 Good morning. Good morning, Craig. Good morning all. This is the sub regional technical advisory committee meeting. It looks like we have a forum. Do we want to wait another minute or two? Craig or Mike, put your thoughts. I don't think so. I think we can get started. Okay. I'm going to promote Ryan Crawford, who's representing Sebastian from just having a little difficulty. Okay, I'll give you a little. We'll just wait a minute and see if that can happen. How are you, Jennifer? I am good. How are you all? I think we're good. It's been a good year for flood protection so far. This calendar year, I should say. Not so good for water supply. No, not so good for water supply and good for the treatment plan, though, in terms of not having to discharge. So depends on what you want to have on. I know. Well, that's the thing about our business is that there's never, there's very few good years for everything. What are, do you know, or maybe Emma might know, what, what are flows into the plant right now? Emma would know. We're looking about 16 MGD. That's kind of a summer flow, isn't it? I think we're at 19 for the average overall of December. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty low right now. All right. It looks like we have Ryan Crawford. Good morning, everybody. How are you doing? Good morning. Ryan, I don't know, before we start cleaning, did you want to just introduce yourself? Sure. I'm a senior hydrogeologist with GHD. I've been there for 15 years, originally with the Windsor and Kelly days before that, starting up in Eureka and down here in Santa Rosa from Sonoma County, originally out in Occidental. And that's where I ended up coming back to. So I do a lot of wastewater, groundwater, mostly groundwater work, but all things water integrated water management. Feel free to discuss anything, but this is my first go in one of these meetings. So just give it a speed on what you guys are doing. So thank you so much. And you'll be representing Sebastopol. That's right. Okay. And if you're able to, it would be great if you could turn your camera on. Do the rest of the tech members, do you want to just introduce yourself since we have a new sub-tech member? Can start with Katadi. Ryan, this is Craig Scott, City Katadi. I also worked with Windsor and Kelly back in 2005. Mary Grace. Yeah, I'm in it as well. Excellent. I did, I did find in our kitchen closet here. It was interesting, a couple of Windsor and Kelly champagne glasses. Coming out of the closet. I love that. Just deep in the closet. One's going to tell you that's great. Thank you. Okay, those were different days back then. So yeah, so I'm with Public Works. Thanks, Craig. And I'm Mary Grace. Hi, Ryan. I'm the city engineer and director of development services for the city of Rona Park and another Windsor and Kelly GHD alumna. So, you know, like, watch out, you're on your way to getting hired by some public agency. I'm Mary Grace. How you doing? Good. Well, thank you. Didn't get to say hi to Emma earlier either. All right, and South Park. Yeah, hi. Hi, I'm Mike Thompson with the Sonoma County Water Agency. I have to confess I never worked for GHD or Windsor and Kelly, but my son does now. Evan. I put him to work and all kinds of stuff, so. Well, he's like right there. I can go say hi to him right now. But you really don't want to see him. He doesn't go on camera first thing in the morning. So, but anyways, I'm with the Sonoma County Water Agency. So, we managed the South Park County Sanitation District along with Occidental County Sanitation District from sounds like we're your neck of the woods. And I've been there for coming up on 27 years and assistant general manager over the maintenance division, but also do pretty much anything that's asked to me there, which is, I think probably anybody who works in Mary Grace or Craig and probably, as we all know, we, we get into things you'd never think we would have gotten into and when you work in the public sector. So, why are engineers doing this. Okay. Sure. So, Michael, if you mind, were you part of the tie in the emergency tie into the Greaton facility for Occidental in the last few years I worked on a bunch of that stuff. I'm, I am, I'm like this deep in it. Yeah, actually, I'm kind of the, I guess the, it's the mad scientist who's working on that. So you're, you were working on the, I guess the truck fill. Yeah, some of the geotech and pipeline work to get it up there at 116 and then down the road. Yeah. I've been working with that. Jose and I were been on about three or four hours of call with Jose Artisa last two days. So we're, we're, we are, we're, they're finishing up feasibility study on that and it's looking really promising. I worked all the financials and where Occidental becomes self supporting with a little money left over and Greaton could get an extra 25, 30% of net revenue a year. So it's, it's, yeah, so the next thing to see is if we can find, I was going to come to Jennifer just saying, Hey, do you have an extra six and a half million dollars laying around for this sweet little pipeline that someday I did to the Santa Rosa system. I'm just throwing that out. Not because there's any plans for it but anyways, the, our next step is we're looking for funding. Looking for cats, maybe pretty cats that will help us get that but luckily I'm sorry, last little thing on that it. It looks like there's there actually is grant funding available for it so we're fingers are crossed. Thank you. We better do real business now. Yes, thank you, Mike, and I've been a pervert I am the director of the Santa Rosa water department and also the chair of the sub regional tax. I just want to remind everyone we are a brown act body we have been live streaming since the start of this meeting. Yeah, so, if you could please mute your microphones when you are not speaking, I'm going to go ahead and call the meeting to order and I'm going to ask the secretary to do a roll call please. City of Santa Rosa. Jennifer Burke here. The city of Katari. Great Scott here. City owner park. Mary Grace possum here. So you suggest Paul, right Crawford here. Sonoma water. Mike Thompson here. All right, thank you. It's nice to have a full. Full board for a change. So, let's see, we are now going to go to item number two. Item number two is adopting a resolution finding the proclaimed state of emergency and that meeting in person would present imminent risks to the health or safety of attendees and authorizing meetings by teleconference of legislative bodies. We are still dealing with a health order that is encouraging shelter in place where possible, encouraging folks to remotely work where possible, due to the search that we've seen. So, at this time we do believe it's still appropriate for us to be meeting in