 Okay, I have six o'clock, so I would like to convene this meeting of a special meeting of the Board of Directors of the San Lorenzo Valley Water District on July 8th, 2021. Holly, can you call the roll please? President Mayhood. Here. Vice President Henry. Here. Director Ackman. Here. Director Fouls. Here. Director Smalley. Here. Okay. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda? The staff has none. Okay. All right. Then we will move on to oral communications. This is a time when members of the public may address the Board on any topic under its purview, except for those things that are on the agenda tonight. I see we have three people in attendance from the public. Would anybody like to ask a question or make a statement at this point? Seeing none. Hearing none. Then I guess we'll just go right on to new business. Okay. The first item being the response to the city of Santa Cruz petition for change of their water rights and our response to them. And I'll turn it over to Rick or Gina. Just before I'm going to turn this over to district council for presentation, but just for information, I received a phone call today from Rosemary Menard, the director of the city of Santa Cruz water department. I'm not going to be attending tonight's meeting, not intending to speak, but would be more than happy to answer any questions from the board. And with that, I'll ask district council to present this item to the board. Thank you, chair may hood. Thank you, district manager Rogers. This item, I think won't come as a surprise to anybody on the board. I think the first of the materials that were presented in your agenda packet were previously presented. Back in March of this year, in connection with the district's receipt of the city of Santa, notice of the city of Santa Cruz's water rights petitions. And we took a close look and provided a presentation to the board at that time. Regarding those petitions. And potential interactions with the district's water rights. We also considered a couple of issues that were of importance to the district and its rights. Namely with respect to the district's ability to call upon its Loch Lomond entitlement. And also interactions between the districts felt in right. And the city of Santa Cruz's proposed changes to its water rights. That both have similar. Flow conditions. The city of Santa Cruz's water rights. The city of Santa Cruz's water rights. The city of Santa Cruz's. Measured at the big trees gauge on the. On the San Lorenzo river. So the district did submit the protest. After talking to the representatives of the city of. Santa Cruz and their water rights. Council. About the district's plans to do so. And that letter from the city's water rights council responding to our protest. And presenting. What appeared to be some, some constructive suggestions for how to resolve the two elements of the protest. And that letter from the city's water rights council is in your packet. And having reviewed that letter, the district has prepared. A response. That. Proposes a couple of minor tweaks to what the city. Suggested. That hopefully can come if not. Resolve the protest come very close to doing so. And of course, the gist of the, the tweaks that we've proposed to the city's. Suggestions for a resolution. Are right along the lines of what we've previously discussed. And then we'll move on to the next slide. And then we'll talk about the timing of the abilities of the district's ability to call upon those rights. That's a critical issue. The district is most likely to need those rights either for use or for its own use or for conjunctive use. During times when water supplies are limited. And so there's a strong concern to make sure. That the permit that the water rights permit doesn't preclude that water from being called upon when it's needed. And with respect to the big trees gauge, it's important to make sure that the water rights permit. That the water rights permit. That the city is proposing for its water rights were imported. Directly into the, the district's water right or directly or indirectly to, to, to apply to the district's water rights. It could seriously impair the district's ability to utilize. Those Felton water rights. And there are proposals that are being developed right now. To make changes to those water rights so that they can be. Provided by the district. Provided by the district. Provided by the district. Provided by the district. Provided by the district and for conjunctive use within the valley. And so there's a need to ensure that the city's changes don't end up interfering with. Other changes that are needed. By the district and other water users in the valley. Going forward. So that that's the gist of the changes that you see in the letter that was presented to you. You should also be aware. That the district's water rights are being developed. And so I'm going to, I'm going to go back to my first report. For its water rights petitions. And there are a couple of public hearings coming up on that. In comments are due on, currently due on July 26th. So that's something that, that we're looking at as well. That bears on the water rights petitions. But it's not directly implicated in the draft letter that's in front of you. So I'm not going to go into all of the letter, but did want to present it and hear your concerns related to it. Of course, this is it. An important issue for the district. And. The hope I believe Rick is that. Once this letter goes to the city. That there could be a meeting. For the city and the district to sit down and bridge any gap that may remain. Between. What the city's proposal was and what we've, that's correct in my conversation today with. Rosemary Menard, the director of city of Santa Cruz water. That felt it would be advantageous to the two districts to sit down face to face. And. Give the city a better understanding of our concerns. And to talk about. The districts. What our district operations look like moving forward. And I agree that anytime that we can sit down and discuss. Issues. And. Put our cards on the table and get a better understanding. It'd be worth our, worth our time. With that. Happy to answer any questions that the board may have about the proposed response. Okay. I'll just mention that. The board did see this draft. And so we're. This is not a night to do wordsmithing here. We've had plenty of time to look at it. So hopefully we, we can just move to. Basically give our seal of approval on it. But as I understand, you don't want to vote on this, right? So. But anyway, are there any questions or comments from the board? Jamie. Yeah. I'm just, if we could talk a little bit about. Because I didn't really. You know, I just wanted to make sure that. I just wanted to understand that the decision matrix to. You know, there was some discussion around moving the. Gauge location. The big trees gauge location as the location where the. Measurements are taken. And I'm just wondering if we, you know, how much of this is mitigated if that is one of the. Resolutions that is accepted. I'm just going to answer that. And Rick or Carly may want to jump in as well. But the idea here wouldn't be that there would be no. Flow requirements. Connected to Felton. The idea there are already flow requirements measured further upstream. With respect to the Felton rights. So the issue would be sort of decoupling. The, the SLB Felton rights from the same metric. That's applying to the city's rights so that you, but nobody is proposing that there shouldn't be any. You know, limitations on. Maintaining sufficient flows in the river for persons with fisheries. You may know one of the comments in the letter is that of course, you know, if you move the. The measuring point for, for bypass flows or flow requirements upstream. You know, you, you kind of, you can't just move it as a practical matter. If it's, if you're measuring it somewhere else, there's going to be a different amount of flow that should be associated with that point. And so it, it complicates the ability to simply say, well, we'll just move. The big trees measuring point upstream. It's going to have to be a little more. New ones than that or it's going to have to rely on the district's existing flow requirements further upstream. And so, but it's a, you know, it's a little bit of a risk on the felt and rights. But. So that's, if you saw the language that suggested. That's. The solution may be a little more nuanced and simply moving the big trees, measuring point upstream that that's why. Is that. Bob, go ahead. Yeah, we've, we've talked about these issues before just really concerns about them is, I think it's great that Santa Cruz wants to, I think in their words, perfect their water rights, but they need to do so within the confines of their own operations. So if they want to have a 40 CFS bypass flow, then they have to deliver the 40 CFS bypass flow. We would be additive to that if on any bypass flows that we might get stuck with as part of this. So I just don't want to be part of their process on that. And I think Gina, the letter, I think makes that pretty clear. The same thing on the lock loan of water. We don't want to missing comedy and impact our ability to draw on that water. That needs to be well understood and well documented that when we get ready to draw on it, we should be able to draw on it at any time. So please carry those into the conversations that you have with Rosemary Menard this coming week or whenever you have those. Thanks. Mark. Yes, I was pleased to see that the city was willing to make some amendments to their petition and I'm glad to see that with some very limited changes, we can agree to that language with the changes that are in the response letter back from Gina. So I think this is positive that we're able to move forward and that the city is willing to make some modifications based on the district's concerns. And I would hope that with these limited changes that we are suggesting that the city can now say, yes, we can accept those and we can move forward on this. So I don't have any further concerns with this. Looks good to me. Lois, you had your hand up. Yeah. I get that the city wants to save the fish, but it's never going to, they're never going to come back like they were in the 70s. And to double the flow that's been what the state has been happy with for years just seems unreasonable to me and it affects us adversely. So I, they've got, they cannot affect our flow. That's the way I feel about it. I guess I would just say I agree with kind of what everybody said here and I'm hoping that Mark is right and that Santa Cruz can accept those changes won't surprise me if they'll, if they won't, but I'm hopeful. And I thought that Gina did a good job of trying to make sure that there wasn't any wiggle room that could hurt us later on while being cordial and friendly about it. And so I was quite happy with the letter myself, Rick. Just in response to director's false comment that, you know, we want to be able to take our lock loam and contract water when we want to. And that's generally the belief from SLB and from Santa Cruz, but we will have to work out nuances down the road of how to deal with Santa Cruz's operational, the way they operate their water system because there are times when there may not be lock loam and water in that pipeline when they're doing maintenance or depending on how they operate their conversions. And I think that's very understandable. But, you know, staffs will just have to work those out. But there will be times when we'll have to work around Santa Cruz's operational of their intake and intake structures. Of course. Right. Go out now to members of the public. I see that Mark Lee has his hand up. Mark, would you like to comment? Mark, you should be able to speak to us. I'm sorry. I thought I was unmuted. I'd like to full three minutes here if I could please. The letter was well written by Gina. I appreciate the clarity, but there's there's a new refer to the wiggle room. I think you're being quite naive with who we're dealing with at the city. Have you read? I want to ask every one of the people on the border. Have you read the EIR? Rick, have you read the EIR? I have not. Okay, so you really don't know the gravity of what is going on here. Lois, have you read the EIR? Lois, have you read the EIR? I hear you speak English and not give me an EIR. Okay, the environmental impact report. The one that's the subject of this letter. Bob, have you read it yet? No. Jamie. Mark, given your expertise in this area, I'd be very interested in hearing what you have to say about it. Don't spend your three minutes curving the board. So anyway, I understand you're dealing with also an attorney, who I went to school with at Davis, by the name of Steve Cronick. He's one of my closest friends. I hate to see him on the outside of the table, but the EIR is completely inadequate. They are giving absolutely no credibility to growth inducement. They indicate in the EIR document, there's going to be a $1.2 billion, a billion gallon deficit. They plan on, once these diversion rights are accepted, they're going to be expanding those rights. You need to read the EIR. In fact, I'm surprised. I think if they do not go along with this language, I think my advice is, Gina, we need more teeth in this with the nuances, so we hold their feet to the agreement. Because once you're gone, you're in LA, Steve is in Sacramento, and the board changes, they're not going to remember this. We need to have performance criteria on this recommended letter. And I don't, it's very nice, it's very accommodating, but they're going to, especially on the language on term 13, it refers to trying to come up with some kind of mitigation measures that you hope that they will agree to. So I know you're trying to avoid litigation, but this is no way to enter the lion's den with those people in Santa Cruz. I know who you're dealing with down there. They have no intention of complying with this agreement. So I would recommend everyone read the EIR. In fact, the EIR is grossly inadequate, and should be in your comments