 Any additions or deletions to the staff has no all right. It's time for oral communications and if I can see by a show of hands how many people think they might want to speak. All right well we've changed our time to you can have five minutes unless so many people want to talk. All right thank you. So you may speak. Hi I'm Tina Toe and I'm a resident of Boulder Creek. I recently applied for the administrative committee but then I was able to come to the meeting. But I wanted to let you know that I'm here and I'm interested in the environmental committee. I have a master's degree in environmental science and I think it would be a really valuable addition. So I submitted my application to Holly and please consider me for the next meeting. And now we're over. I thought maybe the power had gone out because that's a normal thing here. Anyway so yes please consider me for the environmental committee. I will be out of town for two weeks in March but I will make it to the meeting on March 21st. Well thank you for introducing yourself. So no one else put their paw up right. So unfinished business. The first item is committee meetings and we need to figure out when we're going to have the committee meetings. What days and what times. So. Which one do you want to start with? Let's start with environmental committee. Margaret. I think there is a, at the moment there is a tentative standing date and time. Looking through my calendar and refreshing my own memory about when that is. They have been the third Tuesday of every month. My schedule is somewhat constrained by work during the work hours but fairly open and flexible. So I'm working with staff and the availability of the space we have for committee meetings. And Bill you're on that committee. Correct and then my, I'm just starting a new job so but I think that I could commit to, I would like to maybe to have the environment on that Tuesday. Tuesday is fine. At 4 p.m. and then have the engineering committee right after from 4 to 5 and then engineering from 5 to 6. For that one day every month. And then there's, I don't want to, the little fact that there's not, that's not possible for me to come to 9 p.m. Meeting during the day. Otherwise I'd like to not serve on the committee. Because that's basically just telling my employer over the hill that I need to take the full day after work. And that's just not feasible for me. So my thought was that I'm having these meetings, I know it's going to be a little bit of hardship on staff. But it also includes, you know, the public committee meetings. I'm sure that a lot of them are just in my same situation when they also work over at the house on the day. You know, can attend. So I really don't want to, I know you kind of fought back with this before last year or so. So anyway, really I can work with Tuesday at 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for both environmental and engineering. Having meetings in the operation building at 4 o'clock did cause a big hardship on this time. When they come in they change. At the end of the day they do their work. If it was going to have to be, I mean that, I would say you have a different location. And it's, and you're starting to ask staff to attend more evening meetings. And they add up. I mean, we have several committees. We have board meetings. We have Sigma. We have weekend meetings now with Sigma. It's starting to put a burden on staff, especially ones with families. Well, my feeling, I mean, if this room needs to be treated and needed as a locker room one day a month, then, you know, maybe that cartoon in Desindo about, you know, Lompeco as hillbillies applies. Because, you know, I mean, that's just, to me it is ridiculous. Are there alternative locations that are close enough by like the firehouse? Is there a spot at the firehouse? Or is there like the use of a room at the elementary school? There probably is other locations. You know, obviously we meet other locations before other meetings. And the room size for committee meetings can be smaller. So we haven't really looked into it. I'm just saying that this, you know, the operation building is the operation building. And there's a lot of things that go on in here. And I'm not, you know, I take, you know, the word hillbillies was uncalled for. But, you know, we do have responsibilities for our staff. And next, it's lunch, then it's the morning meetings. And then it's the point where they pushed out of their facility. It was bad enough when the board table came in here and pushed the facility to the point that they didn't even feel welcome in the room anymore. Because the nice chairs, when they come in coated with mud, they got to stay away from the good furniture because they're filthy. And that's the nature of the beast in this job. I definitely, you know, staff wants to work with the board, but you know, it's a two-way street. And I think a different location would be the way to solve the facility issue. But you are starting to load up staff with a lot of staff at our meetings. I mean, I'm sorry that I'm really, you know, I said that, but you know, this is sort of frustrating to me to, you know, again, if you really want, if you really don't want to have these meetings at night, then just, I don't really care. I don't want to even argue about this anymore. Take me out for a minute. So that's it. I don't want to argue about it. Bob, you want to say something? Yeah, I think there was a couple points that came up. And you know, one of the things that we have to be concerned about is that the people that serve on the board and the committees also work for a little tour, at least a little. Maybe not everybody. I think on the Budget Committee, perhaps, both the people on there might be retired and we'll find out when we survey them. But a good share of people are going to work themselves during the day and for them to take off during the day unless they have a job that is flexible like that, which as consultants we kind of have some, not all the time, but have some. But a lot of people don't have that flexibility. And so I've been thinking a little bit about the load on staff too. And you know, I do get that. And it may be that perhaps we move to where staff doesn't have to attend both board meetings a month, perhaps as one. Or they can telephone in or something like that if they want to be able to balance the personal life and the work life. So I think that's something that could be thought of as well. But I think we need to make accommodations for our board members for their work life as well. And four to six means actually you're leaving work at three. And that's assuming the traffic isn't what it can be as you're coming down 17 from San Jose, which can sometimes be a bit of a trade. So that's actually meaning if you want to get a full day in, you have to get to work at, let's say, five in the morning. So that's a pretty big sacrifice on Bill's part as well. Do we have to meet monthly? Right. Can we... Is that what you... Right. I'm wondering, it's a wonderful opportunity to have staff participate, educate us, have committee members also come up to speed but maybe a quarterly or every other month meeting will be sufficient and flexible about evening hours to the extent that staff is available to do that. And I like the idea of an alternative location. I don't want to pose on staff here. I don't know why we have to have committee meetings every month. If we could leave that flexibly to staff, if staff thinks that there's more input that they need, a special meeting could be scheduled, but we could have a standing meeting less frequently than that. Any other conflict? Could the schedule be left to the members of the committee? The schedule among themselves? And where it's going to be? I think the where is important for disclosure and posting for community location and agendas ahead of time, but... Excuse me. We're going to get real friendly one time. It would be helpful to have things published ahead of time so that staff would know that this committee meeting is always at this location on the something or other of the month or the quarter. I would say the committee itself could figure that out. Figure it out a week, a month, a quarter of an advance. Right. Right. And when? Yeah, I think, for example, the environmental committee has some important tasks to do. I don't know that that necessarily requires every month of review but it can be pretty lengthy. Right. But the engineering committee, we've got a lot of stuff coming up and so maybe that one is once a month for a while until it shakes out. I mean, we certainly also have to be looking at the inventory of our system that we need to do. And so I think there might be some discussion the committee should have around that. When we get to budget and admin, I also have opinions about that. I think those have been scheduled for daytime. So the daytime meetings aren't as cumbersome. As long as we can keep it, you know, not in the early morning, the staff comes to work, the lunchtime, and we have done that pretty well. Did we pull the public members of admin and budget to make sure they can make those meeting times? That's great. That's fantastic. All that means is that I work till late at night. So I'll be there until night then. Okay. I think the alternative location, maybe a combination of several things, we can make it work. Because I think it's important that board members are on the committees and we're just going to find that happy meeting. And I know Boulder Creek Library has a smaller meeting room about half the size or about the size. I don't know what their hours are, but possibly that four o'clock hour we could have down there. I think that's worth looking into. And we have not looked into smaller alternative sites. So what I'm hearing is we have to look into another site. And the library sounds great. They'll let you use the room there. We've used it before for training during the day. I don't know what their hours are. It depends on which day of the week it is. But Rick, you have keys to every public meeting building? No, not really. But we'll definitely look into it. And if we can keep the after-hours meetings, it sounds like the majority of the committees will be kept during the day. And then we'll try to work in an alternative facility. So we won't make a decision on that. And I think Steve, if that will work with staff and I think Steve's idea of the committee getting together and pick the times. We have another location. We can probably make the four o'clock time work. If you're pushing it to the end of the day, it works pretty well. One more. So that's okay. And Zahandi at Whitehall at night? Well, the let-off pretty much came to the end. We let the committee come to their conclusion. I do believe their quarterly meeting would be held here. And their monthly meeting or whatever, especially meetings, can be held over at Zion Fire. I think a lot of committees work out. They work well together and are well on their way. Great. So that leaves the other two committees that you and I are on. So speak your piece. I think budget needs to be monthly and nine o'clock is fine. Okay, nine o'clock is fine with me. And admin committee... What day, though? Well, my ideal day would be Friday. That's not my ideal day. Tuesday or Wednesday. I just have to show them my schedule. Wednesdays aren't good for us. We have safety meetings here in the mornings. And we may want to check because the person that did respond from the public afternoons were better, which is why we scheduled that first for the budget. Two to four is just a non-starter. It's the same thing. I have to take the whole day off. So are you not attending with one on the 20th, or are you making... I will probably rearrange it for one, but it can't be there. It's got to be in the morning or at night. So I can shuffle my schedule, too. Why don't we just... We can discuss it at the meeting that we have in a week and a half. We have an empty office. Which meeting are you going to discuss? Meeting set up on the 20th for the budget and finance. On the 20th, yes. And that's a Wednesday? Yes. At what time? 20th at 2. At 2. Well, I guess we could live without Bob if we could all... Well, like I say, for one meeting I can shuffle things around, but as an ongoing regular thing, that does not work either. That's the same issue that Bill has. I think it's right in the middle of my work day. Okay. I'm still waiting for that lottery ticket, too. Wow. So, okay, what about an admin committee? Admin committee, again... Nine o'clock. Any day nine o'clock. Tuesday. But the frequency of that, I think is going to be driven in my opinion a lot more by what we need to do on the new website. Because to me, the admin committee's number one priority is that new website. And we haven't... I don't know where we are with that. It'll be in your first meeting. We're moving that way. Yeah, but to me, however frequently we need to need to get that website up and running, we've done a very quick period of time. And there's going to be a lot of document management that's going to come with the new website. So, I think everybody needs to be prepared for a fair amount of work on that. And the committee members need to be prepared to pitch in and help out under Stephanie and the staff's direction on what to do. I'm not admin, though. Who's going to be admin? I'm admin. If it's something that I have a vested interest in... Yeah, they'll be there. The appropriate staff will be there. When it comes to the website, the watershed environmental and finance will be there. They'll be an engineer. They'll be... Pretty much the management team will be involved in the website. Website. That covers all aspects of the district. I mean, I think there are other things about admin that I think are probably not as lengthy. Like, you know, I've been advocating for a long time now moving to board meetings because it felt library when it's ready and all that. Lifestream of the board meetings. Those are things that are somewhat compact. The bigger things are going to be around if we want to make another run like board policies or other policies or... We have the record retention policy. There's things... Well, we've never finished the record retention. No, but we have that started and those will be coming to the admin committee. I think those are not... I see those as being really lengthy things like the budget will be. Is there anybody here tonight that we picked for the admin committee? No? We're like three people, right? Did we survey them? Are they okay with the morning meeting or are they not? I can't remember exactly who was agreeable to what, but I'll have to look at it again. It's probably a really good idea to set the first meeting and let the group decide now that new have agreed that possibly a quarter of the meeting or a bi-monthly would work. If we could do that for all the committees, have the meet and then when the whole group is together decide? Yeah. So, right now, we do have a budget meeting on February 20th at 2 p.m. We could schedule an admin meeting and for 9 o'clock on a Tuesday and see who comes. Do we do it on the 19th? Is that enough time? Sure. Well, is that enough notice time? All right. Yeah. Let's do that. Okay. At 9. Okay. Is there anybody in? Oh, there's Liz Lohan. Do you want to speak? I do. I have recently appointed to the Long Pico Oversight Committee and I attended almost every meeting since its inception in 2016 and I would just like to say this committee decided at the very first meeting that they would accommodate people who worked and they would meet after hours and they would schedule around people who worked. There were several people on the committee who worked. They are valuable to the committee. I would like to see... I know it's an inconvenience but I would like to encourage people to be on these committees who do work because these are the real leaders in our community and that they have really valuable jobs in their managers and things. Those are the kind of people that we want. So I think we need to be able to accommodate that and not turn anybody away and then when we have board openings we want people to apply for the board knowing that that are valuable in their jobs too and be able to come to committee meetings and be active in it. So I think I'd like to see a shift in attitude. I just have one final remark when Director Smallman said he would not be able to come during the day and that he might as well just remove himself from the committees. I heard some kind of self-satisfied remarks around me. That attitude is gone. This is a new board. This is a new way we're going to be doing things. We are not going to be treating people like that. Bill Smallman received the most votes ever when he was elected. He needs to be respected whether you agree with his opinions or not and respect his position and respect that he needs to take part in this board and in the committees and we need to accommodate him and anyone who comes after him whether we agree with him or not because we're above all that. We're a better district than that. John. Yes. I don't have any disagreement with the process of getting to the times where committee meetings. But there have been some postings in social media by Director Smallman in this case regarding this issue and about trying to accommodate people who specifically have a mandatory state position. And from those recent Facebook posts I'll quote a couple of sentences. Firstly about this is we and of course I don't know who we is have someone who is anti-glyphosate wants to join but also works over the hill and we want these meetings at 5 p.m. and then continue. So at the regular meeting we can make the board policy many more clear and Jenny Gomez term and then go through the recruitment process all over again. And then the following comment in this posting thread says those who thought small use of glyphosate was okay need not apply. So I think there's some push towards finding people who accommodate particular views of at least one director and to accommodate their time in this and I find that inappropriate. Thank you. Anybody else? You do know that Jenny Gomez recommended for Andrew and Bob. Bob? I don't know. In a public language. The meeting time for the admin committee would be none. None. But I would like to make sure that our public members can make that. Right. Yeah. I can check with them. Yeah. I think the second part is they can then we may need to revisit the time. Okay. Fine. Fine. Okay. All right. Board policy update is the next item. There was the second part of this memo was about committees about minutes on this island. That's right. There's two different contradicting statements and I do believe it should read that the district secretary shall record the minutes for the board of directors and committee meetings in the board policy manual. Right. Okay. In the board policy manual. Yes. Yeah. I believe that that was a now this word we moved on to the policy manual. Yeah. Well I guess we were part of this first committee. Yeah. It was part of the committee section. So it was in my first manual. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. I think what happens is they have red lines. Yeah. I agree. It's just cleaning up. Are there any board members who have some petitions that they want? Hopefully. Yeah. So I guess in addition to the item that Rick identified here and I'll work on the figure out which words to note there were two other were three other changes to the board policy manual that I wanted to propose. So are we to board policy manual now? Yes. Okay. Yes. The two the two new additions were the first one is the district secretary records the minutes for both the regular meetings and committee meetings. That's what Rick means. Yeah. That was the first one. Hold on a minute. So Rick I had submitted a document with some edits. Did that get included? No. It doesn't look like it did. I didn't see it. Okay. So give me just a second here to fire up the the edits I thought it would be. Yeah. I'm looking through the board. You know I look to see if you made any changes. Yeah. I actually did. Well that's Rick's. That was Rick's. Right. So I had three other changes. Okay. Two additions based on conversation at last meeting and another red line correction as a section didn't get deleted due to a red line failure. Okay. Very good. So it was a pretty simple thing to do but apparently it did get into the board packet. Fortunately this did so we can still act on it. I want to make some. Can I have your question while we're waiting for you to pull that up? Sure. I just want to clarify in this previous remark Mr. Smallman are you saying that you don't want to accept anyone into the committees depending on your beliefs about collaborate? I just I just heard that and I hadn't read it. Well recently that got resolved so we actually banned so that's out of the that now is out of the question but before that meeting my understanding was and my feelings were was that my desire was to ban so otherwise I will know I can't as a committee member I can only as a director I can vote or not vote for somebody to get on the personally if there was somebody that wanted to get on the and if I knew that they were in favor of using black that's all I'm not saying that I thought that you I opened all ideas well I'm against black that's my opinion and that's my right as your board and that's what I'm listening to my constituency and that's my position no black this is different council I'm jumping in just because this discussion isn't part of the agenda item that's currently under discussion so for brown act reasons it can't be discussed at this time so do you know what you passed on? not quite yet go ahead and I'll catch up with you it's unfortunately I had asked previously since we are asking for staff to cut their budgets that we cut our stipend because and cut it in half from $100 to $50 that we cut along with everybody else which would save $6,000 on the regular board meeting so two board meetings a month could have 24 I would like to comment on that one well you can comment okay $100 meeting is a fair amount for us to come down here and review the thing this actually it's not a lot of money and I think this board needs to really focus on the meat and potatoes and not the small chunk change you know you know that's how but the public loves it the public it's more like public grandstanding we're going to say we're going to save you $6,000 it's about 17 cents per Waterville okay that's what we're talking about here and I know all of us old semi retired and semi retired bloody dutties you know we got on this board to get that $100 but in the future you know when people there can be a young person talented person that you know hey they're not going to give me at least a fair decent amount for meeting at the meeting we have a lot of small costs at this district but the benefits are outweighed from the amount of money and one of them is this meetings defense so that would it's a fair amount to get to come to this meeting in other words if that will attract in the future somebody that comes to this valley that wants to run on the board that gets fair Scotts Valley to put this in perspective Scotts Valley pays $200 for meeting and they also pay for healthcare so the cost for their director is as well over $100,000 and we have a lot of smaller costs we have education grants I'm promoting an internship program that's going to cost a small amount of money but the benefits outweigh these small things so a lot of people get really attracted to these cuts these small cuts a great cap it ran around Watsonville saying I'm going to cut 30% of its salary but you know what that's only a few dollars off the property tax your property tax though you want $120,000 supervisor running into it with the talent to run that accounting you don't want some guy that's going to tell you hey we're going to cut we're going to cut this $6,000 that's meaningless completely meaningless so you're against the staff cuts the staff cuts no what we're talking about is so we're going to only get we get $100 I spent a lot of time outside this meeting you don't understand and then there's $100 come down here repair is okay it's a trip to the grocery store you know and it's a fair it's a fair decent amount so and then we're just talking about hey we're going to really you know I would rather have a board of directors there's so many other areas where we can say hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars I want talent I want talent business talent to serve you to do that and get a fair I think we're still in board conversation yes we're still in board so if I may offer maybe a compromise solution because I think the point you're making about we need to be looking at all aspects of the budget and how we're going to reduce our operating costs and I and that's that's where in every area of focus that was some of the things that we discussed last fall in great detail what I'd like to do is take this topic of the board budget within the context of the entire board budget and have that conversation during a budget committee meeting or during the budget setting process and see how we can come up with the reduction for the board budget overall within that there's other aspects of the board budget that I think we need to look at in the board meetings how we do our videotaping there may be with new board members we may have actually increased cost for us attending the CSDA meetings that's something that the board members want to go to the annual meeting and so I think we need to look at it in a broader place rather than just focus on one individual item right now well I totally disagree okay and I don't think I'm you start adding up 6,000 here 10,000 there 4,000 you start adding that up it starts to become a lot of money and I don't think anybody runs for the board to get $100 on meeting I really don't and we can talk about all that other stuff too and you know I asked about this quite a while ago and I think it needs to change that we need to do our part and I'm not saying that it doesn't I just think to now is we should do it during the budget process not tonight why because that's when we deal with the budgets and we deal with the entire board and pardon me and the board policy manual defines the stipend and we can deal with that at the budget committee we need to make an adjustment to the board policy manual I totally disagree with them because this is not this is board policy it is not budget it's board policy I agree I think it should be because we should go to the public budget here Margaret I would prefer to follow Buffalo's advice to take this with the budget committee nobody runs for the board for the stipend to get rich there's this not the issue at the same time all work has value and to diminish the value that we put into this that we bring to this I don't think it's a good idea I'm not trying to diminish the value I'm trying to say hey folks hey environmental we want you to cut hey field staff we want you to cut stuff out of your budget I want to set an example that we're willing to cut also all I got to say do you have anything you have no problem with agreeing right now to cut the stipend 50% of what it currently is and I also have a problem with debating it during your budget meeting okay then the other thing I would like to see that a member of the public shall not it says that in here public a member of the public shall not shall serve on no more than one standing committee that's in here so we have a bit of a problem why we're going to need maybe Jean's advice so it turns out the edits that I made did get in here but not in red line form okay so they're in they're in as the final approval which is fine so on page 18 which number 18 the one in the middle the left and the right so the left is 29 the middle is 18 and the right is 21 okay so the in about two-thirds of the way down the page it says regardless start date in terms of public members of the administrative budget and finance engineering and environmental committee shall end on December 31st of each year and the next line members of the public shall serve on no more than one standing committee at time those are the two additions that I have proposed to the board policy manual so those are new but Gina they weren't they aren't in as red line so is it okay for us still to talk about those well frankly I'm a little confused because I thought the red lines from last time were adopted yeah they were I added two new red lines actually three red lines in two additions one deletion but those red lines didn't get into the agenda they are as red lines they are in as final document okay well that shouldn't be a problem as long as this is clear what the board is voting on okay the language you want in the document is in front of the board yes that it's not ambiguous then it's not a problem that it's not red line okay so those are the two things we talked about that at the last meeting right and so I brought him back as a proposal for us to discuss and see if we wanted to agree on that okay any other comments by the board on those two items so just a little clarification so that means on shall end their term ends on December 31 so they'd have to be reappointed is that I just want to be sure of that okay any other board members have a question would it be of any value to have some additional instruction in here that applications for reappointment shall happen in October or some other time frame so that come January we have a slate of possible candidates to select for reappointment or new appointment that'd be good to spell it out because then it answers board members questions when are you going to get this out when are we going to appoint some language you'd like me to have that would work oh I'd love having a stenographer having she that's a good idea having the board shall work with staff to describe committee appointment opportunities for publication in October is that an appropriate time frame two months ahead of time so that in January so in October so that candidates are available for January appointment and then the existing committee members would reapply at that same time that they wanted to continue sorry for publication in October so so that candidates wishing to apply or reapply so that candidates can be appointed in January appointed or reappointed okay how about the public Chris, Fester I just wanted to clarify something if I might when you were talking about the amount of the stipend and the amount that would save per year $6,000 would per year $6,000 did that take into account the fact that there are going to be twice as many meetings I wasn't clear on how that math worked yeah because we're getting if we get two hundred I mean two hundred dollars a month versus getting one hundred a month that is the difference oh I see person so you're saying that it would have at least $6,000 but now it won't well only if we go for it yeah so if I'm doing the math right you're going to be getting the same amount per month but you're going to be coming to twice as many meetings so it's going to be as much per meeting right it's at $100 a month and then we change it to happen so now we're having two meetings a month it'll keep it to be on par with this last year's budget versus it creating an increase an increase okay thank you I just wanted to make sure I understood and Nancy you had your hand oh thank you I wasn't I can hardly see yeah thank you Lois I'm Nancy Meesey Boulder Creek and I question the need or rationale for limiting any individual from serving on more than one committee if they're qualified and if the board chooses them I could also so I would think the board would want to leave that out well we actually had a lot of people applied to be on committees which really hasn't happened before and there's only so many we can deal with and feel like other people should have an opportunity that wants to be on a committee why do you limit yourself for a long period of time when maybe that won't be the case in two years like then we could change the policy I'm just saying maybe go ahead and select separate people beyond different committees instead of putting it into the policy manual to say that maybe in two years you don't get as many applicants maybe somebody wants to serve on multiple committees it's a limiting thing for you to well it was limiting before because they only had one person on committees and we're having we've got committees now that have three committee members publicly and we you know we have like five people apply and we didn't take them Mark I'm Mark Lee from Badlomen I kind of agree with the concept of having people serve on each committee separately because there's a lot of work that has to be digested and the way I'm looking at this is that citizens become specialists in the area that they're tackling for the district by spreading and being members in multiple districts you're really kind of lose your focus so I would agree that's a good policy I don't agree with having multiple members on multiple committees also before I question do we have an internet website here and a password Wi-Fi what is it Wi-Fi I have to go get it for you thank you I need it for the agenda item coming up I noticed that you said that one of the rationales for cutting the stipend was that you've asked staff to cut their program budget since that I haven't I've been out of town I haven't been to the last meeting is this something that was agendized in a previous meeting the board's instruction to the staff to cut and if not is that something that's on a future agenda I'm just wondering about the cuts that you asked staff to make okay when the three of us new board members when we ran for the board one of our things we said we were going to do was look at costs and try to cut costs where we can so so far we haven't had a meeting what we have a meeting tonight with the environmental committee and we're going to see some of the budget stuff but this will be the first time and we may not vote on anything tonight we might take to another meeting and if we want to cut some things and vote on them so the board has just clarified the board has not instructed staff to make cuts at this point no but they know that they need to be taking a hard look at their at their has the board communicated that formally to the staff is there been a board meeting with that happen we kind of talked about it but I yeah so I think the key thing to remember here on the on the board budget is that over the last two years formally the board so effectively really had two meetings a month just was more special meetings and regular meetings and what we decided to do at our last actually a couple of years ago I guess was go to two meetings a month with respect to anything that was discussed during the campaign very little has been formally put into place yet because we're December, January I think we're in our fourth meeting like fashion and certainly the budget discussion is going to be a big one coming up soon since we have to get our budget ready very quickly here certainly by mid-year at the latest so there will be a lot of things that are going to be discussed as part of that process and it will be fully gemdised and brought to the public as we're doing it and in committee we're certainly going to be looking a lot of the numbers as well I have two requests for board and panel changes updates one has to do with the Long Figo oversight committee going back to that on page 18 and I don't know which page 18 but the one I was looking at page 18 in the middle I think I would like you to strike when it describes the number of people on the committee it now says no more than five members that is not the definition of the merger document it says it shall consist of five members and I'd like that change to shall consist of five members and said no more than because that has been a problem in the past everybody find that? yes and then on page 19 this came up at the last Long Figo oversight and maybe Stephanie can address it I think we do have form 700 and we have since found out that that does not apply to public members only to elected people so that they're essentially telling the district to not get off and I think we need to re-describe that in the board menu I think it's been misunderstood the law on that it is not a big deal except that it is not required of members of the public but it's only for specific classes generally it's for elected people and staff members who have the authority to spend money so if I can read the paragraph it says committee members shall comply with the obligations and responsibilities of office including the obligation to comply with the disclosure requirements of the political reform act form 700 the reporting categories made applicable to the director the public the ventures shall apply to the members to the members of the committee members I see we've got a bad red line there too and conflicts as we know is the code of conduct but conflict of interest code yes so are you saying strike the entire paragraph public members it has to be excluded everyone else it still applies to including the conflict of entry yes so what we're working on the charter for the Long Pico oversight committee and included in the charter is an ethics policy that is adopted by the committee so it's not the form 700 requirement that we create our own ethics policy on conflict of interest and everyone has to agree to that and each committee could certainly write something up similar and it's a it's something just all charters have so it's not a hard thing it's boilerplate kind of item if you want to be sure that public members are have an ethics policy about conflict of interest then that would be a simpler way to do it to include it in a charter and then I just have one last comment on the limitation of two people can't apply from more than one committee at a time I do like the idea and I think what it's based on is that for instance if you're on the board here you can't be on the board board for the school district fire district it's already a law that you can't be on more than one board at a time and I think the reason for that is there could be a conflict and there could certainly be a problem with the Brown Act violation if somebody is on several committees and then talking to other people and so this just simplifies it and I think it's really clear and given that we have so many people I think it makes a lot of sense to support that well okay normally we only let you speak once but I'll go ahead Chris thank you I'm sorry I didn't identify myself last time Chris Vinnie Boulder Creek and Director Fultz mentioned agendizing something and so I had a question about that did we do number six on the agenda the report of actions taken in closed session did I miss that yeah she said that was right thank you okay just that was it I'm Gina Schroggen and I got to tell off before so anyway I just want to make a final comment that I agree in turning the agenda item for the policy of the segment to the budget committee but I'm also in support of keeping it at its current rate Gina I think we had a question here about the committee members obligations under 4700 and the conflict of interest code right so do we have a resolution yes go ahead but I just wanted to say this language in the board manual really won't have legal effect until and unless it gets put into the district conflict and interest code that gets put into the district in order to write that and I was in