 Here we are at the magic witching hour of 7.30. And we will call this November 5th meeting at the board of directors of the San Lorenz Valley Water District to order. Holly, would you please conduct the roll call? It's already unmuted, sorry. President Swan. Here. Vice President Henry. You're muted, Lois. You're still muted, Lois. Vice President Henry. Here, I can't, it won't unmute. No, you're unmuted, we heard you. Oh, okay. Director Moran. Present. Director Fouls. Here. All present. Thank you, Holly. I, did I say anything? Yeah, didn't you? We're here. Let's see, so, Rick, do we have any additions or deletions to the closed session agenda? I have none. At this time, we will open up for oral communications regarding items in closed session agenda. Do we have any, we can't see the, there we go. The attendees, we've got two. Mike and Robert, do you guys have any comments about our closed session agenda? We're gonna take that as a no. Thanks for showing up early. And we will go ahead and adjourn to the closed session. This is a district council, just a reminder to please close completely out of the open session as you transition to closed session. We'll do. Okay, thank you. And Holly, if you could please monitor that, just make sure nobody accidentally remains in the open session. Thank you. Thank you. You will now hold all that. Holly, we're gonna convene to open the session. Did you want me to read the roll? Yes, with everybody's here. Looks like President Swan. Here. Vice President Henry, you're muted, Lois. There you go. Yes. Director Ferris. Here. Director Moran. Present. And Director Falls. Director Falls, oh, here. Thank you. We're all here, thank you, Holly. Okay, so reporting out on actions taken in closed session, is that the, it was the unanimous decision of the board that district manager, Rick Rogers met the objectives that were set up for him for the past year. President Swan. Actually a little different report. Yeah, may I offer some wording? Please. This item, as I understood it, the decision was that the district manager received a satisfactory performance review for the 2019 to 2020 year. Very good. Thank you for that clarification. And may I, while I'm stealing the floor, may I make a quick public service announcement related to chat? Sure, go ahead, remind everybody. Okay, thank you. For attendees who may not be familiar with these Zoom board meetings, we just request to please not use the chat function. It's a great function of Zoom, but it's, it doesn't work well with the public meeting format. We really not, we're not, not everybody is monitoring chat. So if you have a comment to make, please try to make it during the applicable public comment period when we listen to comments from the board. That way everybody will hear the comment and can respond if appropriate. So yeah, sorry to put anybody on the spot, but it just, the chat doesn't work well for public meetings. So we appreciate your participating verbally. And do keep in mind that if you, if you do use the chat, it is a public record. Thanks very much. Thank you, Gina. Okay, Rick, are there any additions or deletions to the open session agenda? Rick, make it back. Rick, you're muted. My apologies. I have no additions or deletions to the open session agenda. Okay, thank you. Okay, now we've reached the point in our program where we're open for oral communications. So anybody attending this meeting in the audience who has anything they'd like to comment on that's not on the agenda may do so at this time. You'll have up to five minutes to speak if you desire. So let me go over to the audience and ask if anybody has anything they wanna bring up that's not on tonight's agenda. It does not appear as if we have any comments coming from the attendees tonight. So we'll proceed on, Rick. Item nine, unfinished business. Would you like to lead us off? I'm sorry, I was confused for a moment. I've still got back in closed session. The CZU Wildfire Damage Assessment Report in your packet. You have the most current Wildfire Damage Report and update from Sanders Engineering is working very closely with the district. And there'll be two parts of this. The first part, I'll ask the Director of Operations if he would like to speak to where we're at in the process to give you a verbal narrative on this report. And then we'll talk about the Harmon Creek Watershed as part of this report. Okay. So I'll start with form and intake. Form and intake's been zipext and sealed up. The cure time is about three quarters complete at this point. This is going to allow water to be transferred to the new 12 inch mainline that's been installed by Vanderstein Engineering. And that will allow us to run our treatment plan with whatever water is at Foreman Creek and start filling the lion tank, which is three million gallons and get it ready for VOC testing to be able to see if that tank is needed for coatings on the inside or not. We are also working on the pipeline between lion, little lion and big steel. That pipeline was pressure tested today and is set to be disinfected and flushed here in the next couple of days and going into the beginning of next week. That's going to also allow us, there's a check valve being installed on that line. That's going to also allow us to run water through our big steel booster up to lion tank as well. It is three million gallons to fill. We'll do VOC testing in itself. So it's going to take us a long time to fill that. So with two sources being able to go into that tank, it's going to help fill that tank a lot faster and get us our testing. So we know if we need to do these coatings, the coatings could take a while if that is the case. We're almost complete reviewing the specs on the coating spec for little lion tank. That's the one that we know has to be recoded due to VOC testing. We'll be working on that and getting that out next week, I do believe. I've done most of my review, Rick's just finishing up a little bit of his review that he has left and that's it and that'll be going out. We are out getting pricing on the rest of the temporary piping that needs to go in on Altevia Road and Monon Way in Brookdale. So we're getting prices from some contractors now. That's all been designed and is ready to go. And Harman would be the last one that we would get into. I do have some pictures of these. I don't know if I'm allowed to share my screen right now or not, but I can go through some pictures as well of some of these projects if you all would like. Well, James, why don't we go ahead and bring up your pictures of Harman and I can give the board an update on the Harman Creek watershed. As the board knows, we have been discussing at board level the district's watershed and particularly Harman Creek. It was a Harman Creek review from a geologist and Cal Fire in the work report. The creek has at least one choke point on district property that could allow the stream to leave the channel during winter rains and create a debris flow down into the area of Boulder Creek Elementary. The report mentioned that if we remove these, just choke point, the potential for this type of damage would be greatly limited. The board directed staff to continue moving ahead. Staff moved ahead with contacting Cal Fish and Wildlife Army Corps of Engineers started a permit process and moved in and removed the choke point. We're finishing up today with erosion control. Part of the process we use because we were not able to go through the permit process. We did our best management practices from past projects of putting in a, and James will probably be bringing up those photos. Bring them. Rick, I gotta get them to share my screen so that I can share the screen. I haven't been granted that from the... Well, CTV. Is CTV, or CTV? We put in a stream bypass. We did salt netting to prevent any turbid water going downstream in the stream channel and we hired a biologist to be on site during all of the excavation. The biologist performed the basic investigation for red-legged frog, nesting birds, dusty-footed wood rat nests, and other species. At this point, as I said, the contractor is getting ready to move off project tomorrow. The project has been completed and we're getting ready to just complete the erosion control. And that will be completing the work that the district said that they would do on district property. And successfully remove that choke point. Would that... Can you all see my screen or no? No, unfortunately not. Okay, I might be missing something, but Holly's saying that I can share my screen right now. The green icon at the bottom? Share a screen? Of the... You don't? No. If you bring your mouse down to the bottom of the screen, it doesn't pop up. Oh, there we go. It just popped up right now. There we go. All right, almost second. So let me get back to this. Now, can you see it? You started it? Yes, sir. There you go. Okay. So this is part of the Harmon Creek here. That's the little bypass line. That's how little amount of water that's been going down that stream right now, that that little three or four inch pipe was able to convey the water that we needed to bypass the area that they were digging out. And then as you can see, they started to straw the area. This is a little bit slower loading, but it'll be... So there's Don Alley, the biologist there, and this is the bank where you can see the cut going into the bank there. The stream's here closest to us. And it was dug back towards that area to widen the channel. There's them at work. The excavator, they got the trees protected from getting banged up. Gone down in the streamway. So this was all this riffraff here in the front there in front of Don, those rocks and everything were pulled out of the area. He's standing in and was all peeled back that way and a berm built above him there. And that widens the channel of the whole stream there. As you can see, that's a pretty big piece of equipment. When you see somebody standing next to the bucket down there and the buckets bigger than they are. So definitely some good work was done. That's the fir tree that was laying in the stream channel, blocking the whole stream channel before the dredging started. Let me know if I'm going too fast too. So the stream channel was down to where the edge of the straw is just below there. And that was all one gradient and a lot flatter up top. And so all that was pulled and then put up top there and everything's been strawed back. That's kind of a bad picture, but that's the bottom of the stream channel. That's kind of where they cut down a little bit. So this is the area above the stream over here where the old tank site was at one time. And this is where a new berm and everything and you'll see here in the next few pictures a berm went in here as well to channel to everything coming off where that white pickup spark there. There's kind of another little area there where it's been bermed around the backside of that excavator. So everything also coming from there goes into that stream channel as well. That stream channel was almost at the same elevation as the roadway where you see everybody parked. And that was the concern. Right, and now here you can see the mountain a little bit more steeper edge here, deeper channel, wider. This is all just erosion control picture there. That's probably pretty good James. Okay, so that's all you wanna see there. So to summarize, we removed the choke point as everybody agreed upon with Cal OES and the County County Geologist and we will be out of there before the first rain we'll be out of there tomorrow. And just to summarize the district recovery all of our customers are in potable water and in water and we're moving ahead now on starting to put together specifications for permanent repairs and putting together some reports on types of material and methods of construction or our raw water pipelines. And we'll be bringing that to the board at a future day. And with that, if you have any questions I was kind of a quick overview of where we're at. If you have any questions in particular we're happy to try to answer. Do you want me to go through these pictures of the piping and stuff or no? That's good enough James. You can stop sharing probably. I'm trying to figure that part out too. Back down to the bottom. Take your mouse down to the bottom. We're gonna maximize it first because I can't see it. And now President Swan, this is Rick Moran. I have a question and a comment. You're already ahead Rick. Okay, thank you. We discussed some of this earlier in the engineering committee and one of the things that I wanted to point out was that you also put down some annual seeding to help with that erosion. So it's not just the straw that is there. And did you remember what that seed was by any chance? I would be interested. You've heard of Carly or James. They may know what's going on down. Any ideas James? None of the most critical. Go ahead Carly. From the last conversation we had with Josh from Sandis who was coordinating the project, I believe they decided to go against seeding because they believed it would be washed out and probably wouldn't have time to sprout before the first rains. Okay. They did see the embankment because I was up there when they were seeding it. And so I can get you that information. According to Don, it was a seed that grows and then dies and lets the natural bed come in after. Right. Just another question. Was it hay or straw? Because I've used hay as a mulch and unfortunately it's frought seeds, which may be something that you want here. But I often try to use it as something that kills or prevents weeds from coming up. So I use rice straw. Yeah, it's a basic straw. Okay. Thank you, Rick. Bob, you have a question or comment? Yeah, I have a couple of questions. Rick and James, thank you for bringing those pictures too. I think it's always great to see that and any of our community that watches this later will be able to look at it as well. It was quite the event on social media. There are people that were posting about it. With respect to the other creeks that run across our property, have we done a survey of them to ensure that we don't have any choke points in them or if there aren't choke points there, are there such that we don't believe they're significantly impactful to anybody downstream from them? Well, from talking to the county geologist who's been out on district property, district watershed and the WURT report, there's other choke points but not on district property. Most of where the creeks run across district property are pretty steep canyons. And this is probably the only spot of where the creek could leave the channel and come down a roadway. Clear Creek, we don't own that far down, that close to town and the same would be other streams and they're in pretty deep channels. There was no other real choke points of evaluated on district property or itemized. And going forward into the winter, will we be doing periodic monitoring of these creek channels to make sure that they don't get choked up? I mean, as the rains come, we may see things slough off into the channels. And if that happens, then it may, you know, it may encourage bad things happening downstream. What will that be an ongoing checkpoint? Definitely at Harmon Creek, we will keep a close eye on Harmon Creek when it's safe to go up after a storm event. We will look at it and monitor it. You know, and, you know, we're all very curious to see how the streams respond and see, you know, they're downplaying the amount of flows and debris flows now, but we will monitor. Yes. Will, would a trail cam help? That's interesting that you say that a great question. USGS and the county are working on some type of cameras that they can activate on Clear Creek. And that's the creek that they're using most of their equipment that they are doing trail cams on Clear Creek. All right. Well, I just like to make sure that during the winter, if we do get any of our channels clogged up that we're, you know, that we try to take care of those so that we don't create any more issues for our neighbors downstream. Shifting gears a little bit on the reconstruction of the raw water pipeline. Are we also going to be looking at different configurations? I think there's nothing off the table. I think we'll look at everything. And I think we have a responsibility to look at all types of materials and constructability and environment and try to pass those out, you know. Including different pipe routing. Well, we can look at that. You know, that's pretty easy to do. We can look at pipe routes. That couldn't be something that we can do. You know, we did that way back when we installed the five mile and originally there was going to be two to three water treatment plants on each stream, one on Clear Creek and one on Sweetwater. But when we started looking at, you know, cost to do individual treatment plants, whether to do one plant and run one pipeline, you know, they was, and it was all district property. The decision was made to run the long pipeline. We can look at routes and locations, you know, not easily to change because of elevations and pressures and gravity. And we've got to get it all to the raw water treatment plant. Yeah, I understand. I mean, at some point as we start looking at the district as a unified whole, there may be different configurations that make more sense than when the district was sort of three or four different major components. And so, you know, given this is a capital intensive business, figuring out ways to minimize capital use over the long term through consolidation of facilities may, maybe at least something we should take a look at. I don't have the answer. I'm not saying I'm qualified to have the answer, but I think it's something that we at least need to be asking the question about because as I've made very clear, I want to be looking at this district as a unified whole, not, you know, Boulder Creek, North system, South system, Felton, Lompeco, whatever. This is one system. It's the San Lorenzo Valley water system. And we need to be looking at our infrastructure from that point of view as well. Understand. Thank you, Bob. Any other comments or questions from any of the other directors? If not, we'll go to the public and let them have a chance to comment on anything they've seen with regards to the damage assessment report. Okay. Attendees, it's your opportunity. If you have a question, raise your hand or comment. Love an opportunity. As I said, up to five minutes to comment. Sandy Mast, take yourself off. There you go. Yes, sir. I'm just curious because I'm right by the water tanks, the two water tanks that have, the wooden ones on Country Club off of Scenic way and been moment when they've been leaking for five years. That's not a slam on you. I wanna say that I wanna support you. And I think if you look at my chats, which were illegal, or not what you guys would like, but I'm an educator, so I'm used to chatting in Zoom rooms. So if you wanna look at my chats, you'll see that I have been a farmer of 43 acres that burned down in the campfire. And I also have been a been lonely resident since 1985. I love this place. I love you guys. And when I call, you always respond. So I wanna say thank you for that. But I do wanna say I'm concerned about the two water tanks down from me that leak whenever the water's pumping up from the San Lorenzo Valley River. In the old days when I owned the place, it was gravity-fed as some of you may know. And it was not an issue. Now that we're pumping from the, and I know the fir tree went through the cistern and I have the history of all that and I'm a hiker all through the mountains. So I wanna just say how much I appreciate the hard work that you guys do. I know it's a really challenging infrastructure to maintain, but I am curious about, and we've been through a fire, a major fire. I've been evacuated twice because I have a cabin in the Sears. But what I wanna say is, and I'll shut up after this, is that I wanna know what are we doing about the two leaky water tanks at some point, which started in 2016 as far as the posting on the telephone pole. And I wanna know what I can do to support you, how I can help if we are gonna go to the 124,000 or 120,000 gallon tank up on a little north of us. Or what's to call here? What I just want, I wanna know what I can do to support you to make things better. That's all I'm asking. Thank you, Sandy, and Rick, we're staff. I'd like to comment on what we've been doing. Yeah, what I'd like. We have an agenda item. This is not the right agenda item. We will, we do have an agenda item to speak about the tank replacement. And I'd be more than happy to answer Sandy's question when we get to that agenda item. Okay, thank you, Rick. Anybody else with a comment or question? Nope, doesn't look like it. Okay, back to you, Rick, for next. There's no other public comment. I have nothing to add to item 9A. Perfect, then go ahead and move this along, Rick. The next item, 9B, the urban water management plan and our environmental planner will present this item to the board. Great, thank you, Rick. So just as some background, the California water code requires urban water suppliers within the state of California to prepare and adopt an urban water management plan for submission to the California Department of Water Resources or DWR every five years. And this plan must satisfy the requirements of the Urban Water Management Planning Act of 1983 and applicable regulations. The purpose of the urban water management plan is for water suppliers to evaluate their long-term resource plans and established management measures to ensure adequate water supplies are available to meet existing and future demands. The Urban Water Management Plan provides a framework to help water suppliers maintain efficient use of urban water supplies, continue to promote and conservation programs and policies, ensure the sufficient water supplies are available for future beneficial use and provide a mechanism for response during drought conditions. California's water code permits water suppliers to complete joint plans, allowing for reduced preparation costs to contribute to area-wide conservation and improved local drought resistance. Scotts Valley Water District approached the San Lorenzo Valley Water District with the idea of a joint urban water management plan and in September released a request for proposals. The agencies agreed to split the cost 50-50. The districts received two proposals, water systems consulting Inc. are known as WSC and Western Associates. Both proposals can be viewed on the district's website through the environmental committee link and that was also included in the agenda for you to view. Staff from both agencies reviewed and scored each proposal. On October 22nd, the environmental committee held a special meeting and the committee scored the proposals. Both WSC and Western Associates were found to be qualified. WSC's