during the draft period. I hope you're going to be attending the meetings. Look at it. Read the 80 page and read the growth inducements. And also, Bob, read the ASR chapter on how this water is going to be sent. Millions of gallons are going to be sent to the Soquel Water District for an ASR pilot project. Okay. And it's so this letter does not address specifically the issues that we really need to address. Thank you. I hope you will amend the letter. Thank you. Jim Mosher. Yes, I didn't have a chance to read the letter until the meeting started. I didn't realize it was online. So I don't have any comments on that. And one part of what Mark said I would agree with, which is it would be helpful for me at least. And I think for the public, if we did have some kind of analysis of the EIR, I have not read it. It's an area that I don't have any expertise in. But I'm hoping the board can give the public some guidance about what's in that EIR. The city has approached the friends of the San Lorenzo Valley water wanting to present to us and telling us how wonderful the EIR is in terms of protecting the fish and the environment. But there is a fair amount of suspicion in the valley about what they're up to in terms of the growth down there. And it would be just helpful if we had some guidance as to how to interpret what they're doing and how we should approach it as your constituents. Thank you. Carly, would you like to respond to that? Sure. I'd be happy to try to put together a simple summary of the EIR. There's also, City of Santa Cruz did put together their own community report, kind of talking about the different findings in the EIR and what they were looking to do with their water right changes. And that's available on their website as well. But something coming from the district is probably also a good thing to do. I actually have a clarifying question for Mark and Jim. And that is, just to make sure I'm understanding what you're advocating, are you advocating that our district and this board take a position that would be against the kind of growth that Santa Cruz expects to have in their city population and housing stock and commercial stock and that sort of thing? Is that what's being asked? Jim, go ahead and respond. Bob, no, that's at least not what I'm asking for. I'm just asking for some guidance and interpreting it. I understand we need to be working regionally. We're facing the drought and climate change. And it's important for the district to work collaboratively with the other districts in the area. I just, I am, because of the distrust that we have in the Valley and what the city's up to, I would just like some guidance as to whether or not the EIR is adequately and accurately describing the potential damage that could happen to our watershed. If, you know, it's just not an area of expertise and I would like to have some kind of independent review of that, someone looking at it from the point of view of the Valley rather than from the city. Mark? I know that's turned around on the normal process, but thank you, Jim, for clarifying that. Mark? Yes, I agree with what Jim just said. I appreciate that the city has put together their synopsis of what the, they believe the EIR says. Carly, I want to see what the district's perspective is on that, not the cities in particular, so. And our review of the EIR would be looking at it as its impacts to San Lorenzo Valley. Agreed. Yes. I just want to make clear of that. Yes. Bob, did you have something, Maury, you wanted to say on that? Just a real quick question, and I think this is for Rick. Is it possible to have that our summary completed before Santa Cruz's first meeting, which I believe is the 14th, the week from now, almost a week from now? Well, we'll, if we don't already have, we'll get the, or take a look at it, see what type of bandwidth lift it would be, because I'd recommend it be myself, Carly, and District Council, when we all bring different expertise to the table, and take a look at it. And this would be a look as it affects the San Lorenzo Valley Water District, or what concerns we would have. I don't look at dates of meetings and so forth, but we could make it a high priority and make some deadlines. I believe the first meeting is the 14th. And would we share this with Santa, that summary with Rosemary Menard in the Santa Cruz City Water Department? Yeah, no problem with that. Great, I think that'd be fabulous. That way they can just address it at the meetings on the 14th to the 20th. If they wish to. Make formal comments. It would be due by July 26th, just so the group knows. I'm sorry, Carly. You said that the comment period ends on the 26th of July, so we need to, okay. Well, just to be clear, it would be great if Santa Cruz Water Department could address those at their community meetings, any concerns that we might have. And those meetings, I believe, are on the 14th and 20th. I do understand the formal period is the 26th, but I'd rather have them talk about our concerns during those meetings. It would be good if we had our concerns and if we were going to meet with Santa Cruz to discuss those. And I'll work with Gina and Carly here and then we'll put together a plan. Okay. That sounds good. Beth, I thought I saw your hand up, but it looks like it went back down. Or it's back up again. Okay, did you have a comment? Go ahead. Oh, thanks. I just want to say that I agree it would be helpful. I also think it would be helpful for all of us in the community and on the board to think about how this could impact the Santa Margarita water process. I think that the other water districts are going to pay attention to how much we're paying attention. Any other comments? Gina, do you need anything from us? I do not. The letter will be sent tomorrow. I believe the city's, frankly, has already seen it. And then Rick, I believe the next step will be to promptly set up a meeting with the city to discuss it. Right. And as I said, in the beginning of the meeting, Rosemary Menard has offered and thinks that would be a good idea. I guess my questions to the board, attendance of that meeting would be myself, district council and chair Mahood. What does that sound like? And possibly Carl and Carly would be representing SOV. Does that work for the board? I think it will be helpful to have either me or Mark there because of the association with this all kind of plays into the Santa Margarita stuff and water that they take out of the valley. This is something that Mark and I talked a long time ago about before this all started when I first brought up the issues that I was concerned about what they were saying. Ultimately, we can't really tell them what to do with their water. It's their water. But there are certain things we can make sure is that they don't make a mess and felt in putting in new pipelines and things like that. So it's a little bit of a dance here because I don't want to overstate our what we can do to influence them. But I think it would be good to have either Mark or I involved in terms of the... The same goes for SOV explaining our operations and what we're looking at going down the road and to explain our concerns face to face. I think that would be one of the long ways with putting this to bed, so to speak. Okay. Any other comments from the public? If not, oh, Bob, go ahead. Yeah, I just want to say that we're also dealing here with I think the same sort of divide that we kind of dealt with with the possible consolidation in the Scotts Valley. And that is we are a rural even though they classify us as urban. It's fake urban. We're a rural area with no growth. And the only growth that's going to happen is on remodels and perhaps demographic shifts. And both of those areas are urban areas, truly urban areas, with higher growth in population, housing stock, commercial development, that sort of thing. And so those things are that same sort of city country divide that you always get when those two areas sort of rub up against each other. And so it's incumbent upon all of us just to make sure that all of those concerns are out on the table. So Gail, you being there or Mark being there is absolutely the right thing to make sure that this all folds in nicely with Santa Margarita, to the extent we can. With that, we'll go on to our next order business, which is me giving a talk about updating us on the Santa Margarita process. And I thought that it might be appropriate for me to hand over the reins of the meeting to the vice president. Not that I think there are going to be people rioting in the streets as I talk about ASR or whatever, but it just seems proper. Well, maybe Bob will be jumping up and down. I don't know, but it just seems more proper to have me. You don't have to tell me that, Bob. I've been working on that for three years now. You're preaching to the choir. So if she doesn't mind, I'm going to let her sort of handle questions and things. So with that, I think I'm going to try to see if I can share my screen, right? And... Ooh, PowerPoint, Gail. Ooh, wow, huh? All right, whoops. Let me get my laser pointer out, too. All right, yay. Okay, good. And all right, let me... So what I thought I'd do today is give an update. There's been a lot of things happening, and they're all sort of coming together finally. And before I do, I just want to sort of give some acknowledgments here and that first to the staff and the consultants who've worked on the Santa Margarita process, and I have shamelessly plagiarized all of their slides and other things here. And so I couldn't have put this together if they hadn't done that. I'd also like to thank Director Smalley, who joined the board at the same time, more or less, I did at Santa Margarita and having him be very practically oriented and detail oriented has been a huge addition to the board for Santa Margarita. And I'd also like to give a shout out to the former SLVW reps on the board. I've been going to those meetings two years before I actually was elected, and I was often very impressed by the priscaciousness of Lois's questions and the fact that she often seemed to be the only board member that was very concerned about costs. And then Lou Ferris and I both sort of realized that the problems, potential problems with ASR about the same time. And so we sort of worked together to learn more about it. And I did a lot of reading, and I think he's been a big help in my thinking on this too. So as a geologist, of course, I have to start out with a map to orient us. Okay. And so one of the things you can see here on this set view is that we have the San Lorenzo Valley watershed, of which the Santa Margarita, this little triangular shape thing here, is only a part. And of course, we have our water district and the Scotts Valley water district here. So what I'm going to try to shut... Let's see if I can... What is groundwater? It's basically the water that fills water space and fractures in sedimentary rocks. And I need to figure out a way to close my... How do I get to close the... Because I see everybody and I can't read my own slides. Up in the right hand corner. Maybe I can... In the... You want to exit full screen? I think you go to the top. Yeah, I have a feeling I do too. Okay. That's what I do. All right. Okay. I think I'm just making it worse. Never mind. And I'll just do my best. Okay. Can you see it now? Great. No. You switched your views. Yeah. We see you. We don't see the presentation. Sorry. No good deed goes unpunished. Right. All right. So there... Okay. Now can you see it? Not yet. All right. Let me try something. Let me try share screen again. Yes. I still have... Here there we go. Now I can... You're right. You can't do it with a pointer. You got to do it with a regular thing. All right. Now I've got it together here. Okay. And the water table is just the top of the zone that is the groundwater zone. So what makes groundwater available is porosity and permeability. And the porosity is just the total volume of the pore space in the rocks or in the pores between the grains or the fractures. And then the other thing that controls it is the permeability, which is basically how fast water can flow through. So the left down here we have sands where there's big pores and it's easy for the water to snake its way through. Here there's plenty of porosity but the grains are so small that in this fine grain material it takes a long time for the water to go through. So in deposits or rocks of clay and silt size the water travels slowly and you certainly experience this if you've ever dug a hole in your backyard and if you have clay you sometimes have to come back the next day. If you're in the Santa Margarita the water goes out of the hole immediately. So we have the term aquifer for that permeable layer of rock or sediment, usually sand or gravel. And the best aquifers are either sedimentary rocks or uncadot consolidated deposits of sand and gravel or porous limestones. Other rocks like silt stones, mudstones and most igneous and metamorphic rocks unless they're highly fractured make it very hard for the water to move and so they're called aquitards because they retard the movement of the water. And if you look around the basin we have kind of all different kinds of those aquifers where in the Santa Margarita we have a very good one because it's a coarse-grained sand with lots of porosity and permeability. Then in the Lompico and the Butana we have it's a little bit not all one size so porosity is high but permeability isn't quite so good but it's still a very good aquifer. Then we do have all a tiny little aquifer that's in marble, my house and about 22 others on Fultonville Road are served by a spring coming out of fractures in marbles and the basement rocks. And then poor folks in Big Basin are in what is not a good aquifer in fractures in granitic rock. So here are the rocks that are the stratigraphic rocks that make up our basins. So we have the Santa Margarita on the top, the Lompico, the Butano and there's an aquitard, the Monterey Formation that is usually between the Santa Margarita and the Lompico, only occasionally is there a place where these