 And we'll join me in the Pledge of Allegiance, please. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and the Republic of America, which stand for one nation under God, indivisible, indivisible, indivisible, indivisible, indivisible, indivisible, indivisible. Thank you. All right. Oh, you're back there, Joel. Okay. Anyway, we have a motion to approve the minutes of the November 16th meeting. I will make a motion. I'll second it. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And chair votes aye. Financial reports, Joel. Yes, just bringing that up here a little slow. For the month of November, you can see an increase in revenue collected compared to last November. And most of that is simply due to the rate increase that went into effect in October. And you can see that trailing down and each rate category that was showing. So no real surprise there. A small amount of that was due to increased water usage, but most of that was the rate increase. Rate of return is starting to increase, but it did start the year down due to just reduced water usage earlier. It should continue to recover. The cash reserves are about where we anticipated. Not a, not a big change there. We do have a large debt service payment that goes out on the 1st of November, which is reflected. And several larger projects that would closed out. Otherwise, not any other details there. Accountant got suckers preparing for the preliminary audit, which starts in December. And that all is virtual this year as well. And that is my summary of the financials for the month. Okay. Superintendent. Any questions for Joe on the financials at all? We did approve the, the vouchers already correct. I believe we did not have them. We did not have a motion on that mark. Okay. I thought we sent that around via email, but no. Yeah. For review ahead of the meeting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's correct. So we do need a motion to approve the vouchers. I believe it's later in the agenda. Jerry. I'm just looking to see. My copy doesn't show that, but that's actually, I don't see that either on the, on the agenda. Okay. I stand corrected on that one. So we would request a formal approval of those under the financial report. I will so move. I'll second that. Okay. Okay. I have a superintendent's report. And distribution as is normal for November, we started having water main break. And you'll see we had four. All prepared by the crew. Different location. Well, yeah. Pretty, pretty widespread locations there. I think the only highlight there. And I might have mentioned that. Last month, but I, the crew continues to comment on the electronic leak correlator and how effective it is at helping them find. The source of the main break and not over excavate and trying to find where the waters. Coming out of the pipe. So that purchase has been very well received. Otherwise in distribution, not a lot of other highlights. A little bit of hydrant maintenance. And that would be the summary for distribution. Did we ever get to that spot on North Avenue? 31st street or whatever that. Where there was a leak and we put a patch in. I think we did, Jerry. I can, I can confirm that. Okay. I think the last time I drove by, it was still, you know, the curb was ever put back in or. If the roadway was brought back to where it was. Yeah. Double check on that. Then in operations for the months. You can see that. We did pump about 3% more water compared to last year. So that was nice to see. Looks like we're going to close out the year with the year to date. Average day of about 11.7 million gallons a day. And you can see that's well down from 2018 when we had a. Average day of 13.5. Again, I think we're seeing that the pandemic effect there and possibly. A trend of some reduced consumption, but we'll, we'll have to wait and see on that. We were not able to produce the detail list of maintenance items for this month. So I can't comment on that. But we did complete the base and sludge cleaning operations. And all preparations for the winter months are. Complete. And. The plant has been good shape for the winter. We've been monitoring the rip rap. It's been holding up. There were a few days of very heavy wave action. And it's certainly dispersing that water. You know, taking a lot of the. Kinetic energy out of it. We do get some splash over, but it doesn't have. The plant is in good shape for the winter. And the rip rap. Is that all taken care of on the next month? We've been monitoring the rip rap. It's been holding up. There were a few days of very heavy wave action. And it's been. The punch that it did before when, when we had not made that repair. So I would say the work done by the crew was. Holding up nicely and. It's good to see. Good. Good. All right. Custom relations and fiscal. Yeah. Yeah, enough again. Active months. I think. You know, as the COVID numbers grew worse, we did close the pay window. And you'll see that reflected. We had no activity at the pay window. That was mostly offset by increase in the drop box and increase in electronic payment. Those are actually, you know, just from an efficiency point of view. Very efficient ways for us to process payment. I don't feel like there was a huge loss there. But that's what's shown in those numbers. We are seeing fewer calls coming in. We did see a fair amount of property data requests even more than last year. So