the board manual to be essentially inoperable so we're moving it for clarity is not a bad thing I hand things around and speaking to the fourth paragraph from the bottom, conflicts with an earlier edit that has been made. It says the committee chairperson shall record summary minutes of each committee meeting. We've already talked about the board secretary conducting that. So that entire three-line paragraph can be removed. The feeling is for committee member to be taking the minutes. Pay attention to what's going on. Yeah. If you need to find the place you want to go. It's 19. It's 30, 19, or 42. I think so. So the far left is the entire packet. That's the biggest, going to be the biggest number. Then each section, each little item, is numbered in the middle section. That's what those are. And then sometimes they have other numbers on their own. So it's 30 for them and 19. So we strike the committee chairperson. Yeah, right. And we add in district secretary. OK. OK. I've not made any edits regarding the stipends. I don't. That's going to go to the budget committee. OK. To summarize the changes then that we will have made, regardless of the start date, in terms of public members, the administrative budget, finance, engineering, environmental committee shall end on December 31st of each year. With the addition, the board shall work with staff to describe committee appointment opportunities for publication in October so that candidates can be appointed or reappointed in January. The change along PICO oversight committee shall consist of five public members and the district secretary shall record summary minutes for each committee meeting. And the paragraph starting with committee members shall comply with obligation responsibilities that whole paragraph is constricted. That is the sum total of the change. So can we make a motion? I think there are some additional members of the board. Oh, there are some on the ground. I'm sorry. I'm not a part of the line of sight. Yeah, I want to go back to that one entry saying that you allow no one to serve one more than as a standing member of, as a public member on two standing committees. I mean, this is totally just this ingenuous. You have somebody in mind for this. And you don't know that you're going to get more than three people to apply for the environmental committee. And if you don't, you're going to be eliminating one person to fill out the committee in the same form that you've allowed other committees to be formed. So if you don't want Jenny Gomez to be on any committee other than perhaps LADOC, because LADOC can barely get people to apply to it, then you should say so. But not try to do this in a manner that puts something in place so that when the time comes that she's applying for it, that she's automatic to reject it because of some clause in the board policy manual. It's an ugly way to do this stuff. And you have stuff on your website, Ms. Henry, saying that you're going to restore trust to the district. And this is not a trustworthy matter, the way in which they handle it. And you were really trustworthy. No, the personal attacks of members of the public are probably illegal under the First Amendment. So you should probably bring Gina in here if you're going to do that again. Who's back there? One in the back. Oh. Virgil from Virgil. That comment was completely disingenuous. And we all know what. Were you pleased? Don't be rude, don't be rude. Don't be rude. And I think more importantly, it's exactly stacking the committee with people that the board wants is something we need to avoid. And diversity, unlike a lot of people who only give it lip service, is a way to combat that. And I view this as increasing the potential for diversity amongst our committees. Thank you. Anybody else? I don't object to the idea of having one person only on one board. And the comments about specialization made sense. But just like in, say, affirmative action, you give preference. It seems to me you could certainly give preference to that policy without tying your hands. I don't understand the need for it. You can say our biases, we want to do that. Go ahead and do it. Nobody's going to argue with it. But if what Chuck said came up, then you don't have that situation. So it seems like a big fight about nothing. I don't quite get it. All right. I think there's a more comment. President? Yes. Yeah, I think the board really has to weigh the equity issues and also the efficiency of these committees. We're not talking about board members. We're talking about the committee. They are appointed by and decided on based on their background as president and their resume. There is no particular bias involved, in my opinion. You look at the resumes, you decide what is the best fit to fulfill the committee responsibility. Let's just try to keep it neutral and non-political, please. I think that's the way to be, to go forward in the future in a healthy manner. Thank you. Is that it for the public? OK. Is that a comment? Yeah, real quick. Part of this, you know, but as per our compensation before, I'm against, like I say, my position and I help you respect that position. So, and then part of the Jenny Gomez as serving, you know, personally, I would accept, you know, I would like her to actually rejoin the regardless on what position we take on if they serve on two committees or not. I would actually like to see her passed on the committee. But before, I was fighting for my constituents that wanted to ban, I'm glad to say, on the reason why I, you know, I posted those things on things. And I have the freedom to do that. And I hope you appreciate that. Thank you. Maybe modify that one line so that it says, rather than members of the public shall serve on no more than, that we'd instead, the board shall have a preference for not, where I had that in mind. Oh, give me your right mind. You can read my mind. No. To go along with this gentleman's suggestion that the board shall have a preference that individuals not serve on multiple committees, but it qualified may. Just on the idea that, you know, that the issue of specialization, the issue of brand that compliance should all be taken into consideration, but should there come a circumstance where there are qualified candidates in few member and need for public committee members, then we have that option. I'm good with that, as it is. But I want to forward the rest of the board and pass the vote now. I'm good with it the way it stands, OK? OK. Do we have a motion? I would move adoption of, I'll get to it, 700 Water District Resolution Number 27, 1819. Approval of board policy manual 2019 with the changes that we have described. Jump second. Second. The following could you call for the vote? Yes. Director Swann? Yes. President Henry? Aye. Director Smallman? Aye. Director Fultz? Yes. Director Bruce? Yes. OK, so I've done with the whole business. The next business is SLBWD and Scott Scali Water District Joint Board Retreat. And it would be hosted by the boards of SLB and Scott's Valley and include the San Margarita Groundwater Agency. How are we? Chair, since this item thing in the agenda, I've had conversation with the general manager of Scott's Valley Water and the items kind of changed a little bit. Scott's Valley, as of just today, has made the offer that Scott's Valley Water would like to host this meeting at their expense and limited to the directors and management staff of the San Margarita Valley Water District and their directors and management staff and not include the entire the Sigma Board. They made a couple changes on their request. Obviously, it was too late to get it in the agenda. So it would be paid for and hosted 100% by Scott's Valley Water. It would be the two boards and the management team. It is a six-hour retreat, three hours, and then lunch, and then another three hours. So this is a time commitment. Is there a date? They, well, we did kick a couple dates around. Let's see the rate of down. 28, instead of the Sigma meeting that didn't have enough. I did write it down. Come on, I thought it is. But they did have a couple proposed dates, and they don't have them in front of them. Well, it did mention in your specific 28, which is the 30th day on this thing. 30th. Oh, we started that. So at that, and that's the same day as the Santa Margarita Brown Water Agency? No, I think it was different. OK, there's two dates at the, no? Yeah, OK, March 25th is a Monday, and March 27th is a Wednesday. I'd just like to put in a request that this occurs on the weekend, and if not, that it gets videotaped and the people that can come. March 25th and 27th. That's what I have here, three hours, and then lunch, and then another three hours. It'll be a six-hour total commitment, March 25th, and March 27th. I think people, if it's a retreat, they prefer to have a retreat on a weekend. It's own. I don't know. It's very interesting that now it's free for us, right? That's correct. And the generosity of the Scotts Valley Water District. That's correct. Very, very moving. What is the agenda? What is the objective? What's the goals? Six hours during a workday. And anything that's been proposed so far is a workday for, I think, most of us. And I'm not sure I understand. I mean, I went through the presentation. It was like, group's bad, team's good. OK? Correct. Team building the work together as segue into SIGMA to work together as a team. To get to know one another. The districts in the past, we used to have an annual dinner with the two boards to try to open communications. And this will further do that. It's work as a team to get familiarity with each other, the board members, and spend some time. And then this facilitator will be there. Six hours, though. It is a commitment. We'll meet somebody in six hours. I like him after 01 and he'll be tired of it. Because facilitators are going to be there? That's correct. Dave? I'm not sure. No, I don't think it's Dave. I don't think it's Dave. Oh, so it's the city's facilitator. I'll get more information on it. But there'll be a facilitator there. It's an actual program. Yeah, it's a full-on program. Is it just the presentation that is attaching? I'm pretty sure that's what it is, yes. That's what it is for six hours. The facilitators are a player. Two people that come in and give this program. Oh, and trying to get us to work as a team. A group of them. So I mean, I'll look at what Will said, at least from my perspective, during the weekday, six hours. Weekend, we certainly could look at it. Or why don't we just start out small and maybe just do a dinner? I mean, that makes no sense. Open bar, I mean. They're paying for it. I didn't know about that. No, open bar. I can definitely take back, you know, cheap career. That's my opinion. The Scotts Valley board is very interested in meeting and working with the Santa Rosa Valley board. And they're working together as a team. Because we do have a common problem. I think it was a good idea to get together. That we're going to try to solve as a group. So when I'm hearing it right, we prefer a weekend. We're interested, but prefer a weekend. Saturday. I would like to start just for the day. Here you are. Start just for the day. I mean, that's a great idea, Rick. If they used to do, I think that would make some sense. But I think it has to be noticed as a club of media. Yeah, it's has to be in one of our districts. And noticed as public media. Does that mean anybody that shows up, Scotts Valley is going to pay for dinner? I don't think so. Haven't in the past. I was wondering the same thing. I was going to say, come on down. Start with dinner. And see if we can cut the time limit in half. Yeah, I mean, it started 6 and then 9 or something like that. And no bar. Solid bar. All right, sounds good. I'll take that back. OK, so that's back. Public comment? OK. Anybody want to end the public comment on us? Partying? Debbie? Yeah. I think it's a great idea for agenda 2. And I agree the 6 hour commitment seems like a pretty heavy start off. But in the end of your agenda, our is an attachment that has a lot of education and training for board members from CSDA, I believe it is. And those look really good. And I'm sorry, that's not an agenda item because I'd love for you guys to get committed to something like that. That's hands-on training on how to be a board member and all the things that you're facing here and budgets and infrastructure and everything is covered under that kind of training. And if the district's going to commit time to something for first thing like that, that's a great comment. That's both good. Any other comments? So we're going to move on to the SLVWD water supply outlook and environmental department workshop. And by the way, board members, you do not have to wait until the end of the presentation to ask questions. I am not. Would you like to introduce your presentation? Yes, please. I am just having a little, I came in here early, so I wouldn't have technical difficulty, and now I'm having technical difficulties. We created a set of funny laptops with an apple. You don't like those? Grace, could you get one of the lights? Hang on, hang on, hang on. It's OK, it's OK, I didn't have to. I should have the lights on. I've already done it. Two lights? No, I'm coming up. So I'm so sorry, but it'll just take me a second. I have to. I'm not sure why. Maybe it'll be pretty quick. I'm not. It logged off, I don't know why. She's the wife I never worked with again. Yeah, she was again. I did. Just give me a second. Apple hate system. Apple hate system. I've never had this problem before. And of course, I've been sitting here for an hour and thinking it's going to be fine. Of all the things that can happen during a demo. Only one of them is good. Only one of them is good. So just do the first call on screen. OK. You're not choosing one or what? I'm just giving me a second. OK. Just give me a second. I'm rebooting my computer because. I'm so sorry. Great photos. Beautiful photos. I don't know why. This has to happen. Let's just stand up. I've never seen one that goes right. I even came in so early so I can make sure I was working fine at 4.30. That was the damage of something. They always go at something. But the picture is a little high. Aren't they? This is a little high. Yeah, this is a little high. This is very high. Well, I'll start just while I'm rebooting here. You all have had plenty of time to see those little blue and green cards that were on your chairs. There are pencils over on the table if you don't have one. The blue card is for the first half of my presentation, which is going to be on water supply. The green card is for the second half of the presentation, which is on the environmental department. Update. And so if you could, after the presentations are over, you can please answer those questions. If you have any other questions or comments that come up while I'm doing the presentation, please write them on the back. I do want to get your comments and thoughts after the presentation is over. If we don't have time to get everyone, or if you think of something and then you maybe don't think of it while it's during the question time. So I have also printed out copies of this, but Margaret likes to call the spreadsheet of special magnificence, which is a matrix of all the activities that are going on in the department, in the environmental department. And those are, and so these are mostly sort of generally in the same, it should flow with the presentation for the most part, so you can kind of refer back to that. And then. Zero, six, eight, three. Six. And voilà. Great. OK. So we'll get started. So this is going to be quite a long presentation. I do have stop, natural stopping points, through the presentation, where I'll be asking for questions. And if it's OK with you, Chair, if we can hold the questions until we get to the end of each section, there's many sections that I've kind of broken it up, so people will have a chance to hear the whole presentation for that section, and then they can ask questions about that if that's OK with you, content-driven. OK. So we're going to start with long-range water supply planning, and we'll talk about regulatory compliance and how our long-range water supply planning is the framework for that. Regulatory framework for that. We'll talk about the water conservation that comes out of the regulatory requirements from the state and what we're doing in our water conservation efforts. We'll talk about the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and briefly about the Sustainable Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency. And then we'll talk about conjunctive use planning and implementation. And then for the second half of the presentation, we'll talk about the environmental department, the stewardship efforts that we have, capital improvement, permitting, land use, land management, and environmental stewardship, disaster planning and response, and then we are also responsible for all the communications and public engagement and the stewardship activities of the financial resources, so grant funding and administration that we are doing and networking and getting more work done through partnerships and collaborations that we could do than we could do just if we were doing it on our own. So we'll get started with the water supply planning section. And I'm going to start with an introduction to the geology of the water system, talk about water supply challenges. Again, the regulatory framework. And then we've been doing a streamflow and temperature study for the last few years. And also, I'll kind of summarize that and what we've learned from that study. And then now we're moving into a conjunctive use planning effort. So and then we'll talk about the next steps. Sorry, just to use, that means sharing water amongst all the various systems in our network. Yes. And so we'll talk more detail about that when we get there. So the San Lorenzo Valley, where are we? Here we are. Sorry. Here we are. The San Lorenzo Valley is a really unique area because we have a very complex geology. We have a granite. On Ben-Loman Mountain, we have karst in the south. And then we have a granite geology towards the north part of the Ben-Loman mountain, which you can see here in yellow. Over here, actually, in the purple is the schist. So where are we? I'm going to look at it. Reorient. Yeah, please, Vanna. Here's Felton. And here's the Ben-Loman Fault. And this is where the San Lorenzo River runs. And then over here on this yellow side is the Scotts Valley area. And you can see a lot of sandstone from the Santa Margarita outcropping here and here. And then over here on the west side of the valley, we have more of a granite. This gray area is more granitic. And we have schist and marble, which is more the karst feature. So it's a really complex geology. And it changes from one mile to the next as you move through the valley. Most areas will just have a very homogenous geology with a luvial plain or something. So you're not having all of this very complex geology. Because we have this very complex geology, we also have a very complex water system. And so this is a flowchart which nobody could ever understand. But I only put it up there to kind of demonstrate the complexity of our water system. We have, and I'll just briefly talk you through it, but this area here is for Felton. And the Felton system is a standalone system. They're operating from surface water only. This up here demonstrates the north system. And that area includes all the way from north of Boulder Creek all the way down to Bed-Lomond. And that system is operating in the winter on surface water flows and in the summer on groundwater flows. So that's what we call conjunctive use. And we've been doing that since 77, I believe. And it's really been beneficial to maintaining our water supply in the groundwater wells for that system. Lompeco is now part of the north system. So they're being served by the north system. We have a water right to Loughlomond, which is demonstrated up there, but it's not being used. And then down here, we have the south system, which is the Paso Tiempo Wells. And you'll find those down near the probation center off of Graham Hill Road. And so we serve an area of Scotts Valley right along Mount Herman Road, all the businesses and houses that are on the west side of Mount Herman Road. So all the way back to Graham Hill Road, our service area, covers all of that area. So these three systems are really operating separately from each other. And they all have separate water supply sources as well. So we have to look at all of these systems and try to manage the water sustainably. So system-wide, about 50% of our water use comes from groundwater. 