Good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Charlotte County Board of County Commissioners Utilities Department quarterly update meeting let the record show all commissioners are present please rise for the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Next, we have changes to the agenda, Mr. Flores. Thank you, Mr. Chair, commissioners. We have two items. Change number one is to agenda item number one. We updated and attached a presentation to that. And then same for change number two, which is item number two on the agenda and Also revised the presentation move changes second motion second to move the changes. Is there any further discussion? Any opposition to the motion? Okay, that is approved Next we'll move on to public input anybody wishing to address the board during this portion of the meeting must fill out a card state their name the record, and state which agenda item or items will be addressed. Remark shall be limited to three minutes, and shall be addressed to the commission as a body and not to individual members. There will not be any discussion. I have one speaking card, Percy Angelo, item eight. Thank you. Good morning commissioners. My name is Percy Antelow and I live in K-Pays. I wrote you earlier in the week to object to the Jones Edmunds discussion of the so-called Suer Affordability Index, which continues to ignore issues such as the environmental effectiveness of subject to sewer conversions in an area, for example, like KPays, but maybe elsewhere in the county as well. Using the county's own data, which does not give any credit for attenuation of pollutants, the county admits that at most pollution from KPays' subjects is only one ton nitrogen per year for the entire area. The county's estimated cost of controlling this by sewer conversion, and this is the county data again, is $2,810 per pound of nitrogen supposedly removed. And of course, the sewers don't actually remove the nitrogen because they go to the rotunda plant which does not have advanced wastewater treatment and can't remove nitrogen. Instead that plant again by the county's own data discharges 50 tons per year of nitrogen to the coral creek watershed. Jones Edmunds appears to suggest that instead of using a median income calculation for KPAs, the county uses a mean which is higher for KPAs, but the fact that there are some income outliers in the area doesn't mean that the median isn't similar to the county as a whole, where you've used median in the past. And we already know that larger lot areas mean there is a lot less potential for sore septic impact in the first place. Joan is Edmund Sites, US EPA language, that there is no single approach to addressing water affordability. That means that you would be entirely justified in considering the cost per ton of removal as we suggest. This is the way that U.S. EPA historically chooses control technologies in a wide variety of fields. Air pollution, water pollution, other areas of pollution cost per ton or cost per unit of pollution. And over $2,800 per pound of removal is clearly arbitrary and unreasonable and maybe correct arbitrary as well in other areas of the county. Affordability should find a reasonable cost for control, per pound of nitrogen, in ranking the need for sewers. Rob Robbins recently provided Brandon Moody with information about a program used by a professor at FSU to model septic tank attenuation to give you something more specific than the broad generalizations in the sewer management plan. And we urge that the county take a look at that way of approaching the issue to get something that's a little more specific to the areas of the county that really need control. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your comments. Anybody else wishing to speak? You'll have three minutes. Please come forward. State your name for the record. Okay, I'm not seeing anybody rise, so we're gonna move on to to the agenda. A couple of things, gentlemen, I have a previous speaking engagement that had been on my calendar for quite some time before this agenda came out with eight items on it. I would ask if we can do items 4, 5, 6, and 7 first out of order, I check with Hector this morning. I think those are the most important to get more board input. And then we can double back on the others. Is that okay? Is there any objection to that? Okay. Mr. Chairman, I would also think the maybe item made as well. If we have time to have the- Absolutely, Mr. Rampe that up. Yes. Okay, so we're going to start with item number four, 2020 sales tax discussion, Mr. Watson. Blushy. Good morning Dave Watson, Director Charlotte Kennedy Tilties. So this is a 2020 sales tax discussion. This was presented a couple of weeks ago. What we're looking for is really some direction. I'll run through the projects and really it's the tier one monies that are out there and explain what's going on with those projects that were originally proposed and where we are with them. So this is a list of the projects in Tier 1, totally about $7 million. About 3 million of that was in the West County area, the Cape Hayes area. We had the lift stations in Mid County and then the Ackerman sewer force main. The Ackerman force main is constructed and completed and the rest of them are associated with other septic-disurbed projects that are either in progress or not completed at this time. So looking at the individual projects, the sewer force main for Green Dolphin in Placida, the sewer force main in Indiana Road and KP's, both were associated with KP's project, which has been pushed out to sometime in in the future. Lift Station 815 was actually completed prior to the sales tax money being available. And then we have the sewer force main on Kasada in Peachland. This was associated with one of the areas in the 2017 septic-to-sure plan, which has now been pushed out past the five-year window. Lustation 805 has been identified that it doesn't need to be upgraded at this time. So there's approximately $3 million or so of Tier 1 money that is still available. What we are suggesting is potential options would be to place some of that money into the Burt Store Wood reclamation facility upgrade that we're currently doing. We're putting it into a force main or two force main projects in mid-county, one is from Altona to Wawa, one is from approximately 776 to Wawa. These are backbone force main projects that benefit the entire mid-county area. So there are just options that are available for the board to consider. But we're really looking for some direction so that we can kind of focus as we continue with the updates on these where we wanna go. Commissioner Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, I think your list looks reasonable. However, when you really look back at that excess three million, at least two thirds of, was West County. Yes. And is there anything that we can look at from a regional perspective more customers will benefit from over in West County? In the short term, we don't have any projects that are currently proposed there. The, I guess, the only one that we have that's in design right now, there is a force main project on 776 that would be rerouting sewer flows that currently go to Englewood back to our plant. That is that is a possibility that's not on this list. Okay. I personally I think that would be reasonable. Again if there's a lot of benefited properties from that. That would be a force main along essentially the entire length of 776 from the Englewood border to the Home Depot. Well, 3 million being enough. It won't cover the whole project. But it'd be quite a bit. That project is currently unfunded. I personally would like that to be looked at. Regional force mains are OK. I think that meets the intent of what we were trying to do with these dollars. But again, I think two thirds of it being originally in West County, I think if we can find a project over there that makes sense, that's where the money should go. Thank you, Mr. Mane. Nobody's in the queue, so I'll jump in. Yeah, I appreciate those comments. It makes sense. But I'm looking at the burnt store, water, reclamation facility. And we have capacity issues and consent decree. So I'm wondering where we are. We're doing this incrementally now. Would this $3 million based on the incremental plan we have now, would that be helpful or we've already identified, I think it was $20 million to move forward that first phase? So currently we have $20 million in the budget. Yeah. We have some additional money available in the event that we are looking at additional improvements that could benefit down the road. But any money that is available for Bernstor would certainly be helpful. Yeah, so I'm wondering, do we take this money and put it all in one bucket or do we put a little bit into burnt store to help with that project and then the project should have identified. I think it is a final decision. I think if they can give staff direction to maybe split, but look at the cost of the West County force may, there may be a, there may be still an amount left, The significant amount of less. They could go to Bernstor. Yeah, that would be reasonable as well. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yep. I'm good with that. Everybody good with that? Any comments? Any more comments? Go to your concerts. You should start with Bernstor. Mr. Consonz, you recognize her. All right. So, thanks a lot. Absolutely, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think I'd given the option to do something in West County as well. I mean, it looks like you've got something that this would be spreading. If you put a third bullet, this would be spreading it to all three parts of the county. So, but bring it back. I mean, I want to see what the total cost of the force me and on 7766 is going to be, we already know the others. But yeah, I think maybe we need help in South County. There's no doubt about it. That's a critical need. But I do understand that this is sales tax money and we should be cognizant of, if we can't all put it, where it had it, was intended to be, then I think it's fair for us to be putting it county-wide. And that's probably a policy that's reasonable when stuff comes back, especially when you don't have identified projects, but I do think that was a good comment by the commissioner to already look out there. And there is something and has no identified funding right now. So even the three million wouldn't move it at all. You've got to, it's probably, so not knowing what that denominator is would be important first to have that information, but you're marking some of that money to go out there, good faith is a good idea, using whatever's left over to do something mid-canny and then definitely trying to fund the board store area, because that's so biggest problem. So thank you. Any other comments? Okay OK. So confirmation. So when we come back in July, I will have the three potential projects with the project information for board consideration. And cost allocation, yes. So we can have that discussion on how we proportionately split the money. Good. I think it. OK. We're going to move on to item number five, fee discussion. Paul, while we're reading Mr. Chairman. Yes sir. Mr. Watson, just curious, They some, the public comment from Miss Angela discussed the fact that we don't have advanced waste water in West County, is that coming or is that why you're re-routing to the Eastport planet? So we're talking about the force main that I just talked about on 7.70 seconds. So actually going to the West West water plant. Okay. And that is just something before I had started with utilities. We had had a swap of land, I guess, or a swap of service area between Englewood District and Charlotte County utilities. So Englewood still treats a portion of Charlotte County for sewer and we have the the water side of that. They would obviously like their allocation you know back and available for what they're currently treating for Charlotte County. So this is essentially rerouting that from that that border area back all the way along 776 and tying into our system to be treated at Westport As far as advanced treatment So we do have improvements being done right now at the retunda plant Obviously retunda is a an NBR plant Our numbers over the last couple of months with these new improvements. And Jeremy, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but Foss Fates and Nitrogen are actually showing below advanced treatment numbers at this point in time. For those two, not for everything across the board, we don't have all that information yet. But the new headworks and the improvements we've done there are showing significant improvement plus we've actually replaced the membranes there for the trains, I believe, out of the 12th. So that plant specifically is doing very well. When we do go to full advanced wastewater treatment. The improvements there look right now, they're gonna be minimal that we need to do. To achieve the full wastewater, to achieve the full AWT, yes. Because there are other parameters outside of phosphate and nitrogen in that. I'm glad I asked, thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Dordy. Yeah, and just to close on that, Westport is in the design for Westport subgrades, we'll have the advanced wastewater treatment. Yes, Westport is going to be right now, we're planning on phasing that. And the first phase, I believe, is going to be, the design is going to be completed in early 26ish. To go out for that, I think we're looking at like $3 million increments for those improvements. Just got to find the money. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Yeah. So the next presentation is about utilities fees. Feees have not been really discussed or brought forward in quite a while. The connection fees date back to 2011, 2012. This is Miscellaneous fees were last discussed between 2015 and 2016. So I'd ask Mary to throw some numbers together as well for the connection fees and some incremental look at the other miscellaneous fees. So this just give you a little bit of flavor. These are the water connection fees. So we are currently full connection as 6792. The index fees, again, were indexed back at approximately 2.5% annually from 2011. So the full cost indexed would currently be $9,075. That doesn't take into account our contracted water service line costs. So we're currently charging $1,070 for each water service that's put in. Our contracted cost is actually $29.70. So in-house is fine, but we're contracting a percentage of those water services out or we have been. So this just gives you an idea of the numbers that we're looking at for water service connections. Any questions on that? Moving on to look at the sewer site. So our sewer connection, full cost right now is 11,201. And this is showing the LPS cost at $4,800. Indexed from back in 2011, 2012 would be 14,802. But when you look at the LPS, that's really how to skew. Our contracted cost LPS is now $13,000 and we're charging $4,800. So giving you an idea of the differences in the fees and LPS installation and just going to go into one of the other discussions too. So an LPS installation normally takes about three days, whether it's contracted or whether it's in-house. So there's a time frame involved in that as well. Just for that, we do everything 100% at this point in time. Can you explain the indexing? Where's that methodology? Just Mary, what? Usually there's a footnote or something where it says we've adopted this index as utility index from someplace. Mr. Chair, for the record, my name is Murray Hamilton, Vice President with Ruff Tullis. Last year, last June you might recall our firm made a presentation about these types of fees. And in doing so, we had calculated the cost based on the capital improvement program that was put forward. As an example, talking about the water fees, we had calculated the cost of just shy of $12,000 a connection. On wastewater, we calculated charges as much as $30,000 a connection. The direction from the county commission at that point in time was to revisit the CIP needs and staff that's that. So Mr. Watson about a month ago contacted me and said that he'd like to put a comparison together of the current fees and a schedule as if the county's annual index provision had been passed on to these charges. So the county does have an annual index provision based on the Florida Public Service Commission index. Had we indexed the connection fees since 2012? Had we indexed the other developer charges since 2016? What would those fees look like? That is what you're seeing in the right hand column of both of those two slides. There are probably way below the current costs as Mr. Watson pointed out, your contract services on the LPS is 13,000 for charging 4,800. So I don't think the intent of the index comparison is to necessarily suggest that that's exactly what we should be charging. But I think from the perspective of staff, if Mr. Watson doesn't mind me saying it is, you know, the calculated cost was pretty significant. It may strategically we may not be able to move to that calculated cost in a short period of time. At a minimum, I think he wanted to show you what a comparison would look like had that index been moved forward. I think overall the purpose of this presentation and Mr. Watson has some other miscellaneous charges behind these couple slides is really to start the discussion again with the county commission. Again these charges haven't been discussed in this form for some time. Okay so it's the Public Service Commission Index. Yes, sir. There's an annual index that's published each year. It usually comes out around February or March. It's the same index that you use to adjust your monthly service rates. So for the upcoming year, for fiscal year 2026, as an example, that index is published at 2.23% for the upcoming year. Okay, but it doesn't reflect our actuals. It's just an index just for that demonstration purposes. It's an ability to keep the rates moving forward with some level of cost absent a formal study. Just a placeholder or something. Just to put something in there. Okay. Any further discussion on the actual connection fee presented? Commissioner Dordy? Then Constance. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think it's important that we set aside some time, some serious time to drill down on all this. It integrates into so many other facets of the financial picture for CCU relative to financing in the future. I think in a vacuum just looking at connection fees without looking at impacts, you know, rates and all that stuff. We need to have an comprehensive discussion. So I would ask the administration to think about that. Maybe we need an extra utility meeting fairly soon, exclusively on the financial side of this thing. I'm just throwing it out as a concept. But I'm not ready to date a really comment on any of this. So then I'm really nervous about us charging only $4,800 for LPS, and it's actually costing us 13 13,000 so we get to write that ship a little bit. We don't make that up with volume right? You gotta fix that so anyway. Contrary to popular belief. Commissioner Constance. Yeah thank you and those my comments were along those lines is we can't be subsidizing anything the cost is the cost I mean we can't make money but't, we're supposed to pass through what our cost is. And, you know, the last five years have changed the economic landscape, you know, with between outrageous amounts of inflation and building and construction within this sector because of all the awful money that's come down and all the different factors that have been very disruptive to the way we normally done business. So I agree I think we need a really deep dive meeting on a sort of a global picture of everything. With utilities. Yeah, with utilities because this, you know, I agree I can't, we can't be subsidizing the 13 and we can't be subsidizing almost $3,000 or whatever it is $2,000 on the water side. We've got to get this all correct. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There's a, in my opinion, a quick solution to the subsidy of the LPS system. And that's to turn it back to the private sector. We don't put in septic systems, we can turn it back to the private sector. We still need to have inspections, I'm sure, at a couple of points. But as far as I'm concerned, that is an avenue we can look at and look at what those costs are in comparison. So just a comment on that, you're going to hear more about that option in the mandatory connection discussion. I just think it's someone who should look at. Thank you. Mr. Flores. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm almost called you Commissioner Flores. I know. Yeah, I'm looking ahead and July 15th is our next quarterly meeting, but they've touched on I think we'll talk a little bit more about other fees on this agenda today, so we definitely wanted to get that feedback that we're hearing from the board. So I think we've got that slotted in, that definitely have more discussions just on overall fees and what the financial picture looks like. And we've talked even in our other workshops of really a comprehensive view at all countywide fees. Obviously this is one of our bigger ones and one that we've known that we want to continue discussions with the board on. So, thank you. Sure, Dordy. Yeah, I want an exclusive utility financial meeting, PSAP. I think July 15 might be our only opportunity, but I would certainly hope we could do it quicker than that. And I don't want to pull in all the other public work, CNA and CIP stuff. It's just exclusively what is it relates to rates and connection fees? That's my preference anyway. Commissioner Trux. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree. I think that when you look at this, finance committee meeting of the utilities is really how we need to look at this, because we're going to have to look at what our options are. We're going to hear an update today that'll help us for setting up that next meeting. But I believe that that's going to be extremely important for us to dial into, you know, and really focus on it. Yeah, I don't disagree with those with any of those comments. We know what we're up against with the utility right now and it's not gonna get any better. You know, the people bidding our projects are not looking at our fee schedule, right? So it's unsustainable the way it is. I would also ask that I know we usually get stakeholders involved in these meetings. You know, make sure the appropriate stakeholders are aware of the meeting, the discussions. I know they follow these meetings, but it's going to be important to get that feedback too. You know, we want to hear from those folks. Anything else on this item? Okay. He's got some other. We will move on to item number. He's got some miscellaneous fees. We have more slides. You got the other slide. So I just wanted to, the next couple of slides are our miscellaneous fees. Not associated with our connection fees, but these are other fees that the utility has that have again have not been updated since 2015, 2016. again, these are the existing fees, the calculated are the indexed and then the proposed fees. Some of them changed, some of them are staying the same. One thing that I wanted to bring to attention was the fire protection charges. So the utility currently charges fire protection on an annual basis, which is a pretty hefty bill. What we would propose would be going to a monthly bill for the fire suppression requirements and charges. These are commercial charges and breaking that out on a monthly basis opposed to a one-time annual fee. So just for board consideration, but what you're looking at are service connection costs, are additional costs, various things, road restoration, cut and capping vacuum pit installation. Vacuum pit service costs we currently don't have a fee for that. We have had one or two where we've extended the vacuum lines and put a new pit in, but we don't have an actual cost for that in our rates. Pre-treatment costs are our FOD program, which is part of our CMOM program required by DEP. Those are some additional fees that we are proposing. And then moving on, our septic fees. So we also serve all the septic haulers within the county. Those fees have not changed in over 10 years as well. Looking at the waste discharge fees, specifically the in county and out of county. We currently charge 8 cents and 10 cents per gallon for in county and out of county. Our proposal would go raise that. But all these other miscellaneous fees we take a look at to consider bringing up to more current cost. Mr. Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As far as your recommendation on fire protection charges, going to a monthly, I'm good with that. The only one that jumps right out here, of course, is still the LPS tank connection stuff. And it's interesting you show in the non-residential side that commercial, you know, their tax costs, but we're only charging the $45.50 for the residential. So again, that's next meeting that we're going to have. I think we can nail that down, but it's probably right now where I sit, I think actual cost should probably be in the residential side too. But let's wait till that meeting to see what makes sense when we see that more on the numbers. But other than that, everything else just reasonable. Commissioner Trex. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just for clarification, this says connection, tank connection. Does that include the tank? Because it's not how I read residential per-reach LPS tank connection. So the, during here, can you clarify? Because there's not an existing fee in the calculations 4550 and the new fee is 4550? So that to me is a new fee that we have aren't charging how I'm reading it, so please. Jeremy for us to the record. We currently do not charge for the tank itself So that is the connection fee not the tank. Yes, okay Any other comments You're conscious so who pays for the tank is that That's the 4800 The homeowners responsible for the tank itself. Okay. So they pay whatever the actual cost of the tank is, they pay that. So this is the actual connection from the main to the right of the way line. Right. Yeah, from the downside of the tank to the main is this connection that we're talking about. And these are for a new construction. Correct. That's the way we do the construction. They're only paying from us for these are again new construction only. What our crew does from the main to the right of the way line. And then the contractor whoever's building the house will have their plumber install the tank and do the connection at the right way. So they write the contract, it does the connection from the house to the tank and the tank to the right of way at the street. Yes. And you've provided for $45.50 the connection from the main line to the step down that they hook into. To the right way line where they connect connect the sidewalk or whatever that line that lower up that that thank you. So this cost does not cover mandatory connections that the utility would be doing in entirety. Right. Any other comments? clears mud. Okay. Need for a recept. Receptive. Every one of what it's. We'll move on to item number six, mandatory sewer connections. And Jeremy's going to take this one. Jeremy, just thought he was sitting back there. Again, Jeremy Frost, operations manager for utilities. You guys kind of took the wind out of my sales ready. You guys touched on a lot of this before, but we're still gonna, you know, broach the subject a little bit. So we wanted to come to the commission and talk to you about the mandatory connections that we have not. Just expand the screen, connect it. Oh, sorry. So. So the. Currently the mandatory connections have not been enforced since 2019 due to COVID. So we are currently sitting with a queue of 600 mandatory connections. That equates to almost 1800 man hours. So almost a little over four years, like closer to five years. So what we're trying to get a little direction from the board on kind of like Commissioner Trux touched on was have any ability to give the homeowners the chance to to own it and take care of it and have the installation done themselves instead of the county taking that on. And that will help expedite tremendously. But we don't have the manpower to complete it all on our own anyway. But right now we have 136 active loans and a total balance of 644,000 dollars out. So we do have the loan and it's in process, but we have not followed up with any of the 600 that are existing right now because of the COVID stature. So neighboring municipalities, they only provide services to the right away where we discussed earlier, we do it all right now. And it takes the better part of three days for just one house to get completed so That like I said that 600 is going to equal to about 1800 man hours and Looking for a little direction to for the future of the mandatory connections installation methodology and offering of the loans So we've kind of just wanted to approach the conversation a little bit Get it out there so that sit at it, sit in the back of your mind, and you kind of already on track with, you know, expressing the concerns of this is a lot of, it's a lot of money for us to be coming out of pocket for, where you're not anywhere near the costs of what it actually costs to install it. So we are losing money there. So like Commissioner Truerks had said, we need to start considering different options, possibly letting the homeowners own it. So, Mr. Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think it'd be helpful for folks watching, listening in just to make sure we clarify what a mandatory connection is. My understanding would be that we have a main that's running by a particular property and under state law they're required to connect Correct to our system. So the main's there. Yes, sir. Did we typically put a service to the to the right away line? We put the main in we don't because a lot of time depending. Yeah, we'll tap in at that point But we are getting into certain areas and a lot of you know the buildouts and some of the existing infrastructure for some of these houses are old. So that's why we have the 600 mandatory right now. But they are per state law requirement that's mandated to connect. So that's covered. These are mostly LPS, I'm assuming. Yes sir. Okay, so yeah, I think we need to get going with this thing as long as we get to the right of a line with the connection for the plumber. I'm all in favor of the property owners hiring their own plumbers and taking care of it. We don't need to be a bank and loan the money. I mean, that's a personal opinion, but it's not sustainable. I mean, we just can't keep doing that. So in my opinion, now we do it on the septic-disceur project, soup the nuts. We did that as a choice. But we're going back in on this. I think it's still, and I guess there's some interesting, we do hire contractors to do the plumbing on septic-disceur as well. So we just cover the cost. Yeah, I personally think it'd be better to get on with this thing, get out to the right away line, make sure they have a point of connection and then let the property owners give them plenty of notice. They have what a year, at least a year to affect the solution, but let them hire their own plumbers. Some of them have had five years. Right, they've had five years. So just a clarification to one of the things we'd like to do currently with the loan program, the homeowners would be required to put 10% down for the connection cost. And then they can actually finance 90% of the cost over generally about seven years. We'd like to bring some options back to the board because that finance and cost right now covers everything, you know, 100% of the installation. So bring back some options that the board can take a look at and consider. The loan program is through resolution. So we would have to do something from a resolution standpoint as well if we wanna change that. Okay, sir. Yeah, Mr. Chairman, yeah, I'm okay with deferring final until we have that special meeting obviously. We need to get down on all the details. But my preference right now is to get out of the plumbing business. Every home is going to be different. You know, when you think of landscaping, some service, some of the lines come out of the back of these homes. I mean, in the old homes, the septic systems are in the rear. It's a mess. So I think my preference would be to stick within the public right away. Thank you. Where's the loans, the funding for the loans coming from? Is that through a financial institution? It's through the utility. Oh, it's our own utility money. Okay, well that makes a big difference because you're talking about 600 mandatory connections. We don't know how many of those will opt for the loan. That's correct. And what would be our cap? What do we have in the, in, you know, to actually loan at this point? Do we have a million dollars, two million dollars? What's the set aside? I'm not 100% sure of the actual, what we have to offer. I know we're currently charging that 2% for our prime rate, but I don't know that we have a stop point for certain. Well, we probably need to know that, like, what's the capacity, the utility, even issue loans anymore? You know, because if we're going to offer it, is it first come first serve, and when do we say no, Moss? Well, that's one of the reasons we wanted to bring this up. We have an allocation, but we've never had an issue as far as having money available to finance it. But it's 600 if all 600 came in and wanted to do this. I mean, we've been in about a million dollar range historically. You know, and as Jeremy said, we have about 650,000 right now outstanding. but if 600 came in, we would be in the millions of dollars. And from a sustainability standpoint, that's really not practical. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I appreciate the discussion about this being mandatory by statute, and it's not a result of our septic dissuwork program. It's two different things we're talking about. One statutory, one is a policy decision that we have here, so we've offered affordability as part of the plan for our policy, but this is just a state requirement. One of the obligations for the utility, even offer loans. I don't know if other utilities do loans for mandatory connections. No, no. Yeah, so I mean, you know, it's worth a deeper dive and deeper discussion. I mean, I do though have sympathy when you look at the economy to offer people who may be your means tested. And that's probably because I sit on the cab, community action, agency and affordable housing. You know, do we have a means test where we do offer loans for those that are fiscally constrained, so to speak, and limit that, or do we even do it at all I'll just scrap the program because it's unique to Charlotte County Nobody else does it why are we even in the loan business? So yeah, that would be a good conversation to have that's yeah commissioning Consumption thank you so I'm trying to understand this did you say it takes three three hours or three days three days three days So you said 1800 man hours, that's 1800 man days. Three days. So you said 1800 man hours. That's 1800 man days. Man days. Yeah. Man days. No, I caught that too. I was, I was doing the math. I'm like, that doesn't sound very good. That's a big difference. That's why I put us to the... That went from 300, yeah, forget it. I mean, that's... So is this going to be, uh, we should already, I would say this should be a component of our our special finance meeting. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We really need to button this up, and I'm leaning toward dissolving this. I don't really think we should be in this business. I think we allow the homeowners to get their own private plumbing to make clear clear of this and then we just make sure we get it to the right of way line so they can hook up. Internally that's like everybody else and I'm wonderful that staff is giving us that as their recommendation because I think it sounds prudent. Thank you. Mr. Truex. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My comment is I agree to a point I think the hardship we need to look at and if we can take it maybe off our plate but find an avenue in the private sector that might be able to assist people that have a hardship on financing and then as a last resort have us talk about what that looks like if we need to take that on. I'd rather not get into that business and I know that there's avenues in the private sector to do that. I don't know what those look like right now. I just don't. And so, you know, we can talk about, you know, what those options are at the next finance point. I think it'd be something good to look at. And, you know, we can get with human services, I think we may have programs already in place for utilities that may be able to help. I know it's to pay utility bills. I'm not sure if it's for hookups, but you know, there's that kind of money I don't think, sir. Yeah, but there's programs out there that's probably worth a look that if we can offer it through human services department through some application process, We probably need to look into that Commissioner Dory. Yeah, I'm not opposed at all to looking at the affordability component and to see if people with hardships need some kind of assistance if we can try to figure that out. Again, if there's a private sector solution to that, that'd be my preference as well. But I'm OK in that special meeting that we kick that all around. Thank you. Any other comments on this item? Okay, we're going to move on to item number seven, US 17 development, development, yes, who worked modeling. Thanks for following up, Dave. Good morning, Mr. Chair. And commissioners, Tom Friedrich from Jones Emons and senior consultant there. I like today to talk about, well that better, talk about this Central States water resources, you have 17 development. This was a sewer modeling study that you that the authorizes us to do and look at the impacts to your facilities. So with that, let's see, get to the next one. So really we're going to talk about some of the questions you had, the phases that are involved, number of parcels, the flow, also the modeling evaluation we did, what we found, And then what we also, what we recommended, and then the effect of that development on the 9MG expansion, it's currently going on at East Port. That expansion is slated to be finished at the end of 26, so we'll talk about that as well. Really looking at this quickly, it's two phases. So phase one is the orange phase. It's basically about 5,000 homes. It's about 800,000 gallons. We would say 0.8 MGD. And that's the first phase that they want to build. And then the second phase is about 2,350 homes. And that's about 376,000 point, just under 0.4 MGD. So altogether, the flow from this development would be about 1.1 A or 1.2 MGD. So it's total of 73, just about 7400 homes. And it's all on the east side of the county, as you all know, the basic rule of section of county. And what they're proposing is to then, well, really connect over, and I'll show you that in a minute. When we do these sewer models, what we look at is not only the average daily flow, that's what we size, the plants are always size an average daily flow. So right now, Eastport 6MGD, annual average daily flow. We're expanding it to nine. But we also look, you know, we size certain things in the plant for peak hourly flow, hydraulics and load. And when we do sewer models, we do something similar, a little bit different factor. So again, we're looking at the peak day and a peak hour flow that we have to handle through your system. When you look at this US 17 development, It's on the east side. It's got a crossover. It's the piece, peace river to get here. So basically the purple red line is coming across the peace river, the yellow line. That's all new infrastructure that would be built. And then on the west side, where east port is, you see the blue sewer. That's where they proposed to connect into. So that was the initial modeling that we did for the county and that area over there. We looked at the impact of lift stations and it was pretty significant on your lift stations, but also on their own because what happens is because of the pressure, it would require quite a large lift station on their side, much higher pressure than you really would normally want to operate these things that too. So we didn't recommend that at connection point at all. So we looked at another spot. So you can see on this, on these, there's two options here. But when you look at these lift stations that are shown from, you know, on either one, 322, all the way down to 302, those are your lift stations there, in that area. And that's where originally're originally connecting in over there. And so, but that had too many impacts to those lift stations to manholes, and again, pressure on their sides. So, what we looked at doing is taking the 16 inch line down and actually coming across or option one, we're actually tying it in, crossing over 98, and then basically tying it into east port. Facilities ports got a 48-inch interceptor that was designed and tying it in there. That's one option and that worked fine and there's no impacts obviously to your facilities. And the second option was on the east side of I-75, the Hampton Roads apartment there's a 24-inch there that goes in and goes into the 48. So again that worked well. So if this was going to be considered at all we recommend that that that force main that's going to be constructed connected at that that that location. Mission Dordy. Oh yes you're done. Yes. Oh you wrap up. Okay I got one more. I guess one more. Last so you guys asked okay okay, what would be our impact in the East Port? So if you look at this graph, you see the dotted line, the lower line is the flows projected now, and so when East Port is expanded from six to nine, we really don't see any, you don't exceed capacity if it's everything grows at the rate we think it will till after 2045. Now looking at this facility, if they said go today, we're projected to be at least five years before you'd see any flow because it's a big project. You've got across the piece of it, a lot of permeate, a lot of environmental work. Then there's the build homes and stuff. So then the blue line is, if it would take 15 years before phase one would be completed. And you see then it does have some impacts that he's poor. You start to, you exceed, we project, he's poor nine MGD right around 2043, somewhere in there. And then when you plan these things, you always have to look five years back because you gotta do the permitting now for 12 MGD expansion and all that. So you'd start doing that work in 2038. And if it was faster than I have it built out at phase one only, built out in 10 years, then you'd see an impact sooner. That's what you're really seeing in this graph. More like 2040. So cuts the time a little bit. With that, I can take questions. Mr. Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah. Basically good planning document. It it looks like the option to obviously for a lot of different reasons. You know, messing with deep grief. Correct. Yeah. Really. Yeah. And plus all the road work. All all all kinds of adverse impacts going with option one. So option two does make sense. Again, a good planning document. I would go back to your map, though, at least the previous slide, slide five. Is that here? Yeah, the service area, my only concern is, is that the service area really doesn't include all of the potential properties that can be in this area that needs to get to the west under the river. Once you build sewer and build that. We're going to see other people not going to, I mean, I just, I'll throw out Ridge Harbor as this is an example. Who knows in 30 years, right? What's going to happen? You see this in more detail in this one side, but I don't know. I think we really need to revisit this model from the standpoint of what the potential service area all along 17 should be. I think it gets larger. Of course, it's way out, way way out. The risk we have is putting in a force main underneath the river that's too large where you can't get your velocities for 20 years. So that becomes a real operational problem. But I don't think you want to go under the river again. So I think it makes sense to look at that pipe size. You got a 24 now that works. It's just actually a 16. So yeah, but you can make the the twig. Oh, yeah, you can. The 24 would work. It could work, yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That might give us sufficient the velocity's might not get high enough that it could help actually handle this. I just don't know. You know, if you look at a floor as a whole and look at over a Disney area, here's a Poincyan area. Yeah. working over there, there was nothing. It was Disney and no homes. And the points had to put a 24 inch horse being in there. Here's a Poincyan area. When I started working over there, there was nothing. There was Disney and no homes. And the points had a put a 24 inch horse being in there. And people thought they were crazy. And it's fine now. It was worked. There was no homes, but as they built more and more homes, the flushing glass, he's increased. It might be a little more maintenance for you. You got a plan for I super-sacred. But I just need to be confirmed, in my opinion, to make sure that the whole service area that could potentially need to go west, not talking about plan expansions, that's obviously going to have to happen too, but make sure that the plumbing, so to speak, under the peace river is adequate and can be manageable for the next 40, 50 years. The days got a good comedy now. So one of the things in the discussions overall with the other engineers and with the potential developers, our discussions have been Charlotte County would not take ownership of this line until it was on the west side of the river. So from the west side of the river on would ultimately become our force main, but everything under the river and on the east side of the river. So from the west side of the river on, would ultimately become our force main, but everything under the river and on the east side is a different service area. It still has to work. Oh, it still has to work, yes. But from an ownership standpoint, it's just a point of point. I appreciate the comment, Mr. Chairman, but I mean still, I mean, who would be the entity? You know, take care of it. We don't know. Currently, these central states, Central states. Yeah, right. If they stay, um, they're. I'll be honest, well, we looked at this and we evaluate it. We assume, though, that you guys might own it someday. With the way we size things, because you know how that goes. It's not a bad assumption. Yeah. It's good. Because that happens. People, utilities utilities take over. So when we size everything, we made a recommendation, we did to your standards for the pump stations and that. That is appreciated. Thank you. And also, that's a rural area right now that really was not in our master planning. You know, that holds east side over there for this kind of work. So that's one other thing. Like you said, we should really define what that what that's going to be. The whole service here. Yeah. What is it really big? I think I'm going to do too. Because that really because once you do build something right, you're going to come. Mr. Johnson. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I couldn't agree more with Commissioner Dorordes' comments. And then I got to highlight the fact that those prediction lines that you're showing us is just phase one. You're not even taking into consideration phase two. And just because phase one, it's numbered one and two, it doesn't mean phase two isn't going to happen before phase one. So all of a sudden you could have phase one and phase two, so can you show me what that line looks like? Sure. Yeah, you could. Okay, and then all of a sudden we're in trouble a lot earlier. So now we've got a program in with all of this infrastructure that's going to get put in the ground, big chunks of money that have to get paid to the utility in advance of having to go from 9-NGD up to 12 or whatever that number is. Because all of this has to be calculated and charged. Right. The discussion of rates and everything just ahead is real. I mean, you know, where this is a kind of a new day because we're growing so fast, we're not we're not going to be financing on the backs at least this commission is not going to allow financing on the backs of current rate payers for all of this big juicy expansion and money that's being made by these monster developers so I want to see how they're paying their fair share and I want to see those charts showing you know you're right it's going to take a while permitting and construction and all that. But the next phase of wildfire growth here in 10 or 15 years, whoever sitting up here is going to be panicking because we didn't get the rate structures. Correct. So yeah, we can show that. Thank you. 10 or 15 years, did you forget the Metro forecasting commissioner Truex? Yeah. No, no. I knew I should have punched my button sooner. To your point though because I was going the same direction phase two could happen before phase one because there's already houses there so that's what I was going to ask. Why do we have phase one and phase two the way they are was that just arbitrarily selected? I know I've chosen by the developer but to your point, yeah they dance. That's right. Chosen by the developer. Right, yeah. They want to make sure they're well I can see the backbone getting put in. Yeah. As far as their fees and all that's concerned if this is going to be owned by central states, we just need to have our fee calculated for what we're going to maintain and what we're We're going to charge them, and we don't really care about the rest of it until we own it. Until we own it. And I was just good at it. So I'm leading to that point because we all know that the likelihood of that is pretty heavy unless they can right size their fees to bail them out. I mean, let's lay the cards on the table. And I don't know what that looks like, but we have to be very careful about how we move forward on this. Knowing that we're gonna own to the like rivers edge, I'll use that terminology and everything else is gonna be theirs. I have a little bit less concern, but I know that our capacity's gonna be immediately affected. And I have to look at this as phase two and phase one coming on simultaneously. Because those are rate payers sitting there, ready to rip and ready to go. So I can just see that happening a lot faster than we think. It's a good comment. Yeah. Yeah, you all both stole my thunder, too, was all about the money who's paying the what. There's another utility involved here. Yeah. And I want, you know, I remember there's some legislation that's being proposed now. And I think it's for water. Maybe it's some legislation that's being proposed now. And I think it's for water. Maybe it's not wastewater that we cannot we have to charge every customer even both great. We can't arbitrarily just charge different rates to different people. It's got to be the same. You know, what we I believe that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it applies to wastewater too. I'm not sure if it's water and wastewater I please tell you and that's critical because I'm going to need to see a schedule of cost who's paying what how is you how are we going to get paid in bulk rate for processing water from a different utility? You know who's paying for the line is there's some proportionate share where They only need this but we're upsizing it for that So I'm'm gonna need to know all of those moving parts in a clear schedule that I can look at and start seeing, are we charging the appropriate fee, which is what was brought up by the other commissioners? Because right now I don't have a clear picture on who's paying what. I have a concept here of how to get sewer treatment to those people, but the money part is still very nebulous. Good planning document. Good planning document. Go ahead, go ahead. Sorry, Tom. Just go a little bit further on that. I want you to think about this too before you comment is that if we're going to have to add 3 million gallon capacity, then that needs to be paid for because we know that this is going to create that. So make sure all these things things are put into effect to get the fee schedule together on the front end to pay for that. Sorry. I think you could also consider if you're taking a sewer you should provide them water. Why wouldn't you? I would look at that. Why wouldn't you provide them water? Do you mean water makes money? Sewer doesn't make money. I think the Soto County is looking at that through there. I understand, but if you're going to take it, you've got the stumbliest to shit to consider. Dave, Dave might be stepping on the table. He's like cutting me off. In discussion on the water, I guess, the Soto at this point is looking to go that route. However, with our discussions right now with Babcock Ranch, having the ability to look at this as a planning document and potentially future serve this in some way that actually helps us with our application on the Babcock Ranch allocation. So just keeping that in mind, there's no commitment from us on the Wooder side, but it may be a benefit down the road for consideration. Commissioner Trex. I was just going to say in addition to that, even if they go with the Soto County on the water, they're going to need redundancy at some point too. So there still might be an interconnect that needs to be looked at from the water side. Oh, that's right. All right. Any more comments on this item? No sir. Okay. Thank you for that presentation. We're going to move on to item number eight, septic to sewer sewer affordability. Thank you. All right, this is a follow-up from Tom Friedrich, Jones Emmons, senior consultant. This is a follow-up from our sewer master plan and affordability discussion. I'm just gonna answer some questions. You guys asked, just go through the index again, affordability, the medium income, and do some conclusions. So this is the affordability that was proposed, talked about in the sewer master plan. It's basically using that four and a half percent and as discussed, where does that come from? And then there's, basically there's data out there. We took the US EPA study that was done in 24 and presented actually recently in 25, but that did a national nationwide study. I can provide that to the commission too and to everyone if they want to see it. But it's basically nationwide and looked at that. And those are the numbers that we're coming out, but if you look at other areas too, it's in that three to four percent, four and a half percent range, if you look at other data. So when you look at that, then that's the total affordability water answer where the sewer component is two and a half percent. And then we looked at, for here, for Charlotte County, US Census for 2023 is what we had. Then so we, the