Good evening and welcome to the February 19th meeting of the Soco Creek Water District. Roll call we'll find all of the directors present and our first item on the agenda is a public hearing to consider adoption of water rates and fees and we're going to have an introduction by several staff members and the consultant and then there will be an opportunity to be a public hearing for you all to speak. Can I just get a show of hands of how many people would like to speak? Okay thank you. All right so take it away Ron. Great well thank just real quick before we get started for those of you who would like an opportunity to address the board on this issue we're asking that everybody complete comment cards. Tracy Hart right here has them in her hand if you would like us like to speak and have not filled out a comment card she's happy to grab one and hand it out to you so if you could turn that in for her that would be great. If you have a comment card that you'd like her to pick up just go ahead and raise your hand and she'll be happy to grab it from you. Yes and you and if you have a protest letter that you'd like to turn in yeah. Protest letters can be turned into Mr. Basso or our protest officer Emma Olin and they all need to be turned in by the close of the meeting this evening. Okay great all right thank you. All right I want to thank everybody for coming and expressing your viewpoints tonight. We'll get our get that first one up. I'm gonna give a quick overview our finance and business manager Leslie is gonna give a kind of nuts and bolts for the district and then our consultants are here in the crowd and they're gonna get down into the finer details about how they develop these rates. So who likes rate increases I was gonna pose that as a question but when I was writing it out it's really a statement who likes them nobody likes them I'll even confess when I get my water rate hikes in the in the mail and I get them from another agency I just have this kind of visceral reaction regardless and I know that what they're doing they need the they need the money for the infrastructure I know that but it's just a common thing I think we all experience I was thinking about why you know why and I think it's just we want people to be more efficient and better. So so with that idea next I think we as a society think that way here is the American Society of Civil Engineers report card this is from 2013 but I got a sneak preview of the one being released in March 6th and it's not much better we do a very poor job in the United States California in investing in our in our infrastructure it's a D plus and if you look down there in the bottom right water gets a C now this is on a United States level but California also when it gets rated for water it gets a D for infrastructure for not investing in its infrastructure and I don't know a few years ago they were out in the seascape area our people were and they were digging up some of the water lines this is what your old old water lines look like this is a piece of redwood with wire around it so it'll be in a museum soon so so which continually upgrading to get better to try to do better than a D I think if anybody's kids brought home that report card right there it wouldn't be the proudest moment in our lives so what's the district done how's it approach rates and this is a conceptual model I think it's really kind of the nuts and bolts what I want to share with you tonight I started around 2003 2004 and early on the board had those discussions of we know we have a lot ahead of us we have to supply good quality water and we have a water supply issue see water intrusion to address and that's gonna that's gonna take a major effort so what the board decided back in early 2000 was to do with that blue line does steadily increase rates otherwise they saw they could take that approach of that red line go along for a while and then spike it up and my argument to you is that why we've taken the blue line I would say most agencies have taken the red line and I'm gonna show you why in 2000 you'll see I've seen some signs around and I think they're right probably in around 2015 14 that era early on we had the second highest rates in the state that's because we were doing that early investing of our infrastructure so we could be poised for a project or projects to prevent seawater intrusion so here is a graph of monthly water bill comparison assuming you use the average what people average Lee use six units of water unit of water 748 gallons so a typical resident uses about six units of water per month and you can see along the bottom there there's different water agencies or water purveyors and we're the red one so Central Water District gets the prize for being the least costly scott's valley next city of Watsonville inside the city then outside the city and then just to the left of the red is see if Santa Cruz inside that's their average rate comparison then word the red and then outside the city the city's more than us and it goes up to coast side county water district which is up in Half Moon Bay San Lorenzo pure source which is a small mutual Monterey and Chalk Gulch but for going from 2014 or 13 where we were the second highest in the state this is where we are just locally okay let's let's take the next slide this is off a state database and what this is is in 2015 when our rates were you know probably proportionally higher than they will be oh let me go back one more table I want to own a this is a question that was asked oops that red is with the proposed rates and everybody else existing rates so the red is with the Soquel Creek water districts proposed rates and the blue is all the other agencies existing rates okay so that's locally so the next slide please this is off a state database for agencies 30,000 30 to 50,000 people that they serve and that's right in our wheel house now this isn't rates this is an average customer's bill this is the way this is sorted and you can see so one could argue well that somebody might be using more water and have a a bill similar that's true but regardless this is what they pay and we're below the average in this database and I would argue probably no agency's worked harder to help the customers and the customers have done no have done better than probably any other customers anywhere in the United States on saving water so why we've helped you you come through to bottom line is our water rate average bill is less than than average up there I think that's important because when we think rates or costs I think we automatically we're comparing against something either value or what other a other agencies so to me this is the kind of thing that helps me and I think I've got one more slide yeah so it's not all just about cost to it's about value right if you buy a refrigerator for $100 and it's gonna last a year you're gonna buy one for 200 that last 10 years well I think you're gonna go for the $200 one well what's so Kel Creek water district faces is abnormal relative to most water agencies when we're not only tasked with replant with supplying high quality reliable water to you 365 24 7 that whole bit and good customer service on all fronts we have to fight this beast and this beast is seawater intrusion seawater intrusion is happening the majority of the populated coastal regions of the world this is locally this is the Monterey Bay you see that yellow that's seawater intrusion the lower part is Monterey it's in all the way down to almost Salinas there the upper part is Watsonville it's in three miles inland the red part that's our service area it it's onshore at either end of the district and just about a year ago our district in the mid-county groundwater agency of Santa Cruz had a helicopter and they flew this it was an innovative technology and they found where it's not already unsure it's right offshore it is knocking on our door front doorstep poised to come in and if we let our guard down what's coming probably right as we speak but if we don't not continue us about trying to fight this supplemental supplies conservation well management it will will look like the yellow so what I'm trying to stress here is that we're not just providing water we've got over 80 monitoring wells we've we've done the heavy lift for this community and we should because we use the majority water out of this basin we probably use about 60 percent of the water out of this basin but this board and our staff have been and central's helped also I want to put a shout out to Central Water District but I've really towed the line and trying to figure that situation out define it and fix it and so why our rates are average or below average we've got this on top of it to do so I just wanted to keep what I want you to keep that in mind when you when you speak tonight because I think that's this is this is the kind of stuff that I thought was important for for me to share with you to give the big broad perspective and with that I'll hand it over to you Leslie thank you run so I want to thank Ron for giving us kind of that big picture overview I want to talk to you a little bit about how we wound up where we are right now in terms of the efforts that went into doing this rate study and what those rates are actually to fund one of the big questions we get well is what are our rates funding what do we pay for and here at the district we're committed to providing you high quality drinking water at the turn of a tap 24 hours a day seven days a week we have a 24 seven emergency response team so if you need to call us after hours we're available to meet your needs we provide conservation services we provide rebates to our customers we provide water wise house calls to show you how to conserve water and lower your water bills we generate bills to about 15,800 customers we answer thousands of phone calls a year we repair main leaks and service line leaks we have 173 miles of mains in the ground to serve you with water we rehabilitate wells we have 19 production wells and they periodically need to be rehabilitated to keep them running at peak performance we replace pumps we have about a hundred pumps and they need periodic repair and replacement we recode our tanks on an ongoing maintenance schedule and we have 18 tanks and so they have to be maintained and recoded in order to prevent them from corroding and affecting the quality of your water we need to construct a new tank at quail run in order to provide some resiliency to our system and to be able to move water from service area to service area we're replacing a cast iron main along so kill drive that's been a huge project for us and it's ongoing we have nine treatment plants we have 5,000 valves like I said 15,800 meters and in 2018 we performed 13,000 water quality tests for over 200 constituents just to ensure that you have safe drinking water so that's the work that your rates fund on an ongoing basis one of the other questions we frequently get about this particular rate study is what are we doing in terms of long term water solutions and I've got three slides up here over the past couple of years we've been actively working on about three supply projects we've been working on a stormwater recharge project and that work is ongoing but we have discovered that that is probably not going to be a comprehensive solution to our water needs but it will be part of a water supply portfolio if we can find a prime opportunity for recharge we've been working on water transfers with the city of Santa Cruz and that work is ongoing we've been working cooperatively with them on opening up a pilot intertie and doing some pilot water transfers that relationship is built on trust we have to trust that the agency that we're working with knows what their water supply issues are knows how much water they can provide to us and at what cost we're also working then on the pure water soquel project and that's the project that the board actually approved in December and that is a groundwater replenishment project you use advanced purified water to inject into the groundwater basin and create a barrier against the seawater intrusion that that Ron talked about and there is a sense of urgency here because that seawater intrusion is occurring in our aquifer right now so we've been spending a lot of years I know since I've been with the district we've always been working on supply options and trying to evaluate what's out there and what will work best for our aquifer the name of the game here is resiliency so we're trying to build a resilient aquifer anybody who's investing in their future in terms of investing for retirement investing for to make a return on their investment the key to doing that is actually diversification you have to diversify diversify where you're putting those efforts where you're putting your money and the district and the board has taken the same approach to our long-term water supply options they're looking at all available options and if other options become available they'll probably look at those too but right now our prime candidate is the pure water soquel project so when we formulated this particular rate increase we looked at that project over the long term and built that one into our five year finance plan one of the benefits of doing that is it is a capital project so when you're looking at investing in a water supply solution there's two ways you can go you can invest in something like water transfers water transfers is not a capital solution it's an operating solution so that would involve us paying another agency to transfer water to us there's no way to get grants on that type of solution so there's no way to mitigate the cost to our rate payers there's no way to get long-term financing on a solution like that because there's no asset being created so it's strictly an operating cost that money flows out the door year in and year out an option like pure water soquel is a capital project we have the possibility of getting grants for that project to the tune of about half the cost of the project when we developed our rate study we actually developed it for the full cost of the project assuming no grants the reason we did that is because when you go out for a rate notification you cannot raise rates higher than you have noticed to your customers unless you go back out for a subsequent notice so we included the full cost of the project knowing that that was as high as we could go but if other funding opportunities became available to us in the way of grants that we could ask the board to review our financial situation and adopt rates lower than we've noticed so that's why the full cost of the project was included in the rate study just to give you a little bit of an idea of the effort that went into this particular rate study this was a two year journey we started back in May of 2017 and we formed a water rates advisory committee and that committee was formed of district customers we mailed out notices to all of our district customers and asked for people to volunteer to participate in this committee we thought we were going to pick up about two candidates and we picked up 11 so we expanded the scope of the committee so that all 11 customers that were interested in serving could participate we also had two members of the board of directors on there and then pertinent staff that were working on the rate study as well and the focus of this committee was really to take a look at the rate structure they identified some goals for setting rates those goals were fairness and equity to the customer legal defensibility they needed to be conservation minded encourage us to use that water wisely they needed to be financially sustainable so the district could maintain ongoing operations and they needed to be easy to administer and easy for our customers to understand so those were the goals that we