 632 on October 18th, we'll call the meeting to order. Motion to adopt the agenda. So moved. Second. To adopt the agenda as is. Oh, sorry. Yes, I'd like to guess the discussion. Right, or do you want to pull anything from? Yeah, I'd like to pull, let's see, what was it? 4.3, the holiday parking promotional plan. Because we just have the agenda, we don't have a consent piece, they're just informative. So, oh no. There is a consent. OK, there's one on the consent. OK, let's wait so you approve the agenda. OK, sorry about that, you were right. OK, vote to approve the agenda. We have a motion and a second. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any abstentions? Nay. Agenda is approved. Public forum, three minutes per person? Yeah. Yes, you may. My name is Mark Stevenson. It's ironic that I'm here today to talk about a guest parking pass on the South Willard Street neighborhood. I live on a dead-end drive off of South Willard Street. I moved there 30 years ago. And during that time, Champlain has kind of grown from a two-year school to a big business. And their footprint grew throughout the neighborhood. And before parking passes were, resident parking passes were implemented, they sort of controlled the streets. And the residents of Tower Terrace, of which I am one, took Champlain to an environmental court. And during that time period, they finally developed a transportation plan, which included the city's resident parking. Tower Terrace is a private drive. The top half is owned by Champlain College. The next piece, I have a right-of-way across all of that. The next piece is seven Tower Terrace. The next piece that I drive across, that I have a right-of-way across is five Tower Terrace. There are two spots at the bottom of Tower Terrace, of which I barely fit on my own property. There are two spots. I own an 1890s carriage barn. That means a lot of tender love and care. If I have a guest or if I have somebody come to work on my house, I have to move my car. The closest space that I've told that I can park legally is the parking lot downtown. I requested a guest parking pass. I'm now retired as of the past year. So I'm home during the day. My wife and I are both home. We have two cars. Through some fluke, I guess, I've been told that I'm not eligible for a guest parking pass. And I'm here today to beg for mercy from the court of public opinion commissioners to see what next steps I can take to right this wrong. I can engage with you, but we can take a comment. I will follow up with staff and have myself or a staff member follow up with Mark and let him know about the process and whether I can see a path forward to making that happen. And if you don't find that acceptable, you're welcome to come back to the commission next month. I'm retired. I feel less alike. Thanks for coming. Take care. Thank you. Any other members of the public? Someone online? Sharon Buscher. Hi, good evening. I'm here to speak about two things. One has to do with what I spoke about at the last meeting, which had to do with the way my property was left after the sidewalk work that was done on East Avenue. I'll do that first. And the second has to do with the holiday parking plan. I'm happy to report that Maddie from, engineer from DPW and Ireland actually came to my property today and started, and they evaluated it before today, but actually started to rectify how it was left. And so there was agreement that this was unacceptable. And so I'm optimistic that at least the work around the green belt and my yard, which was my private yard, will be restored to the way it was. And that's good for the tree. And I'm happy as the property owner, because it's good for my house, it's very close to the road. But it's very good for the small front yard that I did have before and was ruined. And now it will be repaired. And I'll have it again. We're talking a very small front yard. But I'm very appreciative. So that's good. The walkway, which is slanted and sloped, is still under discussion. But I wanted to inform the commission that the department has been responsive, because when I complain, I like to keep you informed and let you know about how things have progressed. I think that's my responsibility to keep you informed. So that's number one. So thank you very much. Number two is what was on consent. I thought I heard someone removed it, but maybe not the holiday parking plan, which I always support. It's two hours of free parking. My question is, I think our downtown is more fragile this year than last year, than even the year before. And I'm really worried that this is inadequate. I don't know what the downtown, what Kelly Devine had to say about this or the other businesses. I don't think it's enough. And I really think that we should be offering free parking every day until, I know Sundays is free, but every day, at least like from the 15th of December to January 1st or something like that, to encourage people to come downtown. People don't want to come downtown because of safety concerns, businesses. They're still really good businesses downtown. I myself don't go downtown as often as I used to. And I'm concerned about my own safety, but I also, the cost, I mean, the cost of having to park is a factor. It's real. So I'm hoping that people will talk about it. I think we want to invest in everything. We've got a drug crisis. We've got a housing crisis, but we have a downtown business crisis, which is being, I think, ignored. And I'm not putting it on DPW to solve, but I'm hoping that you will find some revenue or go to the mayor and the Board of Finance to ask for some increase in the budget to make this happen. Thank you so much. Do you have someone on the line by D. Conder? Can you hear me? Dave Conder, I'm actually a resident of a Spruce Court in Burlington, been a resident there since 2010. My wife has been there from before that. Back in 2013, our neighborhood basically came before the DPW to request the parking to be on one side of the street, because at the time it was on both sides of the street and our street was too narrow for fire, truck, passage. As we went through that process, we basically got all our neighbors on board with that process. And as part of it, and unfortunately I don't remember the gentleman who was representing DPW at the time, one of the changes that we made as part of that was to allow parking across the top of the street for parking on both sides, but south of that one portion to be just one side of the street. When that occurred, we got approval from the DPW. Signs were implemented. And when the signs were put in, a sign with no parking with an arrow for that last parking stall was installed. This last summer, we started getting tickets for that last spot, not understanding why that was occurring. We did reach back out to the DPW as well as parking enforcement to determine what was the reason. Phillip Peterson helped us to look into some of the research and this was back in October, 2013. The DPW commission did make a new parking ordinance to have no parking on, in this case, the west side of the street, but it did not incorporate the fact that there was supposed to be an additional parking space at the top that was allowed. So when we did speak with us with Phillip, you know, if I email with my wife, Amy, we, he recommended that we come before the commission to discuss this because, you know, from our standpoint, we, this was a neighborhood driven exercise that was approved. And it seems like as we went through the commission package, that last note was missing because the sign was installed, you know, to show that intent, but the packet basically did not, you know, say that there was going to be parking at the end of the street. That location is past all the driveways. It's a dead end, you know, fire trucks can access all buildings on the location. So, you know, coming before the commission to, I guess, request that be updated, or we can certainly assist to, you know, go further with the DPW, you know, as residents. And even though I don't have all the emails in front of me, I certainly can. The neighborhood, by the way, most residents here have lived here more than 20 years. We have two houses that have apartment buildings, essentially unanimous agreement that we would be able to get support for correcting this. Your comments. Staff will be following up with you, Dave, and this addition or change, if it wasn't enacted in 2013, we'd need to come back to the commission for action now. And it is subsequent meeting. And that's all we have for public comment. Okay, we'll close public comments then. Next item is the consent agenda. Motion to set the consent agenda with 4.3. Is there a second? I'll second that. Okay, second from commissioner box to prove the consent agenda, but pulling 4.3. And I have one other comment just related to the minutes. It's more just a spelling. Okay. Oh, yeah. Just from my last name was the spelling. I saw that. Okay, we will correct it for finalize. Damien, Damien, Damien, Damien, Damien, Damien, Damien, Damien. You are a gem. Thanks. Okay, vote to approve the amended consent agenda. All in favor? Can I, I'm sorry, can I ask a clarifying question about item, the Clark Street item? I don't want to take it off or anything. Just in the ordinance language itself, item 23, it says on the west side of Clark Street beginning at the driveway of 48 Clark Street, is that the right number or should it be 36? It's the right number because of the driveway itself. Okay, okay. So the driveway is what's important, the house numbers where we located the driveways for the head. Got it. It should be on the east side. Oh, okay. And not the west side, so maybe you just thought that you will hire him. She's paid in charity. That's all. Thank you. Okay, so thanks for that clarification. Amendment to the side. Okay. All in favor of approving the consent agenda with the amendment to poll 4.3. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Anyone against it? Great. Great. So let's start with 4.3. Commissioner Damieny, would you like to start? Sure. Please share. Director Spencer, I was wondering if you could speak to the rationale for utilizing the Downtown Improvement District funding towards these promotional parking events. My understanding is both Holiday One as well as some of the other previous ones in years past have utilized that funding source. Yeah, go from there. Great, I appreciate your email in advance and the question, it's a good question. The Downtown Improvement District has a special assessment and Charter, the tertiary marketplace, sets the rate to the commission and it is for a parking program that the Charter says shall include two hour free in the Downtown, in municipal garages. So the program has to at least provide two hour free parking in at least one municipal parking garage and it says a parking program that includes. So there could be additional parking promotions and efforts as you saw in the packet that we use the DID funds to also support the Downtown employee free parking and some summertime promotions as well. And that is eligible under the Charter. There are also funds in the traffic fund that are paid by meters that are a bit more flexible that are focused around a parking program. So those funds, as long as they control or regulate traffic can be used more flexibly in the past. We have used say meter revenue to help support things like non-main street, Great Street, St. Paul Street, Great Streets project. So usually the DID, which is paid for by business owners is something business owners want to see a direct connection to. So if they pay this additional assessment, what are they getting in return? And usually these kind of promotional parking programs Downtown are things that the business owners feel there's a direct connection to their investment in those programs. Thank you. I personally don't see that those funds should be used to give away free parking to either residents or visitors. I think that money should be used for those other transportation modes, but I think if it does need to be used towards parking per the Church Street Marketplace Charter, is that correct? Per the City Charter. The City Charter. And I can get you the exact line that I don't have it on the top of my head. I guess if it needs to be used for that, I think I would like to see it used a little bit more directly than just Friday and Saturday. I think my understanding from the Great Streets Main Streets project, we got a lot of data about the utilization of parking downtown. My understanding is the Downtown Garage is heavily underutilized, still very close within close proximity to the Downtown District, so I'd like to see the program maybe targeted towards that for a longer period of time parking than on-street and off-street parking, I think. Regardless of whether on-street parking is free, people are still gonna circulate around the city. And if we can get folks to utilize the Downtown Garage, even if it's free for a longer period of time in two hours, I think that's a win for the department and for the garage and for the businesses. Okay, great. Happy to follow up with you guys, Sheridan and me, honey. Commissioner Hogan, do you have anything? Nothing here. Commissioner Barr. I was just gonna say, I guess point of order, are we gonna vote on this because it wasn't a consent agenda. The action is to vote, yes, or is it information? It's information. We have to notice you. We put it in the consent just as a approved slate, but since it's been pulled out, the charter, the city ordinance just requires us to notify you, so no actions needed. Right. Commissioner Vox. I'll just echo the vice chair's comments about wanting to push people towards the garages as much as we can do to prop them up as a really, I don't know, easy way to park Downtown. We should be doing that, so, yeah, that's all. And my two cents. Surprise, surprise. I would love to see maybe increased role of ambassadors to make people who park in the car parks, the garages feel safer so that we can highlight parking there, the ease of parking there, and an extra bit of security with our ambassador program. Okay. That's all. So we, there's no vote on that. This was just informational. We will close that item. Item number five, the wastewater update. I'm gonna tag team a little bit with my engineering manager, Martin, so I can get this up. Water resources, I'm a little bit under the weather, so hopefully I will not cough through this presentation or at least through my portion of the presentation. We wanted to provide you a couple of updates. You all were inquiring about how things were going with evaluating your tertiary treatment pilot results, and we thought, why only talk about one wastewater topic when we could talk about many wastewater topics? I mean, on a Wednesday night. So we thought we would spend a little bit of time making sure everybody has all their questions answered