 Hi, Holly. Can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me? Yeah. And the lighting looks good. Nice. Do you mind if I do a screen share and you can just confirm that you can see everything? Yeah. All right. Are you seeing the presenter view? Mm-hmm. All right. Now live view? Yeah. Great. Thank you. Sure. All right. I'm going to turn my camera off and my mute myself until we're a couple minutes in. All right. I'll do the same. Good afternoon, everyone. It looks like we're still waiting for the other board members to join us. So we will hopefully get started soon. Chair Watts, we're trying to get a hold of the other board members. So sorry for the delay. Thank you for your patience and hopefully we will have a quorum soon. Chair Watts, I just connected with Board Member Walsh and he'll be joining in just a couple of minutes. Thank you very much. Hi, folks. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you, Board Member Walsh. Your video is not on, however, we can. I take it back. You are going in and out. Board Member Walsh, can you try to talk again and we'll see if we can hear you. I don't think we're getting your audio on our end. Is it connecting okay now? That sounds a little better. Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. All right, well, I will go ahead and call this meeting to order at 307. Secretary, if I could, we have a roll call. Chair Watts. Here. Board Member Grable. And Board Member Walsh. Present. Thank you. So just a reminder to all the subcommittee members to mute your phones and microphones when you are not speaking. All right, so we will move to the first item, which is public comments. So if you wish to take up, if you wish to make a comment, please via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary, do we have any live email or voicemail public comments? We receive no public comments. Great. Thank you. So we will move to item three, which is the approval of the minutes. So we're now taking comments on the minutes before approval. So 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. Secretary, do we have any live or voicemail public comments at this time? We have no public comments. All right, so if there are no changes to admit the minutes, we will accept them as is. All right, so let's move to item 4.1. Director Burke, if you could introduce the item. Thank you, Chair Watson, members of the subcommittee. I did want to let you know that I am resending the information to Board Member Grable. He has a slight conflict and will be running a little bit late, hopes to join. So apologies for that interruption. OK, so item 4.1 is our Water Use Efficiency Program and Drought Outreach Update. And Claire Nordley, our Water Use Efficiency Coordinator, will be presenting. Good afternoon, thank you. I'm just going to share my screen. All right, so good afternoon. I am Claire Nordley, Sustainability Coordinator, Water Use Efficiency Coordinator, and I'm going to be presenting today on our Water Use Efficiency Program for 2021 as well as our Drought Outreach Update. So, you know, I really want to just take the time to appreciate the huge increase in call volume that we've experienced this year, especially compared to last year. You know, marketing really does work, I think, is what this graph shows. Basically, this is call volume month over month comparing last year to this year or I should say 2020 to 2021, now that we're in 2022. And you can just see, you know, for example, in July 2021, we received over 800 calls, which is over 25 calls per day received to our team. And customers have been calling about Water Use Efficiency, general Water Use Efficiency questions about the drought restrictions, or of course, to participate in one of our Water Use Efficiency programs. So it's been really exciting to see this increase call volume. Additionally, we've seen a huge increase in our cash for grass, which is our Lawn Removal Rebate Program. As you can see, you know, a huge increase since 2019. In 2019, we've removed 9,300 square feet of grass. In 2020, that increased 26,000 square feet. And then in 2021, there was a 500 percent increase when we removed 154,000 square feet of turf. And that amounts to about $170,000 in this rebate alone that we issued. So it's really exciting to see customers taking advantage of this program. And as you all know, because you voted for it, we did increase the cash for grass rebate amount to $1.50 per square foot up from the usual amount, which is 75 cents per square foot. And that really caused a significant increase in uptake of this program. So it's really exciting to see that that rebate increase helped. And certainly, of course, all of the drought messaging that we've been doing has significantly helped increase participation in this program. Additionally, our Outdoor Water Smart Checkups or our Water Audits, as you might call them, have significantly increased as well. So in 2019, we did 87 audits. In 2020, we did 159. And then in 2021, we did over 250 audits. So that's when our wonderful technicians go out to a customer's home and look at the irrigation system, look at the irrigation controller, help the customer reprogram their irrigation controller. And it might also entail us prequalifying them for an outdoor rebate. So this is a great sort of barometer for our Water Use Efficiency programs because this program is free and it's open to any customer, whether you're a homeowner or a renter. So I think of this as sort of the barometer for the rest of our program since the entire customer base can participate in this. So again, it's just really exciting that in 2021, you know, program participation has significantly increased. And then, of course, water waste, water waste never stops. In 2021, we received over 650 reports. And these could be reports from a single family residential customer through our online reporting form that we engaged in 2020. This could