 You guys can see me, but I can't see you guys. So I'm not sure why that is, so I'll have to work on it. First of all, I guess we'll start with the pledge. Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, the Republic of America, and the United States of America. I'm the God and I'm visible in this book. Let's be just as strong as the agenda. We need a motion to approve the minutes from our December 21st meeting. So moved. I second it. All right, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Chair votes aye. All right, Joe, financial reports. You do have the utility accountant's report of billing for December. I guess the highlight is that revenues were up about $32,000 for quarterly billing and up a total of 104,000 for overall billing. Some of that is due to rate increase that went into effect and we did have a little additional consumption during the month of December. You can see cumulative billing for 2020 is that about 8.5 million, which is down from the prior year, about $236,000. Most of that is due to COVID related changes in consumption. You can see the city of Sheboygan and village of Kohler accounted for most of, well, all of that decrease was Sheboygan Falls showing some growth 2020 compared to 2019. We're not sure exactly why that is. Often if the beam is recirculating, plant is down, we'll see their consumption go up. So I suspect that would be part of that figure. Cash reserves, you can see remain strong and near where we anticipated to end up for the year despite the challenging circumstances. I don't have anything more on the financials other than to note accountant Gutzbacher is preparing for the preliminary audit, I'm sorry, the final audit for 2020. And so the remainder of the financials will not be updated until February or March. We're finding that receivables are greater than they have been prior years. Not bad, you know, we're not seeing a lot of growth, but we haven't lost a lot of territory either. Okay, all right, moving on. Operations, construction maintenance and customer relations. We'll start with, actually I'm gonna start with distribution. Let's do that first. For the month of December, we had a total of four water main breaks that were repaired by the utility crew. Different locations, all on older, six inch cast iron water main. Nothing all that unusual about that figure for December. Let's see, we did a little bit of hydrant work. And that's pretty much the highlight for distribution. Up to my other report for operations for December. We produced about 1.5% more water than in 2019. So that was a nice piece of growth. As I mentioned, or as we were talking about, December was mild. And normally by the end of the month, we'll see water temperature approaching 32 degrees. And at 33 degrees, we go into what we call winter operation mode with the plants that helps reduce susceptibility to the icing and the intakes. We've not had to do that yet because the water temperature remains above 33. If I had to guess another week or two, we may be there and go into winter ops mode. Otherwise for December, bottom right of the first page of the report, you'll see year to date, high left average day. And that figure has been declining from 2018. And that's the figure you get if you take the total amount of water we pumped to the out of the plant in a year. And you divide it by the number of days in a year to get an average day. So you can see we're seeing some fairly significant decline over that two year period. Hopefully we reverse a little bit of that in 2021 as maybe the economy begins to grow a little more. We're adding a few more customers. There's at least one subdivision going in. Hopefully some activity in the South Point enterprise campus. And hopefully we can turn that figure a little bit upward. In terms of overall operations for the plant, I don't have anything too much to note. It was pretty typical of December otherwise. A list of all kinds of maintenance that was completed. Just a huge variety of things as usual to keep the plant up to snuff, up and running in good condition. That would be my highlights for operation. I noticed on the list, you know, people offer COVID leave, has that affected operations in anything or been able to cover it while it's not too much of a problem? It has not impacted operations. We've been very strategic and aggressive to keep our certified operators as safe as we possibly can. And we have not had any impact on operations due to COVID or COVID leave at this point. Great, great to hear. And then jumping to customer relations and fiscal. We did continue with the pay window closed during December due to the high alert status for the county. So our pay window activity was zero. You can see Dropbox payments went up electronic payments went up. Overall payments went down. We're still not imposing a disconnection program. So we are seeing more late or delinquent payments as a result of that. Calls also went down quite a bit coming into the office. Actually account transfers and property changes went up a little bit. So there was quite a bit of activity and people moving around during the month of December compared to a year ago. We billed just over a million dollars for the month. I have about 119,000 outstanding at month end. We had no complaints filed with the public service commission. You can see the remainder of the information there. We're continuing to waive late payment charges as well to the middle of April. And we've continued to maintain two persons in the office handling phones and work that they need to be in the office for, so other than the pay window being closed has been no change that customers would be noticing. That would be my summary of CR and F for December. All right, we need a motion to approve the superintendent's report. I'll second that. Yup, it's okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. There both sides. All right, moving on. Items for discussion actually previously held over our raw water improvement project. Joe Trueblood