, construction management and inspection, real estate and public outreach if we were to hire an outreach consultant to keep the public informed of the steps of a project. It also excludes reimbursements and grants so there is a lot of work done by staff to secure other funding sources that aren't just out of the enterprise fund and we're looking to be able to share that data in the future to show how staff is doing a lot of great work to help stretch city funds. So as you can see from this chart we don't have very many small projects. There are mostly projects of more than a million dollars and then again this is a just a list for your own review at your convenience of the projects that are currently in construction and that concludes the statistical overview and we will hand this over to Rochella to talk about the Lana trunk sewer. Good afternoon chair Galvin and members of the board as deputy director Jensen mentioned I will be providing a brief update on the Lana trunk sewer rehabilitation phase one project. Starting with taking a look at the map on the right you can see the Laguna treatment plant towards the bottom of your screen. Todd road is towards the top and runs east to west that green line in between the two indicates where we will be rehabilitating approximately 7500 linear feet of existing trunk sewer as part of this project and then towards the bottom of your screen where that purple box is located is where we have some improvements at the plant head works. As you may remember last year I came to the board to request design build as a procurement method for this project and just as a reminder what that means is instead of design bid build where we hire a designer to design plans and then put it out to bid and then hire a contractor instead here we hire a design build team from the start of the project that has both your engineer and your contractor on board. We have now gone through the process of soliciting qualifications as well as proposals and are currently in the process of finalizing the contract award. Assuming the contract can be signed in the next month or so I do anticipate bringing the contract before the board early next year. Next slide please. We are currently at around the 10% design stage. We do know for this project we will be doing the rehab method called cured in place pipelining. An example of that is shown on the right. We anticipate that the construction cost will be approximately $11 million and we anticipate that construction will begin in the year 2025. Thank you for your time. I will now pass it over to Associate Civil Engineer Chris Balanese. Thanks for Shella. Good afternoon Chair Galvin, members of the board. I am Chris Balanese, Associate Engineer with Capital Projects. One of the projects I'm working on right now is the Santa Rosa Water Consolidation Project. The project intends to connect nine private community water systems to city water, a combined population of about 1300 people. The connections will serve domestic water to residents and provide fire protection systems where none currently exist. The nine communities are primarily mobile home parks with water wells contaminated with various pollutants above the maximum contaminant level thresholds. Some of the communities are located within the city and some are located within unincorporated Sonoma County. Next slide please. The sites are all individually regulated by the state water resources control board division of drinking water. This is a collaboration project between the state and the city. The project will be funded by Proposition 84 for safe drinking water, water quality and supply. Next slide please. The project is currently in design administered by the state with a consultant based out of San Diego and is in the 90% design stage. We anticipate award for construction in summer to fall 2024 and be in construction 2024 through 2026. Constructions anticipated to cost around $8.7 million and be fully reimbursable through Prop 84. Thank you and I'll now pass it on to Sarah. Thank you Chris. Good afternoon, Chair Galvin and members of the board. My name is Sarah Mathews. I'll be presenting about one of my projects, Leetwell Rehabilitation. The Leetwell Rehabilitation project involves the city repairing an existing 1950s well located in the Fountain Grove neighborhood. We have been assessing the current well conditions with pre-designed studies such as video and geophysical surveys, water quality and pump testing to decide between rehabilitation or replacement of the well and its infrastructure. Next slide please. Leetwell has been offline for the last 12 years due to what was believed to be a separation in the well casing. However, after conducting the electromagnetic survey which gave us better 3D insight of the well as shown in this photo, we learned that there was no break in the casing but rather gap joints between two sections of casing that were joined with a collar. This was great news as rehabilitation of the well still seems to be an option. Next slide please. We will be conducting a well cleaning plan in January to accurately see what the production capacity of the well is before making that final determination between repair or replacement and finishing up the project design. We expect this project to come before the board in late 2024 with a construction cost of approximately 3.5 million and a construction time frame of 2025 to 2026. Thank you. Thank you Sarah, Chris and Rochella. And with that we'd like to open up to questions. Thank you Mr. Jensen and your team. It's always great to see these projects go through the pipeline and start to come out of the ground. So I'm looking forward to, especially the Launo trunk line, that's a big one. So I'll open it up for any board member questions or comments, board member Wright. Thank you for the presentation. Yeah, first of all I'm happy to see all the associate engineers here. That's a good sign seeing some young people here. Also speaking of associate engineers, how is the staffing problems that we had on the CIP teams going, are we filling positions? So currently we are still a