WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:11.640 Good evening everybody. It's 6 o'clock. We barely made a quorum this evening, but 00:00:11.640 --> 00:00:18.160 let's go ahead and call the Monday April 22nd 2019 Public Utility Board meeting 00:00:18.160 --> 00:00:24.920 to order. The first items on our agenda are work session items, and the first 00:00:24.920 --> 00:00:29.880 item is item A, receive a report and hold a discussion regarding the 2018 00:00:29.880 --> 00:00:33.640 water loss audit report. 00:00:33.640 --> 00:00:50.080 Evening. Good evening. My name is Tyler Dawson. I'm the field service tech 00:00:50.080 --> 00:00:55.880 manager, and I'm here to present you with the results of our 2018 water loss 00:00:55.880 --> 00:01:03.280 audit from the water department. At a 30,000 foot view, a water loss 00:01:03.280 --> 00:01:08.920 audit is about finding where all of your water went and why it went there. At a 00:01:08.920 --> 00:01:12.160 high level, this is your equation. You have authorized consumption, you have 00:01:12.160 --> 00:01:15.120 apparent losses and real losses, which I'll get into those definitions here 00:01:15.120 --> 00:01:19.640 shortly, and that should equal the total water supplied. There's a lot more to it, 00:01:19.640 --> 00:01:24.480 but once we get into it, we want to focus in on these two categories. What was the 00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:29.040 water loss? How much was that? Is that okay? Is it normal or abnormal? And what 00:01:29.040 --> 00:01:34.320 are we gonna do about it? To get more into the weeds of this, here's a more 00:01:34.320 --> 00:01:38.100 detailed view of what that audit consists of. So to walk you through this 00:01:38.100 --> 00:01:41.680 busy graphic here, we're starting from the left side. We have water produced 00:01:41.680 --> 00:01:45.320 from our two water treatment plants, and we split that off into different 00:01:45.320 --> 00:01:49.560 applications of that water as we go from left to right. So we export a little bit 00:01:49.560 --> 00:01:53.120 of water to Crum and Singer, some of our treated water, and the rest is water 00:01:53.120 --> 00:01:57.160 supplied to Denton. The vast majority of the rest is authorized consumption, which 00:01:57.160 --> 00:02:00.160 is then billed to our customers, either on the residential or commercial side. 00:02:00.160 --> 00:02:03.760 And then we have a few more categories in the bottom right over here. We have 00:02:03.760 --> 00:02:07.520 some unbilled authorized usage, and we also have two types of water loss, 00:02:07.520 --> 00:02:14.480 apparent loss and real loss. Now when you talk about real loss, this is probably 00:02:14.480 --> 00:02:18.400 what comes into most of your minds when you first hear the term water loss. This 00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:22.920 is leakage. For example, you take a pipe, put one gallon in this end, you expect 00:02:22.920 --> 00:02:26.480 one gallon to come into the other. Real loss is when you have some leakage in 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:29.840 between. You have a joint that doesn't quite fit right, you have an older pipe 00:02:29.840 --> 00:02:34.320 that might crack. Whatever happens, that water actually leaves the system before 00:02:34.320 --> 00:02:40.680 it gets to its intended purpose. Now real loss is an indicator of system health, 00:02:40.680 --> 00:02:43.680 how our pipes are doing, how we're maintaining our distribution system. 00:02:43.680 --> 00:02:49.380 There are lots of causes for these. We have aging pipes in the city that just 00:02:49.380 --> 00:02:53.640 don't hold up forever, that we want to replace those as they come up. We have 00:02:53.640 --> 00:02:57.680 connections that don't quite hold up as well, and the environments of the pipes, 00:02:57.680 --> 00:03:01.160 of course, have different effects along the way. You can see a number here at the 00:03:01.160 --> 00:03:07.120 bottom that's the total water loss for fiscal year '18, 505 million gallons. Now 00:03:07.120 --> 00:03:14.840 that's a pretty big number. I wanted to help put that in context for us. So out 00:03:14.840 --> 00:03:25.840 of a gallon of water, here's your real loss. It's about seven percent of our 00:03:25.840 --> 00:03:30.160 total. In drinking water terms, say you're talking a gallon of drinking water, it's 00:03:30.160 --> 00:03:38.760 about nine ounces. We also have apparent loss, which is a little bit trickier to 00:03:38.760 --> 00:03:43.320 understand, but taking our visualization here, you take a gallon of water, put it 00:03:43.320 --> 00:03:47.120 in one end of a pipe, and you have a meter connection at the other end. Now 00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:50.600 all the water goes through, but your meter doesn't quite register one gallon. 00:03:50.600 --> 00:03:54.240 For some reason, it looks like you have less water at the end, even though all 00:03:54.240 --> 00:03:58.240 the water may have gone through. So the biggest contributor to this is meter 00:03:58.240 --> 00:04:02.340 inaccuracy. Our meters, when we put them in the ground, are as accurate as we can 00:04:02.340 --> 00:04:05.700 make them, and of course they start to degrade just a little bit over time. 00:04:05.700 --> 00:04:09.880 Scaling within the meter can slow down the mechanism, lose just a few percent 00:04:09.880 --> 00:04:14.920 accuracy. This also includes things like unauthorized consumption. If we have 00:04:14.920 --> 00:04:18.200 someone creative enough to bypass our metering system and use our water, it 00:04:18.200 --> 00:04:22.200 went to a customer or an individual at least, but we weren't able to measure 00:04:22.200 --> 00:04:26.420 that water. We weren't able to capture who it went to assign that to an 00:04:26.420 --> 00:04:34.560 individual or an entity. And this is an indicator of fiscal health, because our 00:04:34.560 --> 00:04:39.560 billing system is based on who uses how much water. Each customer gets a certain 00:04:39.560 --> 00:04:43.400 amount of water through their meter and they receive a bill based on that. If 00:04:43.400 --> 00:04:46.720 this number is not accurate, then it's hard to assign that out. It's hard to 00:04:46.720 --> 00:04:52.160 recover accurate revenues, so we want to keep a close eye on this as well. And you 00:04:52.160 --> 00:04:57.040 can see a volume at the bottom of this slide. Our apparent loss in 2018 was 222 00:04:57.040 --> 00:05:08.000 million gallons. So again, let's look at our drinking water example. That's about 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:14.720 four ounces out of a gallon. So you can see everything left in this jug is what 00:05:14.720 --> 00:05:19.220 we consider authorized consumption. This is the rest of the water. As big as 00:05:19.220 --> 00:05:24.120 those numbers seem, we also have about six billion gallons in authorized 00:05:24.120 --> 00:05:29.980 consumption per year. And included in this, we do have some unbilled authorized 00:05:29.980 --> 00:05:34.920 usage. Again, this is not in the water loss part of the audit, but it is 00:05:34.920 --> 00:05:39.640 another kind of complicated category sometimes to understand. Primarily, this is 00:05:39.640 --> 00:05:44.000 fire protection and system operations. Fire protection is not a build service. 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:48.600 It's offered for free to any customer who develops a fire protection 00:05:48.600 --> 00:05:53.320 system. This includes water that goes through a fire engine. This includes 00:05:53.320 --> 00:05:57.000 water that might come out of a sprinkler system in a building, and also training 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:02.200 operations for the fire department. System operations is basically everything 00:06:02.200 --> 00:06:06.320 we do, all the water we use to keep the distribution system running and keep the 00:06:06.320 --> 00:06:10.480 water clean. When we put new pipes in the ground, we flush water out to scour 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:14.640 anything out of those pipes that we don't want to be there. We also will 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:18.320 flush water out for water quality issues. As water ages, it loses some of its 00:06:18.320 --> 00:06:21.360 disinfectant, so we want to flush out that old water and make sure the water 00:06:21.360 --> 00:06:28.200 is clean and healthy to drink. So when you put all these together, you can see 00:06:28.200 --> 00:06:33.760 we filled in some numbers on this chart. You can see our 505 million gallons of 00:06:33.760 --> 00:06:40.440 real-loss, 222 of apparent, and whopping 6 billion 147 million of total 00:06:40.440 --> 00:06:46.200 authorized consumption in the city. And we also want to look at this from a 00:06:46.200 --> 00:06:53.200 financial perspective as well as a volume perspective. The real-loss, well 00:06:53.200 --> 00:06:56.920 you can see that's our bigger amount here in the red, is actually the lower 00:06:56.920 --> 00:07:01.360 cost because it doesn't cost all that much for us to produce an extra gallon 00:07:01.360 --> 00:07:06.480 of water over and above what our customers need. The total cost we 00:07:06.480 --> 00:07:12.320 estimate to treat a thousand gallons of water is only 37 cents, so we cost out 00:07:12.320 --> 00:07:16.920 that real-loss at a little bit under $200,000. The reason this is important is 00:07:16.920 --> 00:07:20.960 because this is how much we could save if we could fix all of our leaks. So it's 00:07:20.960 --> 00:07:25.440 roughly the amount we could apply to a comprehensive leak management or leak 00:07:25.440 --> 00:07:31.440 detection and repair program. There's only so much we can do with that. Honestly 00:07:31.440 --> 00:07:35.760 this is probably comparable to the cost of one repair crew in the water 00:07:35.760 --> 00:07:38.560 department, and that doesn't include finding the leaks and it won't fix all 00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:42.800 of your leaks. So we do have some efforts we put forth to find and repair 00:07:42.800 --> 00:07:46.240 leaks, but we're a little bit cautious on how far we take that, make 00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:50.600 sure we're approaching that in a financially responsible way. The 00:07:50.600 --> 00:07:54.360 apparent loss, the small yellow glass here, is much more expensive at about a 00:07:54.360 --> 00:07:58.040 million dollars. The reason for that is that's priced at the retail cost of 00:07:58.040 --> 00:08:02.000 water. If a customer uses a thousand dollars or a thousand gallons and we 00:08:02.000 --> 00:08:06.000 weren't able to recover the cost of the water they used from revenue, we price 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:12.840 that out at about $4.69 per thousand gallons on average for last year. This is 00:08:12.840 --> 00:08:20.600 a large number and also justifies the meter replacement program we have out of 00:08:20.600 --> 00:08:25.600 our water meter shop. We have done analysis that suggests that about 13 00:08:25.600 --> 00:08:29.120 years old is about the place when a meter needs to be replaced when we can 00:08:29.120 --> 00:08:32.920 save the right amount of money by replacing that and offset the cost of 00:08:32.920 --> 00:08:41.600 doing so. We wanted to benchmark some of this data against some nearby cities in 00:08:41.600 --> 00:08:47.360 Regency. We'll show you our loss, both real and apparent loss, as well as 00:08:47.360 --> 00:08:50.760 something called the infrastructure leakage index which I'll define here in 00:08:50.760 --> 00:08:57.800 a moment. Some considerations when looking at benchmarking. We're never 00:08:57.800 --> 00:09:01.560 quite looking at apples-to-apples. Every system is a little bit different. Some 00:09:01.560 --> 00:09:06.160 have grown faster, some have older infrastructure, some the topology of the 00:09:06.160 --> 00:09:11.960 system effects breaks in a different way and not all audits are performed equally. 