nswer that question better than I can? Good evening, Madam Mayor, council members. My name is Chick Adams. I'm with Fermi Jones Hall in San Francisco where you're bond council. The sinking fund actually refers, it's an older term, the newer term is rate stabilization fund and that's the one that Rosemary was referring to. It's a mechanism whereby if you get to any year where in order to make your debt service payments, you need to raise rates precipitously, you can cushion that by using prior years funds. That's what a rate stabilization fund boils down to and that's all it is. And by modifying your policy, you're enabling yourself to do that. About it? Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, thanks for the clarification. Any member of the community wanting to address this on this item? Please come forward. You'll have up to two minutes. Is there any other members of the community wanting to address this on this item? Okay. Okay. I see you're going to use MUFT Union Bank as trustee, a wholly owned foreign Japanese banking corporation with interest in wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States. Would it be too much to ask what is the justification for this instead of using a more American-owned bank and keeping the considerable estimate of $15 million or so of interest of Santa Cruz ratepayers' money in this country? Is there any chance locals can buy some of these water bonds as a hedge against the astronomical water rate increases that will probably follow? I see you're going to modify by resolution city policy giving up your authority as a city council to suit this foreign-owned bank's demands as an excellent example of your following globalist directives of a foreign authority instead of the people of Santa Cruz. I see you're going to use a bank that has paid huge sums of money as settlements for wrongdoing and violation of U.S. sanction law. While I would tend to agree, it would be hard-pressed to find an American mega bank also not guilty of essentially a ton of criminal activity. Hey, give it a try, you never know, you might find one. Surely some must exist. It would have been nice to know the simplified cost-benefit analysis of these water projects in our detail to see what ratepayers are actually buying with an estimated $41 million. The maturity of the bonds, the lifetime of the improvements, and the estimated pipeline of future debt demands. You know, hard questions. Like the ones that weren't asked at the May meeting where water treatment increases were rubber-stamped after a chamber clearing, radical grievance, longer hissy fit, and some progressive city council members abandoned their duties. I'm still wondering why the rate increases put in place for that didn't include rolling them back after the improvements were over in five years. I'm wondering about that same issue again here when the inevitable rate increases come a call. Thanks. Next speaker. Hi, forgive me. I don't understand how the whole water thing works. I'm trying to figure it out as you're speaking. So I did hear some mention of wastewater. I'm sorry, I keep looking at her because I know she has the answer. Wastewater. Anyway, I'm curious if, because I see from the meeting earlier about the cogeneration engine. I just want to make sure that the cogeneration engine is cogenerating on reusable or renewable energy. And that's all. Great. Seeing that no other members of the community wanting to address this on this item, we'll go ahead and return back to the council for action and deliberation. I'll go ahead and see if there's an emotion on the floor. I'll move the staff recommendation. We have a motion by Councillor Brown, seconded by Councillor Myers. Any further comment? Seeing none. All those in favour, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. Council member Brown. I do have a question. These are such big projects. What's your timeline? Or I guess we get to that on the next item. Well, yes. But I will tell you that for the projects that are we're looking at the financing from the State Revolving Loan Fund, we're going to be bringing the authorization for the council to approve the plans and specs and authorize us to go to bid on the Nill Creek Dam Inlet Outlet Project to the council on the 28th of January. So that one is coming, and we expect that one to be in construction next summer. At your next meeting, you will be getting one of the projects, the approval for one of the projects that would be paid for out of these funds, which is the replacement of the pipeline between the Coast Pump Station. It's under the River Pipeline. This is the project that we've been talking about related to the site that the River Street Camp is on that requires us to access that site for the micro-tunneling process that's going to be done to replace that pipeline. It's a critical piece of infrastructure that if it fails, we cannot get water really from any of our river sources, our flowing sources to the Graham Hill Water Treatment Plan, and things can go bad pretty darn fast if that happens. So it's a critical piece of infrastructure we know is in bad shape, and that project is going to come for approval of the plans and specs at your next meeting. And all these bond proceeds are expected to be spent in three years, and that's basically the maximum length of time we're allowed by federal regulations, and it also helps to just make sure you meet that period of spending because it costs money to issue bond proceeds. So the longer time that you can spend those or make sure that you're covered, the better off you're going to be in terms of interest. Council Member Myers had one last. So it sounds like we have a bit of a Green New Deal kind of coming on here. Definitely do. And again, a lot of our issues are very... This is all about water supply, reliability, and infrastructure resiliency, both of which are necessary for us to adapt to climate change that we already are experiencing, and we're going to be talking more about that in the next part of this meeting. Great. Thank you very much. So with that, we'll go ahead and take a brief recess while the council chambers are prepared for our joint meeting with the water community. All right. Well, we'll go ahead and get started again. So good evening again to those who are now tuning in to our November 12, 2019 joint city council water commission meeting. So I'd like to ask our clerk to please call the roll and welcome up our commissioners. Thank you. Council Member Cron. Here. Clever. Here. Brown. Here. Mathias. Here. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. Mayor Watkins. Here. Commissioner Baskin. Present. Neckis. Here. Ryan. Here. Schwarm. Here. Little shoes. Here. Do that every time. Vice Chair Wadlow. Here. And Chair Angford. Here. Before we begin, I have just a few comments and then we'll go ahead and get started. I'm going to discuss the proposed revisions to the city's work plan to achieve water security. I'd like to begin tonight's meeting with a recap, a quick one of how we got here. As many in the audience and those who may be watching from their homes tonight may remember in 2014, the city council appointed 14 members of the community to a committee to develop solutions to the city's ongoing water shortage problems. The Water Supply Advisory Committee, or WASAC, as it's known, met for 18 months and took a deep technical dive into the city's complex water system. Supported by a technical advisory committee made up of consultants and staff, WASAC members were able to come to agreement on five recommendations to achieve water supply security. Those recommendations included increased water conservation, water transfers, aquifer storage and recovery, recycled water, and desalination. The WASAC set an ambitious course recommending that the water department evaluate all recommendations concurrently with final decisions to be made on which course to take by 2020. Work began in earnest in 2016 and the water department has made tremendous progress on evaluating alternatives. Through their analysis and pilot testing, they've developed a revised work plan. Tonight we'll hear about their recommendations for integrating new information, taking advantage of near-term opportunities for supply augmentation, and adjusting the timeline for decision making. But before we start tonight's meeting, I'd like to ask if there are any WASAC members in the audience and if so, please stand to be recognized. Do you understand those who are involved here? Please. Those that are here with us tonight, as well as others, put hundreds of hours into this very complicated and very productive process. I'd like to thank you on behalf of our entire city council for all your service to our community. So thank you so much. So with that, we'll go ahead and move forward with our presentation this evening or any additional remarks that may once be said by the chair. And we'll follow a similar structure as we did earlier. Okay. Please. Thank you, Mayor Watkins. And I would like to take just a couple of minutes before Rosemary gets started. And first off, on behalf of the commission, express our gratitude to the council for the opportunity to work with you all on water policy and for inviting us here this evening to join you at this meeting. This meeting's a little different than past joint meetings we've done recently. The most recent water supply augmentation strategy meetings have been mostly informational in nature. And this one we're asking you to make a big decision. We're at a crossroads in implementing the strategy. And specifically we're proposing a major change in the roadmap with the water supply advisory committee called an adaptation rather than just an adjustment, specifically as regards the timeline over which we're going to be implementing the roadmap. By way of background, Rosemary and her team over the last, well, several years, but particularly this year in an iterative process have been diligent, thoughtful, and creative in taking a comprehensive look at our existing system as well as our need for supply augmentation and mindful of some of the points that Rosemary made earlier about delayed system rehab that we need to undertake some supply benefits that are going to accrue as a result of that work. Positive piloting results we've been getting on aquifer storage and recovery in the belt's well field. Demand actuals that have fallen short of our original projections, meaning we have a little bit less demand we have to try to meet. The establishment, both imminent and recent of groundwater sustainability plans in our basins and our still evolving understanding of the impact of climate change on our largely surface-based water supplies, we're bringing forth a proposal, staff is bringing forth a proposal that the commission supports that'll make moderate but impactful increases in our available supply by leveraging existing infrastructure, taking advantage of the investments we're going to be making in our existing system and some modest additional no-regrets investments that'll get us some additional supply and buy us some time during which we can get smarter about the things we need to get smarter about so we can make the right decision to spend the right money at the right time to fully solve our water supply needs in the future. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rosemary and her team. Thank you so much, and I appreciate the hard work of everyone who's been involved in this, really from the Water Supply Advisor Committee. When they were finished, the Water Commission kind of seamlessly took up their role as the overseers and partners with us in the work that we've been doing. Really, I think Doug's comments are a lot of... covered the details, and I was recently at a presentation where someone said, in case you nod off, here's the takeaways. That was the first slide. So I didn't want to put, in case you nod off, here. But I did want to put the sort of key takeaways up front. So we're going to find our key conclusions. I think Doug just said them for you. In between is a summary of the work we've done that resulted in our arriving at those conclusions, and I'm really providing you that as much to give you a range, a feel for the sophistication and the level of detail of the work. And then we're going to ask you to take a motion to do the adaptation. So with that, I will get going. But before I do, these are the... what we've learned in the last four years and what we think we need to do to make some significant progress in improving supply reliability. If we focus near-term efforts on using existing infrastructure in the belt system to create a ASR program, we work with the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency on its Groundwater Sustainability Plan, explore opportunities for additional groundwater storage in that basin, leverage the system reliability benefits of upcoming water treatment plan improvements that we need to do anyway, and then continue working, and really this is maybe the first and the last and the over and over again, continue working to understand the potential impacts of climate change on our region's ability to use surface water and groundwater resources to meet our needs on the run. This is a really, really important question with many big consequences, and understanding it better is in our interest and is something that we feel confident that we can do. So I've kind of divided the presentation into two parts. The first part is a summary of where we've been, and it's a little bit of the longer parts, but again, I want to... I'll try to move through it relatively quickly and when I show you a slide with lots of numbers and things that I'll highlight, why I'm telling you that and so you won't have to be trying to figure out everything about it. But so with that, I'm going to get going. So update on the status of the work. First, I'm going to talk a little bit about... a little bit more background about the WASAC and its recommendations, including the work plan that we've been implementing, and then talking about some updates that we have on their assumptions about supply, demand, and climate change, and then talk about surface water augmentation strategies and analyses we've done looking at this sort of available supply, kind of typically wintertime supply that is more water than we have and we certainly don't have any place to store it. So how could we possibly leverage that and then give you a quick update on the work we've done on recycled water and desalination strategies. These are the key dates for the Water Supply Advisory Committee. Council decided to do it in October 2013. November, they created the Council took action to adopt a drought solution Citizen Advisory Committee. February 2014, that group became the Water Supply Advisory Committee. It included 14 members chosen by a subcommittee of the Council. We met for 18 months starting in April of 2014. And then in November of 2015, there was a joint Water Commission City Council study session on the 10th of November, so four years ago now, and then the Council accepted the WASAC agreement and recommendations and directed us to integrate it into the upcoming urban water management plan. So we have done that. The group included a whole diverse representation chamber, the folks who were against desal, the folks who were for desal, some number of environmental groups. Water commissioners were represented, members at large from the community, great payers, what have you. These are they. We were a professionally facilitated group, and it was a group that probably, they did a lot of exploration and they came to consensus on their recommendations. This is their problem statement that our problem, our key problem is that we have limited storage for a system or size. Really our water supply reliability problem is not about growth. It's about meeting supply reliability for the people who live here now. We have fish flow requirements and potential climate change impacts, which could further exacerbate the supply situation. We have a fairly good size gap off of, at that time, an estimated 3.2 billion gallons per year total demand for water. We had a potential peak season, worst case hydrology, 1.2 billion gallon gap, which is a big hill to climb if you find yourself in that situation. And that while we have then committed community to water conservation for decades, and we've done a tremendous job on that, the group concluded that water conservation alone could not solve this problem. Their recommendations as you were sort of summarized, heard earlier, additional water conservation efforts in lieu of water transfers and exchanges with SoCal Creek, with Scotts Valley or San Lorenzo Valley, potential future partners in using our water in the wintertime and resting their wells to create a bank of water for us to use when we were in a drought situation. And then aquifer storage and recovery, those were the winter water harvest strategies. And then the alternate water supply strategies of recycled water, some kind of advanced treated, either non-potable reuse for irrigation or potable reuse strategies for groundwater replenishment or surface water augmentation. Those strategies are on the books as well as desalination. These are really, what you see on this list is pretty much the list of the resources we have available to us in Santa Cruz County. We're not connected to any of the other state water infrastructure. When it rains here, we, that's the water we have and when it doesn't rain here, that's the water we don't have and that's a problem. The one thing I want, this is their work plan and I know you can't read this and this is actually a poor kind of a cut and paste slide, but I will tell you, it was lined up so that in 2020, the information on all of the key alternatives was available simultaneously to allow for a kind of an apples to apples comparison of all the options. And that was a really, really important piece of this analysis that we've been working very diligently to create information that would inform this kind of analysis. And it's one of the main things that we're proposing to change. We're proposing to keep the Apple, the commitment to the apples and apples comparison of all the options, but we're proposing to move that back a couple of years and for reasons that we'll talk about. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've learned in the years, particularly as it relates to the key Wasek assumptions. This is our demand forecast for the 20 years following in the window that we were talking about 2015 to 2035. This part right here is blank, because we're just coming out of the second year of a drought here. Typically what would happen is there would be some kind of a rebound. It would take some time to do that. But the long-term demand forecast was basically flat, slightly declining. And this was flat and slightly declining, including additional 20,000 people coming into the area to be our customers over the 20-year period, as well as there's water in here that would have accommodated. UCSC growth has been kind of talked about over this kind of a timeframe. The basic situation, the reason it's flat is basically three things. One is existing building and plumbing codes that result in more efficient use. The second one was price elasticity of demand. Water has been getting more expensive, and our customers have been responding to it, particularly as it relates to discretionary use, like irrigation or longer showers. And then the third thing was additional programmatic conservation, mainly focused on things like rebates for turf removal or washing machine rebates or dishwasher rebates. In our case, most, not perhaps all, but most of the high-flow toilets, high-flow shower heads, those things are long gone out of our system over the last sort of 20-plus years. This chart is really hard to look at, but I think if I wanted to sort of focus on the color palettes, anything that's kind of the blue, gray, black, those are annual daily, the squiggle line is daily over that year from 2013 and before. So that was our pattern, and that's roughly about 3.2 billion gallons. The kind of average demand of that set of curves is about 3.2 billion gallons of total usage. The red, brown, kind of darkish, brown, purple color, I guess at the bottom, that's our demand pattern since 2014. And 2014 and 2015 were years we had water restrictions in place, but fundamentally, even after we took those restrictions up in 2016, we have not rebounded to the same level of demands that we've had historically. The good news about this is this makes the size of the gap smaller in the near term. It doesn't make it go away, but it makes it smaller. The bad news is we've rung a lot of the discretionary water use out of the system. So if we found ourselves in a situation where we had another 2014, getting a 25 or 30% cut to respond to that would be a more challenging situation. I'm not saying you can't get there. I'm just saying it would be more challenging. One of the things we're doing right now, and that's kind of on another parallel path, is we're working on an update to the 2009 water shortage contingency plan that the council adopted and was developed and sort of based on data and customer use patterns in 2005, six, seven council adopted it in 2009. That plan lays out a five stage plan for cuts up to about 50%. We're in the process as part of the planned urban water management plan update we have to complete in the middle of 2021 of updating that plan because we're required to have a six stage plan that goes up to 60% reductions, but also because we know that our customer use patterns have changed a lot, and so we need to adapt the kind of cut strategies or restriction strategies we would build into that plan in order to get sort of demand reductions if we need them and understanding customer use patterns is a big part of what's necessary to do that. So that work is kind of getting underway now and probably we'll be bringing something forward on this in the spring. But again, this pattern kind of the signal here, one of the signals is supply reliability is even more important than it has been historically because we have such a conserving community and those patterns of behavior seem to have really cemented themselves in many ways in our community. So this is a major issue in the sense of thinking about particularly near term strategies and what we can do to improve supply reliability going forward and you'll see some more of that as we get further on in the presentation. The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is climate change. We've developed a number