proposal fee was approximately $120,000 compared to Western Associates total fee of $43,000. However, the district's manager and environmental planner and the committee both reached the conclusion that WSC was the highest ranking firm based on evaluation of the proposals against the selection criteria set forth in the RFP. Overall, the committee and staff expressed concern with the limited hours, big scope, expedited schedule, limited experience with urban water management plans and unfamiliarity with the region reflected in Western Associates proposal. The committee made the recommendation that the district move forward with WSC to prepare the 2020 urban water management plan upon attaining responses to a few questions that are attached as exhibit A below this memo. Staff from the committee recommend moving forward with WSC's proposal based on evaluating the proposals against the RFP selection criteria and especially the following considerations. Firm's past coordination with the state DWR and a perceived better understanding of urban water management plan requirements, extensive knowledge of both district's infrastructure and service areas, experience with the Santa Margarita Ground Water Agency and other regional agencies, sub-consultant, Montgomery and Associates who's currently working with the Santa Margarita Ground Water Agency on the basins modeling and other planning efforts, previous experience preparing the district's past urban water management plan and other regional water suppliers urban management plans. Submission of this completed 2020 urban water management plan is due to the Department of Water Resources on July 1st, 2020. I'm sorry, that should actually be July 1st, 2021. It is recommended that the plan development move forward as quickly as possible to allow for smooth submittal. If approved, the agencies, both SLBWD and SVWD will enter into contract negotiations with WSC to negotiate potential cost savings. Scotts Valley Water District's Water Resources and Engineering Committee also recommended that the contract be awarded to WSC. And this recommendation will be followed with a formal action from their board of directors on November 12th, 2020. The fiscal impact is approximately $60,000 and the district edited $60,000 this year, this fiscal year for this planning effort. I'd also like to note that the attachments below are actually for the Redwood Park Tank Projects and that was included mistakenly. But attachment or exhibit A is below regarding the questions from the Environmental Committee. Staff is prepared to answer any questions the Board of Public may have. Thank you, Carly. That sure is a big difference, 120,000 versus 42,000 is, you know, in reading the sentence before that, both WSC and Western Associates were found to be qualified and it almost begs the question, how could they have been found to be qualified with a quote so askew from what your assessment has been? I'm just stunned at that. The assessment also, when you talk about the District Manager and SLV preferring WSC, we've got a lot of experience with WSC in the past, right? I mean, I thought we were kind of glad to get rid of them at one point, but did we have a similar experience with the other outfit Western Associates? I mean, as far as using them and understanding their background and capabilities? No, we've never used them before. Okay. What would Scott's Valleys take on it? Similar, Rick, to yours? Well, you know, we did review WSC's proposal when you put the two proposals side by side, WSC put in a proposal that has quite a bit of time to be spent in it and less time with district staff. The West proposal was gonna require a lot of district staff time to mind information and work with them side by side due to their unfamiliarity with the district. You know, WSC did our previous urban water management plan. They've done, I do believe they've also done Scott's Valley. They're working, WSC is a subcontractor in the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency and their sub WSC is Montgomery Associates what's doing a lot of work in the Santa Margarita Groundwater Basin as well. And we feel that their information that they've already mined from the district can be transferred right over. And it's a lot less staff time. We also feel that when you look at the scope of services that West is going to provide, there's no way they can do that work for the hours that they quoted us, not unless we do the majority of the work. So we feel that there will be increases with West just due to the fact that they don't have enough hours in there to get the job done. And WSC's proposal, they have worked on many I think over a hundred groundwater management plans they've worked in this area. West is all down south has not worked anywhere in, I do believe in the San Jose, Santa Cruz area. It's all down south. It's a much better proposal when you put them side by side and reviewed them. And it was interesting when we went to the environmental committee, I don't want to speak for the members on the environmental committee, but we all pretty much came up with the same conclusion. We had the same concerns. They're inexperienced on doing, I think they've only done 10 compared to WSC's, the past experience WSC has done for the district. WSC's work under a bid for the district would be no problem. It's just that when they worked first before there wasn't a lot of bidding and we were just using them as needed. And this would be a bidded proposal. It's got values committees have pretty much came to the same conclusion. It's kind of interesting how everybody evaluated the two proposals and had pretty much the same conclusion. And I'll let the environmental committee members speak if they wish so on your proposals. Thank you, Rick. Lois, I see your hand up. Yes. Well, I read both proposals and I thought that West didn't seem to have the experience as WSC. And I'm not a fan of WSC, frankly, I'm not. But I want us to get the best plan that we can get. And if there's a contract, I don't know if there'll be a clause that if WSC doesn't get the job done when they say they're going to, that there would be a penalty. I don't know, I would like to see that in the contract because that was one of my problems with WSC is they didn't get things done on time when they were working on the USDA loan and then they wanted more money and more money. And I don't want that to happen. And if there's a contract, that shouldn't happen. So I go along with using WSC even though I have a big, I don't care for them. That's all I want to say. Hey, Lois, Bob, I think you were next. Yeah, thanks. Just a couple of quick question background questions for Carly, just for the audience. Carly, how often do we need to do a urban water management plan? And what is the criteria by which that has to be done? I understand it's in there, I'm asking the question. Right, so the plan needs to be resubmitted every five years to DWR, they pretty much come out with a guidebook that changes slightly every five years and actually WSC helped develop that guidebook this last year, so that's interesting. And that's another thing we're trying to do. Right, into there. Basically they prime the RFP for themselves. And what is the reason that we as a 60 square mile, 8,000 subscriber spread out all over heck and gone are considered urban? Right, it's based on the number of connections that you serve is how DWR classifies. And that's 3,000 connections? I believe so. So a district that has 3,000 connections in Redlands, California and a 10 square block area is considered the same as us from a regulation point of view. This is just absurd. I don't doubt that there's a need for us to periodically update things, but in the document that we produced five years ago, what kinds of things did we change from either an operations point of view or a processes point of view? Did that help us in any way? Can we be actual impacted operation at a level? Off your frozen, you pretty much dropped off, if you can hear us. I can hear you, am I back? Yeah, you were, but you were frozen. We didn't hear that your last question. Am I back now? Yeah, your audio is a little shaky, but we can hear you. I turned the video off. So Carly, given the report that we did then five years ago, what in it changed any of our processes or operations? What kind of significant impacts did that report have on our district? Right, I think some of the bigger things was during, when we were experienced in drought conditions, we did take a lot of the recommendations directly out of that report. As far as the operations side, Rick or James might be able to answer that question better if Rick, you wanna jump in? You know, I don't, nothing comes to mind on that point. I really would like to see if we can, perhaps in this next year, do a little outreach to John Laird and Mark Stone to say, you know, guys, I mean, you know, there are certainly things that we need to do, but we as a district are pretty darn good about our standards and practices. And, you know, having a little bit of a lighter touch on us would be, I think, a good thing to do. And really focusing on those things that will impact our operations in a significant way. Otherwise, it's a report that you punch somebody's card and gets put on a shelf. So let me turn my next set of questions to WSC. WSC in the past has themselves even on contracts where it was bid came back for more and more money. So I'm seriously concerned about WSC as the contractor here. Is this a firm fixed price and SFP? And Coret and myself and Carly are going to meet with WSC to talk, to see if we can reduce this price. Yeah, I am really uncomfortable with, I mean, look, one of the things that I think we need to do as a district and probably Scott's Valley too, is increase the diversity of our supply line, particularly around consultants and contractors because we tend to have the same people over and over again. And I gotta tell you something, if WSC is so familiar with our district and has so much data, then why are they twice as much? They should be half as much. I mean, this is ridiculous. And one of the things that I'd like to make sure we get to make sure this doesn't happen again is I want the rights to the raw data that they collect. Are we getting that raw data? Did we get it five years ago so that we could hand it to somebody on the next one and not have to go through the same goat rope? I can't answer that question. Well, I mean, if their access to raw data is the thing that gives them the leg up, then that raw data that they collect really belongs to us. We're paying for it. And so if WSC is gonna be the one, and I'm really uncomfortable making them the contractor in this, they should be coughing up that data and they should be a whole lot cheaper if they have all this data and they know everything about us and they're so wonderful. This just doesn't make any sense at all. And I would rather us have that conversation before we vote on it. But of course, that'll be a board decision. Right now, I'm not at all convinced that this is the best way to go. Okay. Thank you, Bob. Rick Moran. Yes, so we went over this in the environmental committee and I won't go through everything that we went through, but I'll just relay my personal opinions about things. First, the five years ago when I first got involved with the Water District, this was something that we worked on in the environmental committee. And there was, I believe, three companies and we've awarded the contract to WSC five years ago. So in the first reading of this thing, obviously the price jumps out at you, all right? And I'm a Chevrolet set, not the jet set kind of guy. So I was attracted to their low price. And that's kind of how I went into the environmental committee meeting. And as that meeting progressed, my thinking changed as well. And one of the things that changed my thinking most, really about this was kind of like two or three things here. First, I believe Carly, when we did it five years ago, it cost us a little over $50,000. So the price is, you know, there's some thousands of dollars difference there. I'm not diminishing that, but it's pretty similar. And it also, we're working with the Scotts Valley Water District and I support working with our neighbors in trying to find mutual solutions to mutual problems. And then the third thing was the staff had talked about that what they saw would be difficulty and requiring more time for them to work with the West and associates. And the staff has gone through as much extra work and stress as I think we should, that I expect out of them. And I did not want to add more stress or difficulty to them and agreed with their recommendation and their preference to however flawed to work with WSD. So that's how I came to support the WSD proposal. And so that's my personal thing. And then in the environmental committee, there was some people who had some questions that were gonna be referred back to the two companies about environmental issues and some climate change, but they had some particular questions that they had. And I think, Carly, you've gotten some answers to that. I saw it in a review there. So that's my take on this proposal. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Lou, you're next. Immuted Lou. You're muted Lou. Is Lou still up right there? Hi, Si, Lou. You're muted, there you go. There we go, okay. I lost control of the mute button for a second. I think it's worth noting, and it hasn't been mentioned, that when you look at the Westin and Associates quotes, that company has been in business for four years. They have a total of three employees. Clearly they're hungry for business and I think that's why we got such a low quote. But in my estimation, the chances of success by using them is less than 50%. And I think that's the risk that we just cannot take. As far as WSC and our experience in the past with them, yes we have had problems with WSC, but I'd like to just point out one fact. The main contact with WSC in the past was the prior district manager, Brian Lee, and I'll say no more. Okay, Lou. Thank you for your comments, Bob. You have another comment? Yeah, I'm all in favor of collaborating with Scotts Valley. I don't have any problem with that. But based on what I've heard, this particular document doesn't appear to be sort of hair on fire impactful to our district operations. And if nothing else, I mean, it's more of a thing that will inform certain decisions if we get back into a bad time again around droughts, perhaps what I heard from Carly earlier, but we have some experience with that and certainly the old plan isn't completely dead in that area. It still could be used. It's just we have to refresh it. So when I look at that and I look at the scope of things, I see the risk of this actually is being relatively low. It's different, for example, than the risk associated with taking perhaps a three-person company to design a new water treatment plant or a five-mile pipeline through the forest. And I still go back to the fact that, WSC does not have completely clean hands on how they've dealt with us in the past. It has not been a great relationship. And before we vote on this, we at the very least need to perhaps go back and have conversations with both parties. The one with WSC around, hey, you've got all this data, you're familiar with this, why are you twice as much? And the one with West of, are you guys, is this serious? You guys think you can do this? What is it that we're missing here? I certainly don't want to be impactful to staff. But on the other hand, we're talking about a large sum of money here. And every time we make these decisions to go with a high person, I want to make sure we're getting it with the right risk return profile. And right now I see this as relatively low risk. Delivery risk might be the biggest one. We have what, seven months or so left. But from a technical point of view, it seems relatively low risk. And WSC does not have a great reputation in our district for doing the right thing. I get it, it was a different district manager. And I'm certainly expecting Rick will manage them much better than the former one did. But these guys are consultants that when they had an opportunity to do the right thing, they didn't take advantage of that. They did the wrong thing. And I think we need to be very, very careful. I'd like to give West a try, but I do think we need to have a conversation with them as well. I think that's a fair point, Bob. You know, I agree. I don't see the urgency on this. I don't see the risk factor involved. I don't see a severe penalty on our part. I don't know why we can't take the old plan. That's five years old, brush it up ourselves or something, spruce it up and submit that. I'm not, I mean, it just seems, and again, given WSC's experience, you go from 50,000 five years ago to 120,000 now, that doesn't seem right. The low bid by the other guys doesn't seem realistic either, but I like the idea of sitting down with both of them again and having hashing it out a little bit more, you know, completely. But I agree with you, Bob. I think that's very good. If this is really not that urgent right now, I don't think I think can spend more time reviewing things, but let's hear from next up, Rick Moran. Yes, and Carly, you may be able to help me with this. And by the way, Bob, not to correct you here, but it's not half, it's three times, all right? So there's a considerable cost savings with West. The, wasn't, isn't part of this urban water management plan a requirement for getting grants and other legal things? That is one of the things that drives this. Yes. Right. Okay, so that's all I had to add. I understand. Sorry about that, Rick, you're a math teacher background that's showing better than mine, right? Yeah. Was that it, Rick? In that case, we'll go to Lois Henry. So about how long does it take to do one of these plans, considering that they've already done a plan for us, does that mean it takes them less time? We would assume so. Most other agencies have awarded their contracts for consultants to work on these plans, probably five or six months ago. So we are getting kind of a late start here. That's another concern with using a brand new consultant like West and Associates. Something else to add just while we're on the topic, you know, just to make everyone clear, we would split this cost to 5050 Wisconsin Valley Water District. And the other component to consider this year's plan will be a little more significant for our district just because it will fit into the Santa Margarita Ground Waters planning. Those demand metrics that'll be taken from the urban water management plan will be fed into the planning for the Santa Margarita Ground Water Agency as well. So it will have a little more significance than maybe it did five years ago. Does that mean additional funding will be available from the county? I'm sorry, Steve. Does that mean that additional funding might be available from other members of the Santa Margarita Ground Water Authority? I don't believe so just because every water agency is responsible for putting together this plan. So I can't imagine the county would come in with funding. Okay. Lou, your hand is up. Thank you, President Schwann. I'd like to expand on what Carla just mentioned. And that is, I will disagree with Bob somewhat in that I believe there is an urgency here. We have till July to submit the urban water management plan but we get a two for by doing it sooner because it's going to impact Santa Margarita. We're in a dogfight on what the best way to achieve sustainability is. And I believe this is going to be a tool that's going to benefit us and Scott's Valley in terms of what we want to do versus what the county and the city of Santa Cruz want to do. And we don't have any time to do this to make it a significant part of the argument for Santa Margarita. And I'd like to break her Carly the way in but to me, that's very important. More than just fulfilling the urban water management plan, it's also a key metric in driving our position for Smigwa. Thank you, Lou. Carly, would you like to comment? I agree with you, Lou. And Santa Margarita is now moving at a pretty fast pace and going to require a lot of decisions to be made and critical decisions. And this information, and along with a lot of other information is needed. There's no doubt about it. Okay, thank you, Rick. Bob, you have another question or comment? Yeah, a question, Carly. You mentioned something that resonated with me and I think it's a critical one. Did you say that this particular urban water management plan needs to address additional demand metrics? Right, so that's kind of what these plans are mostly focused in on is comparing any growth that we could potentially have, how we're going to plan if there was another drought and what demands we need to meet. So did any of the proposals, and I'm sorry, I went through them, but I don't remember this particular detail, did any of those proposals state that they were going to do any kind of analysis around census information, demographic information, what have you? Right, I believe that does play into, just as part of DWR's requirements, that is something that either consultant would probably have to go through is using the most updated census data and any other population data we have available. Well, I think also a cohort demographic data. I mean, I like to use my street as an example, it's certainly anecdotal, it's not statistically significant, but in the last three years, we've gone from two children on my street to 21 with a replacement of, shall we say, people that have retired out of the area or moved on with families. And I believe that this valley, over the course of the next 10 to 15 years is going to go through a wholesale demographic shift that we haven't seen since probably the 80s, 70s and 80s. And that definitely needs to be part of anything they're considering. It may not show up on the census at this point, I think it's still early days on that, but looking ahead five years, I think we're going to see dramatic shifts in that. That said, I understand we're getting started late. I understand that this needs to be done. I certainly don't want to do ASRs for Santa Margarita, but we are having another meeting. We could have a special meeting to cover this and we are having another meeting in December. I have given Rick's correction that it's three X. I'm just not prepared to bite off in that at this time. That doesn't mean the rest of the board won't, but I can't support it at this time. Thank you, Bob. If there are no further board questions or comments, we can go to the public and introduce comments or hear comments or questions from them. Anybody of our attendees? We have Tina, your first up, please go ahead. Thank you to the board for bringing this topic up. I think it's important to go back and try to renegotiate these