 Good morning, Drew. Good morning. Easter, Roberta, do we have a quorum yet? I believe we do. Let me just take a quick look. Thank you so much. Yes, I believe we're good to go whenever you're ready. Okay, then I will start this meeting, our first meeting of 2022, and sorry that we are still remote, but we're getting good at being in Hollywood Squares. With that, I will call the meeting to order, and I would ask that Secretary Athed do a roll call for us, and please state your name and your city with that. City of Cotadi. Here, Susan Harvey, Cotadi. City of Petaluma. Here, Mike Healy, Petaluma. City of Rohnert Park. Willie Lanara, City of Rohnert Park. City of Santa Rosa. Natalie Rogers, Santa Rosa. City of Sonoma. Matt Rogulio, here, City of Sonoma. North Marin Water District. President Jack Baker, North Marin Water District. Town of Windsor, Valley of the Moonwater District. Unformed Valley of the Moonwater District. Marin Municipal Water District. President Jack Gibson. And now for TAC members, City of Cotadi. Big Scott, City of Cotadi. City of Petaluma. Mike Elmarini, City of Petaluma. City of Rohnert Park. City of Santa Rosa. Jennifer Burke, Santa Rosa Water. City of Sonoma. North Marin Water, oh, sorry. Matt Rogulio, City of Sonoma, I'm sorry. North Marin Water District. Drew McIntyre, North Marin Water District. Town of Windsor. Christina Goulart, Town of Windsor. Valley of the Moonwater District. Matt Fullner, Valley of the Moonwater. And Marin Municipal Water District. And other attendees include Bob Anderson, Brad Sherwood, Chelsea Thompson, Christopher Bolt, Claire Nordley, Colin Close, Elise Miller, Jim Grossi, Larry Russell, Lynn Ruselli, Margaret DeGenova, Mark Milan, Monte Schmidt, Peter Martin, R. Dowd, Shannon Coutoula, and Tony Williams. Thank you for that. I guess we will move on to item number two. Drew, are you going to take this resolution? Yes, I am. Thank you, Madam Chair. So this is just our administrative effort here to continue our Zoom meetings in light of the continuation of the pandemic, with COVID-19. So I just want to remind everybody that Sonoma County Public Health Officer continues to support, or continues to recommend teleconferencing or social distancing during public meetings. And so this is a resolution that's being asked for the WACC to adopt that would continue to authorize these teleconference meetings for the next 30 days. So I'd be happy to answer any questions if there are any, but it's pretty self-explanatory. Are there any questions? Not seeing any hands. Easter, do you see any hands? I do see Mr. Healy has his hand up. Okay, Mike. I was just going to move approval. We need to take public comment on this first, but then you certainly can do that. So I would like to open this up for a public comment. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And then Secretary Ledesma, are there any comments from the public on this? I do not see any raised hands. Thank you for that. Andrew, did you receive any comments? I did not. You did not, okay. So Mr. Healy, it is time for a motion. I'll remove approval. I'll second. Thank you. All right, so we have a motion and a second. So Secretary Alba, could we please take a roll call vote on this item? Yes. WAC members, City of Cattadi. Yes. City of Petaluma. Yes. City of Runner Park. Yes. City of Santa Rosa. Yes. I don't have that much time. City of Sonoma. Northman Water District. Yes. Town of Windsor. Yes. Valley of the Moonwater District. Valley of the Moon. Yes. Thank you. Okay, then we will move on to item three. We'll take public comment on any items that are not on the agenda. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And do we have any public comment on items not on the agenda? I do not see any raised hands. I do not either. Drew, did you receive any written or verbal comments? I did not. Okay, then we will move on to the next item, appointment of the 2022 WAC leadership for a two year term. And I sent out a letter and as stated, it is time for our vice chair to become chair, which is Mike Healy. And he can resume that position for 2022 and 2023. And that leaves us with a vacancy in the vice chair. And I am under the understanding that Natalie Rogers of Santa Rosa is interested in fulfilling this commitment. So that is the item that we have before us. Go back here. So, do we have any questions on that item? None. So, we will take public comment on this item. If you wish to make a public comment, please raise your hand. Dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And secretary Podesma, do we have any comments by the public? I do not see any raised hands. All right then, I would be looking to, Drew, did you receive any comments? I did not receive any. You did not receive any comments. Then I would be looking for a motion in a second for Mike to be the chair and Natalie to be the vice chair. So moved. Second. We have a motion and a second. Could we get a roll call vote please? Yes, I'm sorry. I missed who made the second. Was that Mr. Baker? Yes. Thank you. Roll call of the WAC members, city of Katadi. Yes. City of Petaluma. Yes. City of Rohnert Park. Yes. City of Santa Rosa. Yes. City of Sonoma, Northman Water District. Yes. Town of Windsor. Yes. Valley of the Moonwater District. Yes. Okay, that passes unanimously. And Mike, I am going to turn this over to you. And thank you all. And I will be exiting now. So have a great meeting and we will see you all next time. Thank you, Susan. It's all yours, Mike. Hi, Susan. Bye. Thank you for your great work. Oh, thank you. I'm not going anywhere. No. I'm just gonna let Mike steer the car for a while. So I'm gonna thank Susan for her leadership of the group over the last two years. And those with long memories know that I handed over the virtual gown to her two years ago and now it's being handed back. So... Uh-oh, better watch out. Here we go. So I guess we're on to agenda item five at this point. Recap from the November 1 special WAC-TAC meeting and approval of minutes. Are there any questions or comments from the group? Seeing none, we're taking public comments on item five. Anyone in the audience wishing to comment, please raise your virtual hand. Where are we seeing anyone? I do not see anybody's hands. Mr. McIntyre, have you received anything? I have not received any pre-recorded public comments. Okay. Thank you. At this point, I would ask for a motion in a second to approve the minutes. So moved. I'll second. So we have a motion and a second. Roll call vote, please. Roberta, you... Yeah, you muted her, sorry. I'm sorry, was that Mr. Salmon who seconded? No. Ormond. Oh, thank you. Roll call of the WAC members. City of Katadi. City of Katadi. She's gone. She left. Oh, thank you. City of Petaluma. Yes. City of Rohnert Park. Yes. City of Santa Rosa. I wasn't present. Can I vote? Yes. I'll say yes. City of Sonoma. North Marin Water District. Yes. Town of Windsor. Yes. Valley of the Moon. Yes. That passes. On to item six, recapped from the December 6th, 2021, TAC meeting and approval of minutes. Drew, do you want to take that? Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And you're welcome again to your new duties here. Happen to have you on board as the chair. So this is for the TAC again, all the meeting minutes of December 6th. First of all, just for any of the TAC members, now the opportunity to review the meeting minutes. Any comments, questions from the TAC? I don't see any questions from the TAC, so we'll go ahead and open it up for any public comment. Again, this is agenda item number six. If you're participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine if you're participating by phone. I do not see any raised hands. All right, thank you, Easter. Just let the minutes reflect that I did not receive any pre-recorded public comments on this item as well. So it's time for a motion and a second to approve the meeting minutes. Greg Scott, move to approve. Katati. Jennifer Berks, Ann Aras, a water second. Okay, thank you both. It's been motion and second in. So seconded. So it's time for roll call. Secretary Atha, please. City of Katati. Greg Scott, yes. City of Petaluma. Mike Elmarini, yes. City of Rohnert Park. All right, guys, Paulson, yes. City of Santa Rosa. Jennifer Burke, yes. City of Sonoma. Matt Rogulia, yes. North Marin Water District. Drew McIntyre, yes. Town of Windsor. Sam Samlin, yes. Christina Goulart, yes. And Valley of the Moonwater District. Matt Holder, yes. Okay, thank you. Motion passes. So back to you, Mike. I'd be happy to, you want me to summarize the agenda item number seven on the new WAC member orientation. Yeah, so I'm gonna hand it right back to you, Drew. New item seven, new WAC member orientation, if you would take that place. Okay, yeah, great. So attached to the agenda is the current understanding of the WAC members and alternates list. And, you know, this could change, but it's as current as we could make it based upon the information we've received, based upon what we, as this memo summarizes, we have, there's a lot of continuity carrying on from the previous year. So that's really good. There's one, there's only one new WAC member, and that's from Valley of the Moon, the alternate, which is Brooke Harland. And so what we do, typically at the beginning of a new year is we make sure that anybody that's new to the WAC has some orientation materials that help get them up to speed. So as this memo summarizes, Melissa James with Sonoma County Water Agency will be making outreach to Brooke Harland and get her copies of all these various reference materials. And then the other thing that's really important is especially for new members, and I think we have more than one now that hasn't with the COVID, hasn't really had the opportunity to tour the agency facilities. I know Grant Davis and I and many others recognize the value of getting out in the field and seeing some of these facilities. So, you know, we haven't been able to plan a date yet, but Grant, you wanna just comment a little bit on what your thoughts are and how this could happen this year? Well, that is gonna be everybody's guest. We're certainly hoping we'll be able to go back and have members of the public visit our facilities. That's obviously, as you said, an important part of understanding what the investment collectively has been made of. I think Director Rabbit might have a better read on the public health officer and whether or not we are gonna be able to entertain something like this, but we have managed in key cases where somebody has not seen the facility to be able to meet out on site individually in vehicles and stay socially distanced and masked. I look forward to the date that we'll be able to get back into having not just WAC members and TAC members, but members of the public on these tours. We were before COVID regularly scheduling these for the transmission system, and I think we need to continue to do that. And if any of you are interested, please continue to let me or Melissa or Brad Sherwood know and we'll accommodate. Thanks, Grant. Yeah, we realize it's hard to project the future. Just kind of reiterate the importance of having these tours. And I'm sure that the agency will make them available as soon as it's safe to do so. So, Mike, I'll turn this back to you to see if there are any questions, comments from the WAC on this. Thank you, Drew. And I would certainly concur that it's invaluable to see the agency's facilities, the habitat restoration work going on a dry creek and the collector system at Waller. It really makes this all real. Are there any questions from the group? And are there any comments from the public? I do not see any raised hands. Okay, and Drew, has anything been received in writing on this? There has not. Okay. So I believe we can move on to item eight, which is the Water Supply Coordination Council. And my