EWEB Board of Commissioners — February 2, 2021

0:05 order the february 2nd 2021 for eweb board meeting um and maybe we can do a slow agenda check where people can talk slowly and john will have a chance to to join in um so we're going to start off with um agenda check anybody have anything regarding the agenda president schlossberg i just wanted to call to people's attention that we have uh combined the uh agenda item uh related to the liber and walterville project we were originally going to do that as one technical item and then an economic item and we've combined those so we'll have a combined presentation followed by a more lengthy discussion

0:51 that's item seven on the agenda check but that's we we corrected or made that modification today but just wanted to make commissioners aware of that change great thank you okay moving on to number two items from board members and general manager uh sonya we'll start with you wonderful well uh this last month i attended the uh elkhog uh regular board meeting and uh was elected back to the executive board of elkhorn so i'll continue representing e-web on both of those subwords there and we also i really wanted to thank staff and

1:37 community members and all of our partners that put together the tour that we went to up river i know that there was a wonderful article about it in the register guard it was just it was so helpful to actually see the restoration work and see the you know the vote that we took last year to help make sure that the river banks were secured um that seemed to be a good use of the money and i i really appreciate that the the citizens that were up there let us come onto their property and actually see the work firsthand and tell us about their experience and i hope that you know that that does help others to feel comfortable in working with all of those partners that are so committed

2:22 to that process because it really seems to be a good value for the community so thank you everyone who put that together great john brofsky i guess we need a way to differentiate you but you're up uh thank you i just want to echo what sonja said about the upriver trip it was very informative and i'm excited to continue whatever we can to do to help out our watershed up upriver um i was appointed to the mackenzie or i i volunteered to do that i think i'm going to uh audit that for a while and let the

3:08 staff person that has been manipulating that take that over you know keep keep his position for now and i'll start auditing that and then when i feel comfortable maybe step into a uh a role as far as the e-web liaison but as of right now i think i i'll let the people who know more about it take care of it until i'm up to speed but again thank you to everybody for the up river tour great thank you matt thanks yeah i'll just um echo the appreciation for staff and partners who provide us the tour last week that was very helpful until i have thanks great uh the only thing i have is just like everybody else to thank the

3:53 staff for arranging that tour i know that it takes quite a bit of staff time and it's um you're all very busy and have a lot to do but i find it to be really really helpful and i think that it helps us as a board move things along in a more comprehensive and more comprehensive manner so i think that it is definitely time well spent and i really appreciate it so thank you for that um john brown are you here thank you president schlossberg i i just had a couple of updates i do appreciate the tour as well i thought that um gave us some good insight into what's uh

4:39 going on up the mckenzie as far as watershed recovery i did testify at the public hearing for the city of eugene on behalf of eweb on january night or 19th this was the hearing related to changes in the city code that impact how surplus real estate on from eweb and that process this was consistent with the direction that you provided it looks like it's consistent with what city staff had presented to the city council and so i echoed our support of that process so far i also want to provide the board with a

5:25 little bit of a brief covet update and how cobid is affecting our operations we saw a very slight um lower demand this last month um on the electric site in particular most of the demand being light had to do with warmer weather conditions we tracked the number of and can exclude for heating and so it was pretty close to budget overall just slightly down from a consumption perspective we are seeing a slight tick up when it comes to our what we call their dsso those are disconnect service orders not all those result in disconnects those are slightly above pre-covered levels as i reported

6:11 last month they had dipped down to really pre-covered levels they've ticked up a little bit this last month some of that is likely because we see increases in demand and so some of our aging numbers and accounts receivables and and and disconnect orders slightly go up because of an increase in demand um but not nearly what it was uh last late spring and summer which was many times greater than it is now and as of yesterday we did fill uh all of our customer care reservations yesterday which is about 600 since it was the beginning of the month and so i just wanted to provide those updates to the board and thank you for the opportunity

6:59 great thank you all right so we're a little bit early for public input and is everybody waiting right now in the lobby or in the everybody admitted for public input um we had one person who hasn't called in yet and i haven't heard from john brown either but um we do have um eight including those that will be read by joe harwood so we could go ahead and get started and hopefully the last will join great okay so um all right so we're going to move on to public input when your name is called remember to unmute your call press star six if you're calling from a

7:44 landline or simply use the unmute button if you're calling from your cell phone please state your name and optionally your address reward and speak clearly into the phone each speaker will be offered three minutes to present your testimony please keep track of time we have a timer that i will look at and let you know when it's getting close and you'll hear an audio notification when three minutes has elapsed after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to speak if they choose although by policy we do not engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony if a question is presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer

8:30 an eweb staff member will contact the speaker so that the question can be addressed at a later time the public testimony period for this meeting is now open so first up we have jim new followed by joe mole uh and then followed by rebecca white jim you are up very good thank you um florida commissioners thank you my name is jim new uh i'm in ward 7. thanks for the opportunity to speak as devastating as the holiday farm fire was to the affected communities fire is necessary in rejuvenating the forest if it burned if given the time to naturally heal

9:16 unfortunately this is not happening in the mackenzie watershed the e-web drinking water source protection plan states and i quote as a result of the holiday farm fire salvage logging in the mackenzie will eclipse all previous harvest levels unquote seventy percent of the holiday farm fire was burned on private timberland and there is currently a clear cut frenzy happening in the watershed by these private timber companies and blm salvage logging is a timber industry term coined to convince the public that nothing of value is left of a burned forest this is far from the truth post-fire logging is encompassing more acres than allowed in non-burned areas which causes more sediment in the water and increased risk of landslide

10:01 these clear cuts reduce the soils ability to retain moisture for 15 to 20 years due to loss of canopy it reduces evapotranspiration and increases early snowmelt which prematurely depletes water quantity in the watershed if left standing these burn trees sequester carbon reducing the effects of climate change which is being attributed to the cause of this fire oregon's forests play a larger role in meeting its greenhouse gas targets than the u.s forests have in meeting the nation's targets according to professor bev law from an osu report there has to be an ongoing discussion of forest fire policy forest health restoration treatment with increased forest carbon storage and how they all align with the mackenzie watershed protection

10:47 the future of our watershed is hanging in the balance and is being jeopardized with each acre harvested i urge eweb to work with landowners explore legal regulatory agreements and land acquisitions or provide incentives for watershed wise forest management thank you thank you jim all right next up we have joe mull followed by rebecca white good evening president board members my name is joe mall i'm the executive director of mckenzie river trust 120 shelton mcmurphy boulevard once again thank uh eweb staff for continuing to be a backbone for the recovery collaborative efforts in the valley uh it's working

11:32 people are coming together to attend to these near-term and longer-term needs that backbone that uof is providing uh lend a confidence that will be increasingly important given the marathon that this is going to be in terms of reimagining and restoring and rebuilding the mckinsey valley i don't know about you but i've spent a couple days uh just learning a little bit and watching gamestop and um all of the speculative investment that's going on out there and it has made me think a little bit about the difference between the normal c corporations whose declared purpose is typically financial profit that drives shareholder returns versus a b corp or a public benefit

12:19 corporation whose bylaws call out the public benefit that must be generated as well now eweb's a public utility born of the city of eugene charter and often attentive to citizens as rate payers in contrast to the speculative investments and things like gamestop uf has a history more like a public benefit corporation very specific products the provision of water and electricity all for public good but they are still products and i've often heard board concern in the past about the cost that i as a rate payer must pay you or the impact of utility decisions on bond ratings and other costs of borrowing i think we continue to see that rate payer and broad public support

13:05 for investment in the production of those uh products water and electricity electricity or just more largely the the watershed is strong and i hope that you are not too concerned about what currently aren't even proposed as increased costs going forward from a ratepayer perspective because there's support there tonight you have another iteration of proposed investments in the watershed in that production facility of that product and you're talking both about electricity and that other product water and i have as in the past i encourage you to dial up the investments being proposed you'll note that mckenzie river trust is described as a matching partner for some of the funding proposed for the land acquisitions portion i'm

13:50 happy to say that we have already secured pledges for more than 10 percent of that initial match for land acquisition projects people see the opportunity and want to help i'm confident that we'll be able to continue to see strong support for the kind of work proposed and i look forward to working with the web staff and many other partners on these investments thanks for your consideration of these opportunities gamestop and other market investors have suffered a tremendous amount of nausea over the last few days of speculation we don't want that in our watershed the work ahead of us on the mackenzie needs to be deliberate and measured and again the backbone played by e-web is central thank you again for your service on a board that is a model for what a b corp deliberation should be

14:36 thank you um i'd just like to announce that commissioner brown has joined the meeting so welcome john well thank you um all right so next up we have rebecca white followed by madeleine cohen thank you sorry i was just saying um anna is it possible there to start the timer great okay go ahead thank you my name is rebecca white i live in ward one and i'm here tonight on behalf of cascadia wildlands and william riverkeeper i've been a resident of eugene for several years but i grew up in fort worth texas where the tap water is just terrible it tastes a lot like a dirty swimming pool i grew up before the era of bottled or filtered water so i just thought i hated

15:22 water and i never drank it as a child 20 years later i took a job in monterey california also notorious for poor drinking water quality when i made the decision to move to eugene i was training my replacement a young attorney who just happened to have gone to ufo and had a law practice in eugene i told him welcome to monterey we're trading places and i asked him what do you miss most about eugene well he said the local food scene is great and the saturday market is a lot of fun but what i really miss about eugene is the water i said oh yeah you mean like a certain lake or the river or something and he says no i mean the tap water so here's a guy who grew up in san francisco which as you probably know pipes its water directly from the middle of yosemite national park it's pure sierra snowmelt and some of the best water in the world but this guy says no eugene has the most

16:08 delicious tap water i have ever tasted all that to say we are incredibly lucky people to have this jewel of a water system here and we can't thank you enough for taking such good care of this world-class resource through the years i'm now an attorney with cascadia wildlands a local conservation organization and we've been hearing a lot from concerned residents about the massive rate of post-fire clear cutting happening in the mckinsey watershed they're worried about impacts to our water supply and that's why we are particularly concerned about proposals from the bureau of land management to log over 1500 acres in the watershed this logging will impact both the mackenzie and mohawk sitfield watersheds north of leeburg and vita as well as southeast of ida we know the logging is planned for steep slopes above fin creek indian creek and

16:54 hatchery creek among others we know that post-fire logging usually adds sedimentation impacts and toxic materials above and beyond those that result from the fire itself we just wanted to double check that eweb is aware of this plan and to let you know that the blm is doing scoping for this project now and would likely appreciate eweb's input on ways to mitigate the harmful impacts of this project on our water supply again i want to say thank you for your stewardship of our water resource and unlike the disgusting texas tap water i grew up with i am proud to say that my daughter who is growing up in eugene drinks multiple glasses of clean and healthy tap water every day and that's it let us know how we can support your work to continue to provide this exceptional resource for our citizens thank you

17:43 thank you all right next up madeline cohen followed by steven anderson and hang on one second if we can reset the clock again president shallsberg i think we'll need to go ahead and skip ahead to mr anderson i don't see madeline on the call yet okay sorry about that all right mr anderson you are up are you there can you hear me now yeah i can hear you okay i would uh i'm another one wanting to

18:29 thank staff especially uh janine and karen kelly who took the time to make a walkabout with us i was the only one that could make it but we now understand that we were talking past each other within as far as tank locations are concerned and part of it is there's a lot of stakes missing i think the neighborhood kids got after things but anyway i think they realize now that we're not talking about putting a tank out in the meadow we want tank one on site two which was staked out down in the saddle of the ridge on the very top

