 Yeah, but it's a good point to look at. Yeah, that way it works. Do you want to take a picture with T-Map? Yeah, I'll take a picture with T-Map. Yeah, I'll take a picture with T-Map. Yeah, that's fine. Yes, and I might be just standing up, but I'll put up all of this. Hey, sir. I think we can see each other at a lot of places. Would it be unusual to see each other at a lot of places? Yeah, but I think we can see each other at a lot of places. First look at the two of them. Those were the first one. Yeah. I'll take a picture with you. Yeah, I'll take a picture with you. I'll take a picture with you. We'll be okay. We'll be okay. Okay. Super fine. Yeah, I'm all good. Can you talk into that real quick? I sure can. Yeah, we're good. Okay, great. Well, welcome everybody. Thank you for coming to our town hall on Clean Water. I'm Chief of Spencer, Director of Public Works, and I appreciate you getting through the crowds for the film show tonight to come join us. I am joined today by Assistant Director Mamie Moyer, who oversees our water and wastewater and stormwater division. And Romare Weinberger is going to kick it off with a few remarks in a second. Just want to let folks know a few things. There will certainly be time for questions at the end. There are restrooms in the building. They are downstairs, however, so if you go out the door into the elevator and down on the floor, it will be at the end of the hall. Megan handed out copies of the presentation. If you want to take one home with you, feel free to do so. The copies of this will be on the website after tonight. And I want to just thank the Public Works staff who are here in attendance. We have a number of great resources today. If you're a member of the DPW staff, could you raise your hand? Thank you for being here. So we will be here at the end. If there's any personal questions that you want to ask about waterways, waterstormwater, we'll be happy. If you're uncomfortable asking a big forum, then we will spend time with you at the end of the presentation. I'd like to invite Mayor Merrill Weinberg to come up and say a few words. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you, Jayden. People probably have some sense for this, but Jayden's job and the way he's structured is he's responsible for a huge amount of the city's activities in one way or another, where they're spending from roads and bike lanes and sidewalks to this whole world of water. It is often thankless work. I am very thankful that you have produced Jayden in all these areas and are very fortunate to have him. I think for those of you who haven't gotten to know Jayden and feel the need to see more of that, I'm really fortunate. We want to turn this into a conversation where at least you can make it. It has a lot of information to share. I want to just try to hit a few things from a higher level. I want to just frame the historical context of this work and say a little bit about that and how I think this should be viewed. I want to talk about the events that led us to the specific seven-point plan that is going beyond essentially what's on the ballot for this November. I would like to talk a little bit about what we've done to keep this $30 million plan, which is certainly a big number, but to do $30 million of investment while keeping this affordable for Burlingtonians. I'll start with the history. This has been a challenging summer, I would say, for the three of us and for this whole water team. No one has enjoyed at all the unplanned discharges and the series of things that went wrong this past summer were very frustrating and challenging for everyone who has responsibility here. One upside for me personally on this is I've developed a greater understanding of the history around this issue and it really is quite an interesting history and one that I hope people have in mind as they go out to vote on this and weigh in on this, make the decision on this. Even in many ways our whole city history revolves around these water services. I'm a little vague on some of the early steps of it, but creating a water system, creating a sewer system were major elements of why we became a city initially and some of the early work we did as a city in the 1800s. For a long time, for the first 100 years of the city's history, nearly 100 years, there wasn't a lot of attention paid to protecting the lake. There's a lot of effort put into making Burlington work as a city, a dynamic, thriving city, a place of commerce, a place where people can make a living. But the system was originally built to essentially shed human waste straight into the lake and that's what we did until 1953 and that was a big year when we created the wastewater treatment plant. That was our first effort, really a generational effort to start treating sewage before it was discharged into Lake Champlain. The next big thing that happens in history is in the 1990s we became dissatisfied with the fact that even though we were treating sewage, we were not really doing anything to protect the lake during rain events, during these stormwater events. And that starts to change in the 1990s and I say that and Megan will have some images that make this clear if anyone doesn't quite understand how the system works, but essentially when it rains, the water from the storm flows into the same pipes as the sewage, at least in a big chunk of the city to this day. In the 1990s, a big bond, more than $50 million bond was passed to change that in two ways. First of all, we separated some of the sewers and created a partially separated system where it was impractical to do that. What we did is build this vortex, this ability to treat stormwater during these wet weather events and ever since then, hundreds of millions of gallons of combined wastewater stormwater flow has been treated out of that main plant that is at the base of the city, right by the bike path down by Perkins Pier. And that, even in a tough summer like this, we have treated where we had these unplanned discharges and we had some significant amount of combined flow into the lake that we are not happy about and want to fix. Even with that, this summer, we treated a historically high amount of water, 300 million gallons or so, million gallons of this combined flow because of that system that was built. The next big thing that happens in the history is in 2009 when the city of Burlington became the second city in the state to create a stormwater utility. A utility, in addition to our water utility and our wastewater utility, that's purpose was to make further progress with our variety of stormwater issues because what we did back in the 90s took us a long way in the right direction. It didn't address everything. We still had these combined sewer overflows that Megan will describe in a second. And we had times when the system was essentially overwhelmed by the magnitude of the rain event and concerned that that is something that has gained bigger with global warming. In 2009, we actually created a new utility with new fees that appear on your water bills that give us resources and capacity to make further progress. And we have, since 2009, there are still five of these CSO points around the city that used to go off dozens of times every summer, whenever there was a large rain event. Now it's a pretty rare event that these CSOs, for four of the five, it is very rare that they go off at all. There is one on Pine Street that goes off frequently and that's part of the plan to try to address that. And we'll say more about that in a second. I put this 2018 initiative now, this $30 million seven-point plan that is, you know, the council voted on Monday to put before you as the next significant chapter in this long effort now, more than 75 years old, to find a way in which we can have a thriving, healthy, vibrant city that is in better balance with the natural resources around it and specifically is in much better balance with Lake Champlain. We've come a long ways over the last 75 years. This plan, well, first of all, make sure we don't backslide, go in the wrong direction, which is what, in some ways this summer was, we had things breaking and things going wrong that, you know, haven't been going wrong in recent years. Not only to do that, but actually continue the forward progress. Let me say a little bit about this $30 million plan without the details Megan will provide. I just want to talk about, I think in some ways this may feel like this plan came together quickly and I've heard some sense out there that this came out of nowhere. It didn't. This is an effort that we have been working on for years. As you know, I look around the room, I know many of you are longtime Berlintonians. I think you're well aware that this summer we are doing more infrastructure work than we have been doing in a long time. We have more road work going on, more sidewalk work going on than in many years, if not ever. And really for the first time in, maybe ever, certainly in decades, we are proactively replacing water lines. That effort we kind of all put under the umbrella of the sustainable infrastructure plan. And that work is being funded by the votes, there's a couple votes that you made back in 2016 to make new investment in these areas. When we were developing those plans that 2016 vote was a function of about three years of work leading up until that point of a comprehensive infrastructure plan for the whole city. It was a plan that went through lots of public process, many different public bodies and at its heart was the result of a lot of professional work. We commissioned studies for each of these different asset areas that the city is responsible for. We started and did a lot of that work that is now part of this plan, began back during that effort. At a certain point it became clear that there were reasons to delay the wastewater and stormwater work and not have it part of that vote back in 2016. But a lot of the work, a lot of the professional work, a lot of the behind some of this is this really interesting modeling work where