 call the meeting to order. This is the Santa Cruz Water Commission meeting, 26 August 2019. Katie, can you call roll, please? Yes. Good evening, commissioners. Commissioner Mechis. Here. Commissioner Wilson. Here. Commissioner Wadlow. Here. Commissioner Infer. Here. Commissioner Baskin. Present. Commissioner Ryan. Here. And commissioners Schwarm. Here. Right. Are there any statements of disqualification from any commissioners? See none. Oral communications. Are there any members of the public who would like to speak on any items that are not on the agenda tonight? Okay. So by way of reminder, this is your chance to speak to commission and staff about items that are not on the agenda. You have three minutes. Since these are non-agendized items, you can't anticipate or expect any substantive engagement from the commissioner or from staff. But you're welcome to use the time as you see fit. Wasn't here. Pass them down. John McGillvray. Microphone. You might want to get to the mic, Scott, because we're broadcasting and we're recording, if you don't mind. Thank you. You're welcome. My name is Scott McGillvray. I live in Live Oak. And I have passed out a handout. Because I have been noticing that Rosemary has been making the point that this is really not a simple matter. That's absolutely correct. Like most of the things Rosemary says, there's a great deal of truth to it. And so what this is, is it's four separate sets of data on the subject of water supply and Santa Cruz. Two of them you'll be very familiar with. The top two come from Toby Goddard's annual presentation that occurs in April of each year about the water supply plan. The one on the left is a look at the last 10 years of rainfall and, well, not rainfall, flow in the San Lorenzo River. One on the right is the reservoir storage plan for Loch Lomond. The other two will take a little bit of explanation, which I'm really not going to go into tonight. My purpose in giving this to you is so that it'll be handy when you hear things from sultans and staff. Because in order to be able to assess whether or not the information needs to be questioned, you kind of have to have frame of reference. I want to mention that this three-limit opportunity that we get without any substantive discussion because it's not agendized is really a limiting factor. And I've said it before, I'm going to say it again. I was finally able to get more than three minutes from the Mid County Groundwater Agency meeting with John Kennedy and Jim Kelly. A couple of us sat down and it took 15 minutes to go through this document. I thought that's pretty good. And then they began to ask questions. And because they needed to understand it, it took another 45 minutes. So I'm confident that to understand the case for water transfers as being an extremely robust solution to a majority of the water supply needs of both Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz, Soquel Creek Water District, it's going to take some time to understand it. And I urge you to consider going on that journey. I hope that you will keep this handy. And we will refer to it from time to time when we are hearing what we're hearing and ask ourselves whether or not we need to think about it carefully. Thank you. For oral communications, that's a no. Any announcements from any members of staff? Consent. So on consent agenda, did any members of the public or the commission want to pull some consent? Yes. Or are there any quick items we could just handle with a quick question? I have a quick item on the minutes and what could be a longer question on the recycled water study. We'll pull three. I have, I think, a quick question on item number four. I'd like to pull four. Okay. Okay. I'm going to pull three and four or anything else. Okay. With respect to any items that are being quick on items one or two, anybody other than me have something? On the minutes. So at the end of item number six where it says DBS can abstain due to absence, it should say abstain from voting on the minutes due to absence. I had a question with respect to the city council items. The last item, item Rosemary on page 1.3, the FEMA grant. Yes. Just curious about how much money might be available and how we feel, how we're feeling about that. This is a relatively small amount available in this round in the neighborhood of something like 100,000, which is not much at this stage. But the reason that we are pursuing it is because we think that there's a lot of gold at the end of a rainbow that is further down the road. So we want them to get used to writing the check? Yeah. Part point open. You know, sometimes you have to get into the queue and get into the system. And then they say, oh, and how much did you need? And then they can write you a check for, I don't know, the big dollars that you really do need. But it's a really modest amount in this first round. We be hopin' for the future. We be hopin'. Commissioners, anything else on the remaining two items on consent? Do we have a motion? Well, first of all, I still have my question on. We pulled three and four. We pulled three and four. Good, OK. So move the balance. OK. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Note that I abstain from the minutes. Oh, I should abstain. Both Wadlow, commissioners Wadlow and Schwarm abstain from the minutes. Just the minutes. All right, so with that, item three, the recycled water study. This year at bat, David. Yes. So what I'm curious about on the recycled water study is that in later materials in the packet, on page 5.10, there's a discussion in the climate change materials about key conclusions made by Gary Fisk. And one of them, the second one, says it's impossible to deal with the worst drought with feasible levels of ASR in the catalog climate scenario with 3.2 billion gallon per year demand. And then they go on to talk about that. And I'm wondering if, in the recycled water study, if one of the category of items that is being studied will look at how recycled water could be used to augment ASR and make it meet our needs during certain climate scenarios. And we will talk about this more with, item six, five. Five and six, probably, when we're talking about how we're thinking about climate change, but also how we're thinking about changing the implementation strategy so that we can be prepared to augment ASR and or expedite and implement portions of or more of recycled water. But that is within the scope of what Kennedy-Janks is going to be looking at, to give us the data to make those connections. Yeah, I mean, you will recall from the first round, we didn't really have anything but a couple of non-potable reuse projects, even though a number of potable reuse projects were identified. This is going to be a deeper dive into the potable reuse projects. And it will be happening. Basically, it could be used to actually supplement our water supply in a more meaningful way, is what I gathered. Yes, and it will be happening sort of in a parallel path with a lot of the additional climate change work that's going to be, we're going to be talking about an item number five. So the two pieces will begin to knit together with respect to the question of what do we think is the vulnerability of surface water to various kind of climate change scenarios. So that's a really big piece of what we're going to be talking about more in item five tonight. Right, because I wanted to make sure that the stuff we're going to get from Kennedy-Janks is going to enable us to feed it into the confluence model and see how it's going to work with ASR so that we can have an overall solution to the supplemental water supply issue. Anything else over here? Any on number three? Yes, I was hoping that as a part of this, there could be a, it looks like at the end of the study, there's going to be a presentation to the commission, even though it said and or I'm assuming that would be an and. But it seemed to me in the middle, maybe around the point of including the alternatives analysis and moving into the preferred projects that we could also get a workshop at that point. I think that would be really helpful and ensure our buy-in to where it's headed and also we can hear your rationale for preferring the ones that come up. So specifically after? On page 3.9, yeah, or 3.8, 3.9. So it'd be the end of work item or work test 3.1 and then you need to change it in the list, you know, in the scope of work under on page 3.12 adding in a workshop there. Building on that, I may go without saying, but I presume that we'd not only review the alternatives that have been developed and prioritized, but also the regulatory framework. So we understand. Yeah, and this will start to appear in the quarterly update as well. So you'll have information in there. I had a handful here, Heidi. On 3.4, as we're exploring groundwater recharge at belts, is that practicable as we understand the pipeline routing right now, or would it require substantial de novo development of pipeline that would be sort of city focused in addition to whatever pure water is doing? Yeah, because the Pure Water Project, as you know, treats the water at the Chanticleer site. And so any infrastructure for our purpose would be built on that and isn't contemplated right now on the Water Soil Project. The proposal as submitted here is unclear about when the work's going to get done. It's kind of contradictory. So maybe you could clarify that for us. I guess the comment I notice in looking through it is there was reference, and I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, there was reference as to when the last one was done, which was 2018, and when this one is starting, which is 2019. And then there was a lot of 2019 and 2020 reference. So the idea is that we would have it approved in 2019, and it's a nine to 12 month schedule, so we would wrap it up and title it the 2020. So the final scope of work will say that the report's a 2020 update. On 3.6, I mean, it looks like we get 10 alternatives. Did I read that right? I think we could get 10 at the beginning, and I think some of them may or may not drop out depending upon the regulatory update for surface water augmentation and the DPR, but I think it's important to kind of go back and cover those. I think the other two that would likely fall out of any more in-depth analysis are the ones, the La Boronca Park, I think it's 1A, the La Boronca Park, which is small. So from the perspective of supplementing water supply, it doesn't do much. And then also the Bay Cycle, which has a big cost, but also a very little contribution in terms of supply. So I think that brings us down to about six. That's a realistic target. That makes more sense. Otherwise, we aren't doing much calling. Finally, what's Kennedy Jank's track record against budget for these kind of projects? Excellent. Yeah, they monitor their costs. They're very on target. We're probably gonna increase this slightly because of the request for another workshop. They came in under budget on their last one. I see. Yeah. Okay, thanks. There's nothing else on item three. Orville. There's one more question on item three. Okay. On page 3.10, task four, coordination with aquifer storage and recovery ASR project. The second paragraph says it's assumed that a description of the model assumptions inputs and outputs and other parameters will be provided by the groundwater modeling team. But a handoff of the model or detailed walkthrough of the model is not anticipated to be needed. What does that mean? So Kennedy Jank's wants to make sure they understand how the model is set up so that when we feed an alternative that includes the IPR into that model, they understand what the output means, but they're also saying that they're not going to do that modeling themselves. Okay, so I will just reiterate by concern that what Kennedy Janks is doing is not gonna be deep enough in terms of how it would really integrate into an ASR project that we might do. And I wanna make sure that it gets us where we need to go instead of just setting up for another study. Right, so Kennedy Janks won't be doing that. They will be helping us work with Gary Fisk for the confluence and Pueblo and Montgomery for the Groundwater Modeling to understand the Groundwater Replenishment Project. But they won't be doing the modeling. Yeah, because one of the things we're gonna be dealing with over time is whether or not we should be doing our own recycled water project and where we should be doing it, how we might structure it to compliment our ASR and perhaps work as part of it. And I wanna, and especially when we have climate change scenarios that are telling us that ASR may not be sufficient to meet our needs in extended drought conditions, I wanna make sure that we're at least doing the analysis so that if we need to pull the trigger, we can. So just, I think one thing to say is that the Groundwater Model, which we've just obviously used quite extensively in the Mid County, is going to continue to be a tool that we will be using. And likely we'll be using it either through a direct contract with Montgomery and Associates or through the existing subcontract between Pueblo and Montgomery and Associates. So we will have access to that model for doing the kinds of things that you're talking about. Well, good, because I know that it's one thing to be using the modeling that's being done in the Mid County Groundwater Agency to help us design ASR as far as it goes using San Lorenzo River Waters. It's an entirely different scenario to add in the possibility of using recycled water from the city to be able to smooth out the year injections and make them year-round and their board get a lot more water into service. Yep. Oh, if I could just follow up on that. So if these consultants that you work with on the model need to do additional work to meet the requirements of this study, you'll just do a task commandment or something like that, right, for them. Yeah, okay. And the commission on this one. Public comment? Does anybody have anything from the public have anything to say on this item, which is the recycled water study phase two? Yes, I'm Scott McGillivray. I'm a little surprised that this is on the consent agenda. Recycle water is a subject that Santa Cruz likes to debate. It doesn't belong on the consent agenda. Thank you for taking it off. Couple of comments about what I heard from Mr. Baskin about the quote from Mr. Fisk about the drought condition and how to meet the supply needs in 3.2 billion gallons a year. I think that's what you said, wasn't it? That's what the report says. Yeah, okay. Well, the numbers 2.6 billion. In April, Rosemary explained that our water demand in Santa Cruz is 2.6 billion. So that's the wrong number. It's the wrong piece of information. So it really ought to be addressed in light of the correct information. I'll also point out for your information, you're not alone here. I mean, I'm not saying the commission to this. Soquel Creek's also using the wrong number. They're using 3.2 billion gallons, which is really sort of an insult to us all because that isn't the number. I hadn't really intended to get into the graphic that I handed out, but I guess the time is, it's gonna be useful. The bottom right-hand table, one on the far right-hand, talks about locked loam and levels and the water that's pumped to the San Lorenzo River. If you look at that and think about it, which I'm sure you haven't had time to do, in the last 22 years, every year we've gotten to full. Now I define full as 99% because there are two or three 99s and that's as good as a one-on-one. So when we're told by the water department that we only have a 55% chance of supplying Soquel Creek with 500 million gallons of water, how does that square when 90% of the last 22 years with lock moments been 100% full? You need to couple that with the table to the left, which looks into how much of the water that's available to Santa Cruz from the San Lorenzo River has been used. And again, over that 22-year period of time, the average is less than 40 million gallons. So we have 860 million gallons sitting in the San Lorenzo River that we can capture between November and April that we don't use. So it becomes a little questionable why we're in such a hurry to go out and spend a quarter of a million dollars researching recycled water. Why don't we spend the time? Why aren't we talking tonight about using water transfers? I hear the beeper here. Thanks, Scott. I'm not quite done. Well, the time. Time is time precludes it. Again. You'll have another opportunity to speak on further items down the agenda. Okay. Hello, my name is Jerry Paul, resident of Santa Cruz. I would like to have the discussion before you done in light of the following phenomenon. There is, whether the number is 3.2 billion gallons or 2.6 or some other number, there's a question as to whether the facility, when the facilities need to be built. If we started with water transfers and put the second best candidate, say, whether it be sewage recycling or diesel or whatever it might be, the second best way in my view, in a band, in other words, build it but only to within, say, two and a half years of it's delivering its first gallon of water and leave it at that state of what do you call it, mothballing? Sorry if I'm not using the right word. Leave it two and a half years from being done and then run the water transfer schemes and they may or may not be sufficient. But if we get to a point where we get within two and a half years of needing a second plant to come online, we can put it on then. It looks to me from the numbers, Scott's numbers and many other numbers I've seen, that chances are we will not need anything but water transfers. And if we actually do it that way in a sequence, we may find we will spend a lot less money. So I would like you to please consider that sequencing as part of the discussion. Thank you very much. Good evening. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of Aptos and I am the petitioner in pro per filing a legal action against Soquel Creek Water District for their pure water Soquel project and what I think is a sham of an EIR. I'm taking this pro per because I feel it's important and I couldn't afford the $100,000 to hire an attorney to do it for me. So I wanna let you know that I am not the only person that is concerned about this as Mr. Basso told the city council when the agreement that you never got to see in its entirety before the council approved it on June 27th. Some of you did that worked on it but not the full commission here. Mr. Basso stood up and told the city council that I'm the only one that's complaining. That's not true. I am the one that is dedicating a lot of time and energy to fighting it legally but there are many, many people out there who do not want this and do not trust the process, do not trust anything about it and really want having heard what Mr. McGilvery has said, having looked at the documents and done their own independent critical thinking have come to much the same realization that Mr. McGilvery and Mr. Paul have come to is that it's not a water shortage problem, it's a water storage problem and if we have a regional cooperation we can make this work. We don't need to bring in a recycling project that will take vast amounts of energy and impose very significant negative environmental impacts. I mean, the district signed a statement of overriding consideration and it only considers the project construction phase, not any other part of it. So I want to just let you know that you need to be talking with the people of Santa Cruz because you found out what happens when you don't do that and the diesel plan. There is significant resistance against the Pure Water Soquel project and when I read some of this, for example, on page 3.12, Kennedy Jenks will hold workshops and presentations with city departments but I'm not seeing a lot in there and maybe I'm skimming it too quickly. Anything about reaching out to the public, what do the people think? What do the people think about the possibility of storing recycled water in a local moment which is what I understand is one of the things that could happen. So I urge you don't go fast with this, I'm glad it was taken off the consent agenda because that always lends a feeling of trying to sneak something through and that's what happened with the agreement that Soquel Creek Water District wanted the city council to put through too. That was put on the consent agenda. The consent agenda is for things that are non-controversial. This is anything but non-controversial. Thank you. Are there members of the public have a comment on item three? A motion? Do we need a motion? Well, we can do three and four together if you want to. All right, let's do that. Move the staff recommendation on item three and four. Oh, we haven't talked about four yet. Oh, I'm sorry. Page four, hold it. We just did three. That's right. All right, so item four, the energy plan. I had thought you mentioned you had a comment. I did. So on page four, dash three, noted that for the purpose of this planning effort, carbon neutrality, we'll need to scope one and scope two emissions and then explain those. I was curious why transportation related emissions are not included in this analysis. I am gonna refer to Tiffany. I think you're being one brother and an expert. So Tiffany worked with me and