of new scenarios. This one that's called GFDL 2.1A2. I love this terminology, right? This one is developed and used in the water supply advisory committee planning process, but subsequently we've developed this one that's called four ensemble model. You can see this little orange dots in here are from that one. And then this one called the historical catalog. This was not so much a downscaled global climate model as a picking out of the historical record, the warmer and drier years and then dispersing with a handful of the wetter years and then randomizing that and creating a new record. So this is kind of taking, using the historical information as a basis for what we would do. You can see that the one, the blueish one that we used in the in the water supply advisory committee process is kind of the warmest and the driest in general. But this historical catalog one is also fairly warmer and drier. These are things we've been using a lot of analyses looking at all of these options as well as historical data and you'll see some examples of that in a little bit. So the key changes, the modeling assumptions here we've done is we've recognized that we've got some near term demands that are lower and we're looking at those and building those in including the fact that the annual peaking profile is flatter than the 3.2. We're maintaining the 3.2 billion gallon demand forecast. That was actually a forecast that's created and we'll be updating that forecast also as part of the development of the updated urban water management plan next year. So until we've got a new forecast we're going to maintain using that number. Again, you'll see a lot of analyses later on in this presentation that will show you what the problem looks like at 3.2 billion gallon demand or 2.6 and under these various climate change scenarios. So it makes it for a chart with lots of numbers in it. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I know that you have time for the questions at the end but I saw a council member get my attention. It looks like there was a brief question here. Could you kind of briefly and simply explain that? Yes. Or not. Or should I? I can. Maybe Heidi, you can be prepared. Should we just keep going? That's fine. So the basic thing, there's two dimensions here. One of them is departures from average precipitation. So dryer, wetter. That's on this axis here, median precipitation. And you can see the ones are here. And then this is temperature. So increase in temperature, median temperature. And this is where this one is. So you can see that most of these climate change models are giving us information that says it's basically in this warmer and drier quadrant of this. There's a little bit from this four model ensemble that's in the more moderate kind of down here, closer to the averages here. But typically they're on the drier side. There's one or two little spots over here that are in the wetter side. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you. So it's trying to kind of see, you know, by developing additional models, you're helping to understand whether or not the blue one that we had is close. It's not close. It's, you know, the other ones are similar. And that is one of the questions that we're going to be doing some more work on as we go forward. Well, these were three different models using this. Yes. Created in sort of, oops. Okay. So this is a summary of the changes to the key modeling assumptions. And that's, those are really important. I want to talk a little bit about surface water augmentation strategy. And there's two elements of this. One of them is the transfers and exchanges. And the second one is the, is the upper storage and recovery. So roughly a year ago, we celebrated the valve turning of the opening of the intertide that we have with Soquel Creek Water District at their O'Neill Ranch Well. And we started the first ever sort of water transfer project. It ran until April 30th. That was kind of the window November 1st, April 30th. This is the window we have in our CEQA document for this particular pilot project. And a number of the WASAC members, including there's Mike and there's David and there's Doug right there. And this is Rick Lajinadi and Greg Pepping. These folks are all here celebrating. There's Erica in the audience. And then this is some details. The direction we got was explore these transfers. The actions to date include developed an agreement with them in 2016. In 2017 and 2018 with the backdrop of the Flint kinds of, and the Fresno colored water issues, there was quite a bit of study going on looking at the compatibility of surface water and groundwater exchanging and not wanting to create a situation where we sent water to them and then they had red water problems or other kinds of corrosion problems because surface water is typically much more corrosive than groundwater systems are. So we did a study that came out with successful results that said we could, you know, do this exchange, send water to them without there being any negative consequences on a water quality perspective. In winter of 2018-19, we did it. We had good success. And we're planning a second round this coming winter. We haven't started yet because the flows in the North Coast streams aren't really up yet. We haven't had rain yet, but as soon as we have some rain, we'll get going on that again. This was the area for the first transfer that we sent and the planned area for this time is quite a bit bigger. So it's larger. This was kind of in this little hourglass kind of shape down here. It's going to be this whole service area one, this go around. So this has a more demand on it than the last time did and we're hoping to, you know, basically be able to move water further into their system. The other strategy we're looking at is aquifer storage and recovery. It's where you push water through with pressure, eyes, injection pressures to push it into the aquifer. It creates a little sort of space where your natural, your water that you inject is there. It doesn't mix with the native groundwater. And then later on you recover that, you take it back out and pretty much you can tell by the water quality changes between the surface water and the groundwater when you've moved beyond the collection of the water you put in and now you're talking about water from the native groundwater. So we have successfully done a lot of paperwork looking at the feasibility analysis of this strategy. We got good results and last winter we pilot tested in the Belts 12 well, our Belts 12 well successfully completed a pilot test of this technology and we're planning a second test and this year in a second one of the Belts wells. So this is a real, and you'll hear more about this a little bit later on as we talk about something we could do with an existing infrastructure that would improve our supply reliability. This is a section where I want to talk a little bit about some of the analytical work we've done to look at these things. So now you're going to see a lot of charts and graphs and numbers and things but I'll try to make it easy for you to understand. So we do a lot of modeling. We use a number of different kinds of models but we do a lot of modeling to help us understand the probability and scale of droughts, the water availability to do things like meet the demands of other communities for transfers to be able to put water in the ground, how much do we have? Infrastructure sizing, how big does the pipes have to be to take water to a place to get the maximum amount in the ground? How many wells do we need? Those kinds of things. Operational approaches in terms of things like, well, shall we operate the Reservoir differently, the Lachlan Reservoir differently than the groundwater? Shall we operate them the same? Those are kinds of questions we have to understand and then how to collaborate with other entities and how that could work. So those are the kinds of things we do for modeling. We use a major sort of system planning and simulation model called Confluence. We've been using it for decades. It's a model that uses a daily time step. So when we run a Confluence run, it runs every day of the historic record that's probably, you know, 70 years. And every single day it puts hydrology into the system based on actual record data. It puts water demand into the system based on the projected demand scenarios we're looking at. It simulates how the system will function and then it will feed that information into things like the ground motor models that we've been using in the Mid County Basin and also we'll be using up in the Santa Margarita Basin and then also to the Fisheries Effects Analysis models that we use. So this is our major model and a lot of the results you're going to see come out of Confluence. And again, they're really important in helping us understand are we on the right track or are we not on the right track. To just give you a little bit of background about how it works, there's a dispatch order that is this one that you see here. First start with the north coast. It said to go down the list. And every day so it says, okay, today we have a 7MGD of demand and so how much can we get from the north coast? We take that, then we take the next thing, take how much water is available from the Tate Street diversion and then the Tate Street groundwater and if it's summer time, we'll take the belt swells. And if we still need water, we'll go to Lachlomand now. We don't have the groundwater storage yet. And then finally, if we can't still meet demand, it will identify the shortage. And so at the end of the year, when you see some of these numbers that are accumulating, one put two billion gallons, that means that there were many days during that year when we couldn't meet demand with the available supplies that we had. And so as a result, they accumulate over that whole water year to produce that number. We live in the real world. So our daily dispatch is constrained by fish flow requirements, by infrastructure capacities. You can't put more water through a pipe than a pipe will take. You can't treat more water through the water treatment plant than the water treatment plant has the capacity for. Available flows from the various sources, water rights, flow rates, volumes, and places of use, and then water quality, turbidity, and first flush flow requirements. We have a lot of things that are taken into account in the way we model the system's performance, and these are the key ones of those. Okay, so here's a really good example of one of these charts. There's lots of numbers on it. Just to point out, so these are the four basic sort of climate scenarios, the historical one and the three other climate scenarios we talked about. This line here is the 3.2 billion gallons of demand, the 2016-2018, that's 2.6. And then the question that was asked in this model run is, what are the worst case droughts in each scenario? And typically it's a two-year back-to-back strategy, or in the case of the CMAP-5. They weren't as big of a one, but there were three together that were back-to-back. So that's why this one has three. And so you can see that this is a total for the historical item with the 3.2 billion gallons demand. This is a 1.8 billion gallon over two years. With the lower demand, it's a 781 million gallons, which is not inconsequential, but it's certainly not as big as 1.8. And you can see that the others have, again, this is 1.8, this is two, this is 2.4, this is 2.3. So the good news about these numbers is really probably they're all about the same number. And the second thing is there's not a 3 billion or a half a billion one on this list, which means that even though none of these are right, we're probably in the right ballpark. Let's put it that way. So this is an example of the kind of results that tells us how big the droughts would be and what their characteristics would be under different demand and climate scenarios. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Mid County groundwater basin and the modeling of the city aqua storage and in lieu projects in particular because it leads to some other analysis about what it is that we told Soquel about our availability to provide them with surface water to meet their needs. So our primary purpose was to validate the assumptions we had regarding the feasibility of groundwater storage. We had some parameters about storage losses. We had an operational scenario that said inject the water over a three-year period followed by a two-year drought withdrawal at a level necessary to meet the drought shortages. So put a bunch of water in the ground, accumulate, and then use it over a period of two years while you're having a drought. That's what the scenario looked at. This is a very geeky piece of drawing, but for those of us who love this groundwater thing, this is what the Mid County groundwater basin looks like. The reason I'm showing you this is because one of the references shows to the TU formation. That's this really deep one. You can see this well right here is actually screened in that formation. The city's wells are all screened in the A, the AA, or the TU formation. So Cal has wells screened in those same wells in those soil formations that we do, as well as these formations over here, which we are not, that don't underlie our part of the service area. This is an interesting issue for some other reason, but basically I want you to see that we're going to look at what happens to groundwater levels in this strata and in this strata in the next two slides. We did an example of an injection and a withdrawal looking at in lieu only, ASR only, and then some combination, and then a baseline. So that's what you're going to see in the next slide. So these are three monitoring wells on the coast. The strategy here is to try to maintain the level of the groundwater in these monitoring wells to keep seawater intrusion at bay. And you can see the baseline is these yellow lines. And these are then the little dotted green line is just in lieu only. The blue line is ASR only, and then the pink line is, oh, I'm sorry, this is ASR only, and then the other one is the combined one. One of the things I'm showing this to you for is you can see that this is the, this is the measurable objective from the groundwater sustainability plan. This thing right here is the level we're trying to achieve. And you can see that when we fill up the aquifer for three years and then we draw it down in a period of two years, we actually make the situation in the groundwater elevations in that basin, this particular monitoring well, which is this one right here, we make it worse than the baseline. That's a takeaway message from this. And this is the deepest layer, which is the one that is most subject to seawater intrusion because the seawater is heavier and so can come right in in the lower area. So this is a, operating like this is not a workable solution in this basin with this strategy. This is another one looking at these monitoring wells over here in the Soquel area, but it shows the basic same pattern. This one's in the A unit. And you can see again, this is the minimum threshold, this bottom line on this one is the minimum threshold, means we told DWR Department of Water Resources, we're not going to go below that. And yet we're seeing when the fill for three years and the withdrawal down for two years, that that's going to be a problem. In this scenario, which is this one here, this one here, I think, and in this scenario, these are all show that that's a challenging situation for us to be in. So when we started to talk about how much water we could provide to Soquel, we made a decision about making sure that since we have to solve our drought problem before we can solve a neighbor's problem that this would be the dispatch order. We'd meet the fish flows first, Santa Cruz's daily demand, put water in storage to meet our needs, and then if we have leftover after that, we provide water to the neighboring agency. That produced this result. And the really important takeaway here is looking at meeting that what Soquel has to fight as their 1500 acre feet of water a year is what they need to keep seawater intrusion at bay in their part of the basin. This is a probability. What it says, even with the lowest demand and the best case situation of these various climate scenarios, we can only achieve that 45% of the time. Now, in a good year, a year like we had this year or even last year, we could probably have done it, although we weren't putting water in storage for ourselves, but we probably could have done it. But when you take a long-term view of what you're trying to accomplish and the answer is only 45% of the time could you count on that, that doesn't seem like a very good way to go. Smaller volumes and provided off-peak winter only are pretty reliable. You can see these numbers. And then we have a strategy for improving the robustness of the water treatment plant process that will result in some reliability benefits, the water supply reliability benefits that will allow us to use more water, particularly in the wet situations and in the dry situations. And that improves the condition, you know, to 55%. But still is not really workable.  And so when you're trying to do a water, sort of a transfer project or something where you're taking water out of the river every single day to put it in storage, and all the precip is in one month, it doesn't support that. That's why this says not applicable. And you can see at the lower demand, it works to some degree, but in this situation, the precip pattern is too condensed to even work for an awkward storage and recovery or, you know, using that supply for our own purposes, right? This was an interesting result. You know, again, none of these are right in terms of what the climate change scenarios are, but to get a result like that is kind of a little eye-opening and something we should pay attention to. Okay. So this is a very quick summary. Pilot testing of INLEO and ASR in the mid-county groundwater basin appear feasible. Those results, they say these things are feasible. We have a... We need to design any ASR project. We would work to meet both the protective groundwater elevations to protect the basin from seawater and to provide drought storage. So that's one of the things on our plate. And there continue to be a lot of opportunities for collaboration in both of the groundwater basins to work with other partners on various kinds of groundwater sustainability strategies as well as possible supply augmentation strategies using surface water and other activities. And we're definitely involved in those things. Okay. Moving on. Anybody have questions on that before I go? Any questions? Okay. Keep remembering that first slide about if you'd nod off. I know there's a lot of stuff here. Thanks, Ruth. Quick update on the work we've done on recycled water and desal. We did a recycled water project with public joint project with Public Works, other stakeholders who are involved. We finalized the study about a year and a half ago shortly. Basically, we looked at a lot of different options. This is the Santa Margarita groundwater basin, by the way. This purple one. And this is the mid-county basin, this green one over here. We looked at a lot of different kinds of options. And one of the things we looked at was the market for non-potable reuse for irrigation purposes. And if you have a question about this, you can see Heidi can answer this more, but large landscapes that are these dark ones, so Delabiega Park, et cetera, and then some of them have water budgets and some of them have water audits on them. But they accumulated, they identified every one of these sites and what the use pattern was and accumulated that to determine how or whether the degree to which some kind of non-potable purple pipe system might help solve our problem and it didn't really pencil out in most cases. Let's put it that way. So the project did recommend a couple of things. One was right next to the treatment plan, there's La Veronca Park, that would be a project there potentially. And then this project called Bay Cycle, which would have taken recycled water, tertiary treated recycled water up the hill to the UCSC campus for them to use both in irrigation. And I think earlier there was a commenter who mentioned that some of the buildings on the campus had been built to have use alternative sources of water for toilet flushing. So they have dual plumbing in those cases and so this would be a usable for those kinds of projects as well. And then a number of indirect potable reuse projects which are listed here and really would be things that we would move forward with in the future to dive more deeply into these particular projects. We were asked particularly after the work on D-cell that preceded the Water Supply Advisory Committee to give an update about what would be involved in this project. And one of the key things was to assess the possible change conditions since 2013. And so we hired a local consulting firm, Dudak, to update that information. That work was completed in August of 2018. Not surprisingly, since the ocean is quite large, a project could produce, could be developed to meet our need. Costs were refined based on change conditions. A major issue that has emerged in the time between the work that was done earlier and where we are now is that the Ocean Plan Amendment now requires all D-cell plants to have subsurface intakes, which means buried as opposed to a big open pipe that's sucking seawater in. I guess I would sort of cringe at my saying that because they're a little more subtle than that probably. But anyway, that's the view. But you have to be able to prove that it's not feasible, but they don't tell you what feasible means. So it's really like, well, I don't like that rock, bring me another rock, right? So it's a whole strategy that says this. And that led to this conclusion that not only would it be more expensive, but timeliness to actually get a project like that probably would not make it a feasible project to do in the timeframe we were talking about. A year ago, the council took action to basically de-prioritize desalination as the alternate water supply and prioritize further work on recycling as the alternate. So that took place. It didn't have anything to do with the Pure Water Soquel project. It had to do with how recycled water might possibly meet our needs. Okay. That's the main part. But I want to, I've got just a couple more slides to talk about what else we've learned in the meantime that I think we'll then we'll take a little break with her time