Jun 25, 2018 Public Utilities Board on 2018-06-25 6:00 PM

2018 Public Utilities Board meeting to order. We have a qu orum and it's six o'clock. First items we have are going to be work session items so we'll start off with work session item A which is receive a report, hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding a review of the solid waste department's landfill and collection operations by Blue Ridge Services Inc. Good evening members of the board my name is Ethan Cox I'm the director of solid waste for the city of Denton. It's my pleasure to bring this item to you tonight. We have Blue Ridge Services here with us. I'll give them a bit of an introduction in just a moment but I want to give you a little bit of background on this item before we get started. So as most of you are aware over the last 13 to 14 months we've basically done what we call kind of a series of diagnostic checks on a number of programs and the general health of the solid waste department. A number of those items like landfill mining, compressed natural gas fueling, a lot of that's been brought to the board and the council already. As we've kind of gone through these last few months we wanted to bring in some outside assistance to help us kind of cover the gamut of the remaining operations that we have out there. In addition we also felt it's necessary to kind of assess our organizational structure in our staffing for some of our more critical services and so we contract with Blue Ridge Services to kind of help us along in that manner. The purpose of this was just to do that is to take a look at our operations and kind of compare us to industry standard. It doesn't mean that industry standards right and we're incorrect it just simply means where do we fall in terms of other solid waste operations and so the report that you have in front of you tonight is fairly dense. You also will be provided a copy of the full report which is about a hundred pages. The way that Blue Ridge is going to go through this is by operations. Once they get done with their side of the presentation I'll return to the podium. These are a little bit different than some of the other presentations that you receive. There's both programs being evaluated there's also operational suggestions. So when I return to the podium I'll kind of break out management's response number one to the programs give you an idea of what to expect next and also give you an idea of where we stand with a lot of the operational recommendations in the report. So with that I'm going to go ahead introduce our speakers tonight. First up is Neil Bolton. He's the president of Blue Ridge Services. More than 40 years of experience in solid waste industry. I visited hundreds of landfills seeing quite a bit of the types of operations that we run in his day. In addition he's also the author of several operational and safety handbooks. We have several on site at our operation and most folks in the solid waste industry are very familiar with the training. His product speaks for itself. Instructor 200 plus training classes across the US and abroad. Also with us this evening is Ron Proto. He got 50 plus years experience in solid waste industry really focused on the collection side of the house . He's currently the president of the Ron Proto consulting group as an engineering manager and also runs acts as a group manager in some solid waste operations in San Francisco. So it's my distinct pleasure to welcome him to the podium and I'll turn it over to Neil. Thank you. So my name is Neil Bolton. As Ethan said I've been in the waste business a long time. I've probably been to something north of 500 landfills and many hundred other types of waste facilities. So what we're going to talk about here today is it's kind of the results of an operational assessment or review kind of a boots-on-the-ground look at the facility where we evaluate a lot of your data but also just observe your operations. Ron and I and another person from our company, Kasem, we spent four days total on site so we were all there for about a week observing your operations, collections, landfill, the whole process and that's what we're going to be talking about today to just kind of give you an overview of where we are. So we started off the way we normally do just submitting questionnaires and gathering a lot of data. You guys have a lot of information that included the collections and the landfill operations. We also did what we normally do is the operations and safety review. So as a consulting company we 're the guys who kind of fit in between. We'll come in behind the time when a facility is designed or operated and look at how it's being operated. So more the practical aspect of that. So late March the three of us were here and see if I can get this to roll the right way. The three areas that we looked at and that we're going to talk about tonight are the landfill collections and then sort of the solid waste system in general in terms of the overall process. So we're going to start by talking about the landfill. The landfill tonnage has increased continually. This follows kind of the same pattern that we see in many other areas where the waste generation continues to increase. We see this in areas where there's a lot of growth, a lot of development and we also find that along with that same pattern recycling may be increasing as well in some areas. The department has instituted a lot of ancillary services so we're not just collecting in the landfill but there are a lot of other operations that are sort of integrated into that and we're going to talk about some of those tonight in terms of some that make sense and some that actually in our opinion don't make sense. So there's been a lot of growth and as tonnage increases that generally means revenue increases and when you look at the waste industry in general as a whole nationally there are lots of opportunities to do other things with waste besides just landfill and so your operation has has done some of those things and in some cases you know we found some ineffic iencies with how those are working. So part of the process is being able to plan ahead and we're going to talk about some planning recommendations that we have in regard to the landfill itself. There are three key areas one is what we call a soil management plan but that's really a strategic long-term development plan. I can give you an example for those of you that are familiar with the site or have been to the landfill or seen photos of the landfill. What we're talking about here is being able to strategically as though we were playing chess with all those pieces out there determine when we're going to reach certain areas. So you have a new line that you've just constructed there's a big pile of soil that came from that excavation and the question of where that soil is and where we put asphalt and concrete rubble and where we put other materials is very important because we see regularly facilities especially those that are growing fast and doing a lot of development all at once end up putting some materials in maybe less than the perfect strategic location to the point where sometimes have to be moved twice and so there are some planning goals that we think we could put into place there that make that more efficient so that you know strategically when you're going to fill a certain area and how much soil you will need for that area and how much concrete or asphalt rubble you might need for the access roads and the tipping pads to service that area and then what comes next when do we get to the next point and having those details would be very important. We'll talk a minute in a minute just about how airspace is currently being utilized at the site and we're not as efficient as we could be we could do a better job we could we could improve our operations to be able to consume less airspace by being more strategic about how we fill and how we compact trash and how we cover the trash and that sort of ties into all of this. The next recommendation in terms of a plan is for an annual fill sequence plan so one of the things that happens is when we asked some of the folks on the ground where are you going to be filling next week or next month or next wet season we didn't get consistent answers and what that tells us is we really don't know where we're going to go next we're just kind of filling the next active available place without any pre-planning so let me give you an example of how that would work. If we knew that during the next wet season or 12 months from now during the whenever we have to be someplace where we can travel and have access during a wet period if we knew where that was going to be we could strategically build the base for that out of waste get it covered and then when asphalt and concrete rubble comes into the site we could direct customers to go to that location and dump it so that it's where we're going to need it. Right now we're dumping it in a central location we're processing it we're hauling up to the top of the hill and then we're distributing from there and so we handle that material multiple times at a fairly high cost and there are just more efficient ways of doing that but that requires that we plan ahead again to know where we're going to be next. This is a this is common concept for anybody in the construction business not just moving trash or moving soil but if you're building a building where do you put materials so that during the right place at the right time. The last part excuse me part of a very small piece of this is just having those wet weather tipping pads those areas where we can unload during the wet season set ahead of time. When we were there we were coming off the back end of a few days of rain and we were pulling trucks in and having some issues with that and so those are things that we can we can solve through better planning and just being more strategic about how we move those chess pieces around on site. So this just gives a little more detail on that I'm going to skip through this stuff. We get a lot of rubble a lot of concrete and asphalt rubble comes into the site and we go through a number of processes we stockpile it and we screen it and we move it and we crush it and we do a number of different things where we have an outside contractor come in and crush it. We do a number of different things and in the end we come up with a fairly in the construction industry if you were in the road business you'd say hey that's a nice material for me to use for my roads but we're in the landfill business and so we don't necessarily need to have that fine material that fine gravel for creating roads because it doesn't last nearly as long as some of the concrete and asphalt rubble that comes in if we could just use it in bulk. So if we can use chunks of asphalt and concrete that are this size you would never put this on a residential road or on your driveway but at a landfill where we're building on trash and so the base of what we're building on is pretty soft and we also have trucks and heavy equipment that are driving up those roads and into the dirt and into the mud and then back on the road and very quickly as we saw during our time there the road becomes pretty well covered with mud so we're spending a lot of money to process and touch that concrete and asphalt rubble multiple times to get it to a product that's not the ideal product. It would be better for us to use it almost as it comes in aside from very large pieces of curb and gutter and concrete with rebar in it and the more we can use that material just as is the less handling costs we have and actually the more durable our roads would be. And so some processed material could be beneficial in terms of covering roads and capping, topping off roads that are getting more traffic just vehicle traffic but in terms of a landfill operation that doesn't that doesn't make sense for us. On top of it we're not making any money with this with this rubble gravel processing operation where we crush rubble and create a product from it. Partly because it's so expensive to do that. Partly because we're taking it in at a rate that may be a bit low and we're selling at a rate that's also low and doesn't cover our costs and we're frankly taking in way more material than we need to have. So what normally happens at most facilities is that we'll identify again through this good pre-planning process how much of that material, how much rubble concrete and asphalt and maybe some processed gravel that we're going to need and we take in that amount. Here's here's what happens at other landfills not all but many other landfills. They'll identify how much of that material they need and once they've received that amount of material the gate rate increases because now it's not something that we are reusing to some benefit it's not a beneficial reuse material it's actually coming into our site we don't need it we don't maybe want it and we're losing money in processing it . So at some point we don't need to take in as much as we're taking in. If you 've been to the site recently when we were there the end of March there's quite a large pile of unprocessed concrete and asphalt rubble and there's quite a large pile of processed material and frankly it's just more than we need to have and so there may be some benefits to being able to adjust the rates and close the valve on that material so to speak because we are losing some money in that process. We also have a building material recovery facility known as the BMR and the BMR is a recycling facility where vehicles come in cell fall vehicles they dump their trash on a concrete pad and then that material gets processed. Some metal gets pulled out some materials get extracted from that most of that material then goes through the process where it's shredded or ground up at that facility then it grows across a pick line an outside pick line it's basically a conveyor belt where people could stand there and pull recy clables out of it's a fairly common recycling process it's very labor-intensive. When we were there there was a lot of material passing through the system it was all being processed and ground up and what we found was that the recycling benefit was minimal 10% or less very very minimal amount of recycling going on there to the point that we actually observed one of the large excav ators it has a grapple on it called an orange peel grapple and it would it was we watched it pick up a piece of pipe that was about six feet long just a piece of plumbing pipe pick it up and drop it and reach down and pick it up again and finally move it that's a lot of equipment for a very minimal amount of recycling and one of the understandings that we had in reading through one of the proformas and some of the background on that BMR site was that by processing the trash by shredding it and grinding it up before we haul it to the landfill and landfill it and bury it and compact it that we would get a lot better compaction rate that is simply just not true in fact the compaction rate that we're achieving is below industry standard even facilities that that don't pre -process that so we're bringing waste material in we're dumping it we're pushing it in a pile we're picking it up and sorting through it we're putting it in a shredder we're running it through the shredder across a conveyor into a truck and we're hauling it to the landfill to process it and we're doing all of that work and we're getting less result than if we just sent that mature directly to the landfill and compacted it properly and part of the reason for that is that the compactors and I'll get to that in a minute the compactors then the steel-wheeled landfill compactors are not being used effectively and that 's not a criticism on the operators at all it's just that the space allowed in our work pattern is not adequate I'll get to that in just a minute so the the BMR is also similarly losing money and we see no way that it's going to make money with the current process that it has so there is a small amount of diversion that is happening there but the sheer amount of equipment and effort and the number of times we touch that material is problematic for it's just costing us more than it needs to cost so just