about what happened with the North plants that were siphon break and where we're at with that repair. And then I was gonna talk a little bit about the results of the tertiary pilot. I'll let you know how that came out. Can't remember. Some of you, I know we invited all of you. Some of you were able to come to that awesome explosion of science, neurodegree, which really excited me. And then I'm gonna hand it over to Martin who's gonna start to give you some more information about really where we're going with our wastewater treatment facility renewal and now really largely an upgrade project. And talk about some difficult things, the numbers, how much we need to do and get you engaged with starting to wrestle with the things that we're wrestling with. So North plants to where siphon break. I don't know if anybody saw this presentation came from my presentation to the NPA. Really cool old photo that we found which was how they laid the rivers when we were crossing in the late 1950s. We believe basically laying the pipe on top of the ice and then exploding the ice. And that's how it was laid on the bottom of the river. We have two sewer crossings. Theory. If people didn't know. This is a thing that happens. We're not the only ones in the world when faced with the choice of pumping, which creates lots of energy costs and gravity. Back in the old days without thinking about other things like the river moving and whatnot. The decision was to go ahead and use gravity. And so part of the North plant sewer shed drains to this location. And then it crosses underneath the river and then crosses over land and then crosses again over the river. This area with the blue arrow actually did break back in, I think 2006. And it wasn't related to spring flows or storm flows. We believe at that time that it was related to some work that Colchester did on their side with armoring the river banks that changed some of the river dynamics, caused some scouring and then that pipe broke. We, the response to that at the time was to go ahead and directionally drill it. So instead of the piping on the bottom of the river, we actually went underneath the river and believe it's about 20 feet below the river. And at the time that we did that, we did look at that lower sewer crossing. It was determined to be less risky or less susceptible to this type of break. But as we all know, fast forwarding to the post intense rain floods, it did in fact break. This is the approximate area of the New North Inn that drains to that point. So it's about half of the flow that usually goes to the North wastewater treatment plant. We weren't celebrating, but we were thinking, wow, we escaped a big one when the rains hit in Central Vermont and caused all that devastation and somehow we didn't see any impacts here. Unfortunately, when the Winooski floodwaters hit, the Winooski River floodwaters hit in Burlington, it was that next morning, July 12th, when I got a call from the operator saying, we got a problem, there's no flow getting to main plant. We've popped the manhole and there's no flow coming in. Fortunately, unfortunately, the wastewater operator who was there was there during the previous break. And so he immediately knew or thought it's the siphon or it's the other siphon crossing. So we quickly mobilized. By 8.45 that morning, we were able to redirect the flows. So there's one manhole, the water from North Ave's coming in and then the water from the siphon is coming in and then it goes into the plant. Because the siphon had broken, the water even from North Ave was going and leaking out that same break. So we were losing all of the flow from the entire North End, New North End. Because our crews were able to react quickly, they were able to block off the sewer siphon part and at least get the flows coming from North Ave into the plant so we could treat those. And then we switched our attention to focusing on really in the early days, public notification letting people know as quickly as possible that this had happened and posting of all lake access areas. Including areas that aren't really public beaches but we knew people sometimes like to get free with them along the North Shore. And so we were managing that and then quickly shifting our efforts to a couple of different strategies. The first one was basically 24-7 pumping and hauling, getting trucks there and sucking off as much sewage as possible to keep the entire volume from going to the lake. We weren't able to mitigate all of the stuff that was filling in but we were able to knock it down quickly. And then by, I guess, two nights later thanks to what I call some amazing iron chef engineering and our engineer largely, Ashley Walente with the help of Martin and Kate basically came up with an entire temporary force main and pump station design within two days. And then we were able to contact a contractor and start getting rebuilt. So by July 17th, and I'm just celebrating this because like this is no matter what happens with the rest of my career, seeing my team work this quickly to prevent additional environmental destruction from happening was like high five. I think I told you guys I might be prone to high fiving and a lot of hugging in that time period and I certainly was. So by July 17th, we were starting to build this 5,000 foot long force main across the landscape. And by July 25th, ECI was able to put that temporary force main into operations which was again, just pretty darn cool. I don't know if anybody here I don't think anybody's in the new north end. If you drive by the pipe, I mean it's there. It makes interesting noises as the pump kicks on and off. But really a pretty cool project response to a terrible thing. So by July 28th, we were able to remove the lake access alerts after we did some E-Cole I testing to show compliance with recreational standards. Another thing I didn't mention when we were doing that public notification we weren't just doing it for Burlington. We were also in communication with our partners over in Colchester because they're very near the mouth of the windows game. We wanted to make sure Chip did a great job of keeping them in the loop. When we built the pump station, we acknowledged this is a temporary situation. It's not perfect and it's not as robust as a permanent pump station like we have in other parts of the city. We want to acknowledge another happened a variety of issues. It's worked very well, but during large storm events and then occasionally due to a few mechanical issues such as a day when the, Kimberth is the discharge hose, cracked and spewed things into the air. In every case because of the alarming we were able to get on it act quickly but we have had a couple of additional releases over the course of this event. But overall I mean if we didn't have this in place we would have been dumping I think on the order of 350,000 gallons of sewage in the river every single day without the quick action of the team and the contractor that we had. All along once we put this in place we designed it so that if we had to go for the winter time we could, but none of us wanted to. Largely because of the amount of effort it takes to kind of keep it babysit it and make sure all the things that could go wrong with it don't go wrong. So we quickly were shifting to how could we get something in place for this winter and then also the long term. A couple other things we did in the early days we had done some dye testing which helped show the location of the break. You can see the green dye so that we literally put this very fluorescent dye into the pipe and then used drones to make sure that we could see it. We also dye tested from the other side A to make sure that that first crossing was okay and also to give us an idea of is this a small localized break or did we lose the whole pipe? Because if we had lost the whole pipe that would have been a whole different scenario of emergency repair. But fortunately the times that we dye tested it came up in the exact same location pretty darn close to the shore. It took us a long while because of all of the summer rains and the high turbidity that Winooski was running chocolate brown for a really long time and we finally were able to get divergent. We had them at the ready I think almost even two weeks after the event happened but they just couldn't get in and see anything. I mean even when they got in in August got into the water on August 17th they were largely going by feel. They couldn't see a ton but based on what they felt and recounted I think this is Steve Roy's drawing we were able to kind of sketch out what we were thought we were up against which was largely just this one separation but with some scouring that was leaving that pipe not supported along the river bank. So- Can you just explain scouring please? Scouring is so water has energy and it has the ability to move sediments. So while this pipe usually would be supported by dirt or river bottom sediments or rocks that it was washed away by the river. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. So with the focus on what we knew was the problem again our engineering team quickly prepared a design build RFP and went out to get a contractor to fix this or at least to put a really darn good band-aid on it which will get us to the next phase. So as of last week, is that last week 10, 9 and with the support of the Board of Finances City Council we were able to mobilize ECI it's not a small price tag but when you're doing things in water and with cranes and all of that that's kind of what you expect. So that's underway right now and so far we haven't heard of there being any problems. This is a recent picture with the divers having gone in and really visualized that gap and I believe you may be able to speak to this the scope of work includes not only it's obviously fixing that gap but then replacing a couple of sticks of pipe. They're gonna go about 70 feet beyond that to replace and then do additional like this and once it's done they'll confirm it'll be sealed up. To make sure that these joints because the pipes are joined together. So it's not just one long section of pipe so they're gonna do their due diligence when they're in there. Once this fixes in place our plan is to decommission the pump station those temporary pumps that are over on Platsburg Ave. However, our plan is to leave that 5,000 foot long force main in place so that if something were to happen to our repair and we believe this repair should be robust but we would be able to quickly mobilize and not have to go through the whole process again and spend all of that money but we would be looking to decommission that pipe as soon as we can but that kind of factors into this longer term repair. So in parallel with releasing the RFP on the design build our team was releasing requests for qualifications for design teams who could actually come in and help us evaluate various alternatives to not having a pipe on the bottom of the river that might look something like directionally drilling directionally drilling multiple pipes so we have resiliency under that section but frankly it may also involve looking at creating a permanent pump station with a permanent bearing force main which might be the safest overall I'll just get it out of the river entirely we don't know we're gonna have this design team help us crunch those numbers, figure that out what does it look like, so on and so forth and the cool part is that, well two cool parts that's not cool that Vermont reached this threshold but because Vermont had so much damage we went from the 75, 25% cost share of FEMA now to the 90, 10% I definitely get a little yip in my car when I heard that and then the state because of our disaster planning efforts that we've done at the city the state my understanding will cover half of that 10% local match so we're still gonna be out some money but it's a lot less than we would have been and furthermore, conversations thus far with FEMA it appears that they will, that they're on board with paying for this larger permanent fix so not just the 800,000 that we're spending on the Band-Aid, but for actually helping us invest in putting this pipe back and creating a different pipe system that is more resilient to climate change that we're not gonna be back here having to put more Band-Aids on an old pipe in the years to come so that's also really super positive it's in their system it's in their system, yeah, so hopefully we'll cross some point at which they can't backtrack but it's just, we were prepared to have to kind of fight about that but the partner at FEMA has been really supportive of doing the right thing if people want to stay, stay abreast of everything that's going on this is the website where we've been listening to all of the updates does anybody have any questions on that before we go to the tertiary part? Yeah, that's, we'll give high-fives to Martin and his team whichever it may be. Just a big collection, I bet. I bet. Commissioner Hogan, do you have any questions, comments? Yeah, I guess just one clarification you spoke about the work that was done on like the upstream or like that first river crossing that you mentioned went like 20 feet under rounds which wasn't squaring with my sense of gravity here so was there, under the river and then being pumped back up so like across the land? So even though it goes under because the ultimate discharge point at the plant is lower than the original discharge point even though you go up your, water will move up and under and go up and under. Yeah, it's called a reverse safe-in when you do this for whatever reason, so. But yeah, that's, I mean, that's the big positive is that there's no pumps. Obviously, there's a big environmental impact on your facing now, so. Because the challenges, you know, I think that are bothering us right now are these river crossings. I also don't like this very long crossing across wetlands and forests. Like I don't know exactly how we would deal with that. One of the other challenges is the directional drill for this crossing was a lot easier in that there's a easy access to the receiving pit because you usually have to be on the other side and dig a hole so that the pipe can come up and you can do all the connections. There's not any easy access over here. So we're talking barges and permits who knows what kind of permits to get into this type of area. So that will kind of all get played out in the long-term assessment. But, you know, moving the whole thing land side with the pump station, even though there will be long-term life cycle costs with the energy to pump, it will tackle both the crossing piece as well as this land crossing piece. Thank you. And I'm just curious, did you contract for the drone inspection of the diet testing? We were prepared to contract with the UVM Spatial Analysis Lab, but they ended up actually, they had been hired by the state already to do drone work. And then I think we also, if that wasn't gonna work, we were gonna use another consultant company who had a drone. I think we ended up using Jarless at UVM. We're gonna be using Bertier once. I think we used Bertier once. And then Jarless in the next few. Okay. And with that relationship, cover the future testing. You mentioned like there's gonna be additional diet testing after this sort of the short-term repairs goes in. Yes. Well, I think we would plan on getting it again, whether whoever it is, the short-enters, yes. I'm just, you know, we would do each job accordingly. That'll be probably a couple of weeks time for that. One other important thing is that we regularly dietest these pipes, live annually. And then we had actually just inspected, we'd actually had a diver creepy crawl along these pipes. I think in the spring before this floods happened and had gotten a report back that everything was good to go. So, and we were doing everything one could do with this type of situation and infrastructure being inherited from the decision made in 1967. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Commissioner Barr. No, I'm high-five to everybody for the quick reaction. I'm gonna say that's pretty monumental to help keep lakes and rivers clean as it can be as we work towards it. So, that's the direction of box. I similarly expressed kudos. That was a pretty riveting story going through that timeline. So congratulations to you and your entire team because that's just like a monumental feat of public service, frankly. So thank you. And the only other thing I'll say is I have, I don't live in the New North end but I run up there all the time and I run past the pipe on Northview Drive. I mean, I feel like it's pretty inconspicuous. Like it just sits there and does its job and it's like, hey, that's a pretty cool, like visible piece of water infrastructure that we've had. Maybe we should put all of our pipes up up there. But yeah, so I've seen it. And I'm sorry, I think I just missed this. So that is gonna be decommissioned but the pipe is still gonna stay. We're gonna leave the pipe there over the winter until, you know, we don't know exactly how long that other long-term fix is gonna be but it's likely to take a while. Right. I think fingers crossed maybe we can get it done before the end of next year but I think we have to figure out what the design is. Okay. All the permitting but for right now we think let's leave it there and see how this other fix holds rather than have to rebuild it. But the pumping system will go away and we won't be using that pipe actively. Okay, gotcha. Okay. That's all, thank you. Okay. Vice-Chair Damian. You answered my first question about timeline for the long-term fix but for the for I guess also for the long-term fix with the disaster relief funding that you mentioned that's really gonna help fund sounds like a large portion of this project. Does that impact the city's ability for sort of choosing what design the city thinks is best for us just by having sort of other funding partners involved? Yeah. Because we don't know for sure we think hopefully they're gonna have they're gonna pick the one that is the most compelling case for climate resiliency. We're probably not in the position to fund it otherwise. I think we'll be trying to figure that out. Yeah, I mean I think those two options like doing a double barrel because that's the modern design standard is having two pipes deep directional drill underneath the river is that option or pop station we don't see another option at this point and I think few of you was aware that those are the two options that we're looking at. And they haven't said no to either one. Okay, perfect, thank you. Okay, thank you and thank you very much. You know I love geeking out on this broader stuff. And I think so I was certainly following this as a resident and aware of all the communications and I think we always measure things like my work. This work, but I think this metric but you mentioned 350,000 gallons a day that didn't hit the river as a result of the work that your team did in a very short period of time is I think astounding. And I think we need to celebrate these like, I know the ship has already sailed we're into October and so forth but I'm just so impressed at that timeline that you indicated and the drawing that the diver did. Did he just come out? Well that's deep Roy listening to the diorama and then translating it. Okay even more impressive. I think that's pretty good for an underwater drawing. Right in the rain paper. So I think we're all here because we love infrastructure in some way or another and it's like our kind of socks and underwear where everything is fine until it's not. You don't think about your socks until your whole your toe is poking out and this is a one thing where oh my God the toe is really poking out of the hole. So just really impressed with the whole team on this. And I guess so in this temporary piece I'm happy to hear that hopefully we'll kind of move through with this FEMA funding. And just thinking about the climate resiliency piece and you have these two models examples of what could work. Does FEMA incorporate local knowledge and situational expertise on that design just to kind of expand on what Vice Chair Damiani asked about is there a preference on the two systems? And I know there are sort of lot of calculations that have to go into that or are you still kind of trying to figure out which one's gonna be better? Yeah, we're a little new to the process but I mean I certainly will be reviewing and working with the engineers to make their best case about the fact that one solution in my mind takes care of the whole enchilada, right? Yeah, I mean usually there are non-cost environmental factors that go into evaluation so that'll be important here. So even though things may look equal on one side you can try to make your case more on the other for a variety of reasons. I mean I think just for being honest the next big challenge perhaps not in this iteration because it can't be addressed but where North Plant is not an ideal location on the bend of a river really kind of in like the cutoff shoot if you were to look at the river on a bigger level and in fact is the one piece of city infrastructure that does not have insurance because of this location. So just sharing the risks that we uncover every day of how things were built and trying to figure out how to do our best with some of the things we're gonna be talking about. Certainly the design for the next upgrade will be keeping that in mind to try to make it as resilient as possible given this location but next generation wherever you are they're gonna have to probably figure out how to deal with the location in a bigger way. Bring it back to reality. Yeah, no. It has insurance, no flood insurance. No flood insurance, sorry. Thank you, sorry. For the record, it has insurance. Great, no thank you for those responses. All right and now onto the tertiary treatment. Yes, tertiary treatment. So, why given all the things we have to do would we even be looking at like more new things at the wastewater treatment plant. And the reason really is, you know, the health of our lake. There's a lot of things that factor into cyanobacteria blooms. Some of them we can control and some of them we can't, well, not immediately control. And one of the things we can't really control right now is the calm warm water conditions that we saw this summer which really kind of kicked up cyanobacteria much earlier. The piece that humans can control more easily, more quickly is how much nutrients we're putting into the lake. And so because of that, the state in 2016 had passed a total maximum daily load which looked at all the different ways in which humans needed to limit the discharge of phosphorus which is one of the primary nutrients in the lake that drives cyanobacteria from the landscape. And for those of you who have attended previous presentations, we looked at all of the different ways in which we thought Burlington could manage its phosphorus obligation. Burlington's phosphorus contribution comes primarily from two places, from the wastewater treatment plants and from storm water. And under the integrated planning effort, we looked at all the things we had to do for combined sewer overflow, for regular storm water management and then we started playing with a couple of different variables to see what are the different ways in which Burlington could manage this. One of the options over there on the third sort of this scenario was could we achieve our phosphorus obligations, which I believe are, I can't remember if it's the total amount of pounds, I think it's 1,100 that we need to find, could we achieve all of our phosphorus obligations purely through storm water management? I was gripped as a storm water geek, have come to grow and love wastewater, but I thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could just do all storm water and tackle this problem? Unfortunately, even though we're able to, we can probably eke out enough storm water improvements to meet our target, when we looked at it compared to some other options such as installing tertiary treatment, so a treatment practice at main plant, our largest wastewater treatment plant, when we looked at all the cost differences and the sort of reality of whether or not we'd be able to really make people make the right choices, particularly on the storm water side, our attention kept getting drawn to the fact that pursuing tertiary treatment at main plant was gonna give us the biggest bang for our buck. It was going to not only meet the average, the average phosphorus reduction we needed, but it was also gonna give us a buffer to deal with the fact that our wastewater treatment plants, phosphorus discharge fluctuates based on weather, because we have a lot of wet weather or combined sewer that goes there. It's not a static number. It goes up and down depending on the types of rainstorms. And so, from that, sorry, this was my target slide. So this is the amount we needed about, I think, 1,100 pounds of phosphorus reduction. And when we do the bits that we have to do in the storm water and other sectors, the vast majority, very easily we can get it, say very easily, most easily we can get it by implementing tertiary treatment, a third level of treatment at main plant. So when wastewater treatment plants are looking at new technologies, it's customary to do a pilot. You don't design it on your desk and then hope that it's gonna work. You actually need to subject the different technologies that you're interested to, to the actual conditions. And so the goal of the tertiary pilot was to evaluate the ability of selected technologies to meet 0.1 milligrams of phosphorus. The average performance of main plants, usually she's able to get the phosphorus level down to about 0.28 milligrams per liter. We've had it evaluated, engineers say that the plant is performing exceedingly well, largely due to the creative ingenuities of our plant operators who are dialed in and constantly watching how things are varying. But we can't get it any lower than that, even with additional chemical optimization. It's basically doing as well as it can. So in order to get down to this 0.1, which was modeled in the integrated plan, we need additional technologies. And so we need to evaluate this under a variety of conditions. What we call steady state, which is just sort of like everything's normal, it's a typical day, nothing's crazy. Hydraulic stress, which is when the plant receives a lot of excess flow from that wet weather to so from a storm event, our plant flows ramp up from like 3.5, 4MGD up to as much as 13MGD very quickly. And that can present a stress for any type of treatment technology. And then the other type of stress test is a solid stress test. So when or if the process, particularly the biological process is not happy or functioning well, which happens on occasion, the system can release more solids than is typical. And we wanted to make sure that this tertiary treatment would be able to handle that as well. A secondary goal, kind of like a bonus goal, would be to evaluate the ability of those technologies to reduce phosphorus during wet weather events. We don't believe we're required to do that, but because we're still in conversations with the state about exactly what our permit's gonna look like, we wanted to make sure we had something in our back pocket. So if things went a certain direction, we might be able to at least know what we could do to further reduce the phosphorus that goes out into the lake during storm events. They released a request for proposals and they selected three different technologies or vendors, which all have three very different technologies. The active flow, which I added a W, it does not have a W. Active flow ballasted flocculation, which if I recall, it sort of gets the phosphorus particles to stick to sand particles, which makes them heavier, which means more of them drop out versus sometimes you can keep getting some floaters. Nexum was a really cool technology where they actually sort of supercharged the sand on the outside to be even stickier. And then when the water passes through it, it's able to grab on to more phosphorus and kind of hold it within the filter and then goes through a backwash cycle to regenerate that sand and all those, my antigen sites, that's similar process, action sites. And then aquaerobic system is kind of the simplest in which it's really like a cloth media filtration. It was the shag carpet that you may remember, super soft, blue, and it really just works with the physical action of adding chemicals to create larger particles that then get filtered out much like throw coffee filter. Is that ringing the bell for those of you who go there? These are all the fancy, you know, schematics. This is the active flow system, the Nexum blue pro, and then the aquaerobics cloth media filter sock. And at the end of the day, all three technologies, they met the goal of the point one. So there was no one technology that was a super dud. But when we looked at aquaerobics, it performed the best overall during the steady state. So aquaerobics is this green line. This red line is the goal. And you can see some of the other, and then the purplish blue is the influent TP. So that's what's the phosphorus that's coming in before it goes through tertiary treatment. And you can see that the orange Nexum and the regular blue violia, you know, kind of hugged and were able on average to stick around that point one during steady state. But the, except for this first day when they were kind of dialing things in, the cloth media filters really were able to just perform super well throughout that entire period. It was also, it didn't do as well as, I can't remember if it was the active flow, didn't do as well during the storm event, but it still did well. It