for questions and answers. So this is the, this is the kind of the repeat of the slide early on, which said, you know, we think given the lower near-term demand, there's an opportunity to make significant progress if we focus on ASR in the belt system using existing infrastructure and available supplies, work with our partners in the Santa Margarita to explore options there, leverage the benefits of system reliability benefits, actually don't leverage them, design them in, and then leverage them to the upcoming water treatment plan improvements and then to work on further understanding the climate change impacts, particularly as it relates to how vulnerable is surface water as a source of supply for us to some of the kinds of impacts of climate change that could do the thing like we saw in that climate catalog, one where the rain pattern or the precip pattern changes so dramatically that it can no longer support the kind of winter harvest strategy where you have to have a long period of time to take water every single day or alternatively you have to have really big pipes and treatment plant capacity and, you know, transmission and a whole bunch of number of wells so that you can put the same amount of water in the ground in a much shorter period of time. So that's kind of the trade-off between those two. One thing I wanted to show you just in terms of the possible system reliability benefits of the aqua storage and recovery in the belt system. So this is the... You'll remember from the chart we saw earlier the size of the... with 2.6 billion gallons a year of demand and the historical flows. This is an example. I have the ones for all the ones, but I don't want to make your eyes glaze over. So 780 million gallons was the shortage worst year shortage under the historical flows. With existing wells you can make that shortage go to 105 million gallons a year instead of 700 and then you don't really need to add any additional wells or required capacity. Actually you can make it go to zero if you do add more wells in the area. Here's the warmest, driest flows and you can see the number here is bigger. It's 989. With existing wells you can make it go to 320 and then by again adding one well for putting in you can basically get that to go to zero. This is a really solid benefit to gain in a relatively short period of time for a relatively low price tag that is kind of a low regrets, no regrets strategy that is when we started looking at this it was like we need to change this plan so we can get on with this because this makes a ton of sense. That's the part about what we've done and kind of what we've learned. Well thank you for the presentation. Other than needing my magnifying glass for some of the slides. I learned something, no. It's fantastic. The work is just really extraordinary. So thank you for all your time and efforts in bringing us up to speed. We'll go ahead and pause right now and see if there's any questions from the colleagues here. Council Member Myers? I just have a couple of questions. I attended the climate change session you did in August. It was great to see all that work. I'm just curious how do you keep that prediction up to date? So I mean what does that look like? So the two models that were created from the global climate downscaling were used. The first one was from what was called CMAP 3 which is a whole suite of things that were developed kind of in the early part of this decade. And the second one came from CMAP 5. You go into the CalAdapt website and you can find all this stuff yourself. I mean it's totally available. But these are global climate models that are created in kind of segments. Like here's this one we did and this is work and then we're going to publish that and then a few years later you're going to do an update. So they came mainly from that and that work is ongoing, right? So that's one thing. The second way that we're looking at going forward and we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we get to the next steps is that's all top down. That's sort of, you know, take a bunch of stuff there and one of the things Bruce Daniels, if any of you know him, he'll say, well that takes a tenth out. The square size of that model is 10,000 square miles and then you're trying to downscale it to 50 square miles or whatever and there's a potential lot of error in there. So the other thing that we're doing or we're proposing to do is to do what's called stress testing the system and looking bottom up.  There just have to be whole range of scenarios across a whole wide spectrum of more wet, more dry, those kinds of things and then look at those in terms of how does the system perform in those circumstances and which parts of the system are struggling. If we ended up in, for example, in a pattern where we had the same amount of rainfall but it came in the 2017 winter kind of a strategy where you're just getting pounded by it, that is really hard on water quality aspects. So that's a treatment process needs to be really set up so that it can work better in those conditions. We have a lot of our pipelines in places where landslide risks or land movement, mudslides, those kind of things are a big problem. So those kinds of things stress different parts of the system then, for example, a really warm dry scenario would stress a different part of the system. So the idea is to really try to understand where climate scenarios of different characteristics would stress the system and be in a situation where you're starting to create some signposts out there as we go actually into the future looking at, oh, we're starting to see that kind of thing. Then we know if it goes in that direction we could have these kinds of risks. And so, again, designing in as we do some of the rehabilitation replacement work we're doing, ways to move things out of that right-of-way because that's really a bad right-of-way for that kind of landslide problem and some other right-of-way might be better. Those are the kinds of things we can do and might be informed by the bottom-up strategy. So like the Tate Wells first sea level rise, you would be looking at that from that infrastructure question rather than the climate per se. Yeah. Got it. Great. Thank you. And one of the things I was just going to, I was said to several of you when we talked was that these climate scenarios to do the stress test, I mean, we're obviously focusing on our system, but they're created and we could potentially consider how we stress test other parts of the city's facilities, the flood channel, for example. Smart. Okay. Vice-American. Well, first off, it's a great presentation. I had a question around, I know earlier you'd mentioned when you're pumping surface water into some of these groundwater wells, there's an ability to be able to determine the difference between the sources of water. I'm just curious, is that, are you all using stable isotopes or how does the water department, they're able to kind of determine what source of water they're actually pulling out and how, whether it's mixing or not? Native groundwater has quite different chemistry from surface water, especially when you're putting in a treated drinking water, right? So the mineral content of our surface water is typically way lower in minerals and you wouldn't necessarily look at the dissolved oxygen so much because that's probably gone by then. But native groundwater will have a lot more natural minerals in them, so just that's one thing. We don't need to use anything, but the real different characteristics of the existing water. That's how we do it. Any questions? What do you proceed to? Other commentary by any commissioners? You've been offered one. These folks have been, I think I mentioned to a number of you that these folks have been hearing about this on a quarterly basis in some detail for more up to three and a half years now. So most of them are really up on this. They probably could give this presentation as well as I could. Before you get started, Council Member Carter. I was just wondering about the golf course and we get a drill a well there and can water be stored from the winter for the summer to water the golf course then? I think the main strategy there would be to operate a well there to basically pump water into the pond up there which is the source of where all the irrigation water comes from and it would operate during the irrigation season and wouldn't operate the rest of the time. We hadn't really thought about the awkward storage and recovery there because sometimes when you, the thing about the Belts 12 system and the Belts treatment plan, I don't remember the numbers, eight, nine and 10. There's three wells there. I have a treatment plan on site that if we need to, well obviously chlorine would have to be added to bring the water back into the system but if we need to deal with iron and manganese for example, those treatment plans are already set up to do that and we would be able to do that. So we don't have that kind of facility at the golf course. With respect to UCSC, I know they delayed their, sending their LRDP long range of element plan for a year to the regions. Does that affect our planning at all? Are we waiting for them to finish LRDP and how much they're going to grow? No. The demand forecast we did in 2010 probably included, well after the last LRDP, let's put it that way, included a 349 million gallon per year allocation of water. That was supposed to be used by them by 2020. So they did that 2015 or 2005, and then they were supposed to be at 349 million gallons a year of use by 2020. They're at about half that and they've doubled the student population so their situation looks a lot like ours which is their per capita demand is way lower. So what we did with that 349 million that was already in our demand forecast is we stretched it out. That same number is in our demand forecast now, but it stretched out I think the 2050. So the point I guess I'm making with all of that is there's water built into our flat demand forecast for them to grow, not supporting it or anything, but for them to grow in some fashion and there would be water there in the forecast to meet their needs. That's my problem. So just a quick question about the examples of system reliability benefits of ASR. When we were talking, and I think you've reiterated that the pilot tests for ASR aqua storage in the belt system are using existing infrastructure and so which is why it's a low risk, low-fi approach. And then here it says add, if we were to add wells then we could reduce. I guess just a little bit, it would be interesting or helpful to hear what that might look like. I know that we're talking about projecting out or moving the deadline or the timeline forward, but what is... I'm going to ask Heidi... How kind of infrastructure are we talking about? I'm going to ask Heidi to come up and answer that question because I know she's been looking at that and I think she answered that question last month for the water commission. Good evening. How are you looking about the water department? The phase two work which would install new infrastructure is currently looking at just two additional wells. So like Rosemary said, we're looking at belts 8, 9, 10 and 12 for the low-hanging fruit if you will and then two additional wells over in the Capitola Mall