cheat sheet says I'm supposed to talk about this, but I actually didn't get to that meeting. So, Drew, can you speak to that? Yeah, I can. This is just the Water Supply Coordination Council is meets before the WAC meetings to set the agenda. And so Susan was there coordinating the meeting along with Director Rabbit. And so essentially the outcome of that meeting was the agenda that everybody sees in front of them this morning. That's really all there is to add to that. Thank you. So are there any questions for Drew on that? Not seeing any? Are there any comments from the public? I do not see any raised hands. Did anything come in directly, Drew? I did not. Okay, so we can move on to item nine, Water Supply Conditions and Temporary Urgency Change Order. And I believe Don Seymour is going to speak to this. Sam, good morning, Chairperson Healey, members of the WAC and TAC. So for the first part for the Water Supply Update, Lake Mendocino is currently, it's just under 42600 acre feet. To give that a bit of perspective, last year at this time, the reservoir was at about 29,700 acre feet. So that's an improvement of about 13,000 acre feet. Currently, the inflow is matching outflow. So the reservoir is just staying pretty flat right now. Not gaining, not losing. So with respect to Lake Sonoma, Lake Sonoma is just over 151,500 acre feet. Last year at this time, it was 157,700 acre feet. So we're about 6,000 acre feet behind where we were last year. And we all know what we faced during the dry season with that reservoir level at that or below that level. So that's a big concerning. I would also add that both the GFS, which is the United States forecasting precipitation model and the European model are both consistently forecasting no precipitation over the next 15 days. So as I got received an email from Jay Jaspers this morning, let's hope for a miracle March. Glows at Hacienda Bridge are around 470 CFS. So we still have a fair amount of tributary inflow, but as you go up into the system, flows are declining as you go up higher up into the watershed. So I'll pause with that. If anybody has any questions on the water supply condition before I go into the temperature change order. Don, I have a question quickly. If you could, you gave the numbers for Lake Mendocino and Sonoma. What is the percentage of what we are from capacity? So Lake Mendocino has a variable water supply pool. It's lower in the winter. The top of the water supply pool is 68,400 acre feet and then it starts increasing March one by about 600 acre feet per day until about May 10th when it hits its maximum water supply level of 111,000 acre feet. So with respect to the winter water supply pool, it's at about 62%, but with respect to the maximum in May, it's at about 38%. So pretty low. Okay, with no other questions, I'll move on to the temperature change order update. I think everybody's aware that Sonoma Water filed in the middle of November filed another temperature change order that was to bridge the gap or take over for the order we had been managing under that was gonna expire on December 11th. State Board issued an order approving those petitions. Just to remind everybody, that was just all it did was move the hydrologic index which determines the water supply condition, which ultimately determines the minimum and stream flow requirements. It moved it from Tima Live-In flow at Lake Pillsbury to storage thresholds we've developed at Lake Mendocino. On January one, storage at Lake Mendocino exceeded the storage threshold for normal water supply condition. That was 40,000 acre feet and the reservoir was at 41,400. So kind of just eating by. So for the month of January, we were in a normal water supply condition. Unfortunately, we had, as everybody's aware, we had one of the driest Januarys on record. So it was, we were needing to meet 150 CFS minimum stream flow requirement on the upper river and that's the entire reach, including the very top of the watershed at the confluence of the west and east fork of the Russian River. As we saw inflow from the west fork decline, we needed to increase releases to meet that 150 CFS. So unfortunately we lost about 2,000 acre feet of storage in the month of January, meeting that minimum stream flow requirement. That water supply condition was reassessed on February one where it was based on the storage threshold, it was determined to be dry. So that has decreased the minimum stream flow requirement 75 CFS on the upper Russian River and 85 CFS on the lower Russian River. Just to, you know, with this, these forecast that we're seeing dry forecast, it's very, very likely that on March one, we'll go into a critical water supply condition. So minimum stream flow requirements on the upper Russian River will drop to 25 CFS. And then on the lower Russian River will drop to 35 CFS. Just one other thing to add. State board did do a water supply availability analysis for the month of February and determined that there was adequate natural flow and flow coming from PDP to meet water rights demand. So the curtailment is still in the curtailment that was under the emergency regulations is still suspended and that'll remain that way to March 1st when the state board does another water availability analysis. So that's all I have, Chairperson Healy, unless if there's any questions. No, thank you. Any questions from the lack of the tack for Don? Chair Healy, I might interject for one moment, please. Don, thank you for that update. You've been watching this multiple times a day, really appreciate your active involvement in particular your communication with the state board. Could you describe a little bit more how important moving that index actually is to our water supply conditions? That was a signature. That plus our work with the state board during this winter, during the Atmospheric River in October, we'll capture some of that water and it's the relationship with the state board that allows that to happen. Could you talk a little bit more about that? I think it's important for WAC members to really understand this. Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, the hydrologic index that's in decision 1610 in our water right permits is cumulative inflow in the Lake Filzbury. And that determination was made back in the mid 1980s when the Parra Valley Project was basically transferring on average about 160,000 acre feet per year into the Russian River watershed. In 2006, Psheneysburg license was amended, which dramatically changed that transfer. It went from about 160,000 acre feet down to about 60,000 acre feet per year, really changing the water balance and making what was happening in the Eel River watershed irrelevant to the Russian River. There's just was no correlation now with that decrease in transfer between the two systems. And basically that's resulted in Sonoma water over the past 15 years, filing over a dozen temperature change partitions to kind of manage that issue of the watershed conditions and reservoir conditions in the Russian River watershed, not being aligned with what's happening in the Eel River watershed. And that situation was acutely made worse this year when Psheneysburg announced in October that the transformer bank for the powerhouse at the Parra Valley Project had failed. They hadn't made any determinations with due other than they did announce that it would probably likely take years to repair and would be in the millions of dollars. And so since then, that's had another really dramatic change in the transfer of the Parra Valley Project based on its current operations without being able to generate power and make those discretionary transfers that has been occurring historically. Now the transfer is gonna be going down to about 27 to 33,000 acre feet from that 60,000. So it's really become, unless Sonoma water wants to be basically filing temperature change petitions every six months, we really need to move that index to something that represents what the condition in our watershed rather than this historical remnant that really is not reflective of our conditions. And so along with filing these temperature change petitions, I would just mention Sonoma water is having conversations with the state board and the fisheries resource agencies on the potential for a longer-term process to manage, to move that index to store thresholds like in Desino, in lieu of filing these every six months these temperature change petitions. Thank you for that, Jennifer. Did you have a question? I did. Thank you, Dawn. And thank you, Grant, for asking for the additional information. I had a similar question, so you answered most of it, but I'm assuming the current order goes through June and then is the thought that you're going to be, if we don't have another mechanism filing for another petition and we're going to be looking at similar requirements and conditions to last year? So, yeah, this longer-term fix I was describing is probably much further out than that June, the June timeframe when our order expires. So, we'll have to file... We'll absolutely have to file petitions in late April, May, because, I mean, just to describe how out of sync the systems are, based on how much inflows come into Lake Pillsbury, in June, we would be in a normal water select condition. It's already set, and so we're going to have to file that. If storage conditions don't improve, Jennifer, I would expect we'll be facing a very similar summer as we did last year, with similar types of measures that we've had to take. So it's... Thank you. Yeah. Any other questions from the WAPI attack? Seeing none, we'll take public comment. Anyone wishing to comment can raise their virtual hand. We do have David Keller, and I will allow you to speak. Great, thank you. Great. Good morning. Thank you very much, Don. Thanks for the clarity on that report. Really appreciate that. I was wondering if you or Grant could speak to when the water agency will be submitting a formal request to change decision 1610 to the state board. I know that's been in limbo with the draft EIR, but is there... God knows how long that will take. But do you have any target for when that formal request will happen? So, you know, because of all these changes at the Potter Valley Project, in the time frame, since we issued our draft EIR and made assumptions, a lot of those assumptions really... that went into the modeling and the environmental analysis are no longer representative of probably the conditions we're facing. So, you're right, the Fishbowl Project could possibly be delayed a bit longer. So, we're likely going to try to work through some process with the state board prior to the end of 2022. OK, so still on a temporary urgency basis. It will definitely... We have this order that we're currently operating under until June 7th. We won't be able to do anything before that order expires. So, we will be definitely filing again, like I said, in the spring to have an order in place when the current order expires. OK, thank you. Any other questions from the public? I do not see any more raised hands. Great, and Drew, did you receive anything? I did not. OK, so we can move on to item 10. 