 SJM on the attendee side, if you are a city of Santa Rosa employee, can you rename yourself so I can properly promote you if you are presenting today? Chair Galvin, I believe we are all here. The last communication I had with Board Member Baton Ford is that she was not able to attend today. Okay. And we have all the staff people with us. Chair Galvin, yes. We have all staff that need to be present, so we are ready to go when you are. All right, then we'll call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities Contract Review Subcommittee to order and ask for a roll call, please. Thank you, Chair Galvin. And Board Member Walsh. Present. Let the record show that all subcommittee members are present with the exception of Board Member Baton Ford. All right, just the normal reminders to mute your phones and microphones when you're not speaking. Try and put away your cell phones and your personal computers and keep your video on. We'll now move to item two, which is public comments on non-agenda matters. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Manus. I'm seeing no hands be raised via Zoom. And we receive no written public comment. Very good, then we will conclude item number two. We'll move to item 3.1, Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the subcommittee and apologies for having a little bit of a technical difficulty. So item 3.1 is going to be a cooperative agreement for the transfer of raw and partially treated well water between Sonoma County Water Agency and the city of Santa Rosa. And Sean McNeil, our deputy director of environmental services should be participating, presenting, but I think he just got knocked off the meeting. Oh, no, I see him. I just got him repromoted. Okay, can you promote him? And then Sean, can you just check to make sure you don't have a camera, something to block your camera on your laptop? Can you hear me? I can hear you. Physically on your laptop, you might have a little slide that blocks the camera. Just double check that. Make sure that's not closed. Can you hear us Sean? Okay, he's texting, he can't hear anything. Okay, one second please. So I think I'm gonna call in audible. Thank you for your patience. No problem. Secretary Manus, can you please promote Heather Johnson to a panelist? And I'm gonna ask Heather Johnson, our environmental services officer to please make the presentation on Sean's behalf. I just invited her up to a panelist. So give us one moment please. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, Heather, we can. Do you have access to turn your camera on please? Yeah, hold on. Great, thank you so much. Okay, are we good? Okay, now we can proceed with item 3.1. Thank you for your patience. Let me share my screen here. Okay, are we good? I assume everyone can see my screen, thumbs up. Yes, we can. Okay, perfect. Glad to fill in for Sean. I am sad that he isn't here, but good afternoon Chair Galvin and members of the committee. I am going to be presenting on our cooperative agreement that we are putting in place between the city of Santa Rosa and the Sonoma County Water Agency for the transfer of raw and partially treated well water into our recycled water system. So what's going on is Sonoma Water is rehabbing three of their wells and this is to increase their potable water and then all three wells will need to be able to purge or filter or back flush in as just part of their normal treatment and there is no accessible sewer system nearby for them to purge that water. And so the plan is for the city's reclamation system to serve as the source of that discharge because the reclamation system does run near all of these wells. So here's just sort of a high level view of where the wells are. Those are in red and then our recycled water line is in green and you can see the proximity. I'll just go through all of them real quick. So the Occidental Roadwell, it sits right on Occidental Road and it runs right by our recycled water line. There is the Sebastopol Roadwell, which as you can see also runs very close and was recently connected to our recycled water system. And then their Todd Roadwell, which I'm not sure if it is currently connected but there are plans to do it in the future also sits directly near our recycled water system. So basically the agreement terms are that Sonoma water is going to be responsible for any infrastructure improvements and any CEQA compliance. Before they discharge into our recycled water system they will coordinate closely with our reclamation section. Any discharges have to be approved prior to discharging into the system and they will have to be at a flow rate that we can take. And then we will only accept any water that has been previously approved for us to accept by our regulators. And if there's any instances where they cannot discharge in recycled water system for any reason they do have a permit to truck that waste into the Laguna Truma plant. So in conclusion, it is recommended by Senator Zellwater staff that the contractor review subcommittee recommend approval of this contract by the full board of public utilities. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you Heather. The only question I guess I really had is I think it makes perfect sense that we do this cooperative agreement. I'm just wondering how much of our staff time is going to be needed to facilitate this, the treatment of the water and whether Sonoma water is reimbursing us for any of that staff time. I know they're incurring a bunch of expenses for all the hookups and everything but how much is it costing us you think? I don't have an answer to that question. I can certainly get back to you on that. Anything I have would be anecdotal. Go ahead Jennifer or Director Berthes. I can talk a little bit. Basically we're going to have minimal staff time to coordinate with accepting of when they're discharging the water. So it's very minimal. In my opinion, it's greater benefit to us to have those groundwater wells up and running because they provide water supply benefits and any costs associated with that we have to pay for anyways. So it really is a benefit to the recycled water system and that it provides more water supply and is minimal staff time and just coordinating when they'll discharge. So we didn't feel it was necessary for any staff reimbursement based on that. Okay, that makes sense to me. Board Member Rowe-Walsh, any questions or comments? Yes, just one question to make sure that I know what the transaction is and then I've got a comment. Actually, I'll start with a comment. I appreciate Director Burke calling the audible and I'll say that when we're looking at Heather Johnson's presentation she did better than per the good of the substitution. Sorry about that, but you dig great. And then on the substance of this, so once they're on the water they need to flush their wells periodically to activate them and then we get the water as much water as we can take and we agree to take, we get that. Is that kind of what's going on? That is correct. Well, great, I really appreciate the transaction and Mr. Chairman, if there's no other comments I'd be more than happy to make a motion. Okay. I move that the contract review subcommittee recommended the full Board of Public Utilities authorizing the Director of Santa Rosa Water to sign the agreement, execute the agreement with the Sonoma County Water Agency to take on the extra water that Sonoma Water will use when they flush their wells. Thank you and I will second that. So we have a motion and a second. I'll now open it up for public comments on item 3.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Manus. Chair Kaplan, there are no hands being raised via Zoom and we receive no written or voicemail public comment in advance. Very good. May we have a roll call vote please? Certainly. Board Member Walsh. Aye. Chair Galvin. Aye. With a record show this motion passes with two affirmative votes and Board Member Badenford absent. Great. Thank you again Ms. Johnson for standing in for Sean McNeil and we appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. All right we'll move to item 3.2 Director Burke. Thank you Chair Galvin and members of the committee. I did wanna just provide a short introduction on this one because this is the first time that you are now seeing an item related to our storm drain system. As you may recall and you'll get further details with the change of the charter that was approved by voters earlier last year the Board of Public Utilities now has authority over the storm water utility. And so you will start seeing more items related to our storm drain system. So with that I am going to introduce item 3.2 which we're very excited about. It's our first ever storm drain master plan and Claire Myers our storm water and creeks manager will be making the presentation. Good afternoon Chair Galvin and Board Member Walsh. And as I am new to these I am sharing my presentation. Is that correct Jennifer? Yes please share your screen. Here I go. All right are you seeing the presentation? Yes. Perfect. Well good afternoon it's nice to meet everybody. As Director Burke said and Claire Myers I'm the manager of the storm water and creeks team. I'm pleased to be here today to request your approval for a professional services agreement to develop a storm drain master plan for the city of Santa Rosa. Before I described the project in question I wanted to give you a little bit of background on our team. As Director Burke mentioned until the recent passage of measure J the storm water and creeks team was under the purview of city council. However measure J amended section 25B of the city charter to include storm water systems as within BPU policy authority and direction. So as a result we are now bringing our items to you starting with this contract today. And you will be seeing a lot of our team in the coming months we're pretty busy. So I just wanted to provide you a pretty brief overview of who we are and what we do. And then I'll be back in a few weeks for the full board to present a more in depth presentation of our work. So until then. Storm water and creeks is a team of 11 plus interns and the official mission of our team I put on the board here and it's making Santa Rosa a better place by enhancing creek health through restoration and community involvement providing biological and engineering services and managing storm water runoff to minimize flooding. So broadly speaking our work really centers on ensuring our creeks are healthy and that the city is doing its best to protect the natural environment. We do this by preventing pollution and cleaning up pollution that has already occurred and restoring creeks to a healthy status. And our work is accomplished via many paths some of which include maintaining compliance with regulatory permits doing outreach and education. We do water quality monitoring, responding to spills in streets and other locations providing biological and engineering support for city projects and for divisions and departments within the city. Hopefully you've heard of some of our creek restoration projects we have a robust creek stewardship program along with Sonoma water that does education and creek cleanups. And then finally most pertinent to why I'm here today ensuring that the city's storm drain infrastructure is operational and adequate to prevent flooding in the city. So I also wanted just to note that unlike the rest of the water department we