Oh boy, I had a feeling that something like this was going to happen eventually. It was just a matter of time. So you know those genetic ancestry services that started popping up like 15 plus years ago that were like, hey, send us your DNA and we'll tell you if you're part African or if you're related to Thomas Jefferson. Spit in this cup and we can tell you that you're 10% Japanese so that you can justify your addiction to foreign children's cartoons. But I don't think any of the people who participated in this New Age genealogy service ever realized that by spitting in that cup and sending it off to some corporation you're trusting those guys to safeguard your genetic material. You know, the first thing that the police look for in some of the worst kinds of cases like assault and murder and break-ins and most other crimes that you'd get a decade or more in jail for.  So this data leak here that various publications are sourcing from was originally posted on breach forums by a user named Gollum. Now, I know some of you are probably wondering, how could that be? How could it be on breach forums since the original breach forums owner, Pom Pom Purin, was arrested by the FBI last year? Well, it turns out that there was another breach forum admins by the name Baphomet who was eventually able to get the forum back up and running again on a new TLD and a new Onion site. Now, this post here actually mentions another post from another database leak site called Hydramarket that has a more detailed thread from what I'm guessing is another hacker that was posting leaked 23andMe data back in August. So it starts off by talking about how 23andMe analyzes your DNA with your saliva and he talks about what's in the data that he possesses. So it's your personal information, family background, ancestry, compound, haplogroup, health traits, surveys, and raw DNA data. So he says that the total size is over 300 terabytes and he sent an email to 23andMe company for informational purposes about security vulnerabilities. But instead of them taking the matter seriously, they asked irrelevant questions. You know, they weren't taking this guy seriously and apparently they tried to learn the vulnerability. Like it kind of sounds like he was trying to get them to pay him a bug bounty, but they were trying to figure out what the bug was and fix it without actually paying any money. And then he goes down to say that the total price for all of the data, like if you wanted, I guess, is 300 terabytes of data, would be $50 million. Data can also be prepared specially based on location and ethnicity. The cost for 1,000, I guess, different people from this database would be 10,000. Now below in this thread, there's some screenshots of what appear to be private information from 23andMe profiles of Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and Ann Wojcinski, the CEO of 23andMe. By the way, those two were husband and wife for almost 10 years. So Google and 23andMe were literally in bed with one another.  But it turns out that these aren't the only Big Tech Ashkenazis that had their information leaked. Another post on breach forums that was referencing Gollum's deleted post was posted, but this time the thread title was DNA data of celebrities, 1 million Ashkenazi repost, which appears to be the same dataset that Gollum posted and this is probably the screenshot that you most likely saw in various news publications if you had heard a little bit about this already. So yeah, it looks like it's been a pretty rough week. I mean, first the data of 1 million Jewish celebrities gets leaked and then the Iron Dome got overwhelmed by rockets and now terrorists are taking up donations in untraceable cryptocurrencies. All of this really has people wondering what the genetic data of 1 million Jewish celebrities is going to be used for. Cause I mean, it's been posted and reposted. It's been floating around on various forums on the internet. Well, I don't suppose that all 1 million of them are celebrities. I guess whoever packaged up this data, it almost seems like they were filtering for Ashkenazi Jews and they filled, figured that that was the most effective way to get a really long list of Hollywood celebrities and other big tech celebrities, which I guess kind of makes sense. I mean, that is a good way to unironically get a lot of them into a database. Now, a lot of people are wondering how this data was actually obtained from 23 and May because 23 and May are not exactly claiming that they got hacked. So if we take a look at their blog post about the incident, the language here is very, very interesting. So they say we recently learned that certain 23 and May customer profile information that they opted into sharing through our DNA relatives feature was compiled from individual 23andMe.com accounts without the user's authorization.  I'm sure that they were pushing you. Oh, yeah, use this so you can see your heck in DNA relative so that you can bother random people on the other side of the planet that your great, great, great, great grandmother banged and didn't tell you about it. After learning of suspicious activity, we immediately began an investigation. Well, we are continuing to investigate this matter. We believe threat actors were able to access certain accounts and instances where users recycled login credentials. That is user names and passwords that were used on 23andMe.com were the same as those used on other websites that had been previously hacked.  But 23andMe is ultimately at fault for this. One, they're at fault for not forcing users to better secure their data with things like two-factor authentication or making the users change their passwords every quarter or every six months. I mean, that's a pretty common thing in a lot of corporations and there's even some banks that do that. Or they could possibly even just check if the password that the user wants to use when they're signing up for the service was in a known database leak. I mean, there's actually a way to hook that into various forums and stuff. It's available in WordPress, so I'm sure that it's an open source thing that you can easily add to any type of online service. And that would have mitigated the threat depending on how recently this database or how fresh or how available it is that was used for the credential stuffing attack was. You know, by gaining access to one poorly secured account, you're then able to see at least somewhat limited private information on all of that person's family members. Because, you know, these family members automatically get linked up. Or I guess they only get linked up when you opt in to sharing through our DNA relatives feature, which again, I'm sure this is something that they push on all their users and probably tell you, oh yeah, there's not even really a point in using the service without enabling DNA relatives.  You had two-factor authentication. You created a password with a password manager. But your Aunt Helen, who used Google Play cards to pay off her taxes when an Indian guy from the IRS called her up last year, she's obviously going to have her account pwned and your information is at least partially going to get leaked along with it. So, the only way that I can really see to mitigate a threat like this is for you to have not been using 23andMe in the first place. But, you know, even then, it depends on what the goal is of this database. Because, you know, that kind of raises some red flags since there's people that are really kind of zooming in on the like 1 million plus Jewish people or whatever. Like, if the goal is to track down the people in these databases and track down their families and do something to them, it doesn't matter if you didn't use 23andMe or Facebook or anything else. You could be a complete ghost on social media, but Aunt Helen's mistake could still lead to somebody tracking you down depending on the PII that they collected. I mean, if they figured out what town she's in and, you know, you live right down the street from her, that could be some really bad news. So, if your loved ones were using this 23andMe service, let them know about this data incident, especially since 23andMe is seeming to really downplay it both on their blog and on social media. Let them know that this service has been breached. They should probably start watching their backs a bit and start doing some more research on practicing good opsec in order to avoid being parts of leaks like this in the future.


Okay, I've got my watch just 3 o'clock. Let's go ahead and call the February 22nd 2021 Water Board meeting to order. Heather, can you start with the roll call? Sure. Todd Williams. Here. Allison Gould. Here. Kathy Peterson. Here. Scott Holwick. Here. Roger Lang. Here. Ken Houston. Here. Nelson Tipton. Here. Wes Lowry. Here. Kevin Bowden. Here. Heather McIntyre is here. Jason Elkins. Here. And Council Member Martin is just coming in. So, Chair, we have a quorum. Okay. Thank you, Heather. Next item is the approval of the previous month's minutes. Does anybody have any questions, comments on the meeting minutes? If not, we need a motion to approve the January 25th, 2021 meeting minutes. So, Roger, with the motion, is there a second? Second. All right. Kathy did the second. Any further comments? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Meeting minutes are approved. Next item, item four is the water status report. Nelson. Yeah, Todd, thank you. I'll go ahead and do that. So, not a whole lot to give. Pretty, pretty similar in the winter months. But I'll do the standard stuff. So, the flow of the St. Brain Creek at Lyons at 7 a.m. today was 7.68 CFS. The 124-year historic average is 14.25 CFS for this date. The call on the St. Brain Creek is Highland Lake. Admin number is 897 with a priority date of 531-1874. The call on the main stem of the South Platte that's impacting District 5 is Pruitt Reservoir, which is Admin number 22059 with a priority date of 525-1910. Ralph Price Reservoir at Butten Rock Reserve is currently full and spilling due to the outlet repairs that are planned for that. And those repairs are anticipated to be completed sometime in March of next month. And Jason can go into more detail if he wants to, but I'm not sure if he's... Jason Elkins is currently working on that on that project. Union Reservoir is at 19.4 feet, which 28 feet is full. So it's down at approximately 5500 acre feet and currently released in 9.5 CFS. So, for today's snowpack, I just looked it up before we... I got on the South Platte Basin is currently at 92% of normal. And the upper Colorado is currently at 88%. And Wes will go into more detail on the drought and water supply update. That's all I have, Todd. Okay, thanks, Nelson. Does anybody have any questions, comments for Nelson? Roger? Nelson, how often did they measure the snowpack? How often? Monthly? Well, you know, the physical, you know, Ken and Wes can chime in, but the physical readings, I think are done monthly. They actually physically go out there. They take their snowmobiles out there and there's no shoeing out there. And they take the snow sample that way. I think that's done monthly. And then they have actual snow information sites that electronically are given in the reading. And that's how they update it on more of like every few days. Is that correct, Wes and Ken? That's correct. But that number then you just gave us for snowpack and that's as of what? Just a few days ago? As of today, as of this morning. Oh, really? Okay. Well, when I first actually sapped it in, when I first pulled it up this morning, I think Wes also helped with it. It was that it's 1% less for each one of the sites. And since with our current, our just that last snowstorm that we had it, it raised it up a percent. Okay. Okay, thank you. For each basin, the South Platte and the Colorado Bulls were increased 1% from this morning, actually. All right, thanks. Any other questions of Nelson? All right, I'm not seeing any. With that, we'll keep moving on. Item five is public invited to be heard in special presentations. Heather was there as of before the meeting. There was no public invited to be heard. Is that still the case? That's correct. We don't have anyone today. Okay. And no special presentations? We have none. Okay. Great. Thank you, Ken. Any item six, any agenda revisions or submission of documents? We have none. Okay. Item seven, development activity. There is, in my right, there's no development activity for consideration today. That's correct. None for this month. I believe we'll have a couple for next month. Okay. Thanks, Wes. Moving right along, 8A is an agreement between the city of Longmont, East Tree Creek, Water District, Rapo County, Water Authority, and United Water, a water exchange agreement. Nelson, are you taking this? Yeah, I'll take this one. So as you indicated, Todd, the item in front of the water board is we've been doing it annually for the last five years. We started back in several years. Back in 2015 is when we started the first one. And it's a raw water exchange agreement between East Tree Creek, Rapaho Water. I'm abbreviating in United Water. And so it's considered an IGA. And Water Board action would be review and make recommendations to city council. And it's scheduled for city council on March 30th of 2021. We have regular session for that night. So I included it in your packet a copy of the, and I'm just going to call it IGA, a copy of the IGA. And then also the resolution. We actually had that completed through the city attorney's office already. So that's good. So under the existing municipal code, raw water supplies with other governmental agencies and special districts are considered intergovernmental agreements, IGA's. So the basis of the IGA is to exchange water of equal value. So water for water. And East Tree Creek, Rapaho and United will use its fully consumable, decreed water to meet Longmont Union Reservoir change case. It's 87 CW 222. And it's the Bijou ditch loss component that they're going to meet. And typically the ditch loss is due in July and August of each year. So it'll be July of 2021 and August of 2021. And then Longmont will use its fully decreed water to meet East Cherry Creek, Rapaho and United's winter return. Well, actually winter replacement obligations. And typically that's period we from October to March 33rd. So it'll be October of this year 2021 to March of 2022. And so actually for this year, since it is so dry, I wanted to make a comment that hopefully we can get some water underneath Union Reservoir's decree. So we have to store actual Union Reservoir decree water, and then to generate a replacement obligation, which the Bijou ditch loss is a component of it. There's two components, the return flow obligation and then the ditch loss component. And during actual the last couple of years, it's been pretty dry come July and August. And so in order to help us get Longmont's ditch loss for the Bijou down there. So we've been, they actually can get it easier. They don't have to go travel it all the way down through the South Platte to get to Bijou Headgate, drop it in through third decrees, the water rights right there at Lower Latham's measurement. And so that helps out a lot. So this year if it continues to be dry, that'll be helpful for us. But it's been working out really well and they provide a schedule for Longmont to make for their obligations. They provide it well in advance and they lay it out. If they have any changes, they notify us. So they've been a good client to work with. So is there any questions on just the basis of how it works? So it is water for water. Any questions, Allison? Yeah, Allison, go ahead. Thank you, Nelson. How much water has been exchanged over the course of this agreement? So as I indicated, it's different every year. So it's all based on how much we actually end up in the Longmont's account. So there's several different individual shareholders that have the individual accounts. Longmont's one of them. We are the larger space in that in Union Reservoir. And so each year it varies of how much we actually get of that senior decree in there that generates replacement obligations. But we maxed it out. So we go up to 600 acre feet because we haven't seen the ditch loss for just, and this is just Bijou, there's also return flows for Union, Lorelatham, and Bijou. There's three entities that are part of the GW222. So does that answer your question, Allison? So it varies year to year. Oh, okay. So is it 600 every year? Well, it's up to. It's up to. So it can be a couple hundred acre feet to 500 acre feet. But we put 600 so it doesn't exceed that. And then if they need additional water from us, then if they request over and above the 600, we have to approve that if we want to do that. And vice versa for Longmont if we need over 600 acre feet. But right now we have it up to 600 acre feet. Because you're kind of actually guessing, you're kind of trying to project, you don't know what it's going to be until because the storage period, Allison, actually ends on June 30th. So we can, we have the ability to store all the way up into June 30th. And then we generate the replacement obligation. Generates Bijou's ditch loss. And sorry, Ken, go ahead.  Yeah, Allison, if I could just add real briefly, really the amount that exchange is based upon how much water we can store under the union decree for our purposes. Once we've stored that water in Union Reservoir, it generates that obligation to everywhere. But in particular, the one that's of interest to us is the Bijou ditch. So a good example would be, you know, we store and generate a 200 acre foot obligation to the Bijou ditch. We have to get that water down to them. In a year like this, it's very difficult to do that. So this gives, this gives us the opportunity to have that water delivered right above the Bijou ditch. In fact, literally, the water that they are delivering has to go past the Bijou headgate. They have to send it down to a senior appropriator. So it allows them to divert it. And then in exchange, we have water up here that we can deliver quite easily. So it's really a win-win for both of us. But yeah, the short answer is usually it's around two to 300 acre feet, four to 500 when we store a lot of water in Union. And we certainly are hoping we're storing at least 5,000 acre feet in Union this year because we're down that far. So it'll be a little bit bigger this year because of how much we need to store this year. But two benefits we have to remember. One is the water that we have to get down to the Bijou headgate, that's mostly important to us. That happens. The second is we're not having to release this water in the summer when we normally would have to release it in June and July. Instead, we're releasing it the next winter. So our recreational program at Union Reservoir benefits from higher water levels in the summer. And then we release in the winter. And if I may one follow-up question, I was just wondering what the figures looked like as far as transit loss was saved. So typically, I don't have the numbers off top of my head, but I'll explain something before we did this agreement prior to 2015. So we'd have to kind of work with the state and we'd slug it. And then they charge, you know, a half percent per mile. And I'd have to pull up to the decree to get an exact how many miles it is. But I think it's 35 total to get to the Bijou. But don't quote me on that. But I think I'm close. I think it's 35 miles. I'll get all the way down to Bijou headgate and a half percent per mile. That's quite a bit. And then we have to slug it. In order to get it down there, you can have to slug it. So we let it out of Union at a pretty high amount. So you add that transit loss to it. And then, so you go, like Ken said, say you're using 200, 300 acre feet, then you're adding it to that amount. So you can definitely save it a good percent. It's helpful. And plus the coordination alone is quite, is quite the effort. You got to work with the other ditch companies and especially Bijou and the state and to get that all, all organized. And then also you, you know, the company itself release. So it's very helpful. Any other questions for Nelson on the proposed agreement? If not, we need a, I guess the recommendation would be from the water board to the city council to approve the IGA. Yeah, correct. Does someone want to make that motion? Mr. Chair, I'd make that motion. This is Scott. Okay. Scott Holwick made the motion. Is there a second? All second. Okay. Kathy seconded the motion. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Motion carries. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it. Thanks, Nelson. All right. We're on to the items from the staff. The first is 9A, which is a when you get firming project update, Ken. Thank you, Chairman. Just a fairly brief update this month. I think all the water board is aware that there was an appeal filed for the federal case against the permit issuance. And so we're off on that. Typically those appeals take around a year, but it could be a little less or it could be a lot more.  But we certainly hope that sooner than later that that'll get done. The result of that action is that both Longmont was prepared and ready to start the process of selling bonds, as well as the project participants who were doing a pooled bond were ready to start that. Both of those processes of course have stopped. The pooled financing proponents are still preparing their official statement. I know how much work it takes for Longmont to put an official statement together. So it's almost staggering what it takes that many participants to get that big of an official statement together. So that will continue. It's expected that, you know, it won't happen quite as fast, but it's expected that will continue in the next three or four months to try to get that official statement and get ready to issue that bond. Then the participants, project participants will have to decide, you know, what do we do? Do we go forward? You know, the most likely we will not be going forward until the end of the appeal period. Technically, the project can start and can move forward because there was not a motion to enjoin the project from being constructed, just a motion to appeal some of the ruling on the permit. So the permit is valid and there is some small preparatory work going on. An example is that getting electricity into the construction site from the local provider, which is Puder Valley REA, that works ongoing because you got to have that. The U.S., the United States WAPA, Western Area Power Administration, one of the first things that needed to happen, their main transmission line that delivers power from the CBT system down south, including Tulongmut, goes right through the middle of the Chimney Hollow Valley. So that power line needs to be relocated. After the permit was issued and the ruling in favor of the permit, the WAPA was ready to go, and so they launched right away and started the relocation of those power poles. That work is continuing and I would expect to be done fairly soon. So hopefully that's positive. That'll be out of the way. So when the project does start, it'll be one less thing. So there is a little bit of work going on, but as far as kicking off the main project, that's going to wait. The project participants will probably have a much more informed update in your March meeting because the project participants will have that conversation at the March participants meeting about how they want to react to the appeal, and again, I say most likely it'll become, we will not move forward issuing a contract, but until then. Once it costs us, it will cost a significant amount of money each month to postpone for approximately another year. We don't know what that is. We do know the numbers we've got right now had a May start of construction, so we know what it is to tell May, but to postpone it for approximately another month, that conversation and negotiation will start with a contractor and should hopefully have that information before too long. Certainly want to keep that going and want to keep that contractor engaged. The final thing is just to give you a quick heads up, probably at the March meeting, so when we entered into the allotment contracts last fall, it was expected that we would about now, fairly soon, be making for a long amount of $49 million payment. The other participants, their proportionate shares, that the money for the project would come in within the next month or three. That's obviously not going to happen now, but the project still has considerable ongoing costs. Many of the environmental mitigation costs were triggered by issuance of the permit, and so those things are going on, and that activity is happening. We've not pulled back on the Colorado River Connectivity Channel yet. That may still have to happen. We would hope it wouldn't, but there's some costs there that if we keep going with that project, you'll continue to have costs there. The reason we aren't stopping that right now is because there's a good portion of the funding for that project was a grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. That grant had a deadline that expired and got renewed, got extended, and is yet to expire. If we were to postpone the project, we'd lose a third the funding of the project, so it's critical to move that forward. Also, if this delay postpones it too long, you could lose one of the real benefits to the environment on the West Slope is that connectivity channel. How that happens, I guess for what I'm trying to tell you is that there are ongoing costs that will need to be paid, and so the project Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District Sub-District will come back to the participants to ask for a partial, our alignment contract doesn't allow for payment for just part of the project. It contemplated payment for the whole project, so we'll be coming back probably in March or April, probably March, to amend the contract to allow us to pay for the first probably around $10 million, and long months will of course be $75.90 of that $10 million, that's for the whole project, to allow us to pay earlier than for the whole project for that amount. Right now, it's not contemplated that that will increase the total amount that we'll pay, that that will come out of contingency funding, and some of it like the connectivity channel, and a lot of the environmental mitigation work was already contemplated and is already funded. So right now, we don't know once the negotiations with the contractor are done, then we'll know if the total project might have to go up a little bit, but we don't know that yet, we just know that right now we need to get some of the 49 million long month contracted for about a million of that would come from us, and we need to get that amount of money up to Northern sooner than we would for the rest of it. The rest of it will come at a later date, which again is not determined, so just wanted to give you that heads up that that'll be coming next month. And then one real quick update similar to windy gap is that Northern has been very proactively and hard at work on the fire recovery efforts for the West Slope from the East Troublesome Fire. Right now, they're working at infrastructure protection, i.e., looking at Willow Creek Reservoir impacts to it, Grand B, they're looking at some debris booms, both around the Adams Tunnel in Latt, a little bit of some possible debris booms in Shadow Mountain, and then in Willow Creek, and then we're also going to be having some conversations about how to operate the project, though that's yet to come, but just real briefly to let you know Northern is working very hard at looking at the recovery efforts that need to happen on the West Slope and working hand in hand with Grand County, because Grand County just doesn't have the wherewithal to deal with the severity and the full scope, they're looking at a fairly large emergency watershed protection grant, which requires 25% match with Grand County and as well as other things that can be done on the West Slope. So still a long ways to go on that, but they are working on that and operationally it will change a little bit what happens with the CBT system. Everybody's looking as hard as they can to try to protect our water supplies, West Slope water supplies, as much as we can. So that's all I had, Mr. Chairman, if you'd be happy to answer any questions if there are any. I think Marcia has her virtual hand up, so did you have a question Marcia? Yes, I do. Thanks Todd. I just wanted to know after I put my hand up Ken said it's on the order of a million dollars for transitional funding since the start of the project is delayed again, and it's going to come to the water board next month. Do you have any expectation that it'll be any less than the month or a few weeks after that that it comes before the council? Or what should I tell people to expect? Well, the earliest we'd be able to get it is the I think it's around the 30th of March. It more than likely will be in April, and that depends on whether any decisions are made at the March Windy Gap participants meeting. If though that the participants have to make their decision on whether to go forward right away, which then if they don't make that in March, then they'll make it in April and it'll be a month after that. But yeah, I would expect it wouldn't be it would not surprise me that that decision will be made at the March participants meeting, which would then mean the March water board meeting and either the last regular meeting in March for council or the first regular meeting in April for council. I don't know. Yeah. We'd have a contract that I need to get through our legal department to review and give them sufficient time. Right. And that's pretty much as fast as it could happen, right? That's as fast as it could happen. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. Any other questions for Ken on the Windy Gap update? I'm not seeing any. Okay. Thank you, Ken. Next item is 9B, the monthly legislative report. Looks like you're up again, Ken. Yes. Since the legislature recessed and just recently sat again, they have introduced a couple water bills, and we will get those water bills to you to review. But it's we haven't had time to even really hard to look at them ourselves, as well as because everything got loaded on the legislature all at once. I'm thinking that they're not going to be able to move too quickly. The one bill that I did want to highlight not because it's ready to review or even have any input, but it's a I believe it's a bill that has a lot of people looking at it from both sides and and does impact long months. So I wanted to give you heads up and we'll bring it to the March Water Board meeting. Probably will be asking for a recommendation at that point. But basically, it's what what is for lack of a better term. It's called the turnback bill. More recently in the last few years, there's kind of been a push on some water users, but also at the state level to see more language in water rights decrees that prevent turnback of water on water that's changed out of a ditch, but then not used out of the ditch by the shareholders that move it to not allow that to be turned back into the ditch and used by the other shareholders. And there's a whole bunch of levels of conversation around that. The first one is so just generally, you know, when we transfer water out of a ditch, we're transferring our proportionate share of the ditch. And then when we transfer it, there's a whole bunch of controls on what we can do. One of them is we can't go beyond the historical use of the water. So we are left with in the decree, we're given very specific volumetric limits, limits on times when we can divert when we can't divert all kinds of limits that protect both the creek and the other water users in the ditch. So in the past, when in the past when when you use that water outside the ditch, then the remaining shareholders got to use that portion that wasn't changed. But in the past, many times, say Longmont would has decides, oh, we don't want to use the Longmont supply ditch this month because we have other water rights we're going to use. Then that water could be used by the other shareholders because it wasn't being used for the change operation. So there and there's a couple things that of concern that's happened. One is there's a concern that if we meet our volumetric limit and then it goes back in the ditch and others use it, is that an injury because you've expanded the use of that water right? That's one issue. And the courts have been just recently had a court case that allowed that specifically said that can't happen once you've reached a volumetric limit. A more concern is what happens when we don't, when the changed water right doesn't use its its full allotment but hasn't met its volumetric limit. Do you want to cut back on the other shareholders ability to use it? And the theory is that generally in a ditch, irrigation ditch, the decree is pulled and then especially many ditches you, one third of the shareholders are used all the decree and then it'll go to the next third and then the next third because there isn't enough water to give every single shareholder a proportionate share. And so that's kind of a rotating basis. Many ditches do and you got to do that to make the ditch work. And so the courts have kind of held that if the ditch and it's a real fact specific thing, the ditches. So there's a lot of unknowns right now, that whole area of turn back and what can turn back when you can't turn back. Quite honestly, a lot of long much decrees. Once we pull the water out, it can't go back in anyway. So it's not quite as big a deal for long month because of a lot of our decrees. We have to say at the start of the year, we're going to either allow this to be used for irrigation or we're going to allow it to be used for change use, but we can't go back and forth. But on the other hand, some of our ditches, we use some of the changed water outside the ditch and we use some of the changed water left in the ditch, say to irrigate a city park. So then we want to make sure that we can irrigate the city park. So there's a lot of, this is an issue I think has enormous potential to take a long time to figure out. And I'm really not sure where this bill's going to go. I can tell you right now it the Colorado Water Conservation Board's State Affairs Committee, which does look at a lot of the water bills so that they can be worked out kind of the technical details can be worked out. They are currently meeting. They met last week and changed a lot of the language from the bill that you're looking at right now. They changed some of that language and they're meeting again this week. I think Wednesday or Thursday and it'll change a little bit more.  And still got to get a sponsor in the Senate, but it's a it's a big deal. I think in my mind it's one of the bigger issues in front of the legislature in terms of water rights. And I hope everybody that looks at it can, I hope we get it right. It's going to take a little bit effort and the courts right now the courts are going to are having to come up with their decisions because there isn't a lot of legislative guidance. And I'm sure there's a lot of people out there understand even a lot better than I do. But I wanted to give you that heads up that this is probably one that we're going to be looking at pretty hard and trying to figure out what what best to do with it. So I'll leave it at that. I don't know that I'd be able to answer a lot of questions on it because there's still a so a lot of unanswered questions but I'm happy to answer any that I might be able to. Alison. Yeah, thanks, Ken. I was just wondering if there'd been any discussions among other municipalities on this bill? And if anybody taking a position at this point? There there will be. Most municipalities are still looking at it. And I've I've talked with a couple of my compatriots but I don't have anything from any of the other participants yet. It's it's entirely possible that it might it'll probably be brought up at the windy at the windy gap participants meeting where a lot of the municipal entities sit. And a lot of times that's where I can get kind of some input from other cities. So if I do get some input from those cities then or any other time, yeah, I'll pass that on to the board as well. But I don't have any right now. Just I guess one update on that I know the northern district you know is monitoring that as well. And I think the point is is just as Ken said it's kind of in flux so waiting to get maybe more clarity on the wording of the proposed bill before anybody can take a stance on it. But anyway, northerns looking at it pretty hard as well as you can imagine. So any other questions comments for Ken? I don't see any Ken is that the so is that the only one you wanted to bring up with regards to the legislative report? Okay. Yeah, that's that's the only one we've really had time. I knew how big that one was. So I wanted to make sure we took a look at it. But the others we haven't had time to review. Okay, go ahead. Scott, you had some. Yeah, sorry, Todd, I'm not sure where this best fits on the agenda, but it derives from legislation that was passed several years ago and I just thought I'd ask Ken if he has any information on this topic. It has to do with the revision of the 811 program. And that revision that was legislatively approved went into effect January 1st. And that does affect infrastructure that's underground and the need to the owners of property with underground infrastructure needing to do a certain number of things in order to be in compliance with the statute. Ken, I have had some conversations on behalf of some ditch company clients with the city of Boulder and the city of Boulder is investigating potentially taking charge of all of the locates for underground infrastructure in public right of ways within the city limits. And I just don't know if Longmont has a program that it's looking at thinking about or has been in consultation with other municipalities that would be similar or how the city is approaching 811 locates within its city jurisdiction. Yeah, that's a great question, Scott. We have done some locates within the city limits on in real select cases on some of the ditches specifically I think Longmont supply and a couple others. Quite honestly, unfortunately, a lot of the ditch, a lot of the private ditch companies facilities are not locatable. And so we're having conversations amongst the local ditch companies in Longmont. We don't think we haven't been able to work out a locate service internal to the city yet. I would certainly hope that we can work something out in that arena. We have informed the companies of the pretty significant penalty if you don't play that game. A lot of people don't. It's like a $50,000 fine if you don't play the game. And that comes as a shock to many of the ditch companies, but it's the legislation that was passed. Ironically, I know of a private HOA that has some raw water irrigation in its subdivision when I live in and I've told them twice it's the size of that fine and I can't get it through them. So it's a real unfunded mandate out there that that is hitting everybody. I agree with Scott. We're trying to figure out with the ditch companies. For one thing that most of the ditch companies have part-time ditch riders, so you don't even have anybody to locate it. And we're even considered things as far as saying, can we go back to the legislature and say if it's a road culvert and the contractor can look on one side of the road and see it and look on the other side of the road and see it, why do you have to locate it? But you do. And so, yeah, we're looking at everything from possibly doing permanent marking of some of the ditches. That doesn't help the private HOAs. It's amazing how many HOAs out there have some infrastructure buried underground. I don't think, you know, the folks that wrote that bill thought about that, but it's a big deal. So yeah, I apologize, Scott. We don't have any answer yet, but we are looking at that. And I don't know, I'd even like Kevin throw in anything more. He's been helping us look at that quite a bit too. But yeah, we're still working on that one. Yeah, Scott. We're a few of the ditch companies are looking at getting a private locating service to do their locates. So I was working with the Denial of Taylor today, trying to get it. There's a contract with a private locating service up and running. So, you know, short of that, the problem we have, like Ken said, is there's just, you know, the ditch riders work only