2022 annual water supply and demand assessment planning. And I believe Paul Piazza is going to hand it over to this one. And Chair Haley, this is Secretary Aitha just for your information. I believe that Representative Huffman's office has joined and they have been promoted to a panelist. So, I didn't know whether you wanted to reorder the agenda. Yeah, let's let's let's take the congressman first if we can do that. And is this in connection with agenda item 12 or? That's correct. I apologize. All of this time. Yeah, yes, correct. OK, so agenda item 12 is regional water supply resiliency study update. And Jay Jaspers is going to take the lead and the congressman is going to speak for that as well. Excuse me, Jenny Calloway here for Congressman Huffman. He's not on yet. You'll see his name when he comes on. I just got in before him. I'm trying to get him in. OK. OK, well, we can start with Jay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Healy and members of the WAC, Jay Jaspers, Sonoma Water. I'll kick this off this update of the resiliency study off and then turn it over to Armand Ludovar, our consultant from Jacobs, who is working with attack and Sonoma Water on on the study. We last updated you at the WAC in November in terms of what a worst case drought scenario over the next two years might look like. As you'll see by Armand's presentation, the October rains and then the December rains in particular have significantly benefited our situation in terms of the next couple of years and in terms of drought, worst case drought scenario next couple of years. However, at the same time, a dry January and what's forecast to be a dry February remind us that we're not out of the woods on this drought yet. So we need to ask the messages for all of us to stay on this in terms of drought resiliency planning. Armand, you're controlling the slides. I am. Yep. Just let me know when you want to move forward. OK, so here is the outline of our presentation a little bit on the background. OK, you know, I'll cover a couple more slides through it over to Armand. He'll talk about the model that we're using to really analyze the different drought impacts and the benefits of different drought measures in terms of withstanding the current drought and future droughts. And then also he'll cover some of the drought management options and summary and recommendations and kind of next steps for the resiliency study. Next slide, Armand. Thank you. Just just a little background on the study. As you may recall, the premise of the resiliency study is really to look, step back and take a big picture of view of our interconnected systems, all of our agencies and remove the jurisdictional boundaries and just look at the interconnected infrastructure we have in terms of pipelines, tanks, booster stations, river diversion facilities, reservoirs, groundwater basins, groundwater wells and really look at what the collective systems can do in terms of responding to stress tests. And those stress tests can be drought, as we're talking about now, seismic or even other either, you know, another emergencies that might occur. And what can we do in terms of really operating or looking at our system a little differently or identifying projects that have a regional benefit? So this is the overall intent of the study. And in the what we've obviously with the drought, our first really deep dive is for the drought resiliency. And so when we are done with this drought analysis and you're going to hear really the status of that today, our next next step will be to pivot towards seismic emergencies. Sonoma water is just completing a technical update with its consultant, seismic engineering consultants and updating its 2008 seismic reliability analysis. And that that study will feed in here to the resiliency study. So that's where we're going to be moving to once we complete this drought evaluation. So before I turn it over to Armin, just on the drought itself, there really are two types of droughts we've looked at with two time frames. One is, as I mentioned earlier, the near term or current drought that we're in and looking at the worst case, a possible worst case over the next couple of years. And you heard an update on that in November. You're going to hear another update of that now, given the more recent rain since November. However, there's also different kinds of droughts. So the near term drought is really an acute severe drought. But there's also looking at droughts that can be maybe not as severe and an annual basis, but a long term drought, you know, that's more of a chronic drought that may last 10 or more years. And so that's a different kind of drought that also might lead to different response measures in order to withstand those longer, yet less severe droughts. And so we need to look at new tools in addition to what we already have to address some of those more longer term chronic droughts, because those those kinds of droughts are what's forecasted in our climate futures. So the most serious acute drought that we're looking at is historically the 1976-77 drought. The climate forecasts that we use in California don't show anything more severe than that. However, in the future for these longer term droughts, the climate forecasts there show longer term, multi-year droughts. And so that also is going to require us to really look at additional programs and projects to treat drought resiliency, as you'll hear from Arman's report. So with that introduction, I will turn it over now to Arman, to do a deeper dive on this. Chair Haley, before Arman starts, he just want to acknowledge that Congressman Hoffman has joined the meeting this morning. So thank you for that, Drew. Congressman, do you want to jump in now or do you want to wait until after this staff report is finished? Thanks, Mike. I can do it either way. What's your preference? You know, it might make sense to do it now because I think it sets a little bit of context for some of the more specific items you're going to hear from, from Arman. Please. Yeah. Well, thank you. And let me start by thanking you for moving the agenda around to accommodate me. I think this is the first time I have ever spoken to this group in all these many years of being a representative in the North Bay. So I appreciate that. And there's a reason why I think it's an important time to check in. And I wanted to discuss two specific things with you. The first is some federal money. The extreme shortages that we all experienced last summer are obviously not going to be the last time many of you face the prospect of actually running out of water. And it has become really clear, I think, that our region needs to do a lot more planning and collaborating and investing so that we can adapt to all this volatility. Jay was just talking about not just acute droughts that we're starting to get familiar with, but these longer term droughts like what the Colorado River Basin has been going through for well over a decade now. So look, it's all very daunting. None of us like this new normal. But I actually bring some good news on this subject because there is a very unique opportunity right now for federal financial support to improve our water supply systems and our resiliency in the North Bay. These are things we need to do anyway. But I wanted to talk with you about some of those specific opportunities that are going to provide billions of reasons for us to get a jump on these things and try to work together. OK, second thing and a somewhat related one. I wanted you to know about some recent negotiations and collaborations that I have been urging and to some degree facilitating involving Sonoma Water, MMWD and North Marin Water District. So let's can we start with the federal funding and then we'll we'll go to the other with the passage of the Infrastructure, Investments and Jobs Act. We have fifty five billion dollars in new federal investments. This is the largest investment in drinking water, wastewater, water reuse, conveyance, water storage, Western water resiliency, all these aspects of water infrastructure, the largest we have ever seen in American history. And it sits on top of some major investments that were authorized in other recent pieces of federal legislation. So look, the takeaway for all of you, I hope is that there has never been a time maybe never will be a time that's better than right now to try to secure federal funding for priority water needs. And there are going to be two factors that really help drive the success of the different projects that we try to find. The first is equity. And you may have heard that the Biden administration has a policy they call EJ 40. The intent is to make sure that at least 40 percent of funding from our infrastructure investments go to underserved and rural and Native American communities, the environmental justice community. Many of you represent communities that would qualify for this. And so if you have projects that improve water quality or resilience for these type of communities, they're going to compete very, very well. And then the other is regional collaboration and resiliency. So instead of pursuing something that involves a winner and a loser or going in alone to meet water needs, folks are going to be rewarded if they pursue win-wins, if they have co-benefits, if they have collaboration with neighbors and benefit the resiliency of an entire region. And so that's why I think this North Bay resiliency study that you're going to be hearing more detail about here in a moment is such a great fit for this moment. I think many of the projects that you're going to be exploring, especially if all of the water districts and the communities in our region stand together shoulder to shoulder in supporting them are going to do very, very well. And you will have champions in Congress to help you draw down these funds. Many of you are in my district and my team and I will work directly with you to shepherd you through the various programs and to, you know, weigh in in every way we can to try to help you get that money. And I know that those of you in Congressman Thompson's district are going to get the same. And we will work together on behalf of everyone in the North Bay to try to to secure those wins. So about the specific funding, a lot of them are going to come. A lot of these funds are going to come down through existing state revolving fund programs. There are billions in low interest loans and grants that will come through the drinking water revolving fund. So if you think about testing and abatement of lead pipes, any kind of drinking water quality improvement, including fixing old and leaky pipes and storage tanks, anything public health related, those are all going to be fundable in the drinking water revolving fund plus up from the federal government. And then there's similar grants and loans through the clean water revolving fund for wastewater, stormwater, including decentralized wastewater treatment. I know that's something that some of you care a lot about. Nature based infrastructure, basically anything that involves the management or treatment of wastewater or stormwater is going to be a lot of new funding for. And some of this is really timely. There are going to be many tranches of this funding, but some of them are already open right now. One example, there's a large scale water recycling program with large grants. The application deadline is March 15th. Now, this is for large scale like Las Vegas scale kind of stuff. But there's a bunch of other programs with with tranches that are open right now, and there will be others that we want to make sure to get you ready for. For example, 400 million for water smart grants, basically any kind of water management improvement that contributes to sustainability resilience with environmental benefits. These grants are open in March, April, May. There's three separate programs, but they're going to be rolling out in March, April and May. So there is a guidebook that is super helpful to orient you to these various funding opportunities It is available on my website. In fact, I know Jenny Callaway is on here. Maybe she can even post the link for all of you if you want to go a little bit deeper into that. So I'm happy to answer questions, but that's the federal funding message I wanted to bring to you this morning. Now, just a moment if we could on the Marin Sonoma collaboration last fall before it started raining when it appeared like Marin Municipal was on a course to run out of water sometime this year, I