Megan has led an effort to where we really know what all the pipes are underneath the streets, know their sizes, can do computer modeling and kind of animations and projections of how that system will respond in different events. All of that work factors into this plan as well. We had talked with the city council in the last two budget years about the need to come forward with this work relatively soon. We thought that that was going to be next spring or maybe the spring after that. What has come together quickly is in response to the events of the summer, the unplanned discharges that took place this summer, we accelerated those plans and we accelerated them first. We made an announcement that we were going to try to get this plan done by December 1 so that it could be on the town meeting day ballot and as we got deeper into it and as some additional frustrating events took place, we made a decision to accelerate it still further so that it could be ready for this November ballot. That would not have happened. That final push would not have happened without a really a ton of hard work by the people in the room who needed to pull all this together, do the final analysis, go back, check assumptions, check pricing and work it up into something that we feel is comprehensive, is solid and we'll see how this discussion goes tonight but I think we'll hold up to scrutiny and we'll get done what we need to get done. It is a plan that really prioritizes the most sensitive, most high-risk, most impactful parts of the system as you'll hear more about in a second. I do just want to pause there and make sure the team at the back of the room, Megan and Chapin have put in huge work, nights, weekends to get here and I just want to say thank you again to the whole team for what you've done to it, to give us the opportunity to have this conversation and hopefully make this community decision in the weeks ahead. Final thing I want to hit on is affordability. Again, it's a $30 million plan. By any measure, a big number in a community of our size. In some sense, when you hear $30 million, know that we have work to make the financial impact to bring down the financial impact to a plan that is 40% smaller. Essentially, we have found cost mitigation strategies that will relieve the rate payers. You will not see the full increase that a $30 million plan would otherwise have and that is why we say with confidence that when all this work is done, about five years from now, four to five years from now, the difference between your water bill today, your total water bill today versus the wastewater and storm water bill, that part of your water bill in the future, those areas of the bill will go up. They will only go up by about $5, a little more than $5. The main way we have achieved that is by first of all taking a very significant amount, hundreds of thousands of dollars of existing revenues that flow to the storm water and wastewater utilities and repurposing that for this debt service on this long-term plan, this 20-year plan, 20-year bond, and then the other is that we are quite confident we will succeed at securing some sub-market rate financing that will further bring down the cost. We're hoping we're going to do even better than this. This is a long list in the plan of additional cost mitigation measures that we're going to pursue, additional federal grants. It possibly changes in other areas of city finance that could actually mean that the bill never goes up that full $5.36. We've tried to be conservative in the way we've projected that, but we are going to continue. We hope to beat expectations in that respect. All right, I think that's what I was going to say. Next, I'll hand this over to Megan to get into some of the details, and then we'll go to your questions. Thanks, Mayor, and we're going to get into a lot of the details. Mayor did a great job of encapsulating roughly what I'm going to talk about tonight, but I'm hopefully going to be putting some pictures and some numbers to everything that he said so that you guys can really understand where all of this came from. So we're going to take a quick look at just the overview of the bond proposal, look at that trajectory of water quality progress that Burlington really should be proud about, even if we aren't proud at all about this summer. Talk about the specific issues around what happened this summer and what some of the root causes are so that you can understand how those played into the current plan that we have. We'll dive a little deeper into the bond proposal and the highlights of what we're looking to stabilize and modernize, and then talk a little bit about that rate impact and affordability strategies. For those of you who've come in a little late, if you'd like a hard copy of the presentation, we do have some available. It will also be online afterwards. If there's folks who don't really feel comfortable asking a question, I will say now, there are no dumb questions. We are here to talk about your system, to educate you about your system, and hopefully help you guys become stewards of this information and your own communities. The more everybody knows, the better we're all going to be when we go to the polls and when we flush the toilet, use our water, use any part of the system. So, tonight I'm going to talk to you about how this $30 million bond proposal essentially gets us back on track with continuing our city-wide legacy of natural resource protection by stabilizing and modernizing our aging every single day, older and older infrastructure. You'll learn how, even though, as the mayor said, it seems sudden, like this came out of nowhere, this is based on multiple years of work that I have done and my team has done, and I want to reiterate the thanks. Not everybody has a gray shirt on, but most people have a gray shirt on back there. Those are the folks who, after the presentation, if you do have questions, please pull one of them aside and you can have a one-on-one, all of your questions you ever wanted to know, maybe, about the water system answered. The $30 million plan is roughly comprised of about $20 million for wastewater and $10 million for stormwater and does represent approximately a $5.36 increase for the typical single-family property owner on your Water Sewer Storm Utility Bill. This is not on your tax bill, this is on the bill that you receive every month and is based on how much water you use on what your classification is for stormwater in the city. One last thing in this map, I believe, is on the website that we will put the link up, but it's important to note that these investments are throughout the city. We're not doing them only in the Old North Inn or only at the wastewater treatment plants. They are going to be benefiting the entire city. So this really cool trajectory of our progress. As the mayor said before 1953, our sewage went into Burlington Bay and into our rivers completely and totally raw. No treatment whatsoever. Pretty gross. In 1953, main plant was constructed in the 60s. It took us until the 60s to actually get to building the plants that, the North Plant, which is at the end of North Ave, at the very tippy top of North Ave, and then Riverside, which is the plant on Riverside Avenue right next to the barbecue donut place. My little joke is you're on Riverside, you smell donuts, you smell barbecue, and then you smell something else. That's East Plant. 1994, really great year from the perspective that folks realized that we had a continued problem. We had handled and improved how we were treating our sewage, but we were letting go millions of gallons, at least 170 million gallons, estimating more in the 300 million gallon range, was going into Lake Champlain every time it rained. 2009, stormwater utility, and then this intensive capital planning effort. So backing up a little just to make sure everybody is using the same jargon, what is a combined sewer? What is a combined sewer overflow? So part of being an old city, and we're one of about 750 remaining CSO communities in the United States, the city, and when it was built, people were just excited to get the water and the sewage away from them. They put one pipe in, and that's where the sewage went, and that's also where the stormwater went. Under normal conditions and under small storm events, this worked fine. The sewage coming from your house gets to the treatment plant and gets that treatment that we established in 1953 and then upgraded in 1970. Under really large storm events, the system can't handle it. The pipe's not big enough. We have relief points, which are called combined sewer overflow outfalls. The mixture of sewage and stormwater would be surfacing on streets, would be flooding many more basements. It does still sometimes flood people's basements if they don't have a backwater prevention valve on their home, but that would be happening on a much more frequent basis without these relief points. It doesn't mean it's not gross. It's just the way the system was built, and it started as a lot of New England communities did. It doesn't change the grossness, but it is important to know that combines sewer overflows when we have to report them. After 2016, the state passed a law where, and we're very much in favor of this law, a public notification that when these things happen, we have to tell the public, and we have to post it in a public place. Those overflows, when we report them, we have to report the total volume. About 90 to 95% of that total volume is stormwater, so if it was a separated system, it would be like all of the other stormwater outfalls. It does have sewage components, about 5% of it is sewage, but it helps a little bit when you're looking at 100,000 gallons to know that it's not all raw sewage, which sometimes gets depicted in the media. So as we've said, prior to 1994, there were about 11 plus or minus CSO points these outfalls, most notably at the bottom of Maple and College, and then a really big one right where Maine Plant is today. And about 170 million or more gallons, million