Video Description:
Water Advisory Board – December 2023
Read along below:
Unknown Speaker 0:00
The robotic arm records cast anymore. Nothing this week. All right. All right, maybe next week. We’re gonna start following the order.
Unknown Speaker 0:11
All right.
Unknown Speaker 0:12
You got Tom duster? Is here online test today. Scott hallway here. Roger lane. Renee Davis your
Unknown Speaker 0:24
damn lover?
Speaker 1 0:25
Can usin Yes, Wes Lowry here. Kevin’s voted here. Cool Bartlett here, Christopher. Yep. Other McIntyre is here. John Gage here. And councilmember Barton is not here yet. But Cheerio. Quorum. Alright.
Speaker 2 0:50
Approval of previous month’s notice any questions or concerns on that month,
Speaker 1 0:55
I did notice that I inadvertently left attached something that was attached to the October minutes so that attachment of the legislative guiding principles should not have been with the November minute so we can take those out.
Unknown Speaker 1:15
Anybody else
Unknown Speaker 1:17
you’re looking to approval so
Unknown Speaker 1:24
I
Unknown Speaker 1:28
haven’t. Yeah.
Speaker 3 1:32
The float St. Green Lions Gate this morning was 2.8. The 100.5 years towards average is 16 CFS. The reason for that difference there is supply which is pouring water the maximum
Unknown Speaker 1:56
age so it’s about average.
Speaker 3 2:01
So the column the same brain as divide reservoir, and that’s priority data April 1 1879 in the South Platte River, Collins the Riverside reservoir
Speaker 3 2:22
grouse Rockbox reservoir butnot preserve the elevation and 63 minutes which is approximately two and a half feet down or approximately 50,006.
Unknown Speaker 2:41
Indian reservoirs and engaged
Unknown Speaker 2:42
from eight
Unknown Speaker 2:44
or 9000 feet down approximately 2800
Speaker 3 2:58
At the end of November based on was was suddenly frequent
Unknown Speaker 3:08
Alright, thanks for inviting me here, we don’t really did revisions
Speaker 4 3:24
they’ll develop an activity you can talk to us i i have a is not an action required. So
Speaker 1 3:36
we don’t have any development activity. This one. Roger, notice that the structure of it is a little bit different than it has been since we started using the agenda software that we’ve been using for a little while. There’s not really a way for us to do in another indented 123 under the different categories. So each item is listed out separately and in parentheses, it tells whether or not each action review. So like here, we don’t have any in either of those categories. But if we did have multiple properties or somebody that we were we were looking at the title of the property and then action required or for information only listed at the end of that. So understand that. Yeah. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 4:36
So I made a cache I’m just gonna go through kind of a summary of where we’re at today and
Speaker 5 4:48
get a shareable little bit. As the Board may recall, back in March of last year, city council took action based on Water Board’s recommendation to set the current fee for cash in lieu, which is a 48,500, based on the entire cost of providing a full acre foot of water to the city’s portfolio. More specifically, it was determined at that time that the wind gap project will be used as a principal project representing that methodology. So, we’ve been, you have been looking at that, ever since then it’s your quarterly meetings. As you may recall, the current fee of 45 is in two components one and $30,000 per acre foot, which is basically the waterway, the Parent Project, water rate valuation. And then the second component, the 18,500 was constantly the gap forming project, the sum of those two projects, total costs 40,500 to get a firm acre foot of water to the bar. So that’s been in place for going on close to two years. As we look at those two different elements within that determination, we drilled out a little more specifically into the windy gap project back in 2022, the same The same year with council last set the current fee, the Platte River board, authorized their staff to sail up to an additional 10 A lot of units when the gap. And they this year 2023. Earlier this year, they put out an RFP to for the sale of five of their unconfirmed when the gap units. And they put that out in June. And then later that year, or excuse me with a caveat that the minimum bid that would be accepted would be $3.8 million per unit. So they received their bids and receive a total total of I think it was five bids for eight units. They rank those in order of the bid offering. The top three bids were selected. And those three bids represented the five units that they were wishing to sell. So the the next step in that process was to go to the northern submission board to receive their approval to make to authorize that transfer. So December of this year back on December 7, the northern municipal seventh district Board reviewed and approved the request to transfer two units to the town burthen, and one unit for the little Thompson water district. So those three units represent three of the five, the other one will be going to their board sometime likely in the first quarter of next year. After the board acts, then the staff can move forward with those entities and actually developing a closing and having a closing that would transfer those those units. So as of right now, that kind of if you think of it in steps, they kind of on step three, for two for three of those units, that being the actual setting a closing date and closing. The other one is like on step two, but to get the board approval that they can set the closing and closer and closer. So similarly, like if you were buying a house was up and you do a real estate appraisal, there’ll be some bids and some information you’ll have that will represent contracts that are ready to be sold and not finalized, then you’ll also have ones that are finalized. And so as we look at these particular bids, we believe staff believes it’d be it would make sense to wait till those closings occur. If for any reason those bids don’t close, then they then the staff would have to decide if they’re going to look at a lower bid. And so the idea is that it’s expected that and hoped that all five units will have been closed in that within the next quarter. Although it could be sometime in the first half of 2020 for the for what we’ve been told is that once those bids once those clothes things have occurred that Platte River will share with us. I’ll say more details of what those closing amounts were, we know that they released 38, the equivalent of 3.8 million is that was the minimum bid. But that being said, it’s expected that the weighted average for those selected bids will be around 41,500. So as we jumped to the winner yet firming project, as we’ve talked about, there’s been settlement costs for the lawsuit that we’ve had to work through, and some other other efforts, and those increased to the amount of approximately $1,000 An acre foot. So that would adjust the current 18,500 to 19,500. So if you take the two new expected cost of 41, five and 95 is expected the total project cost, in order to deliver firm acre foot unit of windy gap water in the system will be approximately $61,000. So that’s kind of the numbers behind it. Staff is recommending that any future cash into adjustments will be based on actual values attributed to the total projected windy gap project cost. And then final closed sales be used as part of that evaluation. So not just speculation, or not when we actually have closed sales. And so we’re of the opinion that it probably doesn’t maybe make sense to make a have a recommendation for change until those happen. But that recommendation is certainly your purview to make. We’re gonna continue to monitor or what the northern board, municipal sub district board reviews. And we’ll continue to have conversations with Platte River by the end of the likely your next quarterly review. Hopefully those core sales.
