 Okay, I have 630, so let's go ahead and get started. I'd like to convene this special meeting of the Board of Directors of the San Lorenzo Valley Water District on November 10, 2021. Polly, would you please take the roll? President Mayhood. Here. Vice President Henry. Here. Director Ackerman. Here. Director Foles. Here. Director Smalley. Here. Okay. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda? Our staff has none, sir. Okay. That brings us to the oral communications. This portion of the agenda is reserved for all communications by the public on any subject that lies within jurisdiction of the district, but is not on tonight's agenda. Would any member of the public like to make a comment at this time? If you do, please raise your hand. Okay, seeing none and hearing none, we'll go back to the agenda. We forgot and left out the president's report. So I'm just gonna tuck that in right now because I'd like to, I don't have anything to report, but I would like to ask our district manager to announce some good news that sort of bears a little bit on the future uses of the Water Master Plan. So go ahead, Rick. Thank you. Yes, we're happy to report that on Monday, we received notification from the State Department of Water Resources that they approved our grant application in the amount of $3.2 million for consolidation, intertized with Brackenbray and Four Springs Mutual located up off of Big Basin Way. The grant funding is available immediately and we can start facilitating as soon as we get agreements in place from the two agencies. Okay, well, that's great, great news. So tonight then we'll just go ahead and turn to the one item of business which is a presentation of the Water Master Plan. This one is specifically for the public and is a requirement of the funding that we received from the State Department of Water Resources. And so with that, I'd like to turn it over to Mr. Akele to give our presentation tonight. All right, President Mayhood, thank you so much for that. And let me now share my screen. Can you all see my screen? Yes. All right, very good. Again, it's a pleasure being here to talk about this very important project for the district. We were fortunate to have been selected and worked on it and now we are here to present the Master Plan in the next screen, the next screen. So our agenda has two items. The first item is we'll talk a little bit about the objective of a water system master plan. So what is it? What is a water system master plan and how do we use it? And the next item is how it was developed. It was a long process. What are the steps? So what does it include and how it was developed? Starting with the objective, what is it? How to use it? What is it? It's a document that identifies the water system improvements to service existing users. In this case, most customers are existing users, but also if there's any growth, they will be serviced and they also have to meet assembly bill 1600. That's a assembly bill that stipulates you have to associate a future development's cost with future developments and existing development costs associated with existing development, existing rate payers versus capacity fees. And what is it? It also identifies improvements where they are quantified and they are prioritized with estimated costs. So how much does it cost to construct improvements? And when do we need them? How to use it? The master plan becomes, it's a defensible guiding document. The most important word here is defensible. Guiding documents, capital improvement projects for planning purposes and for budgeting purposes. So that's what master plans are about. Next, we will talk about what does it include and how it was developed. And the screen you're looking at has 10 tasks, essentially to quantify the little elements that we work on. First, we looked at land use. Land use is important, existing and future land use. We characterize the existing users. How are they using water? Where is the water being used? So that comes from building record. We inventory the existing facilities just to make sure we have a good understanding is to make sure we are moving forward with a good understanding. And then we developed a tool that is called the hydraulic model. What is hydraulic model? It's a computer program that simulates how water moves in pipelines, how we get pressures in certain areas. That was a big investment by your staff in this project. And this is a tool that you will continue to use in the future. And then just because it's on computers, we want to make sure that it works and that it's been validated. So task five is calibrated, validates this computer program, make sure it's predicting things correctly. Then when we have that investment, now we'll start looking and evaluating the system. How can we make it better? Then we recommend improvements. So now we know how we can make it better. What are those improvements? Let's list them and then come up with a capital improvement program, which is a list of improvements with associated costs. And finally, it's a report document that brings everything together. Characterizing the existing customers, we have about 5,677 acres of lands that are developed within this district here. Looking into the future, we only foresee about at this time, about 108 acres to be developed for a total of 57,85 acres. Then we looked at characterizing water use. How is it being used between seasons? All that is important for planning purposes. We want to see what's the annual, how much is it during the worst day of the year, the hottest day of the year when water is being used the most. Our system has to perform during the hottest day of the year when water is being used at its highest. But some statistics on an annual basis, if you look between 2009 and 2019, as an example, production range between 2.1 MGD back in 2013 and 1.57 MGD in 2015. In 2019, it was back up to 1.7. During the maximum month, so the maximum month is the hottest month, August, July, production range between 2.89 MGD. And as was in July, 2013 and 1.9 MGD in August, 2015. So July and August are the hottest month. And within those months, we look for the hottest day. And that's where we look if the system can, and even the worst hour, we want to make sure the system can meet the demand and provide the proper and adequate pressures. So some stats about your system, 190, 190 miles pipeline. Look at the map on the right-hand side. That shows the major pipelines, but it shows also color codes of zones. Those are different pressure zones. Your district has very challenging topography. And so there are water, the way to remove water, we have to push the water uphill to a tank and the tank will serve and pressurize the system. And every time you have a different topography, you have to have a new tank. You have 55 storage tanks. And in combined, they store about 9.25, 9.26 million gallon. But they are scattered, 55 tanks scattered. So it's a challenge topography. It is very challenging to maintain the system. So kudos to your operation staff that maintain it and have to worry about responding to whatever happens in the system. They worry about it. There are 33 booster stations and then also 40 pressure reducing valves. Reducing valves is when you have this lower zone, you reduce the head so that the lower, elevations get the proper pressures. And there are surface water diversion, seven of them. So this is a zoomed in version, which we show the system on two plates. And you see in the background, the pipelines that are color coded in red are the larger pipelines, 12 inches. And then the ones that are color coded in blue are the slightly smaller pipelines, so the eight inches. So those are the ones that you see. And the ones that you can barely see them in brown, they are the smaller, very undersized pipelines, maybe four inches, two and four inches. So all those plates you will find in the actual master plan document. Those were extracted. They are figure 6.1 and 6.2. I mentioned the hydraulic model. The hydraulic model was extracted and developed from the GIS. GIS is an electronic world that maps the infrastructure. It maps the lines, the pipelines. It maps where the hydrants are. It maps where the valves are. So we use that information at GIS to build this computer program. And you're looking at a screen capture that shows what the program looks like. So in the center of the screen, you see pipelines with pipe sizes. And that's what it includes. The program doesn't do magic. It just tells us how much water flow just tells us how much water flows inside pipelines. And where two pipeline meets, it's called a junction or a node. It tells us how much pressure the computer reads at that spot. So this is how we monitor what the pressure is and how it's fluctuating during the day. And this simulates days and hours. And it tells us how much flow is going through pipeline. Is it going through properly with a proper velocity or is it a bottleneck? And we need to upsize that pipeline. This is the tool that we use, the computer program that we use. On the left-hand side, it's a layering system that we can turn on and off. We can bring as an example, an aerial photo in the background, Google. We can bring them in the background so we can see where the streets are, where the buildings are, or we can turn them off and show, in this case, we're showing in the background, pressure zone, different pressure zones, different zones operate independently, almost, but they're interconnected. And in this case, it's the lion zone on the lower left-hand side and big steel on the right, lower right. And then on top, you see in the blue, the reader pressure zone and then Blackstone. So that's the computer program. Then I mentioned calibrating. Calibrating is validating the model, making sure that it is predicting