this manner. So you have a resolution before you if there's any questions or comments. We have a motion. Oh, well, before we do that, I'm just going to open it up for public comment real quick. We are now taking public comment on item 2.1. If you wish to make a comment, please raise your hand. If you're dialing via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And secretary, do we have any live recorded or voicemail public comments. We have no public comments. Oh, there's a motion. I'll move the resolution. Okay. Great Scott second. So we have a motion by runner park in a second by Katadi. If we could please have a roll call vote. The city of Santa Rosa. Yes. The city of Katadi. Yes. City of our park. Yes. City of sabbatical. Yes. No more water. Yes. That motion passes unanimously. Thank you. We are now on to item three 3.1 approval of minutes before we accept the minutes. Are there any questions or comments by the sub tech. All right. So we'll now open it up for public comment. We'd like to make a comment on the minutes, please. Raise your hand if you're on zoom or dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary, do we have any public comment. We do not. All right. So hearing no objection, we will go ahead and accept those minutes. We're on to public comment. Item number four. This is the time for any comments by the public for items that are not on the agenda. So we're now taking public comments on item four. You wish to make a public comment. Please raise your hand if you're on zoom or dial star nine if you're on telephone. Secretary, do we have any public comments for this item? We do not. Okay. Great. Thank you. So we'll move on to the new business and the first item will be item 5.1, which is approval of the 2022 meeting schedule. I think you all received that hopefully. So it has our meetings for the year. Any questions or comments by the committee. All right, seeing none. We'll now open it up for public comment on item 5.1. If you would like to make a comment by a zoom, please raise your hand. If you would like to make a comment by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Do we have any public comments for this item? No, we don't have any public comments. Okay. Then we will. Consider the meeting schedule accepted. And we will now move on to item 5.2. So item 5.2. We're going to do a presentation on our virtual water reuse tour. Something we're very excited about and been working on for a while. Elise Miller, our communications coordinator will be making this presentation. Good morning. Assuming you can see my presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Well, it's my pleasure to be here today to share a new digital education tool that we've recently launched for the regional water reuse system. Now, the region has a long history of water reuse. And in fact, a few years ago, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Laguna treatment plant. And since coming online in 1968, we've been using the regional water reuse program, producing billions of gallons of recycled water and thousands of tons of biosolids each year that are beneficially reused. And each year pre COVID. The plant welcomed visitors from around the world, students and interested individuals of all ages. But due to the pandemic, we currently have our in person tour program on hold. But we do plan to restart that soon. In the meantime, the team produced a virtual tour video that provides an online learning opportunity and can be used to enhance our in person tour experience once we resume. So what we created was a 10 minute video. And as you can imagine, creating a video like this requires a bit of planning and coordination to impactfully tell our story. And this included building and editing scripts. We used the three main steps of filming at various locations with a variety of our staff. And we used high quality video and drone footage to try and capture the magnitude of the service that we provide to show the people that work around the clock to operate the system. And to showcase the value of water and the importance of water reuse. So in December, we launched this new outreach tool to the community. This video has been produced in both English and in Spanish. And both versions have been shared using the city's website through city connections newsletter that reaches over 100,000 subscribers, our YouTube channel and the city's social media accounts. And to date we've had over a thousand views of this video. So what I would like to do is just show you a short little segment of that video. So bear with me while I pull this up. This video produces a remarkable 7 billion gallons of recycled water per year. And most of that water is beneficially reused off setting the demand for valuable drinking water. The maturity of our recycled water is pumped 41 miles to a geothermal energy production facility called the geysers. Hi in the myocomus mountains. There it's pumped underground to recharge steam fields which are used to generate electricity for nearly 100,000 homes in the North Bay. By recharging and replenishing the underground steam fields, our recycled water helps to support the generation of clean renewable electricity. Approximately one third of our recycled water is used for agricultural or urban irrigation. So if the plant produces more water than can be reused, the extra recycled water is released to the Laguna de Santa Rosa and returned to the Russian river. The solid component of sewage is processed and turned into nutrient rich biosolids. Each year over 30,000 times are used as fertilizer and soil amendment for the city of Santa Rosa's farms and other agricultural lands. So it's just a little sneak peek of it. Let me see if I can get back to my presentation. So like I said, this was a 10 minute video and we've broken it up into three sections so that we can easily share it on our social media accounts and through our website. And all the videos are available online at srcity.org forward slash water reuse. So I hope you enjoy the preview that you're interested in watching the full 10 minutes of it. And I'm more than happy to answer any questions if you have them at this time. Thank you, Elise. Are there any questions or comments from the sub-tech? Yeah, just real quick. Thanks for putting this together, Elise. I think this is, I think this will be good. Not just during COVID, but at any time. So I look forward to seeing that. Thank you. Thank you. It's good to, is it, I'm sorry, was it Denise Chadman? Denise Cadman. Cadman, I'm sorry. Yeah, it was, it was great. I didn't know she's still working and it's great to see her. Out there, but I know she's always had a lot of, a lot of passion and a lot of dedication for her job there. So anyways, it's great. It looks great. And I look forward to seeing the whole thing. Thank you. And Craig looks like you have your hand up. Yeah. Thank you for the video. Looks really well done. Very professional. I just had a question. Do you, does the city of San Rosa have any objections to us posting a link on our city website? Okay. We'd absolutely love it if you share it. This is for all the partners to use. You know, this is something we've been wanting to do for a while and COVID really motivated us to get it done. And then it's really meant to enhance our tour program, especially as we get back, because it's showing you things you wouldn't, may not normally see on an in-person tour. And so we wanted to get that, that bigger picture. So please share what love for people to see this product as much as possible. And to that point, at least if you could get the Lincoln information out to Roberta and we'll send that out to the sub-tech. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? All right. From the sub-tech. I will just note, Mike. Yes, it's lovely to see Denise. It's a lasting legacy. She has since retired. So she is enjoying retirement life. All right. So I will now open this up to the public to see if there are any public comments on item 5.1. If you wish to make a comment by a zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in by a telephone, dial star nine. And Secretary Aitha, do we have any public comments on this item? We have no public comments. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, Elise. We are now moving on to item 5.3. And this will be a presentation on the start of our fiscal year, 2022-23 budget process and timing. And we will now move on to item 5.3. And Kimberly Zanino, our deputy director of administration will be presenting. Kimberly. Good morning, everybody. Let me share my screen. All right. Can you all see that? All right. So I don't have a lot of information for you yet just because we are just starting our budgets. We are just starting our budgets for each division, but I put together as much as I could for you today, just to give you a little bit of information about what will be coming for the next meeting when we're together. So I will go over the preliminary increases that we are expecting. The annual flows, cause I do have that. I have completed the miscellaneous revenues. So I can show you what those will be. And then we'll just talk about the budget schedule. And then we'll move on to item 5. And then we'll move on to item 6. First of all, we do have some increases that we know are going to be coming our way this year. We're going to have a little bit of labor increases because we are having salary increases that were just approved. We did not have any increase in July of 2021, because most of our bargaining units had open MOUs. And so we needed to negotiate. We did not have any increase in September. So in September, the city gave an increase by 3% for this fiscal year that we're in. And then they also agreed because of all the delays and how long it took to get negotiations completed. To implement the next year's increase early. So we'll have the 3%, we had 3% in September, and then we'll have 2.5% in April of 2022, but then there will not be one. In July, which would be the typical timeframe for increases to go in place. We do know, sure everybody's aware that the cost of everything seems to be going up right now, but we have seen a significant increase in the cost of chemicals. So we expect to see an increase there. I think in our, in your last meeting, which I'm sorry, it was not at Emma talked about some of the projects that have been going on out at the plant. There have been a lot of emergency. So we expect to see a little bit of an increase in operations and maintenance projects. And then also we did. A restructure. We moved people around last year. With that change. It was discovered that we left the plant a little bit short. So we need to bring a new wastewater operator on. That is scheduled to go before our city council. In a couple of weeks. So it will be a mid-year. If it gets approved. And then also we are looking to add with the new fiscal year, a supervising lab analyst. This position is needed due to new regulatory requirements and just keeping up with those. And I think Sean is here. If there's any questions about that position. This is just showing you your annual, the annual flows and how the allocation will look like. This is just showing you your annual, the annual flows and how the allocation will be spread out this year. Pretty much everybody stayed fairly stable till last year. So nothing. Nothing earth shattering. Very, very consistent year over year. As I said, I did already complete the miscellaneous revenues. This is good news. We actually are seeing an increase in miscellaneous revenues. So this will be nice. This will come off of our total O and M allocation. The biggest increase is coming from the high strength program. We are seeing a significant increase in that program. So that we're going to see those tipping fees. Increased by quite a bit. And then just as a reminder, I'm showing you what the allocations were last year. Obviously the big increase came from the new debt service for the UV project. I also provided for you what each of the partners who used fund balance, how much they used. Last year for the allocations. Here's a picture of the refund reserves. You're going to see there is a big drop in the total dollar amount in there, but just so that you're aware it's only, it only reduced because Santa Rosa was going to use some of their funding to cash fund the UV project. And when we decided not to, when we decided not to use our funding, we were going to use our funding. We were going to use our funding. And the funding was so reasonable when we went through that. We just moved that money back to our wastewater fund, which is where all of our funding comes from. And so we just moved that money out. So that's why you see a big decrease there. And then finally, this is our schedule. So we will see you again on March 7th and April 7th. We will, I will be meeting with the budget. Subcommittee for the BPU. We will be meeting with the city council. We will be meeting with the city council. We will be meeting at BPU on April 21st to get the preliminary budget recommendation, which will include the preliminary approval of the sub regional budget. And then city council, we will be on April 26th. And then our budget final approval work with the city council, the study sessions will be in May and then adoption of the budget on June 21st. And with that, we'll see you on April 16th. And then the last item that we want to present is a sub pack of. Thank you. Kimberly. Are there any questions from the sub pack I see. Craig. Go ahead. Just timing. When, if