plans. And I think you mentioned that, but before there's a permanent vote on this, I think that that's something that could be done and preferably done swiftly because clearly we are a little behind on this topic in timing. But yeah, so that would just be my request is if the management would go back to the contractors and see if they're willing to renegotiate their process. Cause I also feel that the staff has been through a lot the last few months and would not appreciate another load on their shoulders. Thank you. Thank you, Tina. Any other questions or comments? I don't see any. Okay, we'll come back to the, back to the board. Okay, so Bob, we kind of know your feeling. I agree with, I agree with you. I feel the same way. I'm not prepared to vote to accept this immediately. It would at least give it some more time. However, Lois, go right ahead. So I'm wondering how soon SLB and Scott's Valley can talk to WSC and see if they can get a lower price here. And because we don't have a lot of time and the holidays are coming up and we can hear that there isn't gonna be Thanksgiving. Of course there will be Thanksgiving and there's gonna be Christmas and there's gonna be buying of presents. So the sooner that they can talk to WSC I think that would be a good idea and maybe they can come back in a week or two weeks. Well, two weeks might be Thanksgiving. I don't know. But I think we need to move a little rapidly on this. Thank you, Lois. Any other comments? Any other directors? Does anybody wanna make a motion to accept this or move forward with this? Because I'm not hearing it. If I could, Steve. You make it a moment. Rick, if you're- No, I wanna kind of summarize what I think I've heard and try to come up with maybe a solution here. I was taken by the cost difference and I understand what Steve and Bob are saying about various problems to hear. And if Rick doesn't mind going, you said you were gonna talk to Perrette about this in the near future here. Yeah, you know, I would like to, you know, I totally understand all the board's concerns and, you know, staff had many of those same concerns. I think what we probably have time, our goal would be to get this in front of our board for a decision either way before Scott's Valley's, next board meeting, I do believe, but that's November 12th. So if we could regroup with WSC and Scott's Valley's general manager and have our return to our board on a special meeting for review for the decision by November 12th, that could work for us. Okay, so, you know, I think that helps Steve and Bob be more behind this project here if we have, and we always had some concerns as well. Just my thinking here. Yeah, no, I think that's a good thought. And if we can do that, I mean, I don't think we have any problem with special meetings. I mean, we had enough of them during the fire. It seems like you had one every couple of days. So putting one of those together is unfortunate as it is for the staff. I think it would behoove us to pursue that. Bob, you got a comment? Yeah, I would also recommend though, again, the board may not agree with us that we have a conversation with the other company. I would also recommend that we make sure that it's clear that the data that's being generated from this belongs to us, that it is delivered to us in a format acceptable to our district staff so that we aren't held hostage again in the future because they retain the data. And therefore, even though they know everything about us and have all our data, they charge three times as much. I think this is something that we need to start moving to with, especially with folks like WSC that in the past have demonstrated that, you know, they're a consultant. I do consulting. I get the game, but we don't have to play the game. We can set our own rules and ask them to play by those rules. Yep, totally agree. Lois, you got a comment? Well, I'm a little confused about what we would ask West and associates would we ask them to raise their price? I mean, I don't understand what we would ask them do, would we just ask them to come up with more information or somehow that they have more time that they have spent doing this? I mean, what would we ask them? If Steve, if I could answer that question, maybe. Sure, go ahead, Rick. I think Lois, one of the things that I'm hearing is clarity about cost overruns and staff time. I think that that was the things that I was hearing were concerning about West and associates. And this is Gina, if I could just jump in here because we've gotten proposals from two contractors and both of them should remain in the running and be treated fairly until a selection is made. So it's gonna be important to approach both contractors with some of the same considerations. Usually the process to negotiate a price would be to make a selection and then enter into negotiations, see if we could negotiate a reasonable contract with the highest ranking firm. But I do feel that especially working with Scott's Valley an approach could be worked out between them and SLB that works to get to address some of these concerns. It just approaching just WSC for a price reduction prior to making a selection as a little bit of a irregular and awkward process. So you would recommend approving the contract but direct staff to negotiate a lower cost? Well, that could be one approach if the board were prepared to select them subject to negotiating a reasonable agreement is then one possibility is that the agreement could be brought back to the board for approval once something's been worked out that's acceptable to WSC and Scott's Valley. That is a possible approach. How does the board feel about that that they direct staff to move ahead and accept WSC's proposal and have staff move ahead with negotiating and bring back a formal agreement? I don't think I would support that. I think we'd rather say, I like the idea if you know what, talk to the other bidding company, the other subcontractor and ask them, okay, you got two bids, right? So I would talk to the guys with the $42,000 bid and say, what are you guys thinking? And I wouldn't disclose the other bit because I can ask them to really justify based on what you know is gonna be needed how can they justify what their bid is? Can they and see what that happens? And at the same time, as Bob has said, talk to WSC about A, retaining the rights to the data that they end up producing which I'm sure they might claim it's a work product of theirs but regardless, I think it would be be of us to have ownership of that. And at the same time, make them justify, well, I guess maybe they can, but badger them with regards to their $120,000 fee versus the 50K from five years ago and justify that based on the fact that they've already done it once. I mean, usually you get a break when you're going back to an existing customer and are picking up additional, it's leverage carry on business for them. WSC? Well, no, I mean, you know, but that's what you're saying Bob, hold their feet to the fire and make them prove what they're asking. They don't roll that way. That's not what they do. That's not their culture. Well, that's the approach I would take if I were talking to them. But anyway, sorry, Rick Moran has a comment and followed by Lou. So I'm trying to get this resolved here in my own mind anyways, is if the board gives Rick and Harley direction to talk with these two companies one more time with the questions or the concerns that we've thought about here, cost overruns, WSCs, previous track record, clarification from West and associates about things. But as Gina says, guys, both questions companies that if, you know, I mean, I'm sorry to say this, but it would be, you know, one more brick into Rick's, you know, arrange, you know, trying to do something here. So given that, you know, and then we could come back next week and have a special board meeting and resolve those questions. And here's the thing. There's $40,000 hanging in the difference here. That's the end of my comment. Thank you. Lou, you had a comment? Yes, I'd like to dispel a misconception that a lot of people are putting out there. We're comparing apples and oranges. The 50,000 we spent five years ago with WSC was just for SLBWD. This new quote is for SLBWD and Scotts Valley Water District. So if you really want to do a cost comparison, compare the 50,000 we spent five years ago with the 60,000, that's our share of this quote. You can't compare, you know, the 50,000 five years ago was 120,000 now because it's apples and oranges. And as far as that other quote for 43,000, that'll never work. There's no way they're going to give us an acceptable result for $43,000. In my opinion, it's a low ball that we would be really remiss and regret if we even thought about doing it. So it sounds like, so Scotts Valley would have had to have submitted an urban water management plan five years ago or so also, right? Do we know who'd produced that for them? I don't know. Do you know, Carly? I'm unsure. Rick, you mentioned it might have been WSC. Are you sure on that? I thought it might have been but I'm not sure if they did it. I can't speak to them. I'd be curious to know that. I'm sorry, I think we may have a technical question coming up here from Holly. You have your hand up for some reason that makes me nervous. What's up? No, it's just that we're talking about next week being a day for a special meeting. The only possibilities would be Monday or Tuesday. That's correct. So this would all have to be done on Monday and Tuesday, special meeting, talking to both consultants, that sort of thing. Okay, I'm sorry. Lois, you have your hand up? Yeah, I do. I mean, I have to go along with Lou here. We're talking $10,000 different than it was five years ago. And this is time sensitive and I don't like WSC but it just seems kind of crazy. And I'm assuming if it was Western Associates would we be paying half of the 40-some thousand? Or I mean, I don't know the answer to that. But if our share would have been 40, whatever 1,000, why don't we just deal with this now and say that we're going to approve this with a caveat that Rick and Scott's Valley will try to negotiate with WSC if they get nowhere, then we have to do it some other way. If we want to do this, where we go to both play and do all this stuff, it's going to be a problem. And we're not going to make the deadline. Yeah, well, I don't know, Lois, but we're talking about an urban water management plan. We're not talking about a tank that's ready to fall over on somebody's house. We got to do something to make a decision that's going to affect that tonight or tomorrow. We're talking about a plan that has to be submitted in July of next year. And I don't know that we can't buy additional time if we were to say, hey, due to COVID-19 and due to a forest fire and due to a number of other things that have occurred, we're going to be a little late in filing our urban water management plan, which is going to tell you what we might or might not do if there's a drought three or four years in the future. So I don't see this as an urgent matter. That's my whole point. And we've been, as a board over the last couple of years, we've been pushed into approving a lot of things because there wasn't any time to wait. There wasn't any time to get a second bid. There wasn't any time for this or that. And I don't really feel that way about this particular matter. So I'm not really in favor of agreeing under any circumstances tonight. I'd rather see the staff go back and actually talk to WSC and maybe the other guys aren't realistic with their bid. But it sounds like Gina says, if we're going to talk to one, we need to talk to both. But that's my thoughts on that. Bob, you've got your hand up. Yeah, or we could approve West and go back and do a deeper dive on them to really get something that we'd be more comfortable with. And then that can come back to the board. If it's acceptable, if not, then you go plan B. But I, and Lou, I do get that it's, that it's 50 versus 60. I still have the same question. I, you know, on a board I served on previously. We had an annual report that had to be done and every year the contract of charge is, you know, $15,000. Until we asked, well, it's really the same report. You change dates in a page and, you know, all of a sudden the price went down to 5,000. I'm not saying that it's equivalent here. I get that WSC probably baked things into the RFP requirements that work to their advantage. But it just, this just doesn't seem, this doesn't seem right. And I think we ought to give the other guys a shot to at least justify why they're coming in the way they are and to get a sense for their honorability and talk to some of their references and that sort of thing. And if the way to do that in a legal fashion is to approve them to go have that deep dive, then I would recommend that we do that. Thank you, Bob. So that being said, you know, the board, if somebody on the board really feels strongly and wants to make a motion to approve this, they feel free. If not, you know, we'll direct the staff then to, you know, take the input that they've received and go back and work on the quotes that we've received and maybe talk to Scouts Valley as well. I have a question that might not be right, but. Go ahead, James. What's the difference between the urban water management plan that was submitted five years ago and the one that should be submitted now? I think the date's different. I think that was Bob's point. No, no, no. There are some things that WSC baked in. It sounds like there are changes. There are changes. I have changes. Otherwise the consultants would have to do that. So I'm sure there are substantive changes, right, Pearl? Right. And then also whenever these plans are completed, it's looking 10 years into the future. So, you know, you're projecting 10 years from 2021 instead of, you know, 2015's date of 10 years in the future. So you're adding an additional five years of planning. That answers my question. I just didn't really know what it would be different. So just one in the interest of time, it does not sound like there was going to be a motion. So I think staff has enough direction. We'll get together with a legal counsel and the district manager from Scott's Valley discuss tonight's board discussion and we will come back. Perfect. Okay, Rick, back to you. Okay. Moving on. Item C. Okay. Item C is the Pennorama contract amendment. And I will ask the environmental planner, Karlie, you wanted to... Yeah, great. So just kind of giving some background to this. In August, 2020, we all know that we experienced the CZU Lightning Fire Complex fires and it's been set a few times, but we did lose quite a bit of our watershed land approximately 1600 acres along the Ben Lohman Mountainside. Prior to the fires, staff was working to prepare a fire management plan through partnership with Panorama Environmental Inc. The plan would expand mapping, create fuel reduction projects, identify funding sources, improve road access for fire personnel and improve communications with fire prevention agencies. The initial draft was slated for September, 2020. However, emergency response to presidents. The mapping database created by Panorama served the district well during the fires, helping our staff to make initial decisions based on real-time fire mapping overlaid on our infrastructure and creating an efficient way to share infrastructure with Cal Fire, the County of Santa Cruz and various state agencies. Since August, Panorama has taken on a number of tasks outside of their scope. Tasks include hazard tree assessments, watershed restoration planning, identifying emergency response grants, alternate to the FEMA funding, organizing site visits with state agencies, erosion control and debris removal permitting, potential funding through the carbon market and valuable feedback on various fire-related topics. Panorama continues to work on the fire management plan as preparing to do a presentation of the plan to the environmental committee, for the environmental committee at the November meeting. Fuel reduction and hardening will begin as soon as emergency response subsides. It is important to note that part of this amendment includes $8,000 of work pleaded outside of Panorama's scope, which included the post-burn assessments, hazard tree evaluations and reports and assisting staff with meetings, attached as exhibit A as Panorama's contract amendment scope and fee sheet. The approximate fiscal impact would be $40,000 and staff as well as Panorama environmental's principal, Tanya Traces, on the call to answer questions. Thank you, Carla. Okay, do we have any questions from everybody on the board? Two, three up. Go ahead, Bob. Yeah, now, you know, this contract is very much in contrast to the one we were just talking about. These guys have delivered significant value and in real time, I understand they even helped us with mapping, doing, they had resources that allowed us to map where the fire was actually going, allowing our operations team to take early action to stem the amount of damage. These guys have, I think, delivered honorably. I think they've delivered fairly. They are not out of line in terms of what they're asking for. Interestingly enough, if we save $40,000 on taking it out of WSC's pocket, that would pay for this. I think these guys are great and have done a really good job for us. So I think we're lucky to have found them and to have them. So thank you for bringing them in. Thank you, Bob. Rick, we're in. Yes, for, is, Carly, what's the consultant's name that's on the phone? I believe we have Tanya and Caitlin on the call and I think they're in the audience, so I'm not sure if we have to give them allowance to speak if we want to ask any questions. Okay, so for Tanya, they give us an example of what hardening of the infrastructure looks like, particularly with the lion's tanks and the five mile pipeline. That's my question. Thank you. Tanya, you can go ahead and unmute yourself and speak. Yeah, so I don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet. We aren't quite there yet. What we have so far is established the template for the plan, which that would be a part of. And our sub-consultants from a spatial informatics group, Jason Mogadass, who gets a lot of credit for all the real-time work during the fire as well, would be helping to identify what those would be. And again, I think part of our scope also includes working closely with the district to understand what works for you guys, what you need and what the priorities are. So at this point, I don't have exactly what that be yet, but it would become part of the plan. I can speak to a little bit of the hardening of the district. We don't have anything really on the five mile and treatment plan area right now, but a lot of the hardening of the district has to do with wood pump stations being converted to block pump stations. Redwood tanks being taken out of the system, which is one of our goals anyway right now, but this just exaggerates it when it's in a fire plan. So those are the kind of things right now that we've been working on, talking about, and that's to hardening the district. And now that this fire has hit us, now a lot of this, obviously, HDPE lines that are above ground are coming to the headway, and those will continue to be in the plan. Thank you. Yeah, and a little more info. Caitlin just sent me via message here conversion. Some of the examples were conversion of wood tanks, the steel conversion of poly plastic to steel tanks, replacement of wood stands, supports and tank platforms to steel or concrete stands and support should also prevent movement during seismic conversion of plastic pipe to metal pipe, things like that. Okay, thank you very much. Any other questions or comments from any director? If not, we'll go to the public. Does the public have any comments they wanna share or add to this item, amending the contract? I don't see any questions from anybody, okay. Oh, Lois. Do we need to make a motion to approve this? Is that what you just did, Lois? I'm sorry, I was talking while you were talking. Oh. Yes, make a motion and directing the district manager to move forward. I would like to make a motion to direct the district manager to move forward on this panorama environmental proposal. Okay, make a motion. Okay, Holly, would you please record the vote? Director Swan. Yes. Vice President Henry. Yes. Director Ferris. Yeah. Director Moran. Yes. Director Fultz. Yes. Okay, Holly. Okay, Rick, up to D, Rick, are you still there? Rick, you're muted. You're on mute, Rick. There you go. Okay, use me there. Okay, item 90 is the Redwood Park Tank Initial Study Mitigated Negative Declaration, Environmental Planner. Blanchard will give this report to the board. So last item from me tonight, but we have. But we do have the discussion and possible action regarding the approval of the Redwood Park Tank Initial Study and Mitigated Negative Declaration, or ISMND. Just for some background, the district plans to retire two aging and leaking 20,000 gallon water storage tanks referred to as the swim tanks located at 1045 Country Curled Drive. The district will need new water storage and pipeline infrastructure to support the north service area and meet fire flow requirements. The district prepared a draft initial study and mitigated negative declaration for the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. The original 30 day public review period commenced July 31 and was scheduled to end August 30. But due to the CZU Lightning Complex fires in August, the district chose to extend the public review period until October 2. After the public review period, the district worked with RINCON consultants to finalize the ISMND, which is attached to Exhibit A, respond to all public comics, which is Exhibit B, and create a mitigated monitoring and reporting program, MMRP, as Exhibit C. For the project description and location, the Redwood Park Tank project consists of the construction and operation of a new 125,000 gallon, bolted steel water storage tank on about a 6,500 square foot parcel located northwest of the intersection of Country Club Drive and Dundee Avenue in Ben Lomond. The project site is currently undeveloped. The post footprint of the new tank is 30 feet in diameter and is clear of any trees and thickly vegetated with ivy, a grove of native coastal redwoods, and mixed hardwood species is located approximately 18 feet south of the Peros Tank site. The project would construct the following infrastructure at the project site, 125,000 gallon bolted steel water storage tank, two water pumps housed in an 80 square foot pumping station made from concrete masonry and fire-resistant roofing, base rock surfaced or paved driveway, and then 400 feet of buried 8-inch HDPE water line from the project site to the Swing Water Storage Tank site on Country Club Drive, and then a standby backup generator and