thought it was important to bring Marin Municipal in Sonoma water and North Marin together with some urgency to start talking about strategies to prevent a worst case scenario. And that was a pretty successful collaboration. December storms, of course, came along and reminded us that even in critical droughts, we're going to have these atmospheric river events that give windows of opportunity to capture wet weather flows. And these are well within existing water rights. They're well within existing biological opinions. We just need to have the facilities and the operating plans to do it. And what we saw over the course of several months last year and early this year was a real win-win collaboration that dramatically changed Marin Municipal's water situation going into this next summer. Large volumes of wet weather flows were delivered, this saved Marin needing to tap into its own reservoirs. It brought money into Sonoma water that will benefit all contractors. And part of the success was bringing the Costania Pump Station online. That resolved a historic bottleneck that will benefit Marin Municipal and North Marin. So the combination of all these things, plus all that December rain, has put Marin Municipal ahead of normal for storage right now. And that has enabled them to slow down this East Bay intertide, put it into a full CEQA analysis, a non-emergency track. But I think more than that, it's really opened the door to the possibility of further North Bay collaboration and thinking about doing things differently in our region. So look, you all know that normally Marin Municipal's plan is to take as little Sonoma water as possible because it's expensive and it's always cheaper to draw down your own local reservoir supply and avoid the risk of spilling. So in most years, Marin Municipal leaves about 10,000 acre feet of water or so on the table from Sonoma water. And there's a contract there that would provide that, but just as an operating philosophy, they don't draw that water down. And that makes them, I think from the Sonoma perspective, a bit of an unreliable partner. There's all sorts of history and baggage here that we don't need to get into, but from Marin's perspective, as these critical droughts become more frequent, I think there's a point where you need to rethink that approach. And that's what I've been urging all the parties to do. And the collaboration we've seen in recent months, I think has revealed an opportunity with some really interesting possibilities. Why build a hundred million dollar pipeline to the East Bay to get about 10,000 acre feet of water when you've got a contract where you've been leaving about that amount of water on the table in many years. Why stop with just buying it during atmospheric river events like we did these last few months? Why not look at system improvements, local and regional partnerships, resiliency projects, things that are going to enable all contractors to optimize delivery and storage and leverage our needs into some win-win solutions. So look, it's very early in these discussions, but I am hopeful that if Marin Municipal can figure out a way to redirect tens of millions of dollars in long-term investments to the North Bay instead of an East Bay pipeline, that could be a win-win for the entire region. I think the EIR that they're undertaking now is an opportunity to develop that and see if it's a viable option. And it ties right back into this regional resilience study that all of you are talking about here today and to the federal funding that I wanted to update you on. There is going to be federal funding for short-term drought response. In fact, $200 million was authorized last year in our continuing resolution. There's money for conveyance projects, aqueducts, pipelines to optimize Marin's reservoir storage. And it occurs to me and I think increasingly to the water managers in Marin and Sonoma that in dry years, the empty Marin reservoirs are a potential asset for the entire region if we have the interconnections and the conveyance to actually utilize them, especially during these atmospheric river events. It involves a type of collaboration that we've never seen before, but the possibilities are there and it really could speak to the resilience not just for Marin, but for the entire region. There could be a regional desalter that could benefit the entire region. There's just all sorts of things that I think will be on the table in this resiliency study that line up almost exactly with federal funding opportunities. And I wanted you to know that I am going to continue encouraging that collaboration and I'll do more than that. I will go to bat to try to bring down the federal dollars to actually make it happen. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks for giving me a little bit of time, Mike, and thanks for all your good work. Well, thank you for the good news and for the insights. I see Supervisor Rabbit has his name raised. Yeah, no, I just want to state the obvious and say that we are fortunate to have a congressman who understands our water supply system so well, being on the board of MMWD in the past and someone who is so engaged in helping us confront our challenges, but more importantly and most importantly, finding solutions to those challenges but doing so in a regional collaborative way. I think that we've proven that we can do that in the North Bay. We've done that, for instance, with North Bay Water Reuse Authority and been very, very successful. There's no reason that we can't continue to do it on potable water going forward. And so I very much appreciate that and Jared, I appreciate those dollars flowing our way. We will use them very well and we could be the shining example of how to address these changing times up here in the North Bay with our water supply system. So thank you for all the work that you've done on this and throughout the entire system and thank you for being so engaged. It's very, very helpful. Thanks, David, appreciate that. Thank you, David. Any other questions from the WAC of the Tech? Mr. Lunaris. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to thank the congressman for joining us and also, I have been on so many calls this past week in relation to the portrait of Sonoma that was recently released and it showed, data showed the different neighborhoods and the inequalities that exist. And so I'm really inspired and wanting to really advocate. It just happens that I live in one of the fourth lowest of all of Sonoma County cities in our neighborhood which is B-section of owner park, right? It's in my district. And there are so many related items including, environmentally it's been identified as a community of concern. And also, for example, we have two gas stations in our district, which we know, it seeps into our groundwater, into our soils and all sorts of things. And we have the oldest infrastructure because it's the original neighborhood of owner park. And so I'm really grateful that we have these funds and inspired to do whatever it is we can, whatever, however we can indicate. I know our staff is ready to do it. We have shown that we can apply for grants and put them to work. So thank you for being here and continuing to inspire and touching on that there's an equity piece to it because I believe these inequities are oftentimes people created, it doesn't just happen. So thank you. Well, thank you. And those items you mentioned, the old pipes, presumably lead pipes in many cases and the groundwater contamination, that's just right in the wheelhouse of these federal programs. We surely can help you address that. Thank you. Any other questions from the Wacken's attack? Not seeing any, Jared. Thank you so much for taking time out today and updating us and bringing the good news. And you gave us a lot more things to work on. So we'll be happy to do that. Thanks, Councilman. Thanks, everybody. Yeah. Drew, do you want to proceed with item 12 and who's up next? Yeah, I'll go ahead and turn it. I think Armin is ready now to present. Yeah, good morning. Hopefully everyone can see the screen okay. And then we're back live. Yes. Okay, thank you. Well, good morning Wacken members. My name is Armin Minnever with Jacobs Engineering and I'm kind of after that great interlude from Representative Huffman where kind of continue where Jay left off on the discussion around the resiliency study and particularly its focus on this near-term drought. So, and I'll move through these slides fairly quick and happy to take any questions following. But just a recap that the resiliency study really was meant to look at a range of risk factors not just drought, drought, seismic, wildfire, flood, water quality contamination efforts. So like Jay mentioned, we did an accelerated bit of work on the drought work here. And then we hope to continue back looking at other risk elements. But really looking at this regional system, you know, the Sonoma Water System and the backbone, the transmission system being the backbone but also looking at retail customers throughout the region. We had a multiple phase effort. We did back in 2020, 2021, we had the work plan effort we're now kind of in this phase two, which is the development and application of the model. And then there will be a further phase three beyond that where there'll be continued updates of the model. So this is a process that's been underway for a while and we kind of recently pivoted it for the drought resiliency. So just the last bit just to help you kind of understand the scope of the study we, last year we went through a survey process with many of the TACAD hockey members indicating what risk factors they had that were most important to them and had greatest amount of uncertainty. And we have this list in the table to the right things like wildfire, earthquake, drought, power loss, sea level rise, flooding, demand growth, et cetera. And so as the drought really hit big in the summer of last year, Drew and the team asked if we could pivot this work to focus specifically on this near-term drought, which was, I think was a really fortuitous effort which allowed us to advance our work and also address a real-time need. So that's, I'll just have very briefly that big part of the effort is developing a decision support model which we now have that links basically the Russian River and the Potter Valley Project, the transmission system and a simplified representation of the retail customer systems. So we have hydrology from the Eel River down to the Bay and then local agency demands, et cetera. We validated the model from 2009 through 2017. So we've been able to have it replicate historical operations in a fairly good sense. We're quite comfortable where we're at right now. And both at the Lake Sonoma Lake Mendocino and Marine Municipal Reservoir level, but also at the deliveries from the aqueduct, the transmission system and the mix of supply from the retail customers. So as we kind of got into the looking forward to the drought, we just started in earnest in about October, September, October of last year. And the first simulations that we did where we tried to project out was starting in November and November, then we updated it in December and have recently updated it with January 1st conditions. And so what we do is we run a baseline simulation and we say, what would the future look like if we didn't take any drought management actions? That's what our baseline simulations are. And we've been running the water years 2022 through 2026, essentially a five year look ahead to assess the conditions. And since we don't really know what those future years look like, we've been exploring sampling of historical hydrologies. So we have about 108 individual years of history and hydrology that we can sample. And so we run stochastic, what we call stochastic simulations, which is