showed him that. Well, I was invited by council to give a presentation to the committee of the whole, which I'm excited to do to update both the council members and the community on the raw water improvement project. So I'll be doing that immediately following the council meeting. And I think my goals there are just simply to update them and the community on details involving the project, which has been out there in planning stages for a number of years, but we now have a lot of details to present. It's important that everyone understands that we're replacing critical infrastructure needed to secure a safe supply of drinking water for the community for the future. So I'll be talking about that later tonight. Otherwise, detailed design has started. We have a meeting later this week with CDM for some additional updates on that. They are planning the underwater survey work to be done in April. And they're near to signing an agreement for that work to take place. And some final survey work of the site took place this month. So otherwise, everything's on track. We'll talk about it a little bit under five, two, but we are the utility accountant and operation supervisor and myself to a lesser degree have been working on that FEMA BRIC grant involving the shoreline protection portion of the RWI. And that has been actually submitted to the state for an initial review. And when we have their feedback, then we submit it to FEMA fully. And that should take place later this month. And otherwise, RWI is on schedule and moving forward. You know, approximately what time your presentation is going to start from then, Joe? Well, I believe the council meeting starts at six. Sorry, sorry to tell you, I'd get 645, but it could be off 15 minutes or half hour. All right, well, that's fine. All right, any questions for Joe on the raw water project? Time for me. Time for me. Okay. Items for discussion and possible action. Annual large meter testing services. Yeah, this is for testing large meters. It's hard for us to do in-house and we prefer to just have them done at Badger meter where they have a full large meter testing facility. This is a remove test, removing the swap meters and they actually physically go to Badger meter. Oh, they do, yeah. All right, I would make a motion to approve. And I would second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. They're both sides. All right, moving on. Next we have the FEMA brick grant cost share commitment, the letter that we submitted. Everything's going good on that, Joe? Yeah, what we have to certify is that the public entity commits to the required 26% match. So our application is going to be for approximately $2.6 million and the board needs to authorize, need to submit a letter that we're committing to 26% of that $2.6 million coming from our own funding sources if we were to get the grant. And of course that would be covered under funding for the overall project. Okay, so we need approval for that at this time? Yes. I would make a motion that we approve the letter as written. That's the match commitment letter draft. I will second that. Any further discussion? Nope, none here. All in favor say aye. Aye. Sure, vote's aye. All right, 5.3, the report on certification of completion for the federal risk and resilience report. So under America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, public utilities of the size of Sheboygan's were required to complete and certify completion of a water system risk and resilience assessment. We had engaged AECOM to work with us on the RRA as it's called. It includes really reviewing and investigating risk due to malevolent acts and natural hazards, resilience of system components themselves, monitoring practices, financial risk, really a whole gambit of things involved in a public utility. So what was conducted during earlier in the year was a series of interviews with utility staff, police chief, fire chief, a few other individuals to develop this really accumulation of information about the water distribution systems, supply intake and really all of the facilities involved in our utility. That plan has now been completed and we're required to send a notice to EPA that we are certifying completion of the RRA and we've now done that. You know, the purpose of this kind of assessment is really to help utilities that are understand their own vulnerabilities and try to reduce single points of failure in particular and any vulnerabilities that are large or kind of unnoticed. So I think the review process itself is very helpful. A number of our staff members felt that it was useful to see a charted layout of our system and its components and an assessment of their vulnerability or risk. One thing EPA does not want us to do is to produce multiple written copies of this report and submit those all around just due to security. So we aren't at this point required to actually submit the report but simply our certification that the assessment's been completed and complied. So we have now done that as of the end of December meeting the deadline and I think it was a good exercise and a good accomplishment and we plan to use the results in various planning purposes through the coming years. Is there any sort of a requirement as far as the schedule to incorporate the findings into the emergency response plan? The details of that are still pending a bit. I think we have high risk of items that are going to have more of a timeframe and lower risk that may not. The previous time we did something like this was after 9-11 and we were required to submit what's called a vulnerability assessment at that point. At the end of the day, implementation rather fell by the wayside after the documentation was completed but we're not exactly sure how much and to what level we're going to be required to implement against some of these risks or not. I think the first portion was reporting and certifying and we're a little bit in a wait-and-see mode after that. Actually, my assumption is they