 It looks like we have a good turnout so far. Hopefully folks keep trickling in. This presentation is also live on streaming on Facebook and will be aired on channel 17 tonight on their cable channel as well as their YouTube channel. So if you are having trouble accessing the webinar for whatever reason, you are still able to see this by going to Facebook Live or by tuning into channel 17 either on their cable station or through their YouTube channel. So welcome tonight's open house is about our rate and affordability project. It's April 14th. We are starting this around 7, 7 p.m. You will be hearing tonight from our project team which consists of Megan Moyer, our division director for the Water Resources Division. Jessica Lavalette who is our customer care and finance manager in the Burlington Water Resources Division, myself, Jenna Olson. I'm the water policy and programs manager for Burlington Water Resources. And Dave Fox who is our senior project manager working for us on this project from Raft Ellis. To participate tonight during the presentation, if you have questions, you can use the Q and A function to share any thoughts or you can use the comments area on your Facebook Live feed. We will note these questions and answer them at the end of the presentation just to maintain our flow. If you're not sure about Zoom, you haven't used it yet at this crazy point in our global pandemic. If you go to the scroll bar or the toolbar at the top of your Zoom, there should be a Q and A button. You can click on that and ask questions there. If you are joining solely by phone, at the end we will ask you to unmute during the Q and A to join the discussion and we'll call you by the last four digits of the phone number you're calling in from. So you'll have an opportunity to speak up at that point. This is not your only opportunity to submit comments or ask questions. So at the end, you're more than welcome after the meeting to submit comments or questions or account impact requests through the project website. The link to that will be at the end of the presentation. It was also on the postcard we sent out citywide. And if you do have questions on any of that, you can always reach out to me or Jess directly. So just to go over the agenda, we will be talking about the general background and the goals of this proposal for about 15 minutes. We'll spend roughly 20 minutes talking about the proposed rate and assistance program changes, another probably 20 minutes talking about the anticipated customer impacts. We'll spend just a few minutes on going over the summary of this and our next steps. And then we will try to provide at least an hour for Q&A. We may not need that whole time, but we did wanna provide plenty of time for folks to ask questions and offer some answers live. This presentation is also being recorded. And so this will be available on our project website probably tomorrow. So jumping in here, this is a continuation of a proposal we originally brought forward based on a city council request of our division back in 2018. The goals of the study were to ensure the affordability of our rates, improve our overall financial health and sustainability and ensure that our rates were equitably recouping the cost of service in an equitable way across different users. The tension between our core values is just a constant balancing act. We need sustainable funding in order to maintain the infrastructure that's necessary to provide clean safe drinking water and to treat and manage wastewater and storm water before it drains to the lake. But if the cost of service is not affordable, then residents may not have the access they need to essential life water. Now, one of the first things we asked ourselves when we got into this project was how much does it really cost to provide water service in Burlington? Who is using that water and are they paying a proportional amount of the costs? Our distribution system has to be sized appropriately to provide adequate flow to all of our customers, but each customer class is unique and doesn't place the same demand on our water system. The infrastructure to provide that base level of demand from normal residential and commercial water usage is represented by that innermost or the smallest circle that you see. And our pipes would be a certain size in the fixed costs for chemicals, electricity, pumps, all of those things needed to provide clean safe drinking water would also be finite. But what happens when we add things like watering our lawns or gardens or peak demand and everyone seems to be using water at the same time? Now, in that case, we see that our distribution system has to be that little bit larger, that second circle in order to provide water for both the base level demand and those extra capacity flows. Now, the final circle, that largest circle represents fire protection and how larger system has to be in order to provide flow for all of the private fire services in the city if needed. All buildings have a water service line to provide flow for domestic water needs and that pipe is typically one or two inches in diameter. However, a pipe that size would be inadequate for most institutions, commercial and large multi-unit residential buildings that have fire protection needs. So they either have a separate larger service pipe to provide fire service and retain the small domestic service or they have one incoming pipe size big enough for fire protection and then their domestic water services tapped off inside and reduced down to the appropriate diameter for base level needs. Now, as we mentioned before, as the size of our pipes increase, so do those fixed costs necessary to treat and deliver the water. Now, going back to our original question, are all customers paying a proportional amount of the cost to provide their property with water? Well, the answer today is no, because right now in the city, everybody pays the same rate, even though certain customer classes require our distribution network to be inherently larger and they're the ones who benefit from it. So I'm gonna hand things off to Jess from here and she's gonna talk about some of the proposed rate structure changes and the adjustments that we are making to