 Hello everybody, thank you for being here. It is now 6.30 and I want to convene to open session. There was no action taken in closed session, so there's nothing to report. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda? I have none, staff has none. Okay, so oral communications, it's now open for oral communications and you may have five minutes to speak, so who would like to speak? Debbie? I wasn't going to, but something occurred to me on coming in. I don't know how to say this very diplomatically, but the good news is we have a new board majority and we have a new mission here and we have a whole new plan and a whole new platform. And I'm very grateful for that and I know that a lot of people are grateful for it because you guys got voted in by a very large margin. And I would just like to invite people who are perhaps from the last board or supported the last board or who supported the last platform to come and join us because we have a lot of work ahead and the focus is on infrastructure and money management. And I know a lot of things were going on in the past, but we're going in a new direction here. And I think part of the problem that I'm seeing, and again my personal opinion is, a lot of people have not been able to confirm that the election is over. But it is over, it has been decided. The public has made their point, there's been a lot of platform issues that were thoroughly discussed and this board is seeing those through and I thank the board for having the courage to do that. And I believe you have the majority of the rate payers behind you as seen in the election. So please, there's never been a formal acceptance by the incumbents that they did not win the elections. I think it would be a really healthy move if someone could formally congratulate the new board and to commit yourselves to being part of the district and the district moving forward. Thank you. Anybody else? Virgil? Sorry, me again. Virgil Champlin, Brookdale. I was disappointed not seeing an agenda item discussing Director Bruce's participation in the recent social media madness. I'm unconvinced that she regrets her two posts, which clearly took advantage of the unfortunate incident. Attempting to redirect some of the popular outrage to unfairly online fellow directors. Her only statement was that she would not apologize for displaying outrage at Director Slalman's offensive behavior. But this display of great moral authority was in fact a rhetorical misdirection from the criticism level. Taking political advantage of an insulting situation minimizes the victim's distress and was inappropriate as the original insult. Director Bruce was not the victim and the other directors were not the abusers. Since I wanted a discussion and not a sermon, I'll abandon my criticism with an appeal to Director Bruce's better nature. And I believe she truly has one. Over the last several years, I've witnessed a few unfortunate outbursts but have also seen very thoughtful policy comments and a regular willingness for actively listening to the public. An inclination often repressed by many of the prior directors. You have different colleagues now. Please explore that potential. Thank you. Is there any other public comment? Yes. Lou Ferriss-Selton. So this is what we have become. I was shocked and saddened by what transpired at the end of the special board meeting last Thursday. The meeting was called to address only one issue, the consideration for a censure of a board member for what was truly reprehensible behavior. Still, some present lowered themselves to the same level of hate and disrespect displayed by the board member in question. And what was clearly an invasion of privacy and quite possibly more, two members of the public referred to pictures on social media showing the board member in question at home at the time of the meeting. Why he was home doesn't matter. What does matter is that they were taking pictures of this, someone was taking pictures of this truck and peering into his window. It is particularly egregious for the person who was a prior member of the same board. Knowing what it's like to be a member under a microscope, this alone should have prevented this reckless behavior. Why have we become like this? It is not uncommon these days. It seems more important to win at all costs or get our way than to be right and do right. Before you ask, yes, I include myself in this category. That is why I have stepped back and asked some probing questions. We who live in this pristine valley have much to be thankful for. We are neighbors, friends, and by all accounts, in this together. If we are eager to fight the righteous fight, then there are plenty of foes outside of SLV trying to do us harm. Other areas of the county covet the plentiful water we possess and a proceeding in not so subtle ways to come after it. Lest we forget our friends in Sacramento, they too are making our life difficult. Nate Gillespie recently made me aware of proposed new state regulations that increase analyte testing by four-fold. No new testing, just repeat testing. As a scientist, I question the added statistical confidence we get from a four-fold increase in cost. I am going to try harder to be more considerate with others with whom I disagree. Listen more intently to what they have to say and to try to find common ground through compromise. Remember too that the board members are basically volunteers, worthy of our support. If we want to keep high quality water at a reasonable price, get involved, make suggestions, be considerate, and exercise give and take. Remember, we are all either part of the problem or part of the solution. If we continue to act the way we have, we will suffer the fate John Milton describes in Paradise Lost. Any other public comments? No? Okay, thank you. The first item of business, we have no unfinished business, but we have environmental committee, public member appointments. And there was also a budget and finance resignation, but there's nothing on here for a new budget and finance person. So how many people here have applied to be on the environmental committee? Sir, your name? John. Okay, John. Elaine Fresco. Okay, thank you. All right. I did receive messages from the other two applicants and their notes are in front of you. Okay. Being on a committee is important, and this board has run on certain policies, like cutting costs, getting rid of glyphosate, certain things. And we hope we don't have to keep debating these in committee. If you think you want to continue to debate these items in committee, please say so. Okay, John, if you would like to stand up and tell us why you want to be on this committee. I think you're a new in the valley. Right. I think that's probably actually a very reasonable place to start is I don't want to make this sound like inappropriate. Most of you have never seen me before. I've lived here for about a year and just came upon the opportunity and I've been investigating all sorts of ways to contribute to the place that I now call home. So for a background standpoint, I've just really enjoyed water. It's kind of odd. I work for a water purification company. I own my own stillers and I work in the energy sector and there's obviously an access between the energy and water. So to me it's just an important part of life and community. And so I was just looking for a way to contribute. Thank you. And whoops. Elaine, you want to tell us why you want to be on the committee? Yeah, I lived here in Felton for about eight years and actually our property borders the San Lorenzo Valley watershed. And I have just seen how important the environment is. I've always been interested in environmental issues. I'm a retired nurse midwife. I have a science background and we do all sorts of things in our property to stay environmentally responsible. We have gray water. We catch rain. Now we have caught about 10,000 gallons this winter. We have animals. We compost. We have a worm bin. We have a garden. We have an orchard. And we have native plants and we try and get rid of our non-native plants. We are pulling broom all the time. And I just think it's a, I feel like I'm a protector of the environment and I want to be involved. So board members have any questions? Oh, I wasn't sure. We did these committee appointments before and I'm in favor of just allowing to allow all the public members to join the committee. To me, the more the merrier. And so anyway, I would like to put my thought into that. I think that all the applicants be assigned to be appointed. Because that's what we did in the last one or all the other. It's instead of some suck. In the past, to clarify, we've only selected one. You know, so anyway, I would just like to make it possible to just allow all the applicants to join the committee. And have equal amount of voting power. Did you, today, any of you over there, Bob? I just appreciate all of the applicants. It's nice that you put your hat in the ring. I concur with Mr. Smallman that we have four very capable applicants. And I think that they have diverse perspectives and each of them would serve the district's priority cross. Well, I have a little issue with having all four members because a quorum would be four members. And it could create a problem that there are six people. And we didn't pick everybody, all the people who applied before. We picked, I think at the most, three. Three people for a committee. So, if I were to pick my top three, Madam Chair, it would be Mr. Sup, Ms. Fresco, and Ms. Tina Toe, who introduced herself to us at the not quite realized last environmental committee meeting that she came and introduced herself. And she is, I think, a very articulate and well-qualified applicant. Okay, anybody else? I don't know if this fellow, Kevin O'Connor, I don't know if we've got any comments from him, but I really appreciate his background and his experience. And I'm not sure, but you might be right to have an odd number, might be beneficial. It's not, you know, to avoid any tie bugs or whatever. Well, I'm going to suggest that we pick the two that are here tonight and hoping that they will work with us with our goals. Because you do serve at the pleasure of the board. And if you don't like our goals or where we're going, then we've got a problem. So, if you think you can do that, and if the board agrees on me picking the two of you that are here, that's my suggestion. Yes? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really interested in personally is starting to expand the number of people that get involved in Santa Rosa Valley Water District. You know, demographics are unstoppable. And we are going to, over the course of the next 10 to 15 years, face a situation where we're going to need leaders for our community. And so for people to move in to our community and want to volunteer, as you do, Mr. Sup, I think that is a fantastic thing. It's very difficult to choose among a lot of the people that apply. There's a lot of very strong candidates with background, but I could go along with your suggestion. Anybody? I would like to pick a third. Yeah, I did know, I think, well, originally I said it's all four, but I think it would be really a big advantage to have an odd number, just in case there was sort of one of those sort of split vote decisions. So I think, obviously, I think we should, I mean, I agree with Director Bruce. I think we should pick a third. When I heard your third pick, I have a little issue. I'm getting tired of being told that we are moved by our emotion, not by science, and I have a hard time going along with your pick. Do you have a different pick? No, I don't, yes. I mean, for me, the key point is making sure that three is the quorum, right? At least three. Yeah. So that means you could have either three people, four people, or five people. The quorum basically is the same for all of them. I think the committee, just to be clear, the committee is an advice and recommendation committee. And in most cases, operates within some boundary of consensus, or at least trying to get something that most people can agree with. If that situation doesn't occur, I have absolutely no issue with the fact that there might be a couple of different opinions that come in with no recommendation for the board to consider or for the committee to ask the board for additional guidance on what to do, which I'd be very happy to do. So I don't see that five is necessarily an absolute requirement. I think we can, we have four on another committee, I believe, or at least we did. We've got a budget committee until an Islamic resign from another committee. So yeah, I'd be fine with two. And I have no objection to your preference, Mr. Swan. I just happened to have met Ms. Toe and was impressed by how articulate and voice she was and how engaged she was in the issues. I'm sure she's very articulate. I want to be able to, I don't want to hear again that we're not scientists. And we aren't. But we ran on a platform we were voted for. That was my, that was where I was going with that. So I think both of the other applicants are both scientists. One has a master's of science, master's of environmental science, and the other has a degree in biology. I'm not against science. Science is not perfect. Science doesn't agree with itself. There's all kinds of thoughts when it comes to science. I do like, when I read Elaine Fresco's item, I liked all the things she said she was doing on her property. Although she did bring up the word science too. Sorry, it's a little sensitive spot. I like John. He's new. I don't think his mind's made up. I think he'll come and listen. I hope Elaine will come and listen. I wish that the other two were here. And usually if people don't come, we don't always pick the people who, generally we don't pick them if we can't talk to them. So I mean we, I'm not done. We can always, if we decide we want different and more, and let me, don't get me wrong. You can disagree with us. You can disagree with us. That's fine. But I don't want every committee meeting to become a battleground. And that can be, that can happen. So it's the same way with this board. I would like us to work together. I would like as committees that you will work with the, whatever board members are on your committee. That's, that's all I really ask. You're entitled to your opinion. I would like to make a motion that we appoint Mr. John Sepp, Ms. Elaine Fresco and Mr. Kevin O'Connor. Is there a second? I'll second it. You want to call the vote? No, we need to go to the community. Oh, that's right. I'm sorry. Pardon me. I tend to get a little ahead of myself. Comments from the public. Yes, Nancy. I'm Nancy Macy from Boulder Creek, and I'm delighted to be able to be here tonight because I didn't think I was going to be able to because I think this is really cool to watch how this is going. I'm grateful that you are actually bringing someone who is not here today. There was a woman who introduced herself at a regular meeting here who said she had applied. I thought it was really cool she came out of her way and introduced herself, and so she's not here tonight because she couldn't be, and she knew she couldn't, so she came. So I thought that was cool. And, and you've got their statement, which, and I know it's really nice to be able to kind of change and have questions, but I don't think you should just close your mind to the fact that if the person's not here, that you're going to choose the person who is, and especially if someone like that has gone out of their way. So, thank you for being open to that. That's all. Okay, thank you. Anybody else? Chuck? I was very pleased to see four very well-qualified candidates applied to this. There tends to be people who can't remain on it. You know, when you put four people on the committee, people will sometimes find they have conflicts and can't make them. You won't have four on the committee forever. So, in the interest of engaging everybody in the community, who wants to participate in this, I encourage you to do all four. But I think the three that have been, the motion has been made for three well-qualified candidates and it's been seconded. So I look forward to, if that's how the vote goes, that there will be three instead of four really well-qualified candidates on this committee. Any other comments? Debbie? Yeah, just a short comment sort of following up on some of the conversation here. I really like the two that have shown up and fully support both of them for being on this committee. The importance of being supportive of the board is not more apparent than on my own committee that I'm serving on where I have, there's five members and two of them have loyalties to the past board, more so than the new board. And it has created a lot of more time going over items that have already been discussed. And so it is kind of important that whoever gets on any committee, whether it's environmental or budget or admin, does embrace the forward motion of this board and the goals. And certainly other opinions are welcome, but not to the extent that it harms the ability of the committee to move function and move forward. That's just my observation. So I encourage people to try to do the best they can in meeting the goals of the board. Yes, Chris? Chris, Penny Boulder Creek, it disturbs me to hear people talking about loyalties to various board members or boards to talk about supporting goals of particular directors. As a customer and a rate payer of this district, I would hope that any directors, any volunteers, any board member, any committee members would be most dedicated to the best interests of the district and the goals of the district and the best interests of the rate payers. And so I also was impressed with the people who applied. I also am encouraged that so many people volunteered, but it worries me to hear things that sound to me like loyalty oaths being asked for. That's not something that just disturbs me. It is not something that I want to hear in the United States of America, frankly. Any other comments? Well, Chris, we ran on a certain platform. We won a huge amount. And we know that we represent the whole district, everybody in the district. But bottom line, we made, let's say, promises to people who voted for us. And I feel all I'm trying to say is we feel obliged to meet those promises. We don't want to hurt other people by doing that, but everybody had a chance to vote, and it was a huge turnout, and it's not like we squeaked by. So I feel that we have a right to ask for people to work with us. They can express their opinion, but that they work with us, and we've got important work to do. The environment is important, and we need to take care of it. So could you please call the question? Yes. Director Swan. Yes. Director Poles. Yes. Just to clarify, we're running from the three, I'm sorry. Yes. Well, just to, this John saw Elaine Fresco and Kevin O'Connor. Kevin O'Connor. Okay. Yes. Yes. President Henry. Yes. Director Bruce. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Well, let's move on here. So the next item on the agenda is Board Member Committee Assignments. Possible discussion and action by the Board regarding current Member Committee Assignments. Two of the committees that we would like to look at for possible change is the Environmental Committee and the Engineering Committee. As Board President, I can suggest to, suggest Board Members for those committees, but it's up to the Board to agree to whatever I suggest. If they don't like it, they can tell me so. Right? Okay. So for the Environmental Committee, I would like Margaret Bruce, if he's available. Are you available? I'm available, but I think we need to talk about what the underlying issue is. Okay. The underlying issue is, we want to make change for the Committee Assignments. Most of the committee's meetings are held during the day, and that's because of staff demands. It costs more money when we have meetings at night. Director Smallman has made it clear that he can't and won't attend daytime meetings. He has just not gone to meetings. In 2018, in the summer, he had a fake meeting notice that looked like it was a district. Serving on committees requires Board Members to work with the public and other Board Members. So because of past behavior, we are suggesting taking Director Smallman off of committees. Now, he has agreed to take training, and I hope he does that, and I hope he rehabilitates himself and that later he can be back on committees. That's my hope. And that's why we're doing this. So, Bob? Yeah. Okay. I think that's a good background on it. I think there's two issues here. One is Bill's ability to attend meetings during the day. The other is the comments that Bill made recently in which we had a meeting for last week about censure. Bill, relative to your ability to make meeting times, what is the times that you can do? Well, I prepared a statement tonight in my defense. I will yield to Bill. How long is the statement? As long as I need. So, I really want to make it patently clear to the public that my statement on the next door post was directed towards a certain group of people. But I do understand that people on the outside of that conversation, and I understand how upset that they were from that statement. And that's what I hope that I learned from going to the diversity training class, which I understand that's already been scheduled. So, you know, I was actually going to contact them. But I'm also going to double down and also attend the nonviolent communications anarchers, which I've gone to before. I have to say that I descended down. You know, I grew up. You know, I'm a product of the 50s in the schoolyard. We're boys who fight together and we call each other every other name under the sun. I got really upset about this post about advertising glyphosates for sale. You know, I'm a true environmentalist. Rachel Carson's my hero. And my desire is to put Monsanto and biochemical out of business. But it's no place for a director to have that. I know that I have a problem. I get mad. I get on Nextdoor. Actually, when I get on those Nextdoor posts, I want to debate. I don't think there's been a director for this district. There's been more open about my position to the public about how exactly what I've done for this district, what are my accomplishments? Is the stop paying for the defense of Tarah Viera? I think I believe I have an overwhelming approval rating from this district on moving forward on interesting topics. And I've told myself many, many times before and I've gotten in trouble with this before, is that I've just come here. I provide my input and you can take it or leave it. But I think what we have here is really an ego problem. A lot of people have serious ego problems and it's either my way and you can't get engaged in reasonable debates that way. And that on Nextdoor, every time I've gotten on Nextdoor, it's been arguing back and forth and people have called me every name under the sun. I slip up one time and then now all my enemies, which is about probably less than 10% of this district are picking that up as a knife to attack me and say, oh, you know, but this has nothing to do with what I am going to contribute to this district. Words are words and I'm going to apologize over and over again that, you know, they were wrong. And the only thing I can do is go to diversity training and stop this and I can also stop going on to Nextdoor because these are just meaningless debates, et cetera. I have no concept of what it's like to be a woman, to be honest with. I have no concept of what it's like to be LGBTQ that I can understand now, but somebody told me, hey, that can really hurt you for a thing. But, you know, the other thing is I've gotten these three elected. I did that as well and I've also got life of safe dance. Okay, there's nobody can argue about that. And so I was, you know, my comments were against people that used life of safe, that I couldn't understand why the opposition were against it actually because they're against it basically because they thought that the environment is so sensitive that we couldn't pull the Scotch broom without using it. It was a last resort in other words. But I'm coming from the guys that I know, and I just, for example, I was in El Dorado Hills the other day and I was walking by and there's a very nice neighborhood in El Dorado Hills and there's here's a skyscraper and fight roundup on the crack on the, you had nice rolled curbing udder and paved streets, thousands of houses and all the water comes down off these hills. I remember back in the day there was nothing up there but all that water goes, flows right into Folsom Lake and he's spraying glyphosate on the weed sprint and I go, hey, all you gotta really do is take a hawk burner and torch all those weeds and seal it with a crack sealant instead of going flying roundup. Okay, but these guys, they don't know, they don't know that, they don't know that, they don't respect environmentalists in other words. They're guys like me but they're not educated science, which you are probably, but they are not educated science so they don't respect environmentalism, but they take the hard life because Rachel Carson got DDT off the shelves and we can put Monsanto and Dow Chemical out of business and so anyway, my slip-up was, my post was towards those guys, it wasn't, I didn't mean to insult, you know, because I understand people from the outside saw it as harmful towards, you know, attacking the LPG community. So again, you know, it's ridiculous, I stuck my neck out to stop the spending of the era and then I got censored for that and so my other contributions on the engineering committee, these three wanted to cut the education grants, it was only about like $35,000. We want to install a, our in-house construction department an engineering department that could save the rig payers millions and millions of dollars and the reason why is because we just saw a bid for $468,000 to replace the PRBs and my analysis was that we could actually do that project in-house for $300,000 a year. I mean, for that particular project and if you add that up to about, you know, all of it, although other projects that we're doing... Please wrap it up. Please. So they, so anyway, we're talking of savings of millions and millions of dollars. So it's completely ridiculous to take me off the engineering committee. You know, it's a committee that, all it does is make recommendations. I'm a 30-year experience project manager, estimator, design-built engineer that can add a valuable input to these decisions that are made to move this district forward to save millions and millions of dollars. So, and then you're buying into this entire argument that I make this one mistake of talking about making fun on the Internet and you're going to get real upset at me but all I can say is I am really, really sorry that I'm, you know, I'm... Anyway, would I like to offer anybody that... I'm going to wrap this up. Again, I'm sorry. I mean, I really, really am sorry. You know, I mean, that I will pull Scott's Broom at anybody's house. Just email me. I'll come over and I'll clear out your lot for that. And, you know, I mean, there's over-the-top contributions of things that I can provide to this district. And the censorship is completely worthless and to take me off these committee meanings is, you know, I can see not seeing a lot of happy faces towards me, but, you know, I'm just, I swear to God, I'm just here to help. And, you know, and well, back again to the the cure, well, the bottom line is I'm not homophobic. I'm not. I mean, I'm not. But I'm going to obviously go to this diversity training. And I think this is a good thing. I think this is a good thing for the entire board, actually. You know, it's a bad, you know, usually when something bad happens, it's a good thing for everybody. And then I'm going to double down and go back to the non-pilot communication. So, anyway, I'm sorry. Oh, okay. I'm a little disturbed. When I came in, you were talking about goals of the district is to save, preserve the budget and to not rehearse the past. And we just heard the past rehearsed again. I'm concerned that it's time to go forward, not back. Okay. Yes, back there. Well, I spoke last week from Ben Lomond and I was one of the original responders on the thread to you, Mr. Bill Smallman, and I would like to clear up what seems to be few misunderstandings on your part. The blowback against you was not because of politics, not because of roundup, not because of anything else. Because you decided the best way to insult somebody was to say that they were me. And I get that shit and nothing in my life. And life is too long. I want to deal with another 45 years of having to deal with people like you using me as the ultimate insult. The fact that you chose to double down on it and the fact that you choose to roll your eyes at me now. No. Can I respond? No. You are rolling your eyes. Is visible. Your online history, which is right there on the side menu on the Santa Cruz Sentinel comments, you have a very lengthy history of making very odd comments about a large numbers of groups of people. It's not just the queer community. It's not just people from Africa. It's not just the homeless. It's a nesting Russian doll of odd assumptions about the way the world works and people in it that I don't want to call bigotries because you shut down at that. But you have a very disturbing way of looking at the world where you get the training and you recognize what's going on. Step back from this. I voted for you. I agree with you about Roundup. I don't agree with you about all of this and making it into one long campaign speech about all the things that you've done and ignoring the core concept which was you insulted a large portion of the valley, the queers, the rednecks, the rednecks who identify as queer and the ones who support all of the above. Refuse to recognize it, double down and continue to throw out more and more bizarre stereotypes until you reach the point where Roundup makes people trans and run off with the farm hands. Which is what you wrote. Recognize that this is not some sort of political attack from your enemies. This is people who voted for you seeing what you write and going holy shit what is wrong. Thank you. Anybody else in the audience want to comment? No? Okay. Moving on. So Director Fultz can you be on the environmental team? Well I could serve on it. I think the bigger question is what will be served to you? Is this a punishment for Bill? Is that effectively what we're dealing with? It's a wake-up call. An intervention in some ways. Right. In my mind, it's a wake-up call and and I think he needs to realize he didn't get the three of us elected he needs to realize that he did something he shouldn't have done um I don't think, okay we censured him in his own words it means nothing so what will mean something to Director Smallman? It doesn't seem anything will mean anything to him and I would call this an intervention and hope that he takes his training it sinks in and he's rehabilitated and he can come back and be on committees but I'm not willing for him to be on committees tonight. That's my own personal feeling you get your vote, Bill gets his vote Steve What's her name? What's her name? She gets her vote I know your name you just had it give me a second I am getting old sometimes words come a little slow but so it's not up to me it's not up to me I'm simply asking if you could take that position I could Bill would you be willing to voluntarily step back from committees for a period of time? I have two years left on my term and I want to provide the best service to the public so you know I know that I I'm going to go to the diversity training but I also go to about three or four of the non-pilot communication Santa Cruz events and do that you know the bottom line I know somebody told me it's not enough to say that I'm not homophobic but to prove that again my comment was you know I'm just addicted to getting into this I get into the next door comments I was a schoolyard I was back in fifth grade with a group of boys in the playground and it was not something else would you please answer the question but anyway to answer the question you know I mean maybe maybe one of the ways to demonstrate to the people that may be a little skeptical about your good intentions what you intend to do is maybe step back from it for like three or four months that's right and then we can have a training we can revisit it would that be acceptable I would like six months six months yeah I would like to see real change so look I'd like to do four if you would voluntarily step aside for two months I would voluntarily perform what about the rest of the board well personally this is totally appropriate response from the board the bills actions you haven't helped the board at all we're under a lot of scrutiny as a new board and your behavior is drawing all the wrong kinds of attention to this board and bringing that type of criticism on