 Good morning all. Looks like we do have a forum. I think we're just missing a Sonoma water. But it is eight oh one and stuff is all here to present. So it's the sub tack. Okay. If we go ahead and get started. Okay. We will do that. So we will call the meeting to order at eight oh one. And secretary. Can you do a roll call, please? Yes. City of Santa Rosa. Jennifer Burke here. City of Katari. Thanks, Scott. Here. City of Roaner Park. Right. Crawford here. Sonoma water. Okay. Thank you. So let the record show that we have all members present except for Sonoma water. Just to remind everyone that. We are virtual yet again. So if you could mute your phones and microphones when you're not speaking, that will be great. And a secretary. That will be there too. Unmute members of the public if they need. If they would like to speak. So next, we have to go on to. Item number two, which is. A resolution finding a proclaimed state of emergency and that meeting in person would present imminent risks to the health or safety of attendees and authorizing meetings by teleconference of legislative bodies. I think we're all aware that we are still under a health emergency. We're still from our local health officers. We're still into climate change. We're still doing climate change. We're still going to do climate change and social distancing and masking. So we believe it's still appropriate to make this finding. So if there's anyone who's willing to. Has any questions about this or comments. About this item. Okay. So. Before we take a motion, we'll now take public comment on item 2.1. You wish to make a comment by his name. Please raise your hand if you're dialing in. And Secretary Aitha, do we have any public comments on this item? We do not. All right. Anyone would like to make a motion? I'll move. Second. Okay. So we have a motion by Mary Grace Possum of Burnett Park and a second by Craig Scott of Cattadi. And Secretary Aitha, could you do a roll call vote, please? City of Santa Rosa. Yes. City of Cattadi. Yes. City of Rohnert Park. Yes. City of Sebastopol. Yes. Sonoma Water. Yes. That carries unanimously. All right. Thank you very much. We will now move on to the approval of the minutes. Are there any questions or comments on the minutes from the sub-tech? All right. Seeing none. So before we accept the minutes, we'll take public comment. If there are any public comments on the minutes, please raise your hand by a Zoom or if you're on the phone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Do we have any public comments? We have no public comments. Okay. We'll move on to item number four, public comments. This is the time for public comments on any items that are not on the agenda. So if you would like to make a public comment, please raise your hand by a Zoom or. If you're on the telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And do we have any public comments? We do not. All right. Great. So we'll now move on to item 5.1. And this will be a presentation of our fiscal year. 2022-23 regional CIP project funding. Okay. So we'll move on to item 4. I'm a Walton. Our deputy director of water reuse. We'll be making this presentation. Good afternoon members of the sub-tech. I'm a Walton deputy director of water use operations. I'm here to do a brief overview of our. 2022-2023. Regional CIP funding. projects that we currently have going on as well as do a couple highlights of some bigger, some bigger of our projects. So just to provide kind of a very high level overview, we have a lot of CIP projects underway, both at the plant and outside the fence or within the regional system but not here at the plant itself. These are kind of just an outline of all the projects that we have either under construction in design or under evaluation that we anticipate will be in construction within the next five years. So I'll go into a little bit of detail about each of these. So first, I just wanted to highlight our on call contracts. We have on call contracts for not only general services but electrical services as well. So our on call provide the general services provide support for corrosion that needs immediate attention or recycle to water main breaks or sink holes, like I mentioned at our last meeting. We also have an on call for electrical services, and we had a pump fail on one of our by the properties that we do by all solids application on, and we needed an urgent repair of that pump and replacement of that pump so that work was done under an on call. The electrical on call is extremely important right now given we are down three electrical technicians in a team of just six electrical tech so they're very high need for electrical assistance right now. The next project is PID 2268 it's emergency generator radiator replacement project. This project was originally slated to begin construction last year, but due to supply chain issues, the radiators themselves arrived too late in the season and we couldn't take down our radiations going into wet weather and also the radiators themselves were damaged through delivery. So the vendor had to come in and do a full replacement of the damaged components, but we are now in a position to move forward on construction with this project, and they should be starting up here very soon. In 267 our maintenance building roof repairs just finished up during the October 24 storm. We realized we had very severe leaking in our maintenance building. Our maintenance building is what houses all of our fabrication equipment, which is very heavy duty equipment that provides all of our mechanics with the ability to do their job. And we do not want any of that equipment damaged so we quickly undertook a project to repair the leaking roof for that building. PID 284 is our UV replacement disinfection improvement project this just went out to bed in January and we are shooting for a bid opening March 29 with a construction award coming after that and looking forward to starting the construction on that project this summer. PID 2366 is an aeration header replacements. We've talked about this project before. We currently have a temporary bypass for aeration header given the severe leaking of the underground piping and then the subsequent sinkhole that occurred over the aeration piping. So this project is to construct a permanent aeration header above ground header and we are finalizing design on that and anticipating construction this summer as well. PID 2192 is our emergency generator fuel tank replacement. Our EGEN system was installed in 1990 and the fuel tank is the outer containment of the fuel tank is starting to realize some deformation and we're unable to do the testing that we need to for compliance with our permit. So we are moving forward with a replacement of this underground fuel tank with an above ground fuel tank and some other ancillary improvements we have received 90% and reviewed the 90% drawings on that project and are anticipating getting that