didn't find any major, major problems. Nothing major. One example would be the intake that we'll talk about later but having two is a risk compared to having three. Some things like that popped out that of course we know about that are still risks that we deal with every day. No other major glaring kind of risk out there. Any other questions for Joe? Not at the moment for me. No, I'm good. Okay. We can discuss the resumption of water disconnection program. So following the pandemic outbreak, Public Service Commission directed utility, public utilities to cease disconnection programs, which we did and if that continues until April 15th, we then are required to inform Public Service Commission if we intend to go back to having our disconnection program like we did before. So we have had a disconnection program for at least 20 years. It is not a requirement. Some communities don't. For example, Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay do not have water disconnection program. Sheboygan has had a disconnection program for many years, as I said. What we see in the numbers is those communities that don't have a disconnection program end up with more delinquent water bills at the end of the year than those communities that have disconnection programs. That's not a huge surprise. And the figures like for, well, Milwaukee is quite high. I think they were almost 20% delinquent by the end of the year. I think Madison was 6%, Green Bay maybe 3%, figures like that. For Sheboygan, the last year we looked, it was more like 1%. So we have evidence that our disconnection program helps keep delinquencies down. It does come at a price. We spend a lot of time and effort chasing delinquent customers, so to speak. At the end of the year, we are allowed to put those delinquencies on the property tax bills and collect them. You know, that shifts collections to city, county, entities, it creates disfavor with the landlords because ultimately if the renter has a utility bill in their name and goes to the delinquent, we're then allowed to put the delinquency on the landlords tax bill at the end of the year. So that creates hardship and concern there. But overall, I think we feel like we would recommend restarting the disconnection program on April 15th. It seems like the pandemic effect on the economy is going to be moderated by that time. We feel like without it, we're going to see just an escalation in delinquencies going to the tax rolls and we don't really want to push that big of a change like that in a dramatic way. We would like to tweak our program a little bit. For a long time, we had a limit if the bill was more than $100 and delinquent, we kicked that situation into disconnection. And then we increased to 150 and we saw a drop-off and disconnection activity. And I think what we'd like to do is push it even higher, say to about $300. So that if an account is $250 delinquent, we're not going to spend the time and energy to disconnect. Once it exceeds 300, then we would and we would feel like at that point it's worth our while to start an enforcement measure. The other factor we have to experiment with is when they're contacted about disconnection, we're required to offer a deferred payment arrangement. And currently we require 50% of the delinquent amount to enter a DPA and avoid disconnection. We feel like if we're going to increase the trigger level then we probably should decrease the DPA percentage down payment, say from 50% to possibly 25%. So that there's less money required to start the deferred payment agreement and to avoid disconnection. We really don't want to disconnect customers. It creates a lot of negative feeling. It's risky. It's a lot of time and effort. That's something we want to be doing more and more of. But we do feel like if we didn't have it at all, we would just end up like the other communities where we have three, six, 10% of our billings going delinquent and not getting those payments until property tax collections come due. I'm talking the total bill, George, just the water portion, just the water portion, okay? Well, if you don't have a disconnect program and you have a large number of bills that are going unpaid that interim period of time doesn't mean that you operate the utility without revenue. Somehow or another, you still need funds to operate the utility and that's going to either affect the strength of the utility or it's going to affect the customers that do pay their bills. So I think it's a basic situation of fairness that if you use the service, you need to pay for it. I agree. I would not be opposed to experimenting with the program as you suggest because there is a cost and when you mentioned risk with this convex, I assume that part of that risk is physical risk to the employees. That's part of the risk and sometimes these are old laterals and we go to disconnect and the curb stop breaks. But yeah, certainly there have been threats to our staff members and it can be a hospital situation. Joe, Mike Van der Steen here in the council chambers. Do you have any idea of how many accounts you have that are in arrears right now and what the average arrearage is? I'd rather not speak off my head. It's less than six figures, but it's a pretty high figure this year, higher than most years. I'd rather confirm a figure than anything else. I guess Mike Steen, this is the water commission meeting. Probably best if Joe answers that question directly to you outside the meeting. I know there has been some interest in programs to help citizens that are struggling with payments currently we have very limited opportunities. Salvation Army does have program and one or two other entities have programs, but they take time, people have to qualify. I know the mayor was involved with another potential program along those lines that would be a very good thing if that were to come to pass. And I think as commissioners Smith mentioned, you know, customers not paying, it does come at the price of customers who are paying and