 Resourced and able to respond to them, the issues that come up quickly and decisively. And in water resources, we have great people there. We have outstanding leadership that we're fortunate to have. And at the same time, I think the experience is far more frequently a reactive one. I think we have been talking for some time about how under invested we've been in terms of on the capital side, on the infrastructure side. And I think what we're going to have to start grappling with tonight is that we've also been under invested on the personnel side. And I think we have an opportunity to address that and get this right. And I think given what the public expects from us and from this department in terms of performance, I think this is a conversation we need to have. So I'm excited that a lot of the work has happened and we're ready to get to this point. And then look at that, I'll turn over to Megan to take it from here. Do you want to go through the whole report and take questions after unless there's a like a burning question? I want to make sure we get through the... I think that makes sense. We're positioned to take half an hour to get through it. Okay. So we have a half hour for Q&A. Okay. So let's hear the whole presentation unless there's something that really needs to be asked in the middle of it. And then we'll go to questions after. Great. Thank you, President Wright. On the phone, we have Catherine Carter from Raftellis. Catherine, are you still with us here? I am. Excellent. So Catherine and Megan will be doing the bulk of the presentation tonight. And I wanted to say that this is really the result of a year of hard work among our team and with Raftellis to position our team for success for the challenges and opportunities that are here now and will be hitting us in the future. After confronting the legacy issues over the last year of the billing errors and the capital under investments, I was concerned that we did not have the optimal structure or the resources to deliver what Burlington ratepayers deserve, which is a utility that's able to innovate, that's able to be proactive, and deliver on our mission of clean water. So last September, the Board of Finance approved a contract with Raftellis to do this organizational assessment and we're pleased to present the findings. So we are pleased their insights were similar to perspectives of DPW leadership. You'll see the recommendations tonight and you'll have it in your packet. Because the recommendations are comprehensive and extensive, we thought that it would be best to have this work session and deal with the questions, give the time to have the conversation before we deliver the specific recommendations for the personnel changes at Board of Finance and City Council. Hope you all find this two-step process effective. So overall, I'm heartened that the recommendations you'll see tonight are deliver a viable proposal that is within the rate estimate that we had in FY 19 for FY 20. We're under 5%. We'll talk through the details of that, but I'm going to turn it over to Assistant Director of Water Resources, Megan Moore, to hit the presentation. Thanks, Chief. And thanks, Mayor. And thank you all. I know this is a special meeting and you don't need any more meetings in your life, but I really do appreciate taking the time. So as the Mayor said, we are functionally a utility or three utilities providing really essential services to the densest community in Vermont. Burlington can't exist in the format, the land-use pattern that we have without wastewater treatment plans, collection systems, and drinking water. People can't be on wells and have septic systems in Burlington. That would not work well here. The challenge is, even though all of these three utilities are unified by one thing, water, they each have different regulations, different rules. And frankly, particularly on the wastewater and the stormwater side, those rules are quickly changing. So in addition to trying to keep things operating 24-7, as an existing entity, and dealing with our current existing infrastructure deficit, we have all of these additional new regulations and new challenges that are coming down the pike. You've seen this slide before, all of the assets we manage. What we haven't talked about is the human capital assets, the 43 current full-time water resources professionals that have to keep all of this stuff running to make sure that people can have clean tap water and can flush their toilet and have their sewage disappear and not walk out, generally, into streets that are entirely flooded with stormwater. With your support, we've done really great work in these last few years. We have started reinvesting in this capital infrastructure that has gone underinvested for a really long time. And our team has been able to translate your, the bond votes and your support in our annual budgets into real projects on the ground. As you all know, we've been doing an unprecedented amount of water distribution reinvestment with the support of the voters at 88%. We continue to draw down that bond authority. And I believe it was last board of finance meeting, we came with the most recent round of water main relining proposals. Unfortunately, as everybody knows, break rates continue to increase. So I'm happy that we have started reinvesting because who knows how many breaks we would have had this past winter had we not started. But we are going to continue to see those break, break rates potentially. One of the reports that's out there nationally shows that break rates for the entire nation have increased 27% over the past six years. 82% of cast iron pipes are over 50 years old across the nation. And those have been experiencing a 46% increase in break rates. And guess what 75% of our pipes are cast iron. So we're not quite out of the woods. We got to keep plugging away at this. If you look at the overall trend in our annual capital budgets, as well as our bond funded, you know, it's been on a clear steady increase with your support. Recently with the challenges that we faced, we were able to present a bond proposal to the voters and November six had 92% you know, approval rating, which was amazing. It was really great to see people stepping up for clean water and being willing to pay up to $5 a month more at the end of all of this for clean water. We I'm happy to report that we have even though the clean water SRF process so the clean water SRF process is how we're getting the 2% loan instead of the typical 4% private bond market rate state revolving fund. Yes, thank you. That that program is great because it has those low interest rates and often we can access pollution control grant. I'm hopeful we're going to be accessing some pollution control grant money so that we're not even going to have to have that indebtedness. That process does have a lot of quirks and it does take a little bit longer than I would like but we are poised to be able to implement the computerized control upgrade project the SCADA PLC by fall of 2000 of this year. The disinfection system which is one of the things that failed last year by winter and then a couple of