 Good afternoon. I'd like to call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities for the City of Santa Rosa to order. Can we have a roll call, please? Chairman Galvin. Here. Vice Chair Noni. Here. Board Member Bannonfort. Here. Board Member Bannister. Here. Board Member Grable. Here. Board Member Watts. Here. Any statements of abstention by board members? Hearing none. We have no study sessions. The minutes for October 17th and November 21st will all be approved. We are all present. We'll move to item 5.1, which is a staff briefing on the 2019 compliance update. Dr. Burke. Sure. We have Heather Johnson, our Environmental Compliance Officer, who's going to give the staff briefing. Welcome, Ms. Johnson. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer, for the introduction. Good afternoon, Chair Galvin and members of the Board. I'm Heather Johnson, as Jennifer just said, Environmental Services Officer, and I will be giving the 2019 compliance update. So I just want to start by telling you guys something that you probably already know, but reiterating that we at Santa Rosa Water strive to protect the public health and minimize our operational impacts on the environment through complying with regulations. Regulations that are there to protect water, they're there to protect air, they're there to protect land. But we also strive to remain transparent and to foster public trust, and so offer this following presentation. Today, I'm going to go over these three main areas, the sanitary sewer collection system, our wastewater treatment, and recycled water along with our air quality and emissions. I'm going to talk about the regulations that apply to them and our 2019 non-compliant events and then I'm going to go into emerging regulatory issues that may affect our compliance programs. So our sanitary sewer collection system is regulated by the statewide general permit for sanitary sewer systems, and it requires that Santa Rosa maintain a sanitary sewer management plan. And the main goal of the sanitary sewer management plan is to prevent sanitary sewer overflows. The SSMP or sanitary sewer management plan is managed by our local operations division. And in 2019, we had two sanitary sewer overflows that happened during the 50-year storm event that we had early in the year. I think it was February, which resulted in flow exceedances in our sewer line. I wanted to point out that we had no sanitary sewer overflows related to our commercial or industrial sector and kind of highlight our environmental compliance section at this time and the service that they provide to local operations through their Fat Soils and Grease Source Control program. So the environmental compliance section operates a rigorous inspection permitting and public outreach program, and they through their permitting and inspection program have been able to reduce the amount of grease that's in the sewer lines, especially in the downtown area where there's a heavy congregation of restaurants to the point where our collections crew, our local operations crew, have to do less cleaning in that area. So I have two maps up there for you. One is from 2008, and I don't know if you can really see, but the yellow and the red on there are from when they came and they TVed and they cleaned the lines. And they marked up areas that were moderate to mild grease. And you can see that there's quite a few areas. And then if you look at the 2019 map, the orange and the green actually represent, they both represent mild buildup in the line. One is for grit and one is for grease. So it just really speaks to the effort that environmental compliance has done and kudos to them. So for our wastewater treatment and our recycled water, we we have an MPDS permit that's held by our Laguna treatment plant, and that's for the discharge to receiving waters and also for water reclamation requirements. We have Title 22 for our recycled water, and then we have the state water board general order for biosolids, and that's how our land application is regulated. In 2019, there were two leaks from the expansion joints of our geysers distribution system. And those were discovered during a routine shutdown of the system, and it was about 75,000 gallons. We had 52,000 gallons from our reclamation system, and those leaks came from various things at various times. They could be from over irrigation, from a pond overfilling, from leaking valves, and there were some pipe breaks as well. The last one up here on the table was from our treatment plant, and it was from our ultraviolet disinfection system, and it was 120 million gallons for 41 hours, so almost a two-day event. And I just wanted to go into a little bit more detail about that one, so I have this next slide. So during February, that same February with the 50-year storm event, we had extremely high flows coming into the treatment plant, and our ultraviolet system is rated to handle 67 billion gallons per day coming through it, and so when we go over that, we were putting more than 67 through that system, and so that water is considered off spec, all of that water, and it's, for a good portion of that time, I think it's nice to point out that we were still meeting our minimum UV dosage, even though we were above the rated flow. For about 55 million gallons of that 120 total, we did drop down below the UV dosage minimum. So, and then what we do with our off spec water when we have it, we isolate that