people are those, those tend to come up and people are moving new accounts being set up. Zero complaints filed with the public service commission. I guess another highlight is the amount that we sent to the property tax roll. And this year it's going to be about $114,000. And that's up considerably from prior years. Mostly due to the lack of a water disconnection program. And, you know, people that were unable to keep up with their water bills and that being allowed this year compared to prior, prior years. Anybody have any other questions for Joe on the superintendent's report? None for me. No, I'm good. All right. Thank you. I would move to approve the superintendent's report. I'll second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Okay. Moving on on the agenda items previously held over for discussion. Law, water improvement project. Um, we did execute the, the contract for detailed design and bidding work with CDM Smith. Um, we had a kickoff meeting with them for that and laid out the schedule and you'll recall there to be completed with detailed design in June of 2021. So it's pretty ambitious schedule. Um, and we went through that and laid out what they're expecting to do, uh, wrapping up very quickly after the holidays. Um, we, uh, in terms of, uh, the financing aspect of that project, we kind of completed the determination that the brick, uh, the FEMA building resilient infrastructure grant money program. We really didn't have time to apply for the whole project for that. And also I think because that program's just starting up and the whole project is rather large, the likelihood of getting funding for that I think is pretty low. Um, we did continue to monitor their safe drinking water loan, uh, activity and that continues to be supported at a very high level. Uh, we do expect, um, and Ms. Godfrey is working on that along with, uh, to provide a swarming in, uh, to apply for FEMA brick on the shoreline protection portion of the project. And depending on how extensive we decide to make that, that, that's certainly more than a million dollars in cost. And, uh, we feel like that's got a little more chance of success in terms of being a, a project to mitigate the, the damage due to flooding or high, high waters and wave action. So we do hope and plan to, to apply for that, um, in hopes of getting some grant money for that portion of the project. And I think the, the final point, um, I was, uh, invited to make a presentation to the committee of the whole in, in January. Um, and provide a summary of the raw water improvement project. Um, and, uh, a couple goals and that I want to be sure the council members and the public fully understand the background of the project. Oh, why do we need to do this project? Oh, what is the project looking like? Uh, cost elements, how long it's going to serve the community and just, uh, to be sure there's a lot of awareness of everything that's already gone into the project and what we expect to be coming in the next few years. And that will be, uh, I believe on, uh, why the, the data escapes me. I think it's the second council meeting in, in January. Uh, that I would be doing that. An hour for you. I'm sorry. I'll be a lot of an hour for you. I don't know how much time, but probably. Yeah, I'm hoping more of a half hour to 45 minutes, but, uh, I'll try. I'm pretty good at summarizing. So I'll try to keep it early. That's fine. Joe, could you remind me is this, uh, application we're making with this be a grant or with this be a loan. For the shoreline protection portion. The FEMA brick is the grant and on that aspect, I believe it's a 75% grant and then we have to match 25%. Okay. Uh, and yeah, grant is, is, uh, not, uh, repair, repayable. So it'd be very nice if we can achieve one of those. If we get 75%, that'd be great. Yeah, that would be outstanding. So we're excited about that. You know, it's a nationwide competition. I think in the first year, there's something like $500 million allocated. You know, that's, there's a lot of states and a lot of projects to cover. And with $500 million, but we do feel like we've got, uh, you know, the mitigation aspect is definitely there because our site that we're building on is low limited. It is vulnerable to wave action and flooding and it's a critical piece of infrastructure. Are there any funds to help pay for what we've got to do? Are the application portion? Yeah, I mean, or even, even beyond that, uh, that grant, is there any other grant money to cover what we've had to do this year when the, the riffraff basically had to be replaced? Um, not that I'm aware of cherry. Um, all right. Okay. Um, anything else on the raw water improvement project? Not for me. No. Any questions from you, Tom or Mark? No, I'm good. Not at this time. Okay. Very good. Um, Next on the agenda is the request for approval of the, uh, purchase of the Georgia and his evidence standpoint. Uh, have been an actuator, Georgia Avenue stamp, electric actuator. Oh, okay. It's all right. I've got, I've got maybe an older version of the, I've got an older version of the agenda looking at the official and it does the actuator. I'm sorry. Okay. I did want a preliminary one, I think. Yeah, I had to correct that. I didn't want to be old one. We're kind of ripping it up. So. Okay. That was the only correction. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I did want to, uh, I just wanted to, um, congratulate our distribution and ops personnel and the contractor contupus for. Doing an outstanding job on getting the Georgia stand pipe. Uh, stripped and repainted both inside and outside. Um, if you've seen it, it's a massive improvement in appearance and some of the neighbors have commented to our staff that they're very happy now with the appearance. Um, I think it was, uh, pretty, uh, pockmarked. It had been hit by a lot of, uh, what do you call it? Wrist rocket. Rock hits from horseman school grounds, we believe. Just an aging coating. And a lot of the footwork that went ahead of that was, you know, taking that. That water reservoir, and being sure that we could handle the effects of not having that in our system. So. Our teams had done a lot of footwork to be sure that we could operate without it. And in fact, when the time came, it was out of service about two months and I think two to three weeks. And we had no, uh, impact and distribution that we were unable to manage. And you can see it's a very nice clean appearance. Now, uh, the interior coating was failing and that was, was a problem. It had ice damage. It was starting to corrode. And one of the other big features is that we've now added a mixing unit. So if you imagine that's a two million gallon water tank. Um, before the only actions, uh, water motion would be as water would come in and go out. Um, that doesn't create a lot of mixing and ideally in a, in a water tank of that size, you want some mixing, uh, to, so that you don't put water in and then remove the freshest water at the same time. So we now have what's called a grid B, a mixer floating in there and achieving some mixing that we're hoping reduces some of the icing in that tank and, and also, uh, maintains a little higher chlorine levels than we've seen in that tank in the past. Um, but as part of that project, there was an old, uh, what's called a mechanical altitude valve at the base of that standpipe or water reservoir. And that valve operated, um, by a pressure. So when there was enough water to fill the tank, that water would push the altitude valve closed so that you couldn't overflow the tank. Um, and the altitude, altitude valve in the tank was original and was, was no longer functioning very smoothly. So we decided to remove it. Those are somewhat outdated pieces of infrastructure. So the crew removed that, uh, and in its place now we would like to add an actuator to the valve, the inlet valve. So now we can, with an actuator, we can control that, uh, valve, uh, and mediate the flow of water going in, uh, and out of the tank. If we were to have a major problem and wanted to shut the tank off, we could do that very quickly and remotely from the water treatment plant. So this, uh, electric actuator, uh, would be going on the existing valve and giving us those capabilities. And we've now added those to the tail hill reservoir and the double E reservoir as well. It will $8,400 well spent in other words. Yes, definitely. And we're staying with the alma actuators. So common, common technology you're familiar with. Yep. That's our go to, we've been very happy with the maintenance and, and longevity of those units. Yeah. I'm all in favor of that idea. Is that a motion? Sure. Motion to approve the, uh, proposal. I'll second it. I'll second it. All right. All favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Great. All right. Next we've got, uh, the COVID lead carry over. Request to carry over the remaining leave until June 15th or, uh, vaccination. Um, Yeah. I guess just to remind the board not long after the pandemic began, there was federal law establishing. what's called COVID leave for specific purposes. And the board determined to exceed that in some ways, partly because we wanted the flexibility to protect staff and contain our critical service and not have an unknown virus at that time kind of rush through our operation and threaten our ability to produce water for the community. It's worked very well. The majority of that leave has been used for staff members who have children in school that were forced to home school and needed a parent homeless them. That's been by far the majority of the usage of that leave. Some employees haven't used any at all. It has been used for those employees who have had COVID in cases where a staff member had a primary contact with somebody with COVID. And in cases where we felt we needed to isolate people to protect our operations and not bring them into the workplace in a few instances. But I think my request here would be, no numbers are still high in the county. I think we're all hoping those continue to come down, but I don't think the problem is going to be eliminated at the end of the year. So I would request the flexibility of carrying that leave over, which has been maintained on our books very precisely for those staff members that may need to use it in the coming months or until June 15th, or hopefully if there's a vaccine that's widely available to our personnel earlier than that. We are considered in the second category of CDC vaccine distribution. So the first category is medical, staff, elderly. I may be missing some of the second category is essential workers. And it's defined by CDC that includes utility workers and many other workers, it's a very large category. So we have no idea when we're going to see