pump stations and stormwater outfalls. I'm also super psyched that we were able to there was $1.25 million made available through some money from Senator Leahy for combined sewer overflow green stormwater infrastructure grants and we were able to grab a million dollars of that. So that's going to be a million dollars of the work we had previously proposed to you guys that is in fact going to be covered by no match no local match grant money which is amazing. We've been trying to make things more efficient knowing that asking for more staff is always going to be a challenge. It starts with making sure that when we're in the field we're doing GIS based field data collection. When somebody touches the pipe when somebody operates a valve they're recording that data right then and there versus a lot of times it was stored in people's heads and wasn't really very useful for planning. We've been doing the risk based capital planning knowing you know not just picking pipes randomly but actually figuring out what the probability of failure and the consequence of failure is. One thing that really increased our efficiency in this past year was that we acquired a new water meter reading equipment. It used to take us three days with two people to read all of the meters in Burlington and now with about one person one day we can read about 85 percent of the meters. So one simple piece of equipment ten thousand bucks and we're able to get a lot more done. We've done some reorganization of the wastewater work group structure. We're doing various things like making sure we have ample on-call contracts for excavation services so that when we have three breaks that happen at one time and we don't have enough people we can bring in people from the outside. And one thing that we're going to be talking to you about with our budget presentation is that we're going to be we're looking at contracting with an asset management firm to both rehabilitate and provide long-term maintenance for our elevated storage tanks the one that's on Redstone campus and the one that's on UVM both to maintain our good partnership with UVM but also because those are super critical assets if those go down those feed the hospital and the hospital needs to have water. So they are probably some of our most critical assets sometimes we don't think about them because they're up high and you're not looking at them up close but they really need to be taken care of. Various risks we've already mentioned that we're in a constant catch up on system-wide infrastructure deficits. We have also had a backlog of preventative maintenance. We've been focusing a lot on capital which is great but there's some fundamental preventative maintenance things such as making sure we're operating those valves. If we can't count on a water valve working when you get a break instead of having to isolate a small area you have to keep going out further and further. Our hydrant system which is for our fire protection needs to be painted almost none of the hydrants have been painted in any time recent history they need to be in good working condition. We need to update and strengthen our operational SOPs. One of the things that I've been finding is that you know the the treatment plants they do have standard operating procedures but they have not been updated in some time and that is concerning to me because equipment changes people change and again a lot of it lives in institutional memory. The need to strengthen our compliance and enforcement programs one of the things that came out of the industrial pollution the high-strength wastewater piece we have existing ordinances in chapter 26 that designate how much high-strength waste somebody can send to us and we have these agreements with our breweries that charge them based on that but we don't have a comprehensive program for how that we would apply that more strictly to certain entities like breweries but frankly across the city we mentioned the changing environmental regulations we've got a lot of public and private projects which require detailed review and coordinated investments and just skipping on down to the the more recent risks that became realities our meter billing error discoveries in 2017 late 2017 and then unfortunately none of us will forget I certainly won't for probably my career the wastewater incidents of last summer. Failure is not an option we have to have these utilities functioning at a high level and getting to the point of innovation I've been able to go to some conferences there's some utilities that are really doing amazing things and we'd like to get there but we're in this constant as you said you know reactive position so we brought in Raftellis we wanted to make sure that we weren't just looking backwards and only focused on what was bothering us right now we wanted to make sure that any solution we came up with addressed any historical backlog dealt with our immediate pressures but also had some near-term looked towards the future at least as a near-term basis so we're going to turn it over to Catherine they're a third party water resources consultancy firm that is a leader across the nation the most recent conference I went to a utility management conference I would say I don't know how many presentations Raftellis had but they were a key member presenting some of the most innovative work in utility management so it's been really great to have them on our team okay Catherine are you ready with that strategy to reduce risk side Catherine maybe loser probably coming off from you it's my guess Catherine are you able to I can keep going let me see if she Catherine I'm going to give you a call back and let's just see if we can hey Catherine greetings Chapin and Megan here hey I'm sorry I'm not sure what happened no problem we are on the strategies to reduce risk slide and why turn it over to you to discuss the recommendations absolutely um so just to give you a little bit of background on me my name is Catherine Carter I worked for Raftellis which was founded in 1993 to provide financial and management services to utilities and since then our services have increased considerably and we've grown to work with utilities that provide service to more than 25 percent of the U.S. population and at Raftellis I'm a manager and I've been part of our management consulting practice which focuses on strategic planning and organizational operational assessments mostly I've been with Raftellis for about eight years and during that time I've worked pretty much exclusively with small medium and large utilities across the United States so that's just a little bit of background on me and on Raftellis and I wasn't sure if you had already gone through that before I got disconnected thank you um nope absolutely um so in terms of kind of what we're talking about here um you know and and like the previous slides have have suggested there are a number of kind of organizational and operational risks that are really inherent to the utility industry um and those have been identified and what we've found is that those risks can be addressed um by both discrete activities and then also through