Speaker 4 12:05
Say, as far as bringing in Jimmy Harlow that those costs, I mean, notice finalized the cost optimization of those causes out what other year, so about a year and a half? But now, are you saying you’re not saying you want to wait till the final before we just this? Okay,
Speaker 5 12:32
so what you’re what you’re referring to is one, so there’s two parts, the Parent Project will water, the water right when you have water, and then there’s the chimney hollow Kirby project. So here, what you’re talking about is a chimney haul firming project, yeah, that’s gonna take a couple of years to complete. There’s already money in reserves to help pay for unexpected overage costs, it’s possible those could go up, those if they do are going to be a much smaller value, it’s going to be something like that $1,000 An acre foot type of increases as opposed to the value of the parent water, which is based upon whatever the market is, and that’s where it’s went up or in the current $30,000 An acre foot to what’s going to be projected to be around 41. Five.
Speaker 6 13:25
Say, I think at the last board meeting, we talked about an outreach program that you guys had already started, I guess is there been like anything given the council that would lay this out, like you’ve done here for us in a study session or executive session, just so they’re aware of as well as developers are going to be hit with another 13 grand per foot?
Speaker 7 13:48
So so we do plan on doing that? We’re not at that point. We’ve actually been asked internally to look at additional options. Also, there’s a there’s a little bit of concern about how cash flow will affect affordability in the community. And also looking at what future projects we may use, currently, or at least cash flow we’ve been accumulating for some time now. We use bulk about four and a half million dollars. When we entered into the contract with India, firming project, we use the remainder of the pie mountain dam fund. What happened in cash in lieu, we have a bond
Unknown Speaker 14:54
citizens
Speaker 7 14:56
approved and then some money we have already we Got a consortium of money to put together to take that the biggest item in that, of course, was the bond. So that bottles have to be paid off. So we will, we will use some of this cash in
Unknown Speaker 15:17
addition
Unknown Speaker 15:19
to to pick that bar.
Speaker 7 15:23
Right now we’re being asked to look at different alternatives. One of the things I wanted to do with councilmember Hardin on the on the spot today, I apologize. But I would kind of like choked. So we’ve heard, have had the opportunity to listen to a lot of staff work or reaching out where we can. And when we were reaching out really heavily to our planning department, because they’re the frontline working with the development community. We’re reaching out to our economic development partners, and our economic city to reach out that wanted to work with waterboarding. Counselor, so actually, anything that you could give us any thoughts on on that? Also, the whole thing is I’ve got the whole portability. Councils thinking about that. I
Speaker 8 16:18
guess the the thing that we would say about Wess analysis is that it is the kind of analysis that a public utility would do and be limited to, in in terms of their rate setting, right in the sort of cost plus, and what that what let’s look through very capably is what it costs us to get that water from our primary water sources. So there are a whole bunch of other policy things that the council will look at, before setting the final field. And I can just hit on one of the big ones, which was the city’s needs, right? How much? What are the things that the city is going to have to use to fund the those fees go into for? So if the city’s needs are really urgent we might want especially if there’s high demand for water, we might want to set that price higher?
Unknown Speaker 17:40
What’s gonna be the rationale for that?
Speaker 8 17:44
rationale is that we need stuff. Okay. In other words, we’re not particularly, we’re not limited in our policy decisions to cost to us at all. There are a whole bunch of other policy matters, that I don’t know whether this board should be in the business of analyzing them or not. But we can tell you that the council is in the business of analyzing what is just what other municipalities are charging, in the same position flutters the flooding to feelings work. Really well it doesn’t mean annexation, or Johnstown or any other municipalities enough to have water departments. And what we found the last time there was a major change in the fee loop formula was that we were way down at the bottom, you know, way, way down, like a factor of five difference between one Lightspeed and everybody else’s. And we’re still on the lower end of that, although this, nobody else changes this 61 predicted 61 will put us much more in line with other other cities. That then we have to figure out what the policy objectives are for the city and how much that fee in lieu affects whether the transition transactions that people developers particularly make will with the city enter into our our impact by field. So if the city’s policy is that it needs more development, no matter what we need to annex all the land we hear them. We might want our fee loop to be as low as we can afford to keep it. I don’t think we would want to be letting Lampi annexed low cost, right. But we but we might want to go with this at cost, or a narrow cost plus cognitive policy. On the other hand, there are a lot of people, a lot of voters. And if you really analyze the results of the last election, there are a lot more voters than there were last time around, who don’t think Walmart should be growing as much as long as growing. And that would translate into a policy of really jacking up the fee in lieu because more developers would go away and go somewhere else. And then there’s, again, the affordability idea of well, yeah, we want to develop, but we want to develop a lot of housing that is lower cost, whether it’s subsidized housing, or whether it’s not subsidized, you know, it’s naturally affordable to more people below the average income. And that would be a good reason for keeping the feeding loop. But there’s a catch there to the council can have a policy, which we did last time of discounting the field, in exchange for a covenant with the developer that they’re going to produce affordable housing. So there’s all kinds of knobs that go into the determination of what the final fee in Lieu is gonna be. And at least some of those should be considered. By this board, for example, us have a survey of what other municipalities are charging a discussion with planning about what kind of applications they’re going to get an inventory of what the annex what land is. One of the one of the things that has been observed right now is that all of the land that is left in or adjacent to the long run planning area, is harder to develop plans that were, that are awaiting the outcome of the lawsuit for the council estates parcel, which is not hard to develop, and it’s pretty much close. But it’s hard to get. There is a fight over that land. And then, you know, there’s the sheer middle area land, which is the epitome of hard to develop land, it’s blighted, it’s polluted, it’s, you know, it’s a mess. And there’s no infrastructure, even adjacent to it. You know, it’s there’s all of all of this blighted land inside the city limits already. So you’re pretty much starting from just as you start to develop that.
Speaker 4 23:22
And you have you heard from developers recently that it’s too expensive to do
Unknown Speaker 23:29
much of that, oh, really say? No,
Unknown Speaker 23:35
way out of the range of anybody else in the area?
Speaker 8 23:38
No, no, no. Thank you. They can’t say that, you know, what, what, compared to all of Frederick or sub flood, there’s just trying to grow as hard as it possibly can. We’re probably harder to work with, you know, we’ve got bigger land use code and bigger development code. And so, you know, you have to toe the line in order to get your projects through the process. That gets said a whole lot gets said a whole lot that it takes too long. But I don’t think anybody has ever said that the city will work with us, or that this the city’s costs are out of line. I mean, everybody in this area, the cost of land is outlined with respect to the United States of America. But, but but for our area. No, I don’t think
Unknown Speaker 24:33
I don’t think that’s true. reducing crime.