the city, if the agencies. Want to present to their. Governing bodies. What would the timing be for that? Where we'd be looking at April. An April meeting. Yes. Okay. It should all, we'll be, So we had to go through all of the processes. And we don't have weeks that happened at that point, but water gets their budgets done fairly early because we have to go through all these other processes. So it would be pretty finalized. If, if, if the city's had a, um, had input at that point. Would it be too late? Then or. We can still make adjustments. Um, but it would be a problem for city councils, Now we have to have things submitted so early in order to get on their calendar. So we could do something more preliminary, possibly in March. It just wouldn't be up, you know, the finalized numbers that would be going to city council, maybe. We can talk about that though. If you want to. We will let you know as we get closer. Okay. So we're going to have a meeting on the, the April sub-tech meeting is where we're looking for a recommendation from the sub-tech. Got it. So it would have to be a March. Council meeting. Okay. If you, if you could have, keep that in mind and have some materials ready for us to present. We would need for the potati. We would need something. The first. First or second week in March. I have, you know, multiple funds that I work on, but this one always is the first one I work on. Just because it has to, it has so many approval processes. It has to go through. I have to get, I have to get a jump on this one. So. Thanks. That's great. Mike. Yeah. Thanks, Kimberly. Just a few questions. One. And they may be questions for Emma, but first up, one with regard, what do you attribute the tipping fee increase to? Is it, um, that's just my question. Um, actually that's under Sean's group. Okay. We've just seen an increase. I think, um, Sean can speak to that. But yeah, we've had a lot of, a lot of new. New folks and a lot more tipping going on. Yeah. So, um, you know, we've had one industry moved into town and to runner park. Um, and we're handling a lot of their waste, um, uh, through the truck to waste program. Um, and then we've just seen, um, an increase, um, Uh, you know, it rained a little bit this year. So we saw some increase there. Um, you know, just takes a little bit of rain and then everybody's got extra water to get rid of. Um, so, uh, those, those are the two things that we're seeing and we're also, um, I'm not prepared to, I didn't present on this yet because it's kind of preliminary, but I did mention earlier that we are doing an evaluation of our truck waste program, uh, to make sure that it's optimized for our community's needs. Um, and ensure that the, uh, tipping fees that we are accepting are covering the costs, um, of the program. Um, so we have enough time in the program to, to really be digging into those, um, details. And being open for whatever other opportunities are out there. Great. Um, thanks, Sean. And then, um, let's see the next question was the, you indicated that plant had a lot of, a lot of emergencies and there's going to be more equipment and more equipment. Could you maybe shed a little light on what the emergencies were? Um, I can take that question. Um, I, uh, that's a great question, Mike. Um, and on the agenda later is a regional operations update item. Um, and I'll be going over the activities that we've been undertaking. Okay. Thanks. Then the last question, Kimberly was on, you had a chart showing the change in the reserve. Was that a net change in reserve or ending fund balance or ending balance of reserves? That's ending fund balance as of last fiscal year. So there were, I thought I saw a negative negatives in there. So there were negative fund balances. Yes. There are, there is, there is a negative fund balance in there. So I mean, really it's a running total. So we've talked about the reserve before it's kind of a complicated piece of our budget, but. Um, as far as our auditors in the finance department goes, they just care about the bottom line of the fund balance, right? So it's just as long as that's in a positive status, it can't go into a negative status. They keep track manually of each different partners amount that is in the fund balance and it's a running total. So what we do is we obviously set our budget based on previous funds. So we set our budget based on previous funds. And then we set our budget based on previous funds. And then we set our budget based on previous flows. And then they true that up with the actual flows. And then they distribute whatever turn back there is based on that. So there is the ability to go below. If your flows are higher. Then, then what you're, what you were budgeted by. So that's the mechanism that gets it. Into a negative. And then I know you had mentioned this, but. I don't know. I don't know. Did I read that right? No, that was just here. You want me to put that back up? Yeah. I just, I just, I didn't understand. Let me get to it. So that, that 12 million there. That's what we had sitting in the funds last year. So Santa Rosa pays their portion of the sub regional budget. We pay for it with wastewater rates. So what we used to do is we used to always just move that to the waste water fund at the end of the year. We had not done that for several years because we thought we were going to put some cash towards the UV project. And when we decided not to put cash towards the UV project, we took that whole 12 million, 12.8 million, and we moved it back to the wastewater fund. So it doesn't, it wasn't a reflection of there being more expenditures or less turn back. We just moved it out of the fund. And my question was, is this. Is it, that's what was my question. Is this show a net change in the reserve? Or is Santa Rosa really have a. So our overall reserve there is, you know, so that's what your orders look like. We're still in that positive. In the reserve, which is good, but that Santa Rosa. Has a negative 12 million reserve. So we have, so the, with the running total and the turn back from when this was true to have, we have 592. That's our total. So you had the total. Okay. Okay. So, yeah. Okay. So the, I'm sorry. So that, that, that was my question. So the bottom line is the ending fund balance. Each year just shows the net. The, the, the, the, the net change. Correct. Okay. Thanks. That was just my question. I didn't answer. Ask it correctly. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the button. Any other questions from the sub-tact members. Our comments. Thank you. Kimberly. All right. Thank you. Nice to see everybody. It'll be nice to see everybody in person someday. Maybe as March. Yeah. Wouldn't that be nice. We might want to decide when we're going back to meeting in person for this body. So. We have a public comment on item 5.3. We wish to make a comment by a zoom. Please raise your hand. If you're dialing in by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And secretary. Do we have any public comments for item 5.3? Not. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Kimberly. We will now move on to item 5.4, which is the presentation on our regional operations division committee. So we're going to be looking at the presentations. Emma Walton will be making this presentation. And Mike, you will hear about all the issues that we are having. So Emma, please take it away. Right. Everyone see my screen? Good afternoon, members of the tech and welcome, Ryan. I am also a former Windsor and Kelly GHD employee. So I'm going to provide a brief update today on, operational ongoing since last, since we met last. Oh, here we go. I will be covering our recycle water and the supply and availability, some of the operational activities that we've undertaken since October, as well as briefly touch on some upcoming projects that we have. So our recycle water production, as I had mentioned previously, for January was about 19 MGD, which is lower than average, but higher than what we saw last year. You can see there the historical flows from 1986. Just kind of give you a sense of the variability that we see here. Along the middle there in gray is our average production. Last year in the dotted line along the bottom was our lowest production in our historical records. And we are currently trending back towards that direction as well. Given the rains we experienced in October, our recycle water storage is higher than average. But you can see that it's starting to flat line given the lack of rain that we've been seeing. We anticipate this to continue. But we are in a much better situation with our recycle water supply than we were last year. We are already have already started looking at our anticipated deliveries for this year. For geysers, we're looking at 4.2 billion gallons, which is our average. Last year, given the extensive shutdown that we undertook for maintenance needs, we supplied geysers less than average. And we gave them for we sent 4 billion up the hill last year. Agricultural irrigation on average we supply about 1.7 billion gallons last year. If you recall, we only had 600 million available for ag irrigation. So that was a pretty big hit to our ag program. This year, we've already established allotments and we established a minimum allotment for allocation of 900 million gallons. We decided to establish allocations in January this year, one to allow water to be used for frost protection, and to kind of give our users a sense of what the minimum that we would provide for the season would be. As we move through the season, this number will only go up. So this will be the minimum allocation that we provide for the year. If we don't receive more rain, we might not be able to free up more water, but we'll at a minimum make 100 million available for our customers. Our urban users, all the contracts we have in place there, we have to allocate 500 million for urban use for a total of 5.6 billion that we're looking to allocate at a minimum. So now I'm going to talk some about some of the projects that have been going on out here. The October 24 storm brought a lot of water our way. We had a the picture on the left there shows Chris Ward, one of our mechanical techs working on a valve actuator. He we had a valve, a critical valve fail during that storm, a valve that allows water to move from our primary clarifiers into our aeration tanks. It failed closed. And water, we were starting to gain elevation in our primary tanks. And we risked overtopping our primary tanks. Luckily, our mechanics were able to respond very quickly, remove the actuators on this valve and manually operate this valve and get water flowing again. We also experienced some localized flooding, not too severely. But you can see there our parking lot is a little underwater. As a result of the October 24 storm, we also ended up going off spec. It just was more water coming into the plant than our capacity allows us to treat. And it's also more water than we were able to pump to the geysers and to brown farm, which is our off spec pond. So we did end up storing water in our metal lane complexes and both C pond and D pond, a very large amount of non spec water that we have since been returning to the plant for retreatment. So on the left is our crews constructing a pipeline so that we can pump water from D pond into C pond and get it all isolated into C pond, which we have already completed and done. And then the photo on the right there shows pumps being placed in C pond. So that we can pump water over the levees and back into a manhole that runs along a Lana Road. We are nearly complete with draining C pond and returning all of that water, which is quite a big effort given the amount of non spec water that we generated during that storm event. So in the next couple weeks, we will have completely retreated all of that water. The other big project that's been happening out here, you may remember last meeting, I showed you a video of leaking aeration piping. This is piping that provides air to our aeration tanks. It was severely leaking. And our plant cannot go more than a day without air being provided to our aeration tanks. So we got an emergency project together. That video was taken on September 28. We quickly got an emergency project together, got an engineer to do a temporary design to do bypass piping and got a contractor out to complete that work. The work was completed on November 30. So we now have this temporary above ground air piping that will provide air to our aeration tanks. And the underground piping has since been abandoned. We are in the middle of design for a replacement of this piping. And we will, we're going to replace it with permanent above ground piping. And we'll utilize this temporary bypass during construction as well. So it'll help facilitate the permanent construction of the above ground piping. Let's see. We had a Christmas present come early on December 24. We had a pump fail and break and had a very large polymer spill that our crews quickly responded to. Not only did our regional crews respond to this, our local sewer and water crews also came out to assist in the cleanup of this spill. A little after Christmas, we had other gifts. We had a large sinkhole appear over the failed aeration piping or the leaking aeration piping open up. The picture on the left doesn't really do it justice. This sinkhole is about 15 feet deep. You can see on the right after we pulled it back and got some shoring in. You can see kind of the magnitude of how big it is. We were very concerned that these conditions