19:20 i also appreciated commissioner matt mcrae responding to me and i appreciate that he's planning a field trip with staff for commissioners the only thing i would say is uh and we have people every day inquiring that would like to see the tank locations well i can take them out there uh or or jim or some of the other people can but we don't have the actual stakes anymore for tank too yeah as i say they're missing we can we can flag it we can show them the boundaries but i think before the commissioners do a walk there would be really useful to have the tank two boundaries at least roughly mapped in so you can actually see it on the ground because i believe what the staff thought

20:07 was we were thinking of a tank down in the meadow and uh the tank to site that was originally staked out only goes down into meadow maybe 30 feet and so it doesn't impact the metal really at all so anyway that's it i appreciate um you do billing willing to work with us on this and just on another note bieber restoration is going to be huge across the world and it's especially critical now and i imagine most people have no idea what i'm talking about but in beginning in 1820 to about 1840 hudson bay trapped all the beaver in the northwest deliberately creating a beaver desert so

20:52 there would be no way for americans to settle the country well it didn't work except in this way we're without beaver basically and they are the key to restoring watersheds and keeping them intact so we need to get them going again a great book if you want to find out what's happening in the vanguard of beaver restoration it's called eager by ben goldfarb i highly recommend commissioners read it you'll be amazed at what we're missing out if we don't get beaver back into our watersheds thank you oh and just so you know i'm talking about the tanks on patterson hill east 40th yeah so i forgot to mention that

21:37 all right thank you bye all right um we will have some public input read by joe harwood so he's going to read public input on uh on behalf of patricia hathaway chandra lagoon mike brinkley and mary kelly so joe you are up thank you president sloshberg the first letter is from patricia hathaway 1983 jackson street we lost our home in the holiday farm fire and we are extremely concerned about the post-fire logging projects occurring in the mckinsey watershed logging which we believe puts at risk the future health of the

22:22 watershed although we should all be concerned about the degradation of this special area eugene residents should be particularly concerned about the contamination of their single source of water the current logging risks the safety of our water source in a number of way ways logging increases erosion which increases the risk of landslides allowing contaminants to enter the waterway logging roads increase sedimentation in the river which is harmful to our fish and destroys their habitat and causes the water temperature to increase industrial logging sprays toxic herbicides which can drift into our waterways or be washed in by rain with the massive

23:07 and sudden amount of logging we should expect an unprecedented amount of these dangerous chemicals to flow into the river with unknown results salvage logging also harms the watershed by removing the soil nutrients needed for post-fire regeneration plants that cannot regenerate naturally will not provide the structure and protection needed to keep the river healthy due to these reasons i am encouraging eweb to strengthen your advocacy against private lands logging projects that endanger this vital resource mckinsey river is a state jewel and is too special to allow the interests of a few to potentially harm this valuable resource for years to come

23:56 the second letter is from chandra lagoo 3025 friendly street i'd like to thank the source water protection team at eweb for their innovative and forward-looking work in supporting natural solutions to water quality and climate change like flood plain restoration preserving riparian forests and the planting of native vegetation the aftermath of the holiday farm fire and in particular the post-fire logging already occurring on private timberland will continue to be a challenge to our drinking water quality and i support eweb in taking additional steps to secure increased repairing protections on these lands whether through an uh land acquisition easements

24:41 incentives for increased no logging buffers or other means such investments and work will benefit our communities for the long term okay uh number three uh this is from mike brinkley 2582 west 28th i really commend you for your restoration efforts on the mckinsey fire area but i am very concerned about post fire logging logging will increase sedimentation into the river causing damage to fish habitat and introduce dangerous materials into the water this water is our drinking water post fire logging will increase erosion and landslide risk toxic substances exposed by the fire

25:27 will be washed into the river from disturbances by post-fire logging please restrict post-fire logging in this watershed okay the fourth is from mary kelly uh 1163 olive street please deal with post-fire logging it multiplies the adverse impacts of fire for drinking water supplies fire might impact the watershed temporarily but studies by top experts at oregon state university have shown that post-fire logging can magnify the effects on the river by all accounts there is so much logging that the mckinsey highway closes on a regular basis because of the

26:13 trucks it is just exacerbating the situation and that's it all right and ann is madeline cohen here no she did not join okay so that is the end of our public testimony so the public testimony period is now closed not hear from the available and uh you know i have one question that i'm hoping uh at the end maybe frank can answer uh

27:00 so we heard uh quite a bit of testimony tonight about the logging upriver and aside from the properties that we own i mean most of that is private land so my guess is that we don't really have a say over it other than we're trying to help the landowners you know shore up the the you know the riverbanks the riparian area so it doesn't allow a lot of you know runoff and seepage from these areas that are not uh now secured but um do we really have any influence there is that part of the round two and in partnerships that we're building um so as we go through the evening if i get that question answered i would greatly appreciate it

27:45 thank you welcome matt thanks um i likewise just want to say thank you all for taking the time to provide testimony tonight um i think we are going to address some of the issues that you um that were brought forward about watershed protection uh during our discussion this evening um i i share sonia's concern about you know i don't know how much influence we have but i think that we'll be discussing that and encourage you all to listen into the conversation thank you

28:34 thank you thank you to everybody who testified uh thank you jim neu with mckenzie river trust i know that we have a long-standing relationship with you guys and hope that we can continue that for a very long time as well as far as the logging and the other concerns that were brought up by some of the other testimony uh i hope it's in our purview to do as much as we are possible to to help mitigate the the impacts of of the logging that's going to be taking place up river whether that's working with private land owners to to acquire riparian areas near near some of the feeder creeks and stuff like that or whatever but i i look forward to working with staff and

29:19 all of our partners upper river to try and mitigate the damage that has been done by the fire and any try and minimize any type of damages that may result from the restoration in the upriver great thank you kind of cut out there john um john brown welcome well thank you i think i missed most of the public testimony so i'll just have to pass on that but thank you everybody and i'll just sit here and let my blood pressure reduce a little bit before i visit so you can only imagine [Music]

30:04 all right thank you i guess deep breath um i want to thank everyone for their public testimony i think this is our first meeting post first coven post covent meeting where we've had so much public testimony so it's really great to see people engaging and not letting the technology get the best of us i would like to thank staff who's working really hard with the residents up around east 40th with the water storage tank i know that there's been some back and forth with what's going on there and i really appreciate that the staff is taking the time to reach out to the residents up there and walk through the site and really try to make sure that we come up

30:50 with a plan that is beneficial for everybody and then lastly regarding the clear cutting just to um add on to sonia's question i'm curious if there's any regulatory work or like legal or legislation stuff that's being put forth to address clear cutting um i know that there was a bit of a expose or something in the paper recently about timber industry and what's going on there but i'm curious if there's any kind of work at the state and federal level to address that all right and that is the end of our public testimony um

31:36 moving on to board item number four which is approval of consent calendar a anybody have anything i wanna i just moved to adopt consent calendar all right uh all those in favor raise your hand and say aye aye aye all right that's unanimously a past moving on to number five approval of consent calendar b move to adopt all right second all right all those in favor raise your hand and say i i alright

32:22 well that was pretty easy now we can move on to general business items so um running a little head but i don't think that matters i'm assuming that the lieber walterville crew is all queued up well thank you uh president schlossberg um i would also like to thank just as a make a comment that um appreciate all the q a that we get from the board prior to the consent items being approved just so that the public is aware we do publish the various questions and responses that the board supplies us so those consent calendar items can

33:10 can be understood and and be discussed if necessary so some of that occurs prior to the meeting just want to provide that for context i want to make sure that the the right crew is queued up here mike are you available to jump in in a moment yep we're we're set to go frank okay great i will kick things off but go ahead with the next slide please i think i have control oh let me see that work there we go great i will just uh kick this off before we get into the meat of the presentation um and uh with the really the bottom line up front for commissioners and uh we're asking for your direction on moving to the next step there's a

33:55 number of steps that will and decisions that will need to be made regarding the lieber canal leeberg generation and at some point in the future also including walterville but we've come up with some immediate recommendations relative to the canal specifically as it relates to generation we are recommending that in the near term the board reduce the risk of water conveyance along that strip of the canal but we do not return the generating site to operation um as you'll see throughout the presentation the levels of

34:40 investment are significantly different uh between either returning lieberg to its generation capabilities versus simply doing what's called swc here which is stormwater conveyance and managing and managing the risk of the canal itself and the water conveyance which if we are obligated to do under our license and so that's going to be our recommendation that we go with water conveyance only um and at this point i'll turn it over to mike and his staff and and to go through the the various technical status as well as the economics of which uh we drew that conclusion so mike you can take it from here all right thank you frank uh good

35:26 evening commissioner schlossberg and uh and commissioners um this is really an organizational goal that carried over from 2020 um and and we were tasked with developing a tbl based plan for the lower mackenzie river hydro projects uh in compliance with what the federal energy regulatory commission or ferc was asking us to do and in collaboration with the mackenzie valley community in previous board materials we identified two scenarios that we started analyzing the first was a return to service and the second was a conversion to use as a stormwater conveyance mechanism only we further developed these scenarios and added a number of variations so that we have a range of costs and timelines that we can look at

36:15 i'm going to run through sort of the introductory material and and do so very quickly so that everyone's on the same page going in because i know we have two new commissioners and i want to make sure everyone's familiar with the canal and its features and its history the canal went into service in 1930 it's it's an earthen five mile long unlined canal that begins at leeburg lake and it ends at the ford bay just west of the town of lieberg um just i today had the opportunity to watch a construction video from uh when they built the canal it was done using horses and steam equipment and uh they blo they blew up a whole bunch of tree stumps and other things large rocks so it wasn't today's construction technique

37:00 um this project and all of our hydro projects are regulated by ferc uh and ferc's portland office houses the the regional dam safety program that we all the answer to here's the canal i'm going to try and use the uh the moving mic head here i think you can see so starts up at leiburg lake so the lake exists for the purpose of damming up the river and putting water into the canal and the blue line is the is the river the red dotted line is the canal and so again it goes from up near lieberg lake where it starts and then ends goes past the town of lieberg and ends here at the four bay where the water transitions to the pen stock and then goes under the highway and to the powerhouse it's about a five

37:45 mile long section and the canal is hugging the north slope of the uh of the valley and for the most part is on the north side of the highway the project as i mentioned went into service and um uh 19 well it went into operation in the early 1930s uh in 2000 the year 2000 we re-licensed the leeberg project with the walterville project so we combined the licenses together and they're licensed for 40 years so through 2040 we're roughly halfway through that license the liebert powerhouse which when operating that's the picture of it on the left can provide nine average megawatts of

38:31 energy to e-web and together with uh walterville they provide roughly 13 average megawatts uh to help us uh serve load in in our service territory and the jet the output from these projects is dedicated to serve load under our current bonneville contract again here's here's a view of the of the canal this gives you some idea of the topography and there's a couple of areas that we're interested in um one is this area down here it's um known as this is cogswell creek that comes out of the timberlands to the north that's one area of concern i have a picture of it later

39:17 and cogswell is one of the major tributaries the other major tributary is johnson creek and that's right here and our other area primary area of concern is the ames reach which is uh this area down here just uh just west of uh where johnson creek comes in so those are two areas but really the canal um has leaked from from day one when it went into service and and we've been monitoring those leaks really since the since the canal went into service here's some pictures showing some of the investigations we've done recently in in the summer of 2018 we found evidence of soil movement also called piping at several of the

40:03 seeps we were monitoring this picture here in the lower right is a seepage monitoring weir we currently have about 15 of these spread along the canal and we have staff who monitor them on a daily basis they give us an idea of the water that's flowing out of the seeps but also can collect soil that comes out and you start to see soil that's more problematic because that means soil is moving out of the embankment and into the into the weir out of the canal embankment so that's called piping we started to see piping at two of the areas that we were monitoring we notified ferc and at that time ferc ordered us to cease operation uh close the head gates and dewater the canal we did those things and um and have been