accurate values. Just because it's in a computer, just because we put it together doesn't mean it's predicting correct results. So after we built it all together, it's our obligation to make sure it is predicting what the field is reading. And we have eyes in the fields and our eyes are called the SCADA system that measures pressures at all the tanks, at all the pumps. So all that information we collected in addition to that, we installed something that's called a pressure log, or it's a small device that you install in the field and it measures pressures. Instantaneous pressures every minute, every five minutes and for a period of a week or two weeks. So we gathered that additional information. We spotted them in places where we need to get additional data in addition to the tanks. And then after we had 13 temporary pressure loggers, it says here, and they were installed in on 11-4, 2019, between 11-4, 2019 and December 16, 2019, that was just before the pandemic shutdowns. We used data from 29 storage reservoirs and seven boost, six sources of supply and seven booster stations. Each one of those that are identified on the left-hand side of the screen, we generated graphs for under, like you see on the right hand of the screen and we compare two things. One, what did the field tell us it was seeing? And that is spotted here in blue. There's a blue line that you see over 24 hours is telling us what the field saw. The red line is telling us what the model was able to predict. How we were able to now calibrate, made the model predict like real life was predicting. Tony, I can't read the axes. Can you just tell me what the X and Y axes are? Yes, absolutely. The axis that the Y axis is the pressure. So this is telling us in this case, this is a pressure logger. It's reading a pressure from zero to 200. And in this case, the pressure is hovering at about 125, maybe 130 PSI throughout the day. And then on the X axis, we're looking at time in hours. This is zero. This is six. This is 12. This is the 12 noon, then 18 hours and then 24 hours. But in this case, the pressure here was pretty constant. This is pressure logger and this was in big steel. This logger was in solid in big steel. And at Irwin Way and Redwood Way. This other pressure logger as an example was in zone 31, McLeod, it was at highway nine and Riverbank. And the pressure on the X on the Y was about also 130, fluctuating a little bit up and down, but the model was predicting what the field was predicting over 24 hour period. The lower one here, we're looking at Brookdale and zone 16. And then the last one was a pump station operates with on and off. So the blue line is the telemetry data and then the model was slightly behind, maybe a couple hours. So it's not a perfect world, but we want to do not perfect. We want to make sure it's predicting accuracy. It's the behavior we're looking for and the pressure. So in this case, the flow here, the Y axis is not pressure because the pump is not about the pressure. The pump is moving water. So the Y axis is gallons per minute at flow, but the X axis is also 24 hours. This is where we're seeing how does the pump operate in real life and how does the model predicting and the models shut down at one point in time to zero and back up to where the level was. It was a couple hours behind, but it's not perfect, perfect. We can fine tune, we can spend the next two, three weeks doing this, but that's not what this is about. Any other questions? No, thank you. Excellent question, but an advanced question. The next step was after we had this tool that where we had confidence in, we call this a benchmark model. It's a benchmark, now we can use it. Now the fund begins from our perspective. We call it fund because now we can come up with meaningful evaluation, meaningful numbers. So what did we use it for? Number one, we look in pipelines. Do they meet fire floor requirements? That's very important. Can our pipelines convey that fire floor requirements that we needed when fire season is here? We worry a lot about it right now, maybe not as much. Service connection, do we have the adequate pressure? Do we have customer complaints about pressure? Storage tanks, are they big enough to fight the fires we want them to fire to fight? And then finally, the booster stations they pump that water that we needed them to pump and do they have redundancy? If one of the pumps goes down, can we rely on a backup to step up because pumps are mechanical and they can fail at any time. And when they do fail, we want to make sure we, it's at the end of the world, we may want to make sure there's a plan in place to take care of it. And so we evaluate the existing system and here we're looking at some color coded result. And what are the color coding on the maps real quick here? We looked at fire flows. The first, there are two plates we're looking at. One looked at what kind of, what are the minimum fire flows that we can get? Minimum fire flow residual pressure. So what kind of pressures do we get during fire flow? And there's a legend on the left-hand side here that says if it's a blue, light blue, we're getting good fire, good pressure, good fire flows. So the blue means we're getting good fire flows during, there's a good available fire flows at 20 PSI. And green means we're getting between 1500 and 2000. Orange in 500 and 1000. And red is less than 500. And we don't like the red too much. It's, we're getting some fire flows, but we like to get, sometimes we get to get more than that. And we'll talk about why, why is because the system is overall undersized. Endersized means we don't have the desired size of pipeline that we would like to see. We see a lot of small pipelines throughout. And so over the years, the objective is over the years to update those pipelines and upgrade them to larger sizes. So the system get gradually enhanced. We can't do it overnight, but at least we know where we are. We need, we know where we need to go. And this is, this master plan is going to chart a path for us to get from A to B, not overnight. And as opportunities happen, as grants make it available, also they will help us get there. So the map on the left-hand side shows the minimum fire flow residual pressure. On the right-hand side, we account for the storage tanks. If it's the storage tank big enough, and if it's not big enough, we run out of water, we start seeing more red dot. So the fire flow availability is less. And that's important. We just don't look at instantaneous, how much we can get instantaneously. The fire, when it happens, hopefully it doesn't last long, but a lot of times it lasts one hour or more. And then in the master plan, we have, so we can see some clarity. We zoomed in, the system is a big string all over, and that's the challenge for maintaining it. We broke it into plates. We call them plates or detailed sheets. And so the figure 7.7 on the left-hand side is a key or a legend for all the individual sheets that we followed. And the reason for that is we wanted to make sure we can see some clarity for the improvements we are recommending. And the plate on the right is one of the details. It's detail C on the map, and detail C is shown right here. And we'll show you two more details. But let's take a look at the legend first on the left-hand side of the screen. And specifically the color coding for pipeline. If you see a red pipeline, it means that this is a capital, this is a capacity improvement. We need to make it bigger to be able to fill the tanks properly and to be able to provide pressures adequately during winter time, during summertime, anytime. The orange line, it's FF, it's a fire flow reliability improvement. It means we would like to improve that pipeline, make it bigger to be able to fight the fire adequately. We can fight fires now, but adequately. For commercial fires, the fire marshal likes to see a certain amount of fire. So to be able to meet that desired fire flow, we need to make improvements in the orange zone. So now let's take a look at the plate on the right-hand side. All those red lines means we need to upsize to meet regular operations. And when you see an orange line, the orange line means that we need to improve that pipeline, increase the size of that pipeline so we can fight fires better and longer. And then the next slide, we'll look at two more similar exhibits through the system, the detail E and detail F. Again, the orange lines are for improving the fire flows and the red lines, red lines, a lot of red lines. And that's because, as I mentioned, I mentioned it again, the pipe sizes are way undersized here. So over the years, the objective is over the years to begin, and we have to, when you look at it and you see it's too much, it's good to know where you are and it's good to start someplace. And this is giving you a plan so you can start planning, you can plan ahead, depending on budget availabilities. And this is the place to start. This is where you need to start. At the end of the day, we wanted also to, since there are so many, we wanted to prioritize them. Which ones do we start with? There's a lot to deal with here. So where do we start? So we did another exercise here that we called a risk assessment. And this is like a business. This is intended to be run like a business. And so we looked at the business risk. What are the risks for a pipeline failing if that pipeline fails and it's serving one or two homes? We don't like it to fail. But if it does fail and it's serving two homes, the risk is low, the consequence, I'm sorry, the risk, the consequence is low. If two homes, they'll give us some time. We'll contact them, they'll give us some time to fix it. But if it's serving the entire pressure zone, that's a high consequence. We cannot allow this to happen. So those are