water in brown and alpha ponds, so those are circled in the middle of your screen, and then we will, we can also isolate it in B pond, which is circled down at the bottom of the screen. So we were sending the water to B pond, alpha ponds, and brown ponds, and we were nearing our storage capacity for the off spec water ponds, and just overall storage capacity. So we started discharging at that time, and that is when we discharged, but I really wanted to point out here that at no time did we discharge off spec water to the Laguna. The discharges were of spec water. Okay, so our air quality is regulated by a Title V federal permit that the Laguna treatment plant has, and then we have the state with the California Air Resources Control Board, which does our portable equipment, and we have portable equipment permits for local operations and regional operations, and then our Bay Area Air Quality Control District gives us a permit to operate, and those are for the sewer and water lift stations for local, and then we have some for the treatment plant that go kind of above the Title V at this time. In 2019, we had one non-compliant event, and that was from our digester gas. We treat the digester gas for hydrogen sulfide, and there's a limit of 50 parts per million, and we went over that one time. The Air District did come out, and they did issue us a violation for that one. All right, so our emerging regulatory issues, we're going through two permit renewals right now. One is for our NPDS permit, and we're doing that with the regional board, and then we have our Title V air permit, and we are working with the Air District on renewing that permit. The Russian River Pathogen TMDL was actually completed in 2019. I believe Vice Chair Arnone came and spoke at the adoption hearing along with my supervisor, Sean McNeill. We have another TMDL for the nutrients in the Laguna, and Santa Rosa Water Stop along with regional board staff have been working together. We've provided them with some nutrient data that we did some monitoring and collecting within the Laguna, so we look forward to collaborating with them further during this next year. We're going to be transitioning our recycled water program over to the statewide general order. This is most likely going to happen in concurrence with our NPDS permit because it's currently housed in the NPDS permit, so if they need to come together. Then with regards to emerging contaminants, PFAS and PFOA have surfaced to the top. If you don't know what those are, they're a manufacturing chemical that they apply because they have the ability to repel water and oil, so they put them on non-stick pans or like the lining of cardboard boxes, you'll see them. They're also used in fire suppressants. So anyway, staff is staying on top of that. We're attending seminars, we're going to trainings just in case any future regulations for PFAS or PFOA come or any monitoring requirements. All right, thank you for having me here today. I am happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Ms. Johnson. Board member questions? Very good. Thanks for the presentation. Thanks for the update, and nice to see that for the vast majority of the time we're in compliance. That's good. We are. Thank you. The second staff briefing is on the Laguna Environmental Lab update. Dr. Burke. So we have Sean McNeil, our Deputy Director of Environmental Services who's going to do the staff briefing. Welcome, Mr. McNeil. Thank you. Let me just get this set up. Good afternoon, Chair Galvin, members of the board. Today I'm here to talk to you, just give you a little update and remind you about the little gem that we have hidden out at the Laguna Treatment Plant called the Laguna Environmental Lab. The Laguna Environmental Lab is located at the Treatment Plant. It's been there since 1968, was expanded recently, and the purpose of today's presentation is just kind of give you a little overview about this lab and a little tour of what it looks like in the lab a little bit, and some of the activities that the lab does for the department, as well as other elements of the city, and just kind of talk a little bit about who we serve. The Laguna Environmental Lab, as I mentioned, was started in 1968. At that time, its primary function was to provide physical and chemical measurements pertinent to the wastewater treatment plant. Later on, shortly after, oops, the Laguna Environmental Lab, or excuse me, in 2000, Laguna Environmental Lab expanded to increase the amount of analytes that he could run, took on additional clients doing water quality, as well as supporting stormwater and the police department and fire departments. That expanded the space of the lab to 10,000 square feet. It operates 365 days per year to meet these regulatory requirements, performing over 500 different analyses on 500 different analytes in drinking water, wastewater, soil, plants, and hazardous waste, and the lab is currently staffed with 14 individuals. The Laguna Environmental Lab is one of the largest and most sophisticated accredited municipal labs in our region. The lab has expanded our service to include not only our treatment plant process, but also compliance monitoring, water quality, stormwater, and as I mentioned, supporting police and fire for any environmental investigations that they may have for spills and environmental crime scenes. Last year, the lab took on a big project, which was a special study to look at