 Conservation Collaborative. We're a non-profit based here in Portland that's committed to accelerating conservation in southern Maine by providing administrative and technical support to conservation organizations and by strengthening strategic partnerships. This is a really good example of a strategic partnership. And the work that we do is built on a membership of 20 conservation organizations in southern Maine, everything from very small, all-volunteer land trusts to the Nature Conservancy, the biggest conservation organization. We have our list of members here. And we are thrilled tonight to be co-hosting Paul from the Portland Water District to tell you a story of a fantastic strategic partnership to the very true value of land conservation and to the water that we all drink. So, take it away Paul. Okay, thank you. It's hard not to think you're gonna disappoint when someone refers to your talk as, we're thrilled, but I'll do the best that I can. Thank you all very much for coming tonight and for inviting me to speak about your source of drinking water, Sabago Lake. I've changed the title of my talk since the poster was printed. If you remember, the talk was entitled Trees Not Treatment. And I changed it because I previewed it at our treatment plant in Standish and one of the treatment plan operators said, what do you mean? Are we out of work? And the fact is the water that you drink here is treated. It's disinfected three times, but the level of treatment that's required is much less than it would otherwise be. And this talk is about what we're doing to ensure that it will not, it'll only need a minimal amount of treatment into the future. So, I changed the title to More Trees Not More Treatment because there is a level of treatment that will always be there. It's not gonna go away. And I'll have to re-preview it at the treatment plant so that they'll invite me back there. I, you know, I, well, at the end, I'm gonna open it up to questions. But if I'm talking along and you're, like I've completely lost you and you want me to explain a slide or something that you see, go ahead and raise your hand. I won't be knocked off my game. But if you have a longer question, there's time at the end and I'll try to answer any questions that you have. This is how my talk is organized. First, I like to start with kind of a sense of place, kind of create a setting and then the story fits within the setting. So I'll start with that. You may not, you may know a lot about Tobago Lake and you may not know much. But either way, I wanna convey to you something about the quantity of water that we have available to us. I'm gonna talk about how clean it is. I will tell you that I could easily give a two hour talk about water quality, but I will not subject you to that. It, in fact, there'll be very little data, really not much data, all like one data point. But I think I can convey to you in just that one slide the quality of water that we're fortunate to drink. I will then frame the challenge for the future of the water supply that we're working on meeting and then I'll open it up to questions. So that's how the talk is organized. Okay, a sense of place. Here's earth, 70% water, right? And you are here. Now, I realize that's not very helpful, so I'm gonna try a little harder to, again, place you on earth and then start my talk from there. So instead of starting big, I'll start, I'll zoom way in and here we are. You know, here's the peninsula and you are right about here. Okay, so all I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna, we're gonna get in a helicopter and we're gonna rise up higher and higher and I'm back away so that you can get a sense of kind of the big picture. And I think that will help set the stage for the rest of my talk. So all I'm doing is just going up a little bit higher here. There we are, still on the peninsula. Now you're up high enough that you can start to see, you know, Westbrook, you know, you're starting to see, you can see the Przomskiet River, which is the outlet to Sibago Lake. You can see it kind of running down here. By the way, when Sibago Lake has been the source of drinking water for Greater Portland since Thanksgiving day, 18, here's some Sibago, some Portland water trivia. Thanksgiving day, 1869 is when the water first flowed from Sibago Lake to the first tap and none of your friends are gonna know this, 94 Danforth Street was the first tap that was turned on with Sibago Lake water. But before that pipeline was completed, which took three years to get a pipeline from Sibago Lake to Greater Portland in 1869, the Przomskiet River was one of the other water sources that was considered. Here's another piece of Portland water trivia. There was a third source considered Long Creek. Long Creek flows right through where the main mall is now. I think they made the right choice since we're still using this 150 years later and I'm not sure where that would have been true for those other two sources of drinking water. Anyway, now I'm gonna just back out a little bit further and now for the first time, you can see your source of drinking water. You can see the lower bay, the southern part of Sibago Lake and the towns of Wyndham and Gorman Westbrook in between. Water from Sibago Lake is provided to 200,000 Greater Portland residents and that's how it's done. What you see in red now is part of the 1,000 miles of water pipe, the network of pipes that conveys water. The intakes are here in lower bay and the water, the trunk mains we call them. You think of it like a tree, the largest mains come right down like this and then it fans out from there. So I kind of think of it like your hand. You know, the trunk mains come down like this into the peninsula here and then from there it fans out. The Falmouth feeder, the southern feeder, those are the large mains that go north and south. But anyway, that's the water network. Again, there's another great talk about the water. Some of the pipes are over 100 years old. Some of them were put in this year and it's constantly being added to and renewed. But I'm not gonna talk about that. If you don't, most of you, how many of you have Portland Water District water at your home? Everybody, right, or almost everybody. I give this talk to people who aren't on the system sometimes so for them, I always put this slide in to remind them that even if you're not on our system, it's very likely, well, I'm certain that you benefit from Portland Water Districts. Tobago Lake is a source of drinking water because if you're ever unfortunate enough, and I say unfortunate meaning, because then you'd be in the hospital, not that you wouldn't get good care, but if you're treated at Maine Medical Center, the instruments that are being used have been washed with Tobago Lake water. If you buy something with microchips in it, they could have been made at Nationals, Semiconductor or Fairchild, Texas Instruments. Those facilities use Tobago Lake water. Oakhurst Dairy, Hood Dairy, the orange juice they're mixing up, they're using Tobago Lake water. I'm not saying any of you would ever drink beer, but if you do, actually that's my line for when I speak at University of Southern Maine. But anyway, there's a number of breweries in Greater Portland, all using Tobago Lake water as their source. There are a lot of iconic food manufacturers like B&M baked beans. Again, all these companies use Tobago Lake water. It's sort of like, here's the one way to put it is it's sort of like the lifeblood of the Southern Maine economy is Tobago Lake water. So even if you live off of the system, out in this part of Southern Maine, probably you work in Greater Portland, even if you don't, you benefit from the products that are made there and the services all from Tobago Lake water. You may have read that we're in the midst of a drought in Southern Maine. The state has what they call the Drought Task Force, which is several state agency representatives that only get together if there's a drought condition and then they talk about what the state is gonna do to mitigate the effects of the drought and to provide relief for places that are severely affected. So I was, where was I, I was at Beals Ice Cream maybe two months ago wearing a shirt like this one and someone said, so how are we doing for water? You know, because of the drought. So I'm gonna answer that question for