Back to the YouTube channel to avoid Mr. Garner baby and I'm back again with another eye opening video but hey I'm here with Natural Garner girl. I mean are you team natural team? Of course, team natural all the time, every day, all day. All day? All day, every day, yeah. You've been running out for me for the past two years. You want to talk about Ghana content creators for diaspora? I think she's the first person that started. You, the only way is Ghana. You've gone out to the only way is Ghana and there's another girl. Yes, I am Hamat. Exactly. So I reached out to her in 2018 and she never responded to me to 2020. No, tell the story properly, you're lying. He's lying, it's not like that, it's not like that. Did I reach out to you in 2018? Hold on, you reached out to me and then I didn't see the message because I wasn't very social because I was heavily pregnant at the time. But I got back to you a month later and then he ghosted me. He ghosted me completely. So I wanted to start the Project Africa to the world. I was trying to bring all African content creators together to preach about Africa. So I saw your video, I was just researching about Ghana content creators. I saw your video popped up, then I sent you a message, the same message that I copy and pasted to Ghana. Copy and pasted the same message to Hamat. And I think the only way is Ghana replied in 2019. See, it sounds better. Anyway, tell me, they don't know you, what's your name and where you from? So my real name is Della, but I go by natural Ghana girl. I was born and raised in the UK, but now we live here in Ghana. We've been here for six years and we absolutely love it. And counting. And counting. Six years and counting. And counting. No, you just introduced yourself but I've seen a judge. Yeah, yeah. I'm on my body. My husband called me. Husband. You were based in the UK? Both of us, yeah, based in the UK. Born and raised in the UK? Well, I left here when I was six. You left Ghana when you were six? Yeah. What about you? No, I was born in the UK. That's all I've known is the UK. Yeah. Except for the odd few holidays in between when I was younger. That's it. And I just want to know, I mean, UK is a paradise to so many Africans. UK is the place that, listen, I don't know why anytime I say this to you, I feel like, you know, did you watch the video I did with Manke and E? Yes.  Yeah. And we'll go to the UK and leave it up to you. They have no idea, absolutely no idea. Tell me. Anyone that says that the UK is blissful, I know you've never been there before. I can tell straight away. It's not true. The UK is there. I mean, I would never diss the UK. And I would never cut my ties with it.  Yeah. Definitely. You hustle a bit. Once you get into it and you make it, the sky's the limit. It just goes away all the time. And I think as well in the UK, what happens is that you end up in this rat race so you're continuously having to work for money, work for money. When you were there, you worked six days a week. Six days a week. How can you live like from morning, like you leave home at like five in the morning? I wouldn't see him till seven in the evening. That's not living. Building houses. That's not living. That's what. That's like torture. That's called the rat race. It's torture. It's the rat race. Let me know. Let me know. You lived in the UK and decided to let everything go and return to Ghana. Why? It wasn't easy. Kwame, your idea first, wasn't it? We actually came. That was the first time I came. Yeah, yeah. You go first. We were on, I would say, a honeymoon kind of room. Oh, wow. Married. Yeah, so I came here. I've never been to Ghana for a very long time. Like I was raised here for now six. And I've been almost 34 years of my life in the UK. So when I came, I was very surprised. I said, hey, it's Ghana. That was in 2007. We came as a family on holiday. And I thought, wow, is this how Ghana is? So that's what kind of made us even prompt to even come back here. You're saying, is this how Ghana is? No, because, you know, sometimes you have these African parents who will say, if you're in trouble or you get in trouble, I will ship you to Africa. So when you hear things, especially when you hear things about Africa, you have that mindset of famine, drought, people are malnourished, everybody's dying. That was my perception. I'm not saying it's like that, but that's what I was doing. So especially when you're in school, they don't teach you much about black history and history in itself. So when I came out very shocked to see that, wait a second, look at the airports. Wait a second, there are fat people like myself. Yeah, you know, I was shocked. So it really surprised me. I said, nah, this place is amazing. You know, even though, like I said, the infrastructure may not be there and all that, but it's really amazing. I don't know what it is. There's a peace. There's a freedom. There's no one looking to be shocked. That was his experience. That was my experience. No. It was nice to come on holidays. It's nice to come back on holiday. But you've been there all the time. You can't be there now. Yeah, but I was like, when he said, let's come to Ghana to live.  What am I coming to do inside this country here? I was a bit of a snob. I'll take that. I'll take that. Yeah, I was a bit of a snob. Yeah. I said, I'm not coming to live in Ghana. I haven't even had my children yet. I'm not going to go to any hospital in Ghana. What am I going to do there? I said, no way. Absolutely not. I said, no. What made you change your mind? Yeah. And over time, I don't know, something just kind of switched in me. And then at the time, one of my children got sick. And then I was looking for something different. The more I started to research into things, I thought about the health and the types of food that we were eating and that kind of thing. And I just, I felt so, I felt that we needed something more. And so Ghana then, something was birthed inside me. And we started, we started slowly telling people, oh, we're thinking about going to live in Ghana. And people are like, you can't. They say you can't. No way. I said you. I'll give you six months to be back. Who are the people that were telling you this? Friends, family, everybody. Are they Africans? Yeah. Yeah. Someone who has been here and they've, they've relocated. You know what it is? I think UK, when you get there, there's a system of, because things are done. Infrastructure is done. You've got free schooling. The healthcare is fantastic. So you get kind of comfortable. No, but don't you think that it was the people that were saying you can't make it at all. It's not, Ghana's not good. They're the ones that have lived here from the beginning and then later moved to the UK. They're not, those of us that like want something new, like we haven't had that experience of Ghana. Yeah. The new generation. Those of us are the new generation. We're the ones that are coming back. But those that were born here and went to the UK, they're not really interested. They're not interested. And I just want to know how was the transition? Oh, God. Because six years ago, I knew that definitely there was not too much information. Yeah. Yeah. No, there wasn't. Well, I spent a few nights crying here. Yeah. I definitely cried. That was a wound in this moment, man. Honestly. The desert. Listen, there was one day, do you remember? Because we were staying with my dad at the time and there was this one day. It was the middle of the night and then light. Oh my goodness. Oh, and we were all showing a room at the time. And it was hot. I said, Kwame, can you help me? My third born, he was a bit younger. Yeah. He was a bit young. And I said, can you help me? Can you just hold him for me? He said, no. I'm not helping him. He said, I'm going upstairs to sleep with the mosquitoes. He said, I'd rather get bitten upstairs than to stay in this heat. I was sweating, you know? I was on it.  Ice block. Yeah. So the water is sitting like this. Yeah. We had it acclimatised. I was acclimatised. I was sweating. But nobody even touches me. And I was like, man, give me a shower. Yeah. So he was like, no, no, no. It wasn't easy.    It's really, really freezing. Yeah. So it's really interesting. The transition period was not easy at all. It was, yeah. I feel like the children probably handled it better than we did, actually, which was surprising. I thought, I'm not sure how they would take it, especially in terms of the types of food that we were used to eating and now you can't get, like, yogurts and stuff. It was very hard to get here. They were very expensive at the time. We couldn't afford all that kind of stuff. So, but they actually fitted in easy. They were happy. They were running around barefoot outside and doing all that. Thanks for watching. Me, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm suffering. I can't get this to eat. I can't get that to eat. I was really struggling. We struggled, didn't we? We struggled and... I don't know about you, but I did. I did. I was accustomed. No. I'm going to embarrass him. I'm going to embarrass him now. You know the first time we came and this guy ate banku? He used a knife and fork, spoon and all that. Cut the meat to go and eat it. Can you man? I was just looking at you like, this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. I know all of you are enjoying this. You have a YouTube channel, yeah? I do, I do. The name is... Natural Ghana Girl. The link will be in the description please. Subscribe to our channel. Let's continue the whole session, yeah? Right now you're building a house in Ghana. Yes, we are. It's incredible.  I appreciate that man. Thank you. It's really beautiful. But I just wanted to know somebody who is moving to Ghana for the first time. Do you think the person need to buy a house or maybe build a house by himself? I think building is more cheaper, definitely, than buying. And you've also got... When you're building, you can choose what you want to kind of put in. And you could also check the quality. But if you're like someone who don't know building, it's always better to try to get someone who's an expert, like a contractor or maybe a project manager to check over stuff. But it's far cheaper. Far cheaper to build into. I think even aside from even the cheaper thing, I think the fact is that you can build what you want here. We're so used to buying a house and you make do with what you've got. You try and make the rooms work. But if you build, you have exactly what you want. That will work for your family because every family is different. You might want a big living area. And so I think building, you get to have all of that and fit it in how you want over buying. That's interesting. I just want to know, is it expensive or cheaper to live in Ghana? I think it depends on the kind of lifestyle that you want to live. If you don't like going to the market, if you don't like local foods, then yes, things can get expensive because you can buy potatoes here and you can cook all the British foods or the American foods that you want. It can definitely get expensive. But if you're willing to compromise and you don't mind eating local sometimes, then things can be cheaper. A lot of it depends on your lifestyle, what kind of person you are. So it's up to you. We're not very lavish. We don't go to lots of posh restaurants. We don't do that many things because of where our focus is at the moment, which is on the building. But I think if you come here and you're not in holiday mode, then Ghana is definitely cheaper in that respect, definitely. Do you think Africa is the future? Absolutely, without a doubt.  When we came to Ghana in 2007, we looked at some lands and that land now in East Lagoon Hills, we cannot afford it. We wish we had bought back then, we cannot afford it. I wanted to buy it too. She didn't want it, she said bush, she said bush. You want to sleep on the couch tonight then? She said bush. I'm a bit more tunnel vision. He sees things, the more of the bigger picture over me, which gives a nice balance. And you've been in Ghana for the past six years. If you have the chance to change anything in Ghana, what would that be? For me, corruption. Corruption. I hate it. I'm not going to go into too much details, but I absolutely hate it. When you learn things like if you're doing a job, you're paid to do that job, why do you want something extra? That mentality, not everybody, absolutely not. Not everybody's like that, but there are a few things and it can frustrate you sometimes when you want to get something like that and I feel like that slows down certain processes. But if not for that, Ghana. But like I say, we're still living here, so it can't be that bad. If I could change things, I wouldn't go back. This is my home, absolutely. This is your home. If you're living in the West right now, if you have an advice for people like that, what would it be? Okay, have an open mind. I really feel that I have an open mind. Don't kind of take on what you hear about Africa. Yeah. And just take your time, digest it. Little by little, you get there. And that's what it is. Just take it small steps. Don't come in and think that, you know, I'm not going to go into too much detail about Africa. Don't come in and think that, you know, I'm from the West or I'm from a better developed area. I can come and change Africa. No, you can't change Africa. You adapt and you learn with Africa. You make you improve things. You're not here to change things. You're here to improve things. And everything is day by day. So take your time. Learn to slow down. That was the hardest thing for us. Learning to slow down. Stop expecting things to happen so quick. You know? Don't forget to subscribe to natural girls. Natural Ghana girls. Natural Ghana girls. How many subscribers do you have now? Oh gosh, I have like 8,000. Almost nine. How many do you want? What's the heights of the sky? Don't hide the heights. Don't hide the heights. Make sure you subscribe and support them. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you.