two are in connection and that's a really important one for recharge of water into the Lompico. And then in the Butano there's three different members. The middle one is not so good because it's finer-grained and it also has pyrite in it which then if you oxidize that releases iron and sulfur and sometimes arsenic. So these things in yellow are the ones that we generally put the things in and these are thick units. So if you look at the Santa Margarita groundwater basin, again this little triangular thing, it's bounded on the north by the Zionty Fault on the west by the Ben-Loman Fault. The boundary on the east side is sort of a transitional one and is based on the fact that there's sort of a granite high underneath there that separates this basin from mid-county. And the aquifers here, the Santa Margarita in yellow where you can see the Quail Hollow and Olympia Pasatiempo is in some of those wells are in there, then the aquitard of the Monterey and the Lompico is only exposed just a little bit here and then the Butano is exposed up in the high areas as she drives into the mountains. And that strange shape of that groundwater basin is a function that we're basically on the plate margin here. We're on the Pacific plate moving away from the North American plate and if we get in close here we can see, so here we are here, we are between this Zionty Fault which is still active, the Ben-Loman Fault which is associated with the San Andreas Fault Zone but is probably not active anymore or not very active. And one of the interesting things about the Fault here as you can see where the Lower Prieta Fault 1989 was is there's kind of a bend in that little fault there and when you get those bends what happens is that the two rock units, two plates can't move past each other and they kind of bonk up against each other and cause things to thrust up and over and to fold. And so that's what's happened in our area around here is that's why we have folded rocks that make up the basin. And if you see these kind of a bullseye here this is a contra-map but instead of on the topography it's on the upper surface of the Lompico so that's where it's deepest that's where you go down to it so it's a sort of circular feature. And I'm going to show you some cross sections to illustrate that where we go AA this way and then one that goes the other way so just illustrating that. So this you can see this sort of bull-shaped thing with a Santa Margarita on top the Aquatard of the Monterey and the Lompico underneath and the Butano there. And now next if I think the next one I was going to do was D across here which is through the area of wells in the southern part of the district. And you can see again the folding in the Lompico and in the Butano and sort of less folding in the younger rocks but again this little window here where it's a good place for water to go through. And finally one that goes perpendicular to the others and again this kind of bull shape and it's these rocks are being folded up against this granitic high and it's this granitic high that prevents any water going into or out of our basin and into the adjacent basin of mid-county. So what was the sustainable groundwater management act which was signed into law in 2014 and basically this was to halt widespread overdraft and it requires local agencies to develop sustainability plans. It was basically a trade-off between one group of people that wanted the state to take stronger control of water rights and others that thought it should be local. So what they ended up with is they said it's all going to be done locally but you're going to have a lot of responsibilities. You can define what constitutes sustainability you can tell us what plans are to reach it but if you don't do it then the state will step in if you fail to meet those milestones. And these laws will be done by new agencies called groundwater sustainability agencies which have to be consisting of public agencies with water or land use authority but that doesn't mean they can't make contractual agreements with other private entities okay so you could you know make a contract with Mount Herman or something like that if you wanted to. They also need to take input and take into the account the needs of all beneficial use and users of groundwater so that would be other agencies private well owners industrial users tribes and environmental users which in this case usually are aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and and fish are the big one and they have a surprising number of I was shocked when I realized how much authority they potentially have we have not we have not wielded any of this instead of our greedy yet but you have a lot of tools in your command to get control over pumping to make people contribute to getting towards sustainability. So the department of water resources announced basin ranking rankings in 2019 and said that any of them that were right rated high and medium had to submit a groundwater sustainability plan basically that would bring the basin into balance in 20 years and then be able to maintain it at sustainability for another 30 and you can see on this little map here here we are and of the basins 21 of them were considered in critical overdraft we are not we're in this yellow color and we don't have the hatcher but other basins near us were so mid county Pajaro Valley and parts of Salinas Valley and in their cases and here's here they here it's because they have groundwater is the groundwater is becoming saline due to over pumping of the aquifers so that seawater has moved in underground and has essentially destroyed a number of the wells in Soquel and even ruined ones from Santa Cruz so here's the timeline for our own Santa Margarita Groundwater Association we created the joint powers authority and it consists of three agencies San Orlenzo Valley Scott's Valley Water District in the county of Santa Cruz it didn't have to be those it was just that those three groups said they would work together it could have had other people but it didn't and then that group received a million dollars from the DWR as a grant to develop the GSP they hired a facilitator to help with public outreach and those things happened in early 2019 when they also executed a contract in the amount of 1.2 million dollars for Montgomery and associates to develop the GSP so this is when really the work begins so for the last two years we've had monthly meetings of the board to hear presentations by staff and consultants in order to develop criteria for sustainability in other words what are the minimum levels of the groundwater table has to be at what are the maximum levels of contaminants and we're right here and here are the things that have to happen really fast the final draft is going to be presented to the Santa Margarita board shortly and then based on those comments they want to complete the draft and then let it out for public comment on July 30th for a month and a half and then revise it based on that public comment then there's an official hearing and then that is so it's in time to be submitted by the deadline of January 31st 2021 and this has been coming as Mark can point out it's been coming on really fast at the end the amount of reading has been almost impossible to do in terms I mean hundreds of pages a week often a very technical stuff and it's been a little frustrating in that regard okay so who are the members the directors there's two kinds there are member directors which are they're two of each two each for each of the three organizations that are the founding ones and then there are others that are just kind of regular members that represent other stakeholders in the basin two private well owners one from Mount Herman one from the city of Santa Cruz one from the city of scott's valley and the point here is that no single person no single group can take kind of over and decide the fate of the basin most decisions could be made by a simple majority of the 11 member board however on decisions on the budget major expenses and approval of the gsp there has to be unanimity among the member directors so these six people in effect have veto power if I don't think I've ever seen it exercised but it could be so what is getting to sustainability all about it's basically about avoiding six undesirable results which are shown here um lowering of groundwater levels reduction start well I don't I don't have to read them you can read them um there's two of them we don't really care about one is seawater intrusion um and this is where for example this is the place where the groundwater tape is below sea level um in so cal um and western part of Santa Cruz and so the wells are all salty and have had to be abandoned um and this is just from drawing down too fast so ocean water seeps in and now your well is is bringing up brackish water the other thing we don't have to worry about is land subsidence which is a huge problem for example in parts of the central valley um where there's been many dozens of feet it's not a problem for us because uh the rocks that I described that are our aquifers are all consolidated sandstones so when the water goes out of them that the framework is still there that does not collapse and so we don't have to worry about that one okay so I've crossed out those two but we still have uh four we have to worry about and I've written below what are the things that are considered the sustainability indicators in other words what are you supposed to be measuring the idea is that you have to have something that's quantitative that you characterize you know you just can't say oh everything's hockey dory or oh gosh we do have this kind of problem you you have to quantitate it by some way um and it's sort of logical that in the case of lowering of groundwater it's the water levels in the wells and degraded quality of water it's the measured contaminant levels and in surface water depletion its house surface water um how well it's flowing the figure of vegetation around it and the health of aquatic organisms so let's go through the first one the lowering of groundwater levels and this is just superimposed on this map this is uh just kind of to it's very bright and lively it just basically shows pumping for the interval from about 1990 to 2015 the pink is in scott's valley the uh blue is uh the san lorenzo wells and this is mount herman and you can see how there's this kind of very rapid ramp up in um especially in scott's valley that corresponds to when there was fairly rapid growth in scott's valley but it's but you know there's also fairly rapid growth in our area too in terms of the amount of pumping that was done and so if you look at the hydrographs that is the measurements of the level of the water table in those wells through time you can see here that they've been declining dramatically so in the southern part of the basin not so much in the northern part and so now i'm just going to go through quickly and take a kind of visit each one of the aquifers and what this map shows is it's kind of stripped away everything else but to show that particular aquifer which is in this case a santa margaritas in yellow it's the youngest aquifer it's covered here by younger rocks locally and you can see that these are from 1980 to 2018 and there's maybe a little bit of a decline but it's not very much in those uh in the santa margarita and that's because it's exposed at the surface so it recharges very quickly and it's highly permeable so any rainwater that falls on it um easily falls in now on this graph and all the other graphs you'll see there there are these like vertical lines that are colored and yellow is normal rainfall years blue are wet years and the uh orange is dry and the pinkish orange or purpley orange is uh extremely dry and um so you can just watch these as they go through so here's the Monterey shale which as we said was not an aquifer it's mostly an aqua clued between um the santa margarita and the lompico but it's important because it's it's used by a lot of private well owners that tap sandy layers in the lower part of formation especially around here and up in here where it's exposed um at the surface and here you can see that the Monterey uh shale in this particular well has uh the water level has dropped significantly about 200 um feet over this interval from 1980 to about uh 1997 where it bottoms out and then you see this sort of slight recovery since um and the reason that recovery is uh fairly slow is that this rock is very impermeable so even if if it has water trying to get in it takes it a while to get in but at least we stopped here and we're going the other way the lompico is the most important of our aquifers because we use it in the southern system and because uh the uh scutz valley uses it as well and again what you can see is um it is being drawn down more so in the south than in the northern part of scutz valley um and if we look we can see here that since 1980 there's been a 215 foot drop in the water level here it seems to have uh bottomed out somewhere around 2015 both in their well and uh our well here and then it's kind of come back up since and that slight recovery since 2015 is encouraging because what that means is that we're finally um no longer overdrafting um we're more or less in balance the problem is is that we've now drawn down the water table here so we don't have as much of a buffer if there's an extended drought and I and I do want to say something about population growth I notice and water use and and I notice that scutz valley tends to be demonized on this and they're everybody says evil things about it's their growth that's causing the problem and it's really not entirely the case here is the the plot of uh population of scutz valley with time from 1985 to 2020 and you can see it's going up and yet um and during that interval yes their amount of water they were pumping goes up but so did our water here shown in green um but sometime around here um around 2000 it starts going the other way and that's largely due to better conservation efforts and the fact that a lot of the buildings