address this. Thank you, Jenna. Hi, my name is Jessica Lavalette. I'm the customer care and finance manager here. I am wanting to discuss our proposed rate and fee structures along with some estimated customer impacts and what opportunities exist for our residents to further reduce their bills. So we have several proposed changes that support our first goal of equity. These are designed to ensure our customers are paying for services in a manner equitable to the burden they place on the system. Gems and green reflect changes made to our proposal since last March in an effort to mitigate commercial customers while still maintaining our affordability benefits for the residential customers. Those modifications are in direct response to the economic hardship caused by the pandemic. The first one up here, fixed charges by meter size. This is a separate fixed monthly charge for both water and wastewater that escalates based on the size of the water meter beginning with five, eight inch meters up to our largest size of six inch. We have always assessed a fixed charge on meters one inch or larger but this will be the first time since 1996 that five, eight and three quarter inch meters will receive one. This type of charge is often called a ready to surfy and reflects the cost of service providing service to that meter whether water is used or not. Incorporating a fixed charge for all meter sizes will ensure a nugget of revenue that we can count on to provide stability for the funds. This type of rate structure is also viewed favorably when we need to borrow money and allows us to place in some cases. Here we see a modification from the spring where we're able to achieve a lower fee for all meter sizes by modifying the calculation basis and reducing the percentage of our cost recovery. The next one is class space rates. As Jenna discussed, the strain each customer class puts on our water system is inherently different. So it doesn't make sense in charging everyone the same rate. We have five primary customer classifications single family, multifamily, commercial, mixed use and irrigation cooling. This change would assign different volumetric rates based on those classifications to ensure water is priced in a manner proportional to burden they place on the system. Our previous recommendation did have mixed use and commercial classifications at a higher volumetric rate but we have decided for the upcoming fiscal year to leave them at that lower rate to mitigate pandemic impacts. We are also proposing a higher rate for water use solely for gardening initiatives like BACG or the Interval. Private fire protection charges. This change introduces a monthly fee for customers with a private hydrant or fire service that escalates based on pipe diameter. Conceptually, this goes back to our cost of service analysis where we are paying more to have a water system capable of serving should these properties need it. As you can see in green we have decided to phase this fee in over five years instead of assessing the full fee in year one. Next slide, please. There was a request that came in just to slow down a little bit. Thank you. As a water utility, we have been focused on the more traditional roles of permit compliance, safety and ensuring efficient, accurate and reliable delivery of services. As you can see from this slide our assistance options were fairly minimal and reflect that more basic focus. I think we can all agree that most customers want to have their accounts in good standing and we believe there's an emerging role for water resources to improve how we support our customers in achieving that goal. Next slide, please. And so the Water Resources Assistance Program or RAP will be the very first rate payer assistance initiative for water resources. We have plans for several different tiers of assistance including initiatives that address rates, payments, infrastructure and efficiency. Up first we have the lifeline rate tier which deeply discounts the first 400 cubic feet of water consumption for single family residential properties. Currently, we have a uniform rate structure where everyone is charged the same amount for 100 cubic foot, which is equivalent to 748 gallons. The introduction of a lifeline rate allows us to improve and protect access to the amount of water necessary to sustain life, safety and health. We chose 400 cubic feet because it's the median usage in Burlington and in calendar year 2019, 54% of our customers fell into that usage category. Also under our rate assistance tier, we are proposing to waive the fixed meter charge for residents of single family properties who meet our income or age eligibility criteria. That income eligibility will be for residents who can demonstrate that they are at or below 185% of the federal poverty level. We will be leveraging existing state and federal benefit programs as our qualifying criteria in order to limit the administrative burden associated with developing our own income verification program. This means rate payers who already participate in programs like Lifeline, Three Squares Vermont, Crisis Fuel, SSI, Rental Assistance through Section 8, they can apply and simply use their proof of enrollment to be qualified for RAP for one year. Here we see a modification from the spring proposal where we have expanded eligibility to include senior citizens age 65 or more living in single family homes along with nonprofit housing developments providing affordable or senior living units. I'd like to mention here that we're also open to adding qualifying programs to the rate assistance list and would encourage feedback about other initiatives that we could add to expand this particular tier of RAP. Under our payment assistance tier, we will be adding both a budget billing option and in a Rearage Forgiveness program. These items will be in addition to our existing program for residents to request an interest-free payment arrangement with terms up to 24 months. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Megan for a short while. Hi, folks, and let me know if I'm cutting in and out because I might have to cut off my video due to Wi-Fi issues. So I get to have the pleasure of talking sort of about our newest iteration of assistance programs. This is something that throughout the entire part of this project, we've been really wanting to provide these other types of assistance and with the sort of last fine tuning of the budget in these last weeks, we are able to provide some pilot funding within our water and wastewater budgets to make this happen and to see sort of what the uptake rate is out there and then hopefully expand it in the future. And so what does this look like? One of the major issues and major affordability pieces that can really set back a property owner is when they have a sewer lateral fail. As many of you may know, while the water line is a shared cost for portions of the water line, the part that's in the roadway and then 100% of the cost is on the homeowner, the sewer lateral is actually entirely private from the home all the way to the sewer main. And we've heard stories of people having to get their sewer lateral replaced in the eight to $10,000 range. And while we are not quite able yet and we're still looking at it to provide loans and grants to help people with those replacements, we think that one of the best things people can do is have the information and to know what the condition of their lateral is so that they can start our plan for those replacement costs versus it being an emergency. And so the concept of our current infrastructure assistance program on the wastewater side would be to be able to provide up to $250 rebates for residential customers to cover the cost of filming their sewer lateral in talking with some of the local companies a sewer lateral filming usually is in that $250 range. We would like to, for non-fix fee waiver type customers so not income qualified folks, we would be covering up to $200 of that 250 and then for income qualified customers cover the full amounts. This is also gonna give us some more data that may help us drive those loan and grant programs. The other piece would be conservation assistance. And with that, we would be looking to provide up to $75 in rebates for the purchase of a water sense plumbing fixture. In particular, I've installed low flow dual flush toilets and you can get a pretty decent toilet that meets that category for about a hundred bucks. And so we're hoping that people are going to leverage this opportunity and further reduce how much water they use which is gonna help their bill but also obviously also help the environment. And lastly, we're bringing back the stormwater management assistance program, the BlueBTV that some of you may have participated in. This involves, we're working with a consultant who would be visiting homes and doing lake friendly home evaluations. So a lot of education about what people can do, what behaviors they can adopt on their own property. And then where there are sort of low hanging fruit easy practices that could be constructed or installed whether it's putting a gutter on your roof line that allows you to direct the water away from your driveway and onto a green space, potentially a rain garden. In some cases we'd be able to fund permeable pavers. Our stormwater program would be providing grants towards the cost of those practices. Next slide. One thing that I wanted to just address the elephant in the room. We are very excited about our RAP 60 waiver but we recognize that it doesn't apply to everybody. So currently as conceived, it applies to single family properties where the occupant is the account holder. And then there's probably a handful of duplexes and triplexes that might qualify depending on the structure of whether there's a meter per unit. And this is also going to apply for renters where the landlord has allowed the renter to be on the account versus the landlord. As Jess mentioned, it's also going to apply to non-profit affordable or senior housing accounts. So those multifamily units. But generally renters and multifamily rentals are not gonna have access to that piece of our affordability program in this phase. Why is that? We know that there's what 64% of properties in Burlington are rental properties. So why aren't we helping them? It's not like we're not helping them. Why aren't we helping them? Especially when Burlington renters pay such a large proportion of their income in rents. And basically it comes down to the fact that, and I'll talk a little bit on the next slide about other communities that have tried to figure this out. But if we were to provide a fixed wee waiver to landlords, we can't guarantee that the landlords are gonna pass on that affordability measure to their tenants under the current sort of billing structure. And then the other tricky piece is multifamily units often share a meter. So there'll be one meter for a whole building no matter how many units there are. So just applying a fixed fee waiver to that meter charge isn't necessarily gonna be beneficial to that individual rental unit. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, water utilities across the country are struggling to address this gap. Our consultant Dave Fox with Raftelus, Raftelus serves a large number of water utilities who are specifically trying to implement affordability programs. And only just recently have we started to see programs that may make sense for the scale of Burlington. DC Water and New York City Water are some of the ones that have most recently launched programs, New York City's one is quite complicated and we're really looking closely at DC Waters to see if we might be able to apply it in Burlington. And we just wanted to make sure that folks as they're evaluating this proposal know that we are committing to further evaluating those options and bringing them back to you as the stakeholders and to City Council by April 2023. We need to have a full fiscal year with our RAP program as it currently is and we wanna give adequate time so that we can check in with our partners at DC Water and with Raftelus to understand the benefits and the disadvantages of how they've structured this particular piece of their program. And with that, I believe I'm gonna hand it back over to Jessica for some more deep dive on the rates. Thank you, Megan. So what are these proposed rate and policy changes actually look like in practice? We