00:09:11.960 --> 00:09:15.800 We're pretty proud and dentin of the way we do our water audits. The state has 00:09:15.800 --> 00:09:20.880 caught up to doing a more advanced water audit, water loss audit program that we 00:09:20.880 --> 00:09:23.200 feel like we've been at for several years and we put a lot of effort behind 00:09:23.200 --> 00:09:30.760 making sure our numbers are as accurate as we can make them. So within a Regency 00:09:30.760 --> 00:09:35.360 we're looking at real and apparent loss per connection. So that'll kind of 00:09:35.360 --> 00:09:39.280 normalize it between different utilities and you can see dentin's numbers right 00:09:39.280 --> 00:09:43.920 here. We're right around the 60th percentile, so right around the mid-range 00:09:43.920 --> 00:09:51.320 of utilities within Regency on a per connection basis. On a per capita basis 00:09:51.320 --> 00:09:54.040 you can already see the difference in the cities by how much this chart 00:09:54.040 --> 00:09:57.840 changed just from per connection and per capita. We shift just the other side of 00:09:57.840 --> 00:10:01.880 the midpoint so we estimate we're right about at the median for our 00:10:01.880 --> 00:10:11.800 water loss. And finally on the ILI, infrastructure leakage index, this looks 00:10:11.800 --> 00:10:16.600 at total real loss compared to a theoretical minimum real loss. So there's 00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:20.640 a leakage calculation based on the size of your system that can help you 00:10:20.640 --> 00:10:25.120 determine what's the minimum that your system is expected to lose just through 00:10:25.120 --> 00:10:27.840 leaky pipe joints and connections throughout the city that are buried 00:10:27.840 --> 00:10:32.800 underground and it compares your actual real loss to that theoretical minimum. So 00:10:32.800 --> 00:10:37.040 our number was 1.83. Theoretically you can't go below 1, you can't 00:10:37.040 --> 00:10:42.800 lose less than your minimum and there's no cap on this number. So 00:10:42.800 --> 00:10:49.000 within Regency our ILI is significantly lower than most utilities. We're pretty 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:53.040 proud that we're below a 2. That's consistent if maybe a little bit higher 00:10:53.040 --> 00:10:56.800 than some past years but we're proud that we're on the on the left side of 00:10:56.800 --> 00:11:04.320 this chart. And some of the results of this audit, some of the steps we're 00:11:04.320 --> 00:11:08.240 implementing as a result of these numbers we found. First of all we want to 00:11:08.240 --> 00:11:12.960 continue our meter replacement program at the schedule we're doing it. We found 00:11:12.960 --> 00:11:16.840 nothing wrong with the program as it is and we think it's doing well to offset 00:11:16.840 --> 00:11:22.640 our apparent losses. We also want to continue leak detection as we've done it. 00:11:22.640 --> 00:11:27.080 Again we can't justify a bigger investment at this time but we do have 00:11:27.080 --> 00:11:30.440 leak detection equipment that we're currently in the process of renewing to 00:11:30.440 --> 00:11:33.720 some updated technology and we're going to continue using that and trying to 00:11:33.720 --> 00:11:39.600 find leaks that nobody's seen yet. We've also made some improvements to the audit 00:11:39.600 --> 00:11:44.960 itself. Our main break water loss estimates as you can imagine if there's 00:11:44.960 --> 00:11:47.840 a main break that water is not coming through a meter and it's not coming 00:11:47.840 --> 00:11:51.600 through a regular sized hole in the pipe. So it's difficult to estimate how much 00:11:51.600 --> 00:11:55.320 water is coming out of that but our water utilities coordinators put 00:11:55.320 --> 00:11:58.320 together a great program to help us jump-start that and improve those 00:11:58.320 --> 00:12:02.200 estimates so we can get a better feel of how much water is leaving our system. 00:12:02.200 --> 00:12:07.000 Similarly we're improving our water estimates for operational applications. 00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:12.400 Again these don't always come through meters. Some trucks are outfitted with 00:12:12.400 --> 00:12:16.480 meters on the back of them some are not. When we flush pipes for new construction 00:12:16.480 --> 00:12:20.380 we don't always have meters available for that so we're improving this process 00:12:20.380 --> 00:12:26.640 to to better understand how we're using water operationally. And finally we're 00:12:26.640 --> 00:12:31.680 improving our source metering at the production plants. This involved this is 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:35.600 mentioned during the conservation plan presentation a couple weeks ago but we 00:12:35.600 --> 00:12:39.360 have at each of our two plants we have a raw water meter that pulls water from 00:12:39.360 --> 00:12:42.520 the lake and measures it and a finished water meter that pushes water out to the 00:12:42.520 --> 00:12:45.800 system that finished drinking water and we've had some concerns with the 00:12:45.800 --> 00:12:50.240 accuracy so we have actually replaced two of those last year have two more to 00:12:50.240 --> 00:12:55.040 be replaced next year and we're also looking at some steps to help keep those 00:12:55.040 --> 00:12:59.720 systems in calibration so that we can keep an accurate idea of this. The reason 00:12:59.720 --> 00:13:03.120 that's important is those meters the way they're built actually overestimate 00:13:03.120 --> 00:13:06.280 water so as they come out of calibration we could actually be 00:13:06.280 --> 00:13:09.600 overestimating how much water we're sending to the city and assuming water 00:13:09.600 --> 00:13:12.160 losses that were never actually there to begin with so we want to make sure 00:13:12.160 --> 00:13:17.400 that's accurate. And that's all I have for you today I'm happy to take any 00:13:17.400 --> 00:13:25.920 questions or comments. Can you expand a little bit on what the replacement 00:13:25.920 --> 00:13:31.960 program is I mean do we know how many need to be replaced right now how many 00:13:31.960 --> 00:13:36.600 are replaced every year things like that? I don't know those numbers currently but 00:13:36.600 --> 00:13:41.200 it's a 13-year cycle our customer service program helps manage that list 00:13:41.200 --> 00:13:45.160 they store the meter ages with the accounts so they provide reports on a 00:13:45.160 --> 00:13:48.640 rolling basis any any meters that hit that age are sent to the water meter 00:13:48.640 --> 00:13:52.280 shop and they go out and replace them as the time comes. Okay so you said you 00:13:52.280 --> 00:13:57.560 didn't know how many come of age on a on a yearly basis or anything like that? 00:13:57.560 --> 00:14:03.680 Yeah Tim may have a better answer. I know he does. 13-year rollover. He knows everything. 00:14:03.680 --> 00:14:10.800 We actually have a projection going over the next five years when meters will be 00:14:10.800 --> 00:14:14.840 replaced and we're currently keeping up with them so we have no meters over 13 00:14:14.840 --> 00:14:21.000 years old. Okay so we're currently staffed to keep up with that at the 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:26.200 present time. Real quick will you state your name? Oh I'm sorry my name is Tim 00:14:26.200 --> 00:14:31.520 Fisher and I'm the director of the water utilities. Thank you. Thank you. How many 00:14:31.520 --> 00:14:38.640 residential meters do we have in the system? Approximately 32 see a 30,000 or 00:14:38.640 --> 00:14:51.800 32,000 Daniel. David why don't you stand up and tell us through the microphone? 00:14:51.800 --> 00:14:59.280 This may not actually have the breakdown. 35,000 total. So sort of divide that 00:14:59.280 --> 00:15:03.200 by 13 and that might give us a rough number of how many? A rough number yes. 00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:11.480 If I can just ask a couple more do the do the resident plan do the payers know 00:15:11.480 --> 00:15:16.680 when it's being replaced or are they notified or does it just happen or 00:15:16.680 --> 00:15:20.440 they're typically only notified if they're on site at the time. We'll make 00:15:20.440 --> 00:15:24.880 sure we're not shutting off water to prevent anything that's happening inside 00:15:24.880 --> 00:15:29.000 the home but it happens very quickly. If you're not home you probably wouldn't know. 00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:32.760 So you probably wouldn't know. Okay just wondering because I was thinking well I 00:15:32.760 --> 00:15:37.800 don't remember the last time that mine was but I wouldn't know. Okay all right. 00:15:37.800 --> 00:15:43.840 I have one question. For the purpose of the audit when you're determining real 00:15:43.840 --> 00:15:52.080 loss attributed to faulty poorly calibrated water meters how is it that 00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:58.600 you come about a volume or figure being that the meter is faulty or not working 00:15:58.600 --> 00:16:03.200 properly. Yeah that's a good question. We've done bench testing studies where we 00:16:03.200 --> 00:16:07.160 pull meters from the field and we know the actual age of those meters and we 00:16:07.160 --> 00:16:11.440 will test the accuracy. Again taking our example if you pour in a gallon here and 00:16:11.440 --> 00:16:14.520 see what comes out the other side. We can see that in a very similar way if you 00:16:14.520 --> 00:16:18.680 know that that bottle is one gallon then you can fill it up and see how much the 00:16:18.680 --> 00:16:22.400 meter reads. Okay. So we've done bench testing to see what those degradation 00:16:22.400 --> 00:16:27.040 curves look like. Okay. And on the larger meters anything over I think two inches 00:16:27.040 --> 00:16:34.120 and above we do testing annually we actually pull those meters test them on 00:16:34.120 --> 00:16:39.800 that specific meter and we can rebuild if we're able to rebuild and regain some 00:16:39.800 --> 00:16:43.360 of that accuracy or we can completely replace that meter. Okay so some of them 00:16:43.360 --> 00:16:48.080 are estimates based on theoretical approaches to the loss rather than 00:16:48.080 --> 00:16:51.840 somebody actually really tried to measure how much water came out of the 00:16:51.840 --> 00:16:55.040 pipe or something like that. Yeah majority of this is extrapolated from the bench 00:16:55.040 --> 00:17:02.920 testing study. Okay thank you. Does anybody have any other questions? Okay thank you. 00:17:02.920 --> 00:17:12.820 Thank you. Our next item in our work session is item B receiver report hold a 00:17:12.820 --> 00:17:16.440 discussion and give staff recommendations regarding the solid waste 00:17:16.440 --> 00:17:26.680 fiscal year 2019-2020 operating and capital budget. Good evening Chair, 00:17:26.680 --> 00:17:30.520 members of the board. My name is Ethan Cox. I'm the director of solid waste. For 00:17:30.520 --> 00:17:34.680 my props I'm gonna empty a bag of garbage on the table. Just kidding. I was 