all of us and it's not helping the community it's not helping the board it's a mess and I don't think six months is too long either I think six months is fine I would go along with that I think you need to train you need the exposure and stay off the freaking social media but yeah the action is totally appropriate I'd be supportive of six months as well and let me chime in on the it's really difficult to have committee meetings committee members is so inflexible about when they can meet you don't run for office and then say oh it's an inconvenience you run for office and you're signed up for the whole ride and if you can't do the whole ride you gotta step back so you know we did I put it out to you when would you like to meet what day would you like to meet where would you like to meet I have at least so far a fairly flexible schedule and I didn't get back sure this will work so six months alright so voluntarily step back for six months we'll do reassignments of committees okay thank you okay okay so in that event yes I can do it okay um so is that agreeable to the board and it's Margaret and Bob yeah unless you guys want to do some more for it well there's one more to go I'll accept the engineering oh you'd like to do the engineering I'd love to okay so that means Margaret is on engineering and Steve and when I mean when could you meet please explain I know you work I would say that again as I suggested in the past Margaret and I can sit down and discuss and come to an agreeable time typically it's going to be on the same days that the board meets and it would be anywhere from early to mid-afternoon either the first Thursday or the third Thursday of any of the month and we can pick a specific time and stuff at our convenience if you want to back it up to the closed session that works for me too if that works for staff we'll let the staff chime in agreeable to everybody there are public members who have to be consulted but okay so we got some consensus here with board how about the public what do you want to say that you haven't already said okay so do we we have to vote on this yeah vote on this I would make a motion to accept the proposed changes to temporary changes to the board committee assignments removing Mr. Smallman from his committee assignments six months in Mr. Foltz environmental committee board committee member and Mr. Swan board committee member for engineering environmental director Bruce can I make a suggestion on the motion the suggestion would be to simply remove director Smallman for the time being and replace him with the new committee assignments to be revisited after six months but that way you don't end up with a vacancy if nothing happens right at six months okay so to restate the motion what you said that would be hauling just going to figure it out the good news is it's all recorded and video so I will figure that out if everybody in the audience would yes so so you need to call the vote for whatever was said I'll do a second on whatever we're going to do okay so whatever was said is that too vague what the motion corrected by the attorney it's on the recording so I think it's okay alright because I can't say it again director Swan yes director Pulse director Smallman yes president Henry yes director Bruce yes alrighty well so item C do I turn that over to James James do you want to present that item so this is a proposal to get going to contract with Martin B. Feeney consulting hydrologist with the proposal totaling $38,100 for the rehabilitation of the district quail well 5A and this is to rehabilitate these two wells with jetting and cleaning of the screens from Iron and Magnes buildup and we want to soul force Mr. Martin B. Feeney as he has been our hydrologist on these wells for years and his knowledge is impeccable with our wells he knows every one of our wells on top and bottom and that is our recommendation I do have one correction to the there was a district rules and regulation article 14 contracts of purchasing section 14.09 states whenever professional specialized consultants or soul source services or supplies are purchased the board may dispense with the provisions of this article and in the actual memo it was stated as ordinance 8 which is actual article 14 any questions Mr. Director Fultz whichever it wasn't clear to me does this actually do the execution of the work as well or is this just the planning for the work and the overseeing of the work and that there would be other costs potentially involved in the execution the planning has been done we've already done that we have some right of report the reports attached in here this is for overseeing the work and overseeing the work there will actually be another contractor that will have to be awarded as well which that part will go out to bid for the rehabilitation contractor of the wells that part will go out to bid if this is sole source Mr. Merton be is this an emergency we have been working on this and our production in those wells has deteriorated significantly due to plugging in it's been inspected and we already wrote a report on these wells put everything together and this is the well so one of the things that I like to do is make sure that I understand the total scope of work that we're talking about here and not sort of piecemeal it so there is a contractor that's going to have to be hired in addition that's going to cost some additional amount of money we don't exactly know what it is yet correct correct and Martin Feeney will write the bid spec for each individual well and then we'll go out for formal bidding and have we done this before? yes what did it cost when we did it before? we just did past Temple will 7 and it was $107,000 for the cleaning that's not including Mr. Feeney's contract Feeney's is separate and he was $19,000 in that so about $18,000 to $19,000 for wells that's what it is it'll be competitive bid and we had I think we had three or four bidders last time that we did the past JMP or well and select if per se it's not the well hasn't failed it's not an emergency in that sense but Martin Feeney has as James said has a great understanding of our well field but some of the local hydrologists have used them for a long time how long have we used them? probably about we used him and other hydrologists like Nicholas Johnson for different types of work Martin's more of a mechanical end and gets into the well construction and the maintenance of wells and there's no one else that can do this there's other people but they'll be from farther out of the area and we won't have a historical knowledge of working with he does a lot of the local wells he does Scots Valley he's pretty much the same Scots Valley as well and he does work in a lot of this local area I've had there are other hydrologists but they'll come from out of the area and they'll probably be I don't know without a bid but they'll be more expensive that's correct I mean if it was an emergency and we needed to do this right away then I would expect both the consulting engineer and the work to be done sort of simultaneously but if we're going to go out to bid on this it doesn't sound like it's an emergency what's the target for getting this work completed before the the summer months before in July or August take one well down at a time for all the offline this year we're not anticipating drought conditions we should be able to take a well offline and the reason we do it this way is because Martin will write these specs now for the well drillers to bid on he'll put all the technical language together on how the process is going to go for each individual well the depth of each well the screen intervals and he'll put that big package together the technical end we'll use our front end insurance docs and then we'll go off to bid and then he'll come back after we select and oversee and be on site for the complete treatment process I've had some experience with this being on a long peak of water board that when that happens to your well you've got to clean it out it really needs to be done and it involves people who really know what they're doing we can't just dive down into well and clean it out then it's got to be disinfected and all that I agree with Lois and from my experience I think this reasonable cost I think in the future and committee meetings with budget and finance to talk about certain when in my opinion this is not a bid worthy project to me seems worthy but I think in future committee meetings hopefully when I'm back on the engineering committee to discuss the best cost effective way and to me I'd like to make a motion to approve the cost of $38,100 to do this work I have a question before we go to are there any special permitting or aspects associated with his work that have to be done and could that draw the effective timeline of when you want to have this I don't believe there's any permitting no impacts because there's no pavement so we're not worried about the sand park plan or any dune beetle or any species this will be done on pavement or on existing access roads I don't believe so so it's just hiring him and then he creates the then we go out to bed and we pick one and we move as time goes on I'll speak for James but I think you will see over the next few years you will see a maintenance schedule that will be done every three years to come back to our bacteria so we hope to get this on a more routine basis where I don't know if we've changed the bidding I think we'll lose Martin to affirm out of the area increase staff time and entries his time while I'm trying to learn the district and the other load rollers but we are going to look to getting this more of a budget routine maintenance as time goes on I just think that's essential I agree and I kind of think that's where you're coming from well yeah, I mean one of the things that I think the district is needs to do better in the past things seem to come in pieces that's more of a surprise as opposed to schedule and understood and even with this one here there's another $100,000 that's going to come in behind it to me the communications of the board needs to be holistic not piecemeal and in the past the money wasn't there to do schedule maintenance it was at budget time what was needed to be done and we tried to get in as much as possible because the funds weren't there to do the schedule maintenance hopefully with current rates and the way we're looking at our maintenance we will at least propose to the board so the board knows if there's something going to get cut and not get done but a lot of you're going to see over your term a lot of why wasn't this done the same questions are going to come up a lot especially on tank coatings there's one that gets put off every year that should have been done for years to do a different tank you'll see a lot of money coming in on maintenance tank coatings, very similar to the same thing what's going on with the well rehab but those can be get tank coatings at hand but there's a lot of deferred maintenance out of the distribution system and we're starting to get funds and we'll be able to do it and that'll be coming to all of you at budget time so hopefully a lot of this will not come but it's going to be a while before we get on a piece of maintenance tail whatever your name is do you have a problem? I support this proposal to use Martin Feeney you trust him, staff's worked with him he knows our wells, he knows our system then there's that early 1990s yeah so I'm going to offer one additional comment if I may on that I understand that there's a lot of people at this time who are comfortable with them but I've had circumstances for that comfort level can lead to unintended consequences in addition we need to expand our bench if we're relying on the same contractors over and over again the same consultants over and over again and we've been doing so for 25 to 30 years again demographics being what they are traditionally we need to have people that can step in behind them at a certain period of time that's just good business for the district that's nothing personal that's nothing to do whether or not they're competent or do a good job or we know them or anything like that the district has to be prepared for folks like this retiring at some point deciding they don't want to work as hard it's coming down the tunnel which is another area of your concern we're going to be reaching much further out of Santa Cruz County I know that's one of your other concerns that you want to see us work on more local which there isn't a lot of and the more we reach out the further these people are going to come but I don't know that I recognize the silver tsunami and the relentless drip of the sand through the hourglass we have a lot of talented folks in this district here is contracting capacities for a long time and I want to emphasize the long time part and it makes us vulnerable yeah I personally know contractors that are in my age that it would help to know that they're going to end up like you said you might be available to so to have a backup to research and find out what's available okay alright so, yes I may have misread the paperwork but didn't it show $7,000 for traveling per diem did I misread that because you said he was local well he doesn't live so to speak local in San Antonio Valley he's going to make work from this and then he has other people that will fill in when he's not there but continuous operation so he's not coming without flying but he's local above locals you can find in hydrologists I think he sounds serious he also has people that work for him they come up from down south his incumbents they come from down south he has people from all over the state I think his address is Ventura by most also he oversees he oversees the project yeah, so it's going to take a while for it to be done I don't think we didn't get a motion we didn't get a motion we got a motion well we were done talking I said accepting I'll make it again I'll make a motion to accept the cost of $38,100 to contract with this guy there's a resolution make a motion to accept the resolution second all second okay, does anybody from the audience want to say something before we vote nope, okay there's a motion and a second and a second and so Polly I'm ready do your job Director Swan Director Falls Director Smallman President Henry Director Bruce okay so next item our esteemed attorney there and it is on social media and browning so give you the floor thank you, Chair Henry and I believe sometimes it gets a lot sometimes it gets a lot sometimes it gets a lot so I don't want to do all of you guys we're all in the middle of it send an email to the library I believe the found library will have much more just saying the is a logistical work out we'll make it more second you don't have to go okay are we going to be looking at this so I don't have to twist my head I've seen those the paper if you've got one is exactly what's going to be on the screen there it's not, it is exactly it is exactly what's going to be would you take my thing again what take it we have been overcome by technology we always have takes a minute it's part of this do people need a short break you want to do jumping jacks or anything okay that was a break you may go alright okay so it's going to take a minute it looks like the presentation to come up but I can get started just off my notes here to be clear this presentation is a response to some of the controversy that has percolated up over the last couple of weeks about social media posting and the brown act and this is not a full brown act training I don't expect it to take more than about 15 minutes so you've had separate brown act trainings so I'm going to try to get right to the point the presentation you haven't had it in front of you some of the key language from the brown act I'm not going to read that to you because we've already been through that but I am going to summarize the main takeaways that are important in the context of social media so something that's important to understand about the brown act is that in the interest of promoting open meetings and public participation in matters of public concern that are before the agency it essentially prohibits non-public meetings it requires that the agency conduct its meetings in a public forum such as this instead of in private settings or in back rooms so that kind of begs the question what is a meeting under the brown act almost anything can be a meeting any kind of communication among a majority a forum majority of the board can be