Feb 12, 2018 Public Utilities Board on 2018-02-12 9:00 AM

Go ahead and call the February 12th 2018 Public Utilities Board meeting to order. First on the agenda we have a work session and the first item in that work session is to receive a report, hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding the solid waste departments landfill vegetative buffer and maximum landfill heights proposed in the permit amendment. Good morning. My name is Ethan Cox, I'm the director of solid waste for the city of Denton. So this morning's presentation as posted is about the proposed landfill height and a permit that we're currently pursuing with the TCEQ as well as some of the landscaping and vegetative buffer in the area surrounding the landfill. These are being brought to the forefront because of various citizen concerns have been brought up with the council over the last six to eight months. We really want to use this as just an opportunity to educate the board and we'll be educating the council next week as well. Not any action required at this stage, we just want to give you an update on where we are with both of these items. In regards to landfill height, that's really a product of direction that the department received from the city council in the 2006-2007 timeframe which was to pursue landfill expansion with the hopes of procuring or securing enough capacity to allow waste disposal for an extra 50 years. And the way you achieve that expansion or that capacity in solid waste is through new land development but also airspace which is vertical construction for waste disposal. Planning began in earnest on this expansion project in 2008 . There were a series of land acquisitions and the permit process has run for the last few years. We are very close to the finish line with the TCEQ on this. I'll give you an update on the timeline in just a few slides. In terms of the buffer zone, just briefly, this is something that came up fairly recently, last six to eight months. We did provide a staff report to council in the September 2017 timeframe and I'll just kind of hit the highlights of that with you as we go through today's presentation. So I'm going to take these things in order first beginning with the landfill height. There's a few things here that I want to try to kind of separate for you. There's our existing height, there are some restrictions that we have currently and then there's what's going to be proposed in our pending permit. So right now the tallest point, the tallest cell that we have on the landfill currently is 53 feet above ground level. In terms of our current permit, which is titled 1590A, again that's issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, they limit our height to 80 feet above ground level. And so we are still currently underneath that restriction. In addition, there's also a specific use permit that was approved by the city a few years ago that also has that same restriction. Even if we were to alter that specific use permit and get a height adjustment by the TCEQ, there's also a settlement agreement with some of the surrounding landowners that limit our height to no greater than 95 feet until at least 2028. At that time that settlement agreement expires and we can exceed that height if we choose to do so. You would just need a new permit and a new specific use permit to do so. So currently the permit that we have queued up with TCEQ is titled 1590B and the height that's proposed in that that's been brought to the forefront for council by some citizens is that it's proposed at 213 and a half feet above ground level, which is a significant increase over what we have right now. And so what I want to kind of walk you through over the next few slides is kind of what that looks like and understanding that there's no impetus for us to get up to that height. That's really a decision for the community and the council and the board as we move forward in these out years. So what would that look like if we did achieve that max height immediately? This is kind of a visual representation of what that would look like. Thank you to our engineering firm PSC. Frank Pugsley is here today if you want to question him on his artistic renderings here. So this is a picture of Mayhill over here on the right. This is heading from the north side down to the south side. Over here on the left is our landfill operation, a few of the buildings there. This bright green representation right here is actually our current landfill height. And so if you're driving along Mayhill, that's about how high we would be. And this dark green area right here is what would be the final cover would look like if we went up to that 213.5 feet. A couple of things that I would want to put out there for everyone to kind of consider is in terms of height and expansion, like I mentioned earlier, in terms of landfill expansion, it's really a matter of new cell development but also vertical expansion as well. Operationally, we could delay increasing our height from that 80 feet for another 20, 30 years if we chose to do so. We have about 11 new cells that are proposed in permit 1590 B. And so technically, depending on how we phase that up, we may not need to make a decision on any further vertical expansion for another 20, 30 years, depending on how we sequence that. Does that make sense? So another visual just to kind of give you a comparison of what our height looks like for other landmarks and other landfills in the area. So right here on the right-hand side is our current height, our current restriction at 95 feet. The city of Irving landfill as well as the city of Dallas landfill are already above that at 129 and 139 feet respectively. We have a couple of landmarks that we plugged into this as well. I think all of these are TWA buildings as a matter of fact. And so you can see those two landfills are already pretty much on par with those buildings right there. The max proposed height would obviously be a substantial increase over what we have now and would be pretty noticeable in terms of the landscape as well. Anytime we look at the height of a landfill cell, it really comes with a trade-off is what is the impact to the surrounding area, to the community in terms of visual aesthetics? But it's also a matter of how much capacity would we be losing if we chose to reduce that? And again, we're not asking for the board or the council to take any action on this now. It's just something I want to plant the seed for you to consider as maybe a decision does need to be made in the future months and years ahead. So right now, again, we're at about 80 feet in terms of maximum height. The estimated landfill life for that is 2048. And so about 30 more years in essence. And again, that's about the time that you'd really be pressed to make a decision on increasing height. The maximum height that we are proposing is 213. So we kind of rounded that off to 200. You see that the estimated landfill life achieves that 50 plus years that was set out by council. That would be closure of the full site at 2087. You drop 40 feet off of that, you lose about 10% of your capacity, and you lose about seven years of landfill life. Another 40 feet because these are slopes, so the further you cut, the deeper the loss in terms of capacity, you'd lose about 26.2% and you'd be closing 2068. And then again, this is our current high right here. And so again, no action today. Just wanted to kind of plant the seed is these are the trade offs that you'd really be looking at in terms of what does the community