can see now from this table that the fixed charges are assessed on all meter sizes. The five eighth fee is currently proposed to be $3.32 per month per water and $4.67 a month for wastewater. If we move down to the volumetric rates we can see the single family residential volumetric rate was previously charged uniform rate of $4.44 but we have proposed a two-tier structure. The tier one or lifeline rate is for usage up to 400 cubic feet and will be $2.42 per 100. The tier two rate will only be applied to the consumption over that 400 cubic foot threshold. We chose 400 cubic feet because it's the median usage in Burlington. And in calendar year 2019, about 54% of Burlington customers fell into that category. This rate structure would also apply to duplexes and triplexes but only if each unit was separately metered. As mentioned earlier, multifamily residential mix use and commercial properties won't be eligible for the tiered structure but we are proposing to move the rate from 444 to 424 per 100 cubic foot. And this is a midway point between the two residential tiers and provide some relief because they are typically larger consumers and would actually pay more of eligible for the lifeline tiers. The irrigation rate is currently a bit higher than the uniform rate and will be increasing fairly substantially to $7.26 per 100. And this reflects the cost of providing service and sends a pricing signal to conserve water when use is not for basic needs. The wastewater volumetric rate is proposed to go from 620 to 607 for everyone. This rate is the same for all customer classes because volume is not a primary cost of service driver for wastewater. However, the strength of waste is a driver which is why we can assess a monthly surcharge when an industrial user exceeds the weight strength threshold set by city ordinance. If we move to the far right column, we can see that private fire protection charges are proposed for the first time and escalate based on size. Again, these rates are planned to be phased in over five years and reflect 20% of the intended full charge. The combined water resources bill also contains two other charges not included in this table. Stormwater has been charged since 2009 and is assessed based on property type with single-family duplex and triplex homes being charged a flat fee and all other properties directly assessed for their actual impervious measured on the property. The stormwater rates are proposed to increase 5% across the board next year. And the water bill also contains a franchise fee, a charge that we are required to pay to the general fund according to city charter and that is currently set at 3.5% of all our water and wastewater sales. And next slide please. So it's important to remember that future bills will vary based on a variety of factors like actual consumption, the final approved rates, eligibility for those assistance programs, but we did create a model that uses consumption data from 2019 to calculate the estimated financial impact for every account. Our typical customer is shown under the median volume row and they will see virtually no change in their water bill. If that same customer were eligible for the fixed fee waiver under wrap then you would see their bill, you can see their bill now drops by about 16.4% a year. Our low volume customers will see an increase due to the fixed meter charge being assessed for the first time. And as we go down the list, we see varying changes with most increases being related to private fire protection fees and decreases are benefits realized from the reduced multifamily residential volumetric rate in the fixed fee waiver. It's also important to remember that a large increase does not always correlate to a significant monetary increase. As we can see in that first example, a 14.5% increase is about $50 a year or just over $4 a month. And there are also opportunities to control bill costs as we will see on the next slide, please. Thank you. To go along with that rate model I was just mentioning, we also developed an account impact summer request form for customers to fill out if they would like to receive their estimated impacts. The postcard was very effective and we received about 40 over the weekend. So that's great, we'll be getting back to people with those. They're a great idea because this will allow us to have a discussion about why a bill might be higher or lower and also gives customer an opportunity to learn about our available credit and review programs and the related eligibility requirements. Initiatives like applying for the fixed fee waiver or the stormwater credit along with requesting a meter sizing review or implementing conservation strategies can all be considered and completed in advance of the proposed rate changes. In that request summary, we're also going to be including data on post COVID consumption trends because the pandemic has significantly altered how water is being used. We have seen an average increase in residential consumption of about 9 to 10% and a decrease on the commercial side of 30% or more when compared to the previous year. And with that, I'm going to hand some highlights back to Megan. Thanks folks and thanks for hanging with us. We know this is a lot of detailed information. So no, you know, no rate restructuring is perfect. There's always going to be customers who are going to benefit a little more and customers who are going to benefit a little less. So we're not trying to say that, you know, when we use the word equity, it's not about everybody being impacted in the same way. It's about making sure that the impact is commensurate with how much you're sort of using the system with that additional ready to serve charge that's in there. And that's really critical. And I just wanted to remind folks that if you look at your gas bill or your BED bill, there's usually an admin charge or some other type of fixed fee charge. And so it is really very much standard utility practice across all of the utilities and also specifically within the water utility. Most water utilities do have a fixed fee, though I don't know that it is necessarily as prevalent in Vermont. From a highlight standpoint, I'm really excited because the water wastewater