 Good morning, everyone. I'm just checking in if we're expecting all three subcommittee members today morning Good morning as far as I know chair what we are expecting everyone I have not seen board member right on yet. I never received confirmation, but there was no Notification that he was going to be absent today All right. Well, you can give it a minute. He is attending. He just sent me a text I need to re-send him the link. He's having trouble getting on. So we'll do that right now All right. Well, thank you. And you could probably hear in my voice. I am sick again I've had a horrible November now. We're at the flu. So Or I guess it's December now. So I apologize if I have to Go off mute to get some water and stuff marriage won't help maybe I think Glenn Glenn would I don't know if he's a Vice chair the committee will have somebody else to walk you Thank you, we'll see how I do if I need someone I'll I'll let you guys know It's just promoted board member, right? So when he'll be on the panel aside momentarily Chair Watts, we are ready to go whenever you Okay, thank you. All right, so I'd like to call the meeting to order at 11 o'clock to and Secretary Mandas if you could do a roll call Certainly board member right here board member Walsh here board member chair. What here But the record show all budget review subcommittee members are present Thank you. And just a reminder for committee members to mute your phones microphones when you're not using them and Now I'd like to open it up to share for item two which is public comment on non-agenda items If you wish to make a comment via zoom, please raise your hand if you are dialing in via telephone Please dial star nine to raise your hand Secretary Manas do we have any live or recorded public comments? We have no public public comments for item two Great. Thank you Now I'd like to move on to item 3.1 director Burke if you could introduce the item Thank you chair Watts members of the subcommittee item 3.1 is our miscellaneous fees miscellaneous fee update and deputy director of administration Kimberly Zanina will be making the presentation Good morning. We'll share my screen so you can see the presentation All right, can you see the presentation? Yes. Good. All right. Good morning chair Watts and members of the committee. Today we are going to revisit the proposed updates to miscellaneous fees Based on feedback from the last subcommittee meeting we wanted to provide you with more information. And so we've done that. And now we will go through I will try to keep this brief so we can stick to our half hour that we have And I will go through all of the fees that we are proposing So as background, miscellaneous fees are charges to our customers for services that are not citywide, but that are specific to a customer or a property. Excuse me. We developed these fees so that we are not spreading the cost of the services to the entire rate payer base and there are currently 79 existing miscellaneous fees. The typical calculation for developing these fees is based on staff time, vehicle costs, materials, but there are times when other methodologies are used and today we will be talking about one of those. The fees are also go through a public process. And so the last time that there was a public hearing and fees were adopted was in March of 2019. As we previously discussed, we are proposing several new fees that have been developed with this round of updates and I'll go through the fees here. And the calculations for them. So the first one is a payment plan processing fee. We have various payment plans available for demand fees. There is a downtown area payment plan and there are residential payment plans. These provide the customers with the ability to pay their fees over five years. And we are basing the processing fee on four hours of labor from a civil engineering technician to process the application and then follow up with yearly invoices. When the update to the guide to water and wastewater policy came to the BPU this last March, there was approval with that policy to create this fee to process the plans. And now that we are updating miscellaneous fees, that fee has been developed and you see it here at $320 an hour. The next fee is our manual water meter reading fee. And this is proposed for the few properties that are not on our automated meter reading system. We have 12 accounts without an automatically read meter. And while we don't have an official opt out program, we have allowed these customers to retain their meters and they are read manually. In order for them to be read manually, however, we are proposing a fee based on a meter technician having to drive to the property. Get the read for the meter for the monthly billing. And it's based on 15 minutes of labor and vehicle costs. The next fee that we're proposing is a credit card charge back fee. We have customers that pay their bill by credit card and then request a stop payment with their credit card companies before we receive the payment. And when they do this, the bank charges us $25. So we are proposing to recover this cost. The fee is only charged when customers initiate the stop payment, not when credit card company denies payment because of suspected fraud. We are also proposing a new fee when a customer is disconnected for water waste. The disconnection happens after our customer has been notified multiple times and warned that they're not complying with our water waste ordinance. This fee is based on meter technician labor and vehicle cost to drive to the property, lock off the meter and then return to the property to reestablish service. The two additional fees shown here that we are proposing are for applications for the water demand offset. When the water demand offset policy came before the full board for a recommendation in March of 2022 and then was followed that same month by approval by city council, staff reported out that there would be a fee developed for processing these applications. There are two options for the developers in the offset policy. The developer can pay the demand offset fee approved with the policy which will be applied to a city run program or they can develop their own program. If they pay the offset fee they will pay the smaller application fee shown here but if they choose to develop a program there will have to be an evaluation of the proposed program's water savings which will take significantly more staff time and then there is a much higher