may exist over the entire length of the leaking aeration pipe. So we mobilized the CCTV crew to video the inside of the pipe to verify the integrity. And then we got, we brought out geotech engineers to do ground penetrating radar to see if we could identify additional voids. Luckily, nothing through those efforts, nothing was identified. We also did additional exploratory excavation to just verify that nothing else had opened up that we were unaware of. And the extent of the sinkhole really was just isolated to to this area. And since December, we have backfilled and repaved the area. January 8, we had a plug in digester number three, we were unable to get waste material out of digester three. Typically, this would not be an issue since we do have excess digester capacity. But we have a digester currently offline, because it was just cleaned. And we typically have a digester offline because we, on average, clean the digester every two years. So we have four digesters. And so we, on average, have a digester offline. And our crews were able to get a bypass line installed to keep material flowing, and to ensure that we were able to continue to make class B biosolids. Our mechanics and our onsite crews being able to do all this work has really prevented a lot of failures and a lot of us going off spec and keeping operations going. So it's really great to have such amazing crews. Just a couple weeks ago on January 22, we had a recycle water main break. It was a 12 inch line, the main line that feeds recycle water to the plant. As you can see, it was a very extensive impacts and flooded the area. We were able to isolate the line. But because we use recycle water to supply water to a lot of our processes, we had to go shut down equipment that utilizes recycle water prior to shutting down the line, so that we didn't further damage equipment. So more spilled than would have otherwise. Again, the response for this work was not only from our regional crews out here, but our local crews came out to assist as well. And ultimately, the break ended up being so extensive that we needed to bring in our on call contractor to make the repair. This repair has since been made and we are back in water. Those are kind of some of the big projects that have been going on out here. We do have some exciting upcoming projects. Our disinfection improvements, our UV project finally went out to bid on January 28. Very exciting and long waited event to occur. So it is currently out to bid we're getting RFIs in the process of responding to those requests for information. We are also scheduled to rehabilitate two of our belt presses here in February. So that work is going to be starting soon. We are have a project to replace the our flow equalization return pumps. So the parts for those pumps have been ordered and they're on their way and our internal maintenance crews will be doing that work. We have a project that was awarded to replace our emergency generator radiators. That product that work was stalled last year given the early rains we received. So we were unable to complete that work last fall. But we're going to be kicking off that work here soon. And many, many, many, many more projects that I could go on and on about. But at the next sub-tac, you'll be receiving a presentation from our engineering staff to talk about all the exciting big capital improvement projects that we have going on. So with that, I'd be happy to open it up for any questions. And if you're interested in what that is, then you can ask that too. All right, thank you, Emma. Yes, a sobering look at a 50 plus year old treatment plant. So and I just have to say staff is doing an amazing job keeping everything together and working through this. And you know, we're trying to be as proactive as we can. But we continue to have difficulties with having enough labor and resources to get projects done. So that's that's our biggest issue really. So any questions from the sub-tac? Yeah, I would say no questions. But you know, just thanks to your crew. I mean, I thought we were the only ones that had to go out on Christmas Eve to prepare emergencies. I'm glad we're we've got company here. Or I guess I'm sorry for you, we have company. But anyways, those can be really trying time. So how did your crew respond? Our crews are absolutely amazing. You know, the redundancy that our infrastructure should be supplying is just not there right now. And it's being, you know, picked up by our crews. And they just do incredible work. And the fact that we have very highly skilled mechanics and highly skilled electricians and highly skilled instrumentation techs and operators has just really kept this plant going. It's wearing, obviously, with COVID and emergency after emergency. It's it's difficult. But I just can't speak highly enough about our crews. I guess I would say if you can pass, I guess on I'd look if I can say on behalf of our our tack here, can you pass on our appreciation to them? And I think we, you know, I'm sure Craig and Mary Grace, we've all been in that position where we're really at the mercy of our staff. When things go wrong, I mean, there are things that when, you know, I'm looking at your recycled water break, you know, I think most would look is like I have no idea what to do. And, and you have folks on your staff who just immediately jump in. And you know, they're the ones who go running into fires, then away from things. And I know we all can't, you know, can't thank them enough. So if they can on again, I say on all our behalf, just say thanks. I will definitely pass that along. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the Subtack? Alright. So if there are no other questions from the Subtack, I will now open it up for public comments on item 5.4. If you wish to make a comment by zoom, please raise your hand. If you are calling in by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary, do we have any public comment on this item? You've done public comments. Alright, thank you. And thank you, Emma. And thank you, Mike. I second the appreciation on behalf of the Subtack and just continue to always acknowledge how amazing the staff is out at our treatment plant, but in our department in general. So thank you. Alright, so we will now. Oh, yes, Ryan. Oh, I was gonna say, Emma, you didn't. I guess you didn't tell us really what that that I'm gonna give a quick guess on what that last picture was. Yeah, is that was that the pandemic phenomena, inorganic, wipey monsters that are hearing it all the treatment plants around the country? I'm sure there's some non flushable wipes in there. That is a rag ball a rag ball that was taken out of the bottom of our digester after cleaning. So Christian, our supervising wastewater operator had the pleasure