and stormwater proposed FY22 budget, we've been able to build it to both recoup some of the ground that we lost with this last fiscal year with revenue downturns due to COVID. We also made the decision because we knew there was so much uncertainty to not have a rate increase last year, even though one was proposed, both to cover the general increases you see in operations and maintenance because of staff salaries and whatnot, as well as to address our debt service. So anytime we've been borrowing money to implement and replace infrastructure, we have to start paying down those loans. So I'm very pleased with the FY22 budget with the amount of sustainable funding, the establishment of some capital reserves, and then also with the establishment of some of those targeted pieces of funding for those customer assistance programs that I mentioned. If we weren't doing all of the stuff that we're talking to you about, without the rate restructuring and affordability changes, all residential ratepayers across the city and all ratepayers in fact would be seeing an increase on their bill. In the case of residential ratepayers, it would work out to about a 5.9% increase with these proposed changes. And these are the sort of the, looking at the forest for the trees. Some trees are going to experience more of a benefit or less of a benefit. But when we really look at what our goals were, which is to make sure that people who don't earn as much money as some of us are fortunate enough to earn and are having trouble paying their bill, ultimately our main goal is to help them. And with this program, income qualified ratepayers and seniors are going to be able, and also the nonprofit housing and senior housing are going to see a decrease in their overall water resources bill. On average for somebody who uses 400 cubic feet a month, they would be seeing an overall decrease of about $100 a year from this year's bills. We can't help everybody the exact same way, but over 63% of single family residential ratepayers are going to see a benefit on their water resources bill. It's not necessarily going to go down, but they're going to see less than that 5.9% increase that they would have otherwise seen in order to get the money that we need in order to run our utilities. And a piece that we're not, as Jess mentioned, we're not quite leveraging as much as we ultimately intend to leverage, but the fact that we've established these class-based rates is going to allow for us to into the future continue to have specific affordability-based pricing of that essential residential water usage, of the amount every person in Burlington needs to cook, clean, bathe, do their laundry, so on and so forth. And we are very excited to hopefully see this through with the support of our stakeholders and with the city council. And with that, I think I'm turning it back over to Jenna to let you know what the remaining schedule is for our project. Yeah, thanks, Megan. And it looks like we already have a bunch of questions coming in, so that's good news and we will be getting to those momentarily. So our next steps, we will be going through the continuous improvement process between now and July, that will be the process where we're incorporating feedback from all of our stakeholders, reviewing and validating and responding to all of the impact summary requests that are coming in. A question did come in about, you know, why that information isn't available right up front. The short answer is that we have over 10,000 customers and our customer care team consists of three individuals who are doing all of the day-to-day work for the division. And so preparing all of those requests preemptively would have been an extraordinary challenge. And so we built time into this process to respond to those impact summary requests for those who wanted them. We will be then be doing the ongoing QA, QC with the data and making all of the required changes we need to make to our billing system and drafting our affordability policy and making any necessary ordinance changes. Approvals will be happening between April and June. We are going to the DPW commission on April 21st, so that's next week. We'll be going to the Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee on the 27th, so the week after. The city council, we are seeking city council approval of the rate and fee structure changes, including the wrap on May 10th. And then the city council approval of the budgets and rates for fiscal year 22 will be happening in June. Implementation would be rolling out beginning effective July 1st, which would then be reflected on the August bills. There will be an additional round of outreach to all customers in advance of those August bills, just to remind folks of the changes that are coming and make sure that they have what they need in order to prep for that. So from here, my fellow panelists, project team will unmute and answer some questions. So I'm going to read off the questions that have been coming in on the chat in order. Please feel free to ask additional questions in the chat as we're answering these if they come up for you. So far there haven't been any questions posed in the Facebook live feed, but I will be keeping an eye on that. So the first question that came in, I was from Peter Young. It was having a discount based on income sensitivity is understandable. Why include an age-based or senior discount when it clearly provides financial aid to someone who has no need for it? Parents of young children have just as good an argument as older folks. Payment assistance should be limited to those with financial hardship, not based on stereotypes equating age with low income. Megan, do you want to take that one? Yeah, that's a great question. And we struggled with that a little bit. The reason why the senior discount kind of came about was particularly when we were looking at the increase in the bill for the low volume customer. And we were imagining potentially a fixed income senior, single senior who might still be in their home. And we were trying to figure out how to provide assistance to them in that particular category. Because if they are just low volume and you don't have the fixed fee, they would actually