out to bid here in the very near future for construction beginning in September. PID 1978 is our waste gas burner replacement. Our waste gas burner was installed in the 1970s and is past its serviceable life and needs replacement so we another project slated for construction to begin in 2022. We have already reviewed and finalized the 100% plans for this project and the BPU has already awarded or approved a sole specification for the bid set given we had to design around a specific waste gas burner. PID 2096 is our filter valve and actuator rehab and replacement. We completed phase one of this project about five years ago and we are just starting up on phase two. This summer we will undertake the condition assessment of the valves themselves to determine which valves need to be replaced in which we can and which we can just rehab. We have done this project before. It is a very straightforward project. We are confident that we will be able to get this project out to bid early next summer or early next year for construction beginning in the spring of next year. PID 544 is our flood protection project. We currently have a grant application in which is under review by environmental review by FEMA. We actually have a cultural resources site visit scheduled for today to keep that effort moving forward and we are moving forward on design, finalizing design, just waiting on confirmation from FEMA for grants funding. And we are anticipating construction for that in the 2022-23 timeframe depending on grant funding. PID 2404 is our aeration basin assessment and rehab. I will go into a little bit more detail later on in the presentation about this project. It is a very large project that is a condition assessment of our aeration tanks themselves with the concrete, structural integrity of the concrete as well as the aeration piping. This project has been awarded by the BPU and it is about a $1 million design effort, evaluation and design effort alone. Well, that project also or that project work order for that also includes design. So we will just after evaluation is done, we will move right into design and anticipate construction in 2025. PID 1979 is our secondary clarifiers assessment and rehab. We are doing an assessment of again the structural integrity of the concrete itself as well as the steel components and the superstructures. And that project also includes design for whatever recommendations come out of the evaluation and again looking at a 2025 construction timeframe. Can I ask just a quick question there? How old are the clarifiers with regard to the concrete and the aeration basins and mainly the clarifiers? Would you have a sense of that? I would have to get back to you on that. They're not all the same age. Two were built then followed by two more and then the last one that's kind of off to the side. My clarifier number five was most recently built. This was a project that came out of our master plan as a recommendation for further analysis and evaluation. I will have to get back to you on the specific age. And then finally the last project is 2050, our electrical infrastructure evaluation. We just undertook an evaluation of all of the electrical infrastructure here at the plant. We are just wrapping up that project. And out of that project has come some major recommendation for major improvements and replacement. So I'm going to be talking a little more about that as well. Just a high level overview of some of the projects that are going to be under construction outside of the fence this summer. We have two projects out at Delta Pond 2200 and 2111. 2200 is a dredging of our diffusers and 2111, the upsizing of our geysers delta connection to help provide more operational flexibility and move water around our system to better utilize our storage. 2284 is a West college storage facility pumping improvements. This project has already been advertised and awarded. It was awarded by BQ in January. Construction should be underway soon. This is a project to install permanent pumps at our West college diversion facility. We currently rent two pumps on an annual basis, and we want permanent pumps there so we can more readily rely on those pumps when we need them. And then lastly is the PID 2259, our Dottie Farm Recycle Water Main Improvements. This is just an improvement to our reclamation system. Dottie Farm is one of our largest, one of our larger users in our recycle water system, and the main and the pumps station itself needs some improvements. So that project is slated for construction this year as well. So to dive in a little bit on our electrical infrastructure replacement project, as I mentioned, we are just wrapping up the evaluation stage. The consultant is finalizing their report for recommendations for CIP projects. They are recommending in the near term, so in the next five years, about $20 million worth of improvements. These, I'm going to quickly go through these one and two are some minor improvements to our emergency generator switch gear. Number three is the largest kind of component of this project, which is the replacement of our M1 switch gear with a new switch gear to be installed adjacent to our substation. M1 is very old and showing a lot of signs of aging and needs replacement. We will also be installing new duck banks from our new switch gear to all of our load centers and converting overhead 15 kV to underground. We will also be replacing all five of our existing load centers, as well as the cabling that ties the switch gear to the load centers. So this is a very large project. Again, about $20 million worth of improvements in the next five years. Out of the evaluation, additional improvements were recommended, but for more mid to long term improvements, these were just the immediate issues that needed to be addressed. The next project I wanted to highlight was our aeration basin assessment and rehab. As I mentioned, we have already a contract approved by BPU. It's about a million dollar design contract. It's an evaluation assessment and rehabilitation of our aeration tanks and adjacent channels. So this spring, we are going to be taking the consultant will be undertaking design of a bypass pumping system. So a number of these channels do not have redundancy and we need full flow bypass in order to dewater, clean them and inspect them. So that's going to be a huge part of the project is just the bypass system itself. We're planning on putting that out to bed this summer and having installed this summer so we can clean the channels and inspect them. Further condition assessment of the aeration channels themselves so the aeration tanks themselves do have redundancy so we can take those down one at a time and have those inspected and assessed. Continue that effort into spring of 2023 after evaluation and assessment is completed will move right into design. We anticipate about two years for design and then starting construction in 2025 on the