Okay, it is nine o'clock and we have a virtual quorum, so we'll call to order the Public
Utilities Board meeting of June 8, 2020.
The first item on the agenda is to approve consent items A through G. Does any board
member wish to pull one of the items?
Yes, Karen.
I'd like to pull A and D, please.
And a reminder, we should probably all mute and then just raise your hand so that we're
not talking over each other.
Any other board members wish to pull any items?
All right, so do we have a motion to approve B, C, E, F, and G?
I so move.
Second.
All in favor say, "aye."
Aye.
Opposed?
Serious.
Okay, item A. Go ahead, Karen.
She's muted, you're muted.
You need to unmute.
I unmuted to vote.
Anyway, I remember when this item first came up, I was on the PUB just for a few months,
and I was really impressed with the staff trying to accommodate the landowner and cut
down the sound.
I mean, they really just went above and beyond, so congrats staff.
Anyway, at the time there was a discussion of putting in a berm to cut down the noise,
and I was wondering if that had been considered.
And then my second question is, is there any evidence that we're gonna get acceptable bids
on this?
I agree we don't need to spend a million dollars on landowners.
Nice complaint, but is there any other solution that we can go to for this?
Karen, I'm sorry, Karen, we have Chris Lutrik from Ditton Municipal Electric that can answer
the questions for you.
Hi, Chris.
Hello, how are you doing?
I think your first question was about the berm, something that we proposed with the
initial presentation, but if you remember that that berm in the sound modeling was only
gonna provide 0.2 dBs of attenuation, that was not worth the cost.
We did get the landscaping berm in in the trees, so that's been done, but that berm
is not really a viable option for us.
So the second part of that is we had to extend the RFP two times just to get one bid in,
and the presentation we gave to you when you first got on PEB was based off a sound study.
That engineering company elected not even to submit a bid.
So our engineering estimate we had for the first presentation was based off of their
information, and then they did not propose a bid.
So at this time, we think part of it is the liability.
So these guys are gonna be working aerial above our engines.
So in the RFP, there was language where they had to take responsibility for damage to the
engines.
So.
Okay.
And we're kind of out of sync here, and we can't mention it here, but there is a closed
session item later in this show, and we'll have some other options for you.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
That's it for me.
On the A.
Do we have a motion to approve?
Sure.
I'll move.
I'll second.
All in favor, say aye.
Aye.
Motion carries.
Okay.
Item D.
I was curious if this indemnity escrow account was a new thing with DMPA, and if we knew
how much it was gonna cost us.
I realize it's an escrow, but.
Karen, we have a Smith Day from Determinus Ball Electric on the line who will be able
to explain the details.
Smith.
Smith, you're muted.
Hello.
Can you hear me now?
Yes.
All right, sorry.
The Zoom has an independent mute feature other than the phone.
This is Smith Day.
I'm with the municipal electric, the regulatory and risk manager, and I speak a little bit
about the, to answer your question on the agreement, this indemnity agreement actually
is a creature from the joint operating agreement for TMPA, and the joint operating agreement
is, was put together just a ways back, a couple years at least, and this was from schedule
H of that agreement.
So all the cities at the time agreed that they would create this fund.
And so this is a, this is actually, like I said, a creature of fulfilling the promise
of that original obligation, and the amount is already funded.
It was $5 million, TMPA already has it.
Are you satisfied, Karen?
Yeah.
My mute button seems to be going on and off.
Yeah, that's fine for me.
Thank you.
All right.
Motion for item D.
Move approval.
I second.
All in favor say aye.
Aye.
Opposed?
Okay, motion carries.
Next item is consider the approval of the minutes of May 11th, 2020.
Do we have a motion to approve?
I move we approve.
Second.
All in favor say aye.
Aye.
Okay, next item B consider recommending the adoption of an ordinance for the City of Denton
with JDK Associates for the installation of a gravity retaining wall in the Brinker substation
for the amount of $755,296.68.
Good morning.
Do we have a presentation on that?
Yes, Terry Nolte, DME.
Let's see.