gallons of sewage was going into our nearby water bodies. Completely utterly unacceptable. I don't know if anybody was here in those days. I have heard people talk about being on beaches and seeing things wash up. Does not surprise me that that might have been happening in this time period with the volume that was going on right near on shore inside the breakwater. So what did we do? The mayor mentioned this $52 million bond. One of the first things that we tried to do with our collection system was to try to eliminate these CSOs through separation. So a lot of the city, about 75% now, after this phase of the project, did put in two separate pipes. So there's a pipe that goes and it carries only raw sewage to the plant and then there's a pipe that carries the stormwater from the storm drains. This is good for mitigating the acute impact of those CSOs. We now know it's very bad from a long-term water quality perspective. Stormwater is not clean. It's cleaner and less icky than sewage, but it is not clean. It has nutrients, it has sediment, it has bacteria from pet waste. It has all these different things that is not getting treated for the vast majority of the separated system that gets into the lake. Okay? So in part we knew that it wasn't necessarily the best idea to separate everything. Additionally, complete separation was going to be really, really expensive. I don't know how much that bond would have been if we had tried to separate the entire city, but it probably would have had at least a one in front of the 52. It's that expensive. If you can imagine trying to dig up all of the streets and put in new pipes in downtown, where there's already all these existing utilities, in some cases buildings already have their waste and storm flow combined within their internal plumbing system, so you can't necessarily just snap your fingers and do the separation. But it was also because of this long-term water quality impact. So this is a map. The purple area is the remaining combined sewer area that drains to main plant. There's a little bit of combined sewer that drains to riverside or east plant, and then a little bit here in the new north end that drains to north plant. So because we couldn't separate and we didn't think it was cost effective, the other strategy was to provide the best treatment possible to these combined sewer flows that were previously running off into Burlington Bay. The main feature of this was to enhance the capacity of the plant overall to actually be able to provide full treatment to the entire, like full treatment to small storms and to a good portion of any storm that even happens. When the storms exceed the capacity of the whole plant, so all of the treatment practices, it still gets really good treatment through enhanced screening and what we call the vortex, which basically the water comes in at an angle at a tangent, so it swirls around which enhances the amount of solids that will settle out. The most of the solid material that comes out of that vortex actually goes back into the plant to get full treatment. The other thing about the vortex is that it has a really quick acting disinfection agent. So the main acute water quality issue with CSOs is the bacteria, the elevation of bacteria in the water at the discharge point. Because of this vortex, we're able to keep those bacteria levels well within water quality standards when everything is working well. We also, as part of that project, extended the outfall further out into the lake. I believe, Steve, it used to be right on shore. It then went about 1,000 feet out and then with this project, we extended it another 1,600 feet beyond the breakwater and put in another diffusing system. So it helps to diffuse the area so you're not having just a pipe with material coming out. We do, after that project, still have those five CSO locations. There's the Pine Barge Canal CSO, the two Manhattan's, Colchester Ave, and then GAISO CSO up there in the north. Before 2009 and the stormwater utility where we started working on these again, the Manhattan's and GAISO went off quite frequently and at much higher volumes than we see today. Today, our main problem child is the Pine Barge Canal CSO. It is much more active. It's gone off now with last night nine times, all in these intense rainstorms that we've been getting. Even though it's been a dry-ish year when we have gotten rain, it's come all at once over 30-minute periods. That's the type of thing that makes these CSOs go off. This one in particular, it discharges into the southern end of the Superfund site, the Pine Barge Canal Superfund site, and travels about 2,100 feet before it enters Lake Champlain. 2009, that's when I got to join the city. I really like that year. When we created the second-in-the-state stormwater utility, which created a dedicated funding stream, which enables us to leverage grant funding, have dedicated staff, all these different types of things. It was created largely because there were all these new regulations that were coming down the pike, but also because we had this continued CSO problem. The CSO problem is really a stormwater problem. It's driven by rain, not by anybody doing anything wrong, just by the rain, which unfortunately is on an increasing trend, this intensity piece. One of the major benefits of creating the stormwater utility is we use that as an opportunity to create a much more stringent stormwater ordinance. If we didn't have this stormwater ordinance, people would still have to get stormwater permits from the state, but the state only requires stormwater permits at this point for projects that disturb or create an acre of impervious. There's a ton of projects we all know in Burlington that are well below an acre. We needed to create a program that we were going to capture more of the projects and leverage them. How do we do that? Not only do we manage them or require them to manage 100% of the runoff from their new impervious, the biggest advance was that we started requiring them to manage some of their existing runoff. I don't care if you have a parking lot and you're doing a building. In the old days, you wouldn't have to do anything because you weren't making any more stormwater runoff. We're actually asking you to make it better. Through models, you can show what the runoff would be if half of that parking lot was grass and come up with what your release rate is. With every one of these redevelopment projects, we're actually filling the hole in that we've dug for ourselves. Large projects, in addition to meeting those stormwater criteria, if they're increasing their overall sewage flow substantially, we require them to take off even more stormwater. In most cases, they've already taken off all of their stormwater from their project, and so we say, hey, we've got these two catch basins on North Avenue that are still connected to the combined sewer system, and we're going to need to pay to help us infiltrate that water so that you're making things even more better, making things betterer for our stormwater system. Examples of that would be Cambrian Rise, City Place Burlington. Those are projects that, yes, are adding to the overall dry-weather sewage, but they've made substantial gains as far as the stormwater impact. Is everybody still sticking with me? Is that interesting enough? Okay. We've been able to do a lot, about $1.6 million worth of wet weather mitigation projects. First, in 2010, the project almost killed me, but two years of American Reinvestment and Recovery Act money, we were able to take off, I think, about three and a half acres of impervious surface in the Old North End, and what we do is, so stormwater is only a problem when it doesn't get to do what it wants to naturally, which is fall and then run off and soak into the ground, right? It's a problem because we've covered the sponge with all of our impervious surfaces. So anytime we can infiltrate that water, so in this example, there's storm drains, and instead of the storm drains collecting the water and going to a pipe, which then rushes to either the plant or somewhere else, the water is actually allowed to infiltrate in. Now we're very careful about where these infiltration practices go. There's a lot of contaminated soils in Burlington. We're aware of that. We do scrutinize these locations to make sure that we're not going to be causing an unintended consequence. We look for soils that are highly absorptive. We're not going to put one of these, likely, in the South End where everybody knows there's clay, soil, and high groundwater. Things like this are really great for places like the Old North End where they're 65 feet of sand, and you can really soak up a lot of water. So because of that work, this is just a frequency sort of count of CSOs. You can see, in particular, Park and North Champlain really used to go off quite a bit. And since we did that project, we are seeing those frequencies go down substantially. North Champlain and Park did go off once this year. I can't remember which storm event it was, but it was a whopper. But we clearly do have a problem at the Pine Street barge. It's going off quite frequently. One cool thing, and kind of harkens back to what the mayor was saying, in addition to the models that we've had, we've recently been able to install specific flow meters at these CSOs. So before, we were estimating the flow based on some characteristics of the pipe, and now we're actually able to tell you exactly how much came out of that pipe. That's really important for us figuring out what solutions, right? If we're just doing estimates, we don't know exactly what size things to build upstream. But if the tighter numbers we have, the more optimized, and hopefully the more cost savings that we're able to implement for you guys, the ratepayers. Are you ready for my super wonky, like, who here likes numbers and graphs? Okay. I'll keep some of you happy. So this is my graph that kind of captures the current picture of our water quality world, even with the really terribleness of