recommended rehab. And then just last I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, we do have a lot of CIP projects underway, we're making good progress on the improvements and replacements and rehab of our infrastructure. But in the meantime we are continuing to rely heavily on our on call contracts. I'm just again September. We just there just a few of the things we've been relying on our on call contracts for September we had a leak in our filter valve that needed to be addressed immediately. Shortly after that we had a reclamation main breakout on one of our irrigation sites. In October, we had some corrosion on clarifier number one that needed to be addressed immediately. We, in November, we had our own call contractor install our aeration bypass piping to address the severely leaking aeration piping. In December, you probably all remember we had our sinkhole, and then just most recently in January we had a major water main break here at the plant that did some flooding to the media area. And with that, I'd happy to answer any other questions. Thank you, Emma. Are there any questions or comments from the subtract members. Just a quick one and just say thanks Emma for that presentation it looks like. They looks like you have a lot of work to do. And a lot of things going on and I just Jennifer I'm hoping you guys have the, like we're short on engineers. You know, we have the staff to be able to, you know, to actually get these projects done. I think we're all kind of scrambling to find staff to actually, you know, we have like you we have the funding it's finding the, the honestly the bodies to actually do the work. So, good luck on that. Yeah, I, you know, we, we have that same issue. And we have been looking at some creative ways to try and bring more folks in. We're also getting very close to finalizing a contract for staff augmentation with an outside third party so that we hope will help get more projects done I think they will be dedicated to doing water department projects, if and when we get that on board so hopefully that'll be soon. But yes, that is a continuing problem I think we're all having in this, this industry in general with the great resignation that's going on right now so Yeah, I had read for a while that, you know, the number of engineers leaving college or going into it really hasn't been sufficient to meet the demand, you know, many went into computer science for many years and so we have this big we may be starting to see that that shortage now. Yes, you all have any brilliant ideas on recruit, let us know. Any other questions or comments from the sub tag members. Alright. Okay, thanks, Emma. And yes, a lot of work that we have to do out at the plant. So we'll now open it up to public comment. We are now taking public comments on item 5.1. You wish to make a comment by a zoom please raise your hand if you're on the phone dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary, do we have any public comments on this item. We do not. Right. Thank you. Okay, so we will now move into item 5.2 which will be presentation on our preliminary fiscal year 2022 23. We are going to have an O&M debt service and capital improvement budgets and allocations and we are going to have Nick Harvey our administrative analyst doing the presentation. And also Kimberly Zanino our deputy director of administration will be here to help with any questions and also do some modeling for folks if you'd like to look at different allocations at the end of the presentation. So I will now turn it over to Nick. Can you see the ability to share my screen. Oh, there it is. Sorry, I had to click a few extra buttons there to get my screen to share. Okay, good morning everybody. As director Burke stated my name is Nick I'm an admin analyst with Santa Rosa water. I'm presenting the preliminary overall regional budget and resulting partner allocations for the fiscal year ending June 30 2023. Next slide please. Okay, so today we're going to cover the final plant flows for the fiscal year ending June 30 2021. We'll then discuss the overall planned regional budget for fiscal year 2223 and the partner allocations. Let's finish up with a quick review the calendar for the remaining budget process. Next slide please. So here's a comparison of the yearly flow numbers through June 30 2021, which as you know are used to allocate the enterprise zone and budget among the partner agencies. As you can see overall flows to the plant are down slightly from 1920. That's due to the department's efforts in terms of water conservation so it makes sense that we'd see reduced flows. There was no effective change in the partner allocations that the year over year change was far less than half a percent for all the agencies so we're seeing consistency so we shouldn't see any wild swings and allocation. Next slide please. So here are significant increases in the budget. We'll start with salaries. So we had a unique situation this year where we had delayed labor negotiations, but we eventually came to an agreement. The city eventually came to an agreement I should say with the various units and we executed. It included two years of colas in one fiscal year at 3% and 2.5% for a gross increase of 5.5% total. We also have a $500 per employee wellness benefit and with the number of employees we have that's that's quite a jump in costs benefits increase as a function of base salary so it makes sense that we're seeing the increase there. Professional services, we're experiencing we're planning on increased consultant costs for various programs and components at the plant. O&M projects are up due to environmental compliance costs and component failures at the plant. It's just good policy to to have increased O&M budget with the number of failures we've been experiencing with the plant. The funding lends our organization more agility in terms of reacting to failures. So we were really investing in that this year. The next category energy vehicle, etc. An overall increase of 1.3 million. The key here is that these unfortunately are uncontrollable costs of the department these are reflect internal service costs and are allocated by finance. So we unfortunately have no control over that. We're continuing with the plan $1 million year over year increase in the CIP program. And just a note on one additional position. We have a request out for a supervising lab analyst position. But as a side note, these numbers are not include included in the salary and benefits currently because we're still a position still pending city manager and council approval. Next slide please. Okay, so here's a breakdown of our own costs by category. And we like to show you that every year the circled figures represent the uncontrollable costs I mentioned on the previous slide. And as I stated, professional services are up as we're investing in consultants and higher compliance costs. Next slide please. So here's just a visual