fee for that. The first fee is based on two hours of civil engineering technician time and the second higher fee is based on 10 hours of time by the sustainability coordinator for evaluating the proposed program. In addition to the new proposed fees that you've already seen we are asking you for your consideration of the modification to the high strength waste tipping fees. Staff hired a consultant to review and evaluate the program and with that study they developed a fee schedule. In that fee schedule there are two new categories and other categories that have proposed updates and we will look at the proposed fee schedules in the later slides. Once again we provided this for you last time we're providing it again it's just basically a summary of what was evaluated in the report just for your information. We added this slide since the last presentation we realized that there could be some confusion with the increases that are proposed in the schedule on the three-year schedule that we provided for you last time. The increases may look a little inconsistent so we wanted to just take a little time to explain that to you. We have the consultant produce a 10-year schedule which you see here but because we would like the opportunity to reevaluate the fees more regularly and because processes can change a 10-year schedule is too long so we are only proposing the first three years and then we'll bring back the additional years in the future. We thought showing you the full 10 years would provide a little more clarity on the three-year schedule. So this is the three-year schedule that is that we are proposing now and requesting a recommendation on it will increase fees over a three-year period it includes two new fees however the new fees are not new waste streams for us it was just determined with the report that it was appropriate to separate them out and develop a new fee for each of those waste streams those are the medium and low strength categories. We also wanted to provide you with a little bit of additional information because the other fees are all just one-time fees and they're just based on the one-time charge these fees are a little different because they're monthly charges and they're based on volume and so we wanted to provide you with some examples of how the customers would be affected by the billings or by the increases I'm sorry in the monthly billings. So because there are so many miscellaneous fees we just wanted to let you know that when the new and modified fees will be will be incorporated into the existing resolution when the full board considers approval this makes it much cleaner for staff and customers so they don't have to search through multiple resolutions for the various fees. We also wanted to make you aware of the public outreach that has gone on with this round of updates the first was the subcommittee meeting that we held on November 7th which was publicly noticed and we have also sent out letters to the affected customers so they are able to request any information regarding the fees and are aware of the public hearing on December 15th in addition there have been three notices published in or there will be two more published in the newspaper but there has already been one in that publishing it has my direct contact information so anyone from the public can request more info information or attend the public hearing. This is the schedule for the fee process it provides you with the publication dates the date of the original public hearing which was continued so that we could follow up with you on the feedback provided by this committee the new public hearing date and the effective date of the fees if they are approved and finally it is recommended by Santa Rosa water and the BPU budget review that the BPU budget review subcommittee recommend revisions to the Santa Rosa water miscellaneous fees and charges schedule as proposed to the Board of Public Utilities at a public hearing and with that I will take any questions that you may have. Thank you very much for the presentation and thank you for bringing it back again for us to have another look. We will now open it up for board member questions and comments and it looks like board member Walsh you have a question you have your hand raised. Well just a comment I think the presentation was put together the presentation was great in combination with the last meeting I appreciate the extra documentation and the staff that's putting this together is doing a great job also I'm concerned that last time I made some comments and it didn't to me thinking back about it didn't I didn't recognize what how good a job they're doing overall and I was just looking for a couple of documents I wanted to read but it's a great job and I think this lets us fully support the rates and any conversation in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? All right I just had one question has have any public members reached out since the letters have gone to them about the fees? I've had one customer reach out to me I've spent quite a bit of time on the phone with her and her husband and they have said they had some questions about the automated meter or the manual meter agency. Thank you. All right no other questions or comments? Then we will open it up for public comments on item 3.1 so if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand and if you were dialing in via telephone please dial star 9 to raise your hand. Secretary Manas do we have any live email or voicemail public comments so far? We do not. All right thank you very much. With that I would like to entertain any motion for this recommendation? I'll make a motion. All second. I move that the Board of Public Utilities Budget Review Subcommittee recommends revision to the Santa Rosa water miscellaneous fees and charges schedule as proposed by staff to the Board of Public Utilities for public hearing. Thank you so we had a motion by Board Member Walsh and a second by Board Member Wright. Secretary Manas would you take a roll call vote? Thank you Board Member Wright. Aye. Thank you Board Member Walsh. Aye. The other aye. And tier what? Aye. Let the record show this motion passed unanimously. All right well thank you very much for this meeting and its effectiveness and succinctness I think we finished in record time so with that we will adjourn at 11-16. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks folks. Thanks Kimberly. Appreciate bringing it back. You're welcome.