be from our water waste patrols that we conducted in the morning hours, early morning hours with internal staff driving around our city and looking for water waste. Or it could be through our AMI system, which is detecting continuous water usage. And we follow up with those customers. So from those 650 reports that we received last year, we followed up over 850 times on those reports alone. So you can see some some people take a little bit of a nudge, need more than just one contact to fix their leak. And we certainly continue to follow up on those until that issue is fixed. And last year, we did proceed with a water shut off of one account that is sort of our last resort. We definitely try to educate the customer. We reach out to the customers on a regular basis to encourage them to fix their leak through letters, phone calls. We leave messages, we knock on the door, we leave door tags. We really try to never get to that water shut off situation. But in 2021, we did have to get there with only one account, which is pretty good for 650 reports. And the customer was able to fix that leak the very next day. And we turned it back on. So it was a quick resolution, which was great. We also were out and about in the community. So even though, you know, we're dealing with covid and we certainly have cut back on the in person events, we did do a significant amount of outreach in person, in a safe and socially distanced way to encourage our customers to continue to save water. So we did a series of drought by events throughout our community. We did five of them in total across the summertime. And we provided over three hundred, sorry, three thousand four hundred kits total throughout our customer base. So that's really exciting. And those drought kits include a shower head, faucet aerators, marketing materials. And this particular event that's shown here on this picture, we partnered with Sonoma Clean Power, who donated LED light bulbs. So we tried to have a water energy mix here. And then we also handed out these yard signs, as you can see here. And I have seen them sort of blanketed throughout Santa Rosa. So I think it's been really exciting and fun to see our hard work out there in the community. And then in addition to the drought by events, we also attended a Roseland back to school event. And so we put all of these drought supplies in backpacks for kids so that they could bring them home and share them with their parents. We also went to Halloween at Howard Park. We did a Roseland Trick or Treat event. And then we also provided over a hundred kits to Sonoma Clean Power's Advanced Energy Center. So when customers go into that in person building, they can also pick up a water conservation kit. So all told, last year we distributed over 5,000 shower heads and 5,000 hose nozzles. So we really were increased the volume of supplies that we provided. And it's exciting to be able to get out there in the community. So what's on the docket for 2022? Well, we did resume our Water Smart Checkups in November. It was really exciting. We had quite a few audits. And then we're now back to not doing them anymore. So we postponed them in January. We hope to be able to get out there as soon as we can. We're just waiting for it to be safe for not only our customers, but also our staff who are going into people's homes and in that enclosed environment with somebody. So we hope to resume those as soon as possible. We also plan on continuing with our AMI or Advanced Metering Infrastructure Targeted Outreach. So every month, for example, we send out hundreds of irrigation off-letters specifically to dedicated irrigation meter customers who, you know, those are commercial customers, usually are multifamily customers who have their irrigation, their dedicated irrigation meters still running. And so we send out letters to them, just letting them know that that they still have irrigation on and that it's the wintertime and they no longer need to have that on. And we get a pretty good response. We get phone calls directly in relationship to sending out those letters. We also send out high use letters. So I presented to the BPU on this previously. These are letters specifically to sent to customers who have a sudden spike in water usage. Usually that indicates that there's irrigation going on in the wintertime or it could be that there's a leak. But either way, we send out letters monthly again to just let customers know that something might be going on with their irrigation system and they need to check that out. We also continue always to send out our continuous use outreach for customers who have usage 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And then we also have been implementing rebate expiration letters. So as the customers rebate gets closer to that end date of when they're supposed to be having a post-inspection and receiving their rebate and they haven't contacted us, we just send them a friendly reminder. Hey, are you still interested in this rebate? Your money is still available, but you need to schedule post-inspection. And we've seen a really big uptake in conversions from pre-inspection to post-inspection actually receiving the rebate due to these letters. Also in 2022, we plan to continue our workshops. We have a series of workshops, just like we did in 2020. We're going to have them hopefully in 2022. Some of them will be in person. We'll also continue the virtual workshops because we've just found a huge amount of uptake for those virtual workshops. I mean, in the last workshop that we had in 2021, a rainwater harvesting workshop, we had over 700 people register. So there's no way that we could have had that kind of participation in person. So we really do want to continue some of that virtual interaction because it seems to be really tapping into a market that we haven't worked with in the past. And then lastly for 2022, we're also planning on testing some data loggers. So we want to be able to see for some of those really large commercial accounts or multifamily accounts that have large meters where it would be expected that they might have continuous usage over one hour, which is what our meters currently read. We want to see minute by minute what's going on at their site. So we're testing out some data loggers, trying to see if we can find an application that might fit for us. So in 2022, we do plan on having a robust workshop schedule. The workshop titles that are highlighted right now in bold are also going to be offered in Spanish. So we have a garden maintenance workshop that's coming up in March. That's going to be in person. You know, Fingers Cross COVID allows that to happen. We also have a Water Smart Insect Investigation. That's going to be a really exciting one where it's parents and kids being able to look at some native and low water use plants at Bayer Farm. And that one's going to be in Spanish and do some insect investigations. So we're hoping to tap into that kid and parent relationship. We have drip irrigation, gray water, laundry to landscape, a lawn gone, so that's a sheet mulching workshop and then another rainwater harvesting workshop since we had such a popular huge response last year. So now pivoting into the drought outreach that we are continuing to do on a regular basis. So our winter campaign that's currently running right now is really focusing on indoor water conservation actions, because as I mentioned earlier, people should definitely have their irrigation controllers off at this point and do not need to be watering. So we're trying to emphasize water use efficiency for the indoor sector. So we have these actionable, small, actionable items that people can take, generally behavior changes. So, for example, loading up your washing machine, using full loads, I'm taking a five minute power shower. So they're inexpensive, easy to do, easy to implement actions that can save water at your house. And then, of course, always upgrading your fixtures to save water. We always have a huge response whenever we do advertising about picking up free fixtures at one of our city locations. And this is no different. We've really had an increase in people interested in shower heads and faucet aerators from our office buildings. And so how are we getting the message out there? Of course, all of our messaging is always in both English and in Spanish. We're always tried to reach people in a diverse number of different ways. So, for example, through our water bills, we have a message that's written directly on the water bill. We do bill inserts. We have messaging on the outside of the water bill envelope as well. We also do radio ads. We work with Wine Country Radio. And we have ads in English and Spanish. We do targeted Google ads, certainly print ads, including the press Democrat. Our city connections, e-newsletter that goes out once a week on Thursdays has been a really big success for us. We always know that we get a big uptake right after an article goes out about a specific subject. Friday and Monday, we get a huge increase in call volume about whatever that article was about on Thursday. So that's been a really great way for us to advertise. And then, of course, social media. I mean, we have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We get our message out there in all of those ways. And then we also plan on having some events coming up in 2022. Hopefully that won't be canceled. St. Patrick's Day, 5K race is slated to happen in March. And so if that moves forward, we'll have a booth there like we have had in years past. But regardless of whether that in-person event occurs or not, we're certainly going to have Fix-A-Leak Week activities. So that's a week in March where we really encourage our customers to think about the leaks, the silent leaks in their house and fix those, because that can really add up to water savings over time. So we're going to be pushing toilet leaks and talking about dye tabs and really getting our customers to find and fix their toilet leaks specifically. We also do plan on having an Earth Day 2022, hopefully in-person, but if not virtually then, to be able to celebrate and get more of our customers and get more of our drought kits out there. We also plan on having some sort of a WaterSmart event that's specifically just water conservation focused at some point in the mid to late summer. It's unclear at this point whether the Wednesday night market that usually happens over the summertime is going to happen and that's usually where we have our WaterSmart Expo in May. So pending that, we can just have a separate event and we hope to have one later on in the summertime. And then, of course, always popular, the eco-friendly garden tour. This is an event that we partner with the Sonoma Marin Saving Water Partnership with. They usually do in-person tours of various different low water use and native gardens and gardens that have rainwater harvesting or gray water systems. But this year, they're going to be doing videos just like they did last year. And last year, they had thousands of views on their YouTube channel, specifically looking at these garden tours. So it's probably pretty comparable with the number of people who used to come in-person to that tour and the number of views that they're getting. We do have three Santa Rosa-specific gardens on the garden tour this year. So that's exciting that we're going to be highlighting some of our customers who have gone through our rebate programs and have installed beautiful low water use gardens. So with that, I will stop sharing my screen and see if there are any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. Do we have any board member questions? Or comments? Board member Walsh. I have a comment. What a wonderful presentation and a comprehensive program. I really want to thank