 Hi Roberta. Hi Priscilla. Good morning, Sean. Good morning. Hey, for some reason I can't find the agenda or the meeting packet. Was that emailed out? I believe it was. I can resend it in just a moment if you'd like. Yes. Thank you. Was it from you? Yes. Okay. Can I see it? I'm a seven. Thank you. Good morning all. We do have a quorum, but I do believe. Both Mary Grace and Mike were. Supposed to be a tending. So maybe we'll just wait a few more minutes. All right. Not here in back. So we'll go ahead and get started. Okay. So we'll call the meeting of the sub tack to order. 805. And secretary. That can we have a roll call, please? Yes. City of Santa Rosa. That's me. Jennifer. Santa Rosa water here. City of. Yes. Greg Scott. City of. Here. City of. Park. City of. Park. City of Santa Rosa. City of Santa Rosa. City of Santa Rosa. City of Santa Rosa. Sonoma Water. Right. Thank you. So. I think we've all been on these zoom platforms for a while, but we haven't had some tack in a while. So just a reminder. If you're not speaking, if you could keep your microphone muted, that would be appreciated. So let's see. We'll now go to item two. And item two is the consideration of a resolution finding proclaimed state of emergency and that meeting in person would present imminent risk to the health or safety of attendees and authorizing meetings by teleconference of legislative bodies. I think most may be aware that recently the last month the governor signed Assembly Bill 361 which does allow us to continue to meet virtually because it amended certain aspects of the Brown Act. And in order to do so, certain conditions have to be met and the legislative body needs to make findings to state that we need to continue to meet virtually. So this item before the sub-tact will allow those findings to be met and us to meet virtually today. So are there any questions by the sub-tact on this item? Yes, Joe. Move for approval. Okay. Second. All right. So we have a motion from Sebastopol and a second from Katadi. Before we take a roll call vote, we will open for public comment. We're now taking public comments on item 2.1. If you wish to make a comment by a Zoom please raise your hand. If you're dialing in by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary Aitha, do we have any live email or voicemail public comments on this item? We have no public comments. All right. Thank you. So as I mentioned, we have a motion from Sebastopol and a second from Katadi. And this is on item 2.1. And so can we please have a roll call vote? City of Santa Rosa? Yes. City of Katadi? Yes. City of Rohnert Park? Yes. City of Sebastopol? Aye. Sonoma Water? Thank you. So I'll let the record show that item passed with four ayes and one absent. So we are now looking to approve the minutes from both March 29th and April 1st. Are there any questions or comments on the minutes? All right. Seeing none. Before we accept the minutes, we need to take public comments. So we're now taking public comments on minutes approval. If you wish to make a comment by a Zoom please raise your hand. If you're dialing in by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aitha, do we have any public comments on this item? We have no public comments. All right. The minutes are accepted. And now we're moving on to item four. Item four is public comment. We are now taking public comments on item four. If you wish to make a comment by a Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in by a telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary Aitha, do we have any public comments on this item? We received no public comments. All right. Thank you. I have a procedural question. Yes. Do we have to take a motion to approve the minutes? We just accept the minutes unless there's any changes. Got it. Thanks. All right. So we are on new business. So item 5.1 is gonna be our fiscal year 2020-2021 financial update. And Nick Harvey, administrative analyst with Santa Rosa Water will be making the presentation. Thank you, Jennifer. And good morning, everyone. As Director Burke mentioned, my name's Nick Harvey. I'm an admin analyst and I'm here to give you a quick financial update on the 2020-21 regional financials as Deputy Director Zimino's unable to attend this morning. So with that, I'll share my screen here. Okay. Can everybody see that? How about that? Okay. Thank you. Okay. So the first thing I wanna go over is you all are used to seeing this typically during the annual budget review process and approval process just gives a line-by-line by category of the planned O&M expenditures throughout the regional operations fund. So this is a quick variance analysis. The first thing I'll point out is this total uncategorized. You may not remember, but the uncategorized is really our operations and maintenance jail keys. And so we have 3.7 million actual as opposed to just over 2 million budgeted. At first blush, this looks pretty extreme, but in reality, we're okay here because our O&M jail keys have significant carryover budget. So although that variance is quite large, we have more than sufficient funds to cover without driving the fund in the deficit. The main things contributing to this is Sean McNeill's team has been working on a pretty significant regulatory effort with regard to the MPDES permitting. In addition to combined heat and power of the CHP engines under one significant maintenance this year and the geysers