medium household income was $66,145. So, when you do the math there, that's that times 2.5%. It's really that $1,650, $54, right? For affordability for a sewer. So, when you do that, the average sewer bill is 808, that's where the 840 came out a year for S2S assessment. When we're doing subject to sewer. Any questions on that slide there? Not yet. We can go back, obviously, later. Yeah, later. So again, I kind of put put still this under here already. This is really what we got, got some of the data. I can send the board the more recent PowerPoint study, some of the stuff that they were looking at too. But again, it's nationwide, they look at that. Commission, Adority, do you just want to wait until we start? Oh, wait, okay, thank you, sir. So here, we're looking at really this is probably what you're interested too and so you're looking at when you're looking at this slide we're looking at the median household income four and if you look here it'll go back and forth these are the census tracks we're looking at where they're septic and so we're we oops sorry commission adorate real quick commission adorate Got in the queue. I don't know. Did you want to wait? Did you have a question? I'm just gonna comment on those numbers. The numbers use are great, but they're already out of date Yeah, you know reality they are. I mean affordability. I think it's it's a good count It's a good question rates all those things are really a big topic for discussion That that excluded two years three years of pretty serious inflation to get us live. I mean your costs are going up to maintain stuff two and everything so, agreed. So really what you're looking at. The fed numbers are always behind. We know that with population that 10 years behind most of the time. So there's just- Just showing our median, you know, the media for the county, for these census tracts, it's really showing the median household income there. We have the mean in there as well, but obviously the mean skewed by, you know, some, you know, more hiring of brackets. So we're using the median. And so when you look at that across the, it's showing you, you know, where the supportability falls in across the, across the line. And as you guys talked about, I mean, if you look there, there's one, there's two winter garden there, they're below. And as I think Commissioner Dory mentioned, there's hardship programs too available from both the federal program now and stuff, so that we really have some people who will know that's one thing you got to look at, consider. Any questions on this slide? Everyone just do it at the end. And when you get down? Yeah, and then really this is, again this is really relate to that. It's all that. It's all that. It's up to the sewer areas, the priority. Obviously the red being the five-year, 10 to 15. And then just those census tracks we just showed. And then lastly, you know, we, so the basic, this is our methodology that we looked at here, you know, for affordability. And so we'll just receive some questions. Commissioner Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, I appreciate the update. I appreciate you going back and looking at our questions from the previous discussion. Now the analysis from Stratus uses the median, right? The median household income. So I think median, median. So I mean, the blue lines are interesting, but there are means, there are averages. And the orange line, I guess orange, if my color blind isn't off, but orange is really the numbers that I was expecting kind of to see that these particular neighborhoods are not affluent. I mean they're struggling, they're at or below the county wide, which is what I was guessing. I didn't know, but I was guessing. So, you know, I look at this, and again, this type of an analysis that is done by a consultant for a national average type thing, you know, it makes sense, I'm sure in some geographical areas, it works. What I brought up in the last discussion was, do they factor in neighborhoods that have gone through several natural disasters in two years? Right. And the impact that these particular properties that aren't even reflected in this are suffering from repairing their homes, trying to get back into their homes or their businesses, and the outrageous insurance premiums that are happened to everybody here in this region. I mean, that's not, none of that's factors. It doesn't, it doesn't factor in. So is it just a pure isolated engineering analysis, it makes sense to me, but it does holistically, I think we, I think we need to stick with what we've been doing, gentlemen. The numbers need to be in that order of magnitude. We start off at what, 550 hectare per year. And now we're up to 575 on the annual assessment. Is that roughly right? Anybody know? I'm showing a number here, too. Any head nods? I don't really have that. On our 72-seater program? Yeah, I see. 575. I thought it was right. And that we're talking about close to 600, I think. But this is as we're calculating around six, though. It's not substantially higher than what we've been at, but just pushing the payment, the emurization out, to well within the life expectancy of the improvement. Right? 35, 40 years. Stretched it out. Yeah, so that is that's still where I am. I think that we have to make it annually affordable, factoring all these other things. Hopefully we don't get stuck with any more problems with insurance, it makes it even worse. But I think we have to be sensitive of that. I do truly appreciate this though. This gives us a great backup to what we we're doing but I can't I can't move ahead with it's not enough information in this kind of analysis to look at the true household picture in my opinion. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Consonz. Thank you. Mr. Chair but part I mean this is a this is affordability but you know I still need to see the denominator I know we're talking about 575 annually or pushed out to serve you maybe is high 600 but pushing out the window but again the cost is the cost and are we we have to keep looking at what that cost is and we have to keep looking at I mean true cost or indexing indexing, but whatever that, you know, we have to have a policy in place because every time we do the next project, I think what are we up to now? 17, 5 or, you know, we're going to be hitting 20 pretty soon. Right. Yeah, maybe we can get regard for our peers just to give us three. Rick are their fiscal services 575 is current we haven't actually adjusted the resolution. We're going to you know bring that back for accurate and I think the last time we showed you was extending at 10 years and there was also some additional costs on the latest contracts that came back and I think we're in like the 635 range over 30 years. Okay and this one is ready to quit. for the total amount? You know, I'm putting on the spot. I apologize, but are we hitting 20,000 or 19,000? 19,000 or 19,000? So close. You know, and that's that's probably that's the I mean, that isn't even close to what it is go North, go south and they're in the thirties on most in a lot of places. So, you know, I think that type of sticker shop has to be continually represented and trumpet it out there because, you know, folks have to, you know, the cost is the cost. We're not, to add any flow for icing or anything to the cake. This is what it's costing and we just it's a pass through. And part of it might be exactly what we talked about is those connections from the right of way to the house and those types of things where we get out of that business may help us because that'll take some of that off our plate. But, you know, all of this has to be properly calculated and then communicated. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well, the sewer master plan, though, talks about affordability and that's where we're at. You know, that's why we have in this conversation. Commissioner Trux. Oh, I keep it longer. Oh, I got you. Hey, thank you. So, I agree with Commissioner Consance comments and the fact is is that we're going to continue to see rising costs. So my comment on the side was we're almost up to 20 headed to 25. You know we have to look at when we do the resolution to allow it. We talked about Tuesday MSBU rates. We have to allow for the ability to raise those to accommodate as we move forward because you get to the Inglewood East section and we're not going to be at 20,000. So we need to be able unless we do a separate resolution and that'll be according to our legal team. But we've got to be mentally prepared for how do we adjust these up and prepare. And if we're going to use 30 years, yeah, we can take 25 and divide it into 30 years and come up with a number. And that's fine. But we have to be prepared for that, and we have to have that conversation to be transparent to the community. This isn't going to stay at 635. It's going to keep moving up unfortunately, it's the nature of the beast. But if we'd kept on track in the 90s, we wouldn't be dealing with it at these big numbers. We were talking 3,500 back in the 90s. And we didn't address it. We put it all on the shelf after millions spent. So I don't want to put this time and effort into this and not keep moving forward. It's going to continue to be painful, but it's going to continue to be a need for the community to move forward in the right direction. Thank you, sir. Commissioner Duets. Yeah, we've been circling the wagons, but we're all pretty much in the same direction. Utility prices are shooting high. We know that. We're committed. We have a commitment to a subject to sewer program, which I talked about for years and Commissioner Trox just said that we started it late. We're committed. We have a commitment to a septic to sewer program, which you know I talked about for years and Commissioner Truex just said it we started it late, but we were at so we have to deal with it What I want to know is what commitment and policy do we have established for New portable water being delivered throughout the county and and what commitment have we made for delivering new sewer lines throughout the county? I don't think we've defined that. And that's the big question. What do you want to do in the future about that? What do we just want to focus on maintaining what we have, having people hook up to that that are close and are able to do it and follow through on a septic to sewer. I think that's the big picture we're supposed to deal with. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Commissioner Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, I just want to kind of clarify what I was saying. I think that the, I don't disagree that whatever the cost is, we've got to try to transfer that to the property. There's no question. what I'm trying to communicate is that the annual assessment I think needs to stay as close to what we've been trying to do as we can. And then push out the payback as far as we can do, the useful life of the improvement. It goes with the property. So, you know, unlikely that the same homeowner or property owner is going to continue, pay off this, that loan. But again, I'm not uncomfortable with going to 40 years. You know, the materials today, the equipment, everything else, I think we had Jonathan Cole provide testimony from Giffel's Webster as to, I believe he came in and said, oh, this stuff may last 100 years. So, quite honestly, we're okay. It's just a matter of making sure that annual payment is as tight as we can make it. But again, making sure that that property commissioners is paying for its improvement. And it just pushed the payment deadline out as far as we can realistically push it to be reasonable. But I'm okay with 40 years, quite honestly. So I don't know what those numbers are quite to, but I think we get closer to what the really the numbers need to be. Thank you, sir. Yeah, I mean, the subsidies are big. I mean, that's what's helping us keep it so called affordable. Quote, unquote, affordable, whatever that definition is, I wasn't a commissioner when this was started, but right after I got elected, it was getting put in place. I was at the transition period. And I remember going to those meetings and we told the public an element of this process would be affordability. That was the policy decision. So to me, that's never going away. Unless we tell the public we're now changing our policy and affordability is no longer a component of it, and this is how we're going to charge you. So that element, again, for me is going to stay in there. And it gets down to how are we defining affordability? Is it objective or subjective? Now, for affordable housing, for instance, HUD puts out what affordability is based on our median income in the area. They put out the schedule it's updated. That's been adopted as affordability. And then there's percentage of 30, 50, 60% AMI, right? So that's kind of a standard. With this, it's a little bit more, you know, nebulous vague and subjective. As instance, we had a speaker today, Mrs. Angelo came up, she sent us an email, and she also talked about other ways, looking at affordability. One of the comments she made was, did we take into account the cost of unit per pollution control? I don't know anything about that methodology. So does it exist? Apparently the EPA calculates and balances the need for control and its review of potential control technologies which it considers a regulatory for regulatory mandate. So, you know, I'm looking at these emails and I'm saying, you know, I'm not an expert in affordability for sewer, but are there other ways that people are looking at affordability taking into account those things? I don't know. I don't know if you're familiar with that. You've heard the comments. Sceptic tanks, either than a septic tank. It's a great rule. I really do three acre lot, it works. But when you start putting densities in, you've got to change that analysis then for different scenarios, age. So that's not an easy, simple math problem. Yeah. I don't know how all that works. She asked, pointed out, but at the same time, that's not that simple. So we can address that in another being, we can talk that out further. Yeah, I mean, but for us affordability is always been the subsidy. So either we have to continue to pound for grants and other money to subsidize is to keep it in that range that we've talked about. You know, is it going to go to $1,000 a year? You know, is that affordable? Well, I'll tell you what, for a lot of people that may double their tax bill. You know, especially people on fixed incomes. I have an issue with that. I have Mr. Flores and the Q. Then Commissioner Truex. Thank you. You touched on a couple thoughts that I had. I was thinking back to the whole program, you know, our first one out of the gate, East West, Spring Lake, and the financial conditions have been favorable, favorable to the county, to the homeowners. I think East West Spring Lake was 10,000, the assessment level. Second one was El Jabeen, that was 11.5, you know, obviously, the cost crept up, but you always wanted to keep that balance of affordability. I always call those buckets whether it's SRF funding, you mentioned grants. Our legislative asks those buckets are tightening, so those are the added pressures. What's left is our fees and the assessments that the homeowners pay. So I'm hearing what I need here for discussion at least to bring back when we have our next meeting so I appreciate that. Thank you. Appreciate your ex. Thank you Mr. Chairman. I think Ms. Angelou brings up a good point when you look at trying to calculate the cost per ton if you will or pound. I wouldn't put in focus. But the point is is that we have rising waters. And rising waters means less separation between the drain field and the water table. And that's been happening for years. And putting in a septic drain field at two feet separation is the minimum requirement when they suggest five feet should be the separation. That's 64E if you want to look it up. But I think we have to take a look at all of it. And when it talk about affordability, its relationship as to what the average or median income is. However, we want to look at that based upon what our costs are. So we need to look at where we were to where we are to where we're going. And then we try to, you need to try to be as fair as we can and continue to try to get SRS funds or any other grants that we can get. federal state would have you to bring these costs down over time. I don't think we're ever going to stop fighting for that. Congressman Stubi has been very good in assisting with us in these programs. Unfortunately there's always changes in DC budgets ability to put line items in requests that type of thing. This is going to be a moving target, and it's never going to be scientifically accurate. We're going to have some subjectivity in the process, and I don't see any other way, unfortunately. It'd be great to have a formula out there and say, hey, Murray, create a formula for us, and Murray could do that. But then we're going to say, yeah, but what about this? And oh, this area is a lower income area than that area. There's going to be a lot of things that are brought into the formula. The pot's going to get stirred and we're going to come up with something each and every time we have a project. So we need guidance, we need certainty, but we also know that one area to another area is going to affect a lot of decision making, El Joubine, for example. El Joubine is a low income area. Glad we got it on board when we did, because man, $20,000 per ERC down there, that's hard for them, especially when you're talking about a mobile home unit that's been there for 40 years that they're living Very restricted in comp so All these comments are really important and I think everyone who's gonna have to be evaluated each and every time we come to the table That's all thank you. Yeah, thank you sir any other comments on this item. Yeah, okay. We're gonna move to Sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't see you in the queue. No, I know you're not in the queue Okay, go ahead sir. Oh now you can talk. Alright, come here. Thank you just kidding. You have to, sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't see you in the queue. No, I didn't. You're not in the queue. Okay, go ahead, sir. All right, now you can talk. All right, go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's