just rerunning a lot of the historical hydrology through. And then we found that the most severe hydrology that we could find to represent the next two years is a repeat of 1976 and 1977 hydrology. And so we run that 1976 through 1980 hydrology out for five years and it represents the biggest stress tests we can find. So essentially this is looking at a four year drought. You can think of it as a four year droughts for 2020, 2021. And then we emulate 2022 and 2023 as if they were 1976 and 1977. And we've not seen a drought like that in the historical record at this point. So that's what we're calling our stress test. And just as I won't delve too much on these, but if we run 108 historical simulations through and then we do statistics on the results, we can get a sense for how high is the risk of low storage conditions. So this is Lake Mendocino storage starting in January one, simulated conditions out through through 2026 with that range of hydrology. And what we see is there's a low probability of hitting essentially dead pool storage or low storage in Lake Mendocino, but it is a probability. It is something that's something on the order of a 1% probability of hitting low point storage. Should we do nothing to address the drought? And that would occur the earliest in 2023 that could be out in the following years as well. If we look at Lake Sonoma, again, it's also a very low probability of low storage conditions, but we do see a 1% probability of a low point storage in 2023, should we do nothing to manage through that drought period? So there are severe hydrologies on the horizon. We did the same for Marin Municipal Reservoir Storage. The conditions are pushed out a little better for Marin because of, particularly because of the latest storms, the November conditions were quite a bit more severe than these ones, but we do see conditions popping up in roughly 2025 period. And so those are the statistics, and then we can just look at if we just ran that 1976, 77 hydrology, this is the one single hydrologic trace, what we might expect if that hydrology were to repeat itself. So we have conditions here in 2023 at Lake Mendocino, low point conditions in late 23 at Lake Sonoma, and we kind of squeak by and Marin Municipal Reservoirs during this hydrologic condition. Okay, so just as a kind of a summary of that work, the baseline work where there were no actions developed, we looked at starting conditions in November, December and January, and then we said, what was the amount of gap between total demand and the amount of ability to deliver that water? And that's what we've called the shortage here. And as you can see, it was quite high in November, about something like a 25% reduction in Sonoma water delivery. It improved just slightly in December to a 23% reduction. By the time we got to January, those storms really had a huge impact in alleviating the risk. And now we're looking at something on the order of about 7% or around 7,000 acre feet of potential shortage should we do nothing. So then we've worked with the group in looking at various drought management actions. We met with all the retail customers to get a sense for what they wanted to, what they want and could implement in the near term. We looked at options like increasing supply, reducing demand, improving operations, or modifying policy and regulations. And we ended up with this group of listing of options here. So we have options like increasing groundwater production, much that is already underway, the winter water diversion, regional groundwater banks, the SDC supply, recycled water, ocean desal and the interconnection with ocean and brackish desal and interconnection with Bay Area supplies. We also had water conservation and water use efficiency. And then Kostania, pump station improvements, improving storage, looking at FIRO, the forecast informed reservoir operations in Lake Sonoma. And then lastly, what types of measures could be implemented through modifying policy and regulations in particular, the TUCPs that Don was mentioning earlier. And then so when we went through the analysis, we said, what are the options that could actually be built in the next two years or could be operated immediately? And this is what we called our near term package, which was looking at maximizing delivery of natural flows for the winter water diversion, the Kostania booster, increasing product groundwater production, both at Sonoma waters, wells in the Santa Rosa Plain as well as retail customers, the regulatory flexibility through TUCPs and water conservation. And if we, and so if we look at those same plots now with the implementation of this near term package, so the black line represents the plots I showed previously with the do nothing alternative. And then each of the lines that are higher in storage than that represent the near term package without any conservation than the near term package with 10, 20, 30% conservation. And finally, 30% conservation plus Russian river depletions being reduced by 30%. So here looking at Lake Mendocino, we find that while implementing the TUCPs and the reduction in Russian river diversions at 30% would allow us barely to squeak through a drought of 76, 77 proportions. At Lake Sonoma, the story's a little bit different but the TUCPs certainly have a large impact but conservation has a considerable impact as well as does the bringing of groundwater online. We're allowed to, that allows us to bolster storage in Lake Sonoma and make us make it through this drought period with a little bit of buffer, not a huge amount of buffer, but with a little bit of buffer. And for Marin Municipal, the story is largely about increasing their amount of storage they could end the drought with which is essentially a drought resiliency measure. So the conservation levels bringing the groundwater online to Kistania allows them to deliver or retain more water in local storage for subsequent dry years. I apologize if I'm going too fast and I'm happy to take questions after but I don't want to take too much time. We had the baseline and we're looking here at potential shortage, projected shortage. So the baseline had this number of about 7,000 acre feet of potential shortage over those two years. Then we looked at what would the individual actions, how could they reduce the shortage? So the groundwater production and the retail, both Sonoma and retail customers reduced the shortage by some magnitude but not a huge amount. The winter water diversion in Kistania reduced the shortage somewhat but also gained storage in Marin Municipal. And then the conservation levels had a substantial reduction in shortage as did the TUCP implementation of the TUCPs. And when we implement all of those actions with or without conservation, we have essentially reduced that shortage down to zero under these conditions. So I think the take home message out of this is that there's a near term package there that many of these actions are already implemented that allow us making us through another two years of drought period but it will continue to take investments in terms of conservation and ensuring that these measures come online. And then lastly, I'll just pivot to the long-term droughts that Jay mentioned earlier. A number of these actions offer immediate resiliency benefits. The ones that are listed here, those are the ones that are part of that near term action. But then there's longer-term actions that require a little bit of wet season water in order to build up the storage but then offer substantial benefits in the long run. And like Blake Sanilma-Furo offers considerable amount of storage benefit, 20 plus thousand acre feet of additional storage benefit. Should we implement that in a wet year? Same with the groundwater bank. I'm expanding really good timing of taking this winter water diversion and parking it in reservoirs outside of Lake Sanilma. Then you know, SDC, the ocean desal, the import or the transfer options and then some interesting concepts on surface and recycled and aquifer storage options. So I'll just wrap up with this slide here as really we've been fortunate to essentially do a lifetime test on the decision support model that we've been developing. It's been quite helpful to test it in this arena. We looked at these drought risks. The December storms have altered the near-term drought outlook, but like Jay mentioned, January is exceptionally dry, February looks like it's going to be similarly dry. So we're kind of entering a third or fourth year depending on how you measure it. But the near-term drought management options offer substantial improvement to get through our stress test which would essentially be a four-year continuous drought in the basin. And then just wrapping up next step. So we have a technical memorandum that's been circulated now to the tech ad hoc. They'll go undergo some review and I expect some changes. Continue to update this group as needed and wanted by the team. And then looking at further review of these long-term strategies, which I think are going to offer substantial benefit if we get one or two wet nears preceding the next drought. And then we'd really want to continue pivoting back to our, the resiliency study to look at a broader range of identified risks. Okay, with that, I know it probably went long. So I will pause and see if there are any questions, Mike or Drew or whoever wants to handle that. So thank you for that. I actually had one question and that is with the Castania trunk upgrades. Is that something that's been done or is being looked at or authorized? What's the status of them? Yeah, my understanding is it has been completed, although I'll let the folks who know a little bit more of the details of that, that it's been completed as of I think January or December. And now it's about operating it in a real-time fashion a little bit further. So I don't know if Jack or others want to. Could Paul or Ben confirm that? Yeah, thanks, Grant. And Chair Haley, Paul Selyamer in water, just echoing what was, our manager just said, it's substantially completed at this time. And we're working through some additional testing before full completion. Great, I appreciate that. Any other questions from the WAC or TAC on this? Not seeing any or are there any questions from members of the public? We do have a raised hand from David Keller. I will unmute you. Thank you, David. Great, thank you very much, Armin, for Jared's hand also to Jay for the presentation. Armin, in looking at management of Lake Mendocino and the upper and middle reach of the Russian River, we do know that even during the mandatory curtailment that came as a result of having emergency deflation from the governor, there were still 15% or so of the water rights holders in the upper and middle Russian who did not report, did not comply. And thus, management of releases from Lake Mendocino constantly have to make up for those losses in the Russian to maintain minimum and stream flows. And I didn't see anything in your report about how to manage other than asking for conservation among certain among the cities, which I think is a given. And for most of the rights holders upstream, but there is this loss that continues to plague management of Lake Mendocino storage and it's obviously a lot worse during drought periods. And I'm wondering if the agency has leaned on or would formally ask the state board to institute a higher degree of enforcement, which this year, this past year, there was no enforcement capability because the state only has 20 enforcement agents so the entire state board either to increase the budget for enforcement and that's a legislative act as far as I know. And the other long-term, what needs to be done and almost everybody I've talked to over the past 30 years that said, please adjudicate the Russian river. It needs to be brought into