 Good evening, and if I could have your attention, please. So I hope you enjoyed dinner. I know I did at the salmon, that was great. Now, we'll transition to Anne. She is the superintendent of the Whismattertuna plant. She has a brief statement to address the woman. Hi, everybody. I'm so happy that you're all here. We all have in common our desire, right? To make a positive change for the environment. And you have all taken steps to do that. And that's why we have presented this dinner for you, because we appreciate you so much. We feel like you are our partners, because that's what we do, right? That's our main mission as public servants is to protect the environment, to protect human health and environmental health. The city has two sewer systems, as you know, the storm drain system and the sanitary sewer system. And the storm drain system collects rainwater. And we have pump stations, catch basins, pipes. But basically, all that water is conveyed straight to the river or straight to the ocean. Very little treatment. And so anything that you do to protect those streams directly protects the river and the ocean. The wastewater treatment, you're protecting that also. Our most effective wastewater treatment is done by bugs. We use bacteria in our secondary treatment to treat the water, to remove waste from the water. And if we have too many toxic substances coming into the treatment plant, that can affect the health of the bugs. So our environmental compliance department here, Dave, Aaroner, and Fred, and Ken, that's their main mission, is to work with industrial dischargers to protect the safety of the treatment plant so that the water we discharge to the ocean is clean and will not damage the ocean. Our discharge goes through a pipe that is a mile out in the Pacific Ocean. It's about 100 feet underwater. It's got 1,000 feet of diffuse reports in it. That gives us a concept I'll introduce to you. It's called the dilution ratio. We have a dilution ratio of 139 to one. So when we discharge our six million gallons of wastewater a day, it's immediately diluted to that ratio by seawater. We do an annual dye test of our discharge port. We put dye at the end of the pipe and we fly over it with an airplane to make sure that the ports are open and that the plume is diffusing as it should. And we inspect it with ROVs also to make sure that the pipes are clear. I can tell you all the other much more complicated things that we do in terms of toxicity testing, respiratory tests, but we're keeping an eye on the bay and we're keeping an eye on the river and we're sure the ones that are helping us do that. So we appreciate it. We have, I'll tell you about a couple of fun things, new things that are coming up for us. And then if anybody has any questions or we'll turn it back over to environmental compliance. I know many of you are restaurants. We, the California State Senate passed a bill a while ago to try to divert organics from the landfill, organics being food waste, right? So the city is approaching a pilot program to collect food waste from restaurants. The collection part is happening and right now it's being processed, I think, into feedstock pellets, but that's not our final plan. Our final plan is to collect the food waste, turn it into a slurry and then bring it to the wastewater treatment facility for digestion. The way we treat solids at the wastewater treatment facility is we collect them in digesters. Giant tanks that we heat and we mix, the organics are digested, they give off methane gas. We collect all that gas, we burn it in our cogeneration engines and we make electricity out of it. And we make 70% of the electricity that we use at the treatment plant is from our cogeneration facility. So what we hope to do, now our landfill also collects methane gas and has a small engine up there that they burn, but the state knows that a lot of landfills don't. So the state is directing us to collect the organic material, bring it to the treatment plant and increase the amount of methane gas that we create and use it to make more electricity. So that's a program that we're piloting right now in the collection system and we hope to bring that to completion at the treatment plant. Another innovative program that we're working on, we are working very closely with the Soquel Creek Water Department, Water District, they're called, they're a district to be the source of recycled water for the Soquel Creek Groundwater Replenishment Project. Soquel Creek Water District is completely dependent on groundwater. City of Santa Cruz, you know, we have the river and we have North Coast streams where mostly surface water, Soquel Creek doesn't have any creeks that they take drinking water from. They are all groundwater wells and their groundwater wells are extremely overdrafted. They've been able to determine that seawater intrusion is starting to impinge on their wells. So they are moving cleverly and quickly and courageously on a program to use our wastewater discharge to treat it to highly purified standards and to inject it in their groundwater wells to keep back seawater intrusion. The status of that program right now is that our city council, city of Santa Cruz has approved an agreement with the district to provide the source water and to build a tertiary treatment plant at our wastewater treatment facility. We recycle water at our facility right now about 140,000 gallons a day of secondary effluent that we would normally send to the ocean. We treat it through sand