a meeting as that term is understood under the brown act so what the brown act says is that such meetings have to be open that means there has to be an agenda, it has to be properly noticed, an agenda posted within the required time frame the public has to be allowed to come in to the business before the district and to hear the deliberations of the board only matters on the agenda can be discussed during a meeting not things that were not put on the agenda and that creates a setting where all the actions and deliberations take place in the meeting room and not outside the meeting room do you have control of this? we'll go to the next slide so what the brown act prohibits then in order to make sure that meetings are open to the public is prohibits in the majority of the legislative body from consulting with each other outside of a properly noticed meeting regarding matters within its jurisdiction and notice how broad that is that doesn't just mean matters that have been put on an agenda that means anything that is within the jurisdiction of the agency to consider so if the majority of the legislative body of district business or those that could be district business it has to be done with a proper meeting agenda in the meeting room next slide I called this slide very purposefully and other communications instead of non-restrictive communications because I'm a lawyer and I split hairs but I'm calling this other communications because these things are not prohibited by the brown act there are other rules that can apply but these other communications are things that are not limited by the brown act that includes communications not within the jurisdiction of the legislative body so board members can talk about purely social matters or the fire department business or other things outside of the meeting room that's perfectly okay the brown act also does not prohibit individual contacts or conversations between board members and staff or even between board members as long as it doesn't involve a majority or a quorum of the board of course that's tricky because if two board members talk to each other there's always a risk that a third board member could be looped into the conversation there also could be a perception if a couple board members are talking to each other that a third board member might get involved and then you have a quorum but it is not a brown act violation the quorum talks to each other about matters within the district's jurisdiction question could you give an example of where that would be a problem what you just talked about where you've seen a problem with that in the past okay well I think this sort of dovetails with the next slide which is about serial meetings so this is where communication individual contacts become a problem under the brown act is where you have serial meetings you know maybe two board members are just talking to each other a board member is talking to a staff member that's fine but it can become a meeting in violation of the brown act if other people get looped into the conversation the traditional ways of thinking about this are Hovenspok and Daisy Chang so for example if I think it's important for the board to make a decision about something and I call each of the board members individually and ask what they think about the issue or what their position is on the issue that I've created a Hovenspok serial meeting violation Daisy Chang the best way to think about it is like a telephone game so if I call director Swan and say what do you think about X and then he calls and I may just intend for the conversation to be between me and him but if he then doesn't sort of understand or comply by the brown act limitations and calls director and asks him the same question and then director calls director smallman and so on now we have a Daisy Chang serial meeting violation as soon as the third director gets involved in the conversation of the communication this this serial meeting problem can be created by any method of communication in person if three board members sit down to dinner together and instead of talking about how their kids are doing at school talk about what they think about contracting with individuals within the district instead of outside the district that's a serial meeting violation well that's actually just a straight up brown act violation if it's done in this Hovenspok way Daisy Chang way in person telephone email any combination of those you can have a serial meeting problem I put social media question mark on here because if you could go to the next slide the law hasn't really caught up to social media we don't really have much case law attorney general opinions and so on that tell us exactly how these brown act rules and serial meeting rules apply in the social media online context but of course we can draw a lot of inferences based on just how the general principles work with email, telephone, in person meeting so on we can get a good understanding of how a court or any decision making body would apply the brown act in the social media environment we all know social media is increasingly pervasive everyone's using it especially younger folks and it is rapidly evolving which creates some problems because sometimes folks use social media without thinking about what the brown act or other implications are because they're just not used to thinking of social media within these legal constructs right so some characteristics you're probably familiar with the social media I'm not going to start listing all the different types of social media that you could be on most of you were probably familiar with some more than others but some characteristics you're probably aware of is that there's usually a mix of public and private communications depending on what kind of privacy settings you have depending on who you communicate with depending on whether you're using like a person to person messenger or whether you're using something that posts information that anybody can see there are no private conversations we're getting to that yeah that's why you will notice throughout the presentation that private is always in quotation marks and that's because anything that sort of think is private or is private at one time can very rapidly become public so it will always appear in quotation marks but regardless of whether you're using sort of more private or more public features or what social media platform you're using it does provide rapid sharing of all kinds of information if I could get the next slide so there's some positives that go with this it's a rapid interactive way to communicate with large numbers of people if I could get the next slide it's a negative such as the ability to rapidly interact with large numbers but there's another risk for those who are involved with public agencies and that's that there's a heightened potential for Brown Act violations due to serial meetings you could go to the next slide so the question gets asked well wait, a lot of what's done on social media is sort of public for everyone to see isn't that public and transparent and seemingly in keeping with the purposes of the Brown Act to make the deliberations of the legislative body more public and transparent well maybe, I mean it may be a more sort of public way to communicate about matters that are of public concern or within the district jurisdiction but it really depends what are your privacy settings and how well do you really understand your privacy settings because it may be public but that doesn't mean everybody is reading it but the key under the Brown Act is that you can't avoid a serial meeting just because communications are public and not secret. Under the Brown Act deliberations happen in the meeting room pursuant to an agenda appropriately, yeah do you want to say something Bill? Yeah, we'll go, I have a question and I will circle back to it again and the Attorney General was actually addressed this situation that arose when bodies developing a consensus by email they tried to cure the Brown Act violation by making the emails public with the idea that that's sort of consistent with the purposes of the Brown Act to show publicly what they were doing but that doesn't work, that doesn't cure the violation just because the communications are public doesn't make it not a Brown Act violation. The communications about matters within the district jurisdiction among the majority of the directors has to happen in the neighborhood. Okay, so the next slide. So I've got a couple of hypotheticals I'm almost done. It's a couple of hypotheticals. The first one is that a board member posts a press release or an announcement pertaining to district business on a personal Facebook page. Does this violate the Brown Act? Anybody from China? I see some nodes. Does anybody think yes it does violate the Brown Act? Maybe, yes. It's an attorney. It's maybe. All the answers are maybe. I was going to say, you can know when the lawyer asks a question to say maybe, but it depends. If I could get the next slide. Okay, so probably not just posting an announcement on a Facebook page or some other public platform or in a newspaper or so on probably doesn't violate the Brown Act. But it's complicated because what if other board members say it's Facebook start to like them most? Now, not only does that mean multiple board members are looking at the post and reading it but it also means they're expressing their opinion about it and starting to develop a consensus outside the boardroom. As soon as you hit a majority participating in this, you have a Brown Act violation. Can you go back one? So then what if another board member posts a comment? I would vote against this. That's probably even more strong than a like in terms of expressing a viewpoint about what's going on involving district business. It's a little tricky because you know, if one's expressing a positive view and one expresses a negative view, you're not really moving toward a consensus. But this is very risky sort of yellow card, gray areas stuff that should be avoided. As soon as multiple directors start to comment on matters on social media you have you're getting very close to a Brown Act. You have a potential Brown Act violation and it's hard to know whether you've crossed the line because you don't really know who's looked at the material and whose responding to it. Okay, so second and last type of fact, a board member uses social media to communicate with a few constituents about district business and the board members views. So let's pretend for a second I was a board member and I have a few neighbors who share my concern and I have a little sort of messenger chat going with these three or four people and we're talking about matters of district business. Is that okay under the Brown Act? No. Yeah, that's good though. I'd like to hear opinions on what's going on. No, this actually I'm going to disprove the assumption that the answer of lawyer questions has always made you because this would not violate the Brown Act in and of itself. However, there's the but. What if you think this is private but it's actually not? Yeah, and again, and I'll ask the question again, how well do you understand your privacy settings? And even if you really understand your privacy settings and you know, well, do you understand your privacy settings? You know nobody's using Nalias. You know who you're talking to. What if somebody thinks this is really interesting? I wonder what the other four directors would think about it. It takes a screenshot and e-mails it to them. Now you have a Brown Act violation. So it's a risky area and it doesn't mean that you can't use social media when you're a member of a board but it requires extreme caution. Okay, could we get that next slide? And there's some other issues related to it too. You are all familiar with the Public Records Act. Of course there can also be discovery when litigation gets filed. Even private communications may be subject to collection and production in some circumstances. And this is the bottom line and some folks said it earlier. There's nothing really out of private quotes everywhere. Nothing's really ever private. Private communications have a way of becoming public. So the takeaways if you're not sure, and this is directed to the board, if you're not sure and the staff for that matter, if you're not sure whether a social media activity or frankly anything else would violate the law, please consult with counsel. I'm happy to take your calls respond to your e-mails. Most of the time these kinds of questions are very easy to address. It doesn't take a lot of lawyer time. I would much rather you know hear before something gets posted or something happens and try to help provide some guidance rather than hear about it afterwards. And the final takeaway is that if all the board members wanted to we could craft a policy to set reasonable limits on social media activity. You know there's different ways to deal with these issues. One is everybody just understands the risks with social media and polices their own behavior. Another way is that we could put a policy in place for the whole board saying you know here's what board members should do with social media so everybody has a uniform set of guidelines to work with. That's really up to you. Did you have a question? Yeah, well you know since I have a poster on social media and I got trouble for this as well I did not communicate with my colleagues here. I think when I first was elected there was some email sort of new and we sort of got in trouble with that. We knew because it was okay if it was two directors it was okay so there was some confusion with that but it was so easy to get into a serial especially with technology and social media and stuff like that so I mean I hear you but if I saw for example Bob posted something and I would immediately there's no way I can like it or dislike it or even have any sort of back and forth that's a communication but one cited I feel obligated to the public to use social media and I've always been I still want to be able to say this is my position on social media and this is how I'm voting etc on social media without having the fear of creating some sort of so I mean I think that needs to be established that there's we can still be free as directors to communicate with our public on social media and get some guidelines so that we do not have we need the guidelines these are good points these are actually this probably should have been a hypothetical number three because all five of us felt obligated to do the same well exactly and by rights the public may demand that kind of information be out there right I mean that's a great way to say probably should have been a hypothetical number three because if you only have one director who's active on social media it doesn't present such a problem but if you have three directors who are routinely telegraphing their positions on social media you know potentially have a problem in risking your territory yeah well I mean just to clarify if you do this if the board does decide that you know that's not a good thing to do I'm not saying that I have to do this but I think it can be done I mean my opinion is that it can be done without having any sort of some sort of meaning as long as the postings from my fellow colleagues or a conversation by the fine bit of the brown there I don't know I'm just throwing that out there again so I'm not saying I'm right or not wrong is there questions from what is the penalty for violating your brown well she yells it up no jail time right Bruce Holloway this district has faced challenges on brown actors used before there's a couple of ways that can come up what it has to do with the decision that's actually made in a public meeting there's um ways to cure it there are other types of violations where you know the district could be sued to stop a certain type of occurrence from happening again so there's legal risks related to allowing brown act violations to occur it's embarrassing to a board member to have that possibility you would not want to knowing the violation John so maybe I don't understand it correctly but it almost seems like there's a perverse incentive if you're all on the same social media platform remember that comes out first because if you come out first there's no violation it's only when other people start weighing in on that same topic so it seems to me like a really odd situation where you're almost rewarded if you come out first I don't really have much to say about