part-time, part of the year. And the 811 system requires somebody to be available 24-7. So that's why we kind of went with a private locating service. We're going to try it with a milled itch. That one's, there's a pretty extensive amount of underground infrastructure with a milled itch. I'm going to try it with that one and then kind of move on from there. Well, Kevin, if you wouldn't mind keeping us posted. I have ditch company clients similarly looking at private services as a way of at least limiting the potential liability. Certainly, there'll be a higher cost and that's hard to swallow for relatively lean operations that ditch companies generally run. But I do know that, like I said, Boulder is contemplating something. I'm told Lafayette has something similar, where at least within the city limits, there's some assistance that potentially is forthcoming. And I'm not asking for it. I'm just curious if you guys come to that conclusion or if you're talking about municipalities, that would be nice to know. The one thing that's obvious is that because it started January 1st, I doubt that anybody's got any invoices yet to give them any sticker shock, frankly, at the cost of locates. I'm going to be interested in how this unrolls because I think, Ken, your suggestion that corrective legislation is perhaps in something on the horizon. I've talked with several groups about looking at something in 2022 because I don't think 2021, we have enough data to really prove a point. But I think 2022 will be ripe for that. And I just wanted to make sure we collaboratively thought about that because I think there's a lot of dormant issues that will arise that weren't intended by the bill. Thanks for your time. I appreciate that. And Scott, I just got one comment to make. Kevin and I, on the boards that we serve on, most of them we have been bringing it up because it's annual meeting time right now, January, February, March. And so we've been bringing it up at most of the meetings. Roger, did you have a question or comment? Yeah. Scott, did you mention the city of Boulder's applying on doing all locates under their jurisdiction like power and telecommunication locates or how far are they looking at going? And that's a good question, Roger. I'm not sure I know the answer. I was having a conversation with one of the city attorneys about the ability for the city or the city's desire potentially to at least help ditch companies. And similar to Longmont, they sit on a lot of boards. They own a lot of ditch shares with ditch companies that exist within the city boundaries. So they were only looking at those infrastructural elements that were within city right of ways. So it was fairly limited. But I don't know what the scope of that was if it was solely ditch infrastructure, whether that dealt with other utilities as well. I just don't know. I can try to find out and circle back, Roger. I just, I don't have any better information at this point. I think that would be a real bad decision to mess with something that works well now, particularly power locates and telecommunication. Why would you, you know, I just don't understand why would you try and fix something that's not broken? So I was just kind of curious. And maybe they're not planning on going that direction. I'm not sure they are. Like I said, it was specifically in the context of ditch infrastructure. And again, as Ken mentioned, yeah, if you can see a culvert on both sides of a, you know, a covered road, shouldn't have to go out and locate it necessarily. But most of the power companies and the telecom companies have people 24 seven available. Ditch companies just don't. And frankly, they don't have any budget for the increased expenditure of doing that. I mean, if you don't narrow your buffer on the locates, you're looking at a fairly big amount of locates that aren't anywhere near your ditch, but you get called on anyways and have to be responsive to and have to be responsive to almost immediately. It's a pretty draconian bill on that element. So all right. Thank you. And in practice, we find basically the call out service, they're not going to put themselves at risk at all. So it's practically, if the call for locates within the same quarter section, it might be a couple thousand feet away, you'll still get called. And you still got to pay for that locate. And it adds up pretty quickly. It's a lot of locates real quick. One nice thing about their new system is they are accepting our GIS shapefiles so we can actually send them the actual map of the ditch. And then they're saying they're their callouts are within 40 feet, but we'll see how that actually plays out. That would help. Okay. Any other questions, comments? All right, we'll keep moving on. The next items is the water resource engineering projects update and Jason, are you out there? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Hey, everybody, it's Jason Elkins. Just wanted to give you a quick update on a couple of our capital projects. As you might recall, Button Rock Outlet has been torn apart for the better part of a couple months now, getting repaired. We're actually starting assembly of the gate today and installation of the gate begins tomorrow. So I went down to CoBlocko on Friday and did a final inspection of all the gate components and the coatings and everything to make sure it was ready for assembly. And so now AMS is starting to assemble it in their yard. And then they're going to transport that up there via trailer and start assembly tomorrow. So right now we're scheduled to have the outlet back in operation by March 5th. And right now I don't foresee any issues to delay that. But if something comes up, I'll be sure to update the board. But as of right now, we're expecting the first week of March to have it back into service. The South St. Vrain Pipeline, as you also might recall, we're installing a pump station that will connect the South St. Vrain Pipeline into the North St. Vrain Pipeline. And we have Burns McDonald, who is doing the design on that. And so we've completed our 30% design and we've actually submitted an RFP for the actual pump station, the purchase of the equipment. Just to remind the board that we're using leftover FEMA PAP funding from the 2013 flood recovery projects. We have about $900,000. And so we've asked FEMA, can we use that money to purchase equipment? And so the purchase of this pump station, we did open up bids. I can't disclose who the lowest bidder is right now because we're still vetting them. But we're going to be able to purchase all that equipment with the available, the FEMA PAP funds. So right now we're looking really good. We're planning on having the pump station should be fully constructed by the end of the year and hopefully within operating within the first quarter of next year. And that will be dependent on a lot of things. We might get the pump station done before we get the South St. Vrain Pipeline rehab project done. I don't think that'll be the case, but you know, can't turn the pump station on if we can't get water to the pump station. And that's really it. Does anybody have any specific questions? Any questions for Jason? I am not seeing any. Thank you for the update, Jason. I guess one question. So you guys are using temporary pumps on the button rock dam to pump water out. Is that correct in the interim? And I assume you have those. I think Ken was saying you had enough buffer in that that that'll allow for that March 5th time frame. Is that right? Yeah. So we originally was just allowing it to naturally spill over the spillway. And so just whatever the in stream flows was, was what was going over. But because Northern had to make repairs and basically turn off one of our water supplies, we had to install some pumps to make up for that loss. And so we installed two pumps and pumped 15 CFS over the spillway. And we had to do that for three whole days. And then we turned one of the pumps off, and then we turned the other pump down to about four CFS so that the in stream flows could then slowly refill the reservoir and then naturally start spilling over. And so now it's back to spilling over as it was before Northern turned the water back on. We're back in, you know, that full running at full capacity and the pumps have been demobilized. One thing to note, I am writing an SOP on on the pumping for for emergencies like this, just so for future reference, we have some documentation that shows how it was done. Great. Thanks, Jason. Any other questions, comments? I don't see any. Okay, we'll keep moving on. Next item is 9d is the button rock preserve management plan update. Is Danielle going to give us updates? She wasn't able to make it today, Mr. Chair. So I'll go ahead and just give you a quick update. That project is still continuing. We were not able to get enough of the work done to bring that project forward in the early spring this year. So it'll be a little bit later in probably into summer before we bring that that report that that master plan before you. One reason we wanted to bring it up today was just to kind of give you a heads up. We there there had been talk about possibly as part of that process, looking at eliminating fishing permits in button rock and just allowed to be the same as the stream above and below just you'd fish in it with a state fishing license only wasn't we've not been able to get enough directed input to move that one forward. And actually we weren't able to get it in time to get it in the state's fishing brochure. So the 21 fishing brochure is already out saying you got to have permits and button rock this year. So we've we are going to go ahead and continue this summer to have fishing permits. But we will come before the board and ask that question probably late spring early summer about the future of that permit program, whether to keep it or eliminate it. But it won't it won't be for this summer. So mostly that's probably the biggest thing we wanted to do is let the board know that we'll continue with the fishing permit program as we've had it for the last 25 years for at least this summer. And then we'll explore that in that master planning effort later this spring and