pipeline underwent a replacement of the expansion joints during the year. And so while the pipeline was down, our team took advantage of the time to perform some maintenance on the pipeline. So that increased expenditures this year as well. Professional services, 5320 here. That's a little higher than usual, which is to be expected given the COVID impacts and the fact that the department in general has had to rely on outside services to a slightly larger extent than usual. And then our utilities line item was up a little bit. We all knew we were gonna see increasing PG&E costs. We were just a little bit off on our estimate, but nothing major. And the most important, or sorry, the capital outlay here is the largest variance. That's due to mechanical services and the reclamation sections had to make some equipment purchases during the year. But although it's a pretty significant percentage variance, the dollar impact is minimal, just over $30,000. The most important part of this slide is the bottom line figure here, showing that in spite of our variances, our overages, we also had significant under variances on a few line items. And so at the end of the year, we still came out with our actual expenditures less than our actual budget. So we've done well this year. Okay, just a few CIP budget highlights. As you may remember, we approved $7 million cash funded CIP for the year. We ended up spending about $11 million. Again, might seem slightly alarming at first, but I'll have a little more information later as to why this isn't concerning to us. And just wanted to point out that we did get the Geysers Pipeline Expansion Joint replacement project complete, about a $1.8 million effort, which was pretty significant because we did run into some requisition issues in the middle of this project, but we're still able to complete it. Okay, so some key takeaways from the 2021 regional budget. Our budgeting is on track. Our unexpected funds will end up being distributed based on actual flows into the Laguna Treatment Plant. That is what factors into what contributions are made to the sub-regional refund reserve. And that's determined by finance. Our spending levels are up in CIP, as I pointed out in the previous slide. The reason that's not overly concerning to us is it actually decreases our carryover balance, which we've had discussions in the past. We wanna show that we're proactively spending our CIP. And so even though we overspent our CIP, it actually helps us in reducing our carryover budget and shows that we're using our CIP funds effectively. We also successfully issued our 2020 bonds for the purposes of the UV disinfection replacement project and that funding has been distributed to the department and is currently in use to execute that project. And most importantly, in my humble opinion, the biggest takeaway is that in spite of all the COVID impacts, our department continues to carry out our objectives effectively. So looking ahead, the finance department will be calculating the user agency refunds or shortages. Shortages is always a potential, even though I'm not sure we've seen them, but I just have to add that caveat in there. That's done based on the actual flows into the plant, which the finance department receives, I believe at the end of October, early November, and we'll be hearing about that in the coming months and how it affects the user agency refunds. We'll be beginning the annual budgeting process for fiscal year 22-23 by the end of this calendar year and into the winter. The UV disinfection system replacement project obviously continues to be a priority, if not the highest priority, at least from a CIP standpoint for the department. And we're also actively working with asset management to improve our CIP project delivery model. So we're continually working with them to find improvements in how we can increase our project delivery efficiency. And with that, I am free to take any questions if you have any. Any questions from the sub-tact on this item or comments? Yes, Joe. Can we get copies of the PowerPoint? So I don't have to decipher what I wrote down here. Yes, we will distribute copies of all of the presentations from today after the meeting. Thank you. Yes, thank you all. All right, so if there's no questions or comments from the sub-tact, we'll open up for public comment on this item. We're now taking public comments on item 5.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary Aitha, do we have any comments on this item? We do not. All right, great. Thank you very much, Nick. Our next item is item 5.2 and it'll be a presentation and an update on our Regional Operations Division and Deputy Director, Water-Reuse Emma Walton will be making the presentation. All right, good afternoon, members of the sub-tact. Thank you for having me. We'll share in my screen. All right, great. Here to just give a real brief update on some items that we have going on out at Regional Operations. Start with just talking a little bit about our Recycle Water production. We've finished out the water a year. We have produced less water than we have ever produced on record. This is in comparison to last year, which was our previous lowest production of recycled water. And well below our average. So kind of looking at comparisons, on average we produced about 7 billion gallons of water. For reference in 2013 and 2014, we produced about 6.1 billion. Last