you. And the best way that I can convey it to you is to say you have to have some sense of how much water is in Tobago Lake relative to how much we need. So how much water is in Tobago Lake? I could give you a number, but rather than do that, I'm gonna, you know, when I first heard the number, it's just too big a number to really do much with in your head and say, can you put that in context? So we talked about it and this is what we came up with. If you were to attach a spigot to Tobago Lake and start filling those splash trucks that are used to fill pools with water, just fill them one after another and then line them up end to end, you could fill a lot of trucks. I mean, if each truck holds about 10,000 gallons of water, you could fill a lot of trucks, like 100 million of them, which again, it's a big number, but even that is hard for me personally to, my brain, 100 million is just such a big number. What does that mean? Well, so what if you lined them up end to end? How far would the line extend before you ran out of water trucks? Anybody wanna venture a guess? How far it would traverse? Who said that? That is awesome. No one has ever guessed that. Usually I get California or around the world. Water trucks filled with Tobago Lake water would stretch from the earth to the moon and back twice. So, but still, that is the best answer. No one has ever guessed that, but that's how much water is there. That's what 100 million truckloads of water, that's how long the line would stretch. So what does that mean for us? Well, we use to meet all the needs of Greater Portland today, we use about 8 billion gallons per year. So all those trucks would hold more than 800 million gallons, almost a trillion. So that's 100 years. So the way to think about that is if it didn't rain again, and of course, none could evaporate, none could flow out of the Przomskiet River. So it's kind of a mind experiment, but there's as much water sitting there right now that if it didn't rain for 100 years, that's when we would run out. So the drought is not a concern at this point. I mean, maybe if it went on for 10 years, because you have to pull the water out of the lake, treat it and get it to customers. So if the lake dropped a lot, that could affect the hydraulics of the system. But still, there's 100 years worth of water there for us. I'm guessing there's one or two towns or cities in California that would trade our situation for theirs. To have 100 years of water in storage is a rare situation to be in. We're sort of the Saudi Arabia of water. We should be happy about that and we should also be very protective of it. And we are protective of it. In fact, the Water District has been protecting Subego Lake for 100 years. I'm gonna tell you about how we protect it, but I'm gonna do it quickly so that we can move on to the other part of the talk that I wanna get to. So I'm gonna tell you in eight words what our watershed protection program consists of. We sample, we have 17 monitoring programs. Some of them are on the tributaries to the lake, some of them are in the lake themselves, some of them are right at the intakes. We test for microbiological, biological and chemical parameters at various frequencies. All of that is designed to sort of like the same reason when you go to the doctor you get your blood pressure and your weight. You monitor to see what's the condition of the patient. So we do sampling of locations all around the lake. We analyze them, we have two fully certified environmental laboratories where we run the samples. Some things we ship out because we can't do every parameter that we test for, but many of them we do in-house. We inspect construction work that occurs particularly within the shoreland zone of the lake to ensure that when they're doing that work no soil is washing into the lake and we inspect septic systems when they're installed to make sure they're installed properly and then therefore don't fail and impact the lake. So we inspect. We have an outreach, in fact this is sort of part of our outreach strategy which is, this is where an quasi-municipal non-profit where public company, this is your water district, not mine and so we try to help people to understand how fortunate we are to have such a great source of drinking water and the benefits of, for example, the conserved land around the lake which is not only protecting the water but is also open for public, certain types of public recreation. So we try to inspire people to help us to love and protect the lake. We do patrol the lake, there's a no swimming zone, there's a no trespassing zone around the area where we draw the water out of the lake. Most of the lake is unrestricted or is the same as any other lake in Maine but there's about 10% of it that is protected by state law with no body contact and no trespassing zones and so we patrol that all summer and we patrol the land all year round just to ensure that the rules are being followed and people are being protective of your drinking water. We have an in-school education program explaining to tomorrow's water customers and watershed residents why protecting the lake is such a good idea, how they can help us and how they can, decisions they can make that support the protection of the lake. So we explain, we conserve land, that's really what the rest of my talk is about is working on the conservation of land around the lake and I'll explain to you why that's so important to us and how we are contributing to that effort. It's certainly not ours alone and this is my favorite word and it's in our organization name, Collaborate. I've been working on Svega Lake Protection for 17 years now and I will tell you that probably for the first five, my mindset was okay, I have this number of employees whose responsibility is to protect this lake and this is the budget I have to do that so how are we gonna best do that and it probably took me five years to realize okay, even though these are some brilliant people who are very dedicated and we're very fortunate to have them, there's only a dozen of us and this lake is enormous and the only way it can really be protected is to partner and collaborate with lots of other organizations and we, again, every year I'm kind of thinking of what other organizations can help us whose mission it is that if their mission is further the lake is better protected, that's a potential partner we ought to figure out how to collaborate so now I'm gonna cheat, that's my eighth word and I'm gonna put a whole lot of other words up there but this is every year we compile a list of who did we collaborate with in the last year because we're required to report to the state every year on our Watershed Protection Program and so I always ask the staff, I want the names of every organization that you did things bigger, small width in the last year to further the protection of Sabaga Lake and so this is just one year's list and you're not gonna be able to read it, don't try, don't stream, I just want you to see the number of organizations that in just one year we partner with on the protection of the lake and some of them are state agencies, some of them are municipalities, schools, nonprofit organizations and this is really where it took me a while to figure out that this is the way to protect a resource is to enlist all the people who benefit because it's not just our customers by the way who benefit from a clean lake, there's all kinds of people that benefit from it and they all wanna help protect it too as long as they're doing it in a way that furthers their mission and that's really what collaboration is really all about. Okay, so I'm gonna in one slide try to convey to you just how clean I've already conveyed to you, I hope that we have a quantity of water that is adequate to meet our needs. It's also incredibly clean, it's one of the cleanest water supply lakes in the country. Now am I just talking, does every water utility say that? Maybe they do but I'm gonna show you why I feel confident saying that and that is that if you in the United States there are about 13,000 public water systems that use either a lake or a river as their source of drinking water. There are many other water utilities but they're not on this group of 13,000, why is that? What do they use for a soy? If they're not using a lake or a river, how could they be a water utility? Groundwater, so I'm excluding those and I don't know quite how many of those there are but there are 13,000 public water systems in the United States using either a lake or a river. Of those 13,000, notice there's a little red slice there. There are 50 of them out of 13,000 that do not filter the water. In other words, draw the water from the lake or the river and all the rest of them except for 50 run it through some kind of filtration process whether it's sand, membrane, there's a number of methods but all of them except 50 are legally required to filter the water, to remove particulates and then disinfect it and then provide it to customers. 