40:49 sort of monitoring the seeps since and doing some other investigations so the picture in the upper left shows some subsurface investigation of the canal embankment that we undertook in early 2019 in response to the the piping that we saw and the uh the picture on the right shows some improvements or temporary repairs that we made uh following the drawdown um and the idea here was we would take out the heavily impacted saturated soils and replaced them with more porous gravel or sand material and then a seepage blanket on top and install a french drain and so that was to collect the seepage as it came out and prevent further piping from the canal

41:38 this is what the canal looks like today it's looked like this since uh the fall of of 18. the head gates are closed and we received storm water from side streams uh johnson creek and cogswell creek primarily but a bunch of other side streams and that storm water is emptied through canal exit points but not through the turbines the turbines haven't operated since we shut them off in late 18. uh we continue to monitor and maintain the canal as required um but uh but ferc has ordered us to not open the head gates so we can't let water into the canal other than what comes into the storm and we can't generate power and uh and so what we're doing is basically maintaining and monitoring the canal in its current condition i also want to point out however that

42:24 the current condition is not acceptable to ferc they've told us that they expect us to take action to address the primary issues identified in the current condition and those being the uh the embankment soils that are seismically not stable and and the seepage issues that we continue to see i mentioned two areas in particular we are interested in um i'm going to touch a little bit about them before i turn this over to mark this is the cogswell creek area and if i can get the little mic head to move here in this area just downstream of the bridge um we saw a whole bunch of seepage kind of coming out of the toe of the embankment so in this area and uh this is where we first saw some

43:10 piping the subsurface investigations that we did up here on the canal embankment revealed that the core material which should be the stable material that prevents both seepage from getting through and stability to the uh the embankment um was saturated soil it's looks like native uh locally sourced material it's saturated and potentially unstable um so this uh this meant that we now know that we know not only have a seepage issue but we also have an earthquake stability issue with the canal and so um and then for purposes of today's discussion as we get into it the seismic risk to e-web to this canal is greater with the canal

43:56 full of water than in its current condition and this is the ames reach looking downstream at the ames reach it's kind of this area in here and it's a fairly steep section it may be the most the steepest section of the canal embankment as we contemplated a path forward uh general manager lawson asked us to take on this tbl analysis as an organizational goal for us the first step from a technical standpoint was to hire qualified consultants to help us and then for us to engage directly with ferc and we did both those things last year that work's been underway now for almost a year we got a little bit slowed down because of covid we got a little bit slowed down because of the holiday farm

44:42 fire but we've made great progress over the last i would say four or five months uh and that leads to tonight's discussion and so with that i'm gonna ask mark to take over and let's see if i can figure out how to there i stopped control mark so you should be able to pick up control on the slides okay okay and let's see mike if if i need you to advance him uh i think i might just ask for that because i'm not seeing controls showing okay all right so yeah thank you mike and uh good evening commissioners um next slide there mike and i'll um

45:28 continue on the uh the backgrounder that you had included an attachment with quite a bit of technical information uh included and um i was going to just give you guys a highlight of that information and really focus in on our findings and conclusions so that uh the the work that was done is foundational to the effort included hydraulic modeling of the canal simulating breaches of the canal at high consequence locations estimating those uh consequences to property and the potential for life loss and brainstorming potential failure modes etc that was covered in a fair amount of detail in that background or attachment

46:14 but really the highlight that i wanted to make here is that throughout this process it was not just eweb and our consultants but we also involved ferc in the planning of our risk analysis and they also participated in the actual workshops themselves so it was important for us not only to come to our own understandings around liberty risk but also uh formulate an understanding of ferc perspectives on those canal risks so next slide please mike okay can i go too nope you're good all right so uh in order to analyze a five mile long canal that goes through uh varied terrain we broke it into

47:00 ten separate reaches uh and they're shown on this drawing alternating dark and white and um focused in specifically on two of those reaches that mike touched on cogswell and ames where we had the most subsurface in uh information uh but each of these reaches have have somewhat levels of uniformity with respect to the embankment configuration its height and quality as well as its condition and then the consequences associated with potential breach of those different reaches next slide please so really jumping to the results the the highest risks that we found

47:46 were seismic and specifically in the area of the ames reach this is the taller steeper portion of the canal embankment that was identified as our highest risk at the library canal next level of risk down was another type of seismic vulnerability related to internal erosion following an earthquake also seismic stability at that cogswell reach ranked at that same high level as well as internal erosion the piping that mike mentioned which uh is what triggered the canal to go out of service in october of 2018. followed by that level of risk we have internal

48:32 erosion failure potentials at ames as well and then landslide blockages we have some steep slopes above ames that under a heavy storm event could come down and block the canal or could that kind of a land movement could be triggered by a seismic event next slide please mike also mentioned that the tributary creeks that are coming in and so when we constructed the canal back in the late 20s we intercepted not just those two that mike mentioned johnson and cogswell but a number of smaller streams as well and so even in a flood condition when we close the canal head gates

49:17 uh the canal continues to receive water from those tributary streams and so there's another potential failure mode lurking there in the form of uh debris getting into the canal during those severe storm events and and debris presents a risk in that it could block our outlets either at the forebay the siphon spillway there uh or at the wasteway gate or a kind of midpoint drainage point and and then also at bridges you could have debris get lodged on a bridge or if you had a large enough tree fall in you could almost create a a nest of logs um uh anywhere on the canal so that's another important level four or five risk and then other seismic risks of import relate to the

50:03 canal head gates if we have a seismic event one of our our immediate actions is to intervene by dewatering the canal so we would do that by closing the head gates and opening the drain gate at the wasteway either of those are vulnerable to seismic damage as well in which case they might not function when you need them to next slide please so conclusions wise uh we we focused in as i mentioned on cogswell and ames because that's where we had the most information particularly subsurface investigation information but we did extrapolate those results to all the other eight reaches of the canal and and at into varying degrees uh we

50:49 ranked high risks on on those others as well so really our finding is that the capital investments uh might be most immediate and urgent in the ames and cogswell area but there are similar investments needed along the length of the canal um so those substantial investments are required uh for operation for generation but also for conversion to storm water which i'll touch on a bit later um we also note that deterioration of the canal embankments continues even though we're not generating power we are continuing to convey storm water through the canals and as a result during those periods of time

51:35 even when you're not generating power you can uh expose yourself to the potential for embankment failure during these heavy storm periods when there's a lot of water in the canal from the tributary creeks so it is important that as mike said before it's you know do nothing is not an option um either path forward will involve ongoing risk reduction uh measures and and we do need to to move forward on those in the near term in in either case return to service or stormwater conveyance next slide please the extended repairs uh is uncertain at this point in time we do have limited you know information on a couple of locations along the canal

52:21 and so that means additional subsurface investigation is required in order to come up with complete repair approaches and in the course of doing that it's possible that we could discover that we have you know favorable findings the uh that the risks that we've characterized are actually lower and thus the cost to mitigate them is lower um or we those findings could be unfavorable meaning higher risks and higher costs and so that does reflect in the cost estimates you're going to see a little bit later from patty in that we we do have pretty broad ranges there pending a better understanding of subsurface conditions along the length of the canal

53:06 it's important to note that construction of repairs would need to take place during dry weather seasons and that does challenge construction timelines so when we thought about return to service potentials in terms of when the timing might happen 2026 was determined to be about as quickly as it could be accomplished the reduced canal flow rate is another risk mitigation measure that was highlighted and if you could operate the canal at a lower flow rate 1300 cfs that's enough for one of the two generating units of the carbon plant would translate into roughly six average megawatts and that's in comparison to the full capacity of 2500 and nine average megawatts that

53:51 we did consider both of those scenarios in the return to service you know one a little higher risk than the other and it's important to note that implementation of these risk reduction measures would take place over time and that residual risks would persist until the canal is fully rehabilitated next slide please many of these same findings pertain to the stormwater conveyance as well we also you know to safely moth ball and continue conveying stormwater we do need to do more subsurface investigation that could result in uh you know differing costs for the remediation so that again you will see

54:36 bands of cost uh for the storm water conveyance options as well similarly the weather uh it has to be favorable for that kind of improvement work the important thing though is that the length of canal that we need to focus on becomes reduced with a storm water conveyance approach we can reconfigure the canal in a way that takes advantage of some of the existing former stream channels the smaller ones might be redeveloped without impact to a significant impact to subsequent development between the canal and the river but that's not entirely true and that fourth bullet points out that some of our former stream channels have been developed that does make them more challenging to reconvert

55:22 so again residual risk will pertain with stormwater conveyance as well until uh full rehabilitation uh the thing is though that those significant risks would really only be present during storm water periods so unlike a an operating canal where those waters in the canal at all times storm water conveyance is only there during storm periods next slide please just a depiction here of a bit of what i was talking about with respect to the stormwater conveyance scenario there's two different colors depicted here the purple and blue the blue portions are how we would route the major creeks cogswell and johnson back to the river those portions of the embankment would be

56:07 needing uh remediation in order to safely continue conveying water from the canal to the river one would take it to the wasteway gate that's the cogswell creek direction and then johnson creek would go to the forebay i did want to point out though that uh in terms of considering our options there we would need to compare the cost for remediation of the canal for johnson creek to the forbay uh to the cost of potentially redeveloping that former johnson creek channel to the river it it would entail quite a bit of expense some potential impacts to downstream development construction of a highway bridge etc but that would be another alternative you'd want to look at and make sure you are

56:52 making the most cost effective approach similar is true for cogswell creek but there we do have you know even more challenging development conditions between the creek and the river between the canal and the river next slide please so based on the information we developed we did come up with a range of uh scenarios that patio will show cost for uh momentarily the uh the scenarios uh are uh vary in terms of the speed with which we could implement them they also vary within with respect to the canal

57:37 operating capacity and they vary with respect to the degree of risk reduction and one of them that we included in there scenario 1e is the most uh robust safety improvement by converting the earthen amendment to a concrete flume it was also so incredibly expensive that we we did not you know show it in the range with the others it was considerably more expensive and then the storm water conveyance options that we looked at also it's kind of speed of implementation as well as a degree of risk reduction in terms of the remediation work that you do so those are the scenarios that we presented patti will follow up with some costs but we did want to take

58:23 pause here just to see if the board had any questions regarding technical or background information before patty gets into the costs go ahead john um thank you um thank you mark and uh mike um i have a a bigger global question i i might tenure on the board expand when we were i just came on the board when we were re-licensing this i think it was 120 130 million i don't know what it was i don't mean to minimize the cost but how did this get missed how did we have all these experts and everybody saying go ahead and do this and a lot of the risks that you posed here saying like the gates could fail during a a seismic event well they that's that

59:08 hasn't changed in the six last 12 years and how did all these and you said it leaked since they built it why didn't somebody raise a red flag and say don't spend this hundred million bucks yeah that john i have uh wondered that myself um for as long as this has been a problem so in the last couple years what did we miss and how did we miss it and and you know um i i think this is the answer so this slice this project got licensed and or re-licensed in 20 or year 2000 but really the work that led up to the re-licensing took place in the early 1990s and that was 30 years ago so it could be that it wasn't leaking as bad that really there's a time differential where we've

59:54 reached the end of this canal's uh service life where it's just gotten back i mean we've noticed in the last 15 years the seepages have uh gotten worse and uh and and the uh the piping issue is something that only became apparent to us in 2018 the the other thing is the seismic issue that you bring up we uh you know in in 1990 we didn't have large earthquakes in oregon or at least we didn't know about them and so the the whole awareness of cascadia and the magnitude of the earthquakes we need to be concerned about really sort of took off in the mid 90s and into the 2000s and by then the project was already licensed so you know to really get back and