a push to the actual talk. You can't talk unless you're in the queue. All right. You're recognized. Thank you. I was searching and March 6, 2024, City of Cape Coral did a water and sewer capital expansion fee study and it was very interesting and and the short of it is their per equivalent residential connection. This is up to 23 from 2020, 2009 to 2010, went up 60%. Now it's probably up to 85% just connection fees. So we didn't track that at all. There's something else in here with regard to implementation of increasing expansion fees. They're thinking that's part of the Florida Impact Fee Act. So I need guidance on that from you guys because do we have to consider that if we're going to be doing fees because of expansion? I don't't know if you can see it. Yeah, I mean, that's there. They're considering that. Anyway, I would ask administration and utilities to please look at that March 6, 2024, because the stand-tech seems to have done a pretty good job of looking at their fee structure. And then when they're looking at their expansion and sewer, they actually have a district one and a district two. So they've actually segregated parts of their delivery areas to different fee structures. So maybe that's something we've got to look into, especially in light of the fact that we're looking at the expansion 17. Maybe it's not a holistic approach. Maybe we can make a case for, hey, zone C is now a totally different animal. And this is the fee structure you're going to be paying on. And the increases are going to, but that looks to their expansion in the future and the future needs. So when the expansion in Eastport has to happen, that sector is going to pay for that. And those folks alone will pay for that. That makes a lot more sense to me than everybody who's been having sewer in mid-county forever has to be because they've got one diagram here where they have the how costs are done and it's a circle. Customer affordability, projected rates, then the amount that they're going to need and then then the fourth piece of the puzzle, growth subsidized by existing rate payers. No thank you. That's not part of this. So we've got to figure out what that wheel looks like for the each new district that's coming online, and that may help us solve the problem. Thank you. Good stretch. Thank you. And to your point, we have the perfect opportunity with the 17-quarter conversation, because it is a completely different animal. Not going to be our area, but yet we're going to treat it. So this is something that we have to make sure, because the expansion that's going to be required by that area needs to be on those right pairs. So I agree 1,000 percent, sir. 1,000 percent. Any other comments on this item? Okay, we're gonna move back. Thank you. Thank you Thank you Yeah, I'm gonna put yeah, you're gonna take the deliberator you want to take the seat Okay, yeah, go ahead grab it Yeah, you want the gavel keep these guys in order Okay, all right. Well that's gonna bring us back to item number one then Two and three those are the three remaining. Thank you sir. Thank you. Mr. See you later. Drive safe I can't hear you. It's a charger for you. It should be good. You think that's going to die? You think that's going to die? You think that's going to be fun? They told me to come in. I know for you. Go ahead and take care of it. He's following orders. We're going to go the old- way too. Yeah. Hey, I got it. We don't want to return there, right? We could do a fashion. Perfect. Well, that's it. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, we're just getting warmed up. So you might want to keep that to a little greater hand. Is that working? Yeah, we're fine. Nope, I don't see you. Doesn't work. There you go. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for the test. Thank you. Great. Good morning commissioners, regards to our fiscal services. We're here. Today we got the model update from Ref Tell us. Of course we do this once a year where we can really come through the utility and take a look at its finances and and project where we're going to over the next few years. And I want to thank all of fiscal staff and the utility they've been working very hard on this since really right at the beginning of the year to bring this back today. So we've got Murray here today to go through this with you. A couple things I want to mention, the connection fees that you saw today and the miscellaneous fees, those kind of things that Dave talked about, those have not been included in this, this is just including our current rate structures. So possibly when we've been listening to all the comments that you guys have been making, possibly for next meeting. If we take a deep dive into the finances, we can maybe model some scenarios based around kind of some of the things that you saw today. All right. All right, so we have Murray Hampton here from Ruff Tiles. And I'm gonna hand it off to him to take you through the model. Mr. Chair, commissioners. Again, for a Mr. Chair, commissioners, again for the record, my name is Murray Hamilton, Vice President Rafftales. We're a utility rate and financial consulting firm and we provide the annual update to the revenue sufficiency for the utility system. Also Diana Ling is still an important key team member on our projects. She just couldn't join me here today. In regards to the update of the financial plan, on our first slide here probably the most critical takeaway is we're preparing a 10-year financial forecast predicated on the proposed 26 and 27 budget cycles. So we've got the biennial budget cycle that's incorporated in here. While we have a 10 year forecast out through 2035, we're providing some emphasis on the first five years. Obviously our next jump off point is fiscal year 2026 in the past, the county commission has put in place the annual index, that's the Florida Public Service Commission, that index that I spoke to earlier this morning. The published index for 2026 is currently 2.23%. You know the index as we talked about is really just an intentional mechanism to move the rates forward to try and keep pace with some level of our costs. Absent of formal rate study and formal rate hearing process. And while inflation is an important factor in our financial forecast, I would probably assert to you that your primary cost driver deals with your capital needs, as well as debt service payments. And so as an example, Charlotte counties would participate in the Peace River Regional Expansion. They're planning to issue bonds in order to help facilitate that. And we're going to have a dedicated payment stream in order to help facilitate that. So one of the recommendations that we're making here is for the commission to consider a minimum adjustment of not less than 2.5%. And that's pretty important. Now, when we look at the Florida Public Service Commission Index, nine out of the last 12 years, the index has been below 2.5%. And seven of those years, it was below 2%. So it's really only been the last couple years that we've seen in the index that has been greater than 2.5%. And why that's important is, is if we under perform on the index and we're using the index to try and help adjust rates uniformly we're not going to meet those bond payments or I shouldn't say we're not going to meet them. We're going to be at risk of underperforming relative to our plan. So that is one of the recommendations we're making. Yes, Commissioner. Commissioner, go ahead. Thank you. So what you're you're basically saying is you don't want us to be adjusting to a trailing indicator. That's right. That if that if if it's heading down, then you know, we're safe. But if it's heading up, you're you're saying be a little bit preemptive because you're pretty sure the following year it's It's not going to be 2.23, it's going to be 2.6. And now we're behind the April, because we we're under charging in a rears kind of. You do and of course you always have home rule so you could elect to do something different but again we think a floor is appropriate especially when it's not just the operating budget that is driving the need for rate adjustments it's heavily on the capital side. Thank you. Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, I like maintaining the 25 index at 3.25 or 3.24 personally. I think that we're going to have to be right sizing this as we move forward and it wouldn't be easier to maintain kind of like the increase that we had last year and look as we move forward it's going to be less painful to make some of these jumps. So for me I always like to budget and I would look at maintaining the index of 3.24 from 2025 for next year and then moving forward we can adjust accordingly. Okay. I'll put myself on the queue here. Yeah, I think that's, I think I'm good with that too. I think that that's currently the index. Well, it's right now the published index is 2.23. Yeah, but, but certainly we could look at those alternatives. Yeah, let's look at that at the next meeting. You know, this drill down on that a little bit more, but I'm leaning towards that, too, to provide a cushion. Right. I'll save you some. So. at the next meeting, you know, this drilled down on that a little bit more, but I'm leaning towards that too to provide a cushion. Right. So I'm trying to understand. So you said it hasn't been above the 2.23, but it was 3.24, so was it up and then it came down? That's correct. That's correct, Commissioner. The last three years it was slightly above 2.5% and it has come down. And who knows where it's going to be in 2027. Again, now what we put together for y'all today for this particular meeting is- So it assumes the 2.5. It assumes the 2.5. Well, so what we did, because the commission has not made a decision. Profisco year 2026, the results that you're going to see today are modeled off of the 2.23. That's the published index. So I didn't want to come to you with the results that kind of ties your hands. Right. Now, the Ford index approach that we've used is a minimum of 2.5% starting in 2027. And so we've used that minimum floor in order to prepare our projections. Up to this point, we've got our base case, which fully funds all the active and committed projects. That was a discussion that came out of our meetings last year. And I know that you all had those discussions throughout this entire fiscal year leading up to to today about the, making sure we fund the active and committed projects. We also have in that base case the estimated purchase water costs through Peace River. It does account for all of the facility expansion costs and those bond issuing payments through Peace River. And then lastly, county staff have recommended the addition of 12 new personnel in order to help to continue to maintain our current levels of service. Now beyond our base case we've run some scenarios for today. Three of the cases that we're going to look like are totally reflective of this index approach to 0.23% in 2026 and a minimum adjustment to 1.5%. We ran a final case that said of the total program needs that the utility needs to fund. What type of rate adjustment would it take in order to fully fund that type of project? So we've got a number of different cases that we're gonna look at. Some will consider some additional staffing positions to address the needs to serve new customers of the utility system. Again, we looked at what I'll refer to as a capital capacity analysis under the index approach. How much capital can we afford over our 10 year forecast period? And then lastly, that estimated rate adjustment to fully fund the program. Murray, a question, I guess on the base case, I just want to clarification, active and committed CIP, does that include Bernstor? Yes, sir. The new water reclamation facility that will be going out for an RFP. That's right. We have an estimated, you know, probably in the tune of $100 million or something of that nature. Not the band-aid I call it that's going in right now, but do we have the actual larger plant figured into these numbers? What I would suggest to you, Mr. Chair, is that the first band-aid that's about $41 million, that's represented in the base case. The second phase, the larger piece that you're talking about, I do think is still fully funded under one of our alternatives. It's still under the index of pros. So we look at this capital improvement program incrementally. There were projects that were defined as active and committed, and then there were projects that were defined as temporarily postponed. And so what we wanted to demonstrate to the commission first was did we have enough revenues to fully fund the active and committed projects and they answer yes. So then we take the additional revenues and we flow them through that second increment. And I would suggest to you that when staff goes through their priority listing,'re going to pick up that that birch door project and I suspected would be fully fun. Just wanted to ask you know it would mix and things up down there so I just want to make sure we had it covered the other is course piece river the surface water expansion project the 3MGD that we're buying we're guessing at 63 million hectare we We don't know what that number is. The GMP's not coming until the summertime out there. So we have something, we have it plugged into this. Yes, sir. We need the most current cost. Any other questions? Yeah, Mr. Chairman, I think if we let him proceed, the indexed approach, he's got two scenarios and they've got the full program. So let him wrap through these, because he's got to, I have a lot to and I'm going to wait. Thank you. Thank you. On slide four, we's got a little answer a lot of these questions because I have a lot to and I'm gonna wait Thank you. Thank you on slide four. We've got a summary of the major assumptions You know our approach as it relates to estimating future revenues of the system is we try to normalize the growth rate over time You know over the last five years the utility system has benefited from a customer growth rate of more than 2000 connections per year. It's about a 3.5% growth rate. We're assuming that at some level, that's going to at least continue for the next five years. And then it may normalize over that year, six through 10 year forecast period. And again, that's our way of trying to be a little bit conservative. To Mr. Arthur's point. The capital connection fees are based on the fees that are in place today. Those are a contributed revenue source. We have the proposed 26 and 27 budgets. Again, they include the addition of 12 new personnel positions. Collectively, if those positions are all approved, it's an annual annual expensive about $1 million per year for the utility system. When we talk about those major capital improvement projects, funnily referred to as the capital needs assessment related to those plant expansions, there are incremental operating costs associated with bringing birch door on point. You've got fixed operating expenses. You have certain staffing positions that are required. Collectively, by the fifth year of the study period, those expenses may be $6.5 million a year, including inflation. Yes sir. All right, I got Commissioner George and the key. Appreciate the projections. Did you have the benefit of reviewing the recent population study that we saw, was it a couple months ago? Yes, sir. Okay, great. I just want to make sure you have. Is there a mantra for casting tool? Yes, sir. A little bit beyond, I think what most of us expected, I didn't know if you had the opportunity to review that. Yes, sir, we did. We had a lot of discussions with administration about our customer growth forecast and those kinds of things. And again, we think it's aligned well with recent history and where we thank utility system like. Thank you. I have several slides about purchased water related to peace river. And on this particular slide, I just tried to highlight it as a cost per 1,000 gallons of water. of water. That's not necessarily how we're charged, right? We have fixed costs associated with those member payments. We have variable expenses, and I've got some slides that will specifically talk to peace river. But you can see over the five-year period, the initial five-year period, the average cost of water is going up roughly $2 per 1,000 gallons. And again, we've got some slides to speak to exactly what's happening over at that peace river enterprise. In talking with the administrative team over at peace river, we had conversations with them as well as documentation that they provided us. We made certain estimates about the purchase water costs over our forecast period. Very specifically they've stated what they believe the variable charges are going to be over the next three year period. There'll be approximately a seven accumulative, 7% increase in that rate by 2028 to a dollar and 21 cents per thousand gallons. We're anticipating that those rates are going to continue to go up at the rate of inflation at least. The county pays what I refer to as a base rate or a base cost. Those are the fixed costs. It relates to administration, operating expenses, capital maintenance and system wide improvements. We've adjusted those costs for inflation based on feedback from a piece of river staff. As it relates to the facility expansion, this is the 3MGD that Charlotte County is participating in. There are gonna be just like your plant would have, you're gonna have fixed operating expenses associated with that expansion. For the system-wide Peace River, it's about $2 million. And we think it's gonna come on somewhere around fiscal year 2028, 2029. Charlotte County pays a portion of those costs. Again, it's attributable to your overall capacity. A positive benefit is your overall ratio, your allocation of fixed base costs is actually going to decrease. So not to not to understate this. There's upward pressure, there's downward pressure. Overall, the total costs are going up and we've got a chart that will show you a projection of that here in a couple minutes. And by the way when I talk about purchase water costs it's inclusive of everything. It's not just operating expenses, it's the allocated debt service principal and interest payments that flow through the Peace River program. As it relates to the financing plan, again, we've got current information here. The Charlotte County staff helped us coordinate with Peace River in order to get this information. So first and foremost, the Peace River anticipates two bond issues relative to the facility expansion, as well as reservoir number three. There's a 2025A bonds as well as a 2026 bonds that are anticipated to be issued. It's almost like a 50, 5842 split. It's almost 5050 in terms of the overall capital cost and how they're breaking that up. The bond payments are strategically structured to be phased in over time and not to get too much detail, but to give you a feel of what that looks like. These are Charlotte County's payments. They would start out around $1.5 million in 2020, setting this is just the facility expansion. They'd grow to about $3 million, $5 million, and then by fiscal year 2030, almost $6 million a year in payments for the expansion. Beyond 2030, so looking out to the future, those payments continue to ramp up over time. So this is all captured in our financial plan. In 2030, it's about 7 million. 