that other than that's a really odd situation Debbie besides the brown act there is the respectful workplace policy issue that has been coming up most drastically recently but also having board members post things like animosity towards a neighborhood or a project or a group of people representing something that's very difficult to read there's a lot of disrespect that's posted just simply because social media is all about you can disrespect people and speak your mind about that also and if there is going to be a policy I'd like that kind of stuff addressed to how far can a board member go isolating a person or a part of the community that is being served and not violate the respectful workplace or perhaps we need to expand the respectful workplace policy that says you just can't do it in any format in person, online, anything I think that's being pushed to the edge quite often too is there any other public comments yes Suzanne Schetler, Van Lomond I was once in a public position and I was new and my predecessor pointed out to me that in a public position you can only wear one hat you are that public you wear your public hat all the time you never have a private hat as long as you are in that office, in that public position and I found that to be really very useful I can't wear a public hat and a private hat at the same time my public opinion and my private opinion may diverge somewhat I may say some things in private or do some things in private that would not be appropriate in my public position and so the one hat rule I think works any other comments out there any other further comments from the board so is the board wanting you to create a policy that's what I'd like to know do you want a policy created on social media and how it affects say perhaps respectful workplace I don't know I personally I think Steve I think it might be valuable to let council draft something that specifically outlines what can and can't be done just more alphabeticals whatever just so that there are some concrete guidelines that we can make sure are easy to see if they're followed or not I agree with Director Swan and I also I agree with Director Swan and I also think that that work will dovetail with our future website and communications work where we may have some support and guidance in how to communicate with our constituents in the public I agree with you but I do agree that there should be some consideration with what I said earlier about having as a director enjoy my freedom of communicating to the public my position in serving the public and I think there's a important connection there but I could see where the line could go overboard in the wrong direction there are limitations already that we have to observe some of us write letters to the local newspaper and there are limitations as to what we can document or state in there without violating any of the same principles that we're talking about here so I don't think that you take a page from what we currently do and add that into policies I think everything is going to be very reasonable for everybody we still have nobody's denying free speech first amendment's here for everybody but again as a director there are certain restrictions limitations that we need to be able to apply for I think it gets tricky and that so for example the comments that were happening in the next door I'm not on that next door neighborhood there are private conversations relative to me until something like a screenshot and and I think that goes to your point earlier about the the fact that none of it is private whether you think it is or not you know I generally like to see board members decide what speech they want to do but the perverse incentive is a problem and that's why I'm still on the fence about whether or not we would invest the time and energy right now in doing that I won't say no but I'm not there yet the other issue I would think that need to be addressed is criticizing staff on social media I think that it just seems wrong to me that you criticize staff it's bad enough actually we shouldn't criticize any staff members even during a meeting I guess we could beat up on brick if we wanted to because but I mean basically so any of you who are new don't realize this if you did a flow chart of responsibility the boards up here we have two people who are responsible for Rick Rogers and our attorney and Rick Rogers deals with all the staff we don't deal with staff it's not our place to criticize them either here or on social media I think that's on a very extremely important technique to include in the recommendation that's covered in the respectful workplace policy too is there any we have to recreate the wheel so to speak are there any polls out there that we could piggyback off of in preparing this presentation and look for some of the samples that we have internally and I have a good one for the specific purpose that we were addressing here which is balancing elected officials First Amendment protections with Brown Act issues personally I think there are other documents that are better vehicles for some of the other issues that were expressed such as the respectful workplace policy the board manual where it has a discussion of how board members interact with each other and maybe those should be revisited as well but I do have a good sample and I guess what I'm proposing is something that would talk about balancing First Amendment protections with against Brown Act issues specifically rather than a more global treatment of what can or should be said shouldn't be said online so it doesn't sound like it would be a huge lift then to get something for the board to review could then be leveraged to the other districts so maybe take that to the admin committee for a kickoff once you prepare a demon and then kind of go from there so when to that is that agreeable for it to go to the admin committee and then come back to the board okay alright okay alright I think the next item our last item unless I'm wrong here is our finance and business service department workshop oh can we have five minutes a five minute break okay we have important stuff here you alright okay does that mean you have a different hat on I'm getting ready to start the snipe are these are these are these are these are these in the back if people think they may not be able to see the presentation my name is Stephanie Hill I'm Director of finance and business services and we're gonna go over what department is reports that we do and some stuff that governs us and so forth so we have nine full time employees in our department HR customer service an accounting clerk HR, pretty much all the basic stuff that HR anywhere does. The field customer service team are the ones that are reading and maintaining the meters, investigating high and low usage, turning services on and off, and other service orders as requested. Customer service team, they're the people that are answering the phone when you call, when you go in to make your payments, handling all the utility billing in the background. They also do certain accounting things such as purchasing, they will process any of the leak adjustments, they might manage our backflow program, so it's a lot more than just simply the bills. The finance team then is responsible for essentially the audit, the budget, maintaining the general ledger, accounts payable, receivable, all our capital project accounting, payroll, inventory management, and what not. So here's some customer service stats. So the blue is the number of calls that came in during the respective months and the total number of minutes of those calls, and then also the number of service orders that were newly issued for that month. Needless to say, it's pretty much non-stop. It's quite a bit of stuff constantly going on. The service orders, the majority of those are going to be the cut-ins and cut-outs, so when someone moves, we have to go out and read the meter. High load usage, turn-offs. If there's any wrong info that didn't report through the handheld, something like that, we need to send someone out to go get. Some of our department goals, finance, we want to continue to improve and grow the financial reporting. I'm always open to ways that will make it easier for the public to understand some of our reports. One of the things that we're going to try doing starting with the next board meeting is break out the bill list from the financial status report. Right now, it's the financial report and the bill list all sit underneath the financial status report, which ends up making it an 80-page or so document. Kind of hard to go through. Some people may be interested in the bill list, some people may be interested in the financial report, so breaking it out I think will make it a little bit easier to access. We have been receiving the GFOA Financial Reporting Award. I would like to achieve the GFOA's Award in Budgeting. That's the Government Finance Officers Association. It's a nonprofit made up of government finance professionals, so they have a lot of different standards that they use to review and give out the awards. Customer service, continue the excellent customer service the front office provides, development of ION Water, there's an example of that on the next slide. Encouraging people to do e-bills and auto pay, it saves paper and money. HR, just continue attiring training and maintaining employees. That's a relatively new position and so we're still kind of fostering that role. ION Water, if you've heard us talk about the Badger Meters, that is what essentially it is. So we have the Badger Meters that can transmit daily consumption that customers are then able to create a login, have the app on your phone or your computer. And so ideally a customer would be able to catch a leak very quickly. You can set leak settings, what not. So here it's showing in gallons the month of February. So you can see something seemed to have gone on February 13th. So you can actually drill down and see the hourly consumption of what that meter read. This happens to be my personal home. I know that we were leaving for vacation on the 13th. When I got on my vacation and saw this, I was like, what's going on? So I actually had SOV operation staff go out and shut off my water because I very clearly had a leak. We woke up at about 3 a.m., left the house and consistent 25 gallons. Came home, found a small leak in one of the toilet flap valves. So it just kept going down, kept refilling, kept going down, kept refilling. So it is a very powerful tool that we're trying to get in the hands of our customers. Right now we have about 1,500 in our system and operations is working hard. They're putting in about 500 or so each year. And as we finish the routes, we then send out information to the customers for how they can sign up for this. The one's in Longpeco. I know Longpeco has it. Longpeco has it. Olympia Mutual. And then it's heavy down in the Felton area because a lot of the old F2 meters there. How do people get the AF? So we sent out, if we didn't have people's email addresses, we sent an email. If we didn't have that, we sent a flyer to the home telling people how to get into this. Now Longpeco does have some cell service issues to where they have manual endpoints to where we're still having to go out and read. So those individuals wouldn't be able to get daily or hourly. They would simply be able to get monthly. Oh, simply because of the bad cell service? Exactly. I'm not going to dive into this too much. I have copies of the article back there. But this is a really good report written by Deloitte and Touche addressing the current water infrastructure crisis facing the nation. It's not just our water system that's aging and needing to be replaced. Pretty much a lot of the infrastructure all went in around the same time across the nation and it's all hitting its useful life. AWA, American Water Works Association is estimating it's going to be at least a trillion dollars over the next 25 years to replace the pipes. That's not anything new construction going in. That's not even dealing with repairing treatment plants. So it's going to be interesting to see some of the different policies that come out, monies that maybe the government offers. We are seeing some of those. The district is always trying to get any sort of grant funding that we can to maintain a safe drinking system. About the district, to know where we're going, we kind of have to understand a little bit of the past to figure out kind of how we've gotten here. San Lorenzo Valley is a closed water system, so we're sole sourced. It's our surface water. It's our wells. We have two treatment plants. It's different than Hetch Hetchy up on the wall that you see there where there's massive reservoirs where they are piping millions and millions of gallons into the San Francisco Bay Area. Also then wholesaling and making money off of that sort of stuff. So there are different nuances to each individual water district for how you get your water. So while some move here to get away from some of those high housing costs over the hill or in Santa Cruz, there is in turn a cost associated with having a widespread out mountain water system. In short, we're maintaining more miles of pipe with less customers. So here's some statistics pulled from a Soquel Creek Water District in Scott's Valley Water District. And it just kind of gives you a picture of what is used to our area. So we have 7,900 customers, so literally half of Soquel Creek. And we are actually maintaining more miles of pipeline than they are. So from a purely financial aspect, you could think or argue that we would have to be charging double or 7,900 customers to even be able to make what they are. Below has some of the different ratios, kind of showing what number of customers to the operating revenue expenses. You know, you look at the three agencies, the ratio of their revenue to expenses. All of us are relatively similar ballpark, about 80%. So miles of pipeline to customers. And that's where it's becoming very clear that for a mile of pipe, we're serving 46 customers. For a mile of pipe, Soquel Creek serving 95. It's just a gross difference in economies of scale for having a, you know, tight suburban neighborhood where you're able to effectively have a lot easier connections versus the mountains that we're in where we have to span very far and wide. So miles of pipeline to revenue. For every mile of pipe, we're only generating $59,000 in revenue. Where Soquel Creek is 124,000. Even Scotts Valley is at 110,000. Here's a view of the past 10 years. So this is all data that you can find in the statistical section of our annual audits. It's showing the operating revenues and operating expenses over the past 10 years. And then we overlaid the units of water that was sold. So as you can see pre-drought, so 2014 and earlier, customers were using around 800,000 units or so. Drought came in and hit in 14, 15, and there's been over a 20% decrease. That obviously directly is going to impact the district's revenues. The 20% decrease will come up again in a later slide. We talked about the elephant in the room. Rate history. Water rates are one of the top concerns of our customers for good reason. It's a financial impact on them, but it's also what their pay is supposed to be going towards the district's mission statement of maintaining safe, reliable water for future generations. So you want to know that where your money is going to is being well spent. So there's no denying large increases in the past and current. Here is a 20-year view of a customer. If a customer used four units of water over the last 20 years, $19.99 that bill would have cost them $21.38. And today it would be costing them $73.56. I mean, it definitely is a significant growth. So compound annual growth rate, what that's doing is saying, forget about all the different variations and increases in the different years. What would it have been if we level loaded it? So it would have equated to the district raising rates. 