1:00:40 summarize your the answer your question you know we we've looked back at the re-licensing work that was done in the 1990s we don't see anywhere where people were looking at the condition of the canal or the condition of the embankment or asking the questions that probably should have been asked um and we missed it but i'm not sure that we would have got it even if we had been looking well thank you that's an excellent answer can i follow up with one more mindy um just a just a question and comment as you know i'm kind of an advocate on the fisheries and things and i know that uh the corps of engineers is required to provide water to both of the salmon and the trout hatcheries and odfw has designed an initial cofferdam and it only takes 50 cfs to

1:01:25 supply water to the uh to the salmon hatchery and that salmon hatchery serves not only the mckenzie but the willamette the columbia all the way out into the ocean i mean that's something that i certainly hope that we can incorporate into our our uh go no-go design because we don't have to pay for it uh the corps of engineers has to do it and i think we just have to facilitate getting that done and i know cogswell creek is important to attract the salmon the water comes down to do that so hopefully in in the in the considerations in the future if we could at least work with uh with odfw and the corps of engineers to make sure that we don't have to scrap those hatcheries because that's a huge economic impact for the mackenzie basin and a lot of

1:02:10 recreation was up and down all the way to the ocean yeah commissioner brown uh mark knows more about the details than i do so i'll let him speak in a minute but we've been working with both the salmon hatchery and the trout hatchery since we ran into these difficulties with ferc and we're aware of their water needs and we know that they've because the corps of engineers is required to provide them water they've got uh folks from the coors hydro design center currently working on water alternatives for the salmon hatchery thank you that that's really um refreshing to know and you know it gives me hope that we're not going to have to do that but i just hope that we can have eweb's cooperation with with doing that because i know that

1:02:55 we're not in the business of providing salmon and trout habitat but we are kind of i mean we have the biggest impact on mckenzie in the watershed and i want to make sure if we can cooperate with them that we do that thank you sonia hi i just had a quick question um kind of following up on the the fish hatchery when we went and did the tour it looked like the fish hatchery was not operational maybe it was just the pools outside were not open is that just due to covet or is that because of the impact from the canal being it didn't look like that should have impact them right now that the canal is downstream further so having it lower

1:03:40 is more of an impact downstream but does anybody know and could help me a little bit with that yeah mr commissioner carlson are you talking about the hatchery the trout hatchery at the dam or the salmon hatchery further downstream at the dam um yeah as far as i know that's operational and they're raising trout uh and uh they should be getting all of the water and stuff that they need so i don't i don't know what if there's an issue we haven't been aware of it okay all right i just wanted to know because you know obviously they're a community uh member that's impacted by whatever we do especially in that that area so yeah okay thank you john

1:04:26 thank you um so can you make this clear to me if you go back to the slide that has conservation to storm water conveyance if we do that is there going to be parts of the canal that are dry or will will water be running through the whole canal so the um tributary streams that feed the canal are highly variable seasonally they can go from essentially dry in the late summer to raging creeks during a big storm so it would be uh directly related to you know what the seasonal uh

1:05:12 season you're talking about so late summer there would be portions of the canal that would be bone dry most likely and even johnson creek and cogswell creek are are really down to a trickle uh in the late summer so it would be a very dry canal and the the only reason i asked that because i see uh green things called canal plugs and so i wasn't sure if you were taking that and then running it right into the stream there and keeping that section so that you don't need to remediate that yeah so those plugs would be strategically placed so that the smaller streams that come into the canal can be routed out of the canal

1:06:01 and those so those plugs are intended to do that to try to keep the cogswell creek high flows and the johnson creek high flows out of the rest of the canal so that we don't have to strengthen more embankment than absolutely necessary to get that water back to the river and then my final question is you know we you kind of made it seem like you know we don't really know whether and what this will go into cost coming up in the next set of slides but we don't really know how much it's going to cost until we actually get in there and start putting shovel to to dirt and i'm wondering if there is a phased approach where we get in and start doing conversion to storm water

1:06:46 find out that it's not as intensive for the whole length of the canal as we thought and could phase it into power production if if things get better on you know if it looks like it's not as bad as we thought i i would say that is possible that we we have an intent to you know focus our initial efforts on portions of the canal that are beneficial regardless of which ultimate path is um picked but uh so yes i would say that that kind of a phased uh approach is is is available

1:07:35 all right matt do you have any questions you want to ask at this point no questions for me just uh thanks for the presentation mark appreciate the detail and no questions from me but just to comment john brosky you must be an optimist because usually construction things end up going worse not better but i guess that is always the hope thank you president slashberg and with that uh i'm gonna turn it over to patty if i can for some reason my holly i'm having a hard time advancing the slide

1:08:21 there we go i don't know who did that i think maybe you did holly but patty you're up okay does everyone see that the chart that's up there mine took quite a while to come up so i want to make sure that it it is connected so uh again good evening commissioners and and we're transitioning now to the sort of financial or economic aspects of this conversation and having completed this initial stage of the infrastructure planning we can better inform that economic aspect of what is a really very important decision and and so displayed on the screen are the planning level cost estimates developed with our consultants and i wanted to spend just a minute or two describing

1:09:06 how they come to those cost estimates the range is first determined by developing an expected level of work needed in each of the scenarios and then combining that with a couple of different contingency costs the first contingency reflects a potential increase to the scope of repair for example that the the initial design is correct but it needs to be longer or it needs to be deeper but the initial estimate on the type of repair is correct the second form of contingency and one that really drives quite a bit of cost is the potential repair type is changed

1:09:52 where it is no longer after we've done additional investigations we find that it doesn't reduce the risk as it as we originally intended or doesn't accomplish the initial goal and we need to change the type of repair that is being made and in that case it can be quite a bit more expensive and and that's how our consultants largely put together these ranges and if you look at them overall it's really very clear that the stormwater conveyance options are significantly less expensive than the return to service options and i think is mark connected to the infrastructure pieces that's around the the length of a canal that would need to be remediated i think holly would you mind moving to

1:10:39 our next slide so with those cost estimates we were able to then sort of forward on our uh more complete economic view and combine those infrastructure repair estimates with information our previous work had been done on the financial analysis of the project itself in the table at the top of the slide we have calculated the net present value of the plant and service under three separate power value assumptions a high and a medium and low power value assumption as well as then npv of the plant as a water conveyance facility with no generation the npv includes the routine operations and

1:11:24 maintenance costs of the plant as well as the capital needs of the plant that are not associated with the canal repair work given the low power values and not considering the canal issues we are really only slightly better off in operation under most uh power value estimates i'm really pointing out the mid power value and the low power value being in operation this plant over the rest of its anticipated life loses somewhere between 12 and 14 million dollars also using these updated power values we have combined the display of the npv with the cost range of the scenario in the chart that you find right below that

1:12:09 table the the npv on each scenario is calculated using the most conservative power value but even if you were to use the mid power value it doesn't change things much you can see there's just not much difference between those two estimates uh and and that leads to just a little bit of variation in the npv uh on the o and m side that's the blue bars and the green bars on that chart represent the range of cost for canal repair and so again in this graph it's all the storm water options are anticipated to be much more economical than the return to service options but i'd like to point out that

1:12:55 in this particular graph one piece is a part of the next phase about what we have recommended is a little more or initiating really our conversations with our regulatory partners and interested parties on what a decommissioning would be what could look like uh i think as frank mentioned essentially in the in the initial part of our conversation we'd really our recommendation at this point is to initiate conversations with those regulators so we can have a better sense of what that decommissioning looks like of a canal over time and estimate its costs so i wanted to pause there for questions

1:13:41 before i hand it over back to mike for a little more conversation on the triple bottom line aspects of this conversation but would point out that the decommissioning itself and its process is really very compatible with the tbl approach in that just as commissioner brown mentioned we will engage our regulatory partners that includes folks like odfnw and the corps to ensure that we are really looking at not only the financial aspects of this decision but also the societal and environmental impacts of any changes or any infrastructure improvements that we make on the on the canal but let me just pause here for a little while on an answer or try to answer or record and

1:14:26 return to you with information on the economics go ahead sonia um i i just wanted to make sure it was crystal clear on the decommissioning uh side of it um the convert to stormwater conveyance the npv's that you ran doesn't have that decommissioning cost because you don't without doing that further work you don't have a clear sense of what those costs are is that correct that's correct hd decommissioning that i have tried to become familiar with looks a little different depending on the environment or it's operating in some decommissionings take place in very remote areas that don't have a significant development around them

1:15:11 and so each decommissioning can be quite different and really working with our partners and for will help determine what the scope and therefore give us a better sense of what that that both the length of time and the amount of investment that would be required okay and how long does that process if there is a typical uh take generally speaking well i would say that a decommissioning process is is very similar to a licensing process and it will take several years to come to a firm approach on how things would go and in that time frame we would be keeping of course the board informed but you would bring your partner regulatory partners together you would have a

1:15:56 certain set of decommissioning studies just as you would have re-licensing studies to ensure that the public purpose of the waterway is is maximized public value sorry i just meant that the initial study to to get an estimate of the costs no okay sorry i missed it that's okay jumps ahead into a work planning kind of uh of process uh i would expect that it has a similar time frame as our engineering estimates uh really put forward and that i think was initiated about a year ago i don't think we would take any longer than that okay perfect those are my questions thank you

1:16:48 thank you as somebody who's new to the board um i'm intrigued to find out where the costs that have been incurred to get these that john brown referred to earlier the 100 or 120 million dollars that has been spent on these these generation facilities weighs into these type of scenarios you know you're saying it costs this much but where does that pre-loaded capital and figure into these financial recommendations yeah um patty before you respond let me uh commissioner with that with the re-licensing the way the fer licensing process works you you commit

1:17:36 to making a certain level of investment and then you get a license of a certain length and so in this case commissioner brown is correct we we signed on for whatever it was a hundred million dollars worth of improvements which were like uh usual excuse me mostly uh fish ladders and fish screens and recreation improvements and things like that um and we did all that work in in the year 2000 to 2004 or so and in return ferc gives us a 40-year license to recoup that cost and at the end you get once you pay for your investment you get a little bit of time to sort of make money on top of it that's how the ferc licensing process works all of these costs that patty's talking about are in addition to

1:18:21 and on top of and would have to be funded elsewhere by eweb patty yeah that that's correct so what is calculated within the npv is from this point forward through the end of the license go ahead matt uh quick question i understand patty that there's a ton of uncertainty around decommissioning i get that um i do wonder if you can tell us if you have a sense of how many zeros come behind that uh well yeah that that would i'm highly speculative on on that and it really has to do in my mind as to the scope of the decommissioning

1:19:06 and whether or not with our partners that we determine that the damn remains in place because outside of the canal investment and just from my limited thinking on how this goes down is if it is determined that the best public value for the project as it stands right now for any decommissioning is the lake remains in place that's a whole different scale of decommissioning than if the dam is removed and so it the in a dam removal scenario is a much more significant commitment to decommissioning costs

1:19:51 there's a tremendous amount of restoration work that would need to occur in order to to do that and i won't speculate in terms of what would be eweb's approach yeah i won't push you to speculate thank you no problem what i what i would like to say uh is commissioner is that um if we were to go to that place where we were looking at removal of the dam we would look for other partners to potentially uh help us with those costs and and other licensees who have decommissioned dams as part of hydro projects have received additional funding from federal

1:20:36 agencies who are interested in restoration so i think that avenue would be open to us john brown did you have your hand up before i did uh and patty thank you for that and maybe just to follow up on the damn thing because i see that as probably the is one of the biggest unknowns here because it's my understanding that we can't just open the roll gates and leave the dam and use it as a bridge because uh the salmons still won't have a way to get over the fish ladders because there won't be water for them to to go up and we have a native run of salmon up there and so if we have to either tear the dam out to accommodate the native salmon runs uh or we have to run