Hello, Terry.
Can you see that presentation?
Nope.
Not yet.
All right, hold on a second.
I've got to share.
There we go.
Now can you see it?
Now we can.
Yes.
Okay.
Good morning, Terry Nolte, DME, Assistant General Manager.
This is a presentation about a gravity wall that we're proposing to build at the Brinker
substation.
This site has about a 30-foot elevation change which requires some sort of a wall to keep
the soil from eroding into the substation site itself.
Two options that were considered, one was the gravity retaining walls.
We have good experience with those and then a standard concrete wall.
This is a photo of the, or a print of the site itself and as you can see, this whole
entire corner on the lower left is where the wall goes.
It's 728-foot long and it has a 22-foot maximum height that needs to be retained.
This is just a diagram of the retaining wall.
I think everybody's pretty familiar with how these blocks work and we use a geotechnical
geotextile fabric and, you know, the blocks are placed inside, the fabrics and the fill
is placed inside the blocks and all the blocks are anchored together and provide the rigidity
necessary.
Here is a breakdown of the costs.
Total is $755,296.68.
And we're recommending that we award this to JDK Associates.
They did receive the highest evaluated score and also, interestingly, had the lowest price.
With that, I will answer any questions you might have.
Could you go back to a couple of slides?
Yeah, right there.
Is there any reason why this, I'm just curious, that you use, let me ask this way, does a
Bermuda solid sod require a lot of watering or is it?
No.
Okay.
And I'm wondering, and the temporary irrigation system, is that for the sod?
Yes sir.
Is there any way that could use indigenous plants there, buffalo grass, anything like
that that would not require a $13,000 temporary irrigation system?
I think this grass is a native grass that really doesn't require a lot of maintenance.
So then why does it have an irrigation system?
Oh, that's to make sure that it gets established.
Because if it doesn't get established, then the soil will erode and we'll have a area
behind the wall.
Okay.
Thank you.
Any other questions?
Billy?
I noticed the disparity in prices from the different vendors and I know that happens.
Was there different designs offered by different people or was it all just the one design?
No, we specified the design.
We were quite surprised as well in the variation of the bids.
You saw the summary sheet, we had significantly higher bids than this one.
This contractor actually had very good references and has done quite a few projects similar
to this.
Yeah, I'm familiar with them.
I don't have anything bad to say at all about them.
So just curious as we knew by the difference in pricing across the board.
It happens though, I get it.
Maybe they needed to work.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's good.
Thank you.
And Russ?
Go ahead, Russ.
Yeah, this is just a comment, Terry.
I looked at this package, the background material over pretty close and looked at the comparison
of the bids and the way the purchasing group here did the evaluation and it was the process
was very impressive to me, looked like you guys did a good job in putting this together.
The work is well-defined and you took more than just a cursory look at the bids that
were submitted and I was impressed with the process here.
It looks like you did the right thing.
I totally agree with your recommendation.
We appreciate that our engineers and purchasing have a long established procedure to make
sure that we're trying to get the best value for our ratepayers.
Barbara, you're muted.
Did you have a question?
Okay.
It shows that I'm muted.
Oh, you're muted again, Barbara.
Okay.
It's showing up mute for me, but are the brick that, not the brick, the walls.
Does that look anything like what's around the landfill?
Yeah, it's very similar, very similar.
Thank you.
Any others?
All right.
Do we have a motion to approve item B?
Approve.
Move.
In a second, I guess we have many approving.
Second?
I second.
Okay.
All in favor say aye.
Aye.
Okay.
Opposed?
Motion carries.
Management update.
Madam Chair, members of the board, good morning.
Not a whole lot to say.
We do have the management study that was conducted for the utility, water utilities and for municipal
electric.
It's attached.
It's quite lengthy.
We do have on the line, Ken Banks, if you have any questions specific to that.
Looking ahead in your future agenda items, as you can see, we'll be having a lot of budget
discussions over the coming weeks, so we'll get back on schedule with those items.
And then on the new business action items that we'll be bringing forward at your next
meeting, the environmental purchasing policy.