need in terms of waste capacity? And what do we need in terms of visual aesthetics for the height? Any questions on landfill? Question on that. So these are these with all 11 the 11 cells developed? They are and there's also the height addition on our current operation as well. Okay. So that's not just the sales we have now. Exactly. That's gonna be in addition to the 11 other cells to develop. Mr. Robinson, a good way to look at that is if we did not increase our height on any of the side, then these 11 cells are going to buy us about another 16 years right now. Our closure date for our existing operation is about 2032. So those 11 cells without any height additions would give us 16 years of additional capacity. Question so can these the do these two issues the issue of citizens concerns about the buffer and making the buffer greener putting more trees in there and the issue of maximizing the height capacity? Could these two theoretically be uncoupled? In other words, I understand you're presenting them together, but because the one seems to me to be a present concern about the way things are present and the other one about height is is is future oriented. You certainly can. The reason why we're presenting these together is they've been brought up together by citizen concerns. The other thing that I would say is typically landfill height, the buffer zone. These are issues that are discussed during the TCEQ perm itting process. I'll get into that on the next slide. It's also something that both of these affect the visual aesthetics of the surrounding area. There's a lot of activity going on out there. And so the vegetative buffer serves to kind of shield our operation from public view. And obviously, landfill height has a hand in that as well. So just to clarify, so I understand we're not taking action today, but when it comes to taking action at some point in the future, could it be decided to currently increase the trees and make the buffer larger and greener and to postpone applying for the new permit to some future point? If I might, I can answer that with my next slide. Any other questions on this? All right. So to that point, we do have a few remaining steps with our permit with the agency. We estimate that the process will be complete in about four to five months. First up, the first step that needs to take place is the agency needs to declare the permit technically complete, which basically means that they don't have any issues that we need to go back and address. There's kind of a back and forth nature of this is we found an issue on this page. Can you go back and cure that? And we're working through that right now. The next step up is public comment period. There will be a mailing out to a variety of citizens that they can speak directly to the agency and provide their concerns. It's not unusual as you go through this process for some of the things that we've submitted or proposed to actually change. As a matter of fact, when our original permit was approved, that actually took place. We reduced the height. There were a number of changes to the buffer, things like that took place. Once we work through that, then the TCEQ issues the permit. And our recommendation would be to your point, Ms. Arment ier, would be we would come back to both the PUB as well as the city council at the conclusion of that. So here's kind of here we here's how we ended up with the permit. And if we want to, we can do another specific use permit that tweaks that a little bit. In other words, if let's say, for instance, the agency says , yes, 213 feet is fine for height, but the board and the council says we want to limit that. We don't want to go up to that for a number of years. Then you can issue a specific use permit that limits us locally as an operation. And you can do the same thing with the buffer. You can have more prescriptive elements for the buffer in an SUP than the agency will. And on my next slide, I'll point that out. The agency typically does not prescribe trees or landsca ping, things like that, in a buffer zone. They're more concerned about just making sure there's space between public use and the private property. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Charlie. Do you have any idea in the timing of these things, particularly the public comment period? I'm hoping that we get the technically complete designation within the next two months. I mean, maybe sooner than that, quite frankly. And so once that happens, when we enter the public comment period, it should go pretty quickly. And if we have a contested case, which I believe is what happened with the last permit, that could drag on a little bit. But really, what we're hoping is that we're through with all of this by the end of spring, and then we're looking to get our permit within the summer time frame. Does that help? Yes, sir. Question. Brendan? When we talk about the buffer, is this buffer just along May Hill there? Or is there a buffer prescribed around the entire perimeter of the land? I'll actually hit that in the next couple of slides, if that's okay. Great. Thank you. I had a question. The TCEQ permit process, when did we start that, and how long does it typically take to go through that entire process? Frank Pugley's here. I'm going to ask him to answer that. I don't have all the history on it. He's been through all the battles. I don't need an exact number. I'll just... Come on over here. Yeah, please. In general, for a landfill permit amendment like this, it takes what we budget for is about two years from the time we submit to the time it's approved. We'd like it to be shorter. We submitted this permit to the agency in early 2017. I believe it was January, February of 2017. So here we are. One year later, we've gone through already three rounds of comments with the agency, and we are completing our last and fourth round of comments . Following that, what Ethan said was they'll issue the public notice that gives the public 28 days to submit written comments and request a public meeting. I would imagine we'd probably end up with at least a public meeting on this permit, and that usually occurs within another month after that. So that kind of fits within that four to five months remaining that we've got. So we're looking at a total of maybe 18 to 20 months of time for this permit amendment. And that process is... We hire consultants. Yes, sir. That's my job. Okay. Non-consultant, sorry. Well, I'm not going to ask you how much we paid you because I don't want to embarrass you. But the point being the TCEQ permit, time consuming and expensive, and I don't know that... I think the height is going to be hashed out during the local public comment period and the SEP, really. And so that's my only comment is we've got to look at what 's going to get us the capacity to get us down the road as much as we can. And so we'll leave it up to somebody who probably hadn't even been born yet to determine how high it's going to be because certainly I don't know if any of us will be, at least not on this board, but at that point in time. But anyway, thank you. I appreciate it. Yes, sir. Just for clarification, we're going to go for the max. It doesn't mean we're going to go to that height. Correct. Correct. Usually what we'd like to do is ask for as much as we think we can, knowing that at some point in time we may have to negotiate that back a little bit because it's kind of a factor of scale there. The more you ask for, the more you get per dollar that you 're spending. Okay. Any other questions? Well, thank you. All right. So if there's no more questions on landfill height, I am going to dive a little bit into the buffer. Like Ms. Armenter said, this is more of a pressing issue. Just a few quick clarifications. I'm not sure if anyone's dealt with the landfill buffer zone before, but there is actually a definition in our permit that describes what that buffer is. It's basically the distance between our permit boundary, which is where private property begins and the foot of our waste. And so the permit, I believe, and I'm just going to look for a nod of the head, is about 50 feet between the foot of the waste to the permit boundary. It's 125. Oh, 125. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. So that's really about as prescriptive as the permit gets. Again, there's no landscaping requirements that are called out in our permit with the agency. That being said, whenever this permit was initially issued back in 1995, there was a specific use permit that coincided with that. Here's the ordinance number along with it. And Wade described our landscaping and basically said it needs to be sufficient landscaping and screening to ensure harmony and compatibility with adjacent property. And that's about as prescriptive as it got. Now that being said, there were a few other documents that went around with the Planning and Zoning Commission and also bundled with that ordinance that said, here's what we'd like to achieve or aspire to in terms of our landscaping. And so this is the visual I think the council's seen a couple of times. What this calls out is typical landscape buffer. This calls for about 20 trees per 100 linear feet, with 30% being evergreen. And it also calls for 115 feet wide along Mayhill Road and 100 foot wide along Edwards Road. So Mr. Carroll, to answer your question, the buffer is really around the current operations is when the requirement goes in. And I'll show you an image in just a moment. It really runs along that Edwards Road up through Mayhill. And you'll see that in the next slide. In terms of our history here is my understanding is we did have a planning that occurs quickly following the permit approval that did meet that typical prescribed buffer as you see here. Unfortunately, a number of those trees have been lost to drought and disease over the years. There was also a lot of construction and utility work that 's happened in the area. And where we stand today is we have about 217 of the 780 recommended trees that we should have on site. So some of the comments that have been made to City Council is we need to be planning now. And we certainly understand that. So to that end, we have started taking some steps to get a design going. As you see these challenges down here, I'm going to call these out on these visuals on the next slide so you can kind of see them for yourself. So over here on the left-hand side, this is an aerial view of our landfill. If you follow my mouse, all of this is our landfill operation right here. This road right here, if you can make that out, is Mayhill running north to south or south to north, I should say. And each of these little boxes here represent 100 linear feet of buffer zone. And so the buffer zone wraps around Edwards Road, which is right here. Trailer Park right here is our neighbor. And then it runs south to north along Mayhill Road. So the colors that you have here, these are representations , our urban foresters as well as building inspections went out and did a survey of this just to kind of tell us, are we close to that typical landscape buffer or are we pretty far afield? So the red means that there is really no buffer or very minimal buffer in place. And so this number two here, if you'll follow me over to this picture, this is kind of what that looks like on the ground. And so we have our buffer wall that was installed a few years ago. You also have your overhead utility lines. And I understand that there's also underground utility lines in some of these areas as well. It's a very restricted area in terms of planting trees. Even if we went out there to plant them today, there may not be much we could do with the exception of maybe planting behind the wall. And you see that there are some trees up here. That's something that we want to explore with our landscape architect is when we run into these types of issues, can we build up the behind the wall area to provide that vegetative buffer? What the loss of trees to drought and some have to do with construction. I'm wondering, you know, looking back, was there any did anybody discover that, oh, there were certain kinds of trees that were planted that maybe in retrospect, there should have been hardier trees, you know, more drought tolerant trees or was it? I don't necessarily know the answer to what occurred. What I can say is that's going to be a key factor in terms of the recommendations from freezing Nichols, which is the landscape architect that we 're working with. We don't want to plant any tree in terms of a mitigation effort here that doesn't have a good chance of surviving. That's really our goal. Yeah. So I take it they would also look at whatever specific tree diseases were were common to those trees and. Right. Yeah. And I do know in terms of drought and stuff, we had a lot of problems with an irrigation system that was installed with all of this utility work that was done. That's been replaced like three times. And so we certainly don't feel like that's a good use of dollars to install an irrigation system only to have it taken out and to redo the work. So that's something else we want to be mindful of. So the yellow area here means that we have what we call a substandard buffer. There's a couple of different areas. Number one and number four. So number one runs parallel with Mayhill Road right here. Again, you can see some overhead utility lines. You see the buffer wall. We do have some canopy trees here, however, just not as dense as prescribed by that typical buffer. That's the same case down here running along Edwards Road and picture number four, some trees in place, but not nearly the 20 trees per 100 linear feet that we need. And then the green shaded area down here near the corner of Mayhill and Edwards, we do have a buffer that's approaching standard. That's visual number three right here. We have some new plantings that have occurred. We have the buffer wall. So that area is fairly dense. In addition to our current challenges, one of the things that we partnered with Freeze and Nichols on is we wanted them to take into consideration some upcoming development that's happening. I'm sure the board is familiar that Mayhill Road is going to have some work done on it. There's going to be a realignment and some added lanes. There's also some transmission work for DME that's going to be done and some distribution as well. So this visual over here is from Freeze and Nichols. I'm going to zoom into this here in just a minute, but this is the same orientation that I showed you just a moment ago. If you follow my mouse, here's Edwards Road running right here. The existing Mayhill Road is underneath all of this color and all of this busyness that's happening right here. And the new Mayhill is actually these black lines running right up here. Landfill operations are right here. I'm going to actually exit out of this and kind of give you a better sense of what that looks like. Bear with me for just a moment. All right, so this is this busy little corner right down here. I'll pull that up and zoom into