the summer. And as the mayor said, it's probably been the most professionally disappointing six months of my water resources career thus far. But what it's showing is, if you think over here, this is the graph of what we know was going out into the Burlington Bay, $170 million. It's likely more, which is why it has the arrow. And when we start to look at how much combined sewer flow we've treated, this blue bar, 211 million gallons of combined sewer that has gone through the entire wastewater treatment plant. So grit screening, primaries, biological systems, secondaries, and the disinfection area. Like, it's getting the same treatment that your sewage is getting, which is a lot cleaner than any of the separate stormwater outfalls. About 105 has gone through that vortex system. Not as great a treatment, but we can ensure that at least the bacteria issue has been addressed when it goes through there. This red bar here is what went wrong this summer, in which we had plant infrastructure and process issues which did cause, overall, the release of about 12.3 million gallons of, in most cases, partially treated but not fully disinfected. So the bacteria levels leaving the plant were unacceptably high. This other little number, and I have a pie chart to break it out, so I guess this isn't my only geeky slide. This is what the CSOs, those combined sewer overflows out in the system discharge. This is not abnormal for what we've seen in the past. So, yes, big problem, yes, problem, but not because something was going wrong. We knew about this and we're trying to fix it. I just want to, this is often a misunderstood point. That, you know, 13 million, almost 13 million gallons there has sometimes been characterized, even including by the media, as raw sewage going into Lake Champlain. Oh, and Megan anticipated this. I'll let her speak to it, but it's important to understand it's not all sewage. Correct. So, what have we been doing with the last few years? As the mayor said, we have been working really hard to develop better plans. 2017, we did a 10-year capital plan for all of our wastewater systems, our pump stations, and our three plants. The period 2014 to 2017, even until today, where people were out looking at an outfall, where we did a stormwater outfall assessment. We did the first phase of our sewer pipe assessment, where we're actually putting cameras into pipes, looking at what the pipes look like, and using that information to make better decisions. We've shifted our thinking from, oh crap, it's about to break. Let's fix it to a risk-based capital planning where we look at not just the likelihood of failure, but the consequence of failure. Certain things can break and it's okay. Certain things can't break, and if they do, bad things happen like happened this year. And then all behind the scenes, and this sort of is a foreshadowing of the future, we've been working on integrated planning, which is all of these new regulations that are coming down the pike, the Lake Champlain cleanup, stricter combined sewer overflow regulations, stricter stormwater regulations. We have to figure out how to deal with those in the long term, not ready with all the answers for that. It's work that's ongoing, and will continue to happen while we're implementing this plan. When you look at the results of our capital planning, it is a little stark. There's been no comprehensive upgrades made to the wastewater plants since that 1994. So they are approaching or well past, in some cases, their useful life. And these are just some examples. A bromine pump, which is 24 years old, that's really critical to making sure we disinfect the combined sewer flows. Corroded metal components with literally band-aids. Corrosion of metal that's so bad there's not a lot of stuff left to, even if we got the welder out. These are things that have to be addressed, because they're part of making sure we produce the high-quality water that we do every day. There are about 11 critical pump stations. We have about 25 total stations in the city. These are pumps that are in low-lying areas. If you live at Crescent Beach, or if you go to North Beach, those areas are lower than where the plant is, and so you have to pump the water back up to the gravity system to get it to go to the plant. So they're pretty critical. If they fail, you can have discharges to the water. A lot of them don't meet the storage requirements. We'd like to have more storage on site, so when a pump fails, we have a little bit more time before the guy in the pump truck comes and has to literally suck it out and take it to the plant. There are about 13 miles of what we would consider high-risk collection pipe systems. These are just some examples of sewer pipes with cracks, probably about to separate a corrugated metal storm pipe with a hole in it. This is what causes sinkholes. If folks remember the DPW truck tipping up in the air caused by that, where the hole forms, and then as the storm event happens, it erodes the soil that's above the pipe. Your pavement ends up looking like it's fine, but something heavy drives over and can fall through. This is an example of a stormwater outfall that because of the erosion has actually separated, and once this happens, it's a very bad cascade process. Now, every time when it rains, this hole, this ravine gets worse and worse and worse, which causes more pieces of the pipe to break off. It's not a good situation. I'm not going to dive into this a ton, but to let you know the organic loading issue that we had, which contributed to the June 2nd, June 4th discharge, we had been tracking the increasing trend of what they call biological oxygen demand. This is the amount of organics that are in what somebody puts down the drain. A typical residential system puts in a certain amount. We know that in the industrial industries, not because they're doing anything wrong, but because they're handling food products, whether it's breweries or cideries or bakeries or chocolate factories or kombucha tea, anything that puts more down the drain than a typical residential area is going to have higher loading. We knew this was happening, and we had started to address it by developing internally an improved framework. We did not develop it in time. We had communicated to the council and to the mayor that these challenges were coming. We knew in FY 2020, so that's next year, that we were going to need to act. But this summer happened, and we discharged almost in total 13 million gallons. A large portion of that was that one event or two days of one event in which we were having trouble with our biological process due to the high strength waste. The infrastructure failures that happened, approximately, as the mayor was saying, approximately 75% of that total volume was stormwater, so we have to report the total volume, but in certain instances it is in fact largely stormwater. It doesn't mean it doesn't have bacteria in it and that we shouldn't close the beaches. Then this little slice up here, the nine events that we've had, which is about 90% stormwater, are those collection system CSOs. In each case, we've taken quick action, but those quick actions and short-term actions aren't enough in order to really fix them and make sure we're not going to be going backwards. We have to do more, which brings us to our Clean Water Resiliency Plan. Seven points of investment. I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm just going to give you some of the highlights. You have the handouts, or if you don't have a handout, they should be up at the swag table, where we also have dog poop bags and stickers and all sorts of things that we would love for you to pick up and take home. This graph shows the approximate distribution of where the money is going. The large majority of it are the wastewater treatment plants and the pump stations with another significant chunk on the collection system. And the highlights, the majority of this money is going to that stabilizing and modernizing our existing infrastructure. So nothing new yet. We just got to keep the roof on the house. Our initial focus is going to be those disinfection systems that failed, the ones that caused the yellow slice. We're going to be upgrading our computerized controls. That was one of the things that fails. And we're going to be upgrading them to make sure that they're smarter, more redundant, more alarms, more backups, automatic backups, so that even if somebody's not standing right there, things switch over automatically. We're going to be upgrading the mechanicals for those systems. So one of the issues we had this summer was that Valve had failed at the disinfection system and the disinfection agent couldn't get to where it was supposed to go. So that's going to be upgraded. We're then also doing all of the other high-risk, critical infrastructure at all three plants, Maine, North, and East. We're going to be working on 11 of the most or the highest-risk pump stations and upgrading 13 miles of sewer, combined sewer, and stormwater collection systems, as well as five of the worst 11 outfalls. As far as the improvement side, how are we making things actually better, not just preventing backsliding? We're going to be continuing our mitigation work on that untreated collection system, combined sewer overflows, and the combined sewer flows to Maine Plant. So anything that we can do above a CSO is going to help that CSO. But at any point, anywhere in the city, if we do a project at the combined sewer system, it helps Maine Plant provide even more treatment to more of the flows that reach it. Because Pine Street is challenging and will likely continue to be a challenge because of the nature of the geology and the bedrock and all of the characteristics of the south end, we're going to look into the feasibility and cost benefit of actually building a satellite disinfection station. So if Pine Street is going to keep going off for some likely extended time period, is there something that we can do to knock down the bacteria even further if