And then lastly, just as a reminder, month of May we met just for the one time, but starting
this month we'll be meeting on our regular schedule twice a month, so we'll get back
on track.
Thank you, Mario.
Concluding items.
Does any board member -- oh, go ahead, Ed.
I just -- I asked a couple of questions at February 24th's meeting, and they're not crucial
and they probably got lost in the shuffle with what's been happening with COVID.
But just to repeat, I asked for a copy of the 2015 clean fleet ordinance, and I asked
what percentage of our current city fleet is hybrid or EV electric.
So at some point if somebody could get back to me from staff about that clean fleet ordinance
and the percentage of current hybrid and EV in the fleet, I'd appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yes, sir, will do.
Thank you.
I have a question, maybe just a comment, about the management study.
It doesn't require an answer now, but it's something I'd like the appropriate person
to think about and respond when it comes time to make their budget presentation.
And that is, on about slide 88 or 89 in this 260-some slide presentation, they showed the
number by each year, the number of capital -- approved capital dollars for projects that
were not spent, and that number grew over the last three or four years.
So if I'm understanding this right, we're -- the city is approving more capital expenditures
than the respective utility is able to accomplish.
And I wonder is -- what I wonder is, what's being done to address that?
Are we getting further behind?
Is any of that going to be made up?
Are we -- what are we letting go?
What are we left -- what's being left undone that should be done?
That's the nature of my question.
We can certainly cover that in a bunch of discussions.
Okay.
Yes, Karen, go ahead.
Just wanted to know -- this doesn't need to be a formal report or anything, but I'm just
curious about the status of the landfill expansion.
I know that's in public comment at this point, I think, but we had a -- I have a note from
the January 13th meeting that council was receiving a report, and we would receive information
later, and I'm not remembering hearing about it, although I might have slept.
Correct.
And we can give you an update in the next meeting or even through an informal staff
report.
But we were on track prior to COVID to have those public meetings earlier this spring.
All those were postponed until later in June.
So we'll give you an update on that.
We provided council with an informal staff report; we can resurrect that and send it
to the PUB.
All right.
Thanks, Mario.
You bet.
All right.
So did we do concluding items?
I'm sorry.
This virtual is -- gets me a little off.
Any concluding items from the board?
Something you want added to the agenda or -- okay.
I guess not.
Then we'll go into work sessions.
We're going to receive a report and hold a discussion regarding the 2019 Water Loss Audit
Report.
Good morning, board members.
This is Tyler Dawson.
I'm with Water Utilities.
I'm the manager of asset management.
And I have a report for you here on the Water Loss Audit for 2019.
This is a regulatory report that we do annually through the Texas Water Development Board.
We submitted this in April ahead of our May 1st deadline, so this is a report on the findings
of that report.
For those of you who are new to the Water Loss Audit -- I know we typically talk about
this once a year, but that's a long time between reports -- it's essentially a formula.
We look at where all of our water goes, and we try to fill out this formula.
We have our authorized water consumption, apparent losses, real losses, and that should
add up to total water supplied.
The crux of this are these two in the middle, apparent losses and real losses, which we'll
define here in a few slides.
The bigger picture, aside from this simpler formula, is more like this.
If you look from left to right, we're looking at where our water comes from and where it
goes.
I'll say real quick that these arrows, these shapes, are not exactly sized with the volumes.
They're made to be readable.
But if you go from left to right, you can see we start with the water produced.
This is drinking water that's treated at our two water production plants and pumped out
into our system.
We have this gray area at the top, a little bit that's exported for use by Crum and Sanger.
The rest is supplied to Denton.
You can see the vast majority of the rest is authorized consumption that is billed to
our customers.
So aside from these, we try to identify the rest.
What is our unbilled authorized volumes?
That's primarily fire protection and system operations.
And then we have our water loss category that's split into apparent losses and real losses.
So I'll start defining those terms for you.
Real loss, water loss through distribution system leakage and excessive pressure.
This is called real loss because it is water that is actually lost out of the pipes.