50 have an exemption to that legal requirement and we're one of the 50. And the reason is that there's really nothing to filter that there's no benefit really because there's so little particulate matter floating around in there that we can bring it right to disinfect because if you have particles, algae, or sediment suspended in the water and then you try to disinfect it those particles can interfere with the disinfection process. We don't have enough stuff to interfere so we can go right to disinfection and only 50 utilities have that legal designation. So again, I have other slides of water quality that could, we show our water quality data to other utilities and they think they must be faking it. Like that can't be your raw water but it really is. So the lake is incredibly clean and it's pretty much all the water we're ever gonna need as long as we're careful with it. So you've gotta be sitting out there thinking, this guy has the easiest job in the state. He's protecting a huge amount of water that's so clean that it doesn't even need to be filtered. How can I get that job? Like what's the challenge? Well, there is a very big challenge and it's sort of represented by this image and that is that there's a reason why there's probably more than one reason but there's certainly one big reason why Sabago Lake does not need to be filtered. It actually is filtered but it's filtered naturally so we don't have to construct a filtration plant to do it and this slide is an aerial image of the land north of Sabago Lake and that's where the filtration is happening. So I'm gonna go back to the helicopter and I'm gonna zoom out a little bit further so you'll recognize the thousand miles of pipe that's used to convey water from Sabago Lake to all of our customers. You can now see all of Sabago Lake. So that's one water network but there's another water network and the other water network exists not down here south of the lake, south and east of the lake but it exists up there north and west of the lake and so I've drawn a line on there in yellow who wants to venture a guess at what that line represents. It's the outline of the Sabago Lake watershed I've been surprised to find out that there's different conceptions of what the term watershed means maybe not in this room because you wouldn't come to a talk like this if you weren't kind of in the choir already but what that represents is all the land that drains to the lake that flows to the lake so rainfall that falls anywhere within that yellow line eventually makes its way to the lake and then possibly into your glass. So therefore we don't have a lake protection program we have a watershed protection program because all that water could eventually be in your glass. So the water network that is of significance in this case is shown in blue here and that's all the streams and ponds and lakes and rivers that flow over that land to Sabago Lake and then from there could be drawn out and brought into the system. So the Sabago Lake watershed this is just another image of the same thing and one thing that I want you to notice about this is that when you first learn the concept watershed at least as I remembered it was a watershed as a bowl and the lake sits in the bottom of the bowl and so anything that hits the sides of the bowl flows down into the lake and it's a pretty good concept for when you're in school but notice that the Sabago Lake watershed is not shaped like a bowl. If it was shaped like a bowl it would be sort of sub-equally distributed around the lake and if that were the case the water quality would be very different because the land, notice that the watershed is long and skinny and it extends north and west of the lake while the land north and west of the lake looks kind of like this. So you might recognize the Naples Causeway right here this is Long Lake, this is Brandy Pond but all I want you to notice from that aerial image is green and furry. The land north and west of Sabago Lake is very forested, more than 80% forested. The land south and east of the lake that if the watershed was sub-equally distributed around the lake, this whole area would drain back into the lake so that would be Windom and Gorham and those are nice rural towns but they're not as rural as these towns up here and so there's a lot more trees that have been cut down in Windom and Gorham and Westbrook than in Naples and Harrison and Otisfield so those towns are in the watershed, these towns aren't and so as a result all the water that's coming into the lake is flowing over this land, this green and furry land. So what's the significance of that? Why does the forest matter so much? So I want you to think about a forested piece of land and it's pouring so imagine the rain coming down so imagine you're walking through the woods and you're listening to it, what do you hear? What you hear is the rain hitting the canopy of leaves above your head right? So just think about walking in the woods in the rain, you can hear it hitting all the trees. What's happening there is the energy, every one of those raindrops is full of, is that potential energy, right? Cause it's not been expended yet, right? I think that's my physics are right and then so anyway the energy in that raindrop is hitting the tree, the leaf canopy and the energy's being dissipated before it reaches the ground because then it's hitting the leaves and then it's kind of dripping down the branches and maybe running down the trunk of the tree and then spreading out on the ground beneath the tree. If the tree's not there that same raindrop would travel right from the sky straight down and it would hit the soil and eventually would erode away the soil and cause it to move cause the energy would be expended on the ground instead of on the trees. So what that tree canopy is doing is it's absorbing the water's energy. That's also promoting infiltration as it kind of drips down the tree and then spreads out on the ground. Remember that the forest surface is also hammocky and full of depressions. Those are filling up with water and then over time that water is kind of infiltrating into the ground. As it moves through the ground of course there's the filtration that's removing nutrients. Nutrients sounds like a good thing but when you're a lake too many nutrients just like too many nutrients for us causes us to gain weight. Too many nutrients in a lake causes it to grow algae and so you want those nutrients to be absorbed by the forest and that's what happens. So, and sediment that might be entrained in the water is gonna sort of settle into the ground of the forest and infiltrate into the ground and it won't make its way into the lake. So what that means is that the forest is a natural filter. So Tobago Lake is filtered but it's filtered by the forest before it ever gets to us and therefore we don't have to pay to do that. So what's this challenge that I'm talking about? What's the big deal about this sweet job of like this resource that's amazing one of the best water supplies in the country? The challenge is this that there's our treatment plant and 91.5% of it is privately owned. So in other words, it's forest. It's beautiful forest. It's treating the water as we speak. By the way, that's a great thing about if we built a water treatment plant we'd have to staff it, we'd have to operate it. I mean a filtration plant we would have to operate the filtration plant but as we're talking right now the filtration plant is operating itself because that forest is doing the work for us without us having to do anything but all that forest is owned by individuals who could develop it into subdivisions if they choose to. It's their land. They can do anything they want to it. We are just all so