any vaccinations available for utility workers in a separate group. But hopefully it'll be sooner than June 15th. And I felt like if we don't do this formally, then we're a little bit left unclear how we might handle the outbreak, if it were to become worse after Christmas or just not wind down as quickly as everyone is hoping. A couple of things that I've seen are saying that the essential workers might be available to essential workers as early as February. It could be ideal. I think once it becomes available, then my feeling is that this leave would be taken off to books at that point. None of it has paid out in addition to anything beyond the purposes it was set out for. Do we have a specific plan as far as the people in the utility, employees in the utility, as far as either requiring them to get vaccinated or taking order within the utility? We don't. And I think from what I've gathered, mandatory vaccination is challenging to enforce. I think we're hopeful that most of our staff members would become vaccinated and that that would give us a lot reduced risk to any widespread exposure in the utility. We have had several members that have staff members who have tested positive. So we do have some folks that have had the virus. And my hope is that when the vaccination becomes available, most of our folks would get that vaccination and that our risk to a widespread outbreak at that point comes very, very low. All right, we need a motion to carry over and remaining COVID leave as determined previously until June 15th, according to Joel's request. Any questions? First of all, is there a second before I found it? A question. Was there a motion? I made the motion. You made the motion. Okay. The only thing I would add and then I don't even know if this is that important. I heard a story on public radio today. They're talking about mandatory vaccinations for healthcare workers. And the doctor that they were interviewing was saying with this conditional use vaccine or this emergency authorization for that vaccine, even for those healthcare workers, they can't mandate the use of the virus. So that probably, yeah, for the vaccine, yes, excuse me. So I think that we're going to have some time left in this crisis before we're out of this. So I would second the motion. Any other comments, Tom? No, I'm good, I'm for this. From what I have heard, I think it was yesterday that the logic there is once we have some time or 75% of people vaccinated, you know, that the other 25, at least at that point, they were considered dropping the term pandemic because of 75% of the population had been vaccinated. There still would be outbreaks, but not as severe. So anyway, motion to second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All right, that motion is carried. We know of Whitman's Confidence Policy. So we have a renewal quote from Accident Fund through Hub, our local office broker. And I would only say the premiums are by state statute based on our industry and our, our mod or kind of our safety assessment. And our mod has been very good. The part that is a little bit different between companies would be the dividends that are paid. If you don't have claims, you'll see the dividend table laid out here is very high, 35%. We have worked with Accident Fund for many years and in various ways. And I would have, you know, only a positive recommendation on working with Accident Fund for workers comp along with Hub out of Sheboygan. I would move to approve your second. Yes. Second. Any comments, otherwise? I'm just kind of curious how the, how the policy costs this year compares to last time we renewed, approximately keeping up with inflation or I mean, I'm not looking for a scientific response. I'm just curious. I know I specifically asked the accountant that question like I'm scrambling back. I know it was less than a 5% increase, if that. Okay. The other thing is because these are set by the state, you really don't have the option going through a different company or anything like that because the state is setting those rules based on the vocation itself on the clericals difference and someone working on the crew. And that suffers based on dollars worth of payroll. So payroll goes up, yeah, the premium will go up a little bit unless the rates come down but those rates are spread over the entire state and basically the experience rates within those categories. So that was a second Mark? Yes. Second. Okay. Moving second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. And insurable aside, motion carried. Last item under items for discussion action after the health insurance strategic plan and update. I wanted to just take the board back a little bit earlier this year. I believe it was July, we had engaged Anthony Fioretti who does consulting on health insurance plans. Mr. Fioretti's goal is to develop more of a strategy not just the year by year, well change this and see what happens. He kind of takes what I'd loosely described as a holistic approach. And in doing that, he began meeting with myself and Scott Sucker and the utilities health insurance broker. And his initial goals was to understand the plan that has been in place at the utility, where it came from, with the board's intentions over the years and maintaining it as a key part of our employment package. And then starting to look at the details of the local market. He's out