50% of the water comes from surface water. That's not exactly that much every year. We're really rainfall dependent. So if we have a really heavy rainfall year, we'll get a lot more surface water that year, and less groundwater. We'll use less groundwater. If we have a period of drought, our streams are really flowing low, have low stream flow, and it's not adequate to serve our whole north system, then we'll use more groundwater that year. So it's really dependent on the north system because of the conjunctive use. But in general, you can kind of ballpark it and say, it's about 50-50 in a normal year. So I may have already said some of this. So it's really a benefit for us to have such a diversified water portfolio, to have these surface water sources. We're really fortunate to have those surface water sources and to have groundwater sources so that we can balance those sources. One of the great things about serving this community is that people in this community already are very water conscious. We have about 43 gallons per capita per day, which is extremely low on a statewide standard. And California is much lower than most other states in the country. So we have a lot of water supply challenges, though. We're not totally in the clear. We do have a nice diversified water portfolio, but there's a lot we can do to make our system a lot more resilient for the next long drought period that we will certainly experience. And so now, this year, we're having a lot of rain, which is great. We're right around average for an average rainfall. And so that's great. It gives us a little more time to kind of get our ducks in a row and get ready for the next period of drought that may start any time. We just don't know when. So we've got to get ready on it. So there's a recently, over the last over the years, we have been seeing an increased variability in precipitation and stream flow. And our groundwater supplies in the south system are overdrafted. And I think everyone here knows that. And our groundwater supplies in the north system, while they are in sustainability during long periods of drought, during 2015, those wells were strained to meet the demand of the north system. It was to the point where we were just barely able to get enough water into the storage tanks so that when the weekend was over that there would be just the tanks were nearly empty. So it was like we were pretty hard on the edge during the drought because those and those groundwater wells were pumping constantly. Our surface water sources had almost completely dried up to the point where our treatment plant was having to be operated manually. And our groundwater wells were just barely maintaining the supply that we needed to be able to serve our customers during the late summer period. So it was kind of eye-opening for the district. And so we started looking at how we can improve our sustainability on our water sources. The Felton system, as many people know, has been out of compliance on its water right since long before it came to the San Lorenzo Valley Water District. That water right is tied to the San Lorenzo River. And when the river gets to a certain flow regime in October and November, and the water right specifies exactly how much CFS is in the river, and if it drops below that CFS, which is a cubic foot per second, then our water right says we don't have the right to take any water from Fall Creek. And Fall Creek is the main water source for the town of Felton. So if we were to obey that water right, then water would be turned off in Felton. So obviously, that's not an option. So we need to figure out how we can come into compliance on that water source in Felton. And then we have a lot of deferred maintenance that's been becoming more and more of an issue with leaky pipes and a lot of leaky tanks. And we have undersized pipelines for fire flow. And we have undersized pipelines to resolve all of our water supply challenges if we were just to try to move water around through conjunctive use from the NOR system to alleviate Fall Creek. It's not so simple. Everything is very complex. And the more you look into it, it gets more and more complex. So some of our water supply challenges. Another big problem for us or could be a big problem for us is if we have a catastrophic fire in the San Lorenzo Valley, if it burns Ben Lohman Mountain, that will impact our water supply, our surface water supply for a long period of time. It could be years. So we need to prepare for that. And we need to have fire personnel familiar with our lands, touring them annually. Fire personnel change. So we're working on a fire management plan now. But we are at risk for our surface water supplies in case of fire. And we also have an increased frequency of flooding events. In 2017 was one of the highest stream flow or precipitation on record. And the district experienced significant damage during that year. And you can see right here is our lion tank. I think it's a 3 million gallon tank. And so there was a massive slide at the lion tank just below the lion tank. And it took out the road. And so the field crew were having to manually carry the supplies up the hill to get to the treatment plant. And we haven't figured this one out yet. This one's still a problem. We're working on the engineering. It's a tricky one. So being prepared for these kinds of emergencies. And then also we have to respond to these kinds of emergencies, which takes a lot more staff time away from the regular duties. Just responding and working with FEMA and trying to get reimbursement. So we don't have to pay for all of it ourselves and trying to keep the costs down for the customers. That's really important to us. And we've been doing that. So here's a picture of the variability of our precipitation. And you can see how it goes off the charts high and then down low. And about 100,000 acre feet per year right here is about average. So you can see it's always either way below average or way above average. And so these present challenges for us on managing our water supply. This is a graphic image for you to see how the Pasatimpa well has performed over the lifetime of the well. So it started up here really high. And initially it just dropped off really precipitously. This line right here represents the screens in the well. I was going to bring a screen to show you. When the water drops in the screen below, when the water in the well drops below the screen, it starts to rust and oxidize the screen. And then you have problems getting the water to come into the well. So you have infrastructure problems. So not only is this showing that the groundwater has been overdrafted significantly, it also is causing problems with our infrastructure. Is that the one that's being replaced? Yeah, it is. Actually, that one, it's on the last chapter of being replaced. So Paso 8 is replacing that one? That's right. And the other one, I think, is Paso 6. Was that one rehabbed? No, I don't know. They're not watching. OK, this is the Olympia well field. And this also just shows that the water level is below the screen there. But I didn't find a good graph that demonstrates that the Olympia well field is actually kind of in sustainability for groundwater in order to be in sustainability. Ideally, you would have an average rainfall year annually, and it would be spread out through the year. You would pump the water down in the summer. And then in the winter, it would rain. And it would just refill the aquifer. And then you would pump it down in the summer, and it would refill. And so annually, you would have sort of this up and down of the water level. And that would be in sustainability. And when we have these catastrophic rain events, a lot of that water ends up running off into the river. And it's not able to soak in. When you have all this rain happen in a narrow period of time, we're losing a lot of recharge. So we're not getting that water level to come back up in the winters. And when we have, obviously, no rainfall in the same problem. So it does tend to start going down. But we've been operating the Olympia well field for a long time in sustainability. And it's looking good, except for the storage capacity as a problem and getting enough water out of those wells to serve the community. So I think I'll probably cover this a little bit later. But I did mention already that Fall Creek is out of compliance in October, November. And the Norse system really has not enough unused potential from the diversions. So it has no unused potential from the diversions, which means our surface water diversions are fully used. We treat the water. We just supply it to the Norse system. And especially in the summertime, we use it all for the Norse system. In the winter, there's some excess flow. And then there's some playroom there, some leeway with the surface water. In the winter, when there's more surface in a wet year, and we can treat that water and then move it through the pipeline, then there's some percentage that we can alleviate. Anyway, conjunctive use can work. But it's not enough to really get Fall Creek out in compliance. So I think the point here is that using water conjunctively and taking water from the Norse system is not enough to get felten into compliance. So we need something else. In addition to or instead of? Is that your tank? Are you in the cell system? Well, we have one above. Oh, OK. It looks like that. All right, so deferred maintenance. I think I jumped ahead a little bit earlier, but we have insufficient storage during severe drought. We have compliance issues overdrafted. We already went through these. So now we're going to start with a regulatory framework. During the drought in 2015, the state of California started rolling out a California Water Action Plan. And in 2016, there was an executive order that basically directed water suppliers that they would have to implement these water supply plans. And then we also have the urban water management plan and the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. And then we have some bypass flows issues that are coming up on Fall Creek as well. So I just wanted to give you an outline there. We'll talk more about the framework. So there's four sections of the California Water Action Plan, making conservation a California way of life. It's what their slogan is, using water more wisely, eliminating water use, water waste, strengthening local drought resistance, and improved agriculture use. I'm not going to go over the agricultural aspect, because it doesn't really apply to us. But what it means for us would mean that we'll have to update our water shortage emergency ordinance. Our current ordinance has a lot of, like, in stage two, you're not allowed to wash your car without a shutoff valve or you're not allowed to spray your sidewalks off in these kinds of, during certain stage of emergency, there's these water waste restrictions. But this new state requirement will say that those identified in our different stages will have to become permanent prohibitions. For the district, we'll have to make our own ordinance that says you're not allowed to do these things ever. And then there'll be additional regulatory requirements with the drought, with the different stages. I'm not sure exactly what that will look like yet, but we will have to change our ordinance. So currently we are meeting our water use targets that we had identified in the 2015 Urban Water Management Plan. And there will be a new water use target methodology for the 2020, which hasn't been developed yet or the guidelines haven't been published yet. But there will be a new methodology for that. And we will need, we are already now reporting water use and amount of water conservation achieved and any enforcement efforts. So that's something that already rolled out and we're already doing that. So water suppliers will have to complete a validated water audit, water loss audit annually, which we're doing now. We've done for the last two years. And the state should be having some funding programs for water saving devices and technologies. So there might be some opportunities for us to get the state to pay for rebate programs to put out to the customers. Excuse me, the water loss audit, is that the loss that, for example, the supplier is losing in their own? Yes. Leaky tanks. Exactly, leaky tanks and pipes. Yes. Can we get money for that? Maybe. I haven't seen that yet. For the water conservation in individual homes, it's important. But the big kicker, losing 20% to 25% of our water production to leaks, which I think is what I've heard before, 17%, whatever it is. It's not quite that much. But whatever it is, we're going to get it picking. So we're going to get more money for that. I think there is going to be funding coming out for water districts like ours to get help with infrastructure improvements. I was talking to the foundation of Santa Cruz County recently, and they were saying that that's that they're expecting that to come out pretty soon. And that might be an opportunity for us, which I'll get into later to look into the integrated regional water management effort. And I'll be updating that plan soon. Do you know off the top of your head when that's happening? Well, there's not a big update that's coming right now. It's a fairly small update just to bring in the compliance of the current regulations. We are soliciting projects, so we can add additional projects to that plan almost at a time. Cool. OK, so the next part of the state's California Water Action Plan is strengthening local drought resilience. Sorry, what does that mean? It means we need to make ourselves more drought resilient. What does that mean? In short, it's storage. What does that mean? I will get to that. That's what I really wanted to know. I'm seeing all this. We're working towards that, and I think I'll answer your question soon. Is it taking people's water consumption down to 20 gallons a day? I don't think so. I think it's more supplier-oriented. I don't think so. We're doing really good with our water conservation. I don't think it's going to be getting the customers to conserve much more than they're already doing. Hey, we need to get to 50, which means we need to start selling more water. We'll have to do a drought risk assessment every five years, and we'll have to do an annual water budget forecast. These will have to be reported in our urban water management plan, which will be due in 2021. And if we're not in compliance, then that means that we will not be eligible for grant funding for infrastructure, for water conservation, for... Can we get funding for staffing to support all this regulatory stuff? I don't think that's one of them. Our recent water leak, which will come out next, which you guys will get, we had a little water leak report. And it'll be on the agenda in March, or is it second February? Second one in February. We had 40 leaks, and it was 120 gallons per minute system-wide. And that was 206 acre feet. So we made a fun graphic to show what six acre feet would look like about the height of a redwood tree across the entire SLV high school football field. These are 100% of the leaks in our system. That's what it's found. Oh, so there's more of them. This was the leak detection that we did, the subsoil leak protection that we have professionals come in that weren't surfacing. They were found underground. We fixed a lot more leaks than that. Does that report the next four weeks? Yeah, which we'll get coming up when we get into the operations presentation. We can stop overdressing a lot just by fixing the leaks. Just by fixing the leaks. So this is a timeline, just kind of, you don't have to see too much about this. But it just kind of shows you that there's going to be quite a few more rules coming out by mid-2020. Unfunded mandates. I mean, I hope CSDA is basically the same guys. You've got all these mandates coming. Start funding them. And they need to make them at a shadow at the top of their lungs. Yeah. And Mr. Stone needs to help us with this as well. All right, so urban water management plans. I just wanted to mention that an urban water supplier is a supplier, either publicly or privately owned, serving more than 3,000 customers. San Lorenzo Valley Water District supplies 7,900 customers. So we are an urban water manager supplier. Do you have a density requirement on this? I mean, come on. 3,000 subscribers in California is different than 3,000 subscribers in California. I don't make the rules. I'm just delivering the message. OK. Urban. Yeah, we're not urban, but we are an urban water supplier. These are some of the demand management measures that we are currently doing. This is a whole list of all of the demand measures. So in the urban water management plan, it has a whole section dedicated to demand management measures, which is how we can get our water supply or water consumption down. And so we are doing all of these things, and these aren't all in my department, but throughout the departments. With the ordinance, we did a water waste ordinance. We are replacing meters. All of our customers are metered, and we are replacing those meters. We changed the rate to promote conservation. We have annual water quality reports. We have monthly billing cycle. I'm not going to explain through these pretty quickly. We're going to be updating our website, hopefully getting more conservation information out through that social media. We do Water Conservation Coalition of Santa Cruz County, which is a wonderful opportunity for us to really pool resources with all the purveyors. We'll talk more about that later. We're at 43 gallons per capita. What is the goal for conservation? At what point do we continue to squeeze people down? What is the end goal that we're going to get to? I think we just want to maintain people to understand where we are, and maintain the conservation where we're at. I don't think we're trying to squeeze people down any further at this point. So we're kind of good with that. We've been doing direct mailers, advertising, and local papers. We have booths at many events throughout the district and in other areas. We are quantifying non-revenue water losses and system of the leak detection that we talked about. We're replacing faulty water meters, and now we're doing a, when customers have a high use, and we all investigated, and we'll work with the customers to try to help them get their water use down, and we'll even go and do a water audit on their property to see if they have a leak. We're at 43 gallons per, if we have another graph, we could replace a 20% reduction as required by law. It would be very much dependent on the drop. I can't really say. Or would it be based on a earlier baseline? It was the last of 2013. That's what it was last time. The new, there's this. Could they change that to make it baseline as it's 20%? So what it said was in 2020 at the urban water management plan that we would have to, that they were going to roll out a new methodology for having a much more, instead of just saying 20% from 2013 and having that blanket across the state, this new methodology is going to be more site specific to allow water agencies to really work with their own numbers and actually come up with a number that makes sense for us instead of just doing the same thing as everyone in the state. So that's what they're doing at the state. So we do the watershed education. Oh, and then, so this is the schools in the public education we're doing a lot of, or not a lot, but we do some outreach there. We do the majority of our school working with our schools is through the watershed education grants. So most of our, we're not working with the schools on a regular basis. We do go and do presentations occasionally, but most of our water conservation and watershed education through the schools is done through our grant program. We also participate with the Water Conservation Coalition and we have a couple of partnerships that we work with the Green Gardener and the Cabrera College to fund gray water workshops and remove your lawn kind of workshops and other ways to get water conservation. Do any of those programs co-sponsored by the county? Yes. Scott's Valley? They're all co-sponsored through the Water Conservation Coalition which is all the water purveyors in Santa Cruz County. And so we're all putting in relative to the number of connections that we have. We put in funds. We're not matching funds. It's prorated based on the number of customers you have. Exactly. That's how we're doing it, based on the number of customers. So the city puts in a lot more than we do because they have a lot more customers, connections. All right, I kind of want to get through this because we're getting 30 minutes, not too bad. Okay, it feels like longer. We have our rebate program. We have our water survey that I just mentioned and we have water conservation devices that we give out like hose nozzles and sink aerators and shower aerators and things like that. So I was asked to give some numbers. Our water conservation program budget, I estimate this year will be looking like about $30,000 in total, $15,000 for the rebate program, $9,000 for the conservation outreach. The Water Conservation Coalition last year was $5,500, we haven't done the budget yet for this year so I'm not sure what that will look like. And we have the water audit program which is in-house and the conservation education in schools, which is also in-house. So we don't have to pay anything. Just our time, yeah. All right. So moving on, we'll talk briefly about the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. I'm gonna have a stopping point just in a couple more slides for questions. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, we have so much going on with the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency and we have meetings every month and we are doing this series called Understanding Our Water and I think most of you are going to those but if you haven't been, there's another one coming up this weekend and it's not gonna be the same content as last time. It'll be from nine to one at the Felton Community Hall and then there'll be another one, a third one in March. And they're all building on each other so it's not that you're missing, it's not that you can't understand where. Anyway, you should just come. So the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act gives authorities to local agencies to form a Groundwater Sustainability Agency and so we did that and we formed the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency which is a partnership, a joint powers of authority between the County of Santa Cruz, Scott's Valley Water District, Santa Lorenza Valley Water District are all the member agencies and then there's a second tier with the City of Santa Cruz, the Mount Herman and the City of Scott's Valley and the private well owners. We're working towards writing a Sustainable Groundwater Management Plan which will be submitted by 2022. So we have a couple more years but we have a lot of work to do and so we're moving forward with that at a pretty quick pace. It was formed at the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency was formed in 2017 and in 2018 we put together all of the administrative documents and kind of put all of the legal portions of it together and just at the end of last year we finished the existing Groundwater Model Evaluation which is where we're really starting to look at the hydrology of the region and we had it evaluated and there were some recommendations for how that model needs to be improved in order to look at all the priorities that we've identified or that the agency has identified to come to sustainability. We haven't, not we, but the agency hasn't really defined what sustainability looks like or what it will be because that's something in the state law that says it's up to each community to define sustainability for yourself and so that hasn't happened yet so there's still a lot of opportunity to participate with that agency and be heard as far as what your feelings or what you think sustainability should look like. And 20, like right now we're working or the agency is working on hiring a new consultant to modify the existing model, Groundwater Model and write the plan and so that will be the next phase that we'll be moving into this year. So far we're engaging the public, we've had really good turnout at the first workshop and we're trying to get public input and really try to engage the public with that process. So the total cost to develop the Groundwater Sustainability Plan will be $2 million, one million of that's been grant funded and then we've broken it up that San Lorenzo Valley would pay 30%, Scotts Valley will pay 60% and the county will pay 10%. And so the total cost to develop a plan for the San Lorenzo Valley is $300,000 for us, for the whole plan and that will be broken up over the years until 2022. So that's not a one-time payment. Okay. On the famous side of that, is that the agency itself has the ability to create new webby fees? Is that where this money is going to come from? That has not been decided. This comes out of SVE. We'll see you at the 300,000. Are there any other questions? South as well zoning. So no conjunctive use between surface water and wells. Correct. Or excuse me, South as, does that, South, does there, is there a type of groundwell road that feeds on surface water? Well, can't. Thought there was for emergencies. Right. I'm talking about just regular, self-districted, no one. For emergencies. So there is a pipeline. Yeah, I get that. I understand that. We're moving in that direction with great authority requirements to make that pipeline be able to be utilized. Yeah, we'll talk more about that. That's actually a question because right now, my understanding is that state waterways basically could hit it down. No, from Felton, yes, but not from Boulder Creek. So we can ship water out of Boulder Creek under our waterways anywhere we want. That's correct. Well. Though we don't have capacity, right? Right. Is, and then Felton is surface only and north is surface and ground. What's the split in north between ground and surface? It's about 50-50. Okay, so basically everything's roughly, so 50 and sad, but it's not, maybe that's good. Approximately. It depends, it's very dependent on the year, right? I understand that. 43 gallons per day, is that common through all three systems? Or is one system more? No, that's an average on the whole system. Do we have to break down by system? We do, but I don't have that for you right now. You can go almost for your devil in the Scotts Valley area from the north system. You look at the topography and the sandy soils and the lawns. The lawns. There are a lot greater users in the south system. Okay. When we say overdraft the Fall Creek, we mean more in violation of our water grain. Yeah, I didn't mean to say overdraft on Fall Creek. Yes. There. Well, there's a lot of good stuff here and I wish we'd had it a little earlier so we can have more questions. I'm not done yet. We will have more, there's more. But wait, there's more. But wait. I'm going to try to, yes. Go away. So, we need to start using hot glue. It seems pretty obvious to me. No question. And I've actually talked to Rick about this. He thinks it wouldn't be that difficult so I don't know why we aren't going in that one. I think we should. We should. We will be. I think the money is what's going to be the biggest hurdle in the lock-loom. Lock-loom money is our only, is our only other water source that's available. It's a contractual right. Right. 300 plus, a little better than 300 plus acre-feet a year. So probably get into that. I'm going to get into that. Into that slide what's available at lock-loom. Including what it would cost us to purchase it. I don't, oh, no. We're just lock-looming to it. No way of contracting it. We're going to have 13 acre-feet a year. Yeah, we have, there's a price for raw water and it's negotiated price with the city of Santa Cruz way back. For treated water. For raw water. Raw water. We do not have a negotiated price for treated water. And the water needs to be piped to the curvy. Well it needs to be treated. Yes, it's got to be treated. We're going to talk about all that. Okay. Are you ready to move on? Okay. Anything else? Okay. Yes. You briefly talked about groundwater recharge but it sounds like it was more of a passive rainwater drainage. Do we have any specific plans to be more active with groundwater recharge? I'll talk about that. Okay, great. Okay. So I'm just going to briefly, and I'm not going to briefly. Nothing is really brief. It's infinite complexity. So we'll talk about the, oh, I first wanted to mention, I think now's a good time to mention that we have a memorandum of understanding with the county, the city of Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley Water Department to explore conjunctive use and to manage our water resources sustainably. And this was, and then we'll talk about the streamflow and temp study that we've been undergoing for the last five years. And then we'll talk about conjunctive, we'll go into more detail on conjunctive use. So the agreement is available on our website, the memorandum of agreement. It's under a water supply and the public documents, it's buried. But hopefully when we redo our website things will be easier to find. I just put a couple of the bullets here so you could just see, get a flavor of what that agreement looks like. But it basically says that we're going to be working together on a plan to look at conjunctive use and to improve sustainability of water resources in our whole Santa Margarita region. So that's all I'm gonna say about that. I just wanted to mention that that's out there and it's available on our website and you guys can look into it. The same as Aquifire Storage in your interpretation. Yeah, so banking it would be pumping it into the ground and storing it like a bank and then using it in the summer when it's dry. We have a good ground storage. Right, exactly. Limited, yeah. Okay, so in 2014, we began a study on stream flow, temperature and related observations in the San Lorenzo Valley Water District, surface water sources of community water supply. Can I briefly mention that you didn't exactly volunteer to do this? No, I'm gonna get there. We were followed and told. Yeah, so in 2014, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries Service were concerned about the San Lorenzo Valley Water District's diversions and their impact on fish habitat. And so we were told that we need to look more closely at that. And so... And they funded it. And so we entered into a contract with the Balanced Hydrologics to initiate a comprehensive study to quantify stream impacts of surface diversions on stream flow and temperature in the main stem of the San Lorenzo River. And if we didn't do it, what was the end of what? The state was off land. I believe that the or what would be that we would have to do a habitat conservation plan which would have cost a lot and been years of agony. Do we know that? I wasn't there actually for that. Do you know what that or what was? Well, I'm from the state right now. There's a lot of background to why it even came up. It came up with the consolidation of Olympia Mutual through the Environmental Impact Report study. Several of the fishery agencies commented on the district's water use and sent us a letter and said it's time that you either do your habitat conservation plan or they're going to start looking at enforcement for bypass ports and we need to establish those. So it was either you need to do something to show your water use or we're going to tell you what to do. So it was kind of we went along picking and screaming but said we would do it. Even though we're 43 gallons per day? We weren't then. No, we weren't then. Santa Cruz was already going through the same exercise with the North Coast. Then they started looking at Santa Rosa Valley as the next bigger and the biggest user in Santa Rosa River Watershed. So they really didn't have any really good idea of how much water we were using, how much water we were bypassing, or what effects it had on the tributaries and the Santa Rosa. So that's how it started. To gather information. That's what we've been doing, gathering information. Right, and we'll talk about the findings. So we were monitoring one of the cool things that happened that we didn't know was going to happen, but we ended up monitoring during 2014 and 15 one of the driest periods on record and 2017 one of the wettest periods on record. And then 2016 and last year 2017 were pretty average years. So we got a really nice variety or variability in stream flow and able to really monitor that and see what that looks like and what does that mean for our water system and our watershed as a whole and how does it work. So initially we installed 12 gauges in 2013 and 14. I'll describe those a little more detail in a second. In 2015 we discontinued three Clear Creek stations and replaced them with real-time stations, which means you can go online and see what the bypass flow is at any time. We are required to have a 30 gallons per minute bypass flow. We have a contractual easement with a homeowner to bypass 30 gallons a minute at all times on record. And the reason we put a continuous monitor engaged in there because it was almost daily that we'd have to go up and measure the flow because the homeowner called us and said I'm not getting my 30 gallons a minute we'd have to go up and measure bucket stopwatch type thing. So we finally put in the technologies change the communications was much better up in the Clear Creek canyon so we put a continuous monitor engaged so that equipment saved a lot of hours of staff time by not having to go up there and maintain that 30 gallons a minute flow. We could do it all by computer. And then in 2017 during the flood the Foreman Creek gauge was buried in boulders and so we moved it upstream Highway 236 so that just changed the location. We installed a real-time gauge on Fall Creek diversion and that reports to the SCADA system so we can watch that at all times we can keep an eye on that and we had been doing daily monitoring of that as well before. When we took over Fall Creek from from Kal-An that equipment was already in and it was damaged two years ago in the flooding so that was an actual female replacement paid to replace the equipment on Fall Creek but we're required to monitor Fall Creek continuous because of the bypass flows. Fall Creek is our one stream that we have that really produces some water and we do have significant bypass does have fish in it that we monitor closely. So currently or up until recently we had 10 operable gauges on nine creeks plus plus we monitor the USGS gauge at Big Trees which is really the primary one that most people use in the area. Okay so this is maybe too much information I'm going to go with the map just make it easier and more fun to look at. So you can see up here in Boulder Creek what we were doing was up off of Boulder Creek we have multiple diversions and we were we put in gauges on the stream and then we put gauges and then we were monitoring the stream flow upstream of our diversion and downstream of our diversion so that we would understand how impacted the total flow in Boulder Creek. Boulder Creek is a salmon or a steelhead stream and so we are looking at those all of our surface water diversions that flow to the San Lorenzo River they're actually not passable to fish except for Fall Creek and so we're really looking more at how the stream water that would come down those tributaries into the San Lorenzo how would that impact the total flow in the San Lorenzo River and the temperature because the temperature is critical for the health of the fish and so we were doing that on way up at the top you have Pevine, Foreman, down here Clear Creek and Sweetwater each of these tributary red things are the gauges that we had installed we're also monitoring up on Lompico Creek and Zioni Creek as well as upstream and downstream of Fall Creek and the Bull Creek stream at the confluence with the river and this is kind of what the this is what the monitoring took in so they were getting an estimate of the inflow at the stream and then we did during this project we put in meters on the diversions here they weren't formally metered and then they were then they were calculating all of this sort of bypass that was happening there were leaks underneath the weirs this is what one of our diversions looks like there was leaks coming in concrete and leaks coming in subsurface and they were kind of joined up into the stream and they were measuring how much water was still flowing down that stream and looking at how that impacted the total flow in the either Bull Creek or San Lorenzo River so some of the key findings and this is positive is that even under drought conditions during 2014 the diversion quantities were much less than the flow in the main stem of the San Lorenzo River and that the points are really that the diversion points are very far from the river and so since our diversions are so high on the watershed the water gets diverted from the surface water flow but there's still subsurface water coming down that stream bed and so it doesn't, it's not dry even if we divert 100% of the water there it's not really dry for very long because the water comes underground and it perks back out and then it starts flowing again in the stream and so that was one thing that we were finding is that what we were diverting is so much less than what the total flow is in the San Lorenzo River so we kind of knew that anyway this was just where we have to spend a lot of money to prove what we already did we just have to have data right so we have a lot of data and diversions are much less both as a okay well let's just skip to the important one sorry the adverse effects of the diversions on temperature are slight in most places within the main stem used by a steelhead or coho so that was that was interesting so the most I think it depends on the, if it's fall creek fall creek might be an exception but so what happened what we found is that as the stream flow okay so we did this shut off shut off test we had shut off our surface water diversions and let the stream flow back down into the river and then we monitored the stream flow in the stream and the stream flow in the river and the stream and the temperature as well and we found that the temperature is really more affected by ambient air temperatures and less by our diversions which also makes