Well, for nearly four decades, the International Eelpout Festival has made the community of Walker its home. With the possibility of the festival changing locations, Josh Peterson went to Walker to find out how significant the impact would be with a new location. In a community where its number one draw is tourism, people in the community have been buzzing over the possibility of losing one of its largest events. The International Eelpout Festival has made Walker its home for nearly 40 years, but now is looking to make a move to Bemidji due to ongoing issues in Cass County. I do not have a defined area on the ice, so I'll set up all my events and everything that's going on and at the last hour, anybody can come and put a tent out in the middle of the bay. One of the issues cited for the festival's possible departure was the strict enforcement of vehicles on the ice. For the Cass County Sheriff's Office, when having thousands of people on the ice, the main issue for the festival was public safety. The Sheriff's Office will, we will promote any event or allow any event to go on as long as it's done safely. I don't see how you can argue with that or argue with the fact that you should clean up your garbage when you're done. Whether residents here are for or against the possibility of the International Eelpout Festival leaving Walker, one thing is certain. No matter what the final decision, it will leave a lasting impact. Others just become more of a vacation destination year round. So I think we're in a better place than we would have been a few years ago, but I'm sure we will still feel the difference somewhat. At the Leech Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, the phone has been ringing off the hook with business owners and guests asking about the future of the festival. People just want to know and of course they all ask us, well, what's going on? What's the story? We don't know any more than anybody else. We're just waiting to hear. While most in the Walker community would like to see the festival stay, the Chamber and the county have both said they will assist Beltrami County and the city of Bemidji if needed. In Walker, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. A decision will be made by the Beltrami County Planning Commission in the next couple of months on whether or not a permit will be issued to hold the Eelpout Festival on Lake Bemidji. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


The students of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, have blocked the Akure Elesha Ibadan Highway in protest about the death of their colleague in a road accident. Five students of the institution were involved in a loan crash on Monday night around the cathedral area along the Oyeme Kun Road, Akure. One of the students, Daniel Akinyele, in 200-level in the department of software engineering, died before he could be rushed to the hospital. Late Daniel was first taken to the school clinic, but the security personnel reportedly refused to open the gate for them. It was gathered that the student council, the student union government of Futa, declared Tuesday lecture three, a day after news of the death filtered in before the students, when mobilized to protest the alleged action of the school security personnel. The protesting students set fire at the entrance and locked all access gates. They claimed the negligence of the school health workers caused the death of their colleague.


Well, I wanted to explain the little bit of my past work history and why I'm no longer doing that. It would be something good to know for some people considering getting into that field and gives quite a different perspective on some political matters, past things now, although still sort of debated. I spent five years of my life in the medical field, started from a CNA, got into home care and then worked up and I liked the work. The work itself was fine, the people I worked with were all right, they weren't anything special but they weren't bad by any means, so five years of work with that was totally fine. By all accounts I was good at it, the performance reviews were absolutely phenomenal and I would be eligible for certain types of promotions or additional training and things like that. Quite a bit earlier than they were telling everybody else, so I was getting these opportunities well before the eligibility. By all accounts I was really adept at it and worked for a company because that's what they all are. They're companies, you can call them something else, but they're still a company for about three and a half years and then actually wound up starting my own business in the field, going through the whole registration process because there's both like the normal business registration that you've got to do with the state and federal government, but also you have to clear that kind of thing through the Department of Health and they've got to do this whole investigation, but I was fine with all of that. But after doing that for about a year and a half, basically succumbed to burnout. So it took me a few months to realize it, but just definitely realized that I am totally sick of this and want nothing more to do with the field anymore. And it was sort of odd considering how well I had done with everything, how my ability to handle everything. I was regularly doing 60-hour work weeks when I was working for the agency before and that even got up to 84-hour work weeks for a while, totally fine. I never left because I felt overburdened. I actually willingly took on. I was the one who proposed that in both cases, handled it fine. So it wasn't the work itself, it wasn't the people. Why was I getting burned out? This largely has to do with a law that was passed over the course of while I was, well, yeah, yeah, basically. Law that was passed over the course of while I was working and went into effect very shortly after I switched over to private practice. The PPACA, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Just so that it's a little bit obvious, I have personal reasons for not liking this, but I'll definitely have other stuff to comment about, but I'll get the personal stuff out of the way just so there's no argument that can be made that I'm trying to hide biases or anything like that. These here are the rates that I would have to pay. Now having bought other types of insurance, automotive insurance for myself, I sold life insurance for a while, the payment for these things is typically expressed as the term, the coverage. So insurance is usually six months, you have others though, but generally it's a six-month period. So when I first saw these numbers I thought, oh well that's not that bad, and then noticed that that's per month. So we're talking $800 to $1,000 per month for affordable healthcare? What's going on here? This was around the time where they were having big problems with the website. Now I will note that year after year these numbers have not really changed, they're still in the same general ballpark, the last two digits will get adjusted slightly each year, so that's what they've been each year when I check. But first year this happened, they were having all sorts of problems with the website and I called them up and they're like, look, this is what's going on, I think you guys might be having some, I know you guys have been having problems with the other parts of the website, is there some miscalculation or some problem with the database lookup or what's going on here? So we looked into it a bit, that's totally correct, asked what the explanation for that would be and they hung up on me, the federal government hung up on me, sorry, state government, state government of New York hung up on me. So whatever, maybe it was a line disconnect or something, call them back, explain again and as time get told that instead I need to contact each of the individual insurance companies and ask them to explain, because all they do is broker the whole thing apparently. Okay, that's fine, I don't really have a strong criticism against that, there's plenty of other sites that broker stuff and when you have a question about that, say like why a specific airplane ticket costs so much, the broker can't explain that to you, you have to... So I don't really have a problem with that, call up each of the companies, get told they're not at liberty to discuss that, I'm like what, what? With my auto insurance I can ask why the rates are what they are even when I'm shopping around for another policy just to see, they can always explain why and so I ask them, what's the deal with this? In each case, they explain that since they cannot properly verify my identity over the phone that it would be a potential medical breach in the event that I was not who I was saying I am and that is totally actually a legitimate thing, once they explain that I'm like alright that's fine, how about we do a HIPAA release and you can mail them to me because there's a special way that you can mail these kinds of documents and they're okay with that, I'm okay with that, we're good. Get the documents and it largely has to do with a congenital heart defect that I have. I have something called Wolf Parkinson White Syndrome which is, there's an anomaly in the heart where something called a bundle of Kent, an extra nerve bundle that doesn't belong, bypasses the atrial node and goes directly to the ventral node and causes some heart rate problems and quite a few cases it just winds up manifesting a superventricular tachycardia which is just a type of fast heartbeat in and of itself not a problem, like if you have a healthy heart and SVT, basically ignore it. If you don't, it can be pretty serious but I've always been pretty fit, any medical tests that are done on me come back with flying colors. We even did a stress test and they were amazed at how well I could do because it was above and beyond what they would normally see, even in healthy people, so the official medical opinion was like, hey, you have this, we want to keep an eye on it, so like a yearly test but you're fine, you don't even really need to take anything because anything that you take would likely cause more problems than you're already experiencing anyways. Cool, that's actually really good because there are cases of that where the person needs to get a pacemaker installed and I'm actually considering that for a while. My insurance rates are crazy high because of a congenital heart defect, something I was born with that I had no control over that was cleared as not needing any medical intervention. So basically you have this thing, we don't really need to worry about it other than the occasional checkup, you're basically good, insurance company, Skyrocket. Now if you listen to the, and I close those blinds, now if you listen to the political narrative that was used to pitch this whole bill, one of the big things touted was about how there would be limits in place to keep these costs from skyrocketing. Or then that wound up changing to, in the event they do skyrocket, we'll be able to discount you based on your earnings. The very first year, which happens to be the graphic I showed you, that was at the start of my medical career and I made about 22,000 that year. Those are really high costs and income quite considerably below the national average, decent income that's definitely above minimum wage, quite a bit above minimum wage, but not high income by any means. We're talking about huge costs per month, easily half my income, where's the assistance from the government there, a few dozen dollars, it's okay, what the hell is going on here, do some digging around and actually come to find out that this