the big pipelines that we need to worry about the most. Those are the ones we need to fix first. This is how you get the most bang for the buck. And so this exercise is very intricate, very complex and thorough, but we assigned scores for each pipeline in the system, although we're from extreme risk to a very low risk. So we looked at the consequence of a pipeline failing. Is it near a school? Is it near a hospital? And we looked at the likelihood of failure. Is it old? Do we know, has it been fixed many times? So that's the likelihood of it failing. We looked at the both and then we, you marry those two together and that's called the business stress. Looking at the consequence of failure, the consequence of failure and the likelihood of failure. And at the end of the day, we summarize that on a map that you see on the right-hand side. We have about 8% of the system in extreme risk. In this case, this is a consequence, I'm sorry, this is a consequence of failure with flows that are over 250 gallons per minute, as an example. Those are designated as extreme risk from a low perspective. And there are about 15 miles of those. This map doesn't mean those are the pipeline we need to fix. This is one element that we looked at. And there were several elements that we looked at and at the end of the day, there was a resultant that prioritized the improvements. Where do we look first? We also looked at energy reliability and efficiency and else, how can we save on energy? And there were specific areas that we were directed to look at. And in this case, we identified four areas where we can, where you can change and modify the connectivity in the system and save. And I think your staff have looked at that and moved immediately to see if those savings can be implemented in the field. And I think these have been, some of these have been implemented and I'll let Josh discuss if you have any of those questions. Finally, at the end of the day, what are we looking for is, okay, what do we need to fix? How much are they gonna cost us? We've seen a lot of red lines. So yes, there's a lot of red lines. At the end of the day, you will see a table that you can read. It's on top here, but it's itemized cost for each project that we think needs to be addressed. We don't have to address it all today. We have to address it at one point in time. When the conditions are, or the funding is available. But at the end of the day, there's a summary table that you see at the bottom here that says, in terms of capital improvement costs that we need pipeline improvements, about $57 million. That's a lot of money. Valve improvements, about $200,000. There's a lot of money. Booster station improvement, $788,000. Reservoir tank improvement, $17 million. Tank improvements, capacity-wise. We don't have enough capacities in tanks. That's what this is telling us here. And certainly our pipelines, they need major, major upsizing. You know, does the system work today? Yes, it does. It does work. But our job here is to tell, how can we improve that level of service to be on par with other cities, with other districts? It's a level of service that will provide to customers. So over the next 20 years, this is the next 20-year phasing. If we look at an annual budget between 2022 and 2027, we're looking at about 3.3 millions to about 4.2 millions per year. So this is breaking it down to an annual expenditure budget that can be considered here. The five-year budget between 2027, so beyond 2027, we looked at five-year budget between 2027 and 2041, we're looking at about $10 million to $14 million every five years. So that's back again to an average of $3.5 million per year. So somehow the $3 million per year should become a sustainable expenditure and budget to renew and replace and enlarge the capacity of the pipeline and take care and enlarge the capacity of our storage tanks. So when important element of this project, a very important element of this project is to identify how do we address disadvantaged communities. And in this case, the map on the right-hand side shows the area that is delineated within this district that is delineated as attributed to disadvantaged communities. So there's a corresponding capital improvement budget that is associated with those disadvantaged communities. So out of this total capital improvement cost of $75 million, we said this area, the area that influences this, the purple area that's highlighted on the map is going to be about $13 million or $13.8 million. So this is the capital cost for the servicing areas which includes this disadvantaged communities. But how much is attributed, attributable directly to this purple areas for those disadvantaged communities? We did a cost analysis and that number is going to be $7.3 million. That is directly attributed to the disadvantaged communities. But holistically, it works disadvantaged communities but they are part of the system. And the system is supporting it, I think. So with that, that concludes the presentation. And at this time, I'm going to have Carly help us out with the next few slides, Carly. Great, thank you, Tony. So the district would like to start by extending a special thank you to ACO Engineering, the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County and the California Department of Water Resources. The Water System Master Plan was funded by the Department of Water Resources through a grant awarded to the Regional Water Management Foundation. Funding need was based on the 2012 through 2016 disadvantaged community data developed by the American Community Survey. The American Community Survey determines median household income for the United States. Next slide, please. To support the community, the district created a rate assistance program in September of 2021. This program offers $15 off a monthly bill for up to 138 qualifying residential customers. Currently, the district has 67 customers participating in the rate assistance program with three applications pending approval. Next slide, please. So how do you qualify for the rate assistance program? You must be a residential San Lorenzo Valley Water District customer and receive a discounted rate through PG&E's CARE program under the same address and name as your water bill. If you meet these criteria, you qualify for the district's rate assistance program. The application is available on the district's website on its customer service page. A copy of your most recent PG&E bill reflecting participation in the CARE program will be needed. If you're a tenant, you'll also want to include a copy of your lease. If you'd like to figure out your eligibility for PG&E's CARE program, you can visit their website, which is www.pge.com forward slash CARE. And once you qualify there, you can then try to qualify for the district's rate assistance. Thank you for attending and we will now take questions on both the master plan and the rate assistance program. Okay, Josh, did you want to say anything now or did you just want to be available as a resource and maybe respond to questions? I think best to respond to questions rather than trying to guess what people are going to want to hear. Fair enough. Let's go ahead and start with Mark Smalley because he's the chair of the engineering committee. Hey, thanks, Gil. Josh or Rick, can you tell us the approximate amounts that we have been spending on capital improvements for the last maybe five years and how that compares to what this water master plan is recommending for future expenditures? Sure, happy to do that. We have been averaging roughly $4.8 million per fiscal year over the last five fiscal years in capital improvements. And you may note that's a larger number than the master plan points out. I think it worth noting that in this past fiscal year, approximately 75% of the projects that were not funded by FEMA that were not part of the CZU fire recovery then showed up on the master plan as being priority one projects. So I think that the expenditures being suggested by the master plan are in line with what we've already been spending. And I think that the specific projects being pointed out are also in line. Okay, and then going forward for the next year or two years are the capital improvements that we've been planning already part of this master plan scenario? Not quite sure what you're looking for but I'll answer what I think you're going after which is are the things that we are planning already reflected as needing to be done in the master plan? Is that it? Yes. Roughly? Yes. That's it. The projects that we have planned for the next fiscal year are almost exclusively within those projects all out in the master plan as being priority one projects. Okay. Good. Thank you. And we heard at the beginning of the meeting of Rick Rogers announcement on the funding for the incorporation of Four Springs and Bracken Bray. And I've heard the question before well, what would it take to expand this water master plan to include those areas? Tony, how long has your firm been working with the district now to get to this point on this water master plan? And it's in, I think you saw some dates that I mentioned and those are things we do initially. So it was late 2019 when we were installing the pressure loggers in the field. But then we had to work through the pandemic. That's one thing I did not mention here. Right. Okay. So two plus years that you've been working with the district right now. Right. Under three years, yes. Okay. And then if we were to come back and attempt to add another two zones is what I'm considering at this point is that a two month process? Is that a 12 month process? It could be another three years. I'm joking. No, I'm joking. No, I'm joking. No, sorry about that. No. I don't know you're well enough yet to know when you're joking. I like to joke. I