you. Thank you, Claire. That's a wonderful list of accomplishments and a breathtaking list of work to go. I truly appreciate that. You're doing a great job and a lot of it is so interesting. So I'm hoping we achieve more successes or expanded successes, you say. And I was interested, is there a measured change between and use between customers that signed up for the portal to get information on their water use and those that haven't? Thank you. Thanks for the question. We haven't done an analysis yet, I think simply because we don't have enough data. The portal just rolled out, you know, a handful of months ago. And so we don't really have enough substantial data to be able to analyze water use before or after. Director Burke, maybe you have something else that. Yeah, thank you, board member Walsh. And Miss Nordley is correct. We are very interested and we want to be able to look and see what behavioral changes we would be having with the portal. The difficulty is really trying to parse it out at the same time we're doing drought outreach. So we don't really know if it's because of the portal or the drought or other activities. And so I'm hopeful that we will have a period where we're not in active shortage conditions and we can really then try and tease out the data. But that definitely conflates the savings right now. So that's a little hard for us to analyze. That's understandable. That's a listening to you and Claire. I can definitely understand that. I was all excited when I first signed up. I could have probably used less that day. But now I'm just looking at my monthly bill again. So thank you very much. Those are the only questions I have. Thank you. Any other board member questions or comments? Well, I just want to say that's an extremely large number that you saw on those virtual workshops. And I think that's really great to be able to offer a different medium and way of learning for those people who might not be able to get into a physical location. So I think that although that was not the intent of moving education into that format, it's obviously had some positive outcomes. So I think that's great to see. And I think it's really nice to be able to do both if we have the staff capacity. So I applaud that you're going to try to do that in 2022, if safety allows it. But that's an incredible amount of people to register for one workshop. So congratulations on that. Otherwise, just thank you for the update and the good work. And obviously, we still need it being pretty dry January. So thank you so much. Thank you. All right, so then we will open it up for any public comments on item 4.1. So if you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. And if you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Asa, do we have any voicemail or public comments at this time? I've seen public comments at this time. Great. All right, so if we can move to item 4.2. Thank you, Chair Watson, members of the subcommittee. Our second item is our Water Use Efficiency Rebate Program Modifications. And Claire Nordley will again be doing this presentation. Thank you. Just share my screen. Okay, so we are requesting some modifications to our existing Water Use Efficiency Rebate Programs. This is really because over time, our rebate programs have not been evaluated and kept consistent with the rising cost of water from Sonoma Water. And so this is just sort of an update to them to ensure that we're being cost effective and that we are staying the course with increasing them not above our cost of water, but generally to that cost of water. So there are four proposed changes that I recommend that we make today. So the first one is increasing our residential irrigation efficiency rebate to $300, increasing our graywater rebate to $100, increasing the recirculating hot water pump to $250, and increasing our sustained reduction rebate to $400 per 1,000 gallons saved. So I'll go over each one of these changes individually. So first, I just wanna remark that at the very top of this graph, the $1,000, that's the current amount of money that we're spending per acre foot from Sonoma Water. So we have always kept our water use efficiency rebates underneath the dollar amount that it costs us to purchase new water so that we ensure our water use efficiency rebates are cost effective. So on the left-hand side of each one of these columns in blue is the current rebate, the existing rebate for these four rebate programs that I encourage us to update. And then in the orange, it would be the proposed cost. So you can see while they are larger, of course, than the current cost of those rebates, they're still all below the water use efficiency cost effectiveness level compared to our cost of purchasing water from Sonoma Water. And you may also note on this slide that the graywater rebate and the sustained reduction rebate are not as high as they could be. We could have increased them further, but I'll explain why we did not in further slides. So again, this is just another view of our cost effectiveness. As you can see on the far left-hand side, that is our single family residential cash for grass rebate. And you can see that it's higher than our cost effectiveness level or the cost of water per acre foot. And that's because we currently have our drought special going on. We were paying $1.50 per square foot and we decided that it was important for us to achieve those water savings and more important to achieve those water savings than it was to be cost effectiveness in comparison. You can see the other rebates that we have on this slide. There's the rainwater harvesting and the clothes washer rebate program, none of which we plan on increasing at this time. The reason why we're not planning on requesting an increase for the single family residential clothes washer rebate program at this time, even though there is more room for it to be increased is because we've