is the situation a lot of medical workers find themselves in, not their rates as high as mine, but definitely seeming to be elevated. Now there is arguably a valid reason for that in this kind of work, you are quite literally putting yourself in danger regularly. It's for the benefit of others, but you are regularly exposing yourself to sometimes violent patients, well actually quite often, various diseased patients and you have the possibility of contracting something. I get why the insurance companies are doing it, there's a certain cost that they have to absorb to accept you on and in that certain field, certain lifestyles, there's all sorts of reasons, that cost is going to be higher, but the whole thing the government was saying is that even though that is justified, we like to help the situations that are sort of deserve the help but are falling through the cracks. Now I'll get to some more on that later too, why you're not hearing a whole lot about some issues. I think the overwhelming majority of people can agree that putting yourself in danger literally for the sake of others should not be something that you are punished for, especially considering you have to sort of purchase that insurance. Would you find it acceptable that a police officer or fireman who additionally is putting themselves in danger for the safety of others doing highly respectable and much needed work should be forced to pay the higher insurance? I get why it's higher, there is again a higher risk of something happening to them, they cost more to take care of, but the whole point of this, the big argument in favor of government interacting in anything is to help balance out some of these things, where somebody is doing good and deserves the help, wasn't getting it, but this isn't by any means just about me, like I said I just wanted to get anything that could potentially bias this out in the open as quickly as possible. Towards the very end of this bill going into effect, the narrative about it limiting the cost switched to only ever being limiting the cost in the case of obesity and limiting the cost in the case of smoking, with no mention about limiting the cost for anything else, it became those two very specifically and in fact if you read through the PPACA which I had to do when I went on to private practice, it's not a fun read, it's like 943 pages or something, maybe I'm mixing that up with another one of the bills, but it's very long and very like bash your head against the wall. You want to know why there was controversy about the bill, just read it, then compare that to something like the UCC which has like no controversy, it'd be really obvious after reading both, but quite early in the bill, I think like one of the first 20 sections, they do mention the limits, the restrictions essentially on cost increases and they are only defined for smokers and being overweight. If you were born with a terrible condition, say the Shenz muscular dystrophy or basically born of a death sentence where you're gonna be fine for a while, but the last bit of your life is going to be a living hell like Huntington's, there's no cost limit in place for those types of situations.  Terrible situation to be in. These people totally deserve help, there's no cost limit in place.  That covers all medical workers even if they only serve clerical roles in medical fields. It's a pretty broad-reaching thing and I do think justifiably so, but it should be a glaring red flag when the very people that can comment on how this law is actually working can't speak up because any specific examples, any way of substantiating it would be in violation of medical privacy. Similarly, any type of research examples wouldn't be able to actually give, release the information because of again, medical privacy. This is not an attack on medical privacy, medical privacy is totally in the right. It's the glaring issue, the sort of information wall. Again, the people who can see directly how this actually pans out can't say anything. Now I've also wound up seeing, because there's no protection in the law for this at all, cases where some of these disabled people from birth, from accidents can't get signed on to the insurance in the first place. They're still declined. Sorry, sorry, sorry, because that's not allowed anymore. I misspoke. Let's start this over again. They're signed on. They have to be. You cannot reject somebody, but the services then get declined. Again, this sucks because I cannot give any specific examples, but I would see people, they're born with some kind of condition which totally, they need help and they, I do believe that they should not shoulder the entire burden of that. I want, I do want some type of public system in place to help as long as it actually helps. But whether they were born with it, whether that happened to them by circumstance, even if not their own fault, they'd be made to buy insurance who would then just reject every little thing they need. Because that was the loophole in the law. You can't reject taking somebody on, but you can reject coverage of specific things. Yeah.  It's unfortunate, but purely in a sense, in the commercial sense, there's nothing wrong going on there. Nobody is being exploited. In more social sense, obviously something needs to be done about that, but there's no commercial issue in place. Now, socially, well, people have the insurance. The people have what theoretically will get them the help they need. Theoretically, commercially, what's actually happening is they're paying for the insurance, but each little thing that they actually need gets denied. Eventually, I just couldn't take this anymore. The incredibly dual- phase nature of seeing the people this was supposed to help get melt for money while not getting anything in return, while the government would go up there and have these people that probably were the ones that actually got help talk about how great this thing was. No medical worker can speak up any more than I did in this video, because the violations for medical privacy breach, maximum sentencing of $10,000 fine and 10-year imprisonment per offense. As we all know, you need a lot more than just one example to make a case. That's why I got out of medicine. If you're looking to get in, talk to some people first to see if this is really something you're comfortable dealing with. There's a lot of other issues in play, really high levels of burnout and other stuff. Actually, let's talk about that. Medical community is one of the highest burnout rates in all fields. It's not the highest, and I also don't know the statistics off the top of my head, but I'll see if I can remember to look them up. Typically speaking, anybody that gets into the field needs to take a break after about usually within their first two years. It depends on specifically what they're doing and a lot of other bits of information. Not everybody needs to take a break, and these companies are usually really, really supportive about that because they know it's such a big thing as much as they can be, because a lot of laws get in the way. One of the things that drew me into this field was the pay. It's hard work. It deserves good pay, but the pay was good. One of the things the PPACA put into effect was cost-cutting measures, and this was rather unsurprising from the party that knows almost nothing about business. One of the biggest costs of business is wages. Now, I'm not advocating for people's wages getting cut. Rather, quite the opposite. The hilarious irony is that in implementing cost-cutting measures, you are encouraging suppressing wages. Not okay. That's not okay at all. And in my home state of New York, this is creating, along with another bill that got passed, a very interesting phenomenon.  It has. Today, as I speak, it's definitely in effect. We've got fast food workers making 1175 in this state with many CNAs, PCAs, and HHAs making less than $11. And so what a lot of fast food companies and other related things have been seeing is those specific positions fleeing to go work for, say, McDonald's because the work is less stressful, just as fast-paced, far less emotionally draining, far less risky, and pays better than if you have less people working in the medical field because, rather understandably, if you're at a ceiling using business speak that you cannot go any higher, whether it's just raises or a higher position, you look to find somewhere you can, right?  If you're looking at very high stresses, very high risks, and no promise of increased pay to compensate you for that, you will see people leave. We have been seeing people leave, not just the lower positions. By next year, when the fast food minimum wage goes up in New York State again to $1275, I believe. But remember, right, it's going up $1 each year up until $475, and then it goes up just up to $15. You know, that worked out so well for Seattle. Let's do it for the whole state. Because of the cost suppression measures in place in hospitals, nursing homes, and related fields, related businesses, rather, we're quickly getting to the point where fast food workers will also make more than LPNs do in many areas of the state. Now, yes, I know that an LPN in New York City is going to be still above that. But as of two years ago in New York State, at least in the county that I live in, LPNs were typically making about $1240 to $13. After I moved back here, after being away for a year, stopped by where I used to work, basically just to say, hey, what's up? And me and the administrator got talking, and this came up. And they mentioned about how they were barely able to increase their pay at all. To the point where LPNs just started to make $1225. Next year, in this county for at least one business, and they do pay very competitively, fast food workers will make more than LPNs, the starting level of what we call nurses. Just like with the CNAs, PCAs, and HHAs, you will see LPNs leave as well. And I don't blame them. I would, too.  Where, in the states where this is legal, and it does happen to be a lot of them, including New York, because of the essentially duty to provide medical care, legally obligated duty to provide medical care, you have to have somebody there with them the entire time. Or there for them the entire time. It's slightly different depending on whether you're looking at home care or institutionalized care, but between the two, you've got them both covered. So what I mean by this is if nobody is available for that specific position, or if you have a certain capacity that has to be met to meet the needs of all the, say, patients or residents, you can force somebody to come in, or force somebody to stay. And in some cases, this results in absolutely ridiculous situations, like I once did a 49-hour shift. Me, not realizing that that was actually totally legal and obligated by law. Reported that to the Department of Labor, only to be told that, oh no, for that field, that we actually require that. Okay? Because that's what you want. We talk about required to learn about, because it's also something the government worries about, not realizing that there are a huge reason why it's caused, is medical abuse. And to be clear, this is never okay. This is never justified.  Again, not justifying that. In every single instance where I have seen that, I have been stricter than almost anybody else. I wasn't even at the level of reforming them. I was straight up to take them out back and shoot them. That's not okay. But it's pretty obvious what's one of the big contributors to causing it. So I'll do a follow-up if I think of anything else, but I think I've covered everything that I want to cover for this.