are not funded by the water enterprise we are a little different, a lot different. We have our own enterprise fund the stormwater assessment that funds the majority of our work and we get the stormwater enterprise funding via an annual charge placed on all parcels in the city. And this was set up in 1998 as a long-term public funding source for creek restoration and water quality improvements and drainage improvements. So it brought in about $2.7 million last year and the rest of our teams funding comes from the general fund CIP projects and grants. Moving on to why we are here today we're here today to address the city's storm drain infrastructure system and it's an aging system with a lot of issues. This map shows the age of the storm drain pipes and the majority of the city here you can see that red denotes pipe that is 60 years or older, orange denotes 40 to 60 years, green is zero to 40 and yellow is unrecorded in the map. And you can see a significant portion of the pipes in our system are past their useful life or nearing the end of it. And what this means for us, I've included a few photos of the kinds of failing infrastructure that we're seeing right now and the frequent problems on the top left you see pipes from other utilities that have punched through our storm drains in the center you see metal pipes that have eroded to the point of not even having pipe bottoms on the top right we see some settlement for causing a joint offset or separation between pipe segments and the bottom is a pretty good shot of some tree roots that are growing in we see this quite a bit. And so these are just all conditions that reduce the capacity of the pipes themselves and can result in flooding. In some neighborhoods in this city we see localized flooding even during smaller storms these are some photos I wanted to put up just from the storms at the end of last December and this month the floodwater on the bottom left resulted in the closure of one lane of Fulton Road for several days the others are on private property off of public roadways and adding to the problem the wildfires of the last several years have exacerbated the risk of flooding. So the system needs fixing we know that but we don't currently have the data or the modeling necessary to really understand where to best focus our efforts and how to prioritize projects. So to address these flood issues and protect life and health and safety and property I'm here today to request support for a professional services agreement to develop a storm drain master plan and the goal of the plan really is first to fully understand the risk to the public safety and property and infrastructure posed by our current storm drain system and then second to determine the appropriate mitigation measures and how to fix it and how to fund it. So the plan will do several things it will evaluate the condition of the 340 miles of storm drain pipe and about 17,000 structures that make up the system. It will create a model of the system to support drainage review so we understand what will happen for new developments and future developments in the city will build an asset registry or complete that registry, identify costs of replacing this aging infrastructure, rank projects proposed for maintenance or replacement and then identify ongoing funding needs and really critically options for funding and how to fund both replacement and operations and maintenance. So to go over our process for selecting a consultant in October 13th of last year we put out our request for proposals and on November 11th, we received six grade proposals. We met as a review panel on November 16th to evaluate those proposals. That review panel consisted of council member Tom Schwedhelm, deputy director of environmental services, Sean McNeill, myself and Flannery Banks our stormwater assistant engineer. And we evaluated those six proposals based on let's see six criteria, responsiveness to the RFP, project team qualifications, adequacy of staff resources, an understanding of the work to be done, previous applicable experience and demonstrated technical abilities. So based on that evaluation, the review panel chose three consultants to move forward with for in-person interviews. And on December 8th, the same review panel along with our deputy director of engineering resources, Lori Urbanik, conducted in-person interviews and made a final selection. So based on those interviews, the review panel unanimously concluded that Woodard and Curran of San Francisco is the most qualified proposer to develop the storm drain master plan. Their interview was really impressive for a number of reasons. They demonstrated really strong technical expertise. They are experts in the field of storm drain infrastructure evaluation and showed an in-depth understanding of the technical needs of this project specifically. Their modeling team includes environmental science associates who is also doing the modeling for the Santa Rosa Creek flood study, which we will be back in a few weeks to tell you more about that as well. So they already have an understanding of the city's waterways and current models. They demonstrated a really superior approach to funding strategies and showed a nuanced understanding of the city's need for identifying potential funding sources. And above and beyond that, they really demonstrated how they've used storm drain master plans to get community buy in for funding storm drain infrastructure, which is really something that we need garnering community support. We loved their approach to communication with the public, their public outreach specialists that they brought to the interview was outstanding in both the presentation and the interview itself just showed that their