Good morning. It's March 17th. Welcome to transportation and environment committee. Today we are taking up a number of CIP amendments Count recommended by the county executive back in January as part of the FY 26 capital budget and amendments for the FY 25 to 30 CIP the CIP amendments involve Environmental related areas including recycling and resource management, storm drains, storm water management, WSSC, and the approved six year spending total across all the CIP programs is approximately $376 million. And these expenditures are funded with special fund dollars from the Solid waste disposal fund for recycling and resource management and the water quality protection fund for the storm drains and storm water management CIPs. And the county executives amendments would add about $11.2 million in expenditures for a six year total of $387 million. And before we get into some of these areas, I do want to note that we received the County Executives budget on Friday. And with regard to the recycling and resource management, CIP, they are two different discussions. So today we are taking up the CIP as part of the six-year CIP, not the operating budget. That will come through this committee in due time as we take up the FY27 budget in a month or so. But right now we are taking up this interim CIP amendment schedule and I'll turn it over to Mr. Lovchenko to walk us forward the packet. Yeah, our first item is a recycling resource management and the amendments we're looking at today are the ones that came over in January as part of the executives' full amendment package in the off year of the CIP. As you mentioned, the operating budget came out late last week. There were also CIP amendments that the executive recommended last week as well, which we've not had time obviously to turn around. Those will be discussed later. And as you mentioned, there's a significant project in the RRM CIP that came over late last week and will be discussing that separately as well. So today we're talking about two amendments within the Recycling Resource Management CIP that came over. One is the Oaks-Landfield-Leach-A-Preetin Project and another is the full upgrade of the existing recycling center complex. And we have DEP staff and OMB staff here today that can provide a brief update on those amendments. I have a couple of slides we'll bring up. And then we can talk through those. So I will do that right now. Just a second, here we go. There we go. I'll turn it over to the EP staff to briefly talk about these two instruments. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Jamie Ballster. I'm the Section Chief of the Planning and Design Construction and Monitoring Section in the Resource and Recycle and Management Division. So I put together a few slides to give an update on these two CIP projects next slide please. So this is for the Oaks landfill, LeJay, Retreatment Plant. So we are in the process of retrofitting this plant. Most of the retrofitting is to address PFAS, which is considered for every chemical. There are new state and federal regulations that are being promulgated in order to address these for every chemicals. So we're working to use the amended funding to develop some treatment technologies that will work that we could install in the treatment plant in order to mitigate PFAS from the effluent that we use to discharge into WSSES sanitary sewer system. So the funding that we are requesting will actually help us continue the evaluation of figuring out what type of treatment system that we'll need. We started the evaluation and we started it with a granular activated carbon system and we did benchmark sampling to figure out that our effluent will effectively be treated, but based on the test, and we realized that we would not meet the four parts petroleum treatment goal, so we're moving on to other treatment technologies to try to address this situation. So that's the update on the oath. Any questions? Colleagues? No? Are questions? Next slide. And so this is an update on the materials recovery facility, the March Upgrades project. There's a slight delay in order to conduct a facility conditions assessment. We needed to do that assessment to understand the actual facility conditions in order to expand the basis of design, not only to install process and equipment, but also to do building modifications that would help accommodate the new process and equipment that we're planning to install as part of this project. So we've completed the facility condition assessment. We're now in the 30% basis of design. We received that on Friday. I'm currently reviewing that and I have a meeting today at 1 p.m. with the contractors to figure out the next path forward. Okay, so let's go, let's, since you're ticking through them all, let's just go back with the to the oaks landfill and no objection So we'll support the county executive recommendation there now to the MRF customer welcome I don't look like you had a comment Yes, I do so thank you and this certainly makes sense The we're getting we're gonna launch into a discussion about just the waste System in in total total soon. Do you anticipate any changes in this facility based on the way that we do solid waste in the county County? We conducted, do you want to get that? in Willie Wainer, the chief of the area department. No, we are going to be, we continue with the same recycling program for our commingo facility. So there will be no changes on that. we're going to continue bringing in the basically the same amount of tonic that we're being today, about between 31, 33,000 tons of material and we're basically collecting from countywide right now. So that's not We're not planning to change that portion of the business Okay, thank you. Thank you And councilman welcome alluded to a conversation that we will have that I teed up in my opening remarks during the operating budget I was gonna say look forward to that discussion It will be a tough discussion that we have before us, but one that we have to tackle. So Mr. Wainers, do you want to keep going? Are you good? You're good. Okay. So one question I have is regarding the new equipment that's needed for this facility. Talk about the actual value of that investment, going from whatever our current capacity is to new capacity. So currently in the design phase we are evaluating different technologies including artificial intelligence that may help with processing equipment to be more innovative in terms of how to increase capacity as the county grows recycling is going to grow. So we want to make certain that when we install this process and equipment that we do it in a way that it enables the county to also accommodate future capacity. So at this point we don't have any definitive specifications on the actual process and equipment, but once we get to the 60 percent design phase, then we'll have more information in terms of what the actual process and equipment will look like. We just conducted a sort study at the MIRF to figure out what type of recyclables, recyclables we received there. So then that way, as we proceed through the basis of design We make certain that the design phases accommodate and also include the data that we received from that sort of study In in looking through the packet and reading other literature is it an Expectation or hope that capacity is able to be increased nearly threefold. Is that a goal? Yes. Okay, let me answer that. So the current equipment, as was described before, was installed back in the 90s, early 90s. It was upgraded in 2001, and it can only process about eight tons per hour of material That's less than the incoming material that is coming right now So we are forced to bypass a portion of that material to other processing facilities So the facility that we are looking for