6.72% every single year is what the equivalent would have been. So you can see some years didn't have hardly any. Then you have some jumps, then you have it die down, then you have some jumps again. So now this is just high level and I'd say semi-fact, but still partially in my opinion. Two main reasons for the current situation. The 2013 rate study was for the increases that you see occurring in 14, 15, and 16. That was done before the drought had even hit. So back then all the projections that they used to decide what revenues needed to be generated was back at about an 800,000 unit revenue base. So instantly we were going to be in the hold to a certain degree. The 2013 study showed that there was five years of approximately 11% increases each year needed. For whatever reason only three years were adopted. So I started here in 2014 where we had rate increases going into effect. We had monthly billings starting right away. And in seeing all this stuff when we were coming out needing to do the 2017 rate study, I already knew that it wasn't going to be pretty. How could it be when the 20% reduction had occurred? And even the other study had showed there were more years than the three years adopted that were needed. So that just kind of has led us into part of the reason some of the results of the 2017 study. Now I'm going to go into what makes a government, public, company different from the private sector. They're focused on serving the public versus profit driven. So private is for profit period. If you run inefficiently you go under. If you're a publicly traded company you have shareholders wanting to see your earnings per share. Where the public side we're having to deal with balancing socio-economics that sometimes you're going to have to spend money on something that's not going to give you a return on investment because the socio-economic benefit is deemed greater. Procurement process is drawn out quite literally the bureaucratic red tape. I mean everything takes longer in the public sector as well. Everything needs to be done in a public forum. It needs to go out to bid. So you're requiring a lot more stuff even down to hiring a new employee. If there's a new position that you want to create it's probably going to take about a year to do so in a public agency. Level on hiring and about the same amount of time for if you need to let someone go. Versus the private sector you can hire, you can fire, you can pretty much do a lot of different stuff. Pivot very quickly versus the restrictions of a public agency. We do face unique accountability. There is a lot more reporting. We have annual audits that we have to do. We have to do annual budgets. So while the mom and pop shops can get away with having a bookkeeper, buy you taxes, you're good to go. Any of the private sector that are traded publicly, they are having to follow more scrutiny. They are having to file 10 queues and 10 Ks where I don't know if you ever listen to any of those. It's pretty much a sales pitch and how they didn't make enough money, they're going to make enough money. The next, you know, the next earnings call. You don't have as much back and forth as you do with the public here. We have a lot of different meetings that go into developing all of our stuff. Responding to crisis situations, similar. A private sector produces a product, doesn't go well. You can decide to stop selling that product. If you have multiple manufacturing plants you can shut down a manufacturing plant to cut costs. You don't have that in a public sector especially in something like a water district. We can't choose to stop operating our line treatment plant because certain expenses are getting too high. You can always work on ways to move towards figuring out solutions, but you can't just simply pivot. And we saw that simply with even the drought. It was a direct hit to the revenues. The drought surcharge had to go into effect to help supplement the fact that there's a lot of fixed costs with warning water district that you can't just scale back at the drop of a hat. More boring stuff. Accounting principles and regulations. We're governed by GAF, generally accepted accounting principles. It's created to have uniform accounting so that you can look at our financials, you can look at Soquel Creek's and even once you get into the Securities Exchange Commission and publicly NASDAQ-like traded companies, they have to follow GAF as well. But any other private small company doesn't need to. GASV is then the independent body that helps guide and provide oversight on GAF. Private sector GASV is what would be the equivalent of financial accounting standards for it. We operate off of fund accounting, so it's a proprietary enterprise fund. We actually have two. We have the water and we have the sewer. And essentially it is you need to collect enough money from your ratepayers to be able to pay for the services that you're providing. So the sewer is considered separate. That's why you will see us having on the audit certain aspects will have the sewer broken out separately. We budget the sewer fund separately as well. We operate off of accrual basis versus cash basis. So we record revenues when they're earned and expenses when they are incurred. Audit basis versus budget basis will differ slightly. We do have a hard year in close, so this is when all of the different accrual analyses are being done. A good example is consumption revenue. So you receive your bill in July. It's going to be covering approximately 30 day period, say June 15th to July 15th of your consumption. What we're required to do is go back and pro-rate those 15 days and book it back into being June 30th. Because that's essentially what you have to do is if it's earned or if you incurred it as of 6.30 it needs to be reflected on your books. This is where our books stay open for a month or two after June 30th, because any invoices coming in that say that it's for work that was performed in the prior fiscal year, we have to book accruals and get all of those back into there. Sometimes when you look at the budget versus actuals on a monthly basis, more particularly for June and July, it may look a little bit skewed, because we're having to take all of that July revenue that would normally be budgeted for and move it per the audit. Our property liability insurance typically comes in one big bill. So that's going to be just a single hit in the month of July versus it being spread evenly over the 12 months. That's a difference between accrual and cash. Exactly, accrual and cash. All kinds of different stuff. There's even modified accrual. We don't have to do that thankfully. Accounting versus financial reporting. Accounting essentially is all the detailed information internally that comes through. That's the purchase orders, invoices, packing slips, matching all up to the who, what, and why, coding it to if it's for a capital project, what not, and then all of that leads to recording the journal entry. We have approximately 13,000 journal transactions per year. And so all of this accounting information is then what flows into our internal reports, external reports, and any special reporting that we're doing. Some of the keys to financial reporting is it should be in a usable form for those who need it. External reports that we produce, we have the annual budget and the annual audit as two of the larger ones. Those typically have multiple committee reviews. We have a special board meeting typically to do a deep dive into those two. But then on a monthly and quarterly basis, we have the financial reports that are in the finance status report. And so monthly is doing a little bit higher level. Quarterly is starting to dive in a little bit more in comparing against prior year and higher compare against the actual budget. The internal reports are essentially the same as the above, except for department staff are reviewing at the transactional level. There's six key characteristics in financial reporting. Understandability, reliability, relevance, tideliness, consistency, and comparability. So these are considered kind of the best practices of what should be making up your financial reporting. To me, understandability and relevance are the ones that kind of stand out. I were to attempt to hit people with 13,000 transactional data. People would go cross-eyed. That is part of why we have the general ledger categorized different reports. So those 13,000 transactions are going into one of 440 general ledger accounts that we have. 255 of those are the department operating expense accounts. And then these are categorized into six main categories. You'll see the same six categories in the audit as we do in the budget, as in the monthly and quarterly financial reporting. So that way you're able to have an easier way of being able to understand the relation of the law. The six categories are salaries and benefits, contract professional services, operating expenses, maintenance and facility. While they all are relatively, you know, they could be lumped into one. We do break them out separately. Then general and administrative is going to be all the other miscellaneous. Postage, office supplies, it's where water conservation programs hit, and our insurance bills. Budget process. So right now we are in the budget preparation process. This is where department heads are gathering all of the different data so that they can come up with what they want to request for the upcoming budget. What I would like to do is enhance this more with the board having more so a kickoff meeting. This all is going in line with wanting to get that GFOA award. One of the main things is tying all of your different strategic plans and goals back into the budget. So if there's certain goals and objectives that the board wants to meet for that year, it's better for staff to be able to have, for all of us to be on the same page so that when we're preparing our budgets we can keep some of that stuff in mind. So the next budget and finance committee, we're going to have another roll-up of the budget. And that's kind of the budget review process. So that's where committee is looking at it. The board will start to get some views of it. And that leads us to the budget approval to where it's getting formally presented and adopted. And again, that's typically a special meeting with that being the only thing on the agenda. That way you can talk about it for a couple hours without worrying about five other things on the agenda. After all that's done, we're monitoring all the outcomes and analyzing the variances. So this is where you'll see our monthly reports. Water districts, while it's exciting, it's not crazy exciting from a financial standpoint. All your money is essentially coming in from your customers. The expenses for the most part are fixed. It's not like you have a new product launch and you're able to see some cool profit margins or, you know, marketing department expenditures. You know, we don't really have a ton of stuff behind it, but nonetheless, it's important to always go and do a review. Here's a snapshot. We'll get into some of these a little bit later. But this is essentially the revenues, expenses, and changes in reserves that's in our current fiscal year, 18-19 budget. So you see the operating income, the non-operating revenue, debt payments and the interest-related and the capital funding needed. And so that'll give you what the estimated increase or decrease in reserves are going to be. Another thing that we're working on in the budget and finance is getting a better, fine-tuned reserve fund policy with setting some of the target levels that we want to have. You can, the board can create multiple levels that they want to specifically designate. Come up with ways of how you want to fund them. The only time you start to get restricted is if you have restricted revenue, such as some of our debt covenants require us to hold X amount of money specifically for them. Similarly, any special assessment districts like the Lompeco Assessment District, those monies cannot be spent on other district functions. They have to be spent on what that assessment district is for. So therefore, it holds them as being restricted as well. Chart version we have in there as well. So we have roughly a $15.9 million budget currently. You can see that the majority is being spent on operating expenses. While the capital improvement says $6.1 million, that's not going to be what's getting spent. That's kind of one of the goals and trajectories that I want us to get better at. We talked about the budget and finance committee where forecasting the capital projects and getting realistic timelines to be able to put in the budget are important. Because otherwise, you have something here that the reality is going to end up being a different looking pie chart at the end of the day. Right now, we spent about $1.5 million. We do have some extensive projects coming up like the probation tape where we're going to have close to $2 million coming out here semi-soon. But not nearly the... I mean, it'd be great if we could spend $6 million, just at least for this fiscal year, that's not going to really be the reality. So the main sections of the reports you've kind of seen are the revenues, expenses, capital projects. And so what ends up happening is that this is a picture from the budget. Don't worry. You don't need to be able to see it. The next couple slides are going to be just snippets out so you can get a visual example. So there's typically narrative. There's something explaining. In this case, it's the revenue summary. There's the tables that's breaking down the different categories. And then a lot of times there's a chart that's helping to give a more visual graphic of it. So in this case, you're able to see that almost... I mean, all the money for the most part is coming from the consumption. The consumption and basic fees. Again, here it is in a similar chart. And so you're seeing the operating expenses broken into those six categories. Those are then going to get broken down by department. So each department then has those categories related to it that are all what's feeding up to it. So this is the Finance and Business Services Department. It's showing what the proposed budget is, what the prior year adopted, and what that prior year's estimated actuals are going to be coming in at. And then showing some of the variances. We then go and explain any variances to the prior year budget and any variances to the prior year estimated actuals. If there's any large items that are making up those different sections, those will be broken out in separate bullet points to be able to see. And then a lot of times all of these have some sort of trend data. So you can see for the most part it was steady as she goes for 2011 through 2015. And then it start to tick down. Part of that was a restructuring of this department in particular. It went from being just financed to we pulled in, we created the HR position, and the field customer service positions all came underneath this department now. Revenue budget straightforward. You can start to see the shift in the rate increase and structure, how you're seeing more water usage coming in than the prior year. It's still going to be extremely variable due to consumption. Capital projects are all listed out in summary, showing you the funding type for how we plan on paying for these projects, any money spent in the prior year, what we plan to spend in the current year, and what we anticipate the future year. So it's getting you an idea for the total project costs. Similar. Then it all gets broken down into more detail. So you'll have a detailed explanation as to what that project is. If there's pictures that we have that are good, that's great. This is the probation tank that's going to be having a lot of action here coming up some way soon. Hopefully. Hopefully, yes. So the budget versus actual comparisons. So the monthly finance status report has a high level, by month, year to date, and trend analysis. It's comparing against the prior year and annual budget, and looks at expenses by the high level category. Then on a quarterly basis, it's the same thing, except for we add in a management discussion analysis, and we then break down the departmental expenses by category, what the capital project expenditures are, and any of the non-operating and debt related items. We'll pull up what this most recent quarterly report was at the end of this, so people can kind of get a high level idea of that. Future budget goals. Add more trend analysis and revenue expense history. Better define and tie back into reserve fund policy. And the requirements for us to apply for the GFO, a Distinguished Budget Presentation Award, is not going to only be myself doing late work. They really want to have the district being the board and the individual departments really spell out the strategic goals and objectives for that fiscal year and for upcoming. And so it needs to be a measurable thing that we can actually