receive a benefit. As far as the inadvertently giving a discount to somebody just based on age, we believe that people will kind of self-select. It's not gonna be, we don't know what your age is. And so we're not just gonna uniformly start giving people the discount, somebody actually does have to apply. Is there the possibility that somebody who doesn't really need the discount applies for it anyway? Sure, but I guess we're sort of relying on people's good nature. And I don't know what the word is I'm looking for that we're not just gonna get a whole bunch of really rich seniors coming in and asking for this discount. Okay, it was a similar question. Does this mean that people over 65 who live in a single family home get a discounted rate? It does, I think we have to make sure and when we're doing the RAP program, in this case with the senior, they would need to be on the account. So if you are, like if I had my mother living with me, if my name is on the account, I'm not gonna be eligible just because I have a senior living with me, the senior would actually need to be the account holder. Megan started to get into this in writing, but I'd like to answer it live as well. Will the president's new infrastructure money and the $1 million the state just got help with this, especially the thousands of dollars individuals might have to pay for new water lines? Yeah, as I mentioned, we are super excited about the possibility of the ARPA funds that have come to the state. The current governor's proposal does allocate some proportion of those funds for what they're calling the Healthy Homes program. And it does appear their intention is to use that for some amount of grant funding for sewer and water laterals. In close communication with the secretary of A&R to track that program. And I'm really hoping that we are going to be able to access that money and funnel it to particularly low income folks, but hopefully just other folks who are being proactive about taking care of their infrastructure because it really is so important and can be so costly. Okay, next question, I started to address this in my next steps, but the question was I'm struggling to understand why the marketing campaign surrounding these proposed changes doesn't simply focus on before and after projections of how people's bills will change. Given that's all anyone cares about, why is this crucial info immediately unavailable and why does it take a special request and then 10 business days to learn? That's also a good question and Jess might be able to chime in here, but we did consider sort of trying to make a database available. To folks so they could kind of look up their own rates, but we felt that it was important that we actually be looking at people's impact so that we can be well informed if those folks contact us with questions about how to mitigate those changes. So, and every customer is different. We're able to generalize some of our customers, but particularly in the commercial setting, it's gonna depend what size meter you have, if you have a fire service, if you have any prior fire hydrants. So it is very specific to the customer, how much water they may have used in the past, because that's all we have to go off of. Jess, do you have anything to add? No, I think that you covered it there. I mean, in the responses that I've been sending out as far, we are including a fact sheet that sort of summarizes a bit of this proposal and goes over the different ways that someone can lower their bill. And it's very clear on that summary, what are the drivers for them in particular and what they can think about going forward if they wanted to try to change anything and it gives them information. So I think it's nice for us to be able to look at the account, package that up for someone. I've actually called someone directly when I got one. We only had three since the beginning of the year, but like I said, we got over 40 this weekend. So I will be getting to them shortly, likely, in the next couple of days, probably over the weekend too. So everyone that's given me one thus far will get a response fairly soon under the 10 day deadline. Can I just add one point to that? Absolutely. This is Dave Fox with Raftelus and the city's re-consultant. I do rate studies all across New England, all across the country. And I have to tell you the amount of outreach that Water Resources has done throughout this project is an anomaly in the industry. The fact that they've had meeting after meeting and the fact that they're having open houses, we had one at the beginning of the project, we're having one now and several meetings in between. I'm trying to communicate with folks as much as possible about what we're doing, why we're doing it, when we're doing it, how we're doing it. Most communities do not communicate with their customers the way in which Water Resources does. I think the fact that they're giving the ability for folks to request information on the actual impacts that a customer could potentially see, that's almost unheard of. No communities do that. So I just, I want to applaud them. I know it can be frustrating from the perspective of a rate payer, especially with some new information being put out there. But I think comparatively to some of my other clients or all of my other clients essentially, Water Resources and the city of Burlington is doing a fantastic job of communicating and has from the very beginning throughout this process. Thanks, Dave. It's something we've tried really hard to do. And as somebody who lives in Burlington, there's so much going on. And it is important that we do our best to try to at least let you know what's going on and give you the opportunity to engage with us and give us ideas. Cause, you know, we're only just four people trying to do the right thing and we may have missed something. The next question is also from the same user. I'm reading this verbatim. Please defend the idea that residents should pay market rates for water that is likely laced with toxic PFAS chemicals resulting from Vermont Air National Guard activities at the airport by the Wynoski River, treated in untreated effluent from area wastewater treatment plants and other sources and other contaminants