went into this overall rate evaluation thinking about these goals were decided upon not only by the customers that sat on our committee but by the board of directors as well and during that two-year journey we did look at some other rate alternatives and we evaluated we evaluated a rate structure that we called customer select and it was a rate structure that was developed in North Carolina out of UNC Chapel Hill and it had never been tried in California one of the issues that we run into when we're looking at something like this is in California rate setting is governed by a statutory requirement called Proposition 218 and that tells us how we can devise and administer our rates and so in order to come up with a rate structure that was legally defensible we had to look at it under the statutory requirements of Proposition 218 we hired Raftalus financial consultants to assist us in developing rates and they actually worked with us quite a bit on this rate alternative to see if it was viable there are some challenges that we ran into during during this process devising a new rate structure under Proposition 218 is not easy as we neared the point where our board needed to make a decision about which rate structure they wanted us to ultimately pursue we had to take a look at customer select and understand that it had never been tried in California we didn't know how many legal challenges we would get to trying something that new and untested and so we decided that because we were running out of time and we need to really consider some of these other rate goals like like simplicity and administrative ease that the customer select was something that we would continue to evaluate but we probably wouldn't be able to pursue at this time it's at that point that we decided to take a look again at the tiered rate structure in the past we've had a four tiered rate structure we looked at it again and it was decided that we could legally defend a two tiered rate structure so those two tiers represent sustainable beneficial use per household at 5.99 units or about 6 units per household and anything over that actually exceeds our pre-recovery pumping goal for the basin and so it does need to be charged at a higher rate because that's the use that's driving a need for a supplemental supply so that's where we wound up with on the rate evaluation so then once we made those determinations it came time for us to communicate to our customers about the proposed rate increase so on January 2nd we mailed out about 22,000 Prop 218 notices to all of our customers as well as all of the property owners in our district and you guys probably received those in the mail we've communicated with our customers via our website and we have included all of the pertinent information on our website as well as a copy of the Prop 218 notice we have a copy the full copy of the rate study if anybody's interested in seeing how those rates were developed we've also got a rate calculator for our single family residential customers to be able to put in their meter size and their anticipated usage and be able to calculate what the bill would be under the proposed rate the other thing we did is we included it in our news and updates email blasts that went out in February one of the other things then that we wanted to do was we wanted to take a look at the protest letters that we did receive from our customers and we got about 230 roughly 239 and so we looked at each one of those protest letters and we wanted to see if we can come up with some themes that we were seeing recurring in some of those letters and so we did find about four concerns that our customers had one of those concerns were were there cheaper water supply solutions available as opposed to the pure water soquel plan that we did include in the rate study when you're evaluating water supply options especially regional water supply options you have to approach that cooperatively have trust and respect in the other agencies that you work with and so we have worked with the city of Santa Cruz on the water transfer project the information that they provided to us on that project did not lead us to believe that that was going to be a cheaper solution and again it was not a solution that we could get grants on and it was not a solution that we could finance in the long term it would be an ongoing operating cost we also looked at the e-storm water recharge and as I said there are opportunities hopefully for recharge in our area but they're not a comprehensive supply solution there's not enough water to be recharged that would solve our overall water supply problem so we did look at some of these other water supply solutions and we feel that pure water soquel is probably the least expensive option we have available to us especially if we get grants that could cut the cost of the project in half we also looked at an economic study done by an economics professor at UC Santa Cruz the cost of doing no project at all and the cost to our customers in terms of water rates and economic benefit to the community it would be about three times as expensive to do nothing at all so again we felt this project was the project that it was in our customers best interests to continue to pursue one of the other questions we've had from our customers is is there help for low-income customers as I was explaining to you proposition 218 is the statutory requirement that we have to follow when setting our rates what it does not allow us to do is set a rate that has to be subsidized by other ratepayers in the community so if we were to offer a low-income benefit to low-income customers the cost of that would have to be borne by all the other ratepayers because we don't have any other source of revenue and that's against the law under prop 218 so there is a statewide initiative that's happening right now it's called Assembly Bill 401 and it has tasked the State Water Resources Control Board with looking at a low-income rate assistance program that would assist low-income customers if that that's going to be state law once it's enacted and so the water district will be participating in that we don't participate directly it's actually something that's administered by the state but we will be working to make sure our customers know that that opportunity is available to them and it would be available to customers whose household income was 200% or less of the federal poverty level so for a family of four that's going to be about a $50,000 household income if you're less than that then you probably qualify for the state low-income assistance program so we are continuing to monitor that monitor that and as soon as something becomes available we'll make sure that we outreach our customers and let them know it's available one of the other questions we've had is is there something better than a tiered rate structure and we did take a look at that we took a look at it and spent about two years working on it and as I said we developed a customer select plan that we didn't feel was ready for us to roll out at this time we'd like to continue to evaluate it but I don't know if it's ever going to be viable under Prop 218 but we'll certainly continue to look at those options but any rates that you look at have pros and cons and so we did take a look along with our board at all the rate options and the inclining tiered seem to be the least painful and most effective in achieving those rate goals and let me just say so they Leslie can I jump in for just a second so what you see up here are different types of rate structure uniform rate decreasing block rates increasing block rates that's what we were proposing but let me just give you an example uniform rates that was something we considered too so that's just a flat rate for every gallon of water everybody's charged the same amount so that sounds kind of good but when you go to a rate like that what happens the people who can serve and do a good job and don't use much water have to burden the cost of what would be in that second tier so now the lower users would be paying more so I just I share that because every every structure has its tug and pull to it pluses and minuses one of the other questions we've had from our customers are why are the service charges for larger meters increasing so much and I know that we've worked with some of the customers who've called in to try and help them understand what what is going on on this issue we set our service charges based on the hydraulic capacity of the meter and based on the peak peaking behavior of that particular customer class so Sanjay Gower and Kevin Costiak of Raftalus will be going into more details on how all of that was set but when we took a look at that and we used the manufacturer's specifications for the larger ultrasonic meters it did have an impact on meters that are two inches or larger and so we did respond to customers concerns about that we have taken a look at what that means for individual households that are sharing one of these larger meters right now a single family customer that has a separate five eighths inch meter which is our standard size meter pays a service charge of about thirty thirty seven oh six I think is what we're proposing that it go to right now I think they're paying thirty two ninety five for multifamily income or multifamily residential customers we took a look at the household impact of the cost of that larger meter and our multifamily residential customers are still going to be paying an average of around eighteen to twenty seven dollars per service connection which is still about two-thirds of the cost of a single family service charge so I realize that that is a significant increase but it's not out of mind with what our other customers are paying so we did listen we did want to try and address up front some of those concerns that I know were brought up on the protest letters I've got um Sanjay Gower and and Kevin from Raftellus who are going to give us another presentation that's going to go a little bit more in depth into the background of the rates and and how the rates were developed thank you Leslie so okay we'll run the projector for or the screen is that okay you're gonna do the slide or you want me to do a slide uh Leslie can do it if that's better for you or would you like to do it can you can you work it from there yeah I don't want to interrupt your flow did you find it no that's me I think it's the one just to the left of it Sanjay yeah thank you Leslie president board members staff and public I like to present our presentation associated with rate study my apologies that I'm my back to you but as you can see this is how the podium is set up we're gonna be going over this presentation talking about the different steps associated with the rate studies and to talk about the process of doing a rate study so when doing a rate study first there's a few steps that we want to do the first is what we call the policy objectives in the framework as Leslie mentioned we work quite a bit with the advisory group we also work with the board if I recall correctly we've had four board meetings with you those were public meetings where people could be engaged we work with the advisory committee quite a bit too got their input about the policy and sort of the golden objectives of a rate study what do we want to achieve with these rates Leslie outlined the different objectives that we had once we've determined what are the goals and objectives what is the ideal rate structure what would achieve next we do a financial plan financial plan as leslie mentioned is sort of the cash flow of how much cash we need on an annual basis to fund the operating cost of the district to meet reserve targets to meet obligations associated with that we also looked at different cip expenditure levels associated with pure water so cal and the ability of having grants and not having grants we looked at the different scenarios associated with that we actually presented that to the board and got your input associated with that the next step is what we call cost of service or rate design and that's really the allocation of cost as leslie mentioned rates do fall under prop 218 prop 218 basically states that there needs to be a logic and rationality with the rates we need to prove that these rates meet some kind of logical framework that is done through the administrative record that's that report that leslie mentioned that's a publicly available I encourage the public to look at it and glance at it is very tedious my apologies but that's the requirement now with the legal framework associated with rates that we have to show all the different costs the budget and how that flows into the actual rates why the rates are like that we've also looked at different impact associated with the customers we've had a lot of staff discussion we presented that to you also at a different board workshop and at the last step is the rate adoption where we develop the administrative record it's available to the public we do the prop 218 and then today's the public hearing where we receive input from the public too so the legal environment associated with developing are really two folds the first is prop 218 which was a voter initiative the voters approved that there's been court cases that have been going on about water and prop 218 but basically it states that there needs to be a logic and rationality with our rate structure we can't arbitrarily charge people a certain amount we can't unfortunately have policy goals associated with certain disadvantaged communities or individuals and have one rate subsidized another we have to have each of these is a fee for service this is not a tax so since it's a fee for service every individual needs to pay for their fair share and there's needs to be a logic and rationality associated with it in addition to article prop 218 there's also article 10 of the california constitution that talks about beneficial use its date it's in our constitution first second it states that water is should be we should prevent waste it's a beneficial use argument that says that we should you look at water and see what's the highest value what's the most important thing water could be used for and we should dedicate that water for that first so of course that's health and safety and that's indoor needs and then the next is outdoor reasonable outdoor needs and then etc etc so we've taken these two concepts the cost and article 10 the beneficial use argument looking at the circumstances here with the limited amount of groundwater available and develop the rate work or rate structure we believe that meets both of that balancing act so drivers for the rate studies are threefold as mentioned the first challenge is so this is sigma it's called the sustainability groundwater management act this is based from the state that looked at all the different groundwater basins in california as we as we may know there's certain parts of california where we've actually had land fall because of the groundwater being overused so this is a legislation from the state looking asking people to start managing their groundwater basins so the the the district is involved in that with the county looking at that program so that's a one-cost driver and trying to prevent groundwater and seawater intrusion the second is the solution which is a supplemental source which is pure water so cal where we're looking at approximately 90 million dollar capital project associated with that we're also looking at the annual cost the operational cost associated with that we put that in to our long-range financial model and we've also taken into account grants as leslie mentioned we looked at the different scenarios of what could happen what's the best case what's the worst case as mentioned leslie stated these rates need to be what we're looking at is the