some staffing adjustments and so um to go through some of the activities that we've called out that are more high impact um just wanted to to call out a few in particular but um preventative maintenance versus capital work uh when we started to dig in to um when we started the staffing assessment and we started to get a sense for current and and expected service levels and things like that one of the things that we found was um that we were talking to different groups of people and um especially in terms of the distribution crews there was a lot of time that was spent the um supporting the relining projects and that time was spent kind of at the expense of doing regular programmatic preventative maintenance activities like um exercising valves and doing hydrogen flushing and so um while there was money that was being saved in the short term by using staff versus using contractors um the lack of kind of preventative maintenance can really lead to some problems with um the infrastructure over the long term and that can be more expensive in the long term uh other activities that um can help to mitigate risk specifically here would be um strengthening and improving the processes and standard operating procedures related to the meter to cash cycle um and that also helps to ensure full and accurate revenue collections uh renewing infrastructure and executing on the expanded capital program that Megan was talking about earlier uh especially related to managing the projects associated with the recent bond referendum uh and then finally kind of developing inspection and regulatory compliance programs uh such as those that are kind of listed here for high strength industrial waste and cross connection and backflow prevention um and both of those will also serve to help to protect your infrastructure uh and to ensure that you're maintaining regulatory compliance if we move on to the next slide which was um the strategy to kind of reduce risks and the tweaks that we can make to our staffing approach uh I think that you know one of the major goals of the staffing study was to look for ways to ensure that staff resources are consistently engaged in a way that maximizes both safety and productivity and so um from a staffing perspective you know mitigating risk is going to be most effective when we can ensure that sufficient staff time are being devoted to continuous improvement um and kind of making sure that the organization is a learning organization we are doing things like evaluating and updating our processes to be more effective or more efficient uh making sure that our SOPs reflect those improvements so that we can be training and making sure that you know people understand what's supposed to be happening uh crafting and maintaining appropriate policies for the organization and also for you know kind of customers that are interacting with the organization um and so in order to kind of move from being a more reactive organization to a more proactive organization we need to look for opportunities to ensure that staff can for the most part be operating kind of in their in their lanes and spending time as the slide says kind of spending the majority of their time in their zone of genius you get pulled to do a lot of different things and to respond to different situations that arise um it's easier to let things kind of slide and to um have things kind of fall off and so in order to ensure that we are maintaining really high service levels we are you know committed to our mission of delivering clean water and treating wastewater and and all of the services that the organization provides we need to make sure that people have appropriate time and resources in order to kind of focus on their core functions um and then the other thing that we kind of focused on throughout the study was looking for ways to develop kind of a more robust leadership team um which will allow the assistant director position to be more focused at a strategic level rather than a tactical level and so doing that um will allow the assistant director to delegate more activities and more functions and instead focus on you know that high level strategic what is it that the organization needs to be focused on in terms of long-term financial viability operational optimization customer satisfaction kind of the high level is this organization being managed effectively and it also allows for kind of more time and more organizational effort to be devoted to the complex technical projects that come up that will have a large impact on the utility or on the community and it just ensures that there are sufficient resources to make sure that those are those are successful very carefully and our goal is to try to wrap up in the next five to ten so yep just keep this moving yep yep okay um so generally speaking our approach to the staffing study was to talk to either representatives or full groups from each of the different functional areas within water resources to get a sense for current and anticipated service levels and then to benchmark those service levels and in some cases practices across utilities in new england and get a sense of how peer utilities are staffed this led to a number of specific recommendations the first was around kind of the meter function we wanted to create people who were solely responsible for meter activities and to move meters away from distribution and under the customer care and billing team to ensure that the entire meter to cash cycle is kind of in one place and that helps to improve customer service increase accountability and ensure that communication is strong another recommendation was to add a customer care lead and this is beneficial for a lot of reasons this would be somebody who would report to the currently the utility benefit billing administrator but ultimately this customer care lead position would help to ensure that the customer the utility billing administrator could be enriched to increase the final financial management that's living within the utility and focus on revenue assurance processes so move that to a customer care and finance manager it also helps with discussion planning provides a career ladder and provides additional administrative support we move to the next slide other recommendations included creating a policy and programs team complete with a policy and programs manager currently i think that the policy and program development falls largely on the assistant director position and the stormwater program manager and the requirements as was stated earlier kind of continue to evolve and will need to increase to meet regulatory needs and so this recommendation creates a group to manage policy and program development and administration so that there is a program manager who can coordinate with the assistant director and then lead and implement programs process development etc we would then have a stormwater coordinator and a water resources technician that would be focused on environmental compliance and providing some engineering support we would report up to the water resources program manager for the engineering group we recommended adding an additional staff