fortunate that to date that hasn't really happened. Most of the watershed is privately owned and forested but it could change. So that's the challenge is how do we ensure that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 500 years from now this filtration system is still working because if it weren't, if it's gone well we're just gonna have to build a filtration plant and guess who will pay for it? We all will. I'm a customer too. We'll all pay for that instead of it happening naturally by the forest. It took, as I say, I started here 17 years ago. It took me a while to even grasp that this was part of my job. Like I saw my job as keeping the boat fueled up and patrolling lower bay and ensuring inspections got done and ensuring samples got collected and it took me a few years to kind of step back and say let's just imagine all those things are being done well. We're collecting samples, we're analyzing them, we're inspecting properties, all those things I told you that we've been doing and we need to keep doing. They're really critical but if that's all that we did we would have a lake with a very, with a lot of construction projects that have occurred around it that were done well because they've been inspected and they didn't but so the shoreland zone would be very healthy but if all the land behind that in the watershed were developed the lake wouldn't be clean anyway and it's like it took us a while to kind of realize we're doing part of the job of lake protection but not all of it because that land behind the shoreland zone is part of our treatment process. So it took us around 2000, between say 2000 and 2007 a few land trusts came to us during that time kind of out of the blue like my phone rang and it was from a land trust and they said we're working on a project to conserve this piece of property and it's in the watershed so are you guys interested in helping pay for it and honestly like the first time that was posed to me I said I don't know I mean it sounds like a good idea good luck and I hope it works but we had no mechanism we had no program we had nothing it was just and so what I said was put it in writing and I'll bring it to our board of trust I mean I can't, I couldn't authorize that our board would have to authorize that so the land trust went to the board and made a request you make a donation to help us finance this transaction and the board did several times but after like the third or fourth time it was a few thousand dollars here a few thousand dollars there after that then the board's members started saying how do we decide like the amount how do you know what are we basing this on and there was really no basis for it and there wasn't even a rationale now if you've worked for a non-profit which is what we are I try to tell my brother this who works for for-profit companies that policy is kind of critical to any non-profit organization because a policy is like a statement of principles this is what we're doing this is what we believe in this is what we're trying to accomplish so around 2005, 2006 we were asked to put together a policy statement that talked about this like when these requests come in a policy kind of helps guide decision making like this is our policy so this is what we're going to do to accomplish that policy goal and so the policy that the board adopted in 2007 essentially said you know we do own some land I showed you a picture of a bunch of people out on our the district owns a collar of green land around the southern part of the lake but most of that watershed is not owned by us and the state, the policy essentially said it's not feasible for us to try to buy a significant percentage of the Sabago Lake watershed we don't have that kind of money in no way could we ever do that and it's not even desirable because there are land trusts whose goal it is to conserve land and they're the ones who when they acquire a piece of property in fear easement they're the stewards of it they maintain it that's better for us because that's not our business that's their business so it's not feasible or desirable for us to own all the land in the watershed but we support the efforts of others to do it now you might read that and go that doesn't seem very revolutionary but I can tell you that the water district had been in business for 100 years and very rarely does the water district write a check and not own something afterwards you know you buy a pump station or you buy a pipeline or you buy infrastructure that's what we do for you is we figure out what infrastructure is needed to provide drinking water to Greater Portland and then we finance it as need be but to make a contribution to or to support someone else accomplishing something is really different and so this policy said yes we will do this and the rationale is because if they own that land it's treating our water so that's a good thing for us and it's worth us contributing to that so that policy was adopted it was very exciting because then it made clear when a request came in that the board wasn't going to say what's this request about and why are we why are being asked to contribute to something 20 miles away from our intakes way up there it was almost like the board all agreeing yes that makes sense to us so we operated under that policy for a few years some more requests came in from land trusts because it sort of signaled that hey we're on the same page if you're successful and what you're trying to do that benefits us so we are open to the idea of us being requested to support that so we did that or the board did that for several years until it became what we sort of said is we looked at what was happening and we said this is very good land trusts are conserving land and that benefits our customers but we said to the land trusts could you go faster like we love what you're doing but there's a large 300,000 acres of land we'd love to see more of it being conserved than is at the pace you're going and they said well what do you think they said if we had more money we could conserve more land kind of logical so we went back to the board and we said you know the land trusts are coming to you because you have a policy that says you support what they're doing but and they're asking you for $5,000 and $3,000 often by the way I don't know how much you are involved in land conservation but sometimes people are even willing to donate the land or the development rights to the land but even you know so imagine someone says I have 500 acres and I want to donate the development rights so that this land will be forever forested guess what that person still has to come up with money like even to make the donation because there's legal work research that has to be done into titles and things like I mean there's a transaction cost and sometimes the land trust doesn't really have that money and so it's kind of like insult to injury I'm trying to make a gift and I have to bring out my checkbook just to make the gift and so several times they came to our board and the land trust said could you help with the out-of-pocket costs so that this transaction can happen so anyway in 2000 and so in 2012 we we went back to the board and we said it would really help if we had not a policy but a program so that it would be clear that it was funded and it would have guidelines and so land trust could kind of look at and say well this is how much we're going to apply for like like a grant program as opposed to just come to us and tell us what you think you might need so in 2012 2013 I'm sorry it was 2012 it was brought to the board they deliberated on it and in 2013 they adopted what we call the land conservation program and there's a the significant difference from the staff level and from the land trust level and land owner level is that it has a clear set of criteria this is when we would as a board consider contributing to a land conservation transaction and here's how much we would contribute so like a formula because it was sort of it after the three or four times that request came in could we have $8,000 and you know there was no way to say whether yes you know sort of like the board would say doesn't seem like a lot of money for 800 acres of land $8,000 we're not paying much and that's going to treat our water for the next 500 forever so they would do it but sometimes the land trust wanted a more clear formula