breakdown of how we're spending the cash CIP dollars or planning to spend the CIP cash dollars for for 2223 with the $1 million cash increase we're at 9 million total. And it's important to note that the bond funds that are that we're using to fund the UV disinfection replacement program are obviously not included. So this is just the cash CIP allocations. Next slide please. Projected miscellaneous revenues for the year as deputy directors and you know pointed out in a previous meeting or high strength waste tipping charges are up pretty significantly which brings our projected miscellaneous revenues to over five, just over 5.4 million. And as you know this number is netted against total plan regional expenditures to determine the total contributions needed each year, which we'll cover on the next slide. Next slide please. We're planning on total overall expenditures of just over $50 million. And at the bottom. Well, it's a combination of expenditures plus the slight increase for operations reserve is that we like to keep it about 15% of operational costs. So that that gross figures just over 50 million and then if we net out the planned miscellaneous revenues of 5.4 million we end up with net gross agency contribution of 44.6 million for the year. Next slide please. So this is a visual breakdown of all regional spending categories is currently planned this chart also includes planned miscellaneous revenues as well as a required increase to the operating reserve to bring the balance to 15% of planned expenditures. An important note here is that the salary and benefits are higher than in previous slides. And that's because we've separated the salaries and benefits out from the city and internal overhead category for clarity. Next slide please. Okay, so this is a summary of where the refund reserve sits as we move into the budget process so your agencies can start thinking about applying the reserves. The biggest item here is the $12.8 million decrease in the Santa Rosa refund reserve because if you'll recall. And when we were initially planning the to execute the UV disinfection replacement projects, we were holding on to cash because we had anticipated applying a significant amount of cash up front to fund that project but we got such a competitive rate on the bond issuance that we decided to hold on to the cash and so this just reflects the return of our refund reserve back to our sewer operating fund. Next slide please. So here's a year-over-year comparison of the tentative 2020-22-23 allocations against last year's figures. And as you see we ran a scenario with an assumed applied fund balance that puts all of the partner agencies at approximately a 6% year-over-year increase. Of course we can apply different, you know, each agency can choose to apply the refund reserve in different amounts based on your agency's needs. So, as Director Burke mentioned Deputy Directors you know can work with you to run what if scenarios for your agency. Next slide please. So this schedule for the remainder of our budget approval process we're going to be taking the regional budget to City Council on April 26 for preliminary approval for the purposes of notifying the partner agencies of their allocations by May 1 as we do every year. And another important point on this slide is April 21 we're going to be asking BPU to make budget recommendation to City Council. So I'm sure that we have our numbers set by then. Next slide. And with that we can address any questions. Thank you for your time. Are there any questions or comments from the sub-tac and also Kimberly if you want to open up the model. So we can, if anyone would like to look at different applications of fund balance we can do that as well. So Mike. Just a couple of questions and thank you very much for that presentation. Is there a way I'm just and look. What is essentially the cost per million gallons. I'm assuming that's how you know we're looking at a total of for South Park we're looking at $1.291 million estimated for next year. What volume is that based on for South Park. Do you know. Yeah, that's if we reference the annual flow slide slide three. Yeah, I mean we I noticed there was a 166 million I think was, if I had was if I copied that down right is that correct. Yes, and that's what what all the O and M and O and M project costs are allocated by by these figures. And just a reminder, CIP is actually allocated per the original sub regional agreement. So yeah, this is the number that this flow number is what's being used as a basis to allocate the cost for you for the year. Or the O and M right for the O and M objects, as well as the O and M project keys. Okay, but not the CIP, but not the CIP and correct where is there a way or do you have on your site slide anywhere showing how this, how those funds or how those costs are allocated. I can look those up for you, Mike. Okay, that'd be good. Yeah, those are for the agreement. So the agreement has a defined percentage for each of the partners. Okay, and I can send those out pretty quickly I have that all from, I think last year, so I don't have the memorize, but I can find them quickly for you. I think I think that would be helpful so just so as I understand it, it's essentially we have the O and M rate is, you know, it's the O and M costs are are allocated based on, is it the 2021 We use the last we use the last full year of actual flows that are to determine what the next year's budget is. Okay, and the flows are are determined for the following year, then they true that up and that's how all the numbers move around in the refund reserve. And, and again, if you can, Nick, what were the what what are the O and M costs then that these figures are applied towards. So if we go to the total allocation. Yeah, that would be the sum of your 2223 budgeted O and M figures in that column, because the CIP so your overall allocations for any given year is a combination of the budgeted on M costs budgeted CIP costs, and budgeted debt service costs CIP and debt service allocations are set based on the agreements and the bond inventors at the time of issuance of any given debt. Only the 2223 budgeted on M column is is allocated based on your flow so you're you're getting your agency is scheduled to get about a $1.1 million allocation on the own and based on the flows. Okay, we're It's like all point out that so the total O and M expenses are this 40 million. Okay, great. Thanks. So we met out though from those operating costs, the 5.4 million and revenues that are going to come into the plan. So that comes off of the O and M before we do the allocation. Okay, that's the, that's what you're showing here. Okay. Okay, so we have you have the operating is it the operating expenditure request that I'm looking at Kimberly that's Yes, you're looking at this is the operating costs for the year. Then CIP is added in after CIP there's also we have the policy reserve which is 15%. So when O and