propane tank for emergency power. There is no fiscal impact for this item for approval, and then the actual items were too large to include and send in a packet. So they were sent out to the board and anyone on our mailing list as well as included on the website as a link. Thank you, Carla. OK, do we have any questions or comments by anybody on the board? Lois, put your hand down. That's still left over. No, I left it up there because I've got questions. Oh, sorry, then please proceed. Thank you. So I've seen there were a lot of protest letters over doing this project. And I was wondering, have we already paid Nick Nakari for the property? I'm going to ask Council if she would answer that question. No, there is an agreement with Mr. Nakari for the purchase of the property that's still in effect it hasn't closed. The closing is contingent upon a couple of things, including successful completion of this secret process. So how much have we already spent doing our due diligence on this property? Anybody got an idea? I think what was the cost of, currently, the cost of the environmental? I don't have those documents in front of us, but I think we spent about with CEQA and some of the surveys we did close to about $40,000, $45,000 somewhere in there. So I don't know what the percentage of the people who live in that particular area, how many of have protested, but what will it take to use the other site? Will it still be like 20-gallon tanks instead of putting in a tank that would give the people a lot better fire management? It'd be so much better. So it seems like to go back to the old site is asking to not do what we really need to do. And I believe, as a district, SLV wants to do right by the ratepayers. And I guess I feel like going back to the old site would not be doing a good thing for ratepayers. And I understand their concern about road closure. I mean, I have lived here in Montpico ever. And we had a road, not a total road closure, but where a lot of us lived, it took us an extra 20 minutes to get down to Lompico Road and back to where we would have been if we could have used our road that was damaged by Lompico Water District. And I realize that somebody could have dried before an ambulance could get there, or that someone's house could burn down before a fire truck would get there. But those of us in the area, the Lompico Water District wanted to fix the main that broke and took out all the water in Lompico and undermine the road. And we said, no, we wanted the job done right. And I feel like going back to the old site would not be doing the job right. And yeah, I get how inconvenient it is to have your road closed. But I believe that this district, SLVWD, wants to do the best possible job. And that's just my two cents. Well, if I can try to quickly answer a couple of your questions, Lois, going back to the old site, there is not enough room to construct the 120,000 gallon tank, which is fire flow requirements for Santa Cruz County. It would be a much reduced capacity. The environmental impacts to that site, we would have to remove the majority of the trees, the redwood trees, and hardwood trees on the site. There would be a large excavation. There would be road closures, even with that project, because dump trucks would have to stage in the roadway to haul out all of the excavated dirt. The new project, the new location, the tank project itself will not have road impacts other than equipment coming and going. The pipeline, which is on the district's capital improvement program replacement, regardless of the tank goes in or not, will have road closures. That project, I think, is scheduled to take about two weeks of actual excavation working in the roadway. And we will, as we do all over on one-way roads, we have times that we open the road. We close the road for maybe 45 minutes, and then we plate the road. We have steel plating that we line the roadway with, so emergency response, fire, ambulance, police can respond at any time. The district routinely replaces mainline in one-way roads and limited access areas. And we work closely with emergency services, and we work closely with the community. I do believe in the beginning, folks thought that we were going to close the road for several days to do this project or close it all day long and all night. That is not the intent of this project. We have established working hours, if you look in this document. And we will close the road for about 45 minutes to an hour somewhere in there, and then open the road for on the hour. We will work with the contractor on a schedule. Services, you will still have all of your services. This project is very important. It's the right location for this tank and elevation. And it also provides an increase of fire flow to county standards, state standards. As you saw in this packet, there's an artist rendition of what the tank will look like. That's actual location of the tank, the trees in the background are an actual photo of the location. And we have the steel tank put on that photo. Once constructed, you really won't even know that tank's there. And you'll have a much better water system, especially since we've had the fires. It's very needed in that area. That area has insufficient fire flow for the amount of homes and for that area. That tank is strategically placed to provide fire flow. Thank you, Rick. Lou, you have a question or comment? I have a question for Carly. Carly, that study, I believe calls for the removal of one redwood and four canoes. Is that correct? There is a couple other little dragler redwoods that are two to four inches in diameter that are just suckers coming off the redwood grove there. And it's more of a cleanup thing. But other than that, yeah, you're correct. It's one redwood and four canoes with some scrub brush. And my question is actually, I don't remember seeing the reason for the removal of the trees. Is it because the trees are diseased or is it because of the need for site preparation? The canoes are for site preparation and the one redwood is a, it's about a 14 to 15 inch diameter redwood is coming off of the side of another redwood tree and coming out towards where the tank would be. And it would need to be removed due to the fact that it could be a danger to the tank itself. It's the hazard. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Lou. Rick Moran? Thank you, President Swann. Yes, so we've gone, the board has gone through long and extensive negotiation and evaluation of this property. We've had a public meeting on this just before COVID. A lot of the neighbors came and voiced some concerns. And in the meantime, COVID has happened and slowed this project down. And those letters of concern that people had, I think, I would not necessarily, although the word protest was in there, I think they need some assurance here and about their road and they have questions about that. And to one of those concerns is about the road closures. And I've, as much as the water district is about water, it's really, it's a lot about roads as well. And we saw earlier today in the environmental committee, James made a presentation about some of the work they're doing in other parts of the water district. And there were pictures of the one-way road or one lane road and the steel plates that go over there and the machines that the constant care that is taken to ensure that people can pass in emergency with on a schedule. So I think people can be assured that there will have access to their neighborhood. It will be restricted. The smallest bit, you know, these are things that are trying to do with this least disruption to the public as possible and still get the job done. But the consideration is there and the expertise in how to do that is there as well. The other one was about, so I think those people are concerned about that, the water district can assure them that it's not as big a problem as they may imagine it to be. The staging area and the worrying about the cars and everything going out there, there was someone who said that maybe the staging area could be down in Highlands. Well, you know, that's the kind of thing that I think can be worked out. And no one wants to run over the neighborhood up there and disregard what their concerns are. The other thing was about the noise level of the pumps. You know, I don't know exactly what can be done about that, but I'm sure there's, I got a guy next to me that has drums and he built a shed and he soundproofed it and I don't hear him playing the drums. So I'm sure a pump can be, this noise can be dead in some way. The size of the tank is something that I read is a concern. And again, we saw a presentation by James earlier about the tanks that are going up in Longpico and they were of similar size. And yeah, in that particular environment, they, you know, they're new and they're big, but they're not huge. You know, I mean, those are all kind of subjective words here, but they're reasonable in size for the location. And you know, I had a two-story house built next to me or a second story added on it. I didn't love it when it happened. I've done things to mitigate my view of it, but I got lovely neighbors there now. And I think if you had the water district there with 120,000 gallons of water, you'd feel a lot more secure if a fire was coming down there. So I think the size is something that you can look at those pictures and, you know, there's water tanks all around here. We all have to put up with some visual disruption that maybe we would prefer not to, but we'd also prefer to have good water and good pressure and fire flow. And, you know, people were concerned about the increased water security. I believe this is gonna resolve that. The tree removal, it's pretty minimal. And I think there's even a mitigation in there to put an owl box in there to help with road and control and to be as conscientious as possible about the little forested grove that is there, okay? So those are some of the things that I heard from the public in those letters in our last meeting. And then just let me finish up here with what I think are the positives of this. Because like I said, we did a long extensive negotiation and evaluation of this property in close session for a long time earlier this year, all right? And the first thing that it did is this site saved a considerable amount of money in doing, trying to place it back on the present site. Concertable amount of money is being saved here because of the application. This is a beautiful piece of property. You put a piece of, put a flat property, nice water tank. It's, as I think Rick was explaining, it was a lot easier to do the construction. An environmental destruction as well. The trees don't have to be removed like they would be half if we tried to do something like this back on the present swimming tank site. So there's less environmental damage, there's a lot less cost, easier construction, saves money. It provides up-to-date water and fire flow. And I was just gonna, yeah. So those are the things. And you know, I think the water district can assure the people in that neighborhood that their grievances are heard and can be, you know, we're mitigating for a lot of things, for animals, for endangered species we can mitigate for the people that live in that neighborhood. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Director Fultz. Well, between Rick Rogers and Rick Moran's statements, I don't have a whole lot of other questions or comments other than whether or not we've heard from the people that submitted their concerns and if they have acknowledged that their concerns have been addressed and that they are satisfied with the district's intense intentions, good faith and that they would really like to see the project proceed. So that's, I just wanna hear from the people in the neighborhood. Hopefully some of them are attending. If they haven't, if they aren't attending, maybe that's a statement in itself that they're okay. Okay, do we have any other questions or comments by any other director at this time? If not, we'll go to the attendees and give them an opportunity to speak and ask questions. Okay. First up, Sandy Mast. Go right ahead, Sandy. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for letting me respond. I've lived here since 1985 and I love you guys. I have you on speed dial. Whenever the pump on the old Redwood tanks at the bottom of country club in 1090 Dundee would overflow, my husband, before he locked them, would go down and fix the pump or fix the float. So I just wanna say, I've been here since 1985 and I really appreciate you and all I wanna do is support. And I think moving the tank to the other place is awesome. I don't worry about the road control. I'm a fit 65 year old woman and I can walk up my hill. I'll park wherever you need me to. I think you guys are awesome whenever I call and you know, water's flowing over the edge or something's happening, you guys always respond. My only concerns are these and I've been violating the chat room because I'm an educator and that's how we do Zoom is we chat to each other not to disturb meetings. And so I just feel like I'm old enough. I can violate the rules. So I apologize for that, but I would like to say that I'm concerned when I moved here in 1985 we had galvanized pipes that were underground that were safe from fire. Now I have plastic pipes up above next to my property that if there is a fire, it could be a problem. But I'm not dissing you guys. I just wanna just be support to you and I wanna know how I can help, what I can do. Jim Rapost is a good friend. Beth Thomas is a good friend. I was an assistant principal at SLV. I love this community. And I just wanna know how, and I know I violated the chat thing too because I kept chatting and you guys kept kicking me out, but then I found my other email. So I just kept chatting you. But I just want to say, I really appreciate you. I know how hard it is. I've run 24 schools and 24 programs across the county. And I know managing a water system for all the people is really difficult. But I wanna support you in this. I think the move is a great idea. I want to say, I bought the two lots next to you that were up for tax sale in your water company right by the Redwood Tanks. And if you wanna sell that lot to me when you're all head and done, I'm gonna buy that too. Because I want my kids and my family to enjoy the beauty of this valley. And I know this is a hard time for all of us with COVID and the elections and all the stuff. And I'll shut up in a minute, but I just wanna say how much I appreciate you because I know every time I call SLB water company, they always come out and they go, oh, it's Sandy Mask calling again about the tank linky. You know, oh, or Sandy Mask calling about the homeless up there in the top of the mountain, cutting the line. Oh, no, that's Semper virus. And no, I know how hard this is to manage because I've managed 24 schools. So I just wanna say, good on you. And I really support you moving the tanks to the other place and having enough water to save our houses. And thank you so much for all you've done over the years. So that's just my two cents. I feel like you need encouragement as do I. And I just wanted to say that and I'll shut up now. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sandy. Appreciate the comments and on behalf of the staff, I appreciate them as well. Matt and Jen, you're up. Matt and Jen. There we go. Hear me now. My name is Matt Johnston. Hello, district members. I work for the County of Santa Cruz as the environmental coordinator. I've been doing SQL review for the last 10 years and writing them for eight years before that. Municipal studies. It's also on the water commission for 10 years. So I understand the water districts. I think this is a good project, but I think there's still some issues. In the initial, the original initial study, the traffic management plan spoke to standard traffic control and the access through alternate routes on Dundee and scenic. That's been corrected with the, in the new initial study or the revised initial study, the 10 minutes on 45 minutes of working. That's a change and that is a mitigation and that actually has to be seen as a mitigation. Otherwise it's not enforceable. We need to know from, I live up above the project. As you know, this is the only way in or out for about 50 houses with COVID and people staying at home. We get three or four trips from Brown and three or four trips from FedEx every day plus all the gas. We get a lot of traffic up and down this road. So when you stop that road for 45 minutes, it's average of about 12 to 15 feet wide. There is no off street parking for the majority of the road. So you're gonna have traffic impacts, 45 minutes of these trucks and people waiting. There's no place for people to pass once you open it up. So the traffic management plan needs to be developed and it needs to be shown that you're gonna have people not just at the site, but down the road, up the road, directing people where to park. That's one issue. Another is that was not addressed is the workers who are coming up and working on it, there is no place for them to park. That there is no parking in this neighborhood. So parking on the street, again, creates traffic issues. And then the third issue is with the trenching and the opening it up. You addressed emergency services, but it's, I lost my train of thought on that one. Yeah, the plates will work, the plates will be going up and down, but again, getting people through that area once it's opened up and getting up into the neighborhood, it hasn't been developed and we don't have any assurance that if I've gotta go into the office at two in the afternoon, because I've got something to do in the office, I may be sitting there for an hour and a half. I may be able to get, you open it up and then I go down and I can't get down the road. And I know Lompico has had the same issues, but Lompico road is a two lane road. This is more like shutting down West or Lake Boulevard, not even Lake, because Lake has two ways out. There is no other way through. So I think that needs to be developed more. And I think that adding in the mitigations, even if they were standard practices, as you saw it from the public's view, from a CEQA standpoint, you changed your CEQA document and you added conditions and that requires recirculation. So unfortunately, I mean, I do support the project. I think the tank position is a good spot. I think having a ensuring that Peter Parker, the neighbor there is not hearing that pump all the time. He's gonna be right next to that pump house. So making sure that it's well baffled and that's important. I don't see there's really environmental issues, but I think the traffic component of it for two weeks of not being able to get in and out and not being able to get deliveries. If UPS is trying to deliver a package and they come into a traffic jam and they're told they're gonna have to wait for an hour, they're gonna go away. We're not gonna get our packages delivered. I know you're coordinating with emergency services, but you're not coordinating with that. So that's, yeah, or the other folks who are trying to get in and out of the neighborhood other than emergency services. Emergency services is very important. I don't want to discount that and it's important to work with them, but there needs to be a way that, and I, the jack and bore is an option to keep the road open. That's expensive, I understand that. Having, I think that the answer may lie in an expanded traffic control plan that is reviewed, that people have a chance to see how it's going to work rather than just saying, we'll have the contractor will do traffic control and it'll be great. That's what we hear right now. And that's frankly, when you walk up and down these roads, that's not good enough. There is no place to pass. Where are you gonna put the cars that are backed up and the cars that are trying to come through? That's my question and that's my comment. Thank you. I'm sorry that we have a number of other people that your five minutes had expired. Come back to you if you still have additional questions. I'll be happy to. Next up is Jeff Lieberman. Go ahead and unmute yourself, Jeff, and share your comments. Can you hear me now? Absolutely. Very good. Matt covered a few of the items I wanted to cover. Let me add a few more to that. Pump noise, I was the one that instigated the question, the calculations on the noise levels produced by the pumps. I realized later on that they were revised, though not very much. I realized later on that those measurements were done at ground level, but I live on a hill above, that was gonna be above the tank. And I'm gonna be hearing whatever's coming up from the top of the tank. And I have no idea how noisy that might be. In one of my letters, I suggested that I visit one of the existing tanks and be able to, with my sound level meter, and actually take a measurement and see what I'm really dealing with. I still wanna do that, because let's just say I'm not too happy about what I'm seeing. However, I'm willing to tolerate it if that's what it takes. Okay, next item, traffic flow. Again, adding on to what Matt says, the problem with the traffic, the way I see it, the traffic's gonna be a problem not only for the two weeks while they're laying pipe down country club, but also through the entire duration of the project because there's gonna be people, equipment, parts and pieces of the tank, all kinds of stuff going up and down the road. There are two rather sharp switchbacks in the road, big trucks, they can make it, go back and forth half a dozen times and they'll eventually make it. That blocks up traffic instantly. I haven't seen any mention of any kind of traffic study where somebody puts a counter across the road and see how much traffic they're actually dealing with, but I think you'll be surprised at how much there really is. I was gonna go around the neighborhood and count cars, but basically the revised version of the proposal arrived on Monday evening, and here we are three days later and I didn't have enough time to do that, was doing other things. So the traffic situation is what really bothers me, not for the two weeks for the plumbing, but for the entire duration of the project, there's no staging area, there's no parking area, there's no passing area. This place is, well, unless you have everybody parked down on highway nine, it's just not gonna happen. Okay, next thing, the roadway, the theory is you're gonna have 45 minutes of work and 15 minutes of moving the plates and passing the traffic. I'm just kind of trying to remember what it was like on some of the traffic jams up on Graham Hill Road when they were working on chopping trees on the side of it. And it took me, typically it was about 10 minutes, I would think, of waiting 10 minutes to get through and then 10 minutes coming back. So in