of Milwaukee area but he works in Sheboygan County. So it's positive. He's not comparing us to Kansas City or something. He's very much looking at our local market. Several meetings amongst that group of four to kind of flesh out where do we, what do we think is important to the staff about the health plan? How do we want to keep it? How do we see it in the future as part of our employment package? And then based on all that input from us, Mr. Fioretti developing something of a plan going forward. And I would remind the board that our relationship with him is a three-year contract. So this is not, again, all in one year kind of thing. So we did receive a draft document from him laying out some details, showed our benchmarks compared to other very comparable entities in terms of what the employees contribute to premium, the benefits, description, contributions as well. And he made really three recommendations at this point. The first is a private clinic option. And he, what he's talking about there is a fairly new concept where a clinic has physicians that develop more of a one-on-one relationship with the patient and can do more than just kind of be a feed-through to other services. One example is a group called Palladium. There are other examples in our market as well. I wouldn't want to, I only single them up because we did get some information on them and spoke with them, but there are certainly other providers in the same market, Prevea and some others. So he's recommending that we at least pursue that option and what it might do to allow our people to get more focused and quicker appointments. My understanding is that appointments are actually with a physician and within one or two days, not the type of clinic where you see a medical staff that are more limited in their background and prescription ability and training, but a type of clinic where you're seeing a physician-based approach. The second option that he thinks is worth considering is a health reimbursement account and these have become pretty common. In our case, the health reimbursement account, the monies stay with the employer, but the staff members have incentive to use their dollars wisely because they receive a certain amount of pre-tax for their benefits and if they use them wisely, they last longer is my simple approach to HRA that he is also recommending that we start looking at. The third idea is what's called a stop-loss captive and just for a little background the utility self-insurance plan is self-insured and what that means is that we buy coverage for large claims and the utility pays the claims below that coverage limit or stop-loss limit as it's called. And one of the things we found is that the amount of quotes we're getting on our fairly small group for stop-loss coverage has been decreasing year by year. So stop-loss captive is a way to join others in getting quotes on multiple stop-loss packages rather than just one employer at a time. That's my basic understanding. I'm still learning about these as well, but those are the three areas that he's singled out in our first round of evaluation. At this point in time, I just offer those on an advisory basis. He hasn't sought quotes for any of those. He hasn't done anything beyond simply evaluate our plan and great detail and confer with us. And those are the three primary recommendations that have come out. And the follow-up would be in 2021 to start looking at those in more detail and to provide real scenarios where the board's consideration of possible changes in each or all of those categories or none of those categories if at the end of the day they don't seem to be a beneficial for the plan. So I think at this point I just wanted to give kind of an update on what's come out of the planning sessions that we've had and the draft document is there for your review and I guess that's what I wanted to present at today's meeting. Anybody have any specific questions about the materials that Joe provided? Not at this time. The document that we were provided earlier is quite in depth, quite deep. So I appreciate the summary, Joe. Tom, how about you? I'm good, yeah. No, I read the document and yeah, it's very detailed. It's definitely going to need a professional to explain all the different things and the benefits and betterment of that, you know. Yeah. All right, so we'll look forward to an update on that in the future as we're going along. Next on the agenda, personnel items. Any personnel items, Joe? No, there was nothing this month. Except wishing everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and happy holidays in general. That's right. I'm assuming there's no Christmas get-together or holiday get-together at the utility. No, not this year. Unfortunately. All right, next meeting. Unless there's anything else that I have missed. Next meeting, the third Monday of January would be the 15th. Yep, that was good. Is that okay for everybody, Joe, on your hand? Yes, that's good. Okay, set that for January 18th. 3.30 again on the third Monday. I'd just say 2021. For somebody that just, I don't know. The years ago, I'm really, really fast. Oh, we don't want another 2020, that's for sure. Yeah, I see it. All right, with that, we've got one other item on the agenda and that's the motion to adjourn. So moved. I'll second it. All right, motion carried. Anything else? Take care of your family, Joe.