M goes up the policy reserve or the 15% goes up so we have to add to the reserve amount. And that nets you out or that gives you this total cost for O and M and CIP and then we back out the revenues those miscellaneous revenues that are going to go into the plant directly as it as a as a revenue that goes specifically to the plant but doesn't come to the waste water funds at all. And, and, and then from of that 44 million though that's going to be split up different ways depending on the original agreement, the sub regional agreements correct. Correct. Okay, so this column here these O and M this is split out by those flow numbers. Yeah, this column here which is the CIP contribution is split out based on the agreement and the numbers the percentages that are listed in our partner agreement. Okay, and then this is just a subtotal for you and then debt service is separated by the debt service agreements when we actually issue the bonds. Most obviously the most of it is for currently the UV project, or a large amount of it is for I guess the swing is for the UV project for the UV project we used CIP percentages to distribute the actual debt service. Okay. I guess I should say I should. Okay, so that's not quite done with that but we will be getting close. So, so debt service and CIP are used the same equations for the same distributed most current one uses the same equation so the UV project uses the same equation geysers I'm not sure exactly what the number was back then and there have been so many refundings that I would have to look into that for you. Okay. Thank you very much that's helpful. Craig. Sure. Thank you. Thank you Nick for that presentation. I'm glad you're on this slide this is a slide I was going to ask about. So that, if you're proposed. After this analysis the proposed rate increases are shown there on the right for the upcoming year. Is that correct. Yes. Okay. So with the with the. We're kind of digging ourselves out of a hole with the reserves. It looks like the trend is that we're coming back to balance. Is there an idea with the turn back this year that that'll happen that will will get back to a positive reserve balance. That's the hope. I think keeping our, you know, our own and projects knowing how many unfortunate emergencies we've been going through. If we had looked at cutting that budget, what we expect is there would be a lot less turn back. But yeah we we're hoping just like you that this year, you know that actually gets you back to a positive status. Okay, is that is that have to do with the 15% on M reserve, it kind of, if that's not used, it goes collectively into everybody's reserve reserves. No, that just has to deal with unexpended budget so anything we don't spend for budget comes back into the fund and then is distributed based on that true up of actual flow amounts. Okay. The second question is looking out, you know, we're doing a five year rate model, as others are as well. And I just wanted to get an idea from you. What kind of range can we expect going out the next five years. One of the things you're going to see as next year we're not going to have the sharp increase in salaries and benefits, because we had that two year rating for sorry salary increase and benefit increase that came into play this year and the additional $500 per employee. So next year we will see just a two and a half percent increase and that $500 will already be part of the budget that's an ongoing MOU requirement for us now. So you're looking at, I don't know what's what what so you're saying this is like on the high end of what we would expect over the next five years so it would come down from here. As long as we don't continue to see the failures we're seeing I mean I think, you know, those are those are the those are a significant factor for us currently, obviously we didn't expect to have so many emergencies happen this year that we had to address hopefully this year with all of the CIP projects that Emma pointed out and all of the on M projects that will be working towards that are going to maintain some of those systems that should decrease we hope the number of emergencies that are happening at the plant right now. Okay, thanks. There we go. Thanks. I'm going to follow on on kind of Craig's line of questioning and repeat the request for some long term financial modeling from sub regional system is similar to what we have for Sonoma water it really seems like we are continually confronted with these annual decisions. And it would be extremely helpful to understand the range of predicted rate increases. Over a longer horizon that that would just own rates it would help us make some decisions about how we use our refund reserves. For those of us that have some rates stabilization reserves locally it would help us make decisions about those. We would not be making very short term decisions about the use of refund reserves and it seems like we kind of continually find ourselves in the pattern of doing that. And you know and I understand they're unexpected things and I understand any long term plan would need to have some contingencies, and we definitely expect you guys to have a range. You know we certainly wouldn't expect the promise but that that would really be helpful. Just so you know I'm working with our financial, the person who developed our long term financial model. I'm looking at doing a new agreement with him because we want him to fine tune our model on a regular basis. But certainly we could discuss how he could set up the same thing he sets up for us to look at for the water in the wastewater fund to look out for sub regional as well. And we'll be in discussions with him about that. Thanks. That would be really helpful to all of us. Yeah, and I think, you know we presented last year and so we can bring that back again this year our master plan with the long term CIP and what we see out over the next 20 years. I will note that the electrical upgrade is a new addition to that. So we can bring back that information at the next sub tack meeting to refresh you all on what we talked about last year and our long term planning for capital projects. Yeah, and I think the concern is, you know, capital is a piece of it but it's not all of it. There's a lot going on and it's an incredibly complex operation and you read it really well. And, and none of this request is to imply anything else. As much as just to help the partners make decisions long term about, you know how we balance reserves with weight increases. I really understood and I think part of part of, you know, why we moved over the years to have the refund reserve available is really trying to help with that weight stabilization. So, so if folks would like, you know, we, we just applied some fund balance to try and get a consistent rate increase, but there's quite a bit more available for most except for Katadi. So we can look at various scenarios and run anything folks would like