still was able to knock down the phosphorus that we usually would see going out into the lake during a storm event down lower, I think to point three or something like that. This is sort of their performance over all of the different states. So you have steady state, the hydraulic stress, and then back to steady state with that one peak being the vortex blend. And you can see again, this isn't a comparison, this is just the aqua aerobics, but you can see that aqua aerobics again was able to stay below that point one target the entire time with the exception of that one storm event. But even the storm event, right, it's knocking it down quite substantially. So it is able to do good things during a storm event. Any questions about all the grass? I love grass. What was that hydraulic stress period? Was that ever rained during those few days? So the hydraulic stress period is a artificial hydraulic stress situation that they create. They just, they're only pumping a certain amounts, if I recall, they're only pumping a certain amounts to the tertiary treatment. And so they sort of artificially pumped more than would usually go there during under normal conditions. So that's an artificially generated. The vortex one was them actually grabbing flow from the vortex and blending it and then putting it through the system so that it was seeing that potentially dirtier water. Because the vortex, it's the big sort of swirl separator. It's not, it's the water that's not going through the full primary biological and secondary process. So during certain portions of the storm, they can have more phosphorus than wastewater, than treated wastewater would. Certainly not more phosphorus than regular untreated wastewater. Gotcha, thanks. So they're both artificial stresses. The vortex wasn't artificial and that there was a storm event going on and that we intentionally grabbed some of that flow. Whereas during the rest of the time period, that storm flow from the vortex wasn't going through only the stuff that came through the plant. So there are some cost proposals that are listed in the report. Happily, Aquaromix was the most consistent performer and it is also believed to be the most cost effective option which is a win-win because sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Both from a capital cost as well as a life cycle cost perspective. So when we look at energy and chemicals that way, as well as just pure capital cost, it's still the most cost effective approach. The cost proposals in the report are preliminary and they don't, Martin, you can maybe chime in, they don't include the cost of potential pumping that'll be necessary. So the next step in designing is figuring out where we can fit this thing and based on where we're fitting it, how much pumping is gonna have to happen to get it to the new system. And so those pumping costs will increase the overall capital cost of being able to do this. We have the effluent from our secondary clarifiers and then that goes usually out right to the disinfection. So we have a certain elevation that we have to play with that's very likely that that won't work and we'll need a pump to get it through the tertiary right after that step. Right now, we're place holding a conservative estimate of about 20 million in order to be able to implement this technology within the confines of the other things that we need to do at the wastewater plant, which we are getting to soon. Any other questions about tertiary treatment? You know, I would be remiss. We're, I've frequently committed, Burlington is gonna do its part. We're gonna meet our phosphorus obligation during the 10 of jail. The challenge is the lake is a mixed system. And so just continuously remind people to support statewide efforts for phosphorus reduction because we can do everything that we're gonna do and there's still gonna be phosphorus coming down the Winnieski River. And so sadly, we may very likely continue to see cyanobacteria blooms. And so we're having conversations with BP, with Burlington Parks and Recreation Waterfront about resiliency measures, about how do we provide places for people to cool off, even if they can't access the lake. You know, one of the challenges with the flood, I think I heard a snippet that the entirety of what came down the Winnieski River in 2022 as far as phosphorus came down the Winnieski and that one flood events. So climate change is a thing that we collectively, as a state and a region, have to really try to figure out how we're gonna change things. Pretty much an artery in happiness, but. Okay, well, let's see if we have any questions so we can hand on a high note now. Commissioner Fox, any questions on the Yeah, I had one. I apologize, it was a lot to get through, but I'm on, let's see what page of the packet that I'm on. Oh, the report itself, okay. Yeah, on page three. Well, okay, maybe I can just summarize it, but it seems like the Aqua Aerobic System is in place, like a version of it in South Burlington. Is that correct? I believe so. Okay, yeah, I noticed like airport parkway, whatever. So I was just curious if we have reached out to the folks there to see what their experience has been with that system, see if we can learn from them. Operators are real big, like wastewater operators, they're not gonna listen to engineers, they wanna talk to other operators, and so whether it's a pump or this or that, they're always looking for references and field trips to go kick the tires and really talk to somebody, not the salesperson, but the person who's dealing with it every day, and like, okay, how much is it paying in the butt to shut this thing down to, so yeah, 100% references all the way. Okay, cool. Yeah, I was just curious since it seems like it was close by, like, probably a good opportunity. There's one in Hawaii too, I think, we can go to. Bring the whole DPW commission, right? Maybe sometime in February. Yeah, I'll tell you about it. Another question I had, I don't know if this is too nitty gritty, perhaps, but I was curious about, instead of like the ongoing maintenance part, they estimate that miscellaneous parts replacement is gonna be like only 20 hours a year of annual maintenance in miscellaneous parts, and I just feel like maybe this is a question out of a lack of understanding, but it just seems like that number's really low, like 20 hours of miscellaneous parts replacement a year. You can write that down and take a look at that. Okay, I was just curious, like it seemed potentially low to me, I don't know. That's on like the year when no major maintenance is, because I'm, Maybe I'm on average. Okay, okay, that makes sense. No, I was just sort of, Yeah, I think my understanding with the aqua aerobics thus far is that the major sort of ongoing thing is like you have to occasionally replace the filter socks. Okay. And then, but the systems are redundant, so you usually have like, you have one system and then you have an entire backup system, so if you have to take this one down, you can use the other one. And one of our, some of our thinking is depending on the pumping costs, because we always have to have those two systems anyway, for dry weather, for normal weather compliance, there's the possibility to be able to use that backup system at least on occasion for storm events to process storm events, if done in the right way, right? Rather than just sitting there as a backup, can it be used to get us a little extra boss? I mean, if we can do better than we're supposed to for the lake, you know, then by all means, we want to try to figure out how to do it as long as we can remain compliant with our permit limits. Those are all the questions I had. Thank you. Those are good questions. Commissioner Barr. Sure. I think this is fantastic. You obviously know your stuff and you guys are all working in the right direction for this. And I know that this is focused on Burlington and what we process before it goes in. I'm just curious, and we don't need to get in a lengthy discussion about it, but what about the other cities that border the lake and do we get phosphorus and blooms from as far north as St. Albans and Swan in those places, or is that, are they going to be looking at the same kind of things that we are? They are. I mean, all wastewater treatment plants over a certain lost track, because we basically had to do everything. They did sort of break things down into small plants, medium plants and large plants, and I can't really guess all large plants or medium and larger had to go from current levels down to point two. Some of those are able to just do it through optimization, but others are also going through upgrades. The majority of the influence on Burlington Harbor and the main lake is going to be coming from stormwater, river erosion, and wastewater treatment plants all along the Leweski Basin. That's really our biggest influencer, so. Right. And I haven't done the analysis of sort of, because there's a lot of smaller plants along there that may not be subjected to technology changes. Every single plant, my understanding, every single plant across the state is having to go through phosphorus optimization planning where they're supposed to get as much out of their plant as they possibly can. Okay, good, because I mean, as much as you're doing. And agriculture, sorry, I miss agriculture, but across the board everybody's having to do way more than they ever have. Right, and the agricultural piece is the one that I was just thinking about that there's a lot of farms that border the Leweski River and a lot of stuff flows into it. It has much money and effort and great ideas that we're putting into it to process from Burlington. It's gonna reduce it, I know it is, but are we still just gonna just keep getting affected by the stuff coming down? I mean, agricultural regulations have also become much more stringent and it is harder because it's like non-point source and you have to go farm, my farm, my farm, my farm, my farm. And that's why I just sort of called action when you hear people debating in the state house about funding for any water quality activities, whether it's wastewater or stormwater or ag. Like we all need to be standing up and making sure that as much money as possible is going towards those. It's unfortunate that it has to battle against other things that are also important, like social services, but it is all very important. Yeah, and I certainly don't wanna create any increased impacts on the farms because they're struggling as it is, but. That is the challenge. If they are an impact on it. Anyway. Yeah. That's fine. Thank you and thanks for answering my questions earlier. Sorry for jumping in there. I appreciate the look at both the capital costs and the recurring costs of something that struck me when I was taking the tour of the different options that day. Some have like things running and humming the whole time and some are more like filter based and stuff. Yeah, thanks for the update, Erin. Great work, I know. The next stage is to turn it into a preliminary design and figure out some of the intricacies that Martin was saying and to be emerging that effort with the larger wastewater treatment facility where you will not create effort, right? We're moving this thing, it's like a giant slide puzzle. So trying to integrate all of that together and figure out exactly the timing of when we will be implementing tertiary, which needs to happen sooner rather than later because of the obligations under the TMGL. So we're hoping that we'll be one of the big drivers in the conversation about seeking voter support and actually move forward. So, are there any other questions? Sorry if I... Is there a timeline that we need to get to the point one, is it point one zero, point two zero? Point one. We need to achieve our phosphorus overall limits, yes. I believe by 2026. Soon, yeah. And then, I heard you just say, I started going to the voters to get funding. Is that, is the city responsible for an entire local share? Is there state money involved in funding, something like this, given I'm assuming this came from a state regulation? Yeah, there is no explicit phosphorus reduction funding now. There used to be and it has moved from where it was I think in the 1990s. There were some specific grants. We would be looking to fund this largely through the state revolving fund for which we can sometimes get loan forgiveness. I don't have the details, but I know some of the projects we've already done, the disinfection and this, I think the disinfection and the SCADA project, we've recently got notice. Sometimes you find out years after the thing was built that you got the grant money, which is what has happened recently. So you don't always know in advance, but participating in that state revolving fund program does give you access to a variety of loan forgiveness programs. I think as we get closer and have our final number of all the different things we're gonna do, we're gonna be beating the bushes even harder than I know Chip and I have put together multiple funding requests to the congressional delegation, for something like this, and that will be continuing because it is important and it will be very helpful to the ratepayers of Burlington to get some grant funding. Excellent, thank you. And could you also speak to the, you know, if the target is this number that the state has set and the city of Burlington is asked to have more and more development within the city and sort of does the modeling that is either in this report or where does the modeling of as more development is being pushed into Burlington and all that impervious surface and all that other stuff, how does that impact sort of what the city is looking at of building here and do we need to scale up more? Are we looking at scaling up more for this type of system for the increased development? So it's part of the integrated planning project we did at that time, I think it was in 2019, looked at 20 year future flows. We've been updating or making sure because there's been some shifts as you all know in growth tolerance recently at the state level and here in Burlington we've been constantly double triple checking our growth projection numbers both with the larger upgrade project to make sure that we're building flexibility and capacity for that growth to happen. So that, and as we get into preliminary engineering I think we'll be holding in on that more because we'll be able to, I like the Aqua Robics because it's sort of like little IKEA modular like you can buy it in sort of different sizes, right? So the same technology, if you need to ramp it up or add additional concepts, you're able to do so. But it's very important when we start talking about the large pumps and other things that we're building as part of the upgrade. We do have to be thinking about that because it's a lot harder if you have to replace all of the pumps to bigger pumps. Yeah, we touch, later