1:21:23 a dam in perpetuity even if we um have storm water conveyance because i don't see any other way to get around that because this the native salmon still have to get past that impediment and if we just think we can open the world gates that won't work because the salmon can't migrate through open roll gates so have that so there is no cost of dam removal or damn retention i mean if we remove it then we have to give an alternative means of ingress and egress to the homes over uh there don't we um we go ahead patty uh i think john you you uh touch on any a lot of things that are on the list for further investigation not only how we would restore those

1:22:08 what's it if there are engineered solutions that fall in between so providing water sources to the existing ladders while leaving the dam in place i think that's a it's going to be a fascinating and long-term conversation uh i expect there'll be several iterations of that that conversation i think you touch on some really interesting points on access to to homes that are on the other side there are not only that but private property rights and water rights along the canal uh so you know i think our one of the things our consultants and mark reminded me of not very long ago is that their from their perspective

1:22:54 a relicensing investment and a decommissioning license in decommissioning is is of similar scale in terms of both effort for planning and conversation and investment so uh it it it's no it is no small uh effort to get through this conversation and it's a long-term one and that's one of the reasons why we have a it from my perspective a sort of approach that builds on some infrastructure that mark noted while we move forward on the regulatory piece thank you frank and then i have a question after you frank yeah i just wanted to provide a little bit of

1:23:39 context on on the timing aspect of this uh under because we have a 40-year license that would typically expire in 2040 and under those kinds of conditions you would normally make a decision 10 years prior to that 2040 timeline whether you were going to either decommission the project or re-license the project i may be getting a little ahead of staff uh with this comment but there are some benefits to eweb and potentially the community to make that decision earlier especially as it relates to our bonneville contract and some of the many issues around scope that you just identified

1:24:24 whether there are there there could be transportation impacts irrigation input water rights impacts there's just there's just a number of them i would like to actually make the decision um going forward whether we want to pursue a decommissioning which also includes walterville by the way because this is not the they're both part of the same license whether to do a real take the the tact of re-licensing versus decommissioning and do all the research we can uh sometime prior to the end of 2022 the decision in front of you now is for right now do we invest do we at a level that returns this to production or do we

1:25:11 take the approach of mitigating risk that is associated with the canal itself and managing water and our recommendation is to not spend an extra 30 million to get somewhere between a 5 and 12 million dollar return on that 30 million and so um now as we go into it we will learn more we're hoping that john borowski's optimism is is something we find but that's our current recommendation but i just wanted the board to understand this is this is the beginning of a series of decisions that we will be needing to make and and so we're on step one of probably you know 50 different steps okay thank you so i just have a couple

1:25:57 questions um so it so back to your comment frank about bonneville how how will we know how lieberg affects our bonneville contract like if we decide to decommission it what does that mean for the future um in negotiating how yeah so the the present contract we have uh expires in in 2028 our our power trading group would starts in fact they are starting to have conversations as to what this might look like if we decommission permanently right now lieberg is and walterville total of about 13 average megawatts out of our total load

1:26:42 of about 275 just to give you some some context that load is present bonneville assumes that we are taking lieberg and walterville and using it for our own load we're not selling it on the open market um which at some point takes away from the entitlement that we would get as a preferred customer from bonneville that's the negotiation that has to take place prior to any decision that we would we would come to regarding decommissioning we would like to have access to the bonneville power to replace that as opposed to looking at an alternate source but that's a discussion that has to happen and it it

1:27:27 would happen we thought i think it's a benefit to have that conversation sooner rather than later but power our power planning group is investigating that thanks uh another question is um where did where would the money come from so if we're gonna decommission or even if we're gonna re-license it's a lot of money so do we start like a fund now how does that work so um i it comes from deborah hart honestly no i'm just kidding um the um i i think part of the value of making decisions before you get down to a 10-year time frame is there are there are issues related to

1:28:14 finance you you don't capitalize uh decommissioning for example um and so because there's nothing to depreciate and so you have to create and understand your ability to finance it i i think that if if we could it's possible we could set up a fund uh some type of type some type of sinking fund for this or start looking at other potential funding sources but that that will be a challenge and the the more runway we have to plan around that especially financially and work with the community so that they're not left holding the bag either um i think the better so that's that's the reason i like the end of 2022 kind of time frame which is the the tenure of this board

1:29:00 that's why i picked it it's not the next board it's this board no pressure but i i think i'd rather do it in that time frame than to wait until there's 10 years left on the license in 2030 to be making those kinds of decisions i think this is going to take a long time to work out great so i just have a question for the commissioners we can go and have another round right now or i know that mike has a little bit more of the presentation to do so we can hold our questions until the end and have one final round unless you feel really strongly that you want to ask another question now but i saw okay so mike um holly can you take it to the

1:29:46 next slide please thank you so um you know really this started out as a tbl or triple bottom line analysis uh we have focused on the financial piece the environmental and socioeconomic considerations um uh we got sidetracked a little bit like i said because of covid and then again by the holiday farm fire so so really we haven't done a whole lot with those um but they'll be more fully explored once we have the short-term and long-term plans in place for the project whatever it that is i think that's okay because it's better to go to the community with some plans in place and get the reaction so that's our intent

1:30:32 i do do want the commission to be aware of certain things though that do affect this uh commissioner brown mentioned the first one the library project starts with a dam and a bridge that creates leeburg lake that's going to be the biggest challenge going forward there are communities the towns of lieberg and walterville have built up around the projects the town of lieberg sits below the library canal and so anything we do with the canal is going to affect the town of lieberg mark talked a lot about the side streams that are intercepted by the project and if we decide to do away with the canal we're going to have to find new homes for those side streams to uh to flow through one we haven't really touched on is is there are water right holders and irrigators that use the canal to take their water out and they have businesses they have um

1:31:19 that rely on that water and they are currently not getting uh water like they they used to and uh and we are working with them but also what we decide to do with the canal will affect the irrigators and the water right holders along the canal on the other side of the coin uh diverting water into the canal at both leeward and waltonville does impact water quality it has an impact on the temperature of the mackenzie river in that lower reach and we know that and doing away with power generation will benefit the water quality overall in the river and finally this last bullet you know there's a number of different ways to enact risk mitigation we've been talking about some number of ways but you know if you

1:32:04 just go back to board meetings in december we bought a piece of property that property was one of the high risk properties below the ames reach of the canal it came on the market we saw an opportunity and we bought that basically to buy down our risk for that section of canal um we felt like that was a reasonable uh a purchase to make in order to to reduce our risks going forward next slide please so this is right back where uh general manager lawson started us tonight we're asking the board to provide us with some direction i'm moving to the next stage overall to summarize the comparatively small scale of generation from the

1:32:50 leeburg and walterville projects and the low power low forecasted power value going forward just do not justify a reinvestment for a return to service scenario for the libre canal so staff recommends that we invest in the canal in the near term to reduce risk and we do so with an eye on water conveyance strategies going forward then we initially initiate dialogue with ferc and with the other partners on the river to understand our obligations with the surface water conveyance scenario and ultimately move towards a decommissioning um at some point towards the end of the license term and the other piece that uh we need to

1:33:36 talk about is the financials and so with some direction from the board we'll integrate these scenarios into the long-term financial planning and the power planning processes uh to inform future strategies for our power supply funding for decommissioning and the overall financial status of the utility going forward and with that i am done with my slides and we can continue the discussion all right so yeah open it up to questions um john brown you haven't had a chance to go first would you like to be first in the queue um yeah i would thank you very much and

1:34:21 thank you mike and and mike and everybody patty for a great presentation i i'd just like to say that you know my direction would be when we're considering the cost of this that it's all inclusive because i mean we've got homes up there we've got uh you know brand new substation we've got new new power lines we've got uh you know all the fish diversion things we did on partridge lane for the steelhead i mean i just the the economics of what we're going to walk away from is mind-boggling when you stop and think of the magnitude of of uh both fleiburg and walter bill and and where we're going with that and so and and that thing with the dam and everything i just it just absolutely it causes me a lot of concern about the economics of what this is going to do to us

1:35:06 you know walk away versus make it run because i just want to make sure that when we do the financial analysis that we consider everything um and not just the power part of it because if we're going to walk away from this or do we can't walk away from it but if we're going to change how we how we operate this i think it's it's going to have a 100 year impact on us so thank you and you have a daunting task ahead of you sonya do you have any questions i i mean i just wanted to add in on the recommendations i mean it certainly thinks i certainly think that we need to move forward with you know the additional um you know scenarios and looking at decommissioning and

1:35:51 and moving forward with it it sounds like we're a ways off before really having all the information that we need to make a a real decision on it but i do appreciate the work that's happened so far in getting the update i think we're on the right path um and thank you and yeah i agree this doesn't look like it's easy at all i mean something that takes ten years to look into the future to say this is what we need to do that's that's not a small undertaking so thanks that's it matt uh yeah just a few uh comments um one i appreciate the analysis done by the staff um this is super helpful and the

1:36:36 presentation was really really clear so thank you the timeline that you've proposed frank for making the decision i think is the right one i think moving quickly to make sure that we're making decisions early is smart um i will certainly support the staff proposal to look into the stormwater conveyance mode for this particular project um most importantly to me um two items you know as has been discussed tonight uh you know we're talking about major infrastructure projects in people's backyards um and so um i think it's really important that we um we begin communication with those neighbors that are whatever we do are going to be affected by the actions that we as a board and we as an entity take

1:37:22 so i'm really supportive of early outreach and um and really clear direct communication um from us and lastly um assuming we're going down a road of decommissioning um i'll be all all things being equal um you know we never know what all the variables are going to be but i'm going to be most interested in whatever option is most beneficial to restoring uh nato salmon runs so that's all i have to say thanks very much thank you um well i think i'm gonna be the outlier here and it's probably because i am a little bit naive but um i'm leaning

1:38:07 towards return to service um and i'm concerned that if we take a vote today to go to the swc scenario that is a recommendation for decommissioning it doesn't give us that option because we're already starting to do the work on stormwater conveyance so when frank says we'll make that decision in 2022 or by 2022 no that decision is being made tonight and one of the things that i again i i may be naive and i know it's going to cost a lot of money but i'm with commissioner brown as far as we've we've got a 90-year commitment to these projects

1:38:55 that we've invested in over over those times the other thing that i'm concerned about is we are decommissioning renewable energy and and to me renewable energy at this time is is at a premium and it's only going to get more so and so to to say that we're going to just walk away from 9 to 12 megawatts well yeah know again i may be naive but i'm on the return to service bandwagon in my votes i think all right i'm going to jump in and then we'll have another round sonya i see

1:39:40 your hand raised um so i well first of all thank you that was a really um thorough and easy to digest presentation so i appreciate that um i have a question about the power planting um so if we were to decide on decommissioning or not part of what we have to know is what does it mean in terms of a bonneville contract and so i guess maybe the bigger question is what is the timeline or how do you see the timeline for what decisions need to be made or what information we're going to have to kind of digest because we can't make that decision tonight and we're not going to make it next month or the month after um so how do you how do you see that

1:40:25 playing out yeah that that's a really good question and um i think in the immediate right so we we have things that we need to do to improve the safety of the canal that will work for both return to service or water conveyance and and ferc is looking to us to do that so coming out of this meeting we will start to work with our consultants and our regulators to figure out what those actions are and what they might cost and how we might get there and we'll be able to provide that back to the board i would say you know sometime by like you know mid-year or so we'll have a better idea this the second thing is you know it's going to take us years to actually