we determine that that is driving beach closures? There's likely other sources of bacteria in the Pine Barge Canal. There's a ton of birds that hang out right in the canal and also right at the outfall. Those all add to bacteria. So we're doing some additional studies to determine, okay, what are the biggest components? Because we could disinfect the CSO all we want and still end up with a bacteria problem right there. We are going to be implementing a tiered industrial pollution prevention program, not just for breweries. We're going to be looking at all of those industries that handle organics and coming up with appropriate programs to make sure they're managing and diverting their waste instead of putting it down the drain and affecting our public system. And then so that we do better in the future, we're going to be trying to implement a more modernized asset management system using a computer-based maintenance management system where all of the records and all of the information lives in one place instead of people's heads, which unfortunately is the nature of the business. So $30 million. The good part is that there won't be any bond-driven rate impact until FY21, which is July 2020. We calculate that the maximum bond-driven rate impact, so we hope that it's going to be even less because of a number of different strategies that we're looking into, the maximum impact on your water sewer storm water bill, not your tax bill, after five years would be $5.36 a month. This is calculated for a property that uses about 600 cubic feet of water. So if you want to know if yours is going to be $5 or $4, you could look on your water bill and see it tells you exactly how much water you use, and that's going to be a driving factor. This impact is after we've already applied two key rate mitigation strategies, which are saving you 40% over what it could have been. We're leveraging the Vermont Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which has about a 2% admin or interest fee compared to typical bond market rates, which are now in the 4% range. It's not without its challenges. It has a lot more paperwork than just buying a private bond, but we believe the cost savings are significant enough that we want to do this. And we're also leveraging existing capital funding that we've been building our capital line over the years. It's not enough to really get us to the $30 million, but it has enabled us to have funds that we can kind of reapply to the debt service. There are additional state grants. We're going to be looking and seeking and applying for all the grants that we can. And one thing that we were already interested in, and the council actually put in the bond resolution as a requirement of us having this bond vote, would be to look at alternative rate structures and affordability programs to make sure we're doing everything we can to keep our water as affordable as possible. That might be discount programs. We might be figuring out plumbing conservation programs if we can help people use less water by having low-flow toilets, low-flow fixtures that helps your water bill. We are even looking into whether or not there may be funding to help people pay for or provide loan money so that you can improve your private sewer lateral. A lot of folks don't know that the pipe between the street and your house that carries your sewage is entirely on the property owner. And so when that breaks, it can be thousands and thousands of dollars. And we want to figure out a way that we can hopefully bring that cost down through helping folks understand more about their pipe, maybe aggregating contractors, things like that. When this bond and the work is implemented, the benefits, minimizing permit violations, I can't say that we will never, ever, ever have a permit violation ever. But we're working to minimize it so that what happened this summer is something that only happens once in a blue moon. We're going to be upgrading those disinfection systems at all free plants, major rehabilitation of all other critical, so high likelihood of failure, high consequence of failure, clean water systems, and we're going to be implementing more green infrastructure and stormwater runoff reductions in both the combined sewer system and the separate system. To be transparent, and I had foreshadowed this, you know, beyond 2022, we still have work to do. We have to figure out how we're going to actually reduce even further our phosphorus inputs from our plants, from our stormwater systems, from our roadways. So we are actively looking at phosphorus upgrades at the wastewater treatment plants, you know, full build out of combined sewer projects. How do we get it so those don't go off except once in a blue moon? Looking at other separate stormwater runoff management strategies, enhanced street sweeping, leave collection programs, downspout disconnection programs, and then, you know, we're continuing our capital planning and we're probably going to have additional investments that are needed for the next round of critical infrastructure. I want to stress that drinking water is not included in this bond proposal. You did vote for that in 2016 and we've been actively replacing pipes. There are more pipes that need to be replaced. There's our high tanks, the tank that's at UVM and at Redstone need investment. And we also need to make sure that our water plant, which is running really well and we've been investing in it incrementally, we need to make sure that that remains stable. Lastly, just a couple of answers to some common questions. There has been clear progress in reducing our footprint on the lake over time. This summer is a terrible, terrible blemish, but we can get back on track. We still have over a million gallons of sewage processing capacity at our plants. So the issue is not the connecting of toilets and sinks. The issue is stormwater. And to the extent that with all of these developments, which I know people are concerned about from the sewage processing standpoint, can help us reduce our stormwater. We leverage private dollars to help us with our stormwater problem. And we can do things better. The collection system CSOs, they're caused by intense rainstorms, not by a mistake, not by a valve, not by something that somebody did. And those CSO volumes, those untreated CSO volumes, are typically more than 90% comprised of stormwater. And lastly, and we can dive into this a little bit more, the unpermitted discharges that we had in the CSOs, they're not a key driver of cyanobacteria, the algae blooms. Those are driven by phosphorus, with our releases this year, our bacteria issues. The wastewater treatment plant does release some phosphorus, but wastewater treatment plants as a whole, all in Vermont, the only represent 3% of the total phosphorus load. Phosphorus is a every sector, every person problem. It's a urban system with stormwater runoff, it's farms, it's anything that discharges phosphorus, and those are largely driven by large rainstorms throughout the watershed. And with that, we wanted to draw our attention to, it's under construction and gets better every day or every five minutes with our incredible public information manager, Robert Golding. Also wanted to announce, we've been talking about this for a while, for the next two months, every third Thursday of the month, we're gonna have open house tours at Maine Wastewater. The best way for you to understand the system and see what we're up against is to come visit us. We'll probably take a break in the wintertime and then pick it back up in the spring, but it's something we wanna continue in the long term. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Megan, for that great presentation. We'll also be, for folks who may not have been able to come tonight, you can tell them that we will be taking a tour of all the NPAs this coming month as well. So the neighborhood planning assemblies are other avenues to learn more about the Clean Water Resiliency Plan. Anybody who has questions, please come on up to the mic. We have mics so that we can capture it on CCTV and so everybody can hear. Come on up, thanks. Hi, my name is Fifi Kaplan. I am a new citizen of Burlington, very happy, but also, first of all, I wanna say I commend you for the acceleration of this bond. This is so important, as you can well imagine, I was flabbergasted about what happened this past summer. But what I'd like to speak with you about is something you touched upon, but did not really utilize it as a major component of how to deal with stormwater. First of all, Burlington is a growing metropolis and it's been so for a long time. In the last 10 years, I've been living out of Vermont around the world and believe it or not, I've lived in tropical places where they are running out of water. Climate change is part of it, but it really has to do with the concretization of the world. And aquifers not being allowed to be recharged. So I did see that there is a new regulation that you were saying for projects. For example, you used of a parking lot, perhaps not being all used with macadam and doing that way. But you also showed a picture of taking up surfaces that were impervious. And one of the places I suggest that we be innovative in a very low-tech way. Now, I'm not an expert on this, but as I said, I've traveled the world. In Japan, which gets very cold and frost in the winter, so many of their surfaces are some kind of upcycled rubber, tire, something. So the water goes through it, but you can walk for miles and miles and not feel it on your feet. And the water is, again, recharging. So I am asking you that when you think of these regulations for these new developers, that they start looking at innovation but, you know, of course, they're going to scream about the cost, the cost, the cost because cement, face it, it's cheap and it's available. But there are so many other ways, and we are in the state of Vermont, which prides itself on innovation for the environment. And these are the kind of mitigating factors that we really need to start utilizing. Or else this city is going to begin to have a lot more big city problems as we increase in population, which means more development. Let's do smarter development. 