sense we would kind of know that too but it's not well maybe not the streams are much cooler sometimes but they're so small exactly exactly okay so we're two for two here's a cool one one thing that we found was that so we have the bed moment mountain here and here's the topographic peak of the mountain but our recharge is happening over here in Bonnydoom as well by empire grade on the back end of the peak and so it's not just the water that falls in our watershed that we're benefiting from for water supply we're also benefiting from the recharge that happens in the Bonnydoom area go cars exactly I'm afraid to say these out loud because they are pretty obvious so I'll skip a couple the base flow in the higher tributary was high obviously in 2017 but one of the things that we found was that even after normal year in 2016 and then a gonzo year in 2017 the base flow didn't really recover back to what we had would expect it to be a normal base flow that's due to the extreme drought that we experienced and also the narrow period with which the rainfall fell in so it didn't really get to recharge into those into that area as much as it would if it had been spread out through the year the water temperatures at all the sites were remained below 20 degrees which is good for fish and recharges still happening in the watershed although 2017 was such a wet year the karst hydrology provided more sustained flows in the summer than other geology, geologic features in the valley and the last four years on average roughly presented the long term average at the USGS big trees gauge so those dry years combined with those wet years really kind of all averaged out to be about an average period so this is one of the findings that was pretty interesting so we have the way our system works is we're pumping groundwater from the Zianti area, Quail Hollow County Park that's where our wells are for the north system there and we pump the water from the ground there and we move it way up into the valley so way up past north Boulder Creek and so by pumping the water back up into the valley upstream and everybody's on a septic system and those and you know many septic systems are functioning properly some of them are not, this does have water quality implications but it means that the base flow in the upper watershed is being benefited by the way that we're operating our water system because we're moving water from the south part of the system and putting it up into the north part of the system and that actually contributes to base flow so that's a habitat what is the estimate of that we get to return? Oh yeah, I'm not even going to put 50 percent of the water that we've pulled out, it goes through septic tanks goes back to the stream flow so again, kind of we would want instinctively to have that, that's a good thing for us it's a good thing but I hope that the water in the niche fields would eventually get down to the aquifer and that's kind of a common sense and the difference is about the transpiration trees soil type but I mean eventually some water can get back down either gets into the aquifer but a lot of people don't know when you, once you say it it's like oh yeah, that makes sense making us do this this is important for the unique concept today what is that last bullet range, Jim? that San Lorenzo Valley Water District most water purveyors are not moving water up into a watershed, most are moving it down most are sewered and if, yeah, if this had been sewered then it would significantly impact the base flow on the river or if it's a staff where you're bringing all to a common location but that might actually have some advantages so what we would like to do moving forward would be to suspend the operation of the Bull Creek and Bennett Creek gauges we'd like to suspend the operation of the late summer stream gauges on Boulder Creek, Clear Creek and Fall Creek how much was this costing a year? it was about a hundred, was it with the temperature as well as like 180,000? yeah, that's a significant one let's do that we'd like to suspend the temperature monitoring and reduce the monitoring in the seasonal gauges from May to October on Foreman just to seasonal gauges so we're not doing it year round, just seasonally and we'd like to maintain the Lompico Creek gauge as a year round gauge for at least two more years until a Lompico forbearance agreement can be negotiated because we may decide to look at our Fall Creek water right and change that if that would be something that you would have to make a decision about if you choose to do that it would be wise to have data to show what we're maybe willing to trade something for the Lompico surface water right that we have and if we're, you know, we may want to because the Lompico is a really valuable water supply water source force for fish and so the fish agencies are more interested in keeping water in the Zioni and Lompico watershed than maybe in others so there could be something like that worked out I'm not saying that that will happen I'm just saying it's an option and then we'll continue to work with Santa Margarita groundwater agency in the county to help fund some of the other monitoring that we had been doing and they'll maybe take some of that over for the funding those portions so we've already talked to them about that and seem amicable so the outcome here is that we've met with all the resource agencies in November and we've been meeting with them annually and discussing our results from this study and the last I talked to Nymphs he said, yeah, I'm not going to be pursuing your habitat conservation or enforcement on you it looks like you guys are doing the right direction and so they seem to be quite happy with what's going on for now so I think that's valuable for the district and then the next thing we'll have to do is negotiating the bypass flow for Fall Creek and we'll have to do pre-1914 we'll have to do stream, we'll have to do we'll have to get permits from the California for bypass flows on our pre-1914 water rights, that's something that they've not started enforcing us to do but that's something that's coming down the pike so how many years did we do all that? four years so that's $807,000 $807,000 for that I mean for 8,000 subscribers well it's just $800,000 by the way it's a lot of money for each subscriber that's a burden that is an overhead burden it is expensive but there's more that comes out of that so all that data that we collected over the last four years will has been used for the next section that we're going to talk about so let's talk about some questions from this last section and see if anyone has questions and then we'll talk about conjunctive use and how we're going to use that data we're talking about negotiating the pre that means going back to the state and saying we don't like the water right we have we want something different is that what you mean by that on that last slide so we would go back to them and say we want to change our water right from 100 years ago we would say that because our direction would be I don't think it's a maybe about it Santa Cruz is looking to change their water rights on the Santa Rosa River which may impact the amount of water that crosses the big trees gauge which is directly reflected on what we take out of Palm Creek our permit requires us to monitor the big trees gauge and that's what tells us when we can withdraw and we can't so I would say yes we would want to go back and renegotiate our bypass flows so there's two parts to that first Santa Cruz is one of that or change their water rate that that action is impacting us that is if they weren't doing that would we be making these changes I would say yes because Fulton has never really been in compliance you know it wasn't just Cal-Anne it goes way back I'm not sure when they were ever really in compliance you know maybe a wet year a real good wet year they were in compliance but that's you know very hard not to get that system in compliance some people can say we should just use our block loan and allotment a person I disagree with that because that's not solving that problem that's bringing that's bringing water that we can solve all of our drought problems that I wanted to say matches Fulton's but I think we should table have for a whole discussion because is there any danger I mean I know for example when we remodeled our house we did a fairly large remodel and basically you have to bring everything up to code to do that which can be very expensive if we open the water rights up for that kind of renegotiation are we going to get in that same kind of well that has implications for the district and budget and money and is the state going to impose other restrictions as we just left it as is it would be harder for them to do that not impossible because of course they can do whatever they want but harder for them to do that so that's what I'm worried about I would say that's definitely something to be concerned about and it's something that we need to look into at this point we haven't looked into it yet we don't know what that's really going to look like yet but that's the next step we're getting one no but I think there's concern for all of that and I think they're going to look at the bypass regardless of what because we're not in compliance are we not in compliance the entire year no it's just certain times of the month just certain times of the year generally two months now on a wet year we're probably pretty well that's correct I have some prepared comments on the conjunctive use plan from the engineers but we are not on the conjunctive use plan I was going to just wait until you get things done okay great can you do you have an idea how much longer I am two thirds to three quarters probably another half an hour this is really good stuff so I'm perfectly happy to take the time this is a little picky but I just want to see if I have my math right there's 8,000 connections and it ran for four years and it cost $300,000 $800,000 okay I thought that doesn't seem that much I put 800,000 maybe 300,000 300,000 comes out to $9 for connection a year so that's but now it's $25 for connection a year more or less thanks for doing that the regulatory agencies that are asking us to do these things the stream flow monitoring are they in a position to point us in the direction of any possible grant funding from their agency or from others and would there be an opportunity to you know say could you put in a good word for us were the things we've identified that you think are potential mitigations or solutions against future impacts can you point us at some pockets of money if they're not being forthcoming about defraying the costs of unfunded mandates do they have other resources if we're volunteering to pick it up why would they volunteer well no we would have to apply for grants if they were available my day job trying to figure these things out and I don't have a lot of free time to be looking it through Prop 1 grant opportunities we do partner with other agencies who may have some more bandwidth for that and we do work with the foundation and definitely they have staff that are pouring through these grant opportunities all the time and so we are communicating with those people to do that and we have only recently I mean only in the last three years have we even been eligible for grants because we didn't have an urban water management plan done until 2015 or 16 yeah it was late so and we have already received two grants since then so okay more questions just a quick comment on the water rights having been from coming from Lompeco going through the merger this was a major issue for many of us in Lompeco the value of those water rights not taking the water upstream protecting the fish because it is a it's got a classification as being studied and it's an important fish habitat for sure so for many of us this was a big deal that you could leverage those water rights to take them further downstream as far downstream as possible to say that the district has decided to not use the water for obvious economic reasons to use those rights right now so the value of them may be diminishing because if you go to Fish and Wildlife and say well we want to leverage this aren't they going to just turn around and say going back the original plan was to leave Lompeco on that water source for five years that all changed so now we're looking at none of that water is being taken out the value might be dropping is there any way to put that leverage to use sooner rather than later because aren't they going to just say well you're not using it anyway so there's no advantage you lost your leverage well in conversations we've had, in verbal conversations we've had they will not transfer or credit the right for another we've talked to them and said we'd like to take more water out of Ball Creek and not here in Lompeco they don't look at that as something that's viable that they would transfer to Lompeco right we know sooner took over Lompeco even before we had Cow Fish and Wildlife and no fisheries tell us that hey Lompeco has not been in compliance with the waters against Lompeco about taking too much water out of the creek and they weren't going to allow that with San Lorenzo Valley they were going to enforce that we looked at Lompeco Creek it wasn't an economical decision not to use it because there just isn't enough water there and that's one of the reasons you all merge was for a more reliable water supply they know that we want to do something with that water right and they want us to leave it in there so I think it's more goodwill than anything the value is more goodwill with them they're not going to transfer or give you credit so to speak I know it wasn't across the board but from my memory they were very interested in the use of stopping as part of the merger they were very encouraging at that time in merger but it didn't have a value and I'm wondering if the value is going away I would say no because the Ziane Creek has been identified as one of the most important streams in the lowest for coho recovery and so Lompeco is one of the main tributaries for Ziane I think it's a critical stream for fish habitat okay did you have a question yeah come here this is a very complex accordion knot we're going to be dealing with in the next couple of years there's a lot of moving parts the calculation the calculations are going to be the calculus is incredible and my concern is one we shouldn't be making these decisions strictly from a being counter point of view I'm concerned about the future changing of water rights that are growth inducing particularly with a minority member on spring walk I'm referring to the city of Santa Cruz who really is this back bench boat we should not be allowing the tail to be directing the dog here we're going to sacrifice fish and environment as soon as we change those water rights with the city of Santa Cruz being called Scott Valley through conjunctive use the real issue here is growth management and that is not being addressed and it should be inside the environmental impact reporting system on each of these projects I question the issue of $100,000 for eight meters or how many meters that you have which are for flow meters that you have on each of the rivers which are necessary for collecting data and I don't see how you can just completely subtract those out when one fell swoop I think there needs to be more analysis I've looked at the conjunctive use plan for the last couple of days I find that we haven't even come to this yet in the next agenda item I find it woefully inadequate a lot of fluff a lot of speculation sure there's some nice graphs and everything but if you look at the final conclusions on the report that's coming up it needs a lot of work and I would recommend that we do not even approve it tonight so we've got a major major problem here facing us and when we got into bed with Smigwa which was required by the state the county's involved the city of Scott Valley and San Lorenzo Valley Water District what's really driving it though is real estate growth in the coastal communities we need to all be aware of that the water that's allocated sure we'll make money sure we'll make money as we reduce our usage we should be using additional water resources from Loch Lomond we should not be giving away our valuable resources particularly during drought years let's be realistic that's not on the table giving away water during the drought it's not something even I just think that there's a lot of issues that are being motivated and also market driven I think we need to really look seriously at the decisions that we're making here or in the next two years and how it affects us in a low place I know we're a fixed population the big 800 pound gorilla is on the coast and they're going to continue asking for additional water rights we aren't going to vote on anything I understand I'm just making some comments we're just talking about managing our water supply sustainably your question your poor good answer is too simplistic it's a lot more complicated and we all know it I think I said it's infinitely complex I think I have many environmental impact report meetings where we can dissect the EIRs and add our environmental committees thank you okay so with that we'll move into the conjunctive use portion of our water supply outlook so in 2017 we received a grant from the wildlife conservation board in partnership with the county of Santa Cruz to it is yeah to look at our water supply and how we can manage our water supply more sustainably and the grant award was for $330,000 the scheduled completion is December 2019 which makes me nervous so the main goals or objectives was to look at potential stream diversions in excess of system demand potentially available for transfer to other systems so north system stream diversions to look and see if there's access stream diversion sometimes I would say to our own self system which is right I would recommend that the board try to first make this district whole before but looking at what opportunities there are at the same time so is this the same $330,000 that we can reduce our $285,000 or is this a different $330,000 so many of them we've only had yeah it's the next item on the agenda okay well I'll talk about the match because I actually didn't put the match in here so I will talk about that so when you receive a grant usually the grantor wants to see that the grantee has some skin in the game so they want to see you already doing stuff that will support whatever they're helping you to fund so we used the stream flow monitoring funds from the last year or two as match funds and also some infrastructure things that we already had projected we redid the pipeline from Bull Creek down to the treatment plant we used that as match funds so we're not coming up with new projects just to match the funds we're using the funds that we've already spent have already spent as the match funds so how much money is that we agreed to $285,000 I think is what you said I think that's about right I looked at it the other day and I think we've already submitted it so we've proven that we are working towards it we've spent the money and we've already submitted it to the Wildlife Conservation Board and they're going to be reimbursing us for the funds that we have been spending on this conjunctive use effort so they'll reimburse us the $330,000 or some portion of that because there's some staff time and there's other things that come in there too it sounds like we did way over 180 or 285 we had two years at 180 well there was like a time limitation so we were awarded the grant on a certain date and then we could only use the funds that were spent from that time all of 18 and 3 quarters of right so the board voted to accept this