to look at. We can also get together some of the long term information on CIP I don't, I don't think we'll have a long term projection yet before the next meeting. But we can definitely get information out on our long term CIP and what we're looking at from that perspective as well. You know, we're, we're happy to make any changes or other applications that you would like to do for at least next year. One option too is I can just send this out. You'll see that you can, you know, do whatever you need to in here, and it'll, it'll automatically let you know how it's going to affect your increases. So I can send out the spreadsheet, which has all the numbers for you available as well for you for discussion and so that you can manipulate things on your own. We can mess around with it now if you'd like to or when I do send this I'll send out also a copy of the current reserves that'll come in the presentation as well but then that way you guys just have it together so that you can determine what you'd like to apply more fund balance, less fund balance, and what your choices are. We are asking because we need to go to BPU on the same day that we see you next, which is April 7th, that determinations or decisions about fund balance be sent to me by, I think I looked at it the 28th so that I have time to change all the documents so that I can help them ready for you to look at in our final meeting and also for BPU to look at. Yeah, and, you know, I'll just, it's the longer term planning more interested in I mean I can almost do the math in my head that if we applied another $700,000 of our refund reserve we could have a 0% rate increase. But I don't know if I had to save that $700,000 for next year or the year after, or if it's a smart decision to burn it this year and make everybody happy because there's, I can tell the council there's no increase in sub regional. Understood. Okay, my ice cream now or do I want to save some of it. Right. I would always recommend never do zero. We did that once, and it was hard to come back from. Yeah. So it sounds like we will send out some more information to folks and we will send out some information on sort of long term capital. I think you know the plans that we have right now are the next couple years we're continuing to increase the CIP by a million dollars per year, and we'll see some other sort of increases or salary increases we have in place at least through the next fiscal year so we can give that information. And then we can also give our sort of long term CIP information from our master plan, and our electrical master plan, and then we will work to get more long term financials over the next year. So, we have to get that agreement in place and get a long term model in place. Yeah, currently the issue for us is that because we pay for it from the wastewater fund, it's all tied together in our long term financial plan for our city council to see and for us to plan rates from. So I'll, I'll be discussing with Mr. Hildebrand, the ability to actually separate out and create something just for the sub regional system. But what are the projected rate increases or adjustments that Hildebrand is coming up with your five year model. Is that being published yet or is that getting ahead of public data. No actually it's in our rate or last rate increase study, you can see the charts in there for what we're planning for our water and our wastewater customers. So that's where you're in place right now, and we're just heading into year two, but I can send you that to more than happy to provide that. Thank you, that would be very helpful. It's got it does have, it will have actually really good information for you which is, you know what we have planned for increases in O&M costs and increases in employee costs, that's all built in there. So, so yeah, I'm happy to send that out to you. Any other questions or comments from the sub tack. All right, seeing none. We will now take public comments on item 5.2, if you wish to make a comment by zoom please raise your hand here on the phone dial star nine to raise your hand. And secretary that do we have any public comments on this item. We do not. Okay, thank you very much. Now move to item 5.3. Sorry about that. So I don't 5.3 will be our regional operations division update and Emma Walton, our deputy director of water use will be making the presentation. All right. Good morning again. I just have a few things to update the tack on first one just wanted to go over our recycle water production and storage and what our irrigation season is looking like. We had a pretty good production on November December. We are but unfortunately now in February and coming into March we're back down to summertime flows and lower than we actually were last year during this time. Our recycle water storage is in better shape than last year. We are approaching our average line we were pretty high there from the October storms for a while. We wanted to get back down to a more manageable level in the event that we had a geysers unexpected geysers shut down or an unexpected rain event. We have deep now decreased our clothes to the geysers so that storage line should start to recover and gain. But we are starting to see use on our irrigation and from our irrigation and frost protection users. So we're hoping we recover a little bit, but given we haven't seen any rain. Our demand might be a little higher than is normal during this time of year. We have already sent out allocations to our recycle water users. We sent them out in January this year and plan to do that moving forward. We have allocated 900 million gallons for frost protection and irrigation use. And if as we move through the season, we're able to increase those allotments we will. However, in January or February and March we were unable to increase those allocations because we just haven't seen any substantial rain. The next thing I wanted to talk about is our recovery from the October 24th Atmospheric River event. As you probably all recall that hit our plant very hard. At the peak of the storm we were receiving a record flow of over 92 million gallons of water per day. Very, very high flows coming into the plants. Unfortunately, our plant is not designed to treat that high of flow. So we had under disinfected water go into our storage ponds across the street at our Meadow Lane storage complex. Typically we would store off-spec water in brown farm pond and either your gate on site per our permit or return to the plant for retreatment if necessary. But because water was coming so quickly, we did not have pumping capacity to pump it all to brown farm ponds. So we did take in non-spec water into our Meadow Lane complex which already had fully treated water. So we did end up contaminating the water that we had previously stored in there. After the storm passed, we quickly isolated all of that water and over the weeks we're able to construct an above ground piping