 administration reopened the facility to house migrant children. I haven't got the call back yet from David to see how Paul, I sent him like a voicemail. He's my insurance agent. Oh, nice. So, if I hear anything, I'll let you know. Okay, thank you. Thank you. David Mitchell, how are you? How are you, sir? All or one on the phone? Is there someone other than David on with us? Oh, hi. My name's Georgie. I'm just a citizen and I wanted to learn more and I noticed that this meeting was open to the public. It sure is. Georgie, if you wouldn't mind, just for the record, for the informational hearing, your first and last name, obviously Georgie. Yeah, my full name is actually Georgiana. It's G-E-O-R-G-I-A-N-A. My last name is Durram. That's the lower case, D-E, space, capital R, H-A-M, as in Mary. Okay, Durram. Great. Glad to have you here. Thanks for making this open. No problem. I'll give it a minute or two here in case there's anybody else that's looking to log in. And David, I don't know if you can hear me. I haven't been able to hear you, but I see you there. There is a chat feature if anybody has anything they want to type in for questions, but we'll also keep this pretty casual with conversation. I'm going to give it two more minutes and at 7.05 I'll get rolling. Georgie, what town do you live in? I live in South Burlington. I actually recently moved here from Huntington. Okay, nice. Yeah. Welcome. Thanks. Where are you guys from? I live in Williston, and our plant here is just down the road from you in South Burlington on Queen City Park Road behind the New Haniferts and just a Pine Street intersection. Cool. Not only the general manager, I'm a paying customer on the Williston water system. Nice. You're a stakeholder in two parties. That's right. Yes. One more minute and we'll get going. Okay. We'll get going now. So Georgie, I'm Joe Duncan, and anybody else who may be watching because I see town meeting TV is logged in as well. Anybody else who's watching, welcome. I am Joe Duncan, the general manager with Champlain Water District, and I'm here tonight to present what we're looking at for a bond vote for the Champlain Water District general obligation bond in the amount of $1,090,607 for construction of various capital assets we voted on on town meeting day, March 2, 2021. And before I get going too far with this, welcome back, David. Hopefully you can hear us. Thank you for getting back on. And are you able to try to see if I can hear you? All right. So, and so thank you, Pete, for also being here. Pete is one of our board members from Shelburne. So this bond vote here, I'll give you a little background about who we are, what we do, and then why we're looking at this bond. And so we are Champlain Water District. We are Vermont's largest water supplier. We went online in April of 1973. So we're not quite 50-year-old, 50-years-old just yet. We are a municipal regional water supplier, which basically means that we sell our water on a wholesale basis to 12 municipal water systems in Jenton County. And we are a consolidated water district. We are a municipality, so we have all the rights of a municipality. We just, the only thing we do is water. So we don't have any other, any other business other than selling water. So we sell this water to 12 systems in Jenton County. It's done in eight communities. There are 12 water systems within those eight communities. We start out here in South Burlington, where our plant is. We go down to Shelburne, over to Williston, over to the town of Essex, as well as the village of Essex Junction, up to the town of Milton, into Winooski, as far east as the village of Jericho. And then the town of Colchester is unique. They don't have their own water system that's owned by the town. They're actually made up of several fire districts and water systems within Colchester. There are five of them, and we serve four of the five in Colchester. There's Colchester Fire One, which is St. Mike's area. There's Colchester Fire District Number Three, which is pretty much most of the village area and the Camp Johnson area. Then there's Colchester Town, which is kind of a little bit of a misnomer, but it's Exit 16, where Costco is in Watertower Hill. Then there's a little small system called Malis Bay Water Company that is kind of founded by Winooski on Malis Bay Ab, but it's within the town of Chester. Those are the four that we serve. The City of Burlington has their own system, so they are not part of our district. We do have an interconnect with them, where we can supply them water on an emergency basis and vice versa. Then there's also one other system called Colchester Fire District Number Two, and they actually buy water from the Aburling. There's a little bit of information around about what happens with water in the general county area. When you look at all this, we are a 70 square mile county service area. There's about, in these 12 systems, there's about 25,000 connections, and we service about 75,000 people within those 12 systems. As I mentioned, we are a wholesaler, so we provide our water to that system, and then once that water is to that system, there's individual water systems that the town of Willsden owns, that the town of South Burlington owns, individual mains that go from our transmission main to your residences and businesses in each of those communities. That's how we're set up. You can kind of see here, it's just meant to be sort of graphical, but the blue lines are the mains that we own, and those blue lines make their way out to Jericho and up to Milton, down to Shelburne, and that's