on in the presentation we touch on that a little bit with the East Plant where you get the main plant kind of checks that box. Yeah. Okay, excellent, thank you. I was just thinking as we look out this way with the South End Innovation District and all that development, so. It's been interesting because you know, nothing ever just stops. I would love it if things would stop for like five years and we could just catch up and then we could progress but that is not humanity, so here we are. Excellent. So, and then did you get it? No, actually you covered, I think you covered most of my questions. I guess maybe one final thing is when to anticipate this coming back before the commission. I was gonna say we'll talk a little bit about potential schedules. I think right now we are, we're trying to use the remainder of the bit of money that remains for 2018 because as much work done as possible. Mark will be talking about that we're referring to as stage zero. Tertiary will be coming in stage one which we would hope to start construction in 2025 and so right now we're currently looking at a bond vote of some size in November 2024. And so I suspect in late spring, summer we're gonna be hitting it hard, trying to get everybody on the same page about why we're doing these things and why they're important as we head in to take the necessary votes to get it on the ballot. Yeah. We have a number of big investments. There's water investments that are needed as well and so the question we're trying to figure out is when do we bring each and do they go together or they separate but yes this wastewater I am given we're still doing some of the preliminary. Thank you. So zooming way, way out to our three plans. Some of you were around in the 2018 challenges when, look our plans were built, they finished building them in 1994. So they are approaching 30 years old. Wastewater treatment plans usually are upgraded around your 20, 25 max, that's their usual typical lifespan. We saw some failures that started to happen in 2018. We had done a preliminary evaluation with a consultant in 2016 and had some decent estimates at the time of the things that we needed to focus on and so when the disinfection system failed and the SCADA system failed in 2018 we did grab those numbers off the shelf and those were largely what we used to develop our proposal that was for $30 million of which about 20 million was for wastewater. I think we tried to express in obtaining that voter approval that we didn't view this as the end all be all. This was sort of the life get it started. And in fact, once we got the disinfection and the SCADA project kind of on our way towards construction of those failed systems our engineering team with our consultants kind of turned their attention back to okay, there's the remainder of the money which was about 12 million bucks. Making sure that we had updated cost estimates and then also making sure that the list of things that we thought we needed to work on were in fact the highest priority things. And I've shared this with you all before but what we found when we started looking at it and looking at it from a risk perspective is that while we were doing some improvements after the 2021 upgrades and getting rid of some of the failed systems as you looked out across time even after we thought we could spend the $12 million there were still a ton of systems that were in the CDNF category and this is also an eye test apparently for those of you who can't see that but those are letter grades A, B, C, D and E using a fairly rudimentary risk system. And overall the number of systems and the replacement costs of the remaining high risk systems we just found were significantly higher significantly greater than the remaining money that we had. And we also started to see as we tried to move all the pieces that anything less than a comprehensive like a truly comprehensive equipment and process renewal was gonna keep Burlington at risk of wastewater treatment failures and what I consider preventable beach closures. There's some beach closures that are a little harder to prevent because of climate change but the ones that directly result from our failed infrastructure I do view those as preventable. And I made my pitch to you all last time that you know, Burlingtonians they deserve resilient treatment systems where risks of failures are minimized, right? So at its core we need to make sure that the stuff that we got there right now works because we're starting to have trouble with that. Separately when we start to think about a more modern wastewater treatment system we want to focus on actually improving and modernizing those wastewater treatment systems not just not backsliding but doing things like tertiary treatment making it so that we can create even better water quality for what's going out the pipe. Making sure that our systems are as resilient as possible even given their locations against flooding and other natural disasters. We're looking at how we increase the capacity of Maine to accept a potential east plant consolidation as well as other growth opportunities in the city. We have a number of safety issues and we want to make sure that in this upgrade we're making those conditions a lot safer for our employees, particularly around ventilation. We're exposed to a lot of different types of gases and whatnot from sewer systems and we want to take care of that. And then the last piece which I think everybody will vote yes for is we may not be able to get rid of all the odors but through some of the work that we're trying to target on the primary systems the initial sets of tanks which has some the stinkiest water in it we're hopeful to reduce offsite odors at Maine wastewater treatment plant which we hope will be a benefit to bike path users. And this is what I alluded to before I'm gonna hand it over to Martin. Stage zero is largely us drawing down the remaining money that we have. As we move on to stage one there's a specific focus there and that's where tertiary treatment would be. Stage two has a different area of focus and then stage three is further out. We want to be making sure that we have this big plan and how we're gonna progress over the coming years. And with that I'll hand it over to Martin. Thanks Megan, I'm gonna share this with you. I can go ahead, I'll run the. Okay, sounds good. So as Megan said, stage zero is what we have on money for now. That's the head works upgrade and I'll get into the scope as we move through the slides. Stage one is main wastewater treatment facility significant upgrades which we don't have on money for. And stage two is the conversion of East Plant into a pump station as well as high priority items that have the North plant. Stage one and stage two are in preliminary engineering phase and stage three includes important upgrades at North and Main. There would be no East in the scenario and we aren't in any engineering phase at this point. So as we move into discussion of stage zero I just wanted to talk about schedule and cost a little bit for stage zero. This is the head works upgrade which includes screening and grid primarily involved with wastewater plants. So design is underway. So from 2023 to 2024 will be in design construction plan to start in 2024 through 2026. The cost estimate is approximately 12.8 million which is part of the 2018 bond. And as Martin goes through we are presenting our cost estimates. They are conservative. Constantly refining them in early stages you often do see cost estimates with higher contingencies but they are where they are. Yeah, excellent. Yeah. So yeah, this is stage zero in final design. This includes Megan is highlighting the bottom is the screen buildings, screenings building and that's where the wastewater first enters. That's where we're gonna be replacing the dry weather influence screen. That's with a rake system and a wash press. It's basically a replacement of what's there with modern equipment and as well as influence gates and the controls for those gates produce substantial pieces of equipment that just need to be replaced because they're constantly failing. I have some photos of those. We have some building improvements here that are necessary from a code perspective as well as the new equipment that we're putting in. And then on the right hand side of the screen that's the grid building. So we'll be replacing the grid and grease removal system that's in there and updating components of that system. Again, that's just largely a replacement in kind but with modern equipment and meeting modern design standards because these systems are at the beginning of the plant process so they really do experience the highest wear and tear. Bricks, rocks, whatever anybody that's down there or in the catchphrase and so they get hit hard. Yep, probably go to the next slide. So same thing is happening and proposed for recent final design for state zero work at North and East wastewater treatment facilities. The East plant is the aerial image on the left and the highlight is around the grid and screening building. So the building itself, which is the green roof, that's where the current screen is that needs to be replaced. And the exterior right on the right hand side there is the grid and grease removal system. So as part of this, we'll also be modernizing the building so that it's more energy efficient and so that it has up to the HVAC ventilation and. And that system of say, even though we're gonna consolidate or turn East plant into a station that's something you would need to have there anyway. So it's not like we're spending money and then we're gonna do it the wrong way. Right, so we picked basically items that were high priority and under all circumstances that we perceived need to happen. Like if we're not wasting money on things that in five years we may not need anymore. We're gonna need these for a long time. And same applies for North plant. So this is down at the end of North Ave. Basically it's the same design constructed at around the same time. So next slide. These are some photos that thanks to operation staff I collected some of them even from today because I was like, oh, what's in the maintenance garage? And it happened to be one of the cylinders and shafts for the gate. So on the upper part that's something that will be replaced multiple components of our gate systems are failing and are gonna be replaced for stage zero work in the screenings building. And then on the bottom there is that's where the screen that's the channel where the screens are. And it's actually supposed to have the shaft connected just happened to be snapped off after that specific failure. And the thing is that these don't work, right? Stuff gets through and we'll just destroy the rest of the plants. So like it's not really a thing that we can leave. Yeah, and then onto the middle here. This is in the screening building as well. In, I think it was December, it was late 2023. One of our mechanics, oh, end of 2022. Yeah, mechanics completely rebuilt our influence screen that we're gonna be replacing. But they had to use custom parts because the equipment is completely obsolete like the basically the manufacturer doesn't supply the stuff that we need. And so thanks to having such a great operations team we were able to do that. But I just wanted to share that photo and on the bottom is again, it's just something that needs to be replaced in kind basically as the dumpster that's been welded with basically half the metal that's corroded away. And on the right, we have more corrosion to show this is in the grit building now. So part of our grit classifier system, this is removing the grit from the wastewater before it moves through the system. And these show more welding and corroded pipes. The upper right hand piping shows one pipe was actually replaced a few years ago with stainless steel because it was failing. So we need to do the other one. Just things are falling apart in there. And the bottom photo is the grease arm on our grit collection system broken so that's before they repaired it. So just, you know, our guys are always working and maintaining the facilities and wanting to show it'll relieve a lot of headaches that are only gonna get worse if we don't fix this. And also the person who primarily fixed all of these things is probably retiring in the next year. And just from a workforce standpoint fighting folks with some of the skills that we currently have, it's been hard as well. So that's also like a risk in the back of our head. So stage one work, we're in preliminary engineering phase right now from 2023 to 2024. Design will start in 2024 through 2025 and then construction starting in 2025. And this is a big ticket cost item because it's not just replacing in kind. It includes replacing in kind but it also includes significant improvements at the main wastewater plant, including tertiary and new tankage. So I'll move to the next slide and jump into. Thank you. Yeah, no, it's not, it was my idea. $4, $4, $4, $4. $4. Yeah, 121 million estimate was what's on the first stage and it's a significant update to main plant. This is in preparation. We can't bring East Plant to main plant without upgrading here first. And upgrades here are also necessary for aging infrastructure. I can get more to the justification of the East Plant hop station when we get to that slide later but I just wanted to set that up that this upgrade is due to comedy the East Plant flow is coming here. It includes some of the new items are replacing aeration tanks and getting new blowers. And so that equipment would be in a new location and tertiary treatment equipment would also be in a new location as well as the secondary new secondary clarifier. So the circle in the upper right is... It's like my little red thing is not responding. Yeah, so that depicts the, you know, a to be determined location of the secondary clarifier and then tankage also represented on the right hand side by that rectangle. You can see that that's in Perkins Pier which is a significant piece of this project. And just to speak like the expansion is both for East Plant as well as main plant is starting to butt up against some of its capacity challenges, particularly like on the organic loading like my hydraulic standpoint still has flow. So that will sort of has on the cusp and then the scenario bringing East Plant definitely pushes us in the direction of leaving the East. Right, so bringing East Plant over as we'll talk about it now. Such an important item is we would be combining the permit flow from main plant with the permit flow from East. So not just the design. East Plant doesn't receive its full flow that it's permitted for. But we're not gonna bring it over here and kind of forego what we have permitted because that's very valuable and we need to keep that. So we'll bring it over to main plant and what that adds is also a level of flexibility of where