00:17:34.680 --> 00:17:39.040 actually hoping you'd leave it for some refreshments but. I wanted to drink the 00:17:39.040 --> 00:17:44.840 red one. I was okay with the red not the yellow one. All right so I appreciate the 00:17:44.840 --> 00:17:48.000 time this evening. We do have kind of a two-headed presentation for you this 00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:52.160 afternoon. I'll be leading us off walking you through the operational side of the 00:17:52.160 --> 00:17:55.080 solid waste budget and then Mr. Nick Vincent from the finance department will 00:17:55.080 --> 00:17:58.960 come up and dive into the numbers for everyone. We do have our managers here 00:17:58.960 --> 00:18:02.180 from solid waste. I'd like to take a brief moment to introduce them. I have Mr. 00:18:02.180 --> 00:18:05.880 Eugene McKinney. He's our operations manager in charge of the collections 00:18:05.880 --> 00:18:09.720 fleet. His staff are the friendly faces you see on the road every day doing the 00:18:09.720 --> 00:18:15.360 recycling refuse collection. Ms. Tina Eck is our senior business analyst so she's 00:18:15.360 --> 00:18:19.520 a wizard with numbers and spreadsheets. We've got Aaron Clark our administration 00:18:19.520 --> 00:18:23.220 manager and then we also have Brian Berner our deputy director over the 00:18:23.220 --> 00:18:27.640 landfill and side operations and so in addition to Nick Lee these folks have 00:18:27.640 --> 00:18:31.280 done quite a bit of work putting the presentation or the budget together. It's 00:18:31.280 --> 00:18:38.040 always kind of a drawn-out you know kind of a thought-provoking process but I 00:18:38.040 --> 00:18:42.720 appreciate all the efforts they and their staff have put into this. So when 00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:45.760 we talked about the solid waste budget last year one of the things that I'd 00:18:45.760 --> 00:18:49.440 mentioned is we're basically preparing to do a number of diagnostic checks for 00:18:49.440 --> 00:18:52.880 the solid waste department and by that I meant we were bringing in a number of 00:18:52.880 --> 00:18:57.720 consultants to look at our operations. We had audits ongoing from Weaver and 00:18:57.720 --> 00:19:02.600 Tidwell and we were also undertaking a rate study that's fairly comprehensive in 00:19:02.600 --> 00:19:06.400 nature and so all those have wrapped up in the past year and so for this first 00:19:06.400 --> 00:19:09.440 slide what we'll do is we'll go through a few accomplishments as well as goals. 00:19:09.440 --> 00:19:13.120 I bring those things up simply because it informs a lot of what we've been 00:19:13.120 --> 00:19:17.320 tackling recently as well as what our goals are moving forward. In terms of 00:19:17.320 --> 00:19:21.280 accomplishments we did do a fairly massive management reorganization of 00:19:21.280 --> 00:19:24.800 solid waste last summer essentially turned over about 70 percent of our 00:19:24.800 --> 00:19:29.640 management staff. For the folks that remain really what we were focusing on 00:19:29.640 --> 00:19:34.480 is bringing in leaders that are focused on employee engagement as well as 00:19:34.480 --> 00:19:38.200 workplace safety and one of the biggest accomplishments we've had we do an 00:19:38.200 --> 00:19:43.280 annual employee survey and we had tremendous gains year over year. Our new 00:19:43.280 --> 00:19:45.920 management teams been in place for the better part about six or eight months. 00:19:45.920 --> 00:19:50.040 We're getting really good responsiveness out of our employees the survey was 00:19:50.040 --> 00:19:53.120 outstanding so I really want to give a tip of the hat to our operations managers 00:19:53.120 --> 00:19:56.600 their staff as well as our line staff because I think we've made a great deal 00:19:56.600 --> 00:20:01.440 of progress on that front in a very short period of time. In addition whenever 00:20:01.440 --> 00:20:05.200 the PUB and the council received the Blue Ridge report that operational 00:20:05.200 --> 00:20:09.120 review last year one of the things they pointed to is lack of a safety culture 00:20:09.120 --> 00:20:12.160 in our department and they identified that that was one of the reasons why 00:20:12.160 --> 00:20:17.760 we're having a high incidence of accidents and workplace injuries. There 00:20:17.760 --> 00:20:21.280 is an award called the Jimmy Huff Award through Texwana which is the Texas 00:20:21.280 --> 00:20:26.320 branch of the Solid Waste Association in North America. I want to point out that 00:20:26.320 --> 00:20:30.000 our department was recently recognized for the best year-over-year improvement 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:34.040 of workplace safety. That doesn't come without a lot of hard work by our staff. 00:20:34.040 --> 00:20:38.080 We hired a safety and training coordinator named Jason Palofsky. Brian 00:20:38.080 --> 00:20:43.040 spent a great deal of time putting in some curriculum with Jason's assistance 00:20:43.040 --> 00:20:47.080 and it's starting to pay off and so again just a tip of hat to staff as well 00:20:47.080 --> 00:20:53.000 as our line workers that make safety a priority every day. We also have a number 00:20:53.000 --> 00:20:55.500 of initiatives where we're trying to right-size our fleet and improve 00:20:55.500 --> 00:20:59.640 operations that's efficiency, effectiveness, making sure that we're 00:20:59.640 --> 00:21:03.080 making good decisions. One of the things we're doing in terms of right-sizing our 00:21:03.080 --> 00:21:07.000 fleet is changing out a number of pieces of equipment in the landfill to 00:21:07.000 --> 00:21:11.280 basically be the right size for our operations. One such change that we made 00:21:11.280 --> 00:21:14.840 is replacing our compactors which is basically a big piece of heavy 00:21:14.840 --> 00:21:19.800 equipment that compacts the waste. Just as an illustration of what right-sizing 00:21:19.800 --> 00:21:22.800 can do that's given us about eight additional years of landfill life 00:21:22.800 --> 00:21:26.600 through that one change in our operation and so I don't think we're I think we'll 00:21:26.600 --> 00:21:30.040 be hard-pressed to have another impact that large. That's really one of the 00:21:30.040 --> 00:21:35.220 things you'll see as a thread as we go through this presentation. In terms of 00:21:35.220 --> 00:21:38.720 goals for 19-20 I'm not gonna hit all these but one of the things I do want to 00:21:38.720 --> 00:21:42.880 point out is we did have an audit by Weaver that basically came in and looked 00:21:42.880 --> 00:21:47.540 at our scale house operation. For those of you that don't visit the landfill the 00:21:47.540 --> 00:21:51.240 scale house is basically the entrance and the exit to the facility. The way I 00:21:51.240 --> 00:21:55.140 allude to it is like the nerve center for any landfill operation. Everything 00:21:55.140 --> 00:21:58.800 gets weighed coming into our facility it gets weighed going out and that's where 00:21:58.800 --> 00:22:02.840 all the financial transactions take place. And so I neglected to put it in 00:22:02.840 --> 00:22:06.280 your packet but I will circle up with Mario to make sure you have a copy of 00:22:06.280 --> 00:22:11.680 the audit for the next PUB meeting. But essentially what their findings were is 00:22:11.680 --> 00:22:15.680 there weren't really good separation duties there weren't good internal 00:22:15.680 --> 00:22:19.200 controls. We've corrected all that that we can but one of the things they 00:22:19.200 --> 00:22:24.200 identified is your system has some big loopholes that can't be closed and so the 00:22:24.200 --> 00:22:27.160 system that we use for all of our financial transactions is what I'm 00:22:27.160 --> 00:22:30.360 alluding to. And so one of the things you'll see when we get to our 00:22:30.360 --> 00:22:33.920 supplemental packages is we do think that system needs to either be upgraded 00:22:33.920 --> 00:22:37.720 or replaced. It is an investment that we really feel like it's a top priority 00:22:37.720 --> 00:22:42.380 for us moving forward. We've talked a little bit with the board and the 00:22:42.380 --> 00:22:45.160 council about the state of the recycling market that's going to be an ongoing 00:22:45.160 --> 00:22:49.200 conversation with you all as we move through the next few months. The market 00:22:49.200 --> 00:22:53.180 is still somewhat in turmoil and so as we mentioned in that presentation making 00:22:53.180 --> 00:22:57.280 sure citizens are informed, educated, and doing their best to recycle right and 00:22:57.280 --> 00:23:01.880 reduce contamination. That's going to be an ongoing goal for us. Next going to 00:23:01.880 --> 00:23:05.120 talk about the rates in a moment. The last thing I want to highlight here is 00:23:05.120 --> 00:23:10.600 we do have continued efforts to improve our fleet performance and uptime. Back to 00:23:10.600 --> 00:23:13.920 Blue Ridge's report last summer they were looking at our fleet. We're carrying an 00:23:13.920 --> 00:23:18.320 abundance of backup fleet to try to keep a functioning fleet on the road. One of 00:23:18.320 --> 00:23:21.440 the things that you don't want to play too much with is your collection fleet. 00:23:21.440 --> 00:23:24.920 Otherwise trash is sitting on the curb. Folks aren't getting their stuff 00:23:24.920 --> 00:23:28.800 collected. It becomes a human health issue and so we've been carrying a large 00:23:28.800 --> 00:23:33.760 number of backup pieces of equipment for a number of years. With the assistance of 00:23:33.760 --> 00:23:37.200 the fleet department we are basically trying to change out our equipment as 00:23:37.200 --> 00:23:41.280 fast as we can and catch up from some of the negligence that we've had in years 00:23:41.280 --> 00:23:44.560 past and so that's again going to be a top priority as we work through the 00:23:44.560 --> 00:23:50.640 budget and the capital improvement plan. In terms of budget emphasis one of the 00:23:50.640 --> 00:23:53.640 things that I always like to talk about is your budget should really be an 00:23:53.640 --> 00:23:57.120 offshoot of your purpose and your strategy should be closely linked to 00:23:57.120 --> 00:24:00.720 your budget as well. For us if you ever come out to our administrative building 00:24:00.720 --> 00:24:05.320 take a tour you're liable to see that illustration there on the right. That's 00:24:05.320 --> 00:24:08.400 what we call our big picture which is really a statement of purpose for our 00:24:08.400 --> 00:24:12.120 department. It also provides a little bit of a cue to the employees that look at it 00:24:12.120 --> 00:24:15.340 as if I'm making a decision and it doesn't jive with everything under the 00:24:15.340 --> 00:24:19.040 big picture then it's red alert we may need to reevaluate our decision making. 