 Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Hey, lions, I sent you. I just sent you an email. Are you. You're all right to run the meeting. Yes. Okay. I may have. I'm. I may black myself out for. A couple of periods. I got a couple of people who are probably going to call. Really needs to talk to this morning. So. I'll try to be as inconspicuous as possible about that. That is totally fine. Yeah. I think we have a pretty simple agenda. Yeah. Your script. So. Oh, good. Yeah. I think. I'm not sure if that's the most updated. I didn't actually check back in to find out if they'd updated that. In the last six months or a year or so, but it's close enough. So. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to say. I want to. Cover the bases. Morning, Jason. Good morning. Snacking on grapes. Sorry. I think Amy's going to be joining us from the math waterworks. I'm here. I just don't have my video on because I'm in my car. Clearing your car. Yeah. I know. I'm going to remind you to like. Stop the recording and restart it so it doesn't pick up this five minutes of chatter before the meeting starts, before we get into business. Welcome everyone. Steve. Thank you. Get to you in a moment. Yeah. We're so into chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. This meeting will be conducted via remote means members of the public in which to access the meeting may do so via zoom or by telephone. Now in person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings via real time. Via technological means. So our agenda today. Is. Introducing our new member, Steve Kurtz. Approving the minutes from the last meeting. An update on drinking water regulations. Water supply. Status. Upcoming water management act. Registration. And. Sampling results from. 2022. So. Are there any. Additions or. Changes to the agenda before we get started. I think there was a couple more things on there. Yeah. After the sampling, which is number six, there was seven was. Centennial water treatment plant update. Oh, there's a whole other page. Yeah. And then the important one nomination of new chair and vice chair. That was on there too. Yeah. And conflict of interest training. And selection of a date for a September meeting. And then any other items. Sorry about that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Agenda. I wish it was short. Yeah. So. Let me welcome Steve Kurtz. I would ask if you don't mind. Give us a brief couple of sentences about yourself. Cause I don't actually know who you are. Okay. I've been in town for. About five years. Prior five years was North Hampton. We have a son and three grandsons. There. And his wife. And I'll forgive my ding and clock. Do it for another hour. It's running late. It's an antique. My training. Was in philosophy, analytic philosophy, NYU. And. I dropped out of grad school because PhDs were driving taxis in the seventies, early seventies. And. Did. Learned early derivatives. Down on Wall Street, cause I'm sort of a competitive guy. Chest and bridge and sports and stuff. When I was younger anyway. And. After about 25 years in that I retired at 45 and. I did organic gardening for a decade up in not far from here up in. Southwest New Hampshire, right? Not too far over the border. And. After about a decade and I also picked up the self study again in environmental ethics and system science. From my philosophy interests. I'm a. Shall we say a. A systems thinker. So this is where I. In my interview, when I mentioned that. You have to look at the demand side as well as the supply side and. In water, because the supply is limited, of course. And it varies, but the supply side. I mean, the demand side can keep growing and growing and growing. Okay. So I went up to Canada then for. About eight years and did some volunteer work for the. Futures. And then I went up to Canada and did some volunteer work. And I went up to Canada and did some volunteer work for the. Like the part of the national research council. They had a future studies. Meetings. And strategies in this volunteer. And also the Canadian association for the club of Rome, which was limits to growth. There you go again on the demand side. So now you have a picture of my. Point of view and my. Generalist skills as was mentioned. By Paul. And. I do pay attention to science. I follow several blogs and. It's, it's not a fixed. Body of knowledge. It changes all the time. So I try to go with the flow. And that's about it. Great. Thank you. Welcome to water supply. Protection committee. Thanks. So next on our agenda is approving the minutes from our. September and November meetings. Are there any. Corrections to either of those. Hearing none. We have. Motion to approve the minutes. Approval. Yes. I'm two, three, four. Great. Minutes are approved. Thank you very much. Update on drinking water regulations. I'm sorry. Where are we with that? Do you want me to chime in on that? Yes. So. Yeah. So. As you guys know in Amherst, we have. Drinking water. Permit. That allows us to get a certain volume of water. And then we also have a registration that's. I guess guaranteeing us a certain amount of water as well. So we kind of have two different processes that we fall into. So we're going to do that. And then we're going to do that. And then we're going to do that. And then we're going to do that. So the permit is the kind of overarching. Like you default to the permit. But our, the registration portion of our water allocation. That is going to be renewed this spring. And we just got notification a couple of weeks ago that the DEP is. And acting new regulations that basically are going to put. In place whenever the state declares a drought in that region. And so there's going to be. Certain protocols and certain water use restrictions that we're going to have to put in place on a more regular