worst case we're hoping for the best to occur and if that occurs then the board could implement lower rates than that that would be considered today the last one is repair and replacement and this is where ron was talking about sort of the infrastructure the long-term infrastructure needs unfortunately the california united states and california is not doing a great job in maintaining the infrastructure needs for water a lot of infrastructure was built during world war two or during when the clean water act came about when there was federal money available basically that car that we've been driving for 30 or 40 years now is done in the brakes the tires the transmission everything's falling apart and as a community this is one of the challenges that we face is repair and replacement and maintaining our system and unfortunately we can't assume the federal government will come out and help us the financial plan so we've looked at lots of different scenarios associated with the financial plan we took into account debt we've worked with your advisor the engineering firms that you've selected this is the scenario that we've come up with which is basically a nine percent increase in revenue we've also taken to account the amount of debt which is quite a bit 95 million dollars of debt that we're assuming in this scenario now again we're hoping that grants will come in and that we will actually have to issue only half amount of that debt and that will have a significant savings for the district next is some just some visual graphics of the of the financial plan where we're showing the nine percent increases out that's being considered we actually the model does go out more than five years got seven years we also should make sure we want to make meet our covenants the coverage ratio requirement whenever you issue debt there is some obligation the district has we want to make sure you meet those obligation fiduciary responsibilities the bottom is the ending balance of cash flow there's a lot of expenditures and and debt proceeds coming in so you see the ending balancing moving around and that's just the wording of the contract one of the challenges whenever you do large capital projects is that you have to have the money in the bank before you can award the contract so we have to almost occur the money have the money award the contract and start burning it down and spending it one of the things about financial models is that as you go out in the out year especially year six and seven you know you you would want to revisit this and look at this and hopefully we wouldn't have to do those kind of rate increases now years so once we've determined how much revenues we want to collect on an annual basis to fund the solution associated with the seawater intrusion looking at the capital cost the next question then is how do we allocate that cost what's what's a reasonable what's a rational approach given the golden objective that we receive in front from your advisory community so what we do is we call a cost of service where we look at the different costs associated with supply base delivery and meter maintenance base is just sort of the infrastructure needed for winter time the basic of the infrastructure right now then we also look at the infrastructure that's needed for the summertime that's that additional capacity we also look at meter maintenance customer service and then also water reliability we also ask ourselves what makes sense where that cost should be collected on the fixed or variable so as you can see on the bottom we have volumetric we have a fixed charge so what we're saying is that supply base and water reliability that should be a variable cost which makes sense there and then the peaking the facilities that are needed for the summer time meter maintenance customer service at the cost issue of bill having people available to answer phone calls that should be on the fixed charge and those are allocated differently based on customers based on how much they use how much peaking they do or how much additional water they use in the summertime versus the winter there's a lot of numbers here but again we need to show these numbers to show the rationality logic with the rates again the report goes in even more detail but we actually didn't start breaking the cost so we want to collect 21.5 million dollars we identify through the budget working with Leslie and engineering staff to determine the cost component associated with water reliability supply production associated with moving that water out of the ground base delivery the average demand max day max hour that's that peaking I was talking about that tends to be used more in the summer fire protection cost meter maintenance and the billion customer service and we identify those different cost components based on input that we receive one of the challenges is that because of the drought we went through a significant revenue instability so we want and at the same time though by increasing the fixed charge we are very concerned about affordability so we do a slight increase on the fixed charge we're collecting right now 35 percent of it on the fix so we're saying we want to collect 40 percent the peaking characteristics we did look at each of your customer class and asked yourself are they different right now you have different meter charges based on customer class are they similar based on our analysis what we're saying is that irrigation really stand out by itself the other customer class single family multifamily and commercial their characteristics of how much water they use versus the winter and summer are very similar and so their meter charge should be similar irrigation does use a lot more in the summer so they should have a higher charge associated with that so this chart basically shows you the different rate structure as I mentioned right now you currently do have a different meter charge by customer class for single family multifamily commercial commercial and irrigation our recommendation is that single family multifamily and commercial all collapse into one given that there isn't really that much difference in the usage we actually have the billing data of your customers we did analysis associated with that and we actually looked at the patterns between winter and summer to determine that they are similar irrigation did stand out so they should have their own meter charge this chart shows you the current and the proposed with the additional 9 percent revenue that I mentioned as Leslie mentioned earlier we also had a lot of discussion about the meter size and what's the appropriate capacity or how much it should that be so we actually look specifically in your community at your meters and based on what kind of meter capacity they have and based on that input we did it based on that so it's very tailored to your specific needs and your system and the concept here is that even it is it is true that these are significant increases for larger meters the concept is is that those larger meters have the ability to use more water so it's that instantaneous ability even though they may never use it they could use it and I know Leslie's been talking about some programs in a place to help those people if they wanted to downsize their meters the tiered rate structure what we're recommending is a two tiered rate structure we looked at basically well how much water do we have in the pre-recovery goal we identify 2300 acre feet and then we asked ourselves well we have that's a very limited amount of water so what's the best way to allocate that water given article 10 beneficial use argument for health and safety the logic is is that we should give that to every account I mean every household side every household should have some water for their indoor needs that translates to 5.999 I say six here keep the number simple but that basically that's enough for a family of three or four for their indoor needs at least that that people can have that rate as affordable as possible given the circumstance that we are in so we're saying that the tier break point between single family multifamily should be the same multifamily of course would increase as there's number of units increase so if someone had a multifamily complex of 10 units then it would be the first tier would be 59.99 commercial irrigation where we're recommending them to have a uniform rate structure given how different the water use there is and it's really hard to identify what their beneficial use in some sense is water reliability we estimate that cost to be on an annual basis not on total 5.5 million dollars again that cost is to improve the long-term health of the groundwater basin so it's quite clear from a cost of service perspective and again from article 10 that that cost should be on those people who bear that who bear that need and that's those are individuals who are in tier two so that cost is in tier two for commercial and irrigation it's a blended rate a uniform rate so our recommendations to have two tiers for single family multifamily uniform for non-residential which is commercial and irrigation when designing the rates now we ask ourselves what are the costs that we're covering as I mentioned earlier that supply base delivery and water reliability and so now we have again some numbers here but we're showing you the tier definitions the amount of water we anticipate to be sold in the tiers so again this is a very analytical exercise that we do we get your consumption of your customers we look at how much water they use then we ask ourselves well how much if we have these different tier break points would they be using we have that information in here we look at then we allocate the cost the supply cost we allocate the base delivery the water reliability as you notice there's none in tier one it's in tier two tier two has very limited water your community has done a great job in conserving water it's one of the lowest gpcd in you know in california and because of that it there's not much water there but the unit cost has to go goes up significantly and as you can see then but we're recommending is that tier one six thousand forty three cents and tier two would be twenty nine dollars and nineteen cents commercial and irrigation if you notice the supply and base are the same cost the only thing that's different is the reliability and that reliability is spread through all the units so that's why it's four dollars and thirty six cents so residential customers if you use five point nine nine nine or less you're not paying for pure water so okay you're not paying for those costs next one what I want to show you is a comparison between your current rate structure and the proposed this has the current tier definitions as you see you have the current rates you have to propose now this is before the judgment that occurred as we know we we had a judgment so these were the prior the judgment this is the current rate so basically right now with the current judgment you've had tier one and two is basically the same rate at six dollars and ninety cents if you notice the tier that we're proposing six thousand forty three cents so it is slightly it is lower than your current tier and then the tier two of course is higher that's covering the cost of pure water so cal so what we now show you a sort of a visual graphics of where the break even points are as you can see so the blue the teal blue color is your current rate structure the darker blue is the proposed if you use five point nine nine nine or less you're basically paying the same almost unit rate or even less in some point cases associated with it if you go above five point nine nine nine it is more because now you're paying for supplemental supply especially up to fifteen and after that actually pay less associated with this rate structure one of the challenges with cost of service and prop to eighteen is that we have to have a logic and rationality especially and that's a challenge especially with your larger users of water consumption and I'll be talking about a little bit of some ideas that we've talked about in the past about how to deal with those customers so what we've done next is we actually calculate the bill so we've changed the amount of revenue we're collecting on the fixed and variable we've changed the meter ratio we've changed the tier definitions so a lot has changed and of course the question is well what does that mean to me as a customer and your service here and for the board what's happening to generally to most of my customers so we actually calculate the bill for this is only for single family accounts I just want to make sure we're clear about that and we're looking at what was the current bill and under the proposed bill and then do the dollar difference between the two and then how many of those customers see that difference so as you can see over here and look over this slide about 12 percent of the of the bills so again these are not accounts but bills we'll see a decrease in their consumption in this in this proposal around 60 percent we'll see between zero to five dollar increase in their bill and then you can see some individuals they'll see more and there are some customers that will see increase I mean that unfortunately is a zero some game here in the sense that we need to have a logic and rationality we try to look at what's the best compromise given the legal framework and goals and objectives that we're trying to achieve next what we've done is might be easier for some people some for some people are the information they would like to see which is well what if I use a certain amount of water what will my bill be so we're showing you here is two five seven nine and 12 the different you and we show you the current bill the proposed bill the dollar changed and the percent change and as you can see those individuals that use if five units is sort of the sweet spot you will actually see a 47 cents decrease in your bill if you do use two units because of the increase in the fixed charge it does slightly increase to three dollars and 17 cents seven and nine is a more of an increase because now you're paying for water reliability a pure water so cal project and then you've 10 12 you see that increase this represents 94 percent of your customers 94 of your customers and single family live in this space right here now there is a small minority that do live above that this is the remainder and they will see one of the unintended consequences is that is that that these customers will see actually a decrease in their bill we've talked about how people who use this a kind of amount of water given the water limitation of water supply that you have available that prop 218 water rates is not the avenue to deal with these individuals there are other mechanisms that you could potentially look at such as penalties so the other state that's how you would deal with these individuals you can't deal with them with rates but you can deal with them through other sources and other means and that's what I sort of suggest you do to look at we've also looked at private fire so there's two types of fire services that the agency provides one is public fire those are the hydrants that are on the streets the other ones are individual private those are mainly used to help protect property and these are the private fire lines associated that for private protection we show the proposed the current the dollar change and as you can see they are there is a decrease associated with that and there was a forgot about that there was a lot of court ruling and so one of the rate did change slightly in there and that's what you saw right there next I want to talk about emergency rates as we know one of the challenges that we face in the water community is the hydrological ability of water this year we've been blessed it's been lots