look at and be able to move forward with. And so part of that all plays into presenting a long range financial plan, and we'll add glossary showing all the different abbreviations and acronyms in it. One of the other things that I would like us to do is we'll have the engineer coming on soon. My report simply from a capital standpoint is saying what we spent. James does a good job in his department of status reports of explaining the projects a little bit more where we are with those. The idea is to have a collaborative report that's explaining how much we spent, how the projects are going, and I think a lot of that is planned to play into once we have the engineering department to be able to help provide some more insight to that. Again, budget package, reserve fund policy, those are the things where you want to be part of it, come to the next handful of budget and finance committee meetings that is pretty much going to be the only thing I'm talking about unless something really important comes up. Future, there's certain policies and procedures I want to go over. Surplus water, fire service, there's a whole lot. Even more on understanding customer assistance programs and the limitations that being a public agency has. We get the question a lot of times from low income or how come you don't have low income or senior rates that you can offer, PG&E does, or they came from CalAM and CalAM does. And that's again where the private and public sector don't always see eye to eye. There's California statutes that prevent gift of public funds, Prop 218, from charging one customer class more to subsidize another. So there's a lot of different quirks that prevent us. There are certain ways that we could try and work around that stuff and so we want to bring that back to the Budget and Finance Committee. Website, if you were at the admin committee yesterday or the day before, we have a RFP that we'll be bringing to the board on the 21st to hopefully be able to go out for a new website. So that'll be a very collaborative effort since every single one of us here have some sort of vested interest in the website. The Johnson Building and any other asset opportunities is something we'll be talking about again. Seeing if the district really needs the Johnson property for future plans. If not, this summer would be an excellent time to sell it and capitalize while the market is still very high. And then any other asset opportunities that we have? Public outreach, finances, increased e-billing and auto pay. I would really like to get some sort of, oh, even if it's just internal or on the website, figure out some way to help push this a little bit more. It literally can save money for you and the district. When you think of how many bills we have going out, the real cost that the district can save on is paper and postage. So if people are signing up for electronic billing and no longer receiving their paper bill, that's saving. Anyone that's signing up for that is a little bit more likely to use the website for auto pay or at least a one-time payment online. So that's going to save the person from mailing something in, et cetera. How much do you think it would, let's say the entire district was all in online pay? How much would that save for a year? Well, paperless billing, it'd be saving definitely a chunk of change here. I'd have to go right somewhere around 10,000 probably. 10,000. Everyone making payments online is a double-edged sword because you have transaction fees. If people are paying like credit cards, you have credit card fees. I just got done beating up our transaction fee people to get a reduction in that. But I mean, as those increase, and for the most part, I haven't seen any water districts that charge you a fee for using a credit card. Essentially, the customers are paying for that anyways because whatever our credit card processing fees are going into what's making up the rate. So it's kind of full circle that way. Only place I see charge is the county. When you go to pay your property taxes, if you want to pay my credit card, they're getting you with like the 3% transaction fee. It seems to me that the district can make more money if we could convince people to give up their plastic bottles of water and use their own water because a lot of people are not using water from the district. They're only buying water and plastic bottles and it seems like somehow we got to get people convinced that the water is safe or use some kind of filter at home if they can't be convinced of that. But I think that maybe it's not that much, but I think it might be a lot. That definitely all adds up. There's different ways that you can incentivize people to sign up for evils and automatic payments. Correct me if I'm wrong, Gina, but you can... The district could offer some sort of incentive program where if you sign up for these two things, you get entered to win something. If it's created... It sounds like it could be created consistently. I've seen other... And that's one of the recommendations from some of the different conferences that I've gone to that they've done. Enter for all of this. You can win an iPad. It could be enter all of them. Sign up for these two things and you get entered to win a free, non-disposable water bottle type review. I have two questions. 440 accounts. Can you go back to that and say what are those 440 accounts? 255 of them are the operating expenses. So that's going to be... The salaries and benefits category is not just one geological. That's going to have what the actual salaries are, what overtime is, what the FICA taxes, the different things that make up that. So by far the majority of it is coming from the operating expenses though, a postage account, different stuff like that where you wouldn't want to sit there and show in 255 accounts. That's why they are categorized. The rest of them are for the most part going to be all your balance sheet accounts. So all of the different fixed asset categories that we have, the corresponding accumulated depreciation, that's going to be going into that, those are all the different, the basic ones then. Accounts are reasonable, accounts payable, all the different geological accounts. And my second question was, and had to do with the low income senior citizen, not discount, 218 prevents us from doing that. And you and I, and we've had conversations about this going for a few years. It's my hobby horse to figure out some way of doing something like a voluntary pay it forward kind of program where the district is providing a landing page where on our website they can voluntarily contribute some portion, whether it's rounding up their bill, like you can do on some, you know, charity, for some charities, or if there's a special campaign of some sort that we can say, please contribute to this other organization who is running this for us, or with us. But I understand that the Springbrook accounting system is sort of, well, awkward to work with. Rolling the bill up would require it to be administered by us. If it was something where there's a third party that you partner with and it's very clear that it's a third party, but you have the link on your page to where someone can make their donation, I'm all for that because that's taking the burden off of us. Because if it was something where you have the option to round up your bill and it's happening through our system, I'm going to need to see all their checks and balances, and to make sure that that money is going into their account. I mean, essentially I would want to hold some responsibility for making sure that that's checking out. But if it's something where, you know, Valley Church is probably one of the number one places that we do point people to that is able to pay for some assistance. If they were interested in parting up to where people can make donations specifically to people being able to help pay their water bill, I'm all for something like that because essentially it's removing the district from the main equation. When you see some of the cities or counties offering these programs, they're massive. You know, they can afford to have a person that's administering this program. I can't hire someone to even accommodate the scale for it. I mean, that's where being the small water district, but we're not that small because we do have a lot of customers. I keep thinking there's just got to be some way of solving that riddle. I wish Mr. Stone would take that to the legislature and try to get that done. They have a super majority. I don't understand what the issue is. I hear it all the time from all the people. They want some kind of tiered rates. They just don't understand why you can't provide it. Well, no, I understand that. But the legislature who has a super majority can easily put that on the ballot and sell it. And for whatever reason, he refuses to do so. I don't understand. So again, a lot of this is high level mainly because I can't sit here and do a deep dive into our audit and our budget all at the same time would be here until midnight. But if you want, we can go ahead and pull up the Q2 report. Sure. Do you want to put it? It said questions. Do you want to ask questions? A question. Could you go back to the slide that showed the increases by year from 2000 to present? If not, I can just I think I've got the numbers off my head, but I just in case I get it wrong. There was also a period of time in the 90s where the rates went up like zero. Oh yeah, I mean even elephant in the room, now we're getting there again. So if you look even before that, there's the whole decade is zero. Here's my question. Are you saying that the consumption drop of 20% in 2014 was the cause of the rate increase of 40% in 2017? Is that your state? That's what I heard, I just want to make sure. So the 2013 one was making up for the obvious prior years that didn't have a lot of increases. That was being based on 800,000 units of water and it projected 5 years of 11% increase where only 3 years were adopted. So again do you believe that the consumption decrease directly led to the rate increase? Oh absolutely. I don't agree. People are consuming less, the district is literally making less money. Significantly. Well I'm not going to argue that what I'm going to say is I think it's basically that it's volume dependent and I don't think it's nearly as volume dependent as we think. My point is where can I bring this discussion up? Because I've done some analysis based on the numbers from the website. Where can I go and have this discussion? Is it with you one-on-one? Is it come to a financial committee meeting? I don't want to take a lot of people's time but I do want to have my thoughts heard about the past rate study? Well about the whole analysis of the consumption versus expense. Because I think the expense ramp up happened long before the consumption drop in my analysis. So I'm just where do I have that discussion? Well you can see I'm arguing here. It's relatively proportional. I don't think it's that simple. Again, where can I contact the chair of the budget finance committee and talk to them by getting something on the budget committee. Mr. Fultz, thank you. And get something and have him put something on the agenda for the budget. Well no, I want to sit down and talk and to show what I've got. That's where you could do that. That's the hard part is it has to be in a public session you'd have the committee there and Stephanie there and I would be there and we would talk about that. Okay. So for example I think inflation just for comparison purposes $21 in 1999. So the inflation factor just your broad CPI, not any particular industry. That bill would be $31.65 in 2018 just on inflation according to the online calculation. So over 20 years 50% increase it might be there is a specific water loss I'm just talking about the generic CPI but I think from a public perception point of view that gets down to the issue is that the water rates have been going up an enormously higher rate than anywhere close to inflation and it really pinches people. People that make $50,000 a year in their household seeing a $100 a month bill, when you take out taxes and social security and all that, it is a non-trivial amount of their budget and that's where it starts to hurt people. I think that's why you... Yes, at 6.7 each year that's steep to have as an ongoing basis part of it ties into growing pains I mean part of this whole aging infrastructure thing across... But the issue is the infrastructure all the rate increases again, perception is all the rate increases in the past have not gone to infrastructure in fact I think we sold the probation tank how many times correct? It's like the operating expenses expanded to meet the available money that was there from the rate increases and so the infrastructure didn't get done and after two or three times of that the public is going to say time out so this is where it's incumbent upon us collectively as a group a team to basically say we're not going to do that again we're going to figure out a way here to control this so we can actually put money in the infrastructure. And I mean I wasn't here for the prior rate study so I don't... all the reports I saw some of the background detail for what went into it I was here for the 2017 one there was a whole lot of deep dives and everything going in and it's a major increase like there's no denying that we're trying to catch up for years or not but the other thing is we don't have reserves huge problem this rate increase was drastic do you think it is the band-aid off approach to where we shouldn't have to see increases like that again the rate study is factoring in the capital that we needed it did factor in building the reserves back up so those are some of the key key details but we've had okay we've had the second increase right we've had the second increase and we still don't have reserves we still don't have but the study showed that we were not going to be hitting our reserve levels until I think it was year four that we would start to put more towards that but those reserves were pathetic they were reasonable two million dollars for capital not reasonable reserve it's not reasonable it's not adequate that's the better one it's not adequate you won't hear me arguing my concern is some of the bids that came out the market for contractors that last 50% the markets are that's why I think we're going to really save a lot of money with the in-house engineering and construction department and why anyway I think that's one of my concerns is that we're going to have all these projects come up that we want to get going and we're going to see these marked up bills about the operating expense this district neglected forever and we were so spread thin forever finally getting the employees that we need and we're still short-handed and that's where the majority of the operating expense increase has come from in the past four years we've added people to our staff that are important and needed and we're finally starting to catch up on some stuff around here it's nice to be seeing some project capital improvements projects finally hitting the ground yeah, you're right they didn't happen five times sold to the public but what wasn't sold to the public was the boost in the staffing and why it was necessary it's all about setting expectations when you do these things if the expectations are sold to the public we're going to get lots of capital improvement projects and then none of them happen within a four-year period the public is going to say fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you, but now I can say you see it moving forward now but we're going to have to take a look at the expenses and I think that's what you're talking about that's a major part of that increase as employees added to this district that were neglected for years and years I think also operating the district effectively like we're talking about improving the model system too it saves a lot of money too and I think we had a couple meetings, I think that the budget finance committee should talk about some of these quick purchasing like the pickups like you being required to take that up for bid I mean some of these things need to be ironed out so that it's more our procurement policy could be reviewed ours is one of the lowest I've seen out of all of the ones I've been building the levels that we have to go and do everything at it essentially does hinder us to have to go out when you bought I don't know, I think it was for