as a kind of set the tone for where we're going to be going from here on a very basic level a landfill can receive waste and push it and pack it and cover it that's a basic landfill operation but you can also do a lot of diversion activities you can divert concrete and asphalt rubble and you can push it in a pile and you can dump it through it gr isly and you can grind it and you can screen it and you can make a product and you can move it around you can do those things in the same way you can find recyclable commodities like what's coming out to BMR basically trash and you can process that with a lot of equipment and just because you can do that doesn't mean that economically or practically you should do that we see this same thing I was at a site a landfill in Colorado last week they have a very extensive composting operation and anything organic can be composted and it looks great on the front end and when you go to the back of the landfill they have piles and piles and piles of compost that can't be marketed because people don't want compost from the landfill for whatever reason in that region they don't want it so just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should or that it's gonna make economic sense so we think that the concrete and asphalt rubble operation and the BMR should be discontinued or at least drastically modified to the point where they are more functional and more cost-effective and you said there's only 10% that was truly recyclable in all the BMR I believe that's correct and I think Ethan ran a separate comparison and verified that that's in the ballpark yeah so 10% is 10% that's not bad but the cost there was a significant cost to that and that's a question we have to look at is how do we how do we function does that we will not lose airspace it's not like we're putting a material in there that could have been used somewhere else rather than going into the ground if you compact and process the waste properly you will actually consume less airspace than you currently are consuming and I'll get to that in just a minute but our airspace consumption rates are not are not good they don't they don 't match industry typical standard and again not any reflection on the operators or the staff it's primarily just a process it would be if we all went into that back room to one tiny table and all tried to make tuna sandwiches at the same time we could all work hard and have the best of intentions but if there's not enough space for us to be efficient we just couldn't do it that's what's happening there question on the on the BMR rubble so that that material who's bringing that in is that a commercial operations that are bringing that in it's coming in from local contractors is my understanding yes so for the building materials recovery operation it's a mix of commercial entities businesses sometimes small businesses sometimes large and you will see you know citizens come in there single-haul trailers and dump so BMR is much more of a mix I think the rubble processing it is by a large large contractors that are doing either state road projects local road projects things like that and so I think looking at those two separately building materials recovery we will be accepting that waste one way or the other when it comes to concrete or rubble we don't necessarily need to accept that material on site kind of the adage that I've used with staff as we divert a hundred percent of the materials that we don't accept and so I think those two things kind of warrant a different evaluation if that makes sense I know the details would have to be worked out but like if we let's say we say okay we're gonna start raising the gate rate or just not take any more in for a while so you know how's that communicated them and I don't know are these is this is it is this a regional type deal that's coming in or there are other landfills that don't accept this that we are for some reason I don't want to steal Neal's airtime but I will comment on that real quick is and I'll have some of this in the presentation when I get back up on the I think from a concrete standpoint there are many other concrete and rubble processors out there several others that have approached us in the past is you know we provide this service we actually contract out our grinding and processing we don't do all that ourselves and so I think when it comes to the rebel is there are other options out there we're not the only show in town there's probably several in this region I think when it comes to building materials recovery the way I would look at that is that's waste that we're going to be processing and so if we can divert some of that material it 's definitely to our benefit but I think it's like Neal said is what is it what is the cost we don't want to overdo it with big pieces of heavy equipment and huge picking lines we want to try to kind of right size that if that makes sense and so I hope that answers the question and I do see those as two separate waste streams you can get rid of the concrete that's really maybe not even our role or should have been but the building materials that that's a solid waste that's it you're either gonna be burying the building materials it's gonna come in one way or the other exactly right it's what I would call demo thank you so how much is the city of it and put in for all the streets are repairing no I'm just kidding you can answer later we were also doing a process that we refer to as enhanced leachate recirculation program where leachate is pumped le achate is a liquid that comes out of the landfill it's pumped back into the top of the landfill we're reinjecting that into the landfill and the primary two reasons that landfills do that one is to get rid of the leachate if you have a lot of leachate and that's a viable option for that that generates a lot of settlement so it will help the landfill to settle because now you're wetting the waste and it will decompose more rapidly and it also softens the cellulose fibers take a piece of paper and wad it up in your hand now get that paper wet and see how much smaller you can compact it so recirculating leachate will help us in some ways it helps the landfill in some ways it also drastically increases the rate of gas production within the landfill so within the landfill and part of the decomposition process waste decomposes a cubic foot of waste from your landfill would weigh about a hundred pounds and if we watch that fully decompose it would create about 600 cubic feet of landfill gas so one of the primary reasons that we research at leachate is to make more gas there's a problem with that currently the city doesn't control the gas control system at the landfill that's done by a private contractor and so they are not required the private contracts not required to put in landfill gas wells where needed to control landfill gas so we don't have landfill gas migration from our landfill they are strictly focused on maximizing gas recovery so with their operation they want good clean gas they want to put wells in where they get lots of good clean gas but if there is an issue where we have some migration or we have some issue with gas being produced in an area of the landfill that we want to be controlled we don't have the mechanism to require them to do that that's something that will be coming up at some point I believe that contract renews at some point and that's something that we would recommend that the city take more of an authority position in that to be able to put gas wells in where you need to have those so we also suggest that the ELR system be discontinued for the time being and at some point when you need to have more gas when you have a mechanism to control excess gas to go ahead and resume that we also looked at the heavy equipment to landfill and a couple of things that we found that are pretty typical the kamatsu dozer you have one big dozer d-155 that's a d8 size bulldozer that machine is working more hours than it needs to work and partly it's because of the process of being constrained in a very small work area and granted we were there when the landfill was up on top of the hill and you were getting close to moving into the new liner at some point but the hours of the machine bear bear out the fact that it 's being used too many hours and the reason that is is because we don't have enough space so we're going to be making some recommendations I'll show you here in just a minute what that's going to look like we're recommending that the tipping face be broadened and widened so there's more room for trucks to dump because here's what happens in a very small space the bulldozer has to be on call because when the truck dumps and pulls out he has to push that load to get ready for the very next truck because we only have a few slots for trucks to dump that's not only inefficient because he spends a lot of time at the starting gate waiting for that next push it's also unsafe because he 's having to get in between trucks and close to trucks and the fatalities that we have at landfills almost always occur at that location for that reason we're just too constrained and too crowded so we're making some recommendations that we widen that face out I'll show you what that looks like in a minute but in the process it will decrease the dozers hours by getting him into more efficient situation where he can actually push in a productive manner and then park the dozer and get on the water truck or go do something else and a bit later come back and do the same thing again we think we can cut his hours by about 50% you also have a couple of cat 826 compactors those are caterpillars medium-sized compactors compactors have a certain optimum production rate if they try to handle too much waste they don't compact well and you lose airspace if you overuse those compactors you spend more money on fuel and machine wear and tear then you gain an airspace so there's kind of a sweet spot in there with these machines they would have to increase their annual work hours their combined work hours from about 4300 hours to somewhere around 5600 hours per year that's a very very full-time process and it's because those machines aren't quite big enough for the inbound tonnage that you have so we're making a recommendation that at an appropriate time budget dependent that you replace those machines with the next size of caterpillars largest or another vendor another manufacturer of a comparably sized large compactor which would do a better job of compacting trash and not have to work as many hours you just be much more efficient because the production rate of a large machine is just higher than it is for a medium-sized machine like someone one that you have you also have a small dozer out there which is ideal for trimming and covering and we don't have any issue with you think we think that's great we should continue to to have and use that small bulldozer and we're also using three articulated haul trucks to haul soil and we haul some rubble with them and we do different things with those those those machines are excessive in terms of the number of machines we have if we utilize a more effective means of covering the trash an alternative daily cover and we'll talk about tarps here in just a minute that system would allow us to vastly decrease the amount of soil that we're using in the landfill and the excessive amount of soil that's used for cover is partly significantly part of it of what's driving our airspace consumption rate we're consuming airspace quicker than we necessarily have to do so we believe that we can decrease the number of articulated haul trucks at the site we could probably get by with less than one machine and we get into the question of having a backup and how difficult is it to find a backup in the market if one machine goes down that also takes us back to planning if we are planning to fill here this week and that's all we know if that truck goes down we're in it we're in trouble because we've got to haul dirt in for the next place we're going to fill but if we knew that we were going to be filling along that table for the next six months we could be putting soil strategically in those locations and if a truck goes down right there that's fine we've already placed soil we can use for weeks and weeks and we can we can keep up with that so the planning component is a significant part of the solution for all of this we think we can decrease number of trucks and certainly the number of truck hours by just being more efficient with how we use cover soil we also strongly recommend that we increase the use of the tarping machine out if you've been out there you've seen we have a machine called a tarpomatic it's a mechanical tarping machine it's picked up by a bulldozer or compactor and it rolls tarps out like a giant paper towel roller and covers the trash and that is called alternative daily cover and just as a point of reference when we covered and based on studies that we've done across the country when we cover trash with soil at a lined landfill where airspace is valuable that soil covering costs us between 50 cents and a dollar a square foot you could go to Home Depot or Lowe's buy cheap carpet and roll it out every day and save money as opposed to using soil so soil is something we want it we want to minimize to the extent we can the tarping system on the other hand cost between three and five cents a square foot to use that it doesn't because it doesn't consume airspace and so there are some benefits to that we're strongly recommend that we increase that and in the process we think that we can go from what's currently about 1,100 pounds per cubic yards if we look at how many tons of trash goes in and how much airspace that consumes and we just do the simple math don't extract dirt and add this and just look at how many tons of trash goes in how much airspace is consumed we are consuming about 1,100 pounds or we're getting a density of about 1,100 pounds per cubic yard that's that's that's below what would be an industry norm for a landfill like this we think that by improving the operation we can get to somewhere around 1,400 we've seen similar landfills get as high as 1,600 pounds per cubic yard and so the little bit that we might benefit by shredding and grinding material at the BMR and touching it so many times is is no comparison in terms of cost and efficiency if we get things right at the face that where we actually compact and cover the trash we can get a significantly higher comp action rate and can consume much less airspace as we go so in summary we think we should have a soil management plan that's a long-term plan that shows us how we're going to develop material for example I can tell you that if you've been out there in the past couple of months we were there at the end of March we had a large pile of concrete and asphalt rubble that was right next to the big stockpile of soil that came out of our new lined area and the soil stockpile was starting to erode and cover up some of the concrete and asphalt rubble what does that mean it means at some point we're gonna have to pick that stuff up again and screen it or sort it again to get to it we need to have an annual fill sequence plan that shows us step by step where we're going to be that includes having what weather tipping pad so we can have access we need to discontinue processing rubble at least to the extent that we are right now we're losing money at that we're processing it beyond what is useful for us and it doesn't make sense the same for the BMR there can be some significant reductions in costs without any additional loss of airspace in fact by making some good changes we can actually improve our airspace consumption rate and finally eliminate the enhanced leachate recirculation process that's not helping us right now it's hurting us right now if we want landfill gas we can start recirculating leachate once that contract is changed and we actually own the the responsibilities for the gas so there are some other things in the report you'll find an appendix in the report that talks about a typewriter type system you'll see some information there about a pancake type system and those are all integrated to widen the face out give trucks more