basis. And I know we've been talking about this for a while. It's just that the time is now here. That we're going to be having to do water use restrictions. Throughout the summer. So. So I think, I think that was actually number five on the agenda, the upcoming water management act registration, which Amy, you were going to, I want, you were going to talk about that then, but number three was the, the regulations that you just were getting through the council. Sorry. I do not have the paper in front of me because I am. That's okay. Yeah. Well, and I don't know, you know, I talked about the regulations are the. Are the. The. Water management act. That side of the regulation. I guess, are there any questions on that before I go to the other topic? I'll mention. I guess just. Just so everybody. Don't appear to be. I have one. I'm just. Is that a definite that the. Registrations are changing and. I don't think that the summer, we're probably going to have to do some conservation efforts. It appears. So last I knew the. The DEP. Proposed those regulations to. Basically to the governor. And so, unless the governor for some reason changes course on that, but it has these proposed regulations have gone through the process of. Public input, which we did submit a letter. To the governor. To the governor. To provide public input on this, but it has gone through the whole public input and public hearings and. That whole process. So they've done, they've checked all the boxes. They need to move through the process. There is a group of communities. I believe that maybe trying to challenge that. I don't know if that will be successful or the timing on that. I doubt that. Even if a challenge like that is successful, it's going to be. Fully challenged by the summer. So. As far as I know. It's probably going to happen this summer. Anna has a question. Yeah, I do. I'm just curious. So that means when we're under, when the state calls a drought situation, does that mean that all communities will, will then be reacting to it in the same way? In other words, like Hadley would react the same way that Amherst would react to it in the same way that the state calls a drought situation. No matter where the sources of waters are coming from, if they're all surfacial or groundwater and surface water. So yes and no, every community within the, um, the drought regions. Will have to react the same way if they have a registration, although if they have a permit that has water use restrictions, they're going to have to follow that. So North Hampton, for example, has a water management act permit with water use restrictions tied to the stream flow in the Mill River. And so they're going to have to follow their, what their permit says. Where us and I think Sunderland doesn't have, I think Sunderland only has a registration. I'm not quite sure about Hadley. Um, so there's going to be a little more uniformity, but there's still going to be a mishmash. And in a couple of years when we get our permit, we may have different water use restrictions in our permit that is going to trump the water use restrictions that we have in our registration. And therefore this whole thing might change in a couple of years when we get our permit. Thanks. Yeah, I get that it's confusing. Call a moving target. Any other questions? Steve. Yeah, since I'm a newbie. What's the difference between a registration and a permit? Yeah, sure. So a registration is, you know, way back in the day, the state. A loud community. It's kind of a grandfathered right to a certain amount of water for you to be able to take from the environment and, and give to the water system. And so that's why a lot of communities have, or basically every community has a registration as long as it was around back then. At, at some point they started a permitting process. And if you needed water above what your registration was, then you had to apply for a permit as well. And that's why we have both, but it's why some communities like Springfield, when they got their initial registration, their water usage hasn't gone above what their registration limit is. So they only have a registration. There's their registration only community. And then some communities that's became a water system. After the permitting system only have a permit. Does that, does that make sense? Sure. It only applies to the public, not private wells. That's correct. Yeah. Okay. Well, it does put a question on if a commercial enterprise. Did something tried to do something like bottling spring water. Did it happen in other parts of the country? Well, they would need a permit to do that. And there were. Yeah, because they're commercial, not residential. Correct. Separate commercial. Okay. Permits that exists across the state. Gotcha. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions? I think Anna has one. We just mentioned that we do have a permit and then you said earlier that we're getting another permit. I mean, so we already have. Allocations that are above what the registration would allow. Yeah. Um, so we. The town of Amherst, the way that it grew. Um, you know, we got a registration for a certain amount of water. Um, you mass continued to build out. And I think because of that, the population in Amherst continue to build out. And that's why we got. A permit above that registered volume because that growth happened after when the registration, when we got the registration for a certain amount of water. Um, we have over time. Everyone has gotten a lot more conservative with their water usage. And so, um, we're actually below most of the time, our water usage is actually below the limit. Like we would be within our registration if we wanted to give up the permit, but that's a whole nother. That's a whole bigger thing, but yes, we do have both. And it's because we went over the