like to joke, you know, unless it's not appropriate, I will take it back and I won't do that again. But it takes a lot of effort to build the model, to build the credibility of that. Now that's what I'm saying. I think now we have built it. Adding on pipelines is easier to add on. And you said adding a couple of zones. So the first question I will ask is the information available, if it is, it's easy to add them on. If it's not, it takes a little bit longer. But you said, you were asking, is it like a two month or a 12 month? I would say it's closer to two month than it is to 12 month. I think we take probably a month to build it. Maybe another couple of weeks to verify what we've added to this so we don't compromise. And then this is where the fun and analysis begins, maybe another two weeks of analysis. And if everyone's done with the results recommendation, so two to three months would be a solid. And that's after the district has all of the information on pipe sizes, lengths, tanks, all of this base information. Correct, correct. Okay, all right. Okay, well, thank you for this. I don't have any further questions at this point. I'd rather open it up to the rest of the directors and the public, since I've heard about this, at the engineering committee meeting and at the last board meeting, I've had other questions addressed there. Thank you, Tony. Can I just follow up quickly on Mark's question about what's involved in adding on. Rick, can you confirm to me that my impression was that it actually took quite a bit of staff time to verify some of this information to get the elevations of various things. And so it's not simply a matter if, so could you kind of give me some background on that and what might be involved? In other words, I guess what I'm trying to do is expand on what Mark is saying. And is that something that you could realistically expect to get and use as part of the discussion of the process or is it going to be so time consuming and expensive both in staff time and perhaps of a cal time that it probably isn't something that you would do in the process of doing a consolidation? Well, that's a really good question. To do our whole distribution system, as Tony said, that was a huge undertaking with a lot of staff time, with data loggers out within the distribution system, elevation checks, that was a horrendous undertaking and I commend my staff and Tony and our engineering department, they got through it with everything else going on. A lot of the work looking forward at the consolidation between the three mutuals has already been done in our lion zone, big steel zone. Most likely we will look at our backbone water systems going up to those three mutuals that I anticipate that that wouldn't be a big workload. What might be a huge workload, it's a small system but we know nothing about the existing big basin distribution system. Not sure if there's any mapping, not sure if they know where the regulator valves are, the key parts of the engineering study to get the information. We want to do that and that is something that when we get what I've been calling seed money, this half a million dollars, that'll be a discussion that we will have with a consultant on maybe to break down to do modeling. We need to do some modeling, the interties need to be modeled, Bracken-Brady four springs and big basin flows but when we get into the actual distribution system of four springs, it's going, or a big basin will be difficult. Four springs and Bracken-Brady are just about going to be all new six and eight inch main. That'll be a brand new system laid out by an engineering company with plans and specifications that we will work with engineering and to find out what our flows are and what fire flows are. We anticipate eight, 10, 12 inch, we have a pretty good idea but that's just to get us to the computer and then we need to run the actual data and confirm it. Short answer to your question is, I think that we'll get the majority of it done of a big basin, maybe a challenge. Thank you. One thing I would add to what Rick had to say if I might is that vote particularly Bracken-Brady with Bracken-Brady and four springs and to a lesser extent, big basin, we can't model their current systems because they don't exist. They've all been largely destroyed by CZU fires. So until we have something to actually look at and we can't go out and measure what is in there, I'll do the only thing I wanted to add. Okay. I'll next go to Lois and she's the second board member that's on the engineering committee. Did you have any questions or comments, Lois? Lois, you're muted. Probably. I tried to not have a problem here and I always forget I'm muted. We do have a rate assistance program that isn't being used very much but I was totally unaware that we have disadvantaged communities. So I think I'm in the dark on that and maybe you don't wanna say what the communities are right now, that's fine but I just was unaware. I thought, I mean, it costs so much money to live here and that's why we have the rate assistance program but I don't know how disadvantaged communities in our water district would even survive. There probably should be a quick clarification I'm already referring back to Carly on the disadvantaged communities because that was a snapshot in time, Carly. Right. So when we were awarded this grant, we did have a few small disadvantaged communities and that was based on the 2012 through 2016 data. However, since it's been updated within 2018 to 2020, we no longer have disadvantaged communities in our jurisdiction. We do have another survey coming up which should be released in December and that's when we find out if we have any new disadvantaged communities. And unfortunately without those, we really don't qualify for a lot of the state grant funding. So we'll see what comes of this next survey here. Yeah, Lois, let me just clarify that. That's why that's what's behind all of this is that the sort of big pots of money that are easy to get right away are for these smaller districts in parts of California, especially in the Central Valley where there's a large proportion of disadvantaged communities. And we're not that. I mean, there's, and you know, even the parts that qualify sort of barely qualify technically, but that's the reason that you go through this exercise because it's a source, it's a separate source of funding that might have been available to us. Is that right, Tony? More or less am I stating that right? I'm sorry, was that about the funding? Yeah, or record, Carly. That's correct. The way I explained it is more or less right. And, you know, the whole premises behind it is the disadvantaged communities can't afford the higher rates and they can't afford to do the capital improvements. So there is a lot of grant money available for disadvantaged communities, which we do not qualify for, since we did the original water master plan. Thank you. So one of the things as I was reading this was about the need for new storage reservoirs. And I don't know what the public thinks about that word reservoirs, but when I hear reservoir, I think locked loman. And I'm looking at that and thinking reservoirs, what does that mean? Okay, I get it. It's tanks. And so I saw the tanks that this plan is saying needs, we need to get rid of redwood tanks immediately or as soon as possible, I think. And I know staff's been working on that. And to resize these tanks so they're bigger will hold more water. So if their reserves basically do they have a mixer, like a mix master to mix the water to keep it from going stale. Thank you. Thank you. Is that going to add cost to that? Is that included in the cost for these reservoirs? That's a very small cost of the project that all adds up, but what's not included in those costs and that will impact a lot of our tank projects are the size of the property that we own, barely fit the tank that we have and to increase the size of the tank, there'll be either considerable property purchase for that or even possibly retaining structures and others. So those prices are probably a good ballpark, but I would think that they're going to be much greater when we actually go out to construct. Well, since you just replaced six tanks in Lompico, we know how expensive it is. Anyway, the other thing, this GIS hydraulic water model, Tony says it's not magic. Sounds like magic to me that it can look at capital improvement plans, fire flow, water quality, future growth, all kinds of things. And so how do we... Okay, first of all, I want to say, I totally trust our staff. We have a great staff. Who's putting this information into the model to run this? Is it staff? Is it Tony? Who is doing this? So, and how do we know that it's right and it's not magic? Let Tony answer that. Thanks, thanks, Rick. Vice President Henry, that's a good question on GIS. The first thing I want to mention is that this was a team effort all the way. That's what it takes to gain confidence. It's not about us gaining confidence in the model. This is about your staff gaining confidence in the model. So where do we start? We started with all the effort that your staff expended, and I'm sure over years, to build this GIS. You already had, I'm not sure if you know about AutoCAD. CAD was the different world. Yeah, your staff had both worlds, CAD and GIS. There's a lot of information, a lot of information. And for the longest time, CAD was it. Everyone wanted to be in CAD. And your staff realized when the time came to let go of CAD and go to the world of GIS, and that's where everyone is at. And we were surprised when we first started here to see that your staff have already migrated that information to GIS. And there were two sets of information, so we were able to compare both. And whenever we need to validate something, we always came