right now as an upgrade Will will be processing about 22 to 25 tons an hour which is almost three times what the current one can process. I think it's important to frame it that way so that people understand what the investments and what the goals are working toward and a threefold collection effort is something I think everybody would support so So I support this, colleagues, yes? Okay, we all support this. Yeah, please, council president. Before we leave this, I thank the chair for teaming up that we're going to have a broader conversation on this issue. But I think Missilla Chanko, this might be a question for you because I know at the beginning of the packet, you note that the expenditures that we just talked about for these two projects are funded through the Solid Waste Disposal Fund current revenue and revenue bonds with the debt service paid for the solid waste disposal fund current revenue. We did receive from the county executive in his proposed budget a rather ambitious increase in the solid waste management fee. Is that increase that he proposed for the upcoming fiscal year impact any of the decisions that we're making on the CIP? Well, the executive's recommendation would accommodate these from January and also accommodate his recommendations that came over late last week, both in the operating budget, which had increases as well, but also on the CIP, which has the new treatment process project with a lot of planning work that is current revenue. So all of that is built into the rates that the executive is transmitted to the council. Now the council, as you know, will have to go through all this and decide what rates based on those projects and what it wants to do, what are the appropriate rates to approve and the council will have basically to mid-May to make that decision. Thank you. I just want to clarify that because I think it's an important piece as we're working through all this to understand how all these things are interrelated. Yeah, thank you. So would these projects alone trigger a fee increase? That's something we can ask D&P to come back with in terms of what are the rate or the fee implications from different scenarios. If you were to defer the new project, for instance, that came over. What about the other issues you've talked about including, for instance, the spending to extend the life cycle of the RRF. That's also current revenue. So that impacts the rates in FY26 as well. So it's all part of the same package. Yeah I think that would be good to know because we're we certainly all agree that these projects that we're looking at this morning today are important. So I think we just need to know as we go along and I know that the decisions of fees are made at a different point in time. So I think it's as we make those decisions I think it would be great to know just the impact, the revenue impact of each fee impact of each of those. And I think these two projects, which are ongoing projects, well justified in the past, the councils approved them, and the recommended, the executive recommended changes this year, staff feels basically we need to do these to move forward, both with the regulatory side from the Oaks project, and also the criticality of the Murph in terms of capacity as well as upgrading the processing ability of it. So regardless, I think of where we may be on some of the bigger picture items in terms of waste disposal, I think these projects need to move forward and so staff's comfortable today with the committee taking these up. As you said, we have a lot of other work to do on the bigger picture items going forward. I appreciate the questions and let me ask. The same question a different way. Are these investments predicated on the fee increases that the county executive just proposed? Well, as I mentioned, these today have a much more marginal impact on rates. They're much smaller in impact than what we're seeing in terms of the operating budget changes and the new capital project that's recommended, was recommended March 14th. So I imagine, we have to get the numbers from DEP and OMB, but I imagine these projects alone are not driving so I'm not significant in time to end this. There's an interplay of course, right? But it's not the driving factor. I understand that, and I'm seeing DEP not in agreement with that. Okay, okay. I just think it would be helpful maybe if we formally asked from the T&E committee to get that breakdown on projects, and especially since we just got a whole bunch of CIP amendments on Friday, because there are so many things that are in motion with this budget this year. And so having from DEP as soon as possible, I clear breakdown on the fee increase and what that project say goes towards. And even having conversations about priorization, sooner rather than later, I think it would be very helpful. That's a great response. Right, thank you, thank you. Okay, so right now we support and understand the goal. understand the goal. We will learn more information to see how it all interplays with the larger waste management proposal. And this committee will be taking up the waste management plan next week or in two weeks time. We do have the Solid Waste Management Plan coming up for discussion next week. Now, that's not specific to the budget per se, but obviously the policy issues associated with it are cut across all of these budget budgets. And then more importantly, regarding the budget itself, we'll have the operating budget discussion in April. And the follow-up CIP discussion on things that are not before the committee today. Not right, not right, not right, not right. An ongoing conversation. That DEP is clearly excited about. I see it, I see it. Good. Okay, so moving on from the recycling and waste management will move over to storm drains. Thank you, thank you, D.V. All right. Yeah, with regard to storm drains, which I purposely chose first before storm water management, we actually have just one project for amendment and it's really a correction to address West, yeah, yeah, we are going forward. So with regard to this is regarding the facility planning project, Stormsry. And it has the impact of accelerating dollars that have already been appropriated and DOT staffs have talked about this specific situation. But there's no, there's no substantive impact on the CIT entrance scope, go climbing and I mean projects. This is really, really our housekeeping to just get this project online with what's actually happening. I'll turn it over to DOT staff. Good morning, emulgan and deputy director of DOT. On this storm drain facility planning, some work was occurring right at the cost of the fiscal year, some of those dollars in that project were charged to the earlier fiscal year, so it accelerated some of the work or staff often get that two year appropriation. And so they're trying to tee up the work that will then be constructed in facility. I'm sorry, storm drain general project in the second part of the period. So staff is comfortable with the I would call it a technical amendment to just correct or reflect reality. There's one other project that I noted in the packet. It doesn't be part of action by this or a recommendation by the committee. But it has to do with the follow up on the river falls, the long grain and the movements project. This is one that's in the planning landing. And the committee and the council had included language in the project was first and drawn for duty to come back at a later time when the project was fully developed. Partly because it would have a, it's got a significant cost associated with it, if it moves forward on the current assumption on. But also because it's in some ways a precursor to other projects we will be seeing coming out of the flood management plan. We'll be talking