and the board wanted a more clear form and staff did too so that we could know what we were doing so this program is designed to assist willing land owners who want to conserve their forest land in the Sabago Lake watershed and to just boil the whole program down to one number 25% what the program essentially says is the district will contribute up to 25% of the total value of the transaction now what does that mean well some of these transactions if you have 500 acres of land that you're going to put an easement on that will never be developed you're probably giving up several hundred thousand dollars of the value of the land that's the value of the transaction so 25% of that number gets big you know it can be a big number but again from our point of view we make that one contribution the land trust and the land owner have to come up with the other 75% and then our water is treated forever for us without us having to lift a finger so it's still a great transaction for the districts from the district's point of view I think it's a good thing that if a person donated say 500 acres it would there would be you know there would be costs there legal funds and so forth that might be as much as maybe five thousand dollars or whatever it is some thousand dollars but then just now I was trying to follow and I thought you were talking about several hundred thousand dollars as an example of how much they'd be losing for what they could maybe get on from the property they developed it so 25% has to do with the first or the second most of the time a land owner wants to be compensated for the lost value it's there are people who are willing to donate it maybe they have the means to do that maybe that's just really their own personal goal and they don't want to be compensated but most times a land owner purchases land to invest and so one way to recoup their investment would be to sell it and have it be developed another way would be for a land trust to compensate them for the development cost then the land can stay forested the answer to your question is we ask the land trust how much money do you need to make this transaction happen and so if the person is donating the easement then they would only need the out-of-pocket costs and so we would calculate it from there on the other hand if they're had the land trust is having to pay sometimes they buy it in fee so you're buying you're paying the total price tag of the land that can be a much bigger number and we would say it but if they have most of it then we only contribute the amount that they need up to twenty five percent so it's whichever number is smaller uh... so it varies it there you know each transaction is different generally the number comes out to be about twenty five percent of the total cost of the transaction is usually they're paying for the whole thing not just the out-of-pocket cost they're also paying for the development rights most of the time but each one is different and again we choose the smallest amount you need to make this transaction happen i'll show you a little bit more about how the transaction so here's how the program works in practice there's sort of three steps to it the first and most fundamental thing or most important thing is that it be a willing landowner we wouldn't enter into any kind of conversation with an unwilling landowner has to be someone who it's his or her goal to conserve his or her land in perpetuity and that whole conversation always occurs between the landowner and the land trust where you know we're in the water treatment business we're not in the land conservation business directly so we that the land trust have been doing this for a long time we don't we stay away from that whole process of them talking to the landowner letting know what their options are that whole decision is not anything we get involved with but once they have an agreement like the landowner and the land trust have agreed this is what we want to do then they come to us with a with a request so when we get the request uh... we have a checklist in a formula that we used to calculate what's the what's the reasonable contribution up to twenty five percent that's needed to make this transaction happen and it meets our criteria i will tell you that if you've been involved in land conservation land conservation can accomplish many goals at once and it and it's done for different purposes maybe it's being sought as a protection of habitat it could be related to outdoor recreation we look at it through a very narrow lens of what's its water quality value because that's what we're doing it doesn't mean we're not happy to see other things accomplished by this transaction but we do a calculation that's based on how much if this transaction happens how much water protection happens and that's how we value the land so that might be different by the way than the appraised value they they might be paying two hundred thousand dollars for this transaction we do a calculation that says well the water quality value is a hundred fifty thousand that's where we start counting because we're only contributing twenty five percent of the water quality protection values that's another nuance of it but then the third step is you know i work for the water district but the decision makers are the board of the elected board of trustees so the last thing is staff calculates based on our formula this is what we think the contribution should be but then it goes to the board and they can contribute more they can contribute zero they can contribute less it's their call i will say that they have we've done about a dozen to fifteen transactions and they've always voted eleven to nothing and they've always accepted the board's recommendation because it's based on the formula or the staff's recommendation because it's based on the formula that they approved and we follow that formula so how much trend conservation has happened so this chart just shows you we've been involved in you know this is going back to two thousand eight there were a couple of small transactions before then but since two thousand and eight the height of the bar tells you how many acres were conserved that year by land trusts or others in the watershed that the district contributed to and then the number in the on the bubble is how many transactions that was so you'll recall that it was in early twenty thirteen that the program was uh... established by the board the good news is that the next two years you know this our goal was to accelerate the pace of conservation and it did work we're kind of in a while now there were three transactions in twenty fifteen but they weren't large ones uh... but it's really kind of driven by landowner interest it's we could be more than willing to enter into uh... you know to contribute to a transaction but if there's no land owner that is interested then none happened they haven't been any in twenty sixteen so we're sort of you know again you can't push on a rope it has to be pulled from the other end because the landowners it's their call but anyway we're quite happy with the pace at least in twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen and uh... it has made a difference that the money uh... is more it's more clear to land trust like they can almost pencil it in in their heads that if this transaction goes we can so this is how you do land conservation anyway as you kind of have a pie where you try to piece together the funding from what you know your donors and maybe a grant from here and a grant from here and they they kind of know approximately where they're going where the district is likely to contribute at what level and then they have to find all the rest of the money so this is just uh... you know my one table to summarize before two thousand and seven with no formal policy two projects happened uh... three hundred sixty six acres conserved in the district's contribution was sixteen thousand dollars to those two projects once we adopted the policy between oh eight and twelve and twenty twelve five transactions happened twelve hundred acres and the district's contribution was twenty eight thousand since twenty thirteen there's been a lot more conservation and the district's percentage has gone by a lot uh... so we've contributed almost a half of more than a half a million dollars now to these transactions but there's now four