Speaker 8 24:37
Yeah. So I heard somebody say the other day that the the city ate up too many of the Low Income Housing Tax Credits so that their private low income housing development is going to have to wait longer to get some. But that seems to be like pointing, you know, everybody’s everybody is dipping out of the same bucket. There’s a lot of illegals in buckets not very big. So I’m not really advocating for a policy because I only speak for myself. You know, I don’t think we should leave my personal opinion is we shouldn’t leave money on the table for commercial developers. But we should make allowances for affordable housing. And we already did that, you know, last time around, we the policy now contains a reduced fee alliterative if there’s a covenant to vote for us. So I just wanted to talk about all the things that need to be considered. And I think, at least all of the factual information needs to be brought forward by the staff and by this board. So we really need all of the stuff about what’s happening in the surrounding area. It’s, it’s up to the council to tweak the quantitative analysis, I think, to decide whether we’re going to, we’re going to incentivize affordable housing, whether we’re going to incentivize building in one module, not all those things in, but it’s not up to the council to go figure out how much all the other municipalities are charge. It’s not, it’s not up to the council to go and figure it out. Who’s buying and selling water baits, and for what, so all of that stuff needs to be looked at. And, you know, maybe a trend analysis, because, you know, there’s no reason you guys are professionals, if you are adjacent to the business in one way, or the other councils, not professional in anything most of the time. And, you
Unknown Speaker 27:07
know, so we don’t do stuff
Speaker 8 27:08
like trend analysis, right? That needs that needs to come, right, that needs to sit well, you know, water rights are getting more and more expensive. With respect to the cost of living with respect to the cost of land, or not.
Unknown Speaker 27:30
You any comments?
Speaker 9 27:35
I have a few. But I just kind of just continue to advocate for the fact that I feel like it is our board’s job to find out how much it costs a city to buy an acre foot of water, and all that kind of additional kind of planning, almost kind of pseudo political kind of stuff is really not up to us. And that we just kind of, you know, the professional role that we hold, is just figuring out how much water costs. And I don’t even know that what other municipalities are charging for their fields, who has really anything to do with us either, because that’s not our city. So in our city has a unique set of circumstances that that result in whatever the cost is for us. So that’s, I guess that’s my two cents.
Unknown Speaker 28:36
You may have any more.
Speaker 10 28:39
I have. I have some questions. One of my first questions is you guys are doing outreach to developers at one point to let them know that there will be an increase.
Speaker 5 28:48
Not that there would be but I’m suggesting it might be Yeah. Delivering as they’ve been going through the development review process or they’ve contacted contacted our
Speaker 10 29:00
division. So when they contact you, you let him know that there could be a change. Okay, how’s that going? Like, do have a sense of how many of you’ve done what percentage of folks know well known to development, it hasn’t been outreach to the to the impacted community.
Speaker 5 29:16
So as you’ve kind of seen through the development review that you’ve looked at, there hasn’t been a lot and so even since the March of 2022, since the last change heard by for cash in lieu, there’s been a I’m going to call it a limited amount of development that’s went through this required one board action. Now a lot of that has to do with right prior to councils actually marching towards you wanting to a significant amount of cladding that was sitting there and even annexations. So just a quick refresher when you annex in Loma you transfer your historical water that leaves the remaining debt As at that time, you can satisfy all remaining deficits of pertinent to that annexation, you don’t have to wait until a plat. Most do, but you don’t have to. So when the bigger change came out a couple of years ago, some annexations to improve satisfied all the remaining devils, which therefore allows them to develop at their own timeframe whenever it is, without after bringing more water and reworking fashion. And so, and then there was a bunch of final plat so that I don’t have the numbers in front of me. But it was a significant amount of the developable. Land was a long way. So in the last two years, there’s been some development proposals that have come through that have happened, some outstanding deficits. But on a very small scale, somebody that’s got, I’m gonna, I’m just gonna make up a number for illustrative purposes, they may have less than five acre foot deficit. So as opposed to somebody that’s coming in, and as 150 acre deficit has significant impact. And so they’re also another point is, there is a handful of developers that represent a significant amount of the development that’s going through one marker. So in other words, they’re prominent, and I’m making this number a little bit up. But it’s, I think, you’ll get the context. There are five or six developers that probably represent an 80% of the development that’s going on right now. And we’ve had conversations with those, yes, there’s going to be other developers that just come through as in any given time, a developer can walk into the city’s development, building, and say, I want to have a have a meeting and talk about a project. But I think we’ve had a lot of conversations that are everybody, those people that are in the development process, now we’ve had conversations that represent that roughly 80%. There’s an expectation, they just understand, costs go up with time, it’s very unusual for customers. So as they go through there, they’re doing their own performance. They’re like, almost expecting it, not not wanting it but expecting it. And so that’s kind of the conversations that
Unknown Speaker 32:25
we’ve been having so far. Great, thank you. And I respect
Speaker 6 32:29
that you guys are communicating with planning staff and economic development staff, and you’re not directly impacting developers, because again, anything you say, can be countered to it about what’s going on on our planet. So right, you’re just kind of guiding the ship through other city status, right? We’ve
Speaker 5 32:48
had like, we’ve had very specific conversations with the planning staff, there’s been a pretty good tip, turn over to New planners. And anytime that happens, I’ve had more direct comprehensive discussions with them about cash in lieu. And so what’s been happening most recently is those Clearing House plan, planners are suggesting that the applicant directly contact water resources, so something doesn’t get lost in in transition. So I’ve had and continue to have a lot of direct one on one conversations with the players, or the developers when they come through so and that process can take a while. So even though even though there you haven’t seen development applications in front doesn’t mean there’s some in the pipeline. They’re just not ready at around a point yet to come before the board for taking taking action on but I think we’re gonna see a few of those. And in the near future
Speaker 8 34:02
I’d like to maybe draw the distinction that that Tom was trying to make a little differently. Because yeah, it is not this words. charter to make policy. That’s the council. But the council is not chartered to do sophisticated data analysis. The staff and the advisory boards are supposed to bring that forward. So you know, as designed recall, the last time we did this execute a few this exercise in a big way. We had you know, an incremental same formula recommendation, the king from the staff in the water board, and we had people public water, public, inviting heard pounding on the table and saying long was charging a fifth of what all this room in cities are charging? Why are we leaving this money on the table? And what we had to do as a council was send that question back to the staff. And it’d be great if we didn’t have to do that. Because that could be, you know, the this is the thing, Roger, to your previous question. Developers hate uncertainty. Because every time there’s uncertainty in equals two to lay, and it means that they’ve had the finances that to get their financing lined up in advance if they can’t find them, that they can’t even do an application, you know, so they just hate uncertainty. And so the faster when we begin this exercise, the shortest time possible from from taking up the question until settling the question, the better it is for everybody who does transactions to the city, and therefore bringing forward you know, doing the data analysis, because, you know, I can tell you, the council is not going to be the best people for deciding what all the factors are, you know, they’re not okay. You know, there’s one councilmember that goes to the windy gap meeting and needs the doughnuts and hears about the litigation and stuff. Hey, Brian badly thought those donuts will be only recently. So but, but most Mosley counsel doesn’t even know that there are legal issues to be dealt with, let alone that they’re going to impact the cost per acre flip of a firm. Well, I used up all my words already in the cost of the water per acre foot out of chimney hollow, is going to be impacted by those legal fees. So all of that stuff, all the questions are the staff and the board knows how to ask those questions. And the at least, the data and the potential impact need to be part of the package that comes forward? What the council does with it? Yeah, that’s policy. That’s, like, that’s whether the council is still committed to more affordable housing. That’s where a council is still committed to reasonable planned growth or whether the council leans more toward capping growth, as some city councils and other cities have done on you know, that’s, that’s Council policy. But, but the data analysis that informs the policymaking process, is I we’re gonna depend on this board one way or the other, for that analysis. And it’s just a question of how many roundtrips
Unknown Speaker 38:22
was anything else?