of emerging concern. Yeah, great, great question, Kai. What Kai is referring to is something that in the water industry we're constantly on the lookout for as humans have been on the landscape the sort of accumulation of all of our activities can sometimes cause certain things to start appearing in our water that we weren't looking for before or our treatment processes don't tackle. With regard to PFAS, and I did just put in the chat box the link to our latest consumer confidence report. Now, obviously in a perfect world probably for Kai we would be sampling all of the time for PFAS but we did participate in the requirements from the state to do a round of PFAS sampling in October of 2019 and did not detect any PFAS in our raw water. In the event that we had there certainly would have been communications and we do have some emergency treatment supplies in place or treatment processes in place that we could implement if we were to detect it. But yeah, there are things and in addition to the specific things that the state makes us test for that the water quality data report talks about as part of our EPA Safe Drinking Water Act compliance we also have to do UCMR. I think four was the last one and five is coming up and basically the EPA every, I think it's three years generates a huge long list of all of these potential emerging contaminants of concern and requires all the water systems to sample them so that they can make sure that there aren't these sort of things that are starting to crop up that they need to be regulating us for. Dave, I don't know if you have or anybody else has any other answers but I wanted to make sure everybody on this call did have the latest link to our annual testing data. There was one other comment from the same user and it just said an important thing to communicate to customers which I was not informed about is that replacing a water lateral will result in a significant increase in usage cost given the improved flow that a clean copper or plastic pipe provides versus a heavily corroded antique pipe are billed unexpectedly jumped by approximately $20 per month following the installation of our new water line. Yeah, I guess I hadn't really thought about that and I don't know if you had a galvanized line before that was heavily tuberculated but I could imagine that it could have been acting as a sort of low flow break on your water usage in your home and if now your water line is not controlling the amount of water that is easily available in your home probably would need to start looking at some low flow options, low flow toilets and flow restrictors in your faucets. But yeah, that's something I hadn't thought about and we should make sure to let people know that possibility especially if they have kids or teenagers in the house. Stu asked why is there a wastewater charge for irrigation? I think Dave clarified that in the comment section that that was an error on the table. There shouldn't have been a wastewater charge for irrigation. Greg asked, we've put down a deposit to install permeable pavers in our driveway in August or September. Will we be able to take advantage of the Blue BTV programs rebates or credits? Megan, that's actually a good question for you as well. I think if the Blue BTV program is up and running by then and we can get you in for an evaluation then we can talk about that more. Yeah, I mean, we are a camera when our kickoff date is with our consultant Jenna to formalize the Blue BTV program. I think it's a good chance and Greg, perhaps if you wanna send an email to, can I have him send an email to you Jenna? Yes. So Jay Olson, O-L-S-O-N at burlingtonbt.gov to give us some more information and to make sure that we put you in the loop as to how quickly that program rolls out. Bill asked, this is probably a good one for Jess. Under the volumetric rates with a rap qualified household, was the tier one cost $2.42 per 100 cubic feet or for the first 400 cubic feet? It's per 100 cubic foot. And then our household water meter is able to read usage down to the cubic foot or are they in 100 cubic foot increments? Oh, that's a great question. It's, yeah, if the latter, it's difficult to know other household averages at 301 cubic feet or 399 cubic feet, making it difficult to know if they qualify for low usage. Can a homeowner learn exactly what their consumption is? Yes, yes and no. So that's a great question. So you can learn exactly what it is if you're actually looking at your meter register. I might not know exactly what it is just based on the different generations of meter registers and endpoints currently in the city. So we have used Neptune products and they consistently update their meter registers and the ability, as the ability to water measure becomes more sensitive. And so the billing system is configured to bill out an increments of 100 cubic foot. And that sort of stems from the older generations of water meters where they only had two boards so they could read the first four and the last two, they didn't know what the dials were. So they defaulted to zero, which is the 100 cubic foot rounding. We do now have pro coders in the system, about 5% of our meter fleet is that and they can read down to 1, 100th of a cubic foot. And so it really depends on what kind of meter you have and I would be happy to take a look at your account and we can figure out if you have the pro coder, the three board, the two board. And if you have one of the first two, you would be able to see to the cubic foot. We are working on updating everything in the billing system and in the meter fleet so we can have those newer registers for everyone to be able to see their usage on a dashboard and for us to know exactly to the cubic foot they used. And Megan, if you wanna chime in at all with anything there or Dave? Yeah, I can jump in quickly and I'll let Megan. Just two points on Bill's two questions there that went back and forth. The first one, just asking about the wrap volumetric rate and the first 400 cubic feet. Jess was, it was correct. I just wanna clarify that wrap qualified customers are not going to see a different volumetric rate. They're just going to see a waiver of their fixed fee. So they'd pay the same volumetric