little bit understaffed at the associate and assistant engineer level on the enterprise fund teams. I believe we're down one or two of those positions. I don't recall exactly. We did just complete a recruitment cycle for engineering technicians that looks like it's going to work out pretty well and we're going to get three or four on boards out of that. So we're excited and we're expecting to recruit for project managers as we conclude that the recruitment of technicians. We are short a supervising engineer of one of the utility teams, but I think now is a good time to mention that Sarah Matthews here on the left will be on Monday morning. She'll be starting a three month assignment as the acting supervising engineer for Team 2. So we're excited for Sarah to be in that role. But overall still short on staff, but we've been keeping folks and we've been adding folks and we're going to keep chipping away at that. And the second question I have is there's been a backlog for a long time in the CIP and a lot of that is getting things out of design. Are we rethinking what we're doing or is there any sort of new movement on getting projects out of design quicker than just your thoughts? Thank you. Yeah. So the way that I'm approaching it is as we continue to fill the current vacancies that we have, I want to see how that changes our production rates. As we get closer to being fully staffed, I expect to see more items coming to the board for action and seeing more get through that pipeline. If we're still seeing that we're not getting things through the pipeline like we should and we're closer to fully staffed and then at that point we will evaluate our means and methods of delivering projects. Thank you. Other board member questions or comments? All right. We'll open it up for public comment on item 5.1. If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium. Seeing none, that'll take care of item 5.1. Thank you again for the presentation. We'll look forward to seeing you every couple of months or at least every six months with further updates. All right. Item 5.2, Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. Item 5.2 is our laboratory update, the new TNI standards, and TNI stands for the NILAC Institute, and Robert Wilson, our laboratory supervisor, will be making the presentation. Good afternoon, Chair Galvin, members of the board. My name is Robert Wilson. I'm the laboratory supervisor out at the Laguna Treatment Plant, and as Jennifer mentioned, I'm providing an update on our advancement through TNI. So just a bit of history about the Laguna Environmental Lab. We were established in 1968 with the primary function to do physical and chemical measurements of water. As most wastewater treatment plants realize at the time there's a huge benefit to having analytical data support to observations that the operations team was making in the field, and Santa Rosa was not alone in that decision, so opened up the lab in 1968. And then as regulations changed from conventional pollutants like solids and bacteria to more non-conventional pollutants like metals, solvents, thinners, that type of pollutant, the lab expanded in 2000 to add advanced instrumentation in order to bring that analytical power in-house to the city of Santa Rosa. So over time, we have grown to a staff of 15 people. It includes sample receiving, preparation, lab analysts. We actually have a programmer on our team for our laboratory information management system and management to operate the lab. And in fiscal year 22-23, we did 19,500 samples that still primarily covers our operation group. It's the bulk of the analysis that we do is for the operations team, the process side of it and the compliance side of it. But we do cover other groups like environmental compliance, industrial discharges, storm water samples throughout the city. So in order to be accredited as an environmental lab in California, you have to be accredited through the State Water Resources Control Board's Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program, or ELAP. They accredited all environmental labs in California that's private and public labs. So it creates an even playing field for all environmental labs in California. They adopted the NILAC Institute, which is what TNI stands for, and yes, that is an acronym within an acronym, and I will define NILAC on the next slide. But they adopted the NILAC Institute's 2016 standards and required that all environmental labs in California adopt the 2016 standard by January of 2024. So the updates that we're seeing in the environmental lab group are focused on the quality program, and that's the primary function of the lab is to provide data with known quality, and so improvements to the quality program just help solidify the data that we've already been producing for our clients. So NILAC stands for the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference. It's a group of industry professionals that get together and determine how to best create standards, quality standards that would help produce best data of known quality, or quality, and then for what that means for us, it's around 855 changes to our quality assurance program. The best way to describe this is that similar to when you travel, you can go to a Starbucks anywhere in the United States and get a similar cup of decent coffee. It's the idea is the same for environmental labs, that if you use the NILAC standard, you would have a similar analytical result regardless of what lab you took it to. So it provides that all labs are producing the same data of known quality. And TNI is actually based on the International Standard Organization for Standardization or ISO, and it uses format and language consistent with ISO. NILAC is national, so it's U.S. based, where ISO is what environmental labs globally use. So I was here in October of 2022 and provided this timeline about our progress at that point. We have a requirement to do proficiency testing. These are double blind tests that the management team nor the analysts know the data or the value of the data, and it is a requirement that we run