100%, I agree with everything that you said and one of the reasons, and I didn't talk a lot about it, is our strategy for dealing with stormwater, our primary strategy. The one we look at before we look at anything else and the one that myself and Jenna Olson, who's the stormwater program manager when we meet with developments, our first place that we start from is green stormwater infrastructure, which does, it's similar to the sustainable urban development, some of the other things in Europe, it's the same idea that we don't need to put in tanks and ponds and what we call gray infrastructure if we can leverage Mother Nature and do what she's been doing all along. So some examples, and you can't see perfectly here, but a lot of what we're trying to do in those projects that there is money for in this plan are to either go subsurface to do that infiltration if we can't do our ideal strategy, which is stormwater bumpouts, which are planted areas, so instead of raised beds, they're concave. I saw that on the new park, the new of the retrofit of the park, right here. More and more, we hope that you're seeing examples of that. South End City Market. Anybody been there? It's awesome. You don't die parking. That's why I go there. The median in the middle of the City Hall, South End, that's a bioretention. So that water is running from the impervious surface and instead of medians that are perched and do nothing other than just sit there, it's actually a functioning area with perennials planted, all of those things that we can never recreate that Mother Nature does. So I am 100% on board and should have re-emphasized or emphasized more that our major strategy is green infrastructure. Not just because it works better for stormwater, but because of all of the other co-benefits. If I'm going to take your dollar, it'd be great if you wanted to give me all the dollars just to manage stormwater, but I need to be managing other things. I need to be doing traffic calming, decreasing the urban heat island, adding tree canopy. We're totally on board with what you're talking about. Well, that's great, but I will say I did look very, very closely at the plans for the park. You're talking about City Hall Park? City Hall Park. And there is an increase in hard skate. And there is a lessening with the taking out of the trees. There will be less trees. And those two things are in direct opposition to what you just laid out. On balance, because both myself and Jenna have scrutinized that plan. On balance, the amount of stormwater treatment that is being provided is going to be much greater, the erosion. So if you go into the park right now, all of the compacted areas, there's dirt deltas at every sidewalk. So that plan is not going to only be handling the increase in pervious surface. There is some increase in pervious surface. One of the rain gardens, the central rain garden, is a bioretention area. Just as we talked using my nature. And it's actually going to be taking water from St. Paul, water that currently just keeps on going. So I just want to say to you that, again, I think we do share a lot of the same concerns and we are heavily involved in that project. And we are making sure that we are doing so much better from a stormwater perspective, even if there may be more trees in the park, be less trees on balance. The entire downtown with some of the strategies that we're doing, I believe there's going to be not just more trees, but healthier trees. We can plan all the trees we want, but if they're not healthy and their tree canopies are not substantial and they don't have supportive soil environments, they're not going to do as much for stormwater as they could with where we're going with how we manage our urban trees. Well, I will just say that that's the focus of the policies we've had. I just want to ask you one thing about this bond. One last question and then we definitely want to move on to other people. Sure. Why is there no part of the pie for what we were just talking about, for either mitigation, for ripping up old places that have the macadamon and the cement, removing it and allowing there to be more water penetration to the aquifers. So the green slice of the pie, the 4.12 million combined sewer and stormwater retrofits. I colored it green in one of my slides. The high priority where we start is green stormwater infrastructure. So there's a a fairly significant amount in there to make sure that we're able to do exactly the practices that you're talking about. So removing is existing. I don't know if we are going to do that, but there's a couple of roads that if I ever get my hands on them I will do a road diet. But the major strategy there is if you have a roadway that currently just has storm drains to implement things like bumpouts so removing the impervious and allowing the stormwater to access Mother Nature. Thank you very much for your work. Thank you for your questions. Just to just want to add it's not just what the city one of the parts of that question I think it's an important part is it's one thing for what the city itself is doing. There's another question of what we're requiring developers to do since 2009. Megan went through some of the regulations that we have unique to Burlington additional requirements on developers. We in the recent zoning work happening over the last couple years have sort of doubled down on that strategy and for developments in the downtown sizable new projects in the downtown need to function have the stormwater characteristics as if they were meadows as if they were green fields and in some cases that's exactly what the developers are planning to build in response to that regulation. If you look at the plants of Burlington City Place, Burlington there's a lot of green roof as part of that plan which is explicitly using kind of these plantings to provide that stormwater function where that can't be done there they find ways to do that other ways with these big tanks and with with greater retention. So it really is a frustration that so often there's this misconception about what's driving our problem. Megan hit on it several times in that last slide but our main problem is stormwater and the solution one of these solutions for our stormwater problem is new development. It is one of the things that helps us move in the right direction and we're trying to maximize that opportunity. Thank you for your patience. Jerry Manek, Kingsland Terrace my wife and I have toured the sewage treatment plant the manager pointed out two problems with the rotating tanks that aerate the water. One problem is that the smell is unbelievable unless the wind is blowing directly from the east which doesn't happen very often I can attest to that because I had at one time a mooring on Perkins Pier and every time we went to our boat it was noticeably a very bad smell. The other problem with those tanks the aerobic tanks down there is that vandals go along the bike path and throw stuff over the fence into the rotating tanks which then blocks the rotation which means the tanks have to be drained and the jam cleaned out and then the tanks refilled so it's down time for the aerobic system. The city of Rockland Maine which I'm very familiar with has a plant sewage treatment plant approximately the same size as ours. It's one block off the main street. There's absolutely no smell and that's because it's an anaerobic tank. In other words has a roof on it and isn't open to the air. So my question basically is does your bond plan include plans to convert our plant from an aerobic system to an anaerobic system? It does not currently I actually had a conversation with somebody today they can raise their hand about the feasibility or at least running the analysis on covering our primaries I believe that's what you were referring to for the odor mitigation and also to protect against some vandalism. It's not something that is in this this plan but if there's money for it and it's cost effective I do think that there would be benefits because it's on the waterfront because it's close to the marina and I certainly would love to have one less problem of managing a challenge which is that wastewater is made of people's sewage. So it's something that we are looking into but it's not explicitly in this plan. So I would suggest that you look into putting it on the plan because it's very critical have you been down to Vermont Tech to see their anaerobic system? I have not. October 8th 2013 I wrote to Maro with this invitation from Vermont Tech to come down and see their system as it was being constructed. Is it a digester or a wastewater treatment plant? Anaerobic treatment system, digester yes. So a digester is a component of wastewater treatment. That is something that we are looking at to manage our biosolids to my knowledge and I don't know if one of my people in the gray shirts wants to chime in. I'm not sure that we could replace our primaries with an anaerobic digester. It doesn't quite work that way. I believe they have a digester for other reasons but I would love if you can leave that with me to make sure that I'm speaking from an informed place. I push our folks and they will attest to this to attend every webinar and every conference and workshop. So I would love to get an eye on that and we can always contact them and make sure that we're not missing something. I'm sure it's running up to full capacity now because this was five years ago. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hi, Andy Barker, I live in the south end. It was great. I appreciate all the good work and foresight about what we need to invest in the city. So I'm really just looking for a little bit of context. So I think the bond makes a lot of sense and I think one thing it's important for residents in the city to understand is if we don't pass the bond, there are lots of needs that you identified that we're going to pay for one way or another and so I'm curious if you've done any modeling about the impact on rates going forward if we don't pass the bond and we only do what we have to do and I'm assuming that's not a zero number. So when we say it's going to cost us $5.36 more per month if we pass the bond what's it going to cost us more per month if we don't pass the bond? We have not modeled it explicitly. I would love to be able to do that but we haven't done it for this. I can tell you without a doubt when we have emergencies our costs skyrocket one of the reasons, one of the factors when we were evaluating our sewer system was depth of sewer system because when we have a sewer system that's 18 feet below grade and it breaks and it creates a giant sinkhole the economic loss, the traffic issues, the cost to even get to that is huge so if we can get to these pipes before they collapse by relining them in advance it saves us tens of thousands of dollars on an annual basis I think the bigger issue is if we keep having these discharges the lake is a huge driver of our tourism economy. People will stop coming to Vermont, they'll stop wanting to recreate here and that's not okay and that overall may not be on your water sewer bill but it's Vermont and Burlington is going to feel it. I don't know if Mayor wants to chime in any. I think that captures the well. When Megan says we have Vermont, it's a challenging thing to try to model exactly which is why it hasn't done but it is very clear that there's substantial costs avoided by these kind of investments. If we don't make these kind of investments that we end up spending more there's potential of fines that we would owe to the state for permit violations there is the yes, when the there's I guess you hit on the roads being undermined and just the difference in costs. We're seeing it in some of the water work we're doing now when we are doing relining as opposed to digging up pipes and trenching we're able to get for the same amount of water we're able to get a lot more substantially more mileage on the water side. Same thing is true here if we're relining these proactively we're going to get a whole lot more done than in these emergency conditions over time conditions digging things up it's just clearly there's substantial costs avoidance and as we agree we can be more specific about that over time. It would be great as we continue to develop more of what things cost the cost of open digging a sewer especially on an emergency basis versus relining. It's a stark difference. Just one really quick follow up can you give me a sense for the order of magnitude of the potential fines that we would be liable for from the state or I don't know are there fines at the federal level as well. I don't Steve we did have a fine at some point the magnitude is when it first comes in 70 million sorry not 70 million, 70,000 you know there has been a lot of chatter sometimes on social media about us being fined the challenge is we don't make profits so that money does have to come from the rate payers so the state has been investigating the issues this year we have not heard back as to whether or not we are going to be receiving fines I hope that we don't and or if we do that the evidence of all the good work that we are doing and heading in the right direction will somehow play into that but that's out of my hands. Great, well again thanks for the presentation and I really hope that we pass the bond and we can make the smart investments going forward that will keep the lake clean and keep our cost down so thank you. Thanks for the questions and comments. My name is Aidan Saunders I go to Champlain College and I live in the north end I'm wondering how this project will, how long will last and how when it might need to be updated and if there's thought about as more people move to Burlington and the population grows if an increase in sewage would affect this project it's going forward. Thank you. So currently the investments are planned over probably a four to five year time period. We are working right now on that logistical plan of when we actually think what will happen. The issue of I think you said your second point was will there be more needed and the answer is yes we don't know exactly when that next round of investments will come. The integrated planning effort that's combining our wastewater challenges with our stormwater challenges that plan is due to be completed early 2020 part of that plan is looking at the full build out and do we have enough dry dry weather capacity and if we don't what do we need to do about it so that is being considered. I think with water conservation because even as we add more people as more people have water conservation efficient appliances sometimes that increase in flow isn't as great as it would be and that's one of the reasons why we're interested in it. It hurts us on the drinking water side we'll have to figure out how to make up that money but the overall benefits of maybe reducing the overall flows to the wastewater plant and making sure that we retain capacity for growth. And then did you have I think you had a third question. I think we're going to be looking at the ongoing process so even the minute we do a capital plan we're continuing to revisit it with the new information that we get on any given week or day so yes it will be updated to make sure it's relevant to what the conditions are at any point and then also I think folks should be aware that there probably is something coming in the 2021-2022 at least a conversation about what additional investments we need to make. Thank you for that. Questions? Oh I love those. Yeah if I could decipher my own notes. And some of this you might have already addressed. Okay the capacity issue you mentioned is a million gallons of capacity among the three plants. Is that excess capacity? That's total capacity? That is total remaining unallocated capacity. So our plant runs three million gallons Is this just main plant to be clear? Yes sorry we also as projects come in we write capacity letters so if somebody has said they need a certain amount of capacity that's sort of on our books so when we talk about the million gallons I believe Steve it's one million of unallocated capacity. At Riverside, Riverside is only running at about 50% capacity so there's ample capacity there and then North Plant I think is also 50% ish capacity. So those parts are less constrained. That's comforting to know. The end flush is the one. I worry about that too. I've been here 25 years but I used to live in a college town that had a stadium that held 105,000 people and they had to size the whole plant for the halftime flush and it was like triple the amount that you would need halftime flush is totally a thing. I don't know if Burlington has an analogous halftime flush. What do we peak at for halftime flush? Okay we will get that tidbit out there. So I guess so related to that is sort of like a peaking question I know we just talked about a lot in the electricity utility world but I'm just wondering is there when it's not raining are there certain times of day when the load on the plant is more and are there scenarios where like high volume dischargers could be encouraged to discharge in the middle of the night when the rest of us are not flushing our That is exactly one of the things that we would be looking at and are looking at as part of our industrial program. Not just when you send us the stuff but can you send it to us in a more consistent stream at a better time. So part of the problem is it just all comes to us at once in slug loads right that's a lot for the bugs to handle the bugs kind of get the biological system gets used to a certain level of nutrients and then all of a sudden people are throwing pizzas at their face and they can't keep up and that's sort of what happens when we get these slug loads so totally part of where we want to go with the program and where what we're talking about right now even before we have an official program we've been collaborating a lot with the breweries in the Cideries they know we have a problem they're invested in the lake and so even before we have the piece of paper that says exactly what they need to do they're getting on board as quickly as possible. I just want to reinforce that last point real quick just that from my perspective the breweries, Cideries have been helpful partners in this effort and the city from the city's perspective while we do think there's an issue here that is first of all bigger than them that deals with other types of industrial users that are putting off high-strength waste we want to maintain that partnership we want Burlington to be a place where these kind of businesses can thrive we think it's been part of the success area of Burlington in recent years and we're looking for collaborative solutions that address this issue but also a lot of these industries I think a few more random questions yay let's see okay a funding question because you mentioned over the years the city's been adding to a capital renewal fund like how much obviously it's not enough let's see if I have and is that just coming out of operating dollars that you set aside every year? yeah so we this is sort of the trajectory of how our capital spending so our PAYGO not our debt service related capital spending has happened and so you can see that across stormwater wastewater and water we have been on upward trajectory it's just not enough we need to basically turn those capital dollars into debt service dollars because we can buy and pay for a whole bunch more if we spread it out over time moreover these are investments that should last 20 and in some case 30 years and so we don't want the current rate payer to be bearing the full brunt of the cost for something that somebody 10 years 20 years down the line another generation is actually going to be benefiting from so that's some of the thinking around making that conversion so answer your question and maybe if there's one other