1:41:11 complete that work there's more field work that's needed to prepare for that uh that work and it's going to take years to you know get it contracted designed and built um and so we're probably talking five years before we're able to really contemplate uh either a return to service or or a full water conveyance and and that starts to line up really well with the decisions that we'll be making as a utility around the bonneville contract uh in 2028 so i think to answer your question and and i want to check to make sure i am answering your question i think you know the immediate need is the next two or three years where we're working on making the canal safe and then we start working uh as a as a utility and as a board to

1:41:56 or towards uh whatever that next step might be and it should be clearer at that point whether we have a return to service or a a stormwater conveyance scenario is our best bet i'll leave it at that commissioner schlossberg this is this is susan ackerman i just wanted to jump in on the bonneville question it looks like frank may have stepped away temporarily but um we would have to go through a process to take the uh power supplied by these canals out of our regional power sales contract with bonneville and then the question is whether there will be replacement hydro available from bonneville to fill that gap and that is something that we just don't

1:42:42 know right now whether it's there but this is the sort of planning that the power planning group works on all the time and and we could begin that work with bonneville fairly shortly once we've got um some ideas in place great thank you um i know my time is up but i'm just gonna go ahead and then we'll do a second round for everybody because i know people have more questions um i i think it would be really great if we could maybe see a sketch of what a timeline would look like for us like what information we would get first and what we would um get later um to piggyback on what matt said about outreach to the community we have our

1:43:27 upriver meeting in april and um i think that a lot of people up there are going to have questions about both the um restoration of the mackenzie after the fire but also this and so it's a great opportunity for us to begin some real outreach up there um and then also i think it's really important for us to schedule um some work sessions and figure out how long it will take to get some of this really important information because this is so this is a huge uh decision to have to make and i want to make sure that we have enough time to really delve into it and digest it and also know how long it's going to take to get some of these answers to these questions that we have so that we

1:44:12 can realistically plan that um because you know 2022 still seems you know a little far off but it's going to come before we know it so i want to make sure that we're really mindful and we plan this out well frank yeah thanks president schlossberg i think understanding the schedule is important when i look at the options simply as they were presented tonight there's there's some level and this is an investment to to continue through the existing license so so this is an investment of either somewhere in the 30 million or somewhere in the 60 million dollar range um the the question there being um is that

1:45:00 additional increment necessary or or desirable for the ability to produce electricity for that remainder remaining period of the license there's a number of different investigations whether that be ferc or bonneville there's there's pieces that can provide some context to that the a complete decommissioning decision wouldn't happen until near the end of the license and so um now there's there's some potential benefits to doing it sooner what we need to clarify those for the board um i don't think we'll be doing any kind of construction that would preclude us from looking at future paths i mean

1:45:45 that's that's something that we'll be working with the board on as as we go so i don't think this box boxes us into a corner but to to answer matt's question just right now we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get us through the end of the license either managing water or producing electricity um as well so that this is a i think we tried to classify that this is a step-by-step process and there's a lot of pieces to this puzzle and eventually we're going to have to work with the community we're going to have to work work together to understand what all those pieces are so that we can look a little bit beyond the near term horizon right now we're we're looking at a

1:46:30 pretty near-term horizon and and the direction we're looking for is yeah we're kind of okay with this this initial 30 million dollars because we pretty much have to that's that's really the compulsory level of investment just to manage water and risk there's a lot of different ways we can do that so we'll we'll explore that further but your request is is valid i think we can put together some some sessions and some schedules and some timelines for the board yeah and and frank i want to throw something out to add to what you just said one of one of the things that um i think is important is if we make investments now for a stormwater conveyance strategy right those investments are not lost

1:47:16 should we in the future if the power market changes change our mind and decide to start generating power again any investment we make for a storm water conveyance strategy has benefit uh for a future return to service all right sonia you had your hand raised before oh i i just had a brief comment because i it sounded like i was hearing that other commissioners were thinking that we needed to vote tonight whether to decommission or not and i think staff and others have answered that that is not what we're doing tonight we're just giving recommendations on kind of yes please go and gather more information or not i mean

1:48:02 that really to me is the recommendation what we're not even really voting on tonight i don't think there's a motion that we're going to be you know entertaining it's really just giving them feedback so they know kind of the general direction to go in so that they can bring us back something maybe years down the road that we will actually vote on to make a decision so that was all thanks john brown just a quick comment um just uh frank and mike do we have something that we can learn from the decommissioning um studies they're doing on cougar big cliff and uh detroit right now because they're talking about shutting those down generation not because they have a problem to fix or a canal to plug just because they cost more to run than they

1:48:48 generate and that's the core of engineers and that's three facilities that are you know one of them's on our watershed and is there something we can learn from what they're doing or we can piggyback that study because it's already funded with you know coven money yeah i i i think commissioner brown we can now that's a little bit different part of that uh analysis is the fact that they need to add a lot of fish mitigation at those at those facilities and so it's not just a present sort of operating analysis this is an analysis given a lot more fish mitigation um at those sites but yes yeah i think that's a two-year study and it was authorized at the end of the year so there's an opportunity to learn from that as well as

1:49:33 we do have a lot of contacts in the industry um some of which you have been through decommissioning processes uh in in the past and so uh i think there's a lot of opportunity to learn from others as we go yeah john brofsky do you have any other questions comment um yeah so i think i can and can come along and thank you sonya i unders i understand that this isn't the decision tonight but but um so on the second bullet point on this slide i would feel more comfortable if that read the way it does there but also initiate a dialogue with ferc with staff

1:50:21 to help determine eweb's obligation under a return to service and re-licensing scenario as well because right now the way it reads is we're going to start talking to ferc about storm water conveyance and decommissioning but there is no conversation with ferc about fully restoring and re-licensing so if if that could be part of that recommendation i i would be i would feel more comfortable yeah john i think we can incorporate that i think part of the reason we omitted that was having been through a re-licensing process recently we probably have a little better feel for what that side of the equation is as opposed to a decommissioning process

1:51:07 but i i think that we can include that all right matt you are last up nothing else for me thank you very much um president schlossberg could i add one thing before we move on in the agenda item yeah absolutely well i i just wanted to thank mike mccann um as as you know this is this is mike's last hurrah at a board meeting and um he's he's been a really as as you can even see in his knowledge of of the topic here um been part of eweb for 18 years and and really provided a tremendous amount of leadership and

1:51:53 value to the community as well as the eweb and to the past this board and past boards and um he's he's going to part retire part work i still haven't figured out what he's doing there but um he's moving on and i wanted to we're gonna miss him tremendously um rod has some plans to to back bill and and you know move ahead but we're gonna miss mike a lot mike's not uh not replaceable so mike thank you very much and um you're gonna be missed thank you frank uh i i will the the person who follows me in the agenda you're gonna hear from carl in a minute carl's the one who got me to uweb uh 19 19 years ago and uh i i would say

1:52:40 i i count myself as incredibly lucky to have spent 18 years working on the mackenzie river mostly and uh you know all of you know it's a wonderful place it's our it's our watershed it's where we play um and uh you know it suffered a terrible tragedy this past september but uh it'll come back and i know uh uh it'll be important for eweb for many years to come so it's been really a pleasure working for uf all these years and uh i'm not sure what i'm doing next either frank except trying to pay for college so uh after that we'll see thank you thank you mike thanks for your service mike yeah thanks thank you thank you mike you'll have to come back

1:53:25 when we're in person and we can celebrate your retirement together i would love to do that when we can do that safely yeah thank you all right i hope it wasn't anything i said [Music] all right we are at 7 29 and it is time for our break so why don't we just add on an extra minute to make an even 7 35 when we come back

2:00:23 everyone is taking the last second left to come back all this sitting in front of zoom all day long or team whatever all right so all the commissioners are here hopefully frank will be back in just a second but it is now

2:01:08 7 36 and um we are on our next agenda item number nine state of the mackenzie watershed report a mckenzie watershed recovery and restoration plan good evening president schlossberg commissioners and general manager lawson for the record my name is karen kelly and i'm the water operations manager for eweb with me tonight is carl morgenstern watershed restoration program manager and we're excited to discuss a number of topics with you tonight regarding our beloved mackenzie river watershed along with plans for its recovery from the holiday farm fire next slide please

2:01:55 to start off i'd like to refresh everyone's understanding of eweb's primary interest in the mackenzie watershed as a public water system we follow the multiple barrier approach to safe drinking water this is an integrated system of procedures processes and tools that collectively prevent or reduce the contamination of drinking water from source to tap in order to reduce risks to public health the approach includes source water protection a robust water treatment system a secure water supply network water quality monitoring and emergency preparedness including community involvement it takes work in each of these areas to effectively manage that risk tonight carl will be talking with you about how the effects of the fire increase the threat to the quality of our sole drinking water source how our source

2:02:42 protection program has contributed to our resilience and how our restoration efforts can further reduce the risks to our drinking water quality excuse me not only from the treatment plant but also throughout the system and to the customers tap this conversation will cover quality and reliability of our water source and our ability to meet our customers needs in the long term but it really poses the question of stewardship to the board in terms of strategic investment opportunities in our watershed for the future next slide please we're going to be covering the following topics first a brief overview of the 2020 state of the watershed report which is a summary of our source water protection work for the calendar year

2:03:27 and was provided in your written materials the report includes the normal source protection programs and eweb's initial response to the holiday farm fire next we'll review a summary of work and funding necessary to carry on initial restoration activities into 2021 and finally we'll give an overview of the proposed five-year mckenzie watershed restoration program and long-term financial plan in particular we're hoping to provide enough information to you tonight about the 2021 budget amendment to be able to return next month for your approval likewise we're opening the conversation with you about the proposed restoration plan and long-term financial planning to ensure we arrive at a common understanding of the needs and opportunities for investment

2:04:12 to be able to return in may or june to you with a formalized plan for your approval next slide please and now i'll turn it over to carl thank you karen uh good evening commissioners um it's a pleasure to be here tonight and as you know the state of our watershed as you as tonight's meeting has shown is in need of some tender loving care and the watershed see the watershed report that you all have in your background are really pointed to some declines as a result of the the holiday farm fire uh clearly the wildfire impacts was a was a huge one a significant impact on the watershed and our water quality had saw some slight declines because of that

2:04:57 and of course as was alluded to earlier this evening from a number of speakers forestry is uh is ramping up salvage logging at levels that have not been experienced before and so i think um you know the picture here is that you know we we are seeing some impacts some short-term and some longer-term impacts that we expect from this fire and i think you know what we designed uh from the initial start as well as where we're going really starts to mitigate for those impacts and helps kind of position us for a more resilient stance moving forward next slide please excuse me i'm waiting all night to talk and now my throat is a little cracky

2:05:45 so as you know uh and as you can anticipate the holiday farm fire has had some impacts on our water quality these impacts have been uh not as great as we originally thought given the conditions that we were facing where we saw increasing concentrations of some metals nutrients of course solids bacteria carbon that were happening during storm events but when we were out of a storm event and just base flow essentially the quality returned back to pre-fire uh levels and so the concentrations even though we're seeing these upticks during storms the concentrations that we're seeing of these various constituents are are well below any health based criteria or mcls so that's the good news i guess is that we have water quality impacts but uh after hayden bridge is done doing

2:06:31 its amazing work the water that is still being provided to our customers is really the same excellent water as pre-fire next slide please so when we first got up into the watershed after the fire was contained and we're able to go take a look at what we had uh before us um it was a site uh of course that that brought tears to my eyes the ash and debris asbestos has its materials all right along the river there's over 430 homes that were destroyed and as you can see from these pictures uh our race against time was to try to do something before the rain started washing this stuff into the river and moving stuff into the sediment for longer term impacts