having to offset those differences. Joe, do you have any plan right now as to how to start this out? You know, once we reach that date where you wanna begin it, are you gonna give these customers a certain amount of warning before this happens? What's your plan for that? I think we would have to do that because we now have a number of customers in arrears that have not been keeping up more than normal. I think the hope would be by increasing that limit, we would filter some of those customers out and not, you know, then disconnection is really our last resort. We don't, it's costly, it's intensive, all those things we mentioned. So we don't want to just rush and suddenly disconnect a large number of customers. So our plan would be to phase that in, make those changes and hopefully, again, filter out some of the people that have been, that are sort of in that bin now that normally would not be. One of the things we do find is that sometimes we have the same customers struggling with payments that end up in the disconnection program from time to time. It's not uncommon that they've been in the program before and are struggling in a lot of ways to keep up with not just our payments, but many other payments that they have going on. So I think by phasing it in and increasing those limits, we would be trying to not capture people that are new to that situation and that have started to recover. But again, having other places that they can turn to, a public utility can't be in a business of funding customers who aren't paying their bills. So that has to come from outside, but we're certainly in the business of directing customers who are struggling to those entities, but there's just very few of those out there for us to work with. Thank you. It goes to my question. If we're talking about disconnection, if they don't pay what happens with the other portions of the bill, which are not pertained to the water, it's not pertained to the water usage. We've got to make sure we're coordinating with everybody to make sure that they understand if we've got a program that, they're not getting paid their share either. Yeah, and I may have been unclear on that. Certainly, if they're not paying the utility bill, they're not paying any part of it, and that would include sewer and garbage and recycling fee. Yes. Everything else that's on the bill, so. Right. Any further questions from the board members? I think that the mayor might get a great question though. There should be some sort of communication plan for those people who need it. I agree, I agree. I think you don't want to surprise them. You definitely want to let people know that the possibility is there or that it is coming and give them time to make plans and that type of thing. Just like we do with the rate increase, we let them know well ahead of time, and there's opportunities to respond to something like that, kind of the same thing. I think if the board is in agreement to resume the disconnection program, we're required by April 15th to send a written plan to the Public Service Commission, and with that, go ahead, we could flesh out some of those details, you know, how we want to ease back into this because we've now been away from it for almost a year. So that we can take up at our February meeting. We can have something put together by then? Yes, I could certainly have the written plan. You know, one other factor is that because the end of the year now has passed, all those delinquencies now have gone to the tax roll. There was no alternative. So we're kind of starting the year fresh in that way. And maybe reactions to that as well that we can take in this consideration. When we put together the plan. Yeah, but we could certainly, for February, present a written draft of a plan that would be submitted to the PSD. And so if someone owed $300 for their water bill on December 31st, on January 1st, that $300 was transferred to the tax rolls in? Yeah, that's correct, Tom. They would have received notices in November about that activity happening. And there's also an additional late charge if that happens, but ultimately, those do go to the property tax rolls. What we found is normally when people see that additional penalty in November, many of those get paid. You know, this year we didn't see quite as much getting paid as in a normal year. But this year was an anomaly, for sure. So basically, everybody's starting out from zero then on January 1st, just to pick the first year. Are delinquencies pretty much, or? More or less, but. Yeah. You know, there may be a few that fall in between, but. Yeah, but the vast majority are starting at zero. That's correct. Okay. You know, I did mention, but the one factor that does come up is renters who have an account in their own name, and if they go delinquent, it does go on the landlord. And that's what happens at the end of the year if ultimately those are delinquent. I'm going to talk to the landlord to get that money back from the tenant. That's correct, and landlords can always put it in their own name, but many choose not to do that for their own reasons. All right, any further discussion? Not for me. No. All right, moving on to 5.5. Request for approval of the Bell Avenue led service line replacement. One question. Joe, did you need approval to go forward with developing the draft plan? I do, to resume the disconnection program. Yes. But I think we can do that at our February meeting once we have the draft of it put together. Okay. Okay. All right, number 5.5. They'll have the led service line replacement. Yeah, so after some inspection work, DPW found that they had some sewer issues on Bell Avenue that they need to address soon, like this spring. What happens when sewer work is done, often led service lines are physically disrupted. And we know now that that can cause the release of high amounts of lead into the water. So we don't want that to happen. We've identified four led service lines on this particular project. So what we would like to do is enter