Jan 25, 2021 Public Utilities Board on 2021-01-25 9:00 AM

Okay. It's nine o'clock on January 25th, 2021. We have a quorum, so we'll call the Public Utilities Board meeting for the City of Denton to order. Are there any public people from the public wishing to speak? Do we know? Hi there. This is Tyler. Currently there is no one here to speak. All right. Thank you, Tyler. Then we'll go on to the regular meeting. We have first order of business is our consent agenda. Items A through C. Does any board member wish to pull an item? Yes, Ed. Go ahead. Item C. Item C. All right. And then do we have a motion to approve items A and B? So moved. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? A and B? Approved. Item C. Questions, Ed? Yeah, I was just curious as to what is encompassed by lab supplies. Is there somebody that can address that? Terry Nolte is going to answer the question. Hi, this is Brian Smith with the City of Denton. Can you all hear me? Yes. Go ahead, Brian. Okay. Your question about lab supplies? Okay. It's just, what this is, is we're trying to get a contract for the lab supplies for the both water plants and the municipal lab. So we can, in the past that we've just been buying, you know, our chemicals and our lab supplies from just various vendors. And so we decided to see if we can get a contract, hopefully with one vendor, but it may end up being two to be able to supply everything for everybody. Does that help answer that? Yeah, I was just curious as to whether it was actual testing materials that were used to test the safety of the water or if it were supplies like test tubes and rubber gloves and stuff like that. Right, it's both. It's everything that we would need to do our testing. All these chemicals we get from HAWK, which is a lot of instruments that we use are made by HAWK and we use a lot of their reagents and chemicals. The other thing that HAWK doesn't provide that we get from other vendors to run the other tests that we have to run. And of course, you know, like you said, you know, beakers and lab coats, anything else that's not a chemical, you know, is what we call just a supply. Yeah, I was just curious as to whether or not the delay of this contract in any way jeopardized the testing capabilities. No, sir. We have, you know, inventory currently so we can do this. I understand. If we got low, we can always, you know, go out for, you know, do our quotes and get a purchase order that way. If we do, you know, if this gets to a point where it takes longer than we anticipated. Okay, thank you very much. You bet. Do we have a motion to approve item C? Move approval. Oh, and Ed can second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Carries. Items for individual consideration. The approval of the January 11th, 2021 minutes. Does anyone have corrections or changes? Do we have a motion to approve? So approve. And a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Okay. Next item is consider recommending adoption of an ordinance adopted concurrently by the cities of Bryan, Denton, Garland, and Greenville, Texas, approving the execution by the Texas municipal power agency of an asset purchase agreement for the sale of the agency's Gibbons Creek steam electric station and related assets in Grimes County, Texas, approving an associated generation budget amendment and providing an effective date. Mr. Nolte. Good morning, PV. Let me pull the brief presentation up. Okay. Good morning again. This is the formal request to the PUB to recommend adoption of the concurrent ordinance for the sale of the Gibbons Creek station. As you recall, PV members, we brought this to you several weeks ago, had a detailed discussion. We've provided a number of additional pieces of information in the Friday report and through informal staff reports. Just a brief summary of the transaction. Again, it's the sale of the Gibbons Creek station to the Gibbons Creek environmental redevelopment company is the buyer. It's 6,200 acres, including the reservoir and all the coal combustion residual units. We do TMPA does retain ownership of all the transmission assets. And under the terms of the agreement, the buyer must decommission the power plant and remediate all the CCR units. Significant effort and security been put in place to ensure that these CCR units are properly remediated. And there are certain limitations placed upon future land uses for the areas that have the CCR units. There's a considerable economic benefit to TMPA members, including Denton. We anticipate that the savings as compared to the self-performance of the remediation and demolition activities will save $48 million, $10 million to Denton. And for this fiscal year, $1.8 million versus our current budget. The most important thing besides the economics is the fact that the environmental risk profile is greatly reduced for TMPA and for the member cities. They cite itself adjacent to the site is the is the the mine, the lignite mine, which will be ultimately sold, if so directed by the TMPA Board of Directors and additional 10,000 plus acres. So today we're recommending approval of the concurrent ordinance. Denton is the last of the four member cities to bring this ordinance before Council for final approval. And as I mentioned, we did provide the information that was requested by both Council and PUB in a series of Friday reports. The land use issue, Grimes County regulations, Grimes County does not have zoning, as most counties in Texas don't. There are requirements that are placed upon subdivisions in Grimes County. And with that, I'll be glad to answer any questions. Also have Bob Kahn, the General Manager of the TMPA on the line. Questions? Barbara, was your hand up? Okay, go ahead, Barbara. So once this is sold to them, as requirements change on things like this, this will no longer be our responsibility. It will be the responsibility of the new buyer, correct? That is correct. Any other questions? I will make a comment on that question, Barbara. The last meeting that TMPA had was a quick call meeting to approve additional insurance for any new developments. We were able to get