filters and we use it for process water in the plant. We used to use drinking water for this. Now we use secondary effluent. But the Soquel Creek partnership will bring in membrane filtration units. We'll build a plant to treat about two million gallons a day. We will operate the tertiary treatment plant at our plant in Santa Cruz and then we will send tertiary water to their location on Chanticleer where they will treat it with reverse osmosis and advanced oxidation and they'll ship it out to their injection wells in Atmos. I did just hear, they have been working very hard on this project to get it grant funded by the state. And I don't think anything's announced yet but they are looking very good to get a prompt one 50 million dollar grant for this project. Besides the exciting lives we lead just treating wastewater, we have a really exciting project on the side. Anything else you wanted to know on my table? We had some really fun discussions about river sampling and Cowell Beach sampling and how much we all like to swim in the ocean. We talked about the rise and fall of the San Lorenzo that you're all seeing going on. Yeah, so if you have any questions, I'll be here all night. I'll be here all night. Next up is Tanner Barnes and ask his presentation on a pharmaceutical take-back. Other than exciting developments. Hey everybody, I'm Tanner Barnes. I'm the newest environmental compliance inspector at the city of Santa Cruz. I'm on the east side. I think the majority of people here today are actually on the east side. So it's great to see familiar faces and great to meet some new faces too. Today I'm gonna be highlighting the city of Santa Cruz Pharmaceutical and Sharks Disposal Program that we started back in about 2008. And this program is aimed to basically allow people to properly dispose of their medicines or other pharmaceutical ways and also sharks. And so by doing this, we put in convenient drop-off locations all throughout town. We have locations at horse snipers, CVS, Walgreens. I believe the county building in town has one or two. If you'd like to look at this map, part of my Google map so you can see the exact addresses, you can look up netproject.com and they'll work off board and they have all the information for the exact drop-off locations. In the first year of this program, they are able to collect 51 million milligrams or 113 pounds of waste in the first year alone. To give that some context, that is, as you can see on the screen, 28,000 doses of pain reliever, 22,000 doses of anti-inflammatory and 20,000 doses of blood thinner. And so basically this made it so instead of these medicines and other pharmaceuticals, potentially they're being dumped down in the toilet or just disposed of and properly getting into our environment, they were disposed the right way. This basically means that it's staying out of our rivers and staying out of the public health. And so I believe it's made a huge positive impact on our community, health standpoint and environmental standpoint. And so that's been going on for just over 11 years now. And currently we have a new program that we put in place about two weeks ago on Coral Street. That's where there is a high density population of homeless people camping out there. And so this was brought to us by some of the neighbor companies there who kind of came to us with their struggles of how it's impacting their businesses and the environment and their health. So firstly, we were able to put a shark's kiosk and that's right there on Coral and Lime Cone. That's right into the granite rocks wall right there installed. And so that's giving people access to disposed of needles properly. And we do know that not every needle is gonna be able to make it in there unfortunately, but at least it does give people an easy access point to put in the needles and that is being serviced right now on a twice a month and that will either, that will change depending on if we needed to be serviced more or less. We're hoping more, hoping to get more needles in there. And secondly, we on Coral Street there, a private, a jointly private and public effort to clean up Coral Street was an idea that we got of power washing there on the street. And that was an effort with PD and our streets team where PD went in first and kind of got the campers, notified them in time, gave them time to be able to move any of their belongings that they'd like to move. And then after that, we had, they were able to move. And after that, we had the streets team going in and just cleaning up any other trash debris that was left behind. And then lastly, that allowed a contractor to go in, block the storm drains, power wash the whole sidewalk and gutters to be able to contain the water and then send it down to the sanitarics where we can then treat the water rather than waiting for rain events to happen and for all that water to then, and anything that was left on the sidewalks to the gutter to then be able to left going to the San Lorenzo, which is right in your mind and then into our ocean. And so we did that on both sides of the street and we're hoping that with the success that we're seeing this program take place on the Coral Street that it could potentially lead to more places in the city that need this. And then I have a visual here for you all where we give this to some businesses but this is a smaller needle kiosk that can be mounted to the wall or elsewhere where they can properly dispose of needles. And we do that with the use of if you need