The nature of the environment that surrounds us are essential for our well-being and for our survival. Sweden supports the project BIAH ASAP 2030PLUS to work with experts and decision makers in Bosnien Herzegovina to develop a strategy and an action plan to protect the environment in the whole country to 2030 and beyond. The strategy and action plan will include water, waste, biodiversity, air quality, climate change and energy, chemical safety and noise and sustainable resource management and environmental management. It will be a key policy document that will help Bosnien Herzegovina to fulfil the criteria to become a member of the European Union. But most importantly it will preserve nature and the environment and it will contribute to the safety and the health and well-being of the population now and for generations to come.


Hello I'm Alina at Kiwi Connect and we're here at New Frontiers 2016. I'm with Simon Miller who's the CEO of Pure Advantage. Simon do you want to just tell us in a nutshell what is Pure Advantage? Okay Pure Advantage is a think tank and we're a voice for a green growth, business green growth where we're founded by Philip Mills and a small group of some of New Zealand's most successful business leaders to with the aim to transform New Zealand's economy to a low carbon economy. Right and so what sort of initiatives are you looking at or what sort of business ventures are you talking about that that could achieve a low carbon economy? Right well it was formed in 2012 really in a response to a political regime that wasn't really doing very much about green growth in New Zealand. We have a very perception that New Zealand is very clean and green but there's big gaps in the in the actuality of that. So Philip and the trustees invested in some robust economic research done with the University of Auckland and Vivid Economics in London to present opportunities that best aligned with New Zealand's future in a strategic way and they there's seven of them. So they are agricultural technology by diversity, by fuels, smart grid, renewable energy, housing and waste of value. Yes so a couple of those that you mentioned there are things that New Zealand is traditionally already quite strong in so agriculture, renewable energy. What I guess opportunities do you see to build upon those strengths? Well there again is the perception that we are really strong and we have been leaders in agriculture but we've focused pretty heavily on profitability instead of productivity that's in the dairy sector per se and but you look at much more broadly than that so you have to go into forestry. We're in net deforestation something like 20 odd thousand hectares a year right now so we're trending downwards and the renewable energy front we've been sitting at 80% renewable energy renewable energy for a couple of decades and we actually slipped down from about 90% when we took on more fossil fuels to provide our transportation. So there's therein lies the rub we've really been we'd like that because it's lowly populated and you know we have this perception you know however these economic opportunities that we can really grasp and take a hold of and that's what we're focused on in terms of a solutions based response. Do you see a lot of opportunities for I guess cross sector ventures perhaps renewable energy into transport or I guess systems that work together in a whole systems approach? Absolutely it's a good question on the renewable energy front of course I mean we could have an electric highway you know in a heartbeat with fast charging stations and the uptake of electric vehicles and and that would drive that area. On the you mentioned I think we talked about ag tech before biodiversity, bioproducts, waste of value all of these areas are driven out of the primary sector forestry, smart farming so you know a lot of cloud-based applications in terms of more efficient farming and value-add products too and we've talked about this for decades in New Zealand and you know yet we keep shipping off logs to you know foreign countries like Asia and they get come back to us and chipboard and and but you know there are companies that are focusing on this now but it's hard but we need to focus on it with more R&D and capital investment. Yeah you mentioned a couple of questions ago that the size of New Zealand is quite small and perhaps a limiting factor so do you see a role for I guess people to be coming into New Zealand and working on on these issues together with New Zealanders? It's a limiting factor if you think it's a limiting factor I mean I think it's it's a limiting factor in terms of the availability of capital here on the ground to scale something clean technology innovation in such a way that it becomes a viable business however if you look at it as from a from a test bed case because we're isolated we can kind of control these environments and and build opportunities that then it's not limiting at all and I think that's what we absolutely should focus on I mean you look at places in the US for example there's large counties but they can turn things around you know and so when you talk about four and a half million people I think it's just possible to do that. Is that building up of New Zealand as an incubation nation place where you can test these products and really make something? Yeah and it has been like that all along but then what we talk about are natural advantages so pure advantage are natural advantages and we have advantages that no one else really has and and that's accentuated or amplified by the tyranny of distance and the fact that there's not many people coming here to exploit them you know yeah we have three and a half million visitors per year but tourism is is basically our biggest GDP contributor you know second to dairy only only in the last year but I mean these are these are huge opportunities if we smart farm focus on our biodiversity forestry you know this this will align and increase the sort of natural capital of New Zealand and the opportunities to invest and test and scale yeah playing to our strengths absolutely absolutely yeah fantastic thank you Simon here at New Frontiers 2016


Good afternoon. Hi, Bob, it's Roberta. We're just waiting for people to join. Sir, thank you. Hello, everyone. I think we are still waiting for Board Member Grable. I spoke with him earlier and he should be on the call. So I'll wait a minute or two to see if he joins. Okay, great. It looks like we have all the board members. Director Burke, do we have everyone on staff on the call? Yes, Chair Watts. We have everything all staff needed for this site. And this meeting. Great, thank you so much. All right, well, we will get started and call the meeting at 1-0-1. If we could get a roll call, that would be great. Yes, Chair Watts. Here. Board Member Grable. Here. Board Member Wright. Here. Great, thank you. Are there any announcements? All right, seeing none. We will open it up for public comment. We are taking public comments on item three. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary, do we have anyone raising their hand for public comment? There are no public comments. Great, thank you. We will move on to item four, 4.1, New Business. Director Burke, if you'd like to introduce this item. Sorry, sorry about that. My screen disappeared and I can unmute you or unmute myself, I apologize. So item 4.1 is our preliminary water and wastewater cost of service review and an update on our reserve policy. And Deputy Director Zanino will be starting this item and then we will also have our consultant firm doing the presentation. So Deputy Director Zanino. Good afternoon, everyone. I will be turning this over right away to both Bob Reed and Mark Hildebrand and then I will be running the slide deck for them. So moving through this, we saw you a couple of weeks ago and started to discuss with you the rate setting process that we're going through. We've actually met with a few of you as well with your perspective or respective city council members. So this information is probably starting to become somewhat familiar to you but Bob and Mark are going to go into some more detail today and get into the cost of service study. So, and I'll talk a little bit at the end about some of our communications plan going forward. So with that, I'm gonna start sharing my screen at the presentation for you. All right. Okay, yeah. This is Bob Reed and I'm gonna let Mark lead the presentation today. I did most of it last time but I'm gonna let him do much of it this time around recapping the financial plans as well as getting into the cost of service analysis and the rate calculations. So Mark. Great, thanks Bob. Can everyone hear me okay? Yes. Okay, great. So go ahead and go to the next slide, Kimberly. So, what I'll be covering today will be the first three bullets. I'm going to do a quick overview of our, the study and the scope and then recap the financial plan results which have been slightly revised since the last time. We're not gonna show this in as much detail as during our last meeting because we think that you're familiar with that information. So we'll just recap some of it and then show what's changed a little bit as we hone in on the final recommendation. And then we will, bullet three is new information. We're gonna start introducing you to the specific rates that are being proposed and how we derive them and what those look like for specific bills. And then I'll hand it back over to Bob and he's gonna go through a discussion on your reserve policies. Next slide. So just as a general methodology that's used for almost all rate studies follows these three steps. We first go through your revenue requirements which is also referred to as a financial plan which is really just looking at all the money coming in and all the money going out and determining what sort of rate revenue adjustments need to be made and whether a debt strategy makes sense or not. So it's really at the highest level looking at the overall financial picture. Next we go to the cost of service which is the cornerstone of Proposition 218 which is the law that regulates these rates and it just ensures that we are collecting the right amount of revenue from the different customer classes based on how they use the system and the cost to provide service to them specifically. And then in the rate design, once we've identified how much we wanna collect from different customer classes the rate design determines how we're gonna collect it whether it's going to be through fixed charges or volumetric charges and how to balance those things. So we'll be covering all three of these topics in today's meeting. Next slide. So here's a overview of the fund for this applies to both water and wastewater and it just shows the general source of revenue most of which comes through user rate revenue that's the largest source of revenue. And it goes into various funds, the operating fund which is made up of a series of reserves. Bob's gonna be getting into details about what those reserves look like and the intent of each one of those later on today. Revenues also go towards your CIP creations to pay for capital projects as well as your designated reserves. And ultimately those monies are used to spend are spent on O&M costs, debt service and capital. Next slide. So here's an overview. We cut out most of the information that shows some details on the financial assumptions that we went into the financial plan, the operating costs whatnot because we think we covered those in pretty good detail. This slide should be familiar to you as well. We left it in simply because when we do these financial plans, the capital spending usually has the largest impact because it's the one part of the budget that you have a certain amount of discretion over. So we just wanted to show you what that looks like for the next five years and beyond. For the on the water side, the spending is going to basically increase at the rate of the CPI generally inflation. It's going to be increasing incrementally as the cost of delivering capital projects goes up. On the wastewater side, it's a similar picture. And on the sub-regional, it is increasing by about a million dollars a year based on planned needs for different capital projects. Sorry, I've got us can't quite see here. There we go. Nope, no, I just hit that. Sorry. There is in the on the wastewater side, it's important to note that in about five years, there's going to be a significant amount of existing debt that's going to be retired. And that is going to make room for quite a bit more capital spending when that happens. So you can see we have the asterisks there in future years, but there may be a capacity to increase the capital program significantly when that debt service begins to retire. If I could jump in for a moment, Mark. One of the things that the city has recognized is a need to expand the spending on capital projects to rehabilitate and upgrade, replace existing infrastructure. And much of what's shown here for water and wastewater is just sort of inflationary growth. But as Mark indicated, there will be room to expand on the wastewater side as the debt service falls off in future years. We are seeing more than inflationary growth on sub-regional, but this is an area that will continue to be something that the city will need to look at in terms of making sure it's staying on top of its replacement needs in the capital program. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, next slide. So here is the high-level picture of the water utility and Bob explained the different components of this slide. And I'm gonna see if I can find my pointer option here. Are you able to see my cursor? No. No. Oh, yes, yes. Oh, there's someone else's cursor. That's Kimberly's cursor. All right. That's gonna be my cursor. You won't be able to actually point at them. So... Okay, well, I was gonna point out that the background, the background on the upper graph, the dark green at the bottom is your non-rate revenue. And the lighter or the middle green, there is the amount of rate revenue you currently get from your existing rates. And then the light green at the top represents the additional rate revenue that you'll receive as a result of the percent increases that are being proposed down at the bottom of the slide here. So you'll see that the recommended increases for water are 3%, 4%, 4%, 4%. So a little bit lower in year one purposefully to as in recognition of the current pandemic and recognizing that we should do what we can to try to minimize the rate increases in the immediate future. The superimposed over the green are some columns that represent expenses. This graph is really well balanced. So it's sort of hard to tell them apart a little bit but because they're kind of the same, the columns are as high as the background in every picture. But that basically shows that the expenses are balanced out with the revenues every year. And that's the name of the game in this exercise is trying to make sure that all the expenses are being paid for by projected revenue. So the light blue at the bottom would be your normal O&M expenses. The hashed in the middle is the existing debt service, existing and future debt service. And then the dark blue is your capital spending, your cash-funded capital spending. So you can see every year they're about at the same level which means that it's the budgets in balance for those years. And the graph down below shows your target revenue levels. The dark black hash represents your target and the light blue solid line represents your actual ending fund balance. So you can see the target jumps up significantly next year, this year. That's a result of the increase in the proposed catastrophic reserve and that's a topic that Bob will be getting into in more detail later on. But you can see that because of the fact that you have undesignated reserves in your fund right now, you are able actually to absorb most of the costs of increasing your target reserves in year one. And there's just a little bit of building that needs to happen in the coming years to get to that new target level. Next slide. So on the wastewater side, the graphics, the same idea with the green in the background and the blue columns in the foregrounds. And again, they're balanced for the most part. The amount of undesignated reserves that you have existing now is a bit lower relative to the total target that you're gonna be looking for in the future. So you can see that light blue solid blue line there in the reserves is gonna be built over time. We're not trying to do it immediately. Again, in recognition of the current pandemic, we're not interested in trying to immediately achieve that new target reserve level. We do think that with such a significant change to that target, it does make sense to achieve it over time to ease into it. And so you can see that with 4%, two 4% rate increases and then two 2% rate increases after about five years, we will get to that target reserve level. So the next slide, I'm going to transition to the cost of service rate design. So I just wanted to field any questions from the board if you have any at this point. This is all should be pretty familiar material, but the percentages have changed a bit as we've fine tuned the models. And so I just wanted to make sure there weren't any questions before we switch gears. I'm just curious the water and the wastewater. So the water you're, you know, the out in the future you got 5% and in the future on the wastewater you got 2%. Yet the fund balance, excuse me, the target reserve levels are significantly higher. The difference between the target reserve and the fund balance is significantly more in the wastewater than the water, yet the rates are lower in the wastewater. What does that mean? You know, a lot of that has to do with, I mean, there's a lot of numbers behind this obviously. So it's a good question. A lot of it has to do with the fact that wastewater is going to be retiring a significant amount of debt in the next five years or so there's a lot of outstanding debt that we'll see its end in that time period. And so it's actually a bit the opposite on water. There's some debt service that is existing but hasn't actually quite hit yet. It was planned to begin paying the debt service out in the future. So I think that would probably be one of the reasons. The other reason is that water does have one element of its budget, a significant part of its budget, the Sonoma County water purchases, which is going up by a steady 5% or so per year. Wastewater doesn't have that kind of cost escalation in its portfolio for the most part. So I would say those are the two main reasons why wastewater is seeing a more sustained increase in its rates over the next 10 years. Bob, can you think of any other reasons? Yeah, I was just going to clarify the Sonoma water, we are assuming a 6% rate increase in their rates each year. And that does represent a pretty significant chunk of the O&M costs for the water utility. And they've been in the five to 6% range for the last several years and we're estimating 6% a year going forward. And I think Mark is correct that, there's a lot going on on the wastewater side with debt service and the link with the sub-regional system and so on. If we were to have larger rate increases on wastewater early on, we would sort of overshoot the mark. And so we, that's why we're seeing just that long string of 2% in that graph. Okay, thank you. Sure. Any other questions? Okay, Kim, what if you could go to slide eight? So here's just a summary of the rate increases as they stand now. Again, these are preliminary numbers. We continue to massage the numbers. Most importantly, there's a debt issuance that's still being sorted out regarding the UV project with wastewater. We have some assumptions in the financial model regarding where that service will end up, but the numbers aren't final yet. So that should occur within the next month or so. Is that right, Kimberly? That we'll have final numbers? Yes, we're actually going to try to price bonds. We're really watching the market right now, but we'll probably price bonds by the 9th of November. And then we'll have a much better picture of what it's going to look like by that point. But it could be a little bit later. It's really going to depend on timing and what happens with the election. So our financial advisors and our underwriters are currently just paying attention to what's happening before they actually price the bonds and then start to issue them. Great. And we tried to put in conservative assumptions for what that final debt service will look like. So I don't anticipate there'll be any bad surprises, although again, it's not final, so we don't know. But that debt service also will be shared with some of the member agencies within some regional and so ultimately, regardless of what the interest rate ends up at, I don't think it's going to have a really big impact on these percentages. So we shouldn't expect any huge swings as a result of that, but to be determined. I have one more question. So what's been kind of gnawing at me a little bit is this a blended rate between the fixed and the commodity or how does that all work? Correct. Yeah, in years past, the fixed and the commodity has been broken up and increased at different paces. Going forward for this financial plan for the next four years, we are going to be increasing both parts of the rates at the same pace. Okay, thank you. And Mark will get into it in a minute with the cost of service analysis, but as we update the cost of service analysis, there will be some differences in what happens with the service charges versus the commodity rates as we dial the rates into the proportionality requirements that results from the cost of service analysis. But beyond that first year, all of the rate components would go up in lockstep by an equal percentage for water and same for wastewater. Right. So in other words, results will vary in year one because the rate structure is going to be tweaked a little bit. And so some customers with higher water usage and different size meters will see rate increases that hover in and around that 3% for water, but it won't be exactly 3%. But in years two, three and four, everyone's rates will go up in lockstep at 4%. Okay. Next slide. So as we get into this cost of service and rate design, just a few points to be made. When we do cost of service, as I pointed out before, you do need to justify the proposed rates based on the financial analysis that we did and Proposition 218 requires us to allocate those costs to your customers on a proportionate basis. It's the cornerstone of that loss. So generally speaking, almost entirely the current water and wastewater rate structures that you have in place have been retained. So we're using exactly the same methodology as was proposed and developed back in 2015 that has been used over the last five years. That being said, even though we're using the same methodology, the numbers that we're putting in are different. So as we go through that cost of service methodology, there are certain costs associated with capital or with water purchases or with operating costs that get plugged into that cost of service analysis. And as those numbers vary a bit from what we saw in 2015, there will be tweaks that you'll see to how much, how many costs get allocated to the fixed portion versus the volumetric portion. So there will be changes in the structure, but it's not because the methodology has changed, it's simply that the inputs have changed. And that's totally natural utilities experience changes over time. And that's why we do these cost of service studies periodically just to updates the structures and make sure that they're reflective of the current cost structure. The one significant change that we are proposing, and this gets back to Director Wright's question or it's indirectly tied to it, is that up until currently, the city has been using automatic pass-through adjustments based on the Sonoma Water Rate changes. So in other words, as Sonoma Water has announced what their rates were gonna be for the next year, a portion of the city's rates were modified to pass that cost through. Which changed over the last five years is that Sonoma County's become much more transparent and much more organized in providing projections to its member agencies and communicating better what they expect their rate adjustments to be. And the information that we've gotten from them recently has been that rate increases will