 Testing my audio and video. Roberta, can you see and hear me? Yep, perfect. Thank you. It's going to keep my camera off, but it looks like it's working. Good afternoon, everyone. Looks like we're still waiting for the two other committee members. So we will hopefully they jump on soon. Thank you for all being here. With your sad picture, director Burke. I'm sorry, I thought I voted. Chair Watts, we will see if we can contact both board members. I believe both had accepted. So give us a moment. We'll see if we can find any update. Okay. Great. Looks like we have board member Gray will join us. So we do have forum. Yes, we do chair Watts. I know secretary. I think we're going to have a discussion. I think I'm going to have a discussion with the board member. Secretary Aitha is trying to get in touch with. Board member Walsh. It's completely up to you. All staff is here. If you'd like to start, we can do so. If you want to give us another moment, we'll see if we, we hear back, but your discussion. We can wait another minute as long as stuff is okay with that. I don't want to waste your time. Okay. Chair Watts. We just heard back from board member Walsh and he is unable to hear back. Okay. Great. Thank you so much. Well, yes, we'll call them meeting to order at 105. Secretary Aitha, can you do a roll call? Yes. Chair Watts. Here. Board member Gray. I'm here. Sorry. There's a baby crying. That's just a parenthood. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are not speaking. And now we'll open public comment on item two. 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 Aitha, do we have any live. Email or voicemail public comments at this time? There are no public comments. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for approval. So if you wish to make a comment via zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aitha, do we have any public comments on our minutes? No, no public comments. Okay. Great. Now I will ask director Burke to introduce item 4.1. Thank you. Chair Watson members of the subcommittee. I just wanted to ask you to introduce item 4.1. That is a draft update. We really want to look to this subcommittee to provide in-depth information on how we are responding to droughts. We invite your feedback or suggestions. On other things that we should look into, but we really wanted to provide a lot of in-depth information. Show you all the different activities that we're doing. Invite any comments that you might have. future items that we are looking at in terms of our drop response as we anticipate the drop is going to continue through this winter. So with that I'm going to hand it over to our water use efficiency coordinator Claire Nordley and I believe she is going to run her own presentation. So Claire. Good afternoon. Thank you Director Burke. I'm going to share my screen. All right just confirming that you see my presentation. Not yet. Not yet. It's strange it's showing that I'm sharing. Okay just confirming you're seeing my screen now. Looks good. Okay great thank you. So I am the water use efficiency coordinator Claire Nordley and I'm going to provide an update on water use efficiency in drought. As you all know we are in stage three of our water shortage contingency plan which means a 20% community wide mandatory reduction. And fortunately we are doing quite well in meeting that reduction target. As you can see in this graph here the orange line is our 2021 target. The blue bar is our actual water use and the gray bar is our use from last year. So not only are we significantly below our use from last year but we're also meeting our target every month so far. So we've got a 22% reduction in both July and in August. In you know September through December we have reductions that continue to decrease as our water use decreases and we expect to be able to meet those as well. As a region we're also doing quite well. This is the cumulative Sonoma water Russian River diversions. And again as you can see month over month we have been meeting that target compared to our diversions or compared to Sonoma waters diversions since last year. Again that's almost a 22% reduction, 21.9% reduction. So it really just speaks to you know Santa Rosa and our regional partners commitment to water conservation. Part of the water shortage contingency plan in stage three are certain prohibitions and our enforcement of those prohibitions. For example our waterways ordinance which is always in effect year round but we do step up enforcement and we do receive many more reports of waterways during a drought. Since January we've received over 500 reports of waterways which is about a 200% increase since this time last year. We follow up directly with every single report of waterways that we receive either through a direct phone call to a customer. We send a letter sometimes we do both. We also offered a schedule an in-person outdoor inspection of their irrigation system. So you can see from this picture for example we did go to this property and were able to assist them in dialing back their sprinkler irrigation system and they didn't even know that it was causing a lot of. So sometimes it's just a little bit of education and customers are really happy to learn more about their irrigation system and fix whatever issues may be occurring. These are the specific prohibitions and our enforcement response to them. So the pictures on the right hand side are cards that we actually printed designed and printed in-house and sent out to various different customer types. So for example the bedsheets wash daily. We sent an example of all of those to all of the hotels and our short-term rentals in the Santa Rosa area. And let them know that those are free and available for them. They are required to have some sort of signage because we are in stage three indicating that bedsheets don't need to be washed daily and they needed to have some sort of an indication of that at their property. We did send out let's say 1500 of those cards in the last few months. So it was quite popular. We also