already actually rebated over 14,000 clothes washers in the city of Santa Rosa. We think we've reached quite a few customers with that already. And even increasing it up to the cost effectiveness level probably wouldn't decrease the amount of money it takes to buy a new washing machine. The new washing machine is between $7 to $800. And so a rebate of $75, probably not gonna drive too much more attention to purchasing a new washing machine. So why spend additional money that we could be putting into another program that really we can drive participation in and change the market. So you can see the other four rebate programs here on the right-hand side, the recirculating hot water pump, gray water, irrigation upgrade and the sustained reduction again are all below the cost effectiveness level for water use. So moving into each individual program, the green exchange program is made up of two different programs. One of them of course is our cash for grass program, hugely popular. We've removed over three and a half million square feet of turf since program inception. And then the other half of the green exchange program is the irrigation efficiency upgrade rebate. We've issued almost 2000 rebates since that program has started and saved almost 7,000 gallons per upgrade that has been achieved. So this rebate is really for people to purchase hardware equipment that will make their irrigation system more water efficient. So this could be a new irrigation controller, it could be drip irrigation equipment, it could be a pressure regulator, et cetera. We do not provide a rebate for labor. Annual participation is only about 10 customers so there's not a huge amount of uptake for this program. So we're hoping that by increasing the rebate we'll be able to capture some additional customers that may need some assistance. So currently we provide $100 worth of irrigation efficiency equipment. So again, this is hardware only. And we're suggesting that we modify this rebate and increase it to $300. This would allow customers to be able to purchase more water efficient equipment and increase the water efficiency at their property. And just to note, this is only for single family residential customers. We do have a rebate for irrigation efficiency equipment for commercial customers, but we're not increasing that rebate at this time because that one is at the cost effectiveness level for Sonoma water. So again, this is just a breakdown of the irrigation upgrade rebate. You can see the current cost effectiveness and on the right-hand side, the modified cost per acre foot. Again, it's below the cost of water purchased from Sonoma water. The second rebate that I encourage us to increase is our gray water rebate. This is a rebate where we provide financial assistance to purchase parts for a laundry to landscape system. So it's routing your washing machine water out to your landscape. There's some piping and tubing involved, a valve to turn the water from the sewer to your landscape, for example, et cetera. We do not provide a rebate for labor. The water savings for this rebate is generally about 3,700 gallons and annual participation really only about two. We don't have a ton of participation for this rebate, but we really want to encourage people to start thinking about this alternative use of water. The current rebate is $75 and we propose to increase it to $100. And the reason why we're not actually going higher on this rebate is specifically because the parts to purchase for installing a rainwater system, or sorry, a gray water system are only between $75 and $100. So even if we increase the rebate above that, customers can't, there's nothing additional to purchase. The maximum cost usually for these parts is around $100. So there's no point in increasing the rebate beyond that because it wouldn't be utilized. So you can see here that the cost effectiveness is pretty low, it's great. It's only about $600 per acre foot of water saved compared to the $1000 that we purchased from Sonoma Water. Recirculating hot water pump is the third rebate that we propose to increase. So the pump is specifically a unit that attaches to an individual fixture. As you can see here, this one's underneath the sink and it provides instant hot water. We anticipate that the water savings are approximately 5,800 gallons per installation per year. We have about six customers per year who participate. But we do see quite a lot of interest in this. We get questions about this all the time, I would say, both over the phone and in person from customers who are tired of waiting at their sink and running their sink or their shower for minutes at a time wasting water. So this is a really great rebate to help incentivize them to install this unit and have instant hot water. Current rebate is $100 and I recommend that we increase it to $250. Again, we are still below the cost effectiveness or below the cost per acre foot of water purchased from Sonoma Water with this increased rebate. And then the fourth and final rebate that I propose that we increase is our sustained reduction rebate. This is a very customizable rebate. This is usually for commercial customers. We've had a few single family customers over the years, but mostly large commercial customers. And it's basically a rebate for any kind of equipment that we don't currently have a rebate for. So for example, you can see in this slide right here we provided a rebate to Amy's kitchen for them to install new cooling system in their kettle deck. Obviously we don't have a kettle deck cooling system rebate so it can be rebated through a sustained reduction rebate. Though we've since 2000, we've rebated about 29 customers. So it's not a huge uptake, but the water savings for this program are significant. And that's because we're working with very large commercial customers building a relationship with them over time and then having them install