00:24:19.040 --> 00:24:22.800 This kind of leaves out our culture our approach what we expect of our staff and 00:24:22.800 --> 00:24:27.800 our leaders. From a strategy perspective we try to basically make this really 00:24:27.800 --> 00:24:31.760 simple is our goal is to provide exceptional value to our community. When 00:24:31.760 --> 00:24:35.600 you pull solid waste down to its nuts and bolts we're here to collect waste 00:24:35.600 --> 00:24:39.200 and recycling we're here to divert and recycle as much as we can and we dispose 00:24:39.200 --> 00:24:44.680 of the rest and safe and environmentally friendly manner and so doing that 00:24:44.680 --> 00:24:48.640 providing exceptional value we're basically the only choice in town for 00:24:48.640 --> 00:24:52.720 service and so we have to be a little bit of everything to all people and so 00:24:52.720 --> 00:24:57.960 how we do that is we balance our goals and our approach. Financial performance 00:24:57.960 --> 00:25:01.640 is important but so is operational excellent being safe effective and 00:25:01.640 --> 00:25:05.960 efficient. Customer focus is something that we've been spending a lot of time 00:25:05.960 --> 00:25:09.560 with the board and the council on giving you overviews of our program showing you 00:25:09.560 --> 00:25:12.840 what we think is working what isn't because the breadth of service is 00:25:12.840 --> 00:25:16.880 important but also making sure that it's high quality and then from a 00:25:16.880 --> 00:25:19.880 sustainability perspective we certainly want to focus on the environmental 00:25:19.880 --> 00:25:23.840 components but we also need to be financially and socially sustainable as 00:25:23.840 --> 00:25:29.160 well. A few cost drivers for our budget obviously with most of the presentations 00:25:29.160 --> 00:25:31.880 you're going to see from the other utilities customer growth and increased 00:25:31.880 --> 00:25:36.480 service demands are always there. Unlike other utilities solid waste is exposed to 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:41.280 market forces from a landfill we are in competition with other landfills in the 00:25:41.280 --> 00:25:46.560 region that's based on a price basis as well as a convenience basis. Construction 00:25:46.560 --> 00:25:51.560 is probably one of our sectors that is most exposed to a recession and so 00:25:51.560 --> 00:25:55.080 construction tends to die off if a recession hits so we have to make sure 00:25:55.080 --> 00:25:59.160 we're paying attention to that and then obviously with the recycling market being 00:25:59.160 --> 00:26:03.200 in flux the commodity prices are certainly something that will affect our 00:26:03.200 --> 00:26:09.160 bottom line. We're also a highly regulated environment so we are known to 00:26:09.160 --> 00:26:13.400 run into unfunded mandates at the state and federal level occasionally and so we 00:26:13.400 --> 00:26:16.860 do track those bills and try to integrate that stuff into our budget when possible. 00:26:16.860 --> 00:26:22.920 A few cost containment strategies in terms of the operating budget those are 00:26:22.920 --> 00:26:27.400 your ongoing year-to-year expenses that don't typically go away. We do zero 00:26:27.400 --> 00:26:30.920 based budget for some of our stuff like travel training and outside contract 00:26:30.920 --> 00:26:34.920 services. We essentially want to rinse and refresh and look at that fresh every 00:26:34.920 --> 00:26:39.000 year. Improvement in resource management is something you're going to hear me 00:26:39.000 --> 00:26:42.760 talk a little bit more about on these next few slides. When we say resource is 00:26:42.760 --> 00:26:46.440 really for our operation what you're talking about is staff, you're talking 00:26:46.440 --> 00:26:49.640 about equipment which can be landfill equipment, it can also be collection 00:26:49.640 --> 00:26:53.400 vehicles and then you also have your containers and carts and things that you 00:26:53.400 --> 00:26:57.480 actually as a consumer or as a customer of ours use out in the field. Those are 00:26:57.480 --> 00:26:59.980 all things that we need to make sure we're managing effectively and 00:26:59.980 --> 00:27:06.040 efficiently. Equipment of vehicles we do utilize or we analyze vehicle 00:27:06.040 --> 00:27:10.300 utilization information we get from the fleet department and we try to rat size 00:27:10.300 --> 00:27:14.760 our fleet. I don't want to misspeak I'll kind of do an eyeball check with Tina 00:27:14.760 --> 00:27:18.640 over here. I think we've eliminated something on the order of about 40 or 50 00:27:18.640 --> 00:27:22.720 vehicles and pieces of equipment the last two years is that about right? And 00:27:22.720 --> 00:27:26.680 so one of the things that the utilization will do for you is you look at 00:27:26.680 --> 00:27:31.120 underutilized equipment and you find ways to rat size but also what we've done is 00:27:31.120 --> 00:27:35.480 tried to implement means in which we can share equipment. I think we've done a 00:27:35.480 --> 00:27:39.240 good job of that within the department but we're also looking at trying to 00:27:39.240 --> 00:27:43.280 partner with fleet and share equipment across other department lines too. We've 00:27:43.280 --> 00:27:46.000 also identified and tried to replace some of those underperforming vehicles 00:27:46.000 --> 00:27:50.640 like I alluded to earlier. At some point a piece of equipment or a vehicle if 00:27:50.640 --> 00:27:54.640 that's a lemon it costs more to maintain than it does to jettison and replace and 00:27:54.640 --> 00:27:59.520 so those are ongoing conversations for us. The last thing that I'll talk about 00:27:59.520 --> 00:28:02.840 down here we I'm sure all of you are familiar with the business case analysis 00:28:02.840 --> 00:28:06.000 that we bring through so I'm not gonna spend much time on that. I do want to 00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:09.400 talk about kind of how we've approached our capital plans and so whenever you 00:28:09.400 --> 00:28:13.040 look at solid waste you have your disposal operation in your collection 00:28:13.040 --> 00:28:18.400 operation. Years past the landfill tended to get most of the investment through 00:28:18.400 --> 00:28:22.080 our capital improvement plan and so what we've really tried to do the last couple 00:28:22.080 --> 00:28:26.460 years is make a more holistic approach to how we evaluate and so when you see 00:28:26.460 --> 00:28:30.720 the supplemental packages and our capital plan it's basically focused on 00:28:30.720 --> 00:28:34.560 needs first and making sure that there's a good mix between those two divisions 00:28:34.560 --> 00:28:39.920 and then we get to once after we've satisfied all the needs and so hopefully 00:28:39.920 --> 00:28:44.320 that makes sense. In terms of process improvements I think we've hit some of 00:28:44.320 --> 00:28:48.120 these I think one of the things that we're really proud of is our relationship 00:28:48.120 --> 00:28:51.840 with finance I think we have a good working relationship there challenges 00:28:51.840 --> 00:28:55.280 assumptions on both sides of the table and so there is a healthy amount of 00:28:55.280 --> 00:28:59.080 checks and balances that go into our budget. We do have some improved 00:28:59.080 --> 00:29:02.680 processes and internal controls that we've implemented responsive to the 00:29:02.680 --> 00:29:06.440 audit that we received last year a couple of new things we're implementing 00:29:06.440 --> 00:29:10.400 that are just on the starting line we've implemented a dispatching operation 00:29:10.400 --> 00:29:13.920 basically charged with improving the routing of our collection vehicles 00:29:13.920 --> 00:29:18.080 making sure that that route is as efficient as it can be it's not just 00:29:18.080 --> 00:29:22.400 about money it's about wear and tear on the road it's also about emissions and 00:29:22.400 --> 00:29:25.560 making sure that we're not doubling back in a neighborhood when we don't need to 00:29:25.560 --> 00:29:30.160 be. We've also implemented that formal training and safety program like I talked 00:29:30.160 --> 00:29:33.600 about. These are going to be ongoing improvements for us ongoing focus in the 00:29:33.600 --> 00:29:37.480 years ahead. I've talked about resource management for future improvements I'm 00:29:37.480 --> 00:29:41.200 not going to hit that again but I will say that this is a nice segue in terms 00:29:41.200 --> 00:29:46.160 of the scale house software and asset management that takes us into our 00:29:46.160 --> 00:29:50.120 supplemental packages. So we do have about 1.8 million dollars in 00:29:50.120 --> 00:29:53.520 supplemental packages that we're going to be proposing for this upcoming fiscal 00:29:53.520 --> 00:29:57.600 year. If council recalls and I'm sure Nick will hit on this when he gets to 00:29:57.600 --> 00:30:02.080 the podium is we've essentially gone two years without issuing any debt and so 00:30:02.080 --> 00:30:06.160 we've right-sized all of our capital plans to try to maximize the use of 00:30:06.160 --> 00:30:11.880 existing funds. So what we're focusing on here is a few priorities. This is the 00:30:11.880 --> 00:30:15.560 scale house and asset management software that's responding to that audit. 00:30:15.560 --> 00:30:19.520 Engineering services is something you typically see for landfills what we're 00:30:19.520 --> 00:30:23.920 actually doing is eliminating several different line items smaller line items 00:30:23.920 --> 00:30:27.760 in our budget and collapsing it into one blanket engineering agreement. So we'll 00:30:27.760 --> 00:30:33.840 be putting an RFP out for that. Route consulting services believe it or not 00:30:33.840 --> 00:30:37.800 for a modern city all of our drivers come in in the morning they get a piece 00:30:37.800 --> 00:30:42.240 of paper that tells them where to go. There's no onboard GPS the driver 00:30:42.240 --> 00:30:45.760 basically has either a printed map where they're operating off of what they think 00:30:45.760 --> 00:30:50.200 is the best route to go collect the trash and recycling. Don't want to speak 00:30:50.200 --> 00:30:53.520 for Eugene but I know he was out doing a ride along with one of our drivers 00:30:53.520 --> 00:30:58.280 they came across a commercial can. Okay when do you pick this one up? We picked 00:30:58.280 --> 00:31:01.040 that one up on Monday. What about that one over there? We picked that one up on 00:31:01.040 --> 00:31:05.920 Tuesday. Why are we not just picking them both up on Monday? And so I think there's 00:31:05.920 --> 00:31:11.560 a lot of efficiencies to be gained both with the new technology for a system as 00:31:11.560 --> 00:31:14.840 well as designing clean and efficient routes that our drivers can have an 00:31:14.840 --> 00:31:18.240 onboard computer that tells them where to go. Takes a little bit of the guesswork 00:31:18.240 --> 00:31:22.160 out of it. We have some pieces of equipment here I'll just quickly go 00:31:22.160 --> 00:31:25.040 through those that roll off is for construction we are seeing growth in 00:31:25.040 --> 00:31:29.240 that segment so we're trying to keep up with customer demand. A waste handler 00:31:29.240 --> 00:31:33.680 dozer that is a replacement. The mini rear loaders I have a picture of these 00:31:33.680 --> 00:31:38.960 because they're kind of cute. So right now what we have when we go out into a 00:31:38.960 --> 00:31:42.500 community we have a lot of pieces of heavy equipment and we have light duty 00:31:42.500 --> 00:31:47.160 vehicles for our supervisors and crew leaders. Rather than dispatching a heavy 00:31:47.160 --> 00:31:50.960 piece of equipment to double back on missed collections we would be replacing 00:31:50.960 --> 00:31:53.920 light duty vehicles with a mini rear loader for our supervisors and crew 00:31:53.920 --> 00:31:57.680 leaders. They can be more responsive to customers that get missed or that 00:31:57.680 --> 00:32:01.960 customer that's running late and has has to have us double back and get them. It's 00:32:01.960 --> 00:32:06.000 more efficient, more economical, keeps our drivers on task so they're not having 00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:08.960 to divert from their routes. 