more about that with the EEP. But this project is intended to deal with localized flooding issues in this particular area and there's all sorts of different solutions they're looking at and that will help inform perhaps how other parts of the county are dealt with as well going forward. Now we don't have a there's no amendment today per se, but I just want to learn a thing that's come back probably in the fall for discussion. I know this is an area that doesn't get as much attention as other areas of the CIP, but as we continue experiencing more flooding and more increased precipitation and rainfall, it is something that we need to continue investing in and making sure that we have the resources in Probably more parts of the county moving forward. Mr. Wallan Are aware within the county if you're able to speak about it? Are there areas that we are looking towards in the next few years? That might need more support. So I believe DEP is doing more of a comprehensive management prioritizing certain areas. We're looking at more of a localized flooding, you know, particularly within a particular community instead of the entire watershed. So I think they would be able to speak to those larger issues. This is the only one that we have on tap and in the pipeline right now for specific solutions like that that was studied as part of the grant. Great. Thank you for that and we'll get into stormwater management next. So thank you for teaming that up without objection. Well we'll support that amendment. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah next up we do have stormwater management. Yeah. Yeah. And they come up and they do actually have a brief presentation we can return to. But I think first we can go through the amendments. Uh, better for us today. And, and then the presentation we helpful for follow up questions and some of the discussion. And this actually is the same packet. If you're looking through your notes, I combine the storm drains and the storm drain mentioned packet and one because they are so interlinked. There's a lot of coordination between DEP and DOT on this work. Obviously, the storm drain tends to focus on flooding issues. DEP has to focus on not just on quantity, but also quality issues as well as meeting the storm mark management permit. And as you mentioned, we have the flood management plan that's been moving forward in planning late. And we've had placeholders hours put in the CIP to provide what we expect to be worked, what will be generated on that planning.. But we do have a couple of specific CIT amendments for today. And first I just want to mention we have the Scomer Measure, Retrofit County wide project. And the County Executive District of the Manket, that recommended increase in there to add three new upstream mitigation projects. They're discussed briefly in the packet. See if I can find that. Page number. Oh yeah, page nine of the packet. There's a few projects including some stormer and management management work for the proposed Loaderman Middle School outdoor class rounds, designing construction of four congregations between water biogen-. That's a so a nonprofit partnership and also money for the green vestry for a station project. I mean, he can speak to each of those perhaps now, real quick, before we move on. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Morning. Morning. We see you in. Division chief for one of the restrooms division. These projects are like like he mentioned, they're all like when work. They're bioretentioned. They're located in the rock creaking and a cast the watersheds. There's small projects that they're, you know, they're going to do the treatment that we need in those waters and stream all over the work for human streams. And so we wanted to push them forward and advance them for this to be funding. I just want to say thank you because clearly you heard what we were sharing last year about the need to do more upstream water collections and these three projects as you noted might be small, but you did make those changes based on the feedback that we provided, which was after deep consultation with members of the community. And thank you. Great. Great. Do you want to while you're here, you want to just provide a little more context about what those three projects are. Sure, absolutely. So the clean water congregations for clean water is a partnership with with congregations to do small scale projects on their property. We do it in conjunction with all of our other projects like treemont Co. So we're doing a project at Temple Emmanuel. It's estimated to be completed in 2027. They have one right now at St. Stephen's Youth and Church and then we have two more that we're still working through. We're adding the Lloyd River Middle schools and outdoor classroom in Rock Creek. They're doing a great, this part of reach hub for familiar with that. And then the Reforestation project is one where we found some an acreage that could be reinforced sitting green fest, one of our pay for performance contractors. Brought the project to our attention and we wanted to move forward with that. Great, great. Sounds promising. And while we're talking about amendments for this existing CIP, look forward to next year's conversation, when hopefully there'll be some more upstream projects added to that. So without objection, we will accept that. Thank you. Thank you. And just bear with me for a moment. We're going to queue up presentation on the flood management plan and so the team That's the same proposal that's in the packet Yeah, there are two amendments. Basically, they have an increase in the planning work needed to fully assess all of the watersheds, but they're able to take a little bit out of the placeholder project to offset most of that. So both projects are being amended and in, but really the focus should be on the planning aspect is this right now. It's nothing so forward on the implementation side. Yeah, that's okay. I'm going to go to the next slide. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay to ask. Sure. Good morning. I'm staying there. We're at some of the chief of the Division of Energy Climate and Compliance and DEP and helping to lead the development of the comprehensive flood management plan. We have just an update on where we are now. We're making good progress. So some of these slides you've seen before. So again, the three key objectives of the plan are to look at, to an engineering study of the watersheds that we assessed in phase one of the project to understand where we're vulnerable to flooding risk in the future, particularly with climate change. We wanna, based on that information, we wanna understand how to modify counties, programs, policies, regulations around development, building codes to address that flooding risk. And finally, we wanna make sure we're addressing racial equity and social justice and the identification of those programs and policies. Next slide, please. As I've mentioned before, this is a multi-department effort. There are six key agencies here and as well as representatives from the CanX Actress Office involved in this. All these entities have some involvement in flooding, whether it's reviewing development, approving development, addressing flooding concern. We heard about storm drains with DOT or recovering from flooding in the case of emergency management. Next slide. The three phases of this phase one has been completed. That's where we were identifying the watersheds that we wanted to do the detailed studies on. And we started review of our programs and policies now so we could get a basis for moving forward. We're in phase two right now doing the detailed assessments of the watershed starting in Slago Creek. That's our pilot watershed. We're almost completed with that one and we're digging more in more detail into the policies and programs that we want to look at to address flooding and I'll talk a little bit more about that a minute. Face we will be implementing projects to address flooding and continuing the work on on policies and programs that will take quite some time to figure out some of those will be quite controversial so that that will be an ongoing effort. Next slide please. So the timeline for the watershed modeling that I've got this in front of me here. I can read it better. We're doing 11 water sheds. They should be modeled by the end of 2027. Sligo is our pilot watershed. We're doing now. Rock Creek. Both lower and middle rock creek will be done in 25 and the other eight will be done in 26. The models will show the risk of flooding from 10 year storms up to 500 year storm events and we're creating models for now 2050 and 20 100 so we look into the future. A lot of the infrastructure that's being put in whether it's for storm water management or buildings last a roadways last a long time so the model of the future. We've made some updated assumptions about post precipitation and impervious area. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in the future. The next slide, Keith, thank you. Shows the details. We're doing about 101,000 acres of watersheds. That's about 157 square miles in the county. The map on the previous slide. So they're mostly in the I-70 corridor up 29 that where you'd expect the most populated areas in the county. The map on the previous slide, so they're mostly in the I-70 corridor up 29 that where you expect the most populated areas in the county inside the beltway. Coverage about 670,000 people in the county, so about two thirds of the county's population. A large percentage of that is in areas with a social vulnerability index greater than 0.5, which again was a factor we considered when it evade the determining which wire chest evaluate. Next slide please, Keith, actually, you can go two slides. So the first thing we did as part of this work is to update precipitation assumptions. The data that's still being used is by when you're doing storm management planning is based on storm gauge data or ring gauge data from the year 2000. It's 25 years out of date. Noah was maybe is updating that to to current range data so come up to current time and also also projecting into the future we hope I don't know the status of the no work now with the administration. Nonetheless, we went forward with our process using the same analysis techniques that no one uses looking at rain gauge data and taking the most recent modeling for climate change to project increased rainfall. train phone you can see here these are the rainfall projections. So on the left, there's the current baseline, 24 hour projection for Rockville and subsequent we are the updated baseline for the 24 hour event for Montgomery County. It's not site specific to Rockville, but for current day, 2050 and 2100, you can see that the amount of rainfall increases considerably. So folks folks, it's on the gold bar there. That's the 100-year storm. Right now, it's 8.2 inches and 24 hours. With our updated numbers, it would be 8.4 inches current day, and then going up to 9.7 in 2050 and 11.9 in 20.100. So, a considerable increase in the amount of rainfall or projecting to occur. And we want to make sure we fact that that in the following. Mr Edwards before you move on, can you re up the coordination that the information sharing that the counties receiving from NOAA? What is NOAA providing the county with regards to these efforts? Yes, we're not getting any support directly from no one. On this, they do rainfall projections for across the country. So you can go onto the no website right now and get any geographical location and get what they call the IDF curves, the intensity duration frequency curves to find out how much rainfall you would expect, given the storm of that. Those were, again, last updated using 2000 engaged data. They were, and that's called, because we referred to as Atlas 14. They were in the process of doing Atlas 15, which is updating that across the country on a phase schedule. I don't know, they were working on that. I don't know the status of that. We'll have to check with Noah. But we, again, we're going beyond what even Noah was planning on doing, I think, because we're projecting out to 2015, 2100, so. Thank you for elaborating on that. Clearly, we all know the situation that's happening at NOAA. The uncertainty that's there, the certain fact that thousands of people have been laid off, many of whom are Montgomery County residents, but the point here is that NOAA and its staff are helping provide information that we use to prevent catastrophic flooding. Full stop. Just wanted to bring that home and make it relevant to this discussion. Thank you. Thank you. On the next slide, another critical part of our analysis was looking at impervious area assumptions. We know we're going to have some growth in the county. There's lots of people working on various discussions about that. So what we did was we looked at, we did two things. One, we looked at what we called the reasonable worst case based on what we currently see, based on zoning in the county. So the bar chart on the left in the in the R60 zone, for example, in Slago Creek, we looked at certain areas that are already developed. The most developed R60 areas in the county, these are just small sections. We looked at the current valve. And we assume that if those areas in our 60 could be developed that extent, then every other place under current zoning laws could be developed to that. So that's what we call the reasonable worst case. And so we use that as the 2100 ultimate development that could occur in that zone. And we did that for other zones in the watershed. And then we also looked at focus growth errors around transit quarters and we increased the amount of impervious area based on what we currently see in very developed transit areas like surface grain or wheat and we used that along the metro quarters along BRT routes along the the purple line to increase development and then perform a soon-deferred area around metrohertz. So that's the way we we accounted for increased and in purpose area and all those obviously more rainfall more purpose area needs more water rough and so that's what we want to factor in the wild. So if you go to the next slide please. Right now you can go on to the DPS website and see FEMA floodplains. FEMA just did an update to the floodplains in the county. In the route, what they call riverine flooding. So this is like Oak Creek. The blue there is the 100 year expected floodplain for 100 year. The gold is expected for 500 year storm. Again, this is something we're also curious what's going to happen with FEMA doing this work in the future. But that's a story for another day. But this map right now is what all we know about flooding, the extent of flooding in the county. And this shows how rivers and streams would top their banks and severe storm events. What we're interested in is talked a little bit about earlier about storm drains that can't handle the amount of rainfall. And so go to the next slide, please Keith. This is what we're, this is an excerpt of our preliminary results for Sligocreek. And this is what we see when we have storm drains that can't handle the amount of rainfall that channel that water off of neighborhoods and the streets seen around buildings. So this is a little snip of our preliminary model of Psygocreek. And we're close to having a full scale model of this that we'll be able to provide. You can imagine this is something one of the things we're working on here is how do we tell this story of what this model shows because