my estimation, if you're gonna go a 60 minute cycle, that's gonna be 30 minutes of downtime where nothing's moving while they're juggling around plates and another 10 minutes, sorry, 20 minutes of downtime while juggling plates and 10 minutes while the traffic is moving one way or moving the other way, it's five minutes for each way to go. That means that optimally, if that can be done, you got half the time of an eight hour day or four hours a day for 10 days to delay that pipe. Can it be done in 40 hours? I don't know, but I don't think so. Mr. Rogers would tell me otherwise, I'll gladly accept his opinion, but from what I can see, I'm not sure. Okay, equipment staging. Equipment staging is probably gonna have to end up on highway nine at the turnout opposite Highland Park. No problem there, again, except that getting the equipment up and getting it back down again is gonna go through those switchbacks and that's not gonna be easy. It's gonna take some time and when they go through that switchbacks, there's not gonna be any traffic flowing up or down until they go from the top of the hill to down the hill. So if anybody needs some entertainment, just take your car and simulate how long it takes for you to get from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill and then visualize how many cars are gonna get stuck behind that during that time. That's gonna be for the full year of the project. Every time some piece of equipment goes down to the staging area. The obvious solution was to convert the turnaround into a staging area, but I have no idea how much or what kind of equipment or how many personal cars or inspectors or officials that have to go up there and find a parking space. The place is gonna be a zoo and like Matt said, there is no off-street parking. I've been here since 1973 I think and the very first thing I did was take a bobcat and chew up some parking spaces so at least I'd have some few parking spaces. So I've got two and the neighbors have got three right next to me and so forth and that's it for my side of the road, done. Everybody else is parking in these little turnouts cut into the side of the hill which are inherently dangerous. Okay and lastly cleaning up the old mess. I went onto the sandy mass property today and took pictures of the four inch plastic pipe that is literally laid half-hazardly across the hill. I assume there's some rhyme and reason to the way the pipe is there but I'd never really noticed until I took the pictures. If you'd like to, I can, I put them on my website. You're welcome to look at them. I can send it to the board, whatever. But those pipes I hope will be moved but I have a proposal. If you don't want to block off country club for two weeks while they're laying the pipe, the same pipe could be laid down Dundee where it intersects to Jackson next to Sandy's house and he's gonna hate me for this and then down the hill where those plastic pipes are now located directly above the tanks. It's a flatter site, it's a more reasonable slope. You don't have to worry about cars slipping on the metal plates when it rains. I think it's a better way to do it. And most important, Jackson Avenue which connects to country club drive up there can be a loop so you're not blocking traffic. You just simply go around whenever there's construction going on. So it isn't like no way out, there is a back road. What I mentioned in my reply to the board or to the proposal was that some excavation would be done and I was stupid and I didn't indicate exactly where. The back end of Jackson Avenue where it connects to country club is pretty well pitted and it's four wheel drive country only. You run a blade over that thing, level it out, pack in the dirt and you've got a back entrance now so you can go around and not get stuck. Okay, that's it for me. Thank you very much. Yes, well good comment. So we have the mic next. Whoa. I have a few comments. Some of them have already been covered but perhaps I can add some valuable information to what's been said. Do you speak up a little bit, Mike? I'll get up. Can you hear me better now? I can hardly hear him, Steve. Yeah, can you speak up or close me to the mic? Try to move my mic. Is this any better? Yeah, that's good. Okay. I am very concerned with the Redwood water tank project and strongly opposed the current proposal for handling the traffic on country club drive during construction and the pipeline associated with it, particularly with delays of emergency vehicles. This is completely inadequate. The time to clear the road and lay steel plates could be the difference between life and death or the spread of a fire. This doesn't even account for large equipment and trucks delivering supplies, traversing the sharp curves, particularly at Sylvia, Sylvia up and down scenic way. There is no other way out of country club drive. We have not been given any way to address these issues adequately with the construction personnel or any means of control, particularly once the construction is turned over to a contractor. Another important point is that the starting of this project is in August, as stated, in the height of the fire season. I think this is not a good idea. The whole ill-conceived plan shows a lack of proper planning and concern for our wellbeing, at least to this point. A notice included with our monthly bill would have gone a long way to inform us of this important issue. In my public comment, I mentioned an alternate location to the tank above Hartman Avenue, which was the first location I mentioned was too small, but there is a pad on Caledonia where a small cabin now exists that could well be suitable for this tank and possibly even a larger one. This location could easily tap into the pipeline from the existing tank located slightly further up Caledonia and save us from the presence and noise of the tank and other problems and the pump at this present location. At the very least, if this pipeline plan must move forward, a little more thought could be put into its safety. Radio contact between equipment operators and at least three trained traffic control flaggers at the top and bottom of Country Club, as well as a road closure sign with a direct phone number to the workers we could call and a traffic director at the bottom of scenic. To be able to forewarn personnel of an approaching emergency vehicle would add at least some minimum safety and convenience. It might also be better to open the road for approaching traffic within reason rather than for 10 minutes every hour if nobody is approaching. Backed up traffic could impede emergency vehicles. A contractor would possibly compromise our safety to be able to finish with the minimum delays. It appears we would have little control over this and we would like to have, as I said, meaningful contact with him or his crew. Please consider another site or a post-movement to do this properly. I understand the financial benefits of this plan, but as it stands, there are many problems which we very much want to see resolved. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. Let's see, anyone who hasn't spoken yet in the public? We have, you guys, your hands are coming up and going down. Peter Parker, is your hand up? Yep, go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad to have an opportunity to comment on this project. I appreciate the work that Jeff Lieberman did. In addressing the noise concerns with the pump, and I don't feel that they've been adequately addressed with Mr. Moran tonight. I didn't see or hear any evidence of actual mitigation in terms of the pump noise. I mean, comparing that to having somebody play drums in a shed, to me is an indication that this question hasn't been given adequate concern. In the beginning, I heard a number thrown around 30 decibels of pump noise. That's a very audible noise, and the noise in these on this hill here and throughout this neighborhood is transmitted. It's almost accentuated. You can hear neighbors talking a block away. So it's, I mean, 30 decibels is, that's definitely a concern. So I haven't seen anything as to, you know, the structure, I know the pump house itself is supposed to be made out of concrete block, which is a good sound attenuator in general. But I don't think, I think the roof is gonna have to be wood-framed. So I haven't seen any insulation numbers for that or actual tests done on a similar pump house. To see what actually how audible is that. So I think it's important to get a little more specific and as Jeff suggested, if there's an opportunity, I think we need to have an opportunity to visit a pump house of the same design and be able to be in the vicinity of that pump when it's coming on and determine for ourselves actually how audible that is. I'm also concerned about what times of day and how often that pump is gonna be going off and for how long, you know, if it's going off during sleep time and it's 30 decibels, that can definitely interfere with people's ability to sleep and especially to get deep sleep. So I think the times that that pump is being activated is something I haven't seen the schedule or for how long it's going. But to me, I haven't seen signs of adequate mitigation on this and I think that's gonna be really important for me to get behind this. This project is right exactly next to my property. I think I'm probably the closest person to it. And one of the things that I appreciate about this neighborhood I've been here for 20 years is the peace and quiet. And if we have pump noise that's audible, that's gonna be very impactful for us. This is not a, this is a rural situation. And I think that you need to consider the character of the neighborhood in terms of how you address the mitigation on this project. So that's my main concern. The other concern I have is the desire to work on weekends. In other words, all we have up here during this construction is the weekend. And the last I heard the water district was considering working on Saturdays. So that's, you're shaking your head. Mr. Furtado, so is that not true? Do I have misinformation on that? Yeah, that's misinformation. We do not plan on working on the weekends up there. It's in the review from Rincon in the document. There was one thing stating that there would be no noise making activities on Saturdays and Sundays, which was a misprint. And Carly is actually working on getting the actual document up on that one paragraph. Okay, so no, no, no noise making construction activities on the weekend. That's correct. Page 72 of the, page 72 of the document states that page 17 had it stated a little bit differently, which was wrong. Great, that's good information. That document in general is indigestible for a layperson. So, reference to that document. To me, to make this really, this project transparent to the public, you'd have to provide a summary of the report in the key areas written in lay language so that we actually understood the ins and outs of it. So that's something that was disturbing to me. Because what I hear from the board a lot is that we work with the neighborhoods. We really, this is what we wanna do. We want to meet with the neighbors. We wanna make sure that these projects have less impact. And that's a main desire of ours. But I haven't seen the transparency in terms of the document itself or some type of easy review of it. So this is a little scatter shot, but I have a couple of other things that I wanna mention. One is, I just heard at the beginning of this meeting, people talking about fire flow and how this tank would address that. And then the information that I've had from the beginning was that the additional volume in this tank would allow a sufficient fire flow to battle one house fire, a single residence fire, and certainly not to provide water volume or pressure for a wildfire. And so, if there's a, I think this information needs to be clarified and we need to see, okay, exactly what is the additional fire flow capacity related to this project? Because when you say, oh, there's extra fire flow here, well, who's gonna wanna object to that? You know, I mean, that's a loaded issue. But in the beginning, I heard that it was only sufficient to handle one residential fire. So that's another issue that needs clarification as far as I'm concerned. I think, you know, that's about it for me. I don't wanna try to deal with everything, but I appreciate what Matt and Jen have said and Jeff Lieberman and Mike as well and everybody else that have made comments. And I really appreciate the board members listening thoughtfully to what we have to say. And more importantly, actually taking steps to make sure that these issues are mitigated to our satisfaction. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. Do we have any other people that would have comments that have not spoken yet? Jeff Swan. Yes. I would recommend that the board take no action on this item tonight and let staff take these comments and meet with our environmental consultants and return to the board. Great idea, Rick. Totally concurred. Okay, now, Sandy, you had your opportunity. I'm gonna give you, because this is a very sensitive issue, you have three minutes to say something if you wish. Ms. Mast, you can take yourself off mute and you've got three minutes for comments. All right, thank you. I didn't realize that was mute. Thank you so much. I'll be very quick. I've lived up here since 1985. I love this place. You guys have done a wonderful job, but I have to say, I understand his concerns, the previous man that talked, but the point is, is that we need, I've been evacuated from my farm up north of 43 acres and this place twice. And I have to say, we need a better water system in this area. And we are one of the higher paying water companies in the state if we're all being honest. And I would rather we err on the side of caution and make sure maybe we have to spend a few days being inconvenienced. But my point is, is that I think that having a bigger water tank, having us really be mindful of each other, finding all alternative ways of making sure that we have enough water, water is new California gold if people haven't realized it. And so my point is, we have to like, I understand the sound of the noise because once they stopped, when I first moved here, it was the wells up above that fed the gravity tanks. And now it's the wells that pump the noise up from San Lorenzo Valley. So the river and I get it, I get it. But my point is, I think we should be really careful about how we handle why, while we might be inconvenienced, we should really support you guys in making sure that we have adequate water supplies in this county, especially for San Lorenzo Valley. So I appreciate you letting me come back on. I hope I made my three minute quota. Thank you so much. Okay, Sandy. Thank you very much for your comments. Appreciate it. And thank you to everybody for your comments. They're most appreciated. Okay, moving back to the agenda, Rick, item nine. Oh, Steve, Steve, just a sec. Sorry, I wanna make one final comment on this because I'm not sure I heard Rick correctly. What I'm getting from the comments from the public is that we still may be falling a little short of community engagement. So in addition to meeting with the environmental person, have we also been meeting with the community members and or are we planning to do so now if we haven't in the past? Well, we'll regroup with our consultant first and come up with a plan and most likely it will include meeting with the individuals that spoke tonight or just a general meeting, you know, maybe out on site. We can pick a time, you know, with COVID and everything it's been tough to meet but we may be able to, we'll brainstorm with our consultant and see what the best way to possibly have a meeting and entertain additional comments. We did originally wanna meet on site and discuss the project and then have a neighborhood meeting. You know, that's what we've done in the past with projects but with COVID and then the fire just didn't work out. So we'll regroup with our consultant and put together a plan to meet with folks and to address these concerns. I mean, I think these concerns all can be addressed. The pump noise and all the exact same pumps that we have out there now, those pumps today are not in a building, the new pumps will be in a soundproof building. It obviously sounds like we need to provide more information and that information's available and we'll move ahead with it. Okay, my goal when it comes back is for all the members that have the concerns that have those concerns addressed and that they're satisfied. I'm not sure we can satisfy everybody but we'll definitely address their concerns and get information. That's for sure. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Rick, back to you. Item 9C. Yes, item 9C is a governance training. It's recommended that the board of directors review this memo and the attached summary and conclusions from our July 22nd, 2020 governance training workshop and give direction to staff. This year, the district's board of directors contracted with municipal resource group and fulfilling a 2018 grand jury report recommendation to hold a workshop on dealing with contentious issues. The goal of the presenter was to engage the board in a discussion of good governance and board roles and the best way to work together to best serve the rate payers of the district. After the training, several points were discussed for the board to consider. Those points are as follows, yearly discussion, review of the code of conduct, a manual for new board members, the role of a board member, campaigning, first governing, removal of board members, bios from the district's website, create a best practice document, practice this document, adding language to the code of conduct that covers the conduct of the board, the staff and the public in board meetings. It's a recommendation that you review that information and discuss and give direction back to staff. Thank you, Rick. Okay, any comments from any of the board members regarding this matter, governance training? Any questions for anybody? Okay. Director Moran. Okay. Thank you, President Swan. So on July 22nd, we had a Zoom meeting, it was an all day meeting with the board members and with district manager, Rick Rogers. This is in response to the recommendation from the 2018 grand jury and that we have training on contentious issues. We also met with the consultant for an hour each at another time. This is also in the background that in 2016, there was a grand jury about transparency within the water district. It has always been a concern of mine to follow these recommendations by the grand jury. And in that, it's always been kind of the principal guideline for me is that it's just as important of how the water district does its business as the nuts and bolts of what it does. And I've seen times when listening and giving meaningful listening was not adhered to. And I was glad to get the other board members ideas about these issues and our consultants ideas about this issue. And the one thing that I'd like to see carried forward with this is the thing that Rick mentioned at top, a yearly review. So we have training for ethics training and we have Brown Act training, but they're online self-guided kind of things. And I think this demands a little bit more attention and some actual trading of ideas back and forth amongst the board members. So what I would like to see out of this is that the board schedule a yearly review of the code of conduct, discuss what it's done well and discuss what it may be able to do better. That's basically my recommendation from here. Thank you. Bob. Yeah, I think Rick's idea is a good one. And I'd certainly like to see that done. I think if we were to engage in something like this going forward, I think I would like to have more focus on the topic of addressing contentious issues and probably less than some of the other things that were covered. I understand what our consultant was trying to do, but I kind of walked away from the meeting thinking that maybe we hadn't done quite enough in acquiring the tools necessary to make sure that when it comes to things that are going to be contentious or that there is a sharp or specific divided concerns on the board, no matter what number it is one way or the other, that we are able to deal with those in a good fashion. It is my belief that on virtually all issues that come before the board, there is certainly and certainly the ones that are going to be more contentious around money and that sort of thing. There is no unanimity in our community. And the board also needs to make sure that it is working to reflect the interests, not only of particular groups, but of perhaps people that may not even agree with you and to make sure that those concerns are heard and addressed and discussed. And that's kind of what I was hoping we would get more of during that training. But we did learn a lot about other areas. I think there are some recommendations that were made that I would support. There's other ones that I don't think are in the best interests of the district and community, but certainly we could have a workshop sometime, perhaps the first of the year, to dive back into some of these topics. I don't, I think we can probably have that discussion on our own to start. And at that point, the board can decide how it wants to move forward. Thanks. Thank you, Bob. Any other comments or thoughts on this from other directors? Lou? Yes, thank you, Steve. Given the fact that the majority of the board is gonna change in the next few months, we may not wanna wait for six months to a year to look at updating the governance training. When you talk about team building, you're talking about storming, norming, I'm sorry, storming, forming, norming and performing. And to really build a good team, you need to start at the beginning, I think. And so I would suggest that once the new board is, members are seated and the appointment is made, that one of the first things that you look at is governance training, because you're gonna have a whole new group of people to deal with, or almost an old new group of people to deal with. Thank you, Lou. I think I'll share your thoughts as well in sentiment. Any other comments from any of the other directors? Okay, any of our attendees have any comments on governance training? Okay, great. Okay, anybody got any suggestions about direction to the staff with regards to this other than Lou? Maybe re-agendize this right around the second meeting or the first meeting, second meeting in January, the first meeting in February. I think that's a great idea, Rick. Probably the right thing to do. And district council, I have already been talking about, there will be probably a host of training as we take on new board members, Brown Act and how to be a board member. And this would sit in well with that type of all that type of