00:32:08.960 --> 00:32:17.240 Quickly. Nick's chomping at the bit over there I can feel him. We do have an 00:32:17.240 --> 00:32:21.080 additional HEO that's heavy equipment operator they were proposing for the 00:32:21.080 --> 00:32:25.400 landfill. Last year we eliminated about seven hundred thousand dollars worth of 00:32:25.400 --> 00:32:29.960 temporary labor through a staffing service and we also reduced 10 FTEs out 00:32:29.960 --> 00:32:34.400 of landfill as well so we basically took 24 positions out of the landfill. I think 00:32:34.400 --> 00:32:37.280 we cut a little bit too deep and so what we were recommending is adding one 00:32:37.280 --> 00:32:42.680 position back. And then on communication radios right now our drivers and folks 00:32:42.680 --> 00:32:46.460 in landfill are on cell phones. It's not safe. We're having issues with 00:32:46.460 --> 00:32:50.000 communication so we'd like to get the landfill to switch over to communication 00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:54.440 radios instead. And then the last one here, last but not least, is the recycling 00:32:54.440 --> 00:32:58.640 drop-off at North Lakes. This one is on here because we are going to need to 00:32:58.640 --> 00:33:03.280 relocate that facility. It's currently housed where the new believe it's either 00:33:03.280 --> 00:33:07.320 a Vela soccer or tennis center is going to be and so we've been working with 00:33:07.320 --> 00:33:12.600 Parks and Recreation to find a new site. That center takes in about a hundred and 00:33:12.600 --> 00:33:17.240 sixty hundred seventy tons a year so this is a hefty investment to relocate it. The 00:33:17.240 --> 00:33:20.640 other thing that I'll say is the relocation. We may be relocating some 00:33:20.640 --> 00:33:24.080 challenges that we're currently seeing at the site. There's a heavy amount of 00:33:24.080 --> 00:33:27.120 illegal dumping that's going on there. This is similar to the issue that we 00:33:27.120 --> 00:33:31.640 brought forward to the PV and council with our drop-off sites at the landfill. 00:33:31.640 --> 00:33:35.920 We are certainly happy to move that. There's a couple of additional things 00:33:35.920 --> 00:33:40.920 that we could bring forward to the PV and council as alternatives. One is not 00:33:40.920 --> 00:33:45.600 to relocate the drop-off center and is to pursue what we call drop-off or 00:33:45.600 --> 00:33:49.600 pickup events where we basically take containers out into the community on a 00:33:49.600 --> 00:33:53.320 weekend when most folks are doing their cleanup. We can also collect home 00:33:53.320 --> 00:33:57.200 chemicals while we're out there and once we're done we take the containers with 00:33:57.200 --> 00:34:02.120 us to prevent illegal dumping. That's on the very low cost side. We could do that 00:34:02.120 --> 00:34:07.880 with existing resources. On the high side we could take it from a drop-off center 00:34:07.880 --> 00:34:12.200 to a staff site which could go all the way up to a million or two million 00:34:12.200 --> 00:34:16.120 dollars depending on the services that we want to offer. And so we put that out 00:34:16.120 --> 00:34:19.840 there the way we built this into the budget is basically just a flat 00:34:19.840 --> 00:34:26.360 relocation of that site at $420,000. We're happy to take any recommendations 00:34:26.360 --> 00:34:31.720 the PV has before we talk to council on that particular piece. So essentially the 00:34:31.720 --> 00:34:34.600 the cost could scale up or down depending on how we want to approach 00:34:34.600 --> 00:34:39.600 that. So that's essentially our supplemental package in the end of my 00:34:39.600 --> 00:34:43.000 piece of the presentation. Before I turn it over to Nick are there any questions 00:34:43.000 --> 00:34:48.520 from an operational standpoint? Do you know what the contamination rate is for 00:34:48.520 --> 00:34:53.440 the North Lakes drop-off? Yeah so we it's about 38 to 40 percent which is 00:34:53.440 --> 00:34:57.040 not uncommon. I mean when you look at these photos you've got folks that are 00:34:57.040 --> 00:35:02.120 recycling responsibly but then you have a few bad actors. So you've got lots of 00:35:02.120 --> 00:35:06.240 usable cardboard here but then you also have you know a lot of waste that's 00:35:06.240 --> 00:35:09.860 going in. The reason why the contamination rate isn't higher is we 00:35:09.860 --> 00:35:13.760 actually roll out with refuse trucks and do clean up three times a week on this 00:35:13.760 --> 00:35:18.800 side. So it's it's a pretty involved process. I don't know Eugene probably two 00:35:18.800 --> 00:35:25.760 or three employees an hour or so at a time to clean this up. In addition to the 00:35:25.760 --> 00:35:28.520 waste and stuff some of the other problems we have obviously you got 00:35:28.520 --> 00:35:31.920 chemicals and propane tanks here. We're dealing with a lot of windblown 00:35:31.920 --> 00:35:36.920 litter at the site and depending on where we relocate that can have an impact on 00:35:36.920 --> 00:35:41.360 other city properties or private property owners. So our staff is going to 00:35:41.360 --> 00:35:46.800 pretty considerable lengths to keep this cleaned up. Contamination isn't as high 00:35:46.800 --> 00:35:49.200 but it's much higher than what we're seeing at the drop-off site at the 00:35:49.200 --> 00:35:53.960 landfill after we move that behind the gates. 00:35:55.720 --> 00:36:07.920 Other questions? All right without further ado all right good afternoon PB members 00:36:07.920 --> 00:36:11.800 chair I'm Nick Vincent the city's budget manager. As Ethan said I'll be walking 00:36:11.800 --> 00:36:15.240 you through the financial portion of the proposed 19-20 budget for solid waste 00:36:15.240 --> 00:36:18.800 fund. I did want to hit some assumptions that were included in putting this 00:36:18.800 --> 00:36:23.320 budget together this year. Staff is recommending to change the way that the 00:36:23.320 --> 00:36:27.000 current reserve is structured within this solid waste fund. I'll review this 00:36:27.000 --> 00:36:30.880 with you in detail on the preceding slide after well the slide following this one 00:36:30.880 --> 00:36:34.600 where we can explain a little better. We are also recommended to maintain 00:36:34.600 --> 00:36:38.800 existing residential rates. We are wanting to utilize the fund balance 00:36:38.800 --> 00:36:42.160 within this solid waste fund to implement a rate correction strategy that I'll 00:36:42.160 --> 00:36:45.360 review with you in a following presentation after this one also. That's 00:36:45.360 --> 00:36:49.400 a direct follow-up to a cost of service study that was done last summer and I'll 00:36:49.400 --> 00:36:52.840 discuss that with you in further detail here shortly. Some of the major 00:36:52.840 --> 00:36:56.960 capital items that's included in this year's budget in 2020 we are wanting to 00:36:56.960 --> 00:37:01.320 issue one million dollars in bonds to fund renovations to the administration 00:37:01.320 --> 00:37:05.960 building at solid waste. In addition in 2022 we're wanting to issue five million 00:37:05.960 --> 00:37:09.840 dollars in bonds for cell development cost which is in the future years and 00:37:09.840 --> 00:37:15.840 I'll show that to you on the five-year CIP. So as I mentioned staff is 00:37:15.840 --> 00:37:19.640 recommended to change the way that the current operating reserve is calculated 00:37:19.640 --> 00:37:23.480 in the solid waste fund. Currently there are three components that are added 00:37:23.480 --> 00:37:27.640 together to make up this fund total. You have an operating component that you can 00:37:27.640 --> 00:37:31.680 see here that currently has about five million dollars in it. You have a rental 00:37:31.680 --> 00:37:36.360 fund component has about 1.2 million and then you have a vehicle replacement fund 00:37:36.360 --> 00:37:40.520 component about four million dollars. So all together these total about ten point 00:37:40.520 --> 00:37:45.300 four million. They're not separated out they are all combined into one reserve 00:37:45.300 --> 00:37:50.120 fund currently. Moving forward what we want to do is create two distinct 00:37:50.120 --> 00:37:53.960 separate reserve funds. One being operating the other being vehicle 00:37:53.960 --> 00:37:58.360 replacement. In doing that we had moved nine million to the operating side and 00:37:58.360 --> 00:38:02.880 one million to the vehicle replacement side. We are also recommended to do away 00:38:02.880 --> 00:38:08.600 with the current rental fund component that is shown on the second line. This is 00:38:08.600 --> 00:38:12.240 consistent the way the water and wastewater utility currently show it so 00:38:12.240 --> 00:38:19.720 they both have an operating component a vehicle replacement fund component. This 00:38:19.720 --> 00:38:23.560 is the five-year forecast. You can see the adopted 2019 budget that we're 00:38:23.560 --> 00:38:27.200 currently in here in this column. We were projecting to use about three 00:38:27.200 --> 00:38:31.320 hundred fifty thousand dollars in reserves. End of your estimate revenues 00:38:31.320 --> 00:38:34.920 are coming a little bit shy of what we projected so we're projecting to use 00:38:34.920 --> 00:38:39.680 about five hundred fifty thousand in reserves. Moving forward we have rate 00:38:39.680 --> 00:38:43.120 revenue of thirty four point four million dollars. You can see that up here. 00:38:43.120 --> 00:38:47.960 Expenses about thirty seven point three million. This does include the one point 00:38:47.960 --> 00:38:50.840 eight million dollars in supplemental packages that Ethan had pointed out on 00:38:50.840 --> 00:38:55.880 that slide. So given that we would be using two point nine million in reserves 00:38:55.880 --> 00:39:01.040 if PB and council approves this proposed budget. The reserve funds are both 00:39:01.040 --> 00:39:04.800 separated out here down below for transparency so you can very easily see 00:39:04.800 --> 00:39:08.720 there's an operating fund component and there's a vehicle replacement fund 00:39:08.720 --> 00:39:12.160 component and you can see that both of them are growing over the five-year 00:39:12.160 --> 00:39:15.800 period so the operating fund goes from seven point one to seven point nine 00:39:15.800 --> 00:39:19.520 million and then the vehicle replacement goes from one million to four point three 00:39:19.520 --> 00:39:28.160 million. These are the solid waste resources. You can see the adopted budget 00:39:28.160 --> 00:39:31.640 is here in the middle column. The proposed budget is to the very far right 00:39:31.640 --> 00:39:36.440 so we had adopted resources about thirty four point eight million that did use a 00:39:36.440 --> 00:39:40.480 little bit of reserves that were included in here and then proposed about 00:39:40.480 --> 00:39:45.200 thirty seven point three of which two point nine is the use of reserves and 00:39:45.200 --> 00:39:53.200 we pointed out in the forecast. This is the expense detail. You can see the 00:39:53.200 --> 00:39:56.960 expenses by the different service categories within solid waste. We have 00:39:56.960 --> 00:40:00.560 thirty four point eight million dollars in expenses in the adopted budget. We're 00:40:00.560 --> 00:40:04.800 projecting that to come in about thirty four point six with the proposed budget 00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:09.160 to be about thirty seven point three. As I stated before the supplemental packages 00:40:09.160 --> 00:40:17.160 that Ethan reviewed are included in here. This is the five-year capital plan. I did 00:40:17.160 --> 00:40:20.240 want to point out on the previous slide I had mentioned