system to get all of the water isolated into C pond and D pond. And then eventually just into C pond and constructed a system to return all of that water to the Laguna treatment plant for retreatment. We had to rent mobile pumps and generators, had to build, as I mentioned, an above ground pipe system. And we just completed that effort. February 22nd, we were able to return nearly 300 million gallons of water to the plant for retreatment. It was a huge effort and a lot of work by our reclamation operators, by our mechanics, by our electricians, and by our instrumentation staff. They just did an amazing job. The other thing we just completed was, you may recall, in the upper right hand photo is one of our mechanical techs working on a valve actuator during the storm event. We had discovered during the storm event that we had a number of failed valves from our primary clarifiers to our aeration tanks. And we had to remove the actuators and physically turn these valves by hand in order to get them to operate. So that's him working on a valve and operating that valve by hand. We just replaced two of the valve actuators, and there's a third one on its way for replacement as well. So that was a big undertaking and a stark realization during the storm event that those actuators have failed. We are also well underway with our belt press rehab. We have been having serious issues with our belt presses and getting effective dewatering, which has also impacted our ability to pump bio solids cake into our storage hoppers. So a couple of weeks ago, while some pumps were being rebuilt had to stage trucks and trailers under our bio solids conveyance system because we were unable to pump into our hopper. And we had to physically move trucks while they filled because the way they get loaded, if we don't load them through our hopper, doesn't disperse the load evenly and they pile up in the back of the truck. So every few hours, we were having to, you know, move trucks forward a few feet to get an even dispersion of those bio solids. We had to have folks stay overnight in order to move those trucks. So we accomplished the rebuilding of those pumps and got the use of our bio solids storage hopper back. And now we are underway on rebuilding or rehabbing two of our four belt presses. This one is nearly complete. It should be back in service by tomorrow. And then the next number two will be undertaken for rehab as well. I just wanted to update you all we are starting to plan for annual geysers maintenance shutdown. We have a lot of work to undertake this year. We are going to be requesting from geysers a four week shutdown to see if we can accomplish all of the work that needs to be accomplished. One of the big items that we're planning to undertake this year is the recoding of our bare canyon pumps. As you can see they're corroding quite severely and need to be recoded. We will also be doing, as we do every year, an annual cleaning of the bare canyon wet well. This year we're also going to be focusing in on the myocomus pump station for complete evaluation and cleaning of that pump station. We will also be doing an inspection and evaluation of the terminal reservoir and actually have an outside consultant lined up to do that inspection. And we are also trying to undertake replacement of two pressure regulating valves that have failed. So we're working with purchasing to get that work underway as well and lined up for the shutdown. So lots of work to do on the geyser system this year. And with that I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Emma. Are there any questions or comments from the sub-tech? Ryan? Hey Emma, thanks for that presentation. You know, back to that cat five atmospheric storm that hit us. You know the 92 million gallons a day. You know, under normal rain conditions, just out of curiosity, what's the difference? Is that all just rain hitting, you know, open ponds in a big spread out facility or is that I and I? Where is that coming from? That is all I and I. Okay. That was a lot of water. And we do typically see increases in close during rain events. You know, typical rain event, we'd see, you know, kind of 60 MGD, the magnitude of this rain event and the flooding, the ponding and flooding. Just, we brought in a lot of water to our system. And that's probably kind of alarming, considering we could get, you know, if we get hit by those again and again over the years or whatever, like, how are we going to deal with that? So I don't envy that position to be trying to figure out. The other one really was about the reuse and storage water. And this is kind of a hot topic, you know, everywhere, obviously, hot potato. The geysers separately, separate conversation have me going all over the place. I'm trying to get them more efficient with their, their other sources of water intake up there. So I'm curious, you know, it seems like this year it's going to be an absolute disaster. As far as how much we're going to have to use and how much people are going to want to use because they literally didn't get any rain. So we hit that last year, that limit in September. You know, so do you foresee us like, you know, back to your, your, your sort of use storage figure. Do you see that curve like being pushed, you know, earlier into summer instead of the fall at this point? Yeah, this year, our, our recycle water situation is actually better than it was last year. Last year we were only able to allocate 600 million gallons of recycle water. We're able this year to allocate 900 million and hoping for more. We have been in very close, consistent communication with our users. And they were very appreciative of us opening up allocations beginning in January so they could better plan for the upcoming season and know exactly how much water they would be guaranteed. And we are guaranteeing all of our allocations through September. And as I mentioned, we will open up more water as if it becomes available with respect to kind of just, you know, the recycle water system in general, we do have our contractual obligation to geysers and we need to meet that. But other than that, we do operate the system in a way that maximizes the amount of water that we're able to give to our agricultural users. Which we have done this year and will continue to do. So that's why we're pulling back on our geysers flows. We're still confident we'll make our commitment. But now that we've kind of gotten through what is normally kind of the wet season, we feel confident that that we can do that. So, you know, we've been working over the last few years with our recycle water users very closely. I think our relationship with them is improving always. We're just really trying to focus on communication and outreach and help where we can. But this year it is looking a lot better than it was last year. Wow, okay. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the sub-tech. All right, seeing none. We'll now open up for public comments on item 5.3. If you wish to make a comment by a zoom, please raise your hand if you're dialing in by telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand and secretary, do we have any public comments on this item. We do not. All right, thank you very much, Emma. And we will now go to our last item, which item 5.4 is our environmental services division update and Sean McNeil, our deputy director of environmental services will be making the presentation. Right. Good morning. Members of the tack. I'm happy. Are you able to see my screen now? Yes. So today I'd like to just let you know where we are in COVID-19 monitoring. I mean, after budget, what more do you want to talk about? Why not talk about COVID? So why don't we talk about what we're doing here? COVID-19 cases and deaths in the USA as of March 7 have continued to increase the number of cases and deaths, even though the rate is going down. So COVID is still very much with us in our population. So just wanted to remind everyone that as we are getting out and taking our masks off more, you know, we tend to forget a little bit about this. But just wanted to remind you. So we do know that COVID-19 tracking when we just look at doing testing of individuals, it's under reported the amount of infections that we have. What we also know is that people shed virus in their stool within three to four days after infection. And this happens regardless if they have symptoms or not. And regardless if they go to a testing center and get tested. These, it's a really good measure of the amount of COVID in our population. And it's important to remember that the virus does not survive in the sewer, but these dead viruses they leave an RNA signature behind. And that's what can be detected and analyzed in these tests so they don't need to be living virus for us to detect them in our wastewater. We did engage in a study earlier in the COVID pandemic, but the funding for that ran out. And here's kind of a summary of the data we saw. We started about 44,940 replicants per liter and ended about 526,000. And that was right as the Delta variant was taking over. In the area, the funding went away. So we stopped sampling. But then they reopened funding to different entities have have we've signed up with one company Lumen Ultra, we're sending two samples per week. What we're able to do is analyze not only the amount in our, our waste stream, but also tease out the variants in their reporting that on a national level. And we're also sending one sample to another company by a bot, which is the firm that we worked with in the previous study. The labs are doing these RNA analyses and are determining the relative amounts of the various strains. So I'm not sure how clear this is coming up on your screens, but you can see the dark green is the amount detected in wastewater. This is from the bio bot. And when you get this presentation, this link right here, data bio bot should be live and you can just click on it and see the data nationally and then scroll down to Sonoma County. And so the dark green line right here is our wastewater with a gap in between the lighter bluish or green line behind that are the case rates from the Department of Public Health. So when you see this, you can see our tracking kind of has mimicked the tracking of the health data. So here's this dark green line here is our final and we're seeing a dramatic decrease in the amount of COVID-19 getting into our wastewater stream. And it's very similar data that we have we just don't have the history with lumen ultra. So, so in summary, the monitoring of wastewater for infectious diseases can be more effective than just using testing services and this is really because almost everybody sheds into a wastewater treatment plant either through a truck waste program, or through a sewer system. And that also when you just rely on people getting tested, some people are getting tested frequently, while others in segments of our population aren't getting tested at all, and may have positive virus loads, and not being taking part in the the testing program, whereas monitoring in the wastewater removes that personal choice and bias. And then Sonoma County Public Health is really interested in this data so they've seen this data published. We shared the data with them, but when they saw it published somewhere else they were like, where are you getting this data. And so we let them know that if they are interested in screening wastewater for this infectious disease or any other infectious diseases, we're happy to share data with them or share samples with them for them to run in their own lab so we're exciting about the cited about this latest development with our local county officials getting interested in the data. So, with that, I'll take any questions. Thanks, Sean, sorry. Are there any questions or comments from the subject. Yeah, I'm just Sean, could you put the last chart up there that you showed I think with the light with the different green colors. Sure. Okay, so that's that's interesting so it. Sorry. That's okay. Just trying to get it full screen for you. Yeah, yeah, so that this is seems like really interesting data it really does track, and this has been done elsewhere and it's, it's, it's encouraging to see where it's going in March. Yes, it's very encouraging. And the tool, this tool has really advanced through this pandemic and, and I would expect this will be used more frequently in the future. Yeah, I mean, I think what I think what's really interesting about this is that I think personally this is the probably the best day that you can really get because it. It's not based on people's behaviors of reporting or going to go into the hospital or that I mean this is this is like as pure data as you can get which is really interesting and I think really helpful. Yeah, and to just kind of add what they do is they look at to make the data comparable across different sewer agencies that might have a different makeup, you know, residential versus industrial water. They have markers in there that can determine the relative strength of human species so that because we all have certain virus that loads in us. And so they determine that and the data for that so we can compare to say the city of industry which has like 10 people who live there. Yeah, this is really interesting. Thanks for sharing it. Sure. Any other questions or comments from the subject. All right, seeing none. We will now open for public comments on item 5.4. You wish to make a comment by a zoom please raise your hand. If you are on the phone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. And Secretary either do we have any public comments on this item. There are no public comments. All right. So that concludes our meeting. Thank you all very much. Thank you Sean for that presentation and we will see everyone on hopefully April 7 and our next meeting. Thank you all. Have a great day.