2:07:16 and so you know we're seeing as you saw before metals nutrients we see bacteria sediment organic matter they're coming off basically as a result of the fire um and our are really the threat that we're trying to to meet was really mostly associate the homes at first and then we're triaging into other responses that we'll talk about as we move through next slide please so the immediate response that we had uh was within one week after the board approved the million dollars for us to do the emergency response was really a a tribute to the partnerships that we had built for years around the pure water partners program our mckinsey watershed emergency response system

2:08:01 and our drinking water quality our water quality monitoring that we're doing and so with those partnerships in place were able to pivot quickly and go from doing riparian assessments to burn assessments and from designing erosion riparian restoration to erosion control so within that first week after the board approved the money we're able to put in place a web portal for landowners to sign up we had gis tools developed so the field staff that are doing the surveys could actually design bmps we worked with the city of eugene to get arborists upriver to help us with hazard trees and we work with city of eugene erosion control experts to design and research the best erosion control we could find and then put it into essentially these bmps like you see

2:08:46 example on the right the second page of this bmp is actually the design of how you implement this and those are then used to train the northwest youth core crews to help us implement this on a bigger scale and within that first week we are able to stabilize 33 destroyed homes that are right along the river so that initial input of funding allowed us to hit the ground quickly because we knew that state agencies and epa we're not going to be in our watershed until probably december and and they're even just now starting the second phase of work next slide please so as we expected you know one of the big things from the fire that we expected to see was increased turbidity and increased organic carbon and we were not essentially uh we were not surprised to see that hit us

2:09:31 the one thing that was surprising as you see in this chart so the blue line is the discharge at vita and the red is turbidity uh measured in fnu is that we didn't have any storms really of significance until that mid november storm and so thankfully this fall was gave us a time to respond and get as much on the ground as far as erosion control as we could but what we saw was you know that turbidity event in november was essentially the same level of turbidity we got back in april 2019 flood and even though the flood had twice the the discharge of the flow and so clearly that first storm mobilized a lot of ash and debris and sediment uh that that then and then as you look at subsequent storms actually that were bigger in size

2:10:17 we see a subsequent decrease in turbidity for each storm that hit us now we can try to claim credit for that but i don't think we can totally claim credit for that obviously a lot of material was washed off the surface during that that november storm but i do think a lot of work went on the ground that helped us reduce the impacts moving forward next slide please so as we kind of move from that initial response that emergency response mode we're now repositioned ourselves and reorganized ourselves kind of for the longer hall and so this is our essentially our the way we're working as part of the watershed recovery task force that's part of the lane county emergency operations so you see we have six teams

2:11:03 uh functioning well together um and i guess the takeaway message here is a couple things one is it takes a village um not only do we have people like janine parisi uh really leaning in with the not only strategic thinking and looking ahead and agency liaison we have jen doing a wonderful job with communications and then you nancy toth running the landowner program and helping develop incentives and david donahue with the course's water quality expertise but even you know we have the watershed council jared waybright and lane council governments and we have over trust in the upper atlantic soil water conservation district so we have so many people involved in these teams that it is truly a uh a more people than that i could

2:11:48 think than i can right here but just the the demonstration of this just to show that you know we have a team that is really ready and posed to put things on the ground at scale and the ramp up quickly as we move into the next phase of work next slide please so what we're asking for you from you tonight is to look at you know what we're looking what we're gonna need in 2021 to continue this work and set us up for essentially five years of response and recovery and restoration that makes a difference and so we kind of put these into three uh essentially buckets of investment that risk space that really gets at these early actions reduced the high priority impacts the resiliency which we know from the fire we're gonna have more flooding

2:12:33 coming down over time and so these are really to help us bounce back from events and really reduce the impacts of those events the strategic where we start to look at expanding conservation across larger larger acreage and industrial timberlands areas and other areas and so for 2021 we're asking for three about 3.5 million because half a million is carrying over from the initial 1 million investment and then we'll bring this back to you on the march uh budget amendment but really the funding is going for uh continuing the risk-based work which is so important to get on the ground quickly the re-vegetation that we're starting right now as well as building incentives for for homeowners to move their buildings back or their homes back further from the river increase or improve their septic systems

2:13:20 as well as maintaining our early warning network in the monitoring we're doing a gis work the resiliency work in 2021 really be focused on acquisitions of floodway properties with destroyed homes where willingland owners really don't want to face the risk of rebuilding anymore in those in those high-risk areas and so being able to acquire those and restore them back into a functioning flood plain and then of course the the strategic is really just a small slice of the investment this year and that's to really to help us develop the program to start expanding on the opportunities that are uh going to be coming up in in our partnership with the industrial timberlands and others next slide please

2:14:06 so that's you know as we as we move from revegetation and that work the longer view of things is over this five-year horizon and really as we look at that work it's it aligns well with the original 10-year strategic plan that we developed for the board in 2018. and really it does because the ways it does is that it's focused on riparian and floodplain restoration and protection and even in that report we talk about carbon sequestration as a watershed uh essentially stewardship and restoration plan or program that might be possible and so our whole program is developed around stewardship and partnerships and leveraging our money with a lot of other money so overall during those five years we're looking at you know a little over 29 million dollar ask

2:14:52 and basically what this amounts to when you look at the surcharge and deborah hearts group is really the ones that are working on this and and we'll bring it back to you but on average this is about three dollars per meter and clearly there's going to be some some need to scale this up for larger customers and that work is being done as i said by deborah's group and she will bring that back but that's about what you're looking at on average and then looking at bonds to really pay for the strategic projects where we're essentially setting up the watershed for a longer term restoration that will benefit future generations and i guess in this place it's really important to also look at the investments that eweb is making allow us to leverage a lot of other money it allows us to really do two

2:15:37 things it gives us a backstop knowing we can do this work with this investment and we can plan on it and then at the same time as we bring in other money we can scale back either eweb funds or we could scale up the work we're doing next slide please so the the kind of the way the the money flows out in these three investment areas of risk risk-based resiliency and strategic are shown on this slide and basically the wrist base being those early actions in the early part of our five year projection once again they're the ones that you've seen on the ground you know we're we're building up to do the new ones obviously are the homeowner incentives and we're starting to revegetation work it's the resiliency in the strategic uh investments that are the areas that

2:16:22 we're leading into right now and so the resiliency being the first and foremost uh where we're looking at large-scale floodplain restoration projects and i'll show you example that in a second and really that is to try to mitigate uh what's coming off the landscape and and and create a buffer between those those burn landscapes and the river and then the large-scale reforestation severe burned areas on industrial timberlands is an opportunity us for us to invest in the opportunities to to uh increase the the watershed essentially conservation benefits of that uh that could also lead to carbon offsets and so over the five years you see how the the funding kind of flows out

2:17:07 into these three strategic areas nick's site please so of course examples of risk-based um uh a lot of you that were on the tour saw this in action um in addition to what we're doing right now and and the in the bmp's erosion control is the revegetation work and then the land or a homeowner incentives that we're developing right now and zero interest loans that will help with moving structures back from the river and increasing septic treatment but this group also includes our stormwater monitoring efforts our early warning network our gis analysis that helps helps tell us where to work and um and so these are all the risk-based actions

2:17:52 to really get at the high priority actions we need to do along the river next slide please so the resiliency actions are really focused on those floodplain areas that are downstream of severe burned areas and so this is a map of soil burn severity and you can see the fire moving from east to west uh essentially torching the east sides of the the ridges and not so much on the west side and so we've been working in these three areas of gate creek courts creek and fin rock for for a while um and so these are the areas that basically for example fenrock which mckinsey river trust owns investing in the in the continued floodplain restoration of that portion of the mckinsey river that

2:18:37 allows kind of spreading out the flood flows and and dropping out sediment which is up just downstream of the town of blue river you can see those red dots are the destroyed homes and so when you look at the quartz creek and gate creek areas that we look at investing in those are downstream of timberlands that have been severely burned and so what this allows us to do is basically drop out all that sediment metals nutrients carbon attenuate that and reduce flood flows and so the picture you see there below is is example of the south fork floodplain restoration that was done with the forest service and the mackenzie watershed council and so this is an example of how you take an inside channel and you spread it out and put in large wood and it becomes it's a natural flood plain again where

2:19:23 it slows the flow reduces velocities drops out sediment and attenuates floods and so this is a a tried and true strategy that we've used on the south fork and deer creek and it's basically investing in these three areas using fema money to basically do the the the implementation and our funds go into essentially conservation easements and acquisitions and design and so forth so that's an example of what resiliency action would look like next slide please so the strategic actions is one that is really obviously very scalable um this is one where we are essentially focused on expanding watershed conservation and control across a larger landscape and that leads

2:20:08 to carbon sequestration uh product line it leads to essentially potentially generating carbon offsets and so the the this is built on a uh a u of o e web partnership long-term partnership where we're using the high banks road as a carbon research center which will then inform the design of these carbon projects as they as the opportunities present themselves and so this would be looked at as a bond funded uh strategic action and uh and like we said it's it's scalable based on the opportunities in front of us and the desire of the board wants to go in this direction and i think that is it for me i'll turn it back to karen next slide please

2:20:58 so to close out over more than a decade of outreach and research customers have expressed a clear and unchanging priority ensuring safe reliable drinking water remains the most important e-web program we want to undertake this work with the support and guidance of our board of commissioners who represent our customer owners so first we're asking you for direction in the proposed 3.9 million 2021 budget amendment to ultimately gain approval in march and secondly we're asking for your direction to reach a common understanding of the investments that the board would like to make in watershed restoration over the next five years to lead us to reach an eventual approval in may or june this must include a long-term financial plan funding approach such as the surcharge

2:21:43 in bond funding for up to 29 million as mentioned so at this point um carl and i are happy to take your questions and uh we'll open it up great whoops um all right is there anybody any of the commissioners want to go first you can raise your hand if i can see you i don't see any hands raised but i'm just oh okay matt go ahead uh yeah i have a handful of questions um and forgive me to kind of bounce around a little bit um thank you for the

2:22:29 presentation carl um it's very helpful um in terms of the surcharge you mentioned the average of three dollars per meter assume that's three dollars per meter per year is that right and then the second part of that sorry is um are there any large customers industrial customers etc who will see a really significant surcharge that we might hear about i'm going to let debra answer that deborah are you here thanks carl i am here sorry about that uh that would be an average per month charge is actually what he's referencing and how that charge gets applied is something that we're working

2:23:16 on now to bring you all a reasonable proposal next month so it may be smaller for residential and yes larger for some of our large commercial water users i guess i would just jump in and add you know part of the thing we're gonna wrestle with there matt is is how we do this equitably you know is it is it a fixed charge versus volumetric you know do you charge the same and to some extent every gallon of water is affected by the watershed but then you also know that there are some commercial customers who rely on it more than others so we're we're going to have to struggle through the equity piece of that before we come back to the board but we wanted to provide you with at least

2:24:01 an average uh for for kind of a residential uh picture of about three dollars a month how that's structured we don't know yet okay that's helpful thank you um do we have a sense of um that currently bond rates are really low is there a um do you have a sense of how much of this could be bonded of of the whole package of what we're talking about i just don't have a sense of what of this proposed these proposed actions could actually be paid for with a bond do you want me to take that carl much of the uh so much of the the up to 17 million dollars in strategic work that carl alluded to is something that

2:24:47 we would look at uh for bond funding great thanks matt it sounds like you're wondering if more of that could be bonded i guess we are exploring some you know what's called green bonds um but i think i think we're leaning on the the carbon being the bond funded typically um typically when we look to bond funds uh those bondholders are looking for us to be acquiring or building some sort of an asset so most of the um initial 12 the 12 million piece is more o m work okay yeah and um sorry i'm just going on with questions this is okay mindy you can stop me i can