room so that it's safer and reduce dozer costs so the dozer doesn't have to be on track on call constantly and it also gives the compactors more room to process just as a quick note when compactors working in a very small space they spend most of their time slowing down or accelerating back up in very little time in production if any of you have been in a construction industry and you've ever seen a soil compactor work they make long runs and they make them as fast as they safely can do that so by giving us more space to work at the face by widening it out we make the site safer we're going to give it to compactors an opportunity to get much better compaction so we can get to a situation where we're saving a lot of money and we're also doing a better job of landing by just changing some of the things that we're doing and actually getting away from some of the ancillary processes that we just adopted over time Ron I think you're going to be up next any questions on the landfill I'm sorry there's another page here on the info so reduce the dozer hours fully utilize the compactors or get larger compactors reduce the articulated truck hours increase the tarping system and overall will increase that effective density we'll get better compaction at the landfill so any any questions on landfill stuff before we shift over to collections I have on the enhanced leachate recirculation so when does that contract end it's actually up in 2024 any chance we can amend it or is that we've had some discussions with the the vendor that's currently onside essentially it breaks down I think Neil alluded to this where the vendor or the contractor has the right but not the obligation to utilize that gas we have to the recommendations of Blue Ridge scaled back our recirculation of leachate by the fact is is the gas output is such that we could probably not put leachate on there we're still going to be on the gas curve to where gas outputs increased so we are working with legal we've we've taken a couple of runs at that contract we're certainly going to continue to do so okay so are we are we having the flare the gas now excess gas yeah anytime we have excess gas if it's exceeds production capacity then we are flaring okay is the perimeter where the gas production and the gas quality perhaps sure great so they don't want it sure but that's what causes you the migration and it's always going to be like that to a degree but once you once you have the rights and the responsibility for it both you could go put lower production wells there to stop that migration this is a common problem because many gas gas contracts historically across the country were set up for the companies that wanted to take the gas to generate electricity or make some energy make pipeline quality gas do something with that and so they got the rights but as Ethan said they don't have the responsibilities for the entire system okay all right collections mr. Proto Ron was my first boss in the garbage business a long time ago and when I went to the office the very first day I was carrying a cup of coffee like this because I was a country boy I never carried coffee around in an office before the wheel on the oh good you know every time I listen to Neil's presentations I learned something and I learned today that landfills and uber have something in common surge pricing I never realized that again my name is Ron Proto and I've been in the business a very long time when I started we used to go in your backyard empty your can put the lid on it and hopefully close the gate walked up seven stairs and dumped it into the truck I 've seen truck pardon and you hang on the truck - yes jumped in it and put sideboards up on it because you didn't want to make three loads to the landfill in those days they call them dumps and so I've seen a tremendous amount of changes in this industry I've spent pretty much all my career on the operating side the collection side of the business although I did have a small a small gig when I helped develop a landfill for Oakland scavenger company so let me see here whoops went the wrong way the city of damp damn the first thing I look for when I come in to evaluate an operation is is all the garbage and recycling getting picked up every day and I'm happy to report all your garbage your trash municipal solid waste whatever you want to call it and your recycling is getting picked up every day there's no question about that you're not leaving blocks behind and it does happen in some communities if you follow the industry on some of the publications you'll see that sometimes not all the garbage and recycling gets picked up but that's not a problem in the city of Denton you provide a wide wide variety of services including solid waste municipal solid waste recycling bulky items and household chemicals and on the commercial side it's municipal solid waste recycling and food waste you're just starting into the food waste in some in in California that's a real big thing green waste and food waste I think by 2025 you can't put any of it into the landfill on the residential service each route makes about you know a thousand to eleven hundred lifts a day and the industry standard it for an eight hour day is about nine hundred and fifty to a thousand lifts a day one of the things although you're getting good production one of the things that we would like to see is that you conduct some kind of an objective survey to see if you're getting the most out of those residential routes because they are working ten hours a day they're not working eight they're working ten hours a day and that's an expansive day so it is recommended that you do a comprehensive study an objective study to see if you are getting a full day's work out of those routes residential recycling collection productivity is very low there's a one -to-one relation here in Denton there's a one-to-one relationship with the recycling trucks and the trash trucks and that's that's not very common usually a recycling truck because every lift they don't pick up as much and not every customer puts out their recycling every week they travel farther they usually travel more one and a quarter one and a third maybe one and a half routes but you have a one-to-one relationship so on a garbage route you're you're probably getting 95 to 98 percent of the customers are setting their garbage out every week whereas recycling they're setting it out maybe 60 or 70 percent and maybe even less so those recycling drivers are picking up maybe six or seven hundred houses a day versus the almost thousand houses that a municipal waste truck will be picked up the recycling route use the same number of trucks as the garbage routes yet they collect only 22 percent of the residential tonnage so there 's something that's not doesn't add up so what we're recommending is that they audit the residential recycling routes the setout rate now the setout rate and participation rate are two different things participation rate is you put the can out in the street once once a week once a month you're participating in the program the setout rate is how many people actually put it out every week and that's a very important number because that tells you how to design your routes how many lifts they're going to make so we're recommending that department make do a set out and a volume to look actually look into the carts to see how much is in there I did a study for a jurisdiction in California where I actually flipped the lids on on every not on every route but on a lot of routes and the recycling is all over the board but there were a lot of carts that weren't completely full quarter full half full and then yes there's the carts that are over full or somebody has two carts but I think since you don't don't know what the setout rate is it would be good to have conduct that study so that you can see it and then design more productive routes I talk a little fast sometimes so if you want me to slow down and and I'm just really surprised that the recycling isn't higher maybe it's just because I've been recycling so long yes our recycling is full our garbage is not yes in my house it's the same thing yeah I could probably put my garbage cart out I don't have garbage in my cart anymore because where I live they actually take the food waste in with the yard waste I could put my garbage cart out what they call garbage cart out once a month I just don't fill it up anymore just surprised me yeah I know it's not gonna it's not gonna increase the volume of tonnage that you get in but if is having smaller recycle bins increase your setout rate does that make it more efficient yes it definitely would but I believe you use a 64 gallon cart which is pretty much the standard in the industry because that material is bulky it's light it's not very heavy but it's bulky so but there are some jurisdictions that you get somebody that just wants a smaller cart they'll give them a smaller cart but 64 is a pretty standard cart okay so one of the things to increase your lifts when you when you get in there would be to just expand the size of the route have the drivers drive over pass more houses to get a full day's work residential yard waste now this residential yard waste has some issues with it and that is it's in my view it's it's very inefficient it has a two-person crew and they drive by almost 2,000 houses per day but average only a hundred and twenty eight collections now that's an average you have peak seasons and they collect you know 300 maybe even 400 but on average they collect 128 a day and they collect less than four they collect less than four tons per load and that's about 50% of the trucks capacity it's not even being utilized so the recommendation that we have and you can see this here before I recommend it in this the upper photo that was just one little pile that we saw it's very inefficient it was down there you know the drivers are gonna scoop it up by hand they're gonna leave some behind they're gonna leave a mess if you look at the one on the bottom there that I drew a circle around I mean that was on a video that was posted on YouTube I mean the drivers tried you know it was a big pile of there they're grabbing it with their arms I think that driver there doesn't have a long-sleeve shirt on it's it's you know it's not really safe and they did they did leave a mess and as you can see the last photo sometimes they park on the wrong side of the street and they collect both sides at the same time so one member of the crew is walking across the street in front of traffic so it's not it's not very safe for the drivers so we see is there another slide on that no so what we're recommending I guess I didn't put it down here what we are recommending is that you consider going to a cart based system similar to what you have for recycling and municipal solid waste now it's not going to be as convenient for your customers but it's going to be more cost-effective and and efficient for for the city because you can have a one person driver operator operate the truck and go along and just just like your garbage trucks do and your recycling trucks do it's a lot safer it's a lot cleaner and it's way more efficient bulky item collection now this is a this is a very important service for the city I did not drive around the whole city but I would guess that you do have probably have some illegal dumping in the city I'm not sure but I would imagine you have illegal dumping if you were to eliminate bulky item collection you'd have a whole lot more collection there so the crews average about 35 collections a day which is very low some places go up as high as 200 but you know 150 125 is more the average and so you could run the collection every other week or every third week and you could adjust the schedule seasonally adjust the schedule based on the service or I know this sounds counter intuitive but you could promote the program more to get people to use the program and perhaps reduce the amount of illegal dumping that goes on in the city household chemical collection this this is you folks provide valet household chemical collection you know you go door to door to pick it up somebody called a customer resident call in make an appointment you go pick it up usually I mean they there are communities that do it it's very expensive but usually what is done is they'll have a facility where residents can drop it off rather than go door-to-door and collect it and as you can see here there's 3800 almost 3900 pickups meaning that only 12% of the residents utilize the service but that's like 15 pickups a day it's it's not a lot of there's not a lot of pickups out there so there is there are some grants I believe that you folks can apply for that could help you to and get permits to help you establish a program perhaps on the same site that it is now commercial garbage collection I still call it I mean a rose by any other name is still a rose commercial garbage front loaders average about 102 lifts per day the industry standard is somewhere between 125 and 150 lifts a day depending upon route density distance from the landfill and one other thing that's very very important if you drive around the city of Denton you'll see all your you won't see a cart that has any wheels on it that is not common that is ideal that is like a dream route where the driver rolls up to the container and what I call stabs it the only time the driver has to get out of the truck is maybe to open up a gate for an enclosure back out and do it I rode with one of the drivers and he did that on a couple of occasions so there unless I'm missing something there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to get up closer to the hundred and twenty five or fifty lifts per day and the way you can do that is you can eliminate one Monday through Friday route and one Saturday route now you have two Saturday routes and the reason you have two Saturday routes because someone thought that it would be advantage ous to have two drivers out there instead of one in case something went wrong I come from the school is if you have a problem call your supervisor because your supervisor has the wherewithal and the resources to help you out when I looked at the Saturday routes I forget the exact number but there was a 88 88 something like that 90 customers really didn't need Saturday service they had three times a week or less service normally the hurdle for Saturday service is not universal but the hurdle rate is four times a week service so they go Monday Wednesday and Friday and Saturday because they can't hold over for the weekend but there were several twice a week customers some one time a week customers so it's not like you're stopping Saturday service you're just condensing Saturday service and moving that over through Monday Monday through Friday routes and you can increase those lifts to about 120 a day which is more in line with what they should be the commercial recycling routes are similar situation their lift count is only 68 per day you have a very complicated schedule half-day route here half-day route there pick up trash or pick up one commodity here pick up one another commodity here and whenever you have half-day routes you lose productivity you just have to keep working at and working at it and in addition this truck picks up less than 50% of the trucks carrying capacity so again we recommend consider a complete review of the commercial recycling system and then depending upon what you find is to redesign the routes to increase the lift count to about 150 a day again that shouldn't be a problem because you drive directly into the bins occasionally the driver has to get out to move the open or close a gate multifamily recycling we understand that that's an interest of the city and there's no question that you can do multifamily recycling but there's a there's a caution here I don't know if you folks follow the recycling markets and what's going on in China now California is a big big recycler that's where I come from California they are choking on recycling they cannot get rid of their recycling their residual rates in California generally from a materials recovery facility was about 10% now they're approaching 25 and 35% they just to clean the material up and even