those tests to prove that we actually can get the answers that we should be getting when we analyze other samples. So we have to do that every year, and we did that in April of 2022. And then at that time, we were getting quotes for an external third-party audit. It's part of the new requirement under TNI that if you have advanced instrumentation, the instrumentation does medals and stuff that we added in 2000, that you have to have someone from the outside come and do your audit. ELAP will no longer come in and do the audit for you. So we received quotes, and we were able to schedule a third-party audit. For 2023, you're required to do that external audit every two years. And then in April of 2023, we started doing the second round of our proficiency testing. And then actually, it's good to note that we accomplished these two goals slightly ahead of schedule, and the next slide will reflect that. But we had our external third-party audit and then submitted our corrective action plan for audit findings. It's inevitable that there's always areas that everyone can do to improve. And even though we have an excellent lab, there are small tweaks that we can make to always improve our product. The red dot on the screen signifies where we're at currently November 2023. And this is when we have to take all the proficiency testing that we've done, the audit report that we received, and our response, and submit that to ELAP for accreditation. And then they should issue us accreditation in March of 2024. So here is our current timeline. Again, I mentioned we got our external third-party audit done in May, slightly ahead of schedule, and then submitted our corrective action plan in June of 2023 this year. And it was good to mention that we were able to submit that plan and get a media approval on our plan, which doesn't typically happen. We have an excellent staff and we really put a lot of energy into making sure we addressed all the auditor's concerns. They in the audit, when they're here, they said that they typically reject 90% of the corrective action plans when submitted. So we were in the 10% that was accepted on the first run. We are currently submitting our renewal for our application for accreditation. And then in January 2024, we are going to be ready to begin full TNI implementation. We will have to start full TNI implementation prior to receiving accreditation from ELAP, but that is not out of the ordinary for the timeline of our renewal process. We'll start our proficiency testing under the new TNI regulations in April of 2024. And then sometime in the third quarter around August, we'll have a consultant. We're using Kim Valk consulting to help us monitor for effectiveness to the TNI standard to see that the efforts that we have been doing indeed are complying with what the standards asking us to do. And then the final exam will be sometime in 2025 when we have our third party audit to make sure that we are actually complying with the TNI standard. To help do this, we are finishing updating our Quality Assurance Manual, the standard operating procedure, all of our documentation and bench sheets through January of next year. And then after January, our staff will really be focused on that monitoring for effectiveness, making sure that what we said we're going to do is actually working at the bench level for the team. And the Quality Assurance Coordinator and myself are really in charge of maintaining the timeline, but we do receive support from Kim Valk. In terms of fiscal impact, we did have all the additional documentation. We really warranted the need of additional management support. So we added a supervising lab analyst to help our wet Kim team. That does a lot of that 19,000 samples. That's part of what they help us with. And then we reclassified our department application specialist to a department programmer analyst. The application specialist is focused on just a single application where, since we have the advanced instrumentation and our limbs has to cooperate with other software at the plant, we really saw the need through TNI to advance that to a programmer. It's been immensely helpful, especially in terms of getting reporting out to state agencies. There has been an increase in ELAP fees, so it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000, $4,000 for accreditation about five years ago. And we just got the bill a few weeks ago and we're at $20,000 to receive our accreditation. And then the third-party assessment, as I mentioned, we must do this because we have advanced instrumentation that there is a cost. We hire the assessors, and that's about $5,000, and that will be every other year. In terms of fixed costs, we have our consultants, Kim Vowell, and contract with them for $77,000, and the total ongoing will be around $250,000. And that concludes my presentation. I'm available for questions. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. I'll open it up for any board member questions or comments. We'll go first to Vice Chair Arnone. Thank you. Just a quick question. Once you achieve TNI accreditation, does that mean you have an ISO accreditation and is there any benefit to having ISO accreditation? That's an excellent question. California is adopting the 2016 standard, as I mentioned. So achieving TNI through California does not give you an actual TNI certification to do work outside of California. If we were a larger private lab and seeking to grow, I would say, yes, getting full TNI certified and looking to get business from Nevada and Oregon would be something that would proceed. But being the fact that we're a municipal lab and our clients are the city of Santa Rosa, there's no need to do anything more than eLab. Thanks. Yep. Remember, right? Yeah, there we go. Two questions. Did the new lab analyst position, was that strictly because of the TNI or was work haul just increasing anyway? And I'll give you two questions you can answer at the same time. And secondly, I don't see that you're required to purchase any new equipment for the TNI. So anyway, those are my questions. Thank you. Yeah, so the first