a model that shows that your neighborhood might be under some water under certain storm conditions would cause some concern for people. And so we want to make sure we're explaining what we're showing here. They fully understand what the map shows. So we've worked with telling the story. We've got a team of people working on telling the story so that that when we make this map public, we are making sure people fully understand what they're seeing here. When we think it's important to share with the story. We've got a team of people working on telling the story so that when we make this map public, we are making sure people fully understand what they're seeing here. When we think it's important to share what the model shows, but we don't want to cause anybody to panic about what that model shows. This image, a real image. This is a real image from our, where is it? It's in Slago Creek. I'm gonna just leave it at that right now. I love a few blocks from Slago Creek, so there we go. Okay, we'll do it. Can we see? I'm just leaving it at that right now. I love a few blocks from Slago Creek. So there we go. OK, both of you. I'm going to see that. The different color areas on that map indicate depths. So the light blue air is up to half a foot of water. The model shows. And the darker blue, the deeper the water gets. So, you know, half a foot in some places might not be a problem, it could be a problem if you have a basement. If it's on a roadway, if you have a basement, apartment, apartment, apartment, and property, so this is important information, information, and what is the plan to that we tell the story rights. We understand that. And then we would make this a publicly available tool on the web base. Anybody can go on the web. Look at this tool zoom in to it. Just like we have many maps. You go to the zoning map. You know, what's the zoning republic? Okay, thank you. I expect we are releasing this probably this summer sometime. And then as we work on each of the subsequent 10 watersheds, we'll have a map, a model model for each of us. Starting with Slago and then where the others. Maybe we'll get here. I don't know if it's anything important. You go to the next slide. Please. To do that. So I'm going to talk about one extra. One. We do have a implementation. We do have a implementation. We do have a implementation. We do have a implementation. We do have a implementation. We do have a implementation. We do have a implementation. Those are I'm sorry, but we don't add projects. I think that's the last part of the cooperative. We're going to go into the area, and then the issue of projects, which we have to do, and the more detailed, sometimes, cost-to-world-like, and significant. And they took people involved, increasing investments,-to-storing banks, or developing detention is a little bit of a whole lot of money. At least for the storm rates. So that's the first part. If we won't have enough, I don't think we'll have enough money to do all the capital projects to address funding concerns. So there's several other things, number of, I'm kind of looking up to get a new number of events to provide real defense. The purpose is we want to look at finding and building costs to a planning process on this case. In that, you can have a share of you if our house is being, comes in for a demolition permit, you can be far not able to be built. In building is at flambus. I don't think we're going to build it the same way we built it before. It should probably have, this is just an example of what some other jurisdictions have been got. I think we'll look at it should the first floor of base elevation above minimum, above the public's whatever for example, or should that not have a walkout basement, or if there is a walkout basement to be some protection around the basement. So that it's in a library area at the bottom of the list and it becomes me that having infrastructure by eating an air conditioning should have the investment or should have the regard to the the certain public, which things like that. We also have figured out how to factor these models into long-term planning and long-range planning and longer-scale planning doing a development or still developing what's the impact of that development going to be on the areas around it. What should be the allocation of that element? Who do anything to communicate for? It wasn't a controversial subject, as you can imagine. Everyone's been out of the bidding on it. It was responsible for this. We should pay for it. I appreciate you and the department looking into this. It clearly is a hot topic item with a lot of different thoughts. People have a lot of different thoughts and opinions on it. Having over the last number of years looked into newly rebuilt homes and the parameters thereof, you started by talking about the insides of the building, insides of the home and how things can be accommodated for what might be outside. But the complaint I hear most often is that when a home is torn down and a new one is rebuilt, that is 2 to 3 times the size, taking up 2 to 3 times the impervious surface or creating that much more for the Increvious Surface, there is that much more water runoff. Is the department or is the executive department working? In pervious surface or creating that much more in pervious surface there is that much more water runoff Is the department or the executive you I I just want to state that a lot of this work and water mitigation is clearly, as you even noted, emphasized in areas where there is more growth. And one of your slides showed that, right, the areas of growth, particularly when it's likeag a weed that comes over spring and people expect the impervious surface there so we have to make sure the in rupture is able to carry that water with this the newly rebuilt homes they are not in our control room and the runoff is still great and it is directly related to the increase in improperly surfaces because of the larger homes. So it is something that is real and it is undeniable and something that is not completely unbladical. you you you you you you That would be a whole act of reaction. you you you Thank you, Sarah. And thank you for this overview. And I know you said that there's probably going to be more released this summer. And I know DEP does a great job of its community outreach outreach but I think this is really important also to have in multiple languages and think because of how many scams there are out there quite frankly trying to get people to either buy insurance or do things to their homes that aren't legitimate and so I think coming from the county government in multiple languages will be really helpful information particularly on the flood insurance piece of it so thank you for that update. Good point I say I'm mindless serve all the time, particularly with WSSC, right? and sewer mains and clogging or wearing that stuff. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. 