at that point sometimes they can't get rid of the material so if you do go into and multifamily recycling is the most difficult recycling to pick up it is usually highly contaminated so if you do decide to go into multifamily recycling we recommend you go with caution fleet maintenance a major complaint and a source of frustration was that from the drivers was it takes too long to get the truck repaired and so the drivers were avoiding dropping off their truck unless it was absolutely necessary and this is a serious safety concern but also exactly excess excess or baits the maintenance time issue of the maintenance we looked through one of the reports a driver complained about his truck and his truck was in there for like 13 days but then when we looked at the notes that were in there the reason it was in for 13 days is there were so many things that were wrong with it some of them that were obvious the driver should have turned in like the fender was you know rattling really loose that the tarping mechanism has happened to be a roll-off truck and the tarping mechanism that goes back the cylinders and we're leaking and the long hose was leaking and that's because they don't want to bring it in because it takes too long but because they don't want to bring it in it takes too long because there's too many things your mechanics from my understanding or train when a truck comes in you don't fix just what's on the service order you fix everything you find so when they do a preventative maintenance they find several things that are wrong so they have to fix all of it so one of the things that we recommend recommended is that there be periodic meetings between fleet maintenance services and the drivers and this allows the groups to have a mutual understanding of the challenges drivers face and also the technicians face and sort of bring them together to talk about the problems I'm gonna see if there's one more here there's another issue is the city of Denton fleet maintenance has 16 technicians to that take care of about 1 ,100 assets now this includes pickup trucks little vans and everything and to be fair the the the actually industry standard is seven to ten trucks for a technician now I know when a garbage truck goes in there fire engines is going to take precedent over it there's no question about I don't know what the ratio is for mechanics to fire trucks but I know on I can go just about any maintenance program that's running efficiently there's seven to ten trucks for every mechanic and so there is the department needs to add more mechanics in order to get turn over the trucks quicker the other the other fact is that the maintenance facility is four miles away from the collection department and makes dropping off the trucks very inconvenient a driver drops off a truck someone has to bring the driver back to the to the to the corporation yard they have to pick up a truck in the morning somebody has to take the driver to go down and pick up the truck it's very inconvenient one of the things that we heard when we were here is that there was anticipated that there was going to be a fleet maintenance annex built at the corporation yard and it was sort on hold we also when we talked to the fleet service superintendent said that they were running out of room and that they wanted to expand their shop so it looks like everything if they could coordinate that get the shop built at the corporation yard and get the mechanics right there drivers will probably turn in their trucks more frequently when it needs repair and they'll be timely repaired collection summary conduct an objective study on residential municipal solid waste routes as I said you're doing about a thousand lifts a day that's pretty good but remember you work ten hours a day and not eight hours a day so they might be able to be increased audit the residential recycling south 's for set out rate and cart volume then adjust the routes accordingly and then consider using a cart based yard waste system and then consider the bulky collection every other week or every third week to increase the collections to 70 or 100 per day or publicize the program more to try to increase the number of residents and discontinue the household hazardous collection residential collection service and open up a regional facility and have people drop it off at the facility rather than provide a valet service we have a lot of recommendations on the collection side eliminate one Monday through Friday and one Saturday commercial route to increase the lift counts to about 120 a day consider a complete review of the commercial recycling system to increase lift counts to around 150 a day before expanding multif amily recycling services wait for current markets to stabilize and conduct further further resident utilization analysis conduct periodic meetings between fleet maintenance services and drivers and increased fleet services department staff to achieve a ratio of one technician every set seven to ten vehicles and constructing a maintenance shop annex close to the parking where the trucks parked I'm going to turn this back over to Neil so this is a third component of what we looked at talked about landfills we talked about collections this is kind of the overall aspect of that I'm going to talk about safety there is not a good safety culture in the department right now we saw a lot of folks that weren't wearing high visibility safety apparel and they should supervisors or managers also need to be doing they need to set the example no one should ever go out into the yard or onto the landfill if they step out of a vehicle and any any part of the operations they should have a safety vest with them we found that the safety meetings and we sat in on one we talked to folks about other ones they weren't focused on specific things they were just more general there were there were some discussions in there there weren't a lot of safety slogans and posters there just wasn't a lot of evidence that we're really focused on on safety just to give you a little feedback the waste business is the fifth most dangerous industry in the United States based on fatalities per number of workers following logging and offshore fishing and roofing I don't recall what the other one is air pilots and we're number five and so part of the process for this is to just make safety more of a vested interest for everyone on the team so we're recommending that everyone in any part of the operations if they're on the ground outside your vehicle outside the office that they have a high visibility safety vest everyone we need to have safety meetings that are more applicable and so general topics that a safety meeting is fine at times but there are a lot of specific things that should be dealt with and that that involves some more or requires some more involvement from supervisors or whoever's leading the safety meetings to talk about near misses and what are some of the issues we're having on the riot route what are some issues we're having at the landfill things like that we need to have basic standard operating procedures for everyone at the landfill on under routes and here's one of the things that we find is lacking our company does a lot of surveys around the United States and Canada we find that 90% of those managers and supervisors that we survey the facilities that we survey say we really don't have all of our safety documents and all of our standard operating procedures formalized we just sort of learn by doing and we learn by tradition and that's how we do that if you translate that and take that further down the line that means that 90% of our folks don't have good standard operating procedures there's not a standard process and so if we were to quiz everyone and ask how do we do this we wouldn't get the same answer and we didn't get the same answer so we need to have some standard procedures for how we do things this is basic stuff we looked at the organizational structure what we found was that the department is generally management heavy and partly that become that's because I believe we have a lot of peripheral processes that we're doing the ELR and the BMR and the concrete and asphalt all of that Ron can speak to some of the numbers that we found with collections but we just found a lot of management compared to the number of workers so we think that some of the operations have to be discontinued decreased let's get through some of this so collections management positions constitute 16% of the staff industry standards about 10% so if you look at the staff about 10% of our collection staff should be supervisors or managers for us at 16% normally collections supervisors have six to nine employees the report to them or that they're supervising that's 30 to 50 percent below the industry standards so again we just have we have too many management folks a lot of the collection supervisors spend a lot of their time doing administrative things we're having an administrative assistant IE a secretary someone else to do some of the paperwork could be a huge benefit those folks should be involved in managing their routes and their drivers and not doing administrative tasks I think that Ron if you have a comment on this the collections dispatching supervision of backup drivers and fleet maintenance need to be addressed as part of this whole process in other words how are we structured how is the collection system structured in that regard special projects new operations we can we can back I think we need to the gist of this is we need to step back to our core operations and make sure we're focusing on getting those right so we think as a recommendation we can reduce three managers and four supervisor positions within the department basically dissolve the site operations division which was all of the special projects where those were coming from and assign some planning and special projects to the landfill manager we think that the scale house should be assigned to the administration manager so that there's a little closer communication between what's happening in the scale and what's happening operationally I think we should have a dispatch operation which speaks more to the collections side of things and the an cillary services should just be under a facility supervisor so that in other words when we have additional things that we're doing at the facility that we have someone who is who's coordinating that and managing that specifically so this table here shows where we are currently and kind of what we're recommending on the landfill side and this chart you're probably not going to be able to see Ethan are you going to talk about this in more detail do you want me to go through this or do you want to talk about that okay this is going to be hard for everyone to see I think I saw some of your stuff and it looks like it's maybe a little bit clearer to see that Ron any comments on that on the collection stuff I know better sorry this is just a graphical representation of the slide before is consolidating the the supervisors and the managers we're not adding any we added two new positions but we're not adding two new staff in the collections and that is a full-time dispatcher and also a fleet our facilities maintenance supervisor so it's just removing the people around shuff ling them around any questions thank you very much thank you thank you very much thank you Ron so I know I know this report's fairly dense and I'm not going to be going through in detail kind of the management response but I do want to hit a few key items see if I can't find my presentation here seems to have disappeared on me all right I think my presentation got deleted it's a Monday right well I appreciate Ron and Neil going through that again I know this a dense presentation so like I mentioned at the outset what I'm going to attempt to do is just kind of break this down between really two sections of recommendations and responses for most of the operational recommendations I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through that up here let me get my bearings real quick I'll probably just hit the highlights and then I'll field questions on the operational stuff that you've seen there are two items that I want to hit at the outset and number one is the organizational restructure to Ron's point I do want to provide a little bit of additional texture to that in terms of the management restructure really what we look at from our perspective is that we have an abundance of managers in the operation but we also have some pressing needs in some areas as you've seen through their report in terms of helping us to improve planning and operations we are proposing adding a deputy director position for training and safety we feel like that's a key point of emphasis for us we don't want to put our drivers our employees or the public at risk and so we want to bring in a training and safety coordinator to help coordinate those efforts fleet was a big issue that was identified in this the timely maintenance of our fleet so we are recommending adding some of that and we'll bring that forward in the department's budget in the next few weeks in terms of the management positions I think one of the things I would say is we have an abundance of really good people at our side and we want to make sure that we handle this with care and that we approach this in fairness and that we try to take care of our employees as best we can a few things that we want to try to see out of the organizational restructure is improving communication when you have multiple layers of management sometimes it's like the game of telephone in grade school is the messages don't always get up and down the chain of command as well as they should and that's one of the things that I've kind of seen in my time there and I think Ron and Neil picked up on some of that as well right now we have basically supervisor by committee so a lot of our collections operators in particular they have four supervisors and what ends up happening is when you don't have just one person where you can go talk to the communication can sometimes overlap sometimes there's a difference in opinion on what action should be taken and it really slows us down as unnecessary so we're gonna be correcting that too overall we are really trying to take a hard look at redefining job descriptions and job responsibilities especially in lieu of some of the things that we heard from Blue Ridge so our plan is to to begin the organizational restructure immediately and then try to have that wrapped up before the turn of the fiscal year in terms of the program recommendations these are not as simple as turnkey we certainly want to make sure that the public utilities board as well as the council have an opportunity to weigh in on these so what we're proposing from a management standpoint is that we supplement the analysis that Blue Ridge has done that I think they've done a fantastic job in a very short period of time more than anything else some of the recommendations like the recycling audit is we really need to get out boots on the ground do our own audit take a little bit more time with it and then look and see what are those results really telling us you know should we expand our route size should we try to adjust our program in some manner what we want to do is make basically maintain the good components of our programs while making them as efficient as they can be so so after that analysis is done we want to circle back to the board as well as the City Council provide you the results of our analysis which will be financial feasibility operational efficiency and then seek direction we do have one on on the presentation this evening that I'll get to in just a second what I've included down here some of the major program recommendations that Neil and Ron made is kind of a schedule for us coming back to the board and the council for discussion I think what we've tried to do in terms of organizing these and we 're open to comment is to take the largest in terms of the financial commitment and some of the more inefficient programs that warrant quick inspection particularly for BMR and robo processing I think the question we're gonna be asking the board and the council is do we want to continue