to you could always provide this for your business. That is our current update. I was wondering if anyone has any questions or comments on this because it probably affects a lot of businesses in time. Thank you. Does anyone have any questions or comments or I'll be here all night? Yes, stay tuned. Hey, we have a business on North France 40 year old foods. And you know, we get random sharps that are probably in the live amongst other things but when we do it, what do I do with them? Yeah. So that could be where we can either provide one of these sharps containers or another smaller container if you'd rather have something for the meantime. And we'd say for that, you know, definitely protect yourself. You know, I just don't want to get the shovel and put it in the top. Yeah, yeah, because then you're disposing and nobody knows where it will go. But what we'd ask is if we do have one of these containers that you then use maybe some sort of prongs to be able to pick it up and put it into the container just or at least gloves, you know. I wouldn't say that these are bare hands, because you never know. Thank you. What would you say the successes at this point of people actually using those containers, especially like the one down on Coral Street? Yeah, for that, I could tell you I could give you an update in maybe about a week or so because we just got it in and we haven't had a service yet. So, you know, and the success can be measured in a few different ways but if we just get a few meals for me I think that is leading to success, at least. Can I just add a little bit? I think we can illustrate the success of that from the places before Coral Street. So, Coral's another first. And we've had a contractor that Tana's working with who collects and sends us data on a monthly basis. And if anybody wants that, we will ask Jen to put it on the website. Jen is our principal information officer. And she would put it on the website and you can see it. It's very successful. And the city I think announced that they're voting money to put four more around the city. But it is very successful. There's data for easily five years now from different areas where the contractor, because he has to bill for it and we have to pay it. So we know by weight how much he collects at each site that he goes to. It's kind of these smaller individual business containers who bears responsibility of collecting and emptying so they come and pick them up. Yeah, so for that I can be contacting your environmental compliance inspector when that is starting to get to the maximum fill line so that we can go through or there's already a contractor that picks up these bins all throughout town because we have people, let's see, coming to these convenient locations. They have drivers and townals every day. Anyone else? Thank you so much for being here. If you do have any more questions, I will be sitting right there. And yeah, can we talk to you? Okay, yeah. Now we have my presentation, which will be on the TMDL. So what is a TMDL? Well, TMDL stands for the total maximum daily load and this has applications to service water bodies in our case and city limit. So let's go on here. TMDL of course applies to pollutants and how we want to control them. So yes, what is a TMDL? Maximum daily load. TMDL establishes the maximum amount of a pollutant allowed in a water body and serves as the starting point or plan to restore water quality. And so it establishes a TMDL, this comes down from the Clean Water Act, the Fed's. And in our case, we have, this authority's been delegated to our state through the water board. Further divided into regional water quality control boards. And it comes in the form of a basic plan. It gets kind of complicated, but the basic plan really establishes our goals for the water bodies. And so our monitoring comes on the basis of the requirements. So who does the work in the city? So of course this is the environmental complaint inspectors, we grab the samples and then the laboratory at the wastewater plant, they analyze the samples and give us the data. All nice, friendly folks to work with. We see we're not town, so stay high. Okay, so what are our goals? So we need to work within a regional framework because the city exists with the county and we share the same water bodies and the same pollutant sources. Data collection, what we've been going on since 2010. And we're developing information on the trends of bacterial levels to monitor the effectiveness of our PMVs. PMVs are the city's best management practices. So that is how we control pollutants, what practices we put in place to control these pollutants in our service water bodies, such as Santa Rosa River, Carbonara Creek, and Brent's Water Creek, those are the main ones here. Yeah, and of course we want to establish what pollutant sources, if we can find that a water body is polluted, what's the source? Is it from birds, is it from campers, is it from septic systems, or RVs, it's all kinds of sources. So we have to do source tracking as well. So just a history here on our sampling panel. We started in 2010 just looking at bacteria, San Rizzo River, Brent's Water Creek, and Carbonara Creek. And started off a relatively light sample, just 13 weeks a year. And we have ramped it up since then. Looking at bacteria and also TSS, that is the total suspended solids. That's sort of the amount of dirt that's suspended in. And then looking at nutrients, that is phosphates, nitrates. Yeah, that might be the food sources for