that are being put in in scutz valley are modern and so they have very strict rules and there's more townhomes and condos and things that don't have gardens in them so actually scutz valley's use has declined over time and if you looked at it at a per capita basis it would be even more so also I should point out that this is only the pumping south of bean creeks which is in the southern part most of the San Lorenzo Valley water ground pumping is groundwater pumping is north of bean creek in Olympia and Quail Hollow so this doesn't really capture all of our our groundwater use and then finally the Butano uh sometimes it's Putano sometimes it's Putano is uh we really only have a couple of wells they're not very good because they're also screened in the Lampico so it's not really sure whether these measurements are of the Butano or if they're only both but um it's it's an important aquifer uh and it's especially important right up here where it's exposed at the surface and a lot of private well owners um take advantage of it up there so when we set what are called the minimum thresholds and the measurable objectives for these we had a lot of discussion about these at the at the Santa Margarita and fundamentally the the minimum threshold we decided on was kind of like do no harm don't let it get any worse than it has been in the recent past and so usually we took like an average of some of the um the better values that have happened in the recent past and as far as measurable objectives this is where you would like the groundwater levels to be but they're kind of weird because they're not actually enforceable and they have to be achievable so you get in this weird discussion about well should we be aspirational and you know say we want to recover everything that happened since 1985 or 1980 um which is probably almost impossible or should we do something that's readily achievable and I think we tilted more in the direction of readily achievable but between that between the minimum threshold and the uh measurable objective is kind of where you know you have operational flexibility to deal with uh basically droughts or you know things going wrong with equipment but the idea is that over time slowly you're going up towards the um measurable objective so in setting those we took into account that um sort of different things that the Santa Margarita has this different behavior um than the Lompico and the Butano do and that is is um they Santa Margarita recharges so quickly in wet years you can see how it goes up during the blue ones very quickly um and similarly it goes down fairly quickly in in dry years and this is because it's highly permeable and widely exposed at the surface um the Lompico on the other hand recharges more slowly because very little that's exposed at the surface it's not as uh permeable and in fact you can sort of see that in these plots right so in other words there's um times when it dips is when they're taking out a lot of water in the summer and then it sort of recovers in the winter a little bit and then it goes down basically because they're pumping out water faster than water can move into the wellheads um because the permeability is not as high as it is in the Santa Margarita so we sort of set different um ideas on how to do these and I'm not going to go over the details but um one important thing to recognize is that um we're emphasizing the Lompico because it's an important aquifer across the basin and modeling has shown that if you if you get the Lompico to go up it causes all boats to rise now there were some of the water flows out of the Lompico into the Monterey some of it goes down into the Butano even some of it locally if it's downhill will go into the Santa Margarita although that just leaks out again because Santa Margarita is like a leaky bucket um so all of our efforts are going to be focused on trying to get the groundwater levels in the Lompico to come up okay reduction in storage this is kind of a weird one because at least I thought it was weird initially like what the heck does that mean and I finally realized that why that's important is um this is this says is this is the the drought you can't see it's the fact that underneath the ground we're being able to store less and less we're storing less and less water and the reason this matters more than just water levels is if you think about it if you have kind of a poor aquifer that doesn't have a lot of poor space um you can for any unit of water that you pull out that the well level will go down even though you haven't really extracted a lot of water if you're in the Lompico or the Butano these are huge units they're very thick very extensive and so um there what you care about is not so much if the level goes down 10 feet or more but how much you're losing in storage because it's that storage that gives you the drought uh basically the buffer and to figure that out you have to figure out the balance between inflows and outflows in the system and that's the change in storage and doing this requires a hydro geohydrologic model for the valley which is what uh the consultants spent a lie at the time doing is uh reworking the previous Kennedy and Jenks one to fix some of the errors or not errors but just slight differences in them and so you have inflows and outflows that you have to take care take account of and many of them are actually kind of hard to figure out or estimate with any accuracy but on this diagram you can see that again when we're talking about storage and I apologize for these little scruffy little diagrams but when I took it from the the PowerPoint they didn't put them all to the same scale and so it made it look like the Monterey formation had these big changes and the Santa Margarita did but when you scrunch them all back so that all three of these are at the same scale what you can see is that the biggest dives are in the Lompico and especially in the Lompico in the Paso Tiempo Camp Evers and uh Scotts Valley area so this is the area that if we're going to do any projects we're going to really want to focus on degraded quality this one has been pretty easy because the quality of the groundwater in the in the basin is pretty good naturally they're occasionally bump up against the iron and manganese and even the arsenic secondary maximum contaminant levels but not usually and usually dissolved solids are below these levels up here as well and I would note that the municipal operators always treat the groundwater to remove any naturally occurring iron and manganese mostly this is an aesthetic question as much as a health one and we can see here another potential contaminant is nitrate and as nitrogen measured as nitrogen we're below the 10 milligrams per liter mcl in all of our groundwater and in all of the surface waters despite the fact that we have a lot of septic tanks all these purple dots are septic tanks and they're usually discharging you know into the shallow aquifer it is true that by the time the San Lorenzo river makes its way all the way through felton and gets downstream some more it does start to have nitrate problems and this is a nightmare for this city of Santa Cruz because it it makes the water more expensive to treat but it's not really a problem for us in the basin so in setting the minimum thresholds we basically just take okay you know we're not going to ever let it get worse than what the legal thresholds are and we take measurable objections are things that are perhaps you know kind of the some of the better measurements that we've gotten in recent times finally there's a surface water depletion this one is the the trickiest one to to deal with and and it's pretty obvious what it is you have open water locally and little ponds and bottoms of quarries you have rivers and creeks springs and then there's other groundwater dependent wetlands where you know the for example here's the Olympia quarry for where there's no water exposed but the trees and willows and things are roots are reaching down in the groundwater system so to study so to study these it's pretty easy to figure out like okay what do you do with the rivers you just go and check out the rivers what's a little bit more confounding is what do you do with these what are called groundwater dependent ecosystems and that would be the little springs and purple here they're scattered about little bits of open water which are sometimes man-made ponds usually man-made ponds and other groundwater supported wetlands which are usually just places where there's shallow groundwater so what you do is you try to identify those and then you go and look in areas where there's a lot of pumping so here's the municipal pumpers are here and then there's a lot of private pumpers in these areas and try to figure out whether they have any effect on the water and it turns out that this is really hard to do and one of the features of how streams are related to the groundwater table is what are called gaining and losing streams so some streams as they go downstream because the water table slopes towards the stream all the water groundwater is essentially flowing towards the river and is adding to the river or creek as it flows in other places where the groundwater table is below the level of the creek there what is the opposite the creek is losing flow and is going into and is essentially recharging the aquifer usually what will happen is upstream from this there'll be a different situation where there'll be it'll be a gaining stream above that gives us all this water and then there's weird cases where it's not it's not attached in any way in which case they don't consider it a groundwater dependent ecosystem and you don't have to worry about it the the important thing to realize for streams and this really comes into the whole issue of minimum flows are important for fish is that this base flow of water flowing out of the groundwater table into streams is basically all that's there in the driest part of the year they're essentially they they are the cause of all the water in the streams this is for bean creek and you can see these spikes which are individual storms right where the flow and bean creek was much higher so you have storm flow say from November until June but then from the beginning of June until October sometime it's almost all base flow and so this is why it's important to know whether any pumping you're doing might be affecting base flow and so when you're measuring streams we have a number of places where there are already continuous read stream gauges shown on this map and the other thing you have to do besides measuring them remotely like this is you also have to do studies where you go up measure the flow you know how deep the water is you measure the concentration of dissolved solids because often that is a measure of groundwater getting into the stream and observations about the vigor of the plants near it and also the animals measuring the amount of fish and other critters that you find there another aspect of this is that that there's something that is important in terms of designing what are your kind of unreasonable results is that there has to be significant adverse impacts to the viability of individual priority species or groundwater dependent ecosystems or undue financial burden to beneficial users or uses of the surface water and really it comes down mostly to fish um less yeah well the lamprey or fish um and because uh the other you know the the golf courses are going away the most of the quarries have shut down they would have been ones that were using this water and so we have to worry about whether anything we're doing um affects uh fish and and particularly i i i concerned about steelhead trout i i got a little little miffed when the coho salmon gets trotted out because it hasn't been seen up in our area for a long time um and it's basically at the very it is this has always been at the very southern extent of its range um and with climate change it it's i think it's going to be a kind of a quixotic thing to try to save the coho salmon here um so the challenges for quantifying stream flow depletion caused by groundwater use is basically you have to model it you can't actually measure it because there's like no there's no dye in the groundwater that's coming out and um telling you that it's contributing to the creeks or not and there's a lot of other things that contribute to that stream flow including precipitation temperature of apotranspiration stream diversions and sometimes you don't know whether it's pumping or whether so for here's an example of where it's it's natural so for example there's a stretch of of bean creek here that often goes dry in the summer and it's geologically controlled it's not because we're pumping somewhere i don't think it's basically it happens exactly where the stream drops from the low permeability Monterey formation into the high permeability Santa Margarita and so the water just poof goes right down below the surface because it drops down and then as it comes back around down here um into the um towards the where it meets up with the San Lorenzo river you have the opposite that actually has seeps coming out and here it's it's a gaining stream not because there's no pumping here it's because now the water that was seeping through the Santa Margarita here hits the impermeable Monterey below and has can't keep going and so has to come out as a spring or a seed so you can have these kinds of changes that have nothing to do with pumping so it makes it challenging here's here's an example of a modeled bean creek watershed stream flow contribution that they did to try to figure out the effect of pumping and so the green is uh this is basically modeling the stream flow in bean creek at the driest time of the year in October and historically from 1985 to 2018 the green is contributions of base flow um to the creek because right at this time of year there is no stream there is no uh um storm flow and if uh basically the private well pumping that is in this area would reduce the contribution to bean creek by only 0.06 cfs it's really