thousand acres that will treat our water in perpetuity uh... legally cannot ever be developed and uh... will be it that some of them are working forest easements so the some selective cutting can happen in a sustainable way but they cannot ever be deforested and so that's going to that's an in perpetuity legal designation uh... how does it look on the map this is kind of my last slide so what you see on this map is the sabaga lake watershed and sabaga lake down here in green is the land that we own and you can see we only own a thimble full of land really when you look at the whole size of the watershed but what you see in gray is land that is conserved by others so for example way up here that's the white mountain national forest extends into the watershed owned by the federal government pretty confident that's never going to be developed does anyone know what this is right here that's the sabaga lake state park so again we can kind of put that in the bank and say that's going to be a water treatment you know that's going to treat our water forever uh... this is a large easement uh... the jugtown plains owned uh... the easement is owned by a land trust so most of the smaller ones are pieces of property you know fifty acres a hundred five hundred a land trust has either the development rights uh... an easement or they own it in fee so that's all land that is going to be conserved as forest in perpetuity that's where we started from and now i'm just adding in pink all the properties that have been conserved since the district started participating in contributing and i don't know about you but that kind of sort of brings a tear to my eye just to see that it's starting to add up to you know it's it's still a long way to go there's a lot of white on on the on the map but there's a lot of work that's been done a lot of conservation has happened to the benefit of the land trust goals and the benefit of the district's goals all at the same time so my catchphrase for you to take home is as go the main woods so go the main lakes that you know took me a number of years to figure out no you're not doing lake protection you're doing watershed protection because that land around the lake is really what's dictating the water quality in the lake if the land changes the lake changes and so land conserved i don't i used to think you know i used to go to conferences and go to training about water water water and more and more now i'm doing that but also going to learn more about land conservation and because that's where water treatment is happening uh... that is my last slide so uh... happy to answer any questions that you have your hand went up first how much would a filtration plant cost to build and operate per year it's a very good question i'm i'm not an engineer i tend to tease them but i only do that because i'm a geologist and i never could have passed all those classes in math so i i tend to tease engineers because they're they stun me with the things they can calculate and estimate so quickly and i'm not as good at that but and we've asked you know that we get asked that a lot and you get an equivocal answer and the reason is that it would depend when you did it because technology is constantly changing so if you built a treatment plant now a filtration plant now it would it would look very different than when you would build in twenty years and it would cost a different amount so they tend to hem and haw because they don't want to put a number out and then be held to it but if you persist and say you've got to just put me in a ballpark they would and it also depends on how much concrete you have to pour because if you can do it within the exit we have a treatment plan if you could fit it inside the building somehow that'd be a lot cheaper than pouring an enormous foundation and adding an addition so they don't like to get pinned down but the number that they seem to hover around is fifty million dollars that that's about what it would cost to do filtration for eight billion gallons a year at today's sort of rates and again that's they'll say well we have to do some design you know we'd have to you know because they want to be precise but I guess I use that number and they wouldn't fall out of their chair if they heard it but they wouldn't want to bank on it because there's more work to be done to really a firm number but fifty million dollars probably be a million or two a year to operate it because you have to buy chemicals and you'd have to staff it and we have a staff so you could probably do a lot of it with the same people so the labor costs might not go up a huge amount but chemical costs certainly would and other electricity would be generally they'll say one to two million to operate it per year first of all, one of the best talks, thank you three quick questions where does the name Chevego come from? it's a it's a Native American name and it has to do with very big I can't remember the exact translation but I the big is part of it and what role does I have in the place of Little Cebego? What role is Little Cebego? Is that just part of the watershed? Does it drain into the place of Little Cebego? Actually Little Cebego this is Little Cebego right here and it's in a different watershed so they have the same name but they're they're not connected hydraulically. Cebego Lake, this is called the basin if you are familiar with, you know, this is White's Bridge this is Fry Island right here so I don't know how familiar you are with the geography but Cebego outlets right here and then goes down the Presumsket River Little Cebego outlets down here and goes, you know, I think to the Little River goes to a different river so they're completely separate and you said your board is elected? we have 11 elected trustees is that a statewide? only that's for the Portland, we have 11 communities that we serve and the trustees are apportioned by population so I think Portland has five of them they're elected, they're Portland residents and then the you know some of the towns are, we don't serve that many people in them so like Wyndham and Standish might, no I can't remember but it's proportional, it's proportional to population so five of our trustees are from Portland one represents South Portland and Scarborough and it's like that I should be able to rattle that off by now thank you for the talk, you sold me on the strategy but now I'm, but you didn't tell me I'm being able to execute the strategy so help me out here, so I will tell you I was just talking with Jess about this before the talk, there's two big challenges can I try the numbers just on you, I had it because I wanted to ask a specific question so if I got the numbers right you've got about 1.4% of the watershed in through these deals and if it's $126 an acre, which is what that calculation, what you get out of that calculation then it would be a $35 million price minus whatever land it's already, a great stuff you pay on your math to conserve all of it? to conserve all of it so that's never going to be the goal because there are a number of communities in the watershed and people live there people have houses there, there's businesses there the goal is, okay, if you could snap your fingers and say I want this magical place where the water supply is over here and the people all live over here you couldn't argue that that would be great if you could just say this land over here is just for drinking water there's a fence around the whole watershed no one can ever go in there and we just provide water from here and all the people live here but that's not the way the world works so the watershed is never going to be 100% conserved so that wouldn't even be the goal what we do have done several analyses of where the strategically, if you could only conserve 10% of it which property is going to be the next? my question, how are you going to identify given that you can't do all of it and given you're a geologist have you identified the most important parts and if so, how can you promote those parts because it's driven, at this point in time first of all it's sort of an embryonic program I guess, generally people who own land prefer to decide for themselves when it's going to be conserved and ironically if you did a map and said here are the priority parcels the ones that if we could only conserve 10% of them those would be the ones I might