and was it March or something of 2018 or maybe it was August of 17 it was when it was finally was administrative that makes sense okay yeah that comes out so we looked at the percent of unimpaired flows remaining downstream of the diversions we looked at normally sustainable groundwater yields and reduce yields during drought and heavy demand because we wanted to make sure that if we're if we're looking at using groundwater to move to other areas that we're taking into account what the normal sustainable groundwater yields are and how that is diminished during drought and then the system capacity limitations, pipes how much water can we move how much water can we treat from the surface water treatment plants and so we had to look at all these all these components of our system in great detail and so Nick Johnson who's been our hydrogeologist for 30 years 30 years 30 years did a basically he made a model of our system and was able to evaluate these with great detail the three main goals are to bring the Felton system into compliance on its water rights to achieve sustainable north and south system production and to improve base flows for fish habitat in the San Lorenzo the potential for he looked at the potential for the San Lorenzo Valley Water District's Loch Lomond allotment and for aquifer storage and recovery which is pumping the water down into the ground for storage and then he looked at the potential for additional Scots Valley area in the recharge so in the recharge means if we're delivering water to say the south system for example if we're taking surface water in the winter delivering that to south system so that they don't have to pump their water then you're actually banking that water for the winter instead of pumping it out so that's called in lieu recharge so there are four scenarios that he looked at one would be expanding conjunctive use with the system inter ties the use of Loch Lomond the aquifer storage and recovery and the in lieu recharge again put that in twice I think it's important to note that this assessment had limitations that this is a model it's not they're not these haven't been directly measured so these data points are from a model and are not as accurate as it would be if you were out there in the field measuring these things the results he said shouldn't be used to evaluate compliance with a specific regulatory water right or habitat requirements but it should get you in the right direction to help you make decisions about how you want to manage your water supply normal, disclaimer okay so ultimately what we found is that a supplemental source would be needed 20% of the time to comply with the Felton water rights so that two months of the year is about 20% of the time that the Felton water system is out of compliance complying with the Felton water system, water rights would notably increase the minimum flows remaining downstream particularly in Bull Creek because we divert pretty much all of Bull Creek the south system imports of unused potential diversions would allow 30 to 50 to greater than 50% reductions in the south system production so if we were to move water from say the north system into the south system with wet year surface water when we have sufficient water supply to provide all the water to the north system and anything in excess of that during a wet year if we moved it down to the south system we could reduce the pumping on the south system wells by 30 to 50% sort of jump ahead when I was reading the report it seemed like that was not feasible the vast majority of the times in terms of using the north system to do anything because the north system right now is in balance so we can only do that during really wet years would we be able to do it during this kind of year an average year I don't know that but I can look into that for you it's more like by the peak flows so if you have a particularly high peak flow for a storm or two we could divert that chunk of the peak the peak flows are usually turbid and not really the best water quality so it's not the peak flows it's when the base flows have come up enough that there's excess stream flow in the base flow it would be interesting because it is bad except for like one year out of town or whatever you're not going to be able to do that but I could be reading it that just depends on what we get so this is also with the understanding that as of right now other than emergencies we can't use the energize at all so we would have to declare in order to do this and the emergency would be hey we need to stop overdrafting I don't think that would be under the energizer we installed and that wouldn't be an emergency the definition of an emergency to use the energizer on mechanical failure not a drought or lack of water supply would do it but it's pretty defined as short-lived mechanical emergency power outage those types of things we just need to do the environmental background and move ahead doing the environmental work to get the energize to be used how much does that cost? I don't really have that much we don't have that much those energize our funds were approved with a caveat that we have good news and bad news the good news is we've got your money for these energize from the state but the bad news is you've got to have them in in a very short period of time because it was a big tail end of the grant we had a time to do the environmental work so that's how we got around the short timeline getting them in was we'd use them for emergency use and then come back after they were in and do the environmental background I don't know that we as a district communicated that two-step process to the public at the time I think it was emergency only and that's all we're ever going to use so this would be a change yeah this would be a change this conjunctive use grant does fund the CEQA for the pipeline to use the pipeline outside of emergency so the permitting the environmental review this is basically the first step of the environmental review for CEQA 330,000 plus our 285 we fund there is budget for funding part of the CEQA it depends on how much it comes out to be but yeah, there are funds for that supplementing the north system with Felton system now this would require a water right change because the Felton water right specifically says no water from Felton can be moved outside of the town of Felton so in order to move water from the Felton like if we had excess stream flow now we're never talking about dry weather you know, sharing water we're talking about wet winters when there's excess stream flow adequate enough to meet fish flows first and then meeting the town's needs second and then if there's anything in excess then we would be looking at moving that that's the only time that we would so it's a limited time that we could do that we can move water to try to alleviate some of these aquifer overdraft in those narrow windows that can be beneficial to actually base flow in the stream so if you're leaving water in the aquifer moving water and supplying it to areas that would be using groundwater or putting it into the aquifer then you would actually get more base flow into the stream which would also benefit fish habitat it's like very connected surface water there's no limitations on the lack of water that's why it's so attractive the only place we have limitations is from Felton and that's in the front the front is very unique so why do they put that on here you might want to ask can you make a note can you make a note to that I'm happy to be your scratcher maybe be my scratcher okay so and then a note is that stream diversions for in the recharge and ASR which is the aquifer storage recovery where you pump the water down into the aquifer occur during high flow periods I just said this and have relatively little effect on minimum flows remaining downstream of the diversions because it's during the periods when we have high flows I just want to reiterate that because I've heard people say like moving water in the summer when there's not enough water and that's not on the table we're just talking about that narrow window when there's high flows when you see all that water going over the board you go God that's just not nothing fish at all okay the use of Lachlomand allotment allows Felton to comply with the water rights and the south system to reduce groundwater pumping by 60 to 70% making unused versions available for ASR so the Lachlomand could be very beneficial it's definitely a high priority supplementing the north system with extractions from ASR provides 30 to 60% net reductions in the north system groundwater pumping do we know what an ASR system comes from? no but I would imagine that would be a shared cost we wouldn't do that by ourselves not for maintenance though maintenance is a lot higher a lot more energy and a lot more maintenance we need to move along here yes I'm going to have to eliminate the last item on our agenda because there's no way okay alright so with that I will move along and estimated increases in water production with assumed increases in diversion capacity for potential increased yields okay moving on moving on I don't know how to go faster through this I think these are all important points if you did read the report it was provided in the agenda all of these conclusions are in that report and if the board were to accept it I could put it onto the website for people to look at at their leisure but that's the next item on the agenda so the next steps the next step for this effort will be to complete the fish assessment we're meeting with the fish biologist next week to look at what that's starting to look like we don't have that assessment available yet I will bring it to the board when it's ready and then we will want to assess the bypass flow requirements for the north system diversions and the fall creek adjudicated water right which I've mentioned several times with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and fishing game to look at bypass flows and habitat we're going to need to do Sequa on intertide pipelines and evaluate feasibility and cost to bring Loch Lomond into the system consider operating opening the Felton system water rights whether or not we want to do that and consider conjunctive use agreement for ASR Wiscott Valley in lieu of recharge the groundwater in that area we are on a shared aquifer down there so we do pump the same water from our south system as Goss Valley does okay so there's here's some costs upcoming costs I wanted to bring to your attention so our long time hydro geologist took a job elsewhere and will not be available for consulting for us anymore so we it would be very wise for us to get a new hydro geologist under contract for the district to help us with our effort with the Santa Margarita groundwater agency to help us with our conjunctive use efforts and the many things that we do here so I'll be bringing we'll be doing a I assume I expect that we'll be doing an RFP for that soon depending on direction from the board and and then the refined hydro geological monitoring for stream flow would be also a contract that we'll be bringing to the board for approval we had a lot of questions there in the middle I was hoping to hold them off to the end no yeah like I said earlier I had a sort of prepared thing because I studied the conjunctive use plan all today and I spent all the day so I wanted to take out some of the things in order to save time okay right I think it's really important for the public to really know what's going on here and again this report that's on the next thing is basically a assemblage of data for water and I just want to clarify exactly what water that we are talking about we are talking about 313 acre feet from Loch Balmint and we're talking about water from diversions from all the various streams up to almost double actually at certain times it all depends on water rights oh that's what all those tables in the report are all about they show you okay X amount of water that's all freaking X amount of time da da da so it's important for people to be aware of all this stuff so that you're involved with and you can see how we're spending money you know how required to do these studies et cetera I don't want to go and again the big problem was Felton because it's Felton there's three different areas like you said so it's all surface water the south area which is all groundwater and then the north area Boulder Creek which is both surface and groundwater again I think you can appreciate my position I've always been concerned about spending the public's money efficiently so I'm always concerned about seeing studies done that don't really help move the ball forward but I'm critical and I always want the public to know exactly what's going on and what this could possibly lead to you heard me complain about the urban planning study as an engineer that data is useful but I can get that data easily I don't need to spend money to do an urban because this is really an urban so all I'm saying I understand you need to do it to get a grant I understand that I get it that's fine but the important thing that I'd like to say is it should be really patently obvious that walk alone is not large enough to supply water for this county it's only 9,000 acre feet that come from Marin County with the same amount of people and they have over 80,000 acre feet of water storage from reservoirs this county has something against building reservoirs I don't know why so the city can drain block moment at any time from 3,200 to 5,600 acre feet they can literally almost drain it by half if they want to they have that water rights and yes we have that right for 313 things and we've all seen it you know it closes down one drought year it closes and when you go into a drought well guess what well it's not it's not large enough reservoir to supply this thing we need more reservoirs so you're going to hear me lead into my ideas about things I just want to say that these ideas of building reservoirs in the sandcourt you should need to be put onto the table they should not be ignored they should be put onto the table so that people can see cost-benefit analysis of having those things and then you know because if you allow government to stick with their plan what they think is the best what is this constructive use plan that's going to push forward and that's the only thing that we're going to see you might never see the plan that might be better building reservoirs in the sandcourt okay try to be I know we went a little bit over in time so I wanted to click with this you know I've really spent all day talking about this so the report shows that this district needs 2,348 feet per year and that's actually 265 gallons per connection divided by the 79 hydro and there's a reason obviously that's a high number because there's flushing the water there's a lot of water anyway leaks whatever so anyway this report is calling for 265 gallons the 313 feet of acre feet that comes out of Lachlan and obviously the pipe needs to be built from the raw water line that goes up to Lachlan and go over to a curvy water treatment plant and that's how much that's going to cost to do that but again you know I would rather see that pipe connected to a sand quarry reservoir because I don't believe Lachlan is large enough the impact on the fish is debatable it's highly debatable we're just we're basically the important thing you need to understand about the fish is that that there's a certain water flow at big trees that's down below the level all surface water is cut off and that's basically to protect the fish from getting wiped out you know there's just not enough water at all but the conductive use plan is going to take a substantial amount of surface water almost double perhaps from going into the river so with the sand quarry reservoirs you don't have to worry about doing any of that you don't have to worry about affecting the fish I like to think of the fish habitat as real fish real estate basically with more water you get more fish out of the water and we really want to we want to reestablish the fish habitat that's the goal here we want to see a goal so that's another plus for to go to the the sand quarry reservoir plan but there's a reason for this and you indicated it later that the reason why we want to collect water from these clear water stream canyons is it's clean and it doesn't really need to be treated the flood waters on the other hand are highly turbid and they have to be treated at a cost what I'm arguing is that cost in the long run is better and more beneficial at the time because with the reservoirs at the sand quarries we use for fire protection which you indicated later is a serious concern that they're available for emergency water and the water inside the reservoirs maybe it's getting bored here but the water that was put in the reservoir treats itself the sediments settle down and the bacteria breaks down treats itself almost there okay so there's a 313 feet 313 feet the idea of storing water in the ground is not a good one and it's as a result of people not wanting to go reservoirs specifically and the reason why is because it uses twice as much energy you have to collect the water one and then you have to bring it to a well, an injection well which causes it pretty much less maintenance but about the same amount of energy of pumping water pump it into the ground and then guess what you've got to pump it out again more energy and guess what you've got to take it and you've got to treat it again so that compared to doing reservoirs it doesn't make any sense whatsoever but reservoirs are there and those those can engineer they'll see I calculate we can inject about 5,000 acre feet of water from those reservoirs every year with using no energy and that's over double like I said we only use about 23 is this in response to questions about the water supply because it feels like way off topic to me well just give me another 5 minutes I'm just this is a presentation by staff and it seems like you're diverting the whole conversation I'd like to hear I'd like to wrap up if you could continue thanks for the introduction well in a nutshell again the study we're not really voting on anything it's a semblance of data again it's the four different areas and it's taking water and then it's ASR it's not specific on the ASR but the ASR is mainly going to the osteotempo well field and then also well system and that is pumping treated water into the ground basically and it's taking it from all the different surface things and all those different scenarios there's 4 or 5 scenarios all those are broken down in about 5 scenarios I know that there's a lot of people this is an important point is a lot of people are going to go I'm going to take a look at this study and I'm going to say okay this scenario is the best one that's not the case really if water wasn't political and if we weren't talking about a lot of money this stuff would have already been installed we already have the interties and the pipes and the systems and in other words you can move water distribution is really not that complicated so you can have a system the pipes that are called out to move this water oh the osteotempo well well field is low flip a switch, water over there and basically move water around so the ultimate final solution if you go with this plan of conjunctive use let's explain clearly why they use the work in junctive because I think that's really confusing about this whole thing it's groundwater and use in conjunction with surface water and that's the reason why it's conjunctive use but to me as an engineer water is water and it's all about moving water getting it to where it's needed so I mean I think if you're talking about the city of Santa Cruz the city of Santa Cruz