registration because of when the build out of Amherst. Um, and you mass and everything happened. The other questions. Great. Um, is that it on drinking water regulations? I think that's it on number seven on the agenda. And then there's the. Number five. Yeah. So number three are drinking water regulations, which were understood to mean local. Local. Okay. Um, yeah. So as you guys know, when you guys have been part of this process, you know, we drafted up, um, drinking water regulations and a drinking water, water by law for the town of Amherst. Um, in parallel, we also have the same thing for, um, um, sewer use, um, regulations and by law. Um, We've been moving this through the system. We've been moving it through the system for the last year. Um, At this point we, uh, Hopefully we're going back to town council soon. Um, and I think what we talked about was in general, um, the town has agreed and everyone has, you know, agreed with everything that we proposed. Um, And the other thing that TSO felt strongly about was that they wanted to change the model of service line ownership that we currently have. Um, So TSO decided they wanted to change that. So the town of Amherst would be responsible for service lines under basically on town of Amherst property and the private home owner would own what isn't under town of Amherst property. Um, Yes, it's town services organization and it's underneath the town council. It's one of those major committees, um, that will review that. Yeah, that will review rules and regulations like this. Thanks. So they've, they have proposed the regulations with that one change, um, pertaining to the service line ownership. Um, this also has gone through the finance committee and the finance committee, um, and they have, um, They have, um, They have, um, They have, um, Did not approve the change in ownership. Um, and are asking for kind of a two year. Pause to understand that portion of it. Um, although they're in agreement on everything else. So right now that's where it stands. It's still working through the process, but we have kind of. Two committees that have slightly opposing. Um, Recommendations. And so, um, I think that's where it stands. Great. Any questions on. Local drinking water. Bylaw regulations. Um, thank you, Amy. Our water supply status. How's our drought status going? Um, I can talk about that. Um, why don't I just bring up our webpage that we always look at. And we can go right to, um, What the state. Um, I think that's where it stands. Um, I think that's where the drought task force. Latest, latest thoughts are on it. Um, so. As of January from the drought task force. The Connecticut river valley is level zero normal. So, um, I guess they've got that through their, their data through the end of December. That's their, uh, Statement. So we're really not, we're not in a drought under what the state is considering. And then more importantly, we can look at our own data. Um, so in December by the end of December, so really the end of the year, you can look at the whole year's data. Um, I can. Reservoir water level is back up. Um, Back up to basically a very normal level. Um, the only year where at the end of December, there was real issue was the drought year in 2016. Um, so that's good. And then, um, Water consumption data, I wasn't able to actually get the data from our water guys for December. Um, so there isn't really an update on that. Um, again, you can look at the whole year red is. 2022. Um, and we're still, we're doing well. We're consistently below the 10 year average, which is the blue bars and per precipitation click on it. It's easier to see. Um, end of the year. We are back at a normal total for precipitation for the year. This is the 10 year average. This is what 2019 2020 and 2022 are all kind of grouped together. Very similar to the 10 year average, which is good. The two outliers are 2021. And we got huge amount of rain and then the drought year. 2016. Um, so we ended fine. Yeah, we had. There's certainly. June and July of 2022 were very dry. Um, and there were drought declarations by the state. Um, the town responded by. Posting on this webpage updates on that and, and keeping a close eye on our water. Uh, levels and. I think we talked about this before the, um, well, number four came online in the beginning of June. And that, uh, really. Helped us to be able to maintain a safe water supply. During the drought during the summer, but then. Um, the last few months, precipitation's been above average. Uh, and, and we're at a good spot right now at the end of the year. And that is that. Does anybody have questions on. The water supply at this point. All right. I'll stop sharing that. Hey, excellent. Thank you, Beth. Um, number five, we've already done. So on to number six, 2022 sampling results. Okay. I can address that too. Um, we did some LCR letting copper sampling in September. Um, so it would have been after our last meeting. And we, uh, this, this time around, we had to sample at 60 over 60 residences. We collected samples from 63. Residences in Amherst. Um, and we only had. Two. Lead detections that were above the MCL. So, uh, we met the. There's a regulation. Um, that's the 90th percentile, meaning that 90% of your. Samples for both lead and copper need to be below the MCL. And we easily met that with having only two. We had no hits of copper at any of the houses. Um, because well, number four went online this year and is considered. A new source by DEP. We had to actually increase the number of houses that we went to in September. And we have to redo the whole sampling again in the spring. So I think in April. We'll be. Sampling from another 60 houses. Um, At that point, if again, we have really good results after two rounds, then we can apply for a waiver with DEP, which will kind of bring us back to what