how a treatment plant could change some of its processes to reduce the amount of phosphorus in our wastewater. This one project alone amounted to about 48 hours per week of additional staff workload, and lasted for about two months as we were trying to change our processes and make sure that we knew exactly what was happening throughout that process. Ultimately, that project didn't result in a change in our process, but through that lab data and having the staff on site able to run those tests made it much more cost-effective to do that analysis and able to really get that data back into the hands of the consultants that were helping us guide us through that process. Here's kind of just a breakdown of the workload that we typically see in the Laguna Environmental Lab in this chart here. This is back to the data from 2016, and the reason why we're looking at 2016 data is because in 2017 and 2018, the lab did a lot of additional work related to the fires, but this is typically what we'll see. About 56% of the sampling is done just for the Laguna treatment plant, and then if you look at the next largest group there is environmental compliance, which really is a subset of the treatment plant. That's our pre-treatment program that goes into businesses and industry to ensure that the effluent coming from them are meeting federal and our local limit study, which came before you a couple months ago, making sure that those are met, and that's another part of our big part of our sampling, but then we provide a lot of water quality sampling, making sure that we're providing dependable, reliable water, and then various projects coming up and stormwater our other clients. This table, it's a lot of information here, but I want to just kind of highlight a few things here. Over time, if you look at the dark blue bar, that's the total number of samples that we've run, and so over time you can see it's been increasing over the last 10 years with a big spike in 2018. The orange bar, which is the largest reason for that spike there, that's our analysis of organic compounds, volatile compounds, and that is primarily due to our benzene study. So over time we've seen an increase in overall lab, but in 2018 there was a huge amount of work about doubling the amount of samples that the lab was handling. That said, there are some upcoming challenges that the lab is facing that will be coming in front of this board to talk about, so there's regulatory changes. These are constantly happening that as time has gone on, the ability to see chemical constituents at lower and lower concentrations continues to get developed and regulations are meeting those requirements, sometimes getting into parts per billion or parts per trillion, which are increasingly smaller, smaller numbers, and we'll need to make sure that our staff maintain certifications and that our equipment is up just enough to run those analyses. Many of our highly analytical instruments and more expensive instruments in our lab were purchased at that lab expansion in the 2000s and are coming to the end of their useful life, and so we'll be coming in front of this board to possibly make some purchases this next year to upgrade that equipment. Just kind of an example, this is our, one of the key, we're going to be replacing three key instruments this year. This is our volatile gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer. It has an auto sampler there to the right. Some of these instruments, they may be able to last for a long time, but there's elements of them that wear out faster, and this auto sampler has worn out faster, and it's harder to get parts for these older instruments, in particular computer software. Computer software moves at a very fast pace, and this instrument is unable to use the more current operating systems that the city's on, so we're having to have this offline and operating on an older computer and buying used computers on eBay to keep some of this equipment running. Some of the benefits our staff and having regular maintenance on these instruments has actually extended the life of these, and the way our lab is set up, these instruments are really handled by an individual, and they kind of take ownership of that instrument, and so they really take really good care of it and has extended the life. So the next step, as I mentioned, we will be purchasing probably three new instruments in the upcoming year, and those will be coming to the board for approval. They're not just something off the shelf that you can get. Oftentimes, there'll be waivers of competitive bids attached to them because we have service contracts and other things that make sure that we have the right piece of, the right instrument for the types of tests that we do, because lots of vendors will say they do all of it, but we have one instrument that may do two to three different tests, and only certain instruments are really good at being able to change that test in between, so we'll be coming to you with that. And then once we install these new instruments, it's not just plug it in and it's ready to go. We actually need to prove that we can detect the constituents at the appropriate levels, so we'll set them up, we'll get them calibrated, and then we'll run a bunch of standards and we'll send that data off to the accrediting agencies to get ourselves accredited for using these new instruments, so it takes us a few months to get a new instrument online and us to be able to use it for reporting our data. So with that, I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you. Any board member questions? Hearing none, thanks for the update. We'll look forward to seeing these equipment purchases when they come for us. Great, thank you. Final staff briefing is our water supply and recycled water update. So we have Collin Close, our senior water resources planner, and Joe Schwal, our deputy director of regional operations who'll be giving updates on both the potable water and recycled water. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you very much Chairman Galvin, members of the board. I'll just get this power point up and going. Excellent. So I'll be covering the potable water supply update, and I have no surprises for you to report on our lake levels, as you can imagine. They're filling up. Lake Mendocino is at about 109 percent of its water storage capacity, so it is storing some water in that flood pool, and as you know, with a major deviation that's been approved, they are allowed to do that. They're using very high technology to do forecasting so that if very large atmospheric river storm events come through, they can release enough water to make sure there's plenty of flood capacity in that flood control pool. So very good news so far with Lake Mendocino. When we look at Lake Sonoma, we're at about 89 percent of the water storage capacity. It's almost spot on to where we were at this time last year, and this is as of Monday morning, so it doesn't include the recent rain event that we have or the upcoming rains, obviously, that we're seeing in the forecast. So at this point we have no concerns or worries about our water supply, so it's all good news at this point. I also wanted to provide a very brief update on our Winter WaterSmart campaign. You had heard from our Water Use Efficiency Coordinator Claire Nordley recently about this campaign, and it's a collaboration between our marketing and outreach folks and our Water Use Efficiency team to go out and encourage our customers to use less water indoors this winter, particularly December to March, so that we can reduce flows to the treatment plant, because as you know, we have some storage issues with our recycled water, and you'll hear more about that from Deputy Director Schwell in just a moment. But essentially the messages are three-fold. Schedule a Water Use Checkup with us. We have our technicians and analysts will come to folks' homes at no cost and help them improve their water use efficiency. We're encouraging our residential customers to replace their inefficient fixtures, particularly faucet aerators and shower heads. We provide those at no cost. We have some standard models that we provide. And also we're encouraging folks to find and fix leaks, and we have a workshop coming up that will also help our customers do that. We have some additional information online, and we have free leak detection kits to look at toilets and see whether or not toilets are leaking. Those are sometimes hard for our customers to recognize because it's not a constant flow. So just wanted to give you some early results so far. As you can imagine, it's only been about three weeks since this campaign has been up and running, so it's early days yet. But we are seeing quite a few more phone calls from our customers. They're very interested. Typically, in December, January, February, we might have a total of about 30 water use efficiency checkups in homes. We have 96 scheduled already. So we've completed over 36 of those. So things are on track for about a three-fold increase, and we expect it to continue growing. So we actually have fully booked out January, and we're scheduling into February, and our customers are really excited about working with us. So it's going really well so far. So I wanted to just mention that. In terms of reduced flows to the treatment plant, it's a little bit early. We'll have to look probably at January and February data to get a better sense of how that's going because the way our water sales go, we can see our December data, but we're not yet seeing our January data. So we'll see that about mid-February, and then we'll see as we go on about the middle of the month each time. So we can come back to you and update you about how effective this is actually being in terms of water flow. So the other piece that I had mentioned is our workshop. So I just wanted to remind you and the public that we have this workshop scheduled for February 11th at our utility field operations office at 35 Stony Point Road. This is at no cost at all. We do ask that folks pre-register. It's very easy to register. They just go to srcity.org slash workshops and there's an easy online form. If for any reason they'd like to call us, they're welcome to call our hotline at 707-543-3985, and we're always happy to work with folks if they need help, if they don't have a computer or something along those lines. This workshop's going to be really fun for our customers. Lots of hands-on demonstrations, interactive displays, our expert instructors, our water use efficiency team. They're really fired up about this campaign. They love working with our customers. So the three main focuses will be on finding and fixing very common household leaks, on changing out faucet aerators. It's a really simple process, but it can be intimidating sometimes for folks, and then just improving overall water use