be on the order of five to 6%, probably closer to 6%. So we feel comfortable going ahead and assuming that the rates will go up by 6% over the planning period. It's only four years. And so if we're off by a little bit, that's actually perfectly normal. We're gonna be off by other parts in the study as well. It's, we made some assumptions about inflation in general. We don't have a crystal ball. And so we do our best to make these assumptions in the past, the pass-through made sense because there was a lot of volatility in what we were seeing from Sonoma Water. And so it just made sense to use a pass-through since we could, but now that their rate increases have gotten more predictable and more steady, we feel comfortable putting in assumptions. And that's gonna help a lot from an administrative standpoint to be able to just lock in those rates for the next four years and not go through the administrative process of updating those rates. It's also going to increase the transparency of your rates quite a bit. So your customers aren't left guessing what their rates are going to be next year and the year after that because you can't publish it until Sonoma County's water rates come out officially. So we think for those reasons it makes sense to go ahead and eliminate the pass-through. I know that's probably one of the most significant changes that we're proposing. So I wanted to go ahead and pause here for any questions. Yeah, well, my greatest fear is that we have a drought for many reasons on many levels, not just financial, but as we, if we have, if Sonoma Water sells less water they definitely charge significantly higher rates based on the amount of water they sell. So anyway, who knows, I imagine our system has a way to go back and revise the rates also if we get totally out of, you know, midstream out of whack. Absolutely, absolutely. And two points to that. One, yes, you could always go back and revise your rates if any part of your cost projections is significantly off, but even more, you know, more appropriately is that you do have water shortage rates in place and we're gonna be updating those. And so those take into account in the event of a drought what your cost profile looks like. And so if a certain drought stage is announced then those water shortage rates will be implemented. And Bob, we haven't gotten into that part of the study yet. So you're more familiar with the specific lingo for the city. So can you fill in for that? Sure, sure, yeah, the city, Santa Rosa Water already has water shortage rates that would kick in during various stages of shortage. Those are being updated as the urban water management plan is being updated. That's kind of in a parallel trap going on right now. And that urban water management plan includes the water shortage contingency plan which is where the shortage rates are. When we get to the Prop 218 process to adopt the new water and wastewater rates we will dovetail in those shortage surcharges at that time and it'll be done as part of the same Prop 218 approval process. And so that the shortage rates will account for what you just mentioned, Director Wright, is changes to Sonoma County's rates that would be anticipated given different levels of drought. So to the extent that we can predict what those changes will be, those will be incorporated into the surcharges. I think you, if I might just, I think Board Member Wright might be remembering some history that we've had with the Sonoma County Water Agency when we've had times of drought and because the water agency's rate structure is such based on the restructured agreement that it goes back and looks at previous year's sales or previous three year sales and that can result in a significantly high rate increase. I think we would continue to, as we've done in the past, work closely with the water agency through the TAC subcommittees that we put together to review their budget, to look at changes we can make. And if, and I'm really hoping we don't get into a drought situation, but if that does occur and we are looking at significant changes, we'll look at our budget, we'll look at fund balance and rate stabilization options that we have. And if need be, and we have to go back to the Board and the Council and recommend a higher rate increase to deal with that too, that is another option that we have as well. So we're not locked in to this. This is the rate increase we're proposing. These are the maximum rate amounts, but if something is significantly changed and we need to come back to the Board and Council, we can reprop 218 notice and go through that process. I'm hoping that won't be the issue, but that is an option for us too.  So I just wanted to hopefully address that. Might be the question you were kind of asking for member Wright. Thank you. Thanks. Next slide, Kimberly. So these are the general objectives that were sought out both now, but also as I mentioned, we haven't really changed the methodology and so these are a summary of the objectives that were really followed back in 2015 to come up with the rates that you have currently in place. We were looking to ensure financial sufficiency and sustainability, complying with legal requirements. That's really, you start with legal compliance and then you try to incorporate everything else. Encouraging water conservation, revenue stability predictability, minimizing rate increases, affordability and public acceptance. So these were all things that we thought about very actively during the process and they're all built into the rates that are being proposed. Next slide. So the principles that were followed to come up with these rates, we organized your costs into different buckets. First, we look at customer costs.  These usually have to do with billing costs and account costs and whatnot. And so every customer is assigned an equal amount of customer costs regardless of whether they're large or small. Then we looked at capacity costs. So that's really the size of the system and the costs associated with your infrastructure and the size of your pipes and your pumps and whatnot. And we assigned those costs to each of your customers based on the size of their meter because the meter is a reflection of how much capacity is required to serve each customer. And so it makes sense to allocate the cost of capacity to each customer based on the size of their meter regardless of whether they actually use the full capacity of their meter, the district, the utility needs to be ready to serve that meter at any given moment. And so those costs should be assigned to those customers. And then the final costs or the final main cost there is the commodity costs. And so that's the cost of on the water side purchasing the water and treating the water. And those costs are assigned to customers based on the amount of usage. As a sort of subset within the commodity costs you have your water supply and water conservation costs. And so as we assign costs to water costs to customers based on their usage, we have to determine how we're going to allocate those costs to the different tiered waters. You have two tiers. And so we look at your different sources of supply and your water conservation costs as ways to determine to justify how much tier one costs as relative to tier two. And we'll get into that in a little bit more detail in the coming slides. And then on the wastewater side, what we look at is the cost of treatment. So we're looking at not just not only how much sewage flow comes to the plant from different customers but also the strength. And based on the strength of the sewage that's gonna drive costs such as energy and chemicals and whatnot. And so we've created different strength charges based on the assumed strength coming from different types of customers. Next slide. So those three main categories, the first three that we mentioned in that previous slide are shown here graphically. You can see the customer costs at the smallest portion. That's really a lot of administrative costs and billing and whatnot. Your capacity costs is your next largest cost category and that's associated with repair and replacement and maintenance of the system. And then on the water side, the commodity costs is on both sides, the commodity costs is by far the largest component and that's paying for the sources of supply, treatment and disposal of the treated wastewater. I wanted to interject here. If I could, the customer costs and capacity costs go into making up the monthly service charges for both water and wastewater. And you can see for water, it's about 25% of the cost go into the service charge and about 75% ends up in the commodity, the water usage rates. On wastewater, it's closer to about 30% goes into the service charges and the rest into the commodity costs. But it's part of our objectives here is one of the important objectives for the city is to have conservation oriented rate structure. And so there are certain fixed costs included in the volumetric commodity cost category. So those aren't entirely volumetric variable costs. Some of them are fixed costs, but that helps to create the conservation oriented rate structure that you have in both water and wastewater. Yeah, yeah, good point. Okay, next slide. So here's a depiction of your water, your tiered rates for water. So you can see on the bottom there, these represent the first two are your tier one and tier two for single family homes. And you can see that the tier one is proposed to be at about $6 and tier two is going to be closer to $7. Multifamily and commercial is actually the weighted average of the two. So you can see it ends up at about $6 and 40 cents or so. And then for irrigation, you can also see there's a tier one and tier two. The general costs at the bottom are identical. You can see for each of the, regardless of the type of tier or the customer class, those general costs are allocated the same. The difference, and if we could focus on single family tier one versus single family tier two, you can see the tier two for single family is the blue part is a little larger. That's going to be a water supply cost. And the reason that it's a bit more for tier two is because tier one gets the benefit of the local groundwater. So there's a certain amount, it's not a whole lot of water, but you do get a certain amount of your water supply comes from local groundwater and it's far cheaper than the cost of the import of purchasing Sonoma water, water. So because that tier one water, tier one gets the benefit of that source of supply, the unit rate per gallon of water is going to be slightly lower for tier one. The other part, that's the green portion at the top of tier two there is your water conservation costs. And so what we're doing is that we're assigning the costs associated with conservation that we're recovering those costs from tier two water usage with the idea that your larger water users are the ones who are driving the need for a water conservation program. And so they should bear the cost of that program. Again, the multifamily and commercial don't have tiered rates. And so their rates are really the weighted average of tier one, tier two for single family. And then irrigation, tier one, tier two have a lot of the same dynamics. The reason that the water conservation costs appears larger here is simply because the amount of water involved is a smaller denominator and so ends up being a larger unit cost per gallon of water. Okay, next slide. So here are, there's a lot of numbers here but you have quite a few rates to look at. We wanted to sort of have a one slide with all of your rates. So here's the water rate schedule as it currently stands and what's being proposed to be effective July 1st, 2021. And then in the FAR column, we have the change in those rates both in terms of percentage and in terms of dollars. So you can see that the tier one rate for single family is going to increase about 3.4% or 20 cents. And the tier two is going to increase by less than 1% or about 4 cents. As you look down those percentages, what should be going through your mind is that ultimately those numbers should all, the weighted average of all those percentages should be 3%. We mentioned earlier that the rate increase for year one was, the rate revenue increase for tier one was going to