with this in our budget or do we want to try to start making some adjustments before we come back to you this summer so let's dive into that real quick in terms of rubble slash BMR and I think you are definitely served and kind of taking a look at these as two separate entities because I think that's ultimately what we probably end with in terms of a recommendation we kind of validated what Blue Ridge's results were we found that diversion was actually 10% on both of those operations give or take for rubble over the last five years we've accepted over 300 ,000 tons I'll show you a photo of some of the stockpiles that we have out there in a moment but it is significant in a lot of cases you kind of look at this as inventory if you will and like Ron or like Neil was saying is if this sits on the ground long enough it's going to be required to be reprocessed and resorted and at that point this isn't an asset anymore it's actually a liability and we put some dollar amounts to that in just a moment and I want to revisit my statement from earlier is if our goal for both rubble and BMR processing is to divert materials away and safely and fill airspace we have a decision to make at the gate is do we want to accept this material or not unlike waste that we serve the community in the surrounding area with rubble and asphalt we have a decision and we can either price it to make sure that we're only accepting exactly what we need or do we just put a sign up that says we're not accepting that there are other alternatives for other operations to exploit in addition what you want to see with these operations is if you're hitting your diversion targets are you recovering the the expense through sales revenue doesn't always pay to recycle sometimes it's about doing the right thing and I think what we want to try to put in front of the board and the council is there's dollars and cents associated with this we're not as we're not trying to eliminate a program that both the board or the council wants to keep but we owe it to you all to be very candid and very upfront about here are the facts of how the program is performing here's the cost associated with it so on both of these you can see that we we've diverted about 10% for the rubble that is particularly troublesome because now we have an asset or liability that we have to try to move off site and it's going to be it's going to be a tough task here are some of the rubble stockpiles that we have at the facility here on the left as Ron mentioned earlier you have the soil on the back and it's kind of impeding into the unprocessed rubble here 's kind of gives you an idea of the scale of the stockpile here with some of our equipment this is actually processed concrete here that's that's into aggregate and so we've had this stockpile for the better part of the year since I've been out there we really don't have a material right now in that stockpile that's meeting spec for a lot of large construction operations to use we've had some some folks kind of poke around and see if they could use it and unfortunately we just haven't been able to move it off site so with this we have kind of a challenge ahead of us is if we do not move this off site I 'm going to draw your attention to the bottom right hand corner here the realized airspace savings we can apply basically a cost per cubic yard that's the revenue that we bring in for a cubic yard of airspace and so at that 10% diversion rate you know it looks like we've saved about 1.4 million dollars in terms of these operations combined if we're unable to move that rubble off site we may actually end up consuming about 6.2 million dollars worth of airspace and so again if we're looking at what is the purpose of these operations if saving airspace is a top priority we need to be very careful about what we allow into our facility and the stuff that needs to be here the municipal solid waste to the building materials that's where our diversion efforts really need to be focused to be staff's recommendation to go back to the overall financials of this the rubble slash BMR budget for fiscal year 18 19 we're projecting a loss of about 2.4 million dollars what that means that loss equates to if you break that out over our traditional diversion rate is it cost us about 383 dollars per ton to divert material understand that it's and I'm not saying to dispose of things in the landfill other diversion operations are much more economical in that 323 dollars not 383 I apologize understand that it cost us about 38 dollars per ton to dispose of material so it's almost a tenfold increase in the diversion for these two operations our approach from a staff standpoint over here is kind of the historical losses on that I don't need to belabor the point our recommendation would be to at least for the time being eliminate the rubble operation we do not need to accept any additional concrete or asphalt we're gonna have a hard time continuing with the asset slash liability that we have on site from the building materials recovery I think Neil put it really well is we need to reevaluate how we're going about that operation we have a number of issues on site I took a photo this morning as I entered the facility about illegal dumping this is our recycling drop-off site on the corner of May Hill this is this is not an extraordinary day this is another day at the office coming into our facility is unfortunately folks aren't using this responsibly and so what we would propose is let's eliminate some of the more costly components of the building materials recovery operation namely a lot of the big pieces of equipment let's repurpose that as a public drop-off area it would be a man site where we can divert what's what's reasonable to divert shedding some of the cost but also moving the recycling drop-off site behind the gate and really unfortunately when you have a situation like this none of this is probably getting recycled we've run a few loads through Pratt on these sites and it's up to 80 90 percent contamination and it's really unfair to the folks that are using those sites responsibly that this is happening but I think that's an opportunity for us to address a few problems all at once by by repurposing that operation the reason why we're asking for that is we are going to be coming back to the board and the council within the next few weeks to talk about number one our budget but also understand that any loss that we take in an operation like the BMR or rebel processing that has to be made up somewhere in our operation in terms of revenue and that requires rate subsidization if we were to step away from these operations and try to extract ourselves from some of the costly equipment components you probably have very minimal upfront savings you're still going to have to contend with some debt service on the equipment but by year five you probably stepped away from sixty to seventy five percent of the expense so I know that 's a lot to take in I'm talking really fast but I wanted to kind of put that out there this evening and just kind of take the public utilities boards guidance on that comments I agree to eliminate the rubble that's that's not a solid waste issue that's that's outside of what our core services should have been I'm not sure how we got into that but that's that's not handling mixed municipal solid waste and we'll be more yes and I think reconfiguring we can make that more effective I think we want to protect the diversion rate but understand on the rebel if we don't accept it it's already diverted and right now we're losing air space as a result of that operation so do we have some financials that show us like each year how we did I mean I know I've gone out there and the rubble has been gone and the pile gets built up again and then it goes away so is there you know before we pull the trigger on any decisions is there a way we can see I mean did we lose a customer and that's no longer buying it from us anymore is that what's happened I mean something's had to have happened or we would have realized this three years ago that it was not a money- making or not profitable situation it's a in terms of our evaluation and the challenge in terms of our budget and we'll talk more about this in a few weeks is a lot of these operations were co-mingled under the landfill budget when we break this apart and we start looking at what were the actual expenses of the operation it's difficult for us to nail down exactly was that expense truly for that operation was something else what's not difficult to assess is the revenue that's coming in off of these operations and so this goes back to 2014 the gate revenue is essentially what we charged for people entering the facility to dispose a rubble and or the BMR gate rate or no I'm sorry this is just rub ble on this one of the challenges or maybe one of the reasons the explanations of why that stockpile so great is we were charging below gate rates in terms of bringing the material into the facility and so there was some incentive for some of these contractors to haul their rubble here in terms of that the commodity sales understand that these figures up here include sales that we're making to ourselves as an organization and so as best I can tell we don't have a market that's ever materialized for this material you know you can certainly look at that and say we should do a better job of marketing it but I think we have what I in my estimation would be an inferior product at this stage and so we really have our work cut out for us to figure out how are we going to move this material off-site and or draw it down as Neil said and use it in our operations I think at the current burn rate that we have for using this material on-site it would take us about ten years to burn through the stockpile and so it's really going to be I think whenever we say eliminate rebel operations we 're really talking about preventing the stockpiles from going any larger and before we can get it just to allow us an opportunity to get our feet under us to really assess can we take what we have on-site and make a marketable product and if not we need to start planning on how we're going to go through that stockp ile operationally I hope all that makes sense but it's kind of where we are in space and time thinking through this and so I just thought you said that maybe these numbers were only rubble or do they include the BMR so the gate revenue is only rubble because understand the stuff that goes through the BMR we 're going to accept that no matter what and so that's really not a factor of the evaluation when you look at the BMR making or breaking even what you want to see is processing the materials and selling the commodities pays for that diversion operation from rubble you have the opportunity to charge a different rate at the gate to either accept or not accept the material so you want to factor that in do we still I'm sorry do we still not take lumber from the BMR and grind it and put it in our dino dirt the lumber has never been used in that operation now there was an operation that was canceled in December where the ground up lumber was being used as compost for liquid products but that was a hundred percent waste products it was never fully diverted and then back to the gate revenue we were below market so we ended up being the dumping ground because we were the cheapest alternative which that's how business works that's correct yeah and that kind of goes back to you know who's bringing it in is it I mean it may be worth driving from some other part of the region just to bring it if it's cheaper and you know if we're sitting on ten years worth of rubble at this point I don't see how you could I mean I guess there is a price you could take it but I don't know that I mean you're it's costing to store it but then again I go back to that's not our core service right our services right a mix municipal solid waste and maybe the idea of accepting rub ble is you know we can use it for our own bring it in for our own use yes at the landfill right but not make a doesn't sound like you can make an enterprise out of it not not currently I mean we were certainly gonna you know kind of sharpen our pencils on this and see if there's some potential there too I mean we 've got to deal with what we have on site yeah and I think if we find something that looks promising there we'll certainly run an analysis on it understand that a lot of the rubble that we process is from the city of Dunn streets department and streets projects in the city and so what would be ideal is if we can find a way to get out from underneath the stockpile and take in just enough material to suit our operational needs at the solid waste department and I think like Neil said we're over processing that stuff right now to make an inferior product and an attempt to sell it and this doesn't have the operational value that we need on site either so I think there may be a sweet spot here and we're certainly going to be exploring that can you go back a couple slides to the household hazardous waste oh you don't need this like never mind I'll just ask is there any concern that now you know it's valet any concern that if we don't do that then household hazardous waste is gonna end up in the garbage and end up in the landfill it's a possibility now and now one of the things that I haven't done the full analysis on it but we've done some some preliminary work and this may be a situation what we've done since Neil and Ron Ron side is we've actually combined the household chemical collection with our appliance and electronic collection those were kind of two separate things before and so what we've tried to do is combine those and get more participation and so when we did that you essentially double up the amount of participation that we're getting in addition we announced a few weeks ago kind of a soft launch if you will of dropping off allowing drop-off of materials at the side and so we want to try to give both of those kind of their day in court and see how that works in addition reducing from the collection route we run some preliminary numbers I don't think it's going to make a huge difference in terms of the overall rates and so I think there may be an opportunity with how we've structured it now that we may be able to get some better results out of it or down the drain which would be worse yeah I have a few questions for you how do we come up with a value for a cubic meter of air sure so in terms of a cubic yard as Neil pointed out during his presentation it's really about compaction rates right now we're at about 1,100 pounds per cubic yard now some materials a little bit more dense than others and so we we have in terms of this analysis adjusted these a little bit concrete's much more dense than a roll of toilet paper obviously and so whenever you do that you can actually start assigning a dollar amount we charge per ton as you enter the facility and so it really becomes a conversion of math equation if you will of how much can we fit into an average cubic yard and right now we come up with about $16 now that's that's always in flux if we increase our comp action rate if we change our rates the cost of processing that material it can move a little bit and so that that's kind of the formula that we've applied to this and are and the numbers that we use for our purposes are based on 1,100 pounds currently yes that's what we're performing it so is that I know we're this will come to us the budget yet to come to us finalized but you know where is where is this going to show up from a right standpoint that's a great segue I'm going to circle back to the operational stuff and stand for questions on that but I want to talk a little bit about next steps like I said at the outset we really broke this up into program changes operational changes unless the board of the council has any concerns about the operational recommendations we're going to proceed kind of phasing in those implementations from the programs it will be proceeding with the schedule that I gave you all a little bit earlier in terms of next steps we do have a cost of service which is essentially a rate study being performed by new gen right now we do have that teed up to come back to the pub on July 