of rain it's been great in California snow packs amazing while you don't get the snowpack you do get the rain and the groundwater recharge one of the challenges though is is what if 2015 hit again as you recall 2015 was a dry year there was a significantly dry here dry hydrological condition in Santa Cruz county area and I worked with the city of Santa Cruz during that time period and they had to actually allocate water and I know you did the same too so the challenge is is that we don't know what's going to come around the corner this is a great year next year it might not be and that's the sort of the challenges that we live with this climate change environment that we're in right now where the hydrological conditions are swings we have these really highs and lows and because of that what we're recommending is to have emergency rates in place adopted so that you can implement them if they occur hopefully they do not occur so these only occur when emergencies occur so that's a hydrological condition earthquakes you know fire where you have limited sources of water available you would call on these the challenge with the water system as Leslie and Ron mentioned is that you know we're really paying for the infrastructure cost to maintain the system and that's what these emergency rates are for they're really about maintaining the system and going through these challenges that we have so what we looked at is is we looked at the tiered commodity rates we looked at how much reduction would occur where would occur we would also look taken to account the different conservation costs staffing resources that you'll need associated with that we also even took into account the savings that you would have from conservation in the sense of reduced electrical costs and then we have the proposed rates here so these show the different stages you have five stages associated with the adoption the targets they'll go from five to fifty hopefully you'll never have to implement these stages but they're in place just in case we've also looked at the additional conservation costs associated with these stages next is the emergency rates that we were at would ask the board to look at and consider for adoption these are the five stages again these won't be in place unless the board hold a special meeting associated with emergencies that would have to take place you wouldn't have to do another prop to 18 hearing but you would have to hold a public meeting associated with the dot with implementation of our emergency rates so this would be in your back pocket in case if it's needed next thing last is for the board's considerations to evaluate this rates and then to be implemented in March 1st if the board decides to adopt them I don't know if the board has any questions for me at this moment I I do have just a couple of quick points of clarification I included some recommendations in the memo as Sanjay's pointed out we have established our current customer consumption is kind of the baseline for this study we the board can enact a water shortage emergency without having to enact water shortage rates in the past we enacted water shortage rates because of the huge decrease in consumption that we were seeing as a result of the drought emergency and the impact that that was having on our financial sustainability typically emergency rates are enacted either when we incur significantly increased costs as a result of having as a result of some water emergency where we need to bring our customer's water use down and we have to engage in a lot of additional conservation measures that weren't planned for under the existing rates or if we went into a situation where like we did during the drought customer consumption dropped so low that the rates that we had to place weren't able to financially sustain the district with that lower consumption so that's typically when you see a situation where emergency rates are enacted what we're recommending at this point in time is that the board go ahead and enact base rates and drop us out of stage three emergency rates the other consideration that I've put into recommendations in this memo is in the past the board has adopted a rate structure and then every year at the 1st of January we enact the rate increase what we'd like to do under this new structure would be to go ahead and have a have a board memo drafted and brought to the board for consideration so that we can kind of evaluate our financial position each year and you guys can make a decision as to whether or not you feel we need to enact a full rate structure uh adjustment or if we can do something less than that let me we have done it before yes anything else yeah I just wanted to reframe what Leslie just said to paint it one more time because this was a question asked by somebody at a meeting I was at and I thought it was a good question so the rates that are being you know we're in a stage three emergency right now and rightfully so because of the seawater intrusion and the new detection of the right along the coast however what the rates and and we're charging uh stage three but the rates that you have proposed tonight enable you to continue with stage three emergency but not have to charge stage three rate emergency rates so the current the proposed rates will cover the emergency situation and and everything that needs to be done to get us out of it just want to be clear okay any questions from board okay Sunday for now I think we'll thank you very much um so yeah and I'll just say we got 16 cards okay and I think one was noted as not a customer so okay has everybody who would like to speak on this item tonight provided a comment card if you haven't we'd be happy to pass some more around okay so before we open the public hearing I just want to make a couple of notes all of us are customers as well and I'm sure we would rather not have a rate increase but we're all here and committed because we're committed to making the water supply good for the people that are here along after you know we're gone so you know we are just trying to do our best and so as we want we want to hear your story we want to hear what you have to say and we will listen attentively and I'm just going to ask also that you listen to others and and also be respectful in your presentation and try and understand what people are saying okay so we will um I have cards for everyone and what I'll do is I'll I'll call the person out and I'll also give them the name of the next person so that they can be on deck so to speak so we don't um so if we have 16 cards I mean that's I think we can stick with our three-minute limit um not go lower than that so I want you to have an opportunity so the first speaker then would be um Michael Boyd and then Thomas Stumba would be after him hello my name is Michael Boyd and I live at 54 39 Soquel Drive and I'm a customer there um I filed a protest against the service rate and the service charges um basically I'm I'm happy about some of this stuff I'm happy to see you guys are going for the recycled water and I don't see the word um diesel anywhere that makes me happy um I'm a disappointed I feel disappointed that you're continuing to pursue the tiered rates I uh contend that is unconstitutional under Prop 218 the guy seemed to know it um the basic parenthesis premise is the at least what I observed is the service you provide has to be used and usable and what that means is you have to be able to show that it somehow provides an actual measurable service and the cost has to be measurable too and you have to compare the cost to that how the use of the service to the service for example conservation which I can't really see where the how much money you're putting in conservation um that's used but it's not really usable because you don't get any water so how do you measure something that you're not using so the the issue to me in the tiered rate making is it's penalizing the single family residents that are families big families and it's basically discriminating against big families and it's discriminating them for example in in in in comparison to the multifamily residences in both the service rate and the service charge and listening to what your your folks were talking about it seems clear from your own analysis that that's the case and the way to address that I believe is to have a unified rate you guys looked at it and all I heard really from you is bad side effect is the people that conserve it actually cost them a little more than it should but that goes back to conservation conservation doesn't give you usable water it's just the opposite and now we have conservation distance you have other agencies that are set up to deal with that it doesn't mean we shouldn't charge customers for conservation but it's not something you charge through rates there's other ways to charge for that and people can voluntarily pay for stuff you know people I I used to use a lot more water than I did but then I stopped watering my lawn and now my rates are low but when they were not okay I'm done I'm sorry thank you very much thank you sorry we don't have the lights giving a warning but I can't see them all right so next will be next will be Mr. Stumba followed by Monica McGuire we said this thing I'll repeat Thomas Stumba on a resident of Aptos and a customer to quote Elizabeth Warren the Elizabeth the influence of money is everywhere in politics you folks have informed us that you need more money lots of it but your flyer fails to tell us outright the reason why you want so much in the notice the need to develop a supplemental water supply is mentioned directly or indirectly nine times but nowhere do you say that what you are talking about is pure water soquel project they plan to treat sewage water and inject it into the aquifer you have already spent a ton of money on this project and you wish to your wishes to complete it at a cost of millions of dollars more you ought not to be allowed to contaminate the aquifer with sewer water treated or not we don't own it and you are and we are not the only ones who use it we don't need another Flint Michigan here okay please if you could keep that down thank you not needed as there is evidence of the availability of plenty of water without it it is difficult to understand why you cling so tenaciously to this unnecessary project please hang it up or at least put it on hold until it is proven to be necessary thank you thank you next is monica maguire and then after her will be paul ellaric thank you tom i'm monica maguire i've had a business here in this district for a number of years i was a resident i have been an expert on hydration and a health care provider for a long time and i know you've heard from us from me coming to these meetings for a full year that any amount of mistakes in the process that you are pushing for instead of looking at the cheaper safer alternative water transfers is something that is an unnecessary risk and we do not understand why after a year of many of us coming and asking questions we get specious responses and non responses as well as repeatedly having to sit through your hour and a half of other information that tries to supplement your position on this that you need this pure water so cal it is mismanagement that created the salt water intrusion problem it is over pumping rather than going to the marriage made in heaven my favorite analogy as to why we've asked over and over for you to go to santa cruz city and woo them and say we really deeply know that our aquifer needs our perfect match for you instead pushing pure water so cal on us is subjecting us to the myriad amounts of synergistic effects of the pharmaceuticals flushed down santa cruz toilets and into a supply that the new triple treat no pun intended and tried to tell us is absolutely safe synergistic effects as we all know means that pharmaceuticals can combine to create new contaminants we don't know what those new contaminants are because they've never been studied they can't be studied there's too much complexity there we do know about the nitrosamines nitrosamines i'm sorry i'm not sure which the word is that is a problem there are multiple contaminants that you cannot clean with unfortunately michael the same system that is the desalination we are getting a desalination type plant here but it is not capable of fully cleaning the water that synergistic effect has been requested to be addressed over and over and over and you have never addressed it instead you tell us over and over how the idea of the tear structures is actually fair and safe it is not fair i am committed to fairness and more importantly i am committed to the future of this county and all the children not just here but whoever might live here i'm not okay with the potential dangers of going forward with a hundreds of million dollar project that we do not need right now while you have not tested fully what you could have been doing the last 30 years with the equipment in place to do a full water transfer system we are sick of being ignored and we don't need to be sick of your poor management leading to problems with this aquifer thank you okay excuse me your time is up thank you very much i have a number of the forms to turn in because you did not create a form for people to easily get your time is up thank you pass those in that's not right if you only have 16 people speaking thank you with only 16 there's one that i saw mcguire somebody get it you're done the next speaker is paul ellaric i've been done over and over you're never been addressed despite the brown act saying you are supposed to address us when we bring up the same issues over and over excuse me i'm asking all those of you to please speak respectfully um we understand but your time is up and mr ellic is next and after mr ellaric is miss maryland garrett hi my name is paul ellaric i'm an aptox resident and i've been an aptox resident since 1972 or 1970 and i have a long history of working with soak hill creek water district when we moved to aptox there was a big water tank on the hill behind the development and there was a well up there and within a short period of time there was no more water i was surprised to see a big tanker truck come up being a drive about the second day we lived there to refill that tank so the neighbors got together and they said oh why are we doing this we need to contact soak hill creek water district and become a user and that was exactly what happened you know we learned to trust soak hill creek water district we had you know we had meetings with them the neighbors the neighbors did had meetings with them and uh there was a vote i believe and we agreed that we wanted to become part of the soak hill creek water district water is not cheap water is not cheap but you know what we've had good clean water ever since and we're looking forward to having that continue uh i don't know why we're you know arguing about what you know what's going to happen in the future we we know it happened in 2015 when we didn't have any water and that could happen again and it's sort of you know it's sort of a hard sell right now that that you know we've got water coming down the streets but i just wanted to point out i don't i'm not gonna even take three minutes you know we're very satisfied with soak hill creek water district and i would say if we think about what happened during the last election three candidates running for reelection were unanimously reelected and i think that's a vote of confidence from the users of your of your district and i would hope people would you know look at the big picture on this and support the future plans that you people have to give us water in the future thank you thank you and then maryland garrett is next and after this garrett will be jimmy kanazaro excuse me i was listening to kpfa today and they referred to a book that