our transmission mains that go to each community. As a wholesale water supplier, we are very focused on continuity of supply, redundancy, reliability, making sure that we have no surprises that water is getting to everybody on a 20-7 basis. In order to make sure we maintain that level, we, in 2002, developed a master plan, a 20-year master plan, and we're coming up on the end of that 20-year master plan, but it really kind of defined a lot of improvements that we wanted to do over that 20-year period, and really focused in on reliability, redundancy, and making sure that we had a very robust system. Over those past 18 years, we've done a lot of the projects that were identified in that 2000 master plan. Most recently, we had a bond in 2016 for a water storage tank at our plant, as well as a tank in Williston. Those were all part of our master plan. Then we also passed another bond recently last year for a pump station out in Essex, as well as a redundant water line in Colchester. I'll talk a little bit about that when we talk about our debt service. This whole capital improvements plan that we put together was really looking at trying to use our capital reserves for smaller funds and then using general obligation bonds for larger capital projects. That's the model that we were trying to go through with this in getting our master plan put together. What we try and look at is these bonded projects to do these larger capital projects. We had a bunch of projects that back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s have been paid off. As they've been paid off, we're used to paying somewhere between $800 to $1 million a year at debt service. Our rate supports a debt service in the amount anywhere in that $800 to $900,000, maybe $1 million a year. What we like to do is as debt service falls off, we like to backfill it with a similar amount of debt service that just fell off so that we don't have to increase the rate, but we are able to construct new infrastructure or replacement infrastructure because things get old. As they get old, they get worn, and they need replacement, and they need maintenance. We like to look at our infrastructure, put together an asset management plan that reinvests back into our system so that we don't get to the end of the life of that item and have to put a lot of money into it. We're constantly looking at as debt service falls off. This green is our current debt service. As you can see, in 2020, we did the tank projects, and that brought us back up to around 876. We have some more debt service that's falling off. This red that you see here is this Essex West Palm Station project that we bonded on last year and passed. That backfills and brings that back up to where we want it to be. Then there's some concepts of some future projects that are out there that may or may not happen. Again, the idea is we've targeted future projects that backfill and maintain that $800 to $900,000 a year in debt service payment that's within the existing rate structure. Ultimately, this whole idea is we reinvest our infrastructure without resulting in an increase to our wholesale rate to our end users. That's our mindset going forward. One of the things we're going to talk about the bond next, but one of the things about the bond is really tied to this projects that you see that are in red, the Essex West Palm Station and the Colchester South project, as well as this dip that you see in here that occurred. What's happened is is we've been able to obtain grants and we've had project underruns. That's where this concept of this bond comes in. Very unique amount, $1,090,607. That doesn't sound like a very specific number. It is because we've had four previous bond votes. All of those previous bond votes have underrun for various reasons. Whether we got good competitive bids and they came in under our estimate or we got grants that allowed us to not have to spend the total bond amount. Each year, we have to report these unused bond authorizations as a liability. We got thinking to ourselves, we have some of these projects that are important projects for us, but they haven't risen to the level of putting a bond together to make that investment. They're within our capital improvements plan to be used for reserves over the next three or four years. The thought was, the Mont Municipal Bond Bank right now is at a historical low. A 15-year loan is around 1.5%. We got thinking to ourselves, we could wait three or four years and do some of these projects at total around $1.1 million, or we could look at using this unused bond authorization that's already built into this model here because there's underruns that we've experienced that we can take on a $1.1 million bond vote and still be within our current rate structure without looking at a rate increase. We can do several projects that were scheduled for three to four years out and we can do it in today's dollars where the market is a little bit more competitive at the moment as well as who knows where inflation is going to be. All that being said, we said to ourselves, let's let's repurpose this excess bond authorization to do a variety of projects within our capital improvements plan, do them in today's dollars, do them now, and really focus on things that we feel our high value, high return on investment, and increases our reliability with our system. With that, we've got a variety of projects that we know will bring us into the $1.1 million range and they're all really focused on system reliability. I'll walk you through what each one of them is. We've got some