question, it is primarily due to the increased documentation that's required with TNI, the new position of a supervising lab analyst. So it's the supervision of the bench level people making sure that they have SOPs that need continuously updating method limits evaluated peer review performed. It's just a higher level of attention paid on to the data that we're producing. So that's really why that position and it is mostly TNI that is causing that drive our decision to add that position. And then second question, remind me again. Equipment, do you add any new equipment? Yeah, so it didn't at the bench. As I mentioned, there really wasn't that much of a change. There is some in terms of advanced instrumentation, the instruments were already performing a lot of the quality control samples that were needed for it. And there are some thermo thermometers, kind of low level equipment that was needed. But it's really a quality assurance program modification. So it's a lot of documentation that's changed and not really bench level modifications. Thank you. Board member Bartholome. Thank you, Chair Galvin. So there are 855 changes that are going to need to be made. Is there, I may have missed it, but is there a time frame for that? Or does that need to be done before certification? Is it you have time after to implement? What, how does that work? So they need to be made by January 1st of this, of 2024, so in two months. And we have made almost all of them. We're doing a few tidying up as with anything. We're working closely with Kim Vowell. On the technical side, the technicals, the actual operation in the lab were there. They were very happy with it. And we're doing a couple of button up, just documentation side of making sure SOPs match the format that ELAP requires. Other board member questions or comments? All right, we'll take public comment on item 5.2. If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium. Seeing no one, that'll take care of item 5.2. We'll now move to item 5.3, Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. Our third staff briefing will be an environmental services update. And Sean McNeil, our deputy director of environmental services, will be making the presentation. Good afternoon, Chair Galvin, members of the board. I'm excited to talk to you today about some recent changes or some upcoming changes from our friends at the regional board. So I want to kind of go over the 2023 triennial review or the water quality control plan. And I'm just going to kind of focus on the components of this plan that could have effects to the city. But basically what it is, it's a three-year work plan for the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. And they work with their board to define what activities they should be spending their staff time on developing. One thing that is on this are the TMDLs for the Laguna. This has been on, I think, a couple of triennial review work plans. But it does seem like each time they're getting closer to completing those. And so one of the things they're looking at with these TMDLs, just to remind you is there's a nutrient TMDL, which we have in advance of a TMDL. That's where our zero net load for phosphorus compliance comes from. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of this presentation. But it also will focus on temperature and dissolved oxygen. One thing that's new in this plan that was not in previous plans is that they're contemplating using a new mechanism called an advanced restoration plan instead of a traditional TMDL. And this is something, a mechanism from the Clean Water Act that they can put in place to get all of the dischargers in the watershed to pitch in to rectifying and cleaning up the watershed instead of going through the traditional TMDL process, which is defining what the waste allocations can occur in that water body. And then giving waste load allocations to each of the individual dischargers. So it's kind of a point positive approach. It does have mechanisms. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. And then the other main issue in the triennial review for the city is a review of the beneficial uses of waters throughout the region. So the advanced restoration plan, it's really replacing a term that they've used as the alternative TMDL. They're no longer claiming it as an alternative. This is something that is before, an option that they can use before doing a TMDL. It's really important to the EPA who wrote the guidance that this is not considered an alternative to the TMDL that they always have in their pocket the ability to do a TMDL. So the focus is on defining restoration goals in lieu of or in advance of developing that TMDL. The near term plan, it's a near term plan with a schedule and milestones. If we're meeting the schedule and milestones within the watershed, they can prevent going down and finalizing a TMDL. And there's off ramps for them to do that within this program. It's designed to be more immediately beneficial to restore water quality objectives and in their in discussions with staff at the regional board, they're really looking at us as a community, not just the city of Santa Rosa's wastewater treatment plant addressing these issues, but the entire community working together to address these issues. So far, the EPA has approved, while the regional boards work with you on these, these are approved by the EPA, has approved 87 different advanced restoration plans in 24 different states. There are three in California, all three of them are in San Diego County. The other big item is looking at the beneficial uses. So I just want to kind of talk a little bit about beneficial uses for the board just so that you understand in 1972, the state water board adopted a list of beneficial uses. They have this list of beneficial uses which have basically water quality parameters that need to be met by that water quality to achieve those beneficial uses. So examples of beneficial uses are municipal and domestic supply. And as we could appreciate, we don't want anyone polluting the river since that's our water supply. So a water