of removing it. Because you see that picture again. I missed that little detail. So good eyes, Ryan. Let me see if I can make that work. Here we go. And he looks so happy doing it. Well, who wouldn't be? Oh my God. Wow. Okay, well, that's a that seems like for Elise Howard, something for the the video of like, why not put flushable wipes down the toilet? Yeah, it's true. Actually, there's a very interesting display at the treatment plant. So when we finally get back up and running of flushable wipes and toilet paper that have been sitting in water for months now, right? Since October. And there's just no breakdown of that flushable wipes. So all right. So we will now move on to thank you so much, Emma, we will now move on to item 5.5, which is a presentation on our environmental services division update and Sean McNeill, our deputy director of environmental services, will be presenting Sean. All right. Good morning, Chair Burke and members of the Subregional Technical Advisory Committee. I'm excited to be here and share with you what's been going on in our environmental services division. So I'm Sean McNeill, the deputy director of environmental services. So I just want to give a quick update on what's going on with the Laguna Environmental Lab. As Kimberly mentioned, we are adding one new position to aid in the adoption of these new requirements to comply with the NILAC Institute standards. These are the TNI standards that all environmental labs in the state of California need to comply with. In general, we think it's really good best practices that are included, but it's a lot more detailed tracking of which aliquots of various chemicals that we're using and data tracking. So and we need to have certain procedures in place. They gave us three years to update our procedures to meet these new requirements. We're a little over a year has passed. We have a consultant online and adding a new staff person is a part of that process to get us over the hurdle and then to keep us in compliance as we move forward. We did just have our first external audit from a third party assessor. In the past, the external audits were done by by the the state. And this year they've they said that they're no longer doing those and that we'd have to hire our own third party assessor. So we did that auditor came in that we had nine findings, which is fewer than average for the Bay Area and for laboratories of an equivalent side size. And many of those findings were relatively easy to address. Some of them were issues related to COVID that we were able to clean up. So we're moving forward with that. Also, our lab is also aging. And the instruments that we use in our lab are highly technical, and they utilize software and that software kind of gets dated sooner than the technology does. So eventually you get hit you get in a place where you have to have software to operate these instruments that you that are no longer safe to have on network. So we've had to do some update of our instruments. And we're methodically going through and changing those out. We had budgeted a little bit each year. So that it's not a huge hit to the budget to replace these instruments. So in October of 2021, we installed our quick trace low level mercury analyzer. And this will help us monitor mercury and drinking water, recycled water and our effluent, as well as solids. And then in January of 2022, we finished the installation of our new inductively coupled plasma mass spectrophotometer, also known as the ICP MS. And this conducts trace metals analyses, and can quantify the metals in parts for the trillion range. So it's very high high tech sophisticated instruments. And it's not just the purchase and installation of these instruments that we have to worry about. Actually, our staff needs to prove that they they can implement the EPA methods using these new instruments. And we're going through those special studies to ensure that they do it. So so they each get a little test to ensure that the instrument and the user of the instrument can detect known quantities in their samples. Also want to just kind of give an update on our safe medicine disposal program. This program was started in 2008 to prevent unused pharmaceuticals from being either flushed down the toilet and getting to our wastewater treatment plant, or disposed at the landfill where they make their way into the leachate and get to the wastewater treatment plant. So so we've had this program to do that. Senate bill 212 was passed in 2018. And that requires manufacturers or suppliers to establish a safe take back program. Yet that implementation has been delayed because of COVID. And some of the programs that they've proposed are a little underwhelming to the state. So they're looking at increasing that so that increasing the effectiveness of that so that before we take away our program, we want to make sure that the other programs will make it easy for people to get rid of their old expired and unused medications. So since 2008, our regional program operated from our pre treatment program has collected 93,589 pounds of pharmaceutical waste. In in the the whole watershed, we've removed 100, almost 148,000 pounds. And this includes the regional pro our regional program program run by Sonoma Water, City of Petaluma and the Russian River Watershed Association. So it's been a very effective program in getting those medicines out of people's cabinets and out of our waste system. And in the last year, we found here's the collections from each of our locations for our regional with Roner Park having collecting about 500, a little over 500 pounds, Katadi Police Department, over 100 pounds, Sebastopol Police Department, over 1000 pounds. And then the Santa Rosa Police Department, 1800 pounds for so for almost 3500 pounds of pharmaceuticals were removed from potentially getting into our local waterways. So moving on to our annual report, we're just about ready to file it. It'll be due about February, it's due February 20, 2022. Some highlights from this annual report is we had no discharge this year. We treated almost 6 billion gallons of wastewater here. And that was 100 percent reused. And we produced over 5000 dry metric tons of biosolids. And that's all at 100% reuse as well, almost 100% reuse as well. So our phosphorus compliance, just want to kind of give an update here. As you're probably, well, many of you are aware, but Ryan, you are new. So we have to quantify the amount of phosphorus in any of our discharges. And then we need to have a mechanism to offset those discharges. And so to do that, we've had in the past a nutrient offset project. We developed a number of projects throughout the region to remove phosphorus from the watersheds to meet our compliance. We're now in the process of