area. We did look at most of the geology between the river and 41st Avenue which is in our service area. We did look going north to see if there was anything up actually in the De La Viega area and the geology there is conducive to the ASR. So we still need to do some groundwater modeling to understand if those six wells will... how much of our gap those six wells would fill so that work is still ongoing. Yeah, and that would be part of this... the plan so you can... when we get to this colored chart you can see that there's some work that would feed into a decision-making so that second part wouldn't really happen until we made this sort of bigger decision in 2022 but we would be developing that along with the Santa Margarita groundwater and recycling options simultaneously to bring all that forward together. I have a quick question and maybe this sort of a broader question but it seems... I'm just curious how common is it for water department, water planning to be incorporating the level of consideration of climate changes as our water department, as you all are... it seems quite cutting edge. In the last half a decade, decade maybe there's a group that's created itself called the Water Utility Climate Alliance. You can find them on the website and really all of the... certainly all the big western water utilities are members of it and they're basically a cooperative where they're working together to learn and understand what's going on with climate in their own situations as well as about other people's situations. They're very sophisticated and I think if you're a groundwater agency you need to understand this but if you're a surface water agency you really need to understand this particularly in a place where we can't depend on the state to do this work and then figure out how to manage all the state water project and the Central Valley project to cover our interest. There's nobody covering our interest but us. So we really do have to understand this and so I wouldn't say it's unique but I would say that perhaps a little bit unique. I think it's great. Do you want to continue? Yeah. Okay. So this part is shorter and I guess basically I want to talk a little bit about the assessment process and the proposed adaptation. I mentioned to... So this is the kind of overview of this part. The change management strategy and the overview of how we developed it and then what the recommended adaptation is. The Water Supply Advisory Committee were a bunch of wise old birds and they understood that we were doing a lot of study and theoretically if you do the study right information is actually produced that might influence what you do next and so they wanted to maintain the commitment of the people and the process that they were creating and the values if you will and so they created a two-part process to allow for changes to the plan that they created and we worked with them to do this because it made a lot of sense to us too. The first one was kind of an adjustment what was called... This is something that we were given authority to manage on our own in collaboration and communication with the Water Commission based on the fact that we needed to do something to keep the plan on track and if there was something that changed that made us want to change the plan that was a bigger deal and they wanted to have it to be a very public process so they laid out a process a three-part process that we would assess we would do an assessment, we would share that assessment with the Water Commission and us sort of collaboratively would come up with a recommendation to either change the plan or go back and keep doing this or bring it to the council and ask the council to adopt a change and update the plan. So that's laid out in this language and that's in your staff report over the last as I guess the big things that I think have really brought us to where we are in recommending this are the near-term demands, what is happening with near-term demands the positive results on the upper storage and recovery the recognition that we have more work to do particularly on the climate change question before we really want to ask the question of what next and the opportunity to leverage the existing infrastructure of the system to get more supply and reliability and so in the spring one of the things we did is we did a much more gruesome and in the weeds and long major sort of comprehensive update of all the work we've done with the with the Water Commission and the former members of the Water Supply Advisory Committee, we invited them all to a workshop and we went through it in very detail and the packet is the packet for that that included eight attachments that went through some of the major areas so in April we did that and then in June we brought the first draft of an assessment, the product that we have to produce if we want to make a change to the Water Commission and had some comments about that we brought the second version of that to the August 26th Water Commission and we had a major climate change workshop at that meeting also that I think really helped us to talk about what we knew and what we didn't know and some things we wanted to explore more and how that would change the dynamic of what we were doing and then finally in October 7th we put together the materials drafts of materials for this meeting and the Water Commission took action to agree to make a recommendation to you to change the plan any Water Commissioners want to comment on this just letting you have your stuff too you know okay so the plan which is still requires a magnifying glass but bigger is this is in front of you and if you look at the kind of the bottom four swim lanes it's the same stuff that is in the earlier plan I have more copies of this if anybody needs one it's the same stuff as in the earlier plan it's sort of modified in terms of the way that the timing of certain things obviously the vertical yellow bar and the red bar the decision process moved out a couple of years the diamonds on this chart are supply increments including a potential supply increment from the belts from ASR as soon as a couple of years out from now should be really a good thing a lot of the continuing work to input information into the decision process on Santa Margarita basin information on recycled water option the timing of this allows whatever we might do in Santa Margarita to emerge out of the groundwater planning work that's going on up there rather than the city packing its little bag and heading up into the valley and saying we're here to help you and we're going to do our project and wouldn't you like to let us and that kind of thing which is probably not that great of an idea it includes that very top line includes information about the related work that's going on particularly related to the two groundwater basins to the urban water management plan update which we talked a little bit about the work that's going on on the water treatment plan which is not the only project that's happening that could influence any of this but it's a big one the modeling and climate analyses far, it's the second one down from the top includes kind of ongoing modeling using both groundwater modeling and confluence modeling that we've talked about and kind of in an iterative process as things develop and then both the additional top down and bottom up climate analyses that would feed into decision-making process in 2022 and then following 2022 these three things that are happening in the bottom three swim lanes that look all the same it's either one of these or some combination of these but this would be the timeline for the implementation so this is the proposed revised water supply work plan that would represent the adaptation and the staff report I'm pretty sure I these are the implications the lay decision additional climate information would be valuable near term ASR treatment improvements being designed in and this is from your staff report which is the summary of the sort of changes including retain and continue etc that you've seen here this is the document that would be that we're asking you to take action on to accept along with that detail I think that's with that thank you so much I just have to say the policy kind of nerdy me the WASAC process model is just extraordinary I just want to say how much I appreciate the foresight that that committee was just taking into consideration as we move forward this is just really exceptional and to get at this place here using that model it's just it's wonderful so with that I'll see if there's any questions Council Member Myers I don't think I have any I think I'll wait come allow other folks to that's a question I will ready to make a motion and when we're ready okay are there any questions from from my colleagues up here question well I guess since we're all here and maybe if there are members of the public who want to speak do that before but if there are members of the water commission who want to say something about your you know the process then I it would you're here so it'd be great to hear from you so we could go here we can go ahead and take public comment and then come back and hear from our commissioners okay if there's members of the community who would like to address this on this item please come forward and you'll have up to two minutes we'll start with you Mike hi I'm Mike Rodkin I was a member of the WASAC committee if I understood what we're being shown here there's high confidence or at least a reasonable level of confidence that if you add additional wells in the belts area or perhaps to La Viega that we don't need anything else in fact that really now you still need back back up of possible recycled water because it might stop raining if that happened none of these things work at all but I'm trying to figure out the level of confidence you have in the in those injection wells in the in the belts area versus supers for example supersizing our treatment plants so we could deal with major storm in one month or something so how confident are we that there's water that it will store the water that can be recovered with these additional wells that's something it's a quantitative issue that I I understand the process we're in but I don't understand what the numbers look like and how confident you are that we because what comes down to is should we be speeding up the look at the recycled water thing because we're not confident that we're going to get off as you said to the future to decide that or these other options you know basically increasing the capacity of the pipes and the treatment plant that's my question Rosemary taking note we'll go ahead and see if you have any response after we hear the rest of the public comment please come forward thank you good evening my name is Becky Steinbruner I am the petitioner and pro per that has taken the legal action against the Soquel project in Soquel Creek Water District for many violations as I see them of the California Environmental Quality Act that that action is still in consideration by Judge Small and I want to point out to you that part of why WASAC in my opinion did what it did to really ensure that the public was involved is because where WASAC came from measure P and Rick Longinati and the DSAL alternatives people were screaming you're not listening to us as the