bacteria. So we want to keep tabs on all these things. And recently we have expanded it quite a bit, with looking at bacteria, turbidity as well as TSS, so that's kind of how much light will pass through the sample. PCR, that is polymerase chain reaction, that tells us what kind of DNA, what life form has deposited the bacteria. So we're interested of course in human sources, because those are controllable. If they're animal sources, well, there's not a lot. We can do it, but not caffeine. Again, that points to a human source. Fecosterols that can be correlated with either human or. So we've expanded the program and looking at all different kinds of analytes to get a better picture of where our pollutants are going. Here's a map to give you an idea of what sample sites we have. So, we've prioritized the sites at city limit. That's kind of our starting point. If the water's already impaired at city limit, there's not a whole lot more we can do. So that's where we have to work with the county to establish what the county can do if we're already impaired at that point. But then as we do our sampling, as we come into the city, we can see are we getting better, or worse as we come into the city. We have four sites on San Lorenzo. One is here, this is at Tate Street, pretty much by the city courtyard, by the Santa Cruz metro complex. The next sampling site here is at the other Ross pedestrian bridge. The next site on San Lorenzo, this is the pedestrian bridge at San Lorenzo Park. Then our final site in San Lorenzo is at the train trestle. Now we're going to, I guess, the carbonara creek. We have just one exclusively on carbonara creek. And that's at city limit, that's right where the carbonara drives, not far away. Right at 43, it goes high as Santa Vita. Santa Vita is a motor home camping area at city limit. And then the next site is at the confluence, basically between carbonara creek and principality creek. Right where Avalon means market street. Then the next site down, this is water street and market street and principality creek. Final site on principality creek is at, again, about the San Lorenzo Park area. So we've tried to sample a whole city and establish where our sources are and where things could be improved, where things are happening. So we've tried to cover the whole city with this water body. So, like we touched on before, what do we test for? We're looking at the drill system that's solids and turbidity. Those are really nitrate and bacteria. Nitrate is sort of an aged analyte that can point at human waste or septic systems. Bacteria as well. Recent human waste for animal sources. PCR, like I said, polymerase chain reaction. That's DNA for a source tracking. Caffeine runs towards human sources. Fecal sterols, again, human or animal-oriented. And so why do we do it? Well, there's a TMD album. So we have this total maximum daily load for sediments, for nitrates and pathogens. Of course, we're source tracking. If we do see some things that are dirty, where's it coming from? All right, now, I really love data. So it was just a plot that I made up. It's a lot to look at, so I'm not going to deliver it too much. But what we have here is our years. So this is all the years that we've been studying. And doing an analysis. So this is just looking at the San Lorenzo limit. So what we see at city limit here is... So this is the SLR-1. This is at city limit. This is SLR-2. This is at the Ross pedestrian bridge. SLR-3. This is at the San Lorenzo pedestrian bridge. And then SLR-4. This is at the train tracks. So basically, just looking at the block, this is the block, this is this block and this block and this block, we see things are lower and then they get bigger. So what this is, this is a percentage of measurements of bacteria in exceedance of the TMBL women. So we're getting higher and higher as we're going through the city. So we're seeing more bacteria as we are going through the city, but we've already started off at a pretty bad place. So in combination with the nutrients that are already in the water, some people would argue that, well, we'd expect the bacteria to increase if we have a seed, if it's already seeded, if we have the food to feed it. So yeah, the picture is... We're not improving as we're going through the city, but there's not a lot we can do about that perhaps because we've started off with some pollutants. Now if we look at the colors, you can see that it's kind of hard to tell how things have changed throughout the year, but perhaps most recently, things are not the best they've been in the past five years. I won't say much more than that about this data. I'm not a good data person, but I love to talk a lot about it. So if you have more questions later, I can talk. So what can we do? So the city has BMPs, best management practices. So one of those is to control homeless encampments, which might be the homeless don'ts that they have a sewer system to use. So the city can break up camps and control sources of pollution that way. Again, the city has some BMPs to control pet pollution as well. These are examples of doggy bags, doggy pet waste bags that the city wouldn't use. Also, you might be familiar with fairy signs. I love these signs. I remember when they appeared in West Cliff. So I should say, too, that this presentation was put together by several groups, also a storm water contributed to these slides. These are from that group. So the city has three different ways that title back to it, BMPs, as far as the team deal