shouldn't drain La Coloma more than it gets needed for water to get recharged every year and if we spend all this money with conjunctive use it's kind of the same water yes it's included to take water to Scotts Valley and then they can take water if the city and the SoCal water I'm done this is the last point this is the last point I'll make and you know this the city and SoCal can solve all their problems by cycling the 10 million gallons up to 10 million gallons that go out into the ocean every year so they don't need any of our water period and they don't need to drain La Coloma is not big enough it is not big enough so we need more water storage up here and then a final thing is that reservoirs are like batteries and they want to keep the groundwater basin high and when you have reservoirs you know you see them and droughts in California and then you see them drain and then you go oh wow you know we better do something here but they buy it time because that's what water infrastructure is for to buy time to get through the drought and it's very graceful to look at the ground oh well that's our storage tank and then see if that's what they're going up and down and then spend all this energy to put it down when you can have reservoirs all full putting water, keep in the groundwater basin using that water keeping that water in that does not very much cost and then so in conclusion I just want this reservoirs to be heard I sort of feel like this conjunctive use is again getting crammed down the throats of the public without them understanding that I know there's a lot of people concerned about the environment I actually feel my opinion is environment in our system is hardscape that could be retrofitted to permeable surfaces because the back of an envelope calculation one acre gives you about half a million gallons of potential recharge I don't know that number off the top of my head just kind of a like a wild ass idea I know it's something that we talk about a lot but I don't know the number I know that the hardscape is an issue for recharge just wondering if there's some part of this that we can avoid having all that water run off into the creek and recharge it right where we need it as it falls out of the sky right and can I move this last part is going to be pretty quick okay so now we're going to talk about the rest of the environmental departments responsibilities and I'll just jump in okay so I think one thing that's really important to talk about is that we rely on our built capital to provide to move to deliver our water to all the houses in the community we also rely on our natural capital to provide the water resources and we own and manage 2000 acres of watershed land mostly in redwood forest and some of it is in sand hill habitat and those we call those ecosystem services and it's important to keep a healthy ecosystem so we have abundant clean and water resources for future generations so this water district recognized that a long time ago and started acquiring land where those surface water sources are and where the groundwater sources are and have protected those for groundwater recharge so it's important that we continue to invest in those and stewarding our capital because we're moving forward with an ambitious capital improvement program to be able to stop the leaks and fix the leaky tanks and pump the water more and so this is a big part of what the environmental department assists with is that we are responsible for all the permitting for all of these projects so we have five projects in the USDA loan program that you guys are aware of we have the lion access tank so our responsibility is to work with all the resource agencies in order to make sure we have all the permitting in place, environmental permitting for those projects one I wanted to highlight is the fall creek fish ladder so this has been something that's been a long saga and so I wanted to kind of give a little story about that and I'll try to make it as brief as possible but in 2008 we took over the Felton water system and the fall creek fish ladder at that time was undermined so the water was flowing under the weirs so it wasn't a fish ladder it was just running under and so in 2013 the San Lorenzo Valley Water District went with an emergency repair in order to just get the water to flow over the weirs so that the fish could jump up the ladder the fall creek the rest of the fall creek watershed which is all in that state park accessible for spawning habitats it's a good spawning habitat and so in 2015 the water district gave a letter of intent to the Fish and Wildlife Service Cal Fish and Wildlife to say that we intend to improve this fish ladder to make it passable to all life stages of Salmonids because the way that it was done when it was an emergency repair they just tried to fix it as best they could and make the jumps accessible so they were there between 18 and 24 inches and the fed and state standard for fish jumps is 6 inches so 6 inches would mean that we would have to rebuild the whole ladder and take up a lot more space it would have to stretch the ladder up the river up and down the river and it would be quite a costly project so there was some word that in 2015 the regulatory agencies were re-evaluating the 6 inch jump height and there may be a there were 18 to 24 inches and so so at that time we thought well maybe they're going to change the regulations and they'll make it 12 inches and then that would be a much more reasonable plan for our ladder because 6 inches just really makes it difficult to build hard to maintain and expensive and so in then 2017 hit and the whole ladder filled with debris from the just natural erosion that happened in the upper watershed the entire ladder with debris and really wasn't accessible like blocked the access for spawning salmonids the following summer I mean winter salmonids are spawning usually in the winter so in 2018 we worked with FEMA to get the debris out of the ladder to make it accessible for this winter so this year it looks good and the fish are able to get up into the stream for spawning again we had started in the fall to request a variance from the 6 inch jump height to the fish in the wildlife because we'd like to try to get it so we can make a 12 inch jumps in our variance request we have a biological justification for that and many of the biologists Don Alley included has confirmed that really a 6 inch jump height is extreme and that it's not necessary and that juveniles are not necessarily moving up into the watershed it's a half mile upstream from the confluence of the river if juveniles are moving upstream in the watershed they're moving just out of the heavy winter stream flows that are happening in the river you could possibly just an idea of ramps smooth ramps because obviously fish swim like that instead of a broth thanks for the idea so now we're working on that we haven't gotten approved for the variance yet we're working on that and we're hoping to construct a new ladder hopefully we'll get a variance not sure yet constructing the ladder in 2020 but I think it's important to know that the fishing game code section um says that anyone who owns a dam upon which a fish way has been provided shall keep the fish way in repair and open and free from obstructions and so we need to make sure that this fish way is functional for fish passage whatever that looks like so um so and then I wanted to like give a little framework for a capital improvement um the thing about the San Lorenzo valley is that all that complex geology that I mentioned at the beginning of tonight's talk all that means that we have a very complex biology as well and so we have redwood forest we have oak woodland we have meadows we have riparian areas and we have sand hills and um and many other ecosystems and in these ecosystems uh we have endangered lots of species that have been listed are endangered or threatened and so um pretty much any construction that we do in the San Lorenzo valley impacts endangered species or their habitat in one way or another so all of the work that we do here has significant um permitting requirements and that's not always the case in other places it's not much of a requirement to if you're not impacting the species so that's why we have so many environmental review so much environmental review so here's some of the projects that are coming upcoming in the sand hills projects um the sand hills you know we provide water to significant part of our population that lives in the sand hills and so we have a lot of infrastructure in those sand hills we have pipelines and tanks and um pumps all throughout that habitat there sand hills are varying quality of sand hills and so um so upcoming just to put this on your radar we are writing a sand hills habitat conservation plan that will include all of the projects all of the future projects for the water district and it will it looks like a big number for this permit $129,000 but that's for all of the projects and if we had to write a habitat conservation plan for each and every one of these projects and others that aren't on this list it would cost $129,000 each so what we're doing is we're making one plan for all of the projects and specifying what the compensation will be from the impacts from those projects and so that should be submitted to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in December of this year um we have the Olympia conservation management area management set aside so we have the I wanted to mention it because you did say something that you wanted to have some clarity about that so what's going to come out of that that conservation plan is that we are going to propose that all the mitigation or all the compensation for the impacts in those projects and sand hills that we put money aside in an endowment which we've already established through the probation tank and now the other projects will go into the funds from the other projects will go into that same endowment which will generate annual funds to protect and manage and monitor this really high quality habitat that we have at the Olympia watershed and so that will be a that will be in perpetuity so that the district will always have this obligation to manage that land and there will always be funds to do that with there's always biological services that are required along with the projects to make sure that we're minimizing any impacts to the species and the habitat to make sure that we're restoring the temporary impacts of the construction and then we expect that the sand hills management will it will be growing I'm going back to the mitigation bank or the set aside with the endowment every time we do a project we'll put more money into that endowment and it'll generate a little bit more and so we'll have more and more funds in order to manage that property this is just a short list of some of the permits that are required on typically every project that we do um all different agencies and different staff and it takes a lot of coordination so just to kind of give you insight into what those permits look like and what they're called and who we're working with um so in order to to manage our lands that we do own we in the past there was a lot of trespass into the habitat areas into the um the critical habitat areas with motorcycles and camping and parties and just a lot of destruction to the ecosystem there and so um we worked out a contract with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County to monitor and to report back to us if there's any illegal activities happening there and they do find things every year they'll find a cut fence with a motorcycle track in there and we'll get out there and fix it or they'll we don't have staff time to be out their eyes on the on the landscape all the time so it's been really beneficial and it's been it's worked well to have them um monitoring it for us and um and it's really we've been able to protect that habitat out there from um um human activities um so I'd like to get a recovery permit for pulling invasive species at the sandhills habitat we're working on that the reason why that hasn't happened yet is because we're still working on the management and monitoring plan for the conservation set aside so we want to make sure that all the activities that are specified in that management and monitoring plan are included in the recovery permit so we don't have to go back and get another permit so it's all kind of like builds on top of each other and we have to check the boxes um we do erosion control every year so we have a contractor who goes out and puts water bars on the roads and the trails and make sure that we're not getting a major landslide because of erosion and we are we contribute to the fish monitoring annually that um the Don Alley has been doing for 20 years and for the last couple of years we started a broom management on the Olympia watershed it's really important once you get started that you continue doing that because of the money that you invest in removing the broom if you don't continue doing that then the broom comes back and it's wasted investment so um and then we'll be doing a large wood project on Zionty grant it's all grant funded and that's with the RCD and the city of Santa Cruz and that will be uh to improve in-stream habitat on Zionty on Zionty Creek which I mentioned earlier is one of the most important streams for fish recovery and so the last two that I propose is to have an integrated pest management plan and the city is doing one of those and it's costing them approximately $50,000 and the watershed management plan is something that has been needed to be picked up and carried over the finish line but that's not not been the priority um so some other things that we do we review and comment on project ordinances, legislation um that might impact district water supplies like timber harvest or the cannabis ordinance uh endangered species recovery plans and and recently on the vegetation management for PG&E we're just looking at that haven't commented but keeping an eye on it um development of internships and volunteer coordination we're starting a new um broom pole volunteer broom pole on one of the properties in the redwood forest not in the sand hills habitat um and we've been working with the blue ribbon panel and I'm just breezing through this because I know everyone is glossed over and I'm tired too talking except um these are some things that I would be elective would be a fire the fire management plan and post fire response plan um doing a greenhouse gas audit annually and um doing the climate change and adaptation and mitigation plan which I think is absolutely critical and really a lot of the information that we're getting from our conjunctive use and the other project programs would feed into this climate change and adaptation and mitigation plan so I think it would be worthwhile to do that and especially if we can reduce our greenhouse gases community-wide that would be a good um worldwide you know benefit to the world just a good thing to do um so I mentioned the urban water management plan but I don't know if I mentioned that the urban water management plan will have a climate vulnerability assessment that will be required as part of the urban water management plan coming up so we could get started on that with our urban with the climate change adaptation and mitigation plan all right so we also do all the communications and public engagement and I'm not going to say um you guys can see what what we're doing um we'll be proposing a website update soon and um would like to bring to the board to consider getting a public outreach firm to improve our communications from the district so and then um here's our watershed education grant program these grants motivate local schools camps community groups and individuals to engage with the district and create projects that help improve the knowledge of the environmental health of the San Lorenzo River watershed the watershed education grant program has assisted the district in meeting the California department water resources urban water management plan demand management measure um so far we've awarded 95 projects since before 51 of those were to schools 31 of those were to community groups um outside of schools 13 of them were for data collection and restoration on district lands we have reached 1600 students per year 3200 residents of the valley annually on average and the average cost to fund it annually is $16,000 so this is a program that I think is a huge community benefit the community really loves this program we get great feedback from the people who participate in these programs we have a pretty broad reach with this program to directly to the community and I think it really gives us a good connection to the community through this program it costs $2 per connection per year per house per year and then here are just some of the collaborative efforts that we do in order to make all of these things happen we are working with the Santa Margarita groundwater management agency the fire safe council I'm on the board of the fire safe council the integrated regional water management group program we attend those and listen if there are any opportunities for grant opportunities we participate with the San Lorenzo river 2025 which also is looking for grants and bringing funds from Sacramento into the central coast for water supply and watershed efforts I do that on staff time yeah staff time working with the Felton library and the environmental literacy park there could be a programming opportunity that we could reach of the community and have messaging about water resources and water conservation and watershed management and environmental protection and other things that benefit the district and we were a member of the Santa Cruz mountain stewardship network which is a group of large land managers the water conservation coalition has been a wonderful program to coordinate with and cooperate with and we have been very successful in seeing water conservation results through that effort and the weed management area of Santa Cruz county and they're talking about invasive species and the state of the oh and then we do some some public outrage with the San Lorenzo river symposium that's coming up next month in March and then the connecting the drops is every other year so this is just a quick little our time is we're coordinating 36 projects currently managing 21 contracts overseeing 20 consulting firms and my day is like one action item every 10 minutes on email 10 meetings per week I know I should ask for public comment it's 10 o'clock we've got staff here that's been up forever we've got people who work who are up forever and so if you don't mind I don't want to ask for public comment anyone has cards I'd like to get your cards and the other thing is this water availability ability assessment water conjunctive use plan we can't turn it out can you just accept the plan no okay can I post it to the website so let's go to minutes what yeah it's on the consent agenda anybody want to pull it off okay I I hope nobody minds we aren't going to discuss these letters we do have to vote on the consent right thanks for being here I thought we didn't have to slow down I understand but as long as it still says here we have to discuss we have to do it okay all in favor sorry you knew yeah okay I would like to adjourn just take one comment we received another letter from this it's been pretty much taken care of he will be getting filled by mail he sent another letter next week Jim are you going to see him yeah okay there you go I don't want to have a conversation with you in this meeting thank you Jim no I would like for this person to quit talking to me I don't want to be in politics let's go go bye