those into the led service line replacement program where they get up to a $2,500 grant and a no interest loan. We anticipate that it could be done for under $25,000. And if that's true, we're not required under public bidding law to bid this out formally. We can request proposals from plumbers that have done this work for us in the past. We are required to put a class one notice out about the work, but we don't have to go through a formal public bidding process. Due to time, we would like to get this done soon so DPW can go in and not have the LFL lines to deal with. So we're asking approval to seek these proposals and accept the lowest responsive proposal under $25,000. How many are we talking about, Joe? Or four? I would so move. Yeah, that should normally be able to accomplish that under $25,000. I would second that. Any further discussion? No, not for me. All in favor say aye. Aye. Approval time. What are main projects for 2021? Supervisor McMillan has put together these three cost estimates with the engineering department for 2021. These are not bid out yet. These are just simply approvals ahead of time of these projects in general. The first being Georgia Avenue, South 8th to South 14th. That's in conjunction with a city street project. There's a 2,800 feet. It's currently six inch cast iron water main from the 1890s, 1900s that needs replacement. There are a number of lead service lines in that project as well. I believe close to 70 or 80. So we're eager to get rid of those. The second project, Riverdale to Stall Road. This is the project to serve the proposed new golf course on the far south side. The developer under the developers agreement is to pay the cost for extending eight inch water mains from Riverdale to Stall Road. However, we have identified that as an important water transmission corridor. And we would like to upside that to 12 inch, not eight inch. Doesn't sound like a big difference, but it's a huge difference in terms of water flow capability. And we anticipate that being about a $60,000 cost. The third project is the Baron Parkway transmission main. This is coming off of South Taylor Drive to Baron Parkway. That particular stretch of main is currently a 12 inch main dating to the business center south side construction and a huge amount of water flows through that main to NEMAC corporation and also to the doubly water tower. So there's a lot of water flowing through a 12 inch main and we would like to upside that to a 20 inch main and parallel just better redundancy. We're going to see a significant drop in pressure loss even over 1400 feet because there's just so many thousands of gallons of water moving through that main currently. So we've identified that project as well. Will it also have an effect on the new park out there, the business park out there? Well, to a lesser extent, Jerry, there are other mains that flow southward to the other park, but this one is mostly serving water to the doubly tower and the NEMAC area where we have huge demands. On the Georgia Avenue project, Joe, does the 1.2 million, does that include the 70 Liberals? It does include those and it does not include, you'll see a note, net cost to the utility will be reduced by about 354,000 after the loans are paid and grant money is used. So that's a total figure, not our net at the end of the loan period. And because that's replacement, we are not assessing property owners for any water main. Their only cost would be led service line replacement. And we have the capital funds available for all this? We do have plans, yes, yes, we do. All right, is there a motion to approve? Yeah, those would be my question. So I would have moved to approve that. I'll second that. Any further questions? Not for me. Yeah, I'm sure both sides. All right, nothing on the agenda for personnel? I think there's one other agenda item, 5.7. Oh, so the crime story, from the crossing water, sorry about that. Yeah, so we now have a developer installing utilities and a new subdivision, east of highway, okay. And what is that? Menning Road, I believe, east of highway, okay, south of Jackson school area. That's the Warner subdivision? That is the Warner subdivision, yes. There's the developer's agreement, which the board has already executed with the city and the developer, the developer pays for the cost of eight inch water main. And this is by a city ordinance as well. Here again, we have a corridor, we're trying to move water east-west now as we go further south in the city because there's very little east-west water main and that area now is starting to grow. So we would like to loop through these stone bridge subdivision with a 16 inch main and part of it to create more of a transmission corridor east-west in that area. We did, the board did agree to pay for the upsized charges. And it was bid out and the upsized charge came in at $51.13 per foot from eight inch to 16 inch. And on our review, that's below the normal cost of installing a 16 inch main. We feel it's reasonable. And we would like approval of that final cost. Again, the board's already approved the agreement. This is just the detail of the final cost. And funds are available for this upcharge as well? Yes. I would move to approve. I would vote to second. Any further questions? Not for me. All in favor say aye. Aye. All in favor say aye. Motion carried. Now we go to personnel with there's nothing on the agenda. So our next meeting would be the third Monday of February, which is the 15th. Another holiday. Valentine's Day. President's Day. So we move it out to either another day that week or to the 27th? Good, whatever you wanna do. President's Day doesn't bother me at all. The 15th is fine with me. All right, we'll schedule it for the 15th. Monday the 15th, 3.30. We're trained. 3.30, it's all good to me. All right, very good. With that, we need a motion to adjourn. So do we. I'll second it. Very good. All in favor say aye. Aye. All in favor say aye. All right, gentlemen, thank you very much. Thank you.