these pieces of equipment that are huge water savers. So the total program water savings are over 54 million gallons per year. And for this rebate, we propose moving from $200 per 1000 gallons saved to 400. So we're doubling it. This will allow us to better serve our commercial customers, especially ones that are so hard hit by COVID right now. And it's still below our cost effectiveness or below the modified cost per acre foot compared to our cost for Sonoma water. So as I just mentioned, we also did some just to plug one of my wonderful team members. We did some outreach at Down Sebastible Road, going to each individual business and just doing individual customized outreach to all of the businesses along Sebastible Road. So that was really exciting that we got to be out and about in the public. So just a general slide about our rebate information. So we do currently have enough budget to be able to cover all of the increased rebates that we are proposing today. We actually have a million total dollars available for all of our rebate programs and could add more if we needed. Of course, all of our rebates are always available on a first come, first serve basis with budget availability. So I monitor the budget on a regular basis and ensure that our pre inspections that are coming in are budgeted for so we're not overextending ourselves. If this was to be approved today, these rebates will be enacted tomorrow on February 1st, allowing our customers to take advantage of them right away. And of course, we're gonna be doing some outreach if this is approved. We have our social media channels, we can do bill insert, website text and all of the ways that we usually do our outreach to be able to get this information out there. So it is recommended by the water department that the water conservation subcommittee approve new rebate amounts as followed. So for the irrigation upgrade rebate, moving that to $300, gray water rebate to 100, recirculating hot water pump to 250 and our sustained reduction rebate to $400 per 1,000 gallons saved. With that, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and happy to take any questions. Again, thank you very much for the presentation. Do we have board member questions or comments? Board member Walsh. Yes. Thank you very much, Chair Watts. I really appreciate the consideration of increasing the rebates in part at least for recognition of the increased costs, savings that Santa Rosa water experiences is also going to have. And just a question on the labor. Would it be problematic to add labor to some of these items? Obviously we did. It's straight across all the types of rebates. I just want to know a little bit more about that. Sure. Well, I guess the reason why we haven't included labor in the past is that it's so variable. So we wouldn't know if something is worth the labor amount that somebody has submitted to us versus another customer that may have very low labor costs. We also have a lot of customers who do it yourself, do the lawn installation or sorry, the lawn removal themselves. And so would it be fair for all of our customers if we provided that rebate for labor if it wasn't done across the board? Thank you. I had just one questionnaire comment. I think that the all four recommendations are a good way to incentivize hopefully more customers to participate in the program. I was curious when you start advertising, if this is recommended, will you be able to communicate the cost savings that average household would see if they were to participate in the gray water program or one of the other ones that they could see the cost of the installation versus what they would save on a monthly or annual bill? Yeah, great question. Yes, we can absolutely include the water savings. Of course, with some caveats that those savings may or may not be achieved by that individual household. For example, the gray water rebate, we anticipate over 3,000 gallons saved annually, but that's depending on the type of clothes washer that they have that might send out to the landscape and the number of loads of laundry that they do every week. So it's variable, but those are good averages. And I think you're right that customers really wanna know how much water they're planning on saving, especially compared to the costs that they may incur even despite our rebate for those specific programs. I think that would be helpful even if it is a variable average. I do think that from a customer perspective, the recirculating pump has that incentive of not sitting there and at the time as well as the water waste. So just having any other types of ways to advertise these programs that is really tangible for them to see and understand would probably hopefully increase incentives. And I do know that from like a customer perspective, there's also that time involved with the process of researching, finding out how to do it in Silphor. So any type of other incentives, I think would help. Good idea. Any other questions or comments? All right, well, let's open up item 4.2 for public comment. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. And if you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aisha, do we have any live or email or voice no public comments? There are no public comments. Great, so at this time, I would ask for a recommendation on item 4.2. Chair Watts, I would like to make that recommendation. I move that the water conservation subcommittee and the Board of Public Utilities approve new rebate amounts as follows. Residential irrigation efficiency rebate, $300. Great water rebate, $100. Recirculating water pump, $250. And sustained reduction rebate, $400 per 1000 gallons, safe. I can tell motion. All right, so with that, can we have a vote? Yes, Chair Watts. Aye. Board member Grable. Aye. Board member Walsh. Aye. Great, thank you. So that moves item 4.2. So now I'd like Director Burke to introduce item 4.3. Thank you, Chair Watts. And members of the subcommittee, our last item is 4.3. Proposed pool rebates and making the presentation will be Holly Nadeau, our sustainability technician. Thank you, Jennifer. Director Burke, I'll share my screen now. Let's share. All right, good afternoon. My name is Holly Nadeau. I am a sustainability technician on the water use efficiency team here at San Rosa Water. And I'm here to talk to you about pool rebates. Today I'm presenting information about two new rebate offerings, a pool removal rebate and a pool cover rebate. We first began exploring the possibility of offering a pool removal rebate after two of our customers reached out wondering if we had such a rebate. With pool programs front of mind, we then found that of the customers that did want to keep their pool but had it uncovered, many would utilize a pool cover rebate to install a cover. After much research and thought, we're happy to present to you both of these new program offerings. I'll start with the pool removal rebate. The pool removal rebate provides a financial incentive to all customer classes for the replacement of in-ground swimming pools and in-ground spas with a qualifying low water use landscape. As with all of our program offerings, we've taken a holistic approach in designing this rebate, taking into account environmental impacts as well as water savings. Additionally, many customers who have a pool might not realize that removing their pool is even an option. Customers may think that they need to keep their pool and maintain it or drain it and leave it as an eyesore, but we hope that this rebate will advertise to customers the possibility of removing their pool if they no longer want it, as well as steer their thinking and what to replace their pool with. Here's some background information about pools in Santa Rosa. There are about 2,650 residential swimming pools in the Santa Rosa water service area. About four residential pool removal permits are filed each year with permit Santa Rosa and the pool removal permit fees are currently typically $160. Also, the average size of a residential in-ground pool in California is 450 square feet. The pool removal rebate will be offered as part of our green exchange program, which includes the irrigation efficiency rebate and cash for grass, which rebates customers for replacing their high water turf with a low water landscape. The pool removal rebate dollar amount and maximum square foot area will be equivalent to that of our standard cash for grass rebate. So the pool removal rebate rates will be 75 cents per square foot up to 1,000 square feet which comes to a maximum $750 rebate. Both the cash for grass and pool removal rebates will contribute to the same rebate maximums. The pool removal rebate project will be held to the same requirements as the cash for grass rebate project, such as the area needs to be drip irrigated or hand watered. Only low water plants can be installed in the project area and enough low water plants need to be installed so that at least 50% of the project area is covered at plant maturity. You can see on the side a real world example that comes from one of the customers who did reach out to us interested in a pool removal rebate. This customer has a 387 square foot pool that they wanna replace with a low water landscape which would result in a $290.25 rebate. Here you can see our pool removal rebate compared to that of other water agencies. We investigated the existence of a pool removal rebate at 15 other municipalities across the Western United States and found only two utilities that offer a pool removal rebate, Valley Water and the city of Scottsdale in Arizona. Our rebate is on par with what they offer and both agencies are also using their lawn removal program to provide this rebate. We've calculated that we can save 4,950 gallons each year for an average size pool removed in Santa Rosa through this rebate. These water savings come from the replacement of a high water landscape like a pool with a low water landscape. We estimate about four pool removals per year which would result in an approximate cost to Santa Rosa water of $1,350 and save 19,800 gallons each year after. After 25 years, four average sized rebate projects would result in over one and a half acre feet and water savings. Now onto the pool cover rebate. The pool cover rebate is intended to provide a financial incentive for Santa Rosa water customers of all customer classes to install a pool cover and reduce water loss due to evaporation. According to the US Department of Energy, in addition to water savings, pool covers reduce the amount of energy used to heat a pool and also reduce the amount of chemicals that need to be added to a pool. Some background on pools and pool covers. Again, we have about 2,650 residential swimming pools in the Santa Rosa water service area and the average size of a residential in-ground swimming pool in California is 450 square feet. The life expectancy for qualifying pool covers is two to seven years for a bubble, also known as solar cover, eight to 12 years for a foam cover and seven to 11 years for a solid track cover. Also several other municipalities in California offer similar pool cover rebates. This rebate will provide customers a $50 credit on their water bill for purchase and installation of a qualifying pool cover for their pool. The qualifying pool cover types are a bubble or solar cover, a foam cover and a solid track cover. Chemical and liquid covers don't qualify because they require ongoing and frequent purchases of more liquid to maintain the cover and solar disc covers don't qualify because they don't cover enough of the pool surface area to achieve the intended water savings. The qualifying pool cover must be new at time of purchase and cover at least 75% of the pool surface area. We require 75% coverage as opposed to 100% coverage because some pools