engineer to support both existing needs and then also the needs with the new capital investments and to provide technical support for some of the programs that need to be developed we also recommended kind of monitoring needs for water resources for the water resources engineering technician and depending on the implementation and the funding available through the bond referendum monitoring the need for a limited service project accounting and or project management position and then finally with regard to wastewater we recommended adding an operator and training position which would create kind of a feeder and ensure that there's operational redundancy and to help the organization manage upcoming retirement in addition to looking at the kind of staffing levels within water resources we also did a compensation analysis for seven leadership positions and we compared data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics the 2018 AWWA compensation survey for medium-sized water and wastewater utilities we did some peer utility comparisons in New England and we also pulled data from the Lamont League of Cities and Towns and generally from the compensation analysis we recommended a few tweaks and the only thing that was I would say larger than a tweak was our finding of the discrepancy between both water resources and the other sources for the assistant director salary which as of right now is about 40% below the AWWA data and about 26% below the New England peer utility so we recommended the fast position be adjusted and we recommended moving it to a grade 25 which I think Megan is going to talk about probably great so I think we might skip the next slide the next slide is just continued optimization we're continuing to look for ways in which we can make things more efficient we're not just saying hey we're getting more people and we're done trying to be creative um so then the next I will hand it back to you awesome so the next piece is just sort of detailed you know based on FY 20 annual budget and FY 20 wages what the overall staffing cost impact is when you take both salary as well as FICA benefits workers comp some other assumptions in there you know as the mayor said it's it's not insubstantial is almost $400,000 which is about an increase of about 3.3.1 or 3.2 percent over our operating expense budget or about 2.4 percent of our FY 20 all expense budget I didn't know if you wanted to talk about I will just touch on that the assistant director to division director we're proposing a slight name change third lying down and including a small market factor to that given that the reclass does not move the positions compensation anywhere near the median or average for the comparable positions in the market so getting to what probably matters most rate impacts so currently as modeled even with all of the staffing in and with all of our known cost drivers so we're still working with the clerk treasurer's office on some of the final cost allocations which is why I'm showing it as a range my current model with everything that I know about including the staffing is about a 4.5 percent increase in our overall water resources bill so a 4.5 percent increase translates into about a $3 increase a month for your typical residential customer bill that somebody who uses 600 cubic feet a month the current model includes like I said all known cost drivers and that the overall 4.5 percent rate is due to a 3 percent increase in the water rate a 6.25 percent increase in the wastewater and about a half percent increase in stormwater when we back out and try to figure out how much the staffing investments represent it's about a dollar seventy so just ever half of the rate increase is due to these proposed staffing impacts and investment in what I call human capital and I think that's think that's all we got for you guys we've we've talked with the DPW commission we had a great meeting with the Duke we're able to make the final ref tell us report available to you all and now we are here on April 8th and hoping to come back to you on April 15th uh for just the phase one recommendation so that's the moving of people and three staff additions um we would then hopefully with the budget approval and FY 20 and once that all settles that dust settles come back to you for the phase two recommendations that are detailed in the report right let's open up for questions councillor pine then councillor busher then councillor sure I've got a few that are kind of quick and technical but we'll go through those real quick so uh is a grade 25 a department head grade basically as though that is does anybody know no we work with the well assistant Stephanie can 27 department heads are not rated oh so it is one of the higher grades that we have but it is not it's helpful um obviously I think the the need is is pretty well demonstrated in document here the uh alternative revenue raising approaches that I'd like to throw out there is is something that I think we have to spend some time on and we can't get into great detail tonight but one is to look at the franchise fee as a way to cover most or all of this through some adjustments to the franchise fee um I think that ought to be on the table it was once explained to me that uh water rates are um you know fairly evenly distributed to homeowners and businesses with the institutions taking on their share but that the franchise fee is a pretty certain way to ensure that the institutions that don't contribute to our overall city operations through taxes because they don't pay property taxes that they shoulder um a greater share and therefore we would shift that cost from businesses and residents to the institutions that aren't fully contributing to the cost of operating our city so that's one sort of fairness and equity issue and how to raise money I'd like to spend some time on that um and the other is to to talk about a tiered uh water rate structure and and how much you think we can get for um so that low users are essentially um held harmless and that larger users um would have an incentive to conserve and would in fact um help subsidize some of the lower users because seniors and people on low and fixed incomes maybe I think in general tend to fall on the low end of the user scale so I'd like to hear about that well can I remind you that you guys had the foresight in last year's budget in your resolution to require that by FY 21 we come to you with alternative rate structures and affordability programs we've actually already done procurement we have two firms that we need to interview and select um that would be their scope of work is largely that work of looking at alternative rate structures of looking at other ways to kind of spread the costs differently um including other revenue streams like people who have private fire hydrants or private fire services there's a ton of money out there a ton of service that we provide that we don't recover costs on so I think there's a huge amount of opportunity the ability to do that before FY 20 I think that was why you gave us until FY 21 was a promise that we were going to be rolling up our sleeves and digging