9th so you'll be seeing a little bit of the rate implication on some of these programs what we've really tried to do is parse out all of our operations into separate business units that allows for easy evaluation of the financials and then you can kind of carry that over to where does that where does that show up in our rates and so new gen will be providing that discussion shortly following that we're currently scheduled for our department budget presentation on July 23rd our goal was to have kind of the operational strategic discussion with you all on council tomorrow come back and show you the rate implications and then come back with a finalized budget I know there's a great desire there has been in the past and currently and hopefully in the future but to make sure that we're doing we're innovative in the way we approach our landfill and our solid waste as far as renewability and doing as much as we can to be good stewards of that but you know it's just like the mining operation sometimes you have to look at what the real cost is and just weigh the benefit and see if it's you know if it's worth doing or maybe offering the program in some way I think in addition to this I know we talked a little bit about financials and what is the cost of a program and I don't want it to be lost that the we're also very much want to focus on what is the value what's the participation rate of a program are we getting good value for those those dollars spent and I think kind of like we did with the rebel processing tonight is if the name of the game is to divert stuff away from the landfill is 10% an acceptable rate and if that's the case then you know this is the cost for that diversion and we definitely feel like those things it's not all about saving money but it's also about making sure that the program is performing as expected and bringing that back to the board and the council on a regular basis so you can either give us a stamp of approval or we can go back to the drawing board and work on it again comments well you know I think I think the three hundred twenty three dollars a ton is pretty telling for what you know that's kind of the cost of it so is it worth three hundred twenty three dollars a ton to do that that's kind of where we come I think I think if I've heard the recommendation tonight is we will certainly go back and start running some numbers on what is at least from the rebels standpoint what is the next strategy look like like I said the upfront savings may not be significant because the debt service on the equipment but we'll run out of five-year scenario and then we'll also inform our rate consultant that that's that's what we need to carry forward for your next presentation and so if you modify any of those other programs we're talking about you'll come back to us and we'll discuss that most certainly and I think especially when it comes to something like curbside recycling and programs like that you know those are those are near and dear to a lot of folks hearts and we want to make sure that we have good data for you I think Neil and Ron did a tremendous amount of work with their short time on on site some of this is going to be a little bit more involved to where we really need to get out there and understand what we're dealing with in the community so I would expect a lot more information coming from us in the next you know six to nine months on those programs I have a couple more things real quick oh sorry it seems like a while back we approved cameras for our the recycling places the self-serve recycling places we thought we approved some kind of monitoring system for those places we have cameras on this site right here unfortunately one of the things we may need to talk about is what does enforcement look like for illegal dumping and unfortunately the cameras that we have out there we've tried to you know pull a license plate or something and the film quality is not good enough for us to do that I think that's certainly something that we would want to explore especially if we this drop-off site is is probably I mean it's problematic fortunately it's on our site and so we can do something pretty immediate about it some of our remote drop-off sites we don 't want to eliminate those but what we may be talking about is how do we how do we improve or prevent illegal dumping from happening because it's it's really a drag on the program whenever those those canisters come in and it's 90% contamination it defeats the purpose we at one point in time I believe that was it might have been with the police department there was a truck and a person who drove around and there was a number you could call like you know 390 dump or something like that to report illegal dumping perhaps in the organizational rest ructuring there'll be some money for something like that it's a good thought this is notorious everywhere in the country you have a drop-off you get junk yeah you either got a manate or have some enforcement measures or secure it in some way somewhere yeah and now I forgot oh I do I do remember my question um not that we would change out trucks but what is your opinion on the trucks that are both a recycling and a garbage truck all in one so you're making one pass is that I mean it's it's been popular then it's not been popular then you know plus the wear and tear on the streets do you mean a split body truck that yeah yes I learned something every day in this industry I was not a fan of split body trucks because one side packs usually packs out before the other side either the garbage packs out first or the recycling packs out but I just was working with a company where they have actually and you might even want to consider this even if you don't go to that they have four axle trucks that they run on the street and they're getting nine and a half tons in a split body truck and I'm going whoa how did that happen but that 's what they get I guess they've done a great job in training their their drivers to to do it the right way but they got great results and yes that's definitely a consideration and there's one truck less that goes down the street just have to work out the math on it and see if that works for you but that's definitely an opportunity for you okay thank you any other questions or comments for Ethan no thank you for your time thank you appreciate it okay item B is to receive a report hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding the air emissions testing at Nitten Energy Center conducted by Black and Beach Corporation I wanted to say I counted 282, 000 numbers in there but I'd be just kidding George Morrow DME general manager pleased to be here today to let you know that we've completed the emissions testing for the Denton Energy Center Black and Beach was owner engineer for us and they were responsible for contracting for the testing services and to evaluate and manage the report have a couple of gentlemen who are with us today Paul Lee and Stephen Baker from Black and Beach their air quality engineers and they have a I think compared to what we just heard a short presentation not a short report Paul you want to good evening and thank you guys for having me again so the agenda is pretty simple we're just going to provide you an overview of the testing that we did and then obviously give you a high level results of the emissions tests and then I'm going to hand over to George and he's going to just talk about some of the paths forward for the Denton Energy Center so again my name is Paul Lee I'm an air quality engineer with Black and Beach to go over the roles of the different entities that were involved in the project Black and Beach we were hired as the owner's engineer the engineer on the project was Burns McDonald and as OE we basically just checked some of the work that he did also included in our scope was the emissions testing Black and Beach we were an international firm we work in many industries but power had was I think classically back in the day what we really caught our teeth in and with that we had to demonstrate the emissions testing to prove that we mean the permits of state federal regulations and the contracts that we signed with different manufacturers so we were hired on as to to overview or have oversight of the emissions testers we contracted with our hygiene air hygiene is one of the nation's leaders in emissions testing they're accredited by the source testing accreditation council or stack they're accredited as an air emissions testing body a TB and as part of that they have QA test plans that you have to have reviewed they have audits every other year so there's a fair amount of clout that they have that they have by being a TB also within our hygiene they brought many people on site to do the testing because we have 12 engines and we're working pretty hardcore around the clock there's something called a qualified stack testing individual or QSTI a lot of times testing programs will have you know one or two of them and underneath the two QSTI so that act as managers there's a just qualified individuals but on this project we were fortunate not to have five QSTIs to be a QSTI one you had to demonstrate competency but the main way you do that is by passing a test every five years you have to re pass that test and there's a set of tests that you do in order to be a QSTI so those are the companies that we that were involved in the project just something to note air hygiene they're pretty familiar with rices not just words little races but all type of races but they specifically as a nationwide firm have done and counting 55 words all projects some of them ranging from one engine to the dead engine center which was obviously 12 I was told at your last board meeting there are some questions regarding NSPS and N ACS so just want to take a quick side and try to explain at a high level those two terms so NSPS is new source performance standards oftentimes you'll hear 40 CFR 60 those are the same thing so new source performance standards were a very long set of federal regulations that were passed way back when that are technology based so if you're a waste incinerator you're covered under NSPS if you're a coal fire power plant you have a different section in this PS that same also applies for rices as we have here so there are some federal regulations based on tick the technology you are that fall under NSPS N ACS is related but a different term and different regulations so next stands for national ambient air quality standards so that is what the EPA has set for seven criteria pollutants the term criteria pollutants are just pollutants that they have identified that they feel are detrimental to or can be detrimental to human health so they have mandated a certain emission limit well not mission limit but just an ambient air limit and that's it the individual states have to come up with an implementation plan to submit to the federal government to show the federal government how they're going to meet the NACS within the state and implementation plan that covers a lot of the permits that they provide to all facilities so that's your power plants again waste incinerators paper mills auxiliary boilers at mining facilities so the statement of the station plan has to consider all of those in effect when they submit to the federal government so those are two sort of parallel federal regulations going on hopefully that that makes sense at a high level but there are a lot more intric acies that I guess we'll we'll table for later but please ask me questions if you would like any right now or okay all right so the testing occurred May 17 th through May 20th we try to do four engines a day the test protocol was submitted on April 11th by air hygiene to TCEQ generally you're supposed to submit 30 days prior to your testing and we did do that no comments were received from the TCEQ and that's pretty standard most states don't ever comment unless they have a problem with your test protocol silence is implied acceptance TCEQ was invited to witness firsthand with a representative our emissions testing but they chose not to participate so the the pollutants in the table and the EPA methods are shown right there we tested knocks CEO VOC's ammonia and PM which stands for particulate matter going back to NACS I like to just point out we actually did not test for any NACS however ozone is one the criteria pollutants and knocks and VOCs are precursors to ozone formation so just in case that was ever brought up in previous conversations the test durations for all the gases knocks CEO VOC's and ammonia they were all one hour PM we tested for generally two hours the reason why I say generally is because we're more concerned about the volume of sample that we have that's supposed to the actual time we try to have a sample rate and our nozzle size on a probe adjusted to collect a set amount of volume within a certain time and we just targeted two hours it wasn't always two hours but we always did get a minimum sample volume of 60 and actually we targeted more closer to a hundred sixty is a bare minimum that you have to sample so we did achieve that yeah of course where it lists EPA methods yes are there other methods that you could use to run those tests or those the prescribed methods and you have to use those yeah great question um for environmental compliance EPA test methods and these EPA test methods are actually part of NSPS they were promulgated in federal code under NSPS appendix a of 40 CFR 60 and these test methods are actually used internationally I mean Canada has theirs I think they come out under a different name but they're effectively the same thing working projects in Asia we use EPA test methods from US EPA yeah these are also pretty standard for the pollutants like there's different methods like method 20 you could use for knocks it's very similar to method 70 but I would say the vast majority of time you can see method 70 for knocks ammonia we use method 320 you could use another method called CTM 27 both were accepted in the test protocol we submitted to the TCEQ we said we're gonna use method 320 again this accepted method very common that's nice are these these methods are they spelled out in our TCEQ permit which ones we need to use actually no so as a minor source we the standard permit that TCEQ gave us did not explicitly state which test method you had to use so I sort of took it upon myself to identify the most common methods which are here listed again method 320 could be CTM 27 but both are really used very commonly but I will say even though the permit us being a minor source have having a standard permit even though it wasn't explicit in it these test methods would be very much accepted and we again we didn't receive any comments back from TCEQ saying you should not use 70 you have to use method 20 right so we went forward sorry of course is there any advantage to using one method over the other either way for air quality or I mean is there any advantage either way for using to me no especially when we talk about 320 and CT M 27 when I previously talked about method 20 over 7e I prefer method 70 because 20 if you read it actually just refers to 70 over and over and over again I do feel yeah it's I think your perspective there yes yes yes yeah anyone else good thought be a good idea just give you guys a little visual of the actual apparatus and the equipment that we we did might not be the most exciting can you guys see my mouse up there all right great so this black line is going to be our sample line it's connected to the probe that we have stuck into the duck work pulling sample gas and is going down into our trailer which has our analyzers here is our FTIR the FTIR is used for method 320 measuring ammonia it's a actually sort of a sense of machine but we one of our QSTIs was specialized in analyzers and I'm glad he was around site because these are sensitive machines they're very precise and they're great but they can be a little sensitive and he was around to make sure it worked properly so flue gas comes in from the probe probe in the stack into our FTIR measures ammonia then it goes and is split off into a gas conditioning plate here and also to our VOC the gas conditioning plate basically just removes moisture