Unknown Speaker 38:23
No, one
Speaker 4 38:25
question. And I thought when we first started rolling this cash removing the adjusted, was there a thought that maybe water food and be able to make a decision sometime in December that? Is that an optimistic thought?
Speaker 5 38:45
I think that was probably more optimistic on my part, I think that led the board to believe that and I thought that they were going to have closed sales by the end of the end of the year, but it’s just taking longer than expected. And so, again, that’s where our recommendation comes to, it seems to make sense to let that play out. So we can know for sure what those sales and therefore, today’s value of that air water is no
Unknown Speaker 39:15
problem with that.
Speaker 7 39:20
And then, on top of that, staff would like to be able to bring that to the board. And then I mentioned to council, some of the data points that we’re talking about. We have done that in the past sometimes. Survey was a long standing, Sir, we’ve done for 20 years. Other cities have their policies or it hasn’t been updated with things like other cash flow policies. It’s not as easy as saying this HR is this. I mean, it’s like a matrix. All kinds of you know, everybody does it. Do so. But yeah, we can we can update that we, you know, we one thing we would like to do is kind of goes back to the question about how much is out there to do, we have a lot of very long standing GIS map layer that we occasionally bring into waterboard, we’d like to bring that back to you and show you it has by partial, partial by partial entirety, let’s annex what’s not what’s done historically, was fully met, but still needs to be met. You can’t granularly go through it. But it gives you a good visual good base of information on so those are the kinds of things we’re over the next couple months, we’re going to try to bring back and possibly have enough information on the table for the March
Unknown Speaker 40:57
review.
Speaker 7 41:02
Some guy do appreciate all your input now. And then you know, the suggestion. And we agree with that, we do need to get a study session with counsel. So you can think through because there are broader policy issues. I mean, we weren’t good at bringing the data to the policy advice. We appreciate the board and do that. So we’ll, we’ll continue to bring more information. suggest anybody else? Oh, yeah, we want
Speaker 10 41:40
to talk about this, okay. But when I was reviewing the numbers that are in the current packet that will say there was one thing that jumped out at me, and that was slightly concerning, and that was the the the current proposed or somewhat proposed windy gap, firming costs of 19.5. Those are below like inflation index, meaning they’re too low, to be higher. I mean, I want it to be real. But I think we should also be aware that those should go up probably at least a million dollars, which is not the big piece of the puzzle, it’s a smaller piece, but I think we should be making sure that that signal is out there. That’s just comparing two indexes. Okay. But when they’re not going up as fast as the construction cost indexes, then I’m like, hey, this number still good. And if we’re going to delay even longer, I think we should be aware that that number should go up, potentially, maybe not future. And then another thing I wanted to communicate to you I guess to cancel is that avoiding rate shock is lovely, meaning keep the increases small and steady. I’m hearing there’s you know, let’s not do it now. But I think reviewing it frequently, and small increases that are more frequent sometimes can be better than a big jump and more palatable to whoever’s experiencing those increases. So just as part of this stuff to keep in mind, for future reference, if we want to do a market based thing, we could pay somebody to evaluate the market for us in annually or every other year. So that these things are going up more incrementally, more incrementally, but also maybe frequently, you know, keep it going. So that we’re not behind, because I don’t advocate for that. But just it helps things be more powerful and workable for the developers, because as you were saying, they know things are gonna go up. And if they get a feel for it’s gonna go up this much, you know, or it’s if they can expect these increases annually. You know, we’re looking at two years. Now, if we’re going to do this in March, we were doing it annually, maybe it’d be smaller steps, and more palatable.
Speaker 8 43:51
You know, and that’s a really good point. And it’s kind of a thing that the council seldom questions. It’s kind of meta policy, right? How often do we evaluate this policy of our policy? And that council usually is not quick enough on its feet question.
Speaker 10 44:09
So I think annual review of STC or cash in lieu might be like, like annual inputs, some of the bigger is potentially useful if we want to go with market. Maybe the staff is heating up. But but also maybe contracted out, give him some money to get it done. You know, so that’s just food
Speaker 8 44:35
for thought. Yeah. And then there’s, there’s another thing but because if you do it more often than now, now you’re shorter than the planning cycle. You’re a development project. And so then you’re going to have to say well, which which developed which which and the development pipeline is affected by this and which is not. So that’s two years then it’s a little It’s an easier question. Well, and one of the things it’s always kind of troubled me on the whiteboard is, is when we advise on a different cash annuity advice this month.
Speaker 10 45:09
And you know, if somebody doesn’t know that advice is coming in this month, and when that exactly lands to council in the following month, all of that stuff, that’s another thing about annual that’s lovely as if it were truly annual. And they can expect it, that it wouldn’t be Oh, shoot, I should have gotten it in last month. Which sounds silly. But if we’re talking about increases like this, that’s gonna stink. You know? So if they kind of knew to expect, hey, it goes up every April, or, or whatever it is, that at least they can be like, well, I want to try to get them to march. Right. So So giving that normality that you said meta around it. So there’s normalized, that can help to me. Yeah,
Speaker 8 45:50
we just had that theoretical discussion with with respect to the fee in lieu of building affordable units last month, so yeah, it’s that that’s really real. And and it makes big difference to developers. So we have anything that we can do to regularize the process. And it Yeah, part of the problem was because of the pandemic, we didn’t, we didn’t readjust that fee assessment as often as we had promised we would. So we were behind. So that’s all. Alright.
Speaker 10 46:42
I’m gonna say that I did look at all in system development charges on a per unit basis for multifamily. And
Speaker 8 46:48
we’re not that expensive. We’re fairly inexpensive.