trivial if you were to stop all pumping in the basin all mutual you know us everybody it would cause uh it to drop by 0.46 uh cubic feet percent so that's this here which is about 15 percent of the flow and so the question is is that enough uh you know does that make a difference for the fish well probably 15 percent does um at this time of year potentially it could but there's no way we're going to ever stop all pumping so the question is is you know if you decrease pumping by 20 percent is it enough to really make a difference um for the GDEs and the fish and this is the kind of thing that it's really hard to I have found it's really hard to be confident in the modeling that you know you can get it down to that precision that you can really make hard decisions about things so ironically the way we measure um how much groundwater is going into streams or whether pumping is affecting them is by drilling another well so you stick a monitoring well in between where your production well is and where the uh the stream is or a swamp or whatever and the idea is if the groundwater level is high and it's sloping towards the river that means the groundwater is adding to the stream and you should be able to see that slope between the water level in the top of the pumping well the monitoring well and here on the other hand if you pump this too much what happens is you draw this down now and now the slope is the other way uh so what happens is stream water would be going into the aquifer and what you should now see is that that should be detectable in the monitoring well so for that reason um there's six shallow wells have been proposed to monitor groundwater interactions with surface water um around um a variety of places we there's also been three deeper wells in areas with abundant private wells where there's no monitoring at all one deep well in the butano so we have more data on it and Santa Margarita groundwater associations have chained a grant that will pay for the majority of these costs for installing these wells so here's the average model groundwater budget when you put all this stuff together and the interesting thing it shows is the basin is closed it's hardly any goes out um hardly any comes in and um the of the outflows uh from the groundwater um that you can see here that discharge to creeks is 85 percent of it only 15 percent is pumping which you know it's kind of not one of those things you would have thought intuitively right that that pumping is not the biggest thing and then the things that are returning flow are a wide range of things but the biggest ones are um streambed recharge so places where the water goes the other way um into the back down in and just recharge from precipitation so that's why precipitation you can see here 57 percent of what's going in so it drives all of the modeling that you do it's it's the big dog in terms of trying to figure out what happens um in many ways more important than what you're pumping um and I think I'll just skip this one an interesting thing that comes out of this that you know I didn't realize was that um septic systems are are a good thing in a way and we're lucky to have them here in San Lorenzo Valley because they return a lot of water to the groundwater aquifer it's one reason that's the scott's valley part of the system is not as well off in terms of groundwater because they put all of their sewage in a sewer system that pumps all the water out of the system um it also shows that actually residential landscape uses not all that uh big of a deal I mean some of it goes back in um it it goes back in because sometimes we're inefficient we've watered more than we need to um here it also shows that water system losses these are the leaky pipes and leaky tanks are are a non-trivial amount of of water that um goes goes back into the systems so one of the things that Santa Margarita requires you to do is address climate change and it says this explicitly that you have to use some kind of climate model along with some kind of water budget um and that you also have to take account of climate when you're coming up with your 50 year planning horizon for getting the sustainability and these models which started in the 70s have gotten more and more complex with time as we've added more and more features to them as we're modeling more and more complicated things so that they're now take they're like incredibly expensive to run on supercomputers because they have so many things interacting the other thing is that over time they have gotten their resolution has gotten better so for example now you can uh find a small part in England whereas before basically you had all of the uk and one square so now we've got better resolution models too the model you choose is really important for doing this modeling and um this is a comparison of what it's kind of an odd measure the departure through 2070 of precipitation from historic average as a function of the model that you use and these are some models that were used for different things um so uh so the idea is that this is this is the average amount of rainfall that you have so the average amount of rainfall was constant was always the average that you stay on this line out forever but if your rainfall levels are less um basically you'll drive it down this way so you can see that the city of Santa Cruz water supply advisory committee used a model that had a huge decrease in uh the rainfall the first model that we were given for Santa Margarita was the same one that they had used at um mid county but it was essentially what's a historical climate basically you just say well this is kind of how things have been happening in the past so we'll just kind of say that it's going to go along the same but that means that it's not really taking it's not taking into account co2 increases or other kinds of uh greenhouse gases it's just basically saying you know kind of whatever happened in the past is just going to keep going and i objected to that because all of the more recent science has suggested that if anything rainfall is going to go up a little bit and the reason is is that we're near the coast if it gets hotter you evaporate more water off of the ocean and so the rainfall is going to get maybe a little bit more not not very much but a little bit more it's certainly it's not going to drop 25 percent okay and this is really important because if you think that the problem you have to solve is something you know that is like on this scale versus this scale versus this scale um it really changes what you're going to do for projects and and since we have now adopted a what i think is a more realistic model in our round two we sort of backed off from some of the more really expensive huge projects because it doesn't look like we're going to need them so the thing that this model that we're using it's called an ensemble it's an average of four models and and it basically has the precipitation is highly variable which is what all the new good models suggest and that evapotranspiration will go up because of increasing temperatures um and um if you use this model this is what it tells you about the storage into the future by 2012 storage in the Lompeco that we've lost that much so even with the new models we're still losing storage in the Lompeco especially in the southern part of the basin and we're losing some in the northern part with the older models it was way it was way worse but we were still we still have something we have to fix so how do we do that and here are the kinds of things you can do to manage your aquifers um and recharge them one is called in lieu which we've talked about before and when um we heard about conjunctive use and that is that basically you somebody gives you surface water so that you can um rest your drawn down well um because you're not using it and then that allows the groundwater table to rise um and stop uh drawing down in a way that it might affect these other wells here so that they don't get any water so that's kind of a passive way of doing it in the sense that you're not actually pushing any water down there but you're just letting natural rainfall another recharge restore it then you can have active mechanisms where you either percol allow percolation of impounded surface or treated water to just sink into this shallow aquifers um or you can do what's called asr aquifer storage and recovery and this was the idea was that you take treated water that was injected into the deep aquifer you treat you have to treat it because the california law says you have to because you don't want to muck up the aquifer um with bad stuff bacteria or weird chemistry and so you add water there and then the second idea was that later you when you need that water so you put it down there in the winter and then when you need it in the summer you can pump it back out or maybe you don't do it every season you pump some back in and then you wait until there's an extended drought and you take it out or maybe you do it even less frequently that you just basically forget about this right-hand side of the recovery and you just push water down there as a way to raise the groundwater table in there now so um the okay so i've already explained how asr works here so one of the things that happens is when you put the water down there um you've got this water that you stored by forcing it in there it's now mixed with the native groundwater that was in the rocks and the pores of the rocks so you have kind of a mix zone um and the change in the composition of the water that's in the pore space can cause reactions between groundwater and sediments and one of the problems is for example here was a project that was undertaken um recently in la basin and what happened is is that you take this um highly oxygenated purified water and you sink it down into a layer that has is reduced or anoxic and what happens is pyrite that bears arsenic that this fool's gold that's in the sediments breaks down um through oxidation and it releases the arsenic to come up into the water um you can also have other ways where you uh put uh by changing the pH you can destabilize hydrated uh hydrated iron um coatings that arsenic had glommed onto and if you destabilize those those can the arsenic can jump into the water and you can get these peaks in it and sometimes you can get that and if the pH is just right that you can restabilize for example here where you're breaking down the pyrite but then you the pH is okay that you can then make clays you actually end up with less arsenic than you did before but the point is is it it's very variable and in fact the early tests on the belt swells and asr asr by um Santa Cruz and so Cal have kicked up uh levels of arsenic that were above uh the mcl's so this is something you have to worry about okay um so what are the projects that we're considering currently there's basically three groups one are the sort of things that we've been doing already another is the ones in orange or the ones that we're really studying the most um the group three are other projects that are not currently be investigated these were the the big ones that were kind of first trotted out um largely by the city of Santa Cruz when it seemed like there was a real deficit that we needed to make up and Santa Cruz realized that if there's a really big deficit then you've got a big essentially a big reservoir in the ground where you can store water and that's Santa Cruz's problem is they have a lot of water no place to store it and just for Bob's sake I they've got they used the staff used this method for going over how the costs were were estimated and this I'm not going to go through this but it's there Bob if you want to read this later when I post it so here are the tier one projects um the first ones are just kind of simple additional water use efficiency you know the usual outreach rebates also new smart meters and the big cost is addressing the leaks in infrastructure so we don't lose you know I think what we lose something like 200 acre feet a year to that I think that's a lot um the other is to do in lieu conjunctive use as Carly described where we just take things from the north system and the Fall Creek diversion points and send it to the south system to rest the Pasa Tiempo wells in the Lompeco um then a little bit bigger one would involve doing that but also taking our allotment of Loch Lomond water um and using treated water from Loch Lomond to rest both our wells and potentially Scots Valley water district wells um as well and then the fourth one I'm not going to talk about because I thought it was kind of weird that it keeps coming back up but it's the idea that anybody would would pump water into a leaky bucket and the Santa Margarita just seems odd um and then these uh slightly bigger projects where they probably instead of just locally benefiting us or Scots Valley here we use effluent from that's treated at the Pure Water Soquel their new treatment plant and injected into Scots Valley wells in the Lompeco and then finally the treat water from the city of Santa Cruz surface waters where they injected into the well perhaps also in our south system to rest the wells and to provide a drop buffer for this city place they can store it for when they need it in other words they're not going to take it out all the time but if they need to they can do it so one of the things we use the model for was to see are these going to do the job right and so here's a model to show the levels of the Lompeco aquifer in one of the wells and we can see the baseline here is if you do nothing if you do nothing over time you'll end up with it going below the minimum threshold right so something has to be done it turns out if you do the in lieu recharge plus a lock loman water you pretty much stay above the minimum threshold and you don't start to go down below the this one here until you know pretty far out if you're talking about in the 60s or 70s you know we've got plenty of time to worry about it if we did these bigger projects this would take us this would recover you know maybe half of what was lost