We treat it, we pump it out, but it does not reach its destination.
So this can be our main breaks that we actually discover and we repair.
This can be undiscovered leakage, that small leakage through the pipes that just hasn't
been found yet.
This could be background leakage, which is essentially if you've ever done home plumbing
and have a fitting that just won't stop dripping, that's what background leakage is.
So across our 600 or so miles of main, we do have a little bit of a dripping pipe.
And then this is also the catchall category, that when we go through the work of identifying
where all of our water goes, there's going to be some leftover and we have to assume
that as some form of real loss.
In 2019, we had total real loss of 607 million gallons or about 9.4% of our total production.
So we see this as an indicator of our system health, our physical system health.
We want to minimize that within economic reason.
We have some financial figures for you later to help put that into perspective.
And we price out those real losses at the marginal cost of water acquisition and treatment.
The vast, vast majority of our cost in water utilities are fixed costs.
So we filter out the marginal cost and see what those additional gallons actually cost
us.
We also look at our apparent losses.
This one's a little fuzzier of a definition, but it's water that was not read accurately
by a meter or was not read by a meter at all.
Our biggest contributor to this is water meter inaccuracy.
We have about 35 to 40,000 meters out in the city.
And unfortunately, the day those meters are placed, they start to slowly lose accuracy.
So on average, our meters are about 97 to 98% accurate.
And we look at trying to estimate what's the rest of that.
We know a certain amount of that water.
What's the amount that's not being read through those meters?
This also includes a little bit of consideration for unauthorized consumptions.
Once in a while, we find people who have attempted to bypass our metering system.
Of course, we correct those as they happen and we try to estimate how much of our water
was used in those times.
And occasionally, we have systematic data errors that is handled through our billing
system and we account for those here as well.
So these apparent losses are indicators of fiscal health.
It's not a physical health issue like the real losses.
It's not leakage through a pipe.
This is uncollected revenue.
So inaccurate meters in theft reduce our revenue and we price out these volumes at the retail
volume cost of water.
So what would we have recovered if that water had gone through a meter?
And in 2019, we calculate those volumes as 197 million gallons or about 3% of our total
water production.
And to define one more category here before we get back to the figures, our unbilled authorized
is two components primarily, fire protection and system operation.
So fire protection is an unbilled service.
We do not meter or bill water used for fire protection.
Some of that use is for fire sprinkler systems.
So any commercial property you go to, you can probably look up and see fire sprinklers
in the ceiling.
Those don't pass through our meter.
So if the systems are activated, we don't bill for that water, but it is authorized
use.
And then the same for fire engine use.
Any water that passes through an apparatus for the fire department is unbilled.
That includes both fire response for actually putting out fires and training time on the
engines.
The system operations category includes several things that we do here in water utilities.
One of the biggest is cleaning new pipes after installation.
If you've ever seen a water line construction site, you'll see a stack of blue PVC sitting
on the ground.
And you can imagine if that's been sitting up for a few weeks, you probably don't want
to drink out of it.
So part of our procedure when we install those pipes is we load them with chlorine to kill
out any undesirable material in that pipe.
And then we flush a lot of water through that pipe and we flush it until it's drinking water
quality.
So there's a lot of volume that goes through that to ensure those new pipes are clean enough
to drink out of.
We also have water used for removing old water from low flow pipes.
These are areas where we know we don't get a lot of water circulation.
So to prevent that water from getting stagnant in the pipes, we flush the water out and let
the new water come in.
That tends to be a pretty big user of water for operations.
And then we have kind of a grab bag of other operational usage.
We have flow rate testing to validate that what we're putting in the ground is the right
size.
We have water quality sampling and a handful of other things.
So to come back to the graphic from slide three, we filled in the volumes here.
So you can see on the far left side, we produced $6,476,000,000.
These numbers are in million gallons.
This is for the full year fiscal 2019.
We exported $76,000,000.
We billed $5.5 billion gallons.
And you can see toward the bottom right of your screen where we've accounted for our
unbilled authorized consumptions and our losses.