efficiency at home. So that's the focus at this point. And as I said, we're really seeing that things are moving in the right direction with our customers, and we really appreciate their jumping in and getting engaged with us. We haven't focused on our commercial industrial and institutional sector with this particular campaign, but we are seeing them call us. They're hearing the message. They're interested as well in what they can do. Just that with those processes, it tends to be a little slower to change a commercial or industrial processes. So we continue to work with those customers as well. I'm happy to take any questions about this part of the presentation, and I'll also be here if you have questions later. Thank you. Any questions yet for Mr. Close? Then we'll move to Deputy Director Schwall. Thank you, Chair Galvin. So to give you a snapshot of where we're at with our recycled water storage, here's our storage curve. And you can see where we were approaching December when the Gadgers pump stations were offline. The trajectory was very steep and increasing quickly. They're at the first arrow in December 6th or so, and the Gadgers pipeline pumping started. You can see from there at that point until currently, the storage curve has flattened out the 17 or so million gallons a day that we pumped there pretty much matched what we were getting for plant flows. That, of course, is in a big part due to the lack of rain that we've had since the beginning of the winter. Maybe we're seeing a little bit of the impact of the WaterSmart program with that little dip at the very end. But what's really encouraging is that December 6th, the first week of December, we were 460 million gallons over our normal or our average for that time of year. And since that time with the pumping and the lack of rain, we are now 250 million gallons over normal for this time of year. So the trend is good. And to the extent that it continues, we'll be more in our normal operating range. So I want to then just to project forward, if the rest of the season is with normal flows for the end of January and the rest of February, though, the trajectory again will increase. And if we have normal plant flows, we can still expect to be needing to discharge some time in the middle of February, late March or late February, perhaps. So we're not out of the woods yet. We still have 200 odd million gallons more than we would normally have this time of year. And so we're just waiting really to see if we're able to see what the weather does to see how we have to respond to it. We're currently pumping at full flow. We have all of our pumps in service. We're not holding anything back. So as long as we're able to pump that much, we'll be doing the best we can at that point. Do you have any questions for the rest, please? Any board member questions? It's quite an accomplishment to have dropped that excess water that much in such a short period of time. Thank you. I'm doing all I can to hold the winter off. I know you are. All right. Thank you very much for the report. We have no consent items. We have a report item. Director Burke? Yes. So our one and only report item is a policy approval of disconnection of residential water service for nonpayment. And deputy director from the finance department, Alan Alton will be doing this presentation. Welcome, Deputy Director Alton. Good afternoon, Chairman Galvin and members of the board. Let me try to find our policy here. All right. So the item before you now is an administrative policy on the disconnection of water service for nonpayment. This policy will ensure our compliance with a law that is getting ready to come into effect in February. Let's see here. So by way of background, the city and the revenue division already has procedures in place to deal with disconnection of water service. So that gave us a good head start in trying to figure out what we needed to do in order to comply with the new law that was coming forward. We do allow customers to enter into payment arrangements. I think we have a pretty robust notification process. So we kind of, we were able to hit the ground running, so to speak, although we did find that as we started looking at the bill that compliance was not going to be without its challenges, we did have staff from the revenue division and the water department get together to try to decipher the bill, if you will, and see how it would work with our own billing system and our current procedures. So the bill I'm talking about is Senate Bill 998, which is also titled the Water Shutoff Protection Act. It was signed into law by the governor in September 2018 and it goes into effect in February 1st. The main goal of the bill is to ensure water access to a subset of a community that are unable to pay financially, have certain health or medical conditions, and so that's who we're trying to protect with this. It does apply to any water systems that have more than 200 customers, so of course we are part of that group. So the requirements are pretty broad and I'll just go through them quickly. We needed to establish a written policy and have that policy available in six languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. The disconnections could not occur until 60 days past due. Our current procedures are 28 days past due. There are notification requirements that go along with this and really they expanded into having us, when going out and putting out a door