growth happens in the city. So we're kind of by consolidating we're then able to gain capacity at main plant to meet the growth projections. But it's not like we're going to the state to say, oh, we need to increase our permit. We're just going with an existing permit. So I think that's a... Can I get just, sorry, just I don't mean to be dense here. So basically if you're saying like East Plant is like a capacity of, I'm just saying five and North Plant is a capacity of five. By combining them, then you have a capacity, a state permit capacity of 10 without having to ask for more for North Plant. Is that my understanding? For me? Yeah, for me. For main plant, correct. Yes, yes, so it's closer to like five and two. Like one point two, is it one point two? But whatever it is, you're adding the two of them. Yes. And that whole piece for main plant then is still under the same. Right, and East Plant gets I think approximately half of its permit. So that means that we get that additional capacity at main plant, which then is projected to meet future growth for the next 20 years at main plant. Okay. Thank you. Also, and probably get into it or touch on it again, but you know this enables us sort of consolidate resources and so when we look out long term it ends up saving great peers money, do not have three separate plants. It's sort of weird to have a small town with three separate wastewater plants. And a lot of engineers really come there, they're like, ah, they probably, they just put plants where the discharges were sort of already happening. So we'll talk about that more, but there are lots of reasons. Those are doing my questions. Yeah, why are you doing this? Yeah, that's great. I don't even know if there's anything else. Yeah, I need the first three items, the new aeration tanks, tertiary treatment and secondary clarifier tanks. Those are all new added capacity and that before, and then I'll get into the other items. Those are basically all. Do you want to talk about dewatering? Just because? Yeah, yeah, new dewatering. So even though that is kind of, I guess you could say replacement, our dewatering equipment is such a heavy operational expense. It's both from a maintenance and personnel expense as well as like one of our biggest cost items for disposal. So that's a really big cost, capital cost component for this project as well as it should lead to future savings because we'll be reducing the amount of sludge that goes out the door by more efficiently getting the water out of it. So we're not trucking as much water. We're not trucking water plus sludge. We're trucking. Right, fire sludge, fire sludge. We spend about a million dollars a year and that number just keeps going up and up. And when you look at states on our borders, they've seen doubling of their vial sales costs. So it's really something that we need to try to cost contain. Yeah, and at this point in time, it's looking like centrifuge technology that we have piloted a few years back now will be the preferred alternative. And a centrifuge is better than belt filter press. That's the one, I think, at least the main room that everyone bypasses during our tours you haven't been in there. Well, it makes your clothes smell. You gag. I didn't go gag. It is what it is, but it's popular. Wait, did we go in that room? Because I think I gagged. No, I don't think we took you in the window. The light took him near. Our previous safety manager used to, I think, the one time we took her in there, she gagged for a while afterwards. Yeah, so the belt filter presses, they do actually, they're very practical of the equipment that we have now. They work well, except these specific ones are now very old and falling apart and need tons of maintenance, but they're open. So they, I don't have any pictures of them in there, unfortunately, the centrifuge is basically an enclosed technology, though, so that'll help with worker safety as well as being more efficient. So, yeah, just, I guess here we can look at some images that are, these are, as far as stage one, equipment that just needs to be replaced. This is kind of the primary clarifiers that upper left-hand corner. That kind of like the grid and screening that gets a lot of wear and tear because it's near the beginning of our wastewater treatment process. So those corroded components, everything you see there that's metal would be replaced during stage one, and that's in all six existing clarifiers, plus we get a new one in the fifth clarifier that we're adding. The lower left, it's kind of hard to see, but that's a blown out like electrical control unit that is a commonplace, and we have a lot of electrical systems that need to be replaced, and that's also in stage one. Aeration tankage is more of, you know, we're putting in new tanks, so not necessarily a replacement, it kind of is, it's, you know, we're putting in aeration tanks, but they're gonna be bigger, it's gonna be a bigger sized tank with new equipment. You can see here that one of the gate slides in the upper left-hand corner is completely rotted out. There's a big structural crack in that tank right there, and... What is the nearest major one? Yeah, those are the biggest ones. The lower left is also, it was a structural arm support that broke off of a mixture in the aeration tank. And then our influent pumps are how we get the wastewater through the treatment plant and those need constant maintenance, and then this one was in the shop today, so I took a photo and it has some holes kind of through the body of it, so just wanted to share that. Sorry. Sorry. What did you other? Nope. So east, this is stage two. This is the, now that stage one is done, we'd be able to accommodate the flows from the east plant. So this is the pump station conversion, as well as important north wastewater treatment facility improvements. This is also in the preliminary engineering phase from 2023 to 2024. Design would be a little bit after stage one with 2025 to 2026 as the target construction in 2026 to 2028 with the current cost estimate at $38 million. So we did talk a little bit about this, so I'll just go through the pieces that we haven't yet for the east plant conversion. As you know, east plants on the river side have an upper right-hand corner of that map and those arrows show the approximate route that new piping would be needed to get the flow all the way to main plant. So this was evaluated and essentially the evaluation was comparing keep east plant and maintain it as it is versus pump it to main plant and... We'll keep it as it is, but have to upgrade it because it's so dang old. Right, yep. And so with that, when you look at it over 50 years, there's a $30 million cost savings when capital and O&M are considered. So they're significant cost savings, which we will have to refine more as we move through engineering to confirm that these assumptions are correct. So it gets rid of kind of a pretty bad operational challenge right now because there is so much old equipment at the east plant. So if we did keep it, we would have to do a major overall there. Which is all considered in the evaluation. And we talked about the capacity increase. So that's I think an important one that we highlighted. And I think another one to kind of hit home as a really big positive is that the east plant flows would now get tertiary treatment because that main plant is where the tertiary treatment's going, not the other plants. So we would then be capturing that and be able to give it phosphorous treatment. Additional bonus. Yep. So this stage two east plant conversion, it would be a pump station kind of that middle square is where we're assuming the pump station would be. And then one of the capacity of one of those tanks, the primary clarifier tanks is calculated to be enough for emergency storage for large rain events. As part of the pump station design. We'd also be maintaining the admin building that's just on the left of that. And as Megan mentioned previously, the headworks building on the right is still going to benefit this project because then we'll have treated all the grit will be out of the sewage before it's pumped. So north wastewater treatment facility, not kind of gets overlooked because they, except for the siphon I guess, but usually they're not a big problem but they do have some significant improvements that are needed. Clarifier mechanisms similar to main plant all need to be replaced. And the intermediate pumps. So basically north plant, their pumping system is not at the very beginning of their process. It's halfway through. And that is basically how the sewage gets through the end of their treatment process. And that needs a significant upgrade. But north plant sort of we're focusing all of our efforts stage one on the main plant, right? North plant is going to have to hang in there for stage two, but that goes into some of our conversations or eventual conversations about when we try to go for what amount of money. Yeah, and then there'll be improvements to the admin building too. Yeah. Yeah, so stage three, this is a project that we don't currently, yeah, that we don't currently have in the scope. It's not under engineering right now. We're proposing that potentially start in 2026 to 2027 for preliminary engineering with design for 2027 through 28 with construction starting in 2028. This cost estimate is $82 million. So it's not a preliminary engineering, but we have been plant. It's part of the sort of longer range planning, right? Because we don't want to be only sharing part of the pizza with everybody. We want to see what the whole pizza looks like. Yeah. So, yeah, just stepping through the stage three items. This is pretty important stuff. I think stage one was more of the upgrade. This is again, back to a lot of replacing in kind and bringing up the modern standards. The wet weather influence screen is a much larger version of our dry stream, which right where Megan's pointing right where the wastewater comes into the building. And we'll be doing HVAC everywhere. The CSO pumps also, like our influence pumps, they're critical for getting wastewater through and they're even bigger than our influence pumps. And that's right next to, yeah, that's right where Megan's pointing right there. New sludge storage tanks are all the way to the right. Also to be determined exactly where those will end up. We'd be doing the grid blower, replace primary sludge pumps and grinder pumps. So that, so kind of, we haven't touched a lot of the pumps and piping in the main control building, which is kind of a central one. There are a lot of old, I'll show some pictures, pipes and pumps in there as well in the pipe water systems on the list. And we will be repairing the chlorine contact tank and other site improvements. So similar to the stage three at the main plant, here at North Plant, we will be doing replacement of the return activated sludge and waste activated sludge pumps and piping valves. This one's different. We have waited until stage three for aeration system and blowers, which aren't necessarily in great condition, but we do feel like they can go a little bit longer. That's a really critical component of treatment. So just wanted to point that out. And then converting the anaerobic digesters to sludge storage, that's where Megan's pointing now. Updating the control building, replacing electrical and site updates. Just some quick photos of corrosion. So I think, I don't need to talk about every item, but just corroded piping inside the main plant building. This is what we're waiting for for stage three, even though it needs to be done soon. Basically going all the way through stage three gets us to full plant renewal, set the stage, and then we won't have to deal with it within our careers, somebody else's within the next 20 years. It's meeting the 20, 30 resiliency vision of trying to get that all done and making sure that Wellington has fully working modernized plants by 2030. Yeah, I was gonna say we're, Martin's leading the charge on the wastewater treatment facilities. There's plenty of other things that we're continuing to plan. I'll listen here whether it's additional pump stations, collection system improvements, we've got stormwater outfalls that still need to be repaired and combined sewer overflow mitigation. And then on the drinking water side, the 1867 pump house, which is responsible for pumping water from the reservoir up to the tanks, which means the hospital for the region's only level one trauma center. It's very, very old, 1867 needs to be replaced. And so that's in preliminary, or it's actually completed preliminary design, preliminary engineering, right? And it's about to go into final design. And so that's sort of the ticket that needs to go forward sooner rather than later. I can't remember off the top of my head with the current. I'd have to check. Yeah. And then, as we've shared before, the water distribution system, the valves, the transmission mains, and then just all the regular piping can continues to need us to chip away at it to prevent additional water main breaks or anything else, not on this list set, or doing. Well, the drinking water plan, the treatment of the drinking water plan, that was last updated in 1984. Doesn't have as many of the issues because it's not as exposed to harsh environments like wastewater is, but needs to be looked at and is being looked at. And then I was just taking over because, you know, we're talking big numbers, really big numbers. To put it a little bit in perspective, especially when you talk about renewal, the cost of the last upgrade in the 1990s was 52 million if you just convert that into today's dollars. This number may be a little old with recent, recent inflation. That would put a set of 100 million already. And then when you start talking about modernizing and improving and adding capacity, that's where you start to get to some of these other, even larger dollars. You know, we do believe everybody deserves access to clean drinking water and access to wastewater. And so we are very much committed to figuring out how to pursue all state, federal funding and low cost financing for this work, how to strategically and phase the investments to kind of spread the cost impact over time and to explore various rate setting and also enhanced affordability measures. We launched our affordability program in 2021, really, which is primarily targeting super low income people, people who already qualify for state and federal programs. We're gonna be taking a look at how we might be able to create affordability programs for folks who make more than those people but are still gonna have a hard time potentially paying the rates that may have to be set in order to pay down this kind of debt. Good job on pictures. I've been asking for those pictures for a while. I'm like, I know stuff is breaking. Let's start taking pictures of it. Thank you. That was a lot of stuff. All