made me think of this district it's called water wars privatization pollution and profit by vanda nashiva there's a lot of profit making in the corporations who are part of this pure i call it water so kill there's no way to remove all the chemicals you just heard vana come acquire and many pharmaceuticals and trace amounts and the synergistic effects this is true have severe biological effects i've cited another book a number of times but to repeat it the book is called toxic sludge is good for you lies damn lies and the public relations industry by john starver and sheldon rampton and shows somebody with a glass of water if it looks pretty green and there's some revealing quotes in there one is says the 20th century is being characterized by three developments of great political importance the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy and one of these corporate propaganda firms berson mars teller state the role of our communication is to manage perceptions which motivates behavior to create business results i think that's what's happened here the perception is that's been very well manipulated is that you can put toxic chemicals into the aquifer and call it pure and isn't pure i am opposed to this project i went to one of your workshops and saw a slide up there that listed looked like about 15 different corporations who have parts in bringing this uh pure um well it's tertiary treated sewage water injected into the aquifer for drinking thank you this is not a good project should be halted thank you miss canna zero will be next excuse me miss canna zero mr canna zero will be next and then after him will be scott brown uh jimmy canna zero aptos customer um i don't know where to really start i've already said some of these things at other meetings but it's basically about the rates leslie and is it san j you spent um a lot of time explaining the rates and everything and went into how much it's going to increase uh five bucks and that kind of thing but you've only you were only talking about year one we've got five years to go and so when i look at this i i don't know why you're ignoring the the other four years of what it's going to do to our rates um the five eighths restricted is going to go up 85 percent five eights regular which is most of us is going to go up 59 percent boy the one inch it goes up to 58 percent 258 percent that's that's quite a steep thing but let's go to the proposed rates first of all on this rate sheet that you sent out to everybody um san jing am i right i'm so sorry if i am if i'm not but this current rate figure a lot of people don't realize that that's not a base rate that is a stage three rate of the 690 and then when you say it's going to go down well now you're comparing a stage three rate going down to a four or 643 to a base rate so that's kind of misleading on your your sheet here but the stage two 497 percent increase three 34 dollars and 33 cents increase by 2023 that's a huge jump and then i think i understood you to say that stage one or tier one is just going to be for the operations and pipes replacing pipes and stuff so and that's where the majority of us are going to be paying well then where's the money going to come for pure water if there's not that many tier two users where do you get the money to pay for that if it's not going to come out of a tier one so i don't know i'm a little confused on that um i think that's basically all that i have but i also wanted to mention that i understand that this water transfer that we've got going there was over a hundred million gallons available to us since december and we only used about 20 percent of it and i'm wondering why why don't we use more of that's available to us thank you mr canizaro uh after scott brown after scott brown will be um mr maxwell uh i've been a customer since uh i was paying one dollar for a unit so it's a little shocking to see uh what Eliza's store but i do want a solvent district and i really really want to hold sea water intrusion in its tracks um i'd like to apologize uh to the young people because i am the reason we are in this situation right now i i've been a water user i've been using more than the sustainable rate and uh what i'm hoping is these rates will get us down to the sustainable rate uh but it is counting on a bit of things to happen and uh i realize we might have to do something else in the future but that that is our most important thing to do and to develop um other resources of course um i've heard some people talk about uh pure water soquel uh on the surface of it i i i generally support it it seems like a good way to reuse water and the uh the the drug issue is a very serious issue uh when my dad died in uh or again a few years ago i asked the hospice nurse what should we do with the uh leftover medicines and she said flush them down the toilet and um even then i knew that was right and uh we did a little research and made a mash and uh just put it in the garbage so uh before the pure water gets closer there just needs to be a public education campaign and i think most people would be receptive to doing some you know drug pickup and and not just flushing it down the toilet and so hopefully the only drug thing would be what is left over after our bodies metabolize the drugs um anyway uh i'll leave after with the minute to go have a good night thank you um after mr maxwell is um becky steinbrenner it's colonel maxwell and i'm a rate payer and i've watched this committee this board of supervisors this board of directors for years now and i've watched the performance or failure of performance of the soquel creek water district i've watched you guys waste part of 17 million dollars on a desal project study that was influenced by mr koker or korker the former santa cruz city water director whose son-in-law is mr dufort interestingly enough speaking of conflicts of interest and mr korker retired early because he was caught taking money from the people who wanted to sell 300 million dollars worth of desal plant unnecessary to this county and these two this district and the city of santa cruz and speaking of the corporate corruption that miss uh that maryland referred to and speaking of the thousand percent accurate comments made by monica maguire fundamentally you guys have failed i helped two of you get elected i regret it you have failed your sworn duties you have failed to ethically behave you have failed to look after the money and resources of the 15 800 customers here and you're proposing 50 to 100 million dollars in debt be shared by 15 000 water district customers and you're proposing this as a consequence of how did we get here we got here is monica reference 30 years of negligence by the board of directors your incumbents and some of you sitting here and your prior members and mr creaky the very corrupt former director here and i don't say things i haven't gotten boxes of evidence to support he pushed us into this ignoring studies worn by stanford professors and others that we were going to deplete the ground water we're going to deplete the aquifers but it was ignored and pushed aside and they hired phony studies some of the former directors sitting up here and mr creaky and we end up with depleting the water and we end up with soquel village being approved by the directors here against the the recommendations of anybody with half a brain and we reckon we also find out that the studies that mr dufort said oh we should we've offset the water for the soquel village not at all total damn fraud like so much of the decision making up here i'd rather be able to compliment you i can't i've watched the evidence it is tragic and this is not should not be called soquel pure water it should be called soquel poop water and it is unsafe and there is an alternative which i've seen for seven years presented here and that's the locker for study of jerry paul engineer jerry paul but you've ignored it and your predecessors the city is ignored it the time has come for a regional takeover by the state of the water resources of this region because none of you nor your staff can be trusted to be competent and honest at looking at the resources here you have been so profligate with the water resources of this count of this region and district you should all be removed for incompetence and apparent corruption and complicity the next speaker will be becky steinbrunner followed by art alfaro thank you becky steinbrunner i'm a resident of aptos and a customer of pure source water that does have an emergency intertide connection with the district i think that all of the customers should give a huge thanks to customer john coal who did his own proper legal work and that's why you had to change your tear structure because he went to court after you brushed him aside and the judge ruled that it is it wasn't illegal to do what you were doing i want to ask you to not approve these rate structures that are based solely to fund pure water so cal which was not at all clearly addressed in any of the information you put out to your rate payers but you have very been very free to announce tonight i have filed legal action against the um many environmental action environmental impact report violations for the pure water so cal and until that case is heard i do not think you should support approving a rate base that is structured solely to support that project i think that the um increase of two and a half million dollars to annual operating costs that this project would bring is irresponsible when there are other systems and water sources available that you are not willing to evaluate and that is part of why i'm bringing action against your district because you did not evaluate them as a no project alternative for the pure water so cal project i want to thank mr coal for again pointing out to you that your rate your rate structuring again penalizes as mr boyd said the single family residences with more than just a couple of people in them that is unfair and does not support the spirit of proposition 218 i want to point out that you can get grants to help santa cruz city work to improve their infrastructure so that the surface water transfers could occur at a larger amount a larger volume you can get grants for those things so don't tell me that there are no grants available for service water transfers i want to say that mr canizaro has rightly pointed out to you that you have been in stage three emergency rates for many years and in my hearing your previous discussions stage three was supposed to be based on water conditions hydrological conditions not on financial situations and that is exactly what you're doing here i think it's illegal i want to say that your 70 million dollar grants that you're hoping to get for pure water so cal are reimbursement grants and you cannot expect to get those reimbursements for eight to ten years i've heard that said here so you moved up your project is time winner project next will be mr alfaro time is up just to get the money time is i and i want to note that mr elaric the father-in-law of dr jaffee did not have the clock turned on until he was nearly he was under three minutes thank you ma'am yeah because again it turned on i kept track of the time so mr alfaro and then following mr alfaro will be chris keys hi my name is art alfaro i'm a resident of a c cliff mobile home park at 2700 marvis to drive uh we're an over we're over 55 senior park that we have about 150 uh residents there and we have 101 homes and we don't like change you know the only time we come out and when there's a proposed changed and we've been working very closely with roi sykes you know we love him because you know we've been doing an excellent job of conserving water i think we've done too good of a job to conserving water uh one of the things that we work very closely is we self manage our park so we don't want to go out and spend $150,000 to get a property management company so we run ourselves we take care of ourselves and we've been doing that very well and we've been working without a budget and we go over our budget every november that what's going to be for the next year we always call roi or the water district a what's going to be a rate for the next year so we can budget it in there last year we budgeted $35,000 uh our our actual was $34,710 so this year when we were budgeting for 2019 uh you guys sat your meet with your staff for coffee we met with your staff we met with v uh at pacific roasters and everything we said what are going to be your increases for 2019 so that way we can put that in our budget she says well this year i really don't know so uh we said really don't know she says no we won't know until january so being what we've had in the past like in uh on may 23rd 2017 or in 2017 the state legislature approved for all garbage companies a 20 percent increased uh they passed it without public notice or voters approval then on may 23rd 2017 the san cruz county supervisors approved a new franchise agreement with green waste uh for county residents and businesses they approved a 10 to 15 increase for 2018 we just got another hit with another 10 to 15 percent increase for 2019 and there's going to be another 10 to 11 percent increase in on june 30th of 2020 so in the last few years just for garbage that's over 50 percent increase so we said okay what's so calcreek gonna do okay well let's our more or can serve as we can control our water usage okay we're not too worried about the rate we're protesting the uh fixed rate okay that that we have no control over okay we said okay it's 490 it was 437 the year before okay let's it seems like it's gonna go up a little bit okay let's be aggressive let's up at 40 percent so we increased it from 490 to 690 so when the rates came out you can see how when we saw the increase from 490 to 1557 dollars that's a 200 percent increase i mean for seniors that have been you know watching their pennies we you know they what did we receive a 2.8 uh thank you cpi but thank you so hopefully we work to get from a four inch to a two inch so we're working with your staff hopefully we can continue that thank you so after mr keys um would be terry thomas hello chris keys uh resident of aptos since 1964 grew up with jim canizaro you know i what ron said i think sorry uh yeah i believe in keeping up in infrastructure absolutely we see it throughout the state it's not being kept up you know when we were growing up they're building roads all over so we need to do that but how far do we go obviously the pipes need to be replaced but um a lot of the folks that i grew up with live here and now we're seniors you know hard to believe but it's true and you know most of us where i live are on social security fixed income and this rate jump for our area to go up 218 percent is out of line ron showed that nice graph nice and steady for the uh the blue line that's a red line we're going from 490 dollars to 15 57 that's 218 percent and also down the road was it four or five years um it's going to be a amount to 349 percent and you ought to reconsider that i appreciate sanje's work and all this figures and presentation but it seems to be a bit like other people said a bit of a smokescreen so i would urge you to reconsider the rates that we're currently 490 dollars and why jump to seniors are we going to get a 218 percent increase in social security thank you for your time thank you mr keys so next is so terry thomas and then charles thomas after that we're we're together okay so i'm gonna just keep reading we have an acre of land so we went to a citizen workshop on the proposed water rate hikes february 12th at the aptos lab library on a fact-finding mission the situation we found that the situation um showed us well researched graphics and saying that the board does not seem interested in pursuing the completion of the water transfer pilot project with santa cruz before embarking on a 90 million dollar plus pure water soak hell planned which was approved in december when everybody was busy why is that the only explanation i read was that santa cruz might potentially charge more for the water is that all well that would mean that they also might potentially charge more for treated wastewater you want them to send our way instead water that will require further treatment at this expensive plant upgrade you want us to pay for with rate hikes and that isn't even saying that the finished product will be free of contaminants bottom line for us is unless you can guarantee that any water you inject into our aquifer is totally pure then you shouldn't even be considering doing it once you contaminate our aquifer there's no going back or fixing it then the value of all life and property around this area goes down to nothing kind of like flint michigan we don't understand why you're not willing to continue to pursue the transfer of runoff um and excess water through the existing pipes from santa cruz of which there seems to be plenty instead of embarking on this highly expensive and not so clean treated water alternative we haven't heard any discussion regarding efforts to petition the state to allow you to draw water from our area creeks either what action have you taken to change the state rules governing water use restrictions in our district who at the state level have you contacted about this what was their response what about adding more retention ponds or seeing if we can pump water from the aquifer to the east near core elitist a barely tapped resource we have been in stage three emergency water rationing since june of 2015 there's no reason for us to believe that this designation will change with this new proposal correct me if i'm wrong the cost to us rate payers will be prohibitive a bill for 12 units in july of 2018 was 181 next july it will be 200 $324 and in 2023 the cost will be 458 average of 250 percent more also you want to impose penalties on high water users define high plus you plan to charge more if we use less a sentinel article dated february 8 states and i quote the church twin lakes could receive a portion of incoming treated water for irrigation not for drinking thank you that's my one well the next person will come so that would be charles thomas that's i'm speaking for him nope we don't know it has to be a different person sorry okay well he can read the rest okay so start here okay charles i'm with her where to know that just start the talk give me in five minutes would you no three minutes so okay so the sentinel article uh february 8 states that the church twin lakes could receive portion of incoming treated water for irrigation not for drinking if you can't drink it shouldn't allow it to be pumped into the aquifer also my understanding is that the saltwater intrusion is occurring mostly in the silver beach area what good will the pumping treated water into the aquifer twin lakes too for them experts say that it takes about a hundred years for water to percolate down into the aquifer so why this rush to approve this pure water soquel so many objections with so many objections and concerns we were given 218 notice in january six weeks before the public hearing on it certainly not enough time for anyone to mobilize 50 plus 50 plus one rate payer to protest the hike who made up that rule what about demanding the rule where 50 percent plus one rate payer should have to be able to approve the hike of the pure water and the pure water soquel proposal what you should do is send out a ballot so everyone affected can vote whether to support this project or the or the water transfer option with a clear explanation of both that would be fair what i also learned at the meeting was that several concerned residents come to the meetings and to your meetings and claim that they are ignored not allowed to speak and or when they do that is uh it's not mentioned in the minutes three public comments were heard the last one well what were those comments what were your responses minutes are supposed to reflect what is transpired at a meeting these people seem to well informed thoughtful and concerned on november 6th the ministry five public comments were heard regarding concerns on cost and services supplemental supplies future district costs water transfers one favorable comment on the reasonableness of the rate plan was elaborated on none of the others were it would appear that you are in interested in and with anyone who would be willing to support your your attitude and your your feelings this is truly a shame as we believe the points of view are legitimate and have value to be addressed especially the one urging you to complete the water transfer pilot project with sand acres before saddling us with pure water soquel the rate hike goes on and on thank you and i have 16 seconds i think if you guys if you guys pollute our aquifers i think maybe legally you could be legally bound and uh criminal charges i would hope so if you screw things up like that okay that's enough thank you sorry i didn't mention the next speaker the next speaker is gary lindstrom and then after mr lindstrom is richard andre hi my name is gary lindstrom resident of aptos um i think it's time that this board start dealing with reality this rate increase these rate increases are not needed because the semi-pure water soquel project is not necessary at this time the water transfer system is up and running and it deserves your undivided attention to promote and expand the system at a significantly lower cost than the semi-pure water project prop 218 or not these increases are not needed at this time because pure water soquel is not needed at this time water is one of the three necessities of life they are food air and water it should not be used as or seen as a commodity on the stock market it is a necessity of life and should be offered to customers at the least possible cost shame on this board and others in the district office for pricing residents out of our area because that is what you will be doing if these rate increases are passed people are living on the edge right now the economy is not good and you start forcing these people that have lived here for a long time out of our area then you lose the character of your community and you've done them harm there's no reason why they should be forced out of this area simply because of water rates if you are willing to drop stage three as you mentioned a little earlier then rates need to be recalculated because from my understanding these new rates are based on the stage three level so if it is then that whole thing needs to be redone i really truly hope that you guys will sit down and use some common sense and get behind the transfer system it is workable it's doable it is very affordable compared to semi-pure water soquel and i just think that you start you need to start listening to the rate payers the well owners and the residents of this community everyone has a straw in that aquifer and it is your responsibility to make sure that nothing happens to it and that it is refilled as quickly as possible we've proven to you that the transfer system can work but you just won't get behind it and push it put your project on hold for two years and let this go forward thank you um mr so i had a card for richard andre richard andre and then after mr andre is john dickinson uh richard andre i'm a customer for less than 40 years i apologize but a lot of water and we raise a big garden we try to the deer are our main enemy with the water districts close right at the board and staff we appreciate uh you know all you do a lot of the information you gave us frankly uh we we don't really think we need but the collective brains experience and abilities here are good even if you screw up a little bit at some times and well however uh we have praise we thank you for service but there are faults that exist let me get this straight first of all you want to pollute my water supply with treated sewage water and then charge me more for the polluted water i use i think that's a stinking bad deal uh there are some i can't cite them i'm sorry but there are some cases of uh systems that have been declared safe in the past and then 10 20 30 years later oh we made a mistake i predict that's what would happen with your impure or poop water uh program uh i'm gonna take one detour right now to the board uh and to the chairman i respect what he's trying to do he's trying to keep us under control uh i taught law of the press for four years and i've been involved in about four major well at least they were seen major at the time to me brown act disputes and one of the questions that was asked is there any problem with an audience getting enthusiastic or a little bit raucous about the speakers no when they get up and they insult uh and threaten the board or something like that that's when they're out of control so if we're a little raucous or some of us are for some of these speakers it's okay uh now as to your uh well let's forget pure water it's an impure uh water transfers please whatever the difficulties and apparently there are some problems getting it done but with all of your brains and your ability you don't want to be like a lot of board members are of a lot of boards they know a lot of technical facts they know a lot of information it's applied by staff members like these but sometimes they sort of get blinders and they don't look at other opportunities maybe you need a minority board member to go out to really pursue that or woo as the word was used here a while ago uh and as to more customers being added and added and added there is a formula thank you mr. johnry kiss him off and then mr. dickinson my name is john dickinson i live in soquel and to quote one of the all-time great movie lines i'm god damn mad i'm not going to take it anymore so what i'm mad about is that most of my life i've paid water bills and most of my life i have not paid enough for water water is the most precious commodity besides air we have but we very very gladly pay a lot more for other commodities like gasoline wine whiskey perfume coca-cola or Pepsi cola please don't interrupt the speakers are you gonna interrupt this fine because the truth is that most people don't quite understand that if we don't charge enough for water we won't have any water i worked on the pure on the not the pure water project i did work on customer select i helped develop that model the real point of customer select was to create a fair rate system that would enable the district to move forward well with pure water i suppose or with water transfer or with whatever with some other system because we do not have a sustainable aquifer i ran into at a social event on saturday night the monterey county man in charge of drinking water quality in monterey county well all by itself that aquifer is shot first of all they've got seawater incursion and second of all i walk into the bathroom at the church we were at and there's a sign on the mirror it says don't drink this water the arsenic levels are too high that could happen here without anybody doing anything and anybody who thinks that the water coming down the sam lorenzo is pure it's full of something else pure and it's not water because that water has to be purified as well it has to be treated it has to be cleansed it has to be detoxified it's not like it's so damn cheap there is no such thing as putting our aquifer on a safe footing that's not going to cost money it's just not there is no such thing the infrastructure required to do any of this stuff is expensive the chemistry required to do it is expensive to develop and it doesn't matter no matter how we do this if we're going to have sustainable water in santa cruz in this district in santa cruz county in general we're going to have to spend some money and to do that we need to raise rates period so i'm god damn it and i'm not going to take it anymore thanks thank you all right um i've got it that takes care of all the people who have submitted cards it's anyone that we missed okay then um i'm going to close the public hearing before you do that ask if there's any more protest please sorry are there any more protest letters this is the last time anybody can submit a protest even though no forms were given okay so i said this is the last time anybody can submit a written protest are there any more okay thank you i don't know thank you thank you sorry no customer all right so um it's been moved and seconded to close the public hearing all in favor hi hi hi closed okay it's motion that's done with the public hearing i wanted to make a couple of comments and i'm going to ask the staff to um so one of the things that people keep bringing up multiple people keep bringing up is why don't we just do the water transfer which is a water transfer from the city of santa cruz and just just once again i made this clear at the last meeting but i want to make clear again this is from this i i realize if that's the letter i think you're gonna read it's actually in the minutes would you like me to pull it up from the last meeting it's okay i mean yeah sure but i'll read it while you're finding that um so just because we keep hearing this and obviously if we had cheaper water um we would go for it but this is from the director of the santa cruz water department rosemary menard and i'm not going to read the whole thing but the the main points here that relate to what you're asking or talking about is i did not say that we would expect to have more water available to transfer in fact i said just the opposite i said that there is not enough surface water to reliably meet both the city of santa cruz's needs and the needs of soco creek um to protect the aquifer from from seawater intrusion i don't recall saying anything at all about the city water being less expensive than the pure water soquel project if it if i did mention cost under no circumstances what i have said that transfer water would be cheaper than pure water soquel because in fact i don't believe that would be the case and i particularly don't believe that would be the case if soquel gets the 50 million dollar grant it is applying for so there are a couple of points this is the department we would have to get the water from they own the water they own the water and that is their statement and i just wanted to get that clear the other thing is um a couple other mentioned um contamination of the of the groundwater so so that is super important to all of us we've gone through a lot of time and looking at at actually scientific data from the water that's been produced from this exact type of project such as the one that's been used in orange county for over 40 years and the real risk is contamination i agree but it's contamination by seawater so um the other thing i wanted to ask maybe staff could address several people from the mobile home park mentioned the idea about helping them with their meters so i just wondered if you had any thoughts on that we actually do have um taj de floris reached out and is speaking with members of the mobile home park hoa and evaluating what options might be available to them okay see if we could have smaller meters they currently run a fire service through that meter i believe okay so there are some options there there are some options but there are some things that would have to probably be changed as well and if you could run if you could just clarify the stage three question yeah so okay so we are currently in stage three have been for about five years roughly right Leslie and that was due to a number of things one we had declared the state declared drought so revenue dropped by about 25 percent two we had seawater intrusion at our along the coast and the board wasn't exactly sure how close it was now we know it's right at the coast so it was probably very prudent to declare that at the time and so we've been that's kind of become your your base rate it's been you've paid that for five years and what this proposed rate does is encapsulate that the cost in the proposed rates allow us to continue with the lower water usage maybe some increase and also keep doing the things we've been doing all the conservation efforts and whatnot to that you would normally do in a state that you do in a stage three because there's a whole host of things as in our urban water management plan the net result is that the proposed rates allow the district board if they wish to move the board with all the actions of stage three curtailment but not in not impose stage three costs on top of that okay thank you and then questions from or statements from board you had something you wanted to say I don't want to pay more money nobody does but the alternative is to do nothing and pollute the aquifer so I take to heart the the comments especially with building the relationship with Santa Cruz because it makes sense to work with your neighbors to solve problems and I've met personally with four council members to discuss the problem and to see how we can work together and I'll continue to to meet with them and others who want to solve the problem and the problem is seawater intrusion and I'm open and I think all the directors and the district are open to receiving as much river water as the city will give us and right now the agreement is for 300 acre feet and it lasts for another year plus and of course we're going to pursue getting more water from them so we're not so far apart we are trying to solve the problem and it costs money I wish it didn't but it does a few things first of all I want to apologize for the extremely weird and difficult process that this has to that to satisfy your opposition to these rates so what everyone who voted for prop 218 stand up and we can take a you know a clock clock shot at you because basically it comes from 218 that the citizens of California voted for so some of you out there voted for it so it's your fault and ours too everyone who voted for it made this process happen the point is that it the point is we have no choice we have to do it this way because the two excuse me the the period for our hearing is always over so there's no more okay thank you so 218 requires us to do it this way I agree it's stupid and it's offensive and it's ponderous and it's difficult to do but that's what we're required to do by the state now let me talk about I mean I think you've already heard this comment from the director of the water district in Santa Cruz the one who would supply us and charges in fact she's charging us already we're paying $300 an acre foot for the water we're getting from Santa Cruz which is double the cost of what we pay to pump it out of the ground so already we're paying a little penalty because of that and prop 218 and we're doing that right now so we're we're bringing their water over right now and we have been since early December so we're doing it right now to test to make sure it works but that cost only applies for this year and next year and in fact they've already been sued by some of their customers because prop 218 as you've heard says you can't charge one person five dollars and another person ten dollars for the same thing and we're getting water a lot cheaper than their customers are paying right now in fact some of the north coast users have sued the city over that fact that they're getting paid they're paying more than we're paying and so that can't continue clearly that can't continue so we would have to pay the same price that the in fact what we'd have to pay you know from those bar graphs there was an inside the city and outside the city rates and outside the city rates was higher than our current our new rates and that's the rate we would have to pay for the water is outside the city because clearly we're outside the city and otherwise you'd be violating prop 218 and any customer in the city could sue the city and they would win because clearly okay clearly they would pay more we may have to remove you from the room excuse me but and you too if the public comment period is done can you please be respectful of the public process and certain people will have to be leave the room if that's if they don't can't be respectful anyone who's telling you that the water is going to be a lot cheaper is is either diluted or lying to you because that's clearly not the case did someone else did someone else have some Carla did you have something to say yeah yeah i i came on the board just as uh microphone i came on the board just as the stage three emergency we declared that that was i actually favored a more i i saw a more severe emergency than stage three because the we just said he's talking about the threat of the seawater intrusion and once you know mr. Ellarick referred to trucking water to fill up a water tank because of the failed well they're failed failed well if that's what we can do we can truck water from they have a pure water project over in Santa Clara county we could get what they'll have plenty of water we could truck that if we do not do anything we are facing some severe issues and the city of Santa Cruz does not has told us and it clearly stated into us that we we will not be there will not be enough water for us to to rely on that project the pure water soquel project could ironically enough make it possible for the water transfers to succeed because it wouldn't be have to be a reliable consistent supply we would have one as a baseline but that is not with this this whole meeting is about this is about the rates to do this and more than one person that the financial analyst mr. son mr sanjay uh and our own finance manager manager said that we have we have to plan conservatively this the rates are based on not getting any grant money if we did water transfers there would be no grant money so these rates would not change especially but in any case prop 218 forbids we'd have to do another 218 process to raise rates but not to lower rates so it's conceivable if plans go accordingly that we would be able to lower rates in response to lower costs so i i appreciate this has been a very complicated i've been working very hard on this for four over four years now and i have a faint understanding of this but i understand how complicated it is i know rosemary i just had an email a copy of it scott said well how could you how could you cut off water they had to cut off water for to to the pilot project the water transfer because they're ironically there's too much water and it spurred spawning in the the coho among the coho salmon so they cut off our water supply that we were depending on for the transfer because they had to protect the fish spawning season so this water managers are practically on call at various times to respond to the needs of the environment and to the customer's needs but this is something that everyone should take in return they shouldn't be yelling that we don't know anything we have studied this for a while and that goes for you too carnal especially voluntarily you know you were in you've been in these meetings you know how complicated this is we just answered a bunch of those questions again excuse me say with you excuse me shows that ladies and gentlemen no more public hearing it's not public hearing a public hearing has been made a little procedure you have oral communication still being heard no no you don't michael you don't know what you're talking about okay sorry it's on items that are not on the agenda that you already spoke on an item on the agenda it's closed we are we are they're getting them right now please be respectful monica please be respectful of everybody's time and they were not honored the way the grant has asked for needs to be honored thank you so you are out of order and talk about what it's on and it probably will come down to you yeah some other people would like to speak thank you so i would like to talk about water quality because that has been brought up a lot um as you know we test our groundwater all the time we over 300 constituents I think we test for all the time and the city of Santa Cruz tests for a lot of things all the time as well um and in particular um there's the set of constituents called CECs contaminant constituents emerging concerns CECs and we know what's in our groundwater and most things are non-detect there are a few things that are in the single digits so you know eight seven six five four three two one kind of like that um and the city's numbers are several of them are in the double digits so 10 20 30 40 50 60 some of the constituents are up in the three digits so 100 200 300 400 and and you might ask why is that uh when I was on the regional board and by the way tom was on the regional board too the regional water quality control board for the state for our district uh we put the the county of Santa Cruz on notice called a total maximum daily load for nitrate that was in the river San Lorenzo river because you go up that river there are thousands of septic systems and the many of them have been built 60 70 years ago are not maintained well so every time they take a pill and flush the toilet whatever they've taken some of it goes into the water and that's where some of the nitrate comes from and that's where all these constituents come from so really you know if you really want pure water safe water secure water you know with nothing in it you want the pure water project because that's that has been treated in fact people from the from the department have come in and said you know if you want pure water out of this out of the river you would have to put a purification project there in fact I would I would say that if we decide to go with the transfer I would like to pay for a purification project because we were we're getting some of those things into our water supply they're they're all below you know the maximum daily load numbers but they're too high for me I would not like to drink them whereas everything everything from the orange county purification project is below detection levels everything and the same is true of the the project right over the hill pure water silicon valley everything is below detection levels they're finishing up the purification project in Monterey pure water Monterey we don't have numbers for it yet do we do we well they have been running pilot and pilots and you know and everything is below detection levels so if you want really water with no constituents no no pharma school who's nothing then either you put a purification project on top of what we're getting from the city sewer system or you put a purification project on the stuff they're pumping out of that river which is sort of untreated sewage water okay any any other we shall give anything same I I didn't have anything to say about that stuff I was going to ask some questions about the go ahead go ahead okay um I I know we got this letter from mr. Cole and I was wondering if has anybody checked his math to make sure he didn't make a mistake I um I was having a hard time following that what mr. Cole um has failed to understand is that the um the tier allocation is based on household not on account okay because that's what I thought when I was looking at it that it looked like it was like one account so he's trying to compare a single family one household account to a multifamily five or six household account and not a not understanding or not accepting the fact that that five or six household account is serving five or six households okay and so that's the tier allocation is per household okay I just wanted to make sure because I was getting kind of tired reading all of this stuff and trying to make sense out of it okay and then my other question was do we have an alternative what one of the things I didn't understand is what is what are the rates if we got the 50 million dollar grant is that somewhere in there I mean I thought we would have heard something about it and have some idea when Raftalus presented back in November they presented under both scenarios and I believe that was a six percent six six six all the way across the board six percent instead of nine percent yeah because when I when I was on this in the sewer district we looked at alternatives I mean we posted one but then we had an alternative saying well if you don't want to do this whole 10 percent this is what the six percent or what the other option might be and if you want to go somewhere in between because we we posted the worst case but we don't have to accept it that's correct correct right and the rates could be prorated based on the grant amount let's sort of speak think about it but lesson yeah but but when making that determination we'll have to review it and look at the timing of any grant disbursements that we might get well the the grant disbursements I mean they don't just give you the money you spend the money you send them a bill to pay you back so what we're looking at here is assuming we're going to start spending the money a certain year right Sanjay and what year is that this year next year this year and that's for the engineering that's for the design part of a design engineering acquisition okay it's all of that okay and some of that's not going to be probably if we start the work do they are is that can that be still paid for with the grant or is it after a certain cutoff date millie does the grant allow us to go retro if like for work being spent today if we get the grant in the future so no it doesn't so we need to look at that for this year so the work we've done now is on the $2 million planning grant that we secured from the state a lot of that work more questions rachel no i mean i'm not going to repeat everything everybody else already said okay first she had more questions i think to clarify i think your question was the grant money in terms of if we go forward with it well if we got the grant and we're moving forward with the engineering it some grants will let you like as of the day of the grant program recoup your money and others don't or they'll say the money that you already spent can count towards your match yes so both so anything after november 4th 2014 is considered eligible for a match and then what is awarded say if we were to receive grant money especially for like the implementation grant it would be when the grant was awarded and then going forward the state water resources control boards reimbursement from what we've learned from the past feasibility study grant and and now as we're going forward with the planning grant once you invoice within three to six months they should be giving a reimbursement check for that what you're invoicing for there is i think a different type of reimbursement program for federal that that could take a while and then because of the title 16 program where you typically apply for your can get up to 20 million dollars but you may be applying for that in several years or or chunks that could take more years but from the prop one i think the invoicing is going to be a lot faster for reimbursement to come through okay can i ask a couple other questions to you i think that the prop one grant that we were invited to submit for the deadline was yesterday the 18th did we indeed submit that the state awarded an extension to all of those who are applying for round two and so that goes on march 4th march 4th okay so soon anyway and i think you've heard from staff some things that they're trying to accelerate the award process so they're talking about maybe spring to award the grants yes okay they are trying to get out of another round of funding and they can't issue out that next round until the first one's award the second round so it means that as early as say june we could start considering reducing the these increases because we might have gotten the the grants then i we're hopeful that the the announcements of awardees would come then and think it would be if if awarded for the district it would be when the board felt they would want to do that because the grant agreement could take a couple months to work out right yes but still it means like this year we would perhaps know that we've got it and could then consider reducing the rates so that many of these rates in the future that people were talking about may never happen as such that is a hopeful situation if we're awarded the grant right i have one question of you we've been talking a lot about the various supplemental supplies the mainly the two that we currently considering but i think also we can considered what happened if we can't get any supplemental supply and i think you ran some numbers about what we might have to do with the rate increase if we don't get any supplemental supplies you have a ballpark of what that would might be i i know that um we did a in-house analysis of what it would be with no project and that would mean that we would need to reduce customer water use to the 2,300 acre feet a year right sustainable pre-recovery pumping goal and that meant um i i believe it was like a 55 percent increase in rates in year one so instead of a nine percent increase it'd be a 55 percent increase right in less water yes that's not to it's palatable is it if that's if we were to not do a project and have to reduce and of course we could get we could get no grants for that i mean it's like you can get a loan for a car because they can repossess the car you can't get a rent alone for buying food for your children because they can't repos it repossess that so it's very similar to that that if we pay money to somebody for something that we get back we get no grants but if we build something then we can get a grant for that correct okay so there was some comments that i heard about the emergency rates so and becky correctly pointed out that that's whether there there's an emergency or not it is based upon cumulative rainfall over a number of years that's one criteria there's several others yeah and um so that process is if my recollection is in the spring is when we determine that right at march uh shelly could address that but it's in the spring we wait for the yeah so i'll go on record that um i support the staff recommendation of not having emergency rates and the reason for that is that we have a direction now where i can see recovery of the basin in a uh time frame that i think is fast enough to um keep the uh seawater where it should be out in the ocean so that but that's premature i want to see what happens doing now and and march but that's the direction i'm leaning right now any other questions any motions i would be glad to make the motion to consider ordinance and fixing rates and charges and fees okay has presented motion number three okay i will second okay um it's an ordinance so we don't need a roll call so all in favor hi opposed okay motion carries um we'll we will i just didn't know if we had to say anything specific about the stage three rates now uh no no no it's in it's right okay i don't know if emma uh the protest officer needs to read out anything about yeah she already did give us the yeah i i can give a little bit more information okay um so of the approximate 15 800 service connections uh 7901 protests would constitute a legal rejection of the proposed increases this is 50 plus one so uh as of 4 p.m today i received 239 protest letters all protests were received were recorded and not all of those were valid um so some of them were missing a couple an apn or something like that but that's the full number okay so of the 239 protests 230 opposed both the water rate and the service charges zero opposed just the service charge nine were opposed to just the water rates and this represents less than 1.5 percent of district customers and then just to know since the start and end of the public hearing i've gotten 16 about 16 additional okay 18 18 thank you for doing that okay so that's been read um also included in the count that um emma provided are some duplicate um protest notices where one apn has received more than one protest okay that's when she said they weren't all valid and i'll i'll just mention that and correct me if i'm wrong but where they did come in like without an apn staff work to put that apn for them so just not to disqualify on a technicality or something yeah thank you all right so this has been one long item two hours and 20 minutes so um we're going to take a five minute break and we will reconvene gentlemen um we're going to reconvene the meeting director lather will be here shortly i assume but we're going to start back it's been 10 minutes um the next item on the agenda is the consent agenda is there anyone who wishes to point anything from consent three point four okay three point four three point four and three point eight and then um i'll make the motion to approve the hold on just like i just wanted to see if anybody in the public had anything they wanted to pull from consent thank you it's a little distracted is um item three point four being pulled yes thank you okay that's okay all right so now i'll make the motion to second why don't we wait till rachel comes back and see if she have wants anything pulled okay well i mean it i don't know we can continue with those two because they're cool okay well let's go ahead and that's fine we don't have to vote on that right now right now three point four then well production reports so i think there's a lot of interesting information conveyed in these reports and one thing is on page 242 of the packet there's a graph that shows the residential gallons per capita per day and then it also shows the monthly production uh percent difference from 2013 so the black line the squiggly line is the monthly production uh percent difference from 2013 in the blue bars or the residential gallons per capita per day and what's interesting there is just how seasonal the the uh the the pattern is with um and it clearly shows that during the winter time it's around uh 40 or 45 sometimes up to 50 gallons per capita per day and then in the summertime it's up to as high as uh 65 or or more and so i find that really interesting i mean that's obviously outdoor water use versus indoor water use and actually and um then on page the page before 241 it shows how per month the production which is related to the residential water use and also to the commercial water use but it shows how it shows that same pattern in terms of the rebound where the rebound is happening is during the months of the year where more outdoor water use is happening so that's in the um May through November sometimes into November and but during the the winter months there's not there's not a rebound from the that you know the 2015 or 2016 low use or there's less of a rebound yeah there's still a rebound a little bit of a rebound so i think that's really instructive and what it what it what i get from that is that people are not using uh as much water as they were pre-drought still during indoors but where where the increase is happening is outdoors and um so people can uh people can decrease their water use and still um and still have um you know there's room for people to still increase if if if less water outdoor water use is used that's that's what i get from it and then i think um the Steinbrenner had a question on that item as well did you have any comment on that yeah um no i your your evaluation is accurate that it looks like the rebound is mostly happening in the in the summer months and uh that graph that you were referring to does also have the running annual average of the gallons per person per capita per day and it's it's but for the past year it's been 53 to 55 okay okay miss Steinbrenner thank you thank you for um pulling this item because i thought it was really in really interesting information too um i was able to actually look at a color version but but i really am grateful for miss olen printing these packets out for me in advance so that i can study them a bit in advance of the meetings here so the the pieces of information that i also thought was interesting was the production and um director jaffy you called attention to um page 241 that's actually the aromas aquifer page 240 is the charisma aquifer and what really caught my interest in attention was how production has pretty much uh steadily declined with a few bumps last year because governor brown declared the drought over but we'll forgive him for that and and i think that that decrease in production and this is from 2010 to 2019 that's that's rather remarkable um but since 2013 uh 13 production has declined every year and then if you go to page 244 which i thought was really interesting because it compares from 1965 to 2018 uh the number of services which has gone upward steadily as we all know and you've got a bunch more here you're gonna probably approve tonight um the production has gone down since 2005 a sharp decline in production so i have to ask you do you really need this pure water soak out project can you uh delay the project for another two years and allow these numbers to play out a bit and to uh work with the city cooperatively to see what they're going to do in 2020 i think you really need to pause here because these figures do not lie and you can have all the helicopters flying over doing snapshot studies but these figures don't lie so thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this thank you um i yes we have another one on this item 3.4 and i'll be briefer than three minutes i've watched jerry paul come in here i've interviewed him i'm looking at his studies for the locofer program i've evaluated them with other experts in water and hydrology i have watched this board be asked and implored to maybe fund 10 or 20 thousand dollars to evaluate the locofer program going back at least five years and maybe seven and this board negligently failed to do any of that the locofer program has a budget estimate 18 to 23 million dollars tops it would provide enough water to have started recharging the aquifers in question long ago and it could still do that so i would urge you to look at that production alternative of 18 to 23 million dollars and by the way it's mainly rainwater derived water and it stores rainwater in the locofer as it's as jerry provides so i'd urge you to do that before you think about spending another dime of other people's money and committing maybe 50 to 100 million dollars in debt to be spread among 15 thousand ratepayers in the so-called water creek district i don't find that responsible so in terms of production you've got an alternative the locofer system so please scoop up some money contact jerry paul and evaluate locofer the next thing to evaluate is the production possibility of consolidation of this district in the city of santa cruz or consolidation regionally for production purposes by the state that would be an efficient intelligent and consistent with the evidence solution thank you all right you had a few comments i know that jerry paul and and friends have presented the aquifer solution to the wasaac the water supply advisory committee the city committee that was putting together a solution he's presented to the water commission i don't know whether he's been presented to the the actual council but i wouldn't be surprised and they have they've taken a few of these ideas and incorporated in their plans but basically they've rejected it over and over and over again so why should we put money into something the city has already rejected because it's the city's water it's the city's project it's the city's supply and so without the city agreeing to want to do it we would you already had to come in the rain no we're not going we're not going to back report excuse me is probably setting the criminal Maxwell do you want to be removed the rainwater is not the aquifer the rainwater the aquifer is rainwater derived not excuse me this is not a response so bruce um can i have to have it we're going to come away we know let's i'd like to make a comment on this as soon as dr daniels is done okay i just um i need to have called there was also a comment about uh you know that these these production numbers and i think the thing we have to remember is that every time someone builds something in our district they have to not only uh offset their usage they have to offset 200 of their usage so actually turns out every time somebody builds something here we save some water now it's not why we do it but we set it up that way so it wouldn't get worse so there was a reason why building might lead to lower production because when it comes online its water use is offset plus some an extra 100 percent is offset so that's part of this whole process and unfortunately we've kind of run out of offsets i mean we're doing this this project right now this um AMI project which i know you uh didn't like uh but you know that's that's giving us another 80 acre feet of offset credits and when that's gone i don't know where we go so we we probably have none after then so that that'll have to stop at that point we'd have to do a you know some kind of a stop of all development moratorium it's called yeah yeah i'll make a couple comments uh number one production has uh steadily uh increased slowly in the last couple of years so the previous comment um from a speaker is incorrect and where you can best see that is actually on the graph on the screen we were at a low in around may 2015 this is percent cutback you can see a slow incline of water uh more water being used shown by um less water being saved that if you do a line through those zigzags you'll see it increasing there the other thing is we're in stage three and we have the water demand offset program uh so we're trying to hold people back in the uh on a state level um when most of the other agencies when they have recently lifted the drought curtailment they went from a 20 water savings to a 0.8 in nine months so they all the conservation savings vanished in nine months and that's because they said you know it rained and the governor declared that off but we've also seen that in the past where it's rebounded very quickly that hasn't been when we've had a stage three but i think it's important to remember that is as we view these numbers and i i just want to give kudos to actually the district conservation staff because if you look at the graph on page 244 and and the leadership from the board that changed around the year 2000 yeah um 2002 and so i mean it even with in the face of you know moderate rise in number of services production went down because our customers did such a good job our our water conservation department did such a good job and and there was leadership to try and get there so yeah you know i i every once in a while there's some good news there we need to celebrate it is and and that's demonstrated i think on page 243 between the separation of the red lines and the i'm gonna call right blue production where the temperature stays up high and what our production used to mimic that the climate right now it's dropped down so yeah good and staff and customers yeah right all right so that was 3.4 um carla you asked for 3.8 uh 3.8 yeah it was the results of the um subcommittee the committee on uh water supply water supply infrastructure and uh taj uh dufour and christine me they presented the some early data on the pilot transfer study uh and i just wanted to pull up the results of that 256 thanks item 3.8 i think yeah page 261 okay so you're looking at uh yeah in terms of the purity of the water there was some interesting early results uh because that whole purpose of this s