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I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go down, gather, go down, and go to the position. I don't know if you know more of the individual, every month that you think is basically safe, well, a, playing, and model-hunting. I think you've got a place water collection, a category to ensure a collection system of the patients, the battery of the patient and the first man's includes items such as bean pass and new items, water treatment and storage. That covers the water filtration plants, the bucks and the tools and the red and the elevated water storage plants. The water resource recovery facility is another recovery cover the the water resource recovery facilities and that the last one is the general facility which includes all the leads that are non-processed. So I'll go over the categories quickly each. Thank you. you The a lot of new grief and you can see a lot of the projects, the difference in the designation between a surf hill or a frangil or a blue or orange is basically whether the project is in design or is in construction. But you can see most of the projects are located in areas where we have high density of water main rigs. So obviously the impact to the community is replacing that old infrastructure and promoting growth throughout both counties, for instance, in Montgomery County, and replacing agent meter faults. Next slide please. The second category is the wastewater collection system. Similarly, it has the small, replacing the small sewers that are not covered by the PUC, at a budget of around 51.5 million, and then the large sewer mains that are covered by the PUC at a budget of about 42 million dollars. The impact to the community is similar, and it's slightly. And you can see here that is where we're experiencing basement backups. And obviously, the more basement backups and a lot of these projects are located at areas where we've experienced those basement backups, knockouts and sanitary and those who are overflows. And obviously, the projects are also promoting growth in both counties to help economics growth within resources and country and country. actually, could certainly continue with this same category. We also have the wastewater bomb stations. So we're replacing, or sorry, upgrading a nine of them in FY26 and they are listed on this here. Obviously the bomb stations are necessary to have the flow go through the whole system and from the collection area to the wastewater recovery facility. Capri-free is the water treatment and storage plant. This is a program of about 23 million dollars to upgrade and rehellate and paint the elevated with water storage tanks throughout our service area. And this gallery next slide please also includes the water upgrades at the water treatment facilities. The NF-26, the projects are mainly in Potomac, water filtration plant to comply with the consent tree for upgrades within that plant. Next slide please. Obviously the impact to the community is stabilizing the pressure. The way that these elevated water storage types act is that they sit on top of the distribution system. So they help stabilize the pressure. If there is a water-mane drain, the tank will release water so that we don't have sudden drop in water pressure as well as the system. So that's why they're really important and they need to be maintaining them. That's why we're rehabilitating nine of them in FY26. They're rehabilitation, obviously, some of it will be in design. Some of those nine projects are in design, some are in the structure. And then the filtration plant upgrades, obviously the benefits of that is to comply with mandates from MDE and from the state and the federal government, protect the environment by reducing solids returning to the Potomac River. Next slide. Yes, this then tendery for those are the water resource recovery facilities, the projects that are happening there, there are four major programs, one at Parkway, water resource recovery facility, and the Scatterway, the Bioenergy Program, which is wrapping up that Scatterway upgrades the plant and upgrades at the Western branch, a total budget for that. Calgary is $31 million. The vendors to the community and slide please. And the impact is obviously these water resources. The recovery facilities are important to treating the wastewater treatment. And so this really always upgrades, replace old bumps and old equipment that might be using too many chemicals or too much electricity. So it's really making our operations more efficient and saving money to operating these treatment plants helping to reduce the energy and chemical usage and cost. Next slide, please. Mixed-use, category number five is an engineering support. This is a category that allows us to do upgrades at the pump stations and the treatment plants for projects that are smaller in dollar value that they do not qualify to be called major projects under the PUC, but there's still nevertheless our obviously important. So we have roughly 42 million dollars budgeted for that. It also gives us a flexibility during the year. If something comes up as a replacement of a pump that failed in a treatment plan that was not planned for, and now it means replacement, that money gives us a flexibility to do these small upgrades or replacements that were not necessarily planned for. Gallery six is the innovation and investment priority. Like I said earlier, there are the major initiatives under that are the smart water meter infrastructure studies that were embarked on just doing the evaluations of implementing a smart water meter infrastructure. The upgrades for energy performance program, the PAPP fast and studying and understanding what's coming down from the regulators and how to comply with that. And then of course, like I said, the Scattery Bioenergy Plan that was wrapping up. The seventh category is the general facilities. Those are the buildings that do not process water or wastewater, but they are the offices. and we have two major projects during a 5.6 upgrades of the Anacasia depot and then upgrades at the central support building to enhance the efficiency and less than the consumption of energy and electricity. The final category is the inter-dressitional projects, which are basically the investments in blue planes that DC water conducts, but WAC contributes to Earth. And we contribute approximately 46% of all the upgrades that have been at blue planes. The matter woman wastewater treatment plant, the budget for upgrades there is about 4.6 million as well. That's it, any questions? Thank you very much for that presentation particularly than the apps of the region showing where there are ongoing needs and ongoing projects. I want to dive deeper into that a little bit. Relevant to this broader conversation that we're having today about Montgomery County, the changes within the county, both from growth, projected growth, environmental changes with our water runoff and collection systems. Are you, is WSSC, seeing differences with differences with regard to infrastructure, aging infrastructure between the two jurisdictions that you serve Montgomery County and Prince George County? Not really. I mean, the aging infrastructure is the older areas that were built. So in both countries, the areas, if you saw the maps that are closer to the district, those are the older areas and in the counties and at you, go further away from the district, those are newer areas. So the acceleration of the aging of the infrastructure is really any sewer or water pipes that are closer to the district and as you saw further, those newer pipes. However, there is soil percidity in Prince George's county that is higher than Montgomery County. So, and of course our asset management assessments for replacing life cycle and the age is only one factor. We look at the conditions of the assets, especially the reciprocity of the soil. And there are some areas of the sources of the county where the soil is more corrosive, so we see acceleration in those pipes. But we're constantly trying to keep up with it, looking at all these different factors. So thank you for that. I have a few different thoughts in question, but I'll keep it to the two jurisdictions right now. When the revenues are collected, the various fees and other allocations, how are they dispersed? Are the fees that are collected in Montgomery County, do they stay within Montgomery County? Do they go WSSC in dispersed broadly? So the fees are collected and they sort of put it in a collective part and they should be done across the system. So they'll be segregated by the