another larger, longer insurance policy for 10 years, which helps that liability tremendously. Thank you, Bill. Well, I guess we did have a long discussion a few weeks ago. Do we have -- oh, go ahead, Ed. I'm sorry. I just had one comment, and that is that I think this is a really good thing that's happening for our air and future and development, everything. And right now, best as I can ascertain, there are still 14 active coal plants in Texas, of which five by, I guess it's 2032, will either also be closed or converted to natural gas or some other fuel source, which has not indicated what it is. But in any case, we all know that coal is on the way out. Texas, unfortunately, is still the largest user of coal for electric generation. But things like the closing of Givens Creek are a step forward toward a renewable future. So I'm very happy that this is occurring. Thank you, Ed. Like I said, we had a long discussion a couple weeks ago. Do we have a motion to approve? So moved. Thank you, Ed. A second? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next item is management reports. David. Given the number of management reports on the agenda, including a solid waste survey update, if you have any questions, we have staff available to answer them. I believe that was your item, Ed. Are you satisfied with? Me? No, Ed. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Do you have any questions on the solid waste management strategy online? The survey? Yeah. No, I looked at it. I think it's very, very comprehensive. Okay. And I'm not sure about the timeline. How long will this be up before it's completed? How long will it be before the public? I can see Brian's on the line. Yeah. Members of the board, members, my name is Brian Burner, Solid Waste Director with City of Ginton. This survey will be up for approximately one month. And then from that, the data will be taken and used to help create the talking points and questions for the think tank that will occur in March. And then based on survey data, waste characterization data, the think tank data results, plus items that are going on in the legislature and regulatory world, that will all be wrapped up in our anticipation is that the strategy will be completed by late third quarter, early fourth quarter of this year. Thank you. My only other question is, is where is this being publicized? This is being publicized in all of our social media through our Friday reports. We're pushing it out on, you know, directly to different interest groups. And, you know, we've got a month. So we're hoping word of mouth as well as we would imagine there will probably something in the didn't record chronicle regarding the survey. Yeah, I was going to say, I hope that you could get a prominent article in the paper. That would certainly be an advantage. And is there time to put it in with bills and mailings? There is a citizens, one of the citizens newsletters that is going out here within the next day or two that it will be included with them. Terrific. Thank you. All right, then next is concluding items. Does a board member wish to have anything put on a future agenda item or have something to celebrate? All right, then we'll go into work session, receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction on the recent issues impacting online building portal and auto draft customers. Madam Chair, board members, Krista Foster, customer service manager. If you give me one moment, I'll pull up our presentation. All right. So we received a request from one of the board members to provide an update on the context that you guys had seen online or received personally related to trouble that customers have had over the past fall and somewhat through the winter with either bill of viewing or interruptions of service due to auto drafts not coming through or problems with drafting. So what we're going to do is provide a quick overview. We had three separate events that led to some of these things. In August of 2020, we had bills that were not viewable online, as well as auto drafts that were scheduled by customers in the online payment portal, which weren't functioning properly. And then in November, we had a contractual change of our merchant service provider, which caused all registered users to have to reenter their payment information. So first looking at the bill view, we had the problem was customers were not able to access electronic copies of their bills and see their billing history. We identified and reported this with our vendor on September the 8th, and it was resolved on September the 14th. The remediation actions, what we found was the services to provide our online billing, either your bill view or, or the auto drafts is related to that vendor receiving FTP file transfers. So the vendor for the billing system or the bill print had changed an IP address, and it did not been communicated to the online provider. They appeared to not have a process in place to identify that they were not receiving the FTP files as expected. So once we got that in place, then we've coordinated with the vendors to ensure that they have a plan for non receipt of files. The same thing occurred with the auto drafts. This is payments that were scheduled by customers by themselves in the online billing portal. These are not drafts that we would set up in our billing system to auto draft, but ones that customers can go in and modify on their own. We identified the problem and reported it on August 15th. This one was not resolved until September 11th. What we found was, again, there was an IP address change that prevented them from receiving FTP files. They were unaware that they were not receiving the files and it took some time to be able to identify what that problem was. This impacted about 3000 customers. We ensured that during that time period, we stopped any form of disconnections so that there were no interruptions by mistake. We increased our documentation so that we could better identify these types of problems. It's difficult for us to see draft versus web payment when the customer is setting it up themselves. There's no flag that