she wrote the majority of the scope of work. It's still in draft form, looking for feedback like this. And we're gonna continue to work really closely, I think, throughout the development of this plan. Yes, so good evening, commissioners. I'm Tiffany Weiswes, the sustainability and climate action manager. It's nice to be in front of you this evening to talk about this particular item. So the water department obviously has some complex needs with respect to energy and thus the need to do this energy master plan. Later on in starting in July of next year, the city will be doing a city-wide climate and energy action plan 2030, where we will be looking at not only municipal but community energy usage and what kind of goal will we establish with respect to neutrality and what are the pathways to get there? In that plan, it is the intention to cover everything else outside of the water master plan as well as identifying connections. So we could modify the scope now to look at transportation. I think the intent originally was to include it in the climate and energy action plan where we're going to be doing that same thing with all city departments. So it's really the water department's prerogative on how they wanna address that. We can do so sooner or we can do so later. Move it up. It's obviously not a big element of the water department, but it's certainly not looking at it. Certainly in terms of climate change and also fuel use, it's a big factor. Yes, absolutely. City-wide. Well, then I have a follow-up question if you don't mind. Does the city-wide look at it also look at the city in the context of the region? We are going to attempt to do that. Right now, there is no regional climate action plan, but I know that there are some targets that have been set. We can also think about it in terms of state goals related to say, electric vehicle procurement, carbon neutrality and so forth. And what's our proportional contribution to meeting those goals? So that's kind of how we're thinking about it right now. A lot more meaningful and effective if it was done on a region-wide basis. Absolutely, that's something I'm strongly advocating for with some of our regional partners, like AmBag, the RTC, Monterey Bay Community Power, who has actually a lot of funding to contribute to this kind of endeavor. So I'm trying to make those motions to make that happen. Does the switch to Monterey Bay Community Power simplify the process to some extent? It does in the sense that now all of our electricity is carbon-free, that enabled us to achieve our greenhouse gas emissions goal for 2020 earlier. However, does it simplify matters? I think that depends on when our goal is to achieve carbon neutrality. I mean, we have the electricity piece covered. Natural gas is still there, as well as transportation emissions. So that's what we'll probably be focusing a lot on is how can we electrify things? How can we do that? Fuel switching to electrify, knowing that Monterey Bay Community Power has carbon-free electricity and is increasing the proportion that is considered eligible California renewables. You're welcome. No other commissioners have anything? I had a couple of questions. Again, building on Linda's question about the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, is this also, is it or is it not total life cycle? So are we taking into account construction or tear down and reconstruction of facilities? Should we choose to do that as opposed to say remodeling or reusing? Yes, so in the past, we have not considered life cycle emissions. That is a trend that is emerging in this space right now. We, that does require more complexity, more money. And I'm not quite sure that we're going to be able to get there right now. There are very few municipalities that are doing that because of that increased complexity and cost. But that is something that if the Water Department wants to look at that, we can do so. There are methodologies out there that we could do so. We're going to spend a few hundred million dollars building things. And there's a pretty substantial literature out there that you- Absolutely, in an ideal world, we certainly would do that. I'd like to see us attend to that if we can make that happen. I guess, and then building on Jim's comment, and I appreciate you pointing out the opportunity to be able to switch energy sources. I'm reluctant, no, I'm resisting the temptation for us to kind of fall into the trap of saying that because we're carbon neutral, we can go ahead and be profligate with energy use. And what I didn't see in the scope of work is an emphasis on first minimizing energy consumption. To the extent practicable, mindful, we have an energy intensive problem to solve here in water. And then looking at ways to be able to deal with the carbon footprint of the energy that we are using. Absolutely. Energy efficiency is always the first thing that we go to. And I'm glad that you pointed out that wasn't clear in the scope of work because that is certainly within the scope of work. I'd like to see that punched up a little bit. Yes. Okay, so can we have a motion now? Well, public comment. Public comment on item four, which is the energy master plan. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. And again, I just want to point out to you if you are considering recycled water, those reverse osmosis pumps are as the Corolo engineer told the district, energy hogs. And it doesn't matter if it's carbon free or whatever the footprint, it's still a big demand on energy. And for SoCal Creek Water District, they're anticipating that this advanced water purification system would increase their operating costs by two and a half million a year. Largely because of the energy. I think you need to consider that. Thank you. Thanks, Becky. Yes, I'd like to take a minute to comment on this item. First, I want to express appreciation for the Chairman's calling out of carbon neutrality is not zero carbon. That is a very loosely used term and your neighbors to the south are egregious and they're misusing the concept carbon neutrality for carbon zero. The other thing I'd like to say is that I'm not really telling you not to discuss this question of recycled water and energy efficiency, but I think it needs to be slowed down. The staff has to do this. It's one more project, $250 million of work. That needs to be supervised. The energy one is another aspect of it. There are a lot of projects that the water district has to choose between. Andy Schifrin at a very fine thing. I don't think any of you were here because I was barely here. He was the first one that identified that the capital improvement plan, the capital budget needed to bring Santa Cruz water system back to a serviceable level was $200 million, not one. Prior to the time he discovered it, the budget was always, the 10 year CIP was always assumed to be $100 million simply because they knew they never would get more than $10 million a year so any item that was passed $100 million just got lopped off. Andy identified that it was $200 million. Now bringing that to present time, we have had three leaks in the main on Seventh Avenue. We, Soquel Creek again leading the pack has had to issue a boil water advisory for people at the bottom of the pier because they've had a break and their water has is unsuitable so they have to boil water. And we had two breaks on the North Coast this year that caused us to not be able to take water from Laguna and Lydell. So I would suggest that we really need to get the house in order and this issue of recycled water is not a priority. What I hope is that you ask the staff to go back, get the right number, 2.6 billion gallons a year in demand and bring it back and we'll talk about it again. We should talk about it. It's a big deal. Thank you for the opportunity. Thanks, Scott. Any other comments or members of the public? Now we'll do a motion. No approval of the staff recommendation on items three and four. Do consideration to be given to the comments? Always. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? None. Item is approved unanimously. We move on to general business. Climate change workshop. Great. So I'm really excited to bring this item to you tonight with three great speakers who I will introduce in a minute. I tried in the staff report to be brief and to summarize where we've been and where we're trying to go. A reminder about how the WASAC, the Water Supply Advisory Committee, considered climate change in their work. Looking at a couple of other climate models since 2015, the reason I bring that up is because there's even more now and so the incorporation of climate models into our work could be a never ending exercise. Our goal, and I think we've made some good progress as you'll hear, but I just wanna reiterate is trying to understand as best we can what our climate futures might be and maybe more importantly, how will we know when we're approaching a point that we should be doing a project? I think it was already brought up tonight that we're gonna need some time in order to implement a recycled water project, more ASR or looking at doing in lieu with neighboring agencies and those lead times are long as we know and so we're gonna have to understand the potential outcomes of climate change on our water supply and then really think about when we're willing to take action based on what we're seeing in the environment in terms of increased temperature and so on and so forth. I think, so the three speakers we have, Dr. Sean Chartrand is going first, he's with Balance Hydrologics and he's gonna provide some of the, I guess I view it more of the bigger picture in terms of how climate is being thought about and how we're incorporating that into our work and then Dr. Robert Rauscher who, and you know both these folks from the Wasak days, he's helping us understand kind of more on the ground in the weeds on the water supply. These are the outcomes based on the different climate models and looking at the impacts working with Gary and also Pueblo for really understanding how the different projects are gonna help fill our gap and then again we have Dr. Tiffany Weis-West who is gonna share with us a little bit more about how the city's thinking about this to make sure that the work that we're doing will inform the city work and certainly be consistent with any of the city work. I've also asked when they come up just to say a little bit about themselves and their background so you can kind of understand a little bit more about their work. So first of all is Sean Shortran. Can you follow up? Sure. Can I sit in? Yeah, that's fine. And we'll switch. Okay. Does that sound good? And maybe you can make it clear if you want questions throughout or if you want to wait until the end of the presentation for kind of up to you. I think it's up to the speaker. I prefer to do them throughout if that's okay. Let's do it throughout. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, so my name is Sean and I'm trained as a geophysical scientist and a hydrologist. I've been working with the city and the water department now for 19 years. I can't believe it. On a variety of things, but my main role has been to help you understand your water supply sources. I installed gauges on many of the streams that you extract water from so we can understand what the seasonality of those flows are like. So forth and so on. And in the last 13 years, we've shifted some of my emphasis to helping you plan for your water supply and specifically how do we incorporate climate change projections into that analysis and building a model as you will of the local water supply system on the stream flow side of things. Tonight, we're going to kind of review all of that. And I think it's correct that questions throughout is probably the best. And then I'll make a deal with that as we move through in terms of time. Why are we doing this? Well, we're trying to plan for a more resilient water supply system out 50 to 70 years from now. And at the same time, we want to improve in stream flows for Steelhead and Coho salmon. It's a big challenge, but we know that we can do it because the results indicate we can. The presentations in two parts, I'm going to review historical climate data. And in the second part, I'm going to give you an overview of our modeling of what we believe are plausible future stream flow scenarios. So for the historical climate review, we're going to look at precipitation trends, air temperature trends, and then we'll talk about some basic conclusions and how looking at the historical data really links to our work of looking out into the future with climate projections. You might be asking yourself, why would we spend our time looking back when we want to look forward? We can learn a lot from the historical observations. And in fact, what we see in the historical observations is they're already telling us the climate is changing in a way that projections tell us we should expect it to change. So things are already happening and they're happening in a way that the models suggest they're going to happen. The data that we use for this, for the historical work is there's two sources. Anyone can go and download it from the NOAA historical climatology station there and then the state SIMIS system. We're going to be looking specifically at detrended data because it tells us a lot more about what's going on as opposed to looking at annual values. For example, detrended here, all we're doing is taking a value and dividing it by the long-term average. So we can look at trends, how things compare to the average state. So in that case, when a detrended value in terms of precipitation is greater than one, we know it's wetter than the average condition. When the value's less than one, we know it's drier than the average condition. So here's a set of plots we're going to look at. Yes, sir. Go back to the previous slide please. Yep. What's the range that you're using to determine what is the average condition? So the average condition is defined by the NOAA historical climatology data in this case. So the record begins in 1873. Santa Cruz is very lucky. It's just by chance that NOAA decided to establish a station here in the late 1800s. I encourage you to go and look at the map at this website and see how many communities in California have this record. So do we not only look at the average over the given period of time, but also the trends? That's what the detrending allows us to do. Yes, we're looking at the trends in general from the late 1800s all the way through 2018. It's a tremendous set of data that you have. Okay, so we're going to look at several plots that look like this. The top plot here shows the annual data, but we're not going to really focus on that. We're going to look at the bottom plot. In the bottom plot, what we're doing is taking averages of the annual data over two, five, and 10-year time frames. We're interested in that because it allows us to look at trends over these time frames, and that's useful. What does detrended mean? So detrended is where we take an annual value and we divide it by the long-term average. Why scale here is the detrended value? Why is that detrended as opposed to being trended? Because you're taking the average out of the signal. Everything's expressed in terms of the average, so if something, you're detrending it with respect to the average. I think you're going a little behind me and the science, but that's okay. So basically what you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to express this annual value in terms of its average, so it's just going to be a multiple of it. It's going to be greater than one or less than one. On the lower plot, we have two, five, and 10-year averages over those time frames, and I want to draw your attention to two points. The big red-box tells us that roughly the last 60 years, just qualitatively looking at the data, has been more variable, the precipitation has been more variable than it was in the 60 years prior to that. And we zoom in to the black dash box, and this is the last 25 to 30 years, and we see that variability has maybe increased, but it's become somewhat cyclical on these six to seven years' time frames. What we also learned from this data is that the most recent drought, 2014 through 2016, was historically significant. For the observational record, it's the driest we've observed here, and I'll show you why that's the case. Now we're going to switch directions here a little bit and look at air temperature. We're going to look at the same type of data here. We've detrended the air temperature data. So if the value on the plot, on the y-axis is greater than one, we understand that the condition is hotter than the long-term average. If the value is less than one, we understand that it's cooler than the long-term average. Again, the top plot shows you the actual annual data, but we're going to look at the bottom where we've smoothed things out with these moving averages. And again, I'll draw your attention to the black dashed box here. Here we're looking at average annual air temperature. And what we see is the last 40 years or so have been warm relative to the long-term average. It's more, the probability is higher that the air temperature is going to be above or warmer than the average than in the prior 50 to 60 years. Now here we're looking at the maximum annual average air temperature, so the hottest it gets. And we see a slightly different case here where prior to the previous seven to 10 years, things were actually a little cooler relative to the long-term average. But in the last six to seven years, the maximum air temperature has started to rise at a fairly rapid rate. Now here is where the story gets pretty interesting. This is the minimum air temperature that's averaged. And what we see is the recent 30 to 40 years is quite warm relative to the historical observation. So we're compressing the range at which air temperature occurs in the region. We're compressing it to a smaller range of values. Minimum air temperatures are getting warmer. Maximum air temperatures are roughly staying the same. So in summary, this data, what it tells us is we have, there's some evidence that we have increased rainfall variability. And the most recent drought is the most severe in the observational record locally. And we're seeing warmer overall air temperatures with a strong increase in the minimum average air temperature. But we can learn a lot more from this data if we look at it slightly different way. So we'll spend a minute with this plot because we're gonna see this plot quite a bit over the next 15 minutes. This is our way to try to understand climate in terms of precipitation and air temperature. Again, we're looking at values on the plot that are right around a value of one. So we're, in this case, the historical average condition plots in the very center of this plot. Any deviation away from the center tells you, for example, if you're in the lower left, you're dry and cool relative to the long-term average precipitation and air temperature. If you're in the upper right in contrast, you're wet and warm relative to the long-term averages. What can we learn? So we can take the same data. We just looked at in the previous four plots and we can plot them in this space. So here is the period 1900 to 1958 and the values are color-coded by their time in that timeline. So the darker the color, the older the data, the lighter the color, it's getting closer to 1958. Just casually looking at the information, you see that a majority of the points on the air temperature side of things fall below a value of one. So things are cool relative to the long-term average. Precipitation were spread across around the average. We had wet and dry periods. Now if we compare that to the more recent period of 1959 to 2018, now the colors have shifted to red because we're getting into the later period, casually we can see that a majority of the points plot above an air temperature value of one. So things are warmer relative to the long-term average. The spread of data for precipitation is a little wider compared to the 1900-1958 period, but we do have this point out in 1941 where there's quite a bit of rainfall. Yes. If I might ask a question. Why the period 1958 and then 59 to 2018? Obviously things will plot up differently depending on where you choose that point. Absolutely. So there's some question about the air temperature records in the late 1800s. There is some indication that earlier in the last century things became more standardized. So we started the period for this plot at that point, but as we'll see here to your point is yes, if we chose different time periods we'd see different results, but what you will see regardless is that the recent 10 years or so have been warm. In fact, 2014, 2015, the reason the drought was more severe in part because the air temperature relative to the average was warmer. So we see in this plot here that in fact our qualitative review is correct. On the 1900-1958 side of things, the majority of the points plot below the line 38. On the other side, 1959 to 2018, 35 points plot above the line in terms of air temperature. So there was a shift. And then we see what the points called out that the more recent time period was quite warm. And as you've heard from Rosemary in the past, we're seeing some big flips between precip trends where we go from quite wet to quite dry. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, like right here. So here I've called out some data values over the last 15 years or so, just to indicate that in the prior period, there was less range in precip. In the more recent period, we have more frequent flips in precip in terms of its relative value to the average. And this is something that, as we'll see, is being projected by a lot of different climate scientists. Now we can learn even more about this data if we look at it in a slightly different way. On the x-axis, we have total annual rainfall in inches. So lower rainfall on the left, higher rainfall on the right. The y-axis is just time. On the low end of the plot is the later time. As we move up the plot, we get closer to the present day. The points are colored by the number of months in a given year, where we record more than a half an inch of rainfall at the Cymus De La Viega station. Now what we see here very clearly is there is a difference in the more recent drought. Two points right here are colored this light reddish color. That means in 2014, 2015, there were only two months of those two years that recorded more than a half inch of rainfall. First time in 120 year observational record that that happened. That was followed by 2016 and 17, where we had things flopped around. We went from quite wet then back to quite dry. So the point is that precipitation, it's not only getting drier, but the way we receive the precipitation is changing relative to how we've experienced it in the past. So if we try to summarize all that in our diagram here, what we understand is there's some evidence that there's greater rainfall variability and we've experienced more severe droughts in the recent, just recently. Things are getting warmer and we're seeing fewer months of the year where we have meaningful rainfall contributing to our water supply and our stream flows. This is the historical observational record. How does it relate to our climate change work? Well, the climate change projections tell us this is what we should be seeing. And in fact, that's what we're seeing. They tell us we should expect increase in the number of dry years over a given 100 year period like 2014, 2015. We should expect more extreme wet years. So this is that flip-flop between dry to wet like 1998, 2017. We should expect an increase in the frequency of this dry to wet whiplash like going from 2017 to 2018 from wet to dry and an increase in severe storm sequence. I think 2017 was a good demonstration of that. So in short, the historical observations and what we can learn from it is pretty spot on in general with the overall projections that climate scientists are giving us. Okay, so that's the end of the historical data review. Now we're gonna switch gears and I'm gonna give you a very broad overview of some of the modeling work we've done to come up with what we believe are plausible future stream flows. I'll review the general strategy. I'll review some of the limitations and assumptions that go with that work. And then we'll look at some projections that we've analyzed to date and then we'll try to summarize that. So again, we're using a simple framework to understand the projections of climate. In a couple of slides, I'll show you why. But in general, we use this because then we can relate it to what we've seen in the past. The past is very valuable in addition to what I said before, but we have observations of how the water supply system worked in the past. So it makes a lot of sense. Again, we're using publicly available data in this case, the data is pulled from the CalDAP website. If you've never browsed through this website, I encourage you to do so. Our approach is to use data-driven models to develop projections of stream flow. This is different. We could take a different strategy where we use an off-the-shelf model that we plug in a lot of different numerical values and we let the off-the-shelf model come up with our projections of stream flow. The city has a long history of collecting stream flow data from the streams at which you extract water from. So we're using that information to make our projections. There's some history to that. Everything starts with a water balance model. A water balance model is nothing more than an accounting tool. We're able to project stream flow based on how precipitation and additions from base flow compare to our projections of evapotranspirative loss and then loss to recharge. This is where everything begins. We calibrate the water balance model against the observed record at the USGS BigTrees station and we calibrate it, sorry, with these two parameters here, base flow and the recharge terms are our knobs that we can dial to achieve a minimization of error between our projected stream flow record at BigTrees and what they actually measured there. And here is an example of what that calibration looks like. So this is the record at BigTrees. Here I plotted up 1970 through, I believe, 2000. The blue curve is the BigTrees record as measured by the USGS. The orange curve is the BigTrees record as calculated by our water balance model. We are very interested in replicating as best we could the 76, 77 drought in this process. And so you'll see the fit there is quite good. In general, the model tends to over predict water in stream flows relative to what was, I'm sorry, under predict in stream flows relative to what was measured. So we understand that the model itself will be a little conservative for stream flows but that occurs during average conditions. On the dry side of things, we have some confidence that we replicate historical observed conditions pretty well. With this model, then we can go forward and we can acquire the climate change data, in this case through the CalADAPT website. The period we work with is 2020 through 2070. Once we have that data, we can then execute the water balance model. These three plots here just show you three different examples of precipitation in this case, precipitation projections that we could work with. The top plot is 10 different projections that you can download from the CalADAPT website. The middle plot is one time series or one model output from those that 10. The bottom plot is a scenario that we've developed ourselves using statistical techniques. Once we have the water balance model executed, then we can use what we call the HCP hydrology model. And all we're doing there is we're broadcasting flows from big trees out to your other points of water diversion. And we do that using the observations of flow at those stations we have and how it relates to big trees. The HCP model, after it calculates the flow, it's really just doing two things. It's partitioning stream flow between what's available for water supply and what's available for in-stream flows. You understand that in-stream flows are driven by a set of flow rules. Those flow rules have gone through about a decade of development in consultation with the permitting agencies. And so the model's just partitioning it between those two banks. There's some limitations and assumptions of the strategy that we use. We are using a pretty simple hydrologic modeling framework. What we assume is that the present day relationship between flows say at big trees and upper Laguna will persist for the next 50 years or any of the other stations as it relates to big trees. Second, the water balance model is limited to average conditions of big trees, i.e. we're not modeling the variability that we observe at big trees. We're looking at the average trend. We chose that because in climate projections, what we're most confident about are the average projections over time as opposed to the year-to-year variability. Third, the mean daily projected flows assume that day-to-day flow patterns are gonna be similar to observed historical conditions for the same type of hydrologic condition. Meaning a dry year in the past, we assume qualitatively a dry year in the future is gonna be similar. A wet year is gonna be, yes. I'm gonna catch you at the end. Could you offer us an example of what might cause that assumption not to prove out? Absolutely. Maybe a good example is, let's say air temperatures increase at a rate that we're not expecting and we see a forest canopy structure change. So we lose redwoods and we get something else. With different vegetation, the hydrologic conditions, the way that water hits the ground infiltrates, runs off, so forth and so forth, it'll change. And that has a whole other associated effects with it. That's one example. Data-driven model doesn't have any data for that. That's correct. That's right. Okay, thank you. And we are not using state-projected flows of big trees. The State of California, the Department of Water Resources, has made projections of streamflow of big trees. We've evaluated those and in a memo to the city, we've given our opinion that using locally obtained data and driving the model with that data is superior to the state's data. The reason is the state's very interested and concerned about the Central Valley. When we get out to the coast, San Lorenzo River is lumped in with many other watersheds. So the accuracy that they can model, local conditions here goes quite down and we see that in the data when we evaluate it for ourselves. We're very interested in making sure we have a good handle on the dry conditions. So our model's been tuned for that. The state data does not perform as well under dry conditions. When the water supply is most vulnerable and in-stream flows are most vulnerable. Question? Yes. On that statement you were just talking about, we're not using state projected flow conditions. Is the data driving the state projections, the underlying data, the same as the underlying data for yours? Yes. And it's just the projection model that's different, not the raw data that comes. That's correct. Okay, thank you. That's correct. Here's a plot to make the point that deciding how to model the future climate is not easy. It's very challenging. Here are 10 different projections of annual precipitation for average projections for the San Lorenzo River watershed. The annual trends are different between each model. The variability of the models are different. And so this is where looking at the long-term trajectory or the average trajectory of the projection starts to make sense rather than getting hung up on the year-to-year variability. But the point is it's not a straightforward process. So what we've done over time, it's taken some time for us to get there because the city is really at the leading front of a lot of this work. And so when we engage with the agencies, there's not a lot of knowledgeable discussion back and forth in the sense that you should do it this way because there are 100 references that say you should do it this way and it's been done this way 100 different places. It's not the case. But we've tried to carefully think this through obviously. And we use the historical observational past to help guide us to the future and understand the types of projections we're using. So again, we're using the same type of plotting here where we have four quadrants. The values of one here tell us how values compare relative to the average for any one projection. And at the present time, I'm showing you three different climate projections that we've evaluated. We've actually evaluated a fourth. I'm not showing it here because we just recently completed it about two weeks ago and we'll probably complete a fifth. But let's focus on these three here. What are these plots showing us? These are called probability density estimates. All we're looking at are plots that tell us how concentrated the data is around any one given set of values. So where the colors are darkest, that's where we understand we have the most data points for that projection. So in this case, this GFDLA2, this was in fact the WASAC projection that was evaluated some years ago now. We understand that that record was quite dry and warm across the entire 50 year period relative to the historical condition. And we see that most of the data plot about half as dry as historical versus, I'm sorry, yeah, half as dry as historical and about 20% warmer than historical. And we've supplemented that with this thing we call the four model ensemble where we statistically sample from four different projections. And our goal there was to produce a projection that had much more variability in it. We wanted to see wetter, wetts and drier dries and we do it randomly. And what we end up with is something that produces a much more variable record. So we're stressing the system or testing the system under much different conditions relative to GFDL or the WASAC condition. And then we have this thing we call the historical catalog. The historical catalog was geared at making something that was drier but had more variability in the precip compared to the WASAC run. So not as dry, it also had some wet periods in it. These are the three projections we have run or evaluated to date and they test the system in very different ways. I can't tell you how the system reliability under these three, that's Gary and other people's work. But I can tell you that these three projections give us a very different test of the water supply system when we have to meet certain in-stream flow rules. So the point here is to try to bound to the uncertainty to some extent, right? Point is to yes, absolutely. And to see can we break the water supply system under certain in-stream flow rules, et cetera. That's great. Sean, before you go on this, let me make one other comment. So some of you have seen one of Gary's results that talks about the historic condition and these three scenarios in terms of the size of the water supply gap under the 3.2 billion gallon forecast and the 2.6 billion gallon forecast. And I got this question in May when I was sort of talking to the council about some of this work in a very less detailed way than this, but those numbers that come out of the sizing of the size of the gap, they're not all the same but they're in the same range. And so one thing you might say is even though they do have a different effect on the way the system performs, maybe the range that we're seeing in terms of what the maximum effect could be at least in looking at these three different things is kind of in the same ballpark. That's what I would say. You're using precipitation departure as your abscissa. We're using stream flow really as a source of water. Would we see a different pattern if you've showed us stream capacity stream flow? Does precipitation go directly into stream flow? Absolutely, yeah. So we go back to this slide here, just draw your attention right here. Stream flows on the left, precipitation is the main input to calculate stream flow. I mean, I was thinking with recharge and base flow, there'd be a buffering that might without some of your variability. That's right. But in general, if the projection is dry and warm, you can expect less stream flow due to less precipitation but also higher air temperatures because we lose more water to evapotranspiration. The, I'll just make a point that the fifth simulation we will probably complete is gonna be the mirror image of this one. So it's gonna have a lot of variability but it's gonna be warmer and the conditions will likely be more severe. So to wrap this part of it up just to make the connection with Gary Fisk's work, we take projections, we run them through the water balance model, we run them through the hydrology model to partition flows and then I give that data to Gary and Gary analyzes it within confluence and then from confluence we get the water supply conditions projected. So all three projections, if I read this correctly, presume precipitation departure of about half where we are today. Yes, that's correct on the dry side. Yep. Our air temperature may vary but either way we look at it and the fourth model that you did is somewhat similar. So the fourth model, very good question. Fourth model, we harnessed the historical observed record and basically asked the question if 1976, 77 occurred under warmer air temperatures, what might the effect have been? So basically we took the historical record and we added one step degree centigrade increases in air temperature up through five degrees and then we evaluated the effect to the water supply system. And what did that do to precipitation departure? That's a good, I have not plotted it in this space yet so I can't tell you but I can tell you the five degree C case is quite severe. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The precip record doesn't change. All we're changing is air temperature. So basically, but the effect is not straightforward. You'll see a plot of it shortly but I haven't produced it yet. But we held precip constant. We wanted to specifically look at the effect of air temperature in the model. Just in terms of trying to figure out how crazy we're gonna be at the end of all this. On the confluence modeling, so this may be above your pay grade and maybe Rosemary asked me. Are we working just with the system as it exists or are we also playing with confluence to accommodate some of the alternatives we're imagining to improve our system reliability at this time? Yeah, no, confluence has additional, whether it's some water rights changes that we've been talking about. We've been modeling that. We're certainly modeling the virtual reservoirs for the, you know, some form of storage. So yeah. Good, so in summary, temperatures are gonna increase and precipitation is gonna become more variable within and between years. Our analysis and our modeling strategy produces what we believe are a range of plausible future conditions and those conditions are consistent with what the expectations are from climate science as it stands today. Each projected condition stresses the water supply and habitat conditions beyond that which was observed in the historical observational record. And we believe our analysis and our modeling strategy does provide a solid basis to make informed decisions about how we move forward and envisioning a more reliable water supply system. And one that is more protective of in-stream flows for steelhead and coho. That's very, very important to recognize. You mentioned that Santa Cruz is somewhat out front in terms of what we're looking at, the way we're looking at or the degree to which we're looking at it. Can you give a sense for other areas in California where they're also trying to other coastal areas in California where they're also trying to look at, look at this question from similar perspectives? I know of some of the work going on in the Carmel Basin. That strategy is different. They've employed the support of the USGS there and they have a watershed scale model that links hydrology, groundwater, and climate projections. That's a much more involved way to go about things and it's not better or not worse than what we're doing here. What I can tell you is we're more nimble. We're able to evaluate a greater number of conditions because we can implement our models quite fast. It obviously takes time to implement three different basin scale models if you want to evaluate a different scenario. I have worked with large water purveyors in the Central Valley and the strategy we use there was tailored to the portfolio of those purveyors and the kind of information we had available but I used a similar approach in those cases to help highlight what I thought were the vulnerabilities of those systems. In those cases, it was more of let's take a look and then we're gonna take a step back because we don't know how to step forward type of thing. We're Santa Cruz, you're charging ahead and I applaud that. Thank you. It just helps to have that kind of context. And I believe Bob can probably speak to that as well. So I was working with Georgina King and the Mid County Groundwater Basin on the surface water component of the GSP there and we really got hung up for a while on how fog could be impacting the basin there. There's a lot of unknowns. It seems like it's not something that the models are currently really taking into account and we had so many different lines of thinking. We were reading different reports. Some said that it could be that fog might be a bigger part of the water cycle than we might be acknowledging because of the sponging effect that the soils under the redwoods have to capture the fog drip. And then also as the inland areas are heating up, that brings in more fog on hot days. That's our coldest days sometimes. So is any of that something that you've been working toward? Yeah. Yeah, so you're absolutely correct. None of the global or downscaled simulations deal with fog because don't know how to deal with it yet. Just like climate centers that produce and employ these models and develop them are just now really starting to look at how large volcanic eruptions affect global climate. So there is a disconnect between some regional issues that are quite important to us here and yet fog is not accounted for. We need to get some PhD students on it, I think. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Another question, I don't know if this is something you've been looking into, but in terms of fish survivability, there's an upper temperature limit to the water that makes the habitat kind of unusable for fish in different life cycles. Are you looking at the impact of air temperature on water temperature in this work? I am not, no. But what we can gather is if the minimum air temperature is getting warmer and the average is also slightly increasing, there's only a matter of time before the average water temperature increases. And then, of course, if it's hotter in the summer, the stream flows will be warmer. Right, right. And if there's less fog, it'll be warmer. Maybe there will be more fog. Maybe there will be more fog. And I guess my last question, just a little bit more about the impact of drought of high temperatures and evapotranspiration on a drought impacted stream flow. We saw a presentation in the Santa Margarita Basin by Bruce Daniels about kind of the compounding impacts of drought and evapotranspiration and high temperatures. Do you get into, I didn't see it in the packet, but maybe elsewhere, really looking at how that worst case scenario on flow with all of those? It's a great question. It's exactly why we just completed the fourth simulations, which is hold precip steady. Now let's change air temperature. How responsive are stream flows to this change in air temperature? And what I can tell you is that they're quite responsive. And the reason is, is because it's not a linear problem. It becomes non-linear. And so things start to escalate quite rapidly once air temperature gets greater than two degrees C. That's about what he was saying his studies had shown too. All right, that was all I had. Thank you. You're welcome. Speaker. Thank you. I thought I'd do it all at once. Thank you. The only other comment I wanted to make was Sean mentioned that we're now looking at kind of climate scenario four and five. One of the issues that we're grappling with is the groundwater model in particular is only set up to look at scenarios one and three. And it's a bit of a complex effort to build a model around all of these climate scenarios. So you'll start to, you'll read about it in your quarterly report that you'll receive next month. But it's a topic that is going to be ongoing conversation of how do we reconcile the work that's being done, that Sean's doing, the work that Gary's doing, and the work that the groundwater models are doing, both in the Mid County, but also in the Santa Marta area. Good evening. Sean will be here. And I wanted to try to get through the material and then get the questions all at once. Because it may be that they'll be answered in some of what Bob has to say. I think Sean pointed to some of that. We're going to handle public comment as one item on item five. Thanks. Good evening. I'm Bob Rauscher. I'm an economist by training. I've worked in the water sector for four decades now. And had the privilege of working with several of you as part of the WESAC process as the technical support for that committee. It's great to be back here in Santa Cruz and getting back up to speed on all the challenges you face. So we've been really privileged to work with Sean and Gary as well. And also Joel Smith has contributed his insights on adaptation. So I'm going to lead you through a little bit about how we take the information, the kind of information that Sean generates, and how we think about it in terms of planning under great uncertainty with climate change. So I'm going to do a little bit, well, lead you through one of the challenges of dealing with long-term planning under highly uncertain climate futures and thinking about how we can use the information that we're most comfortable with, things that we think we already know. And part of that will lead to thinking of things from a top-down perspective, which is a lot of what Sean just covered, but also some bottom-up approaches and something we'll explore more of. And results that we've generated to date, including some of the work that Sean alluded to with the fourth kind of climate scenario. And then next steps and time for questions. Are you OK with us asking questions? Oh, absolutely, yeah. So we all understand that climate has a significant impact on hydrology and therefore water supply. So that's a given. We also know that if we're looking to enhance our water supplies through any variety of options, that there's several important factors. They tend to be expensive. They tend to be disruptive in terms of construction and environment and institutional challenges, permits, and all that. And they take a long time to go from the general idea to actually having a completed project that's producing water. So these are real challenges. And then you end up with infrastructure and other assets that are long-lived and things that you can't go back with. You're kind of stuck with. So you're really kind of stuck with this balance. How do we plan for a future that's uncertain when any decision we make is going to probably be a very expensive one? We really need to make the right decision. And if you make the wrong decision, there's going to be high costs. So it's a high stakes decision under uncertainty because the consequences of erring on either side in the wrong way has huge implications. You're either under-prepared and therefore have severe shortages that the community has to suffer through or you're over-prepared. And you have a lot of costly stranded assets. So that's the challenge. How do you plan and act prudently under that situation? And it's like the old magician trying to pull the rabbit out of the hat. It's quite a challenge. So I'm going to talk about a couple of different things related to ways of addressing this challenge. One is to use adaptive management. I think you may have seen some materials on this in the past. Adaptive management was also part of what happened in the WISAC process. Talked about taking steps but have alternative pathways and knowing when you can switch from one to another. Trying to keep your options open and being flexible as more information becomes apparent, you can then adjust where you're heading. And that means spending a lot of well-focused effort on tracking the things that are going to be important to your decision-making. What might make you switch? And you need to be able to prepare to act with sufficient lead time because all these projects take a long time to implement. So you can think about the cone of uncertainty. Some people automatically think of Maxwell Smart and the cone of silence. But the cone of uncertainty, we start in the present and we're looking out into the future and the further out we go, the broader the spectrum of future possibilities, multiple futures. And you can think about all these colored dots as being different scenarios. And for your water supply implications, the red future may be very different than the blue or the orange one. So how do you plan for all these possible scenarios? And one of the things that we know is that over time, we hope that the uncertainty gets reduced. So here we have the cone of uncertainty. If we're starting in 2015, we're looking out 20 years. We have this broader area of uncertainty. Well, as we approach 2020, hopefully some of these uncertainties have been resolved or narrowed, though we're still looking at a broader uncertainty again as we look out beyond to 2040 and later. And there has been a lot that's been learned since 2015. And when we were in the WISAC process, we weren't sure what the HCP would look like. So we had a couple of different scenarios. Now we have a go to handle on what that looks like and there's a list of other things. You've learned a lot more about ASR and how that might pan out. You have a plan to upgrade the Graham Hill Treatment Plant. All that information now gives you more information to work with as you look into the future. The other aspect of how to plan under all this uncertainty is to use scenarios, develop scenarios that make sense. But we're dealing again with a lot of uncertainty and look at how your system performs under those different scenarios. And that's kind of this stress test concept of where does your system really break down and then looking at how different adaptation options perform under those conditions. So again, looking at the cone of uncertainty, you look at some adaptation options. Maybe one might be represented by this green cone where it covers a broader range of these future outcomes here. And maybe that's the ASR program and it covers a broad range of things and maybe there's a recycle or another option that covers a smaller range or could be the other way around. The idea is that the options that cover more of your future scenarios are the more robust options but you might find that those more robust options are also a lot more expensive. So again, there's a lot to think about. When we think about looking at the climate change and developing scenarios, there's two basic approaches, top down and bottom up. But what Sean talked about is mostly top down. We start with a real high level, what are the climate change projections and working your way down through a series of models to what does this mean for our water system? Oh, at the bottom up, you kind of flip that over. You start with what you know best, your water system and how that functions and where it runs into trouble. And then you can work backwards and say, well, what are the climate conditions that would break the system and do we see those future climates as being amongst the plausible set that we have to look at? And they're both useful approaches. I think they complement each other. So the top down and this is, Sean kind of led you through this. You start with a selection of one or more global climate change models. You take those results in terms of temperature and precipitation patterns. You downscale them to your smaller region. You plug them into your local hydrology model and then from there into your water system model confluence and you get a set of results. With bottom up, you start with what you know best. With the top down, while it's really useful, you're starting with the most uncertain aspect, the big climate models and the emission scenarios, everything you build into that, then you have to go through downscaling. You add another layer of uncertainty, then you run it through all your models. So this way you start with, we know our system pretty well. We know what would break it and you stress test it. What precip and temp patterns would really throw you into a problem situation. And what we can do now is, we can run the confluence model with Gary, with the current system operating guidelines and the HCP and so on and look at what causes it to fail. And then we look at the climate projections and see whether those conditions that really stress the system are amongst the plausible set. So and for that you can look at historical climate as it is or with plausible changes and we'll talk about that in a moment. You can use the projected simulations which is what Sean has been doing. And from the bottom up, it also helps put these risks in the context of the other risks that the system faces. This is a pretty dense slide and I won't lead you through all the details but just encapsulates a little bit of looking at things from the bottom up or the top down. So from the top down, you start with the climate changes which are the boxes with a little curved corners and here are some of the things that we see with climate change and then the squared off white boxes are the impacts of those climate changes and then the green boxes are the implications for the water system. And in this case, we're looking at if we're tracking down from the top, what does the warmer and dry summers mean and there's a range of impacts and you might need new supply, you may need to alter treatment and for your system, it's actually both of these things. And if you start from the bottom up, you can think about what is it that would cause us to have to look at enhancing our supply or enhancing treatment and work your way back up and say, yeah, that looks like a plausible set of outcomes from the climate. So developing data-driven climate scenarios, these are all, they're not just pulled out of the hat, these are data-driven projections. As Sean talked about, carefully selecting the right GCMs and emissions scenarios, generating the precip and temp patterns that come out of that, downscaling to your local hydrology and your water system. So that's what's been going on and John's great presentation covered. And the other thing that we'll talk about here some more is reapplying or adjusting the observed climate information. So as Sean mentioned, you have a really long period of climate data that's from your instrumental period from the 1880s up until now and we can work with that with an informed change like making it warmer. And see how that plays through, you leave everything else the same, you just make it warmer. And there's also information that we don't dwell on but we've looked at the paleo climate, that's where you look to things like tree rings and other signals from the environment and you can look back through past centuries and have found some really extended drought periods in the American West. So we like to work with what we know and understand and have some confidence in. So we do know from the work that's been done and the experience here in Santa Cruz that two successive years of severe drought severely stressed the system. And so we did a repeat of 76, 77, the same exact temperature and temperature patterns, and included kind of current range of demands and added in the HCP flow requirements. You know, Gary's work with Confluent shows that you get peak season shortages of around 49% with the higher demand figure, a little bit less with the 2.6. So you already know that if 76, 77 were to repeat itself as a weather pattern, you'd see a shortfall of about 50% over that two year period. We also know that temperature is already increasing. That's already evident and we expect that to increase. So we have a really high degree of confidence in temperature increase and how that plays through the system in important ways through evapotranspiration and so forth. So we were able to rerun 76, 77 with different temperature increases. Oops, this is an old version of this, that's okay. So ignore the yellow part. So what we have here is just a look at what's available in terms of projections of temperature increases. This is from a 39 model ensemble from CMIF-5. And you can see a couple of things here where you can see that there's a fairly large projected increase in temperature by 2060. One of the other things to notice is that the lighter colored bars are for a lower emission scenario and the green bars, the darker green bars are for a higher emission scenario. So you can just get a sense of how much of a basic assumption in these models like emission levels can impact the results. You've seen versions of this from Sean. The reason I put this up here is that this is for year 1977. And I think what's kind of telling about this is first of all, 77 wasn't the driest year that you've experienced. There have been drier years. One of the reasons though why this was so hard on your system was that 76 was also really dry. So it's really this notion that you get back to back critically dry years, that's what really breaks down the system. And if you look for 2014, we're restarting to get into that whole sequence of years and Sean had this highlighted very nicely in his presentation. Now we're starting to get way outside of what we'd seen before. If you remember, I think 2015 is here. 2016 is about in here. And so those were really extremely dry, drier than the more intense drought periods than had really been experienced in the instrumental record before. So even apparently worse than 76, 77. Some of that may have been stimulated by the fact that temperatures are increasing. So moving on with this concept of tapping what we already know with some confidence. The temperature increase accelerates the hydrologic cycle. It makes the droughts more impactful. And water years 2014 through 2016, we're really severe water years. The data that we can use in the confidence model only go through 2015 currently. So we really can't even look at how big the impact would be with HCP and so on for these recent years. But we certainly would expect it to be really stressful on the system. We do know, well, and we know that, well, we don't know if it's certainty, but the climate science indicates, and we're already seeing it, one of Sean's other great slides was that box with the different colored dots that showed how in that drought period from 2014 through 2016, how few months there were that had a significant precipitation more than half an inch. So we expect from the climate science that we'll see more of that. More of these wet season can be really intense, can be pretty wet, but it'll be in a more condensed period. So that has some implications as well. And we do expect to see more extremes, far fewer normal years. I think that's already becoming evident and a lot of whiplash between the extremes. We know from looking at the paleo climate that droughts can be quite extensive. Long duration droughts, some decades long have occurred in the 14th and 17th century. The climate change models and the projections show, again, there's consensus on this continued warming. There are varied results on the annual average precipitation, but there's likely to be hotter, drier years and more of them. I'd like any more intense and shorter wet season and large variation between the wet and dry years. I think the version that you have printed at your desks is different than what's being shown. I'm hoping we can just go off what's in front of you. It's a little bit more informative in terms of the work that Gary. Oh yeah, that's right. Those aren't being here with us. We can try and find it or we can just go off what's in front of you. What do you think is correct? Right. Well, this is the... Absolutely. Yes, I'm gonna ask him to just carry on with what's in front of us. Okay, the paper version. Yeah, I'll have that. That's getting the paper. That's right, yeah. So apologies to those of you out there. You won't be able to follow as well. I've printed copies out here. There's one over there. Okay, good. Page 20, right? No, 21. Or well. Yes, you're gonna need to call out page number starting at 20. All right. So yeah, slide 21 is... Let's see, am I in the right spot? Hold on. The number is different. In our packet, it's 20. Yeah, page 20. I'm sorry. So let's see. Inside's clean to date. Yes. So this is slide 20. So we know that the system is vulnerable to severe droughts. So the first part of what's up there is right. It's already evident in the instrumental record and the science anticipates that we're gonna see more of that. And that higher temperatures increase the gap. And so in the printed versions, we have some results that come from Gary Fisk's doing the climate modeling, or not the climate modeling, the confluence modeling. And so it shows for, you know, if we were gonna repeat 76 and 77 with the HCP and so on, in the base case, the two-year total shortage is 49%. So we've shown that figure before. So that's our base case, 76, 77, everything the same, just adding HCP, current operating rules, and about the same temperature and precip. If we do that all the same, but just increase temperature by one degree centigrade, that shortfall over the two-year period goes up to 57%. And then so on with the two-degree change. This is against the three-two demand? I talk to the man on the street or the woman on the street. I talk about how a two-year drought can break our system. We made it through the two-year drought, we're way out of it as we did in the past. Well, yeah, you know, that's a good question and one that I would expect people would ask. And how do you answer that? Well, I think a couple of things. One is now we have to live in the future with the HCP. So that will have an impact, and I think that's a lot of what we're seeing here. So if we're doing those same droughts, we'll be doing it? Well, yeah, the droughts will have more serious implications for water supply. You know, the other aspect of that is can we conserve our way out? And you know, my understanding is, you know, the city of Santa Cruz is a real leader in terms of water use efficiency and really scaling back on demand. You know, it's a leader in the state and in the nation in terms of really the low per capita water consumption. So there's very little left in terms of what you can trim under a drought scenario, really down to a lot of the course. Down to the bone in water use. All right, so anyway, so again, the just increasing temperature, but not having anything else change when you factor in the HCP, it really begins to make a big difference. So then slide 21 is the, and I'll see if this tracks at all. That isn't here, that's weird. Okay. There it is. All right, maybe we are doing better than I thought. All right, so yeah, this is a place where it deviates a bit as well. So potential climate change impacts from ASR, you know, the scale of the drought year shortfalls implies that you'll need some larger ASR and you've seen that from Gary's results that he's shown here previously, I think in April and in this packet is pretty much the, you know, some of the next