back to your staff, we're seeing that information or this information, there was a very strong vetting process on top of where the data came from. We are specialists, so we know that has to be done. Remember what I said, defensible is the word. Defensible is not by the time we get to the cost. Defensible comes all the way to when we start, not when we end. So we start with defensible and everything is a building block on it. And by the time we got to the cost on top, everything underneath that is defensible. And GIS is a big effort. When I said the big investment, it was the GIS investment. And we took that to the model. The model, we made it work better. GIS, you can look at it, you can get information from it. On the model, people say it's a black box, but you push a button and you allow water to flow in those pipelines that are GIS pipeline. You allow water to go into the tank and deplete from the tank and fill the tank. That's the hydraulic model. It's also a computer program. So this is where we stepped in on the computer program side. Your staff were on the GIS side. So this is where the two teams came together. And then it was a team effort all the way. We never let go and went on our corner and worked on ourself. We were always going back and checking with your operation staff because this tool has, your operation staff know a lot more about how it operates. So we wanted to make sure we were picking their brain and the model is reflecting how they think it's operating. So there was like a handshake back and forth throughout the effort, all the way to when we worked on improvement. And then all the way to when we look at costs. What is reasonable? How do we schedule the cost on an annual basis? It was all a team effort all the way to the end. And during calibration levels, there's several times that Tony's group came back to staff and said the numbers we're getting through GIS and elevations, et cetera, are not adding up. There's something wrong. There's either a closed valve or your elevations are wrong. And so we would go back out, take pressures and it got right down to we would go out with GIS equipment and shoot actual elevations and then come back in and try to lay all those numbers out and try to find out where our issue was and why we were getting bad information. So the calibration process was quite extensive. Oh, thank you for all that information. And I for one, as board member, and I'm sure the other board members feel the same way, we are so lucky to have an operations manager, a district manager who have been working with this district for years and have a history and can pinpoint these things. So I appreciate all of our staff. We have certified staff. We're just fortunate that we are able to have the staff we have and that's all I wanna say. Thank you, Lois. Jamie, do you have any questions or comments? Yeah, so when I'm looking at the recommendations that come out of the plan, one of the lenses that I'm looking at this through is what I know about our system, which is that one of the places where we need to make the biggest efficiency improvements is in reducing our non-revenue water loss. So when I'm looking at the projects as they're prioritized, you know, I just like to understand more about how we considered, though, you know, addressing those issues as part of the overall, you know, capital improvement program recommendations and, you know, getting to those savings. Because to me, that's where this, you know, plan really becomes operationalized in that we find ways to not only improve our system for long-term efficiency, but address our non-revenue water loss, which is going to improve our operational efficiency as an organization as well. So could you talk to me a little bit about that? I can start off and then Josh, you can jump in. These high priority projects are addressing water loss and the ones that we're doing that are above the height or are not in within the high priority are usually because of leakage. You know, the tank replacement is redwood tanks or replacing leaky tanks. The undersized mains, a lot of those small undersized mains are leaking, are old, are very, very old San Lorenzo Valley water back in the citizen's utility days. So this program is doing that. It is replacing mainline that's leaking. And that's what we're gonna target in the mainlines we know that are leaking, that we're repeatedly going out, you know, six and eight times a year within a small area to repair. Those are pushed up to a higher priority. There's a project on the priority, on our priority list that didn't rank high as part of this process because it's a larger size main. But yes, that main is leaking and that's the Hermosa Drive. We go out there probably once a month and repair leaks. That's a big area for leakage. So it is addressing unencounter for water and just in doing the capital improvements. Josh, do you wanna add to that at all or? Sure, a couple items. Mostly I wanted to point out that there are three factors that we look at in prioritizing from the district's perspective. One being water loss, of course. The first, which is actually, in my opinion, the most important is fire protection, fire flow. Followed by water loss, followed by kind of a distant third operational issues. Do we have pieces of pipe that are just really giving us fits? If so, we're gonna move those up. As Rick pointed out, we're working on a couple of projects this year that have been pushed all the way to the top of the priority list because they are leaking. And we just need to take care of those. But kind of the balancing act that staff is going through is largely benefit of increasing fire flow to a given area versus benefit of reducing non-revenue water loss in another. And trying to balance that out is the subject of a fair bit of work by the staff. So that's all I wanted to add. Thank you. If I could just ask one follow-up question and this may just be a comment. It's okay if there's not a response to this right now, but I think that one of the things that would be really helpful in communicating the impact of these improvements to the public is in monetizing the benefits of doing these projects. So to the district by completing these important capital improvement projects, there are also long-term savings that we will realize and helping the public understand because the price tag seems pretty overwhelming, but the benefits are also pretty substantial and weighing that out for people so that they understand that would be useful. And I understand that we may not be able to have that conversation in the context of this discussion tonight, but that may be something to consider as well long-term. And if I may just add, I think I had one slide that I mentioned, the risk assessment, risk assessment that we use for prioritizing. We look at the business, so every pipeline, we looked at it. Does it have a lot of flows? Does it provide enough fire flows? Does it need to be enlarged? Does it leak? Does it have a leak history? This is how we know. And so that's how we use that. It was a big model that we used. It's a, if I can tell you, you'll believe it, $120,000 model that was used to prioritize them and that's the risk assessment model. I think it's way overpriced, but we had to pay it because we use it for just this purpose. But it's, and we make everything transparent on Excel spreadsheet so everyone can make that decision. So that's how they were prioritized. But if I can say a little bit about leaks, it's not our fault that the system leaks. The system is aging. They're old pipelines and we're not alone. The whole United States, I work on something called infrastructure report card that graded our infrastructure and infrastructure is old. That's why, and luckily for us, you hear about it at the federal level, infrastructure, bill, thank God, that there are bills that they're talking about it. That's our funds coming down, but we need to rely on funds from your national, it has to be a joint effort, national, state level and local level. That's how we have to elevate the level of infrastructure from the Cs and Ds to Bs and B pluses. So it's not our fault. We know it's aging. We need to start spending more to fix it. And if the more we delay, the more it gets worse and there will come a time when we will never be able to catch up. But luckily everyone in our state, they started in New Zealand a while back, maybe 15 years ago, and then Canada and we have joined big time with renewing and replacing our old and aging pipeline, which are leaking. And just one other quick risk factor that I don't wanna leave out that we had mentioned. Yes, we talked about fire flow, but we also have areas that have undersized mains and during peak summertime demand, customers will lose water pressure and lose water intermittently. And that's a real concern because then that becomes a health hazard when we drop pressure or we have intermittent out of water. So some of these areas also are included. And when you look at the master plan, Tony has those areas outlined from the model that show, hey, these areas are probably running out of water or close to it and low pressure. And those areas have truth out doing the calibration. But that's another factor that concerns us, health and water quality. And I especially appreciate that one, Rick, given that my house is on one of these 1.5 inch lines and the people that are at the upper end of the house, the line sometimes in the summer, they just have no water pressure. It's the same thing in folks house, don't flush the toilet when I'm in the shower type, that's saying that if you only have so much water, going through these smaller pipes, it's a heck of a hydraulic restriction. And we do have areas that routinely in the summer or when a pump turns on to push water to another