goes. So the first is this, we control sewer spills. And so the property owner is responsible to clean up sewer waste spills. Sorry, I didn't show this photo, but yeah, this is a sewer spill. And so the city requires clean up and then re-inspection and correction of torn up and broken up sewer ladders. And if the pass inspection is retained, so these are new rules that just came into effect. Also, when properties are sold, they are required to be inspected. The sewer ladders are required to be inspected to make sure they're not going to have these sewer spills. And yeah, just so you know, I guess this will be a little bit of info, but the homeowner, the property owner, is responsible for their sewer lateral all the way out into the street where it meets the city main. So a lot of people think that because the blockage has been found out in the sidewalk or street area, that maybe the city is responsible. But no, in this city the homeowner is responsible for the entire sewer lateral. Okay, and then TM deals to combat sediment pollution. Often times you've seen, hopefully not a dirty construction site, I see them a lot because I'm an inspector, but yeah, we want BMPs, so these are straw waddles, things to control sediment runoff from construction sites. When it rains, we don't want all that dirt to wash right off into the storm drain. So the city reviews building permit clients and erosion control. Also, yeah, the city has a street sweeping program to control the sediment that's already in the road from getting down into the catchphrase and sending it to the water lines. And they expand the existing program where there might be no parking on certain streets so that this city street sweeper can get those areas. And of course the storm water program will report. So that's about it for that presentation. I covered a lot and probably pretty quick, but actually this presentation was engineered for a city audience, but I figured you know, I'd be close to handling it. Okay, any questions? If I may just ask, before the questions, Eric would join you there because there are questions on BMPs, which I think this is my point to know. So you can both stand there. Eric is from the storm water program managed by Suzanne. And part of the presentation you heard how the monitoring became more sophisticated as we couldn't figure out where the bacteria were coming from. Including the analysis that they have described as PCR, which is looking at the DNA associated with the bacteria to see whether they were from humans with the control or others. That was paid for the instrumentation and the training for that sort of sophisticated work was paid for by Suzanne and Eric's program. It didn't come from our program. And with another sophisticated part of it is the fecal sterols which Dave also mentioned. Those are oils that come from animals, any animal with backbones and doing humans. But their ratios tell us when we find them whose bacteria it is and those tests were paid for by that group. So I figure it's important to have them speak if you have questions. Questions? I know just from our annual reporting that the city has done over 300 inspections of private serolotorals. So that's just a stat I have huffed on my head. And there's probably been a lot of repairs associated with those 300 inspections but that's just kind of a new stat we have from this first year of the order. Orderments. Sorry, I didn't want to blow your mind with all that data. There's quite a lot of visitors. What's next on our program? Sir, I have no questions. Does this mean that this was so murky that no one would have believed me? It's clear as a mark. Before I go into the truly important part of recognizing the you guys who are the reasons we're here to recognize the people who do the work and if you don't mind I'm going to start with Fred Baker, who's our longest serving environmental compliance inspector. He is a specialist in many of the things you've just heard as well as the landfills. We didn't talk about the landfills in there but he's been managing for the landfills and other gases over there. So he is from the environmental compliance group and Tanner who you've heard from tonight is our newest member of the team and I'm particularly proud that we got him and as you can see he's doing tremendous work and Dave Martin who we just heard from whose wife also works in the laboratory so I suspect you take some of this work home but there he is. Those are the people who do all the gathering and all that to inform the work that we do and without further ado I'm going to ask our systems manager and Logan who is going to award Dave plaques for tonight and I think Fred was going to do the announcing of their award. Thank you. This is the fun part of the evening. I've got the rest here. First award goes to Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing. This is Santa Cruz Auto Tent. Dave of the EGA Collision, Morrissey Boulevard. These are people who didn't make it but still have a list. You can find their names on this wonderful website. They're in the program as well. Well we have plaques here for Taco Bell. We have Johnny's Harbourside Cafe Java Junction Seabright North Bay Fort dealership Tony and Albus Pizza Chevron Soquel Avenue Del Pueblo Market Auto World and Lupalo Craft Beer House. That concludes our program. Do you have anything to add again? No. We do this every year because we appreciate you all so much and we're here to chat and we'll see you again next year. Thank you for coming.