So for instance, we used about $77,000,000 gallons in 2019 for various system operations
to keep the distribution system clean and healthy.
Our $197,000,000 gallons of apparent losses, the biggest category, meter inaccuracy was
$176,000,000 of that.
And then we get down to our real losses.
Out of $607,000,000 gallons, $40,000,000 was accounted for in main breaks, which I'm
going to get into the details a few slides down the road here on that.
And then after all the work we put into this, we had $567,000,000 that was not accounted
for in any of our known uses of water, so that's our unaccounted for real losses.
And looking at the fiscal side of this, real losses, we said were $607,000,000 gallons
of our total real losses for fiscal 2019.
The cost of that is $209,000.
We priced that out again at the variable cost of treating water, so per thousand gallons
that's only $0.35.
Again, the vast majority of our costs and water utilities are fixed costs, either capital
or staff that's used for maintenance or operations.
Treating an additional thousand gallons of water just isn't very expensive.
So while the volumes are higher, the cost is actually much lower than our apparent losses.
In the future, we don't know exactly how far a decade or two down the road, we're looking
at when we may use our water supply rights that we have.
And at that point, those costs would go up because we would be buying water from Dallas.
So in the future, those variable costs could go higher than that $0.35.
The apparent losses, again, the volumes are about a third of our real losses at 197 million
gallons, but the cost is much higher, $947,000.
That's because we priced this at the average retail cost of water.
Again, we look at apparent losses as unrecovered revenue.
In 2019, our average volume cost of water was $4.80 per thousand.
You can compare this to our rate book, we consider all of our different rates, our block
rates and everything, we average those out for the year.
So 480 includes both our base rate of $4.15 and all the way up through our commercial
irrigation rates and our residential block rates.
This cost of apparent loss is offset by our proactive meter replacement and calibration
program.
So if you've heard any of our presentations that we replace our small residential meters
on a 13-year cycle, this is where we get that number.
So we look at what are we saving by replacing meters at a certain age and then what's the
cost of executing that program.
So $947,000 is the remaining cost after we've offset what we could through our meter replacement
program.
I have a question.
Yes, sir.
Under the real loss, I can't see that the second bullet point, cost of real loss will
increase in the future when Denton acquires and then I can't see what the rest is because
...
Sure.
So that says cost of real loss will increase in the future when Denton acquires additions
to the water supply.
Okay.
And you mentioned that that could possibly be buying water from Dallas?
Yes.
So that's the long-term plan, currently all of our water rights are fixed costs.
We own all of the water in excess of what we use right now.
So whenever we get to the point that we are using all of those rights, then we will buy
water by the volume.
We will have a volume charge on that water if we buy additional water from Dallas.
So what are our ... I'm not familiar with what we already own in terms of water rights,
what we have.
Can you give me an idea of that, what it's like, is it lakes or creeks or ...
So our water rights right now come from Lake Louisville and Lake Ray Roberts.
We share both of those lakes with Dallas or a few other smaller water right holders.
Between the two, I'm going to look across the room to make sure I'm close.
We have a little over 20 million gallons per day, daily average throughout the year.
So that's plenty more than we're using now.
Right now we're about in the 17 million gallon per day average ballpark.
And then on top of that, we have recently about a year ago had an indirect reuse permit
approved through the TCEQ that gives us about 50% more than that.
So roughly when we max out our water rights, we'll be up to about 36 million gallons per
day on average throughout the year.
And I assume that this would be based upon continued development in our area.
Yes, sir.
And the water volume forecast, those presentations will include a lot of that information to
see where we stand in the long range and how long it'll take us to exceed that supply.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
All right.
So these are our water audit results.
We also benchmark these across the Texas Water Development Board's Regency Planning Group
to see how we compare to other utilities.
The points we benchmark against are real loss, which again are indicators of physical system
health, apparent losses, which are indicators of fiscal health, and then a value called
infrastructure leakage index, which this is a normalized value that helps us compare our
leakage rates to that of other utilities.
And in these charts, just some considerations for benchmarking.
We know that no two utilities are exactly equal, no two cities are laid out exactly
the same.