rate for the first 400 cubic feet. They're just not going to pay the fixed fee for their 5 eighths inch meter. That kind of transitioning into the second question. I just wanna make sure that there's no confusion. It's not for single family residential homes. If you use above the 400 cubic feet, it's not that all of your consumption is then going to be assessed at the higher rate. The first 400 cubic feet will always be assessed at that lowest volumetric rate. It's only the consumption every 100 cubic feet above that 400 cubic feet that is assessed at that highest volumetric rate. So you don't have to be concerned about if you go above that all of your consumption zero through 400 is going to be assessed at that highest volumetric rate. Great. The next question was, do you inspect wastewater systems regularly or does property owner have to request it? We have a homeowners association and expect to get a report regularly. This is Able Tree Point Homeowners Association and Staniford Farms Homeowners Association. I think you, I don't know if you can clarify, you're referring to the stormwater system because I believe with both of those homeowners associations, the majority of the customers, there are a handful of folks in that area who are still on septic, private septic, and it would be up to the private property owner to inspect and maintain their own septic system and ideally connect to our system. But that's a story for another day, per our ordinance. If you're referring to the stormwater systems, I think I'm gonna need to put you in touch with Jenna, again at jolsonatberlingtonbt.gov. The ones where we are co-permittees, there are regular reports that have to go to the state and we do work with the homeowners associations to provide that. Over where you are, I'm trying to remember what the relationship is and so that might be a better offline conversation. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, that would be easier to answer offline. She said stormwater system and yes, we are in private septic. Yeah, I will have to follow up with you, Lee. I'm not sure exactly which development you're talking about specifically for which permit. So it depends on which one we are, if we're a co-permittee or if we just have a memorandum of understanding to maintain items in the roadway. There's a difference. Ted asked, our street has a drywall system not connected to stormwater drains. Do the homeowners on this drywall system qualify for a reduced stormwater rate? Ted, I would have to know if you're on a public or a private street. If you're on a public street, those drywalls are maintained and operated by the city. And so wouldn't necessarily be eligible for the stormwater credit. Additionally, right now the stormwater credits are only available for directly assessed properties and directly assessed properties. So single family duplex and triplex get a flat fee and everybody else is actually you measure the amount of impervious and then we charge you based on the impervious. Let me see if you answered. I don't see the answer. So if you are say in a have a homeowners association where the road is private and those drywalls are private, we could look at that for a stormwater credit. And again, I'm gonna ask you to talk to Jenna Olson and send her an email to make sure that, to sort of evaluate and make a determination on whether or not you'd be eligible for credits. Yeah, and Ted said it is a public street that the drywall system is privately owned by Teed. So yeah, we can follow up on that and discuss that a little bit further. So that's it for the questions that have come in and writing. I am going to give the folks on the phone an opportunity to chime in here. So phone number ending in 3975, 3975, if you, I just asked you to unmute if you'd like to chime in. Next up is phone number ending in 4230. Thanks for attending. Yeah, thank you. And then phone number ending in 8250, it's 8250. Jenna, are you actually unmuting them because I'm not seeing on the screen the little unmuting happening? Yeah, I'm allowing them to talk and asking them to unmute, but if they don't want to unmute them. Oh, asking them to, okay, sorry. I can't unmute them forcefully. Okay, well, we'll give it another couple of minutes here just to let any other questions trickle in via the Q&A. There is nothing coming in via the Facebook page. Well, I just wanted to address, because Mr. Forley has a couple of follow-up comments on his situation where they replaced the Galvea Line and then they saw increased water bills. It makes sense, I guess what I'm saying is because the house is using more water because it is easier to use more water because previously I'm assuming your water pressure and flow was so reduced that even if you were opening your faucet full bore, you weren't, your house was not drawing the same amount of water as it now is now that you have a full capacity pipe that is providing adequate pressures. So everything you're saying makes sense and I just want, it is because you are using more water and not because the water line is somehow controlling your water bill. I think you know that, but I just wanna make sure others know that. And again, I think it's a great point and I think it's something our customer care folks can keep in mind, particularly in the galvanized pipe situation. It's not as big of an issue if somebody's replacing their copper line or replacing going from copper to plastic, but certainly in a galvanized pipe situation where you had only this much and now you've got the full pipe capacity, absolutely you could end up if you're not careful having an increased water bill. I don't see any other comments or questions trickling in. Any other closing remarks, Megan? No, I just wanna thank people for their engagement. You know, this is can be pretty dense stuff. It's very, very important to us. And we appreciate people showing up on a Wednesday night and engaging with us and asking some really great questions. If anything else pops in your head, this is not your only opportunity. You can reach out via our webpage and we'll be excited to answer your questions. Great. Yes, thank you, everyone. Yeah, thank you so much. And yeah, have a great rest of your evening.