2036, it approaches 8 million and by 2041, well into the future, the annual payments are about 9 million. And so again, that's the strategic financing arrangement that Peace River is recommending under its current platform right now that gives Charlotte County and others, Sarasota County specifically, as it relates to the expansion, time to adjust their rates over time. Murray, I have a question. Yes,, please. The, the, I, it's built into this assumption then that the water authority is going to borrow the money. Gonna do the bond issues. Yes. And then with our payback on that, we'll be under the base rate. As opposed to independently going out as we've done in the past. So we wrap everything back into the base rate, right? That's the current thinking. That's interesting. That's not how we've done it in the past on some of these expansion projects. So if you remember the discussions years and years ago, Mr. Flores about common rate, that's where we're heading. Really, that's what this bulls down to. Correct? Am I evaluating that correctly? I know it's work. This would be part of paying back our proportion of share based on our allocation to their bondage. You're not our separate financing. It'll be it will be it wrapped under their financing. I think that's a fair statement. I don't think your financial advisor is here. I would suggest that independently on your own, it may be difficult to structure bonds in the way that extends this repayment, the way that it is right now. And that's exactly where I was heading is that, I think the board needs to get, this is just my opinion, H is that I think the board needs to get this is just my opinion Hector I think the board needs to understand the advantages to doing this as opposed to working independently on the financing of our portion of this we just need to understand that I'm not a financial guy but it seems like this would be to the benefit of our ratepayers. I, I, I, to be specific, I think if you try to finance it on your own, you're going to pay a lot of the cost sooner than later. This is one to clarify. I'm going to do this example. Yes. Thank you. As it relates to the 2025 B bonds, this is related to the regional integrated loop project. It's 100% assignable to Charlotte County. This is a level repayment period with annual payments of approximately $3.8 million per year. So we've accounted for that. And going out to the bond market, the piece of river wants to try and take advantage of any market rate savings that they can take advantage of. Right now, they're suggesting the refunding of the 2015 bonds of which Charlotte County has a portion of the savings. It's not very material, but again they're trying to take advantage of any market benefit that they can do there. Now in those conversations with with Peace River the other items that we've been assured of, you know they have their own capital needs assessment. And the projects that we haven't spoken to here, we've been reassured that they're going to be based rate funded. And what I mean by that is a component of that annual base rate are system wide improvement capital contributions. And it's been expressed to me that they're going to walk through that capital needs assessment to live within those annual contributions. So we're not anticipating any other future debt associated with the program, at least in our five-year forecast. Slide eight, again, it provides you a projection of those total purchase water costs. Fixed variable operating expenses as well as the debt service payments associated with that program. You can see they do increase over time. And again, fully funded under that index approach that we've been talking about. As it relates to Charlotte County's capital program, you know, it's been facilitated over the last year. Staff has gone through a planning and infrastructure audit in conjunction with Jones Edmonds and using our July 2024 financial plan as kind of a backdrop of that to help prioritize some of those decision making. The analysis and discussions occurred parallel with the development of the current budgets. And as such, a large portion of those projects, as I mentioned to you, were put on temporary hold, temporarily postponed, and many of those project dollars were pushed out to fiscal year 2033 or even later. And so again, as we go through our scenarios here, we've tried to kind of walk through this in a few different increments. We have four cases. The first three cases, as I said up front, are all fully funded under the index approach. Again, that would be an adjustment in fiscal year 2026 based on the published index 2.23 percent unless the commission elected to do our minimum of 2.5%. We did assume a 2.5% adjustment beginning in 2027 and later. Again we have our base case fully funded active projects, peace river improvements as well as those 12 priority employee positions. Incrimentally we look at at scenario one that reflects, again, the base case, but 14 new positions to help address the needs of new customers joining the system. The difference in those scenarios is a little bit of capital outlay in order to help facilitate those new positions. And of course, the operating expenses associated with those new staff. We then kind of did a stress test in my mind. You know, what's the maximum project capacity that we can afford through the index approach? And then lastly, you know, what type of a rate adjustment would it might require in order to help fully fund the program? Some to revisit some of our minimum reserve fund targets. Yes sir. Mr. Conses. Yeah. So before you go further, can you go back to the slide 8, the all-in? Slide 8, yes sir. Where is the piece, River? Yeah. What is our current per year? We have 15, 16, 16, 16. You're right. You're just under $18 million. Okay. So the mathematics here, I'm glad you pointed that out. So in 2026, the total annual payment would be about8 million. Okay. And so the mathematics here, I'm glad you pointed that out. So in 2026, the total annual payment would be about $18 million. By 2028, it would be just shy of $26 million. So that's a good movement. You're at $29 million by 2030, and by the last year of the forecast period, it's just under $34 million. Again, that assumes our inflationary adjustments on those costs as well. And so this is the all-in water purchase cost. So right now, for all the water we're buying from the authority, just that we're paying 18 million. That's going to double roughly within 10 years. And you also will be taking on the water, obviously. Very true. More customers. With new customers. So yeah, that actually would be a nice graphic. In other words, if we could see the amount of water, in other words, if we're paying double for the amount of water we get today, I'm not happy about that. But if I can see, because the whole point of us taking on another 3 million gallons a day was like it or not it probably is the most cost effective purchase and we wanted to push out that window of stress and not having water so that you know and there's so many other things coming online also we have other opportunities east county that may help us out in the future, which we were just discussed earlier. So but I think understanding the volumes that are associated with these cost predictions would be helpful to have that as a background for another, yeah, that'd be good. Yeah, we could put, we could add a different access. Awesome, thank you. Thanks, sir. Thanks, sir. Okay, revisiting again some of the reserve fund policies, the operating fund, the Charlotte County recently updated. It's reserve fund policy and targets to equal approximately 120 days of annual operating expenses under today's operating platform, that's a minimum reserve balance of about $29 million. That's the minimum. For the R&R fund, we want to maintain at least one year of our capital maintenance program. That's $6 million per year for the Connection Feed Fund. So those are the capacity fees that we talked about. We have two restricted funds, one for water, one for wastewater. We think collectively we should keep at least two years, minimum revenues and those accounts. Collectively that's $10 million. The positive thing here is when we look at the minimum balances and what we think we have available going into fiscal year 2026, we have about $170 million to help walk through the capital program elements. And so as it relates to our base case and our scenario one, so again, restating scenario one has 14 additional positions in it. That's the difference between the base case and scenario one. They're both tied to the index approach and they're fully funded. They cover all the capital maintenance, capital outlay, active and committed projects, the peace river improvements and those debt service payments that we were talking about. They are completely fully funded and without any additional debt than what's already been committed to. So for example, your SRF loan that you have for Eastport. That's in, obviously, even though that hasn't finished and closed out. But there's no additional bonds that are assumed to be issued with the base case in scenario one. Base case in scenario one, obviously has some additional revenues. We have some additional resources under that index approach. So we looked at scenario two, which are capital capacity that we can fully fund. And basically we're able to bring on roughly $489 million. This is the third column for the temporarily postponed projects. One of those is the Phase Two for a burnt store. I suspect while the critical element is in that base case in scenario one $489 million is almost 60% Of the postpone project so there was there was a total bucket of 839 project costs that were temporarily put on hold a large portion of those costs were pushed out to 2033 even under the index approach we can fund 60% of that. And again, you can see it's to the tune of about $1 billion over that 10-year forecast period. Now scenario two would require some additional bonds. And we've estimated that to be about $180 million. Again, over that 10-year period. As soon as fiscal year 2026, again that's to be determined, right? But there could be an order to do scenario two, you might need a bond issue somewhere between $60 and $80 million over the next couple years if you wanted to pursue some of those to the tune of $489 million in post-pone projects. As it relates to the fully funded program, that scenario three, this requires rate adjustments above the index approach. We'll show you what that looks like in terms of a customer bill. You can see that we would fully fund the temporarily post-pone projects at $839. And then there are other capital needs assessments that have not yet been approved and reviewed yet at $684 million. That scenario three would require the issuance of additional bonds as well to the tune of $1 billion. And again, we've quantified what the rate impact is. But again, those are the programs that we've looked at under these various cases. Murray, I think it might be interesting to, if you're based, your index is based on two and a half percent, you know, the base. And, you know, there could be some movement to go to something like 3%. Understood? How many more of these temporarily postponed projects could, how much more money would that 1% in the indexing help us with as far as borrowing more you said it'd be a bond. Right. Well, just something to think about. I don't need to answer right now, but I think it'd be interesting to see if we can, you know, you said 60, roughly 60% could be handled with basically the current assumptions. What happens when we bump that index a little bit, can we get more of that done? Well, for every half a percent of an index, which is that would be. Half a percent, you could leverage $5 million worth of projects. That was a calculation that we had already made. Half a percent is about $500,000 a year, and again again you could leverage about $5 million. Something to think about at the deep dive finance meeting. Commissioner Doich and then Commissioner Trein. Realizing, even if we slow a couple things down, the simple question that people are going to ask us, particularly those that may watch a little bit of this, who already think their water rates are high. We look at the total rate, not compared to California, but compared to a big part of the country. The person that's paying $150 a month, what are they going to be paying in 10 years for water bill? Well and again under under both the index approach as well as that. It's going to be double. I have I have those estimates for you in a couple slides. Do I want to see them? Thank you. Yes sir. Commissioner Treas. Yeah I just to reiterate my indexing concerns from earlier. Right. I, I, now I might want to go to 3.5% to get that $10 spread. Rick Arthur, fiscal services, we're here loud and clear on that. So this is again what I kind of mentioned at the beginning. None of this stuff we talked about before that Dave presented is, is factored in here either. So if we adjust connection fees, that has a big impact too. It could change what scenario three looks like in those associated rates as well. Not just the changes in the index. So we'll get back together with administration and the utility, have those discussions with Murray and we'll rerun some of these. You all set sir? Yes. Just to that point I think that's going to give us a nice exponential move by doing both because I think that we have to have the conversation of you know doing the entire program at least scheduling the entire program out and what that looks like, whether it's done by 2035 or not, we've got to put something in place to make sure these things are being addressed as time comes forward. So I think with the connection fees, as well as the indexing, we can make some, I think some pretty good moves, but we also do have to take into consideration what the little rates look like in five, ten years. I agree. I think that's why I said earlier that the conversation, this financial meeting on utilities exclusively, without having combined the connection fee discussion, what they can be increased to, along with the rates and everything else we're just having in meetings, we really need to comprehensively see all of that so we can figure out what to do and what we can do down the road. Thank you very much. Now your slides. Okay, so the rate adjustments, again, we have two slides we show the first five years, this is fiscal year 2026 through 2030. And for all the cases, again, we didn't want to come here with a rate adjustment for next year and kind of tie your hands in regards to that decision. So even for scenario three, we've included the 2.23 percent index. And again, if the commission elects to do something different, certainly that's within your purview. The current charge today, again for a residential customer who has 4,000 gallons of meter of water use, is $125.47 and that's the water and wastewater bill combined. If the index is approved at the stated amount, that proposed bill would be $128.27 and that would become effective on or after October 1st of the coming year. You can see we had the annual index of not less than 2.5 percent for the subsequent years there over this first four year period. Under that index approach, the average monthly increase in the bill is roughly $3.22 per month, per year, over that five-year period. When you look at scenario three, you can see we have 7% rate adjustments each year, really over the next eight years. We'll show you that. It runs through 20 29, I'm sorry, 2034. Before it kind of decreases to an index, that's on the next slide. So again that's that scenario three and that's meant to fully fund the program. But again, it's Mr. Arthur pointed out it does not take into account any adjustments in the overall connection fee or any other miscellaneous and developed recharge increases. Collectively over that 10 year horizon, the index would take the current bill from $125 roughly to $160 over a 10-year period. Under scenario 3, it would take the bill to $225. This slide, I know this slide is a little bit busy. I think the first takeaway is the fact that at the top of the chart is the base case in scenario. And again, as we described it to you, if that was all that we were doing at the utility, we'd be in surplus and it demonstrates that. We'd have adequate revenues, we'd had adequate reserves over time in order to address other needs of the system, which that's what we did under scenario two. we were able to add into there about 60% of those temporarily postponed projects. You can see that in the red line around fiscal year 2028, both for scenario two and scenario three. You know, they rely on the issuance of bonds. And so under those two cases, whatever that rate path is going to be, the index under scenario two or seven percent a year under scenario three, we have some cash. And so the decrease in cash reserves is those scenarios buying down the bonds to make sure that we're not borrowing too much. The same phenomenon happens when we get out to fiscal year 2032 and 2033. That's the next assumed bond issue under those two cases is again we built up cash over time. We're going to buy down the bond issue to the extent that we can and that's why you're seeing the results that you're seeing there. By the end of the forecast period you can see under scenario two and three you're meant to stay above that minimum adoptive policy. Is the goal here? The stated amount of bonds or the