nation between the two countries for doing segregated between Wagesur and Gen. And then those cost-accelerrelated and distributed by project before white and ethnic. What is the breakdown regarding fees collected between the two jurisdictions? What percentage is from Montgomery County versus Prince George's? That on top of my head, Lenny. Yeah, we can get that information. We don't deal with it regularly, because as was mentioned, we have a unified water and sewer district. So everything goes into the pot and then everything gets distributed out based on some of the priorities you heard. I mean, there's other factors as well that most of the wastewater treatment plants are in Prince George's County. This is because of geography and how water flows. So more of their sewages treated in Prince George's, whereas most of them are the vast amount of Montgomery County sewages treated at blue plains. So that has a factor in terms of where the dollars are going. Effectively to address the flows from the future. But from WSSE Waters perspective, it is a single unified system that has to be dealt with in a single unified way. Unlike say the park and planning, which has a bifurcated park system, they have central services that's a pretty small, very small budget, and then their park systems are independent and make independent decisions. Yes. I understand how the by county agency was created and currently operates. And I appreciate Mr. Lovchenko, you are quitting at two park and planning because I think there are similarities here to talk about more broadly. For in advance of our next conversation, presumably during the budget, I would request that we get a breakdown of revenues collected between the two jurisdictions and disbursement between the two jurisdictions. And Mr. Oveschenko, you correctly noted, and I think it's an important point, that there are different facilities and the management of the water is different. What I would like to drill down a little bit more on is with regard to the maintenance and creation, building of new mains. I want to see where there are needs to fix aging infrastructure and where we're building new infrastructure, which is different than the facilities in the water treatment itself. And the reason I think now is the time to engage in this and the fact that we don't have this data readily available, it's important because the two counties have disagreed on a rate. And so by implication, we are forging different paths on how to pay for this infrastructure. And we need to look at how we are paying for this infrastructure and who is paying for this infrastructure so that if we are on a course where we continue, and I'm not prophesizing here, but if we are on a course where we continue diverging because we all agree that the rate are too high, full stop. And I've spent two terms on this committee trying to figure this riddle out and it is difficult I understand it. It's almost a gordian knot because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy in that water usage continues to decrease which is a very good thing but then there's not enough revenue to support the aging infrastructure and the ongoing maintenance. I understand that, but just like Park and Planning has a somewhat different model, even though they too were created by the state, now might be the time to rethink and potentially update our model. I know Chairman Chair Korman in Annapolis has thoughts on always trying to make sure that we do better with regard to our state agencies And I think now might be an inflection plan in which we engage in another conversation towards this goal So I wanted to share that and have that information ready for for next series of conversations Yeah, council members to read Thank you. I have a question which I don't anticipate you have an answer for today but it's particularly regarding the blue planes facility and are sharing that with the District of Columbia given the continuing resolution that was passed on Friday. If the bill in the does it pass the house which provides the District of Columbia to continue with this year's fiscal budget, there may be impacts on the blue plane's facility. And so keeping us surprised of what that may mean for just not there, you know, the operating, but also the, as we saw, the capital budget moving forward, I think is going to be key as we're looking at the CIP moving forward. So, and if you have some thoughts, great, but I know this was, you know, just Friday. So, we followed up with it. And the assessment from DC Water, their preliminary assessment was that the federal cuts to the federal dollars will have a minimal impact on them and that them as DC water are prepared to absorb the estimated cost they have as of Friday. As far as additional increases to our blue planes or biosolids, they don't anticipate anything happening, but again, we're keeping lockstep with them just to make sure that there's no pass-through costs, but as far as the federal dollars most of that will impact the city more than DC water. Thank you so much. Thank you for that question, Councillor Buster. Looking at the general's just source of revenue while federal state grants is a very small imperative to other revenue sources. There's still an amount of federal funds that come into WSSC. Have you looked at the stability of those funds that that's at all possible, right? Yes, with the funds that we currently have and that we had entered into agreement with the agencies with those are ongoing. They have not been cancelled yet. Oh, yeah, they have not been cancelled at all. What we're doing is when we are looking at our new sources, we have to take a position of what will happen once the final decisions are made. So we're proactively seeing if we need to identify a different source of revenue to fund those projects. But as of now, there has not been a, again, just like the teacher order, there hasn't been anything major that we've had to take off the books as far as funding goes as it relates to federal grants. Thank you, and as stated before, if you could please let us know as soon as possible if you have any impact from federal funds. We will. Thank you. Great, Mr. Wolf-Chanker. Yeah, I did want to touch on some of the mechanics of the budget this year, you heard in the presentation there are several big new projects in this CIP. You heard today including the major master planning effort that was discussed. Right now those are placeholder dollars assuming that they will identify the most important assets and needs and fill those. They also have the lead bait them project. We had a briefing on that last fall. Along the PFAS. We had both of those were discussed as well as the smart meters. So as all were discussed last fall of this committee, they're all, they all have funding in this CIP. And the lead abatement was, that's a, there's always been some money in there, but now we have a very significant initiative that's moving forward in the CIP. PFAS somewhere, although a lot of that is still, you know, being developed in terms of planning work. In the smart meters, I think is important to know that's actually not a separate project, but it's in another capital programs umbrella project. And for years, the commission had held off on moving forward on that. We had, frankly, they decided a lot of other bigger issues to deal with with the pandemic and a lot of the fallout from that. And there is a significant cost associated up front with the smart meter approach. but they are looking to move forward with that in terms of further planning work to figure out a solution going forward. So that money is also in the CIP going forward. And I'll just note also that there is now support from this committee and from the council to move forward with smart metering, which