from your sample gas and we want to remove moisture because water can be an interference for the NOx and the CO analyzer so we have to remove the moisture and then the flue gas goes through there into our thermo NOx CO analy zers we don't want to move water from flue gas for VOC measurements because VO Cs can be absorbed by water so if you remove the moisture you could get false lows of the actual VOC measurements so here are the the lovely analy zers that we used thermos a lead manufacturer you'll see them often around this right here was to measure the oxygen concentration that we have used for a lot of our calculations pretty much the PM sample train was not done through analy zers it it never is just because particulates a solid you have to collect it you have to analyze in the laboratory so here's a schematic of what the train looks like so here's our nozzle this is the only point of entry of flue gas into this entire system before and after the test we we put a stopper into that nozzle and make sure that the integrity of that system is is good that there's no leaks of ambient air coming into our train to dilute the sample that is the only source of flue gas into our train so as flue gas enters our nozzle here it is a filter through a filterable particulate matter filter if you see a term FPM or ever hear the term of front half when talking about emissions testing that's what we're talking about here the front half or filter filterable particulate matter so you know commonly like dust rocks what we commonly think of PM as for testing though with PM there's filterable and condensable condens ables are that type of particulate matter that isn't really apparent at hotter temperatures but once you settle down cooler temperatures it condenses out so here after the filter we go through a vertical condenser we drop out water is continuously circulated through this little thing coin the flue gas temperature down and then as a flue gas passes through it CPM or a condensable particulate matter will form and then be taken out by this filter here this back half is actually filled with ice to further cool the flue gas down to below the dew point so we collect all the moisture that's going through the flue gas we want the moisture to do another calculation for the molecular weight of the flue gas the pump here is really what's pulling all the flue gas through the train so it goes through there and the dry gas meter measures how much flue gas we 're collecting this is also important because we measure the pressure drop across this peel tube we have measurements of it we know the K factor refraction factors across that peel tube and we could basically do a big calculation to figure out how much flue gas we're collecting here's a picture of what we actually did here's our PM probe right there here is the probe that black line that was referring to in that other schematic that goes all over analyzers it is attached to a probe sort of hard to see there that's also stuck in this is not assembled but this is the train that I was referring to here's our our little condenser where vertical dropout here's a CPM filter and a Pinger's and P inger's just being a fancy word for classware yeah here are the meter boxes so this dry gas meter that you saw here here's a pump that you saw in the schematic we tried to do two engines at a time per engine hall there's a North Hall and South Hall so we're trying to do four at a time so we just had an operator here looking at all of the measurements and join them down to make sure we're on track to collect our full sample that we need after we're done with the PM sample train we actually wash the inside of the probe to make sure that any filter will particular matter that sort of attached itself inside the probe is good gets collected we want to collect all the PM that isn't in the flue gas we also wash all of the impinges as well and so these bottles that you see here have the washes from all of our samples well a portion of our samples and these here these little black things are actually are filterable PM filters they look dirty but um from my previous experiences with other rice engines as well as with air hygiene engines that's not not actually PM that's on the on those basically the temperature of the flue gas from the rice is so hot and if you ever get out to site and then feel it it's hot that the the filter itself starts to char it's not burning burning you're not gonna see any flames but yeah there's a charring effect that you see on the filter surface just due to temperature these filters are weighed in a laboratory before we do testing and after we do testing their weight again and sure enough there was no appreciable matter on these FPM filters so it's actually just a charring effect and now the moment of truth huh okay so on the left hand side there's the engines on the top hence top across the columns those are the pollutants that we tested in parentheses are our permit limits so you'll see 1.33 pounds per hour is what the permit had for NOx VOC is 2.07 ammonia PM 3.17 etc the values that you see are the average of three tests so for each pollutant on each engine we did three tests you know one test it's by itself could be a false low or false I should say false low it could be higher or lower than what 's indicative of the average right so you always want to do three tests confirm and get a more of a sturdy answer so as you can see the average of the three tests for each pollutant on each engine is below what the permit had us limited to yes yes at times very significantly below there's one number I would like to talk about but I just want to give you guys a few seconds to look at the table because I I know that's a lot of numbers there are you gonna talk you 're my maybe gonna attack the PM numbers yes 2.23 yeah that's a I mean next slide okay okay any others that you guys would like me to talk about well I have a just a strange procedural question sure it seems like we spent a long time not publishing the contract limits and there they write are no these aren't the contract don't there's the same as work civil contract limits right there oh yeah I had actually not seen the contract we were never given it but I was told that the contract limits were used for a permit so they are effectively are the same okay but that goes back to yeah okay all right so do you want my question on the PM or you just gonna cover it because isn't that normal that you're gonna have oils and other things in the construction oh okay all right that's what you're gonna say no you're a mind reader um so as you can see from the previous slide all of these values are around one or below and here we have 2.23 which is double or triple what the other engines were testing yet so when we were when we were doing the tests the first run on PM on engine one the backwash the washes on the the back end it was dirty I was looking at it and it was just dirty compared to the other tests that we had a collect at the time it was clearly something I'd accumulated in that engine when we ran test two and test three that day and we got those results back they look clear just like all the other engines had now in my experience whether you're talking about combustion turbines or rises you try to circumvent it by having the engines run for a certain amount of time but it's common that residual grease is like literally from construction workers gloves or act the actual lubricants that are intentionally placed inside the equipment those need to burn off and you try to run the engines or the turbines for a certain amount of time to burn all of that off before you do your emissions testing but here I would con jecture that it would had not been done because run one was dirty runs two and three were were incredibly clean very clean I don't remember the exact numbers but they were below one pounds per hour where you average them yes average one burnt it all off the other two were clean yes yeah so that is the ultimate result engine one passed on p.m. but the value looks higher compared to the rest because of one one engine one seems like an outlier compared to all the other data sets we have just one engine there was another engine that was slightly higher yeah not above yeah yeah but probably the same explanation yeah yeah but still that's significantly below the permit levels yes throughout the testing it should also point out that we do continuous QA so all that those analyzers I was showing you earlier we would bring we had on site calibrated gas concentrations that were past EPA test protocols so you know I don't remember the exact concentrations but say we have a gas bottle of 10 ppm of knocks we have run into our analyzer that analyzer has to read very close to 10 ppm of knocks otherwise that entire test fails we have to fix our analyzer and go through our test again we did not have that problem all those analyzers came to site prepared they were good all the QA checks passed the p .m. trains again the post and pre leak checks they passed so the integrity of that sample train was good so all the QA tests passed and they are in our test report here is a copy this is George Morrill's test report as you can see it's it 's quite thick it's been submitted to TCEQ and it will be viewable by the public once TCEQ gets reviews it and incorporate it into the website if I had to say one statement a very blanket statement generally about the testing it's this all emissions test results passed thinking ahead if you're wondering about how these test results compared to other projects have been a part of they do compare very favorably compared to like coal fire power plants or even combustion turbines the results are low and that's to be expected because as you guys know you guys have a the South Coast special SCR so yeah these did test very well and gave a very comparably to other sources so that I'll hand back over to George what is he just one question for ego yeah of course what's okay this is the initial test yes we send for the permit so what's the ongoing testing schedule or is that yeah is that part of your contract to do as part of your well to dance with that part of the question no that's not part of a contract we'd be more and help you to help out in the future that's the right now that it's not but then did your further question of what it is what is the testing requirements going right I don't have a clear answer to that for you right now other engine facilities that I've worked on they were major sources so they had more of an explicit and longer test or air permit and so other projects for example had to test every third engine every three years without without letting a period of five years I believe between one engine being tested so there's some nuances to it but basically that permit did not require annual testing on each engine and that's that facility and each facility is gonna be different so what it means for dent energy center with being a minor source and being the state of Texas as well as opposed to you know Oregon Ohio Florida I don't know that specific answer but um I do have my play to try to find exactly what that is yeah I didn't know if there was a constant monitoring air quality monitor part of our deal yeah for our permit for this being a minor source no that was not required okay any other questions you might have seen Jason Brown our plant manager he indicates that he recalls our testing requirements to be every three years or 16,000 hours whichever is less but likely we're gonna do something sooner than that just to kind of validate everything but so we've got some time and I just wanted to say I was impressed with the results and the quality of the work that was done you were forecasting in the budget that we brought to you depending what year it was somewhere between 2,300 and 2,800 hours per year 2,800 I think was the FY 19 and that sort of went down after that as we believe the market prices would drop over time and that's going to be significantly less than the permit levels the 2,800 plant hours we have a hundred tons of either NOx VOC and carbon monoxide and we're gonna be down well under that with the 2,800 hours so looks like we're not going to be constrained by the permit emissions levels will be constrained by you know what does the market bear for for operation of the unit as was indicated by Paul you know there's this very enhanced emission control system that was optional South Coast air quality management district grade and and it did work and reduce emissions so it averaged the plant you know we look at NOx as one of the main precursors of ozone and it averaged 0.426 pounds per hour over all the units and that was well under 1.33 pounds which is what our target was so so everything's looking good and you know this is part of our program to bring renewable energy up to the hundred percent level for Denton while we don't we're not required as we've talked about in the past having a fast start unit as part of our portfolio it is gonna provide some value to us as you know we go back just a bit here you know as our renewables don't operate we saw a day a couple of weeks ago that I I made a presentation before APPA and I made a picture of the of what happened that day prices went up as high as three thousand dollars of megaw att hour and typically we're looking at maybe thirty dollars or forty dollars and we looked at the output of our wind project out in West Texas during those same three or four hours it had gone from 150 megawatts which is our contract maximum down to basically zero for three or four hours and that caused the market prices to go crazy and we would we had to pay that price for our load because we buy all of our load from the market and if we didn't have something that we could kick on to help recover that three thousand dollars then you know we would you know we would be upside down in the market so the deck while it 's not required for reliability because that's air cards job and there's other machines left out there that can do that most of the time it's really makes sense to us as a financial hedge and I think you've heard us say that in the past and we'll we'll we'll back up our renewables with that so all is good and happy we could bring you that information so there's get you back on schedule yeah you did good any any questions of George question to come I had the opportunity to go see the plant on June 16th and it's impressive it's yeah it took me through it yeah it was a great tour I really enjoyed it so good job you know we've got a great staff out there yeah I'm totally amazed and the construction went well Chris Lutrik couldn't be here tonight he's having a little health issue but you know Chris was on top of this thing you know working with our contractors so thank you I'm glad you enjoyed it okay thank you George okay the next item we have actually a little bit of agenda shuffle here we're gonna move the closed meeting to the end of the meeting that's okay there's no action item required on the closed meeting item so we can just go through the rest of the agenda and then we'll wrap up with that after we do that so that going into the regular meeting items for individual consideration we have the draft minutes of the June 18th 2018 public utility board published in advance are there any comments questions concerns on the minutes I had made the comment about the recycling materials and I just want to clarify that I it was a little bit about what Ron or whoever was saying that because China is not taking a lot of the recyclables they've gone from the 95% to 99% is that impacting us that's really my question is that going to impact us and our recycling plants so I don't want to stop recycling or anything like that sure okay is there a motion then to accept the minutes or approve the minutes as submitted in a second any discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed thank you item B is to consider recommending adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas authorizing the city manager or designee to execute a transmission line relocation agreement with Toronto Real to Inc a Texas corporation the John Oh partners Ltd a Texas limited partnership and NW realty a Texas corporation for the relocation of 