training. And Rick, just to add in here, Steve, I agree with the director, district manager Rogers suggestion there, January, early February. Thank you, Rick. Okay, great. Back to our district manager to lead off. We've completed our unfinished business. Yes, Chair Swann, item 10A is the district manager's annual contract review and for this item, district council, present to the board. Thank you, Rick. Thank you, Chair Swann. This, if you take a look at the memo related to this item, it copies the provision of the district manager's contract that pertains to the annual performance review and compensation. That's copied here because what's before the board tonight is the district manager's compensation for the coming year, 2020 to 2021. As you reported out of closed session, Chair Swann, the board did decide that the district manager received at least a satisfactory performance review for the prior year. And that entitles the district manager to a cost of living increase for the coming year. In the past, we've used the cost of living index from the district's management MOU for purposes of setting the district manager COLA. So that's gonna be 2%, 2.0%. And that's automatic based on the determination of the satisfactory performance review. In addition to that, the board can consider and that's the purpose of this agenda item up to an additional 5% merit increase based on performance. And there's some information set forth in the memo about the district manager's current annual salary to which the 2.0% COLA will be applied and any merit increase as well. Thank you, Council. Lou, you have a comment or you have the floor? Well, at least you have your hand up. Lou, do you know you have your hand up and you're still muted? There we go. Okay. Now I'm live. I'd like to make a recommendation and that is that it's based upon the fact that, we said that Rick's performance was at least satisfactory. I think most board members would agree that it's the true value of Rick to the district is far north of satisfactory. So in that regard, I would like to propose that he get an merit increase of somewhere between three and a half to 4%. Thank you, Lou. Other comments from other directors? Rick? This is a question to somebody. Earlier this year, we did a COLA adjustment for the rest of the staff, didn't we not? I suppose I can answer that. The COLA adjustment for staff takes effect at the beginning of the year each year under their MOUs. So it was briefly discussed in the context of possibly opening the MOUs for negotiation but the COLA increase actually takes effect automatically at the beginning of the year and it's a different amount for management versus classified. Right, but we were satisfied that they would get that. Yes, that's right. Yeah, right. So I would recommend that district manager, Rodgers also get his same COLA adjustment. And I agree with Director Ferris that Rick deserves a merit increase of three and a half to 4%. However, we'll let's just make it four, right? And go with that. But I agree with Director Ferris. Thank you, Rick. Who else has a comment they want to make? Bob? We're ready, Bob. Thanks. So I think we all appreciate what Rick has done and for the public who may not know, Rick's contract is due at the end of, close to the end of 2021. And it's certainly my fond hope that he stays. I have misgivings about this. The staff, I see my connection is unstable here. Let me stop the video. Am I still coming through, okay? Coming through. Fine. Steve? Yeah, fine. Or maybe not. So yeah, so if we go back to last year, I think the total raise back then was five plus the COLA, which adds up to seven. This year we're talking about six. Over the course of two years, a 14% increase. I don't know that the rest of our staff is getting that kind of increase. And I'm very interested in equity across the board. I'm also interested in making sure that we keep our costs in line as well. Right now, I believe Rick's compensation is just shy of 200,000, is that correct? Yeah, so if you take that and divide that across our subscriber base, and that's basically $2 a month of our customer's bills that are going for that. So that's sort of the range we're talking about. I think given the COVID situation, given how a lot of our community is suffering, given that we have got a lot of uncertainty around what our costs are going to be going forward, I think it is prudent and wise to make sure that people are getting the cost of living adjustments. I think in the case of a lot of our staff, they did get overtime. I know that the management staff does not have access to that. That's sort of a thank you for the wonderful service they did to our community and making sure that we were able to fight the fire and stay in water during that time. But there's a balance here that we also need to take. I'd be more open to a one-time bonus if we wanted to do something, but I just don't think that this is the right time and the right amount over and above the cost of living adjustment that's being made. And it has absolutely nothing to do with my satisfaction around performance as everything to do with our community is going through a really tough time right now. And we've got to be mindful of their pocket books as well. Thank you, Bob. Any other comments? Come on, Lois. All right. Get out of the weeds. I agree with Lou and Rick Moran. I think Rick has outdone himself dealing with staff, dealing with a buyer, all keeping everybody safe from COVID. I mean, he's gone weeks without a day off, not six days without a day off, but seven days, time after time without a day off. And he does not get over time. I think just giving him 2% is a slap in the face. Is that it, Lois? That's it. Okay. All right. So I'm going to paraphrase myself again from the letter I wrote earlier. Rick is a great leader and great leaders are priceless. And as I said, politicians are a dime a dozen. I agree more with Lois than, and also with Rick and Lou on this. I think the ability to manage this water district under the circumstances that we've faced this past year are no loaded less than a Herculean. And I think Rick deserves not only the coal increase, which he gets automatically because we voted he was satisfactory and met his objectives. But I think it goes far beyond that. And I agree with Lois. I think we should give him the maximum amount available. I think we should give him the maximum amount available. And it's not just because he works hard, it's because he's indispensable. This water district is going to face tremendous challenges in the future and obstacles and hurdles that only someone with 40 years of experience in the trenches having dug ditches, laid pipe, built tanks, managed people, motivated people and motivated an entire valley to some extent through the public appearances and the outreach that he's done both through television and on radio, merits the most that we can give him. Also given that there may only be another year left on his contract, I don't think that he's gonna, I don't know if he's gonna stick around for one year or five more years, it's clearly his option. But in case that it is only one year, I think we should recognize all of the tremendous efforts of 40 years and give him the maximum that we can. If we could give him a bonus, I don't know if we can or not, I'd do that too. And a gold watch and everything else. Man deserves the most that we can give him. So my recommendation is that we give him 5% when his increase. So what do we do now, Gina? Oh, I guess, do we get to open it up to more questions and comments from the directors? Here, Luke, go right ahead. Thank you, Steve. I think it's worth noting that, even though it's difficult to compare the performance of two or three different people, as I go back in history and having known those people, the last district manager, Brian Lee, and the one before that, Jim Mueller, Jim was a fine district manager, I think Brian was somewhat less than that. But both of them were made considerably more than Rick. And when you look at his contribution versus their contribution, there's no comparison. And I think that's why I think that he's in line for above average, a good raise. Plus, his contract is coming up at the end of the year. If we don't show him the love, he may go do something different. And I really don't want to see him do that. I'd rather he stay here and continue to outperform the other districts in the area. Thank you, Lou Los. Well, I was going to say that you made a remark that in case Rick would leave after this third year of his contract, we should give him the most. And I'm forgiving him 5%. But he better not leave in a year. That's my opinion. OK, terrific. Any other comments, rebuttals, disagreements, arguments? Well, the public is dwindling, but not completely. So we'll give the public an opportunity to speak should they desire to. So does anybody have a comment they'd like to make with respect to this matter? No one has a comment. So we'll go back to the board. And Gina, we'll just go ahead. I can just go ahead and make a motion, I presume. Yes, that's right. OK, then I'll make a motion that we give Rick a merit increase of 5%. Steve. Oh, Bob, sorry, I didn't see your hand. So I think sometime in 2017 or 2018, the board made a recommendation for a percentage increase from the then general manager, but wasn't able to communicate exactly how much money that was between the cost of living raise and the merit increase. Last year, we were very precise in our calculations around that. We need to continue following that tradition that Lois Henry put in place. How much are we talking about here between the, and Gina is probably doing the calculations very rapidly. How much are we talking about? If you give me just a moment, I will get you that information. That would be great. Thank you. Well, you're an accountant, aren't you? Finance guy, do you know that off the top of your head? I'm finance. I don't do accounting. Big difference. Finance has to deal with the business of things. Accounting has to do with making sure the books balance. I believe that figure you're looking for is $210,000 proxmole. We want the penny. I can calculate it, but that's what Gina is here helping us do. Yeah, so that sounds about right. I think as a total, it sounds right, Lou. I think last year it was broken down by components. So the 2% polo, I calculate that to be $3,941 added to the $197.06, which is the present salary. And then the 5% would add an additional $9,853. And all together, I do think that comes up to, what did you say, $10,800 some? Or I'm sorry, $210,000? Yeah, that's $210,000. Not bad for doing my own. And change. And change. OK, thank you. Thank you, Steve. Lois. I want a second. I'm sorry, did you second my motion? I want to second your motion. Thank you, Lois. Point of order. Bob, go right ahead. What's your? Is the motion for a specific amount or a percentage? Or about, I'm not clear. It's for 5%. OK, will the minutes reflect the amounts we've talked about here to make sure those are in? Yeah, and I can repeat them if that would be helpful. I just want to make sure they get in the minutes. That's it. Recorded. It will get into the minutes. Thank you. OK, Holly, would you like to record the vote? President Swan. Yes. Vice President Henry. Yes. Director Ferris. Aye. Director Moran. Yes. Director Fals. No. Motion passes. Thank you, Holly. OK. Back to you, Rick. New business, fundee. Yes, Ken is the discrimination, harassment, and retaliation prevention policy. I'll ask district council Nichols to present this to the board. OK, thank you. And this is President Swan, board of directors. This is really a housekeeping matter. There have been some new laws and regulations passed since the district adopted a sexual harassment policy many years ago. And the policy really needs to be updated, and it particularly needs to be updated before the end of this year, because there is a training requirement that all of the district staff are required to be trained pursuant to the most recent California regulations prior to January 1, 2021. And for purposes of that training, we need to have the new policy in place. And I guess in describing the difference from the old policy, the best way to sum it up is that the old policy was a sexual harassment prevention policy only. This one, consistent with the law, is a discrimination, harassment, and retaliation prevention policy. It covers all of those issues, as well as reasonable accommodation. We've updated it to meet those legal requirements. And I would ask, I guess for a little bit of leniency, there is a proposed resolution here in front of you, resolution 7, 2021, that by adopting that resolution, you would effectively approve the new policy. It has been brought to my attention that there are a couple of typographic legal issues, some extra punctuation and some page numbering issues. And I appreciate the leniency to be able to correct those in the final version that goes onto the website. Punctuation issues, did I write this? I'm embarrassed to admit that I wrote it, presidents, or I edited it anyway. But I didn't catch everything, so on. OK, cool. Thank you, Gino. Does any director have any comment on this item whatsoever? I don't see any comments. OK, Bob, I can always count on you. I just have a question, so we're going to pass it, and then it'll be cleaned up for the punctuation and that sort of thing. And that's what will be the official document. That's right. So yeah, the page numbering on the last few pages, there's a two TO missing in one location. And there's two periods somewhere where there should be one period. So that's what I'll be directing. Thank you. Rick Moran. Yes, I would just like to say that I appreciate the Water District taking this seriously. And there were times when I was employed that I wish that there was a document like this that could resolve some issues that I saw or was around. So I appreciate the seriousness of this policy and appreciate us trying to keep it as up to date as possible. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Any other comments or questions by any director? If not, I have a question for Gina. That was resolution 20-21. It'll be approved by the board. It will be resolution number 7, 2021. Any questions or comments by anybody on the board? If not, give the public an opportunity to weigh in on this. Any comments? I don't see any. OK, back to the panel. OK, I'll make the motion that we adopt resolution number 7, 20-21. Once Gina's cleaned up the typos or editing, can I get a second? I will second the motion. Thank you very much. I'll second it. Would you record the vote? President Swan. Yes. Vice President Henry. Yes. Director Ferris. Aye. Director Moran. Yes. And Director Fultz. Yes. Motion passes. Thank you, Ali. Back to you, Rick. All right, item 10C is a board member, a resignation, and District Council Nichols will present this item to the board. Thank you, Rick, and Chair Swan. And there is a bunch of information in the board packet related to this item. The first attachment to the memo was important, that's the resignation letter that President Swan has sent to Vice President Henry and the board secretary. And I guess, Steve, do you want to talk about this at all, or do you want me to go through the mechanics first? Go ahead and make the mechanics, Gina. OK. I'll call you later. OK. So the resignation letter summarizes President Swan's reasons for resignation and specifies an effective date of December 31st, 2020. The recommendation with this memo is to establish a process to fill the anticipated vacancy. However, and I'll discuss this in a little more detail, the board could, under the circumstances presented here, reject the letter of resignation and make a determination that the board seat is or will be vacant as of another date and establish a corresponding process to fill the vacancy. Also, the board could take no action at this time, in which case we'd have to revisit the issue at a later date. So I'm sure everybody in this group knows that Director Swan was elected to serve on the board in 2018 and has served as board president since December 2019. President Swan's term as an elected director would end in December of 2022, were it not for the resignation. The government code establishes a process for filling the vacant seat of a director. And in particular, of a particular importance here is that the board of directors has the option to fill a vacant board seat, either by appointing a new director to fill the seat or by calling for an election. And I've outlined some of the timelines that apply to a vacancy that's effective as of December 31st. And I can talk through that. But it may make more sense to cut to the bottom of the memo that talks about the fact that there has been concern expressed as to when President Swan's, when the vacancy is truly effective. I mean, clearly there is a vacancy when Director Swan's letter of resignation takes effect. But we have kind of a complicated and unclear legal issue here wherein, and I don't want to put words into President Swan's mouth. But as I understand it, President Swan, you have moved out of the area. You know, you recently sold your house and you are no longer living in the district. And you've said it's not likely that you're going to return. So I've attached a couple of attorney general opinions that are useful for a couple of reasons. They summarize all of the law related to when a board seat of a county water district becomes vacant and can be filled. But in particular, there's this water code section 30508 that creates a presumption that a seat becomes vacant 180 days after a director moves a residence outside of the district and fails to reestablish it within the district. And the reason why I hate to bore everybody with all this legal background, but the reason that it's important is that as I see it, it creates an ambiguity as to whether the seat was vacant, it becomes vacant when Director Swan's resignation letter takes effect, or whether it may have become vacant as of some earlier date. And because of the ambiguity, I think it's appropriate for the board to make a determination if it wishes that the seat is vacant, understanding that there could be challenges either way. It's not clear whether the seat is vacant or isn't vacant, but I think it's the board's prerogative to make a determination based on the kind of ambiguous circumstances that we have here. Thanks, Gina. So the only comment I'm going to make is that Gina summarized my situation quite clear. I have sold my home. I have moved back to a house I own in Texas, which is where we were during the evacuation. And I have accepted a early retirement opportunity from my employer, effective back October the 5th. And in all likelihood, even though I plan to continue working because obviously I look young, I probably won't be returning to the Bay Area in all reality. I was thinking that there might be some reason to do so, but in reality, I don't think I will. So I'll leave it at my plan is to stay here and continue to work out of this area. And my desire is to resign effective the 31st of December, primarily as a service to the community that I was a part of for over 40 years, the water district itself, and the citizens that elected me. I think that it would be hoove and benefit the district and the valley to have five directors remain on the board clearly for as long as possible. And it should replace me when they have the opportunity. But I think a five-person board is far more valuable to the district and the community than a four-person board. But that's my common, so I'll let the rest of you ask any questions you wish to Gina at this point, or myself if you have any. Rick Moran. OK, this doesn't give me great pleasure to do this, but it's a responsibility that I have. I've supported Steve's candidacy. I supported most of his decisions. I appreciate the fine job that he has done as the board president. My concern about President Swann's resignation is that we do this process with the utmost transparency. While I understand Steve's desire to finish out his term, I do understand your desire to finish out your term, right? It is my commitment to good government that got me into this position. I responded to the 2016 grand jury on transparency. While our legal counsel has shown how the residency requirements are ambiguous, my beliefs about residency are not. If you don't live here, you don't or shouldn't represent here. So in the attempt to be open and fair, I would recommend that President Swann finish his term as president, but recuse himself from voting until then. Thank you. Lois. I think that your resignation should take effect December 31st. I think to do anything different would burden on the new board members that will take office sometime in December. And it gives them time to get adjusted, decide who they want to have as board president, and then it gives them time to say, if we stay right now, we want your resignation as December 31st, and it will be an appointed resignation that the timeline would be for the new board members to actually look at the people who apply. And we're going into Thanksgiving and to Christmas. And those holidays will be celebrated. They may be a lot quieter. So that gives the new board members time to perhaps, it would be January before they would see the people who have applied. And there would be time for them to have adjusted a little bit to being new board members. And I think we should decide to stick with the December 31st resignation for you. Well, and if I could interject for just a moment here, I think in light of Director Moran's comments, respectfully, President Swan, I would advise recusal from further discussion unless you're asked a question directly related to your circumstances and allow Vice President Henry to serve as chair for purposes of this discussion. Great idea. Lois, you're in the driver's seat. OK, thank you. Yeah, another reason to keep him on as board president, who wants me for the rest of the year? So I see Lou, you have your hand up. I do. When I first learned of Steve's resignation, I was saddened. I think he is an honorable man. And for me, it's a moral issue that when he says he wants to finish out his term because he has made a commitment to do that, I think that's why he wants to do it. And I support that. The problem comes in when Gina supplies us with all that information on the legalese part of it. And I did my diligence and read it. And I do not take it as being ambiguous at all. In fact, my take, and I'm not a lawyer, but my take is it draws a clear distinction between domicile and resident. And the requirement for being a board member is domicile, not resident. And I read from the 2012 California Attorney General, by the way, that was Kamala Harris at the time, opinion on a case in Southern California, where she said, and I quote, as both elections code section 349B