team had a really strong ability to take complex technical information and present it in a way that is digestible to non-experts and balance the fact that the analysis has to be technically robust, but we really want to get the information conveyed in a way that will also get community support and be understandable by people who are not, stormwater engineers. And then furthermore, they showed excellent communication with city staff. They showed leadership, they showed an ability to drive the project forward and maintain excellent communication with us. They understood the importance of keeping elected officials educated in a priceless situation and came to the interview ready to address some of the specific feedback we gave them after reviewing their proposal, which we thought was great. So for these reasons, the group unanimously chose what are in current of the three interviews. So for the, in terms of the funding of the contract and the timeline itself, the contract amount is for a little over $1.5 million. Our team has been saving for this project for several years and applying for various grants. In December of last year, we were thrilled to be awarded a $500,000 community development block grant. Did I do that right? Community development block grant, I always get the letters wrong. It's a mitigation grant through HUD and the housing community services. And then in addition, we've saved approximately $1.1 million in funding from our own stormwater assessment enterprise funds and then some funds from CDIF, which is the Southeast Area Development Impact Fees. So we have the funding necessary to enact the contract. And then it is due to be completed by July of 2025. So after going through this process, we feel that the award of the PSA is in the best interest of the city. And it is recommended by the water department that the contact review subcommittee recommend to the Board of Public Utilities approval of a professional services agreement with Woodard and Kern of San Francisco, California to develop a storm drain master plan in the amount of $1,574,204. Happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Myers. I note from the agreement that they're a main corporation. Are they, is there headquarters in San Francisco or are they throughout the country? The office that will be meeting our needs is based out of San Francisco, but that is not their only office. They are located certainly within California and possibly throughout the country. I don't actually know where all their offices are. And the other two proposers that you interviewed, are they similarly situated or are they local or to remember? Of the two that we interviewed, they were California based. Neither of them were within the city of Santa Rosa, no. Okay. And so it sounds like we've had other contracts, I think with Woodard, haven't we? We have. I will just note, Woodard and Curran used to be RMC consulting, which was a firm that was started locally in California. And then they were, Woodard and Curran took them over. So, but there's still all the staff that we've worked with for years. And we've had many contracts with Woodard and Curran since that happened. Good. Okay. Board member Walsh. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm sorry, can you hear me? Yes. Yes. I think it's a great idea to do the assessment. I think, and also I appreciate the affinity between the stormwater functions, the creeks functions and the public utilities. I think the coordinated approach is best. And I did have some questions about the funding and what it may mean to what we have oversight on as the Board of Public Utilities. And then also to just overall the scope of work on the measure J, I thought the recommendation was to allow the city council to make those additional assignments. Did they do that as take a formal action for that? I'll ask our assistant city attorney, Morgan, he can answer questions related to the analysis that was done by the city based on the ballot measures. Okay. And then one, one oddity that I looked at when we were making the Charter of Amendments, one of the recommendations, and I hope it was worded right, it may not make that big of a difference was we're going to do cleanup. It was to clarify, do some cleanup work that we called the Charter Update Modernization. One was procedures for council vacancies, frequency of amendments. And then when it came to the confirmed scope of Board of Public Utilities, the committee recommended that we clarify that in addition to water related utilities including water, wastewater and stormwater. And so I think right there, it probably is in there. But maybe they didn't already know that. And then also we said at council's discretion, they could include dry utilities. So I think it's in there. And that, you know, so wastewater and stormwater. And I thought that was a good idea. We need to bring these together. And then as far as the funding on the mitigation fees, we haven't seen those yet. So this is the Southeast area development mitigation funds. Is there a reason why we're using those specific funds with where they charge for that specific area? And then does that amount that we would start accounting for separately? Yeah, that's, it's an interesting funding source. We, oh, I'm sorry. Morgan, did you want to address the Charter Things first or should I address the CEDAF question? Why don't you go ahead and I'll jump in after you're done, okay? Okay. So the CEDAF funding was about $700,000 and the city is, as I understand it and Jennifer, please correct me if I'm wrong. The city is no longer getting funding from this source. We have had it in the stormwater and created allocated for a project to be determined in that area of town for