during that large drop in groundwater in the 80s and 90s this is to show what would happen in the Monterey formation even though we don't use it as an aquifer and we're not putting water into the Monterey it leaks out from the Lompeco into the Monterey which otherwise would be going down down down down which would be problematic for private well owners um and makes that not go down as quickly okay and of course if we do a bigger project we put more in there the interesting thing is this is the plot if you there's three lines here actually for Santa Margarita so there's the baseline the and the two plots for the projects right plot virtually on top of it and the reason that doing these projects do no good is because the Santa Margarita recharges itself in wet years jumping up quickly here and then going down a lot in dry years but it it comes back really quickly with a very short lag time and also because this is such a leaky bucket there's it's it's so fast that you you just can't put water in fast enough to keep to make it actually come up okay and then the butano this is uh this is up here in the north end where all the private wells are we're not having a project up here everything we're not talking about doing projects is sort of downhill hydrologically so it wouldn't be expected to affect anything up here but this shows how those private well owners might be affected if you know in this area because we're not doing any projects to address that it's going to fall well below the minimum threshold here where it's closer to where the projects are going to be done we can the baseline again falls below the minimum threshold but doing these projects bring it above okay so this is the part that bob always wants to know and i wanted to know too and i think mark and i were anxious to know and i've added two lines at the end there because i wanted to figure out um how much water each of these projects would produce and then there's kind of a weird metric which is the what the opera the annual operating costs are per acre feet of water and now you might wonder why the operating costs and the reason is is that everybody tells me and i will believe them that it will probably be possible to get most of the capital costs paid for three grants but what we're going to be on the hook for forever are these costs the annual costs and so what i've calculated here are how much it's going to cost per acre foot of water that are produced by these projects and um on this one i i had this for some reason they left off the the upgrade that we'd have to make to the curvy water treatment plant for if we took the luck loman water so i put a number in there i don't know rick i might be wrong but it's just an attempt to you know put a placeholder in there that's about a half to a third of what it will actually do well that number that number was valid in 2010 okay well all right so so you can if if you want to pop that up then that would make that number go up to 1500 or something if that's what you know you want it's certainly a lot cheaper than the water you'd get out of by putting water in a leaky bucket um and in many of these cases there's a big cost is not the actual capital construction for example the in lieu stuff we've done most of the work it's it's the legal fees the land fees the environmental stuff that has to be done plus all of the costs that are associated with design indirect construction costs which are all lumped into here as well to get these total capital costs so if we go up from tier one projects to the tier two we can see that this is where we the north scott's valley indirect potable reuse goes up to you know i don't know three times as much as what the other two were and these are the tier three that we've pretty much thought we aren't going to do right now because they are so costly um they also involve a lot of technology that may be like for example the asr stuff we just don't know if it'll even work and we may not need this much water in the near term so we're not really talking about those now so in my own view of this i think it's pretty obvious and and i think rick would agree and and i think mark agrees that the low hanging fruit fruit are these first three projects um where they're relatively low in both capital costs and um the on m and um in many cases the improved structure is already in place or at least it's fairly straightforward to plan for there's no like weird things that could jump out at you and bite you later um and they also tend to benefit us the most in improving water levels in the alam pico in the area we care about and it also secures our water supply the most so that's just kind of my take on this but that's only my opinion and that isn't necessarily what the rest of the board members will think but the important thing to realize is none of this is going to happen quickly because of environmental stuff and getting grants and you know it'll be you know it'll take a couple of years to plan even the simplest projects and any of these bigger ones won't start until five years five years out so it's not like we have to like stop the train now because this is going to take a while to go then there's finally the costs of actually implementing the gsp that i thought i would mention and um this is the total annualized cost is according to this estimate four thousand eight nine well four four four thousand and nine for every thousand for every year for five years and one of the things that is mentioned here where there's nothing in the budget is that now that we're starting to implement things it might be the time to reconsider the structure and membership of the group and this is the way the costs are right now divided between scott's valley us and the county and the question is is should those be changed going forward the assumption is that the capital projects will largely be funded by whoever happens to build them but should the membership of the santa margarita groundwater association reflect who who's actually benefiting from all of this or and should they be taking up some part of the administrative and management aspect of the organization and how will we make sure that there aren't any free riders in other words you know we we can't subsidize all the private well owners and um you know all the other people that will be getting a benefit because if we put water into the long pico and things get better in the monorail or in the butono then this uh also is this is kind of the administrative side of it which comes out to 163 thousand dollars a year um i i really tend to dispute this number i i can't believe that once you start doing planning for these things that that number won't be bigger but maybe that can be subsumed into the caught the capital plans of the cost i'm more worried or more sure that this is an understatement i think that what i know from how much the um all the consultants cost this is a gross underestimate of what consultants are going to cost us and also there's nothing in here for the um anybody that's going to help um think about refining projects management actions or coordinating among the agencies the assumption is is that we'll just pick that up extra for the staff and then then there's this one where there's 870 thousand dollars and consultant fees over five years to do monitoring of various types um and that's just it's a lot and that that actually doesn't even include a lot of uh effort um by our own staff where there's zeros there and and other places where there are i think the assumption we've heard at Santa margaritas that our staff can mostly pick this stuff up that i i just uh i don't see i don't see our staff sitting around i i just don't see how they can do some of these things so anyway if you uh if if you just assume the 409 thousand annualized costs that would work out to 123 thousand for us and if there's you know if there's an underestimate of consultant costs and maybe planning costs um you know maybe that number should be more like 174 thousand so it's a non-trivial amount of money um so at that point i'll stop and take any questions and i guess i'd like input from the public and from the board about what balance do you think that Santa margarita should strike between cost and getting all the information possible about interaction between surface waters and shallow groundwater um in support of these groundwater dependent ecosystems and the fisheries and i'd also like your thoughts on the structure of the membership and allocation of administrative costs and how we can minimize free riders okay with that i think i'm done and let's see how do i und how do i unshare uh stop share okay great did you want me to make over yes i did let us any questions from board members or um comments i it appears that bob has his hand up is that a hand bob yes okay so would you like to comment uh well i have i have a lot of comments but i want to get questions out of the way first and hear all the questions from folks some of my comments maybe maybe okay so the first question though for for gail um i'm a little confused by what you mean this you seem to be creating a distinction between asr and injection of wastewater or other water into scott's valley's wells what's the difference between those i mean it it seems to me like both of them are um injecting uh water into i'm i'm i'm not really making any any distinction about them i i mean the term asr implies the recovery part right and usually it implies when you say that that you're taking the water out quickly annually most of the things that we're talking about here where we're talking about injecting is not to do it on an annual basis summer winter summer winter it's but in terms of the you know the costs i mean the costs are um less if you one of the one of the aspects of asr is it has it has a terrible carbon footprint because you're using energy to stick the water down there and then you have to pump it out again and so this is one of the so in addition that's why it's expensive but it also is you know whereas in lew most of our in lew you know gravity does it for us right well a lot of ours our system is downhill um so i i'm not really making a big distinction it's just that the larger term is managed aquifer recharge right there's and asr is kind of one subset of it but i'm not trying to make a big distinction about it well i guess though it looked like a large portion of getting stabilization and recovery of the groundwater basin had to do with some level of injection into wells um and maybe i misunderstood that but it seemed like there was in the projects that were being seriously considered there was injection into wells the well most most of the most of it was in in lew and potentially injecting some things in wells but again we're not talking about taking it out right away but i'm not worried about the act of putting it in is expensive enough typically particularly if you have to drill new wells now it wasn't clear whether we were talking about new wells or whether we're just going to use their existing wells and you know you well i could answer that question no you cannot um to for an asr well the the diameter has to be considerably larger because you know you're trying to force all this water into the aquifer so they're they're more expensive than your typical production well and you couldn't use the existing production well so any kind of ejection would require new wells yes yeah maybe i misunderstood well you know in the grand in the grand scheme of things you know the wells are you know you start you start throwing large numbers around but that the wells are um we're not talking about you know drilling 25 000 feet into the you know in the permeant basin or something we're talking about wells that are going down hundreds of feet or something like that so they're they're not enormously expensive wells and then my second my second question had to do with phasing was there any consideration um given so far to the notion of phasing this in where there'd be more of an immediate implementation of yes in of the conjunctive use where we're using the extra surface water and then we would measure things in a few years and if we needed to do something then we might go to something else that's that's that's that's absolutely right though that that's the you know that's what we would do and even using the lachloman water a lot of that is in blue right is in other words if we um if we get it we if we do the lachloman correct me if i'm wrong rick but we'd have more water than we need a lot of the time and we'd have water left to share with scott's valley but that would be not we're not injecting it we're just well allowing them to west their wells yeah i mean the lachloman water isn't free so we have to pay Santa Cruz for it and we then have to treat it using more expensive treatment well i mean the it was costed out in that thing there and it made in a relative way uh and of course if we send it over to scott's valley scott's valley will buy it from us not at retail rates if it's in large quantities but they will buy it i don't know why not retail rates but um the did so that costing out included the cost of purchasing the water from Santa Cruz i i don't know i i'd have to go back and look at the details carly might know if she's still here okay i'll i'll wait until later for the rest of my comments but thank you on those questions those are pretty critical for me um any other board members have any questions jamie do you have any questions no um i'd like to hear what the public has to say first okay uh how about uh you mark yes um to further expand on what gail was saying and to meet into what you were asking bob about the uh gradually phasing these projects in yes uh the first thing that's being considered is the in lieu of use um using existing surface water sources that the district currently has access to and at times during wet weather months is under utilizing and being able to use that to arrest wells um more frequently stepping up to one of the next being uh use of the water from lock loman and from the discussions that i that we've had with rick it's