and government code section 244B provide, a person has only one domicile at any given time. The main test for determining a person's domicile is physical presence plus an intention to state to make that place is permanent home. And if that's the definition of domicile, domicile is the requirement for a board member. It seems to me it's pretty clear what needs to be done. Tell me where I'm wrong, Gina. Well, if we're gonna get into kind of reading the specific code sessions, there's a lot of different words that get used. There is clearly a resident and residency quotes requirement when a director is elected to the board. Then if you read the AG's opinions, they point out that whether that residency requirement continues into the director's term can depend. So the AG usually interprets there being a default requirement that the residency requirement continues for the duration of the term. However, they've interpreted that this water code section 30508 actually changes that default rule. But then you have to look at, I mean, there's other sections that way that factor into this. So for example, government code section 1770 is what establishes the rule for vacancy. So 1770 subsection E says that vacancy occurs when the director ceases to be inhabitant of the state, inhabitant is the word used rather than resident or domicile comma, or if the office is local, as this one is, of the district for which the officer was chosen to be appointed. So if the director ceases to be an inhabitant, which is a different word of the district for which the officer was chosen or appointed, then a vacancy occurs. Inhabitant is not defined, but can mean the same thing as residency. But then it all comes back to section, water code section 30508 that has this presumption that if the place of residence is moved outside of the district boundaries, and within 180 days the director fails to reestablish it within the district, it shall be presumed that a permanent change of residence has occurred and that vacancy exists pursuant to 1770. So this section resolves the ambiguity for circumstances where a director moves the residents outside the district and doesn't reestablish it within 180 days. So, I mean, I don't know what to do with all of this, except that the AG has said that section three, water code section 30508 says that if the, let me read it, I shouldn't try to quote it without actually reading it. We have an AG opinion interpreting this law and this is the best authority I could find for this, by the way. And it says, if you give me just a second, that the director would forfeit the office if he gave up his domicile in the district and did not reestablish domicile there within 180 days. So I honestly, I could see this either way, I can argue it either way as a legal matter. And so that is why the question is coming before the board for a determination. So Lou, does that answer your question? No, it doesn't because, as I said in the beginning, it started out being, let's say, a reasonability test. And I take no satisfaction in talking about removing Steve from the board, but once it became a legal issue and Gina supplied all that information, which to me clearly shows, I mean, I think you were quoting from the same one I was, which is 212 Cal AG, Lexa seven. And in that opinion, that was the opinion that allowed the water board in Southern California to remove that director because he was actually living in San Diego but was using the address of a summer cabin in the district as his residence. And it seems like a pretty similar on the surface legal situation in terms of, I didn't realize that there was a big difference between domicile and residence, but apparently legally there is. And I just wanna make sure we're on the right side of the lock that somebody doesn't judge us in the future and say we didn't take the right path legally. Well, the guy down there, he wasn't really living in the district. Yeah, but again, it was all the definition of domicile versus residence that led to the fact. I mean, it was pretty clear because he was using a cabin that he only stayed in a week a year versus where he lived most of the time in San Diego, but it was the whole intent is that a domicile is where your permanent home is, where you are. And I think it's fair to say that Steve's permanent residence now is his domicile in Texas. And I don't know what that means, but it sure sounds legally like it changes the whole landscape of this decision for me anyway. So one of the issues I have with declaring a vacant before December 31st is we would have a four member board and would not maybe be able to make any determination about who's board president, which in that case would leave me as board president until we were finally had a five member board, which wouldn't happen. I mean, you can't expect the new board to be able to decide on who the fifth person's going to be. And again, you have a four member board and I could see that being a two, two vote and that it would not. I mean, we could go on until the board of supervisors decided who the fifth person was. I just see so many problems with trying to do this early and it certainly wouldn't be fair for the four of us right now, say if Steve was gone, the four of us did decide who the fifth person was going to be before the new board is seated. It would just be so wrong. And there are so many little issues here. And I think we need to really look at those issues and make sure the new board has a say in this. Well, my opinion is everything you've talked about, Lois has no bearing on the legal aspects of this situation. And that's what I think is important is that morally, I will not make a motion to remove Steve from the board. I won't, that's just wrong. But when it comes down to voting on it, I'm not sure where I'm gonna stand. And I'm actually waiting to hear what the public has to say first. Okay. All right, Bob, you have comment. I do. I have several. But I wanna start off with thanking Steve for both running for the board, for going through the campaign in 2018 and serving on the board for two years and being president this past year. I think he's done a great job. Like Rick, I agree with most of the decisions. And I think you've done a lot in helping us change the tenor of the board, the direction of the board, the transparency of the board as we promise to do. And I think that is something that is invaluable for our community. So it also gives me no great pleasure in having to say that this situation is disappointing on a number of levels. And I go back even further. Our community has had over the years a lot of situations where elections take place and after the election, a board member resigns. And what that does is that deprives the people, the ones who really should be making the decision of their say in the appointment of somebody to serve effectively a two-year term. And to me, that is a moral and ethical issue that we can't ignore. I get there's all sorts of timing and other issues, but at the very least, the day that you left was the day that you no longer served on the board. I view the section 30508 and the allowances that are in there because I can't believe that a legislature would say somebody that has permanently moved out of state has given 180 days effectively to continue to serve a community in which he's no longer resident. I view that as something like, I lost my lease on my house. I had to move to Scott's Valley, but I'm intending to come back. I sold my house, but I've got a realtor looking for a new one. I'm temporarily staying in Santa Cruz while I did a new place. But there is an intent to move back. And here, I don't see any intent. I mean, I don't know, but Steve, I don't know that you have a realtor. I don't know that you're actively looking for a residence or a house here. I don't know if you have established a domicile here. It doesn't sound like you have. So it's clear to me that the intent is that you're not coming back, for which I'm really disappointed, but we have a responsibility that goes beyond the bonds of friendship that go to the fiduciary responsibility to our community. And in a lot of ways, this puts us in a really bad position. And one that I really wish we didn't have to be in and could have been avoided. I would say your resignation needs to be effective today. We're gonna have a four-member board at some point anyway. And if we're really concerned about the mechanics of who's president, the president isn't boss of the board. The president is the presiding officer. And if we're worried about that, then just do a presidential rotation until there's a fifth member and then we can elect officers then. There's nothing magic about December. So there are ways of being able to deal with that. And the fact is we're gonna have a four-member board anyway, stuff happens, it is what it is. Today is the day, I mean, actually the day to resign from the board should have been earlier, but today is the day that you need to resign. You're not here anymore, Steve, as much as it pains me to say. And I don't understand why there's this sense that your presence on the board through the 31st to vote on things of critical importance or a community that you no longer reside in or serve, that doesn't feel right to me. That doesn't feel like we're meeting our fiduciary responsibility to the community. In fact, it feels like we're kind of, you know, doing a little inside baseball there. And I know one of the things that people don't like about politics is the inside baseball aspect of it at times. So I would really encourage you to modify your letter, now resign effective today and let's get the process going of filling this seat as quickly as possible. Okay, how do I see who the public is? I need to go to participants, is that it? Can you see, click on attendees, what was? Attendees, uh-huh, there's two hands up. Oh, I see attendees. Okay, I see it. Okay, is there anyone in the public who wants to speak about this? Jim Moser, Jim? You're muted, Jim. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, thank you, Lois. And I wanna thank Steve for his service as everyone else has done. And I'm disappointed also that you're moving. I am an attorney myself. I've read the materials carefully and I actually think Gina did a good job of summarizing. And I guess I read it differently than Lou and Bob and Rick in that I think it is appropriate for Steve to stay on the board for these up to 180 days under the statutes as they're interpreted. But I also agree with the three of you that it's also an appropriate reading of the law that you could look at the vacancies being current and that this board has the option of choosing the two as Gina indicated. I think if the only way you'd get a definitive ruling on this in the law, and I think, Gina, you'd agree with me, this is, you'd have to take it to a court of law. The fact that Steve voted, I believe Steve, you voted as a resident of Santa Cruz County in the recent election and that you have stated in your letter that you don't expect that you'll be coming back to the Bay Area is an indication of there is a possibility that you would and that the final residence decision is not currently made based on what you put into your letter. So the board has the option. Getting to what I think is the major point that Lois made that I think would be really critical is that you allow the new board members to be part of this process, however you decide the residency issue. The idea that this board would make the decision of who the next member, the new member of the board would be prior to the seating of two people who were just elected, one of them, the tremendous number of votes would be really a slap in the face of the voters. The closest you can get to reflecting the will of the voters is to allow the most recent people they voted into office to have a role in this decision making process. And you can do that either way, you decide the residency question by spending a period of applications. And I think Lois is right. You're talking about doing this during these vacation times going to be a difficult period for the new members to get oriented, but at a minimum the decision should be made not by these two new elected board members who would be replacing Lou and Rick, both of whom were appointed themselves and not elected by the voters. Thank you. Thank you. Joanie Martin? Joanie. Sorry, it took me a second to get unmuted. Sorry about that. I just listening to your comments, I found it interesting that the Water District's attorney said that she could argue it either way, whichever the board chooses. And three non-attorney members of the board then seemed to question that. And as someone who watched the recent election very closely, I think you can't ignore the fact that you have two new people coming in who had dramatically tremendous vote counts. And if you try to rush through a replacement, it's gonna look really, really bad to the voters. It's gonna look like people who didn't back the number one winner who had more votes than two other candidates put together, it's gonna look like you're trying to do shenanigans. And I know that you don't wanna look that way because I know that you've spoken in the past about mandates that you have felt you had from voters. So to turn around and then suggest that you should quickly replace Steve when your attorney has just told you that there's a way that you don't need to do that, I just, I hope that you'll listen to what Jim just said and that you'll reflect on the fact that the board is meant to represent the will of the voters. And if you do not wait for those two new board members to come on board, it's just gonna look appalling to the public. So I would take advantage of the out that your attorney has given you saying that she could argue in support of that decision and make the right decision and let her make that argument for the water district should someone insanely choose to question that. Thank you, that's all I have to say. Cynthia. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. I'd like to read something from Mark Gargal. I agree, I regret I am unable to attend tonight's meeting due to a conflicting meeting. I also believe the means of selecting Steve Swan's replacement matters. Would one of you be willing to relay my statement below at the meeting? This is his statement. I regret the resignation of Steve Swan from this board and thank him for his service to the community. I note he has volunteered to continue to serve through 2020 and that board council has advised that it is legally proper that he do so. I agree with Bob Foltz that the will of the voters should be needed, should be heated. As we have just had an election in which that will was clearly expressed, I urge the board to allow the newly elected directors to vote on a replacement director by making the appointment after they have been sworn in. So that was Mark Gargal's statement. I'd like to agree with him. Thank you, Steve, for your service. I've been very impressed by your ability to act as president of the board and bring consensus. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, NBBM, I don't know who that is. Beauty? Oh. Hi, he may see here. And mute. Okay, it should be working now. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Great, thank you. This is absolutely fascinating. It's so sad that we just had an election and we're losing another board member and so the big changes are happening and it's gonna be kind of starting over almost with three new members, but or two. Anyway, I'm just so grateful for the hard work everybody's been doing over the past year or so and it's been a wild ride. But I, with COVID and everything else, you guys are doing great with this. I really do agree that it would be helpful if the board could come up with a way to allow Steve to gracefully retire and then include the new board members in the decision-making process. So the comments that Jim made and the others before me, I'm kind of mirroring them. I just hope it can be done comfortably for everyone and I do hope that you can find the way to include the newly elected board members because I think that's a really important statement to be made that they would be included in choosing the person they're gonna work with over the next few years. Thanks again for all your hard work. Thank you. Mark Doulson. Okay, you can hear me now? Yes. So I joined everyone else in appreciating that Steve's contributions in his service and I also appreciate cost sincerely, all the board members are wrestling with this conundrum. I think Jody made some important points. I don't wanna repeat anything that anyone else has said. So I'm going to add two things. One is, I think everyone wants to act legally. I think everyone wants to act in the best interest of the board. I think everyone wants to act in the best interest of the community. I think we're all trying to find the path that gets us there. I do think that I question two lines of reasoning that I'm hearing. One is, when the legal expert is telling you that you have viable legal options, I don't respect the assertion that somebody knows the law better than legal expert and is gonna make a legal judgment in place of the legal expert. I would question that. Someone might still feel that they know what's best independent of the legal issue, but I think it's great there too because I think one of the reasons there's a 180 day margin allowed is because it's also important for the board to have stability and continuity as it continues to operate. There's nobody here that thinks that Steve is going to stop representing the interest of the community in the next month because he's no longer physically living here. And I do think people think it would be very disruptive for the board. I think you can make the argument that even though Steve does have to leave, he doesn't have to leave immediately because that would do more harm than good to the board and to the communities. That's my input, thanks. Thank you. Elaine Fresco. Hi, yes, I agree with everyone. I just wanna say that after this election, it's really obvious that it's much harder to be elected than it is to be appointed. And so this next appointment is too bad. It wasn't a third person that was part of the election, but since it's not, I think that the two, it would be better to have a five-person board and to have the two new people, board members participate in the appointment of the next person and make sure that that person is vetted and selected very carefully. And thank you, Steve, for your service. Thank you. Gail? Yes, I just want to also thank Steve for his service and express my confidence that he would continue to serve the community. But I also wanna make the point that I think we're sort of conflating two separate issues. And that is the timing of when you consider him a member of the board and the issue of when a replacement for him is selected. And I would simply ask that as one of the new people that was elected, that I be allowed along with Tina Toe to help select the person that I'm gonna be working with for the next two years, rather than have that dictated to me by two people that are leaving the board. Thank you. Anyone else in public who would like to make a comment? Okay. So let's go back to the board and see if there are further comments. Lois, there's one more hand up. Tina Toe? Yeah, let's go to Tina, please. I went down and I don't see your hand up. Oh, it's gone. Yeah, there it is. It's back up. Thank you. Okay, Tina. Thank you. I agree with Gail that you could separately agree on Steve's residency and then also separately, either decide to wait or appoint a board member sooner rather than later. But I also agree with the community. I think that Gail and I were elected and I think that it would be in the board and the community's best interest if we had a say in that. And that's, so I'm just agreeing with what the community had said. So thank you. And thank you for your service, Steve. Okay. Thank you, Tina. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to the board and I don't know who put their paw first. I'll call on Bob. Okay, thank you, Lois. I'd like to ask Steve a couple of questions, if I may. I think there's a couple of facts I'd like to better understand. Okay, can Steve answer, Gina? It's a factual question. It doesn't require interpretation. Okay. Steve, what day did you close on your house? What day did you move out of your house? Early part of October, probably around the, between the 10th and 13th somewhere. About October. Yeah. Yeah, thanks, because I believe and Gina can probably provide me with back in this. I believe we have 60 days to appoint a person. Is that correct, Gina? Yes, from when the vacancy is affected by the termination that's taken on presently. I mean, really again, guys, I think this issue is not, a board seat is not necessarily that for any board member to appoint if there's the ability for the people to have had a say in this. I'm just still disappointed that this is another one of our San Lorenzo Valley examples, which happened on numerous boards of where we have a resignation immediately after an election. And because that really does deprive the folks who really should be having the say in it, they have to say. You know, if we had, if Steve had resigned on the 10th when he moved out of his house as I would have advocated that he do, given the intention that he had, you know, it's very possible that the existing board, given our normal schedule might have been making an appointment anyway or at least moving to doing that. What's happened here with this delay and even bringing it to the board for action is that it's now become conflated with the election in a way that I just find very interesting. I mean, I remember at some point hearing about what the district attorney or something being called out by somebody to find out if Steve really was a residence that people were spreading a rumor that he was living in Texas at the time. So, you know, it's almost like we've come full circle on this. So, I do believe that there are two separate questions here. One question is whether or not Steve should be allowed to continue serving on the board as of today. And I believe the answer to that is as much as I regret it, no, because I have to go back to the voters myself and explain why we allowed somebody. Now, I get that there's a legal out here that everybody is trying to convince us to use, but legal outs in many cases aren't necessarily what the people expect out of their elected officials. They expect behavior and standards that are not, gee, what can we figure out as a loophole in the law in order to allow somebody to continue serving? That's not my standard. I appreciate the fact actually that Gina is saying that she could argue it either way because in this situation, you know, we hire attorneys to provide legal advice, but the decision rests with the board. And in this case, given that there is this conflict between codes, I still go back to what's right given the fact that Steve's no longer an inhabit of the state. It hasn't been for some time. So, and all I see happening here with Steve continuing to serve is large sections of our community, those that may not have agreed with the vote that was recently taken and the massive number of undervotes that we have that we had in this election. So the tune of about 3,700 voters. They're also have a voice. Whether or not they voted in the majority for who won or not, they have a voice as well. And even the people that voted us in 2018 have a voice. So, you know, I just come down to the right thing here is for us to declare they can see tonight to initiate the process. That process can be either a fast process or it can be a 60 day process, but we need to do what is right for the community and for the district right now and not establish a precedent that says, well, we like Steve, which we do. We like what he's done. It sounds like even folks that probably didn't support him a year and a half ago or so have come around to liking what Steve has done. Hopefully it's for what he has done and not because he's resigning on the 31st. And send a message to the community, two things. One is when someone becomes an eligible, it is the policy of this board that that person no longer serve. And number two, to send the message to the community that says, we need to stop having resignations of directors and trustees, you know, immediately after elections, that there needs to be more sensitivity around that and giving the people more of a choice. I know that's a hard thing, but that's what we need to say as a board. And I definitely want to hear what Lou and Rick have to say as well. I may have some additional comments too. So I would like to say something. So, Steve was still here. He voted in the election. And if he would have resigned before the election, as far as your thinking, what about the people running for election? They don't know if they're going to get elected or not get elected. And they might want to apply for that position, but they don't know if they're going to get elected. I suppose they could apply and run. I don't know. It just seems like it would have been a complication. Okay, Lou, you want to say something? Yes, I do. Thank you, Lord. Gina, I have a question for you. There was at least some inferences with the public comments that seemed to, at least to me, say that 51% of the law is favoring what Steve wants to do to continue serving until the 31st of December. That's not what I took what you said. What I took what you said was it's not a legal issue. It's a board issue. Am I wrong? Well, okay, I think the most one of the public comments was spot on and saying that this is a question if it were brought to the court that the court would have to decide. And there's a procedure for doing that. It's not an issue that the court has ever addressed before that I can find in any of the materials. I can't say it's 51%, 49, et cetera. It can depend on a lot of factors. What I can say is that it is ambiguous and there is an argument that can be made either way. And particularly because of the timing and the ambiguity, I do think it's appropriate for the board to make the determination whether to either accept the resignation letter or find a vacancy exists. Okay. To the extent that you're willing to answer this question, since we don't have months or years to let this play through the court, how do you think the court would rule ultimately in a case like this? Well, I've been a lawyer long enough now to know not to predict that because I've been in a lot of things, but so if you'll forgive me, I'm not going to try to call that because I also don't want to unduly influence the discussion by opining on that when I really don't know. Okay. Well, thank you. I appreciate your concern. I just, again, I want to make sure in my mind it's clear that legally you cannot make a determination for us. In other words, it's up to us to make the determination. Yeah. I mean, it puts me, and I hope you understand, it puts me in a very awkward position. I mean, I could give you a legal opinion, the legal opinion in detail, it would come out along the lines of what I'm saying now. I think the cleanest path forward is for the board to make its decision whether to accept the resignation letter, find it vacant. And I think that that will, because of the circumstances here, that'll stand up just because of the procedures that would be involved in reaching any other type of outcome. All right, thank you. Rick Moran? Yes. I brought this up because I wanted as much transparency about this issue as possible. And I'm going to go back to, I think we do need to separate some of the things out, right? So I've gotten inflated with an election and a resignation and COVID and the holidays. A lot of things going on. My fundamental tenet of government, representative government, is that people live in the area they represent, okay? So that's, if anybody disagrees with that, I don't know how I can change their minds about that. But I think that's a fundamental tenet of our democracy. People live where they represent, represent where they live. So that's, to me, an easy answer. Where it becomes muddled is all these other things, right? Now, I agree that there's a new election and new people have come on board and they should have a part in their voices should be heard. All right, I agree to that. I don't want to seem like we're hurrying anything through to avoid those people being able to have a participation in that decision, all right? And I think the legal thing with Gina and I think she's, to my understanding, has shown us that there is some flexibility, there's some ambiguity and we're gonna have to, I'm gonna have to make the best decision I can on this. I thought that I tried to, I thought about this hard and for seriously. And then I recommended that President Swan finishes term as president. I understand all the difficulties with that Lois has talked about with running the meetings and having five members on the board. I recommend that President Swan finishes term as president, but that he recues himself from voting. So I think that may be the best solution that I can come up with. Thank you. Is that, are you making a motion of that or what? And somebody make a motion, please. What? And somebody make a motion, please, this is dragging on way too long. I'm afraid we'll talk about this. But I understand it's late at night. I don't want to be discussing this any more than, I don't want to be discussing this at 1030 at night. All right, but we have a responsibility to do this upfront and as democratically with the principles that we have. Okay, even if it takes till midnight. I don't go on either way. I mean, the same thing is being said, let's make a decision. Hold on, hold on. Wait a minute, wait a minute. We're out of order here. So. You asked me a question was, I would make that a motion. You're making a motion. Okay, I will second that motion. Point of order. You can't even understand you, Bob, you're growling. Bob, you're very muddled, we can't understand you. So we've got an open and a second. Point of order. I still can't understand. I will say point of order. He's saying the order. I think what Bob's trying to say is that we have not finished discussion. So how can we move to voting? I recommend that we continue discussion as well. And maybe we ought to wait until December to continue the discussion. Well, and I, there is a legal issue presented here, which is that I'm not quite sure that a motion to allow Steve to not find that Steve's seat is vacant, but require him to recuse himself would be valid unless it were a motion to propose that agreement for Steve's consideration, because he would need to agree to that. That's not something the board can just do. All right. May I comment? We need to know what Steve thinks about that. May I comment first? Yes. I can tell you, I wouldn't agree to it, but sorry. Thank you. So, Rick, just as a point of clarification, are you saying that Steve would be allowed to serve out his term, the remainder of his term, but he would no longer be able to vote on any item that comes before the board that requires board action? Is that what you're saying? I... If that is, if that is, Rick, if that is Rick, effectively what you're doing is saying we have a four-person board and therefore we might as well declare a vacancy. Perhaps I am, Bob, but what I'm trying to do is to allow Steve to have some of his wishes, all right, realize that we're in a bit of a muddle here and to also allow Steve to continue to use his organizational skills in running the meeting, which he has exceptional skills at, and to the end of December to help out the board as a whole. That's what I'm trying to do. But I don't know how we do that if we're also saying you can no longer vote on any item that requires board action. It, I mean, and I'm sorry, Steve, I think you also were gonna say, did you agree to that? No, I don't agree to that. I would not agree to, that would be a waste of all of that. All right, so I think, Rick, the, unfortunately, the, I mean, I share your sort of belief about good government and what it means to be representing people. The only way that we can square that circle is to make a motion to declare a vacancy on the board effective tonight, today. I'll probably look to Gina for specific language, and that is the only way to be able to address what you're trying to accomplish. The other one, allowing Steve to remain on the board, either way, I want to have a vote because I want everybody on record as to what their basic view is towards good government. I am not convinced one bit at all that the folks that are attending this meeting that are advocating in favor of this would grant me the same level of latitudes where I am in the same circumstance. That is, would we do this for people who are our political opponents in the same fashion as our political supporters or people that we want to support for whatever reason? And I just simply don't believe that at all. And not only that, I believe that there might even be a faster appointment. So I think the first order of business is to deal with whether there's a vacancy or not. And Gina, is there specific language around this that we would do if we were going to make a motion to declare a vacancy? Well, if you're asking me for the language or a motion, I can provide that. I think it would be important. Okay. Now, do we have a motion and second on the floor already? Wait a minute. You know, it's interesting to me that you're so concerned that Steve might continue and that you have never agreed with me that we represent everyone in this district, whether they vote for us or not. We didn't. I agree. Just wait. Okay, I'm not done. So all of those people who spoke, they didn't vote for me. They didn't. But I respect their right to have an opinion. And it just seems like you're so determined that you want Steve gone. And Steve can help us. And if you declare vacancy tonight, 15 days from now is November 21st. And that's when people need to have, according to board policy that you wrote, that people need to have their desire, their desire if they wanna run for the board to be in by, that'd be November 21st. May I respond? I know I'm not done. Will you let me finish? So November 21st. So when are we gonna have the first meeting in November? It cannot be the third because, well, I mean, it could be the third and then it would be you, me, Steve and Lou is who it would be because Lou and Steve's time isn't done until November 4th. So I have a huge problem with that. We have had a vote and people have picked who they want on the board. And we certainly can't have a meeting November 3rd with two board members who will no longer be board members in one day. I think you mean December 3rd. Yeah, I think you got your thing. I'm sorry, December 3rd. May I respond to that? Yeah, I'll give you five minutes. Well, I'm not part of the audience. So there's a different set thing. Yeah, but you just- So first of all, Lou is for you to say that I've never agreed with you that we represent all the people. That's absolutely not true. In fact, I've made that statement numerous times. What I do do is I do recognize that there are certain political realities that we have to face. And so when you're making decisions, you also have to make sure that you're considering would I do the same thing if this situation were reversed? In most cases, I find human nature being what it is that people don't give both sides the same latitude. Regarding your statement about 15 days, I think we may need to reread that board policy again. 15 days is, we have 60 days to fill the vacancy. And I think is what Rick and Lou were talking about earlier. In fact, maybe even some of the audience members is that we've conflated two separate issues. The first issue is whether or not there's a vacancy. The second issue is when we would declare that the applications for that vacancy would be due. And as long as we are giving ourselves enough time to be able to meet the 60 day deadline, 15 days is not the day. Though I appreciate the fact that you've already gone through and figured out all the dates so that you understand what the issue would be. So I would like to first deal with whether or not we have a vacancy on the board. And given the totality of the facts that we have, I believe that there is. Now, I think that there is a motion and second on the floor that Rick made to basically say that Steve can continue in his role but he can't vote in anything, Steve refused that. So the first question I've had as a point of order is Rick, would you withdraw your motion so that we don't have a motion on the floor anymore that we have to address? How we draw that motion, seeing that Steve doesn't really want that, huh? Yeah, okay. So then I would like to make a motion that we declare a vacancy tonight. And I would ask Gina to provide specific language around that. And then we can have a vote on that. Should that fail, then we should have a vote on an explicit vote on allowing Steve to stay through the 31st so that we are communicating to our constituents in our community what our beliefs are on this particular issue. This is a very serious issue. And as Gina says, it doesn't look like it's come up before. Okay, I think appropriate language for the motion you're proposing, Bob, would be that President Swan's board seat is vacant as of today's date, which is November 5th, 2020. Pursuant to government code 1770 section, subsection E. Okay, I move that President Swan's board seat is declared vacant as of today, November 5th, 2020. Pursuant to California government code 1770 section E. If I may else, I'll second that motion. Yeah, so I second that. President Swan. Well, I don't know that, I mean, should President Swan vote on this? I'm recusing myself. Vice President Henry. No. Director Ferris. I had to make an 18 month. Yeah. Director Moran. Yes. False. Yes. Motion passes. Does that mean right this second? I assume so. So, I guess we can call this meeting to a close. Well, wait a sec. We need to establish, now that we've declared a vacancy, we have heard the agenda item, we also have the ability to now set in process, now to take action to establish the process by which this board seat will be filled. It's already established. And I, The board policy manual says that 15 days, 15 days from today, we need to have people's letters requesting to be on the board. And then we do have a number of days, 60 days from right now to fill that. I think we need to take another look at the board policy. Isn't that a minimum of 15 days that we can declare more than? Yeah, I think we should let council discuss for. Yeah. So based on the board's decision, we now have a vacant board seat that starts the clock and gives us until January 5th to decide whether to fill the appointment by to fill the vacancy by appointment or by election. And if by appointment to actually do that. So the two decisions that the board would now need to make are first, whether to fill the vacancy by appointment or election. And then two, if by appointment, it would be to set the most important date that would need to be established just the closing date for the receipt of applications. Did that make sense? Are there questions about that? I do have a question, Lois. A question, go ahead. Okay. Gina, in terms of establishing the date for the applications to be received, what is the minimum or do we have the ability to set it to anything we want more than 15 days if we wanted to go that way? Yeah, that's right. It could be anything after the 15 days. I'd recommend a little bit of a buffer more like 17 days rather than 15 or 16. And then ideally you wanna do it soon enough for a board meeting that those materials can be received, you know, reviewed by staff and included in a board packet for the board meeting. So, and then on the other side of this, the election option, because as I've said earlier, I think the people really should have the ability to weigh in on this. What is the, what would the election option entail? I know we haven't done that before, but I think it's worth making sure we understand the facts around them. Yeah, and I obtained some information from the city clerk about this, if you'll hold on for just a moment. It is the next election is in March, but the election has to be called at least 130 days before the election date. So we wouldn't be able to get into that March election. It would be, I'll hold on just a second. I think it's April, it would be May 4th. So the first possible election date would be May 4th. And how much would that cost? It's the city or the county clerk indicated to me that it would be approximately $4 for registered voter unless some other agency in our area also calls an election. So it could be 80,000 plus dollars unless some other agencies call an election for the same time that would happen. Yeah, we have, I think 17,000 registered voters more or less. So $4 would be 68,000. Great, thank you. Oh, does anybody want to come up with a date here? Well, do we have to make that, Councilor Nichols, do we have to make that decision tonight or could because of the hour, could we have a special meeting to discuss this after, you know, say Monday or Tuesday of next week to make these decisions? It is getting, and a lot has transpired tonight. Yes, yeah, I could be done at a special meeting. Just keeping in mind that January 5th is the outside date for making a decision. And well, and not only making a decision but actually appointing someone if the appointment is going to take place. But we don't necessarily have to make any further decisions tonight. That's right. That's what we want to have a special meeting and to discuss this further. Yes. Lois, can I ask a question? Sure. Okay. Um, and this does not preclude that the new seating board members from this election will be able, they'll be able to participate in the choice of this new member of filling seats they can seat if it's done in January. Is, am I right there? That's, I guess to Gina or to Rick or... But they have to, okay. It has to be, normally it's done like the first board meeting after you receive people's requests to fill a vacancy. But we have to go out, we have to advertise that, that has to be done, that's a whole process here. Yeah, it's a whole process but you can, I mean, it can be done in 15 days according to our board policy. Okay. And that'd be what I said, the 21st of November. And, but then when's the next board meeting gonna be? When's the meeting gonna be in December? And that would be the new board's first meeting. No, that's not true. I think the best for tonight would be to move ahead and let council and myself work this out and bring it back to a special meeting like the first of next week. Right. But to get all these details taken care of, I think we've covered a lot of territory tonight on many items and it is almost 11 o'clock and give us some time and we can have a special meeting and to discuss all of our options and dates, put together a calendar and discuss. I agree. May I ask a question before we break? And this question would be of Rick and I hate to put you on the spot, Rick. Rick Moran, not Rick Rodney, sorry. Rick Moran, I think what I heard you say just a minute ago is that it is important to you that this selection be made through the new board members are seated if it's going to go down an appointment route. Is that correct? Yes, right, that's what I've heard. You know, and I'm fine with the newest representatives having a voice in this. People that somebody's gonna have to work with for two years. As what Lois was suggesting, and I don't know if she was serious about it or just saying this could be done, is the alternative would be to declare something very fast, have the cutoff of the applications by the 24th and do an appointment prior to the new board members being seated and from hang on a sec, Lois, from what I'm hearing you say, Rick, that's not something you wanna see done. And so, yeah. That's not necessarily my intent here. My intent was to be transparent about this process and to have the public input and to be as fair as possible. And that's what I'm trying to do here. Okay, great. Thanks, Rick. I'm pretty sorry for putting you on the spot a little bit, but I wanna make sure I understood what you were trying to get to. Thank you. I would like to say, before we close, I would like to thank Steve Swan. And I'm sorry that we, wouldn't let him finish out the year, but I wanna thank him and enjoy life in Texas. I echo that. Thank you, Steve. Chair Henry, what is your pleasure? Do you want to do the consent agenda then adjourn and approve the minutes or and the multiple user variants, which would be helpful staff? If we're gonna have a meeting, say Monday or Tuesday or something. We'll bring these up. Why couldn't we do that then? Well, can do. That's the plan. And the other thing is, you were gonna, by Monday or Tuesday, talk to the WSC and all of that kind of good stuff. How much stuff are we gonna do? Well, I think between council and I, we can pull this together. And I'm sure council can pull together the vacant board chair and I can work on the other and we'll make this work. Any objections to that, Gina? No, no, mine. What do you mean the vacant board chair? What do you mean? I'm sorry. I didn't hear that, Lois. I said, what do you mean by the vacant board chair? Well, not vacant board chair. I'm sorry, the vacant, the vacant director. My apologies. Okay, okay. With that, I'd recommend we adjourn then. So point of order. Are we waiving the consent agenda and the district report? Yes. To be carried to the next time? Yes. Thank you. We're going to adjourn now. Thank you all for being here. Sorry. Thank you.