couple of pages or tables that come from Gary's presentation. Yeah. Can you talk about larger ASR? That mean more wells or could it mean having a supplemental supply that we could pump in year round? Well, I think either of both. I think, I mean, what Gary has looked at and in the tables that are in the updated version are, you know, what the well capacities would have to be or how many wells you would need. Well capacities assuming that you're alive. Yes, that's correct. Well capacities might be different if you were gonna use recycled. That's true, yes. Well that's right and that speaks to the question you raised earlier in the session about needing to integrate the recycled water thinking into the ASR thinking. So yeah, so again, apologies for having two different versions here, but the updates, there's slide 22 though, this slide isn't numbered, is the updates on the gap and again this is work that Gary showed and it shows that with the historical record, year one and year two being basically 76, 77, you end up with 1,869 million gallon shortage in the peak and that's that 49% that we talked about earlier and you can see how those numbers increase as you look at the climate change projections. And if you then move on to the next slide which is 23 again, it's unnumbered. It's the ASR infrastructure required, again this comes from Gary's presentation that he made here in April, but you can see that you would need to change the number of ASR wells or injection or extraction or both depending on the climate scenario that you have. And we haven't run these through yet with the repeating history, but with temperature increases. So. The other thing we haven't done is I think the data that's in front of you is Gary's output, so in other words, to fill the gap based on that climate scenario, what is the well, the injection and extraction capacity required? The next step, and we've only done a portion of this is running it through the groundwater model to understand what is the geographic distribution of those groundwater wells to make a successful project. So it's during that effort that we would model wells that are either ASR and or recycled water wells to understand, can the mid-county take all of this injection, extraction, or does it have to be distributed between the two basins? And that's, we're still working on those groundwater modeling scenarios. That includes sensitivity, exacerbated sea water intrusion. And it includes that. And it includes the Pure Water SoCal project as well. Right. So moving on to slide 24, which is essentially the bottom part of what's on the screen. But before you do that. Oh, yeah. We'll go back for a second, and why under the catalog climate change? My understanding there, and this is what I've heard from Gary and others, is that it was an infeasibly large project that would be needed. I don't know what that technically means. Because the precip was concentrated in that larger scenario in a single month. So arguably, you could only have enough water to actually operate an upper storage and recovery project during like one month of the winter season, as opposed to. That would broke the ASR system. Yep. Exactly. The catalog climate did. Because he wasn't able to protect any number of wells of the capacity to work. Because the quantity of water you're getting was in such a narrow time frame. Yeah. It just couldn't be done. Yeah. And that speaks to the bullet that's up here. And if you're looking on 24, the printed version or the second major bullet here, is shorter, more intense wet seasons are quite plausible. And that would limit your ability to capture, treat, and get water into your ASR program. We're already seeing that, which is why we want to do the improvement. Well, yes. But also, in order to make an ASR project work, we would like to be able to take more of the water that is available there. And whether the pre-sip season is shorter or longer, some of that water will have less high quality than what we can currently take into view. Can you recover the water? Yeah. Yeah. And then through all that, it can take a longer time to build up the desired storage levels. I know that originally there was talk of three years, and now there's a look at a seven year fill period. So those are all things that take into consideration with ASR. Given what's plausible and what we're already beginning to see in terms of climate patterns, it'll be more challenging, or there's a likelihood of it being more challenging to get the water you need for ASR. We're also talking about not just what's plausible, but what's feasible, requiring sites. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, and then sea level rise and saltwater intrusion, those are challenges. Oh, just by the way. You're already familiar with those, but those are. Actually, I do have a question about that, sea water intrusion and sea levels pertaining to the wastewater treatment plant. Maybe it's a question for staff. Are they looking at that? And they must be looking at it. How are they looking at it? I'd ask that question to Tiffany. Tiffany. Sorry, tell me the question again. What's the wastewater treatment plant? The Santa Cruz Wastewater Treatment Plant and how they are viewing sea water intrusion. Excuse me, not intrusion. Sea level rise. Sea level rise, yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to be showing you a map in my presentation that shows the spatial and temporal extent of what we're expecting in terms of coastal climate hazards related to sea level rise. And under some of the more extreme conditions, the wastewater treatment plant could be vulnerable. But we do have a number of strategies called out in our adaptation plan specific to the wastewater treatment plant, things like building a cutoff wall, sealing internal pipe galleries, and so forth, that they're already undertaking. I don't know that they have done a hyper detailed assessment, but it is something that we've talked about as a potential next step. So 25 in the handout, which is pretty much this without the yellow questioning. So what approaches support a reliable and resilient system adding storage is always a key thing under supply uncertainty. And while surface water storage is really a very constrained option or infeasible option in this area, we're all well aware that using your aquifer systems in the region for storage is an important option and a good way to get storage and solve other problems at the same time. So that's a step in the right direction for sure. The other strategy that's typically used is diversifying your portfolio just as you would with your retirement account. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. And so taking advantage of climate insensitive or less sensitive supply options, whether that's reuse or desal, in other communities, they can look more at conservation and water use efficiencies. But in Santa Cruz, there are limited opportunities to squeeze a lot more out of that option. And diversifying really helps from having all your eggs in the basket of the San Lorenzo River. Let's see how we track here. Before I get into this, what's on here, I guess we'll come back to that. So the slide 26 and the handout, what can be done? And this is really thinking about what we can do in a constructive way. And because of the uncertainty and the time it takes to implement various options, trying to get ahead of the curve in terms of getting projects implemented, I think that's really important. So what are the institutional hurdles that you face? Whether it's land acquisition, getting rights of way, getting EIRs done, all those sorts of things, those are steps that could be pursued in the near term before you invest in actually building large infrastructure projects. But you might be able to, I don't know what the typical timelines here are for you to go through all that process with state and local requirements. But maybe you can lop off three years, four years, or however many years, so that you can respond more quickly if and when it really becomes apparent that you need to make that investment, whether it's in reuse or something else. So that's a critical thing. Figuring out what steps you can take now that are fairly low regrets or no regrets and can really speed up your response time in the future. The second part of that is trying to figure out what triggers are out there. When you know you've reached that point. And that's really tricky because we're dealing with such uncertainty. It's hard to know what to really watch for and know that that's a clear signal. We're just about to enter a water year 2020. If 2020 starts off and looks really dry, do you think, oh, this is the beginning of a three years of your drought? Or maybe it's just the water year 2020 is starting off dry and it'll end up being wet. And so it's a classic water supply planning problem. You're getting signals from the weather and you don't know whether that's really a signal about the climate. And so that's one of the reasons you want to go back and say, well, we're not going to get clear signals with a lot of advanced warning. We need to be able to accelerate our ability to move quickly, even when the need arises. Translating that into English. Does that mean that when our models are telling us that we can't hold it? You certainly need to consider what your options are and how to pursue them. And diversification is always a good strategy. Certainly worth a serious consideration. And not just because of what the models might show us in the future, but it's already arguing that. Both of your presentations have included diversification. Yeah. And I think the common theme we're seeing here, too, and Sean brought this out pretty clearly, is we can look at what the climate scientists tell us and what the projections are, but we're already seeing telltale signs. We're seeing events that conform with what the climate science anticipates. So it already is becoming pretty evident that we're on that path, to think that way. And we focused this discussion on the quantity of water and the availability to meet your demands in a reliable fashion. But there are other risks that come along with climate change that we really haven't touched on, but fold into this. All the water quality impacts, higher temperatures, spawn increase disinfection byproduct formation, and that's already a challenge in the system. Increased runoff from when you do get rain, it tends to be more intense, and that carries all sorts of things, nutrients, sediment, and so on. And turbidity treatment levels, one of the real benefits of upgrading your treatment plant is be able to handle a broader range of source water quality concerns. And you know, algal blooms, I don't know what the history or the prospects are here for Loch Lomond, but certainly cyanotoxins, harmful algal blooms, are becoming an increasing issue all across the country. And with more nutrients and things running into the reservoir from the intense precipitation events, that's an elevated risk. Wildfire, wildfire is all is a concern, and climate change is only making that worse. There are significant challenges that come up with wildfire in or near your watershed. Where I live in along the front range of the Colorado Rockies, we have seen that in spades, in Denver water, and in Colorado Springs and elsewhere, where they've suffered huge fires in their watersheds. Huge immediate impacts on water quality that were a real challenge. And then after the next big precipitation event, huge sediment issues, a reservoir that basically got totally filled in for Denver water, debris, all sorts of issues that come up. So this is something that, unfortunately, needs to be kept in mind. Sea level rise and the issues that that raises as well, and the coastal fog issue, and it's another one that is a big question mark, but it's a really critical part of how the hydrology works in this region. What's my job? No, speaking of your job, no. Okay, what comes after that section? That's it. You asked, no. What I'm curious about is, we haven't visited in a while, but do we have a plan B for wildfire and what we do? We do have some work on wildfire, and we certainly are talking more about it as everyone is after the, not so much this year, but the last couple of years have been really, really crazy wild for wildfire. Is our emergency prepared to plan something that's gonna come to us in the, hopefully not too far future? Is Toby nodding his head? I'm not. I'm not actually because that's a series. But if you wanna know, we can talk more about specifically about wildfire. Okay. I add one thing to this. So as Rosemary said, this is a huge topic on the local and the state level, it's being discussed. And there is a lot of funding coming down the pike to address just this kind of thing. So I think we'll all be on the lookout for that so that we can address this in a more detailed way and more coordinated across departments. Is I think it's something that the commission and certainly the public would like to know is happening. Yeah. So my last slide here is next steps. So continuing to sort through the plausible climate scenarios. So Sean talked about three. I've introduced you to the fourth one. And looking across those different scenarios at what their impacts are. And assessing the adaptation options or the combination of options and seeing how they perform. We're also in the process of engaging Dr. Casey Brown who is an academic from the University of Massachusetts who's very active in water supply planning under climate change using a decision scaling approach. It's this bottom up notion. He's currently working many places but currently with SFPUC kind of up the road. So we'll try to get his insights to pile on top of what we're coming up with and identifying the key adaptive management strategy. Can we define key tipping points and pathways forward? That's gonna be a real challenge because of all the uncertainty. And I think more fruitful is identifying no and low regrets options that you can keep your options open and expedite your ability to move quickly when you need to. And then looking at the timing and scale of ASR and how that dovetails say with reuse and these different scenarios. We're gonna talk about that. That's part of what's on this. Hold that thought. Number six. All right. So. Any other questions from the commission for Bob? Okay. Thank you. Next up. Next Bob. Oh, we should take a break. Like I said, we're gonna do that once for the item. I was gonna poll the commission to see if there's a good time for a quick bio break. Okay. Five. It always turns into time. Yeah. Now, Tiffany will start at nine oh nine. One after nine oh nine. So we're gonna reconvene. So you had a Beatles song? Yeah. We're meeting the stay lights out of that one. You're on. Okay. Are we ready? Yes, ma'am. All right. Very good. Just to reintroduce myself commissioners, I'm Tiffany Weisbless. I'm the city's sustainability and climate action manager and I work out of the city manager's office. A little background on me. I am a licensed civil engineer and I actually worked for the water department early in my career about 16 years ago. And now obviously work in the climate and sustainability space after getting my graduate degree at UC Santa Cruz. So at the city, this is the 10th year, the climate action program. And I work 75% on climate action. So missions mitigation and climate adaptation, how we deal with the impacts of sea level rise. And I also work for public works 25% time doing flood control work, which has been enormously helpful. And I'm gonna mention some collaboration that we're hoping to do when we find some funding with the water department with respect to marrying the water supply modeling that Sean has done with flood control and potential future flood mapping. Okay, so I'm just gonna talk about our coastal hazards. And I have to admit a lot of what I'm going to say is rather high level and some of it's already been mentioned. So I'll just really gloss over that. I'm gonna talk about, again, from a high level, the city's adaptation work to date, water system vulnerabilities, many of which have been mentioned already, most, I think. And then water related adaptation measures that are called out in our climate adaptation plan. And I'm gonna also talk a little bit about what's up next. And I always like to use this slide because or these definitions because I think you guys are pretty savvy on this, but climate adaptation, what does that mean? The actions that we'll take preparing for and responding to climate change impacts. So again, this is just reiterating what you already know, the first two in terms of drought and greater frequency and intensity of storms really gets to that variability piece that Sean and Bob both talked about. That's obviously placing increased pressure on water supply as well as infrastructure, particularly in landside zones or other areas where erosion, where we're very prone to erosion. As well as potential flooding of some of our water infrastructure assets. Of course, we're concerned about saltwater intrusion, which has already been mentioned. Fortunately, that's not a problem here yet. And then of course related to large degree to that increase in temperature, to changes in the availability and the quality of water. We will also have impacts to coastal habitat where we might lose habitat or it may shift and we may have breaks and connectivity in order for both terrestrial and marine animals to make that shift. And I should say not just animals, but both flora and fauna. Also, one thing that Bob brought up at the end that I think is really important to mention is that we do need to be thinking about these climate hazards or these natural hazards in a really connected kind of way. And the classic example that's being used in my field right now is what happened in Santa Barbara County last year where we had a protracting drought that was followed by a huge fire that was followed by 100 year storm right in the same area on a known landslide zone. Combination of four factors that made this really devastating disaster. And so we are starting to shift our thinking into this multi hazard kind of way which we had not done previously. And I have to say we are so pleased that the water department is really leading the way on a lot of this adaptation work. As Sean had mentioned, there are not a lot of other agencies that are doing this kind of work. So this is really fantastic. Okay, so what have we done to date? In 2011, we contracted with Dr. Gary Griggs and Brent Haddad of UC Santa Cruz to complete our first vulnerability assessment. We were starting to characterize the frequency and magnitude of changes that we were expecting. That was packaged into our climate adaptation plan that was adopted in 2012 with our local hazard mitigation plan. And as you may or may not know, having a FEMA certified local hazard mitigation plan makes us eligible for certain classifications or types of pre and post disaster funding. So it really is in our best interest to do the LHMP and to integrate adaptation. And in fact, SB 379 that passed a couple of years ago requires climate adaptation to be included in the LHMP. So we did so back in 2012. And in our update, we just completed more recently, which I'll talk about shortly. So, we adopted this first plan in 2012. It was actually one of the first adaptation plans in the state. My predecessor, Ross Clark, really kind of led the way in trying to keep this going and keep this a working document. When I took this position in 2016, about three years ago, we realized science had changed. There were more updated models available for us to characterize risk, new information, and it was time to update the LHMP. So we knew, okay, it's time to start on this new plan. And we completed two things that were unique to this plan that we completed and adopted just last year. We conducted a sea level rise vulnerability assessment, as well as a social vulnerability to climate change analysis. And let me show you what the sea level rise assessment looks like. So as you can see, there's a lot of blue in the beach flats area, lower ocean area, over at Neary Lagoon. And what you're looking at here are the combined effects of climate change and coastal hazard. So we're talking about erosion, coastal storm flooding, and rising tides. We also have these maps and these data separated by hazard. And they're really, in terms of the colors, the grades of blue, when you see something that's a darker blue, that's closer to now, our baseline year was 2010, and the lighter the color is projected further out. Where we use the first generation of models that projected by 2100, we could have up to 5.2 feet of sea level rise. However, we now know that perhaps the emissions trajectory is a little steeper than we thought, a lot steeper than we thought. And we may even face up to 10 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. So again, what you're looking at here are the combined effects. Not a lot of big surprises here. We have a good understanding of what's gonna happen. We have a lot more flooding down in the beach flats, the lower ocean area, and again over near Neary Lagoon, increased erosion along the coastline, pushing back at natural bridges, at Bethany curve, and over at the harbor. And we were able to, through this assessment, overlay