two agencies forged ahead with a project a DSAL project that was very energy intensive and environmentally damaging and the people were saying no no no that's how you got WASAC and that's how you got that good process and that is the flaw with the pure water Soquel the customers, the people in the mid-county have said no no no and the district is forging ahead regardless without giving the people in live vocal voice I want to point out that Locke Lohman is 92% full and I would like to point out that wisely your agency is moving forward to amend the standards of use, water rights that will change very soon so you could give more water to the mid-county area using water from the San Lorenzo River that currently you are restricted to using only the pre 1914 water law north coast streams but you could be giving them water now the north coast streams and using yourself in more minute please actually I didn't receive additional time so we will go ahead and see if any other members of the community you are welcome to submit your comment so we can review them well I did send you two extensive written comments did you receive them thank you as a customer as a person I'm here to beg you to be leaders because Soquel creek water district does not have the will to do so thank you Good evening everyone I'm the Executive Director of the Coastal Watershed Council, and the Coastal Watershed Council is one of the organizations represented on the WASAC. Really short and sweet, I just wanted to come and say that as a WASAC member, it's that I support the recommendation to the staff recommendation and the adaptation as offered. WASAC knew a lot, and we knew we needed to learn a lot more. Still lots to learn. And the way I understand it, and since stepping off of WASAC, I don't have as much of command of the material as I used to when we were really digging into it. But what I have confidence in is that the work that the staff do and the work that the Water Commission is doing and I have confidence in that it's a fact-based recommendation. We knew we didn't know a lot. It's gratifying to see what has been learned. There's a lot of humility that there's still more research to do. I wish it was raining. We can't do anything about that, but we have what we have. With the work that we're doing as an organization, try to, you know, the habitat and water quality work and engaging youth and families and educating them about the river, none of that really is not worth doing if there's not water in the river. So WASAC value is really focused on sharing human, sharing water with a fish and that's consistent with what you have before you. The adaptation is still consistent with that. So that's very reassuring. So in short, just wanted to offer my support for the staff recommendation. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good evening. What are my, my name's Candace from East Morsy. So my understanding is that by making this decision today, delaying the decision, you're only delaying it two years from its ultimate implementation, which would be by 2027. I guess that's a question. The decision on this, the water advisory committee was like ended in 2015. So that like is 12 years. And I remember it being like six to eight years. So I'm just, just feels like it keeps getting pushed out. So I just wanted to point that out. For many of us, I'm one of the people that have just gone down to the bare minimum. I mean, if I were to ask to go down another 15%, I really don't know what I would do because I have reduced my water. I don't water any landscaping, any lawn. Some of my trees have died, a couple of my fruit trees I've lost. I haven't replaced them. Any kind of landscaping is to the minimum as far as any kind of watering. I just barely keep it alive during the summer. Some of my hedges almost died. Finally, we agreed with the neighbors, see they're a fence or heads. So we started watering a little bit, replaced all my appliances, toilets, washing, don't use my dishwasher, do Navy showers every other day. My partner goes to the pool, doesn't shower at the home. Yeah, I mean, what would I do to save water? Beyond what I do right now. And I think a lot of people are in that boat. So, you know, just keep that in mind when you talk about, you know, adding another 10,000 people or 20,000 people, a lot of people in this community are wondering, you know, how are we going to survive? Thank you. I believe you'll be our last speaker. If there's any other members. Okay. Good evening, Scott Graham. There's a lot of different things that could be done to supplement our water. The city owns a large track of land up Zioni Creek where they were going to build a reservoir at one time, put a dam up there, and they could be drilling artesian wells along the hillsides in that land and have a water supply from that. And then with the winter runoff, we could pump some of that water over to the sand pits in Scott's Valley and refill the aquifer that way. The other thing is if the city is digging up the street somewhere, putting in new water mains, they should throw an extra pipe in the ground so that in the future, when there is a reclaimed water system wide, they'll have pipes already existing for that system wide reclaimed water system, which could water landscapes, flush toilets and stuff like that. It isn't completely necessary to use fresh water to flush a toilet.  So anyway, I would hope that you would look at some of these other ideas on how to get more water. And the other thing is that you should contact our state representatives and the governor and tell them to ban fracking in California because fracking destroys the water systems. And even though the Trump administration has opened up California to fracking, let's statewide ban it. Thank you. Seeing no other members of the community who want to address our joint commission and council meeting here today, we'll go ahead and return back. I know there were a couple of questions that were raised. I don't know if you want to speak to those Rosemary. I do want to just sort of really applaud and compliment you. I know you went over the slide, but the social norming shifts that you see here are pretty remarkable in terms of the education and outreach and it was brought up by one of the community members. So just sort of wanted to take note of that. I'll offer your response and then welcome any comments from our commissioners here. Just a couple of things. So with respect to the comment about adding one more ASR well in the Mid County Basin would potentially solve the whole problem. It's potentially solves the whole near term problem. If we end up in a situation where demand ultimately rebounds to some degree, people decide that actually the hedge is worth keeping for example, then we would need to do more. But I think that's the reason we're putting it on the table as something to do sooner is because with the near term demand being what it is, we could have a major impact in the event. We had a 2014 kind of an event again and that would be great to be in a position to say first increment of new supply, news based on storing of water that, of surface water that we have in 60 years, right? So that would be good. With respect to the comment about the opening up the water rights for Soquel, the analysis we did actually already assumed that that was happening, that we could move water from anywhere in the system to the Soquel. So it wasn't constrained by, that part was not constrained by the lack of the Soquel district being in our place of abuse for our San Lorenzo water rights. And then let's see, yes, that's it. That'll do. Okay, thank you very much. Well, I of course welcome any comments from our commissioners or our council at this time. I definitely just want to thank you for your, just your work and your commitment and service to our city and bringing us this far is really extraordinary. Councilor Madges. I just have one more question. I bet all the water commissioners know it already, but I'm looking at the blue to red chart here. And it's not all just social norms, it's a whole lot of equipment changes too that are built into that. Well, of course, some of the things that we've had in place for a long time, the retrofit on resale program has had a dramatic effect over a long period of time. I do think that irrigation practices probably have shifted somewhat dramatically. I remember in 2017, Mike Rodkin used to tell us that he liked to have a garden and grow corn and the good years and he was hoping it for more of those again. And I remember in 2017 when it had been raining, raining, raining, I sent him an email, I said, grow corn, Mike, it's the year. But I do think that a lot of the irrigation practices have really honed in. And one of the things we did in the last rate increase was we put the big irrigators all on water budgets.  You paid a certain amount, but if you exceeded that, then you paid a penalty rate and not penalty rate. So we've done a lot of things in the way that the rates have incentivized efficient use too. So. A lot of things. A lot of things. And so my question, I remember, oh, 10, 15 years ago, we were saying even then we have one of the lowest per capita daily uses in the state. I don't remember what it was then, but this is million gallons a day here. So, what's our residential? It's 48, including indoor and outdoor use. For the system-wide, I think it's about 70. So it's a, it's in number that, of course, we live in a, we live in a, you know, a Mediterranean climate, but generally we usually have kind of wet and dry, what have you. But it's probably one of the lowest, handful of lowest in the states. I think San Francisco might be lower, but then has way fewer patches of ground to irrigate, right? Chair, anything for you? Council Member Brown asked for additional comments and I thought, you know, rather than going through reviewing what Rosemary went through, there were a few other thoughts I had while I was listening to what you had to say. And we have the gift of time here, which is unusual in my experience. And I'm reminded of the old Latin proverb, festo nalante, he's an holy, we have an opportunity to get smarter in a lot of ways. And I'm glad we have the, that we're gonna take advantage of that. Couple little things, the wells, the ASR wells are supply agnostic, as Mike pointed out. Short term, we can take advantage of it with winter flows, longer term, but if those winter flows become attenuated, we can deliver other water there and prep. We'll be able to use them, which is usually beneficial. In the meantime, while we're taking some time here, technology's gonna get better. So if we do end up going with something like recycling, I'm confident that it'll be cheaper, more energy efficient. And more cost effective when and if we do have to do that. I'm also reminded that there are some generational equities in being able to take some time here, as Rosemary pointed out earlier, with respect to the bond issue. If we can delay these decisions or moderate the amount of additional investment we have to make in order to achieve our supply goals, then they're benefit. I've been finally gratified that we did follow the letter in spirit of the WASAC process throughout this plan support. Wonderful points. Any additional comments? Ms. Ryan. Hi. So I had a few points I wanted to bring out. I'm fairly new to the Water Commission. I started earlier this year, but Rosemary's been a very good teacher. We've had a lot on our plate this last year, a lot of opportunities to review this. So for those of you who are kind of new to this, as was I, but I have a few points that I wanted to make too. The first one is that while I do understand that there's a sense of urgency that we are facing that we've created, it's November, it's not raining. There's a real need, I think, that the community feels to see something happen. I think it's really wise to wait until we really have as much information as possible before spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from our ratepayers on a project. We want to be really sure that it's the right course of action and taking these short-term opportunities that have arisen. I think it's really wise. It's the right thing to do, both from a supply standpoint and from a ratepayer standpoint, so that we know that we're taking them into account. Another thing I want to say is that since the WASAC ended in 2015, you cannot go to a regional water-related meeting without seeing a city staff member. They've been fantastic collaborators. Really, at all of the groundwater planning meetings in both Mid County and Santa Margarita, they've been there, they've been active, they've been really collaborative partners, and it's reflected in this, and I think it's important to recognize that they're really talking the talk, walking the walk. They're doing it all, and they're trying to be here, making sure that they're looking at all options and talking to everybody at the same time.  