offer a customized option on our website where if a business wanted to they could actually remove our logo and add their own hotel logo. And so that's available for download on our website. Or we also tell customers if they want to they're welcome to create and design their own cards and have them out for for their own use if they want to be specific about the brand and color etc. But we offer these for free if they'd like them. One of the other prohibitions that we do require during stage three is that irrigation is limited to nighttime you know 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. We did send out over 200 letters to irrigation professionals in the Santa Rosa area. So any licensed landscape professional landscape contractor landscape architect in the area received this letter just letting them know that this is a current prohibition encouraging them to make sure that their customers and their clients are prepared to meet this and offering them any assistance that we can provide with a free site audit. Another prohibition during stage three is that shut off nozzles for hoses are required. We have seen quite a big jump in people requesting hose nozzles. So I think our marketing is working. We've given out over 4000 of these hose nozzles since January. So it's been quite successful. And of course we always have free devices such as our hose nozzles, faucet aerators etc. available for pickup for free at any time at both the UFO and at the MSC South offices Monday through Friday for pickup. We've also been sending out pressure washing letters. So we did send out about 200 letters to companies who might pressure wash in Santa Rosa letting them know that that is prohibited right now if they're pressure washing with potable water. Although there are some exceptions such as for health and safety reasons or in preparation for construction such as painting etc. We have issued variances for those companies that have requested them for approved reasons and we do list those companies on our website in case anyone wants to be able to check into which companies have received the variance. We are being pretty proactive with targeting specific sectors and we found a really good response rate by really segmenting our population and providing them letters or contacting them directly with some of these related prohibitions. We've received good feedback on that. Also as you may expect you know you probably can't read this graph it's pretty small but you can see the general trend line is a significant increase since March. This is our call volume into our water use efficiency hotline and really you know since last year we've received a huge significant increase in calls. We're receiving about 180 calls per week right now and we are answering from live which customers are very happy about and glad to be able to reach us directly. Another big increase that we've seen recently is in our green exchange program participation. So these are specific specifically customers who the blue bar is for people who have requested a pre-inspection for removing their lawn and the orange bar are people who have actually completed their project and you can see the number of pre-inspection in 2021 has left significantly compared to the last two years. It's really exciting to see the number of calls that we've been receiving and being able to pre-approve these customers. We are offering both virtual and in-person inspections depending on the customer's desire, comfort level and ability to sort of interpret the guidelines virtually versus being in person and us talking them through them. So we do offer both depending on like I said the customer's comfort with COVID safety etc and their time and their schedule. One of the things that I would love this subcommittee's input on is you know a way to increase if there's any input on a way to increase the participation from pre-inspection to post-inspection. Most water utilities anecdotally that I've spoken to usually about 50% of the people who go through a pre-inspection actually complete the rebate and whether that means that you know 50% of them do remove their grass but maybe don't ask for the rebate because they don't want to participate in all of the program requirements or just because they find it overwhelming they never remove the grass. It's unclear but usually utilities are see about a 50% conversion right from pre-inspection to post-inspection and that's true here in Santa Rosa as well. So we're trending along average but of course I'd love to increase that. I'd love more participation in our green exchange program so if anyone has any suggestions about how to increase that and certainly all ears. Starting in 2020 we actually did start sending a reminder letter to people about a month before their program expiration date or their rebate expiration date. Just reminding them and prompting them that hey you know you were pre-approved for this rebate you still have about 30 days to continue this. I mean if you're still interested here's your expiration date you need to participate before then and we did see an increase we have seen a continued increase in people actually responding to that letter in schedule and post inspections. So that's one way that we have work to increase participation and going through the rebate but of course I'm open to any additional feedback. Now I just want to touch on some of the newer and you know digital lot of use efficiency measures that we have been implementing recently. So as you probably all know the WaterSmart portal was launched just a few months ago. This is a tool where customers can log in and look at their own hourly water usage it's been incredibly helpful. We've been sharing our screen with various different customers and walking them through how to access this information and it's certainly cut down on the number of especially commercial customers who request their hourly water usage from us directly. Now we can show them how to log in and how to access their usage and now they can pull their own water use data