we're going to issue one 00:40:20.240 --> 00:40:24.040 million dollars in bonds to renovate the solid waste administration building. You 00:40:24.040 --> 00:40:29.640 can see that money here and the future years we do have some debt issuance in 00:40:29.640 --> 00:40:33.700 2022 and five-year money for cell development. Those are the major items 00:40:33.700 --> 00:40:41.440 included in the bond issuance. So you can see in 2020 we'd be issuing a total of 00:40:41.440 --> 00:40:45.880 five point seven million total. This would include revenue funded projects 00:40:45.880 --> 00:40:50.120 and capital fund projects and it separates it out down below here. Bonds 00:40:50.120 --> 00:40:54.960 are three point three and revenue is two point five. You can see, I apologize my 00:40:54.960 --> 00:40:58.400 mouse disappeared on me, right there. So bonds would be three point two and then 00:40:58.400 --> 00:41:07.640 revenue would be two point five. This is the FT summary. So currently there's a 00:41:07.640 --> 00:41:11.420 hundred and twenty two point five positions in the solid waste fund. We are 00:41:11.420 --> 00:41:14.520 projecting that to stay consistent to the rest of the fiscal year through 00:41:14.520 --> 00:41:18.500 September. Moving into next year we would have the one twenty two plus the one 00:41:18.500 --> 00:41:21.920 supplemental that Ethan had mentioned on the supplemental slide. So bring the 00:41:21.920 --> 00:41:29.840 total FT count to one twenty three point five for the solid waste fund. And then 00:41:29.840 --> 00:41:33.000 with that, that concludes the presentation for the budget. I'll stand 00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:36.120 for any questions you may have. Our staff is here, Ethan is here too if you have 00:41:36.120 --> 00:41:42.360 further questions. What caused the increase or the planned increase of our 00:41:42.360 --> 00:41:53.960 operational reserves? Let me go back here. So that's a great question. So the 00:41:53.960 --> 00:41:59.400 operating reserve is increasing from 2020 to 2024. The major contributing 00:41:59.400 --> 00:42:03.020 factor is the debt service. The debt service does go from eight point five 00:42:03.020 --> 00:42:07.400 million down to six point two million. As the fund continues to revenue fund 00:42:07.400 --> 00:42:11.000 assets instead of debt funding them, the debt service is falling off in the 00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:16.960 future years. Okay. Yeah and that does fall directly to the operating reserve. 00:42:16.960 --> 00:42:27.160 Any other questions? 00:42:27.160 --> 00:42:38.040 That's it for this presentation. Thank you sir. Appreciate it. 00:42:41.640 --> 00:42:47.160 So our next item on our work session is item C. Receive a report, hold a 00:42:47.160 --> 00:42:50.480 discussion, and give staff recommendations regarding the solid 00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:57.440 weight, solid waste rate correction strategy. Good afternoon Chair, PB members. 00:42:57.440 --> 00:43:04.640 My name is Nick Vincent, the City of Denton Budget Manager. I just want to step aside and step back up here. So I'll be walking you through this presentation also. 00:43:04.640 --> 00:43:13.200 Appreciate it. So a little bit of history in the summer of 2018, the solid waste 00:43:13.200 --> 00:43:17.440 department partnered with Nugent Strategies to complete a in-depth cost of 00:43:17.440 --> 00:43:21.040 service study, if you recall, and that study looked at the different service 00:43:21.040 --> 00:43:25.640 components in solid waste, residential, commercial, and landfill, and identified 00:43:25.640 --> 00:43:29.720 the revenue requirement of each. Some of those were over recovering and some were 00:43:29.720 --> 00:43:34.200 under recovering, so this correction strategy is meant to adjust those and 00:43:34.200 --> 00:43:38.000 correct those. So I'll walk you through each of them separately and throughout the 00:43:38.000 --> 00:43:40.360 presentations will stop me if you have any questions. I'll be happy to answer 00:43:40.360 --> 00:43:42.560 them. 00:43:42.560 --> 00:44:03.120 Apologize, let me get the right presentation up here. All right, some of 00:44:03.120 --> 00:44:06.800 the major accomplishments to date. Ethan touched on these a little bit, but we 00:44:06.800 --> 00:44:11.600 did do a 12% rate reduction last year for residential customers. We eliminated 00:44:11.600 --> 00:44:16.120 landfill mining to save net losses of over a million a year. I mean we did 00:44:16.120 --> 00:44:22.240 construct a CNG station for net savings of $400,000 annually, and one of the 00:44:22.240 --> 00:44:25.920 recent ones we did cancel the building materials recovery operation to avoid 00:44:25.920 --> 00:44:31.800 net losses of $680,000 a year, and that's about two to three months ago. So as you 00:44:31.800 --> 00:44:36.440 pointed out, Chair, earlier the debt services decreasing in 2019, it's 8.9 00:44:36.440 --> 00:44:42.000 million. That does go to 6.2 million in 2024. This is part of the reason we can 00:44:42.000 --> 00:44:45.960 implement this rate correction strategy over a five-year period, and I'll touch 00:44:45.960 --> 00:44:51.720 on that here with you shortly. So there are three main service categories of 00:44:51.720 --> 00:44:55.680 unsolved waste. You have your residential, your commercial, and your landfill. 00:44:55.680 --> 00:45:00.560 Residential, these clearly identify the goals for each. Residential's goals is to 00:45:00.560 --> 00:45:06.160 maintain the existing rates. Of course we decreased last year by 12%. The 00:45:06.160 --> 00:45:10.120 commercial goal is to incentivize customers to move to larger containers 00:45:10.120 --> 00:45:14.720 with less collection frequency. That, you know, cuts down on wear and tear of the 00:45:14.720 --> 00:45:19.080 equipment, wear and tear on the roads, so we do want to incentivize that behavior. 00:45:19.080 --> 00:45:22.680 Recycling is the same way. We want to incentivize recycling through reduced 00:45:22.680 --> 00:45:26.160 rates, so we'll go over the recycling rates currently in the proposed ones 00:45:26.160 --> 00:45:30.800 with you here shortly. And then also we want to reduce the over recovering rates 00:45:30.800 --> 00:45:35.160 in commercial to bring them to cost of service over an amount of time of five 00:45:35.160 --> 00:45:40.120 year goal. Landfill goal would be to reduce the over recovering rates also over 00:45:40.120 --> 00:45:44.680 five years to establish cost of service rates, and then also to be cost recovery 00:45:44.680 --> 00:45:51.240 in five years, the efficiency they find at the landfill. So as I said, there's 00:45:51.240 --> 00:45:55.240 three main categories. You can see each of them listed in this matrix. Residential 00:45:55.240 --> 00:45:59.040 is listed here. They're currently under recovering through the rates about a 00:45:59.040 --> 00:46:04.680 million dollars. Commercial is over recovering about 3.3, and landfill is 00:46:04.680 --> 00:46:08.880 under recovering about 2.4. What we've done is we've put the five year goal 00:46:08.880 --> 00:46:13.280 below, so you can see that the residential five year goal is to maintain existing 00:46:13.280 --> 00:46:17.320 rates within the residential department. Commercial would be to reduce the 00:46:17.320 --> 00:46:21.360 over recovering rates. We'll review those with you shortly. And landfill would be 00:46:21.360 --> 00:46:25.120 cost recovery in five years through increased efficiency, and as the debt 00:46:25.120 --> 00:46:33.640 service continues to fall off. This is the residential slide. It details out 00:46:33.640 --> 00:46:36.680 the rates for the two different size containers that the residential 00:46:36.680 --> 00:46:40.480 customers currently can choose from. We have a large container, and then we have 00:46:40.480 --> 00:46:45.560 a medium container. The services that have the checks listed next to 00:46:45.560 --> 00:46:50.040 them here are the services that are included in that rate. We do have some 00:46:50.040 --> 00:46:53.560 individual service fees that are out here to the right with the fee of each 00:46:53.560 --> 00:46:59.560 associated with it. So if a customer was to call in, for instance, for excess yard 00:46:59.560 --> 00:47:04.160 waste, there would be a cubic yard charge for that service. I do want to point out 00:47:04.160 --> 00:47:07.400 that the ones that have the red asterisk or their underline, these are future 00:47:07.400 --> 00:47:11.920 program discussions that Ethan will be bringing back to the PB and council over 00:47:11.920 --> 00:47:18.760 the next couple months. So I thought it was important to point that out. What I 00:47:18.760 --> 00:47:22.720 wanted to do is go over the different size containers or type of containers in 00:47:22.720 --> 00:47:26.840 commercial that customers have to choose from. First, you have a front-load 00:47:26.840 --> 00:47:32.000 container. This service is built on a monthly service fee based on collection 00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:35.920 frequency and size. We'll see that on the next slide. These are side-load 00:47:35.920 --> 00:47:39.720 containers, very similar, just a different truck, and these are also built on 00:47:39.720 --> 00:47:44.880 collection frequency and size, and we'll review those also. Roll-off containers, 00:47:44.880 --> 00:47:49.000 you see these at construction sites. They do have three components that go into 00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:52.440 billing it. So when a customer receives a bill for a roll-off container, you have a 00:47:52.440 --> 00:47:57.080 service fee component, a disposal fee component, and a monthly rental fee. Same 00:47:57.080 --> 00:48:00.360 thing with compactors. You see these a lot, like at big grocery stores, 00:48:00.360 --> 00:48:04.240 universities, and they do have three components that go into the rate also. A 00:48:04.240 --> 00:48:10.840 rental component, a disposal component, and then a service fee component. 00:48:13.600 --> 00:48:18.240 This is the front-load refuse rate slide. As I stated earlier, we do want to 00:48:18.240 --> 00:48:22.000 incentivize customers to shift to larger containers with less collection 00:48:22.000 --> 00:48:25.560 frequency to cut down on wear and tear of the roads and wear on the equipment. 