We're not gonna solve this problem. We're going to get us further down the road, and it might be that in the long run, we end up having to do a lot more projects than we're talking about here, but I think this will get us to that point where we can continue moving forward. Can you give me the slide before this one?  So, David first? Thank you. So, point C, looking at the impacts of climate change were the goal of providing the information necessarily necessary to compare the long-term viability of surface water development. That's been our defining thing for the last 10 years. When I got on the water commission, Donna Meyers was the chairperson of the water commission eight years ago, and through all of that, the defining question that has been at the root of our water process for all these years, is our surface water supply sufficient or do we need something else, whether we're storing it in the ground, however we're doing it? And so, to me, the adaptation we're doing now, it's getting down to the real nitty gritty. It's getting to the focus of what we really need to be focusing on. And we should not forget that when we did WASAC, we operated in a vacuum of no capital improvement program. We could just say, let's do this, let's do that. We didn't have to deal with an $85 million project on the Newell Creek Dam and replacement of our underground pipe system that is costing $1,000 a foot. I mean, there's some pretty heavy stuff going on there. And I also think about the fact that we should not lose sight of the impact of fish flows and the concessions we've had to make to the environment because if it wasn't for the fish flows, we probably wouldn't need a project at all. Our surface water really would be sufficient, but the reality is that it's in the drought years when the fish need the water that we need the water. And so that's when we need the project. We don't need it all the time. We need it in the drought years. And those appear to be getting more frequent and of greater duration. That's what climate change has been telling us so far and that's what we're gonna be studying as we go forward. The thing about the modeling which Bruce Jaffe always says and Rosemary always says too, is that the models are always wrong, but they're the best we've got to try and predict the behavior of our system as it meets the conditions. So I look at this adaptation and it's saying, okay, let's do what we know we can do that will work. Let's figure out what we need to do in a really very real and focused way and we'll get there. Which is what was always the WASAC process and has been the water department process and the water consideration process for the last 60 years whether it be the Zionty Reservoir or DSAL or whatever as we've gone through the different incarnations of trying to solve what we knew was the same problem. So I'm glad to see us getting down to it. Good evening. We're all touching on climate change. Climate change can sound sort of nebulous and squishy, especially when we look at multiple models that say something slightly different. In the August meeting, it was sort of brought home for me when one of our experts pointed to a report that says we should expect to be losing coastal redwoods within 20 years due to climate stress. They rely on the same groundwater and fog that we rely on for our water supply. So it's closer than you might think and fish flows. Well, a large portion of our North Coast water is dedicated to fish flows and Department of Fish and Game defines that for us. So in a sense, we are sole source with the Santa Lorenzo River watershed. It's a bit risky and the risks are described in some of our documents. We expand and provide additional storage with ASR that may or may not be enough as we move forward, but it's a good start and we need to get moving. That's pretty much it. Oh, one last item. I'd like to see us moving forward maybe more quickly on some redundancy. We don't really have that choice. We have deferred maintenance for decades on our current water system. And if we want reliability in what we have before we try and expand forward to what we need, we have to spend a lot of money just to upgrade what we have to meet current regulations and to make it solid. So challenges and opportunities. All right, I welcome any other comments, please. One of the things that I'm really grateful for in participating in the commission is the diversity of experience, different perspectives. And it's kind of fun for me working around infrastructure projects to see what a hugely complex project we've undertaken in a relatively small agency and how well we've distinguished ourselves in working throughout this. In your introductory remarks, the WASAC strategy was ambitious. It absolutely was. And it's ambitious because it preserves so many options and I think correctly that we have a lot of options on the table. There are a lot of variables at play and we're trying to keep track of them without just taking them out and freezing them. The DSEL proposal is a very simple proposal, very easy to execute. You do the one thing.  All kinds of side effects, but it's a very simple plan to execute and was maybe not a good plan. And I think we have a very complicated plan. I think everyone's being very patient as we work through some unavoidable aspects of a complicated plan. But I think Doug came up with a statement that's really stuck with me, this idea of the no regrets investment. Seems you find a no regret investment. Something that is obviously a good idea that you should do it no matter what. Like look at one or maybe two more wells in an area where you've already got rights and you can probably find a site. That's very low regret investment.  And then I think your momentum gains. And I think the one thing that we can look forward to as we sit here at the beginning, hoping for things to move more rapidly is that as we put pieces in their place, the other pieces are more obvious where they fit. It's like finishing the big jigsaw puzzle that all of a sudden things look like they make more sense after you've settled down the model. And I'm just, I'm really optimistic. I wanna make sure that people who are gonna new to this and don't touch it every month that I'm eating understand it is extremely complicated for a group of this size to be working through a plan like this. And it's going to get much easier over the next five years. Any other comments? Seeing none, my understanding is you're interested in having us make a motion to move the recommendation. I'll go ahead and see if I can entertain a motion. I'll make a move though. I know you said you were going too early, so. Is that okay? Of course, it's okay. Council Member Meyers. It sounds like we're tracking very well with all the recommendations due to all the amazing and good work and continuing commitment to keep discovering what we can do differently and those tweaks and no regrets. So I'll go ahead and make a motion to approve an adaptation to and also adopt a revised work plan for the November 24th, 2015, City Council approve agreements and recommendations of the Santa Cruz Water Supply Advisory Committee to integrate the new information identified tonight to take advantage of near term low regrets opportunities for supply augmentations specifically with the belts wells. I was outlined in our, in the new work plan to take advantage of near term. Oh, I'm sorry, I said that one already. And finally to change the timeline for decision making about additional source augmentation strategies from 2020 to 2022. Second that. Okay, we have a motion by Council Member Meyers, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously and I appreciate leaving us on a positive note in a place of optimism. Thank you for your time this evening. Thank you for your dedication to our city for this critical resource. We really appreciate your work and good night.


The gameplay is reminiscent of Space Invaders and the aesthetic reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies, so you scroll along the bottom of seven columns shooting aliens as they slowly creep your way to your house. You start with a rifle but eventually can buy more weapons the more you play the game. There's power-ups too like slowing down time. One thing I liked about this game that kept me playing was I wanted to see what the next wave of aliens looked like. I liked the big lumbering guys, but I wish they went a little crazier with this. To go back to Plants vs. Zombies, that's a game that went all out when it came to creative enemies and weapons. They came up with some stuff you just don't think of every day. This game, eh, could have been better. Anyway, you know the saying, it's free for a reason. Well, Get Off My Lawn is ultimately free for a reason, because there's just not much there. I appreciate the little touches of personality here and there, but I didn't think they went far enough. Take the old NES games for example, something like Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. This game is as simple as it gets, Dodge and Punch, just not a lot to work with from a gameplay standpoint.  I guess what I'm saying is that if you're going to do a really straightforward game like this, you really gotta crank up the personality and charm to 11, and really make it memorable, because the gameplay just isn't gonna do that. I do appreciate the Duke Nukem-styled one-liners that the old man says every once in a while. That's kind of what I'm talking about, but he mostly says the same couple lines over and over. Anyway, I just wanted to point out Get Off My Lawn because it's a good, uncomplicated time-killing game, and I certainly appreciate that it's free.