be 3% but that results may vary in year one because of these changes to the rate structure. And so this is where you're seeing that none of them are actually going up by exactly 3% somewhere above, somewhere below. The one piece and the other thing that might catch your eye is that most of these look like they're over 3% that caught my eye and I looked into it. The reason that's happening is that the one number that has an unwieldy or it has a much bigger impact than you might realize is that 0.6%. So the tier two single family water usage is about, I forget the exact percentage but I think it's about a quarter of the total water usage across all customer classes happens from single family tier two. And so that low 0.6% there is having a bigger impact than you might realize. But ultimately all these percentages do, if you add up all the rates, the weighted average comes out to 3%. Bob, anything to add? There's a lot to talk about on this slide. So I wanna, I guess the only thing that I would add is that as we continue to refine the rate calculations, these numbers will change a little bit as we move forward in the process. But it's these little differences in each of the rate components that are the result of the cost of service analysis. And then in the subsequent years, they would all be the 3% or the 4% or whatever the overall adjustment is. And you wouldn't have those differences beyond the first year. Right. Okay. Any questions on this? Cause the next I'll show the wastewater one, but these are really the sort of the final results for the water rates. So do any of the board members have any questions on this slide? No hands. Okay. Next slide. So here the same rate schedule for wastewater. And you can see in this case, what's happening is that the increases on the usage rates is going up a bit more than that 4% that's happening in year one. And the monthly service charges are actually negative in some cases or across the board. So that's generally just pointing to the fact that there's a little bit of a shift. There's a little bit there. We're gonna be collecting a bit more from the usage rates and a bit less relatively from the fixed monthly service charges. But again, for these, the weighted average just come out to 4%. And you can see it's pretty even for the usage rates. It's about 5.7% across all different types of customers. And on the monthly service charges, it is going down a little bit more for the larger meter sizes. Any questions on this one? Okay, next slide. So here is a pretty extensive table that's showing some bill impact analysis. So people always wanna know all these numbers are great, but what does that mean for my bill? And so what we've done here is we've tried to take a cross section of different types of customers and what they might experience. So the first four there are different types of single family residential. We picked from low water use up to very high water use. We assume they all have the same meter size and you can see the water usage assumptions there in columns three and four. And then the various columns show their bill with their current rates, their water bill with current race wastewater bill total. And in the last columns at the end shows the total change in the combined bills. So for a low water user, their monthly bill would increase by about $4.21 or 3.4%. And as you look down the table, you can see those percentages are quite similar across all types of customers. Typically we see a pretty, we can often see a pretty large variation and how much different types of customers are being affected. In this case, these numbers are all quite close to one another. I wouldn't expect that it should be too challenging in terms of explaining why certain customers are being hit more than others because it's really not, that's not really part of the story here. But you can see those percentages are in line with the 3% increase for water and the 4% increase for sewer. And that's really a reflection that we're not making significant changes to the rate structure. It's just updating the cost of service analysis. And if you do have more significant changes to the rate structure, you can have much bigger swings in those percentages for various customers either up or down. And so not making significant rate structure changes helps to minimize that variation. All right. Okay. Well, that's the end of my presentation. We're gonna switch gears now and go to the reserve policy update. So any last questions before we switch over to reserve? Okay, hearing none, Bob, take it away. Sure. So we had showed this slide a couple of weeks ago with our initial meeting with you and it summarizes the fund and reserve balances, the primary components of the fund and reserve balances as of the end of last fiscal year. You can see the water utility has a little over 21, almost $22 million. The wastewater about 18 and a half million and about 8 million, a little over 8 million for the sub-regional system. And these are comprised of first the operating reserve and your current policy has that set at 15% of actual operating and maintenance expenses. And so it's a calculated amount. And these reserves are really intended to provide working capital and help with cash flow needs and just sort of a minimum balance that we always want to have available. We then have the catastrophic reserves and these dollar amounts are consistent with current policy. But we are looking at increases to that based on recommendations that are coming from one of your engineering consultants. I'll talk more about that in a minute. And there's also a geysers reserve, which is a kind of a separate component of the catastrophic reserve. There's a little bit of money and a rate stabilization reserve for the wastewater utility, a million dollars there. And then pretty significant amounts that are undesignated reserves for both water and wastewater. What's not shown in this table are the monies that have been set aside for CIP projects, money that's been appropriated for those projects as well as money for sub-regional member agency refunds if they wanted that money going back as well as some of the bond guaranteed upon debt service reserve monies. We've factored those into our analysis but they're not really key to the rate analysis but those monies also exist within each of the utilities. So if we go to the next slide, talking, focusing now on the catastrophic reserves, you've got a recommendation that the water catastrophic reserve be increased from 5.75 million up to 17 and a half million. So that's about a, what almost a $12 million increase or just about a tripling of the size of that reserve. But for the most part, that money is available in your undesignated reserves. And you could just designate those undesignated reserves as catastrophic reserve. And for the most part, fund it that way. You may or may not want to designate all of those undesignated reserves. And that's sort of a policy choice for our purposes and doing our financial analysis. What we do is first we make sure you have that operating reserve and then we fill up the catastrophic reserve and then beyond that, you'd have undesignated reserves but you could decide to leave. Some money is undesignated even if the catastrophic reserve pockets weren't completely filled right away. The wastewater utility is also looking at a pretty significant increase from 6.8 million up to 21 and a half million for the wastewater collection system. There isn't enough money in wastewater and undesignated reserves to fill up that bucket. And so we're really seeing that, being able to fund that gradually over five to even perhaps as long as 10 years and keeping pretty nominal rate increases rather than building up very quickly. And then the sub-regional system currently, the sub-regional catastrophic reserve is at 1.7 million. There's some analysis being done now to see what that should be. We've right for right now have assumed that that might go to $10 million but that's a number that may change as we move forward over the next few months. So that's a uncertain amount. And then there's the geysers reserve which is currently one and a quarter million and that would increase to 3.3 million. One of the other things that we're suggesting with the update to these reserve levels is that going forward that you adjust these target amounts for inflation so that you keep up with a time value of money over time. Otherwise they sort of deteriorate over time. And also that the policy allows for a broader range of potential uses of the catastrophic reserves and so that they could be relied upon to address either increased expenses or revenue shortfalls that might result from other events rather than a significant earthquake such as fires, floods, drought, pandemics, all of those things that we're actually seeing right now. I think we have always believed that if you have reserves for a specific purpose that you use those reserves when conditions warrant and you've never really used your catastrophic reserves and we see that there could be a way to really help you mitigate the financial impacts of some of these significant events and in that way reduce the need for unplanned rate increases. And so you could use some of these catastrophic reserves if for example as Director Wright had indicated, if you got into a drought and the Sonoma water increased their rates significantly, that was sort of unplanned or unanticipated that you could bridge that gap at least initially with your catastrophic reserve. So it's one of the tools in your toolbox and we think that it ought to have provisions for more flexible use of those reserves if needed. And then moving to the next slide. So we're looking at the current reserve policies. We've made some comments and edits for that and we're sharing that with staff and having some discussions. But for the most part, it's maintaining the current operating reserve at 15% of actual ONM costs. That's for working capital cash flow needs. For our purposes, we don't use that in the financial planning, it's always there. You never dip into that. And as a business practice, that makes sense for the city to do that as well. The catastrophic reserve updating the language there to incorporate those larger target amounts and then to also adjust those for inflation. Going forward and then to allow for greater use of those reserves. And then there's language in the current policy for rate stabilization reserve that will continue. There's a million dollars in the wastewater rate stabilization reserve. I think there's some discussions with your financial advisors as to whether that's necessary or not, but it is being dialed in and maintained in the current new debt issuance. So that may be an issue to look at at some point in the future but probably not in the near term. The policy also specifically mentions capital reserves. And you don't really have any money specifically identified as capital reserves and the way that you fund your capital improvement program by with your CIP appropriations from our perspective, that language in the policy probably isn't needed based on your current practices. So we think that that's probably something that you could remove from that language. And then also the current policy doesn't explicitly mention undesignated reserves as a term that talks about reserves that are effectively talks about that but doesn't use that specific term. And so we've kind of tweaked the language that allows to have some undesignated reserves. And that provides greater flexibility for the utility in dealing with financial issues. I mentioned the way that we look at the reserves that we fill up each of the buckets and whatever's left over is undesignated but you may decide that you want to keep some of the reserves as undesignated as you go forward even if the targets aren't necessarily being met for the other reserves. And then next slide, I think that covers the reserve. Yeah, are there any questions on the reserve policies? I think we'll be coming forward at some point with specific recommendations that way for the reserve policy with specific language there but we are working on those right now. And then I think we'll turn it back over to Kimberly here. So I'm gonna talk about more fun stuff but I just wanted to know