summer. Thank you. Okay, any questions? Okay, thank you, Ken. Next, Wes, you're going to give the monthly water supply update. Yes, Mr. Chair. So this month, I just wanted to highlight a few of the changes on our water supply and drought indicators and go over a couple graphs. Next month, we will because we're going to be returning in a relatively shorter period of time in three weeks. That will be when we really kind of have some real strong meat in what we're talking about. But nonetheless, a couple things I wanted to mention at the beginning, and Nelson has already touched on a few of those. The as we look at some of our water supply and drought indicators, flows are pretty much staying consistent throughout the wintertime. The local select storage is near average, a little bit below average, but near average, we were actually, and I was in a part of a meeting with a number of entities stretching from Pueblo down to or all the way up to Fort Collins. And it's a fairly common situation for most of us of the water providers and cities in that we're all right now feeling like we've got good storage. They're slightly below average, but municipalities and water providers oftentimes will take a more conservative approach and what they believe their their needs are going to be. And that's certainly the case with Longmont. What in our select storage, we find that we have more storage up high. Some of that was a function of the Button Rock outlet work project we had going on that Jason just spoke to. So Button Rock is full, although Union is down more and Pleasant Valley is down a little bit. I think we're at about 40% full, but we're still anticipating that that'll be near full by the runoff. Our trans basin storages haven't changed since the last time we spoke and really won't until Northern speaks to the supplemental quota that they'll put out in in April or May. And then South Platte water snowpack. Nelson mentioned that they were that we were at about 92%. If you actually look down towards the kind of more St. Barain specific, we're a little bit weaker on our snowpack. Just kind of looking at a few of the sites that are more specific to our drainage probably puts us closer to about 80% right now. With the Colorado, although it's at about 88%, if you looked at the Windy Gap storage, kind of the Willow Creek area, it's closer to 96%. So we're kind of paying attention to that. And so Heather, if you wanted to jump to page 30 for us, what you'll see there is some of the specific elevations have been bringing that to you the last several months. This just kind of shows everyone once again that our total in the district in our storage is at 71%. And normally it's probably in the mid 70s to upper 70s, but a bulk of that is coming through the Highland system. And there'll be the ones that are always down there about 50% on their system. So nothing real surprising there. And then if we wanted Heather to jump down to page 38, I just wanted to kind of go over this is a part of a graph on page actually 39. I'm sorry Heather. It's kind of a difficult one to read. You can kind of find it in your packet. But this is one that we pay attention to. You know, you'll have to bear in mind that this was as of February 1. But it is the most recent one we have through NRCS that they've given us. And what it's telling us is that I guess it actually be the next next page forward for long, but I'm sorry, Heather. Thank you that we're probably looking at about as of February 1, they're predicting about a 70% of average runoff for Lions, which goes hand in hand with the snowpack. February 1 snow, we had a lower snowpack. Now we're in the upper 80s. So I'm guessing depending on what happens in the next week that when we get the March 1st reading, we'll find that bumped back up to maybe those around 80 to 85%. So we'll report that next month to the board. On page 42, what I wanted to highlight on these graphs, South Platte, you can see we're kind of tracking a long average, albeit below average. But what you really see is, and it's more often than not, we'll have a a snow event, maybe sometime mid December into December that gives us a bump. Then we've more frequently seen it towards February where you get that bump and then again mid March. And so it's what it begins to show us is that even though we are currently in the South Platte basin, right around eight to nine inches where our normal peak would be at about 15 inches. So we're about halfway there. This last bit of snowpack that we get often comes in the form of one or two snow events, those wet snow events in the spring. And so we're all crossing our fingers and open that we will see those. And so between that graph and the last graph on the following page for the Colorado River, you find how significant some of those storms can be. You'll see those sharp increases in different time periods where it's made those jumps. So again, we'll be coming in front of the board on the 15th of March. And at that time, I think we're going to have, we'll be able to have a much more in depth conversation about where we set. I'd say right now though, we're, we're optimistically hopeful that we're going to have a hopefully a decent runoff. Another thing that was discussed in this meeting that I had with some of these other entities. And it seems to be fairly statewide is the recognition for the low soil moisture and how it's probably take a above average snowpack to yield an average runoff. And so I think that's true with us as well. So we'll just have to stay tuned. So at that, I'll be happy to answer any questions that the board may have. Are there any questions for Wes on his report? Wes, I do have one question. You had mentioned in your write up that the Pleasant Valley Reservoir were just saying if it doesn't fill, there may be a limited water supply under the rough and ready system. In particular, I guess what I'm curious about is you've got the U Creek Golf Course, the rough and ready Park, Stephen Day Park and spring Gulch. Number two, what would the city do in terms of irrigation supply? If you don't have enough water out of Pleasant Valley to irrigate, would they reduce their demand per se? Or is there other supplies that you would then supply? I'm just kind of curious what the plan would be since I got brought up in the write up. Yeah. So for a lot of those parks, golf courses, green spaces, east of town, we really think about them being irrigated with three sources, the rough and ready and that direct flow component. So depending upon the runoff regime, we'll find out how long that stays in priority to irrigate under that. After that goes out of priority, we would then jump to Pleasant Valley. And then if and when the Pleasant Valley decree is no longer to yield enough for that water, Longmont would likely dedicate some of its CVT supplies to those purposes. So the simple answer is we'd probably supplement it with CVT. We have our high mountain dam decrees that are eligible to be stored in Pleasant Valley. So depending upon the call in the river, when the runoff occurs, we may be able to put those in there to help fill up our part of the Pleasant Valley reservoir that we would need for the city purposes. There's a number of different factors that'll be involved, but I think where Longmont would likely and that would kind of depend also upon the quota declaration from Northern. If our first priority will be to be providing and meeting the needs of our domestic users or treated water users. And to the extent that we feel comfortable that we can do that, then we would free up probably those CVT supplies as needed. But if it was very dry and Pleasant Valley was down, they would have to further reduce what they normally would do. And one last thing to remember is that Longmont's use under that reservoir is a proportion to our interest in the company is very small. There's a lot of other users out there that have actually benefited from the fact that we don't have that much irrigated area under the Pleasant Valley reservoir compared to our total share ownership. And basically we should do fairly good because we don't have a huge area to irrigate compared to our interest of whole water we do have in there. Other water users that pull water out of that will have to, you know, they'll have to watch their poll much closer than in years when that reservoir is full. Thank you guys. Any other questions, comments on the water status report? Okay. I don't see any. We'll keep moving on. Right. Number 10a is a review of the water board bylaws and guiding water principles. Ken, are you going to take that one? Yeah. We have before you, we think we made the changes that the board approved of last month. So hopefully you had a chance to look at those and make sure you're okay with that. One conversation we had surrounded remote meeting attendance. And as it turns out, the city does have some policies around remote attendance. The city's kind of policy is that you only, we can only allow remote attendance during emergency situation. So certainly COVID has been a year long emergency, but that's why we're doing remote meetings right now. But generally the city's policy is not to do remote attendance. So we did not change the language concerning remote attendance in the bylaws. We, that remains basically silent on it, but that's not changed in the, there's not specific statutory language that I can point to prohibiting that under a non-emergency situation. But generally it's currently not allowed in long months. I'll put it that way. Mostly be more from a policy standpoint that is going to be reviewed. I think by the time we all go back to in-person meetings sometime this year, whenever that'll be, then after this experience, all the boards have been doing remote as well as council. Then I think we'll probably have that conversation and it'll be a more robust citywide conversation. So if that can happen and in May, then it would probably be appropriate. Next January, we look at the bylaw, the water board looks at the bylaws every January. We think next January would be a good time to look at that particular issue and address it then. So if the board is okay with that, I think the rest of the changes, I believe we captured what water board had asked for and would be ready to move that but the bylaws forward. So in terms of moving it forward, do you need a, is this just a approval? Do you need a motion and a second on that can to approve the changes as you drafted them? You know, it might be good to go ahead and you really approved them last month, but it might not be bad just now that you've seen the changes in black and white and red, be good to approve it as written. Okay. I guess before we do that, does anybody have any questions or comments on the edits and Ken's explanation of that? Okay. If not, we need a motion to approve the water board bylaws as they were included in the water board packet. Kathy is making the motion. Yes. Is there a second? Roger is making a second. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. That motion carries. The next item, switch over here is the, yeah, go ahead, Roger. Can I make a comment on the last part of this, the guiding water principles? I just have one thing I wanted to ask about. I was reading through the annual water board report for 2020, which I thought was done very well, but when you get into looking at sustainability update, there was a paragraph in there that said that we were looking at water use per capita per day in Longmont service area from 2006 to 2019. And I was wondering, Ken, did your people put those numbers together on per capita water use over a period of time, or who did the numbers for those? We did, the staff did that in-house, yes. And we try to keep that updated as time goes on. What I was wondering is if we could see the numbers, the raw numbers, for a five-year period through 2020, just to look at the current look at them, I'd like to understand better what those numbers look like. So when we get into this discussion of sustainability, I know what I'm talking about right now. I haven't seen the raw numbers that I would like to, or I think it'd be good for the board to see them too. Yes, we'd be happy. We will bring that next month as just a general update to give you that information. And then we'll continue to bring that to you. I'd appreciate it. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Roger. The next item is the, is 10B review of major project listings and items tentatively scheduled for future board meetings. Is there anything, Ken, you guys want us to look at in that regard? I have nothing to update there. Okay. 10C is the annual water board report. Is there any, are you going to give an overview of it, Ken, or do you just want input from us after reviewing it? I'll let Wes give you a quick summary of it. So what the board has in front, as you all may recall, is there's a requirement, if you will, that each year you'll put together an annual report to produce to council. And so this is a summary of that report for you guys. And so it looks strikingly similar to the years prior that we've had. It tries to capture all those major items that your board has reviewed and the water issues that you've studied. There's really nothing specific that I wanted to highlight. If there was questions or have you seen something that you thought might be an error, would like to change, we'd be happy to have that conversation. Otherwise, what we'd like to do is just have some direction to go ahead and forward this as your board's formal annual report to city council. Okay, is there any questions, comments on the annual report? I do have one, Wes, under the cash and lieu of water rights. It has a little description in there that the fee is determined by the current market rate of senior basin water rights when such information is available. And anyway, we can keep going through that. But that's really not what we're doing. We're setting it based on the windy gap firming project on a cost breaker foot of that. So I think that needs to be updated that section because it's not really reflecting what we're doing. So that was the only one I saw. Very good. Yeah, we'll make that correction. So it mirrors what we're doing currently, what our practice was for last year. Absolutely. Thank you, Todd. Okay. Any other questions, comments?  If you would. Okay. I guess with that one change being made, we need a motion and a second for approval of the annual report. Make that motion, Todd. This is Scott. Okay. We have a motion by Scott. Is there a second? All second. All right. A second by Allison. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. What annual report is approved? All right. Let me back to my script here. So the next item under 11 is informational items and water board correspondence. It doesn't look like there was anything in there. Was there, can any other items we needed to discuss? We have none other. Okay. And then I guess item 12, we will be reviewing the cash and lieu next month, I believe. I guess the one note on that can would be if you can't get any, you know, indication of windy gap costs. I don't know if, you know, when they're doing updates of the overall project costs, especially given the delay by the appeal to the lawsuit. I guess that would be, you know, something we would need to take into account as soon as it's available in relation to cash and lieu. So yeah, that may be available for your March meeting. Conversations are ongoing with the contractor, but it may be June before, you know, for sure. We'll certainly bring any information we have by then to the March meeting. Okay. I think the only other item that we've talked about was maybe, you know, at some point here getting an update from St. Brandon left hand on the stream management plan that they were working on or the implementation of it, I should say. Yes, we've had those conversations with the same brain district. And currently Sean is tentatively schedule scheduling to come to your April board meeting to give you that update. Okay, great. That sounds good. With that, any other items of board has not saying anything with that, we're on item 13. Well, any questions, comments, anything for the good of the order? I don't see any. So with that being said, I'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting. Thank you guys.


Hello my people, my name is Mijim, and today I got a special treat for you guys. A couple of weeks ago I made a video about how to study the Netherlands, and last week it released a video about how studying abroad can transform you. So what if we just kind of put those together? That's exactly what we did here. This is our first interview video. We have Paloma Kodoti who graciously took about 30 minutes of her life away to talk to us a little bit about her experience studying abroad in the Netherlands and how it's affected her. Stay tuned to the end because that's where we get to the deep stuff. And I hope you like it and I hope you find it informative. You're not going to be seeing any more of me until the very end, so I'll see you later. So my name is Paloma Kodoti. I am a first year still in university. I am currently studying international relations and organizations in The Hague, which is in the Netherlands. I'm studying at Leiden University and I am about to start my second year. So the choice was basically to go for a country probably in Europe. I wanted, I was between the States and then the UK, Netherlands, France, but I reduced my choice mainly for also like monetary reasons because here in the Netherlands since I am a European, I have a European passport, I pay way less. And this university was now for me the program that I was looking for and it's a very good university and it's, it was affordable and it seemed very international as well. So that's why I decided to come. The Netherlands specifically as a country wasn't really something that I evaluate 100% but I knew, I knew a lot about how the Netherlands is saw from an outside perspective and it sounded pretty cool. Now that I'm here, of course, my view on it has changed, but I am very lucky that I'm in a very international city. So it's actually really cool because you get to know everybody from everywhere. So this university acquired me for CV, first of all, all my grades, then a letter of motivation and since this university is numerous fixes, which numerous fixes means basically not everyone that applies gets in. So there's a strict selection program sort of. We needed to do an exam in our case beside the presentation of the motivational letter, CV. And this exam consisted in more or less it was statistics, history and politics. And so it was an exam that we have to do was a 30 question multiple choice exam. And then afterwards they let us know sort of like a month or two later. And yeah, so basically that was the procedure. I started very early on because the deadline was the 15th of January for the motivational letter. And the exam was the 4th of February, I think. And then they let us know around April, mid-April.  