body with that beneficial use assigned to it is going to have very specific and stringent water quality objectives. Agricultural supply, you can imagine that would be another beneficial use, maybe not as stringent of water quality needs as a municipal supply, but it would have requirements. Hydro power generation, water contact recreation, that's like swimming in it versus non-contact would be boating, those have different water quality objectives. So when the regional board goes through all the waters in their region, they ascribe these beneficial uses to each water body. They look at what the uses are and then that's how they set water quality objectives. This really is the basis for how they determine what our limits are as far as discharging in our storm water program. So these beneficial uses have gone through a change at the state board. They've identified three new beneficial uses. One is called tribal tradition and culture. And this is protecting water bodies for traditional uses to support the cultural, spiritual, ceremonial, or traditional rights of lifeways of California and Native American tribes. And then they also created two other ones, one called subsistence fishing and another tribal subsistence fishing, I put them for ease. They're very similar, the tribal subsistence fishing. The only difference is that it's for tribes versus the general public. But these are for protecting non-game fish and having water quality benefits so that people could actually eat the fish every day. So adding these new beneficial uses, the regional board is contemplating whether or not to add these to their water quality plans throughout the region. The armed board, the North Coast, already has a beneficial use that isn't in use throughout the entire state called fish, which is just a subsistence fishing requirement, so they're going to be studying to see if their existing requirement, beneficial use, will meet the state's requirements or if they're needing to go through this. All regional boards throughout the state are looking at adopting these and they're all at various levels of review. So there's a lot of review that they have to do before they add something like this, but this is a big change to the potentially to our permit. So what I wanted to say how this could affect us is this could change the water quality parameters in the watershed. And so we're not exactly sure how that might be, but we don't want to say that we don't think, I'm pretty sure the board would not want to say we don't think these beneficial uses are valuable. That's really not within our purview. But we are concerned that if new limits come to us because of these, that we would like to at least have time to come into those new regulatory requirements, so that we can do the studies that we need to do to figure out how we could come into compliance. One of the biggest concerns with fishing in the Laguna is the mercury levels. The Laguna itself has relatively high mercury levels, and it could make it so that no mercury could be discharged into the waterway, even though we only have trace amounts in our discharge. So that's probably one of our biggest concerns would be how would we address the mercury limits to get our watershed to come into compliance. And most likely the sources of mercury in our watershed are natural. So it would be a harder one for us to meet. I also just wanted to give a brief update of where we are in our regulatory requirements with phosphorus. So the 2006 permit is the first time we got this mercury limit, excuse me, phosphorus limit. This is once again in advance of what typically would have been a total maximum daily load allocation. The regional board would have looked at the watershed, said, hey, they can only handle this much phosphorus, you get to put in this much, you get to put in this much, you get to put in this much. Instead of doing that process, they just told us that we couldn't put in any. I want to remind the board that we are on record, on the regional boards record, that we're about 2% of the total phosphorus loading in the watershed. Yet we and the town of Windsor are the only ones with a no net load for this, which is the regional board recognizes that, which is why they're looking towards doing something more like advanced restoration plans to meet these limits. So it could be a change to this program, really, is what they're talking about. In 2008, the regional water board approved our first nutrient offset program. This was an agreement between the city and the regional board for how we would meet that, and then 2009, it says to President, I should have updated that, it's not to President, 2009 to 2019, this is the way that we did projects through the nutrient offset project. In 2013, they made a change to our permit and they no longer required us to have a zero net load for nitrogen. It was just for phosphorus. And then in 2018, the regional board created a new framework, the water quality trading framework, which really became the new type of regulation. And that was included in our permit in 2019. And this includes the Windsor wastewater treatment plant, as well having no net load for phosphorus. So we have three projects that we've developed throughout time, throughout the time of this nutrient offset program that have been migrated into the water quality trading framework. And these three projects generate credits each year. Each of these projects have different years of life for those credits. So the Beretta Dairy Project, where we worked with a dairy to control the movement of fecal matter on their property and prevent that from getting into local waterways that had a savings of phosphorus into the waterway that we were able to claim. We're getting 412 credits per year as long as that project is still active. But the credits generated from that are only available for our use for three years. So we use them or lose them under that. We did some road work up at the Pepperwood Preserve. That generates 337 credits per year. And those have been deemed to be in perpetuity, which means we can continue to bank those each year and save them. So we can preferentially choose, should we have a discharge, to use the Beretta Dairy credits and bank the Pepperwood and the Laguna 1 and 2 credits, which is a much smaller number. It ranges each year depending on the analysis. Last year we got 90 credits. This year we're getting 87 credits and these will last in perpetuity as well. So just kind of a brief analysis of where we are. We started the 22, 23 discharge year with 15,630 credits. To remind the board, one credit equals one pound of phosphorus discharge. We earned an additional 841 credits from those three projects that I mentioned. And we wound up, because we discharged, because of the amount of water that we got last year, approximately 10,277 pounds. We also sold 850 credits to the town of Windsor to help them meet their requirements. Because we recognize that it's very challenging to build these projects. It takes numerous years to get a project from conception to construction. But we ended 22, 23 with 5,344 credits in the bank. We earned an additional 839 credits this year and that brings our total at the start of this year at the 6,189 credits without another project. But fortunately we do have another project. We have this Colgan Restoration Project which was developed by Sonoma Water. And this is a rather lengthy stretch of Colgan Creek starting from Todd Road and going all the way down to Yonah Road near the wastewater treatment plant. They've removed over 17,000 cubic yards of soil. They hauled that soil up on to our levees in the Meadow Lane complex, which is pretty close to this location. The soil is our hope is to be able to use this as a part of our flood wall project. So we were able to stockpile that soil and that 17,000 yards is a pile that's about 10 feet tall, about 15 to 20 feet wide and spreading over 800 feet in length. That's what about 17,000 credits a phosphorus looks like. It's a really nice visual, because we talk about these numbers, but that's what the credits will look like. That much sediment removed from the watershed. So it is a very challenging regulation for us to meet, but this is one way that we're working on this. And we're starting to work with getting an agreement together for this board to consider to purchase the credits generated from this project for our compliance. So we're estimating right now that the credits are anywhere from 16,000 to 20,000 credits on this. Windsor is hoping to buy 3,000 credits. So we've, the city of Santa Rosa, the town of Windsor, and Sonoma Water have been working on getting this project to happen. The credits will expire in 10 years. So these are not in perpetuity credits. And so from this project, the city would be looking to net anywhere from 13,000 to 17,000 credits, depending on the final calculation. So I just wanted to give an update on where we are on that. It's our expectation that the regional board will take a couple of months to evaluate exactly how many credits and give us the official letter. But our estimates right now are about 20,000 credits from the project. And we're just leaving a little bit on the table for our expectations in case they come in at a lower number. And that concludes my presentation. I'm available for any questions you may have. Thank you, Deputy Director McNeil. I'll open it up for board member questions or comments. Vice Chair Arnone. Thank you. Couple of questions. Was our discharge in 2223 that resulted in 10,000 plus pounds of phosphorus being discharged was. Is that an unusual amount for the amount of discharge or was that typical for the amount of discharge? So that's the first part of the question. And what's the likelihood we're going to have another year like that? Because it seems like we don't have enough credits if we do. Yeah, so when we discharge, we do tend to discharge a lot because we have, it's an indicator of a really wet year. So we say our average discharge is about 3,500 credits, 3,500 pounds a year. But there's many years we don't discharge. So I would say that when we do discharge 10,000 is probably a median number. We've had as high as 15,000 in one year and many around the six to 7,000 range as well. So I think 10,000 when we do discharge is probably a realistic number. What we are seeing is the way strength to the treatment plant is getting stronger. Part of this might be due to the drought. People are using less water, but still the phosphorus that's coming is the same amount. So the concentrations that we're storing in our ponds are have been a little bit higher in this last discharge compared to average. But overall, I think that would be a good number. So it is clear that we are looking at an El Nino year and that may result in us getting a lot more water than average or average amount of water. And that may mean that we would have to discharge this year. So having this project on our books for this season would be great for our compliance. And that's part of why we have worked with the Sonoma Water to ensure that this project was built this year rather than next year. So you answered my next question, which is when are we gonna get these new credits? So it's really right on the doorstep. So in time for the potential El Nino. Yeah, so the credits, the true up comes at the end of the discharge year, really at June 30th is when we have to pretty much have all of the paperwork signed and their check in their hands for the credits. So that's how those would get into our accounting system to account against any discharge that we might have. Okay, great. So it's better than it looks. Thanks. Yeah. Remember, right? Yeah, and I'll have to also say kudos to all the work done getting those credits in place for this year. Otherwise, if we only had 5,000, I think it would be a cliffhanger like the old days used to be. Anyway, just out of curiosity, does our current MPDS permit have a mercury quantity that we have to stay under? Yeah, so we do have discharge limitations and it's three micrograms per liter. That's three parts per trillion. That's a very small amount, but it could go as low as one with the new regulations. Okay, and then... Oh, it