can be turned on in our billing system so that we know. So we've increased our documentation for reporting technology changes to the vendor, as well as we've identified some means of reporting internally to help identify failures in drafts. And then again, we've coordinated with the vendor to ensure that they have a communication plan for non-received files. The final issue that we've incurred, that has occurred this year, was the change of our merchant service provider. Several years ago, when the city contracted with Wells Fargo Merchant Services, it was stated at the time that the volumes coming in from customer service would be included in that so that we could get a city-wide pricing structure. We've been working for a couple of years to be able to move from Elavon to Wells Fargo and that had to occur this fall. The Wells Fargo requirement is that we keep the billing zip code as part of the saved payment credentials. This helps us prevent fraud. It also lowers our costs. However, Elavon did not save that information because the information was not in any of the payment records. We couldn't transition any customers' saved payment information. So it meant that all customers had to reenter their auto drafts, either checking or credit, and that they had to reenter any of their saved payment information. So we knew that this was coming up. So October the 28th, we actually sent out 7,000, a combination of 7,000 calls and emails. We sent 7,000 letters to customers who would be impacted. The way that we did this is we looked at a list of all customers who had payments showing in the system as scheduled anytime from October through December. We cross-referenced that list if it was something that we had set up by telephone so the customer didn't have an email address. We cross-referenced that against North Star data to get the telephone number on file so that we could make contact to that customer. In addition to letters and emails and calls, we did place information out on social media. We updated our website. We put a message on our phone queue. We put a message alert on the payment as portal, and we issued a press release. So on the day of switch 11-5, we repeated 7,000 calls and emails to all customers who were impacted, letting them know that the change had occurred and they could reenter their payment information. Things continued on into early December when we began receiving calls from customers who were indicating that they were on autodraft and had been interrupted for non-payment. So as we started looking at that, first we want to make sure that it's noted that any of those customers who had been interrupted would have received both a courtesy call and a friendly reminder call prior to interruption. But when I went out on December the 10th, I pulled a list of all scheduled payments in the payment system and cross-referenced it to our original list of 7,000 customers, and 6,000 of those customers had not reset up their payment information and started their drafts again. So we did again stop all interruptions, and instead of just communicating to those 7,000, we decided that it was probably better at this point to go ahead and notify all payment as registered users. So we sent 35,000 letters, emails, and calls to customers, letting them know that payments needed to be in place and scheduled by January the 4th. On January the 4th, we did send a final email notice to the original list of 7,000 customers if there had been no new scheduled payments. And that's pretty much where we are. We have begun cutting again and do not seem to have the same kind of problems. Thank you. Questions from the board? So have those people all responded? Have you got everybody set up? We saw that the majority, well, more than 50% of the ones that had not set up by December the 10th had gone back and set up when we went resumed interruptions. Some of those customers maybe have chosen not to do auto draft for a little bit and are just making payments, but we have not seen an influx of customers being interrupted. We have seen a lot of confusion because once we sent things out to everyone, then we have customers that are upset because like they've looked and now they've gotten four notifications. You know, some of those things, just the typical types of confusions that you would see when trying to communicate to that broad number of customers. It sounds like you made every effort. I can't think of anything that you haven't done repeatedly. Yeah. Well, I was one of the customers impacted, but I got a phone call that, you know, I was past due. I mean, you communicated, I think at least four times to me. So it was, you know, you did the best you could. Thank you. We tried to do our best. Yeah. But the important thing is now you have those FTP. They know that something's not coming in. So that'll be a big help. Yes. Sure. Yes, Billy. So Krista, is there going to be a concern going forward when you, like if somebody changes services, that they'll have a flag on their account because of these circumstances where it really wasn't the right payers fault? No, there will not be any flags on their accounts because we're not actually charging any late fees or anything and we're not doing the interruptions. It will not affect their credit rating. Yeah. And I'll just reiterate what Susan said because we were the same customer and I got at least three, maybe four phone calls. Communication has been really good. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Krista. Thank you. Now we will adjourn into a closed meeting. I believe I need to read the entire item deliberations regarding real estate property under Texas government code section 551.072. Receive information from staff, discuss, deliberate, and provide staff with direction pertaining to the potential acquisition of certain real property interests located in the BBB and CCR company survey abstract 196, the West Fork Survey abstract 1087, and the Jay Saver Survey abstract 1164, and the Jay Withers Survey abstract 1343, all in Denton County, Texas for the utility infrastructure. Do we need a countdown, David? That was a multiple.