for themselves and I think that's been really helpful for them to access their data really quickly and it's decreased the workload on our side from having to pull that data so that's been really helpful. As of I believe it was this Monday we had about 3,500 people registered to the portal so it's increasing almost daily and it's really exciting to see more and more people participate in this and then just to note we are exploring options to figure out water savings potential from people who are logged in and committed to being used to using the portal. Another exciting development that we have is this dashboard that we've worked with a contractor on smartworks who developed our AMI the portal and all of our AMI data. This is a dashboard that really shows us at a glance all of our single family residential continuous use information so this is all about leak data basically and just to note this data is actually is old this is the test this is a screenshot of the test data so this is not actual real data but it shows you sort of what the kind of information is that we would receive so we can look at you know the total leak volume by day and see if there's some sort of an interesting pattern you know is there something that happens every day per week or if there are seasonal trend for leak volumes we can also see the total number of leaks resolved over a 14-day period. We can look at the number of notifications that we've sent the projected cumulative water savings so how much water are we actually saving from finding these leaks and notifying customers of this leak before their bill actually gets to them which was the normal way that people would find out that they have a leak. We're also looking at the average leak time so how long does a leak last for example and then we can also see you know when are the when are these leaks occurring how often are we notifying them etc so it's a really nice sort of just overall dashboard to show our leak detection information and then along with that dashboard sort of drilling into a few of the reports we worked very closely with the vendor to come up with this customized report this report and I'll zoom in here this customized report actually shows the date that a leak started how long that leak has been going so both the number of hours and in the last 24 hours how much water has gone through there as continuous usage and then what the total leak amount has been since the beginning of the leak and you can see some of these leaks are quite substantial you know about maybe halfway down through this screen you can see that there's one leak that's over 20,000 gallons since the beginning of their week and so really this is how we are able to prioritize which customers to reach out to first of course we want to reach out to every single customer and let them know that they have a leak but we want to prioritize the ones that are the highest leak and this report really allows us to drill into which leaks to reach out to first and then this little binocular symbol on the right hand side I can click on that and it will lead me to that customer's hourly water usage if I want exact and more information so that's exciting too to be able to sort of have everything in one screen so we decided to do a little experiment with some of this AMI data that we've been receiving recently we sent out a few letters about 84 letters to customers who are using over a thousand gallons in one hour so we picked that threshold a little bit arbitrarily thought that it seems like a lot of water in one hour just to sort of put that in perspective we often have people who were you know one to two people in a household use a thousand gallons in a month so to use that much in an hour seems substantial and we wanted to see how many people in our service area had that amount of water at the time when we pulled that data in June we had 84 people who used a thousand gallons or more in an hour and so we decided to send everyone letters and we broke these this group of 84 people up into two separate letters half of them received the letter on the left which just indicates you know giving them some information saying that they have high water use it may be because of a leak or another issue and we want to try to assist them that they should give us a call and we could help walk them through their water usage the letter on the right had the exact same information we also included a graph actually showing them their water usage and showing them that it was over a thousand gallons in an hour and we were just curious to see with the graph prompt more people to call us with the graph prompt people to respond to the letter more and reduce their water usage would it make any difference so we ran this experiment and basically here are the results so as I mentioned this letter was pulled in June 75 percent of people who received this letter reduced their water usage after the letter was received which is a really huge response right we did not expect that much of a response to be completely honest and then 22 percent of those people also called us and actually a set up an appointment with us and these are the exact customers that we want to be able to help we often get you know quite a few phone calls as you saw in the previous graph we're receiving about 180 phone calls per week many of those customers are already super savers you know people who are really dedicated to water use efficiency have low water use and just want to do a little bit more and while we certainly want to be able to help those people and support all of our customers no matter where they are in their water usage in order to achieve our water saving goals we really want to target people who are in that high use category so we were so excited to have 22 percent of those 84 people call us and actually set up an appointment many of them did have you know leaks some of them had pool filter issues irrigation systems going on when they weren't aware things like that that we were actually able to troubleshoot with them in person and it