Okay, let's bring the court to order please the record on members of the court are present with the exception of Commissioner Metter On the agenda we have Commissioner precinct three We are going to consider discuss and authorize a resolution in order related to aerial spraying to enhance mosquito control If appropriate authorize judge Sattler to execute any and all documents necessary to effectuate the mosquito control process on behalf of Montgomery County. And, Arlo, do you want to come up now or do we want- The discussion at the time before- Yeah, let's have the medical discussion regarding the nature of the emergency. Dr. Eskott. Dr. Thank you for coming today. As we discussed last week and continued this morning, we've got a significant public health issue associated with West Nile, Virus, and the mosquito population attending West Nile. Our levels right now of eight patients infected in one death is more than double the prior peak year in 2012. So what we're trying to do by this effort, let me just back up and say we've had meetings before this one with the commissioner and mosquito control to try to ramp up efforts as we restart to see the increased caseload. They've done that and that increased effort has not been successful at preventing further disease. So now we're at the stage where we have to step it up again to try to prevent the peak which we normally see in September, October. In 2012 that peak was 17 total cases and three deaths. And if we use the statistics and plot that out, it's a significant case burden, a significant number of deaths that we're trying to prevent by doing the spring now. And as Dr. Eskats said, he's been working closely with our office on mosquito abatement protocol. We've been testing in precincts 2, 3 and 4 to identify where these mosquitoes are breeding, where we're seeing a positive test results between all of us. We've more than doubled our spray in efforts times of days. We've even changed the chemicals that we've been using because there's a theory that these mosquitoes will build up resistance to one particular, if you use the same application over and over. And last week, I think Wednesday of last week, Dr. Eskott came to our office and was very concerned about the fact that we're still seeing a significant number of mosquitoes testing positive for West Nile when we send them away with the death we had he thought that it was time that the county takes more significant action and the third layer of our protocols always been aerial spraying we just really haven't had to use it flexing the past. Talk to what does the state of Texas say about this issue? It's truly an emergency where we did just spend a million dollars or more to attack this issue? Let me put it to this way. I have had discussions with the seat of Houston Health Authority as well as the County Health Authority's office. They don't need this to be a, quote, public health emergency, but of significant public health concern. They don't feel this to be a quote public health emergency, but of significant public health concern. They don't feel that a disaster declaration is in order at this stage. However, as is obvious by Harris County's expenditures on aerial spring, it's of a significant burden that we need to take action. So Harris County is doing this? Yes, sir. Harris County is doing this along our southern border. In fact, it very much mirrors Montgomery County and the swath that we're spraying as to what Harris County is doing this along our southern border. In fact, it very much mirrors Montgomery County and the swath that we're spraying as to what Harris County is doing. And of the number of cases up in Harris County as well? It is. It is. And if we look at other studies that have done this sort of spraying, once the spraying happens, there's no more westile or virtually no more. And compared to areas that are not sprayed, there's a significant decrease in the burden of disease and mosquitoes containing West Nile, which is why we met last weekend and further this discussion. This is part of the state's plan, DSHS's plan. So again, once they see that we've had increased burden, we increased our normal routine of ground-based spring. When that hasn't been effective, then we go to enhanced operations activity, which includes the discussion regarding aerial spring. And in those areas where they've identified these mosquitoes that are carrying disease, do they concentrate the spray in those areas? Or is it just kind of a general spray? The most benefit is to focus on the areas where we've seen increased disease burden and increased mosquito capturing captured with the West Nile virus, which is along our southern border. And as a county, I believe we've identified about 250,000 acres collectively covering precinct 3, 2, and 4 that are the highest. We're seeing more positive test results in those areas and it also correlates with our heaviest population and so the aerial spraying protocol should be effective if we target those areas. That's correct. And the guidelines and data suggest only really doing those areas of high population and high concentration of disease. It doesn't make sense for disease prevention or financially to do something like countywide spraying at this stage. So the downside I understand is the B population could be heard from this. Are we giving adequate notice to the B owners in County what's going on? Yes, and the gentleman from the Air Spring can talk about this as well. Generally speaking it's not the natural bees that are affected by this because they're well sheltered anyway. I will point out that the spraying happens 45 minutes before dusk and then through the evening, which is the time when the bees are not out. And there's very little impact in fact in some say there's no impact at all on other sort of flying insects. And you would say in what we're spraying now is not effective That's correct and that's evidenced by the ongoing Trapping of mosquitoes with West Nile as well as our wanted somebody let us know That's out there spraying I mean Wasting stuff well, it's not a matter of wasting what not cheap correct But what happens with with ground-based spring is you have pockets because the prevention is contrary to along the roadways. And that can still leave areas that are not well-traveled to our mosquitoes. Yeah, I would say the effectiveness, I mean, we have been able to control and eliminate mosquito and infestations in areas. But the breeding grounds for some of these West Nile carrying mosquitoes, the Kulux mosquito, we're not able to get to with the spray and apparatus that we have. And so this aerial spray method penetrates the canopy, goes into places where we're not able to get our trucks and it helps further eliminate it. But just from a mosquito population control method, despairing works. It's just it's not able to penetrate in these infested areas where the disease is. One of the first part of this year has been a lot more rain than we've had in the last four or five years. Correct. That's that rain is stopped. We're not seeing the rainfall that we we did in the first part of the year. Do you think that will have an impact on the mosquito population in general just the lack of moisture? Well, I think it will and the gentleman from Vector Control can certainly comment on that. He's sprays throughout the country for West Nile and can comment on this particular environmental factors that are associated with this. And commissioners, it's pretty amazing. Just water in your lawn, irrigation systems, sewers, drain pipes through the areas in which these mosquitoes start to breed in. Rainfall can be a contributing factor, but we've learned through some of the studies that we've undertaken that that can be a small portion of it, a lot of where they're breeding isn't because of the rainfall necessarily, because of some other conditions. that is a can be a small portion of it, a lot of where they're breeding isn't because of the rainfall necessarily, because of some other conditions. They're very adept at finding water and breeding in very, very small pools of water. Correct. Let us hear from the sprayer. Well, start with, I don't know, should we change what we're spraying now? Well, that's really a question for our mosquito control experts. Can you talk about error when we talk about it on the ground? Correct. And in fact, I think our folks from vector control will talk about the need to continue the ground-based spraying in addition to the error spraying to make sure that they're going to get as much coverage as possible during the spirit that we're spraying so that we can eradicate the mosquitoes. Great. Thank you, Dr. Dr. Thank you so much. You bet, thank you. Yes, sir. Good evening. I'm Malcolm Williams. I'm the aerial division manager for vector disease control. And all of these questions come up everywhere we go. You were talking about the rain and the dryness and all. Actually the drier and hotter it is, the worse the west and out is. And the reason for that is the disease is a bird mosquito disease. Not a human. Human is an accidental host. So where are all the birds and the mosquito congregated when it's hot? Around a little bit of water there is. they're all just congregated in there so the virus Amplifies super fast and once the mosquito run out of a bird hose. That's when they fly off to try to find the horses and the humans and You were saying about your pesticides on the ground the it's not that they're not effective about your pesticides on the ground. It's not that they're not effective. Ground spraying itself is not that effective because of the nature and the physics of it. When you go down a road, which side of the road gets sprayed? Which way of the wind? Early downwind for about 300 feet. So if it's 600 feet between that block, you still got half of that block that never gets sprayed. So when you go down the next street, the winds burn opposite direction. So the only way you can cover that ground totally is by air. And it's a good idea that in the areas we're spraying, that you have all of your trucks out there spraying and go what it does, it agitates the mosquitoes. Make some get out of the trees and fly around and you actually have a better result than if you don't spray it on the ground as well. But it is a good idea to rotate your peticides just like y'all have done because you know you use one pesticide one year you use a different one the next year and you don't build up that resistance because we don't have many pesticides out there approved from mosquito control so once you start eliminating them through resistance you're getting you get in a real bind Well, if what we're spraying just agitates them and get some flying Charlie what chemical we got a contractor's frame precinct too. I don't I don't know where Control and we were using And we were using Okay, yeah, that's a per meter And what we're gonna be spraying by the air is an O.P So that's that's two different classes of pesticide which is good good Yeah from the air you've got a We're producing a cloud that's all of pesticide. It's like 30 micron drops little bitty. It's like an aerosol. Well this aerosol starts drifting down as it gets through the canopy. It'll just shift through the trees and all just like smoke and you hardly have any deposition on the ground because it's just such a fine drop that the even the heat coming off the ground will hold it off the ground keep it from hitting the ground and even if anything gets on the trees or foliage 20 minutes after the ULV light hits it to next morning it's totally neutralized. There is no residual to this at all. Really? Okay. And you saw about the bees that's two reasons we fly at night. The main reason is because there's no beneficial insects out flying around to kill. Second reason is that's when the activity appeared on mosquitoes, about 30 to 40 minutes before dark up till about midnight. And you don't want to spray after midnight because your mosquitoes aren't flying. The Q-lex mosquitoes have quit flying. So that's the total waste if you do anything past, you know, midnight one o'clock at the most. And the droplets are so small that one drop of killing mosquito, but it would take a hundred drops to kill a bee. See, and all your bees are inside the hives or up on the hive whenever, you know, we start spraying. So you don't have we hardly ever have any body we have bee we flower bee farms all the time and no have any problem with that's good to hear okay commissioners uh well let me Randy do you feel like this is a situation where we need to look at doing this at this time. I think so, yes. Especially in the southern part of the county, the pockets of the roof are actually like the budget for making things. You think it can have enough impact? Oh, absolutely. I'll give you a good example. In 2006, we were called into Ada County, Idaho, which is Boise. They had 1,639 reported cases of West Nile virus when we got in there They were already three or four weeks late bringing us in the health department was reporting 30 new cases a day We went in and sprayed a couple hundred thousand acres just over the hot spots where they were getting all the the West Nile Two weeks after we sprayed the count went to zero reported per day after we sprayed the count went to zero reported per day. So we totally broke the vector. And what are we seeing in terms of reports in other counties right now that we know across this region? It's difficult to assess the current burden now many counties, including municipalities and counties like Harris. Don't necessarily update the state on the daily weekly basis in fact some of them report at the end of the season. On that day I can't say that we just learned we have a ninth confirmed case in our county. And there's probably a whole lot more cases than that because people that just get a little fever or feel like they got a little cold two or three days it's gone they never go to the hospital but they actually had West Nile. Now in that case does that person then build an immunity to that or is it? About a year and a half is what I understand. You can correct me on that doc but I've heard that the immunity will only last about a year and a half if you get it. Is that what you've heard? Yeah I think that's actually... Yeah. I think that's, yeah. I have to look at the studies. I would have thought you'd have been immune for life, but they say about a year and a half is all year immune to it. Well, also, Phil, what kind of money situation you understand that you found some possible sources of dollars for this? Yes, sir, Judge, you should have a chart in front of you where I'm gone through the anticipated revenues for the county as they've as they've been received to date. And I've identified some that I'm comfortable recognizing additional revenue in. If you would authorize it, we would bring that budget amendment to you with the next court date and that total. That's in this year's budget. Yes, sir. That's in the 14 budget. So we would put that in contingency and then we would transfer that to the county engineers department Maybe to prepare these releases since it's over multiple precincts Well, I think it's probably in the best interest to go ahead and proceed with this out of the buttons to caution all right then I make the motion that we... Just a couple more questions. With the cost. I know she had... You can be spraying one time, two times. We got 240,000 acres in that southern block and we'll spray that twice. What I will do is I'll break it up into like 50,000 acre blocks and we'll spray 150,000 acre block two nights in a row. Then we'll move to the natural spray at two nights in a row and just move on down the line like that. And the reason for that is any given night, you only have about 30 to 40% of the active mosquitoes that are out flying. The rest of them may be dig, they're blood meal or maybe they're just hatched off. So you kill them and then the next night you'll have another 30% percent that's already hatched off since then because this is a permanent water mosquito. So the mosquitoes are hatching off every day. It's not just, it's not like flood water mosquitoes where they all hatch off at once and you're done. These are just constantly hatching off and you kill these adults so they're not going back out laying eggs And so therefore you're reducing those number of mosquitoes coming off What kind of plane to use we've got twin engine Aztecs and twin engine sester 4 2 C How many planes will you use to do this? 2 to 3 depending on what I've got available at that time. Mm-hmm and 20 inches, that's the four or two seats. How many planes will you use to do this? Two to three, depending on what I've got available at that time. Let me take you five days to do it, or 10 days, I guess. Five days, you have five or six days. Depending on the weather, too. Because the winds get over about 15 miles an hour, we won't go spray. I can spray fine, but you may spray Harris County. You won't be spraying your County. Well, tell us what you said this morning about your spray and the wind will drift it to the... Yeah, the technology we've got in our aircraft gives you a full optimization of the spray cloud. Our computer system in the aircraft knows the specific gravity of the pesticide, it knows how far it will drift, in certain wind speeds, no high-faceted falls, certain temperatures and barometric pressure. We've got a meteorological data probe hung under the wing of the airplane that gives me wind speed, wind direction, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity. All of that is spent in our computer system so every time you're out here flying is constantly feeding this information to the computer. So when you get to the other end, it knows where to position the aircraft to release the pesticide so it drifts into the area that you want to spray or the swathe that you're trying to spray. So we may be actually flying quite a ways outside of the block to drift it into the block that we want to spray. So when you see that, you'll say, well, he was spraying over Harris County. Well, that's possible. We were releasing the best aside in Harris County, but it was drifting over in the block. Any more questions, commissioners? I'm going to give a motion. Then I make a motion that we authorize the resolution in order related to aerial spraying to enhance mosquito control within South Montgomery County and we name contingency as a funding source based on the schedule of revenues to be received that the auditors put together. Fed adequate Amy. And authorized Judge Sadler to sign any and all documents related to such order. I think that's a wonderful excuse. Perfect. Is your second? Is your second to this motion? I'll second. On a favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? So far we got two yes votes. So we got two note. We got two, at least I didn't hear any evoke at all. Is there any special permitting requirements that we're going to have to. Yes, they take care of those for us. The NVDS permitting and the low level congested area that's being approved by the FAA. What about the TECQ? The what? TECQ that talked about this morning. Come at the NVDS. The permit will have to be in the county's name but we're going to fill out all the paperwork and incentive to you and all you have to do is sign in. Okay let me. What do we think the ultimate cost is going to be? Well is it 900 and up to 953,000? The quiz that I have is $950,400. For $488,000 at the dollar 98. Well, then we need to change this amount on here. Not to exceed 1.3 million, right? That was just in that was the quote that they said 1.3 for the entire county. And I wanted to be able to discuss spraying the entire county. So we wanted to make sure that it was properly noted. But the amount provided by Vector was $950,400. That's from the $240,000, makeers spraying twice. And Dr. Again, you think that this epidemic is severe enough that that type of expenditure is warranted? I do. And I think this is echoed by Harris County as well, again, who sprayed the Southern Board of our County. We have data from our previous years, which show that our peak is not going to be until September October and there's no reason to expect that we won't see a peak again during that time period. And Dr. I believe we have in our conversations we identified Harris County, Brasoria County, Fort Bend County all have been aerial spraying. I talked to Mr. Patterson this morning so they've not sprayed and fought Ben County. Maybe we could have been Brasora County. Brasora, yeah. Brasora County got their own playing though. They do. They do. Yeah. Okay. Let's vote again on this. I'm in favor to Commissioner Rex motion seeotions, the aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes forward or nothing. All righty. Purchasing. That's a question. Sure. What if it is a negative impact on the public? And what are we going to do about notify or do we need to notify the public? Yes, there'll be 36 hour notification. As soon as the permits are approved, then vector disease control will be able to tell us when they would get in the air. So we'll be able to give specific times and dates of when we will be in the air spray. And they ask for us to give them a window versus saying Friday at 8 o'clock at night, just so they would rather say a week window exactly. So they'll get all that information to us and we'll make sure that the paper gets it and it gets disseminated as quickly as possible. Okay. We'll play for a second third or so you can put that in your public notes. Okay, absolutely. Purchasing. Item 4A. Consider and approve the following discretionary exemption 262.024A2 for aerial spraying for the vector disease control ink for mosquito control and the amount not to exceed 1.3 million for the various locations within Montgomery County and I believe you've already named a funding source of contingency. Yes. Move. All the favor see I? Thank you. Well if we need to change what we're spraying Charlie did anybody contact you and told you that Nobody contacted me either and I spray more than anybody So whoever needs to be telling us that you need to change your product every year Somebody ought to be telling somebody something Actually could you make some recommendations to these commissioners? All what they should be spread That there's only five products out there that I know of that you can spray you know, it's Rasmithron that's Permithrons you've got your OPs and I mean there are a number of companies that make them but they're still all the same thing right Larry So you know, I would you know, I would use ameat from one year, a rasmith run and you know an OP or just every year just rotate from one to the other. There's enough difference that they can't develop in a community. Right most of those you don't have cross resistance but if you you know if you go from you know you've got a zinnevex out there which is a out of Fendprox. That's a new one that's out that you can actually use. And also I forgot to mention that each day that we spray, the commissioners will receive a post-spray report and a map of exactly what was sprayed, the times and everything that was used each day of that application. You'll have it in your if I have all of your emails It'll be there by 8 o'clock in the morning. Okay, so when you've got people calling you you can say yeah, I'm looking at it there it is Charlie do you contract your spray or do you do your own spray? We do our own Does Commissioner Mattress contract is or do we know I'm not sure I don't know The contract I'm not sure I don't know the contracts and I'm pretty sure I think we're the only one that does our We don't know what they're spraying unless we go to Darloo see what they Whenever they be into contract y'all get the contract Ask for a rotation You know you are probably used that new product you're talking about what you call That's not been used in all in this county. I would use that That's not been used in all in this county. I would use that Right Tries and But it is approved for using Probably so you can actually spray it over cross Some of these products you can't spray by air over cross When this spraying will you do it over residential areas as well? To approve to fly over residential areas by the FDA. And this one is also approved to put spray over the warrant. It won't hurt fish. So it'll be alright if you spray the band members. We won't do that. If the lights are on, we won't do that. What's the friendly event? Okay, commissaries. Is your motion to adjourn move? Second. All in favor see out.