migrating those credits from the nutrient offset project into the water quality trading framework. And we're also working with Sonoma Water, the town of Windsor and the Sonoma Resource Conservation District, to develop two creek restoration projects on different segments of Golden Creek to remove sediment, restore that area, and to get more credits so that we can bank enough credits for at least one very large discharge, or possibly two medium sized discharges. Because sometimes projects, it's now with the new rules in the water quality trading framework, these kind of credits have life of imperfectivity. So it's a good investment to start banking these credits, because sometimes projects are not easy to happen in one year. So having multiple years worth of discharge credits is a good way to ensure our compliance with this regulation. And with that, I'll take any questions. All right, thank you, Sean. Are there any questions or comments from the sub-tech? One quick one if I can. And I know I'm sure the answer is it depends. But what it do, do you have a sense of what your reuse capacity is? I know it depends on the water year, it would depend on when the water comes and all that. But in general, do you have a like, is there a sense of how it looks like, you know, obviously 100% reuse last year. Do you know if your reuse capacity is probably like seven or eight billion gallons a year, would you say? Or I'm just just a good question. You know, I'm going to see Deputy Director Emma Walton can feel that one. Yes, I have those numbers. And if I give you one, I'm going to be making it up. I want to say it's 6.4 billion, but I can I'll verify that and send you that information. Yeah, okay. It's not I was just curious, because just was curious how close you were to your capacity last year, your reuse capacity. You were able to do 100%. And if you had a sense of how much more you could have done, if there was more water, I know it was just because there was such a water shortage. Yeah, so obviously, we did 100%. We could have done much more. And I, I want to say it's 6.4. But I will, I'll double check that. Okay. And obviously, it depends on when the water comes in. Of course. Yeah, of course, on average. Yeah, we're able to sustain. Yeah, and I'd say that just also want to thank Sean for working with us at Sonoma Water on these Creek Restoration Projects. These are projects we wouldn't be doing otherwise to restore these creeks if we weren't for the credit trading project. So it's, it's I think there's, there's many wins here. So I just want to thank Sean and everyone that's at Centro as a water for working with us on that. Well, you guys, Sonoma Water makes it pretty easy to work with. So appreciate I want to appreciate you and your team as well. Thanks. One, one quick comment or question. Those are pretty impressive numbers of pharmaceuticals collected. I'm assuming this, that huge number from Sebastopol would be because they're the West County sort of hub. So they've include sort of the river and the west, west of there coming into Sebastopol to be collected. That kind of would make sense to me if that is what's happening there. And then I guess do you have a sense of how much is actually still really needing to be collected? I mean, it's it's such a new thing to see that much pharmaceuticals. I've always wondered that. So thanks for showing that that number. It's just sort of a wow moment for me seeing imagining that much in our waste stream. I don't think I can answer intelligently about how much more there is out there. But I will say that, you know, we do look at whether or not we want to continue the program each year because they're supposed to there are other mechanisms now. I'm I'm a Kaiser member and they'll send you an envelope and then you can just put your medicine in there and mail it back to them. So there are more pharmacy options than used to exist back in 2008 when we started this program. But collecting 3,500 pounds in our our various police departments was is it's convenient. And as long as we can find convenient ways to make this the medicines not get to the flush down the toilet, which, you know, not even that long ago, EPA was advertising. That's what you should do. And then regulating that we shouldn't be allowing that in our areas. So, you know, there's a lot of mixed messages, people aren't very clear. So we want to make sure that there's an easy option getting rid of these pharmaceuticals because we do add our treatment plant except the leachate from the landfill. And so even if it goes to the landfill, it can make its way to our treatment plant. Yeah, I was just wondering if you had a sense of within the waste stream, if you were seeing a decrease overall in residual pharmaceuticals or emerging contaminants generally associated with pharmaceuticals or if that's still sort of an increasing trend like you see in other parts of the country. Yeah, so we in our priority pollutant testing list, we have not seen a change in that getting into our influence or effluent. So we haven't seen a change there. If I'm understanding your question, how much is coming into the treatment plant? But we don't, we do not, and there do not exist EPA methods for every single pharmaceutical. Yeah, it's more of just an organic range, you'll pick up, and you can assume with a lot of its pharmaceuticals, it's a tough one. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. It's just a really interesting subject. Thank you for talking about that. Sure. And we could also dig into the data a little bit more and see if we can find any trends. But we just, we mostly are non detect on almost all those priority pollutants that we have tested for. Thank you. Any other comments or questions from the subject? All right. Seeing none, then I will go ahead and open it up for public comment. We are now taking public comment on item 5.5. If you're on Zoom, please raise your hand to make a comment. If you're on the phone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary, do we have any public comment on this item? We do not. All right. Well, thank you so much, Sean. I think that was a very good presentation. Thank you to all the presenters today. And Subtack members, as I mentioned, we'll we'll see if we're going to be virtual or in person. We'll see how this all plays out. And I do just want to offer to Ryan and frankly, to all the Subtack members, if you haven't been on a while, we are always happy to tour you around the treatment plant. So if you would like to have a tour, please let us know. So you can kind of see everything we're dealing with. So with that, unless any other comments, I believe we are adjourned. So thank you so much. And we'll see you in March. Thank you, everyone. Take care. Thank you. Take care.