tag, we would also have to put out a written policy, again written in those six languages. Payment arrangements for eligible customers, like I said is that subset of folks that are really, they can demonstrate that they're financially unable to pay. And by doing that, they're either on some sort of assistance programs such as CalWorks or CalFresh or something to that effect, or that they could declare that their household income was less than 200% of the federal poverty level. Also, if they had some medical certification that showed that they would have serious health effects if their water was turned off, it limits reconnection fees for that group of folks to $50. And it also required the establishment of a formal appeal process. So what we have done is developed a policy in this which you have before you now that not only meets all those requirements but in some cases exceeds them. And here I've come up with a chart that highlights the main areas that we are, that we needed to address. So the first one is we needed to move from informal procedures into a formal written policy. That's before you. And if approved, we are ready to have that, the transition process and printing process begin on that. We have a purchase order in place and are ready to go. We had to do some programming in our billing system to move from a 28-day pass due disconnection to a 60-day pass due disconnection. That is living long while. We're in the testing process and we don't anticipate any issues with that. Currently, we do not exempt people from disconnection. However, we're moving to with this new policy will be that we would exempt people from disconnection if they meet those the unable to pay and the medical certification provisions that I mentioned before and that they are willing to enter into payment arrangements. So if they were to do all those, to meet all that, we, and as long as they met those payment arrangements and were current on their current bills, then they could not be disconnected as they pay that initial bill off. We currently have a reconnection fee and really what the reconnection fee is, it's an administrative fee for processing a delinquent turnoff, which is a mouthful. So for the purposes of this, I'm calling it a reconnection fee. But that currently exists at $55 for during normal operating hours, which is $8 to $2.30 for the group of people that I mentioned before that met the income and medical requirements. That would be at $50. Currently, when a bill is passed due, we send out a disconnection notice and we also do a what's we send out a phone call that's a interactive voice response or IVR. So those are our methods of notifying customers that they are passed due, that they do need to either pay or just enter into some sort of arrangement with us. We would do those exact same things. This time, we would also put out door tags and I neglected to mention that under our current policy, we do hang door tags under certain circumstances, mainly having to do if we have a residence where the landlord pays the water bill, the tenants do not, but the landlord's offsite. So we will door tag that residence so that the tenants understand that they're about to lose water and they can make arrangements either with their landlord or call us and we can work with them through that. So a lot of those things remain the same. And then in an appellate process, we did not have a formal process before we now do have one under this policy that is very similar to the appeals processes that are currently in place throughout the city. We have 15 days from the bill. A customer can dispute that in writing. That will go to the water director or her designee and then if they disagree with that action, they can further appeal up to the board. So the reconnection fee, as we're calling it here, so we analyze what it would take to go through the staff process of, well, let me take a step back. Our billing system allows us to have an administrative fee like the one that we have that's $55. However, we cannot have two of those. So what that would entail, would that a CSR would need to validate that the person that they're dealing with met all of the special conditions to have a $50 fee and then would then have to manually adjust that fee downward for that person. So we looked at those staff resources versus just reducing the administrative fee for all customers down to $50. We looked at that. The last two full fiscal years, so fiscal year 18 and fiscal year 19, and we found that the loss of revenue by doing this dropping down $5 was less than $20,000 a year. It was approximately $15,000 in fiscal year 18 and about $17,000 in fiscal year 19. So the cost benefit of that seemed that it would be better to just go ahead and lower the fee to instead of incurring the staff costs that would be involved in manually adjusting those. And because it is a lowering of a fee, we're able to do so administratively through resolution, which is what we have following this item. So with that, it's recommended by the Finance Department, Santa Rosa Water, that the Board of Public Utilities by resolution approve a revenue division administrative policy titled Disconnection of Residential Water Service for Non-Payment. And it's further recommended that the Board reduce the administrative fee for processing delinquent turnoff from $55 to $50 for all customers. And with that, I'm available for any questions you have. Thank you, Deputy