my understanding if we purchase the water from the city we're purchasing treated water from the city not necessarily no we can always purchase raw water we tap into it by saying we we can purchase raw or we can purchase treated we get treated we need to get an interconnect between them to do that right right yeah okay all right got it point in time mark we do not have an agreement with the city of san akry is the treated one and we will talk about that further down the road is part of discussion of moving forward on conjunctive use and the benefits of treated water but that's discussion we need to have with right okay but that um doing that is years into the future with using our surface water sources uh on a more regular basis first and yeah i'm not sure you know years what i guess years would be three but and but i think it's it could be done sooner than later yeah so i don't think it's you know 10 or 15 years down i think three i don't think it's that i don't think it's good necessarily have to be looking uh uh with a concrete project and moving ahead right but it's those two that we would be looking at first rather than some of the much more significantly expensive options that gail presented in the in the charts and evaluating how the aquifers respond after we implement those projects so good presentation gail i learned from it thank you gail i thought it was a good presentation also um so i want to ask the board those were questions i'm sure some of you have comments do you want me to go to the public for their questions yes or do you want yes me to let you make your comments before i do that let's let's get questions and comments from the public okay all right i can do that um so are there any questions uh looks like cincy synthia denzel has a question so synthia yes thank you for the presentation gail it was way more than i could take in but i hope that it's available as a recording so we can study it later so my understanding is the the asr projects are really separate from i mean there there are some that are part of smg wa but it's really city of santa cruz that is pushing for the asr projects particularly right now um in their collaboration with sokel is that correct and the other question i have is in what you brought about about the curby street renovation not having been fully considered that means that we don't really know the cost of that and and no one is considered apparently building a new treatment plant and you know maybe that's pie in the sky but i'd like to know you know i'd like to see that costed out and see what you know comparison with the cost of buying treated water from city of santa cruz you know i think that we should be aware of all the the options thank you so gail did you have an answer for her first question i forgot what it was sorry um you know if if rosemary wants to answer that that's fine with me she is she's still here and i could answer i don't see her saying she's here she's here yeah i see her but i don't see her okay so rosemary are you there and do you want to say something but you're on the spot you don't have to but go ahead rick yeah you know since his questions not this fiscal year but in our in in our annual budget the second year we do have funds for to start the feasibility process of the lock loman water and one of the projects that we'll look at under that is buying treated water from the city um that's the preferred method you know operational wise um the city will have a state of the art treatment plant that can treat the lock loman which is is certainly is a lake water surface water it's a little more difficult to treat than our screams um and uh we would prefer to go in that that route because we would be able to pick that water up in the south system instead of moving it over from you know the north system over the south so there's still a lot of potential projects to look at um with the lock loman water and a treated water project could be a very beneficial um and partnering with other agencies such as scott's valley who could utilize a treated water interconnection with the city as well and that could we could share costs so the feasibility study moving forward we'll look at many alternatives to the lock loman water and you know i agree with santhea we need to look at all of those and do what's you know best for the san loramsa valley water district in water quality and cost so if there's no more questions from and i can motion oh jim locher i see your hand thank you everybody i i appreciate the presentation it went fast and furious and it was hard for me to uh follow a lot of it but there are two questions that come up for me in trying to absorb all of this information one is it seems like it's odd to me that city of sanikers isn't more involved in this process um particularly now we have the the water rights issue um and it seems like they have a lot of interest in what's going on here and they're pushing for certain solutions that may um not be of best for us i don't know but it just seems like it's just odd that they're not um more uh a more equal partner in trying to figure this all out and i guess the other question is obviously if we can do this passively um with uh recharge that's obviously the best solution um and i'm just i i'm confused about the extent to which you think that that will be sufficient uh what what are the what are the odds that we can just do this through recharge rather than having to do these injection wells that are so expensive well i think i think um mark made the point that this is going to be done in a sort of rolling manner in which we'll do um the enliu things first and see how the system responds and you know the other thing that could happen too that i'm really struck by is that um um you know the best way to decrease pumping is to improve conservation and you know that's the cheapest by far way to get more you know more water in the sense or they or not have as much problem with the the groundwater so um i i think that uh this will all be you know it's not going to happen fast it's it'll it will all just go at a pace where we can see what it's doing certainly the modeling shows that you know i mean it depends you know those models are just kind of one potential scenario of the climate some you know could have happened another way but it really looks like you know if the modeling is anywhere near correct that that probably some of these smaller projects are going to do the job at least for 10 or 20 years and you know as as long as we don't go hog wild with other stuff so i i i'm optimistic that you know five or 10 years down the road then we'll we'll see and maybe things will um you know there'll be new technology or we'll just see how things go and of course all of these climate models are highly uncertain so you know we we we try to do the best we can with them but um because we have no choice but they they may not play out play out that way um so i so i think it's very likely that at least for at least for 10 maybe 15 years that i i'd be surprised if we need to go to anything that involves injection and that we can probably do almost everything by in lieu that the only problem with in lieu and this was something that i was reading report that nick johnson wrote who's really smart guys and hydrologists and he said the problem within lieu is you're you're limited in how much you can do by uh the winter demand right so in other words because the the demand drops down so low in the winter because people aren't watering their gardens or you know washing their swimming trunks or whatever um so uh that is a that's a you can only do so much within you because of that and that's so that's why um you start to think about well if that doesn't do the job you're gonna have to think about injection where you can take that extra flow if you've got it and you don't just let people if because if they're you know people are if it's beyond the demand you have to do something with that water and so there may be a situation where that would happen and that's why i'm saying i don't consider those asr in the sense of put it in take it out put it in take it out i i consider those more where you would just go in and inject it um with the idea that it would just stay there and be be essentially a drought buffer i i think that's what you know mark and i have sort of talked about this and i i think it's fair to say mark that we we're not in a total panic about this i think we we both feel that um you know we don't have to do anything dramatic or especially costly right away but over the long haul over 20 or 30 years the way things are going with climate and is that we will need to do something we just can't stand around and that we need to start thinking about that now and um is that fair to say mark um yes but i think you're alluding to people from the public showing here um i mean i i interrupt but okay um you've got the you've got the meeting los okay uh jim lozier were you done with your questions because you still had your hand i just wanted to respond if you want to go to some other questions i i wondered in terms of this issue of the winter you know losing people not having so much demand i know that in many at least in portland where i was up with a friend they were having neighborhoods and and um local people do specific things to try to hold some of that water and i wondered if that's to be part of the picture i mean we actually had a someone come up to our property and tell us how we could use some of the extra flow from our water tanks to try to replenish the aquifer by holding it in various places on our property where it would more likely seep and end up flowing down to the river so maybe are there some things that we could be giving homeowners and landowners options for how we could improve the the storage of the water in the winter so that it's not all flowing down the river i know that i don't know much about this but i thought that was another thing that you know it's it's one of those things that sounds good and we should all try it but um one of the things that scott's valley did was they built you know as you probably know these parking lots that have um hervious surfaces so that they could uh water could go down and it's just a really expensive way of recharging the aquifer because the amount of water that goes down is you know like a few acre feet i mean it's just it's ridiculous um so this is not it's not a practical way of of getting the kinds of volumes of water that you need to supply things you know it sounds nice um but and but even yeah it's just not it's just not practical it's more expensive than the things that we're talking about in terms of acre feet produced or saved sorry to say it's out you know don't you wish it would be so april you have your hand up yes thank you i really appreciated gail's presentation with all of those slides although they went by rather quickly it gave me a sense of the overall complexity of these projects and i'm glad that we're going to have several in monitoring wells we might over time want more um the better of a job that the district can do on collecting the data and as climate models improve over time the better of an idea we're going to have about what we need to do in the future so i applaud your efforts in capturing the scientific data that we're going to need to get through this thank you april uh any other members of the public who wish to speak uh raise oh i see a hand up uh mark lee mark lee did you have your hand up he took it down okay i'm here oh you're okay yeah so i appreciate did you hear me yes okay so i said that uh i appreciate the technical report uh the gail is put together i understood every bit of it and taking many courses in hydrology and etiology at davis from my background environmental planning um so i understood it completely i have reservations though on asr i've read a lot of technical information where they're they're exorbitant cost involved in annual operations and maintenance they cave in especially in the certain soil types and they're very expensive one thing i need to to point out to you all of you this is all related to the eir that none of you have read that we're about to make a decision on and negotiate uh through genus letter which i think we need to make sure that we include a stipulation that we that we take off that we maintain some control during the months of july and september uh during this in her final proposed language under term 13 regarding you requested gail uh my interpretation of who should have the the uh you know percentage of representation since we're only 7200 rate payers in the area i think our membership should percentage should go down to 10 or 15 percent whereas the city city's uh absorption of cost should actually increase with the county because they're the benefactors of all this water there we're going to be sending their way a lot of water and if you read the eir you're going to find that the money the water that they want is going to the soquel creek asr programs and projects which you gotta review in terms of acre feet that they need they're still projecting literally a 1.2 billion gallon per year deficit so i would say reduce our percentage to 15 percent of uh responsibility on smigwa and increase the percentages uh thoroughly with city of scott valley city of santa cruz and the county i was shocked that we never had three members on the on the voting panel and we only have two so that kind of was uh i think thank you uh as i see a a hand up is that still jamie has her hand up no i mean oh okay it's but i think we ought to go back i'm sorry jamie i think we ought to go back to mark who started to answer your question so i want to take it back to you mark uh okay um i'm not sure what the question is at this point so i would defer an answer at this point but thank you los okay so jamie it's all yours so um you know we have a lot of big questions in front of us um in terms of you know investment and governance and structure of the board and i i guess i i'd like to hear from gail um you know one of the speakers raised the question of of whether