a rational management. The watershed is over appropriated and overdrawn and the Sonoma County Water Agency constantly has to try and keep up with that and adjust its storage and releases of water to compensate for those losses. That's a lot of water. Have there been any thoughts in that direction? Who wants to handle that with us? Maybe I'll take you just to stab. David, you've been a long-term participant in over the years on Russian River and Eel River management issues. Quite frankly, we do learn a lot under stress and under times of conservation. Right now, we're actually prioritizing working with the state board to ensure that we can get the hydrologic index moved and I'm actually anticipating friends of the Eel River's support for such a thing so that Lake Mendocino can drive our conditions each year. That by far is the most compelling need we have right now. In terms of what transpires north amongst folks that we don't have contracts with, the difficulty lies in what's the appetite of the state board for that. In many ways, it's out of our control and therefore we can't count on that happening. So we're urging the WAC members to continue to let us work in coordination and to identify solutions where possible to let us innovate like what we've done with Furo on Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma. And so I know your point of view there. I just, I don't know how strongly held that view is at the state board and whether or not they would take steps to go ahead and do that. In my mind, that's a long way off. But again, as I said, I have what is friends of the Rivers support level on moving the hydrologic index, which is really an Achilles heel right now as Don Seymour mentioned. Yeah, and thanks for mentioning that, Grant. Yes, absolutely. We do support moving the hydrologic index to Lake Mendocino watershed. It's always been kind of crazy to have it as Lake Pillsbury in the upper yield for management of the Russian River. So yeah, and if you need formal support for that at some point, let me know, we're happy to do that. And I think the state board has been interested in adjudication for a long time of the Russian. Obviously it's political lightning to enter into that. But without management of illegal and improper and unpermitted water uses and withdrawals from the Russian, the water agency is always playing catch up, particularly during drought years when there just isn't enough water to meet what should be happening. And you're required to meet excessive demands on the Russian. So anything we can do in support of that, Grant, we're happy to do that. As you well know, the stakeholders on the Eel River are tired of having the Eel River mop up the mistakes and mismanagement on the Russian. I'm not talking about you guys, I'm talking about what happens upstream. So happy to have future conversations with you about that and support where you want it. Thank you, David. Grant, I'm sure we'll be hearing more on that topic down the road. Matt, do you have a question? I did, thank you. I think this is probably for Armin mostly in the model. And I know that there's been some discussion about this in the past. Just curious as kind of a follow-up, how much the model took into account well water. I know that one of the measures for responding to the drought is for the water agency and for retailers to use as much groundwater as we can to make up the difference. But we also recognize, especially in our groundwater basin, the upper aquifer really relies on rain to recharge. And so we've seen a lot of decline and kind of an inability to do our normal well operations in the midst of the drought. So just kind of curious if the model kind of takes into consideration declining groundwater over the course of a drought. Yeah, good question, Matt. The short answer is no. Right now, we went out to all the retail customers and asked what their potential was to produce water during a drought. And then those are the numbers that we have in there. So we don't really simulate the groundwater to say that, okay, those numbers that were provided are declining over time. We've assumed kind of that face value that they're able to produce. So that is a question. I would say the numbers are fairly modest though. All of the numbers we got from the retail customers, they aren't a huge amount that's addressing it out. The big numbers are coming a lot from Sonoma's new production and the rehab production on the Santa Rosa Plain wells. And then the other measures, the conservation, the TUCPs and Kostani and the winter water, those are the big nuggets that are helping us through the, as you saw on that bar chart, the increase in groundwater production from the retail customers is a relatively small component, but yeah, it does have a question of uncertainty around it that we should acknowledge, but in the modeling, we're not taking that into account at this point. Thank you, Armin. And I know, when we provided our numbers, we tried to hedge a little bit in favor of that too, so. Yeah. Thank you for that, Mr. Salmon. Thank you. I don't know when I needed to raise this, but on the interconnected system map, yeah, it was very good, but I noticed there wasn't any watershed. There wasn't any green. And what I wanted to bring forward is that in the fire damaged areas of the county, particularly Mill Creek and the areas there, we've literally deforested the rainforest. So the logging trucks have taken live redwoods and the landowners that maintain their land. Basically, I think many times I look at the watershed as lumber. And it's been very harmful to me. I come up with a lot of anger and hate and things. So I would like to, we talk about the resiliency plan. I think in some ways we have to get out of the silos and we can't have salvage logging as an excuse to deforest the rainforest that we have. That's it. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. Any other questions from the worker at the check? And we already had, was there anyone else in the public who wanted to speak on this one? I do not see any of the raised hands. Great. So I think we can complete this one and move on, move back to agenda item 10, which I think is where we were before the congressman joined us. 2022 annual waters of plan demand assessment planning. Mr. Piazza, is this you? Yes, sir. Thank you, Chair Healy and good morning members of the WAG, Paul Piazza with Snow and Water. What are you, sufficiency manager here? It's been great that you've had all of the other presentations prior to this one. Really what you've seen, both in relation to Dawn's update on the use of our tools for TUCP for drought and also seeing some of the results of the drought. Risk assessment for the resiliency study. What we're turning to now is an annual water supply and demand assessment. This is essentially a new requirement of the state. And if you can imagine back in the last drought of 2014 through 2016, when the governor issued a statewide proclamation to reduce water use by 20% or 25% rather, the state found there was a lot of disarray at the statewide level amongst utilities and their abilities to implement either adopted shortage plans or the lack thereof. And even with the adoption of shortage plans, a clear path for actions to take to meet the reduction. So with the 2020 urban water management plan update cycle, there were some new regulations added to the water code that included a new requirement for utilities to complete an annual water supply and demand assessment and ultimately develop an annual water shortage assessment report that's due to DWR, the Department of Water Resources, July 1st every year. July 1st, 2022 is the initiation of this new code requirement. And so, Snowmow Water along with all of its contractors will be working to complete this annual water supply and demand assessment. And what's interesting is that although this was a new requirement at the state level, really this is an exercise that we've been doing regionally annually for many years. So we start off in late December, early January, assessing hydrologic conditions to anticipate our ability of our supplies to meet our contractor's demand in the near term peak demand months of summer. So the state requirement essentially is for us to document that. And with the 2020 urban water management plan, each of us, including Sonoma Water and its contractors included in their water shortage contingency plans, the essential, the language, the methodologies, the data that will be used to complete this annual water supply and demand assessment. And so we are directed by DWR to follow the procedures for this assessment that we each have included in our shortage plans, which again is a collaborative effort. The contractors have provided Sonoma Water, their annual demands for the next couple of years. We're currently in the process of converting them into a monthly time step for analysis of supply availability to meet those demands. Currently, we're in the monitor and forecast of water supply conditions period of this assessment. So we'll be distributing these monthly demands back to the contractors for their review. And then once approved, Sonoma Water's engineering staff will be undertaking the supply assessment, the results of which will be shared with the contractors for them to include as part of their water shortage reports that are also due to DWR. July 1st of this year. Included with this exercise and the report to DWR is the understanding that the results of this shortage report would dictate appropriate levels that we would take from our shortage plans and also the need to detail our shortage response actions. It should be noted that given you saw recently with the risk assessment and the resiliency study that that dry period of reservoir storage isn't predicted to occur until 2023, it's easy to think that the coming summer would indicate that we won't be implementing shortage response, but included in the water code when we do our supply availability assessment, we both have to consider the hydrologic conditions, but also any regulatory conditions in the current year that we may have to anticipate. So in that regard, as Dawn was mentioning, we may be facing similar reduction requirements as we're faced last summer. So with that, that's my update on the annual supply assessment, I hope happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Paul. Any questions from the lack of the cat? Not seeing any, is there any members of the public who has a question or comment? I do not see any raised hands. And Drew, did you receive anything? I did not. Great. So we can move on to 10A. Paul, you're still on on the water shortage allocation methodology update. Great. Thank you, Jerry Lee. So following the WAC September 13, 2021 approval and recommendation of the water shortage allocation that only a model update, Sonoma Waters Board did unanimously approve the 2021 model update, which included providing authorization to our general manager, Grant Davis, to approve what are essentially some final minor needed work on the model for some of the other agency customers. That work is underway and we anticipate, hopefully having the changes to those other agency customers and allocations final within the next month or so. And I'm happy to answer any questions regarding that, but successfully adopted the 2021 model update. Thank you, Paul. And I have to say I really appreciate the cooperation of the rest of the WAC and the TAC and making those changes because the old methodology really hammered my city as well as the city of Sonoma. And I particularly appreciate Senator Rose's graciousness and a range of those modifications. Any questions from the WAC and the TAC group? Yeah, thank you, Chair Healey. Thanks, Paul, for that update on the water shortage allocation methodology. I'd just like to remind the group