So we have some considerations that'll account for some of the variability between utilities,
but we look at across the board roughly where do we stand.
And these are normalized values, so it should account roughly for system size.
First we have real and apparent loss per connection across Regency, that's per water service connection.
To help you see Denton's number, it's marked right here just past the midpoint.
So you can see the broad range from Sardis, Lone Elm all the way on the left side to Dallas
Water Utilities on the right side.
We aim to stay somewhere in the middle, ideally a little bit ahead of the middle so that our
losses are generally better than the cities around us and still within reason from a fiscal
perspective.
We also have total losses per capita across Regency, again here's Denton's number.
And we get to move up to the left, which is a good thing, it's a little bit less losses,
a little bit tighter system when we look at a per capita perspective.
So in the large picture, we are a little bit ahead of the midpoint for the cities in our
region.
And before I show our last chart, this Infrastructure Leakage Index, just to give a better definition
here, it's an engineering calculation used to normalize our real losses.
We compare our identified real losses over a theoretical minimum leakage through an engineering
calculation.
Denton's for fiscal 2019 was 2.13 and here's how we compare to Regency.
Here's Denton's number, again ahead of midpoint to the left.
The color coding here we put in here is, this is important because there are recommended
target ranges for your ILI.
So if we start all the way on the right side in the purple, greater than 8 is not recommended
by the Water Development Board.
And then the orange, 5 to 8, this is where there is abundant water supply where your
organization is not sensitive to rate increases, rate increases are fine.
And as we start to move to the left is when you want a tighter and tighter system.
So the lowest recommended range for ILI is from 1 to 3 and we are well within that range
and actually have been since 2003 when we started the water audit and its current format.
And I'll touch on one more component of the audit itself before I get into the results
of the audit or the after effects of the audit.
The biggest improvement we've made in the last several years or one of the biggest improvements
is how we identify our water main breaks and account for those water losses.
If you remember from a few slides back we showed 40 million gallons in loss from main
breaks.
This is based on a new system where each main break is identified individually.
We look at the type of break, we look at the size of that break, length, width, diameter
of hole, the size of the pipe, and when necessary on larger breaks we use our hydraulic model
to better calculate how much water came out of each individual break.
We were not doing this in prior years.
We were assuming every main break was created equal.
They all flowed at the same rate.
They all flowed for the same amount of time and in 2018 compared to our 40 million gallons
of main break water loss identified in 2019, in 2018 we only identified 3 million gallons.
There was no significant difference in the number of breaks or even the types of breaks.
So we count that difference going from 3 million to 40 million gallons.
That's based on us better identifying what is actually coming out of our system.
So for example we can look at the pictures of this main break and by estimating the size
of this break we can say this is about 1.5 million gallons on its own.
So by better identifying the water coming out of these breaks we have a tighter audit
and we have a better understanding of where all of our water goes once it's treated.
So implementation steps.
This is important here.
We don't want to do this audit just as a regulatory requirement or just as a formality.
We want this to have an impact on our organization.
We want to use these results to continually improve.
So some of our implementation steps.
The first three, you can see the check marks, these are things we've been doing for some
amount of time.
Our media replacement program, we want to continue that.
That offsets those very expensive apparent losses.
We want to continue that as is.
We don't have any recommended changes to that program this year.
We also want to continue our leak detection program.
We purchased some new leak detection equipment about a year ago last June and that's helped
us identify some leaks better and we want to continue to use that to offset our real
losses.
And then we want to continue to use our improved main break water loss estimates that we saw
on the previous side to keep that tighter audit.
A couple of new items, we want to improve our volume estimates for new line flushing.
Again, that's part of our operational use to make sure our newly installed water mains
are drinking water clean.
Those tend to be tough to measure based on how much water comes out of them and how many
connections we tend to flush through.
It's hard to put metering points on all those.
We're looking through some ideas to better capture that information.
We expect that we may show an increase in water volumes once we implement a more accurate
tool for this that will shift some of our volume calculations from real losses up to
operational.