felt really good to be able to help those customers and then 15 percent of those people appeared to have some sort of a leak and so we did actually call every single one of those 15 percent that appeared to have a leak and let them know that you know we sent this letter you know it looks like there's some sort of a continuous use situation going on which is you know not not usual for a single family customer and we do encourage you to fix that as soon as possible and we're going to continue to monitor those sites so we found you know we have have these great results we didn't find really any difference between those people who received a letter with graph versus those without a graph so that was you know it was fine we we tried something out no difference it seemed but it's great that people just responded no matter what so our plan is to continue to send these letters out every month and every month it'll be a different threshold because some months you know hopefully in the winter time we won't have people using a thousand gallons in an hour and therefore that threshold will be too high so we hope to be able to ratchet that threshold down and continue to send out letters on a monthly basis just alerting people that you know they may have higher water usage so now sort of pivoting we are you know changing up the look a little bit of our fall and winter outreach campaign we want to make sure that people don't feel like our message is getting stale we're using the exact same tagline that we have been using since the beginning of the drought which is drought is here save water but you can see there's now a cute little curve to the end of the r with a water droplet and we're really trying to focus this campaign on a couple of different things one is specific and real life actionable items that people can do you know providing them something that they can they themselves can do at their own house to save water we also want to highlight real people so these images here are stock images but we hope to have you know more more realistic images that are actually taken around Santa Rosa homes so you can see here again this is of course a real life image I think this is director Burke's background actually so we've gotten that and again we just want to focus on real life examples of people saving water we're also trying to make sure that we're incorporating the voice of community videos that we produce to believe that W director Martin has shown some of those videos and past board presentations but basically those are community leaders such as the Santa Rosa junior college or Amy's kitchen and for them to talk about their own water savings at their own facility and encourage people in the Santa Rosa community to save water so we'll be highlighting those videos and that's with those hand in hand with these real life real people actionable water conservation savings we're also focusing on really getting the word out there that people should be turning off their irrigation come October 1st as the days get longer then sorry as the nights get longer and the days get shorter our plants just naturally need less water even though it is warm I know it feels like plants need more water but they're naturally going into dormancy at this time of year and so really we're trying to make sure that customers really understand that need for turning the irrigation off there's also of course the benefit of making sure that we're meeting our water conservation target as we go into winter time so focusing on that we have a bill insert that will be going out city connections newsletter radio ads and then we are doing targeted outreach specifically to dedicated irrigation meters so we're calling our top 100 irrigators we're also going to be sending letters to all of our dedicated irrigation meter customers every month during the winter if they have water usage on that meter because those meters should be turned off at this coming up in October and then as I mentioned we are focusing on real life water savers for the next fall and winter the voice of the community video series as well as highlighting our super savers so we put out a call for people in the community who really are dedicated to water conservation have done everything that they can to save water at their property and we want to try to highlight those highlight those people you know sometimes we forget that really a lot of people in Santa Rosa have undertaken extreme measures to save water at their property and have been doing so for years in past droughts you know maybe they can move their lawn they have low water use fixtures of their property they have their bucket and their shower they're really doing everything they can and so we want to celebrate those people make sure that they feel celebrated and that we are grateful for their water savings so we'll be highlighting those people also want to highlight a couple of our really successful events we've been doing a series of drought drop by events this is the October 9th event will be our fourth event for our drought drop buys and this next event will be at Colgan Creek Park and Youth Community Park from 8 a.m. until noon so far we've handed out over 3000 drought kits to residents in the last three events and hope that we can continue that success for this next two events in October the drought kit includes a bucket a shower head a hose nozzle dye tabs to test a toilet and then literature as well to provide some education to customers and you can see also in the bottom picture we've been handing out yard signs and I have been seeing these yard signs throughout Santa Rosa it's really exciting to see people who have received the yard signs and are actually displaying them at their house in Santa Rosa so I hope you all can join us at our next drought drop by and then of course we all we're always doing ongoing outreach you can see there's a banner here this is the banner at Finland Park on the tennis courts we also have our drought website that is updated on a really regular basis with frequently asked