example, or something whatever the time bringing it to the meeting when it was just I didn't see, I mean I don't know the other thing though is we can't do everything in house we don't have the equipment and we don't have the staff it's to just say oh, we could save a lot of money to do things in house we're not equipped to do things in house and that is a problem I think we can get set up to do that I mean I think like just for example the PRB, one people PRB I think we could set up a work crew to do that I mean no we don't have it now and we have to have equipment equipment we're moving in a direction of getting an engineer design bill, design bill to save all that money we're trying to make up for a lot of neglect and we're trying to I mean I think the most important thing to do you want to know how we got in our yard but we need to look forward and make sure that we're maximizing we don't go one step forward and two steps forward there's a lot of this hindsight is 20-20 we've made a lot of mistakes in the past trying to be a good neighbor and bringing on and I'm not faulting anybody but we brought on Felton this district was just we were going to bring on Felton no matter what and Felton came with a lot of problems Felton came with a lot of problems the only one that really came with money was Lompico Lompico came with funds to do some repairs but a lot of these small agencies we took over came with systems that needed to be fully replaced and we took on that burden and Felton was a big one there's a lot to be done in Felton we still paying for 1500 customers they're paying to buy the system and that didn't put any pipe in the ground we're out of compliance with that we have a lot of capital projects in Felton we have a lot of capital projects all over but we took on a considerable amount of capital on all these different locations we took and we have quite a bit of our own we've been impacted by a lot of disasters we've got some of the money back out of 100% we still got $1.5 to $2 million to an access room sitting out there from a lot of major storm that we're going to have to FEMA figure 50% a time to get all said but there's a hard part and the collect of the maintenance just compounded including the money and we lived off of reserves to prove to other people that this district you know was less expensive than Calhoun we lived off reserves for like 4 or 5 years just so we could keep our rates low that was a mistake I'm sorry big mistake we should have paid if you want to come on that's what's going to cost and our rates are our rates and we should have put been raising our rates putting that money into the capital we took a good 4 years and just did what we only had to do and we didn't have those disasters I can't believe in the shape that we would be in if we didn't have the disasters that we bought in several million dollars in repairs and replacement of tanks, pipe, spots over the years the earthquake especially we got a lot catching up to do I see a lot at the end of the tunnel though I mean this is where in the next 5 years you know some of our debts that are for the Felton Purchase or different Watership Purchases will be getting paid off and the debt that we're taking out is going to be 4 capital we have the large USDA loan coming up there will be other debts that we need to take on and it's 4 capital which is good it's not for some other not unnecessary purchase but I mean if it's spending the money where you're going to see a James report coming up a number of facilities 25, 28 pressure pump pressure booster pump stations you know 8 or 9 wells 6, 7 surface sources and you compare that to Scott's Valley and Santa Cruz they have nothing of the facilities that we have they're so spread out that's the ratio of customers to what it is so many zones that take care of you know and 20 33 pressure zones 33 pressure zones you know and Santa Cruz you know 6 we have an incredible amount of infrastructure out there and a lot of it's reaching it's life expectancy or it's undersized and one of Bob's big projects that we were talking about moving forward on is a realistic capital improvement program that shows age of facilities a great in depth that will show you costs and free future costs you can't sell a community on an ambitious capital program without having that but it is essential totally agree so if you take a look at the age and project what the cost is going to be and what you need to put away so you can take care of that it might be just staggering absolutely staggering because it might be staggering absolutely staggering because what we did on Pico as we looked and of course we're just looming but we looked at how old our tanks were, our pipes, our pressure reducing all this kind of stuff I worked with the CPA we went through this and we looked at what we needed to get say we didn't merge to fix all of our capital projects it would be staggering we would have been tarred and feathered and run out of town if we tried to get that much money as it was we went for a huge rate increase and I still hear about it every time I turn around but hey we had to do what we had to do and we need to have a realistic look at what we need in reserves I agree and an emergency reserve and we need to stop discretionary spending we don't need to spend it don't do it is my feeling because even though it's miniscule it all adds up 10,000 there you got a pipe crew after a while so if we want I'll just turn the direction so this is my finance status report that was in the last board packet I don't want you to do that and it goes over some of the high level stuff bill list I removed from this presentation it'll tell you in the financial summary section what month it is or what it is that we're looking at this was the Q2 and the December 2018 results and it'll give a brief summary for a set I mean almost every single one is things are tracking as we expect if something is abnormal we'll bring it up if there's something significant that's going to be requiring a budget adjustment we're going to have to come to the board for something like that so a lot of the times it is crazy going on this is just some of the customer service stuff that we always put in there assumption by class what do you in the customer service do you use a CRM that you can break down the calls by type of call like is it a billing call service call no CRM the system pretty much is just registering the calls coming in to each extension going out and what not so this is the MD&A so the first overview section just explaining what this document is in case of someone's first time looking at it it highlights the net operating results, the operating revenue and the operating expenses and then it'll go in and show what the non-operating revenue and expenses were debt obligation payments excuse me, on the property taxes was most done that was property taxes Lompikos, Felton, Boulder Creek Lompikos is around 60, 70 and then the remaining portion is coming from any of the old school SLB customers so Ben Lowman, Boulder Creek Felton did not come across we had to be a special district so they were CalAM they were privately owned so they did not unfortunately come with anything then it goes over the capital expenditures and so again this is where I think we can do a really good job because essentially I see what the spend is at the end so this is where a collaborative effort between engineering operations and finance would be able to put something together that's giving a little bit better, well rounded saying here's how much was spent on these projects and how those projects are doing is what I'm envisioning at some point in the future that we're able to elaborate on so this is actually spent so that's the difference is when I'm getting involved I'm reporting the results of stuff that's already been incurred so this is the prior fiscal year balances the Q1 and Q2 additions so we spent about 1.1 million through the first months of the year on capital projects it looks like you just allocated some cost to madron, kasky, and monetary no it was it was an engineer that did all the initial work so it was divided amongst each of them and this is where you'll get into this is the individual month then the quarter and the year to date all look the same it's comparing the actuals against the prior year and against the annual budget I always like to look at the prior year so that can help start to show you any potential trends that may be coming that you should be aware of a lot of times at least the last couple years it's always just been kind of a timing issue it'll break out some of the different items that you know what the salaries and benefits was 50k higher compared to prior year or 68k 50 of that was timing of the prior year and then again breaking it down and a little bit more visual it's going over the quarterly so again this is the exact same look you can kind of see it tends to be pretty consistent I don't need to make everyone go blind but the three are essentially the same but it's showing you the current month the current quarter and the year to date then it goes in and shows you the trend analysis the example I gave about the revenue you could see that in the July and August operating revenue that's why July looks so low is that was a journal that you're required for the audit to be able to pull it in I mean in the wet year we had to be asking people to use as much in December as they did in September right because we got plenty of water it's not like we need to have a stage two regarding the water there's no gardens in the water we hear them take only shelves or a garden or two a special garden fill up the hot tub so and then it goes into the detailed expense by department so this is where you can go in and see not just the large summary roll up of all of the main expenses what it's looking like by department so general and administrative you can see year to date we're already at almost its full budget but that's because it's a full year of insurance that already came in so that's very common that account is tracking okay to budget as it is we had to get a new copier that's going to end up causing this account to run run over obviously we are already at 105% of the budget it's already over budget but again you're not talking about anything that was of significance that doesn't seem to be tracking we would be coming back to the board to discuss for the most part that's about it and the other ones are just the cash balances and what not better in all of the monthly reports so the quarterly ones definitely do have more information helping to tie back to the budget and show how things are tracking so right now things are tracking great the assumption is slightly ahead of what we were planning and expenses are running slightly below what was budgeted so I mean you got the best of both worlds in regards to that some stuff is timing related though so you can't always can't always can't come chicken just for a little nag for me we have two jobs one of the main jobs we have is a fiscal responsibility and if you aren't getting these reports if you don't understand them if they aren't clear to you board members you need to ask for clarification I'm sure Stephanie would love to have you come in and talk to her and of course our other issue is policy but this is a very important one we need to know what's going on I mean breaking the bill list out to be a separate document will make it a little bit easier to navigate the two because they are very different will it be a table will it be a table as opposed to the current format for the bill list what do you mean I mean it spits out that way yeah I mean it's up where I use you can spit out your bill list in a table it's got the accounts you can't you can't do sort of it's a crystal report I don't like crystal reports it's not a good report and so from a board point of view it's not as helpful as if we had a different format but we do need to be looking at it we do we need to look at it and we need to ask and the public too I mean they can always ask questions and get a better understanding to be more engaged I mean I've been doing a lot of budgets and audits and there's crickets choking typically in the living room so if people won't actually be involved and understand me on some of the stuff I'm all for it I don't hear any crickets I don't hear you go look at when I did the last budget I think we had like two people and the audit usually has hard to take care of they trust us to take care of I mean like it's not astounding stuff it's not I mean it's important but it's not the same way that people look at other businesses when you're looking at different heads looking at their financials for sale it's important I'm not saying it's not important it's not as exciting well hey most people won't even volunteer and check so why would they think this is exciting they just overdraft but can you use the credit card? no okay I'll make a quick comment I have asked Stephanie a lot of questions and when she doesn't know she cooks it up and emails it to me so kudos for Stephanie you're on top of stuff and I do think this has been talked about having a lot simpler reports made for general public consumption because this kind of stuff is really important for the board to get the whole picture but for our member of the public just to get an overview or for you to do a statement about here's where we are these are the big expenses these are ones we didn't expect this is what we're going to have coming up why we need to be looking at our budget things like that and I'm very interested in our departments being asked for their expertise in making their operations more efficient in each department for ideas on maybe crazy ideas to put out their brainstorming maybe we could do this instead and it might save us some money I've never seen my name pop up on their phone and I know it's in their best interest to answer it at least deal with it now versus multiple phone calls you're scary though we're constantly going through bills and reviewing expenditures and cutting stuff out that we don't need because you're the experts you know it and you know how you can do your job better I'm not going to hear it any other comments from the public? then it's no one minds I have one other quick item it's going to be real quick and it's not on the agenda but it's just a scheduling issue the chair and I have been working trying to set up the diversity training and we have it scheduled tentatively trying to first so it would be the regular night of our board meeting there will be no closed session and instead of having closed session we'll have the training for one hour then go into the meeting and this will make sure that everybody can attend I hope with the breakfast moment we can attend so it's regular board meeting night of 21st the hour we normally meet for closed session so I hope that all of you can attend I don't think I have okay great the meeting is the last of the series third of the series we still have the consent it's not oh I want to I want to end we have to approve I need to pull the item for the 21st and abstain because I was not present for the what? the meeting on the 21st on those minutes because I was absent we don't have that on here it's in the packet oh the consent on the agenda isn't correct but the packet is February 21st the agenda says January 23rd it should say the 21st as well the packet has it but the agenda doesn't February 21st and she wasn't here I think 11 a.m. would be heard it's 123 I didn't get it on the agenda but I added it to the packet the backup's in there but it's not on the front page of the agenda that item will need to be placed on a future agenda that's the case alright then now you can return that's why you didn't know about it yeah alrighty are we done? yeah are you sure? can we adjourn? wait wait do we accept the two that are on here though the consent agenda I believe approval of the two consent agenda items I second what? wait a second I'm confused I'm sorry so the two agenda items on the consent agenda are the N27 correct but 27 is not in here it's 221 that's where I made a mistake and so it may be the 27 content but it's labeled 221 so I suppose we could vote on the January 23rd which is basically nothing or we could hold it over until the next one let's hold them over until the next one let's just forget it I'm confused now okay so we're we're we're adjourning this means can you say the time is that okay with everybody 9.39 just passing just passing