in because I really think we need to do that particularly to make sure that that clean water stays affordable for our fixed income and our low income people so we're on board. I'd like to see that sooner than 21 but that's just okay yeah so thank you first of all um the consultant I really want to just thank them for a page pay two pages in this which were pages six and seven which were a nice overview about the history of water in the city of Burlington which I learned quite a bit from so I wanted to thank them for that overview now to the nitty gritty this is the second time I've heard some of this presentation because I was on the tube but it was a very quick presentation at the tube um and so um I'm somewhat concerned about this cost um and I wasn't sure if the cost how is the bond factor in we're not drawing down on it so is the bond part of this are you assuming money that we're paying back in the bond and is that part of the payment as you break it out for water wastewater yep so the water water bond debt service is in this model there isn't any wastewater bond debt service because clean water SRF which is great you don't start paying on it until a year after you've completed a project so that is I mean at earliest FY 21 but likely FY 22 um so there there isn't and when we come back to you for our budget presentation I'm gonna I will and I have already tried to model what that looks like in the future so that we can have a little bit of that conversation so that's really important because this investment in personnel is ongoing and we're just going to the price is going to pull a microphone down Councillor I'm sorry I forgot that you're there forgive me um yeah so I mean so I really think that you know this is the beginning of the increase but it will be compounded by as we draw down on the bond and anything else in the future and so that's the premise for my next set of questions or comments um so I understand that there are three phases but phase one and phase two are the ones that you're looking for right now you're looking for phase one um well my question is that in the report which I did read which I thought was pretty good um the consultant says um that in the future to add an engineering technician position and the rationale for that is that um the premises after observing the department is that a lot of work is being done by engineers that could be done by someone else I think this is germane this is something that is supposed to be added in fy 2020 but to me if we did this right away we could potentially regain some time from the engineers now in the bond you have um 1.25 of funding for engineers and I think if we did this um engineer tech technician position I think we could postpone potentially and maybe even not ever come to call up that additional engineer and so to me these are the kinds of things that I've trying to think about I I came to the conclusion my own conclusion which obviously I'm not the consultant or the department but I came to the conclusion that um there was um a real need for I've got to look at their recommendation excuse me um the stormwater water resource policy and program I thought that that that was really a very strong need that I I definitely agreed was there um the thing that I wanted to say was the water distribution and meters moving three of the people from there to the billing the customer service billing was very laudable to my concern for the department is how do you keep those people proficient because you might have to call them up based on the consultant's report and I wanted to know how you're going to do that cross training I think that that is comes with a cost and then I wondered if indeed the department would consider if you now have six people if you would consider bringing that um that customer service billing position two if you would consider filling that with within the six and not add another position so these are the kinds of I I just didn't know if that was possible you've got three meter people coming and you've got three customer service people currently and they're proposing to have some manager oversee them I didn't know within that six if you could if somebody could be defined as that manager and you wouldn't add a position so these are the thoughts that I had these are things that I feel like people have to chew on I understand the need but I'm looking to make it as affordable as possible so I'll end there thank you just because we've wrestled with exactly how many to bring to you our understanding from Raft tell us was the bond aside the amount of work that is currently on the table for the engineers I end up having to do a lot of technical engineering work because there aren't enough engineering hours to go around so and some of that was looking at what we basically need now hoping the 1.25 that's in the bond if we can sort out with the state and make sure 100% that those are going to be reimbursable that that would be a different project accounting type project management person that would come on only for the duration of the bond to pull the project accounting stuff off of the engineers and get them in their zone of genius so the other question about the water resources um engineering position may I just say something though the I really think the consultant really needs to better address how many hours can be saved by that engineering technical support person that would free up hours for engineers to do their work and therefore not draw upon you I don't know the answer to that question their original proposal actually had us coming for they had them coming forward with a water resources technician and an engineering technician and I and working with them actually delayed on the engineering technician because I wanted to see if we add an engineer as it currently proposed add an engineer and that we add sort of more of a multi-purpose water resources technician instead of having that water resources technician be more focused entirely on compliance giving them some engineering duties like helping with flow metering and it might it might be more uh clear when you actually have the job descriptions in front of you so I was trying to blend the engineering technician with the water resources technician with the hope that we may not even need to add an engineering tech but your because your points are are exactly in line with some of what we struggled with when they came back and said well you actually need more I'm hoping that we may not need that engineering technician I think the presentation uh super clear comprehensive of a few blind spots for me so I just a couple of questions here we'll start with with rate impacts this is looking at 2020 rate projection and I think I heard you say that this projection is based on phase one being being implemented or phase one and phase two so that would be all all the things in this in the memo being in okay and everything in that table in that previous table being in so for this back one so for fiscal year what a forward one fiscal year 20 rate projection what does it look like on a going forward basis after is there upfront costs or is it a long