it for you. Everyone see that? All right, so a few things that are happening here. We have some color coding and I'll call these things out. We have DME transmission line buffer. There's actually a new substation that's going to be going in along Mayhill. These are transmission lines that would feed that. So as you can see, the easements for those are fairly wide. This is this color right here. And you can see if you follow my mouse, there's our buffer wall. It zigzags right through there. And these dark areas right here are actually our trees. So it's likely that as those transmission lines are installed, you can kind of see a pole right there, some of the existing trees are going to have to be removed as well. And so it's not just the trees that we've already lost. We're probably looking at mitigating some additional trees as well. In addition, you also have this yellow strip right here. Those are distribution lines for a DME project. And then in between there, you actually have about 40 feet of potential buffer that we could utilize for tree plantings if we chose to do so. Existing Mayhill roads there, so that may need to be milled up if we're going to take, if we're going to use that. But there is potential there. We also have an existing gas line easement for Atmos right here. This is a little blue shaded area. And so we could plant between there for about 31 feet. The upside to the Mayhill realignment is we do have a significant area here of about 115 feet that we could use for new plantings once that construction is done. And so really what we're working with Frieze and Nichols on is let's figure out a plan or a path forward in terms of how do we want to mitigate the trees that have been lost already? How do we want to deal with some of the trees that are going to be lost? And what's the planning schedule look like? Planings behind the wall could technically occur right now if we chose to do so. Planning out here in the middle of all this construction, we think that it's best to let that all settle, let the dust settle both literally and figuratively. And then we'll come in, implement our irrigation system as well as new tree plantings. This visual is a little bit further up the road. Whoops, a little bit too zoomed in. So it does get a little bit less hectic as you move north. But again, you have transmission lines running straight down our existing buffer. All those trees in there are likely going to need to be removed. We do have opportunities to plant behind the wall right here if you follow my mouse. We also have about 60 feet wide in the buffer zone here in between the gas easement and the transmission line easement. So a few challenges that we're dealing with on this. It's not an ideal situation. A typical landscape buffer was meant to be 115 feet wide or 100 feet wide. We're just not able to achieve that with the conditions that we have right now. Not in a continuous manner. It's really broken up by all these other easements. So again, what we're planning to do is plant behind the wall as soon as we can. We may have to do some earth work to build that up and then circle back once these projects are complete and plant in the buffer zone that remains. So here's just a highlight of what we just talked about. So Freezing Nickels, again, they're the landscape architect for this project. I mentioned earlier, survival of the trees is of the utmost importance. We know this is not ideal. We know that the buffer is not where it needs to be right now. And really our approach with Freezing Nickels is we need to do everything we can to make this right as quickly as possible. So what we've asked them to do is using the space available , make the trees as dense as possible with the right species, the right location, the right planning schedule to make sure that we're not having to redo this work again in a few years. We've also asked them to provide a design work for our irrigation system as well as a maintenance plan. So again, survival of the trees is of the utmost importance to us. And again, just to reiterate, here's our project timeline. Behind the wall, we think that we could hit the next planting season if all goes well. So that would be fall 2018. And then the outside of the wall planning is just really going to be dependent on the construction schedule. Questions on the buffer zone? So I live in a neighborhood that's heavily treed where recently there have been a couple issues with squirrels and power lines where there had been some outages. And I'm just wondering to what extent that'll be taken into account as the trees grow, what kinds of issues, what can be done to prevent that from being a problem. And also kind of hand in hand with that, I would hope that this planning will be done to some extent in consultation with DME to check on, okay, what kinds of maintenance will have to be done on these or might have to be done even on these power lines so that to avoid such problems with the irrigation system and et cetera. And that's been a key point of our work with Fries and Nich ols is we have been talking quite a bit with the engineering department, CIP, DME. There's a lot going on in that little corridor right there. And so we want to make sure that all that's taken into consideration that we're doing what's the best plan overall. And so what our goal is is again to mitigate as many of those trees as we can. It may not be exactly where it was prescribed back in 1995, but our goal is to have as many trees as we can that's still going to work well with the surrounding area, the surrounding utilities and also maintain the survival of those trees. And then when a tree does die, we're going to replace it, correct? That's correct. We do have a site operations manager in solid waste now and that's one of the things that is going to be top of mind for them is taking inventory of those trees on a regular basis. If we have one that's dying, let's get it out of the ground , let's get it replaced and let's do everything we can to stay on top of this. It's kind of like letting things slide for a number of years. This is kind of a painful process that we're going through right now. And I know it's been an impact on the neighbor, the neighbors in the area, but we want to stay on top of it moving forward once we get this in place. Thank you. Ethan, one of the areas that were there substandard or buffer was on the south side, yes, four, I think it is. Is there anything because it doesn't look I don't know is that going to be in the construction path or is there is there anything that could be done there now? Is it going to be behind the wall or can it be in front of the wall to kind of shore that up? I think we're likely looking at behind the wall because again on this right here, that yellow area on that previous slide is transmission lines are going to run right up Edwards Road as well. Okay. And so I think it's probably in our best interest to really just look exclusively behind the wall in terms of buffer with that the trailer park that's right next to us. We do have the wall on our side of Edwards Road. We recently installed a wall on their side as well. We had a lot of children running out into the right of way. And we also wanted to provide some additional screening and kind of noise reduction. So they do have a wall on their side, a wall on our side, and then we can plant trees behind it. Okay. All right, so we're talking about this buffer of what was it, 125 feet wide or something like that. Does that does that buffer width have to change