year I mentioned was our previous historic low at 5.8 billion. And this year we produced 5.3 billion, which is about 1.7 billion gallons less than our average, which also is about what we provide to our agricultural users in average year. Our Recycle Water deliveries year to date, we've sent to the geysers about 2.7 billion. We are anticipating sending 4 billion gallons this year. Our agricultural users, we put on allotments. We allotted 600 million gallons for our agricultural users, most of which have been used. We do have a few users with remaining allotments and we will continue to provide them water until they use their allotment. Our urban users, we allocated 480 million gallons. Year to date we've delivered 335 million, or yeah, 335 million. So we have a little left to go there as well. In all, we have about 1.4 billion gallons remaining in allocations. In storage, we have about 400 million gallons in storage. This, along with what we expect our plant to produce from here until the end of the year, will allow us to meet all of our obligations to our ag users, to our urban users and to the geysers. So that's what I had to share on Recycle Water. If people had questions on Recycle Water, happy to answer or happy to take them at the end as well. I'm gonna talk a little, give a brief update on the Regional Organics Processing Facility, which is an item we brought to this TAC before. We had previously been in negotiations with Renewable Sonoma on potentially siding an Organics Waste Composting Facility adjacent to our treatment plant. Unfortunately, earlier this year, Renewable Sonoma ended negotiations with both Zero Waste Sonoma for the commitment of flow of material, as well as with the city for siding the location due to their inability to get financing for the project. Zero Waste Sonoma has been considering their options moving forward and have not decided yet how they're gonna proceed. They are looking to the Stage Gulch Project that is being developed by a private developer and is expected to have a draft EIR distributed soon. The other thing that's kind of been going on is that the San Francisco Regional Board has been evaluating Biosolids Land Application practices in the Baylands, which is where most of our land application occurs. So we've been working closely with the Regional Board on how we're gonna move forward permitting those sites in the future. We are looking to issue an RFP for the evaluation of our Biosolids program to look at options and opportunities to move to a Class A product and to bring our Biosolids that we currently ship to LizTech back in County. The contract that we entered into with LizTech is a five-year contract with a number of optional renewals and we structured it such that it would give us enough time to have immediate reliable location to have our Biosolids processed while also allowing us time to look at a long-term solution and more cost-effective solutions. I'll briefly talk about a few projects that we have coming up. We are the Board of Public Utilities just approved a contract with Alpha Laval to have our belt press, two of our belt presses rehabilitated. We are seeing declining numbers for our Biosolids and we need to get them back up in order to allow LizTech to accept our Biosolids as well as effectively and efficiently truck Biosolids. We can't have Biosolids that are not sufficiently dewatered. We are also working on replacing the pumps for our flow equalization basins. These are large pumps that allow us to return flow from our flow equalization basins back into the process. They are aging. They were installed in the late 80s and the manufacturer came out and looked at them and said they've seen ones in worse condition but ours have been very well maintained but just due to their age are in need of replacement. So our maintenance staff are actually going to be doing this work in-house. We are putting in an order for these large Archimedes screw pumps in the very near future and we'll be undertaking that work over the next year. The last project I just wanted to highlight was the replacement of the piping for our activated sludge aeration. This is kind of a single point of failure piping that provides the air to our activated sludge process which is very important part of our process. The piping is deteriorating and is leaking. We have a CIP project in process. It's about 75% through design to replace this piping with above ground piping. The piping is buried about 15 feet deep and due to the condition it's in we don't want to excavate it and try to repair it because we don't want to further damage it. So we're going to replace it with above ground piping. The contract is scheduled to be bid early next year with construction occurring early next year. Unfortunately, over the last two weeks the piping has deteriorated even more severely and is leaking pretty badly. And we feel like we need to get a temporary piping solution in place in order to get us through winter and hopefully the rainy season and until we can construct the permanent replacement. So we're having our on-call contractor come out and install temporary above ground piping to get us through. We will use this temporary piping for the permanent construction as well. We were going to have to put in some temporary blowers to facilitate construction because our process cannot go without air for a very long period of time. So we were going to have to put in a temporary solution as part of construction anyways. So we'll utilize this temporary piping to facilitate construction. I'm just going to show a short video of the leaking air so you can get a sense of how badly it's leaking. So that's not wind that is air coming up through the ground. So obviously quite concerning but we feel confident that this temporary solution is straightforward and can be constructed quickly. So that's all I had to share with you today but I'd be happy to answer any questions. Any questions or comments from sub-tact members? All right, seeing none. We will now open up for public comment on item 5.2. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary Aitha, do we have any comments on this item? We have no comments. Okay, thank you. And thank you very much, Emma. Great presentation, a little scary about our piping but I know we're going to get that fixed quickly. So thank you. All right, so we are now moving on to item 5.3 which will be our presentation, our Environmental Services Division Update and Sean McNeill, Deputy Director of Environmental Services will be making the presentation. Sean. Good morning, members of the sub-tact. So I'm here to present a little bit of an update on environmental services and I'll be talking about trucks, phosphorus and forever chemicals. So we'll just go through these three different items. So our truck waste program, I gave a presentation to this committee a while back but just to remind you, we have three different locations where we receive truck waste. We have a septic receiving station charged 13 cents per gallon. This is for portable toilets, chemical tank toilets and septic tank cleanouts. Then we also have a high strength waste station which feeds right into our digesters and this is a four cents per gallon charge. And this includes animal processing waste, beverage processing waste and fat soils in Greece of all kinds. And then any food processing liquids that have high enough strength that we could generate enough gas out of it that it goes straight into our digesters. Then we have an emergency holding base and this is kind of a low strength waste location and sometimes we allow some high strength waste into these emergency holding basins. And this is typically equipment, rinse, ground water in any kind of landfill leachate. And I have this little pie graph showing you a little bit how it's distributed about how much we get from each of those sources per year with most of it coming in as high strength waste and the holding base and only 17% of it being septic. So here's a graph showing each year how much we've generated. This truck waste program has gone through a little bit of a change in the end of 2016. We changed the rate structure prior to that. A lot of the truck waste was being trucked all the way down to East Bay mud. So we changed the rate structure that brought in a lot more to our facility and with a high in 2018. And I'm showing 2021 because it looks like we are on pace to have our highest amounts of truck waste coming into our plant this year, which is interesting given that it was a very dry year. And so we're not getting as much from ground water sources that we typically get from the landfill and other places. So that have to pump their waste. So that's leading us actually to look at this trucked waste program and make sure that the pricing and the program itself is optimized. So we are going to be looking at the costs of the program including the additional staff needs, the wear and tear on the asphalt. And with the increased amount of energy we're producing from bringing in the high strength waste, the additional wear and tear on our engines which are very expensive to maintain. We'll also be reviewing the tipping fees to ensure that they're accurate for these costs of the treatment and also identify any other potential revenue sources or actually any potential plant upsets from the truck waste program and make sure that we look at that. So there might be an opportunity for us to increase the amount of wine waste that we take on here but we have a pH issue with the wine waste. The wineries are now under a new discharge order. And so it might be more cost effective for them instead of onsite treatment and local discharge for them to truck that to us. And then also we wanna look at generating strategic synergies. And what I mean by that is if we make changes to our truck waste program, we need to make sure that we're evaluating how those changes might affect our operations. So if we increase the amount of high strength waste we're bringing in we might need to also look at our engines that we use for converting the gas that we generate into electricity. So kind of looking at that holistic balance. If we change one thing it has ramifications on the process. So we're gonna be working with Brown and Caldwell to evaluate our truck waste program and move on from there. As Nick talked about this last year in the budget he mentioned that the expenses of the environmental services program it really was our phosphorus compliance was our largest cost. So we spent over $700,000 on phosphorus credits and we have been working with the regional board to reduce these costs as best we can and ensure compliance and look for win-win solutions. And so we have successfully negotiated changes to the water quality trading framework with the regional board staff. They've