could actually go to zero. I mean, it's their purview, but if you follow the beneficial uses, if they applied that to the Laguna and they concluded that the Laguna is a slow-moving waterway or estuary, those are two things that drive that number lower. Our current discharge is about two, hovers around two, oftentimes below two, but hovers around two nanograms per liter. And how would we mitigate that if that changes? Would we use these credits? Well, these are phosphorus credits, so we couldn't use them for mercury. So would we have to develop a trading system for mercury? We would have to do studies to evaluate our sources of mercury. When we first got our mercury limit, we recognized that a bulk of the mercury coming into our sewer system was coming from dental offices as we have mercury fillings. So we, in advance of any EPA requirements, we started our own dental program. We really piloted how an EPA program should work, and we've required all dental offices to have mercury amalgam separators, that then all the wastewater, when they're cleaning your teeth, that suction water that they're sucking out, that all runs through this mercury separator, and that collects the mercury out, and that removed a lot of mercury from our wastes. And primarily, it was in our bio, it was in, a lot of it was ending up in our biosolids. And so it was biosolids loadings that we wanted to get that out of the waste stream. So that's a source. Landfill leachate could be another source, you know, and it would be a pre-treatment program. Most likely is how we would go after, we'd study what are the sources in our watershed, and then we look at what kinds of reduction we could do from those dischargers, instead of treating all the water that comes to the plant that may not have mercury in it. So will the advanced restoration plan, does it have an impact also on stormwater? It would definitely impact stormwater. It would impact our stormwater permit. It would direct the activities of the stormwater permit. So currently there are no numeric limits that the stormwater program has, and would most likely affect ours as well as all the other entities in the watershed, and potentially could impact ag as well. Though a lot of advanced restoration plans have not yet cracked how they bring agricultural activities into the program. Thank you. This is a fast move. Well, it isn't fast-moving, but I'm constantly changing and confusing subject manners. But thank you very much for the presentation. Chair. Other board member questions or comments? Board member Bartholomew. Thank you, Chair Galvin. I'm just wondering if there are talks with other potential project people, because it seems like, so if we had 17,000 credits from Colgan Creek for 10 years, and we used 15,000 of them in the first three years, and then we'd only have three, right? It's not a per year number of credits. So it seems like if we had a few, I know we don't discharge every year, but if we had three or four really wet winters where we were discharging, we could go through those pretty quickly. I'm just wondering if there are discussions or thoughts about other projects we might wanna get online. So we have some more cushion. Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, we do have a number of things in the pipeline. This partnership between the city of Santa Rosa and Sonoma Water and the town of Windsor, and it looks like the Lytton tribe who's developing their own wastewater treatment plant is also gonna be on the hook for no net load for phosphorus. So they will also become a partner with us, and we have found it's beneficial for us to work together as dischargers because there's a lot of work involved in developing these programs, as well as risk. It was risky to go, oh, it feels like right now it feels like we don't have enough credits, but it also if we don't discharge next year, then we have nine years to use those credits. It starts to go, we wanna be careful. So we are working to develop additional projects that can be turned on and off, rather quickly, so Rosalind Creek, which is the next creek to the north of us outside of the city areas, it's those kind of sediment removal and restoration projects that could generate credits on a pretty quick turnaround, one to two years. So I think if we were to discharge this year a significant amount, we would probably be working with the Sonoma Water to develop another project either next year or the year after at the worst case scenario. And also we are thinking about a longer range of projects, the Sonoma Water, as well as the Regional Board have put together a vision for the Laguna de Restorone, let me start again, the Laguna de Santa Rosa. It's a restoration of the Laguna de Santa Rosa and it really is a big picture thought of how the Laguna should be restored. One of the projects identified in there is one called Ballard Lake, it's a former lake pretty close to where the confluence of Mark West Creek enters into the Laguna and it would restore this big lake. Ag and open space has been involved in the discussions, we've been working with Marin Sonoma, Mosquito Vector Control, we'll now be working with the Lytton Tribe, Town of Windsor, all looking at a project that might restore one of these lakes which would create what was traditional winter refugia, a place for fish to go in the winter. This is historic because when this lake existed we didn't have dams on the river and so that means the fish didn't really have a continuous flow of water down the Russian river throughout the summer but these lakes in the Laguna were full and so they were full of fish and they were placed for fish to hang out while the river was waiting for the rains to restore it. So part of that plan would be to do something like that. The lake has mostly been filled in with sediment so we remove all that sediment and our estimate that could be 10 to 15 years worth of credits in a wetter type of future. So we are looking towards what would be like the end point but if the regional board goes this other route with the Advanced Restoration Project then maybe we build that project