Speaker 10 46:51
We are and that’s going to compare to stuff around we are a little bit more on the spinny side for single family. But that’s not necessarily where affordability lies in my take. So info for cancer. Yeah,
Speaker 6 47:06
just one quick question or process. Whereas when
Unknown Speaker 47:10
a developer
Speaker 6 47:14
deals with his deficit, he’s done with it before planning. He’s done right at that point in time. So it could be three years before he does that development. So in between that time that he’s settled that deficit, cash removed is increased by he doesn’t have to then speak God. That’s a big win for so yeah. So
Speaker 5 47:36
that’s, we’ve had some annexations do it now that have been satisfied over 20 years, there’s been no development and the caching loops change 20 times, up and down. So that is an advantage of, for developer. They told me, that’s why some of them that came in, because it makes it if you will, more marketable. If you if you can sell it knowing to say to the potential buyer, regardless of what happens with cash in lieu of water rights received, you’re satisfied.
Speaker 11 48:13
With that very point, I don’t remember we saw this last time that maybe you did. I’m not aware of the 20 times up and down cash flow, I thought it was fairly static for a really long time. And then we have three big jumps. So there’s a historical trendline. And what cash was over time to be interesting to see.
Speaker 5 48:32
So you’d want on our on our website right now. And we have a list from 1963 to current of every council Council action on setting the fees starting at $100. Back in 63. Yeah, to where it is today that shows every change. So we’ve highlighted it in red. There’s not a line graph, it’s a spreadsheet for but it shows that there was a period of time where it was changing frequently, where I think we made four changes in one year or six changes in two years of cash in lieu just trying to stay with the market in the early 2000s.
Speaker 10 49:08
Even in my time we’ve done multiple increase, it’s pretty
Speaker 5 49:11
easy. Usually it’s not been huge. And there’s percentages listed there. So you can see relatively speaking, how big those changes were up or down.
Speaker 7 49:21
So yeah, it’s I think in the past 10 years, we’ve been dying changes. Yeah, just about once a year. So
Speaker 5 49:26
not much recently, but Right. And because
Speaker 11 49:29
of the format that we’ve chosen to base our national rely on. It’s not as responsive to market change. And anyways, that’s because we’re looking at cost inputs, which don’t really translate. So we shouldn’t be doing it every quarter, frankly, because we don’t have the data to suggest that that’s changing on a quarterly basis. That should be more than
Speaker 5 49:50
that. Since you moved away from using CMT, as a as a barometer statement definitely does change that right
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Okay. Move on
Unknown Speaker 50:04
to Copeland right. Yeah, thanks.
Unknown Speaker 50:07
Oh, you Yes,
Speaker 7 50:09
I have before he proposed memorandum management agreement between the city of Longmont and the National Heart service. Rocky Mountain National Park. The city of Longmont owns 80 acres in the wild basin area. Rocky Mountain National Park. Just go in park off of State County Road station you got to Copeland like we used to also on Colton Laker we exchanged that in the mid 1990s to the same brain left on Water Conservancy District before golden bonds. That was a good deal for both of us. But we still at the willow car, the main part of the valley, predominated by willows called Wheel Guard. Very, very pristine area. We’ve owned it since the turn of the last century. Remember exactly like IE 10 or so we purchased that property. We filed for a reservoir site when there was a planned reservoir site in the Valley at that point in Ronda, you could actually built Copeland like the small like there, but had planned for about 1500 acres. That never went forward. Quite honestly, the geologic conditions wouldn’t have allowed for it then. And even today, it’s all Glacial Till rock, because you’ve never been able to see like. And of course, now we’ll be able to build a reservoir there. So really, we the city has not been using it owned by the waterfront that hasn’t been used by the waterfront. As such, in the mid 1980s, early 1990s, we entered into an agreement with the National Park Service, or they actually manage the property for us they treated it actually gotten included in Rocky Mountain National in the boundary exterior. Rocky Mountain National Park is still aspect within the park boundary. And as such, they can manage it, they manage it for us. The great benefit for us is that we don’t have to spend a lot of money to go up in Washington area and do minor maintenance and take care of visitation and that type of thing. So they treat it as if it were part of the park they basically this agreement allows them to apply their park regulation regulations to the layout, which is really great for us it preserves it and keeps it better condition. And they have the Rangers station right down. District Rangers outs right there in the current so there’s really it saves us a lot of time, my son crews up there to debate this is been working really good for almost 30 years now. But it needs to be updated. It’s a it’ll be a 10 year agreement. So it’ll be from 20. Now point 33 to 10 years maximum. Staff is recommending board a recommendation to Council to approve the agreement before the terms
Unknown Speaker 53:52
of the agreement basically aren’t changing.
Speaker 7 53:54
There really are you know, it was very written a little bit but you know, it’s everything. Everything that you would see today will management
Speaker 7 54:15
really for for them is a couple of couple benefits for the park. One is they use Volvo car as a because it’s so prestigious national area. They use it for a lot of research. And they’re able to actually do some research projects. Their property just less of ours and so the research can kind of continue to validate. Prior to our joint management of area. We weren’t able to get there quite enough so people started camping that came up people falling further and further to where they were actually camping on National Park. So this is how they came to us and say, Hey, this activity is impacting our so we’ve got rid of overnight camping up there, installed a small days area. But really for the for the park, there’s a couple things they want. They want to keep the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Pristine here it gives them really the the corridor floor for getting people to get into the bar. There’s a hiking trail. So a lot of people not to visit or most of as you’re driving, but a lot of people live in that area actually walking through the park trail. But really, it’s for the park. It’s just it’s the entrance to one of the major life I personally consider one of the best areas of the park, it’s one reason no monetary
Speaker 4 55:56
compensation to them, there is their use able to oversee the land and you see a lot of value in that. Yeah,
Speaker 7 56:05
they do the if you read the agreement, it does have extraordinary maintenance. The long run we’ll sit down and talk about how to find out more likely but but in terms of really their maintenance is patrolling it. They do have work, volunteer work crews take care of the trail. There really isn’t too much cost for them. And of course it was really great thing for them as they actually have their entrance. Gated pay the dollars that the public right off the county road. It actually rodeos across a couple of my properties and growing up in Water Conservancy District property in our property. So it it probably is nice. Otherwise they’d have to move their rally would have to It’s just awkward to have your gates not actually at the
Unknown Speaker 57:13
park property and it’s
Speaker 7 57:15
at the edge of the park. So for them it’s a really good deal. And of course they want to they want to keep the pristine nature of yours in here years ago we actually 40 years ago it was leased by a stable pastor courses on their
Speaker 4 57:38
disagreement first, with the
Speaker 7 57:42
first I think it was 1993 when we first entered and so right out about
Speaker 12 57:46
2003. It was just
Unknown Speaker 58:01
so yeah, it’s we believe it’s very
Unknown Speaker 58:05
Scott. Yeah,
Speaker 11 58:06
I was gonna suggest that in the future because there’s so much historical pieces in here. As I mentioned. In the agenda, we call it a kofler like MOU, you should probably not talk a couple of months ago uses there is a Kirkland Lake MOU that Conservancy District has with the park so true for a particular parcel, just for confusion sake. So it’s really just the lower part should be Copeland
Speaker 7 58:28
Willow car. Yeah, you’re right. Other than that,
Speaker 11 58:32
I would make the motion to authorize the city to enter this agreement. For recommendation City Council authorized the city manager in the agreement and substantial reform presented the waterboard is presented us.