tail I mean there are always once you add I think as as Sharon was alluding to um once you add folks then every year then you have a little bit more of a nugget that you add your COLA as we have health care costs and things like that so that is that long-term projection which when we get into the budget presentations the rate model that we have we try to project what those things may look like but we don't ever really know other than right now we know what the COLA will be so with a reorg like this so shifting a little bit uh assume or uh hope and assume that operations would improve what sort of like downstream benefits would be seeing maybe not um as a direct payment through here but what we'll be seeing is that uh more efficiencies is that what what's the customer experience going to be like assuming it would be improved are there saving money on because we're better planning for management of our assets what are some of those downstream benefits that we can expect from an organization that is that is a great question over time we haven't necessarily monetized all of those but can try to do that for the next presentation I mean I think fundamentally some of this is to um first keep the wheels on the bus and make sure we don't have risks there are risks by not having some of the SOP work done um some of the risks that we uh had last year with the wastewater treatment plant if we don't if we're not able to deliver on the projects that we propose as part of the bond people have given us all this money but if I can't get the money on the ground I think that affects customer trust and impact the um from the customer experience perspective particularly what we're doing with the customer care and the billing making sure that we have highly accurate meters that people's meters are the correct age making sure we're collecting the correct amount of money we could see some actual monetary benefits if we develop a more robust meter replacement program if you have old meters out there they slow down which means somebody who's actually using a thousand cubic feet we may only be measuring it is 900 cubic feet and so there are there is real money out there um with having enough staff to make sure that those programs are in place but we can try to monetize some of it or at least stick a stab at that uh a few other quick ones what what role did did current staff have in envisioning this out and what's what's the motive of that uh Catherine are you still there i am yeah you want to talk about staff engagement yeah um so when we kicked off we met with almost everybody at water resources and also a group of folks from dpw so we had um generally hour or hour and a half sessions with either individuals or groups of people um over i think a four day period uh to talk to them about kind of what their existing workloads were like what they anticipated in the next year and several years in terms of uh different services or programs that needed to be provided within their kind of areas of expertise and their functional responsibilities and we tried to get a sense of how much time they were spending on these activities and so um we had interviewed guys and a series of structured questions like i said i think that we hit almost everybody in the department so it almost everybody was able to provide some input things that we had scheduling problems with one or two and maybe somebody was on vacation but we were able to engage the vast majority of the group to come up with um kind of our initial data and then i believe that um Megan and Chapin you have taken the findings and reviewed them with people at several stages throughout the process we have yes okay last quick one how do we define typical 600 cubic feet a month single family so single family rate uh customers get charges a fixed amount for storm water and then it's volumetric so if you use less than 600 cubic feet your your increase won't be that just the only suggestion um as as we go out and try to bring this out typical defining typical and then also a few levels up in the memo but i didn't hear the memo yeah thank you yeah thanks councillor perry and then councillor jank oh you i thought you were in the queue councillor jank thank you president and thank you Megan for the presentation and this the first question is for the rafters i think rafters yep and i was just wondering if you look into transforming this division into its own department have you looked into that aspect if she can hear me did you hear that question kathryn typing a gesture the question you know the question was did you look at uh turning the water resources division into a standalone department uh we did not particularly look at that um that was a little bit outside of the scope of what we were what we were working on i was not considered within yeah so i think it is important for us to try to think about it that way because this division is providing the most fundamental service in this city and over the past couple of years all i've been hearing is just that they're struggling and they need more support so the second question and i don't know who should be should look into that yeah but and also it relates to grading um i think it would be your position to grade 25 and which i think is already correlating with um city department that are appointed by the mayor if you if you think about it in terms of the pay in terms of the scale of pay and the scope of work i do believe it would be imperative for us to think that way moving forward now the other question that i have is you talked about in the memo that you look into you know or the example of new england utilities um and yeah and w a a but i was just wondering if you can give us some example of those utilities what city and what is the number of people that they serve in terms you know because here looks like the penetration we have is only 10 000 we didn't talk about 40 000 people that the water division serves but specifically 10 000 and was just wondering if um in terms of size in terms of service that is provided are similar so can you so yes uh kathryn the question was did you look at other uh what were the other utilities that you looked at that were of comparable size to burlington and their their structure and uh and resources um and just so that i can answer this correctly are you talking about uh the compensation work that we did or are you talking about the staffing assessment because in some cases we looked at different places um maybe both um maybe talk for each which comparables you looked at and i do want to orient there are tables for each of the each of the different functional groups there are tables which have the listing and just so you know when they reference the 10 000 that's the number of connections versus the number of people just because sometimes that gets confusing absolutely yeah yep but um yeah thank you for answering yeah kathryn okay um so for the compensation data the comparable cities in new england that we used were the city of portness new hampshire the city of manchester new hampshire and the city of paverall massachusetts um and we looked at those because they were um