own that and say just take your eyes right off the parcel that's mine, I have my own plans for it and so we're sort of we're letting the market kind of run itself in other words, if a landowner and the land trust have a conversation we're not even in the room we have nothing to do with that they come to us and say here's somebody that wants to conserve land to date we've never had to choose like this one is more valuable than that one because they're only coming at us one or two or three a year and they're small enough that we can we can feasibly say we'll contribute to each of these if we ever reach the point where I mean I would love for this problem to occur that we have so many requests that we have to prioritize them or say we can do these but not these then we would start looking at because there have been several models that have looked at the land and based on slope and other factors you can determine strategically which parcels have a greater effect on water quality than others and we do have those analyses but again we're in the end the most important factor is willing landowner I could tell you that that 500 acres is so critical but if the person that owns it is not interested then we're not interested because we would only work with willing landowners so we have gone and done a few talks in the watershed and put maps up showing so that people can see when we look at the land these are the areas that have the greatest effect on the water quality of the lake so it's not it is public information but we don't really act on it because it's up to them and so we have looked at what would we love to see happen because it's never going to be 100% conserved it's not feasible that wouldn't be the goal but our hope is that it will move along at a pace that right now I told you 91.5% of the watershed is forested so let's just round it off and say 90% so 10% is conserved we'd like to see it 20% conserved over the next 25 years we feel like that would be most towns want to see land conserved that one thing before the board would adopt the program they asked us to solicit comments from town managers and planning boards in the watershed would you see this as a positive thing for the district to help the land trusts or would you see it as a negative thing and you might say well why would anyone see that as a negative thing well does anyone know why someone might see it as a negative thing I need to say this but a town that really wants development right now it's not connecting the dots because if the land if the development rights are sold or donated then the taxable the tax revenue from that property goes down to the so the tree growth level and the board worried that a town might see this as a negative thing and so they asked us to go out and talk and we did not get anybody that we talked to that said they would see it as a negative thing so most towns comprehensive plan in Maine it usually has preserved rural character, preserved open space somewhere in their goals so most towns I think probably every town sees conserving some of their forest land as a good thing so again we kind of look at it like if over the next 25 years a similar amount of land as you saw on that map additional amount approximately that much but a lot of water quality goals would be met a lot of greens open space goals would be met a lot of landowners goals would be met because it would only be willing landowners and that's within the realm of what if the district was contributing about 20-25% of those transactions that would be feasible so we have kind of thought through the model but in a way it's one of those things where you can do all this planning but it really comes down to landowner interest and I'm hopeful that that many landowners will come forward over the next 25 years I'll thank you for the talk I just wondered as a floating water district customer for the past 8 years this is the first time I'm hearing about a conservation land program I'm just curious as to the funds that are used by the water district to purchase land in partnership with landowners does that come from consumer fees not from a specific this from the public utilities commission regulations allow a water utility to set aside a certain percentage of annual revenues that can be used for watershed protection essentially and so that's where most of the funds come from we also we have surplus land so in other words if 100 years ago we bought a piece of property at a high point in Portland hoping or imagining one day we put a water tank there we learned over this time we're not going to ever do that we'll sell that and then we take that money and we put it into the watershed fund so we're sort of transferring a land interest that is no longer of any value to us we sell that and then we put the money in the fund so that we're transferring it to a land interest that does matter to our customers so it's coming you know when you pay your water bill when I pay mine a percentage of that is going into a fund so I'm anticipating these transactions so I'm wondering if there are opportunities to educate customers about the potential for generating additional revenue so if I wanted in my will to bequeath X number of dollars to the Portland Water District for land conservation I don't even know that that was an option or it's not for its sponsors all these businesses as if you're saying we're like fresh water is like $5,000 to the land conservation you know we are presently working with the Open Space Institute and the Nature Conservancy to boil it down to a short answer so that I don't keep you here too long to establish what we're calling the Land for Tobago Lakes Future Fund sort of modeled on the Land for Mains Future Fund the Land for Mains Future is a state fund that land conservationists can apply to support their land conservation efforts anywhere in the state we envision a private fund so separate from our often when we talk about this people say just add to people's water bills and well we already contribute quite a bit of money from your water bill to watershed protection and land conservation and that 25% number is actually sort of strategic in that the trustees they agree that this is valuable to us our customers are not the only beneficiaries of conserved land in a clean lake there are thousands of them if you're a hunter, if you're a fisherman there's a lot of other interests and so they would like to see okay we've come to the table and we're paying this much the rest should come from other interests and so one idea is if there was a private fund that you could donate a dollar to knowing that this dollar and I will drink the water off that land as long as I live here I think people would be willing to donate to that and it wouldn't be because we have some customers who could afford a larger bill but we have others that really can't so we don't feel that it's the right thing to do to raise rates to help fund this but the very idea you talked about is what we are talking about is trying to find a way for this to happen sort of outside the water district trying to be the stewards of the public trust and a private fund is not something we could establish so it would have to be done by another group like Open Space Institute or someone outside the district but it's the very idea that you that's why I smiled is that we've been talking about this and working on it for several years how exclusive is the water district's right to safe and water from Zabago could Nestle build a plant and start sucking it up we have exclusive we have a, let me say exclusive we have a charter the way a water district charter works is it charters an area and says if someone is going to provide public drinking water to any of this area this service area it has to be the Portland Water District now charters are legislative documents so someone could go and like if a town decided they wanted to break away from the district and provide water to their own residents they can legally do that and have our charter changed and have a new charter established but as far as the lake goes your question really isn't about our customers it's about the lake we don't have the lake is owned by the state of Maine it is not owned in any way by the water district so there's another water utility in fact the Fry Island Water Company I think it's a company maybe it's a department of the