questions that we get from customers when they call us on the phone we're constantly doing social media posts we have radio ads digital ads print ads we continue to do direct mailers to customers we have bill envelope information on the outside of the envelope when you receive your bill we're doing bill inserts employee education there are frequently asked questions and talking points that are sent around to the entire water department every two weeks and so that really makes sure that everyone is on the same page and those who answer the phone are aware of what is going on currently the drought and their current stage etc and then of course this high visibility signage we're also seeking commercial customers who have a high visibility area that would be willing to put a sign up at their property so right now we are working with Santa Rosa junior college and a local church on the corner of stony point and west third who who are willing to put up the banner and some places in oakmont as well who have volunteered but if there are any suggestions we're certainly open to hearing more ideas about places where we could put some high visibility signage out and and then of course we're always seeking grant and funding opportunities we are working with Sonoma water on a regional grant application for the Bureau of Reclamation Water Smart grant we're throwing around a couple of different ideas but we're sort of settling on probably a toilet rebate program and enhancing our cash for grass rebate program so we'll certainly as we have more details on that application certainly bring that back to the board for your review and comments we're also looking into proposition one round two there's a chance for funding through that as well and we are certainly looking into other grant opportunities to ensure that we're making sure that we are being the most cost effective we're offering those cost effective programs to our customers that we can and then last but not least we are also looking into a couple of new rebate programs these were introduced to us through a few customers who were interested actually in a pool removal rebate and so we started investigating the potential water savings the cost effectiveness of these programs and well I don't have a concrete recommendation yet to provide to the board I do just want to introduce the subject that we are looking into and evaluating these two new rebates one would be like I said a pool and spa removal rebate and we would encourage customers to plant low water use plants in place of their pool and then the second rebate is a pool cover rebate to actually rebate the specific plastic cover that goes over a pool that reduces evaporation so we will certainly bring those back to the board again for comments and review prior to going live but certainly if you all have any thoughts or comments on defectiveness or ideas about how to implement those programs we're certainly all ears and are always open to feedback and this is my last slide so you know as always we're here to help we we want to help out customers our water resources webpage is srcity.org slash water smart and our drought information is at srcity.org slash drought and from there I will stop sharing my screen and turn back for questions thank you very much for your presentation do we have any board member question or comments at this time all right I have a couple things that I want to I wrote some notes down okay green exchange so you asked our thoughts on this so we are actually in the process of pulling out our loan right now we've just let it die and become brown for a few months and actually haven't started the process of removal but I think one thing for me that was a bit of a challenge when I was going through the website and looking at which plants and landscape options were were allowable in the program the I was doing it on my like on the mobile phone and the excel document that it you know took me to was really difficult to do on the mobile phone so when I was actually at a nursery to look at items I it was it was a little bit difficult to navigate so I was kind of brushed it off and like I'll just figure it out later I mean our lawn we haven't been irrigating in it's just been brown for a while so but that was one of my issues that I just kind of came up that I thought about with the green exchange and it doesn't mean that we aren't going to you know we definitely are you know pulling out the lawn but it just when you're in a rush and you're busy it was just I think that was probably the biggest distraction that I had from then say to all do a pre you know audit and do and go through with the program. Yeah that's great feedback thank you for that I will certainly look into whether we can optimize that for mobile use because you're absolutely right people are looking at things on their phone now. Yeah and when you're out actually buying buying plants I mean that was that was something and I was like you thinking oh maybe I should print it and I take it I don't have a printer at home you know all those little things that kind of just came up and so I just kind of forgot about it and figured out I would do it later so. Great point thank you for that feedback. And I was curious about the coordination with the parks and rec department and with some of their if you could kind of elaborate a little bit on that I know you guys do collaborate in especially during drought time but I think that that's kind of an inquiry I've received just from people in the community about oh well you know we're seeing sprinklers over at this park or and so forth and just kind of what the process is to ensure that we're still maintaining our public spaces because obviously they are important for for health and and so many uses but how do we message that with the work that needs to happen with the drought. Great question we you're right we have been coordinating with the parks department on a regular basis so we have had a series of meetings with the parks department to ensure that they understand the drought guidelines