the last 10 years. And it wasn't being used for a specific project. And so when we were looking at this project and the scale of the need, we realized that we had the source of funding. And so within the contract for the storm drain master plan, we made sure that the assessment and prioritization of projects will include a project in that section of town. So the funding will be used in the area of town that it was originally allocated for. Okay, so then that part of the funding would be about 700,000. Then the assessment funds would be about 4.1 or I'm sorry, 400,000. I think that's not right. Cause we have about 1.1. It was between six and 700,000, I wanna say of the CEDAF funding and the remainder is through this storm water assessment. Oh, okay. And I think the recommendation makes sense. There may be a need to do a check-in unless we did already with finance with Alan Alton. So I think on the mitigation fees, the prior method that they used prior to 2018, there was an allocation percentage. And I don't know if there was some percentage that was supposed to go storm water, some to parks and some to elsewhere. Cause they're charging developers for their overall impact. They identified the impact. They're supposed to spend money on those projects that they said they were gonna do to mitigate the impact. So if there's a way to maybe have, or to confirm that Kimberly Zunino and Alan Alton kind of coordinate on that and they think it's appropriate use of the impact fees, that would give me more comfort. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's a wonderful contract. I would like to recommend it. I just wanted to make sure that we coordinated on the money part. Then is it okay to ask one more question, Director Burke on the accounting for this? On the, we call it the storm water assessment enterprise fund, but it's likely not an enterprise fund accounting, is it? It'd be special revenue since we're taking it in through the taxpayer, regardless of whether or not they decide to use the services. Is that correct? It's defined by the city and quantified as an enterprise fund because it is a fee that is assessed and adopted by council every year. And so the city does, classified as an enterprise fund, we collect it through the property tax pool. And we will get into much more details on budget. You guys will be seeing the storm water budget for the first time. And I did want to just note, we have confirmed with finance this is appropriate funding to be used for the storm water and creeks team. Otherwise we wouldn't be bringing this forward. So they are fully comfortable with this funding amount for this project. Okay, great. Would it be okay? Mr. Chairman, I'm not sure how to ask for an agenda item. If on a budget subcommittee, we could have some discussion with finance about the use of mitigation fees and how much is in there that we might want to use in the future, how we plan to use it. Yeah, I think that's totally appropriate. Okay, great. Well, this is a wonderful item. I don't know when the budget subcommittees are meeting next, Director Burke, but can you make sure that that becomes some agenda item for that? Yeah, so we will bring, I want to be a little careful because we're getting a little, I think, off agenda, but we will be bringing, because this is really just about the contract, we will be bringing to the budget subcommittee our normal budget information, but we will be bringing storm water and all the funds that funds storm water. So that will be what you will see through the budget subcommittee in the coming months. Great, okay. All right, well, that's all right, Mr. Charm, I'm sorry. No, no problem. Assistant city attorney, your staff, did you want to respond to the other parts? Yeah, thank you, Chair Galvin. Just again, keeping it kind of constrained to the agenda item that we're on right now, this is appropriate to bring this subcommittee into the BPU measure. Jay did explicitly include the word storm water system was the phrase added under the BPU remit. So it's yours now. Great, and I thought it was within scope because first we said, what's the authority for us to authorize the contract? And then also said from which financing source we would, I think both of those are within the scope of the item if not without to say whether or not we like to contract. Yeah, I think we're fine. I just wanted to remind you. Okay, great, great. Well, then I'd like to make a motion, Mr. Chairman. Please. Okay, great. Thank you very much. I move that the contract review subcommittee of the Board of Public Utilities recommended the full Board of Public Utilities the approval of a professional service agreement with Woodward and Curran Incorporated San Francisco to develop the storm water drain master plan and the amount of $1,574,204. Great, and I will gladly second that. So we have a motion and a second. I'll now open it up for public comments on item 3.2. You wish to make a comment via Zoom. Please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Manus. There are no hands being raised via Zoom and we receive no advance public comment. Thank you. May we have a roll call, please? Yes, Board Member Walsh. Aye. Chair Galvin. Aye. Let the record show this motion passes with two affirmative votes and Board Member Baden-Bort absent. Great. Thank you again, Ms. Myers for the presentation. We'll look forward to spending a lot more time with the storm water team in the next few years. So thank you. We'll now move to item 3.3. Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the subcommittee. Our third item is amendments to our professional services agreements for AMI enhancements with North Harris and Deputy Director Administration, Kimberly Zanino will be making the presentation. All right, good afternoon, Chair Galvin and Board Member Walsh. I am going to share my screen. So if you just give me a second. All right, so I believe you are... Let me get rid of this. There you go. Can you see my screen now? Yes. Great. All right. Let me start at the beginning. That'd be better. All right. So today we are going to discuss proposed amendments to two agreements that will allow us to make some improvements to our advanced metering infrastructure software. In July of 2021, the board of public utilities, the entire board approved agreements for the meter upgrade project, which I'm going to refer to throughout the presentation as AMI, because it's a lot easier to say than that. And in those agreements, there were agreements for equipment, for consultants, for installation and then there were also agreements for meter sense software, which is the meter data management software and it also included a customer-facing portal. And so two of those agreements are the ones that we will be discussing today. We will be discussing amendments to the implementation agreement of that software and then also the support and maintenance of that software. And what I'm showing you here on this slide is the amounts of the original agreements that came before and were approved by the entire board. So before I go into the currently proposed amendment, I'm sure that you saw that the attachments were quite large. There have been several amendments to the implementation agreement prior to now. And so I will just quickly go over all of these before we move on to the actual proposal. The first amendment did come before the entire board for approval. And that was really due to the impact to the support and maintenance costs, which we'll show up on a later slide. With that agreement, what we were doing was implementing an entirely new module to the meter data management system. That module is the water conservation manager. And because this was a new project, you can see that actually the implementation piece was even less than the support and maintenance because they were developing this and we were going to help them develop this into a good tool. And so we got it for less than half the price that they would be providing it to other companies or other water utilities. This enhancement provided a tool, sorry, for water use efficiency to track water savings by customer classes, the ability to determine the water savings by program. It helped us to develop water use reports and data to assist with water waste and monitoring water waste. And as we know now, it has provided great tools during this last route to assist with reducing water use. It also provided some outreach tools that are used throughout the year to educate our customers. The other amendments were all, which are shown here, second, third and fourth, were all within the approval authority of the assistant city manager and the director of Santa Rosa Water. So those did not come before the full board, but I'm outlining them here for you. They were all enhancements that made the system work better for Santa Rosa Water's rate structure and the specific requirements. And those are all listed here with their costs. So now I will go into what this fifth amendment is approving and the enhancements associated with the amendment that's before you. The project was completed in 2020. So staff has now been working in the system and with the software for a significant amount of time. And through this recent drought, it has given us the opportunity to compile a list of enhancements we would like to see in the system to assist with various operations related to water billing, customer service, and water use efficiency. You have also probably heard me many times in the past say that the intent of the system is not just to collect a billing read for our customers, but to use this kind of robust and large amount of data that comes to us to help us do the job that we do. We would feel like it was definitely not using the system to its fullest potential if we were only to use it for billing and not use it for all of these other great tools that we've been using it for. We have been developing additional functionality and finding new ways to leverage the data within the system since the beginning. And these additional changes will really help staff with the work they do and provide additional support to our customers. The first of the updates I'll talk about are to the actual WaterSmart portal. The WaterSmart portal is a customer-facing portal that provides our customers with information about their hourly usage. We have received feedback from our customers and staff on some adjustments to the portal that will help increase participation and customer engagement. The first part of it was that the registration processes was a little clunky to begin with. That's been simplified, which is great. But we also heard back that the activation process to access the data was not working well for customers at times and they were getting frustrated and so they were just giving up and not actually accessing their data. So with this round of enhancements, we are asking the vendor to set it up so that we can help our customers activate their access to the portal on the city side instead of them having to follow up with an email and do that activation process themselves. It can happen either way, but it's gonna give us some more flexibility so that we can get more people signed up. We also felt that navigation inside of the system could be more intuitive and could definitely be improved. You'll see on the top right of this slide, the menus or the menu that does exist in the system is the one there on the left where it says my