138 KV transmission line owned by the Texas Municipal Power Agency and maintained by the city located on the near west side of East loop 288 south of Sh ady Oaks Drive and Brent Heath is here to talk about this relocation project one of the owners in town asked us to relocate this project TMPA the owner of the line as you indicated was found that to be acceptable particularly since the owner of the property was going to pay the price for that so we 've got two items here we just wanted to brief you on the relocation itself and then the next item under your agenda we'll ask you to approve the purchase of the polls so that we can meet a timeline that the developers asked us to meet so Brent do you want to do a overview of this for thank you George good evening George kind of keep the teed all this up so I'll go quickly through here this is a transmission line relocation it is a 138 KV line that's owned by TMPA that's Texas Municipal Power Agency the property owner that this transmission line resides on and exist on he's asked us to relocate a portion of that to a different location that's on the exact same property he has he does have quite a bit of land in this area so we were able to work with him on that he we had purchased a piece of property from the same landowner in the past and at that time he put a portion of those proceeds that we purchased the land with which accounted to 2.2 million dollars into escrow and that is being held here in Denton at reunion title and it was intended to pay for this relocation of the transmission line to give you a map of where we're talking about this is the East Loop 288 this right here is tractor supply you can see the water treatment plan over here in the bottom left hand corner the black portion of the line that's parallel to East Loop 288 is the portion that he is asked to be relocated and he wishes to have that relocated to of course it has to tie at the same points so he wishes basically for this black line to swing over to this red line location it's essentially the same distance it's it's slightly a little bit longer will require 13 poles 0.6 miles. Being a Texas Municipal Power Agency line City of Denton is the TOP transmission operator for the TMPA assets here in Denton County so we went to the TMPA board of directors in March of 2017 they gave the City of Denton authorization to relocate that at the expense of the property owner the transmission line agreement that is in front of you tonight will fund the relocation at the actual cost of the construction not to exceed the escrowed amount. For that after the lines relocated there will be a portion of the overhead rights that are no longer needed where the old line was at the city will retain the public utility easement for underground rights for an existing water and sanitary sewer line. We wanted to confirm that the 2.2 million dollars how does that sit today is compared to years ago when we started talking about this we were kind of concerned about the polls being still with the metals prices changing rapidly here in the United States and so we went out for a bid in May and RFP that we'll talk about next down here this agenda item that will be the next item it came back in a little higher than we originally anticipated but the bottom line is we still feel very confident we can relocate this line under the 2.2 million dollars that's escrowed. The benefits to the line relocation besides meeting the desire from the property owner is for the city of Denton it does provide easier physical access for our crews to operate and maintain the line along a city street it does give new poles gives new conductors it improves the system capacity performance and reliability. So the city of Denton after we've reviewed the agreement work through legal with it work with the property owner we recommend accepting the property owners 2.2 million dollars that he's holding an escrow for us to take. So with that I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have. Questions? Do you mind putting the map back up please? Certainly. So everything in the red line when if I recall when the property acquisition for the substation was made did that include the easement cost? Yes sir it did . That's already acquired. So that's already done. That is correct. Just swing it up. Perfect. Okay. Plus it opens up a hopefully it's gonna open up a great commercially developable portion of loop 88 which is you know by moving that line back off the loop that's good. That is the desire of the property owner. Yes. Good. Any other questions? No. Is there a motion then on item B? Move approval. Is there a second? I have a motion a second. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Okay. Item C. I'm assuming Branch are gonna do that one also. Yes sir that is correct. This would be the Galvanized steel poles that we went out for an RFP in May to confirm what is the current price and we did have the previous multi-year steel pole contract expired a few months before this and so we felt like we needed to get a new price to see where at. This is the same map I just showed you of where these poles will be used at. It's only the 16 poles required for this whole project. 13 of them will be funded by the property owner for the portion that he's requesting to be relocated. RFP request for proposal 6744 is only to relocate the section shown in red. This was a relocation that the property owner asked us to move. As I mentioned 16 poles are required for the whole project and 13 of them will be directly related to the project that he's requested us to move. This is the way that the pricing broke down on the specific poles. The top portion is the 13 poles that will be used in the red line that you saw. It totals 845,000 which was the eight exact same number we used in the table I showed you on the previous agenda item and these would be the other three poles that gets us from industrial sub up to the brinker site so we can physically tie that together. To give you a picture of what the transmission poles look like because it is around a curve on shady oaks there will have to be some angled structures that will have to come with some double dead-end poles and then there also are some tangent poles. Both of these designs are able to have alternate circuits in the future come off the backside whenever that need is determined and that is what exists right now with the existing TNPA line so we preserve that right. So based on the evaluation from the evaluation team the Texas Electric Cooperative TEC a proposal it was the highest evaluated score it was the quickest delivery and it also was the lowest price and so staff recommends approval of the Texas Electric Cooperative purchase for the steel Gavin I suppose not to exceed the full amount of 1.1 million. Be happy to answer any questions. Can't beat it when it's the best score the lowest price and quickest delivery. It's hard to believe. I know the overall score came out higher but the one that kind of stands out I mean is probable performance and it got 12 out of 15 instead of 15 out of 15 so I guess what's we haven't actually used some still poles from Texas Electric Cooperative the previous pole manufacturer we had used them before so that's how some of those scores differentiated but they did get a total 96 out of 100 points to ECW. Right. Okay. All right any other questions? Is there a motion on item C? Second? Second. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Okay item D is to consider recommending adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton Texas Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation providing for authorizing and approving the purchase of property, boiler, and machinery in business interruption insurance coverage for the City of Denton through the city sole broker of record McGriff, Siebels, and Williams of Texas Incorporated with a three-year not to exceed amount of 1 million 399 thousand dollars. Good evening Chairman, members of the PUV. My name is Scott Payne, I'm the risk manager of the City of Denton and the item before you is what you just said the approval of property insurance, boiler machinery, or equipment breakdown coverage, and business interruption for the Denton Energy Center of the DEC. So obviously with construction nearly completed it was important for us to get property insurance to protect this asset once it was online. Unfortunately our current property carrier that we have for all the other city facilities affiliated FM doesn't write coverage for power generation facilities so it necessitated us going out to the market to do this on a kind of standalone basis. So we banded February with McGriff who's our sole broker gathering the information for the underwriters on the DEC. A lot of information exchanging hands back and forth. Those of you guys who don't know much about the property market in Texas it's starting to shrink quite a bit from a commercial standpoint mostly due to all the wind and hail losses that Texas has had so that makes the market a little bit smaller. When you add in those who write public sector because typically a lot of our values are in one geographical location we don't have it spread all over the country that makes it even smaller and then when you get to a power generation facility it gets even smaller than that. So we did find six companies that were interested we conducted a tour and an information gathering session back on May the 10th. We had a lot of good interest a lot of things I didn't understand that was being talked out between Jason and the engineers out there but they all seemed to understand it and that was good. Our goal was to have the coverage in place by July 1st when we would have reached substantial completion and take it on from an operational standpoint. Unfortunately on May the 24th we were advised from the Dex Journal contractor that what we thought was still being covered was no longer being covered and that was the property component of the builders risk. Once it moved into the operational testing phase although they had told us it was still going to be covered it was no longer covered and so we had to scramble to put some property coverage in place at that point in time. So fortunately McGriff was already working quite diligently on placing the coverage and so a lot of conversations already been taking place. Most of the information was already in the hands of the underwriter and so they basically just expedited the process by a couple of weeks to get the coverage in place by the 25th. So there was one rather sleepless night on the 24th hoping that no storms blew through the area but again we managed to get the coverage in place without any issue at the deck. The three main components that are covered in this property this insurance procurement is the property which is your traditional hail, windstorm, tornado, fire, vandalism type coverage. There's also which in this situation a big piece of is the boiler machinery or the equipment breakdown because obviously the biggest piece of the value is those engines that are on site and so we want to make sure we have coverage for that and the last piece is a business interruption coverage so that if the facility is damaged and unoperable because of a covered loss there is some replacement for the revenue that we'd be losing because of that piece of it. So we were able to get four proposals for this the one that we recommended tonight is the one from Lexington and Swiss Re it's a combo proposal where each company shares 50% of the premium and also 50% of any loss that happens and it does include all three of the coverage that we identified before. Lloyds of London presented a quote that did not include the boiler machinery and then Travelers and HSB gave us boiler machinery quotes only so really the only one that met all of our needs was with Lex ington Swiss Re proposal. Again like I mentioned before it's a split proposal between the two companies only one that concluded all the elements and the premium as you saw is about $444,000 per year and it covers about 170 million dollars in total insured valuable on the project including the new substation that's there on site as well. So we're seeking approval from the P UB and from the council tomorrow to procure that insurance retroactively back to May the 25th and I'll be glad to answer any questions. Questions? So we had a gentleman's agreement on the insurance from construction to testing? No it was part of the construction documents that the builders risk would cover the actual property itself during the construction and they had given us assurances that it would be covered under their builders risk policy up until July the 1st and then I guess they went back and had their insurance experts really look at what the document said and then we were biased and no that was not the case. Well all the liability coverages the workers comp and everything was certainly in place the actual coverage on the facility itself was no longer in existence. So their their definition of operational became once you could test it? Right. It was the only thing that was under construction at that point. Yeah. Which was not what we initially had understood. Well I'm glad you're able to scramble and get coverage and glad nothing happened on the 24th. Me too. Me too. And it is very difficult like you say in this market at my last employer we sometimes had to get two different insurance so we could get boiler and machinery and they wouldn't cover it all and Lloyd's of London was the one that covered actually I believe the boiler machinery so why they said not here. We must have some claims I guess. Well that was a good thing about this being a brand new facility is that there was more interest in it because it wasn't a 30 year old platter. I think it was nice and pretty and shiny and had warranties on some things and so that did elicit some more interest from some companies that may not have been and you know we think maybe going into next year as we have better data on the business interruption because we've actually been in operation for a year we may be able to get those rates massage a little bit and maybe come down who knows it's the insurance market in Texas no one knows for sure. Was that a good rate? It was really our only rate. Right I mean it was still a good rate you know had we done a layer program with its quotes that were out there it would have been taking the Lloyd's of London property coverage and then all the one of the others for the boiler machinery which have been more expensive than the than the Swiss re Lexington proposal so you know it's it's more expensive than what we're paying for the other property exposures the city has was also a very specialized risk and a lot of value sitting in one location so that makes the underwriters quite nervous. But I remember Jason you said sorry can you still the lights not going you said that the building will sustain what level of wind? 125. I think all those things helped become a more attractive risk for the end of riders because again new construction top of line construction on and on. All right questions Scott is there a motion? I'll move approval. Second. You have a motion and a second discussion all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed same sign. Okay motion passes. Okay thank you Scott. Item E is ACM update. Mr. Chairman members of the board for the benefit of you and everybody in the audience I have nothing to report. Thank you. That is a great benefit. Okay concluding items under section 551.042 of the Texas Open Meetings Act is to respond to inquiries from the public utilities board or the public with specific factual information or rest station policy or accept a proposal to place the matter on the agenda for an upcoming meeting. Nothing to propose. Okay then the only thing we have left is the closed meeting which we will actually will there's no action item associated with that so I guess we take a motion to adjourn this meeting and go into closed meeting and that'll be the final adjournment once we finish that closed meeting. That's always your job Brandon. I move we adjourn the open meeting. Okay we have a motion and second to do so all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed same sign.