And if you were above 620, then you were in. This exam was for all the faculty of political science. It wasn't just for my specific course. So yeah, there were a lot of people applying. Yes, of course, I had to do, there was a requirement for English. There was a requirement for a TOEFL. There was a minimum of 100 on the TOEFL to get in. They didn't require specific minimums for the parts of the TOEFL, but 100 was necessary. If you don't have that, you can take English in university. But to be honest, it's kind of... You have already a lot to handle the first few months and you don't want to handle an English situation. And also they asked for math requirements, which I passed mainly because I did a school that was very math-focused. Otherwise I wouldn't have. I know a lot of friends that had to take math courses in order to get into my program because it's a science faculty. Social sciences faculty and we take statistics and they expect you to have a knowledge of math that is quite semi-high. For non-Europeans, it's 10, I think now, 11,000 euros per year, which is a high amount, but compared clearly to the states and the UK is still very fine. But for Europeans, if you have a European passport, you don't have to live here or stuff like that, you just have a European passport. You will pay 2,143, I think. We incredibly precise, but that's for the whole year. Live costs are a bit higher here in the Netherlands, specifically in The Hague or Amsterdam. Rent and extras, I would say 1,000 euros a month. I would say that would be yet the minimum for me at the moment. So housing in the Netherlands is insane. This is the first thing. It's like London, it's like New York, it's those kind of places, kind of like the general input is that it's search it as soon as you can and take what feels right but never take the first option. Like there's like a certain amount of things that I've learned. So basically I stayed for the first six months. I was able to get an apartment on Facebook, actually, which is incredibly helpful. Facebook, it's basically the main way to go because that's where you find most of the rooms. I was sharing an apartment with a guy that I didn't know but turned out to be pretty cool and it was very nice. Then for the other six months, last year I applied to student housing. Student housing from the university was really expensive because you have to pay a fee and then they will allocate you into an apartment and that apartment is not in the university campus but it's sort of a partnership and I ended up in a building. It was actually quite nice. I had a studio for myself for six months and I could get rent benefit from the government. For living there so it was actually really fine but I decided to move out mainly because you cannot apply for more than a year and also because I wanted to be with somebody because after the whole COVID situation I was decided that I didn't want to stay alone in an apartment. So now I looked for an apartment by myself and with a friend and we looked in several rental agency. We had very bad experiences. We're talking people threatening us to sue us. Like it was a mess and now we found a very nice apartment in the center of town which is incredibly rare but yeah housing is a bit of a mess. I know that in other parts of the Netherlands it's better but if you live in the Hague or Amsterdam it's insane. I know of people getting scammed like sending like 2,000 euros and those 3,000 euros are completely gone. Some people like 4,000 but luckily we do have access to like legal resources that are for free so if anything of those kind of things happen like there are pro bono firms that help students to kind of deal with this situation because it's actually quite common so yeah there are means to deal with everything. It's always good to browse the internet and look for the regulation of housing in the Netherlands I figured because it's there are many expats like websites that will tell you not just that but also how to register in a GP or several things that are very useful so I would say like that as a general advice look for like expat websites wherever you go if you're going studying abroad because it's it facilitates your life basically. There's a lot if you come from Peru and you go to a country that it's like the Netherlands and if you've always lived in Peru you will feel the difference very easily I think. I was in a little like in different situation because I also lived in Italy so I already lived in a European country but it's still like different from Italy there's still so many difference. The Netherlands is a weird country meaning that it's one of the most free countries in the world but at the same time there are many many many rules you have to follow. It's basically nothing is legal but nothing is legal either sort of situation and it's very cool I love the country itself I have to say I'm not too much into Dutch culture mainly because I truly don't have Dutch friends because my course it's so international that most of the people that you get to know are actually international people so I love it here because it's a very international environment you get to meet people from everywhere you get to meet people from I don't know Iceland is that even like a population that it's like yes there is and there's like Luxembourg people which is also like huh and then you get to meet like people from Botswana and people like it's just it's crazy look you can't keep up with the nationalities which is great and our study like a student life it's very what you would imagine as European students meaning going to pubs museums sometimes like if you're a political student science then like of course rallies and those kind of like things there's a lot of little house parties a lot of walking around the city going to like secondhand shops and cafes sitting down having coffee studying so there's a lot of very like would basically what would you imagine as a student in Europe you know I personally love it and coming from Peru it's way different because you can even like in Peru you don't have all this freedom of just walking around and like especially a night or stuff like that and it's here it's a bit better you still have to be careful of course because this is a big city but it's just yeah there's more European things to do basically what you would call it that way imagine something like Peru just forget about it because it's you're not going to find the same environment that you find in universities in Peru everyone is kind of left to its own means meaning that if you don't register for an exam it's your own issue nobody like they're going to send you wine reminder at some point and that is all there's a lot of like if you go badly nobody will help you like it there's not it's a lot of you you you you like you do you you study as much as you can and as much as you want and you study however you want the minimum they do is just like work groups that we have and where you can have a conversation with the teacher and you can of course always ask for your study advisor which is the person that basically advise you for like university stuff but it's not like we have four sessions of exams per year and we don't have mid-terms really we only have finals then we you can retake the final but if you fail the retake you're gone it's really hard to get credits because the only way to get credits is through exams so you don't have like homework or anything like that like you have just assignments that you have to put in and there's gonna come like nothing compared to what the exams actually count so it's it's harder it's definitely harder because I feel like from people well from what I hear from people in Peruvian universities they're kind of like took from a very similar school environment like it doesn't change that much from school it changes but it's not this huge change instead for me it's completely different it's you don't have personal relationship with your professor you basically don't talk to them you're sit in a room with 300 people they're never gonna know your name unless you're somebody that like actually is interested in getting to know the professor for some reason and especially the first year no yeah you are you're fully in charge of you if you go badly that's on you like that's fully on you the university gave you everything that they could and that if you decide to go badly it's your problem I would say the biggest advice would be hang on the first few months everybody hits it like it's it's there's like a 90% chance or like let's slow it down to like 75 but like there's a 75% chance you're gonna hate it it's just it's just it's specifically because the first courses that you take in university they're most likely very general and they don't touch the interesting parts of the topic that you're studying they're just giving you the base from the future for the future so I remember being very frustrated the first few months and now I can say that I really like it so just hang on do the first year and once you do the first year you start you stop studying and start talking about what you study and that's when you're like wow this is actually really simple I think I am a completely different person to who I was a year ago it has made me way more open and way more aware through the problems and the differences in the world and how beautiful it is and how like different it is in several parts of the world it's just it gets you it toughens you up a lot not gonna lie and I'm not gonna like pretend that it doesn't it does you're far away from your family so you don't have the facility of like oh I'm sad oh I'm gonna just like have my mom cooking a meal for me no like that's not the situation so it toughens you up you need to live you know how to you need to learn a lot of things really quickly and there's a lot to handle on the all of a sudden you're completely independent so you're just you're trying to figure out everything and so that toughens you up a lot but it also makes you realize how important it is to people that you're surrounded with because you're in this environment that you don't know and you're able to find people that are also in the same situation because people are in the same situation as you and that's the most comforting thing I think of studying abroad but you're not alone even if you think you are and it just creates you this very deep at the end relationship with people that you met that you meet here your friends the people that you meet and it also teaches you to understand different cultures and understand differences between them so being in a country like the Netherlands after being in a country Peru is just it's completely different so you just adapt to this new environment and you learn from it and you learn what's good and what's bad and then you make your own decision in how to live your life it's a long term I guess thanks again to Paloma for taking the time to just talk with us if you would like to tell us about your experience studying abroad or you know somebody else who would please let us know hit us up leave a comment below we would love to get more people's experiences from all over the world to share with us just what it's like to study abroad and how it affects you and your development if you like the interview please like the video and subscribe to the channel so that you can see the next stuff coming up next week we're going to be talking about how to study in Canada I'll see you next time