right, commission. Commissioner Hogan. So I'm taking away there. What are all your questions? Yeah, no, this is good stuff. A lot to sleep on here. One question. Can you give me an example for some of the pictures of things that look cracked and really disrepair that are worrying what sort of like risk score we're looking at for things like that. You put your tally up there A through F and looking at how that distribution has changed over time. I think the biggest risk items, cause it's like the consequence and likelihood. So some of them are more likely than others and if it goes down for a day, like the grit, they can get by, it's just gonna add a lot of maintenance and kind of a lot of labor to get through and the treatment will still be fine at the end. But if something like the blower goes down, then we're, which we've had, there's been accidents where it's like the oxygen reader is off and they're like, they're scrambling. It's like, how come our treatment's not working well? It's cause of the aeration, that's such a critical component that if that goes down, the risk, the risk is much higher on that, like in the consequence of failure. So I think, you know what Megan was showing that one slide with the highest risk, I would think those numbers are from blowers and dewatering probably, those are high cost and high consequence of failure versus even though our primary treatment, primary clarifier screening grit are very important to everything downstream of it, they can go down for kind of a period of time and not really have an effect on the final level. And I think on the staging, the phasing, I think the turn to the goal was probably trying to take care of the highest risk things as early as possible, but because of the slight puzzle and what has to be done before other things can be done, it's a little bit of a combination. So there might be some things where all our things being equal, you might want to do that higher risk thing sooner, but because of other things that we're trying to manage, we have to put it into a little bit later, which is certainly uncomfortable. But even then it gets into, okay, when we're looking at main plant versus north plant, if there's a failure at north plant, we're talking a much smaller volume into the river than that main plant, which if it happens during the storm, it can be very, very large volumes. And so we're having to make those very challenging decisions. I mean, we love it and certainly we can discuss if the voters just want to give us money to do it all at the same time, but even then it can't be all done at the same time because these are very large facilities and they can't go offline. You can't just say nobody flushed their toilet for the next three months while we built this thing. It's build this, move this. I mean, I haven't been through a comprehensive upgrade and it's daunting, I won't lie, how we're gonna keep things running as we're also building new things. Yeah, I know, thanks. That's a good perspective. Whenever we see the run of the mill cracked wall or something that's of concern, but it's not at the top of the list here. All right, yeah, nothing else here, thanks. Commissioner Barr. I was gonna say Portalettes for everyone. We can do it all. This was a lot and I did try and read through, but thank you for the presentation because it made a lot more sense of what I was trying to read. I'm just curious because I live in the east end of Burlington, the pump station. Will that free up land for other things? I'm not sure. No, yeah. It won't smell because it's a pump station, right? No, I was just curious what that was gonna do because I know there's some erosion along the river bank there. Yeah, we would, I don't know exactly if I ever did commissioning this because most of our investments gonna be higher on the... Towards the road. Like the, I don't see any like frontage basically going away because the road kind of wraps around. It's like, I mean the bottom part where there is already a recreational path like that, kind of like lower section could gain a little space. But at least we all have infrastructure that's that much closer to the river. Right. Should the river decide to gobble more earth. Okay. And that was really one of the focuses that I was looking at being from that area and how we're trying to improve the neighborhoods and connections with the rest of the city. Just seeing what we can do there. Yeah, I think that line, we have waterworks part, we have wastewater part. We could sell tickets, yeah. There are a number of municipal needs that we're trying to slide around like a logic puzzle. And clearly if there's an open space here. That's true, actually. It's likely that we will be able to explore meaning some of our other needs in that space, TPD. Right. We actually use Winooski's drying beds for some of our grid stuff. And so we could potentially then we need there. I don't think every time you talk to me I have your ideas. Well, I wasn't going like this. I was like, ooh, some land that we could do. I guess I was more focused on previous meetings where city engineer Baldwin has told us that there's a lot of erosion along the banks. And what kind of things can we do to try and shore it up a little bit. But that was really it. Thanks. Great presentation. Commissioner Fox. Yeah, I just had one question. So when you say all of the wastewater from the East plant is just gonna be converted to the main plant. Can you just speak to sort of what that means? Like, I understand main plant's gonna be built up so it's gonna then have capacity for it. But how is that wastewater physically moving from one plant to a completely different plant? Can I go back to this slide? That's fine. It would be a, this significantly sized pump station and the design parameters would be similar to actually any of our other pump stations we get in the collection system would just be the biggest one. The same, it needs storage based on how it goes out or if we get torrential rain. So that's why one of those tanks, the clarifiers would be there to help retain the storm flows and then it would all pump along those kind of red arrows is the approximate path. So it would be a significant right of way construction project, getting a new pipe all the way from this plant to the main plant. And some of the questions are, you know, in earlier iterations, we were trying to just build a force main from river sides of the location from near Bluebird barbecue and get it pumped up to the gravity system where it could then go via gravity. I think we're also evaluating whether or not it may be better to just have its own dedicated force main for a lot of the path or more of the path that needs to be originally. Yeah, well, I think it's the bottleneck. I mean, because we have our main plants a CSO facility, so as you get there, that's where all the storm flows going. So if we're adding East Plant flow, it adds a lot of complexity and issues, basically, frankly. So if we have a pipe that goes all the way there, we get around that, we're not gonna impact the capacity of the piping that's already has issues in that area. And one potential benefit would be if we added it to the collection system, it would go through the screening. So if you remember, we've already screened it before it gets pumped. So if we can pump it directly to the main plant, we can then put it in after the screening equipment. So it adds kind of freeze up the capacity there, which we're not re-screening. Yeah, so we're looking at all that. Because otherwise, we would have to pump it to the gravity system and then somehow it increased the size of the collection system, the gravity system. But I think what Martin's saying is as we've continued on our evaluations and our modeling, even though that works for the upper parts, for like the middle part, as we get further and further down Battery Street, there are some historical issues with how things are configured that we may not be able to work around. And so that's the most recent fun challenge that has been thrown as we continue the ball of design. Thanks. That's the only question that I had. Vice Chair Demi, any? I think the only question I had was around, how can we as a commission help support getting, moving this forward to voters to, it's clearly very important stuff that I don't think many members of the public are fully aware of and how can we sort of bring broader attention to these particular issues that clearly are talk sensitive. I think there's a lot of opportunity here. Part of the reason why we came here in advance of a potential November vote is that there's significant time for you all to get comfortable with us, to talk to counselors, to talk to neighbors. Likely we'll be going to NPAs, we'll be going to neighborhood planning assemblies. Having commissioners join us and present with staff can be a great way of getting you involved and to show the public that this isn't just a staff-driven event or effort. So there are a multitude of ways I know in past capital requests to voters you all have weighed in as to whether or not you support a particular ballot item and that has been helpful as well. Given the size and magnitude of this effort, we've been very appreciative of the voter's strong past support of water and wastewater bonds, but given the size, given the high school, given all the other dynamics going on, we're gonna need to lift this together. Yeah, and I've been sort of waiting for the dust to settle a little bit on the final cost estimates before I started running into the different rate setting strategies and like really what is this going to look at? And part of that is also trying to take a bigger look at what the region's wastewater and water rates are looking at, right? To kind of apples to apples that we're not alone and that if we need X number of dollars and rates of a certain size, that that is something that's typical because people are very quick usually to say, you know, everybody can move out of Burlington, costs are too high, but if we can sort of legitimize that these are real costs that other communities are experiencing even if Vermont towns aren't, right? Communities of this size with combined sewer systems and so on and so forth, but this is reasonable. And so try to package that all up so that we have a full story because I certainly don't want to go out and just share these numbers without saying, okay, what is your rate actually going to look like and how are we gonna help you mitigate that through affordability programs and whatnot? Excellent, yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate you sort of talking earlier about when you're looking at the affordability programs sort of expanding beyond even just, I think, lower income folks, because I think. Trying, yeah. It's hard because they administrate, like right now we're leveraging other programs that have already income qualified people and so how do we look at other types of income qualification and who would do that? Is that an administrative burden that we would pay for? Is there a larger city effort? I think there's a lot of opportunity for conversation about how we as a city can do that without it necessarily being water having to do it on their own. BED has an affordability program. We've been talking with them about, do we know potential joint effort? Could we join forces to figure out how to turn up the dial on what we can offer to repairs? Because I think there are plenty of people in Burlington who can't afford the potential rates that may come from this investment, but there's a lot of people where it's gonna hurt and I don't want them to have to choose between, you know, how frequently they're paying their kids, although kids would probably appreciate that. My kids at least, we don't need to pay it. We're gonna only pay it twice a week. Save water. Wait until they're teenagers. I've heard that, we've gotten notes from a customer about that. That's it, thank you. Yeah, thank you for all of this. I mean, this may be like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but you know, what are the behavioral changes that customers, rate payers can enact to help mitigate some of the, you know, you mentioned like bricks going, like it flushes, people flush a brick down the toilet. That's often from like the storing parts of our system. Okay, but I know there are lots of other things that when we went through, I mean, those flushable wipes go down and so forth. We need all this and not flushing a wipe is not going to impact this, but there are behavioral changes that we as citizenry can make. So I wonder, in part of the messaging, it's a whole package that we think about what you put on your lawn, your rain gardens. We're not just bystanders in this. We are participants in this ecosystem. It is your infrastructure. Right, right, exactly. So those pieces as well in the education and outreach kind of as we all move forward. I don't know what those pieces are or what they could look like or what the impact could possibly be, but certainly like thinking about like, how do we all get this together? Right, and then I guess thinking, you know, you talked about the workforce piece where it seems like you need to hire a MacGyver, right. So what are, you know, how is your department addressing workforce and upskilling or making sure that you have, you know, not just the talent and skill, but it seems like in the short term, a lot of creativity to be able to problem solve in just some of those slides. You know, the workforce one is really challenging on as much as it can be a task force regionally to look at workforce issues, because it's not just Vermont, just the number of kids that are coming out of tech school programs, you know, a lot of the people who are our best mechanics were self taught, grew up on farms, tinkered on their cars and you just, that's not what our society looks like. So there is a bigger conversation. I do fear that we're a little behind the curve, like this conversation about skilled trades needed to have happened five, 10 years ago. So we would be reaping the benefit, actively engage with our HR, one of our HR people about the possibility of apprenticeships and whatnot. So we can literally grow from within, have been working with the union and she'd been on trying to come up with different salary structures, like a tiered salary program where we'd be able to hire somebody at a lower pay grade as an operator in training, right? And then train them. And then as soon as they get their certifications, boom, boom, boom, they can automatically move up instead of having to wait for somebody. We do have one operator in training position at main plant right now, but it's static in that you could get stuck there if an operator position doesn't open up. So I'm sure Tick will tell you I have no shortage of ideas and usually energy. Trying to find time to do all of that while we're also trying to manage