instead of underwater quality trading we build that project under that Advanced Restoration Plan so there are discussions with the regional board to help augment funding for doing the initial studies and preliminary design of that project. So we are working collaboratively with our regulators to look at a positive future that would be helpful for us in our compliance but also would be beneficial for the watershed and hall. A question on the Rosalind Creek project that you mentioned and then this lake restoration do you envision that those credits if they're obtained are gonna be in perpetuity or are they gonna be time restricted? So the Rosalind Creek would be in perpetuity and that is based on a decision by Sonoma Water. As they developed these projects they did not feel that they wanted to be on the hook for maintaining the project beyond 10 years and so that was the deal that was struck with them. The regional board was willing to give those credits in perpetuity but that also put the regional or the Sonoma Water on the hook for that system maintaining that level. So at the end of 10 years if the channel got resettlement filled in they could remove that sediment and sell those credits under that project. But the larger project for us to even entertain doing something that large those credits would have to be in perpetuity because if there was any time then we're just gambling with rate payer funds to meet our compliance needs. And so we'd rather just do smaller projects that meet our immediate needs that aren't gonna expire. If we're gonna do a very large project that could generate 80 to 100,000 credits I think we wanna make sure that those are in perpetuity. Great thank you. Other board member questions or comments? All right we'll open it up for public comment on item 5.3. If you wish to make a comment please move to the podium. Seeing no one that'll take care of item 5.3. We'll now move to the consent calendar. We have two items on the consent calendar. I'll move adoption of the consent calendar items. I'll second that. We have a motion by Vice Chair Arnone seconded by board member Walsh to approve the consent calendar. At this time we'll open it up for public comment on the consent calendar. If you wish to make a comment please move to the podium. Seeing no one may we please have a roll call vote. Board member Wright. Aye. Board member Walsh. Aye. Board member Bartholomew. Aye. Board member Baden-Fort. Aye. Vice Chair Arnone. Aye. And Chair Galvan. Aye. And the consent calendar passes unanimously. Thank you. We'll now move, we have no report items. We'll now move to item 8 which is public comments on non-agenda matters. If you wish to make a public comment on non-agenda matters please move to the podium. Seeing no one that'll take care of item 8. We have no referrals. We have no written communications. We have no subcommittee reports. Do we have any board member reports? Apparently not. We'll now move to the director's report. Director Burke. Thank you Chair Galvan and members of the board. I have a couple of things to update the board on this afternoon. First I just wanted to remind everyone that we are very excited about tomorrow's geysers 20 year anniversary celebration. I believe a number of board members are coming so we're excited to have you join us. Reminder that it starts at 9 a.m. tomorrow at the Calpine Visitor Center in Middletown and then there will be an optional tour afterwards starting at about 10.30. Also wanted to let the board know that we have some good news. The geyser system is now operating at a five pump full capacity flow rate of approximately 18 million gallons per day. And this will help us lower our recycle water storage levels in preparation for a potential wet winter. And I think this was reported at our last meeting but we have already met our contractual requirements for this calendar year with Calpine. And so now we're delivering over 90% of the contract and likely will be quite a bit over 100% as well. And I just wanna thank the team for their great work in managing the storage levels and trying to have us be as prepared as possible for a potential wet winter. I also wanted to recognize that we have one of our employees who's been here for quite a few years retiring today. Laura Utter started with the city of Santa Rosa Water Department on May 8th of 2007. And she started as a wastewater operator trainee. She is celebrating 16 years of service and is retiring as a wastewater operator too. And her last day is today. I've really appreciated Laura's commitment and skill as she has worked with the treatment plant for the last 16 years. She's been very helpful and professional. She always maintains a calm demeanor and stays well focused under duress. She's very tactful yet clear when working with new operators and especially helping them during any training. She's supportive and very kind with less experienced operators and has a very good attention to detail when helping others. She's gonna leave a big hole to fill and I just wanted to recognize and thank her for her service to the regional system, the water department and the community. And I want to wish her very well for a very well deserved retirement. So a big thank you to Laura and congratulations on retiring. And then last, I did wanna let the board know that we have received all paperwork and council member Fleming has appointed or reappointed Chris Grable to the board of public utilities. We're very happy to have board member Grable join us back on the board of public utilities and we anticipate that we will be able to swear him in at the next board meeting. And that is my report and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Director Burke. Any questions for the director? All right, then we will open it up for public comment on item number 13. If you wish to make a comment, please approach the podium. Seeing no one, that'll take care of the director's report and that concludes our agenda. So I would like to adjourn the meeting today in honor of Laura Utter and her retirement and wish her all the best in her retirement. We are adjourned.