dashboard. And then right under that, you'll see there's a button that says library, which doesn't clearly identify what that goes to. And so we have asked for that to be changed. That will now be called recommendations. Where that takes people is to screens that allow us to provide information on water use efficiency programs that we run. We can actually put other information out there if we need to, information about water shortage. It will be a much more robust tool or people will probably go there and take a look at that information if they see it called something else. And so we're gonna ask them to change that. And then in addition to that, you can see on the right-hand side where that label has been changed. We're also asking them to set up some quick links for us. So these will be available right from somebody's homepage. From that quick link, they can actually go to the notifications and set up their own personalized notifications. Previously, that was under settings. And so not really clear, didn't really identify to people how to do it or that it was even available to them. And so this will be a nice easy way for them to just hit the notifications button, go in there and set up the notifications that they want sent to themselves. Those come through email for people. The other thing we are going to do with those quick links is set up an FAQ sheet or an FAQ page. And as questions come in from our customers, we'll be able to actually set up an FAQ page for them to answer some of those questions. The other thing we wanna do is we wanna be able to review what the notifications are that customers are signed up for. So it's important for us to know and to be able to pull reports from the system that tell us which customers are signed up for notifications and what their notifications are. That way we have the ability to really do targeted outreach if there are people who aren't signed up for notifications and we think that that's a great tool. It lets you know if you have continuous use, it lets you know if you're using a lot of water more than you normally would. And so we really want people to get signed up for those notifications. But then we can also take a look and see if maybe the notifications aren't set up in a way that are really useful to the customer. And this gives us the chance to do that targeted outreach and reach out to customers and help them to set those up so that they're the best notifications possible to help them with using water efficiently. And the improvements to this portion of the system are $29,900. So next I talked about how the second amendment was the implementation of this new tool for us, this water conservation manager. And so this set of the enhancements that we are proposing and requesting the amendment are for actual uses of the water conservation manager. This tool has been incredibly useful during the drought and increasing functionality will really help staff with future water shortage events. But we also have enhancements that really just help with our everyday work and helping our customers in any type of water supply condition. The first items listed are improving functionality for reports and creating what we call location groups. Location groups are basically tools that allow us to group different customers based on specific parameters. It can be by customer type, it can be by location, it can be type of use, it can be by water usage parameters. So it really gives us a huge tool to be able to group those customers together to track the savings that we're getting, the water savings that we're getting programmatically in different groups of customers. It lets us really look and see how each one of our programs are performing and what kind of water savings we're getting from them. And this is a pretty complicated amount of coding that has to go on when they create these location groups. And if you enter incorrect data, you are going to get inaccurate information out of the system. So we really feel that it's important that we have the experts who know the system and who do this for a living be creating those location groups for us. And so that's one of the enhancements that we're looking for. We also wanted to leave a little bit of extra room, which is that future report writing so that we can reach out to them when we have additional needs to create new reports or new groups and have them do that in the future as well. So there's some dollars set aside in the contract so that we can leverage their expertise in the future. The next enhancement will be for scorecards. And that's what's in the bottom right-hand corner. You can see there's what we call a scorecard there. That's just half of it. That's just the front half of it on the back. We also have customer outreach information on it. We developed these scorecards in the very beginning of using the conservation manager. And we use these to educate our customers about water use when we do water audits. Or even sometimes when we're just talking to them on the phone, you know, we'll create a scorecard for and send them out. It gives them, and it gives us the ability to show them kind of how they compare to like users. If they're in a good range of what most people are using, if they're saving more, which is always great because positive reinforcement when they're saving more water than someone else is always great. And so it really gives us a tool that educates our customers on their specific water use, but also, you know, how a water is being used in similar types of uses. This stuff is really, has been hugely successful. What we don't have is we don't have the ability to create these in bulk. So now we will be able to use those location groups to create scorecards in bulk. We