area because of undersized mains, it immediately lowers the pressure and the high elevations can run out and do run out of water and have low pressure. Is there anything else, Jamie? Or was, okay, Bob? Sure, I have a few questions and a few comments. I wanted to talk a little bit about and understand a little bit more about our maximum peak hour demand. I think if I read correctly, and Tony, please correct me if I'm wrong, but that was a number that we calculated, we didn't have any empirical data on that yet. Is that correct? That's very correct. So if we were able to generate that data empirically, how difficult would it be to update the model to reflect that? This is the easiest thing that you, this is a good question and it's an easiest thing to do in the model. It's a, you know, just literally putting a number and then re-running, and re-evaluating what things are. And that's why at the beginning of a project, we always ask, give us all the data that is available. In this case, the hourly data was not available. I think in one of these days, you will have that available and we'll give you an opportunity to go come back and revisit to see what things are. But absence is availability. We have to go with state guidance and guidelines. So that's what we did. We had to go with state guidelines and we used them. Yeah, I mean, the thing that makes me a little concerned is that we are, as a district wide, we're about 20% below state usage, at least at a indoor water usage. And so my concern is that we might be over-engineering things a little bit. That is, we may be assuming we're using more water than we actually are at a peak busy hour type situation. Sorry, I use telecom. So if that's not the right term, but we do it in telecom as well, engineering for peak busy hour. Rick, what would it take to get to a peak busy hour number that reflected our actual usage at various points during the year? Is that something that we could generate fairly? I'm not sure, you know, we haven't really looked at it. I'm not sure. Once we go to the badger meter customer wide, if we can mine that information from that database, we might be able to, because our customer meters do record that information and that information is available. So that's something, you know, I know the bigger districts do it, you know, they have a lot of different metering and technology. That's something we'd have to talk about. And I'm sure Tony can probably tell you very quickly what it takes to get peak hourly demand. Would it be possible to back into it a different way by going into the production system, measuring that at peak busy hour? I mean, I know it's going to be offset a little bit, but it might be a proxy number and then reduce that by the amount of water loss that we have in our system. It may be possible because we do have tank readouts, you know, you have to see how much comes out of storage and how much we're producing. No, Tony, do you have a quick answer to that? Yeah, I think initially our first priority was to get the hourly from the production facilities. And this is where we didn't have enough data for us to come up with conclusions. The fact that you have badger meters, that's one thing that we started doing that I can tell you this would be the most accurate way, but it's the most time consuming way to get there. You will be able to actually characterize different areas of the system with different behaviors. They peak differently. You can use different peaking factor in a certain pressure zone and a different peaking factors where you can see more water consumption and more peaking happening. You can do that by different categories, you know, the presidentials versus how your commercials do it. We've done it for the entire city of Fresno. That's a very large system and we broke the whole system into certain areas. It was a large effort, but it's yes, we used the building record, we mined them, we mined those with that data. And we looked at, and what influences the water use? It's income, one of the factors. What influenced the water use would be how green the area is, the house prices. That influences how people use water. Certain parts of town, more than others. We looked at a lot of factors and then we, that's how you characterize it, but yes, it can be done. That's a great idea. It takes a lot more effort to get there. Well, I guess from my point of view is sort of moving from zero to something, at least being able to get the production data in there to make sure that we're not over-engineering or over-estimating the requirements which are gonna drive costs, right? At least in a simplistic manner, that's how I think about it. So it'd be great if we could move before we started locking down on a lot of things. It'd be great if we could validate the peak busy hour with at least production, less water loss. Well, I'll leave it there for right now. The second question I had was around the size of pipes. I think I read in your report, correct me if I'm wrong, that the minimum size that you were using was eight inch for fire flow. I have been told previously that six inch would be sufficient for the kind of community that we have. That is, we're not a dense urban environment. We've got like 1.37 houses per acre or something like that. Is eight inch really the minimum that we should be putting in with all the new pipes that we're doing? I'll take this one, if you don't mind, Sony. Go ahead, Josh. We as a district are putting in eight inch minimums because while six inch pipe will provide required fire flow for short distances, once you start getting some of these longer runs, we're getting enough friction loss in the pipe that we are getting insufficient flow out of the hydrants. And in terms of overall safety and in terms of anticipating some small amount of future growth, using an eight inch minimum pipe size means that anywhere we go, we can place a hydrant and the pipe will not be the restricting factor on the fire flow. Okay, great. And that's great. A great example of that is the water storage for Twin Bridge area in highway nine, Ben-Loman Felton comes from the Brookdale tank located in Brookdale. You know, that water comes a long way from store water. There is no other water storage for Ben-Loman, Glen-Loman, parts of Quail Hollow and Glen-Armor. It all comes from the Brookdale tank. Oh, it's good to know. Thank you for that. Can I follow up on the busy hour? One more, one more. Oh, I'm sorry, Tony. Yeah, sorry. If that's possible. On the busy hour, I think it's very important to get that information and invest if we can. But what is the impact on the master plan recommendations? On storage facilities, there's no impact because storage is not based on the busy hour. The storage is based on that maximum day which we have very solid numbers. What does it impact them? It impacts the sizing of the pipelines, if any. But when you go to the sizing of the pipeline, if you're looking at, you know, 2.7 versus 2.5, it may not change the recommendation of the pipeline size. So my point is it's very important to have it and get it, get a busy hour actual number. But at the end of the day, it may not change the recommendations, if any. I understand. And that's part of why you do it to test it out to make sure that you're okay. Because if we meet state standards and then, you know, what we do with our actuals doesn't show much difference, then great. I think we move on, no problem. Just a second, Mark, you had your hand up. Did you want to jump in on that item? From a construction perspective, the cost to go from a six inch to an eight inch, I'm guessing is on the order of less than 5% because you have all of your investments made into the design, the permitting, actually mobilizing the crew out there to go for that small change in costs, eight inch, I agree with Josh, is the way to go for that. So, yeah, I mean, I think if again, given our specific terrain and all the rest of it and the distances makes perfect sense to do, but even 5% when you're talking, you know, $100 million is real money. And, yeah, I don't debate that, yeah. It's worth making sure that at least in my mind, I understand that. The next area I wanted to talk about was the metadata that was gathered. I noticed in the report, we talked about eight diameter capacity and material for metadata for the pipe. Was there similar metadata gathered for pump stations, PRVs, that sort of thing? I didn't see anything specifically, but I may just have missed it in my review. And I'm sorry, what kind of metadata was, are we? Yeah, sorry, if I'm cutting out, let me know. On the pipe, the metadata was age, diameter, capacity and material. I was wondering if there was metadata collected for PRVs and pump stations and that sort of thing. So I'm trying to recall how much information we had. I mean, for PRVs, there were less criticals, but I'm not sure we had age on PRVs. So that was less available pipes. Yes, they were available. Thanks, yes. Pumps, we have capacities. I'm not sure we had a lot of information on that. So there were some- Okay, so the metadata collected was mostly around pipes. Pipes, correct. On the last point on material, so one of the things that you read material that pipes usually last about a hundred years, and so you should be replacing 1% of your pipes per year. I mean, on average, of course, it's going to vary by what pipes you have and all that, but as a planning tool, that's sort of a way to think about it. But does the material of the pipe affect its duration of duty or its lifetime? Absolutely. Remember we talked, go ahead. So I didn't see in the report, and again, maybe I missed it, where material was a factor in sort of your duration of duty or replacement risks and calculations. And I was just wondering how that factors in. Absolutely was used