Director Alton. Any questions from the Board? Board Member Watkins. Thank you for this. I know a lot of this has to do with compliance purposes for that Senate bill, but I think it is an important issue that we look at. I just wanted to, you know, hope that this program also works with the H2O program, especially when if the Water Department has to verify income and if it's a low income for CalWorks, they would qualify for H2O. That $50 fee, reconnection fee could still be a burden for some of those people. So this might be a nice way to partner with that program to hopefully avoid the disconnection. And so that's all. Absolutely. Any other Board Member questions or comments? If not, we have a resolution. Oh, sir. Board Member Grable. Yeah, thank you. I think this is a good policy. I had two questions. One, regarding communications on the disconnection, it seems like you have the mail and the phone call kind of points of communication. Is there, one thing I worry about is just for seniors on their own, for instance, is there an opportunity to have a site visit from an employee, in some cases, where we're getting non-response and there may be someone high on the vulnerability index that is a customer, but it's an indication that maybe they need a site visit from an employee or a wellness check from law enforcement or something like that. It's just something that occurs to me in these situations. Sure. And I apologize. I neglected to mention that, is that one of the things that would generate a door tag from us is if we are not able to reach the person by phone and their mail is returned. So basically, we cannot contact that customer. We will go out and perform that site visit, hang a door tag along with the policy and try to move from there. Do we just hang a door tag or do we have the ability to knock on the door? We do have that ability. I know that typically we do hang the door tag. We could, there's nothing for us to knock on the door. I think that would be a great idea to do. There's nothing that precludes us from that. Or if that's not something our staff is comfortable with, I do think going forward with this having some sort of relationship with either law enforcement or the council on aging or some of the agencies that deal with some of these folks, maybe a quick cross-reference, because to me that could be an indication that someone needs a wellness check, for instance. Right. And there are areas that are way outside of where we can go when we send individuals out to go and do that, which are mainly our meter specialists that will go out and handle that. They do meet with the public regularly. Sometimes there are safety issues that are involved, so we need to be clear of that. And obviously, if they feel that they would not be safe, they're going to limit their interaction with that person. However, if you're talking in a senior area like that, that's where I think that there's some judgment that's there for the person going out. As far as further wellness checks that go under there, I think that that's something that's moving a little bit beyond where my staff is and maybe into more of a county issue, but it's something that we could absolutely take a look at and try to come up with some sort of better answer for you. Yeah, it may be something that we just look to across jurisdictions and interagency coordination, because just in my experience very recently, working with low-income residents and vulnerable residents and seniors on low-income and permanent supportive housing projects, it seems to be an issue and it seems to be an indication of when not only wellness checks are needed for seniors who are isolated, but also for, frankly, very difficult situations with children and where the county needs to be involved. So just looking toward where interagency coordination could happen, all that going forward where that can just be, you know, it can tell us maybe be a point or an indication that maybe a call needs to be made and then it's out of our hands at that point, but at least we're being cognizant of that. So yeah, I appreciate that that is something that our staff can at least deal with the door hanger. My other question was it when there's a change of property ownership? I had a couple of experiences recently with realtors and property changing hands for specifically for housing conversion and when property change ownership and say there's a back, there's an unpaid balance, you know, with our, with city water, do we immediately get a notification that there's been a change of ownership? That is something I'm going to need to get back to you on. I, I believe so, but I'm not 100% sure, so I don't want to commit right now. So that's something that I can email out to the, to the board, if you guys would like. It's in some other detail, but it's the only other experience I have where a shutoff policy maybe doesn't recognize that it was a previous owner and then that wasn't communicated to the new owner, but then the tenants now any complex, for instance, would be the ones who are suffering because the previous owner neglected to pay the bill, not the current new owner. And there was a lack of communication. There's just another just thing that occurred to me that maybe we could, we could be cognizant of to know it's, it's fine. I apologize. I should have that answer for you here. It's something that we, when we looked at in and develop the policy, I think that's just a situation that just didn't quite come up. So it's, it's, it's not on the top of my head right now, but I'll get to the answer and come back. Yeah. And to be fair, it was new to me too when, when it occurred. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah. It's hard to go back to the previous owner after you close escrow. Yeah. Yes, it is. Thank you. Any other board member questions or comments? All right. We have a resolution. I'll move adoption of a resolution to the board of public utilities of the city of Santa Rosa establishing a policy for the discontinuation of water service for nonpayment and reducing the administrative fee for processing delinquent turnoff from $55 to $50 and waive the reading of the text. Second. Motion by Vice Chair Ononi, seconded by board member Grable. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you very much, Deputy Director Alton. Item number eight is public comments on non-agenda matters. I don't have any speaker cards. Seeing no one rise. We have no referrals, no written communications. Subcommittee reports. Vice Chair Ononi. Mr. Chairman, the city council BPU liaison subcommittee met last Thursday on January the 9th. The staff provided an update on the solicitation to find an outside option for processing a portion of our biosolids that is currently composted as well as an update on the negotiations with Renewable Sonoma. The staff planned to come back to the subcommittee on February 27th to review the draft agreement as well as for the subcommittee to consider the site location for the potential countywide organics processing facility. And Board Member Battencourt was also there at the meeting. And as was Mayor Tom Schwedhelm and Council Member John Swear. Thank you both for being there. Unfortunately, I had another Board Meeting conflict, so thank you for taking the reins there. Any other subcommittee reports? Any Board Member reports? We'll move then to the Director's Report. Thank you, Chair Galvin. I had just two brief updates. First, just wanted to make the Board aware that recently there was a news station in Los Angeles that had provided some incorrect information regarding the Making Conservation of California Way of Life. I think the Board may recall that Santa Rosa water staff were actively following and commenting on Assembly Bill 1668 and Senate Bill 606, which together made the new Making California Conservation Way of Life long-term water use efficiency requirements. The recent information that was provided by the news station stated that individuals could be fined starting at the beginning of this year for exceeding the water use target of 55 gallons per person per day. And that is incorrect. It's not true. What the law does require is that as a entire service area, we will need to set a target in 2023. And that target will be based on an indoor standard that's currently going to be 55 gallons per capita per day, as well as an outdoor standard that is going to be based on plant type and square footage and has an ET factor in there, as well as water loss due to leaks. And then there's a component that's for commercial industrial institutional as well. So we will be working over the next couple of years to actually develop that standard. And then that will be what we will be as a city, an entire service area responsible for meeting. So the information and the video that was up was pulled down because it was incorrect. And we have received approximately 10 calls about this story and have provided correct information to folks as well as put information out through social media and we'll be going out through our connections newsletter. So we just wanted to make sure the board was aware that no, there are not $10,000 a day fines for people for using more than 55 gallons per capita per day. And then the second item I had and I was hoping that we have this person here, I don't think he was able to attend, but I wanted to let the board know that we are losing another one of our very long-term employees due to retirement. Chris Badger has been with the city for 37 years. He began his career in 1982 as a maintenance worker and has been our safety and training coordinator for over 28 years. He really has been instrumental in developing our safety program to ensure compliance with Cal OSHA regulations as well as implemented numerous in-house training programs to lessen our dependence on outside providers. And I did want to recognize in particular that he took the lead in developing our emergency operations plan. And thanks to Chris's efforts, I really believe that we fared much, much better through the 2017 fires due to all the efforts and training that he had put into place. So I'm sad he wasn't here to be recognized, but I do want to just appreciate his 37 years of service and wish him well in his retirement. And that's all I have. Thank you. Any questions for the director? All right. Well, before we adjourn, I think you all know that our former board member who's in the audience, Mr. Dowd, has been appointed to the city council. We want to give him our congratulations and much good luck in your 11 months that you're going to serve as a city councilman. He was appointed by council member Ernesto... Halla Vera, sorry. And Ernesto has appointed Glenn Wright, who's a former deputy director of the water department, to fill that seat. And so he will be joining us at our next meeting. So again, much good luck, Dick. And we are adjourned.