00:48:25.560 --> 00:48:29.160 We do want to incentivize recycling through reduced rates. We'll review the 00:48:29.160 --> 00:48:33.440 recycling rates with you on the next slide. The matrix below here, this is the 00:48:33.440 --> 00:48:38.280 front-load refuse rates. So if you look at the table, the current rates are here 00:48:38.280 --> 00:48:42.920 on the left, and then the ones we are proposing to change are highlighted in 00:48:42.920 --> 00:48:47.320 this green column. So you can see, for instance, a 6 cubic yard going two times 00:48:47.320 --> 00:48:52.760 a week is currently 297. We're recommending to go to 282. This would 00:48:52.760 --> 00:48:56.600 take us closer to cost of service. It is reducing the over recovering rates that 00:48:56.600 --> 00:49:01.240 currently exist within the front-load refuse customers. We do have a few out 00:49:01.240 --> 00:49:06.120 here that we have X's next to. I want to point these out really quick. These are 00:49:06.120 --> 00:49:11.160 rates we're recommending that go away. There are minimum customers in 00:49:11.160 --> 00:49:16.100 these categories. We do feel like it'd be more efficient to move them to a larger 00:49:16.100 --> 00:49:22.340 container, maybe going less frequent, less frequent per week. Another strategic 00:49:22.340 --> 00:49:27.960 move we're wanting to propose is to align the side-load refuse rates with 00:49:27.960 --> 00:49:32.360 these front-load rates that you see here, creating one distinct identifiable rates 00:49:32.360 --> 00:49:36.320 for refuse service and one set of rates for recycling service. Just keeping it 00:49:36.320 --> 00:49:40.240 consistent. In the past, the side-load rates were higher than the front-load 00:49:40.240 --> 00:49:44.420 refuse rates. So moving forward, we're proposing to align those two different 00:49:44.420 --> 00:49:51.840 service categories. This talks about side-load rates, the ones I just 00:49:51.840 --> 00:49:55.760 mentioned. So we are proposing to align the side-load refuse rates with the 00:49:55.760 --> 00:50:00.600 front-load rates you just saw on the previous slide. We are also proposing to 00:50:00.600 --> 00:50:04.400 adjust the following rates. So for instance, a 3 cubic yard going one time a week 00:50:04.400 --> 00:50:11.200 would go from 105 to 74. The bottom table is the recycling rates. As I mentioned 00:50:11.200 --> 00:50:15.600 before, the anyone with the X that is in the matrix are rates we're proposing to 00:50:15.600 --> 00:50:21.200 do away with moving forward. They're not currently being utilized or underutilized 00:50:21.200 --> 00:50:25.760 rates and categories, so we're recommending that them go away. 00:50:32.200 --> 00:50:36.600 These are some additional commercial rates that are out in the community. So we do 00:50:36.600 --> 00:50:41.800 have organic collection rates. These are for pre-consumer organics and you see 00:50:41.800 --> 00:50:46.480 these a lot of times at grocery stores in the community that have, you know, 00:50:46.480 --> 00:50:50.400 pre-consumer organics collected in those as are brought back to the saw waste 00:50:50.400 --> 00:50:55.360 facility to be composted. We are proposing that rate go from 374.13 to 00:50:55.360 --> 00:51:01.160 274. The extra fee associated with that we're recommending to go from 240 to 00:51:01.160 --> 00:51:06.160 $75 based on the cost of service study that was done last summer. We are 00:51:06.160 --> 00:51:10.600 recommended to keep the compactor service fee of 275 and separating it out 00:51:10.600 --> 00:51:15.720 from the open top service fee. Reason B in the consultants recommendation was to 00:51:15.720 --> 00:51:20.400 maintain the compactor service fee just because of additional requirements for 00:51:20.400 --> 00:51:23.560 the driver to get out of the truck and hook hydraulic hoses and such a little 00:51:23.560 --> 00:51:28.080 bit more in labor-intensive. So we are recommending to leave that the same. The 00:51:28.080 --> 00:51:31.520 open top service component of it though that doesn't have the hydraulic hoses 00:51:31.520 --> 00:51:35.800 just to hook up, load the container and dump it, we're recommending that fee go 00:51:35.800 --> 00:51:40.760 to 240. That's here on the bottom. 00:51:40.760 --> 00:51:49.960 Landfill rate, one of the major recommendations from staff this in this 00:51:49.960 --> 00:51:54.480 correction strategy is to separate out the gate disposal rate for non-city 00:51:54.480 --> 00:51:59.600 Denton citizens and businesses and I'll discuss that with you down here below. We 00:51:59.600 --> 00:52:03.880 have we are continuing to reduce our reliance on wholesale waste in the 00:52:03.880 --> 00:52:07.480 landfills so the forecast is taking the growth assumptions out in the future 00:52:07.480 --> 00:52:14.040 years. So going back to separating out their disposal rates so we are proposing 00:52:14.040 --> 00:52:18.920 to separate out the city didn't disposal rate from non-city didn't disposal rate 00:52:18.920 --> 00:52:24.360 we would increase non-city Denton's rate from 44 a ton to 46 and that's shown in 00:52:24.360 --> 00:52:29.280 the first bullet point here and then we would recommend maintaining the existing 00:52:29.280 --> 00:52:32.960 rate for city and citizens and businesses and it's currently 44 a ton 00:52:32.960 --> 00:52:36.280 and this is people driving up to the facility disposing of stuff they may 00:52:36.280 --> 00:52:40.560 have loaded on a trailer in the back of their truck we would recommend keeping 00:52:40.560 --> 00:52:48.240 that the same. With that that concludes the presentation I know I've covered a 00:52:48.240 --> 00:52:50.520 lot of stuff so if you're getting questions I'll be happy to back up and 00:52:50.520 --> 00:52:59.160 address your questions. I have a question it's a little off-topic but not really. 00:52:59.160 --> 00:53:13.840 Whose budget is burdened with paying for litter or illegal dumping within the 00:53:13.840 --> 00:53:20.400 city limits? Ethan you want to come up and try to just address illegal dumping 00:53:20.400 --> 00:53:24.000 let me ask Ethan Cox to come back. I mean I know at one point in time we actually 00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:30.320 had a task force there was a number you could call like 369 dump or junk or 00:53:30.320 --> 00:53:34.120 something like that and you could report illegal dumping and I don't know if it 00:53:34.120 --> 00:53:40.200 was ran by the police department or if it was run by Solid Waste or. So Mr. 00:53:40.200 --> 00:53:44.480 Chairman Tony point the chief financial officer so currently that is all paid 00:53:44.480 --> 00:53:47.640 through out of the general fund our parks department is really the one that's 00:53:47.640 --> 00:53:51.080 tasked with that that there's also coordination with our community 00:53:51.080 --> 00:53:55.000 improvement services improvement department formerly code enforcement and 00:53:55.000 --> 00:53:58.440 so that's that department's also in the general funds it's really the general 00:53:58.440 --> 00:54:05.000 fund it's tasked with cleaning up a lot of those they have litter locations 00:54:05.000 --> 00:54:08.360 primarily around parks other city located property certainly if it's a 00:54:08.360 --> 00:54:12.200 private owned property then we try to work with the with the owner of that 00:54:12.200 --> 00:54:17.960 property to have them correct that that litter that may be on their property okay 00:54:17.960 --> 00:54:22.460 okay I know that you know I know this is this is always unintentional but often 00:54:22.460 --> 00:54:27.840 when we're dumping the commercial dumpsters litter spills I know it even 00:54:27.840 --> 00:54:33.640 happens with with residential bins as well but often the resident the 00:54:33.640 --> 00:54:37.160 residents owner will actually go out there and clean it up and put it back in 00:54:37.160 --> 00:54:41.200 the bin but with the commercial collection you know nobody really wants 00:54:41.200 --> 00:54:45.220 to own it sometimes not even the driver who spilled it doesn't want to own the 00:54:45.220 --> 00:54:50.000 trash and then it becomes something that I think we have to pick up and somebody's 00:54:50.000 --> 00:54:54.520 got to pay to have that pick up and I think it's I think it's great that we're 00:54:54.520 --> 00:54:58.040 trying to reduce rates for somebody because that's a good thing to reduce 00:54:58.040 --> 00:55:02.280 rates but it seems like maybe we're overlooking some of the real costs of 00:55:02.280 --> 00:55:09.200 delivering that service Chairman I think that's a great point you know it's one 00:55:09.200 --> 00:55:13.200 of the things that we've talked a little bit about internally is we have a very 00:55:13.200 --> 00:55:17.840 outdated ordinance in terms of servicing and service standards Nick had 00:55:17.840 --> 00:55:21.060 highlighted a couple of slides ago for residentials we want to come back and 00:55:21.060 --> 00:55:24.440 kind of refresh and say okay here's how this was intended to work is it actually 00:55:24.440 --> 00:55:29.240 working the presentation is up but one of the things you noticed on those 00:55:29.240 --> 00:55:32.200 slides for the North Lakes drop-off I showing is those containers were 00:55:32.200 --> 00:55:36.080 overloaded they're spilling out on the ground and I think that's one of those 00:55:36.080 --> 00:55:39.000 things that we really need to work with not just our residents but also our 00:55:39.000 --> 00:55:42.780 commercial entities on is if you can't close the lid by ordinance we shouldn't 00:55:42.780 --> 00:55:46.320 be servicing that container because it's exactly what you're saying is as soon as 00:55:46.320 --> 00:55:50.440 we lift it it's going to spill out all over the place for commercial containers 00:55:50.440 --> 00:55:54.080 especially front load depending on the type of material you could be lifting 00:55:54.080 --> 00:55:57.440 that and it comes straight through the windshield at the driver and so really 00:55:57.440 --> 00:56:01.320 creates not just a literary issue it also creates a safety issue for our 00:56:01.320 --> 00:56:04.880 drivers and so I think what we want to try to do is take kind of a common-sense 00:56:04.880 --> 00:56:09.320 approach to how do we do these things bring back to both the board as well as 00:56:09.320 --> 00:56:13.520 the council some recommendations for recrafting our ordinance changing some 00:56:13.520 --> 00:56:16.560 things when necessary and then we want to talk to you all about how do we 00:56:16.560 --> 00:56:18.920 enforce on that because we certainly want to go out there and collect 00:56:18.920 --> 00:56:23.040 something but it's going to create more litter or hazard then I think the person 00:56:23.040 --> 00:56:26.640 that created that issue is really the person that needs to be part of helping 00:56:26.640 --> 00:56:29.840 us clean that up and so it's just really trying to get to those common-sense 00:56:29.840 --> 00:56:34.240 solutions about how we work around those issues okay thank you this is one thing 00:56:34.240 --> 00:56:39.440 that just occurred to me is have we considered putting like cameras out 00:56:39.440 --> 00:56:47.480 there or something to monitor that North Lakes that's part of that 420 and change 00:56:47.480 --> 00:56:51.920 that we showed up there we don't know what was in that yeah I mean it is a 00:56:51.920 --> 00:56:55.280 relocation but a couple of things that we have built into that figure that you 00:56:55.280 --> 00:57:00.040 saw up there is adequate lighting as well as cameras and then prosecuting 00:57:00.040 --> 00:57:04.800 illegal dumping and folks that are abusing that site it's easier said than 00:57:04.800 --> 00:57:08.440 done we had cameras out at the landfill it didn't deter most folks from abusing 00:57:08.440 --> 00:57:12.760 that site but we do need to be more diligent about going after folks that 00:57:12.760 --> 00:57:17.680 are our bad actors I wonder if one effort you could make in that direction 00:57:17.680 --> 00:57:21.600 as far as catching those people I noticed that you know at that I use the 00:57:21.600 --> 00:57:26.680 North Lakes recycling center frequently and there are signs up that saying it's 00:57:26.680 --> 00:57:29.440 monitored but if you look around you can kind of tell it's not monitored but if 00:57:29.440 --> 00:57:34.120 we do come up with some kind of solution where people can report illegal dumping 00:57:34.120 --> 00:57:39.120 you could actually put some signs big signs along that fence or a fence near 00:57:39.120 --> 00:57:43.000 the dumpster letting people know how to report it and perhaps people will be 00:57:43.000 --> 00:57:47.920 reluctant to do so if their neighbor right next to them is being given a hey 00:57:47.920 --> 00:57:51.400 take a picture snap a text and