or not the city of santa cruz should be in any way financially responsible you know they're not currently a member of you know so i guess you know well they are currently member with one district or one representative but i guess i'm just trying to understand like what what we recommend what whatever decisions we come to as a body in terms of our recommendations about how we would like to see this process unfold going forward um what kind of weight does that carry with the rest of the santa margarita board in terms of you know the how you you make these next decisions well i i guess i i would say is i i i'm not asking anybody to make any decisions right now i'm i'm just trying to you know do my i'm basically trying to do my job here as a representative of the district to kind of let you know the state of play i don't think there's any urgency on on changing you know these things i i think that um that who wasn't that said it oh jim mosher said it was odd that santa cruz wasn't a member that was exactly my response to it's very odd and i you know i'm not sure you know and i wasn't around when this was invented and i'm sure there was some political reason for why it happened and um but it's it's a very strange situation to have a process that is is largely driven by the staff of the county and the city of santa cruz and yet you know we're we're paying for a lot of it and this is this is partly my concern and it's not it's not evilness on their part it's just partly because they're bigger um you know they're they're they have more staff they have more budget um and the two people that you might think would be involved in this carly and rick you know they've got this little thing called the cz u fire that they've had to kind of deal with all of the capital things that are associated with that so i think it's pretty understandable um that you know they haven't had as much of a role as some of the other people have and it's it's part of my frustration is i i often feel like we're kind of um actually i put it we're we're sort of outgunned you know it's i mean i i admire them but i just feel like it's hard to get our point of view across because um we we do only have two representatives and and um you know scott's valley and affect us three because they've got a person that said you know from the um city council it's also on there um so you know it's it's just it's just a little odd as jim said you know i and i don't i'm not suggesting i know the answer to it it's just i think at some point bob wrote an article in the paper saying that you know you had to he kind of implied that you know mark and i weren't paying attention to people in the board and i think i think that's really quite wrong and i think that we've worked really hard to try to defend the the interests of the district and i and um in fact i think i've made myself into virtually persona non grata with most of the people at santa margarita in that regard so i can't attest to that too actually so uh yeah but i so i'm just i you know this is just a very beginning of a conversation i don't expect any any answers i just want people to start thinking about it right there's no rush and i just want people to think about it and to eventually give their thoughts and opinions and maybe you'll have the right questions to ask right you know what matters to you about the whole thing you have your hand up yeah thanks and before i get in the comments i just want to clarify something about governance so the the governance of this is very clear mark and gale do not answer to the sandlands valley board of directors i think that was the only point that i was trying to make is that there are independent voices on the santa margarita groundwater agency now they do have expansive discretion with respect to the use of their vote including the veto power but the sandlands valley water district board of directors do not direct them in what to do i i that was the only point i was trying to make you know not that you guys aren't doing your job or somehow not paying attention it was just a statement of fact about the governance model am i am i not correct about the governance model well i mean in the sense that we are appointed by um usually you know somebody on the board the board president it's not like we just are running amok uh so there was an application of running amok it was simply a statement of fact about governance the governance is we five could take let's just take a theoretical point of view we five three of us could take a vote to tell you and mark to do something and you could ignore it you're you're not directed by us other than perhaps through politics or whatever else but there's no direct authority of the sandlands valley water district other than your appointment relative to how you vote and i i think it's important that people understand that from the point of view of governance i find that very odd myself by the way there's a lot of odd things about the the groundwater agency and that is one of the other odd things about it anyway before i go but i want to make sure that was clear because i'm not you're making it sound like i'm accusing you of mark of of uh dereliction of duty and that wasn't the point at all um i sort of approached this from sort of three dos and three don'ts in terms of uh sand and margarita you know philosophy in terms of what we're trying to get to um do make it simple uh we're just too small in this area to do anything complex like a asr or a lot of that stuff uh do take scott's valley up on their um uh statements that they really don't need a lot of assistance that they've stabilized their use and they don't expect it to go up very much at all and do to the extent necessary sell excess water if if they need it but it doesn't really sound like they needed it the don'ts were don't do injection of any kind um too uh expensive and were too small don't create expensive bureaucracy 200 000 contribution from us a year is 25 per subscriber per year that's that's the tax that goes into keeping sand and margarita alive and don't torture the well owners um by creating an expensive and complicated process for them to have to deal with um i am i continue to be concerned about uh statements on conservation and i think we need to be very clear in what we mean by that our customers currently use if you take wintertime use we talked about this at a previous meeting wintertime use and you divide uh you know do all the divisions we come out between 38 and 42 gallons uh per person per day indoor use um that is almost 20 below the ultimate state goal so the question that i would have for everybody is what is the gallons per day goal that we expect people to continue to drop to for indoor use and if the indoor use is not where we're focused and we should basically make that very clear that what we're really talking about here is outdoor uh use um and not so much again continuing to sort of you know be on people about their indoor use we we are currently yeah uh could we talk about sand margarita here we're talking about it with respect to conservation i know that but you're talking about our indoor use and it's all wrapped up if we're going to make conservation a large portion of this then we need to be very clear about what those goals are and what we expect people to do because right now i don't think we're giving mixed messages to our customers um i very much support the idea of a phased in approach i think that we should not have any commitments and the gsp for anything beyond the water sharing uh in lieu conjunctive use perhaps lock loman beyond that i let's run it for a period of time see how it goes and then if we need to make adjustments do that but including it in there as a commitment even if it's years in the future that means it's still something that people ultimately may have to pay for and i don't think any of the injection solutions are ever going to be um affordable i think there are other technologies that will come down the road that will help us over time that we don't have right now but but i just don't see injection because of physics and science and all the other things is ultimately being a great solution well just let me say one thing about that is that that there is no commitment that that's one of the peculiar things about the the gsp is that you put out ideas about how you think you could solve the problem but there is absolutely no commitment on the part of the organization actually doing them and i you know i'm not sure why that i think i well i i think that maybe the reason that they did that was that they wanted people to kind of blue sky think and don't get overly worried about penny pinching from the beginning but but you know if if there's something in there about uh doing injection or whatever it does not mean that we ever have to go there so i well bureaucracy change over time as well relative to their regulation so if they get an idea that you think it might be feasible or it might be something you're considering over time that might actually um morph into something that wasn't intended to start with which is my my big concern um on that because for a small district like ours even a small contribution is going to be unaffordable for our community um thanks a mark do you have something to say uh no i don't have any further comments the other mark i know i i'm sorry i was talking to mark smally not you mark lee and were talk the boards talking right now i'm not talking to the community of thank you so okay that's that's what i understood lois and thank you for that um and uh no again i don't have any further comments at this point thanks do i get to make a comment i think certainly i i am i'm totally against injection wells there is no proof they were um and i also feel like uh more people should be involved in paying for this besides just the three uh scott's valley slv and the county um the other comment i'd like to make is having been on this committee and now gail and marker on it we are always looking to represent uh our represent slv i i mean um we know pretty much what people think in slv it doesn't mean we can ignore everybody else but we are looking at the needs of slv at least i i think that's what lou and i were doing and i think that's what gail and mark are doing but they aren't ignoring other people in the process so that's that was my comments so if there's no more comments from the board uh mark lee has his hand up i could go out to the to the community is that okay with everyone yeah okay mark lee speak can you hear me yes thank you for the presentation that i was very uh enlightening uh i will i i hope that uh we will lower our cost percentages and participation and uh you know our requirements on smegua it's a large responsibility at 30 percent and hopefully the uh we'll be able to change the rules of the moa that you guys that everyone is a member of and see if we can modify that uh to give us a better leverage because uh any type of projects anticipate even if their test pilot projects uh need to be uh you know paid for by other agencies that have better benefits from it so that's what my my recommendation is and please in the letter that goes to uh the city regarding the eir please put some teeth into it that actually defines the amount of use uh during the the months of use allowing for the diversion of variance because we know when we need our water and when we have too much water and so i don't mind sharing but uh you know we don't want to give away the farm two times the existing uh 10 40 the 1940 permit seems like a lot of money and a lot of water that's going to them and they already control they already have water rights on the San Lorenzo River and Loch Lomond uh it's going to be really hard to determine how much water we really need when it gets really hard really hot here and we get a global warming continues and it gets really bad and we have another heaven heaven forbid any type of fire or anything so we need to make sure that we control water you know in abundance for the people that are actually paying for the staff members that rick roger's bandages okay and the facilities that we can get done but then a time frame based on a capital facilities plan that makes sense we don't have to do everything all at once just the the most important capital facilities project that are actually going to protect us from fire and also the five mile plan so um i don't think we should uh count out of the city of Santa Cruz thank you i do not see any other oh yeah now Cynthia i just wanted to ask whether anyone is considered that with climate change we may have many new um members of the district you know through these small mutuals and private well owners wanting service from slv water district um just as big basin found that they couldn't um couldn't handle the problems from the fire if we have future fires we may have other people also the increased regulation is going to force people to ask for our assistance and i'm wondering if that is part of the consideration of smigwa um that the existing water districts would be absorbing new people also i believe the well owners are asking for education um so that they know how to manage their wells and septic systems to avoid contamination and ruining their wells um you know we smigwa can perform a larger duty of education to the broader public all of the people who are you know dependent on the same basin but may not have access to the same information that the board of smigwa has like your presentation gale would be really valuable to everyone in the area not just rate pairs of slv thank you gale did you want to respond to that i don't see any oh mark lee i'm not letting you talk again so put your paw down thank you okay gale i'm gonna turn this meeting back over to you okay well i i think you're just doing fine not oh you want me to finish well i i was just gonna say that i i i would put forth a motion to adjourn okay if no one has objection i'll make a motion to adjourn do we do that normally no no i was just adjourned okay we are adjourned yay thank you lois thank you everyone okay good night thank you