assumed amount of bonds at the bottom of slide 17 are shown there for scenario two and three, again about 180 million for scenario two, $1 billion of scenario three. Both are somewhat somewhat. What they would call for for a bond issue here in the near term is somewhere between 60 and $80 million around fiscal year 2026 or 2027. Of course, that's to be determined as staff goes through the priority list. And that, Mr. Chair, really kind of concludes this first financial presentation. And obviously it sounds like we're going to kick something off in the month of July as well. Excellent presentation. Any questions, commissioners? Mr. Chairman, go ahead. Just Murray, thank you. You always bring a lot of information to the table. I want to thank staff because I know they're hearing us and appreciate Mr. Arthur coming forward about the options because I think we really need to look at the options and we do need to take into consideration you know the full impact and how we get to cover all the needs that we have in the future and then figure out our timeline of what the real need is to what the real want might be. So that could be one of many configurations of options. So again, thank you. I know it's going to take a lot of staff time and analysis, but we appreciate you. Thank you, sir. Any other questions? Go ahead, sir. Thank you, sir. So yeah, I think things I'm going to need when we meet again are, you know, I really needed spelled out. The full list of, you know, maximum project capacity stuff because I actually want to see it with numbers next to each piece. We can bring that back next time but just for your reference it's all based on what you see in this utility CNA. So the way it's programmed in here is the way that it fell in the CNA, which was based on that capacity, the tool that Murray brought back last year and they prioritize it. He just popped it up, he reminded me. He reminded me that he's got a little back up material. And he is dead. You can't, I think he is. No, it's a fault. Well, I can, no, I can. I can make it bigger on my screen, but he's very comprehensive in how he approaches this. And I do want to compliment again, because you say it's busy, but that slide is very important, and it's very logical and it's very well constructed, and it speaks to exactly what you wanted to present. And, you know, it's a great communication tool. where I have heartburn and all this, again, is, you know, folks that paid for the 16 million gallons a day, folks that already have their sewer capacity, I have really, I have a really tough time. And I don't know if I'm going to be able to move the needle on this. I don't know that I can vote for these increases because unless there's a way to segregate out the new people coming on versus the old folks, even if it's, you know, in some ways ceremonial. I just think that we need to have an A rate, an A rate and a B rate and a C rate and guess what? The Cs and Ds and E's and F rates are gonna be way higher than the A and B rates and it goes with the house. It goes with the fact that that infrastructure is put in for that property back then. And I am just not on board with, hey, we have this great ability to use the fact that we're getting revenue in so that we can show the bonding folks that are issuing. Hey, we've got revenue coming in so we'll be able to cover. Well, that may be the case, but it doesn't mean we have to increase the rates on those on the people that are currently paying. So that's where I have real, real agita here. Real heartburn is that I've got to understand how and I like the fact that we're talking about bringing on the new zones and they're going to be charged at a whole different rate for future expansions. I wish we'd had that in place for the ones we're doing right now. But I so you really have to sharpen your pencils and come up with some ingenious ideas for how it's done and look at our neighbors because they're starting to realize wow we got problems and we've got to figure this out where if whole new zones are coming in they're going to have a whole new rate structure and if they jump up and down we'll say, well look, if you built this in the middle of a field in Ocala, which by the way they're doing, they're paying huge rates because that full expansion is monetized and being charged out to that group because that's how it's being done. So there's got to be other people in the state that are looking at this now and I just want to see other options. Well, and I know you've brought this up in the past and I know we've discussed it so we'll go back and see what we came up with before and we'll look into that Cape Coral analysis that you brought up. Yeah, we'll take a look at that. Thank you, sir. I'll say. I'll say. Commissioner Trex. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In reference to some of Commissioner Constance comments, one of the things that we're going to have to look at when you talk about that is the amount of expansion required because of what we're doing in the Deceptic de Surer conversion program. Those are new people on as well. They may not be new development But they're new and the price for those is different than the ones who've been here 35 years 25 years right? It's a hard analysis. I'm willing to look at all that stuff because When I the easiest thing to point to now is the 17 corridor and what that's gonna do and and that's kind of our mindset and how it needs to be moving forward. But when we do Ingewood East, how are we going to look at Ingewood East? How are we going to look at if we do KPays, how are we going to look at that area? Every time we go into an area and we're doing an expansion, it's not new development, but it's new sewer development. It's not again, I back to, it's not an easy analysis of how to come to a conclusion, but these are all things that we're gonna have to take into consideration as we move forward. Make the hard decision. So thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, good comments. I think that, you know, I've had some conversations with administration about this. And, you know, the art of this is going to be, I think, taking each one of these projects and capital projects, and dissecting them into the different components. There's expansion, capacity expansion, that you can attribute to the new growth. But you look at AWT as an example. Everybody's going to benefit by that. Existing customers, all of us, from a water quality standpoint, everybody gets to pay for some of that. So it's not an easy analysis, but I also think too, that's why I think the comprehensive review of looking at connection fees and rates all in one package, is going to be what things are in rates right now that we're all paying that possibly with additional, because I know on the bonding, I mean you made it pretty clear that the bonding world out there looks at the stable revenues, which are rates. You can't amortize based you know, based on connection fees because they're this. But what can we use from the connection fees to back around, this is maybe what you're maybe getting to, into operations with rates are paying right now, certain things that we might be able to move connection fees over to, to take the pressure off the rate increase component for capital. It's, I'm just throwing it out as a concept. I don't know if we can do that. I don't know if we're not already doing that. But I think that part is part of the question because that we have to get at that next meeting is how that could work. How clever, how creative can we get with this combination of revenues, both connection fees and rates, to try to keep the rates down so that We're not hammering the existing customers. I don't know if we ever get as peers what you're talking about, but I think we should really try to get as close as we can. Anything? Go ahead. Mr. Chairman, if you want to. And I do appreciate your comments, and you reminded me, though, and I've stated this before, yes, I think that part of what we're doing has to do with resilience and there is value to existing customers. So while they shouldn't pay 100%, maybe they should pay an iPhone at 17, 22. I don't know. I need the utilities folks and I need the financial people to really sit down and figure out what is that resiliency factor worth? additional water supplies, having more robust systems, having up, you know, not just A to B T, but larger lines that are more robust and less likely to leak and then there's less R and R and so forth. They receive a benefit. Right, right. So figuring out how to monetize that benefit or value that benefit so that then it can be properly Transferred to their bill that's fine. It's Everything else that they're not benefiting from that we're charging in force. So that the thank you for that. Okay All right, I guess we're all set. Thank you. Thank you again. Great presentation Next item item 2 utility update. Hi again. For the record Dave Watson Utilities Director. And we'll go through our normal routine with this. So we'll start with our key performance indicators. And this is our 12 month running average with the Water Authority. You can see the green line is this year. We stop in March. And we're trending up in March. We had about 14 and a half MGD of our allocation being used in that month. But still well below the 16, but we're gradually moving up each year. For Burt's store, again, a slight increase. We're just under a million gallons a day in our March analysis there. But again, trending right along the lines of the previous years just slightly higher. Reclaimed distribution. Again, March, we had that uptick. When we come back in July the next time, you're going to see a drop for April where we had the emergency repairs that we had to do unexpected, but that took our reclaim out for a little over a month. So you'll see that in the next quarterly update. One question we back online now at Eastport. We are. Very good. Thank you. What are distribution? You can see our brakes leaks, brakes due to contractor and then our customer outage is affected. Again, March, we had 12 main brakes. Four of those were due to contractor, or mostly directional drilling. Our service installs, we are caught up. We have a queue of 50, which is less than 30 days currently. And this is all being handled now by our in-house crews. So you can see the request and installed over the last six months or so. Our waste water and reclaimed events. Again, SSOs, we had 10 in March, 5 in February, 4 in January. So looking at March, 50% of those were contractor error. directional directional drill units. Hit us estimated losses were about 12,000 gallons. And just a note on the bottom. So over the last six months, we have had $38,000 of fines from DEP or soon to be fines. They finis at the end of each fiscal year. But we know we've already been noticed on the 38,000 that are totally due to contract or hits. So this is something that currently we don't have an ability to address because these fines actually the bill comes in well after the fact. So it's something that we potentially could look at, work with legal to come up with some type of a solution on this. There are no fines on DEP on the water side but the water side is more customer outage affected. But again the contractor hits right now the only thing we assess the contractors directly are repair costs for both sewer and water. Commissioner Triath. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, thank you on the water meters. I know you guys have been working on that hard to get caught back up. Well done there. On the fine situation, I think we have to make out a policy. Yeah. I really do. I know directional drilling is not an exact science, but if they're doing their locates, they should be pretty able to avoid those. I would think. And if not, maybe they need to go back to school on how to properly use their equipment. But I think the board needs to look at creating a policy to make sure that the contractor that creates issues fine for it. Why should the taxpayer be paying for that? Or the rate payer be paying for that? Or, right? I agree. I commission Joyce, you okay with that? Well, the administration looking at it. Commissioner Constance? Good. We'll work with legal administration and come up with something to bring back to the board. It will shot. Mr. Chair, I'm actually a bit surprised that we want just directly transfer the entire cost because it, you know, if they really got the $35,000 bill or whatever it is, I think they might be a little bit more careful. Or the subcontractors would be charging a lot more money knowing that their insurance premiums were skyrocketing because they're going to get hit with five figure, maybe even six figure repair bills. How would we not, you know, we can't make money, but we certainly shouldn't be subsidizing anything in the private sector. Well, I'm done. Yeah, I just, we know the problem has occurred before they get a CO, correct? And we know. Well, they're not CO's involved. These are directions for the CO's. Oh, whatever. But we know when it happens. Yeah, yeah. And we know who did it. So even though we don't get the bill, the fine, till months later, we know the problem. So I think there could be a mechanism where we can go back and recoup those dollars. It'd be interesting to see how we figure that out. Yeah, from the sewer side, we more or less know what those fines are going to be because we're the ones reporting the loss, however many gallons of sewer it is. Generally speaking, they're usually in the $500 range in event. We've had one instance where we had $10,000. Can I ask a question? On the potable water, they do pay the full bill though, right? For the pay areas. Yes, okay, good. Yeah, and we make an estimated loss of water that we also charge them as well. On top of the infrastructure. On top of the infrastructure, yes. Thank you. Go ahead. Again, this is our SSOs over the last multiple years. The hurricane events definitely impact our system, and you're going to see a breakdown of where those SSOs are as we move forward. So the SSOs, this is the breakdown of how they occur, what's being affected between manholes, lift stations, blow-offs, force mains, et cetera. And these are the causes of the SSOs. So you can see 30, 31 of them, a little over a third, our contractor hits at this point in time, quite a bit, are the power failures. So between power fair and equipment failure, equipment failure generally a failed pump, something like that. Power failures, we lose power. It could be from FPL. It could, and most of them are non-skata lift stations. So we don't know until we get a report from somebody that it's happening. Customer type, again, is just informational between our vacuum, our low pressure, and our gravity customers. And then our wood or reclamation facility, percent capacities over the past 12 months. You can see, you know, Rotunda is doing well. The current store is up above that 90% tile nail. And the rest of them are basically trending as normal. New customers broken down between the septic to sewer and specifically acumen and then the remaining of new sewer and and new water customers and we're trending over 3% on both sewer and water over the past 12 months. So we're going to talk about ERCs at each of the plants. So burnt store, I think the last time I was here, I did mention that this quarterly, you would see a change between the three years we were evaluating. So, previous was 21, 22 and 23. We dropped 21, we're now 22, 23 and 24. So, that has definitely affected all the plants a little bit regarding the estimated time to exceed plant capacity. So you can see with burnt store, based on that 250 available ERCs, we're at about five months, trending the way we have been. When we add in the paid capacity that we are already there, we are actually behind by 43 months. So obviously this is the worst case scenario, but we have not had any exceedances with our DEP permit. We are still operating at 80 to 90% capacity, and I'm going to give you a little more update on Bernstor. I'm going to touch on it, and then Ken's going to talk a little bit more about Bernstor as well in the project's update. On your available ERCs, the balance, it's a half a million gallon plant, right? Yes. So you got over 100,000 gallons, 116,000 maybe. I'm just doing it in my, and what's our flow per ERC? 160 do we use? No, it's about 90 I believe. Well, if you take 100, I think there should be more ERCs available I just I haven't done the rest of the look just take a quick look I'm not sure I'm right. I'm just saying that look just looks with that kind of a number that we might have a Some more than that it doesn't substantially change the the issue, you know We got to get additional capacity down there. We're just someone who could check the calculation, I'd appreciate it. Bill, too. Go ahead. But I mean, is this, so our, my understanding was that we were at half a million gallons a day, except with advanced wastewater treatment or trying to, to do a better job of cleaning it up, we're actually down to 250. What is our capacity there? Our plant capacity is half a million gallons a day. Okay, and we're treating right now about 0.38 million gallons a day. Give or take. So we have about 100,000 gallons a day that we still have available. A little bit more. All right, I had heard something different. I had heard that we, have available a little bit more. I had heard something different. I had heard that the process there had changed and that they to make it more efficient, you were only able to treat half as much water. No, we have an MGD permitted and that is what we are capable of handling. There was a rumor for it. Thank you. I'm glad I asked because that capable of handling. All right. It was a rumor flood. Yeah, I heard that. Thank you. I'm glad I asked, because that dispels that. Thank you. So this is just a brief update. Again, I said Ken's going to go into a little more detail on Bernsturr. But where we are right now, with this half a million gown a day, update. Our engineering contract was in place in April. April started their design work in May. Our CMAR is finalizing our contract. They will be on board probably the next two weeks at tops. They have been attending the meetings that we've been having with the design group. So they are on board. They are up to date on everything. The design completion and the DEP permitting