Speaker 6 58:45
Second, second, that with confidence that, you know, it makes sense for one entity to do the ecosystem management to different entities. Certainly times have different priorities, doesn’t even I mentioned to the board to after the flood restoration button. The city did a wide number of cuttings of those rules from this property in order to do the restoration.
Speaker 7 59:16
And that’s a really good point. Dan, probably should have mentioned the buck 35 acres that we’ve exchanged the district by date already because the district also has an MOU with the Park Service. So the park with the managing department, both our property and our property. So that is
Unknown Speaker 59:39
relatively the same and the agreements are not that dissimilar.
Speaker 4 59:44
I agree with your suggestion. The only reason I would know exactly where this is because what’s going on? What do I get whatever it is
Unknown Speaker 59:59
yeah, Just for keeping a
Speaker 4 1:00:02
motion made in a second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. Thanks.
Speaker 2 1:00:15
Okay, John, you’re up next. Yeah, great. Well, I
Speaker 13 1:00:22
don’t have to take a whole lot of time here and detract from the water resources out of the conversation. But it’s great. I think Wes, initially asked, I introduce myself. So I know some of you just from working with somebody, Dan. And I get some some of the council meetings. But I’m an Engineering and Operations administrator with the city. I think one of the things that Wes was hoping I can cover is just some of the reorganization of water and waste services department. So Chris, I don’t know how much context you provided as our department.
Speaker 13 1:01:01
So So historically, I feel like Public Works was really headed by Dale right maker, right. And so a lot of decisions and work went through Dale, you know, one person, and as we’ve kind of Reformed this waterway services department, some of the vision was to create some management and supervisory alcohol resiliency within the group, right. So Bob Allen, currently is the Department Director, Chris is the assistant director, myself, I’m one of the administrators, and we have one other administrator, Joma, Husky. And so among the four of us, you know, we kind of oversee and support all of the department functions. And, and really, that’s primarily our waste services group, which is waste collection and recycle compost. We have our obviously Water Resources Division, our engineering section, which handles our capital improvement program, we have our treatment operations, distribution and collection as utilities, and then environmental services. So there’s really six core functions within the department. And then, you know, really, two, two of those divisions are ended up between myself, Chris, and Joe Malachowski. So I think what was open I could do is just maybe say who I am as one of the administrators and what function I helped support in the new utilities. So I primarily support our environmental services, part of the department and our utilities, which is our water, water distribution, and sewer collection. And, and so without going into a ton of detail on the high level of what does environmental services do for the city, others have maybe heard environmental services in the past, and it was a more expanded role within the city in terms of what we would cover, it’s kind of been dialed back a little bit in terms of its scope. And it’s primarily associated with our water and waste services division now. So what does that mean? You know, our baseline of environmental services is to cover Safe Drinking Water Act, and Clean Water Act compliance. Those are two big core regulatory needs for the city. And each of those is associated with water and wastewater. So we cover those. And then another component that environmental services fry for the city is really just technical resource to all of the other divisions within water and waste. And so what does that mean? It was what was technical resource mean? Just so in practical applications, if there’s a challenge at the drinking water treatment plant, let’s say there’s a change in water quality, or, you know, we have an algae bloom. You know, that’s, that’s something where environmental services would come in and provide technical resource to understand why that happened. We don’t get into the nitty gritty of how to fix it. That’s our operations group. But we provide the technical background research, some of our staff are PhDs. And we provide that technical resource for our water staff. And then, and then another component, I guess, would be sustainability. So there is some of that partnership that we have with our sustainability group where we implement sustainability type projects at our water wastewater plants. An example of that would be the solar and battery projects that’s almost complete at a wastewater plant. So that’s another good example of what environmental services does. Let’s see on the utility side, that’s our water distribution and wastewater collection. So you can think of that as pipelines. So that’s another area that I support. And so what are the big needs in those areas? And in terms of water distribution? I think everybody here has probably seen news of water breaks that have happened. I think that that’s around the city. Somebody mentioned a service line It’s not the city that’s sort of cleanser residence. And as a master, what was the main has, are you a lot more resident recreation. And as a, it’s a very good illustration of one of the biggest challenges for utilities, operations groups and, and so aging infrastructure, it is going to be something that gets brought up quite a bit with council over the next year, especially as we start doing rate studies to understand where the costs are from the utility, what our biggest challenge is, that is going to be the primary hurdle for water distribution group is we have unsurpassed iron pipe in the city. And not every city has a lot of cast iron pipe, but cast iron pipe primarily is installed in 60s to 80s. And so that infrastructure, probably do it in the back of your head, right, you know, that the 60s 70 years old, that that infrastructure is prone to failure. And so we we have a water rehabilitation capital improvement program, that our engineering group manages to replace that infrastructure, but is it being replaced at the frequency that we need, that’s an assessment we’re doing as part of our rate study that will Council we’ll see probably in the next next year here. That’s, that’s a big consideration for distribution. And then on collection, I mean, an aging infrastructure again, same problem right on the sewer side. So if you think about it, water lines are being laid the same time sewer mains are being laid. So that infrastructure is just as a bowl. And we have a little bit of a more cost savings type of method to rehabilitate sewer mains, we can do that trench mostly by winding pipe. Whereas most of that infrastructure, when it comes to water distribution is more expensive, we’re pulling up the road most of the time for that we don’t have the same technology to do that in a more cost effective manner. But But rehab rehabilitation, rehabilitation of their collection system follows falls within a big part of that that work. And then you you all have been talking a lot about developments, the impacts of development cash in lieu and so, you know, the collection system was designed at a time when Longmont may have been planned differently, or commercial or single family. And as we continue to add density, which we’re talking about for cash and lieu financing, that’s a consideration for collection system capacity. And we continue to analyze the system through flow monitoring to understand did we design the system for the amount of development that were occurring in the city? And and that coordination, again, is with planning quite a bit is to say, Okay, where’s the development happening is our infrastructure adequate to, to densify. So just another area of utilities that, that I helped support, but plenty of engineers, and field staff are also tackling that. Chris, I don’t know if there’s anything else I want to add.