stuff that we do at our raw water pump station that's super critical. We've got some meter vaults that we need to work on our filter water tank here, part of the accounting system, some pump variable frequency drives, thermocline and plate fencing. I'll talk about what each one of those is as we go through here. We draw water out of Shelburne Bay right outside of Red Rocks and about 80 feet down in the lake, about a half a mile out. We do that using six pumps that are, if you ever walk down and find a little overlook in Red Rocks Park and look down and see a little structure down there, that's our intake building. It's got six pumps down there and as they start to age and they start to, it's been 20 years since we've touched those pumps, we took one of them out of service recently and looked at the condition of them. This was the existing condition of that. We wound up refurbishing it, the pump can itself, and then we replaced the motor and replaced the drives. We want to do that with the remaining pumps and we've got, targeted over the next two years to replace one per year. We've got six, we've already done one, we've got another two we want to do and then ultimately we'll plan to do the rest in the future, but under this one we have two raw water pumps that we want to replace and upgrade and so that's a key feature for us because if we don't have water being pumped out of the lake, we don't have water going out to our user because it comes up to our plant, we treat it at our plant and then we push it out into the system. Getting it out of the lake and up to our plant is key. One of the other things we're going to use it for is a particle counting system. We have eight filters at our plant and our filters use mixed media, a mixture of garnet, sand and what happens is all the water comes in, it floats down in, goes through the sand and anthracite in particular gets filtered out and we use these particle counters to verify that the filters are meeting the level of treatment that we're looking for. Those are about 20 years old, they're in need of replacement, they're about 10,000 piece and so we've got to go through and replace those, we're looking to replace those under this project and take advantage of the bond that's before us to go ahead and do those. They're very key in optimizing and providing a high quality drinking water and so it's a critical tool that we want to keep in our toolbox to do this. The whole idea here is that we want to improve system redundancy and reliability as well as physical safety. Right now our site doesn't have a fence around it so we're looking to put a plant perimeter fence on there just so that we can make sure that we have a secure site. Unfortunately, some of the recent activities that you've seen go on and I know some of it's been cyber related but there's also been some other physical security issues at facilities as of late and it's really brought it to our attention that we need to have that here. I think it's great that we live in the Green Mountain State where I think we live in a very safe environment but fortunately we've done some recent work with the Department of Homeland Security and that was one of their top recommendations to us was to appear at a site from outside access as well as other things within the plant but that was sort of the biggest takeaway. We also have, it's called Well 7, there used to be a well out at Camp Johnson that fed the fort as well as Camp Johnson as well as Water Tower Hill and when we went online in 73 we ran our water main up to that and converted it from a well into a meter vault and the meter vault was below ground and in an old concrete bunker and we put all our electrical down there and we're starting to have problems with the electrical down there as well as some the aging of the piping and infrastructure in there and so we did a phase approach where we put a building over top of that to get all of our electrical up out of the ground and into that and create some space down there to allow us to redo the piping in that vault down there so we're planning on replacing all the meter vault piping down in that meter vault. That's one of our other projects that we have and then the last two projects I think are pretty interesting. The one is the south filtered water tank a couple years ago 2016 we passed a bond to put a second filtered water tank in there. We like to have at least two of everything where we can for a redundancy standpoint. All of our drinking water when it comes out of the filters the last thing we do before it gets sent out is disinfect it and the first step in disinfecting it is putting it into a big contact tank where we add some chlorine and that chlorine kills any of the remaining microbiology that might be that might have made its way through the filter so it's a final contact kill or we send it out into the system and so we had one filtered water tank it was called our south filtered water tank. This blue glass fuse to steel tank that you see here and it's been aging and there's been some issues with the concrete cracking we've also had some issues with the the glass panels starting to leak through and so it's in need of some repair fortunately we can't could not take it offline to repair it because it was the only one we had so we built this new one if you ever come down Pine Street and you come to Queen City Park Road you'll see a a whitish grayish tank that's our our new filtered water tank our north one now that we have that in service we can take this tank offline and make repairs that that will allow us to extend that