first to make sure there aren't any questions or follow-up questions for Bob or Mark before we move on to the next piece. Robert, I think you would see if there were any hands raised, correct? This is Board Member Grable. I just had a quick comment. I liked the breakdown, the slides. I think it was about four slides ago where it shows kind of in real terms what the average cost increases would be to households, commercial properties, six-inch sewer lines, all those different categories. I just wanna make sure we remember the value of those slides and how we communicate this both to city council members and the public to make sure that it's really understood in real terms. What people will be paying or what the average customer in some of these brackets will be paying because obviously that's what really matters to most people who are not in the weeds so deep. And I just wanna make sure that we're cognizant of the readability of those numbers for the average citizen and making sure that we have those kind of first and foremost when we're communicating this certainly makes it easier for me and my family to see in real budget terms and just assuming that other customers and families will wanna know that as well. So thank you. And that's perfect timing moving into then what we're talking about next which is the communications plan that we are and have been working on. We have recognized over the years that we are trying as much as we can to move away from telling people what the percentage of an increase is and to actually show them what it is that they will see on their bill. So we are making that effort to make sure that they're seeing dollar amounts and total bill impacts instead of just telling them that we're going to do an increase by a certain percentage amount. So thank you for that, Board Member Grebel. I wanna just talk a little bit about the campaign that we were putting forward. We know that we are in some very different times right now. We are not getting really FaceTime, I guess you would call it with our public anymore. We're not seeing them. And so we know that we need to get the message out. And so we are starting a value of water campaign. The key messaging you can see here is how we are investing in our public water system and that it's critical. We will be creating videos. We have some that are almost ready to go and we will be releasing those videos fairly soon, at least the first one, and then we will follow up with two other videos. These videos will be really talking to our customers about what we do, about the importance of our infrastructure, about the amount of work that goes into creating and maintaining potable, clean, safe drinking water and treating and reusing and recycling our wastewater, as well as the work that we put into being stewards of the environment. So we will be having this two-phase multimedia campaign, the campaign coming out and hopefully being able to have community meetings that will be virtual, since we can't do those in public. If we get the opportunity to do them in public, we will. But then we will also start the Prop 218 process, which is also a very public process that is brought before both the board and the council in early next year. And then with that, you can kind of see a little clip of how our videos will come out. We will be using the video to show pictures and get out messaging around the reliability of our water system. Also reminding people that we are not a for-profit organization, but the work that we do is, and the money that they pay for the work we do, all goes back into the system to make sure that we are providing that safe drinking potable water and that we are reusing and recycling as much of that wastewater as we possibly can. We have multiple avenues here that we're listing that we will be using to connect with our customers. And we have our e-newsletters, which if you're signed up for, we are getting them very regularly since all of the emergencies have been happening. We will be using social media and digital advertising. We will be posting everything on our website, as well as using bill inserts and radio ads. And with that, I will answer any questions that anybody might have or take any feedback. Great, do any of the board members have any questions or comments? I don't see anyone raising their hand. I will turn that off then, so we are back just to video of everyone. Okay, great. So if that, if no board member comments or questions, we'll open up to public comment on item 4.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you are dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary, do we have any raised hands for public comment? No, there are no raised hands. Great, thank you. And with that, I believe that comes to the end of our presentations. Staff, do we have anything else anyone else wanted to add? Since there's no additional questions, we do have some next steps. Great, thank you. That I was, didn't show you the slide on, but I will just kind of walk you through them. I apologize. Yeah, we are waiting for that bond pricing so that we can finalize numbers more and see where the debt service and especially that refunding, which could save us a significant amount of money for our ratepayers. We will be bringing forward more information on the Catastrophic Reserve policy revisions to you and hopefully have the sub-regional target for Catastrophic Reserves done fairly soon. We were going to have a meeting in early November, but we're going to push that out only because we're waiting for all of these other pieces to come into place before we move forward with meeting with you again. We'll have an administrative draft of the staff or of the cost of service report for you and that we will likely be looking for or requesting a recommendation on that to the full Board and Council early next year once you've had a chance to review that and we have also had a chance to review that. We will also be looking and working on our draft presentations that will be going to the entire board, not just the subcommittee and that final report and then of course working on the Prop 218 noticing that will be going out in March of next year. Thank you again, I apologize for skipping over your end of your presentation. With that, are there any Board member questions or comments about the next steps or any other part of the presentation? Okay, great, thank you. Thank you for your presentation and continuing to supply us with information as you get it. I know that these are all preliminary and you guys have things that keep changing and I appreciate the individual meetings with our city council members. I think those were helpful and I know those are going to continue based on need and as more numbers come in. So with that, it looks like we are ready to adjourn. So we will adjourn the meeting at 205. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


I'm Tanya Beckett joining you live from the World Economic Forum in Davils. Fiscal challenges can governments afford to pay back the debts they now have and is there a solution at hand? It's been four decades since you first invited European business leaders up this mountain and you gave them a pretty stark message. Modernize and adapt or fall behind and fail. We are in some way in a post crisis world. We do not know yet whether we will be really capable to master all the multiple challenges we are facing now. Very cordial welcome to the 41st annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Let's try to bring new ideas to the world, facing problems of a plight and a never-ending complexity. Some problems are so complicated in the world, they need to be addressed by a new form of organization like we have here in Davils. Of course, the importance of this Davils meeting is special, especially in this Davils meeting. Nowhere in the world is there another forum which brings together governments, NGOs, corporate leaders, activists, artists, musicians, to all come together and talk about the biggest issues facing the world. Where else in the world can I talk to Jeffrey Sachs, President Clinton, the head of the World Bank, all in the same room? What was exciting, in addition to having most of the G8 leaders here, of course, had President Medvedev coming after tragic farming, because he actually wanted to show that the new norm to deal with that is actually to come together, rather than to let terrorist issues and dross apart. Our solidarity and coordinated actions depend on the success of the confrontation of this common threat. Because democracy here that is built is really horizontal, the international community is looking at us, so let's maximize our chance of delivering. In the end, we're talking about people. By having a greater interaction between companies, let's say, coming from India, another from Korea, from Brazil, from Mexico, from Russia, I think over time that certainly contributes to improvement of the understanding between people in general, eventually between countries. If you look to where inventions are taking place, where economic growth is coming from, it's not from within the sector. It's the combination between areas of expertise that's coming together. So the social agenda, economic agenda, the political agenda coming together delivers much more powerful things than if each and everyone stays in their own silo. People are really eager to share their view, their value with all the other participants. I think that's great. And interaction, I think that is just like not just only social or talking to the people, but I felt the sincereness and involvement. That is great. Do more than the men can do. It's possible. One of the things we talked about in this room was the G20 and the fact that since the crisis, there has been no mention of women in the G20 deliberations, yet everybody's searching for global solutions to our economic ills, if you will. It's a tragedy that our world leaders aren't focused enough and don't understand, obviously, the economic business case or the empowerment of women. So here's the question, how do we address the need for fuel capability and the context of the need of biomass for food as well as water to support them? Countries that may be doing well on the first two but ignore human rights and rule of law cannot prosper. You actually are confronted with a lot different questions, questions that you probably would have never asked before in that way. And that is the only path to new discovery. Because it doesn't force decision making and just opens people's minds and eyes to the issues of the world. It allows people to leave these forum meetings and prepare responses the way they think it should be done for their countries. Don't just talk about the challenges we faced, do something about them. You heard about the water initiative? It started here five years ago. There was a CEO granted. There were some NGOs that were talking about it and most of the world hadn't even knew anything about it. Today it's real with governments, with companies, and most of the world understands we're going to run out of water before we run with boiling gas. That's not impact. I don't know what is. We have catalyzed partnerships with two country level governments, Vietnam and Tanzania, to help develop new models of public private partnership, increase investment in agriculture. In this blueprint, we look for the participation of light scale farmers in partnership with the public sector and it's the government and the development partners of Tanzania. It's impossible to spend several days in Davos without thinking and imagining how the world is going to change over the course of the next year, five years, ten years. I think the biggest impact, which is I think one of the fondest wishes of the founders and the people that continue to direct the world economic forum is for a greater level of understanding and breaking down the barriers between countries, companies, cultures. I think it's impossible for that not to happen in this setting. So the atmosphere was a mixture of optimism, entrepreneurial drive, new inspiration, but on the other hand I think people were well aware that the global agenda is full of challenges and that we have to work very closely together on a global level with shared values to deal with this new reality.