they were water utilities that existed within a department of public work so it was the same sort of structure um and we had found that they were pretty good comparisons for um some of the staffing work that we had already done kind of similar sizes um face a lot of similar um challenges and you know operating kind of a similar geography so um we felt like those were good for the compensation demo um we also looked at data from the vermont league of cities and towns and so um while that i'm not sure that that is quite as good because um as megan mentioned earlier burlington is obviously the densest and the largest city in vermont um we did look at the data for chester ethics village um browborough a couple of other ones um and all of that is encapsulated in the compensation demo um and then for the staffing assessment we have kind of a larger list and it is somewhat dependent on the position but um i'm just sorry i'm flipping through to i'm one of the tables um but for the water distribution group we looked at lull, villarica, portland water district, uh waterbury, manchester, lauren's, payroll, pennechunk or meters we looked at champlain water district, kind of important wells, portland water uh port smith i mean those utilities were pretty consistent throughout and you can see some of the the data that you know is the comparison in terms of the population served the staffing limbo uh the number of treatment plans in in some cases uh how much water they're producing or how much water they're or wastewater they're treating um so we did try to give you enough information so that you would be able to see kind of where burlington sits in the contact of other utilities in janglund great thank you outside council jane i have additional questions many additional questions but i'm just going to talk about a little bit of comment here and it sounds like that megan's uh rafters rafterless rafterless captain you know was contracted in september as when the board of finance approval happened yes absolutely and also in november we did put a bound in you know to the voters of burlington and i was just wondering why didn't we do this work and try to just send one bound that include all of this to it um largely because bonds at least in my understanding are for capital investment and can't be used for ongoing operational expenses and so all of these once if you were to approve them would be part of our annual budget moving forward and so unfortunately i mean i guess it would be great if we could do bonds and somehow draw down that but we can't have that sort of indebted this happen part of the bound did have a component of adding maybe engineers into it it did that's specifically related to the capital work so you could if it's if there is money associated specifically for capital design managing those capital projects because that is a capital cost it can be capitalized unless you can have the long-term debt service a lot of this is is long is operational support um but that is that is a good question yeah so i think you know the other questions looks like we have a meeting planned or about to happen i will ask it that thank you okay and feel free to send me any questions that come up you know as you're right everybody remember that i mean get what you can tonight but you can also call the omega in shape and whatever the information that was your counselor mason can you just speak to you know that this and we don't know when the next phase will come but you know you certainly telegraphed us that what we did was not kind of fix all of our problems can you just sort of speak to how the staffing changes that you're asking for now you know that they're you have in mind the phase two and that this will facilitate our system yep absolutely so the big the phase two of clean water is i've occasionally referred to it as the integrated water water quality planning which has been ongoing and actually i have amendment that i need to bring to you guys to add on to the scope of work that isn't everything that's forward-looking how we're going to address the lake shim plain phosphorus tmdl how we're going to address our long-term control plan orders that have been issued to us by the state to get all of our clean our cso's under compliance um our storm water impaired tmdl all of the future stuff the next 20 years that planning is ongoing a big piece of this is the policy and programs person being able to lead that effort a lot of what we're trying to do with the integrated plan is not necessarily just build a whole bunch of stuff because that's really hard in the city of burlington to the extent that we can create programs increase street sweeping residential storm water grants um all these different types of programs we're going to be able to tell the state hey we're getting those pounds of phosphorus differently we're not going to be trying to cram in rain gardens everywhere we're going to do a lot of that but maybe half of what we do is a lot of programmatic stuff that leverages private properties um the programs and policies person is going to be figuring out the framework but we'll need engineer technical folks to be modeling and figuring out how all of that works so a lot of this is setting ourselves up for the future hopefully getting people here now so that in a year or two when we're trying to launch some of that stuff we have fully functioning you know robust staffing members who can just hit the ground running because it takes a while to really figure out how the city works as you all know i still don't know exactly okay anybody else can i just just one quick comment is um you know voters obviously supported this by huge numbers as you mentioned in the presentation last fall i think probably some people will think though you did make this clear that we took care of this problem yep and uh would their would their willingness to support that last fall um um what what's the message going to be out of like failure to do this with being what in a nutshell yes we listed the number of risks in an earlier slide in the presentation and without the resources to manage those risks any one of those could emerge to to bite us and we seek to actively have a robust industrial pollution prevention program so we can manage the high strength waste coming to our plant if we don't then the plant could have another upset if we don't have a robust asset management program in place we may not be replacing and providing the preventive maintenance to the assets most in need of repair so um you'll see up here just some of those and then in the meter to cash connection those billing errors or something that staff does not want to relive again and by connecting the meter shop with the customer care unit and really deliver a customer care unit we can drastically reduce the potential of that reoccurring again so all of these are are things i don't add one more staff is our most valued resource and i will say each time a legacy issue comes up we didn't plan for the billing errors to come up we were already maxed out as it was then the billing errors hit we didn't just repay a customer we've inventoried a thousand