this is a real challenge. So it really is a statewide thing as well, but deeply on their mind. That's all for me. Even when she's sick, it's scary. Well, thank you so much for this set of presentations. Yeah, it was a lot of like a pre-court meal, I guess, not just a dinner. There's nothing else that we did to fill the space. Yes, exactly. Nothing else, but you made it very good. It was wonderful that there was actually open space and it was agenda to hit this because it's deserving of the more than 10 minute overview. Yeah, I would love to come back and maybe schedule some time to talk about the Reservoir Project, the Pop House Project I mentioned and the Reservoir Improvement. The 1867 pipe is at the Pop House. Yeah, so it's a little house linear driving up Main Street, right? There's the little cute little sterile building. It's pretty. It's pretty and it's old and the flooring side is very, very, very old and the pumps in there are very, very, very heavy. Is that the one across from Morrill? Oh, yeah. Yes, and then behind it are seven million gallons of water storage that is a critical part of our system. It's what enables, you know, we pump water up there and it enables to kind of manage the various water use levels of the day so that we're not just having to pump constantly and then waters pump from there up to the elevated tanks, which is what provides the pressure, the water pressure to reach to the top floors of the hospital. So it is aside from our drinking water plants is the other single most important piece of drinking water infrastructure. I walk that by that every day on my way to work. I just have a note, total of different appreciation for it now. But you'll have to wait until next time for that whole story. Nailbiter. Thank you very much. All right. All right, so that closes the wastewater updates. That was a good one. Next up, direct issue report. All right, making sure. I think, Chair, when you look up here, you're gonna cover the council presentation for the commission. So I don't give that and say that... Tag, you're it. We are going to be updating the South End Construction Coordination Plan. You all know that we've tried to sequence work with Chairman Parkway, the roundabout, the really hard enterprise project, Street Gray Streets. Yes, thank you. And as we've been evaluating where we are a year into that plan, there are changes in updates. On the positive side of things that the Champlain Parkway is moving out of schedule, now that it's under construction, which it had been behind schedule for its whole life. So this is a new thing that we're all trying to get adjusted to. But we're looking to reevaluate where we are with this plan. We'll be bringing that to either next month or the month after and what that means for phasing other projects. Since we put that plan together, there have been additional projects added to the list, mainly Gray Streets projects around City Place, Burlington, having received major grants for Bank Street and Cherry Street. So we look forward to bringing that to you next month. And I will say we are, as you saw in my director's report, working steadfastly to get ready for winter. We will have winter here soon. The weather is looking good the next couple of days. Our plow trucks and our sidewalk tractors are in the equipment maintenance shop right now, getting ready for winter and we will be prepared. So happy to answer any questions. Push your bar. None so far, I was just gonna give another kudos to the team here working with my neighborhood on traffic calming and implementing things after our last meeting. That daytime we had a meeting here with some of the folks from your team. And it was like a day later, things were implemented. So it was just, it was phenomenal. Everybody that had come to the meeting and everybody who had joined in on our previous meeting to coming here said, oh my God, they're out there painting. There's all sorts of stuff going on. This is so fantastic. So TPW wins again, yep. Commissioner Fox. Thanks. I guess in reading your report, I had one question that just popped up. So in the Great Streets Main Street, you say that bids came in higher than expected. It seems like this is happening very frequently with projects that we're like ready to build, but then all those bids come in and they're so high that we can't. So I know this is an existential question, but how are we sort of dealing with that? Right, like, I don't know, sorry. No, this is a huge question that folks all across the country are grappling with. For this particular project, it means that this crew here has been meeting with me and the technical services team to explore revenue enhancing opportunities. Are there other sources of funding we can bring to the project while also exploring value engineering? Are there things we can cut out of the project? In addition, can we phase the project so that we do things in parts instead of a whole? We are trying to get better at our engineers' estimates. Some of our projects, Main Street, Great Streets is a good example where the unit quantities that were being used by our consultant weren't being updated enough to the point where the engineer's estimate was far from the low bid. And that situation puts an added pressure on staff once the bid's come in because there's only a short window in which you can accept the bid or else you have to go out the bid. So we are now in the period now of changing our schedules, brushing, having meetings, and trying to get the budget to balance. So we hope to have a recommendation that would be brought forward on Main Street, Great Streets, to the city council in November. Not easy. Thanks to the team for working through that. Okay, that's the only question. Commissioner Hogan. There, very pleasantly surprised to see a flashing Pestian light, RRFB I guess at St. Paul at Union, popped up in the past month, was great. Crossing South Union is still a mess in terms of the sight line when you're crossing from West to East. That was something where early in my commission tenure, we might have pushed a sign back by four feet or something. It was negligible improvement there, but at least getting across St. Paul is much, much improved with that. It's not like an engineering change to slow anyone down, but the blinky lights help especially. Yeah, for sure. Real quick on bike shares, I got a chance to ride three different bike share systems since we met last. Of course, sort of shocked that our home system here is really three times the price of per minute of the systems that I encountered in Montreal and D.C. In the past few weeks. And it's a lot. Push a 50 cents a minute, that hurts. Makes perfect sense. We see college kids doing unsafe things like doubling up on these bikes and stuff. So I know really beggars can't be choosers. Not a slam dunk to have bike share at all. Just wanted to toss that out there that it's not, at those prices, it's not like a regular run of the mill thing. Oh darn, I'm running late like a hop on one, but I regret it. Well, yes, we are planning to bring to the transportation energy utilities committee an update on the bike share for this last season. To them, if you would like to see that update, we're happy to bring it here. We're planning to do that in November after the warm season generally concludes. And we were coordinating that today. We have seen significant increase in use with the arrival of the students in September to a level that, frankly, we hadn't seen in the past systems because they really were fixed docked systems. And this more flexible system is at least getting the bikes out to where people need them to your point. Yes, this small system and the vendor needed a price point to make their costs. Given a small market that's higher than the bigger cities that you've experienced. But that is something we can evaluate. It's an annual contract with the vendor. Well, I should say there's annual renewals. The contract continues, but if the feedback from you and others is very clear that there needs to be changes, then staff can work on those changes before the next year. I know we don't necessarily have sponsors bankroll on it or anything. To be fair, that vendor's prices in DC are not much cheaper than they are here for what it's worth. Well, I think it's worth adding, right? The city didn't pay a cent for this new system, right? No one did. So they're just a private company with permission to operate. And so that's something to consider when we look at the prices. From my perspective, it just seems like it's really what the cost of doing business is, especially in a city of this size. We could have a policy discussion on whether we want to subsidize the service. Sure. Other note on, I think I mentioned last time, gotten plugged in thanks to Chair Nave Ivanko with some planning meetings with representatives of our public works engineering staff, the school district, infrastructure crew, and so forth. It's been generally, I think, a pleasant and productive engagements, the couple meetings that I've been involved with. I brought one issue forward just from my regular day-to-day travels. There was something done, I think, to address it. It was not helping. And in fact, it made life worse for the people that they should be helping. So I'll follow up with them, but it just is a little concerning that it's really so disconnected from changes that might help people that are outside of vehicles from some people at some level at the school district. But yeah, we'll follow up with that in our engineering folks offline. Thanks for carrying the torch. Yep. So curious about, I think this last thing quick, our traffic counts. We've got two counties out, at least within the last week, on Locust and North Windewski that I've seen. Does that data get fed in the name on this? Like, contact Julia if we have questions. Does that get fed into the VTRANS or the Regional Planning Commission's database of counts? Or is that sort of our own thing that we hoard the numbers on? I believe it does get passed on to CCRPC, but I can confirm. OK. I'm not sure. I will check. OK. That's all here. Thank you. All right. Vice-Chair, any? I just wanted to highlight. I got an email today. There was an email that went out from DPW around the surveying folks that utilized the North Windewski Ave corridor. So I just wanted to highlight that that survey went out and make sure that folks fill that out so we can measure the impacts of the parking changes along North Windewski Ave. I've heard from a few folks since the last meeting about sidewalk infrastructure and sort of their condition. And I know at a previous meeting, I can't remember when we talked about, as a commission, sort of getting a better understanding around how the department prioritizes sidewalk replacement. So I'd like to see that in a future meeting. And then in light of today's long agenda item with all the water and wastewater stuff, I think it was really great to see it full circle from our field trip that we took, I think, in our October meeting last year. So I just want to encourage us doing more of that as a commission as we talk about additional agenda items and having us have sort of that pre-meeting field trip beforehand more often. Go for field trips. Go for field trips. Feel better. A comment on sidewalks also. Yeah, getting a sense of what repair looks like. Certainly, the sidewalks on Overlake Park in front of my house are terrible. And I tripped last night with my husband. And. Oh, the irony. You know what he said? He's like, I'm going to tell that commission that you cracked your skull on the stupid sidewalk. But some of that's operator error. But no, there are just chunked sidewalks. I walk a lot. And I think we focus on what's in front of our house, what impacts us a lot. But again, as we start to head towards winter, it's just going to get icy and dicey. So I think knowing that there's a plan across the city for either the patch repairs instead of the entire block, just kind of helpful communication. Really quickly on the bike share piece, the great thing about dockless systems is that those bikes do go where users live and work and use them. The cost, though, would be interesting to see the back end data to see where they wind up if it's just beyond students and if we're really dealing with an equity issue. It's too expensive. The idea that they can move into some of the neighborhoods where folks are transit-dependent or zero vehicle households or one vehicle moving with the wage earner, it would be great to see what the rollout could be or what the price point would be and how that's subsidized. And then finally, how are we doing with staffing in the department as the snow begins to think about flying and thinking about streets, maintenance, plowing, any gaps? I'm pleased to report that the street maintenance team is nearly fully staffed, which is great. We have had some internal shifts from some work groups to others. So there are some work groups that are down. Our water distribution team is significantly understaffed right now, and they also help with plowing in the winter. So we are working with the union on some ideas collectively that we can not only support the staff who are keeping the lights on and working hard to keep things going, but also look at ways to recruit additional staff. So I would say generally overall, our gaps right now are in water distribution, transportation planning, where we have two vacancies, and then, I think, a myriad of ones and twos across the organization. But those are the main two areas we're struggling with. Great. Thanks. One final note is three of the public works are attending EV safety training workshop, which is really exciting, thinking about the path towards electrification that the city is on, and that they're excited for the training. Great. Great support from above, I guess. So that's all I have. Looked like our questions to the director kind of led into commissioner communications, but I just want to double check any other questions. Oh, well, I'll add one thing. Next Sunday, Burlington Parks Rec and Water Front is hosting the annual Halloween bike ride through town. We invite all members of staff to attend. In costume. In costume. Nice. Not just as public works, people. And new this year, there is a walking component for folks who don't bike or don't want to bike. So yeah, you're hereby invited. What's the date? Is it really the Sunday? Oh, next Sunday. The 29th. 29th. Yeah, I have that right, right? Next Sunday, not the Sunday. We've got them. We have. The 29th, October 29th. You have plenty of time to get your costumes ready. And their prize is? He's going to win. All right, well, any other comments? That closes that section. Motion to adjourn the meeting. Second? Second. All right. Can we take a vote on that, please? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Any discussion? Nope. Meeting adjourned. We'll see you all next.