send it you know I don't know I don't know it 00:57:51.400 --> 00:57:55.680 just seems like we need some as a citizen who sees it happening we need 00:57:55.680 --> 00:58:01.400 some kind of deterrent yeah some way to report it some you know thank you yeah 00:58:01.400 --> 00:58:04.240 well just one more thing too it just occurred to me we were talking about 00:58:04.240 --> 00:58:09.000 the really large those dumpsters because I go by there all the time and it seems 00:58:09.000 --> 00:58:12.840 like they're always full like to overflowing couldn't we put some larger 00:58:12.840 --> 00:58:16.360 ones out there and that's one of the things with the new side is if we do 00:58:16.360 --> 00:58:19.160 relocate and move it over there instead of doing what we call front load 00:58:19.160 --> 00:58:23.120 containers which is what you saw up there we would do more standard roll-off 00:58:23.120 --> 00:58:27.480 containers that are restrictive in terms of what you can put in there again 00:58:27.480 --> 00:58:30.600 that's not going to knock off the illegal dumping if someone's not being 00:58:30.600 --> 00:58:34.720 monitored or you know enforced upon because we had the same dynamic at the 00:58:34.720 --> 00:58:38.160 landfill when we were seeing that but it does restrict some of what you all are 00:58:38.160 --> 00:58:42.240 talking about is the windblown litter things on the ground consistently so 00:58:42.240 --> 00:58:46.280 it's definitely something we would put into the design for the new side and I 00:58:46.280 --> 00:58:50.440 don't know if you have any control over the design of the actual thing you know 00:58:50.440 --> 00:58:55.880 the actual dumps I mean the containers containers thank you sure I'm very 00:58:55.880 --> 00:59:00.720 short I'm like five foot tall it's very hard for me you know I mean I'm 00:59:00.720 --> 00:59:06.360 constantly having the ground because you can't reach it but I know that I mean so 00:59:06.360 --> 00:59:10.760 I'm very conscientious to try to you know I do but you know other people won't 00:59:10.760 --> 00:59:15.040 I'm gonna go I've done it three times now I couldn't reach it I'm just gonna 00:59:15.040 --> 00:59:19.920 leave it where it is and walk off and just a thought we'll certainly take a 00:59:19.920 --> 00:59:26.620 look at that as we purchased some new containers I have some stairs out there 00:59:26.620 --> 00:59:35.400 so that shorter people can stand in the back of the truck well I think efforts 00:59:35.400 --> 00:59:40.840 to reduce rates for commercial customers is a fine idea I'd hate to see us go 00:59:40.840 --> 00:59:45.240 through some efforts to reduce it and then find ourselves in 18 months or 24 00:59:45.240 --> 00:59:49.600 months trying to bump the rates back up right because we really didn't assess 00:59:49.600 --> 00:59:53.880 the situation right no I'm glad you brought that up so one of the 00:59:53.880 --> 00:59:57.440 recommendations of staff is to bring this back to the PUB and council 00:59:57.440 --> 01:00:00.720 annually as part of the budgeting process where we can take an annual look 01:00:00.720 --> 01:00:03.720 at it make sure we're not reducing them too much we have to come back the rate 01:00:03.720 --> 01:00:08.480 increase thereafter okay okay thank you 01:00:08.480 --> 01:00:18.760 okay the next item is part of our regular meeting it's the consent agenda 01:00:18.760 --> 01:00:25.440 we have a few items on our consent to consent agenda a through H we're gonna 01:00:25.440 --> 01:00:32.920 pull item a for consideration at another meeting Larry did you want to speak to 01:00:32.920 --> 01:00:35.440 that real quick 01:00:35.440 --> 01:00:44.920 we're just gonna push it to another meeting and take care of the first item 01:00:44.920 --> 01:00:49.960 on the consent agenda has to the Saturn non-disclosure agreement and UNT is 01:00:49.960 --> 01:00:56.080 involved in that ultimately and we have a member of our board who is a employee 01:00:56.080 --> 01:01:01.160 of UNT and so she's not able to participate in the vote on that and that 01:01:01.160 --> 01:01:06.040 leaves us down to three so we don't have a quorum and so it's not a problem to 01:01:06.040 --> 01:01:09.880 push that to another meeting okay although it is gonna go to council 01:01:09.880 --> 01:01:14.720 tomorrow okay without a recommendation from PV they'll come back and bring it 01:01:14.720 --> 01:01:22.200 back for consideration here okay thank you so with that being said we have 01:01:22.200 --> 01:01:33.800 items B through H on items for our consent agenda does any member want to 01:01:33.800 --> 01:01:40.600 pull any item for questions or further discussion nobody wants to pull any 01:01:40.600 --> 01:01:48.040 items do you have a motion for approval of item B through G oh sorry through H 01:01:48.040 --> 01:01:54.680 on our consent agenda so moved to approve be through H yes ma'am I'll 01:01:54.680 --> 01:02:01.280 second we have a motion for approval and a second any discussion all those in 01:02:01.280 --> 01:02:08.760 favor say aye aye all those against nay the motion to approve items be through 01:02:08.760 --> 01:02:15.280 H passes the second item we have in our regular meeting is items for individual 01:02:15.280 --> 01:02:21.000 consideration the first item is the approval of the public utility board 01:02:21.000 --> 01:02:26.880 meetings from the minute meeting of April 8th 2019 the draft minutes have 01:02:26.880 --> 01:02:32.360 been distributed in advance of this meeting do does any member have any 01:02:32.360 --> 01:02:37.400 omissions deletions edits that they'd like to make to these minutes no 01:02:37.400 --> 01:02:45.280 hearing none the minutes are approved as submitted and item B is the assistant 01:02:45.280 --> 01:02:49.640 city manager update yes mr. vice chair members of the board in your packet 01:02:49.640 --> 01:02:57.440 you'll have a memorandum or memo from Debra Vieira to myself that includes an 01:02:57.440 --> 01:03:02.160 attachment and informal staff report that was sent to our City Council back 01:03:02.160 --> 01:03:08.840 on on April the 12th basically it just gives a summary of a of a violation that 01:03:08.840 --> 01:03:15.480 that the city was issued from the Texas Commission environmental quality on a I 01:03:15.480 --> 01:03:20.160 believe it was more of a of a missed sampling of a water of a water 01:03:20.160 --> 01:03:23.680 collection it was basically a missed one sampling of a hundred they're supposed 01:03:23.680 --> 01:03:30.120 to pick 120 water samples just threw it in inadvertent error they missed one and 01:03:30.120 --> 01:03:35.240 so as a result it triggered a violation but there's no concern about the water 01:03:35.240 --> 01:03:40.760 quality so based on that we've changed our standard to actually over collect to 01:03:40.760 --> 01:03:46.080 make sure nothing's missed in the future but again because we received the 01:03:46.080 --> 01:03:50.120 violence notice of violation we wanted to inform our council and obviously 01:03:50.120 --> 01:03:54.400 informed the PUB of that of that said violation and if you have any specific 01:03:54.400 --> 01:03:59.760 questions Ms. Vieira is here to answer those questions if you have those come 01:03:59.760 --> 01:04:06.120 didn't we have a similar violation last fiscal year fiscal year before that where 01:04:06.120 --> 01:04:14.080 we didn't test at all with this it actually made the paper and upset 01:04:14.080 --> 01:04:16.720 people for a little bit until they realized that it was kind of a 01:04:16.720 --> 01:04:24.400 procedural thing I'm not good afternoon or good evening board Ken banks general 01:04:24.400 --> 01:04:28.600 manager of utilities I'm I'm gonna take a guess at the one you're referring to 01:04:28.600 --> 01:04:33.180 and I think it was related to the lead copper monitoring that we were yes okay 01:04:33.180 --> 01:04:41.360 okay and basically what that was is it was a the state had changed a procedure 01:04:41.360 --> 01:04:47.180 whereby they used to send the the bottles and that was kind of the the 01:04:47.180 --> 01:04:52.720 impetus for going out and doing the collection and because of that change in 01:04:52.720 --> 01:04:58.800 procedure it was not noticed in the monitoring time by the time that that 01:04:58.800 --> 01:05:04.080 issue was noticed we had gone past our window there's a narrow window in which 01:05:04.080 --> 01:05:08.120 to sample them because they want them want the samples collected in the hotter 01:05:08.120 --> 01:05:13.160 time of the year and so what we had to do is actually wait until the the 01:05:13.160 --> 01:05:18.660 following summer to do that monitoring we were not alone in the state there 01:05:18.660 --> 01:05:23.640 were there were quite a few utilities that kind of fell in that same category 01:05:23.640 --> 01:05:27.280 but this is a different this is a different test these are these are for 01:05:27.280 --> 01:05:34.000 fecal coliforms and for disinfection products and basically you collect a 01:05:34.000 --> 01:05:38.520 hundred and twenty on a monthly basis okay all right thanks again 01:05:57.960 --> 01:06:05.680 the future board agenda items you'll be noticing you'll notice that you'll have 01:06:05.680 --> 01:06:09.200 a number of items budget presentations coming forward to you over the next 01:06:09.200 --> 01:06:14.040 number of weeks so starting today along through through the middle of summer 01:06:14.040 --> 01:06:18.320 you'll be seeing these presentations and look forward to presenting those items 01:06:18.320 --> 01:06:22.880 to the board and answer any questions you all may have nothing further to 01:06:22.880 --> 01:06:32.640 report our third and concluding item of the regular meeting is the Texas Open 01:06:32.640 --> 01:06:37.400 Meetings Act allows an opportunity to us for us to respond to inquiries from the 01:06:37.400 --> 01:06:42.800 public utility board or the public with specific specific factual information or 01:06:42.800 --> 01:06:47.240 recitation of policy or accept a proposal to place the matter on the 01:06:47.240 --> 01:06:53.320 agenda for an upcoming meeting it also allows an opportunity for members of the 01:06:53.320 --> 01:06:58.120 publicly public or community to include expressions of thanks congratulations 01:06:58.120 --> 01:07:01.840 condolences information other type of information like that that doesn't 01:07:01.840 --> 01:07:05.720 require an action by the board does anybody have anything like that they'd 01:07:05.720 --> 01:07:12.360 like to present oh I wanted a status report on the dumpsters off of sidewalks 01:07:12.360 --> 01:07:17.840 those I think those letters gave a deadline of April something and we 01:07:17.840 --> 01:07:22.680 included an update in our as an informal staff report on this past Friday and 01:07:22.680 --> 01:07:26.080 we'll send you a copy so the board a copy of the of the update my 01:07:26.080 --> 01:07:32.480 understanding is everyone's in compliance all right well then so that 01:07:32.480 --> 01:07:39.200 doesn't need to go on the agenda right if we're getting the report we'll still 01:07:39.200 --> 01:07:45.320 include it as a ACM update okay and send it to the board separately any other 01:07:45.320 --> 01:07:52.760 items from anybody none anybody in the audience part of me anybody in the 01:07:52.760 --> 01:08:01.920 audience anybody have anything they want to say okay nothing beings wanting to be 01:08:01.920 --> 01:08:10.200 said do we have a motion for to adjourn this meeting so moved do we have a second 01:08:10.200 --> 01:08:16.040 second and we are adjourned thanks everybody