tank's life for the next at least 10 to 15 years so we want to get in there fix the concrete on the outside and then fix some of the and seal up some of the internals so that we we don't have some of the leaking that's going on and extend the life of that tank. Last project that we have sounds maybe more complicated than it is it's the Lake Thermocline system and so like I said we grab water out of Shelburne Bay uh somewhere in the vicinity of about where my mouse is there and so the La Platt is the major drainage system into Shelburne Bay and so there's a USGS gaging station on there that monitors flow and we can get a sense of what's going on with the with the activity in the La Platt and that tends to influence the water quality within Shelburne Bay if you think about it if the river's up flowing high chances are you're going to get a lot of a lot of sediment and debris washing into the bay like you see in the picture here um especially in uh you know when you get to the spring runoff or you get some of those interesting summer storms that we've been getting as of late with uh that are causing a lot of erosion and flash flooding so at our intake we have what we call as a thermocline and that thermocline monitor uh measures it's got in 10-foot intervals it's got a temperature sensor and so what we do is over top of our intake we measure the temperature at 10-foot intervals so you can see that at the top of the water in the in the summertime it's warm at the top and as you get down towards the bottom it's cold you've gone 80 feet down and so uh what's interesting about Lake Champlain and it happens within Shelburne Bay is there's what's called an internal station so the the lake actually because of northerly winds at times but the lake actually flows to the north to the Roushlo and St. Lawrence River um you have this water trying to flow north and the wind trying to keep it back so it causes this rocking of the lake back and forth so you can kind of see that happening here in the picture here and so there's times where um when there's a thermocline in place where there's warm water over top and cold water uh underneath that warm water if you get a a storm the uh the material tends to stay buoyant and stay up in the in the warmer water in the winter this becomes all cold like right now we're basically 32 degrees just just just barely above frozen and so this is all blue so if you get a storm that comes along it really impacts the buoyancy you know and can allow a lot of that sediment to potentially make its way down into our intake and so what we do with this thermocline is we know that if we have certain conditions across the the levels of our of our intake combined with snow rainfall events and the information from the um the Platte River stream gauge we've seen enough patterns where we can estimate what we think we're going to see for increased turbidity or increased sediment coming into our into our plant and we can proactively adjust our operations that are planned consider changing our dosing of certain chemicals to improve removals if we have more turbidity or take other steps that we might want to so this has been a really key piece of technology for us this thermocline system that allows us this next level monitoring of of how to prepare for um or events that occur within uh Shelburne Bay so our goal is to construct all this over the next three years if bond vote passes uh the majority of the work will most likely be done in 21-22 but we're giving ourselves a little little leeway in case we can't get it all done uh Olas in the next three years um we would be using a Vermont municipal bond bank loan uh looking at a 15-year term with a rate of 1.54 percent our feeling is is if we can borrow that at 1.54 percent um you just look at inflation of what we probably would be constructing this project at three or four years down the road we should be um ahead of the game so that's our that's our overall plan so on town meeting day we are asking voters to uh repurpose previously authorized bond indebtedness for a total amount of one million ninety thousand six hundred and seven dollars and uh this will not result in any great increase and uh it will be um it'll be held on uh town meeting day is Tuesday March 2nd next Tuesday at your respective poll locations in whatever community you live and from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and uh we uh I'll I'll take any questions or anything you may have uh based on uh all the information I knew I probably throw a lot out out there at you but uh any questions of me I either put everybody to sleep or uh did a really good job not sure which I'll uh um but that is presentation was presentation was good Joe oh hey thanks Pete I'll find and uh the public I'm sure appreciates it um did answer a lot of my questions thank you okay good okay well great um so yeah like I said it'll be uh that's what's on the table uh next Tuesday there should be uh if you live in uh South Burlington Shelburne Wilson Essex Milton Wynuski your Colchester it will be on the same ballot you have as your um as your town articles if you live in uh Jericho uh the you need to be a village Jericho resident and they will have a individual ballot um separate from the town article for you to uh vote on anybody have anything else I really appreciate everybody coming and if uh if you if you don't have anything else for me I uh I hope you have a have a great evening and and enjoy the rest of the day and uh look forward to having everyone vote on town meeting day get out and vote okay thank you everybody