town but anyway they draw water from the lake so we don't have any rights to the water beyond what we use can private commercial just draw water? I don't want to answer and then find out that I've butchered the legalities of it so I don't know I'm not trying to be evasive I just don't know and I don't want to sound like I do but it is a good question but I don't know what the rules are about it what will pipeline go through the watershed it does kind of right up through here along like that pretty much traverses the northern part of the watershed is the district concerned with the reversal of the pipeline it's a very good question about two years ago I'm sure you were reading in the paper that tar sands sort of became front page news when concern was expressed that that could happen a lot of people came to the board to express those concerns what the board asked us to do as staff was to find out well first of all one thing I want you to know is that we don't want any oil in the lake whether it's Middle Eastern oil that's flowing as we speak this way or tar sands oil which could some day be flowing this way toward Portland so what the board asked us we did met with the pipeline company to find out what their plans were their answer to us was we have no plans right now to reverse flow but we reserve the right that if that became economically feasible we're a company that's trying to make a living we would consider it if that made sense from business model point of view so they're very open about that but they said we don't have any plans right now so what the board asked us to do is find out do they have a spill control plan now which they do of course and do they exercise it do they follow all the inspection procedures the pipeline has been operating since I think the first pipeline was built in the 40s another one in the 50s and another in the 60s so they've been operating a long time they have a very good record you know so we looked at what they're doing we operate we do joint exercises with them so if there was a big spill there the water district wouldn't be the entity cleaning it up but we just want to understand what they do and how they monitor it and then our board hired a consultant a person who doesn't work for either an oil company or as opposed to oil companies but as a consultant who is a company that has staff that used to work for oil pipeline companies but now are independent and our consultant reviewed all their records and investigated their operation and he essentially said I would invest in them I think they're very well run I think you know he's been around the country and seen others and he was quite impressed with the Portland Pipeline Company so he said at this point in time you know I feel like they're doing all the right things they're doing more than the minimum required quite a bit more then he also did say I'm not sure they decide to reverse flow I think you should hire me again because I have opinions about how that should be done or shouldn't be done so that's kind of where it is at this point so did that consultant have any concerns about the difference between the crude that's coming to north now versus the I don't want to come off as an expert but I did learn a lot and the question is the type of heavy crude oil that's being pumped north now is it significantly different in its environmental impact from tar sands oil which could be flowing south if they reverse flow and the answer is yes if you look at the bulk properties of the two they're similar and so you'll see a table that has about viscosity and other things and they look similar the big difference as I understand it not being an expert is that to get tar sands oil to flow like normal crude oil you it's a mixture of oil types and that if they are released into the environment and the light stuff floats to the top well the heavier stuff sinks to the bottom which is not the way crude oil would operate and it's more difficult to clean up because now you have two problems instead of one he was very aware of all that and that's one of the not the only reason that he said if there's ever a proposal to reverse the flow I would like to come back and give you more advice on what you might or might not do so that's kind of where that issue sits now we feel very good about working with them and the exercises we've done and the things they've shown us about what they do they came right out and said I can't guarantee you it would never spill but we feel very confident that what we're doing is safe and is the best practice we can follow and our consultant felt that that was a reasonable statement to make so if tomorrow you heard about a spill don't say well someone from the water district that wouldn't happen I wouldn't say that but he was quite impressed if the dams were removed or fishways were put in place on a presumbs cut allowing fish to move in and out of the lake would that be a concern to the water district? no I mean there's one dam the eelware dam which is just off this end of this might be right there so how high the lake level is if that one were removed it would change dramatically the level in the lake I don't think anyone's ever proposed that or that would ever really happen the lower ones we have a wastewater treatment plan on the presumbs cut and we might have comments on it if there was proposed changes but generally fish movement wouldn't have any effect on us so we don't really see anything that could change the things that are proposed on the river that would have any effect on us in terms of the map how much coverage you have now with land that's protected am I right in understanding that you can only cut trees within so many feet of stream on the lake so couldn't you draw a thick line around every single stream every small pond and lake that's in that large shed so it's protected because you can't cut trees? well what you're referring to is shoreland zoning Maine has mandatory shoreland zoning laws that apply to lakes and rivers and then streams up to a certain point beyond that and towns are legally required to adopt the minimum shoreland zoning standards they do allow cutting but it's selective cutting and there are rules about how many trees you can take down over how many in what period of time some protection it's not as complete as if the land was owned by a land trust and conserved houses could be built on land near a stream if you follow those rules and so I would, I mean I hear what you're saying that not all land is protected in the same way some is more protected and land in the shoreland zone generally is more challenging to develop than as you go further back but I wouldn't say that shoreland zoning obviates the need for conserving the land also and I will say that our funding formula how we calculate what our recommendation is to the board does have a zoned we actually contribute recommend higher contributions the closer it is to the water for the very reason you were talking about that that's the land that's more valuable like the water protection wise that's one of the factors that goes into prioritizing which land would have a greater effect on water quality is the land the reason why there is shoreland zoning is the land running right up along the streams and around the lakes that's the last opportunity for filtration and cleaning to happen and so that's if you're going to only conserve one strip of land that's the strip of land you would want so that's what we consider the most valuable land to protect but it does have, there are some state regulations that do some of that protection I just wouldn't I wouldn't want to rely on that alone Shall we take one more question? Thank you Thank you Are there any aquifers that are flowing into the system that are outside the watershed area? Well I'm not sure I understand the question Well, by the way aquifers underground water supplies that flow into the watershed area or into the lake that are not identified within the yellow line We haven't done that analysis so I don't know for sure what he's referring to is that when you draw that yellow watershed boundary line you base it on the high elevations you could have an aquifer where water from outside that line actually moves underground into the watershed I don't know the answer to that we haven't ever done that analysis Thank you all for your time I really appreciate it