of our largest meters in across the entire city when the wastewater treatment plan issue blew up we had a plan in a couple years to launch a capital effort we had to front load that and do it quicker and the engineers ran really fast i have to say one of the negative outcomes could be burnout and early departures if our appetite for change and reinvestment is not matched with our human capital okay i do think that as others have said we should find some creative ways to pay for this but um so if all this is done can we assure voters that this will be we won't be having to do any more for a while in terms of dealing with these issues i would say that on the human capital side that this is a generational moment in a reinvestment into our water resources utility when i arrived here six years ago the water resources team did not have any dedicated engineering horsepower had one strategy and programs person in the stormwater program manager and when issues came up it was a fire drill that was not anywhere where i believe a healthy organization needs to be i do see this as a generational moment on the capital side as we've telegraphed there are forward-looking investments that we need but this is the major human resource move in the foreseeable future thanks counselor handsome um yeah just first of all thank you this is really helpful um just kind of echoing some of what others have said in terms of paying for it i definitely it makes sense to me completely why the tier grade structure would require absolutely a much deeper dive to understand what the impacts of that would be in terms of the franchise fee i guess i'm not as clear about why that would require why that is off the table i guess for this year or maybe it isn't off the table but i think it's making a discuss our franchise fee agreement is due up at the end of f y 20 and so that would be the natural time and i think the city may be looking at franchise fee as a whole and so for us to make a change now to only our franchise fee um might be premature but it's something certainly we can discuss internally i don't know bet you want to add anything yeah i mean we talked about trying to manage but it's also a revenue source for the city's general exactly so just somewhere else that when was the last time a reorganization or a review like that's from the staffing level was connected i have made some organizational moves in my tenure in bringing some engineers from tech services into water and changing reporting structures but to my knowledge there has not been one i think it was when water resources moved used to be its own department and moved under dpw which was in the 80s 90s is in the mid 80s yeah under my watch unfortunately dpw commissioner um i have one other question um the they recommended a staffing of about 46 as opposed to 49 but then they said in the interim you might have to overstaff but then within three years we need to look at that staffing i am i have to admit i can't think of a time when a department has downsized their staffing after getting their staffing so i'm concerned about that proposal but i wanted to point out to people that one of the ways that they thought you could get your numbers down is to change these oversight of the water treatment plant which is now staff 24 7 i have some concerns about that without having a person there to assure that the chemicals added to our drinking water is is done correctly so i know that that's the premise but i am somewhat concerned about that and i would hope that in your in the more in-depth presentation you'd address all of what i've just raised about the right size right number and and how you reach that right number as far as adjustments in all of these various subdivisions of water resources so you don't have to answer that i'm just throwing that out thank you yeah that's kasser jane and i think this here in mystic happens pencil saying 10 years now and you did some work and reading this memo i hear the word legacy to make a legacy legacy legacy or not and to me it strikes me as to that's your legacy you know it sounds to me that somebody else did something wrong to try to fix equal to me 10 years sufficient enough to say it's now in your legacy but that's not my point because this is something that i need to highlight what i wanted to highlight is in terms of the work that you do at that division is incredible is wonderful and i think if now you are given the options to choose between 33 staffing to maybe 39 47 43 to 49 with potentially backing off to 46 at some point if things change with the water plan and you know some of these new rules position i think it's important especially the one about policy you know because i think this work should should also happen at the state who can we send to look into these regulations and so but if we said okay we can increase only two staff would you choose who those two would be if for example uh it's it is hard and i i have thought about that because i know i've chatted with uh councilor busher about this you know there is prioritization laid out the the meter um the meter shifts which have no cost impact are very important um i would say the policy and programs person uh as well as the enrichment of the utility billing administrator to be finance uh manager as well as more of the policies on that from my perspective are some of the things that would be most critical however my concern with um my concern with having a policy programs manager and having this other finance uh and meter person is that they are going to be higher level process-based people and a lot of the work we do is highly technical and so then without the technical positions to support them the additional engineer who has bandwidth to answer these people's questions when they're working on a particular technical program somebody can create an application form you know to apply for said permit but if the engineer if there's no engineer to review it to make sure the correct information is being asked for then they're kind of you're kind of setting themselves up for not having success and so that's why it's very hard for me to say like we could have those two positions but i think they're not going to be as functional as they could be without a team to support them right so we can all march forward um it's just like water resources it's a very integrated system of technical people and bigger bigger thinkers um so it's a hard question hard question to answer okay we're 15 minutes over so i think we're ready to wrap up um this was meant to prepare you for the april 15th meeting which is the first phase of recommendations at the board of finance and city council and again as was stated if you have further questions that you didn't get answered tonight before the meeting you can contact the team and we encourage you to do that and i want to just give a special thank you to hr and our treasurer's office and city attorney this took an incredible amount of work and a number of questions along the way and this is not a one department i'll show thank you you moved by council roof second by councillor pine all in favor we are adjourned thank you