question are staffs going to be here afterwards too for one-on-one talks as well alright well I was going to ask something about predictive model like okay when you know there's a major storm event coming that either the city does to prepare or that we as residents who contribute to the flow that we can do like predictive modeling where you can we don't currently have predictive modeling we will be able to once we have a more fully calibrated H&H model hydraulic and hydrologic model so we know what size or type of storm is going to produce a CSO the problem is is the from my standpoint the weather data is still very it's not refined enough a lot of our issues it's not the you're going to get a two inch rainstorm we can handle that it's the cloud burst where a thunderstorm pops up and dumps on us and we don't even have any warning that being said we do have on-call staffing and we have always had on-call staffing and staffer called in there's an alarm when certain things are happening at the plant to let them know a storm event is happening to get there because of the events this summer we have increased sort of their responsiveness so when they know that there is thunderstorms coming people will respond earlier we are also looking into whether or not we can get better predictions of rain events or even you know not waiting until the flow hits the plant you know having our rain gauge tipping bucket the minute it starts raining at plant at the plant you know having somebody get online look at the storms and then determine whether they need to come in but someday I would love to have like Philly the CSO cast where you actually have a map that lights up lastly we actually have alarms at those CSOs so we don't we don't have to wait we don't have to send somebody out we get text messages emails the minute a CSO goes off I know Matt knows and then we go into response mode one other quick thing you haven't mentioned our pharmaceuticals a problem in our wastewater there was a study there are pharmaceuticals that come in our waste stream people who ingest pharmaceuticals you pee it out and some of the byproducts are there that does come to the waste treatment plant which is why we are a big proponent of take back programs and people not flushing them down the toilet in particular to change the fact that if you're ingesting them I don't have the study off the top of my head but if you see I think Steve Roy may be able to get you something USGS did do a study where they looked at pharmaceuticals in the effluent so it's what they call emerging contaminants of concern that we're keeping our eye on it's not something the wastewater treatment plant can easily handle it's almost more of a cultural like issue before I take one more question Councillor Hartnett did you want to say something on that last point okay at the end I'll definitely talk about that we'd be happy to do that and we'll try to take a few more questions and end at 7.30 we told you we'd end then and then we're available for any questions I'll stay until 11 o'clock if you guys want to talk come on I live in the old north end I just have three really quick questions does UVM and Champlain College have to also follow the same regulations as far as building an impervious ground cover they they do they have to go through the zoning office and we review stormwater management plans when they do anything they have to talk to us even to the point of if they're doing a drainage efficiency project so there was like a basement project that they were going to be capturing the water that was currently going into their basement and tying into our combined sewer system they weren't even building any impervious and we had them put in a storage tank because we didn't want to accept any additional flow so we had to go through some of the things also I'm concerned about the barge canal and not the bacteria but the EPA contaminants the toxic contaminants is that an issue that's going to be addressed by this as well that's a little bit outside the purview of local entities it's more of a I mean we can speak I mean that there's been decades and you know essentially there's a cap in place that is designed and generally functioned successfully to contain those contaminants the I don't believe we think that you know there's any real it's the same area of town but the CSO going off doesn't really interact with that waste or cause that waste to worsen in any way just affecting the water that flows over the top of the cap that he mentioned there are monitoring wells and we are actively working with a number of partners to make sure that the cap is continuing to hold and your first question to describe not only are the UVM is UVM the hospital Champlain College all institutions and non-profits not only are they subject to the same regulations they also pay their full fair share of the cost unlike on the property tax where we have many entities in town that don't pay full property taxes or in some cases any property taxes everyone who consumes who uses water pays for that water usage and that's part of the reason why you know it really matters whether this bond is being paid for by your water bill the water costs are spread out over all the water users as opposed to some of the other bonding like the high school bond for example or the sidewalks and streets those are paid for that bonding is paid for just from property taxes and lastly this is pun intended I don't know if it's just a drop in the bucket but would having rain buckets at all properties do anything to help this at all? that seems like a fairly simple yes we have and if you want to see Jenna in the light grey shirt we actually have a residential stormwater grant program an individual house if that was the only thing that came to the plant isn't huge but you take 10, 20 a block of houses and if they all captured and kept just a little bit of their water on the property and used it later for watering your gardens or for something else that would absolutely help to keep the water on their own property and not let it get into the street is absolutely helping and we have programs to help incentivize that so yes thank you and also a really excellent presentation good luck getting this bond passed at the same time as the high school that is a little concerning but thank you understood one last question and then we'll address Councillor Hartnett's point and then depart thanks I'm Lori Fisher I'm director of the Lake Shum playing committee and very much appreciate the presentation and the efforts put forward here I just wanted to encourage you to use all the avenues you have before you when you're going out for this bond and also when you're billing folks to use that to promote some of the really good educational materials that you have on your website I think every time you send a water bill out you want to be communicating those tips you have to encourage everybody to have you know minimize their impact on water quality and you know one of the things that we often ignore particularly in the northeast where we see water is so abundant is water conservation that water conservation here is going to reduce people's you know rate it's also a really good thing to do to reduce the stress on the sewage treatment facility and it's something that everybody can get involved in and I know you have a lot of information on your website but I think you want to be doing an ongoing commercial with every water bill you send out we'd be happy to work with you on that to just change your tips around and not everybody goes on the website so it would be really great for you to be promoting those things with every water bill helping incentivize it also showing people here's a great example where you can see city market south end and explain that and to the extent that you're putting public dollars in there do take put an extra step in there with making sure you do some interpretive signage so you have those ongoing commercials saying this is how it's working for you this is why it makes a difference and I think that'll go a long way and again thank you and we look forward to supporting the bond act great thank you very much do we want to address council heart and its question last night at the word 4-7 MPA there was a citizen who because storm water rates if you look at your storm water bill and if you live in a single family duplex or triplex property it likely says in the storm water section flat fee because that is the basis of your storm water charge we don't measure everybody's individual house we come up with and then everybody gets charged the same if you're single family duplex or triplex anything more than three units we are actually using aerial photography measuring the amount of impervious and charging you exactly based on that however it seems it could cause some confusion as the individual thought that we she was being charged for her wastewater and her water as a flat rate and so she had concerns about the five dollars thinking that she was being unfairly burdened which I understand but that five dollars again is if you use 600 cubic feet if you use 400 cubic feet it's a smaller number your overall percent increase assuming you don't change your water usage is going to be the same as your neighbor but the dollar figure would be a little bit different does that answer you think the question and also if you ever have questions about the lovely sewer water storm water bill that you get please call our customer service 863 4501 and they are more than happy to explain various parts of your bill to you to make sure you understand exactly what you're being charged for thank you all for coming tonight I want to thank the city counselors who have been engaged in this process you see counselor Paul counselor Hartnett counselor busher here tonight thank you very much there's the NPA tours coming up the website is a resource our wastewater treatment plant tours third Thursday of the month and staff will be here after the town hall event tonight thank you all very much for coming thanks