was not always the case, recognizing when people contact us absolutely alarmed, legitimately alarmed about their bill. It's because there was no notification system built in because of the age of our infrastructure. So now we can update so that our residents are not alarmed when when something happens. Right. I mean, one of the benefits certainly of smart meters is near real-time access to data and you can you can drive notifications out to residents where they see unusual water use. So you get you get the issue that you're talking about not having a 90 day delay with a leak or something like that. That's certain they can contribute to the unexpectedly large bills. There's also a lot of other system-related benefits to that as well. But it would be a very significant infrastructure project because the vast majority of WCC water's meters are old and not smart meters. So there's this very significant replacement process that has to happen. And by the way, newer meters tend to read more accurately than old meters, and they tend to read by more accurately, they read higher. So you will also see increases in bills from that. And I don't think the residents will see, will recognize that they were subsidized for a long time on the old meters. They will see the bigger bill. So that's also something that will require a significant outreach component. As if and when these meters do get distributed, we could see that residual input of customers getting a more accurate bill, but also an initially higher bill. But I did want to know, those are several major initiatives in the CIP. But the CIP itself is not going up a lot, as you noted, as you'll see in the packet. But that's because they are resetting several of these other projects, the reconstruction projects. They're setting those basically levels where they have been able to accomplish over the last few years. So before there was a significant completion factor built in, much below, I think it was 70% for the reconstruction projects. So they would be budgeted at 100 completion factor at 70. And so the debt service associate with that was at the 70 and out of the 100, but the budget was shown at 100. Now they're eliminating the completion factor assuming to get closer to the 100 on those by doing more realistic levels of work and shifting those dollars that had been reserved in those projects to these newer projects we just mentioned. So we'll get a better sense of if all of that budgeting pans out the way we think it will. But that- to these newer projects we just mentioned. So we'll get a better sense of if all that budgeting pans out the way we think it will, but that's the assumption going into the 26 to 31 CIP. So the overall six year increase, actually, it's basically flat, but you have those new initiatives on one end and you have these other projects that have been reset to offset most of that. Not to make saples and oranges, but for the council's perspective, the resetting of the CIP and the spending is that akin to what we used to do with regards to MCPS, and now we've updated our budgeting a little bit. Well, with the MCPS CIP, I think it was more of a shifting in priorities away from new capacity, more to regular infrastructure upgrade. WC has been in the infrastructure upgrade business now for a long time, and we've increased those projects tremendous amount over the past 15 years. And so now they're taking a step back to say where are we now? What are what are appropriate levels of spending in those various projects? They do have new technologies to better target their spending in the reconstruction projects. So that's part of this master planning effort is identifying where those next dollars need to be spent. But importantly, those dollars are in the CIP. They are placeholders, but they are built into the long-range financial plan, too. The idea is to try to come up with a financial plan. Hopefully by the end of this budget process, the two councils will agree that can give us guidance going forward not just in the next year, but for the next years. Understood. What I was trying to discern was the difference between truth and budgeting and reallocation of budget priorities. So I think you've explained it but we'll continue this conversation. And also I've noted in the packet a number of items that I've suggested for follow-up by the committee those are are in the very beginning of the packet. I mentioned the long range financial plan. That's something that we talk a lot more about on the operating side because that's the later discussion. That is something that we will want the two councils. We don't approve operating budgets beyond the first year, obviously. The councils are not committed to years 2 through 6, but we would like that the councils to be comfortable with the long range plan that they are assuming as they approve FY 26 that would be a goal going forward so that we don't have a lot of divergence during the spending control and its process in the fall. that we try to come to some reasonable baseline of agreement in the operating budget process that carries over to the next spending control limits process. So that's part of that. Also, there are a number of other issues. The meteor infrastructure I mentioned earlier, I think the council will want to better understand where that is heading. That's still a bit in its infancy right now in terms of being re-re-done at WSSC water. So I think that's something the committee will want to hear about. Also, we have a lot of communities within the planned sewer service area that are not currently served and are facing significant financial issues to get service because of the cost issues associated with extensions, a task force, an interagency work group looked at this issue for some years, but we have not been able to make progress on that. I think it is important for that issue not to be lost going forward. Also, regionally, we do have water resiliency issues that have come up at the Council of Governments. WSSC water participates in that. I expect that may be something that comes up after budget as well. Once again, there's a very significant federal component to that since the District of Columbia is most reliant on this kind of water resiliency. Fortunately with WSSE water, we do have multiple water sources and we're in a little bit better shape in that regard. But as a region, and I think hog is the appropriate place to organize this and they have been, I expect that that there could be some movement on that over time and we need to stay up to date on that. And then WCC Water also does have an ambitious greenhouse gas reduction program that's noted in both their CIP and their operating budget. And that may be an area that the committee will want to revisit as well going forward. Thank you for the in-depth conversation. Look forward to receiving some of that additional information when we take up the operating budget presumably that will be the right time to talk about some of it noting there's a different agency IP and operating but but the overarching goal I want to talk about is about the rate increases and the diverging paths that the two counties might be on and how we mitigate that. So that's the overarching message there. Not seeing any other comments without objection will support WSSCCIP. And as you know, we will have the operating budget discussion in April. So everything is preliminary today. And maybe revisit it as we get closer to our by county meeting in early May, where we work to come to agreement on rates, operating budget and CIP with Prince George's Council. Great. Thank you, Mr. Chanko for the packet. Thank you, my colleagues. Thank you to everybody else. Good day for infrastructure here in Montgomery County. And with that we're adjourned. Thank you.