Speaker 14 1:07:54
Just wanted to point out to you, as well as chunky a great overview of what we’ve been doing and reorganize. One of the things that happened when we split it out from Public Works and natural resources. Obviously, Parks piece is separate from our group now. But the work of storm drainage piece also got pulled out in the public works for public works, streets, storm drainage, but because of the way that we’ve worked in the past, and the rules are set up now, we have a lot of overlap. So we are, as Joe presented last week, there’s a lot of CIP projects that are within the groundwater system. We’re trying to look at the system holistically. Not say what we’re just doing, while in place, let’s just do a sewer storm. And it’s all working together well.
Speaker 13 1:08:54
Yeah, yeah. So each of us and maybe that kind of leadership team support each other and have different experiences that add a lot of value. So you know, I support our distribution and collection teams. You know, Chris has had a lot of experience with development. And so another. How’s that work? Right? What’s the application to say? How do we support each other? Well, one of the big challenges for utilities is development. When you contractors, one for new lines for fiber for whatever underground utility they want, and they strike potentially strike, our underground assets will work really hard. And often we exactly. We don’t want that to happen. And so Chris has been helping us I think, work on the development side, being our advocate there to say how do we better protect our underground assets so that contractors have some some boundaries and safeguards in place that don’t hit our city’s assets. And so he’s been a really good resource to help on that.
Speaker 4 1:09:51
Can you Corp grill at all? Located positioning? Is that a mandatory thing to do? Yes,
Speaker 14 1:10:00
there is state legislature that anytime that a city has a contract with your contractor or designer, they’re required to help pahlawan hire old trucks to our streets and Swiss cheese to locate anything
Unknown Speaker 1:10:18
valuable.
Speaker 14 1:10:20
So we’ve worked on both sides of that. To make sure that we’re located here within this
Speaker 4 1:10:26
building, how do you interface with water treatment? I mean, they’re very tired.
Speaker 13 1:10:34
Yeah, great question. So I mean, water and waste is cradle to grave water. Right. So water resources, there’s no great. There’s no great. Sure water. But yeah, so it goes. So environmental services, right, as I was saying, kind of support can support technically our treatment operations staff. But within water waste department is our water resources, water treatment, water distribution, sewer collection, wastewater treatment, so everything all the way through the system of water life cycle, as within Waterplace. Department. It’s our operations group is led by Jim Hall ski. And then we have supervisors and treatment and operations managers who are overseeing those individual operations.
Speaker 8 1:11:28
Good questions. I know I did. down the primrose path on our close is that solar plus battery project because it’s been hanging fire for a long time, how many megawatts? Or what fraction of a fraction of a megawatt
Speaker 13 1:11:49
it’s a fraction of megawatt for sure, yeah, it’s smaller, and it has been the batteries installed on site. And so as the solar they’re working on the integration of the two now to understand how those are working together, in terms of storage capacity, offsetting peak demand. So it’s definitely not a project that we’re touting as a megawatt type project. But what it is, is a really good demonstration project that LPC has, has even offered some funding assistance to get better monitoring approaches on. So when we talk about distributed energy resources and rivers, this is what we’re learning, right? It’s how can we be offsetting peak demand. So our wastewater treatment plant has a very high peak demand that’s associated with one of our aeration processes. And so as much as we can time the discharge of the battery door electrical system, at the same time that we’re using this high demand variation process, we can start reducing the grid load. And that’s that is what we’re learning as part of that process. But it’s definitely not a offsetting the whole base. Why isn’t kilowatt? And I don’t know, off the top of my head the actual size of
Unknown Speaker 1:13:04
some number of kilowatts?
Speaker 6 1:13:06
Yeah. You have some damn, I’m just asking John coordinating all the federal permits for like, what mitigation and string restoration and all that fun kind of stuff or to
Speaker 13 1:13:18
go today. Chris and I both looked at each other for that one. I have not specifically the go to guy Environmental Services historically, maybe that’s usually my experience. When Kellyanne Berg was a security key. He I think coordinated a lot of that work, as Chris was alluding to these different departmental changes. Environmental Services is working to coordinate with our stormwater group specifically to keep that kind of technical resource in house. And so folks can come to environmental services for assistance, but I wouldn’t say Marmol services. But we now and everybody has to go project managers. First call. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 14 1:13:59
We do have different staff in different areas now that we contact. Like you said, expertise in house.
Speaker 4 1:14:10
Rather than article on paper, did we treat flush water this year? For us?
Speaker 15 1:14:16
I think Chris was quoted in that one. Ken was kind enough to allow me to be quoted.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:28
100 years, right?
Speaker 14 1:14:31
Yeah. Yeah. Like yes. Yeah. It was already a treat was about 2008 for us this year, the average.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:39
Other questions? Thank you. Yeah, thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:47
That’s perfect. All right.
Speaker 16 1:14:54
So I’m presenting to you all, the growing Water Smart, impacted Working 2023 This is different from the water conservation firms as a whole. This is just the growing Water Smart program. So as a reminder, the growing waters and our program is a program that we’re that I’m running to create a path forward to foster an equitable, safe and resilient community that contributes to Colorado’s sustainable water future. Basically, it’s growing, developing waters wise, changing codes and making sure that we implement water efficiency strategies during development and post development. But since we’re not there yet, we’re working on this development water efficiency strategies, with the largest project to be the contingent park for us to garden project. I presented to you all in October, with the photos from the actual event, but here are some hard numbers. We have 131 community volunteers, we also treated this event as a resource fair. So we had seven resource booths participate. And 354 waterwise plants planted, we also gave away 99 plants to the community so that they can start their water in their homes. So that’s the case of different projects. But the growing Morris farm program itself worked on several other projects. This year. We did a code review for Resilient Landscapes. And that is basically a comprehensive review of the city one month, plans and policies to assess our codes and policies for water conservation and water efficient landscapes and climate resiliency. The aim of this project is to identify best practices, policy gaps and opportunities for improvement. For efficiency standards with a water lens. We’re meeting with our consultant tomorrow actually to go over the first draft. So we’re really excited that this project has started growing some fruit, so we’re hoping to present to council some code changes for water efficient landscape specifically in the spring. We are also doing a turf replacement plan. So we’re working with the water now alliance to do a plan for us to establish data driven targets for reducing non functional term on city owned properties. We met a couple weeks ago to do a workshop to discuss co benefits of turf transitions with variety of different cities, staff members from different departments so that we make sure that all our words are being heard, so that we don’t unintentionally affect someone would we pick turbo person purchase quantity and properties. We also are doing the leak notifications. So this ties back to a water smart grant that Francie received several years ago. For our Amr, water meter, infrastructure. We’re required to do notifications to customers who have continuous usage on their in their meter. This is the first year we were actually able to like start sending out letters so that was really exciting. We sent out about 400 letters, and our call team made two or three calls our customer service team so really thankful for them. And we found three city of Longmont leaks that were found and resolved. And just from those city of Longmont leaks, we saved 1.3 million gallons. So that was really exciting. And then last but not least he did our water loss audit, which is the M 36. From the AWA thanks to John’s team. For his all of their help, we couldn’t have done it without them. There’s no direct water savings realized from this report, but it’s really crucial in understanding our system losses and kind of where we stand with that. So we’re told look forward to continuing that report and making sure that we keep our ducks in line it’s gonna help you guys identify your CIP projects and then just a funding summary. So the city for just our Coronavirus, our program we set aside $15,000 We got a $25,000 state grant from the CW CB for the terrco wasn’t a project and then in between other grants for our water bow lights project or code audit, and the water efficiency plan is that the President’s additional dollars for growing Water Smart projects. And then in 2024, looking forward for groundwater smart projects, we’re going to be doing a more in depth city week procedure with the ops team, so making sure that we get our city leaks taken care of more, more efficiently, more timely. The code updates which are really exciting for really excited about and and then a couple more recent progress on city, city or province.