that we are requesting a 20 water conservation target community wide and we are also doing audits at many of the city facilities so actually meeting a site program coordinator out at the various different parks and going through their irrigation system valve by valve to see if there are any issues. As you can imagine just like any other residential system there's going to be leaks and breaks of course we try to fix those as soon as we can but we're not everywhere so we always appreciate people reporting water waste at any location including a city park and we do fall off with those as soon as we get those reports. We're also looking into a prioritization system for auditing those parks there are 189 meters at city parks and so we've gone through every single one of those and compared the water usage data from 2020 to 2021 to see if they are saving 20% and also to see how much water they're using per square foot of park space and the people and the sites that are using the most water per square foot are the ones that were prioritizing for a site audit and really making sure that for example we found one that had continuous water usage it was a small median it was not actually a park but as soon as we found that we got that over to the city parks department and they fixed it within a day so it was a really good collaboration I think we're just continuing that relationship now and passed into the out of the drought even. It would be great to highlight some of that through our you know social media and so forth I think that that would kind of give a lot of confidence in the community around what the city internally and all the departments are doing for this and and showing even if it's there is a leak and just the time to fix it or the super saving type parks that might you know happen with with some of your super saver highlights that you're doing this campaign I think that would probably be a pretty good way to instill confidence in our community that where everyone is taking taking this seriously and doing what they can. That's a great idea. Okay one other thing oh signs big banners I was just wondering if you uh collaborating with different school systems um and getting them on fences at schools I think that that's you know kids are going to school now and a lot of I live across from Santa Rosa high school and there's a lot of traffic going around the schools so I feel like that might be a good place to um get the word out to to the community. Yeah that's a great idea we have reached out to a couple of the different school districts that we're already working with to do audits and of course there's you know similar to government there's some red tape in putting things up on school facilities but we are working through that process and hope that we can put up signs as soon as we as soon as we get the approval. Yeah and then the last suggestion uh for the kind of everyday campaign that you guys are working on um I'm not sure you have it planned but I was thinking something along the lines of targeting those that might be behind in their bills and talking about um saving water equals saving money I know you guys do that with a lot of your outreach campaigns that you do on your regular water use efficiency work that you do year round but just kind of bringing that to the forefront for a really realistic picture of for someone in their everyday life. Good idea and I know you guys have a lot of marketing around that already that you you do so but you guys are doing so much work I mean the amount of volume of calls and you're able to be so responsive with those it's it's really impressive and I'm glad that the community as a whole is reducing at the amount that we're supposed to be in a little bit beyond I just hope that that continues and and um and it seems like the the campaigns and and the work that you guys are doing are is paying off so thank you. Thank you. Those are all my comments and questions. And Chair Watts if I may I just really want to thank um this subcommittee in particular and the board of public utilities for their support and leadership in our drought response this is an emergency it's a slow moving in an emergency but it is an emergency and we are working in an emergency response mode and um the the leadership that the board has shown and the support they've given us to get the word out get the demand response look at other alternatives so that we can respond to the drought has been phenomenal and then I just I can't say enough about the work of um Deputy Director Martin about our Watery Sufficiency Coordinator Claire Nordley as well as the entire Watery Sufficiency Team in addition to that our Operations Team who's helping support that work in the field and our Communications Team with Elise Howard and Katie Osegar who are just in addition to everything else we have going on have just been doing this incredible amount of work so I just really want to acknowledge the level of effort and work we couldn't be successful without all the players including the board and the council and with all that support being able to have our community trust us enough to respond so we're so grateful for all of that and I just really wanted to to say that well I don't think we would be more being able to work normally if we didn't have another disaster emergency for our area to have to deal with right so no but I'll all serious notes it you guys are just have done a fantastic job so it's um thank you and I think that probably concludes our board member questions and comments so we will take public comments on item 4.1 so if you wish to make a comment via Zoom please raise your hand if you are dialing in via telephone please dial star 9 to raise your hand. Secretary Aitha do we have any live raised hand or email or voicemail public comments? Chair Watts we have no public comments. Okay great well that concludes the meeting for today thank you very much for your presentations get out and vote and have a good rest of your week we'll see you in a couple of days I guess. Thank you. Thank you.