some of our infrastructure and other assets. And from that, we determined that right now there's a half mile of water mains that are exposed and vulnerable. And by the end of the century, there could be 16 miles by the end of the century. Yes, sure. Sure, before I answer that question, I should have said two other things about this slide. First of all, this does not include fluvial. So climate influence precipitation. So that's the next step that we wanna look at with Sean. So here, we're actually underestimating most likely potential flooding. The second thing I wanna mention is that this map assumes that by 2060, coastal protection structures such as seawalls and the pumps that pump out the lower ocean area and the beach flats, that they will fail. So this, what you're looking at is a worst case scenario. So I wanted to mention that. In terms of the intake, I mean, you guys are gonna have to help me with that. It's above the highway one. It's above highway one. So that's something that we, I have not looked at. I know the water department is thinking about that. And I think this work that we will be doing with Sean will help us, I think, to look a little more closely at that. Because what we intend to do is then look at that climate influence precipitation. What kind of protection do we have from our existing levees? And how, under what conditions will we experience additional flooding that would contribute here? Right, no, no. There are some issues about estuarial influences, perhaps further up the river than we currently see. I think if you look at the sort of little shaded gray dots, kind of above highway one by River Street, you can see, I think that sort of little square one that's up above. Like right here? That one, yeah. No, yeah, yeah. Other side, there you go. Right there. Yeah, right up there. That's where the river intake is. But we are looking at the question of estuarial influences and king tides and what have you that would affect the quality of the water at the intake there on the San Lorenzo. And as a side note, the public works department is installing somewhat of a culvert structure at the river mouth at the lagoon to help to improve our management up of the depth of that lagoon, both for fish habitat and to prevent some of that flooding that happens. We know that when that lagoon gets to five feet in depth, we start to see seepage under the levy. Yeah, so that's a funded project that will be under construction next summer. Yes, please. Yeah, on your bullet point, you had that there was a social vulnerability to climate change analysis done in 2017. What is that? Yes, so I don't have a slide on that, but I can certainly follow up with some images. We did a GIS analysis where we built a social vulnerability score based on incidents of poverty, elderly folks, crime, English not spoken as a first language and disability. We built that score by census block group and then ranked those blocks according to the score relative to one another, which gave us an idea of where are the areas that are most socially vulnerable and what are the drivers of that vulnerability? We then overlay things like the climate hazard zones in this case sea level rise. We also have wildfire hazard zones to understand where do they coincide and how can we better tailor our strategies to deal with that. And I can give you one example or a couple of examples if you'd like. So we know down in the beach flat area, no big surprise again that there are a lot of people that don't speak English as their first language. There is a high incidence of poverty. So we know that anything that goes out in terms of flood insurance, even emergency flooding notification, it all has to go out in Spanish. Another example is that we have seen high social vulnerability because of a lot of elderly folks actually living up in the sea bright area. Well, we know those folks have mobility issues that areas right next to an open space, if there was a fire or some other disaster or natural hazard, we know that our emergency responders, they need to get there first because these folks have mobility issues. We have just scratched the surface on how we can utilize this, but we are taking off from this work in a couple of projects I'll mention later on that comprise our resilient coast initiative we have going on right now where we're really looking at how not only coastal change, but any adaptations that we propose affect vulnerable people or maybe more correctly underrepresented or frontline communities in terms of their livelihoods, where they live, where they play, where they worship, as well as free access to the coast. So we're kind of taking the next step in these projects in terms of the social vulnerability piece. Does that answer your question? Does that mean like you're finding out if tenants get flood insurance and are you helping make that available to them and are there things to help them financially afford that programs like that? Well, we are a part of the National Flood Insurance program and because we do have a levy system, we do have reduced rates for insurance. Yeah, but I think that's for property owners. I'm wondering if it's available for tenants. I don't know the answer to that. That's not something specifically we're working on on those two projects, but certainly is something that we could look into. Okay, great, thank you. Thanks for that question. Okay, so all of that got packaged as well as updates to all of our other climate hazards and impacts, temperature, wildfire and so forth, much of it drawn from Caladapt that Sean already mentioned as a really strong data source. All of that got packaged into our adaptation plan update that was adopted. Well, this is just a draft. Let me talk about a couple of other things first. In that adaptation plan, it contains 66 different strategies that are ranked. And these really span the gamut of education. If you look up at A1 in the upper left-hand corner, education is actually our number one and that gets to Commissioner Baskin to your point, the education piece. That's our number one strategy. And then the rest of these really deal with policy and hard and soft infrastructure where we're kind of defining soft infrastructure. It's also known as green or natural infrastructure. Where are there opportunities for things like vegetated dunes to prevent a coastal surge or to buffer coastal surge? Similarly, are there other opportunities for things like living seawalls and so forth? So that's really kind of the range of what our strategies look like. And this is what the strategies are for the water department. And I have to say the water department has probably the highest quantity of the very high priority items, much of which has already been mentioned today. If you do look across the kind of the dimension, the criteria of dimensions, really what we're asking here, you see a Y or an N, yes or no, is the strategy socially acceptable? Are there any legal hurdles? Is it economically feasible? And we use this rubric, it's actually the FEMA rubric, in order to kind of dive into these questions and rank these strategies. So you can see the A's are the very high priority and the B's are high priority, all of which I think the water department is dealing with on an ongoing basis. We did then go on the road with a nine month, 50 event outreach campaign that we completed in 2018. Again, with a real focus on vulnerable members of our community, I think over 20% of our events were in vulnerable communities or at events in their communities. And then the adaptation plan update and the LHMP were adopted in October of 2018. So what's next? What's next is telling us what those two Ekremans stand for, LHMP and CAPU. Local hazard mitigation plan and climate adaptation plan update. So just those two documents that we were talking about. Sorry about that. Okay, so, thank you. So you've already heard in detail what's happening with the water department. We do have the climate influence hydrology and flood mapping that we're trying to find some funding for. We have the energy master plan, which in a sense can be considered an adaptation measure because it does help with the resilience of the water system. We also are in discussions with Scripps on a potential coastal monitoring and sensor system that would include the USGS gauges as well as a tidal gauge, which we're sorely needing in this area. We actually have to interpolate between Monterey and San Francisco to look at what we're expecting in terms of sea level rise. So being able to not only have that to measure, but as we're moving into the monitoring triggers and thresholds, being able to actually say what the depth of sea level rise is. And I should mention that this whole notion of adaptive pathways is truly the way to do this work where there's so much uncertainty. You can't base, you saw that we had time horizons on our sea level rise assessment. We're getting away from that. The second generation of these models, we're really getting away from that and thinking in terms of probabilities and monitoring triggers and thresholds. So if sea level rise gets to this depth, then we do this. If beach width gets to this width, then we do this, whether it's planning or implementation. And on that note, one other thing, so we are updating our general plan safety element. That's also the second requirement of SB 379. Our planning division or department is leading that. And these two other projects that I'm working on right now we're billing it as resilient coast Santa Cruz. One is a West Cliff Drive adaptation and management plan that's funded by Caltrans. And we have an expert local team, Gary Griggs is on that team. And then our second project is looking at what kinds of strategies and policies can we adopt in our local coastal program, which allows us to issue coastal development permits aligned with the Coastal Act in order to protect the beach and access. Those projects are along the exact same timeline. They were about six months in. They ended the end of 2020 and there is heavy outreach planned in these projects. In fact, we're just finishing up six focus groups that we just had where we're testing some activities that we wanna then launch with the broader community in the fall here. And I think that's all then. Thank you. Do you have any other questions? Talking about, and many presenters talked about the value of adaptive planning. And then you've got, I think these rubrics, the FEMA rubric, is there a way in adaptive planning to anticipate evolution or changes in political acceptability or budget priorities when situations become per plan more critical? Drilling down, certain things that I could say right now would be completely unacceptable, but that in the future might be absolutely the best thing for our community to do. I think again, talking in abstract terms, it gets to what are those things that we're monitoring and what are the triggers and being able to be flexible about changes in conditions. I will say that in these two projects I mentioned and in going forward in adaptation projects, we're really trying to press our consultants and our internal team to identify what are the possible financing strategies that we can utilize because there is a very wide swath of creative funding strategies that we can look out for this kind of work. And I think to that end, there could be in some cases the need to look at other potential revenue streams even or private investment for this kind of work. So I'm not sure I totally answered your question. I think you did. I mean, where I was going with this is you've got a really marvelous illustration showing beach flats blue underwater. And another way to draw that would be to say green filled with money but still dry. Right, right. Which is what the Netherlands does. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. And you know, we're gonna be developing as part of these projects, these visualizations that kind of show over time the evolution of coastal change and what different adaptations actually look like and that's merged with our triggers and thresholds. So that's a really illustrative way to understand the concept of adaptive pathways and what we're trying to lay out for our strategies. You're welcome. You mentioned pre-disaster as well as post-disaster FEMA funding. Is there pre-disaster funding that somehow helps as far as water system? Have we applied for some of it? Have we qualified for some of it? Indeed there is. I think that Rosemary and Heidi would be better able to answer what exactly has been done. Pre-disaster. The hazard mitigation program and actually I think we had a couple of projects in after 2017. One was the coast pump station, some flood proofing there and another one was Brackney. If I'm right, the Brackney slide area which is the part of the overland sort of right of way if you will for the Neal Creek pipeline comes down off of Neal Creek and then comes down into sort of Felton but it goes through an overland area that off Brackney Street and it's not a very good place for it to be. So that we did apply for both of those and I don't recall exactly what happens but I mean there was a whole bunch of talk about a lot of money and then it's old and I'm not sure exactly why. We're still in the running for one of them. So it sounds good but doesn't turn into a lot of money. It might, yeah, we're just not sure yet but what I was trying to understand. The other one I think is the Neal Creek dam one which is under kind of a similar kind of situation so we're trying to keep our eye out for them at the moment. I think some of the wildfire things, I think there's gonna be a lot of opportunity in the future. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Anything else from the commission before we... All right Scott, you've waited patiently. Public comment on item five. And I'd appreciate it if the speakers are available to answer any questions that come to here. Thank you. Well, that was fascinating. Your presentation is just riveting. Just read a book called Water Will Come. We are in trouble around the coast but try living in Venice or Miami Beach. So I think we'll be fine. The other two speakers, Sean Schartran, right? And Robert Rauscher, I wanna comment about them. First of all, Mr. Rauscher, you really gotta get the 2.6 billion straightened out and you need to rethink your proposition because two years at 600 million gallons is 1.2 billion gallons, big, big number. Mr. Schartran's work, I think is super, is great. I agree with, to the extent to which, whether or not I agree with it matters or not, I think it's sound. And it's also something that we will get better at. I don't know if anybody's got the energy to do this but I'm gonna try. My problem with this is not the analysis, it's not the evidence. It's that the conclusions that we come to aren't supported by the evidence. I'm gonna give you an example. We're gonna take the year 2018. Remember 2018, we had no rain for two months, January and February, it's one of those bad years. We only had 15 inches. City of Santa Cruz declared a water emergency, 5% voluntary. What happened in 2018 is kind of interesting. It's right on these pieces of paper if you've got it in front of you. You've got the reservoir draw down. We were projected to be at 70% by the end of October. We were at 87%. That's 500 million gallons of water more than we thought we'd have. Take that information and say how much water could we transfer to Soquel Creek in a rainfall year with 15 inches? We come up with 504 million gallons by picking the least of the three limiting factors. Capacity of the intertie, amount of water produced by the North Coast streams in Amount and Soquel Creek demand. So, we've got a water year with very low water. It belongs in the drier, warmer section of Mr. Chartrand's work, but somehow we have 500 million gallons that we can transfer. If you look at the San Lorenzo River pumping, you see we've got 900 million gallons. We could have pumped up the Loch Lomond. We pumped zero, so you add the two of those together. You got 1.4 billion gallons that we had in that year, but yet all of our intuition, all of our models, and all of the conclusions we're drawing are, oh, well, water transfers aren't gonna work. The punchline of this is that the 504 million gallons that's in the table on the bottom left, I will go over by about 10 seconds. If you really work it through, if you really work it through, it turns out that half of that water would have been replaced by water in the watershed, flowing down the mountains above Loch Lomond. So we could have transferred 500 million gallons of water to Soquel Creek in this very dry year, and it would have only cost the water supply network in Santa Cruz, 250 million gallons. Thanks, Scott. I think that is a jaw dropper. Thank you for allowing me to finish my thought. I hope you want to know about this, and that we get to talk about it. Sure we will. Again, I'm sure we will. Thank you, again. Mr. Chairman, could I make a comment? I think there is a confusion about the 2.6 billion when we gave the presentation in April, and we talked about what's changing in terms of demand. We talked about that as near-term demand. We do expect the number that we've been using for the Water Supply Advisory Committee process and the long-term forecast ultimately get to the 3.2, which is why we continue to talk about both of those numbers. We're using the 2.6 billion to justify some near-term actions that we think can make progress, but we are not putting the 3.2 away as not relevant anymore. I think that would be respectful, okay? Hi, I'm Jerry Paul. About climate change, great. It's gonna be really bad. I've been reading up on it. A lot of feedbacks are globally in effect, and I think it'll be a lot worse than what you said. I think we're talking about 15 feet, if left untreated with battery inventions or use of nuclear fusion or other kinds of things. Hundreds of millions of people are gonna lose their homes, they're gonna look to move, and a lot of them will look at Santa Cruz and say, I'm moving there. So I think population increases, something that ought to be figured in, perhaps more than what I could see from the handout. Since the late 80s, we've had the water rights to ship water to Soquel. We've had North Coast water, we've had the pipes, of course the new intertie across 41st Avenue went in last year to make the quantity bigger. But the point is, we could have been filling that aquifer for decades, and we still can't. We don't have to sit on our hands. And the bigger we make our pipes, like the Felton Lock intertie, or the having a well at Felton, or the intertie from the city to Soquel, they could be increased when needed. But the point is, we could start now, and we might have those aquifers filled before any of these other projects could actually start delivering water. If we put our minds to it. And with climate change, I believe we're gonna need more than one solution, as was stated earlier here today. We're gonna need more than one solution anyway. Why don't we build the cheap one starting now, use the cheap one, it's already in place. Why don't we turn it on and use it now, and add some capacity to the choke points. There's four of them basically. And I love the water rights sharing, point of use sharing idea that it's wonderful to pursue that. Let's build the water transfers in lieu and use it right away. We're gonna need it anyway, even if we build the other things. What Soquel is building is only one-sixth of a lock, less than half of a billion gallons a year. And one-sixth of a lock, it's something we can easily capture in most winners. And the thing about the HCP, when we allow the bypass to go from 20 CFS to 25, it gives us fewer days or fewer hours per day in which to capture what exceeds 25 CFS. And so I think our pipeline capacity to ship that water to the lock needs to be increased so that we can capture the same amount of water as we do now, leaving a higher bypass for the fish. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jerry. Thank you. My name's Rebecca Steinbrunner. I'm a little confused, Ms. Menard, about your statement in response to Mr. McGilveray's statement that the figure is right now 2.6 billion gallons, but the city keeps the 3.2 because they anticipate that that's what's gonna happen and be needed. Yet in the city water report, and I think this is what I heard you say at the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency workshop last Thursday was that the city's demand is flat. The projected demand is flat. So why would it still be necessary to keep that 3.2 when the realistic figure is 2.6 and the projected demand is flat? Maybe you can answer that. I also wanna point out that in the Pure Water Soquel response to the draft environmental impact report, one of your very excellent comments, Ms. Menard, was that you really felt, and correct me if I'm misinterpreting this, but you felt that it would be better to look at a flexible water delivery conjunctive use pattern with Soquel Creek and not always think that every single year you have to give them 1,500 because there may be years of differing need and availability. I wanna thank the presenters before I run out of time. Sean's last, or next to the last page, I had a question. It has a picture there and it shows a lot of red and it looks really awful. The projected future vegetation, but there's no clue at all as to what that is. Is that a force fire? Is that, I mean, I see these things on the Cal Fire website and they look terrible, but what does it mean? So I'd like some analysis of that. And in the last bit of time I have, I just wanna point out that at the Santa Margarita Groundwater Workshop, which was excellent by the way, and thank you for that good information. It was pointed out that not all streams are interconnected with the groundwater. So I really think that we need to be considering that. And thank you, Ms. Ryan, for your good question about if sea level rise comes in, what would our intake solidities be? And to that end, I know that the city is working, doing some very good work on rainy collectors. So placement of those also needs to be juxtaposed with the sea level rise. Thank you very much. John, why don't you go ahead? You probably have a zoom. So I just wanna point out that I think in 2011, there was a local study done by the Flint, Flint and Flint, that also makes the case that there will be a vegetation change in this area as a result of climate change and that the redwoods would go. So that's a, that's not a new finding, that's a finding that was documented in that earlier study, which you probably can find on the city's website someplace, right? I don't have it, but. Flint and Flint, I think we'll, yeah. I asked and answered. These scientists have been working. I'd just like to make two comments. The map or the graph I showed when I made the comment about the demand being flat was in fact, the 3.2 billion gallon demand forecast from the Water Supply Advisory Committee. I have never, I don't believe said, although you might have interpolated from what I've said, that the 2.6 is where we're gonna be for forever. I, we're leaving some room in the projection so that we can count for growth and things that may in fact happen. But what we're saying is the 2.6 billion gallons of demand is what we're seeing now. It makes a shorter, a smaller gap in the very near term. And there's some things that we can do to with awkward storage and recovery, for example, that can close that gap and we should do those. So if you're gonna stay around for the next few minutes and we get to number six, you'll hear some more about what the strategy is for that. And then with respect to the comment, which I think that has been roundly misunderstood from my EIR comment on the Pure Water Soquel, what I was really suggesting was not that they could take a variable amount, but that they might wanna model the amount that we could have available in thinking about an alternative. And that has been misinterpreted a number of times by people saying that I was actually suggesting a different thing than I was suggesting. What I was suggesting is that they model it so that they know the answer to what could be available. Well, I can't remember what the part was before it or after it, but I realized recently in some other things that in fact, that wasn't the comment I was making. So this was a receive information item. There's no vote to be had, noting that it's 10 to 10 Rosemary. I mean, in some ways, item six is on the agenda. I feel like we can get through it relatively quickly or it could take all night. But we had more on a cadence here to get to council with. Right, so you have a thank you very much for the presentation. Yes, really good. Thank you, staff, for having a really good job. Really helpful. So let's just talk quickly about the meat of the nut for item six. And the way that this is laid out, as you can see from the schedule that's on page 6.4, this was intended to be your sort of first opportunity to review the, and now the assessment, the three parts that if you look on page 6.3, the assessment, then there's a review and a recommendation by this body and then to the city council in an action that the council would take. So this is your first opportunity to review the assessment that's been done on the three main kind of threshold criteria, cost, yield and timeliness. And to look at what a revised plan would include, would include, which starts at the bottom of page 6.3, talks about implementing two no regrets actions. One of them is to further pilot testing of the ASR in the Prisma basin. And the second one is moving forward with the investments in the Graham Hill Water Treatment Plant that will produce an enhanced ability to treat available resources under a larger range of both wet and dry weather conditions. In addition, there's some recommendations about developing a revised work plan and you're seeing a version of that here handing out tonight that talks about retaining the current elements of the water supply augmentation strategy related to in lieu and water transfers and water changes, continue exploring ASR opportunities in the Santa Margarita basin, designing an implement approach to evaluating the sensitivity of the city's surface water sources to the impacts of climate change, which has been a lot of what you heard in the conversation between Sean and Bob tonight, sort of what that work plan looks like. And you'll see some things and Heidi can walk you through on this chart where that work is. Develop feasible water supply, supplemental supply projects using surface water and comparing that to other alternatives using the recommended water supply advisory committee comparative analysis methodology. So retaining that sort of, let's get the information on the table and looking at the key criteria, et cetera. And then plan to make a decision about so that was D and E and plan to make a decision a few years out about which alternatives should be pursued. So it's kind of some near term actions to sort of what I would consider to be no regrets, low regrets kind of activities. And then some longer term additional studies that would eventually put us in a position of being able to do a head to head comparison of additional aquifer storage and recovery in lieu ASR strategies plus a recycle water options that would be either groundwater replenishment or I guess alternatively depending on how far out this goes it could be a DPR kind of a strategy. But anyway, that's the basic gist of this. The plan would be for this to come back to you in your October 7th meeting, originally I had been planning the joint meeting with the council on the 22nd of October, but that date doesn't work because it turns out I'm gonna be out of town at a conference someplace. And so it might work for you all, but it doesn't work for me. Oh, you could have the meeting without me if you wanted to. So, and we had talked about moving it up to October 8th, which is the council's first meeting in October, but that's Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. So they're not having an evening session that night. So that puts it to the 12th of November as a joint meeting date, which means that you have the opportunity to talk about this at October 7th meeting and then whatever the November meeting is, which I forget the date. So there's really a chance for a substantial crank turn between October and November. Yeah, and I guess what I would say is that realistically the, if it's, I think it's the 5th of, Katie, can you tell? Is it the 5th of November? Is that the first Tuesday? I think it's a date like that, which means that we probably have to have the thing in SIR already for the council. So we could do some fine tunes. If somebody had something, we could send out the document in advance for the commission to look at and kind of give us feedback. But realistically, we have a deadline of getting stuff queued up for the council that probably has to happen before the water commission meeting November 5th, first Monday, right? So we have to have our item and probably the end of the week's earlier. Okay. Again, back with risk, just with respect to the work cadence, as regards the proposed adaptation, when do you anticipate we'll have information about cost, timeliness, a yield of the no-regrets, low-regrets item so we can kind of quantify our thinking around those? Well, I wouldn't like exactly, so we're on a trajectory and I think you've seen because we talked in December last year, which we could refresh on in October about the schedule for the treatment plan upgrades, right? So right now there's a series of four treatment plan projects that are happening. Right now the tube settlers are being replaced. The flocculators are coming after that. We processed, tomorrow we have an item on council agenda to amend the contract with the tube settler contractor to replace the flocculators. And then we have, that will go take us through the winter and in the spring and the summer we hope to get the concrete tanks project underway, which is about a 30-month construction followed by the timeframe after that is when that project's finished, then we can start the treatment plant, you know, rehabilitation replacement work. Yeah, I got that. I guess what I'm trying to get, I wasn't very articulate, is in order for me to have a level of comfort around any kind of recommendation about the timeliness of this stuff, kind of need to understand the yield implications of the changes you're talking about so we can sort of do the risk benefit analysis at least in the backs of our head. So that's where I was going with the question. So I guess what I would say with respect to the ASR is we plan to pilot test additional ASR in the belt system this winter in the belts treatment plant, one of those wells and possibly in belts 12 again. It kind of depends on what operational needs we might have because we have both of those offline. It's not very good. It's kind of, you know, ties your hands in a way that it's not very easy to flip it on and turn it all around. If you're trying to, if you have an emergency that you need to deal with. So that would be happening for us to decide how much, you know, what the yield would be in the second well and extrapolating. But at the moment we're not planning on building any major, one of that is practically free. It's not entirely free, but like I don't, I can't give you a number that's better than that. Partly because I would have to not even scientific while that's guessed, just to guess about how much we could actually get in that system of it. I add to that though. Because we are doing additional groundwater modeling to understand what the belts only project will yield. So to get to the question of how much of the gap is that closing? We're also looking at putting some definition around what those infrastructure improvements are. I like to say that they're not practically nothing necessarily, but it's certainly not the bite that we're gonna take when we do the added belts infrastructure. We have Pueblo working on a lot of things. One is wrapping up phase one, which is the belts 12. Working on a work plan for phase two, which like Rosemary said could include belts 12, belts eight, and then hopefully in that work plan will be belts nine as well. So kind of running through all the belts wells to see if we should pilot, can pilot. They're also working on a work plan for the Santa Margarita. So in those work plans would be scope, schedule, and budget of that piece of the project. And for things like the belts only where we know a lot more about that project, putting costs and schedule to the actual implementation of that piece. So that all being said, I think the question was when will we know? And we can start to add some of that detail on the schedule if that's useful. There is an, I would suspect following the round two pilot which is the eight and possibly 12. So at the end of 2020 because then the round two of the piloting will be complete and we'll have time to understand what the results are and put some costs to that. And similarly with some of the anticipated work at the water treatment plan, I would expect we'd have some expectations about whether it's not necessarily gonna be hydraulic capacity but I'll call it effective capacity, treated capacity, changes based on the treatment changes we're making. Yes. And relative timeliness. Yeah, and I think that I would have to go back and look but I think the current criteria treatment capacity criteria is something like 20 MGD with 18 and a half sort of operating level because you have a basin offline or what have you can't fully utilize all the infrastructure but given that our wintertime demand is running in the sort of six to seven now that's a pretty good sized chunk of capacity to be able to treat additional water in the system when it's available and move it out into the existing infrastructure largely to take it to belts and then having some potential additional capacity to go to Santa Margarita in the event that that plays out also. And we do have estimated numbers and we have sort of design criteria that we're working on to try to figure out how to address the yield issues. Yeah, so having some sort of a amorphous blob picture of that as part of what we would be able to evaluate before we went into council. Yeah, and the other thing I just wanted to mention is that, and you know I've had a little exchange about the question of what, how do we design a project in the Prisma, the Mid County Basin that functions in a way that maintains the protective elevations of the, at the coastal monitoring wells which have to be maintained in order to manage the seawater intrusion threat and creates a usable storage for us. And there are a variety of different options that you have to look at. One of them has to do with operational strategies between your two storage. Sources and which one works better. We've seen some data and I know you've all seen this from the April 1st meeting where it looked like if you did the three year field cycle and then the two year drawdown that actually got to blow some of the base level that you wanted it, that you want to not go below of. And so we're talking about, you know, again, what does this look like and how does it have to operate in order for us to really maximize this for a drought storage as well as a groundwater sustainability plan. So that's groundwater modeling work that Heidi has mentioned. One comment. Just want to make sure that when you write your staff report to particularly to the council that you really emphasize that this ASR project is already kind of encapsulated in the GSPs because it plays a regional role as well as just low. And I'm actually tomorrow at the council meeting at the beginning of the meeting I'm giving a extremely brief presentation overview of the groundwater sustainability plan from Mid County to just sort of familiarize them about the work that's been done. And I'm pretty sure, but I can't remember off the top of my head because I did this last week but I'm pretty sure that one of the projects that's been identified in there is the ASR project in the belt system. And two on 6.4. They obtained, part that I haven't seen related to it used to be some discussion of that. But it's not fine for us to talk about this as part of our supplemental supply package. I'd like to know how that works. Yeah, I don't see it. And then an item in the phase two recycled water study that was something that we had in the water section and I'm going to prepare an analysis goes on, what I'm not seeing anywhere is an analysis of how recycled water and ASR might be integrated down the basin more than should so that we bridge that gap with another supply source. I'm concerned both about and pushed out to 2025 but I'd like to have a shorter timeline of this. Not reasonable. And I'll tell you why. We don't have the money to build that project even if we decided to do it tomorrow. That's fine. Then that needs to be presented to the reasoning for this. And we talked about this at one of the meetings when we talked about budget and sort of the basic strategy of stretching things out. And I totally agree when I get where you're going and a lot of the work that we're trying to do is definitely looking at what's the right fit of a project to need and understanding the need on the climate change side, understanding the need on what we can get back. All of those questions are definitely on the table. But a project of the scale of either a groundwater replenishment project such as Soquel is doing or a Santa Margarita aqua storage and recovery project, those projects have price tags on them that we're not going to be able to afford in the timeframe that we're talking about here because. And we still don't, we could not say the same thing. That's one of the things that we need to do. Okay, I hear you. Out of Wasak, there was a Gantt chart with a decision timeline with things that were supposed to be made at specific times. And I understand that it slipped some and we've been hearing about it little by little and other parts are actually pretty much on schedule, which is good. When we talk about an adaptation in the new schedule, what I don't see is sort of some of the hard decision points. Presumably they're being shoved out, I understand. But I'd sort of like to see those on the chart. Sort of where are the new decision points? Are they being pushed out two years or? No, it's longer. And part of it is to give us more time to work the climate change side of the house, really the information sort of focusing on the vulnerability of local surface water resources to climate change impacts is a huge big question that we need to spend some time really understanding because it could drive us from one sense of direction about more awkward storage and recovery using surface water to a different outcome. And we need to be able to really understand what that information is telling us about the sensitivity of our surface water resources to climate change. So in certain ways that is being pushed out a ways to give us more time to do that. And again, from a financial perspective, we're not gonna have the money to implement until at least the middle of the 20s and maybe later. So it's really important that we do the near term sort of low regrets, no regrets kinds of activities sooner rather than later because those things can help us close the gap and make it easier for us to get through the kinds of timeframe that you know, a drought kind of situation that we may face in that timeframe. Thank you, I'm expecting that there's in that search, there's opportunities while we might not fully realize them for some number of years out that as we do infrastructure projects in the meantime, we can do level of planning that will support future needs. And I would, but if we haven't done or haven't finished the research for how we might flush those out five years and 10 years down the road, we can't take advantage of short term opportunities that might cost small amounts of money. And so I'd like to figure some way to explore that. Yes, I agree with you. And there's a lot of things going on that are really sort of out there that we can start to think about opportunities for leveraging and we definitely are doing that. I moved it for my own information and I apologize if this is old hat to you guys, but there was my drilling down on what Jim was asking, is the climate change information that we received tonight, that represent, I mean, that's an assess, right? And I'm referring to the change management process on 6.2 and we're in review now, is it? Am I shoving a round peg at a square hole here? Well, in a general way you are, but it's because this is sort of a more the whole work program as opposed to just a piece of it. So, but definitely the more recent kind of information that we've seen about climate change is making us say, okay, we should know more about that. And we- Really different than when the WASAC was meeting actively. Well, we hadn't sexually consistent, it's indirectionally the same, it's a lot more precise and rich and we're seeing, in essence, a wider range of uncertainty. Gives you pause about whether a given solution is gonna work. But we only have to cover the worst of the bad, we don't really benefit from being covered when it's good, when it's wetter. And the other thing that was- Right. Well, and the degree to which the investments needed to be made in other parts of the system in order to have- The system at all. Well, general resiliency against a whole range of different kinds of experiences. I think Chan's comment, which I've been saying over and over again recently is, I don't know what normal is, but we don't have it here anymore. And I think that's a one year and sort of six has been a normal water year. We don't, we're having this very much, this whiplash weather, wet, dry, wet. And when we have a year like 2017, it shows where the sort of soft white underbelly of the, you know, systems vulnerabilities are. It's not a very good place to be. And the flip side of it, you guys raised questions about wildfire and we have, you know, the drought supply issues. I mean, it's a picture is kind of daunting on either end of it. And there's things that we can do with the existing resources and existing infrastructure that will make it better for us to have a more reliable system under a whole range of situations. And we're going to have to accept the fact that we can't do everything we might want to do at the time we might want to do it too much. And we have to make some hard choices here. I do want to say that, I