request will be going in in October. We had a preliminary meeting with DEP this week, so that was a good conversation with them on how we're going to proceed with this project and application, and the full half a million MGD is expected to be completed by the end of 27. On that, you know, I, in our private conversation, one-on-one upstairs, you know, I looked at this and, and I'm a little concerned, you know, we don't know how many additional connections are going to be hitting us fairly, you know, over the next couple of years, two or three years. This is Band-Aid number one commissioners design look at it down there until we get the permanent facility under design and under construction. We'll get into that more under the project's component of today, but I really think we need to be aware of the fact we need a Band-Aid number two, you know, some additional capacity. I'm not sure I'm just gonna throw it out. I'm not sure you've got, Kimley Horne under contract right now. Is there any benefit to under their contract? There's been selected to a modification of the capacity using the same basic format that we're going to be using to go from 0 five to one. But the other thing would be, and we talked about it upstairs, package points. And making sure those are relatively quick. I mean, we can get that capacity up fairly fast. Yes, we really needed to. Months. Months, not years. Yes. So I think we need to just be cognizant of that, that I'm not convinced that this bump from 0.5 to 1 is going to take care of us until we get the new plant on board. You know, the bigger, the 2.5 MGD that we haven't even selected the consultants yet or this construction manager. So then I then we're going to at maybe three years. All four. So, my my intention once we have the the design for the half a million in place and we we have some firm timelines, firmer and specifically and know what we're doing. I'm planning on coming back with some requests on direction from the board as we move forward. Possibly a band-aid number two. Band-aid number two, or you know, once we know what we're actually going to be putting in with this half a million, we'll have a better understanding of where we want to go from there. The deal with the facts, you know. Yes, sir. That's good. And keeping in mind that this half a million we have an option in there for a package plant expansion if we need to Good. Just as a short term solution. With Kimlingor. Yes. Good. Eastport remaining. So we are at about 5.4 3MGD. Again with the new numbers, we're about 37 months of plant capacity with 30 months based on what has already been committed. Westport, again, about 0.75 MGD. And with the new numbers, about 131 months. Again, this is in current design with HDR, looking at how we're going to phase this expansion in over the next five to seven years. And then Ritunda. They're running at about 1.38 million gallons a day, and we have plenty of capacity there. Again, as I mentioned previously, Ritunda is getting some improvements right now at the headworks. That is scheduled to be completed within the next 30 days. And we have seen a significant increase in the plant effluent numbers since they brought those online. And some additional changes that we've made at the plant. The peace river system running well 13.23 average day over 12 months but we've got about 55 months showing capacity-wise with committed at about 51 months for that and then the increases that we've already agreed to with Peace Forever starting in 2031-32 and 33. And that gets us out to 2045, I think. Yeah, it takes us out to quite, quite, sorry. 10 to 15 years, Adler. Yeah. The burnt store system, we're running at Jishai.atmgd.nail. and we still have about 169 months of capacity there even with the committed we're about 117 months. That plant is actually undergoing some additional changes as well. Ken will be touching on those in the projects update. Missileaneous data. You'll see that the utility line locates have not dropped off at all. We're still, you know, in the projects update. Miscellaneous data, you'll see that the utility line locates have not dropped off at all. We're still in the last three months. We're averaging about 27, 200 locates a month. Active contracts are in the 30s. So we're not seeing any reduction in workload as far as the locates go. Business services, again availability requests still hanging up there in the 275 to 350 range. Service connections requests are in the 170 range. turn-offs they are down Now that we're in to March, this first three months have shown a decline in nose over the past couple of months, over the past couple of years. Customer support data. it about minute 30 or so in speed of answer, and taking between calls and emails still over 8,000 intercepts with our customer service reps. Public relations still active. We've got seven outreach events that happen, two facilities tours, one information request and 45 media posts, social medias continuing to be active. And employee performance measures. We've had a little bit of turnover. We're running in the 20s right now with vacant positions continuously and filling those. And our department over time. What you can see, the biggest change has been really in the construction group. Now that we've caught up with our water services, their OT has dropped significantly. Still have a decent amount, but they came down almost, give or take about 50% when we were trying to catch up on this. The remaining hours are sewer and water OT is really on the brakes that we have with regard to all the various things that happen between contractors and just age things like that. I just wanted to touch base on upcoming quarterleases and some of the topics that I'll be bringing back to the board for future discussion. So in July we're going to give the board an update on where we are with our design manual. We've been working on that. We're continuing the intention is that we'll bring that update in July. We're going to have another stakeholder meeting between July and October. And then we'll bring back to the board in October the items that came up in the stakeholder meeting that we're going to need board direction on. We've got a non-county owned utility transfer system policy. This is relatively new. What this is is just presenting the board a systematic approach to when someone approaches the county about either operator taking over their system. recently had an inquiry from Riverwood about the potential for, you know, having the county look at their system. So this would be just a systematic approach to how that would happen and what processes would go through and how it would be implemented. July also had the connection, continued the connection of Miss Alina's fee discussion and we're also going to bring back some of the commission. We have the connection with the commission and the commission. We have the connection with the commission and the commission. We have the connection with the commission and the commission. We have the connection with the commission and the commission. We have the connection with the commission and the commission. backflow program policy update just so the board can see where we are with that. Hopefully we'll be looking at the design manual again and where we are with that and then further discussion on acronym. Any questions? Very good. Any questions, commissioners? Seeing none. Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Ken, you got projects update. Good morning commissioners. Ken Stacker, Operations Manager Utilities for the record. Good morning. Let's go over some of the major projects we got going on. Start with just a kind of a breakdown of engineering projects what we have going on right now. Most of them private development, that hasn't really slowed down much. Still have your view a lot of plans. And it's kind of overall of the project development projects.. You see pretty little drop, but still fairly steady. Eastport expansion project is ongoing construction. They're moving forward pretty much on schedule. There's a lot of activity out there. I don't know if you guys have ever got a chance to going by, but there's a lot of activity going on out there. Birdstore Expansion. I'll get into this, the history. So originally the original design by Kim and Creed started in 2018 and it was kind of fashion similar to what we have at Eastport in a very conventional design very robust design And that project bid came in at 180 million now this goes back to I think Irma when we had a consent order from Irma And we had a in 2018. I think we had that engineering report that said you know these are the options to address that consent order and one of those options was to do the expansions of the plan. And that was what was decided we're going to do that. And the estimate at the time of the expansion of the plan was $30 million. Now, go from that 2018 to 2024 and now it's $180 million for that and we quite rightly decided not to go down that route. Well I'll stop you for a second I think there's one other number that doesn't show up on the slide but we actually had a McKim and Creed gave us an engineer's opinion of cost which was in the 90-90 million. So that's really the factor that caused us to say we need to reject the 180 because it was double the engineer's opinion. All right. So now we're, we went back to the drawing board, or review all the alternative options we might have out there. So new technologies have also come around and we've kind of gone down that road even on one of the other plants west port. So these you know allow significant savings then in the cost of construction for these new plants. So we're exploring all their options technologies available and trying to find the best option to move forward for the county. Commissioners, I had the opportunity to have a one on one with administration and utilities on this because as you call, we deferred termination, which will come up on next week's meeting, the termination of the contract will become agreed As you recall in our pre-agenda meeting that day, we got into the fact that we had spent roughly $3.5 million for that contract. Although we own the documents, have the documents, have the permits, we were going down a different pathway. So I wanted to have a better understanding of why, a justification for why we just say goodbye to Kim and Creed and not look at their documents, their plans. And so, and that's really the the essence of what I got back was there is a new technology I believe European, if I'm not right, it's generated in Europe. And it's, I'm not familiar with it, but it's been, it's been utilized for probably a decade, I think, as what I understood. It's proven, but it's a lot more efficient. It sounds like which will cause a result in a savings in capital cost and O&M, I believe. I think even on the O&M side, we'll see cost savings. So although we lost the $3.5 million we should ultimately at the end of the ride really come out better. So that's just I want to report. It sounds good. It's still a tough pill to swallow but you know it's something that through that exercise we were able to discover and we have had some changes of opinions, changes of staff within the utility that had different opinions. And you see that in the engineering world all the time. But the new folks have come on and discovered there's a bet, maybe it looks like a better way to do it. And I think we'll be incorporating that same concept in Westport, correct? Yes, in Westport. And it's not to say that we can't use some of the components of that original salvage value I believe the the McKinney Creed I think the electrical component package is some pieces of the documents that will still be able to salvage the new consultant used but I just wanted to share that all the way the that was tough one though that that's three and a half million but it's it we're going to have something better I think in the long run and then the remaining components of that contract are the construction and the bidding and stuff But we really won't be using right they wouldn't they will not so again It's just the foreshadowing of what we got to discuss on toothing Thank you, and then the name of that is a aerobic granular sludge technology, EGS. Say that quick with three times. I had to write it down. To make sure I remember it. All right, let's roll. All right, the update. So the engineer selected is Kim Lee Horne. We do have a CM constructor manager at risk. We're finalizing those negotiations, as Dave said, next couple weeks they'll be under contract. We have had, we have weekly meetings with Kimmy Horn. They were kind enough to be involved on their own. As part of Kimmy Horns contract there is a package plant and they are currently putting the plant together to have that plant ready to pull the trigger as soon as we need that trigger pulled. And just for the benefit of the people watching at home, this particular, this is Band-Aid, what we're talking about, Band-Aid number one for Bernstur water reclamation. The previous slide was talking about the ultimate design, which we have not selected the consultant yet or the construction manager yet. So they're same piece of real estate, but two separate projects. And then as they've mentioned, based on how we move forward with this initial part of that discussion will be future expansion and how we can wrap it all together. Good. You know, there may be options to go this route that really can easily expand into the future as well. So moving forward, any other questions on Bernstore? Okay, Ackerman Water Quality Improvement Project. This is ongoing construction. The backing, everything infrastructure is in place now we're getting into connect construction, the backing, everything, infrastructure is in place. Now we're getting into connections and things like that. So, is the map of the Eckermen area? I can't. I have got some questions that came in from a concerned citizen. I believe those were forwarded to y'all to look at it. We can kind of address those. Yeah, I get those and you go and address them. We're going with it with the staff and we get them dressed. Okay. On top of my head, I've gotten a few. Okay, so you're not prepared today to address them. Okay, I just, they were along the line of, you know, as we go back to your previous slide, you've got, we got Forsberg under contract now for vacuum three and four in the LPS. Yes, as much as they're under contract. Okay. There was a question as to whether or not the sequencing of that it says here they're not they're going to start this summer. Right. Is that accurate They usually get them 30, 60 days before they get everything set up. But that's reasonably close. That's the understanding. The question from the resident was, is there a possibility of maybe starting the LPS portion of that contract ahead of the vacuum component? And I would say, you know, that's your all-call, but it did seem reasonable. And I would think on three and four you could certainly get started with the pump stations. I mean, there's a separate sub for them, I think, to do that. But just a request to look at with Foresburg, whether or not there's an opportunity to commence that LPS and not wait to the end. Okay. And the other big biggest question the residents have out there is relative to their existing septic systems and whether or not they during this transition when they know there were within a year or two of getting connected. How have we worked that out with the health department? Trying to work with the health department on giving some leniency some time, knowing that we're going to be coming in. But we can't let it go too far too because if their septic system is failed, is failed. You know, so we're trying to get there as fast as we can But there's not an easy answer to that question Mr. Flores if if you could you and Dave could get your heads together and get with Dr. Peppy out there too and Kind of give give me something so I can communicate back and as to how they're addressing that issue. I mean it is it is logical question if they got a functioning system and they're within a year or two of having it replaced. But all of a sudden something does happen. They have a fracture of their tank. They have some other expense that comes about. What's the process of evaluation to see whether they can do something, instead of completely replacing their system and then a year or two later paying the cost for the whole? We've had that discussion a couple times and it gets into when do we start paying the ticket? Well, again, Hector, as soon as I can get that back from you, all that would be appreciated. Those questions. Thank you. It's all on the back for me. All right. Thank you, Midway. We're still in design. We're about 60% design on this project. We still have a lot of questions we want to answer through the process of increment. So this one is still going to be in design for a little bit. And the 42 inch water main that's being put in by the authority is continuing. And we do have a an 8 inch parallel main going along with it as they go down to Hillsboro. it is going a lot smoother now. They're starting to work more with public works on how their MOT and everything is going and public works is working with them on being all the shutdowns certain parts of the road so it's overall the project is going a little bit better than it was from G GICO. We're still working with our resiliency and modernization grant to get our overall resiliency and modernization program document together. HDR is in the process of working with that on us and getting that done. Any questions? Any questions, commissioners? For Ken? Okay. All set. Thank you very much. All right. Commissioners, that completes our items on the agenda. And now go to comments. Mr. Flores. Just thanks for the input. Definitely helps what we were looking forward today to hear from the board. I think upstairs are already working on a couple dates. I know when we were trying to juggle this week around, there was only one or two out there. I think mid-June, we've got that week where we do have our workshop. And I think they're looking at a day or two in there so more to come as we try to land that date But that's it. Thank you. Miss Nolton. Nothing. Thank you. Thank you Commissioner Deutsch. All set. Commissioner Tracks. All set. Commissioner Kondra. I'm all set as well This utility meeting is adjourned