we had been doing with LCR, which is every three years and only 30 residences. So once you show that you, um, they jumped us up to the higher number and more often because of well, number four going online. Um, yeah. So that's, that's lead and copper. Um, does anybody have any questions about that and copper? Yeah. John here. Do you guys hear me? Okay. Yep. Yeah. I just want to point out there is no MCL for lead. So that's an action level 15. Action. It's very important to me that we use the right language on this. There is no MCL. Um, there's a maximum contaminant level goal of zero, you know, for health reasons, but there is no MCL that is, it is regulated by a treatment technique or, which is optimal corrosion control and you have to be below the 90% of the values below this 15 micrograms per liter action level, not a MCL. Just want to point, point that out. There's no, there's no individual sample MCL. Okay. In the, in the second or state drinking water regulation. Sorry. I'm very consumed with lead issues in my work. So yeah, just want to clear on that. Thank you. That's. That's good. We had two detections out of 63 that were above the action level of, like you said, 15 parts per billion. What does action level did the lab use that you used and how many were. Versus, do you know the distribution of values or can we see that someone? Um, I don't, I don't know it offhand, but we certainly have it. We don't post our, so, you know, you're familiar with DEP. You have to send back certain forms. And one of the forms is that 90th percentile form and that, that shows the distribution of the, and that's not posted on like their webpage anywhere. But maybe I, we can talk about doing that, but also I can email it to anybody that wants to see it. So, yeah, I know there were some, there were detections. But I'd have to look at that sheet to tell you how many detections we had versus NDS. I'm curious to work with schools where we're, I see thousands and thousands of data points with numbers. I'm just curious of where it sits relative to some. Yeah. I'll email it to you. Well, I'm now to the committee, please. Thank you. Sure. Definitely. Yeah. Any other questions on LCR? I had my, I, but John has covered everything I was going to say, including please email us the data and the data should be available. If it's, if there's not a reason not to have the data available, it certainly should be available. Thanks. Yeah. We do send out our consumer confidence report. We send it out to all residents every year to, to all water, all residents who, to get our water. And that's got the lead and copper in it. But we can talk with Amy about where maybe we can post that stuff. Okay. So then the next thing is PFOS. And let's see. Again, I like, I put together. Let's just see what happens if I do this. Here we go. I just wanted to summarize the PFOS sampling that we did. That we've done in town. So this is. This is all of it. You know, not just the last year, but basically any PFOS that we've sampled so far. In Amherst, we started in 2021 under the direction of DEP. And the first sampling in April and July. 2021 was all of our points of entry, including old well, number four. And then in again, July, 2021, we also sampled at new well, number four, because we did a pump test and we were required to do PFOS sampling during the pump test. And then just new well, number four has more recently been sampled in October, 2022. And then all of them, including. So new well, number four, but not old well, number four will be sampled in January and April of this year. And in all the sampling that we've done so far for PFOS, we haven't detected any of the PFOS substances. Above the laboratory reporting limit of two. Nanograms. Yeah. Parts per trillion nanograms per liter. So that's where we're at with PFOS. Do people have questions on that? Yeah, Beth. I can't. You hear? Yeah, I can't see who's asking. So, is this technically the numbers for PFAS six, which is regulated by the state, or is it for PFAS 18 or 23 from the lab? I just think because PFAS is a class of thousands of compounds, it makes sense to be really specific here. Yeah, so it's what I was thinking is kind of presenting here was more everything from the lab. So it's 18 to. I'd have to actually look at how many different PFOS were. Yeah, it's the whole method is not just the six. But obviously with the six, we were below the 20. The, the, the state. Yeah. You know, makes you high, you know, but the regulation is, so yeah, so no, no, none of the substances that the lab was analyzing for were, were above the two, which is the reporting limits from the labs. Okay. Sure. I think Jack has a question. I do. John, working with the lab, it seems like there's three methods for the PFAS. One being a SOP, which is the catch all is like Rada spectrum. And then there's one for drinking water only. And then there's one more like for, you know, in the vein of, of, you know, standard methods, which is a longer, but they're all, you know, fairly long, but they're, they're different. I suspect that Beth is using the one that's geared toward drinking water. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The commercial lab, but there's two, they have an EPA method number, and there's two, a couple of different methods of proof for drinking water depends on your instrument and what, what the lab is, is doing. And I'm not like super up to, up to date on this specific one. We, we have a LC MSMS method in our lab. But we're not. Yeah. I'm not sure you have to ask the lab, what lab did you guys use? We're using microback. For these, we, we actually just switched labs, but. Well, it doesn't microback send them out. I don't think they actually do the PFAS. Yeah. They don't. We have to look that up. Yeah. The first round in April went to your offense. I think then microback was able to contract with somebody in Massachusetts. Isn't there. Alpha. Alpha. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. There's a lot of, you know, change in consolidation. Yeah. Along with this. Oh, sorry, Jack. I have a follow up question in that. Do, do, does anyone here on the committee feel like the list is going to be expanded or, you know, that EPA came up with that, you know, guidance, which is a thousand times lower than the current, you know, parts per quadrillion. I'm just wondering. Anybody have any intel on the PFAS front in terms of what's. What might change, whether the standard is being lowered or additional PFAS. Analyte's being included. Well, I was just going to say, UCM are five is starting, which is, is the EPA's way of testing for new contaminants. And it's this round is almost all PFAS. I don't remember the total number of different PFAS that it's going to be testing for, but it's, it's all PFAS and one, one metal. And we're going to be participating in that. We're going to sample in August for UCM are five. So for all of those. And so you, obviously EPA is definitely looking at other. PFAS other. Substances. Yeah. I think you can expect this. I think it's a great opportunity to look at possibly adding. Compounds to PFAS six, possibly one or two, it depends on what we know. And the EPA is definitely said they will do more. Change on PFAS. And probably we'll consider other things, but it'll be a while. And maybe that UCM are five. Clinical and regulated contaminant monitoring rule. Five. Thank you. Stemming from federal safety. Right. Well, thanks, John. I mean, read about it on stuff expect, expect more and be extremely happy with this table. Extremely happy with the results of this table. This is, this is, there's a lot of communities and people, people not in this position. It's great. Stop sharing. All right. Um, I think I'm done with the 2022 sampling results then. Great. So that brings us to Centennial update on Centennial. Okay, I'll jump back on to this one. Hold on, Amy. Just hold on a half a second. Steve, Centennial is a water treatment plant. Okay, thanks. I was waiting for the context to come through. Right. Yeah, I thought I'd start with that. There you go. Yeah, Centennial is one of our two surface water treatment plants. It's actually just up the hill in Pelham. And it's one that you know, we kind of struggled with making it produce water in the volume that it was designed to do. So it was always kind of not not operating at 100% anyway. You know, we did we've done a lot of work to try to kind of resolve that. We ended up kind of having the like straw that broke the camel's back a handful of years ago when lightning struck it and it fried a bunch of equipment. And I think that was that was a little bit the like, do we put a bunch of money to replace all of these electronics that just got fried or do we finally move forward with getting a new water treatment plant. And so we move forward with design of a new water treatment plant. We secured state revolving loan funding for it to help to help pay for this project because it's super expensive. So Steve, that brings you up to speed to at least the last September meeting. And then, you know, for everyone else. So the design has been finalized. The the contract is out to bid. We actually opened this because it's such an expensive project, we actually the public the state procurement laws required that we have filed some bids that come in for the different different trades that are valued over a certain amount. So those bids were opened last week. The numbers came in pretty in alignment with our project estimate estimates. So we feel pretty good about that. Literally at two o'clock today is when they're opening the general contract bids. So I think at about 215 today, we're going to have a much better idea of budget wise how we did and if we need to scramble to find additional funding for this. But from that, it means that, you know, hopefully a contract will be signed in the next month. And then, you know, construction will be starting and this is going to be a two year construction. So it's going to, you know, it's going to be a while and some of that's also because of procuring products and stuff like that. A lot of a lot of stuff has a long lead time. But over the next two years, we should get a new Centennial Water Treatment Plant. Question. Sure. Steve? Yeah. When I hear water treatment, I'm thinking of sewage, but you're talking about surface water tells me about streams. But given the recent news reports in the last week, about one freshwater fish being poisonous, giving you over a year's toxicity in one fish, you might consider some of these stream sewers anyway. But anyway, exactly what is surface water in this description? So surface water, it's a, yeah, it's a large, this one, it's actually two large reservoirs up in Pella, and they flow, they flow together and down into a small reservoir that we called the intake reservoir, and that gets pumped up to the treatment facility. And we do understand that obviously, like a surface water source as a opposed to groundwater source, you know, it's exposed to a lot more. It has the potential to have a lot more contaminants and things that need to be removed before we can consume it. And it's why surface water treatment plants have a lot more intricate of a treatment process to remove those things so that we can have safe drinking water on the other end. Okay. So it's for designed reservoir sources? Or selected reservoir sources? Yes. Protected upland reservoirs? Right, right. Well, hopefully the aquifer deep, you know, it gets enough natural filtration so that you don't have to do that level of filtration or treatment. I guess that's the hope that it remains that way. Correct. Okay, thank you. I