Speaker 4 1:20:49
Yeah, 1.5 million gallons is that 20.3? The number was the 2022.
Speaker 16 1:20:58
We didn’t have any growing Water Smart projects happening in 2022. So this was what, from January to now is 1.5 million gallon saves just for Coronavirus farm projects.
Unknown Speaker 1:21:16
So should you save
Speaker 8 1:21:18
me was my you know, I had a new smart roof. And the roof was
Unknown Speaker 1:21:26
squashed on my new
Speaker 8 1:21:31
need to run perennials throwing stuff down off there. So I used to limit your water. But yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:21:44
Anybody have questions?
Speaker 10 1:21:45
So the code review is very exciting. Yeah. That has I think potential and I love the idea of trying to get stuff done. Right. But the other than retrofit, that’s smart. So I guess my question is, is there any way more and more can support in and help with code review? Like if you want to do a presentation to us we can get a stamp of approval if we do approved?
Speaker 16 1:22:10
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it would be really helpful. Once we get our second. I’m actually not the project manager for this. Our environmental and sustainability planner is managing the tour or the code review for a
Unknown Speaker 1:22:27
subject. So
Speaker 16 1:22:28
he’ll come and present to you okay, what’s our plan moving forward is to leave the consultant tomorrow, give her our first round of edits, when we get that kind of trimmed down version, he’s gonna give it to his leadership for like their, for their drafts. We’re gonna give it back to her. And then we’ll come to you guys before we go to council. And then obviously, having you all stamp of approval when we go to council is really helpful.
Unknown Speaker 1:22:57
I’d love to know more about it. Yeah.
Speaker 16 1:22:59
Yeah, it was super helpful. She she reviewed all of our development plans to see all of our comprehensive plans, from Envision Longmont to our water efficiency plant, and outlined everything that had the word water efficiency in it. So we have all of that in one place, which is really helpful.
Speaker 10 1:23:18
But then water loss is also really huge. Yeah, that’s one of the favorites because water losses? Well, no, it’s like one of the conservation measures that’s also revenue positive. So like, how would I not love that? Right? That’s two different things conservation. And so having both happened together is not that common. So yeah, I’m excited about that, too. Is there any way we can see results of that? Done? Send them out? Maybe? That’s cool. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 11 1:23:48
Yes, track water loss on a monthly basis is as reported in Germany. You absolutely. If
Speaker 13 1:23:56
sloping? Yeah, we have Flow Meters located around the city, which are primarily used for larger leak identifications and instances where we have main breaks and those are measurable pressure losses within the system that we see pretty pretty quickly but in terms of water loss accounting on a routine basis, we use those larger Flow Meters throughout the city to do some some accounting. You know this I think what you’ll see in the report when you guys see this water loss reporting is it’s looking at the entire city as a whole right? And so there there can be largely acts that are caught by those big flow meters and our transmission zones but might not catch all the little leaks around the city. And so that that is an important piece that you know, this water accounting says is like, are we falling with an industry standard? So
Speaker 11 1:24:47
that’s why I have no idea what my mom’s system losses are for its water system.
Speaker 13 1:24:55
And it plays it plays into you know, infrastructure rehabilitation. Yeah. So when we talk about older blinds throughout the city, that’s primarily where you’re going to be seeing leaks. And so as we continue to replace old leaking infrastructure with new watertight PVC versus, you know, a corroded cast iron pipe, we’re going to continue to see water losses go down over time, but it speaks to that importance of not only protecting public health but reducing water loss or
Unknown Speaker 1:25:25
increase that that work over time.
Unknown Speaker 1:25:38
Know
Speaker 11 1:25:40
Shawn, I should ask you, we were talking earlier, but when I was out there at the crew, obviously, it was a small monthly thing, it’s needed, right? And then I have to tear off and replacement when you guys started thinking about replacing linear miles of infrastructure, it’s not sleeves. But what does that look like? Because I gotta imagine that that’s, you know, it’s expensive. So if you take a linear mile bike, you got to plan for that yet the capital cost curve is not going fast. You’re gonna have a lot more pinhole leaks.
Speaker 14 1:26:12
That’s been about a million dollars a mile. Right? So
Speaker 11 1:26:15
is it so we’ve talked about replacing vast portions of old infrastructure that’s 25 years land 30 year planning it’s not continuous.
Speaker 14 1:26:29
And right now we’re trying to move through the carbonization process to find where we get the most bang for our buck. As John indicated, the sanitary sewer we have a lot of options to do repairs, it’s just not as cost effective. The methodologies of today turning to internal sort of number of taps for services going through valves is difficult. So start and stop a lot faster. But we are always looking for new technologies
Unknown Speaker 1:27:16
myself I needed Yeah, thank you for the information it is. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 1:27:24
Okay, well thank you.
Speaker 4 1:27:27
Information and hope. Cookies. Okay. On number 10 Review Maker project and listing an item 10 is going to be supporting us any comments they want. So she
Speaker 5 1:27:59
was just replying and it was in there but as as it has been in the past, it will be the fourth Monday in January, not the third Monday January the absorbency. It’ll be
Unknown Speaker 1:28:19
I did send out those calendar
Speaker 11 1:28:20
invites. While I was concerned they accepted because they have seen the weird ones that went out last year like I just know there
Unknown Speaker 1:28:28
should have been three for me one for February and one for the rest of the year.
Unknown Speaker 1:28:36
All right now I’ll accept
Unknown Speaker 1:28:41
a call from Roger don’t accept
Unknown Speaker 1:28:49
any comments on item 12
Transcribed by https://otter.ai