when you increase the height of the landfill at all? I don't believe so in terms of what we propose. Do you want to come up for a moment, Frank? And I didn't introduce myself last time. Frank Pugsley with Park Hill Smith and Cooper. I'm the consultant for the landfill permit amendment. But as far as buffer zone goes, when 1590A, the current landfill was permitted, the buffer zone requirement was 50 feet. And since then, the TCEQ has expanded that to 125 feet. Kind of what Ethan alluded to earlier is that what TCEQ is most concerned about in that 125 feet is perimeter access for firefighting and maintenance, groundwater monitoring, landfill gas detection. So the TCEQ doesn't necessarily influence us one way or the other what we plant or how much we plant. So we are also trying to accommodate that vegetative buffer in that 125 feet. And additionally, even outside our prescriptive 125 feet. And you asked earlier if it encircles the entire landfill. Yes, we do have a 125 foot buffer around the entire waste footprint that we have to keep basically clear to some extent for site access and monitoring. Something I've noticed, touring the landfill a couple of times and throwing away waste is in that southeast corner, I believe, where we share kind of a property border with the creek and then I think it's the golf courses right there are tons of plastic bags. And I've noticed they build up along the fence there and we bring in staff to collect them from the fence. But inevitably, they make it beyond the fence and into the trees there. It seems like if you go higher with your landfill mound that those bags, which seem to be the most popular thing other than just dirt, those bags are going to make it over there easier. Right. That's a great point. And one of the things that we're looking at in our current CIP right now is actually a fence. It's kind of a wind fence that catches that. I mean, you really attack that one of two ways is staff and personnel, you know, climbing up into trees to retrieve paper bags or plastic bags. That's not the probably the best use. And so what we're doing right now is a cost benefit analysis to see would it make sense for us to build a windscreen fence that would kind of border all of our operations. It's not going to eliminate it. It's never going to knock it completely down. But it does prevent us from having the abundance that's out there right now. We were turning the other day with some consultants and it was pretty noticeable. So we are good neighbors with the golf course. They work with us pretty regularly. They allow us onto their land to clean it up. But we do have a number of those trees back there by that creek that can be problematic for us. What do you think is is it wind direction that makes it collect more in that area than out on Mayhill? I mean, because, you know, Mayhill doesn't isn't littered with bad. I think they're the prevailing winds do have an impact. That being said, it's it's easier for us to collect the ones blowing the other direction once they get up into those trees. It is a little bit more of an adventure trying to retrieve those. And so that's what makes it more noticeable. Thank you. Any other questions? No. Well, that's that's it for the presentation. Again, we will circle back with you once the permits completed and take your direction on whether we want to do a new specific use permit and also provide both the board and the council and update as we get into freezing nickels plan for planning and as those trees start going into the ground. Thank you for the time today. Thank you. Okay, next time we have is item B in the work session, which is to receive a report, hold a discussion, provide direction concerning a management study for water, wastewater and municipal electric. Good morning. My name is Kenny Banks. I'm the general manager of utilities. I wanted to give a brief presentation. This is a somewhat infrequent situation that we're encountered with here because our charter requires us once every 10 years to actually go through a management study for the water, wastewater and municipal electric utilities. And so I wanted to kind of give an overview of what that management study looks like and answer any questions that you might have and give you a general timeline of how we're looking at going through this management study. So as I said, charter requirement is to have a management study every 10 years. Last study was completed in 2008 and 2009. We have done situations where we have had water and wastewater combined within municipal electric. We've also had those done separately by individual consultants. We did release a request for proposal on January the 29th and responses are due by March 25th. And I provided a summary of major elements in your agenda information sheet. This is a very comprehensive study. There's a lot of components to it. It's kind of divided up into some general areas. I also provided some additional descriptions in the backup as exhibit two to give you a little bit more sense of what those individual topics look like. And so what I'd like to do today is just go through the very high pass the major elements and then answer any questions you might have. And also if there's any feedback that you'd like to provide staff, we've given a general outline to the consultants. But of course as we start working with them, if there are specific elements that you would like to see or have us emphasize, we'd like to hear about those so we can start rolling those in. So in terms of general management, one of our major elements, basically this is just a review of how the utility operations are conducted as it relates to the cost of providing that service. And so it looks at every individual aspect of that utility. And so I've tried to put a list in here and I apologize for it being a little bit of an exhaustive, but it includes governance, organizational structure, financial practices, development policies, all the support services, the franchise and cost of service transfers, our public communication, public relations, our planning and budget process, how we develop our rates, and then the overall administration of the organization. So a lot of elements there, a lot of things to look at. Active analysis of significant operational cost is the next major element that we had for the management study. We are basically examining the cost components of major utility services and subunits. So I've tried to divide these out by the individual utilities. For electric, this is mainly related to transmission and distribution services. For water, we will be looking at raw water supply, our treatment, storage and pumping, distribution, engineering, metering, and then our wholesale operations. On the wastewater side, collection, pumping, treatment, biosolids management, wholesale services for wastewater treatment and storm water. And then support services are the internal services that we receive as utilities, so customer service, accounting, purchasing, warehouse, legal information technology, human resources, finance, engineering, inspections, and then also fleet operations. In terms of outsourcing, that's an element that we included in this study. It was also looked at in the 97-98 study fairly extensively . Basically if the consultant finds that any function of the utility or city is now performed by its own personnel is not comparable or competitive and couldn't be made comparable or competitive within a reasonable timeframe through some adjustments, the consultant will present that issue involved