here that we didn't, you know, the allocation methodology was not in place last year. So there was sort of an agreed upon allocation recognizing that we couldn't rely on the model. So this year, if conditions continue as being described and there is reduction in diversions from the Russian river, you know, with this model now being approved by everybody in the agency, then it'll be a lot simpler moving forward to just know what those allocations mean, you know, for each of the contractors. So definitely it'll be an improvement over the process that we had to go through last year. Appreciate that, Drew. Any other questions or comments from the group? Seeing no one, is there any member of the public who wishes to ask a question or comment? I do not see any raised hands. Great, Drew, did you receive anything? I did not. Okay. So we can move on to agenda item 11, Sonoma Marin Water Partnerships, Water Saving Partnership, Saving Water Partnership, excuse me, Drew. Thank you, Chair Healey. So this is a two-part item. I'm gonna handle 11A and then Paul Fiazza and Barry Dubin will handle the drought outreach messaging on part B. So in here in your agenda, similar attachments that we have every month, it just updated now through December of 2021, the conservation levels for the partnership you can see for the calendar year 2021, the partnership aggregate reduced their water use overall by 23% and there's some various charts in there illustrating the conservation levels in different graphical ways. And then while we were operating under the temporary urgency change or you can continue Roberto or Easter slide, scroll down another slide. Yeah, right there. I think Jay or Jay had referenced or Don had referenced the temporary urgency change order that expired on December 10th that order had required 20% reduction in diversions from the agency. So this is the, we were tracking that all during the implementation of that order in that order now is terminated. So this is the last report during the tracking from July through early December is showing that all the water contractors collectively met and achieved the 20% requirement and actually the actual reductions were closer to 23%. So that's the last tally from the order that expired on December 10th on that. And so again, these are pretty regular updates on a month to month basis. I'd be happy to answer any questions from the WAC or TAC on this information before turning it over on the public outreach messaging. Thank you, Drew. Any questions from the group? Seeing none, are there any questions from the public? I did not see any raised hands. Great, so why don't we move on? So Paul or Barry, you want to kick that off then? Yes, thank you, Drew. Good morning, Chair Healy, and TAC. I'm Barry Dugan from Sonoma Water, Community and Government Affairs Group. Easter, could I be allowed to share my screen? Yes, just one moment, please. Thank you. So I'll be joined by Paul Piazza on this presentation presentation. So there we are. So this is our public outreach update. As you can see, I'm sorry. So we're continuing with our drought is here messaging. Obviously everything we've heard and everything we know for the near future indicates we're still in a drought and will continue to be. And our winter campaign is underway. As we reported last month to the TAC, indoor water savings is the emphasis for February. We'll be emphasizing fixed a week leak in March. And as we have throughout the campaign, we'll continue our outreach bilingual outreach for all of our messaging. So the bilingual drought messaging includes these sort of advertisements. These are copies of print ads that are published. One in the Sonoma County Gazette and the other in La Prensa, Spanish language paper operated by the press Democrat. And this is the obvious way to save water indoors is taking a five minute power shower. In my house, our power showers are three minutes. So see if we all can't up our game a little bit. Social media ads are supported by support all of our messaging. And I wanna acknowledge the support and the collaboration we've had with all of the members of the partnership. But in particular, Santa Rosa water has been very helpful in both designing and coming up with advertising ideas. So we've really, and all the partners have been active in this program. Paul is gonna take over here. Sure, as Barry was just describing, we have had quite a bit of input from the partners. Some of the initial social media campaign ads drew some requests from the partners to pair up the social media campaign with what are more traditional bill inserts. So we did pivot quickly to create some similar advertising that would be available to all of the partners to use and to co-brand and to make available to their customers through bill inserts or postcards and the like. So a couple examples here, encouraging folks to continue the transformation away from high water use lawns to low water use landscapes. And then also emphasizing the use of graywater systems and rainwater capture as being auxiliary supplies to rely on during the winter months for rainwater into the spring and early summer, depending on rainfall received. And throughout the summer, as it applies to graywater. Next slide. And then as Barry mentioned, we are leading up to the annual fix a leak week campaign which is a campaign that is national in scope through the EPA water sense program. So we are working to co-brand some regional outreach around the efforts to pay attention to the dripping faucets, pay attention to the shower diverters that are continuing to allow water to pass out of the spigot while you're showering. And also making sure people are aware of their water meter as a useful tool for checking for leaks. And then following up to actually make repairs. Again, these are bilingual campaign pieces that are available in both English and Spanish. Next slide, please. And we are already starting to discuss next steps given the weather has been dry as you're going to be experiencing over the next couple of days, we're already starting to see temperatures in the low to mid seventies and are anticipating probably within a few short weeks to a month's time if the weather continues that we're going to have to start messaging for people to make sure their irrigation systems are being checked out before being turned on, that scheduling is in line with springtime conditions or minimized to the best of their abilities to preserve water. So with that, Barry and I are happy to answer any questions. Thank you for that, Parlor Barry. Any questions from a group? Not seeing any, is there any member of the public who would like to ask a question? I do not see any raised hands. Thank you, Easter. So I believe we can move on to item 13, since we already covered 12. And that's the TAC finance subcommittee update for FY 22-23. Kimberly Zuzino or Zuzino, are you on? I am, I'm here. Great. So currently you'll see the memo. I don't have a lot to update you on at this point. We had our first meeting. Lynn went over the entire proposed budget with the budget subcommittee and we have made comments and asked a lot of questions and Lynn and her teams are following up on that. And we will meet again on this Thursday. We met for almost two hours last week. So I expect we'll probably have another good meeting this week and hopefully have more to report out moving forward. Okay, thank you. So I guess we'll hold our questions till the next time. Is that fair? Unless anyone has something burning right now. Not seeing anyone. I've got many members of the public wanting to weigh in on this one at this point. I do not see any raised hands. Thank you, Easter. We can move on to item 14, the biological opinion status update. And Pam, are you on? I am on. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. So hopefully everybody got the attached biological opinion update that's on the screen right now. I'll run through this quickly. I know it's been a long meeting. So on the fishbowl project, staff does continue to work on moving this forward. Dawn described a little bit earlier how some of the assumptions that were made in the EIR that was released a few years ago are now not particularly accurate. So there is a lot of work being done to rerun modeling and do the impact analysis so that we can re-release or release again a recirculated draft EIR hopefully next year, but possibly not depending on how in depth. I know it's gonna be in depth, but depending on how much work that ends up being. So stay tuned on that. There's no construction on the Dry Creek Habitat enhancement project. There's no construction activity in the last period since we last spoke. So there is some update on some of the Habitat monitoring maintenance work. I believe last time we met, we talked about the flights that were done out there, the post construction aerial flights, the drone flights that were done. We did flights in October, both before and after that really large rainfall event in October to make sure that the sites were staying the way we would hope that they would. There was also a follow up flights conducted in January of this year. And as you can see in the photo, there are some willow planting along with some invasive plant removal that's gone on this winter. That work continues to date. I believe the rest of this, which sort of describes that monitoring has not changed since last time we spoke. So moving on to the next phases of expected construction for this project, phases four through six are of course being done on our cost share agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers where the Corps would pay 65% of the cost to implement the actual construction. So we have the documents for phase four of the project and that project is expected to go to construction this summer, at least start this summer with more construction in 2023. Our right of way staff and attorneys, I should say, are in the final stages of executing right of way agreements with participating property owners. And we expect those to be in place by the end of this month or in early March. We have two other consultants that are working on phases five through six, CSA and Cardinal. We have 99% design submittals from them. We expect construction of phase five and 2023 and phase six and 2024. And we have a lot of work going on with regards to right of way to both those projects, both phase five and phase six. So I won't get into the details here, you can read it in the update. There's also work continuing on this additional phase five site that they call reach B. We've met with the resource agencies to go over this with them, but they are still trying to set up a meeting, an onsite meeting with those agencies, which has been difficult to do because they've been, specifically NEMS has been restricted from actually going out in the field. I think that restriction has been lifted recently. So hopefully they'll be able to get out there with them. As far as fish monitoring goes, I think everybody knows that this monitoring is important for us to understand what's going on with recovery of coho salmon and steelhead populations in the Russian River. So we partner with California Sea Grant and are doing a lot of spawner surveys out in tributaries during the winter time. And what they're looking for is there's some really good photos here kind of to show this is what they call a red or a nest where the fish are spawning. I thought this was kind of funny that they use this word excavate, a shallow depression I think of excavate is being quite large, but this is of course being an excavation made by fish so it's pretty small. But there we have staff ourselves and Sea Grant have staff out looking for these reds or these nests that you can see in this photo that's on the screen right now. And this is a way of determining how many fish are returning to spawn to the river. So they each fish or a pair of fish of course create a red. And so they can get an idea of how many adult fish are returning every year. They can also, of course, not just determine numbers but also determine where these fish are going so that they have an idea of the distribution of the spawning for these both these species. Okay, as far as Russian River estuary management goes the estuary is open right now. And hopefully it will stay that way, but we'll see. The monitoring season starts in May and so that we'll see some changes in what goes on out there in that project at that time. We do continue to do baseline monitoring however of the pen and pencil at the mouth of the river. So the last item on here is interim flow changes and bonded an excellent job of describing that earlier in the meeting. So unless there's any questions, I won't go over that. And with that, I'd be happy to take any questions. Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Pam. Any questions from the group? Drew. Thank you, Chair Healey. Pam, on the estuary management, I've asked this before and I'm sorry I've forgotten can you remind the group how long this needs to continue? Is it until the fish flow EIR project is complete and certified or is there some other timeline that will eliminate this annual requirement? If I'm not mistaken, I think it's a 40 to 400 to $500,000 a year in budgetary impacts. Yeah, if anybody's on who grant, maybe you know better than me, my understanding is that that's to continue at least through the current biological opinion which of course expires next year in 2023. So we expect that as far as estuary management, that project, I'll call it for lack of better terminology or program will likely change dramatically in the next biological opinion. So some of that work may change at that time, but my understanding is it should go through the entire biological current biological opinion which doesn't expire until 2023. Thank you. And the only thing I would add to that through the chair is you recall that the original biological opinion was preceded by a biological assessment that took many years to conclude over a decade. This time around, we've already started, I'd call it biological opinion 2.0 and preliminary negotiations. So that type of a question I think is still in play about what level of monitoring and response is gonna be required in the new biological opinion. And just for those that aren't as familiar with this, this is what allows us or take opinion from the fish agencies for NIMPs and Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is why we so elaborately present to you and in every meeting. So very early work is beginning and we're framing the next biological opinion. Thank you for that. Any other questions from the group? Seeing none, are there any members of the public who wish to ask the question or comment? I do not see any raised hands. Thank you, Easter. So we can move on to Potter Valley Project Update and again, you're still open. Yeah, that's me too. Thank you. So I think Dawn mentioned in terms of operations of the project itself, what's going on up at the Potter Valley Project then specifically at the powerhouse that it's not operational right now. And PG&E is moving water around the powerhouse but it's at a much lower level than we would normally see at this time of year. So I won't dwell on that because I think Dawn spoke to that. So we'll talk about however, where we are at and specifically the two basin partnership is at with regards to potentially re-licensing or licensing the project. So as you can see on the screen right here, those are the, this is a letter to FERC from the two basin partnership or we've in FERC LINGO, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission LINGO we are the NOI parties. So that's what we're referring to ourselves to in this letter. So we did submit a request for an abeyance to filing the license application in April, back in September. We received a response from FERC at that time asking us to report on progress in November then again by January 31st of this year. So November of 2021 and January 31st of 2022 we did file an update to them in November and this is the last update that was due to them or status report that was due to them. And as you can see in the letter we have told FERC that we will not be filing a license application as required and we acknowledged that there's a lot of work still to do and we did tell FERC back in November about our hope that we were going to obtain some money to do some work looking at the project including looking at a sort of a non-license scenario. So we gave them a bit of an update in this letter letting them know that we did receive some funding and that we do have some work to do and look forward to working with them as they go forward and we assume at some point we don't know when but we assume at some point between now and April they'll be asking PG need to file with them a schedule and a plan for surrender of the license but again we don't know what their timeframe is on that. So we are just waiting for their response at this point although we are proceeding with the work that we got obtained some money from the state to do and that work includes, I think I described this to you in your last meeting but it includes work to look at how to potentially change the facilities within the project itself at the diversion and then again and then downstream at the powerhouse in order to make it more of a water supply project looking at water supply reliability up in the Potter Valley itself and then also looking at forming a Russian River water users forum so that we can determine who all is benefiting from water that's being transferred through the project or who has historically and whether or not they're willing to participate in funding to see that transfer continue and how much that might be that they're willing to pay in order to keep that happening. There's also some modeling work that will be done in association with what we call the run at the river alternative which is a non-power producing alternative moving water into the Russian over time but the modeling that was done previously was very high level. So we're trying to get a little bit lower level on that a little bit more information. So that's where we're at right now. I noticed yesterday's paper there was an editorial in the PD about the project and of course Congressman Huffman who was on our call earlier is very supportive of the two basin solution. I think that everybody is hoping that we can find some common ground there and implement that which is really looking at both maintaining and restoring fishery on the eel as well as continuing the diversion to the Russian for water supply purposes. That's it unless there's questions. Thank you for that. And I think if this process is gonna play out over a long period of time measured in years as opposed to anything quickly. Yes, it's gonna be a long haul. So we expect, I think this was actually spoken to an editorial, I think we expect that PG&E will probably be operating on annual licenses which is a fairly typical thing for hydropower operators when they're going through a licensing process that happens a lot. So we expect them to operate under annual licenses. Of course, we do have this whole issue of the facility being inoperable at the moment. So that adds another layer of just sort of concern for us and complication for the whole process. So we'll see how that goes. Appreciate that, Drew, did you have a question? Yeah, I just like to quickly acknowledge the good work that the agency did for getting these state grants. The study that Pam mentioned was over $2 million with a straight state grant funding and just to remind the group that one of the regional water supply resiliency study projects, Santa Rosa Plain Groundwater and Active First Storage and Recovery project, the agency was successful in getting close to $7 million in grants for that. So that's a big boost to the agency and the contractor. So good work on that. Thanks for that, Drew. Any other members of the group with any questions for Pam on Potter Valley? Through the chair, I might just wonder maybe if Esther or someone could pass along the editorial from the press Democrat, I know it's not often easy to find down in Marin County and vice versa, but if that could be sent out, at least would let folks know what Pam was referring to, is a good editorial, pretty thoughtful and describes the length and what's involved, if that's okay. No, I was surprised by the degree of knowledge on the subject that they displayed in that editorial, quite frankly. Many members of the public. That's a lot of time talking to them, so. How'd that explain, is it? Yeah. Any members of the public? I do know, oh, we just got a hand raised by Mark Malone, one moment please, and I will unmute you. Oh, a hand actually went down. Mark, if you wanna try raising your hand one more time, if you wanted to make a comment, okay, hand us back up and you are able to speak. Thank you, Esther. Just wanted to mention along the line, so what Grant just mentioned, that editorial and various news articles related to the two basin solution is available on the website, twobasinsolution.org. That's it, thank you. Thank you, Mark. Okay, so Andrew, did you receive anything on this? I did not. Okay, so we can thank you. We can move on to item 16, which is Irwin, Mr. Davis. I'll be brief given the length of this lack of tech meeting, but I always feel that these two integrated water management planning regions should be at least touched upon and always a standing agenda item, so I appreciate the Water Spike Coordination Council keeping this on the agenda. In the Bay Area, you all are aware that we're managing as fiscal agents a $20 million radar installation program that's going to effectively help on near-term precipitation. We're talking about from zero to two days and in some cases six hours, just to better inform emergency management and coordination for sanitation and water supply. That's well underway. We have contracts now with the Scripps Institute for Oceanography and folks at CW3E that have been formulating atmospheric river research, so a lot going on there, and I only raise it because our region is nine counties and we cooperate, this is one of the signature projects that you're all helping us to manage. And Dale Roberts, one of our principal engineers is stepping forward in a more coordinated way now that Jake Spalding, who may or may not be on this call, has moved into really focusing on financing. He also does the North Bay Water Reuse Authority that Director Rabbit was mentioning earlier. Secondly, it looks like the governor's task force on forestry management is likely to be in Sonoma County under Chair Gore's invitation. That is, again, the seven counties north of us that we're also a party to that we're looking at better water management and what Sam was indicating through Windsor, watershed management efforts that we're encumbered with and responsible for stewarding. So a lot of good activity as money's coming down. Certainly the North Coast Resource Partnership is very well positioned to continue small grants, disadvantaged communities, looking at equity, which was mentioned earlier, which is critically important. So those are sort of the two status reports and we'll continue to keep you updated as we go along. Thank you, Grant. Any questions from the group for Mr. Davis? Seeing none, are there any members of the public who have a question for Grant? There are not any raised hands. Thank you. So on to item 17, are there any non-obvious items for the next agenda that usually draws crickets? Okay, so I believe we're done and we'll see everyone next time. Okay. Okay, thank you. All right, thank you all. Thank you.