are irregularly shaped which makes it difficult to cover the pool surface entirely. The application for this rebate will make available online and as a hard copy at our office. Here's our pool cover rebate compared to that of other California water utilities. And you can see that our pool cover rebate falls in with the standard of other utilities. We've calculated that 17,298 gallons of water are lost to evaporation each year for an average sized pool in Santa Rosa without a cover but installing a qualifying cover can save 12,325 gallons each year. We estimate that we'll have 10 rebate participants a year which would cost Santa Rosa water $500 and save 123,250 gallons each year after for the lifetime of the pool covers. After two years, which is the minimum life expectancy for a qualifying pool cover about a quarter of an acre foot of water could be saved by the 10 installed pool covers. This graph shows the costs to implement each of these new rebates compared to the cost of water per acre foot from Sonoma water. You can see both rebates cost less to implement than the cost of water from Sonoma water which is about $1,000 per acre foot. This graph is similar to one that Claire presented earlier but I've added the pool removal rebate and the pool cover rebate on the right side of the graph. You can see that both of these rebates are cost effective compared to the price of water from Sonoma water as well as compared to the rest of our rebate program offerings. There's approximately $461,000 available in the CIP budget for this increase in rebate costs. All rebates, well, these rebates will be available first come first serve like all of our rebates that we offer as long as budget is available. And if approved, these rebates will go into effect February 1st of this year which is tomorrow and our outreach to promote these new rebates will include social media posts, bill inserts and updated information on the website. It's recommended by the water department that the Water Conservation Subcommittee approve the pool removal rebate and the pool cover rebate as described. This concludes my presentation and I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thanks. Thank you very much for the presentation. Are there any board member questions or comments? Board member Walsh. Thank you very much. I wanted to thank Holly for very, very well thought out presentation. I appreciate the recommendations and I intend to support them. And just a question on the pools. Do we have a guess of the approximate cost or somebody to remove? The average size pool, what that entails, but just a big concern maybe that the rebate's so low that it's not as much as an incentive as we may attempt. Yeah, it can cost thousands of dollars to go through one of these pool removals and you're right, this amount isn't so big that it'll necessarily convince somebody to do it. So that's why our thinking behind this rebate is that we're gonna reach the folks who don't know that it's even an option, so would be interested otherwise or hopefully steer the thinking for the folks that are gonna do it anyways, but maybe we can convince them to put in that low water landscape instead of just hardscape. Right, I remember you saying that you're trying to, it's part of the education. I'm looking at rebate, what? I can actually remove a pool, okay? Yeah, that's part of it. God, thank you very much. And if I could just add on board member Walsh, we're not looking to encourage pool removal. What we're really looking to do is shape if you're already gonna make that decision what you put in after. So that's really what this rebate is targeting. Great, thank you very much. Any other board member questions, comments? I just had a clarifying question for the board or for the pool cover removal. It said $50 or cost of the cover. Is that what that said or was it? Probably it said $50 or up to the cost. So not to exceed the cost of the cover. So is that $50 an average cost for a pool cover? I don't know what the cost would be. Typically it would be more the most affordable kind of pool cover seems to be the bubble or solar cover. And if you had a really small pool, maybe like really tiny, maybe it would be under $100, but typically they're over $100 or a few hundred for that kind. And other kinds can cost upwards of $1,000. My only kind of comment is I do know that we have some pool swimming centers that are owned by the Svia Santa Rosa that maybe we could also encourage them to participate in the pool cover program. So I don't know if that is used just when we are trying to educate and advertise for our customers to also make sure that internally we are following the same advice that we are giving out. So I think it's a very exciting to have two new programs and hopefully the ones that have inquired about it already and wanted to pull permits, especially for the removal, will have a little bit more incentive to do so. Thank you. And I totally agree about making sure our facilities are using a pool cover. All right, so if there are no other questions or comments, I will open it up to public comments on item 4.3. 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. Secretary Aitha, do we have any raised hands or email or voicemail public comments? You have no public comments. Thank you. So I will entertain a recommendation for item 4.3. I will recommend that the Water Conservation Subcommittee approve the pool removal rebate, pool cover rebate programs and amounts as described. Second. Thank you. With that, we will conduct a vote. Chair Watts. Aye. Board Member Gravel. Aye. Board Member Walsh. Aye. Great, thank you very much. Well, that concludes all of the items on our agenda. Thank you all for your presentations and your time this afternoon and have a good rest of your week. Thank you, Chair Watts. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you, Chris. Hope your babies are having fun.