with those functions as a part of our interim report. Generally, the way these go, there are several interim reports and I'll go into a little bit more detail about that, but this is definitely something that we wanted to target as a component of an interim report so that we could bring that information if it's discovered back to the board. If outsourcing is an appropriate recommended action, the consultant may be requested to provide a detailed plan for outsourcing implementation and of course that's going to require approval by the city and that would result in an amendment to the consultant's base contract. So in terms of deliverables, it's anticipated that we're going to be completing this project in phases. It's a big undertaking. We expect to have interim draft reports on key issues with possible action items during the course of this study. Those will be prepared for review by the city. We will receive a final comprehensive document that includes all the interim reports and all the action items. We'll also have the cost of service and comparative relationship which is basically a benchmarking operation to other utilities of comparable size. So in terms of the schedule, basically we are looking to do the bulk of this work during 2018. We'll be providing you as a board interim presentations based on the information that we get back from the consultant and we hope to have a final presentation to the public utility board for a recommendation and then on to the city council sometime in the spring of 2019. So I know that's a lot of information. I hopefully some of the information that was provided as backup was useful in kind of seeing the major elements of these studies. I'd be glad to answer any questions that you might have or if there's any feedback that you'd like me to take a look at, start incorporating. I will say that the way that we've released this proposal is basically the respondents have the opportunity to either respond in totality, meaning that they would do an entire study for municipal electric, water and wastewater or they have the opportunity to respond individually where one respondent could just choose to tackle water and wastewater and another respondent didn't municipal electric. We felt that that would give us a little bit more flexibility probably depending on the respondents that we get maybe a better product. So I'd be glad to answer any questions. I have a question. Yes sir. So it's done every 10 years. Correct. Is the assumption that this is obviously to control costs, be efficient, provide services based on today's demand and looking ahead in the future? Correct. Which relates to how is all that going to impact the rates to the citizens? Sure, yes. And so is this a 10 year projection out or does it go further than that? Well, what it's intended to do is look at the current operations and basically how they're managed and make recommendations where those operations could be made more efficient, more cost effective, et cetera. And then those recommendations are to be implemented going forward. So in a sense it is a forward looking study. Keep in mind that we also have cost of service analyses that occur at a more frequent basis. We're required to do those once every five years. So the way this has kind of happened in the past is that the management study has a whole series of recommendations, we begin implementing those during the -- as we go forward. And then we have a five year cost of service that would be in process. Actually depending on the timing with this, we'll actually have two cost of services before this one comes back again. Questions? Yes. Well, first of all, I'm excited that this is going to happen and I really like the idea about having each utility, you know, worked on separately as long as there's some, you know, coming together at the end. A couple interrelated suggestions, recommendations. One, and this is regarding the number six which says that the support service review shall include but may not be limited to utility billing, customer service, et cetera. One thing that I think would be worth considering is the way that customer service has in the past been relatively separate kind of the day to day operations of customer service has been separate from the day to day operations of the various utilities and the management of those utilities. And I would like to see the consultant consider, you know, what might be the pros and cons of having a more integrated management approach where, say, you know, the head of DME is involved in a more regular basis in, you know, decisions being made in customer service. And the reason why, and maybe it's obvious, but because, you know, when so many people in the public, they think about, say, you know, DME or any one of the utilities, often they're thinking about their bill and or, you know, a conversation they've had on the phone. And the things that people tend to take for granted are the fact that, you know, when they have, when there's a power outage, it gets turned right back on, you know, it comes back on relatively quickly, you know, and I mean, we know that those are, that that's what so much of DME is involved in, but for so many people, it's a bill. And so and then following on that on that same note with customer service, I think it would be a good thing for, you know, consultants to consider what might be, you know, the advantages of doing a customer service. I'm sorry, doing a customer satisfaction, taking some customer satisfaction assessment. This is something I had mentioned in the past, but not knowing that this 10 year assessment would come would be coming up. So that seems like something that could be really nicely integrated into that for each utility to see what people think about the the the the utility. And that, I think, would be really, really helpful. And then and then the final thing would be about billing, you know, in the past, when, you know, discussions of say, DME rates have come up, you know, we look at we compare to other similar cities. I would like for, you know, these consultants to at least consider the possibility of one focusing on comparing DME to co-serve, which is just again, on the same principle of the way the public sees it. You know, people around here generally, they're comparing people who are on, say, DME are comparing their bill to their sometimes literally their neighbor, you know, who has co-serve. So I see it as that's our main competitor, and that's what people are comparing to. So I think that would be the most useful comparison. And then secondly, to look at not just the rates, but the the cost of service adjustment. I mean, you know, you mentioned that before. And of course, that's something that's considered on a regular basis. But to consider the ways that customer that the that the cost of service adjustment combined with rates affects people's bills, which affects customer satisfaction, I'd like to see, you know, more integrated approach to that. So those are my recommendations. But I think it's it's great that that that this is coming up. It just seems like a really opportune time. Thanks. Thanks. Questions? No. Anything else? Anybody like to comment on in here? Okay. Thank you. Okay. At this time, we have a couple of items to be discussed in closed meeting. The Public Utilities Board will convene. Okay, we're back in open session at 1032 a.m. to go through the regular meeting portion of our agenda. First, we have the consent agenda, which we have two items on consent agenda. Is there any member who would like to pull either items A or B for individual consideration? I'd like to pull a A. I'd like to pull B. Okay, there we go . All right. So the first we'll move those then for individual individual consideration. So the first one is item A, which is to consider recommending approval for the purchase of one model LP873 vacuum excavator for the City of Denton drainage department. We go through the presentation or you just want to have a few questions you want to ask? I thought I read that we are this is a replacement, but we 're not going to sell it. We're going to keep it. So why if it's a replacement, are we going to keep it? That's the next one question. It's actually this game was shared by two different departments, the streets department and the drainage department. And so the machine was purchased by streets. The original machine was purchased by streets with the agreement with drainage that they would do the maintenance cost on the machine. So drainage, I guess, figures they have enough work for that particular type of machine now that they would like to purchase one for themselves. The street department. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Sorry about that. So the streets department is going to temporarily retain that machine. Now it still has a little bit of life left in it. So we're not going to auction it right at this time. But when they get ready to replace it, they may decide they don't need it anymore. I have a feeling the drainage department used it the most of the time. So that's why they're splitting it and they're going their separate ways now. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I'll move approval. Okay, we have a motion for approval of item A, which is is there a second? Second. And a second. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Very good. Item A passes. Item B. Same thing. Charlie, you wanted that one pulled? Yes, I just have a question. And it's concerning the timeline laid out in the AIS. Yes, sir. It's really confusing to me. Okay. So these are actually fees that we should be paying from the start of the fiscal year. They're basically paid to the TCEQ on a per ton basis. It's 95 cents per ton. This is actually the first time the solid waste department has brought this to the PUB and the council for approval. And we ran into this whenever we were issuing a PO and found that, wow, we really should have been bringing this to the board and the council on a regular basis. And so we are running a little bit on an unusual timeframe right now. We're actually trying to pay our first quarter with the TCE Q, which is due March 1st, I believe. So once we complete this year's cycle of payments, we want to tee this up so that you all and the council are seeing this with the fiscal year information. So we'd be bringing that back in kind of the September, October timeframe and then issuing the PO, the purchase order shortly thereafter once you approve that. Does that make sense? So it'd be approved in advance for the year and you could just issue. That is absolutely correct. That's how we present this moving forward. Okay. Any other questions? No. Do we have a motion on item B? I recommend approval. A motion to approve. Is there a second? Thank you. Discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Item B passes. Next we have the item A, which is consideration of approval , consider approval of the public utilities board meeting minutes of January 22nd, 2018. Are there any changes, comments, questions about these as they were distributed in advance? Okay. Hearing none, we can consider those approved by acclamation then. Item B is to consider recommending adoption of an ordinance awarding a contract with Atmos pipeline, Texas, a division of Atmos energy, corporations to provide alternative fuel transportation services and to install a metering station for their alternative, too many descriptions here, alternate fuel filling station located at 1251 South May Hill Road. I have to say it three times fast. I know. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So members of the board, I do have a brief presentation for you and the public this morning. Just a little bit of a refresher in terms of where we've been with compressed natural gas as a fueling platform over the last few years. This is a topic that was raised in 2012 and revisited throughout those last few years. The solid waste department had invested in about 24 CNG- based vehicles in the recent past and in 2017, this summer, we brought that to your attention because we were utilizing a mobile fueling platform that had some very high cost with that. And as we ran our financial analysis, we found that it wasn 't really going to have the financial benefit that we thought it would because of where diesel was in the market. And so we proposed an exit strategy, if you will, to age out our fleet and try to exit the fueling platform with the least amount of financial damage as we could. And so it was agreed by both the PUB and the council in August of 2017 that the best strategy was to construct a fueling station at the fuel island out at the solid waste landfill. There are a few agreements that are going to be involved in bringing this station online. We currently have an agreement with Zide Energy. They are there for station construction and maintenance. This was approved in 2016. And we are looking at construction being complete in the mid-March timeframe. The first additional agreement that we need to transact is with Atmos pipeline. That's for transportation and metering of natural gas. That's posted for consideration on your agenda today. When we do our calculations based on our volumes, we're looking at about 16 cents per gallon or per DGE. That stands for diesel gallon equivalent. In addition to that, once this is approved today, assuming that takes place, we'll also have a natural gas purchase, buying commodity, if you will. And that contract finalization will be contingent on today 's vote because we need to have a metering station installed before we can purchase gas. Our projected costs there with what we've seen from the submission so far is about 50 cents per gallon. And so our all-in cost on a per gallon basis is going to be right around 66 cents. That's a significant savings over what we're paying today, which is approximately $3.75 a gallon. This is the annual fuel usage for our 24 vehicles in our fleet. And the annual savings come up to about $415,000 each year. Now as we mentioned, we are going to be aging out our investments in the CNG fleet. And so those numbers will come down in the out years. We plan to age out that fleet probably by 2023, 2024. With that, I will be happy to stand for any questions you might have. Questions? Well, I'll just say that's a lot. That's a great cost recovery, especially if you look at three to four years on that, you know, for what we're paying now. It's it feels good to have it presented whenever we're saving money over what we're doing now. It's going to feel real good when the gas turns on at the station. I would like to say a big thank you to Nick Vinson. He's been the project manager on this, done a lot of the financial work, terrific work all the way around. I'm really glad he's here. And I know he's going to be very relieved whenever the station comes online, too. Thanks, Matt. Very good. Yeah, I just want to add my voice to that. And, you know, thanking staff that worked so hard on this to save ratepayers money and make sure that we making sure that we're not sinking