in. Absolutely, especially for pipelines, but I'm going to say something that I like to say a lot, just because the pipeline is old, doesn't mean it's bad. I get it. Look, thank goodness a hundred years ago when I put in the two inch pipe in Boulder Creek, the cast, and you know, that it's still working. I mean, I drive over it when I see my mechanic every time. So the point is that, yes, we looked at it. Remember I said we did a big exercise for prioritizing pipeline, and that's called risk assessment. One of the factors we looked at was age. One of the factors, just because it's old doesn't mean it's ready to go. Is it old, but also are we seeing leaks is being repaired? Well, this red flag and your staff have been doing this, have been replacing them when this happens, but this formalizes the replacement process. So there's a prioritization that takes consideration, age into consideration, takes material into consideration, because certain pipes live, certain materials live longer and can stay longer and some pipes should be replaced much sooner based on material. Well, and I think from a macro calculation point of view, understanding that would probably help determine what kind of capital we need to be spending on pipe replacements. Since that is the big kahuna, a replacing pipe. Last question I had was on the leak heat map. It almost seemed like with the data that you collected that one of the outputs of your report could be a heat map for leaks. Is that correct? Is that a correct assumption? I think you'll find the map that has that. So when we looked at the, remember I said risk assessment, there were a lot of factors we looked at, including age, including leaks. For each of the factors we looked at, we made it transparent and that's probably independent. We show in exhibits or exhibits that show the heat map for each of the categories we'll look at. But the prioritization is based on combining all those heat maps and looking at the resulting heat map as opposed to it's a heat map for age, it's a heat map. That's not how we make a decision. We make a decision by looking at all the factors, looking them in one matrix, combining them and allowing all those factors to come in together. And that's how we prioritize. And going forward, would our staff be able to update the leak portion of the GIS as they fix leaks in the field? That is they grab the GIS information and put it into the system. Certainly GIS is very powerful and can be used very effectively for keeping track of where we are. The GIS already has information about in the age and when it was constructed. So those can all be updated, replaced, date off. But now you know you have a new pipe dated 2022. I started using map info about 15 years ago and unfortunately I made the wrong decision. I should have used park info. So there you go. Just a number of comments here. I wanted to comment that on the $15 million loan that we took out as part of the Seize of Fire recovery, I think the criteria on that was mostly around what could be done within three years. Because in order to qualify for the loan, we had to get all the projects done in that period of time. Rick, I think that was, and so you and James selected things that were both critical and could be done quickly without a lot of overhead or lead time or anything like that. Well, we selected the projects that could be done quickly that had the non-environmental issues such as the June Beagle and so forth. Right, exactly. I would like to caution all of us that capital spending over the last couple of years is not necessarily the criteria. We have taken out $30 million in loans over the last three years. And so a lot of the money that's being spent right now has to do with using that capital. So the thing that we need to be concerned about is what our operating and non-operating margins are combined and what the demands on those margins are. So over the last few years, our operating margin has been running about $3 million, our non-operating margin about 1.2, but that 4.2 has to cover debt payments, principal and capital reserves, capital improvements. When we have to start paying for Santa Margarita, pension pay down and all the rest of it. So the demands on that margin is really, I think the key thing to be focusing on and understanding what all of the demands are on the margin is where we need to be before we start locking down on plans because plans that are not executable are not a plan. They're sort of a hope. And I definitely want to get to a plan because the exciting part about this information that we're getting from phoning is that it gives us the foundation for being able to do that. I also want to- Bob, I'm gonna, Bob, I'd like to interrupt you just- Hang on a sec. I have two more comments here. I know, but you're going off into financial things. And we've had a number of- I have two more comments that are specific about infrastructure. And the things that we have talked about. I will come back to you. I'm just trying to be considerate- Fair enough, fair enough, as long as we'll come back. than are waiting for an hour and a half. And I also don't necessarily want to keep Mr. Akel here the whole time once we start talking about financial issues. So what I'd like to do now is go out to the public, ask them if they have any technical questions that they'd like to address to Mr. Akel. And then we can come back to the board for any further discussion. Right, as long as we have another opportunity- Yes, I will. to have some comments and discuss them. I will. Thank you very much. Patrick LaBruzzo. Thank you, Director Mahood. My name is Patrick LaBruzzo. I am a customer of the Big Basin Water Company. And I read through the master plan, just kind of thinking about what type of analysis our system will go through as we work with an annexation with SLBWD. I want to thank you, Mr. Akel, for the presentation. You actually answered a couple of my questions. But I was wondering if maybe we can talk a little more about the calibration process for the model. And so for the calibration process, I was wondering if you can describe the process you went through to develop your C-factors for the model. Okay. So now we're getting technical and I can spend the next two hours. How much time do I have? Oh, you know, just go ahead and explain it as well as you can, trying to make it understandable. Okay, very good. So what's C-factors? I think for the benefit of everyone else, C-factors are frictions, pipelines, as they get old and different materials, they have different frictions. And that's how you, over the long stretch of pipeline, you start losing head. So the C-factors are sometimes measured and sometimes estimated based on the pipeline material and pipeline age. In this case, that's what we used. This industry standard estimation for the C-factors based on the pipe material, pipe age and pipe diameter, those are factors in estimating these. To get precise C-factors, you go to the field and you go to one side of the pipeline and the other side of the pipeline and you measure the C-factor and you go from pipeline to pipeline to pipeline. So if someone is in a university world, they would like to do that, but it's almost cost prohibitive because it takes a long time to measure those C-factors. Some like to generalize, but just because you measured it in one street doesn't mean it's going to be the same in the next street. So it is very common practice what we do here and not go and measure those C-factors. We use this industry standard for estimating those C-factors. So that's how we use C-factors in the hydraulic model. Did you want to ask another question, Patrick, or respond to that? Yes, absolutely. So I just wanted to kind of understand the process for calibrating those C-factors. So they weren't calibrated. You took industry standard values for the pipe material and age and then plug that into the model. Right. But as reading the RFP, there was an item that was asking ACL Engineering to perform a fire hydrant flow test type calibration in order to calibrate the model. Like you're saying, that's typically done. I was just wondering if you can explain why that wasn't done with this project. And if you think you might be doing that level of analysis sometime in the future. So that's another question. This is the hybrid testing where calibration is different from calibrating for C-factors. Those are two completely different things. The C-factors are related to pipelines. The hydrant testing is intended to give us, these are done typically by fire departments. They do hydrant testing throughout the system to see the performance of the system to get fires. How much can we get in terms of fire flows? Nothing to do with the C-factors of pipelines. How much fires do we get? That's what fire flows are for. And here we did something better than fire flows. Fire flows are snapshots. It's done at 10 a.m. And then another fire flow is done in the afternoon at 3 p.m. They're not talking to each other as fire flows. What we did here is we calibrated over an extended period simulation. So we had the loggers in the field. We had the SCADA data that was given to us. And over a period of two weeks we had solid hourly data that we looked at each one of those areas that we calibrated to. So we calibrated to EPS, Extended Period Simulation. And that's why you were able to see the model compared to the field, the two graphs. Remember the two lines, the blue line, which is the field compared to the red line that was showing where the model was performing. So we did a 24 hour calibration. That's the best that you can have in terms of calibration. This is the next generation. The fire hydrant is used for spot checking, not as critical or as useful, but it can be done as spot checking. But that's in a way old school. That's how we did. This is how I used to do them. I've been around for a while. I used to do them with that. But then we have evolved into the Extended Period Simulation, which is calibrating. It's called dynamic model calibration. The fire flow testing is a static fire flow calibration. Some still do static. It's easier, quicker. You know, we are a specialty. That's what we do. We like to make it as defensible. And if it's possible, we request that we do Extended Period Monitoring. In this case, your staff, the staff here, Rick Rikstein decided to help us out, do the Extended Period Simulation. We went the extra mile for this project. Can I see if there are any other members of the public that have questions or comments? I don't see any other hands up. So I guess, Patrick, you've still got your hand up. I'll allow you one more question. As everybody else has sort of had three comments. I'll let you have three if you still have one. For sure. Sorry. For my last question, I was wondering, this may be more of a question for the district. Will you be maintaining a copy of the database or will ACL be maintaining the info water model and database into the future? And kind of the reason I'm asking is because, you know, the master plan, the value and the cost for the engineering for the master plan seems fairly low. And I know it's half the price of the second, the second proposal that was received for the RFP. So I'm just kind of a little bit wary of loss leaders and the costs of, you know, I think those costs being borne by, you know, other members of the community. Josh, you want to take that scene as we talked about earlier today? Sure. As it happens, we are looking into a couple of software options either for purchase or subscription or possibly open source that would allow us to actually run the model in-house. And Tony and I have actually not had a chance to talk about this yet because the discussion happened today while Rick and I were prepping for this meeting. And we are looking into is it going to make more sense for us to be spending staff time and maintaining this internally or will it make more sense for us to rely on Tony's team who have given us great service and have been very responsive every time we've asked them for anything and thus be on the hook for the costs there as opposed to internal staff time costs. And until we crunch the numbers and figure out what our staff availability is because as you know, we're a very small district. I can't really give you a solid answer. That's definitely something we're looking into and trying to decide ourselves what we're going to do. Okay, that was actually one of the questions I had was whether, you know, we can go ahead and change the variables and test things or whether we need to go back to a Cal. And I'm agnostic about what the best approach is but I did want to understand that at this point we need to go to a Cal to do any updates. That's correct. You know, it depends on how much we use it to so staff can get familiar with software. No, I don't know. I think you all know, but we use it just once in a great while, we'll spend more time trying to relearn the software again. So it just depends on how much we use it and most likely, you know, moving ahead we may use it a lot in the beginning here with what's going on in the district. So that's to be determined. Okay, that makes sense to me. Let's come back to the board or well, let me just check if there's any other member of the public that would like to speak. I don't see anybody. So we'll come back to the board. Mark, did you want to follow up with anything? I have no further questions. Thank you. Okay, Lois, you're muted Lois. Lizzie's snoring behind me. So I was trying, I'm really happy to know that just because something's old it doesn't need to be discarded. My question for Tony here is the cost of the master plan, you used 20 cities, national averages. But we are not a city. We are, well, we're Felton, Ben Lohman, Brookdale, Boulder Creek, Zioni, Lompeco, parts of Scotts Valley, Manana Woods. So how does that work for us? Vice President Henry, that's a great question because this we're talking about costs. This is called the construction cost index from the engineer news records. It's called DNR. This is the equivalent of a stamp, date stamp. So when we put costs down, we date stamp them. And so in the future, let's say in a year or two someone pulls out this, these costs, those costs have to be escalated. Because we have inflation, it was in the news today, we've got inflation going on. So those costs, and then especially if you look at pipeline costs, if you ask districts around, if you ask cities around, they're trying to get pipelines. Sometimes they can't find them. There's a big backlog for new construction of pipelines and certain materials are not available now. But let's look fast forward in the two years. Those costs will continue to rise like everything else in life that continue to rise. Well, how do we know what the assumptions were today? Well, this state stamp, we say ENR cost construction index as of certain date in 2021 that's what those costs represent. So when you get fast forward to two years, you can use that number and with the number from that date in two years and then you can estimate what the cost should be in 2023 dollars. So it's called the 20 city or 10 city index but it's representative. So that whoever is doing the cost escalation, they know what we use, they know how to, just for the how to escalate the cost. It is not intended to, and we use those throughout the city and everywhere we go, knowing that there are some big urban areas and some small, we work with a lot of small communities. Most of our clients are the small communities that we work with. But this is only a date stamp that someone can use to escalate the cost, whether it's in a year or maybe in 10 years. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Okay, Jamie. You don't have any further questions. Thank you. Bob, coming back to you. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it. I just wanted to follow up on the question that everybody is asking and that is, who owns the data? Absolutely, did your district, your staff own the data? You paid for the data. The data came from you. It's going back to you. Everything that was produced here, this is how it always works. This is your data. And then, go ahead. Don't take it the wrong way. I just ask it on everything because we just want to make sure that we own the data and that's clear. But no, and I'm like Gail, I'm completely agnostic as to which way we go, whether it's a service that you guys provide on a regular ad hoc basis or whether we try to do it internally. It's whatever makes the most sense, I think, for that. Just a couple of other questions or comments, give me. We talked a little bit about the margin as being really the determining factor of what we can spend. And that, of course, is determined by rates, by operating and non-operating expenses, and by, of course, how much water people use. And given a conservation-oriented approach, we're sort of have to look at how we're bounding all of that potential. We are currently selling about 25% less water than we were about seven or eight years ago. And I don't think that's coming back at all. In fact, I think it will continue to go down and they go down substantially, depending on how long this drought lasts, hopefully not as long as the last one. So as we're looking at this, we have to factor in that as well as whether our revenue forecasts are reasonable as well. I did want to offer a caution about adding tanks. Tanks are good things. Tanks provide a lot of wonderful benefits, but tanks also have a downside. And the downside is about every 20 to 25 years you have to code them to maintain them in proper working order. If you do, then the tanks can last virtually forever, which is obviously what we wanted to do. I believe as of right now, 100% of our steel tanks are out of their maintenance life. And at this point in time, it's not clear exactly how we get all of those steel tanks back into maintenance life. That is also another draw on our operating margin. However, it gets financed and we need to make sure that we take that into account. The last thing I wanted to mention is as of the last census, and I'm expecting that we probably will see some shifts in this, but about 30% of our population lived on household income under $60,000. That is about, at that time, about 20,000 below the median household income. And so, yes, affordability is a major issue when we're talking about what kind of rates are needed in order to sustain the district's fiscal health. And again, that's a confluence of revenue, operating expenses, how efficient we are, and what the community can afford. I would definitely be very, very troubled by a notion that we're going to set rates based on what folks with 150% of median household income can support versus those that are in the 80% or even 60% range because that has a lot to do with the makeup and diversity of our community. And I would very much like to not see that change in the way that I am concerned that it might be moving towards. And with that, Gail, I will turn it back to you. Thank you. Are there any more questions from members of the board? If not, I'll go out to the public one more time. Any questions or comments? I thank the public for coming and I realized some of this discussion was technical, but I found it all interesting and understandable. And I appreciate, Tony, your effort to do this twice and one week. So thank you very much. And with that, unless there's an objection, I will go ahead and adjourn this meeting. Okay, we're all adjourned. Good night all. Great job, Tony. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, take care.