And if we can consider those approved, then that will show better real losses and a more
realistic picture of our system.
And finally, we want to create and implement mass balance worksheets for our two water
production plants.
This helps with the metering from the water production plants.
And this is critical because meters of that size, when they go out of calibration, they
tend to overestimate water rather than underestimate water.
And when we overestimate water coming from our plants and can't account for anywhere
else on our system, we assume those are losses on the backside.
So again, to have a clearer picture of what our system looks like and where our water
goes, a mass balance worksheet would help us better account for the water within the plants
and the water leaving the plants.
And at this time, I'll take any questions or comments.
Does anyone have a – oh, go ahead, Russ.
I have a question about what kind of technology are you using for your leak detection, what
you've used in the past, you're using now, and what you anticipate using?
Sure.
Our new system, it's from a company called Gutterman, it's called ZoneScan.
We have correlating loggers and leak correlators essentially send acoustic signals through the
pipe wall, and they find abnormalities in those signals to identify where there is a
break in that pipe wall.
The new technology we have is a set of 10 loggers.
It's actually deployed overnight.
Our older technology did use correlators, but we had to go on site, and spot by spot
we had to be on site to collect all the information and to set up and run the equipment.
These instead, we deploy them overnight, we come back the next morning and we collect
all that data.
Those loggers will run four increments, about 15 minutes apart, of these acoustic signals,
and they run in the middle of the night, where since they're listening, they're looking
for low traffic hours.
Typically, they're set to run 2 a.m. when the roads are the quietest, and it gets the
best signal, and it runs four rounds of this and gives us the result.
Okay.
Thank you.
Go ahead, Ed.
Yeah, I was just curious, is there any audit or report done on water savings through conservation
methods in the city?
Do you work with the sustainability department on anything like that?
We do.
Sustainability does the more hands-on work with that, but we do have a water conservation
plan that's updated every five years, also through the Texas Water Development Board.
A year ago, we had the updates to that report approved through council, and we have annual
reports on estimates to that.
Would it be possible to receive the latest version of that report?
Yes, sir.
It's actually on the water utilities website.
Okay.
I'm sure we can get a copy to the board, though.
And along with that, I wondered if there were any thought in the future, with all the development
that's coming in, that the water department could be proactive in promoting less water-intensive
landscaping, giving ideas for xeriscapes, things like that, that would cut back on what
will probably become a scarcer and scarcer resource.
I didn't know if there was anything in pipeline, no pun intended, regarding possible guidelines
for that, or if that would go through the development, folks.
But just curious, has any thought been given to that?
Sure.
Again, our sustainability department does run programs for that.
They have a lot of educational and outreach programs about things like xeriscaping, specifically,
and native landscaping practices.
I don't know of any requirements going to developments.
Yeah, I'm told those could be in the Denton Development Code, but that's not currently
addressed as part of it.
Okay, thanks.
And thanks for that report.
Anyone else?
Barbara?
No?
Good.
All right.
I guess then, Larry, do we need to adjourn to go into closed session so that we don't
need to come back in?
Yes, please.
Okay.
And you want me to read what we're going into closed session for?
Okay.
All right.
"Deliberate regarding real property under Texas Government Code Section 551.072, consultation
with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071, discuss, deliberate, receive
information from staff, and provide staff with direction pertaining to the potential
purchase of real property located southeast of the corner of Thomas J. Egan Road and Jim
Crystal Road in Denton, Denton County, Texas, where the deliberation of the same in an open
meeting would have a detrimental effect on the position of the government body in negotiations
with the third party or potential litigation, consultation with the city's attorneys regarding
legal issues associated with the potential claims against the city associated with the
property where the public discussion of these legal matters could conflict with the duty
of the city attorneys to the City of Denton and the Denton City Council under Texas disciplinary
rules of professional conduct, the state bar of taxes, or would jeopardize the city's legal
position in negotiation of potential litigation."
So before we go into closed session, do we have a motion to adjourn?
So moved.
Second?
I second.
Okay.
We are adjourned.
I'm going into closed.
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