mean, well, and I'll also point again, like, I know that you're new and so you might not know all of this, but the town has been really aggressive in the last really, as long as we've had these sources in purchasing land in the aquifer or in the yeah, the aquifer and the water supply area to be able to do as best we can to try and protect those water sources. So we do own a lot of land that we can protect from development up there. So we're doing what we can. But yeah. Well, excellent. Thank you. Amy, John here. You know how many bids we got or we'll get? Any idea? So because because of how expensive this project is, we had to pre qualify the bidders. So there are four general contractors that are technically approved to bid. We think that maybe only two or maybe three are actually currently interested. These these contractors, we did the pre qualification, like just into COVID. And then because of the SRF process, this got delayed for a while. And so, you know, some of the people that became pre qualified a couple years ago, just don't have the capacity to do it now. So we're anticipating two or three. One of them put themselves, they have a bunch of the filed sub bids that they kind of restricted only to themselves and gave some really pretty aggressive prices. So we we anticipate they're probably going to be the lowest bidder, but I guess we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Any other questions regarding Centennial? I'm just curious, when you do, I mean, it's like magic, you're waiting for the cracking open of those bids this afternoon. Will we get a report on that? Or will that be reported on the town website or anywhere? Um, I am, I'm going to be so excited that I am happy to share with you guys. I think we all this has been, I kid around about how I worked on this project as a consultant before I moved over to the town. And that was 12 years ago. So I think yeah. But you know, at when we open the bids, obviously that's that's preliminary. And we have to kind of get a bunch of you know, thumbs up and you know, approvals and make sure that all the signatures look good and all of that stuff. And so I'm sure the town will do an announcement, but the announcement will probably be, you know, a week or so after we open the bids, but I'm happy to kind of share the preliminary unofficial with you guys, because I'm going to be just as excited as you guys. Great. Thank you. Absolutely. Okay. Moving on. We are going to select a new chair, nominate and select a new chair for this committee. This thing next item on the agenda. Lions, I'm wondering if you want to just like in, I don't know, 30 seconds give kind of what the roles and responsibilities of the chair are so that people understand what they'd be taking on. My understanding of the role is that in part you're invited to be part of the interview and selection process for new members, along with now manager and folks from the department, our department, you're responsible for some minor interface with other town committees, occasionally asked to provide an update to town meeting, but I mean, it doesn't exist anymore. So now it's town council. I think in all the years I've done this, we were asked to do that twice. And under 15 years. So it's not an onerous position. I've been chairing these meetings, not a terribly onerous task, since most of you are well behaved. That's about it. Great. Thanks. That was a great idea, Amy can music headset. Looks like people can hear me. I was going to first of all want to just say thank you for years and years of chairing the committee. Really appreciate it. And I also wanted to recommend that we do a self nomination of anyone who's willing to do it right now, because I'm guessing that'd be more efficient than waiting for a nomination by someone else. So I guess if anyone feels so moved to self nominate, now would be a great time. That was gonna be my suggestion, Brian. Thanks. Brian, I thought you were you were mentioning that because you were about to self nominate yourself. No, I was I was soliciting. I mean, I think Jack has a comment. Well, I was going to strike first and nominate you Brian, but damn, that's just my strategy just went down the tubes for that. But hey, my plan. Yeah, I was going to nominate you too, Brian. So you know, the pressure's on Brian. Just I'm just gonna throw it out there. Ask if anyone is excited to self nominate. All right. And that decides it. Okay. The question is, Brian, do you accept the nomination? Right? Sure. Yeah. Sure. I'll accept the nomination. I guess. Yeah. All right. So we have a second for the nomination, please. Jack, you can't second it. I can't. I'll second it. I'll second it. Oh, okay. All in favor. Is that called becoming the new water supply protection committee? Excellent. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian. I'll mail you the gavel. Okay, great. Thank you, guys. Look in your, look in your inbox. All right. I think we wanted to do a vice chair too. We haven't had one in the past, but it's just helpful to have one in case, you know, the chair can't make a meeting or whatnot. I think the responsibilities obviously would be a lot less. But most committees have a vice chair also. So I guess we need to take another round of volunteer nominations. Any volunteers to be vice chair? John? I'll do it. Excellent. Yay. Thank you, Anna. I second. Okay. All in favor, Anna, being vice chair. Wonderful. Excellent. All right. We have a full slate. Great. Okay. Good job. Like I said, you're all very well ahead of yourself. Easy job. Moving on. Conflict of interest training. Did you all do it? Have you done it? I did it. Can you read the needle? Those of you who haven't set aside a full hour because that's what it takes. Any other comments or questions about that? How frequently do we need to do it? I mean, I get to do every single year. Yeah. Okay. But at least this year, you don't have to actually bring a piece of paper to the clerk's office. It's all electronic. Yeah, I have similar requirements here. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Are you here yet? All right. Well, if you haven't done it, let's please, please go ahead and do that. Anybody have the ability to mute Steve? There, I muted him. But now he's back. That's okay. We muted you for a minute. Steve, you can come back on if you like. Yeah. So meeting dates for our September meeting, the proposed options are the 21st or the 28th of September. Any preference for one of those, particularly from you? Working academics? No. All right, let's go for the first one then. September 21. Seeing no objections, we will take September 21 as our next meeting date. I don't think we had any other items on the agenda. So I think we've reached the end of our agenda, the end of our meeting. Lions, I noticed that there are a couple of folks in the audience, and I don't know that we had somewhere on the agenda for if there was any public comment or input, but I, I don't know if they are here because there's something that they want to say. So I don't know if we want to take a moment for any public comment. I would be happy to take a moment for public comment. I can't see those folks in my view. So perhaps. Yeah. So Maria Kopicki has her hand raised. I just unmuted her. Maria. Hi, thank you. Yes, thank you very much. Maria Kopicki, Amherst resident. I had a couple of questions about the testing. With the lead, you mentioned that two were above 15. And I'm wondering if that above the actionable limit. And I'm wondering what actions were taken and also whether there's any explanation or maybe spatial important spatial distribution on those samples and whether that triggers any other further testing and kind of how we compare to last year. I apologize. I am on phone so I could not see any of your graphs and so on. So maybe this was already discussed. But it would be great to have that. All of this in your packet and available to the public. The other question I had, and I don't think I heard this, but maybe I'm wrong. Did you guys talk about total organic fluorine in terms of testing for PFAS rather than testing for the six or 18? And I'm not sure what your policy is, but if you don't mind asking the questions, I won't have another crack at you until September. Sure, I can I can attempt to answer these with the lead and copper. The two households that had detections above the action level we communicated with we we have a you know, a letter we send out and we talk to them about what we recommend that they do to move forward. We certainly include their households in the next round of sampling in the spring. You know, the LCR has a lot to do with actually household plumbing. So a lot of our recommendations are things like, you know, they should do additional testing, possibly on other faucet fixtures in their households. They should certainly let their water run for over, you know, one or two minutes before drinking it. So we work with them. But regular regulatory wise, when you only have two out of 63, then the town is within the easily within the 90% compliance with that 90% of the households needed to be below the action level and we easily hit that. So our only requirement is to sample again our 60 houses this spring. So that's how that works. And, you know, we really the household, we really just educate the households on how they can try and prove their situation. Can I just add one thing to that, Beth? Sure. And this is this is more just kind of context for folks to know that when we pick the houses to sample on the state has some pretty good guidance on it like they have to approve it, but we have to basically select houses throughout the town that would be most likely to see High Lighting Copper in there. So we, you know, we can't just cherry pick houses that were just built. So we are trying to target these places where it would be most likely to be seen. So I do want to kind of, I guess, throw that out there for for understanding. That that was another one of my questions was is this self selected or do you select and so that that I guess answers it's you guys deciding where to sample. But do that also include or even target rentals rather than privately owned homes? Yeah, it does. There's a there's a sort of system to selecting the houses. The first criteria is if the town is aware at all of houses that may have led service lines or led goosenecks. And our town is not aware of any we have we have no evidence of those existing in Amherst. The next highest threshold that DEP wants you to look at our houses built between 1983 and 85 that have copper piping because the during that time period, the copper piping often had lead solder used. So Amherst actually has quite a number of built buildings. So single family homes mostly that was built during that time period. And that's really what our list is made of at this point. But as Amy said, it's a list that we we created, but we also send it to DEP for their review and approval. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, that was helpful. And just the total organic flooring then. Right. And so I have to get back to you on that. As I said, so the data I just showed you is from a multiple sampling events. And I think I said that different labs have been used. So I need to look back at the data and see exactly what was analyzed for for all each of those sampling events, because it's might be a little bit different. John might be able to add to that. Just comment, Maria. John, to buy some here. I'm going to talk to the member. You might say I'm going to drink more of my career. Total organic flooring. And I've been interesting. You know about it at all in your background, but it's really kind of a research method or or, you know, it also an investigation method. It's not at all routinely done, rarely done. We've done some proposals to try to develop. My colleague, Dave Ricco, we tried to get NSF money to develop a robust TOF method. It is done, but certainly not routinely done in the drinking water monitoring yet. At least I can say that. So probably not a lot of people know about total organic flooring. The idea is to measure all the carbon backbone molecules that have fluorine attached to which is what PFAS compounds are. I don't know, Maria, does that. No, I appreciate your answers. Thank you. And I hope that I hope that this method does become more widely used, because as you point out, there are so many different PFAS molecules in that class. That's a good way to to really know what's going on. And there are a number of these compounds. As you know, we don't have methods to detect. So that's why I was asking about that. Thank you. Yeah, it's a it's a challenging topic. Please a great paper on having crossed the planetary boundary. There is no place with no people. We've the planet is contaminated with PFAS. I don't love it. Do we have someone else with their hand up? I don't I don't see any others. There's just three members of the public, and I don't see any other hands up. Great. Then I will make a motion that we are asking you to make a motion that. Oh, let's unmute him. Hang on, Steve, hold up. I think he can unmute himself, actually. He might need to do it. Hold on just a minute, Steve. We you're muted. You find your mute button. I hit I hit unasked. There we go. There we go. All right. You didn't hear my dog barking. He was driving me crazy. No, I before I forget between now and the next meeting, which is a long time away. For at least three of the winners before this that we've been here, we've had to turn our water on to run because there's a history of the line freezing from the very cold weather. And now that I've gone and stated that I'm concerned about demand, I mean, this is running the water in the size of a pencil, they say, or the size of your pinky for two or three months is a heck of a waste of water if it can be dealt with in any other way. So I don't know how many homes in town or or other businesses or facilities that have to do the same thing. But I'd be curious if there's ever, you know, a computation of that amount of water waste, and I guess as a percentage of total usage would make more sense. But still, because as far as I know, I mean, I could be one of 24 or 2400 or more in the time I get a letter from the town and tells me to do it, but I didn't get one issue. It's been very warm. We have a short list. Oh, Amy, go ahead. Yeah, I can talk about that. And I don't have the numbers in front of me. But it isn't a super long list of houses. And and I'll tell you that, you know, most of the houses that run it, it's it's actually because the service line. So like your guide property, like the service line that you guys own isn't deep enough. And so it's one where like when somebody's line freezes one year, we're like, OK, we're going to put them on the list and remind them to do it next year. And so there is one or two places in town where we do it more because there's such little usage at the end of a dead end. But but generally, it's actually because of the service line. And so, you know, if the homeowner wants to bury it deeper and avoid this, that's great. But that's a big cost. So we're trying to balance the cost for the homeowner to avoid this problem versus the cost of some usage during a low usage period of the year. You know, well, I get a credit back for the amount that it's above my average consumption. So the the taxpayers of the town in a sense are absorbing it. And it's really not that they're paying for it because they only pay for their usage. As long as there's excess water, nobody's getting hurt. As long as they say the aquifer and the reservoirs are always amply filled. But it just be curious. Yeah, I know it's coming. It's on under my property, you know. So it must be that there was legend. They stopped when they hit the ledge or whatever when they put the line in. But I just I'm curious because again, it runs against my nature to just keep it running. But I know this was not on the agenda, but it just occurred to me and I wouldn't necessarily remember it next September. Well, there you go. It sounds like you're among a small group and it's during a low use, water use time of year. So when when we have ample supply, so. There's probably no harm, no foul. No harm, no foul, as long as it's a small group. Right. Yeah, I think I think the point of that, Steve, is like, absolutely, we understand that that's, you know, that's a water usage. You know, that's a water usage. It's as we look at, you know, the full budget or trying to put that cost on the homeowner to fix the problem. Like you said, if there's ledge for you to get your line deep enough, that's going to be super expensive to fix the problem. And so the town, you know, puts our resources elsewhere. If this were something that we had to have people run it during the summer when usage was higher, we may make different decisions. But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it's, I guess it's a calculated thing, but I absolutely hear what you're saying. Thank you. Yeah. Great. So at this point, I would entertain a motion to close the meeting. I move adjourned. Yeah. Second. Excellent. All in favor. Sure. Thank you all. All right. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Brian. Brian, we'll pick up at our next meeting. Good to meet you all. Thank you. Thanks for chairing all those years, Lyons. Yep. Welcome. Thank you, Lyons. All right. And welcome, Steve. Thanks for coming. Cheers. Thanks. Bye. Bye.