can mail them, we can use email groups. We can do all kinds of different ways to try to reach out to our customers with these. And this will be a much more efficient way for us to do it than one customer at a time. The other thing it lets us do is of course do that targeted outreach again. You know, look at specific groups of customers, create scorecards just for those groups of customers and get that information out to them. And then finally, this is the most expensive actually enhancement that we are asking for, but during or when the water shortage contingency plan was approved by city council in November of 2021 and you saw it before then, we even recommended it to city council. We have the requirement that in later stages of drought or water shortage, that we would have to apply allotments to our customers. So we began actually last year trying to do this on our own when we thought that there was a possibility that we may hit some of those later stages. And so when we did that, you know, our only method really to do it was to take spreadsheets with, as you can imagine, especially on the residential side, 50,000 accounts and try to create allotments for these customers. Some of the other groups of customers have pretty complicated methods to determine their allotments. And when you're doing it on a spreadsheet, you make one change to a calculation and once again, you could get inaccurate data. So we think it's really important to have this hard-coded into the system. They're gonna build, they have all the data they need in the system so they'll be able to build those allotments for us, push those allotments out so that we can then just load them into the billing system. So we're pretty excited about this being set up for us and being able to use that or well, we hope we never have to use it. Let's put it that way. We hope never we'll have to use these. But if we do, we need them to be right. And so this will allow us to do that. And the total cost of these enhancements for the Water Conservation Manager are $65,550. So because we are asking for some pretty large enhancements in the system and because they are very data heavy, it also requires some additional support and maintenance fees. If you looked closely at the statement of works, you'll actually see that they waived quite a few of those support and maintenance dollars for us and only and there may have been a little negotiating that went on that got some of them waived as well but they do need to do a little bit more maintenance of that data and they do need to support us with it. And so that will increase support and maintenance. You can see here by $8,624. I also just to point out quickly, I talked about the First Amendment that came before BPU and that it was largely because of the support and maintenance costs of the Water Conservation Manager and that was that First Amendment that you see here and that's why that one came to the Board of Public Utilities and the other smaller ones did not. With this slide, I am just combining all of the increases so that you can see all the costs together for what we are requesting. The total proposed for the Implementation Amendment which includes all those from the Water Smart Portal and the Water Conservation Manager is $95,450 and then the support and maintenance increase is at $8,624 and that increases annually at 4%. I will point out that typical increases to support and maintenance are about 5% for software companies but we negotiated that down for the next several years. So for the next several years, we will sit at 4% a year. We do have budget available for this work. The METER 8 upgrade project actually came in under budget so there is a funding available in order to cover the implementation of these enhancements that we are proposing. So it is recommended by Santa Rosa Water Staff that the Contract Review Subcommittee recommend to the Board of Public Utilities the amendments with North Harris for implementation of AMI software enhancements and increase support and maintenance costs. And with that, I am happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you, Deputy Director Zanino. Board Member Walsh, any questions? Just a comment, I started writing down all the good things in the presentation that gave me great confidence in our water systems, water admins ability to implement software projects, but I'll just roll it all at once. This is the best software investment presentation I've ever seen and I was getting paid to see a whole bunch of them. Congratulations, you guys are wonderful and I'm gonna recommend this. Thank you. I agree. So if you would like to make a motion, Board Member Walsh, that would be great. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I move that the Santa Rosa Board of Public Utilities contract review subcommittee recommend to the full Board of Public Utilities the amendments with Harris for implementation of AMI software enhancements and increase support and maintenance costs as presented by staff. And I will second that. So we have a motion and a second. We'll now open it up for public comments on item 3.3. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Manus. There are no hands being raised via Zoom and we've received no advanced public comments for this item. All right, may we have a roll call vote please? Certainly, Board Member Walsh. Aye. Chair Galvin. Aye. Let the record show this motion passes with two affirmative votes and Board Member Baden-Fort absent from the subcommittee meeting today. Very good. I think that concludes our agenda for today. Thank you all for being there. Thanks for the presentations and we will see you at the full Board meeting next Thursday. So have a nice rest of your day. Thank you.