mean, this is the right work at the right time. I think it's done the right way. I appreciate everything that staff and the team has done. And I want to, I'd like to add the observation that this whole notion, we're talking about budget, but there's really a question here of affordability or our fellow citizens in town. And there's some generational equities that come into play. And then I would be hard pressed to advocate that we should build everything now to solve a problem that's 70 years out that some of this stuff needs to be staged and appropriately we have an opportunity to take advantage of some investments we're making anyway that are going to get us at least part of the way there or probably reduce the range of uncertainty as Bob was talking about for maybe 10 years, maybe a generation which buys us some time to get some of these other bills paid, understand this climate situation better, understand the problem space better, understand our community's appetite better and then be able to make the right decisions at the right time. I absolutely support the idea of doing as much planning as we can along the way so that there's not a 10 year delay if we have to figure. And I think we've heard that loud and clear from a number of commissioners, just the work plan a little bit. I applaud the work that staff's done to try to take maximum advantage of the investments we're making. And I add one more thing to that comment is, there's two places on here where it shows or talks about the schedule potentially going out to 2035. You raise a good point. It could be longer than that. It could be shorter than that. And so what's not included in here is really incorporating the results of this work and what are our triggers and how will that shift our work? This probably isn't gonna be the last time we make any kind of plan. But I think our work in the next two years is to understand the cost benefit of each of the projects, the implementation schedule and how best to line those up so that if it's a reduction by two years or an extension by 10 years, we can adapt to that. Or boy, yeah. I would appreciate it if any of that. I'll link from Gary's list. I think that one of the issues, and we've talked about this a little bit before, is our current assessment is that the space available in our part of the basin in the Peristima, the Mid County, is about a billion gallons. So we are probably, and this is again from the beginning when we started talking about two basins. If you'll recall, there was a report from May 2015 that Robert Marx did that talked about the available storage capacity in the two basins. And it was kind of the two together about a billion and a half each. So I think that we certainly can have Gary do some modeling and I think that in my mind, I've been thinking about is the choice really in either or and either this or that, or is it some kind of a hybrid situation that works in a more adaptive way across a whole series of, right. And so partly the conversation about the climate change is really to help inform the question of what's the need gonna look like and what's the best strategy to meet that need. And it might be a phased implementation of first do this and then do that and then do it in such a way that you have a system that can send water to wherever you're sending it that take whatever water is available. And that means to some degree you can't use existing infrastructure to do that. You have to create new backbone infrastructure that takes that, but it doesn't mean that there's not a way to then maximize what you're getting back when the time comes to bring it back from wherever it's stored and put it into the system. So those are big questions, but the climate change potential for us to see something that's dramatically different from what we've been seeing so far I think is gonna be well informed by some of the work that Sean was describing and doing the scenario number four and scenario number five. And those are important inputs to us having making a good decision. When would we see the four and the five scenarios that were discussed? Sounds like you're working on them. Oh, I'll speak to four and then Sean. Oh, okay, okay. For we have the runs now that is produced in here, here he has run. Basically, I'll update that, write that out. We would see that in sometime this fall. I would think so, yeah? Finish up five this fall. Okay, so pretty soon. Bob said something earlier about the Confluence Modeling was based on 2015 data. And I don't know if that's only for some subset, but can that be updated with a couple of years newer data with what we're looking at? So Confluence is actually a, it's a, the data set that goes into it is probably a minimum of like 50 years. And it, but it hasn't had the data scrubbed and added for years after 2015 at this point. So the data set is, you know, I think the circle data set is 80 some years. So it's not just, it's just that in order to bring the new data from the 16, 17, 18 kind of years into it, that has to go through a very stringent QAQC program in order to make sure that we're all good with that data. And I think that since I've been here, we've only updated the data set once from adding that 2009, actually 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 into it. And so it's not a, it's not a. It's not an easy task. Not an incidental task. So. The only reason I asked was that we're hearing about much greater increase in variability year to year, just in the last five years or so. So it might add value if we could reflect that in some of the modeling. So it seems to me the direction that I've gotten so far is that you wanna see some more details on this chart when it comes back. You wanna see some more details about the questions of sort of cost benefit of some of the early action items. I don't think anyone would ever say, and I'd just be prepared that the water treatment plan changes we're making would be done if it were only for this purpose because that's going to be a marginal benefit, but it will still be a benefit. It's going to be a very expensive project, but has to be done due to the condition of the facility. And so while we're doing it, we should take this step to make it work better for the direction we're going. On the ASR and the belt system, I think we can come up with some kind of, you know, sense of where that's going in terms of its cost. And what we think its benefit would be. And then I think that building in some, some more obvious decision points on that the table would work to, we can definitely do that. And one thing you'll see on this chart this time that you hadn't seen before is some of the other major things that are going on that are, you know, contextualizing some of these things, some of the work that we're doing in the Santa Margarita, for example, we really want to emerge from that process up there, as opposed to have us sort of be working in a vacuum and then making it appear as though those people in Santa Cruz that we already were suspicious of are out there doing it again to us. Yeah, taking our water. Right, that's right. So it sounds like that stuff we can move forward with in terms of the October meeting, and then we'll see where we are from there. Okay. Hey, public comment on item six, the proposed adaptation to the WASAC plan. Yeah, well, this is wonderful. Talking about the real stuff. The water that we have right now for water transfers has no capital costs associated with it. It's already paid for. You can get as much water every month as the lesser of North Coast supply, Soquel Creek demand and infrastructure capacity, which is about 50 million gallons a month. There's nothing in this under water transfers to take that water and use it. Rosemary talks about wanting to do a couple of no regrets things. One of the things that would be no regrets would be taking the water that we have that is going out into the ocean, and send it via the NLU method to the Soquel Creek water district, and let them disperse it. Then we can get to the question that David has been asking for seven years. How are we gonna get the water back? Now, we can't answer the question now, but there's no reason to not put the water into the Mid County Groundwater Bank so that we have it when we figure out how to get it back. This is no threats. I think that's the water transfers section. The water transfer section, where is transfer water to Soquel Creek now? We are at 97.3% in Loch Lomond. There is no risk by sending a million and a half gallons a day to Soquel Creek of any measurable amount. Scott, you're aware that you're at a meeting of the Santa Cruz Water Department Water Commission. Yes. But you have a lot of management suggestions for a different water district. I don't know how to help them from where I sit right now and delivering water uncontrolled into the city streets down there doesn't seem like a good idea. Oh, it's not gonna be dumped into the city streets, Doug. Yeah, they have to decide they're gonna take the water. So why do you talk to us about a decision they need to make? Because you need to acknowledge, this board needs to acknowledge, that it could be done. I don't think this, I... Well, you're not eating it. I'm watching the green light, man. I'm gonna get through my points here. That's what I do. The question of water transfers and a volume of water to be transferred now qualifies as a no-regrets action. It is on the list. It's not, there's no, where is it? How much water will we send to Soquel Creek? We don't have agreements with neighboring agencies without reading to you the list. Would you write a letter and say that the Santa Cruz Water Commission will sell Soquel Creek Water District of 300 million gallons of water in the next six months? The job of the Santa Cruz Water Commission is to advise city council on matters relating to operation of the water department. Not today. And not today and not in any volume. No. In the end of April, right? We do not have water from the North Coast at this time. That would allow us to send water to Soquel. Yes, you do. No, we do not. We do not. Well, I've looked at the production records and there it is. We have more water than we had last year and last year we had water. And, yeah, well... That's time. Yeah, all right. Part of my time was taken up by other people. But I guess that's... I guess that'll do. Thank you. That'll do for openers. But we need to grapple with this. This is our job. Scott. Yes, Doug? Out of respect to the other people here and the folks at the commission and the fact that it's 1030, we have other speakers lined up. We're gonna hold the three minutes, okay? Well, I'll rest. Thank you. I am still Jerry Paul. The water comes from the North Coast by pre-1914 rights. And the rights to ship the water to Soquel come from those rights. But the actual molecules come from the San Lorenzo River in the deal that we're actually running right now. And that's what we proposed. We just maximize the quantity that we can ship through the intertide, which is really the limiting factor on some of the days. And the amount we take out of the North Coast pipes or diversions are the limiting factor on other days. But the point is what Scott said was right. We can ship a lot of water. Though the coastal aquifers are the most vulnerable place now when they have the least water in them. When we start putting water in, they'll get less and less vulnerable. I would think that if you were going to protect the aquifers, the time you'd want to protect them with all your might is this week because they're the most vulnerable. Let's ship some water there. We know we're gonna have to do it anyway. And it's the least risk. It's very low cost. So Cal reverse us as long as we don't give them an inflated price. Remember that any infrastructure that we might have to build wouldn't be just charged to their 36,000 men, women and children. It would be infrastructure that would ultimately benefit all 135,000 people in the area because why do we ship to them? A lot of it, we'd eventually get back when we're in a pinch in a drought. We've already discussed this very much including the joint members, the board of the Soquel board of directors coming and sitting in these seats with the city council and to get this kind of stuff going in years past. So it can be done. And I urge you to go take the opportunity and do it, use the infrastructure. We don't have to draw any more water out of the North Coast than we already do. We just have to say those are the rights we're using and we're using molecules from the river. Especially if we put extra molecules in the lock the previous winter when we also have the rights to put them in there and the fish don't need them. Furthermore, if we fill the lock in the winter the fish can get extra benefits from the lock at the time of year when it's optimal. I'm sure you would approve by a special releases from the lock not just down San Lorenzo River but by an extra pipe that could go to the Santa Margarita aquifer filter through that and come through the streams at all altitude levels not just sea level like diesel would provide or wastewater recycling would provide. We could really serve the fish all the way up and down. You're welcome. So please fill in this detail on water transfers. To the resale building. Thanks Jerry. The retail building. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. I really wanna thank you for your work and staying so late and also the good work of Mr. McGilverain, Mr. Paul. And I think that Mr. Schwarm your question is a good one. Why are we coming here and talking with you about what SoCal Creek needs to do? It's because the two of you do need to work together better and what you do with your ASR affects the water transfers for the district. Last winter the water transfers had to be shut down in order for the city to do the ASR pilot work at the belts 12 well that affects this project. So I would like to see better cooperation between the city and SoCal Creek. And I would really like to see the ASR work done perhaps at belts nine and 10. I don't know if it would still have the same value for the city, but it might not shut down the water transfer work that we really need to expand upon. Acidro came here and told you that whenever the water transfer happened it was actually benefiting the city because the water didn't age within your system and tanks. It kept things going fresher and thereby made your water quality improved. So it benefits you to do the water transfers. I also wanna ask the SoCal Creek had to for some reason decided to start up their O'Neill well which has been shut down for a long time with the ammonia problems. And I wanna know that you're working with them on that issue and how that issue can be affected by the ASR work that you're doing at belts 12. So there is a communication that needs to happen. Let me finish. I also wanna point out in terms of recovery what SoCal Creek Water District General Manager is telling the residents of Live Oak who are complaining bitterly that they were never told about the advanced water treatment facility that is supposed to be plopped in their neighborhood. He's telling them, well, this is gonna help you because it's going to raise the groundwater levels in your area. That's your service district. He's making that claim. So you can make the claim too. The work that you do is gonna store water that will help not only the city but also SoCal Creek Water District. And by doing conjunctive use, it can do it without by using existing infrastructure, keeping costs down and without exorbitant energy demands that recycled water would take. And I also wanna point out that I've been researching and reviewing a lot of materials. SoCal Creek has the ability to independently apply for emergency water permits for the San Lorenzo River that then they could give to you and you could give to them after it's traded. Thank you. You have not pursued that action. Other members of the public have anything to say? Okay, so again, this is an informational item. Staff, you mentioned the feedback. I think you will summarize the feedback you got from commission. I appreciate you taking that on board. Yep. And we'll move on. Seven, we'll get through these quickly. I spoke to Doug. I think I sent him an email where it was bicycling in Spain saying I wanted to retain this group that we had the ad hoc committee to allow us to work with the commission as we work on the phase two of the SoCal Creek agreement. Yeah, to work on the operating agreement, right? Yes. And so I just wanted to sort of recommend that we do that because I think that if we're gonna bring it back, which currently is the sort of proposal, but I don't really know if this is gonna happen because I think they're trying to figure out what they really need at this moment. But if we're gonna bring it back to the next meeting at the October 7th meeting, it would be really useful for us to have a chance to run some things by some folks in a more informal way before that happens. So, yes, I am. I'm seven, yeah. I mean, the idea is try to get that thing in shape, a little better shape before it comes to the commission. Yep, yep. But this would be for the October? Well, this is additional elements like operating agreement and the land lease. The pieces that didn't get put in the last round are would be at least some parts of them. And one of the things I think we've been discussing is that there's a lot of things in the operations agreement that could potentially shift it around. So, no, because we started this on the, I think we met the first time on like the 4th or 5th of June. We got six months. Yeah, we got six months. It's a, from my perspective, it's a direct continuation of the work that we were doing before. That's right. Nice work. Yeah, and can we commend you on behalf of the rest of the commission because the final product you did was really excellent and I think we all, those of us who weren't on this ad hoc committee really appreciate the time you put in. Staff did Yeoman's work on that as well. It was a good collaboration, but thank you. Okay. Mid County Groundwater Agency. Doing a thing at the council tomorrow, very brief at the presentation block. We've got the Q and A schedule for Wednesday night at Simkins, which is for the, if you've got a question about the plan, that's an opportunity for more informal interaction as opposed to presentation and sort of writing your stuff on comment cards. The city is going to meet with Darcy on the 4th of September and do the required consultation between the land use agencies and the plan staff. I think that, I know that she's got that scheduled with the Capitola people. Yeah, and at the county we met with her last week. Right. And so, and then the next one is the September 19th meeting of the board in which they're gonna do the public hearing and close the public comment period and give the direction to staff about finalizing the document, which we'll have a couple of months to do before it comes back in November to have the board take action. Santa Marta, I was just gonna pivot to Santa Marta Rita unless people have questions about Mid County. We've actually moved on to at least the appetizers, if not the fireworks. Yeah, right. So we're starting to educate folks about the real work. We've done a couple of workshops. July was focused on undesirable outcomes. I missed that one. I had to hear that. I'll need a debrief. And in August, we just recently got together on surface groundwater interaction. Becky had alluded to that one. That one I did attend. I can say there was good attendance and engagement by the community and was super technical subject as you can imagine, great range of content from staff and consultants and Rosemary among them. And I don't know what the topic of the next one is. I think we're gonna start getting some the conceptual hydrogeo logic models. I think you're starting to see the. Oh boy. Yeah. The one other thing that happened is Friday, there was a kind of inaugural run of a tour that took place in different aspects of the system. The handful of sort of selected people there to get some feedback. And the idea is to sort of get this thing in the can with a kind of general, okay, this is how it works out. And then run it on some kind of intermittent basis in the future. But there was a 15 passenger van and they went to a number of places, including the intertie between Scotts Valley and the San Lorenzo Valley Water District area and Bean Creek where they have issues of the river going dry in terms of surface water, groundwater interaction. Some place on the edge of the basin. I don't really know what they were trying to do there, but I wasn't on the tours. Well, I can tell. They went to the quarry. The Olympia quarry. The Olympia quarry where you can sort of see different of the strata. And then the last stop was the Felton the version. So we had a, Chris and I were up at the Felton the version at the last stop. And they seem to be having a good interaction. There was a pretty diverse group of folks, including some members of the public, a couple of board members, some staff, and so it was good. It was good. I guess that's it for that one. You can't want to give an oral report. I don't have anything to say. Any informational items from anybody. We are adjourned. Thank you everybody. Thank you.