published those changes and they'll be and they've scheduled the hearing on December 2nd and 3rd of this year in front of their board to potentially approve those changes. And if they approve them it will allow credits that we generate from creek restoration or ecological uplift projects that are also on publicly protected land to last into in perpetuity or until we use them which is a really beneficial given that we do not discharge every year and that's actually a goal of ours is to maximize the reuse of our resource. And so it's important for us to ensure that we can have credits that won't expire and under the current water quality trading framework guidelines all the credits do expire typically in three years. So we could be looking at the $700,000 that we are $780,000 that we recently spent on credits expiring over the next three years without this change. So we're really excited about that and appreciate your support in that effort. Then finally, I'd like to talk about these forever chemicals. This is the latest contaminants of emerging concern. These are manmade chemicals that are used in various industries since the 1940s. It includes food containers, electronics, carpet, paint, sealant and varnish, personal care products, firefighting foam, all of our repelling fabrics typically have some type of PFOS in them. And so it's ubiquitous in the environment and now we're needing to under a board order start monitoring our treatment plan. We do not have the capability to do these tests in-house. There are very few labs in the state that can do this type of testing and that's because it's extremely sensitive. We're looking down to the levels of parts per trillion and a part per trillion is equivalent to about one square meter and 250 square miles or for those of us in the water industry, it's about one ounce in every 7.5 billion gallon. So as much water as Emma and her staff would like to be treating per year, it would only be one ounce of PFOS chemicals. So we did sampling at three different locations in our plant. We sampled our influent and our effluent and also our dewatered biosolids. And then because we also have well monitoring as a part of our permit, we were required under this order to do well monitoring surveys. We worked with the regional board, we submitted a monitoring plan for our well monitoring and what they wanted was us to evaluate a site with only recycled water use and a site with biosolids use. So we chose this site up here in the north here. We had an up gradient monitoring well and a down gradient monitoring well. And the point is to sample each of those. And then in our biosolids area, down here in the south in the purple, we had an up gradient well and a down gradient well from our biosolids application to ensure that to look at the potential effects of incorporating biosolids on the groundwater. So looking at the data here that we got for the influent and effluent, this is in parts per trillion, though the numbers may look high. I would just want to remind you that parts per trillion is extremely small. And so what I have here is on the left axis are the y-axis is the amount of PFOS and parts per trillion. And I have it broken out by the different constituents which are in the legend on the right. And then I have influent and effluent time together based on date. So the first two bars, you can see the influent is lower than effluent and that trend is continued throughout that the effluent is higher. So the water leaving the treatment plant has higher amounts of PFOS than the water coming into the treatment plant. And this is at first surprising, but it's replicated throughout all wastewater treatment plants who've done this sampling. So it's apparent that wastewater treatment plants are taking some chemicals and combining them together through their process and making these PFOS. So they're these organic precursors is what they're called that are being confined through the treatment process that increases the amount of these PFOS chemicals. But I just wanna remind you, these are once again extremely low levels in parts per trillion. So looking at our dewatered biosolids, dewatered biosolids are measured in parts per billion. So it's a thousand times greater than the levels that we are measuring in the water. And what we see here is great seasonality with decreasing throughout the drier times of the year of biosolids. Then when we looked at our well monitoring, we looked at our biosolids application site. So the concentration in parts per trillion again on the Y axis. And in the first two bars is our down gradient and up gradient bars. And you can see the down gradient has a higher amounts of PFOS than the up gradient. And then when you look at the recycled water, it doesn't really show up on this at very low levels. And only one constituent was found in each of the up gradient and down gradient in our recycled water site. So this result was a little alarming to us. So we went a little above them beyond the minimum for this report and we did a secondary sampling of our biosolids application site. So in April, that's the data that I just showed you on the left here and on the right three bars here are subsequent sampling. So we resampled the down gradient one. We resampled the up gradient. The down gradient was still higher, but it was a little bit lower. And then we also sampled another well that we had on the site that