more more costs into this. This is really just excellent problem solving. And it's just great to see this going forward that, you know, I don't I don't see mistakes like this happening again. So it's great savings for ratepayers. So thank you. Okay, very good. Do we have a motion on item B then? Move approval. Second. Second. I have a motion to approve and a second. Further discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Very good. Item B passes. Item C is ACM update. PB members, I wanted to mention a few reports that we've included in your backup. The first is an informal staff report to answer some questions that we receive on credit collections and Tiffany Thompson is here from customer service if you have any follow up questions from her on that item. And the second item is for some operational and cost information related to Lake Ray Roberts. We have some folks from water that are here certainly they can answer questions if you have any detailed questions on them from them. And I also wanted to mention to you about the approach we 're going to be taking for any kind of action items related to closed session discussions. Previously we've been able to have votes take place in closed session on time to time when the occasion required it. The direction we've received from council is in the future to have redacted copies of any kind of agreements or actions that are being taken in the open session. So we'll be doing that in the future and we've provided a short memo just to put that information back up for you so you can see that going forward. We also have the future item list and the new business matrix and be happy to answer any questions that you have on any of those items that are there. Any comments about any of the -- yes. I just want to thank Tiffany for putting together all that information. I really appreciated it and it's really good to see as far as the uncollectible debt by category goes. I hope that as we move into the future that this information is collected category by category so that all this work doesn't have to be done looking backwards and sorting that out so it's just kind of divided into those categories as we go. But this is extremely helpful. I just wanted you to know that this was read with -- that I read this carefully and, you know, be sharing what I learned from that and that I hope that I know that council decided to take a more incremental approach. I think that was the word that the mayor used in reforming the deposits policy because that was the context anyway in which this uncollectible debt was first presented to us as kind of -- this is how you can see, you know, how and to what extent the deposits are working. You know, it was interesting -- I'll just note for now that one thing that was interesting for me to see in these new figures, the breakdown year by year, was how the multifamily uncollectible debt decreases, you know, eventually decreases but then remained relatively constant and so, you know, without going into the weeds in that, that's something that I hope, you know, when we come to this next as PUB and council really gets considered but I really like the breakdown by category. And I wanted to say, you know, as far as the payment options, just for, you know, any public, you know, watching this, you know, I had raised concerns before because I had heard some people in the community mention that, you know, they had been charged additional fee for paying by phone and an additional fee for changing their credit card and, you know, what this tells -- this report prepared by staff just points out that those extra charges are only for commercial accounts and not for residential accounts. I just wanted to qualify that for the public that, you know , that if you did get those charges that that is policy, you know, across the board for commercial accounts and, of course, if anyone who has just a residential account finds themselves being charged those additional charges, then that means that that policy was wrongly applied and then you have something that you can point to to show that it was wrongly applied. But it's good for people to know that it's not just -- it's not arbitrary and it's definitely not universal. And I wanted to add about the closed meeting, the note here in the ACM update on closed sessions. I'm so happy with the new closed session policy that we're not going to be taking votes in closed session and I know that had been done in the past and, you know, justified under previous administration, but I really like the new direction of transparency in the new, you know, management and counsel. So just thank you to, you know, management and, you know, especially to counsel for deciding on that. And then final -- oh, no, yeah, so that's all about that and then I have a question that would -- sorry, that would go under concluding items. So that was all, but anyway, sorry, I realize that was a lot, but there were some really good updates there in that ACM update. I wanted to be sure to get that in that the public knows and that, you know, staff knows how much their work is appreciated. Okay. Go ahead, Susan. I have a comment on the collections too and I'm assuming that when we put in the new meters that maybe we'll see a trend a little bit on that multif amily. That's always a difficult area because of the transient nature of people moving out of apartments. So is that a goal of the new metering? That is a goal and thank you. I want to say that I just got through having a root canal so I'm not having a stroke. So if I start drilling, just go with it. With that, so yes, that's definitely the intention to be able to offer more services for our customers and hoping that with the debt it can go down because they'll be able to pay as they go and they'll never get into that bad debt option for them. That won't be an option for them because they'll pay as they go and we're hoping that's going to be again brought forth in May for the prepaid metering program. All right, thank you. And I also want to say that I like the new change on the voting on the closed sessions out in the open. I think Brenda and I both kind of went sometimes before but that's just the way it was. All right, very good. Any other comments about the ACM report? Okay so as a closing item, any board member who would like to look see future agenda items that we can place or anything to add to the matrix that we have published? Yes. Yeah, I would like staff to look into the possibility of lowering our reconnect fees now that all meters are going to be remote. Maybe that's not feasible for some reason that I don't understand but since presumably the fee was decided because there was manual labor involved in shutting off the power now that remote metering is going to be ubiquitous across the board, I myself don't see why the reconnect fee needs to remain constant, why there shouldn't be a drop in that as well. Again maybe there's some good answer but it seems to me worth discussing. Thank you. Yeah, I think I'd like to see the impact on the revenue side, what that would be as well because I don't know if that's a big number but obviously that's a cost of service issue. Maybe even be in our 10-year review part when they do that, I don't know if they're going to get that far down in the detail. Probably not. Yeah, I understand. Okay, any other comments, questions? Seeing none, is there a motion to adjourn? Thank you Brendan for that motion. Is there a second? Second. Charlie second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay.