we would have two utility support analysts. Hey, Dr. Can you get back to that previous slide on the outages? Yep. So like on the, if you would just elaborate a little bit on the customer's effect about power outages at 130,000, that includes momentary outages too. It does. You got just with a breaker trip. It does. If a breaker operates. Re-secret outage or two circuit outages, that's wrapped up in this 130,000. Yeah, anything to consider an actual power outage, whether it's a breaker that operates and it closes back instantaneously or an outage where the customers are out for a long period of time that's covered by it. We have another metric we go by that's not recorded here, which is the customer hours, and that's something we do to measure how long customers are out. Is it considered an out of frame? You're telling us sort of blink off and on. Sometimes I have. It's just blinking, typically not, but now it's a moment of it's out a couple of seconds and usually it's candle doesn't have it. It depends on the... Yeah, you see like a, you have just like a, you know, a bullet by typically not. So if a breaker operates, even if it closes back instantaneously, we consider that an outage, but we have reclosers out on the system in various locations and they will operate momentarily to try and clear the outage and because they're not coming back to us through SCADA, we don't record those as outages because we don't know that anything's out. Okay, do it. so it is very common that you might see a blink if you're behind one of those reclosers and it's not necessarily recorded as a parallel. Does that like a brick at your house? How does it operate? I mean the break is in the breaker. So in the substations we have breakers that they're designed that if they see a fault so a tree limb falls on it a wire touches together a squirrel gets on the line the the breaker will see the fault and protect the system and protect the customers behind the system the breaker will open and it is very much like a breaker in your house. Okay. The biggest difference is it's designed to close back in. Okay. And so one of the things that don't happen. Okay. It's got a recloser mechanism in that. It opens up because of that fault and it's going to automatically close back and that fault is still there. It's going to open back up again. Okay, that's right. If that fault is still there, it's going to open back up again and it's going to stay. Stay on the building. Okay. I'm doing okay. All that happens in in 20 I mean those are 20 hurt cycles So you talking the happens in the second Like that because you know and then when you got people working on the system They'll call in what they call our tag and they somebody will tag out on that theater and say hey We're out here working on this line and they disable that that, that recluse or feature that way. If somebody gets energized, it doesn't handle three times. You know what I'm saying? Open closes and then for safety purposes. Okay. Yeah, so the breakers in the substations, they're designed the first time it operates, instantaneously, tries to close back in. Unless it's a large enough fault that it decides it's not going to, based on what it's seen. And then it'll try and close in. If there's still a problem there, it'll open back up and it waits about three seconds. And the idea of that is if there was a squirrel or a limb fell through or the wires momentarily touched to each other, then maybe the outer just clear by now. And if it's not, it will open back up again. And then it'll try one more time if it doesn't lock out and that one I believe is about 12 seconds. It's given plenty of time for it to clear and then the power will come back in. So normally you will see one small blink and then the other ones will be longer if it's going to a lock out unless it's a large enough outlet that it instantaneously locks out. And as Chris was saying when we have crews working behind it we don't allow it to close back in. And it's also actually looking for smaller faults. So when a crew is on it for safety reasons, the breaker will operate a lot quicker. Well that, the KELOLL outbreak looked a little bit on that breaker when it opens and stays over, you know, it'll disback the crew. What's that process that they're going through? I mean, they've got to get rid of that. You can't close that without them riding that out. That's kind of what takes some time. Yeah, that's correct. So when a breaker locks open, if it's during daytime hours, generally we'll get it back on a lot quicker. But if it's after hours, we have to call the home call crew to come in and look at it. They'll ride out the line. they'll look for the problem a lot of times. There's actually a power outage behind the power outage. So there's something happened, a fuse blue on a line that caused the breaker to open. So even when we close the breaker back in, there might still be a separate outage. That can't happen. Or if the breaker closes back in and the main feeder has power, there could still be an outage behind it. So the crew will go out and ride the lawn, still be looking for anything that caused it. If they find the cause of it, it's generally a lot quicker because they, well, I say that, is generally quicker if it's something that fell through, but it could be that there's a limb on the lawn or there's a wire down and they have to pick that back up. So depending on what they find, it depends on how long it takes for us to be able to get power back in. A lot of times it can be very quick in the day of time. It can be within a half hour, after hours, it can be hours and hours. It just depends on what the nature of the outages. And that's the same with any outage, not just the ones behind the breakers. The crew has to go out there and identify it. It could be a transformer that's gone bad. It could be wires on the ground. It could be a broke pole. They have to call it an extra cruise. Now you can also imagine that if this has happened during a major storm, multiply that one outage by many. And if there's more outages than there are crews, well then the ones we're not actively working on right now have to wait until we're done with the other ones. And I'm going to go over a little bit of that a little bit later on in the presentation. So we have 12-hour shifts they work. This is an example of the schedule one. We have one operator comes in at 6am to 6pm, and the second one comes in at 9am to 9pm, and then another comes in at 6pm to 6am. Basically, the way we're doing it right now is we only have one person at night. So about nine hours there's only one operator in there. But the URC supervisor, who's here, James Butts, him and also the analyst, they're capable of coming in as extra help or we'll call in extra operators if we know we need more than one person on my shift. And they wrote that about every three months between day and night shifts. So let me ask one question. Yes, ma'am. When there is a major outage in the city, what process do you use to decide where you will start first? If we have multiple outages, one of the most important things we look for is the hospital out. If the hospital's out there, the highest party to get back on, that's the feeder. After that, we're looking at the actual feeders. So the breakers and the substations, they're divided up to a different number of feeders. You can't work on the individual outages until you get those back in. In most cases. So that's the next thing we work on. During a major storm, we're also looking at anything or it's all related, not just the main hospital, but also on the north side. Working at places like Publix and Walmart, it's really important to get customers to get those back on. And after that, we're looking at commercial customers and or large clusters of residential customers. So if there's a 500 residential customers versus a commercial customer, the 500 residential customers probably get priority in that case. Just because of the nature of how big it is. Now what ends up happening with that, though, is as we get to smaller and smaller outages, some of the residents that are in that area, they're still out because they have something else separate that's causing them to be out. And so, individual customers, residential customers, they're generally the last to get back on in anything. And during a major hurricane, it's almost always the plantations. There's some of the last that every of the power. Well, those big events, Ms. Brown, I think your question, like, will prioritize the hospital and all that and so are your components of that. And then your restaurants, your supermarkets, publics and higher of these and places like that, and then your gas stations and your schools and kind of go down from there. I've drew some of that and then you're going to target. You can spend two hours over here to get on 600 customers versus spending two hours over here to get on 60 customers. Well guess what? We're going over here to get on the most began. And so you start working way back like that. And then when you get into a five or six day event by the day five or six, you're working on three people on this one average. It's gonna take all day to get up in three people back on it. So it gets really, really slow after day three, four, five. So when someone calls in and talks about the medical issues they have with machines and their homes and they're really... really um so what we try to communicate in advance of a storm is that um if you if you if you're health you're well-being depends on you have an electricity to run those machines then you need to make arrangements to be somewhere else if we if usually and it we're pretty good about an advance of a hurricane maybe say and be prepared for three days, you know, possibly be without electricity. And, you know, a citizen, let's say they're on a CPAP or an oxygen machine or something, they need to make arrangements to be without electricity for three days, whether that's going somewhere else or having some kind of generation in their home. We don't prioritize, you know, getting someone back up based on that. That, when you register for that, that has more to do with payment processing. You still have to pay, but it has to do with cutouts and things along those lines, but it doesn't necessarily prioritize getting you turned back on in an emergency. In general, the only time the medical customer gets priority is if all of the things are equal. So I forgot. Two altitudes of somewhere in size and I know one of them has medical will generally go and try and get that one first. But that's the only time we're able to prioritize it. And I asked because in the past I have had people call me about young situations. And I knew it was a major outage. So I knew that everything was trying to get back on, but they were calling, you know, try to say that, you know, some people really can't even move out of their houses. I understand it. So it's a lot of issues. But I understand everything you just saw me. That's why I ask you to process this. Yeah. It's one of those things where we can't take responsibility for their health. And so we don't tell them that we're going to, and that there's anything we can do, except you need to get medical help if you need it. You need to follow. That's something that's something you're saying that we could pass on to our constituents and everything. We've always had to put that into press release. Like we know if a hurricane is going to say, like Cheryl said, we'll put in that press release. If your health is dependent upon electricity, you need to make arrangements to either find other resources and the one goes on higher ground somewhere else. Because I think when the Irma, I think we were projecting a 10 day, I think we put out it about 10 day out and expect to be out without power for 10 days. And if you require, you know, you're on oxygen or a CPAP, that's a long time, you know, 8, 9, 10 days to be with our electricity. And that's, that's generally, if we know, we're going to have an extended outage. That's why the efforts are concentrated on those commercial areas. Because if you don't have electricity in your home, how are you cooking food? Or, you know, if you're three days, you may have lost the stuff in your refrigerator, even if you have gas power. So that's why it's important to make sure restaurants, you know, fast food places, grocery stores, places where people can get their medication. All of that is restored so that, you know, we don't have that side of life impacted. Another general guideline you can look at for outages is if you have 5,000 customers out, you're probably going to get half of them on in the first day. And then you're going to get half of the 2,500 left in the second day. And you're going to get half in the next day. So the last 100 customers to get on could take just as long as the first 5,000. Because it just progressively takes more and more time. We've had storms in Hurricane Michael, we had to basically try out because that was a, that was the longest storm we've had since we had K years and years ago and that was nine days before customers had power restored and that didn't count. Some customers that had their services down, they kept us just all the customers that we could do anything about. So we had to make a decision on that that just prioritized and go out and get the main lines back up. And if there was a small fuse feeding one or two customers, or if there was a person service torn down, we left. We had no choice. Because we had so much, we had to get back on that if we focused on that We would never make any progress and we had to come back to those places later on and that's one of those things It's heartbreaking whenever that happens that you have to leave these people and it's like I'm sorry that we We can't spend a day working on this one customer when we've got thousands of others that are currently out so I can make like we've got we've seen Michael, nine days. Are we getting out in front of the city, so let them know that, okay, I know we're gonna say we'll be expecting electricity after nine days, but during that time of frame, are we constantly letting folks know? So what we typically do, we work very closely with the Emergency Operations Center and Emergency Management. Chris Jones is the EMA director. So he pretty much leads the response for Thomas County. And several of our departments will participate in those weather briefings leading up to a storm. We were talking about Michael. I remember all of us, I mean, had been 10, 15 of us police, fire, public works, electric, you know, I was there from communications, city management. We had everybody there and every time we would go the track would change just a little bit. It was very difficult. You probably remember that from your time in the school system. School superintendents are usually there. And we try to coordinate the efforts county-wide. In advance, we try to, we start communicating when we know that we're in that cone, so to speak. That's when we start communicating with our customers right then, based on the information we are getting from the National Weather Service. And part of that response is self-preparation, how you can prepare not just having that extra food or medication, what not. But it's also about preparing your property, what can you be doing. And we actually just did a press release not too long ago, and we were trying to put communications out at the start of hurricane season because now is really where people should start looking and they're on their property, make sure they don't have any low hanging tree limbs or things they can do now to prepare for that. We try to communicate about picking up, maybe your flower pots, your furniture. And a lot of people, for the longest time, I thought that was about trying to keep maybe that flower pot from going through your window or something like that. It's really to keep that out of the storm drain because there are a lot of times we find things like large flower pots or not too long ago what was a leaf blower that we found. Swimming pools. Yeah, I mean, so anything that can float away from my squids over here. They're property because that can have another effect further down the line. We do to answer your question. We try to communicate every step of the way and then once the storm hits we're communicating the entire length of the response. I know during Michael our facilities were closed but I was coming in and I was doing, you know, putting things online, putting things on social media, I was doing the news briefings with EMA just to let people know what our response was because, you know, what we have found is that our customers have about a 48 hour understanding. You know, and after an outage goes about two days, then people get real restless. And I understand it because nine times out of 10, these large outages are happening when it's very, very hot. And nobody wants to be without electricity. Nobody wants to lose the food in their freezer or their other things. I mean, it's disruptive. So I think we have a really good solid response behind the scenes. There's a lot of coordination. Drew's team is responsible for really helping to pull it all together. But we've got folks riding those lines to see what the problem is reporting it back so that you can try to plan to do those restorations. At the same time, you've got public works out trying to clear the trees so that those electric crews can get in there. CNS is a part of that as well. You know, even though you really don't need your video and internet service when there's no electricity, those folks can also help aid in those restorations so that we can get things on quicker. So, you know, it's a pretty coordinated response. And, you know, on the way, you're also communicating all that as it progresses like on social medium or website. Okay. I've got to say that. No, so it's worth keeping it safe. So it's worth keeping it safe. So it's worth keeping it safe. So it's worth keeping it safe. So it's worth keeping it safe. So it's worth keeping it safe. That's hard to say, you know, that's when you're not going to hear say that. That point. You know, do it. Just when her claim season now, I know we have churches that fucking go and evacuate in, evacuates that. But do the city as a whole do having a place? We let the EMA emergency management agency kind of lead that. And they typically will work with Red Cross. What I have learned just in my time dealing with this is that depending on what size storm might be coming to us, we may be limited in our community with a facility that could withstand those winds for example. So they sometimes are hesitant to have a storm shelter to encourage citizens to go to to right out of storm. You know, this is just what I've learned, you know, over the years. But there are many times that they can be a good Samaritan shelter that is established in advance. So that if someone is in a low-line area that may be floods or they don't have a home that could withstand the winds, you know, there's usually, you know, a church like you've mentioned. I know your church has done that in the past. New Covenant has been really good about doing that in the past. But we look to the emergency management agency to give us the direction so that we're all communicating the same message. So once they tell us, all right, here's what's been established. And we'll do our part to help push that out as well Okay, Chris you know we have the crews at Southwest Right and now Southwestern has so So do we have a plan? We house a lot of crews That was the first time we ever had to do that That was the first time we ever had to do that on Michael. Typically, we'll go ahead and like, we know where Storm is coming. It's like Cheryl was describing the rooms. We start booking rooms and sometimes we, you know, we make book them and not have to use them. But if you wait till the Storm's here, you know, we'll get them. So we'll go ahead and start booking those rooms and make them, you know, calling for mutual aid assistance from other electric cities in Georgia and Florida. Is South Washington got any room? Not, I'm aware of the place that we were using was the El Rose Haven building. It's still empty. Well, semi-empty. Miss Jackie Knight is occupying that. So I mean, I think we could probably, probably push him to shove we could make some accommodations with her. But you know when it comes to a point that she's no longer doing that and they repurpose that building then we might find some other other resources. Now you can go we could get cuts and they can be creative. We've had them in this building. We've had them in gymnasiums with cuts which is basically what we had to do at Southwestern. It's going to go out and purchase carts and they have sheets and that's a, I mean that whole endeavor. It's a great way to have good folks art flow provided to clean in the sheets. They need to help them out a lot and then start out and join the state patrol was going to have 30 or 40 officers out there too but they wound up going to somewhere else I can't remember they wound up not landing here but I you know there's a hole you got a restoration effort going on but in parallel to that as big operation to that is the meal plan now so we've got when you've got a hundred people here from my town that's right you got feet you know they got, when you've got 100 people here from my town. That's right. You got feet. They got to be fed. They got to have plates. Not to mention your praise that are working. Not to mention all at 115 people. And we got working. Then there are grocery stores not open, restaurants are not open. So that whole meal plan is. I said, they feed them good. Right. We do feed them good. I worked in the shelter. There's a mandatory with the state that you do your shifts. This is just a glimpse at some of the storm prep through the URC. But when I mention a very coordinated internal effort, it includes meal preparation. Eric leads that up. We usually coordinate getting food on hand so that we can provide those meals because what we have found is if we've got crews working, it's easier for us to get meals to them to keep them working and then that way they're not taking as long of a meal break and we can get our citizens back on quicker. But that's the value in really having that county-wide coordinated effort because it's not, you know, utilities are a big part of it, but it's not just that. It's public safety, you know, it's making sure shelters are identified, and we're all on the same page communicating that. So it's, if, you know, I know several of y'all have probably been to those weather briefings before, but when they do have one, I mean, it's really interesting to go and see that, and you can just witness that coordinated effort countywide, you know, you see the school superintendent's talking so that they can be on the same page with, you know, school cancellations. I mean, 70-80 people in there in some times, it's a big, a concerted effort. And, you know, things like what you don't think about, like we've got a green that would P.F.G. over in K.R. and they'll load up food, they'll bring up refrigerator truck over here and back it up our facility. That way we've got, you got to be able to store it too. And then you can all this food to feed 250 food for the process. And then it's sitting staff that's signing up the work those shifts to make sure that food is prepared. Yeah, we've got an agreement with Harold Jackson, you know, if all the gas stations don't have power, we can't get fuel. We can't get fuel. And so we can go pool straight from this tanks out of the petroleum products. So things like that, you know, and those are for catastrophic events, but you got to plan for those. You got to have a plan. And I mean, I'm happy to say that we did. Yeah. So. Okay. You know, we'll get your resource. You have to do that in the home. That's right. We had the call on them. I believe that and I hope you don't have to. Yeah, yeah. I want to go back one thing that Mr. Scott was asking about in terms of communication with customers on out of his whenever we have a large storm we get a lot of customers they want to know exactly when their power is going to keep me back on and that is very, very difficult for us to figure out. As an example in Michael, this Kate Thomas was the interim city manager at the time and she would ask me for some locations, you know, when we're going to get him back on and I was having to tell her, I was like, I have no plans. It's not even on the radar, because it was so far out that we weren't even thinking of those locations. So it's not uncommon that there are some areas. If you're not immediately planning on working on them, you can't communicate to the customers. If you tell them, well, you could, you could tell them it's going to be two weeks, which is not realistic. But if you tell them anything less, you'll be disappointing them because you can't meet that, you can't meet that standard. I'm going to skip forward to the storm operation overview, just to save some time and stuff. So in terms of what URC does during the storms, we are responsible primarily for dispatching the lecture queries. So we have a dispatch software. In fact, this is a image of what it looked like during Michael. And I'm not sure if you can read the numbers on it, but there was like over 300 outages, individual outages across the system. This is fairly early on within one or two of those days. So we're coordinating with the line crew on the primary locations that they need to go out there and work to get the most customers on to get the most the critical customers on the restaurants, the grocery stores, obviously the some of the larger businesses hospital, those things. So we use this map to be able to see where the outages are and each one of these outages own here we can assign assign it to a crew we can send it out to them they work on the outage and then give us the information it comes back in which is also important it's important to document it so that you know you know how long the customers were out because one of the things that does happen after storms is customers if their power has been out of certain amount of time they can get reimbursed for some of the food that they've lost so we have to have good records to be able to show them, you know, that yes, they were out for this period of time so you can get reimbursed. Let's see. We are on that outage management, all that technology. So there's 49 cities in, electric cities in Georgia. And we're one of five that's got anything close to that. That type of technology infused in outage management. Most cities don't have that They don't have anywhere near what we've got To give a little bit more of an idea about how our dispatch software works We've mapped out every one of our lines every one of our transformers every Switch that's out on the line or fuse all the customers and we have them all networked into this So if a customer calls from Metcalf, we know where they're outages and it'll make a prediction. And as we get more and more customers in, the software will predict the outage farther up. We also have our AMR meters that will report in the outages. So we receive text strategies, we receive phone calls, strategies. We can answer the phone occasionally they're in storms, not as often because we're usually too busy for that. But we can manually enter the outages and then our IVR, our Interactive Boist Response, all the calls that come into it, they come into this system. And because it's mapped and maintained by electric, we have the current customer that lives there, whether they're supposed to have power or not. And we can see that, yes, they have an outlet going here. And it's a tool that we can use to then communicate that to customers and let them know the status of it. In fact, with the texting, you can actually text in, it will tell you the status of your outlet. It will tell you if anybody is assigned to work on it or we could do it ETA, but it'll tell Cruz Rassand if it's been verified, those kind of things. So you could be out of town and you could text in if you have multiple locations and you could just see or any of my locations out. Now the system could also text the customers in London, but in just in case it didn't, you always have the ability to text in in Fondo. One of the biggest challenges we have for that feature is that people don't have updated contact information on their account, including cell phone information. So, if anyone that you come in contact with, if you can encourage them to register for that service with their cell phone number, that's how you can take advantage of all of that. And it, you know, we realized that when you have something like that going on, you may not be able to talk to a human and you may be sitting on hold or you may go straight over to voicemail and you feel like it's easy to feel like maybe you're not being heard or that maybe you're not being served. So that is a good way to even though we are challenged in being able to provide that personal response, you can at least be updated on what's happening and you don't feel like you're not being seen. So, you know, encourage your folks to get their numbers registered. So you have to just call in and get your phone number? In the old days, because I'm old, in the old days, you had, it was a wonder one ratio. You had to have, we had a phone, a phone, and a person. So, and when Terry Scott calls in, the report is electric outage, you had to have a person there to answer that phone. You know, and you can only handle so much. So, let's say you got six people in there and six phones. They're only able to answer six people out of time. And so, everybody else is getting a business signal. So with this system now, it's all automated. You're not having to, a lot of people don't like that. You don't get the opportunity to talk to a person, a lot of a person, but that system can process 10 times as many phone calls as an actual people can. That makes sense. So it's all automated. And to compare, if you go look at that operation now during a major outage compared to what it was two years ago is remarkable. It was an unorganized chaos to put it mildly because when you got 10,000 people out, everybody's going to call. That's their only source of being able to report out outage and you can't manage it. So you're calling for six hours out of time, get a busy sit. The program is called TextAlert and if you go on our website, Thomasville.org, it'll walk you through how you do that. You can do it from your phone. Another thing that Chris was talking about is back in the days when it was one person to answer one phone, we also didn't have our maps, or we had paper maps that they had to go by. We didn't have our GIS in place, so the pressmen weren't in there. We weren't getting it from Coxdale or from U-Bill at the time. Until we got those pieces in place, it was very difficult to do it. You had to have a very deep understanding of where the system was and you had to take those calls, basically, that we literally put them in stacks and staple them together as what they did to send it out for a critical call. So it was nowhere near as accurate as what we're capable of in now. So during the storm we do a lot of data collection in terms of taking information in from the right away, calls that come in, if a damage assessment occurs, larger storms will generally have a damage assessment to identify down wires, trees flooding. One specific thing about wires, and this is a little anecdote from Michael, the schools were calling about four or five days into the storm, and I kept having to tell them, you can't open your schools yet, because we hadn't had a chance to look at the wires. We were so busy getting the power out of just back on that there were wires down on the ground and we went out and looked at it and there were Live services that were torn off houses that were live wires laying on the ground in a lot of places until we got eyes On those wires and we're able to identify that they were safe It wasn't safe for us to have the city schools open primarily the city schools because of all the walking that the students do Axon becomes a big deal. We also, we have to do our install. We have to keep track of the electric services that are cut out for repairs because we have to arrange for electricians to repair it and cut them back in. A lot of times those are some of the longest outages that we have because it's a single customer out. So we'll try and get out there as quick as we can to cut it into clear so that let Kirchkin can start working on it. And we'll be able to go back later on and pick it back up. We keep track of broken poles, other things. A lot of things are really important for FEMA to know not only the hours that we worked in different locations, they actually want to know exactly where the pole was. They want to know information about that. So we have to keep track of a lot of that stuff coming in. The information comes in into field and we generally correlate it for all together. So I have, I'm gonna skip a lot of the stuff, but I wanna briefly go back to Skater. But on that residential single outage, like if you got that service at Toroff in the house, that's gonna be on the resident of the house, that's going to be on the resident, the customer, they have to call their own electrician and have that rebuilt that service for place on the side of the house and we'll come back and reconnect it. That's not what we do. Now if it's just broke off the side of the house and the service is okay, we can reattach it if it's all still safe, but if it's been damaged or broken off the side of the house so that we can't restore it until they have an electrician rebuilt that service and make it safe. Sometimes those can be 34 days. It's one of the worst calls that customers can make because they'll call us up because their service has been over and when we get out there we cut them out. That's it. And then fortunately we may not determine that till day three or four. And they're in storms. Absolutely. Now they got another 34 day or 4 days of lay. So I will emphasize damage assessments during storms are really, really big deal. During Michael, we coordinated one and we went to the street to street. That's the only time we've ever done that. Most of the time it's just driving the streets and looking for things. We made sure to go street to street and collect everything we can. Unfortunately, we weren't really prepared to do anything with it and we've learned a lot since then. So now, if we go out and do a formal damage assessment and collect all this information, our plans are to have crews that can identify what the wires are. So we know which ones we need to prioritize so that we can get the schools back up, so that we can make the neighborhood safe so that the fibers don't get cut, that are down blocking people's driveways. And that happened. It did happen. I want to talk briefly about one of our softwares. We use, it's really important. And it's SCADA. We use SCADA to operate our water system. So you are see operates the water system in terms of, we turn the pumps on and off, and we turn on high lifts, we call high lifts, which pump water from the reservoirs into the overhead tanks. We do this 24 hours a day. So we're constantly looking at the water usage and making decisions that turn the water on and off and also set the chemicals to make sure that they are at the right settings. And we use SCATED to do that. SCATED is a, in fact, I can show you what it is there for. Supervisor control and data acquisition. So I can show you here, this is an example of the water screen that we used to do. The one that's in the back that's in black, that's the old water screen and the one in the front is a redesign we're doing and I'll mention that in just a minute. So we also use it to tag breakers. Chris mentioned that earlier whenever the crews are on it, it's a safety thing. We place what we call a hotline tag, which prevents the breaker from closing back in. It also prevents us from doing any other action to it other than opening it. And then whenever crews have restored or whenever they've cleared the problem out on the line, they will call and communicate to us and it will close the breaker back in. It's very rare for us to open breakers, but when we do, it's super, super critical that we're able to do it as quick as we can because that's almost always a life and death type situation. We also monitor alarms, 25 hours a day from Skata. We get alarms from electric, water, wastewater, or lift stations, the wastewater treatment plant. We have building, building alarms we receive for fire alarms, panic alarms, different things like that, gates, other alarms from that. And depending on the type of alarm, we will dispatch either during the daytime or we'll dispatch after hours. And we use our city works software to record all that we've dispatched. So that's that asset management software I was talking about. That not only are we a really key user of it, but that we maintain. So in terms of SCATO, one of the big things we're doing right now is we're in the process of tanking over to a new SCATO software and reconfiguring all of our alarms to make them work better. So as part of that, one of the things we're doing is we're doing what's called high performance graphics. So the screen that's in the bottom corner that's all gray and blacks and whites, that's the preferred design. So if an alarm occurs, it will flash and it will stand out and you can tell that something's in an abnormal state. Whereas with the pages we have right now, it's a bit more difficult to figure that out. In addition to it, we're reconfiguring our alarms to get what we consider root nuisance alarms. There's a couple of things that happen, especially for operators. You do with a lot of nuisance alarms, which are alarms that you don't do anything with, that you receive, and you have to look at. And that causes this thing called alarm fatigue. And that's a well-known thing in the industry of anybody looking at stuff that if you receive a lot of things that the Stances you don't do anything with it you tend to forget and miss alarms that are actually important So as part of this we're going to be cleaning up and removing a lot of alarms that we receive right now that we shouldn't receive And put a lot more of the priority on to the individual crews that are responsible for these And then in another big thing we're going to be doing is we're going to be distributing a skada to more departments. Right now it's very limited, pretty much only us and tech services that maintains it. We're going to see it actually see skada. And we're going to be moving towards a direction where all the different departments can look at their own skada, water can look at the water plant, wastewater treatment plant, they can look at the own skate of water, can look at the water plant, wastewater treatment plant, they can look at the alarm at any time, lift stations can look and see what everything is, and also that they can do it in the field. That if they're out there in their vehicle or they're at the house and we tell them about alarm, they can log in, write them and see what it is and make an appropriate response to it. So that's a huge thing that's going to really, really push it in a different direction. These are just a couple of different screens we're doing. You can see in general it's going from a screen that's very colorful to something that's a lot simpler. In this case, we're taking two screens and we're actually combining them to one, which makes it a lot more efficient. So it's got a huge, hugely important software, very important to the city. It's a life and death type software. And so we're making a lot of changes on it right now this year that most of this should be done by, I would say, September to October. So I really thank you, whoever. I have a lot of other slides, but for Tom Case, I'll skip him. I think I briefly went over primarily what our department does. So I think that should be about it, unless you have some other questions. So if Skate goes down, we're in a trouble. If Skate goes down, we do things manually. If we lose Skate, they have to line true, has to go to the substation, and they have to open and close breakers themselves. Water plant has to drive around, and they have to turn the pumps on and off themselves. And for a lot of other things, we have no idea what's going on. Yep. We're in trouble. Pretty much. We can recover, but it's not ideal. Thank you, Drew. Yes. We felt like this would probably be a very robust discussion just because it leads so much into the storm response. And, you know, we can get more into that at some point more. We were concentrating on URC, but we could certainly bring a presentation to you all if you're interested that just kind of really coordinate citywide what we do because I think it's impressive. You know, and you know, overall our team does a really good job trying to manage the impact to our community. I was going to, at some point when we get the skate upgrade completed, well, how try have a schedule like a utility committee meeting down there at the barrier building. And then we can do a tool to kind of show and tell them an operation you are seeing in totality and the skating system. It's a key area of our municipal operation. I would say there are eyes and ears of the old utilities, the old city, why everybody else is the whole rest in these guys. Right, it's a small team, but they're important. Very important. We'll turn it over to Ashley now with the financial report. No, that's good. Yes, sir. I don't start your automatic meter reading program sometimes, right? It is complete. So it is complete. And we started in 2004. Now we're actually replacing all those meters that we put in back then. So we're only putting in our second generation of that. So yes and no. Yes and no. So we start over again because with anything new technology driven, it's got a shelf life. The old analog meters, electric mechanical, you put most things in, they were in the 50 years. And these new ones that are solid state, got microchips and software and firmware, and they got, you don't get 25 years out of it, you got a place. That's not the sense of the other region. But you don't have to send somebody out the radio? But you don't have to send somebody out the radio. And then this generation that we're putting out now has got what they call remote disconnect number glass. So you can turn that meter off remote that you don't have to roll the truck shut the power off, which we line. Tricks. I got a quick question. With the heat like it is down to heat index like it is down 100 101 degrees We may consider Yes, we are we that we have internal processes and if temperatures exceed a certain amount We don't do cutoffs and same in the reverse if temperatures are going to be particularly cold We also have a threshold and so it's important that we monitor both the heat and the cold and you know manage cutoff. We don't advertise that, but that's our policy. If we're doing the cutoff is that it's 102 degrees today, we don't. Yeah, it's important that we take care of our citizens. What degrees are you all? I don't recall it right off. Anything, I want to say, and I'll have to go back. And it may also have to do with the heat index. It's the heat index. Anything over 100, I'll go back and tell you something that's wrong. I want to say like 105 or 100. I think the temperature itself might be a little bit lower than that, but it has to do with the heat index, but I don't recall right off the weekend find out. Okay. And then I think that will bottom in to see things like the like 30 degrees freezing in the wintertime now. It's going to warm up in the day, and if we know it's going to get into the 60s that afternoon, then that may get a different story. But we try to look at the forecast, as best we can. So, but obviously, if we got, we know there's kind of, that's coming, there's going to be in the 20s, that we're not going to count all the time. We just plan on not doing it all the week. Okay. Go ahead and week. Okay. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good morning. We'll have financials as of May. And so these again are just the utility enterprise funds. So those highlighted in yellow are and this report. Oh, wow. Here it comes. I'm going to try this again. And the force came to work, we could all use the printout. All right, we're back. All right, so total utilities. You can just look away up a tower. All right, so total utilities net income as of May was 6.7 million. That's about half a million less than last year. You transferred 5.6 million, leaving us with a net income of 1.1 million after transfers. So comparing this year to last year before and after transfers, the difference here is mostly non-operating type of revenues and expenses. So operationally, our sales and our expenses are pretty much in line with where we were last year collectively. The biggest difference between this year and last year again is non-operational revenue. So that is any type of gain, our losses on sale of assets, any interest income on our checking or the CDs and money market accounts. And the distribution that we received from S to GSA is considered a non-operational revenue because it's not based on our operations. And so that component for S to GSA, that distribution decreased this year compared to last year. So that's the main difference here, collectively for all of utilities. So here is the budget of transfers. Again, we set these at the time of budget. They do not change. This is just a reminder of what those transfers are. Most of this comes from electric. There's a small portion from broadband of 500,000. Again, last year that number was about 1.7 million. So electric picked up the slack for that transfer. So here's electric's net income as a may. We're shown almost 2.5 million in net income before transfers. We are transferring more than what we're earning for the year. So we are having to pull from our savings, from our income that's built up over the years. So we're transferring 5.4 million. And we're left with the loss of 2.9. This year compared to last year's sales are up about 3%. So we're doing well there. Our expenses are up compared to last year about 9%. But we did budget for that. If you recall last year this overall operating budget for electric was about 45 million. This year was about 47. So we didn't anticipate bigger expenses for just the maintenance of repairs and distribution maintenance. So the reason we are transferring more than what we are getting in I guess evenly or something is because to support the general fund governments. This is part of the general fund. So we transfer to other departments and other funds. And majority of the support for general fund police, public safety, that comes from electric. OK. So we have to look at what we're doing here to try to make some adjustment because. Yes. So you're transferring more out of what you're getting in. It's just a downroll, you know, to pop a team with flag to me. I agree. We do not want to do this consistently. We definitely want to make a change for for next year. I know we're showing we did budget a loss this year, so we know that we will have a loss at the end of the year. That loss was about 2.6 million. Last year, we did end the year with the loss of 3.4 million, because we did have to transfer about 2 million to landfill last year if y'all recall. And then the year before that, we did see an actual loss about a half a million. So the last couple of years we're actually seeing the loss. We've been budgeting for it, but we're actually feeling that. So we do need to make some adjustments to some changes about how much we want to transfer. Thank you. Yeah. And two, I know we budgeted the expense side of the higher this year, but we also, the power supply cost came in higher than $41.25, roughly $1 million of budget. So we're trying to make that up for that PCA thing, you know, just in the way we made, and we'll provide that report at the next meeting. Can we just let me do that quarterly? Should you have it catch it up or try to catch up? So we're all making some regaining some ground on the retail side. We are. So I believe the first quarter, it was close to like a million dollars. Now that variance between what we budget and what we actually paid is about half a million. So we have kind of picked that up a little bit. We covered some of that. kind of pick that up a little bit and recover some of that. Here are the phones, water gas, wastewater, solid waste and CNG. And so these phones are doing complete opposite because electric is taking on most of the burden of transferring out to the other phones. These departments are not having to do in transfers. They are retaining their earnings to anticipate debt, to cover debt, and also capital. So not much change here since last month. All of these funds are doing better than budget. Water, they're doing better than last year. They have some tap fees this year that FARICC last year. They have some tapfies this year that far exceed last year. I think this year we're at about 400,000 compared to last year. It's about 200,000 so they're doing much better. They are gas department. It's somewhat in line with last year. The cost for gas did go down this year so we are seeing in that those savings. Waste water, there's a big height compared to last year, but that is not due to operations. That is grant funding that we received to help cover the wastewater treatment plants. So there's a lot of money going towards that capital project and we did receive about a half a million. So part of that is in that one, poor three third number so that is on one time thing for this year to help cover those calls. And in solid waste it's well in line with where it was last year. So that's good news for solid waste. They're needing to build up their earnings so that we can buy more capital and in CNG is doing better than what we budgeted. Not as quite as well as last year, but we have not received any type of rebate this year yet. So we do anticipate that. And here's just the broadband phones. We have about 280,000 compared to last year of a million. Again, this goes back to that distribution that we received from SGA GSA. We received a lot more last year. So you'll see this type of variance all throughout the year. And so we received less, we transferred out less, but we did transfer 208,000, We left with $71,000 after transfers. And this is how they stack up individually. Here is our utility reserves. Again, this is set for the budget year of 2024. So the annual amount that will transfer for each individual fund together, it'll be about $3 million. Each month we transfer 264,000. And this is where we stand as a May, almost 21 million. And the goal again is to have roughly 180 days cash on hand. So for some we'll meet that goal a lot sooner as you can see here. But we are chipping away at that and working through that. So we're about 48% where we want to be as far as the goal. And in here, it's just a recap. Again, collectively net income is about 6.7. We transfer about 5.6 million. And we're left with a little over $1 million. I have a question, so Ashley, when you budget, let's say you budget for something at $4 million, but you only had to spend 2.5. What happens to the other? We keep it. And we either have that to budget for next year to budget something different but we don't we don't get into the reserve or anything like that it just stays there to see what happens next year. Yeah. Any other questions for Ashley? Thank you Ashley. We'll go ahead and move on to hit the sales report with Eric quickly. I know this has gone a little longer than normal. So we'll try to make this a little brief for since you do have the sales report in writing that you have available to you. Good morning, Mayor and Council of Great News. I talk really fast. So this should be about three minutes. Additionally, there was a small error when y'all's printout and I'm gonna get that fix in the email y'all and the corrected copy but that is for February's number so all the numbers for this month is correct. This reporting period from May 2024. So as you can see Electrature's doing well we were low down on kilowatts sold. However, revenue was up, 3.84%. That's because of that PCA just but primarily. I would say so. Since your kilowatts is down, I would definitely agree with that. As you see, we're starting to come up some more on our trend line. The orange is our actual sales blue is what we budget. So we are doing well in sales in the dollar amount. KWH, we are a little above what we budgeted for, but we are trending well. These are VX numbers and you can see that we are starting to get a lot closer that trend line started to look a much better compared with that first two months of the year work was. Same here. Now in natural gas we are down across the board. Our customer base wasn't much down. Energy soles down, same with revenue. That negative percentage is associated with the warmer weather. And we also only collected about $1,300 in tap fees for natural gas. Now water, they were doing well across the board. I would make sure that negative 14% you see at the bottom that is directly in 100% associated with a higher tax fee number. We collected last year and that was about $136,000 we collected this time last year. We collected this year with $7,125. However, up to May we have collected a little over $470,000 in tax fees and other related construction costs as well. Wastewater. We are doing well across the board on Wastewater. We collected $6,600 in tax fees for this month and for the year we have collected $114,200. Now seeing us next for video we are down across the board. Internet, we are down on customer base but we're up in revenue. Telephony, we're down in customer base but up in revenue. And telecom, we are down across the board. However, that usually ranges between 73 customers to 80 I know so we're not too concerned on that why we most likely lost about 6566 customers internet the message was to be more than messages to be going up every month. We certainly don't want to lose Internet customers. I would imagine we probably will feel a loss this year related to the other changes that we're making but hopefully with some strong marketing and leaning on our good customer service we'll be able to bring those back over. The percentage is very small. However, the median income did come in and kind of did as big undercut. However, what you don't realize the median income is a captain data. So eventually those customers are going to bounce back. So as long as you're within that negative 3% plus 3% margin, you're doing well. So I would be concerned that negative point one seven. The moving on sanitation, sanitation is doing well and they are up significantly. Any questions? All jobs will win over a minute. Thank you, Eric. That is all we have for the printed agenda today. Does anyone have anything else for discussion? Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Here you go. you Thank you.