was what we're calling mid gradient right in the middle of the fields and to just kind of get a sense. So it did look like the initial result is appelled through the second sampling. So I just wanna maybe discuss and go over a little bit of these results, understanding and making any decisions from this little snapshot of data is very difficult and challenging. We anticipate probably our largest source of PFOS and the chemicals that get combined together to make PFOS are coming from the landfill, landfill leachate. And so that's not something that happens every day but we're getting a little bit and also from many of our residential customers. What's been found in other municipalities in the Bay Area through their regional monitoring program, they combined together and did a very good deep study and they did look at these organic precursors and they found in wastewater treatment plants that were primarily residential, they had higher levels of PFOS than ones that were industrial. So it doesn't look like it's industrial sources, most likely but all of our data is uploaded into a statewide database and the state will be analyzing the data collectively. And we also noticed that the influent and the effluent had the most noticeable seasonal variation. We even had one sample where we detected none in the coming in, in our influent but we did have some in our effluent at that time. So it does seem like our sources are varying throughout the season and that was expected. And as I mentioned, that's probably the higher, or excuse me, the higher effluent compared to the influent is probably due to these organic precursors. And so I imagine the next order that we'll get we'll be looking at those. And then the results of the down gradient welds and biosolids did show higher levels of PFOS compared to the upgraded but there was no pattern detected in the site that only uses recycled water. So with that, I'm happy to take any questions. Any questions or comments from sub-tech members? Sean, I had one. Is the landfill leachate considered influent or is it, it is, it's that when you sample influent it's after the landfill leachate is combined? Well, so the landfill leachate kind of comes in slugs. And so it's not constant. And when it's really dry, we get less of it. So we do work with them to kind of meter in but it's not constant. We're not always getting landfill leachate. We get it both through our pipeline from Meachem but we also get it from the other landfills and it comes trucked in. Okay, thanks. And then congrats on the credit trading. That's great. And that's December 3rd. And Jennifer or Sean, I think one of you, I think sent out emails looking for letters of support as I recall. And I will try to get ours in but I would, if you haven't said this already Jennifer, yeah, I would advise or whatever, encourage all of the sub-tech members to get in letters. I mean, this is huge and really want to give Sean and Jennifer a lot of credit in seeing this through and whoever else on your staff worked on that. That's a big accomplishment. Well, thank you. The comment time for written comments are over. Okay. But there will be at the hearing an opportunity to speak in favor of it. Okay. And so I did reach out to the Riverkeeper. Katadi issued a letter and the Riverkeeper, I talked with Don about it. He was supportive on the phone but didn't end up writing a letter which is positive in its own. Yeah, that's good. But he sees the benefit of this. It really is a win-win solution that we negotiated. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Yeah, and I'll just add speaking for Santa Rosa, you know, this is a really, really big deal. We're really appreciative to our board and council for their willingness and leadership. We wound up submitting a petition for review. We took it out of a bans and pursued it and that really did bring the regional board to the table to have this discussion. And so it was a little bit of an interesting time to be in a legal challenge with the regional board but it really did get us to have some very frank and good conversations so that they really heard what our concerns are and just the need to have a regulatory stability and recognizing that when we invest our ratepayers' dollars, and this is all of our ratepayers, it's important that if we're gonna invest in these big projects, we know we're gonna be in compliance with our regulations and the way the framework was set up, we didn't have that certainty with these changes we now do. So really just appreciative of the work that happened and the team, Sean and Heather as well as our outside consultants and attorneys really helped get us through this process. And thank you to Katadi, thanks Craig for getting that letter submitted, we really appreciate it. And if you all could, might be available on December 2nd or 3rd, we're still trying to find out when we will actually be on the agenda but that is the regional board hearing when they will consider these changes. Thanks. Any other sub-tact questions or comments? All right, seeing none. We'll now take public comment on this item. If you wish to make a comment on item 5.3 via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aitha, do we have any public comments on this item? We do not. All right. So seeing no other new business, thank you all for attending the sub-tact and we are now adjourned. Have a great day. Thank you. Thanks.