2:25:32 come back yeah i don't have the timer anymore but um go ahead okay i'll just take one more and then i'll let somebody else jump in here um if uh yes the opportunity to bond um carl seems like a big opportunity i assume we're talking about when we're talking about industrial forest lands are we talking about um you said reforesting those lands are we also talking about just outright purchase of those lands is that something that's part of the discussion yeah basically the the reforestation is basically because one of the issues we have is a lack of seedlings uh supply that's gonna hit us over the next three four years and so it's being able to uh either through acquisition or conservation he's

2:26:17 meant gain control of large tracts that we could then reforest uh and turn into conservation zones okay thanks then i'll just stop uh by saying i think because this is a long-term investment um in water quality and watershed protection it makes sense it's one of the places where it does make sense to me to um to take out loans to do the work um and i think the um the money that eweb puts forward can be leveraged in so many ways i'm familiar with the ways in which um that's being done already and i think uh it's a smart use of of those dollars that's all thanks

2:27:03 all right john brown thank you um i could be you know anyhow i was going to say we spend too much money on water preservation but i think you'd see through that um you know i'm totally in support of everything as you could probably imagine but just a couple specific questions maybe for deborah uh we're looking at aws alternative water supply you know 50 to 70 million dollars in the next few years it's just teed up in our hierarchy of spending and that's out of the water budget too and are we going to be able to make our debt coverage ratio requirements for bonding for both those these unexpected bonds and those potentially anticipated bonds i mean what how much can we afford um so you you actually do raise a really

2:27:49 good a really good point about our ability to borrow and part of limiting that borrowing is to preserve capacity for an alternative water source so last year in the fall we brought another long-term financial plan with an additional 50 million in it to demonstrate the kind of capacity that the water utility had uh it the capacity is there but it is something that we're watching okay and then um maybe something for carl uh or whoever else would like to further do i'm all for acquiring some of these at-risk properties and if nothing else you know acquire it and throw a deed

2:28:34 restriction on it or you know just and then sell it to the adjacent owner you know and say they can keep it for opening space but they can't improve it and that way we don't have to tie up all that capital we there's some creative ways i think you can do to acquire a lot of this real estate and and do that without having to totally own and fee fee ownership we could you know people want open space they don't want neighbors so you acquire five acres on the river and the neighbors say well i'll give you you know 100 000 for it that we can at least recover some of that money and achieve our goal hopefully and put conservation easements on it and lastly um the thing that's been bugging me a long time about our water quality and you know my favorite uh down in springfield if you look at page 21 on your background or on the aerial you'll see the ip uh pulp effluent uh

2:29:22 pond it has millions of gallons of pulp that's flowing in it right next to i-105 right next to the 42nd street slough are we ever going to worry about that or be concerned about that because that's an earthen berm and if we have an earthquake millions of gallons of that effluent are going to go right into the river right above our intake um is that anything that's on your radar while we're doing this um it it is on our radar but um in what we were moving towards before the fire hit us was a couple things one is you know creating more wetlands in those areas uh but then the other is having an early warning station set up right there um we diverted that early warning station to upriver to be part of the fire they are mobile so uh once we get our feet under us

2:30:09 we'll bring it back i do find that interesting i it would be interesting to engage ip and and just you know look at what is their their long-term plan for that that area okay thank you i just it's just a concern i don't think if you look at an area of what what our risks are and you know they're closer to the plant the greater the risk and we've got millions of gallons effluent excellent the one on the on the west side of 42nd doesn't concern me it's the one next to i-105 that's right there and it's just adjacent to a clue and you can take a shovel and knock the berm down and um you know that's going to be a concern to me so while we're while we're fixing things i hope we can at least keep that in the background thank you and i support 100 uh funding of everything

2:30:57 thank you and more thank you sonia do you have any questions i have a couple um i'm sorry if i missed it but i i didn't hear address the question kind of from earlier on whether or not we really have any input on the logging in these areas i mean it seems like in the area that we own that is something but as you're developing these partnerships is that something that we are working with uh those kinds of groups to promote or or maybe the opposite um to you know prevent or is that something that's really left up to the landowners

2:31:42 i mean we have we have limited influence on how people manage their private lands as long as they're manny gym per the forced practices act we do try to have influence on either um mostly the smaller landowners not the industrial timber owners and so what we are doing now is engaging them on opportunities to how can we uh how can we take control of floodplains and let us manage those how can we take more control over key riparian areas and how can we help essentially restore these areas in a way that that gives us

2:32:28 more resilience but as far as dictating or trying to influence how they are logging and why they're logging it's really it's really hard um we we have been on tours with campbell global and others up there and basically what their race is is against uh infestation of beetles and then losing the value if they don't get that wood out of there in a short period of time now whether that's true or not i don't you know i don't know um but they are in their minds racing against the clock to try and get the value uh that they can out of the lands that they own and that's you know odf regulates that um we can certainly work with the legislature or others if we want to take that route but the short answer is we don't have a

2:33:13 lot of influence okay so it seems like for the you know some messaging for the people who are interested in that it sounds like odfw is really more of the regulating body for that that you know it uh oversight and how that works so if they're really about that they they need to take it up with odfw yes and the way that we are going to influence is through our investments in the resiliency and the strategic areas uh we will have an influence there and we're not proactively you know trying to help landowner log i mean that's not one of the partnerships we're developing we're developing partnerships to preserve the the watershed and preservation of the watershed now is the the assumption then correct um that they were making

2:34:00 tonight that it is it is actually more damaging to to clear that out than to leave some of that wood there have you seen some of the evidence or the science in the the studies that you've done in preserving um it's it's a complex issue i personally uh you know whether what we're seeing the sediment is coming from a severe burned area or a severe burned area that's logged uh it's really hard to differentiate that i do agree that leaving trees uh is a better move until they fall over and they take a root wad with them but you know it's i don't yeah i we have not seen that data that shows that this area that got severely burned

2:34:46 is pumping out less sediment than this area that they just logged okay all right and then in terms of the um the direction for the board tonight what we need to give you um do you need all like one two and three or could we do a layered approach where we you know we kind of take it step one and say yes we give you know if we decide to give approval of that we can do that and then we can look on the five-year and then you know maybe at a later time we kind of say okay now we're at a place where we do the long term or how do those three intermingle for like you know the next month what what how do you need that right now or could we kind of take this piece meal

2:35:31 um well the the plan is that the 2021 budget amendment is what really needs to be ironed down and you know we'll bring back to you in march and if you see some concerns about what we're looking at in the 2021 budget amendment that'd be good to hear so we can make those adjustments um the five-year plan we'll have time to talk about and we'll have more information uh come may and april as we get better understanding of what fema is going to reimburse us for what fema is looking to potentially invest in that we can leverage so those questions are all still being worked out which is why we're gonna look at bringing that part of it back to a little bit later okay yeah because i'm i'm comfortable with going with number one

2:36:16 i feel like you know two and three need to be fleshed out a little bit more before i'm looking at you know just giving full approval tonight i'm more than happy to give you know my blessing to say yes you know go and and actually do the work to bring that information back sorry maybe frank had a yeah i'm just going to elaborate a little bit um commissioner carlson i think that the highest priority for us is the budget amendment for 2021. a secondary and maybe a coupling piece to that is the ability to start some kind of a surcharge approach um and looking and recognizing that we need to have some funding established and now is the time to do it i'll say

2:37:02 that the the sooner the the better for that um and and being able to establish that mechanism knowing that i and i want to make sure the board's clear on this as well as the public this is a five year three to five year proposed approach this is not an ongoing we're going to keep this in the rates forever that surcharge so establishing that mechanism in combination with the 2021 budget amendment those are the two high priorities we will be back in in june regardless with the long-term financial plan and the impacts going forward with these assumptions in place because we think they're generally supported by the board and you have a number of questions as to the

2:37:48 impact but those are the two priorities okay perfect i'll move to approve the uh 21 the amendment 3.9 million dollar proposed uh budget amendment yeah i think we're actually just at we'll bring we'll bring that actual amendment back as a resolution next month but we appreciate your enthusiasm well it says approval you know all right so that's not really what we're doing today i'm done all right um john varovsky you have not had a chance yet and then i see your hand john brown thank you um i've got a question and

2:38:35 then a couple of comments um so for debra so the the three dollar surcharge could that be used to help that'll raise 12 million dollars if that goes for longer than five years could that help to defray the the bond cost and use that to uh to go for the bond costs because i don't know if i'm i'm set with leaving that just at five five years i think that that's something that could be an ongoing thing to help offset the bonds and continue this work for input in perpetuity but that's the question that that's certainly a choice that

2:39:20 this board could make they could they could plan that from the outset or they could make that as we approach the three to five year mark okay then my two comments are i agree agree with frank now is the time to strikes i hate to say this but strike while the iron is hot the community interest is in restoring the the mckenzie valley and the watershed and so i think that bringing this to the public or bringing this to our ratepayers is absolutely appropriate at this time with that said i i would even say let's look at maybe even going higher 3.50 cents

2:40:05 whatever we we feel we can get i think is appropriate the second comment that i would make is um as far as the large the larger uh commercial um ratepayers the business community has been hit hard over the last year or two so i would hope that we can come up with some sort of metrics that is is fair but maybe not based on volume you know look at what our needs are figure out how many meters there are and then do it appropriately so that it's it's not hurting our business community um to the extent you know we're a lot of

2:40:53 businesses are down already and so i know that they'd be on board but on board volume wise may be difficult for some businesses so i would want that to be considered in what we're doing as far as the commercial side all right i just have a couple of comments one is that i fully support this i think that um is money well spent not just money but i also think that it is our responsibility to take care of the watershed um and i'm super proud just by association i think carl the work you and your team are doing is phenomenal and will probably serve as a model for

2:41:39 many other communities because we know that fires are just going to become more common so kudos to you and your team for being able to do this it's really great um i guess i just have one question and in that three to five year plan is there other ways to um i know it's focused on restoration obviously but are there ways to kind of shore up resiliency for when if and when the next fire hits or is it just a fire event is a fire event and we can't really plan for it yeah that's an excellent question um and so the the direction we're moving is more for a um a fire well just for the communities uh

2:42:25 the the folks that are rebuilding is is is really do it with a fire wise approach um and then for the actually uh you know the the the flood plain projects those and of themselves are allow large wetted surfaces to act as fire breaks so to speak and then working upstream of that really is a attention to fuels and planting the right species in the right places that helps you with that fire resistance so yes the short answer is we are all three of these are looking at it from a fire standpoint and a flood standpoint and a natural disaster standpoint great and then one last question and

2:43:11 it's about the um odfw and the issues about timber that the public input we heard today so we get in our packet we hear about like what uweb's legislative efforts are and i'm just curious has it ever been one of our efforts to kind of lobby the state or even at the federal level to address the issue of large-scale clear cutting or is that something that's just too big for us and we don't want to get involved in yeah um i mean to be honest when you look at our strategic plan and what we've done we've shown that forestry is actually not our

2:43:56 highest priority threat that urban runoff is development is uh you know spills uh to lesser degree agriculture but um and so forestry didn't warrant our full attention to be honest but you know post fire uh you know maybe there's opportunities there i know there is the conservation group is working with the timber industry and odf to revisit the forced practices act so i think we should track that work and see is there something there that we that we should lean into yeah frank yeah i was sorry i had my my computer had a glitch there so i had to leave and come back but i was i was going to say um i've also had some discussions with jason huser uh about the

2:44:43 this he refers to it as the stack of bills that are presently going through salem and um understanding and keeping tabs on what's going on relative to anything related to wildfire or watershed or recovery or logging and so he's he's looking into that aspect of it i didn't get a chance to comment completely on the on the rate discussion i i was going to say that um we can i'll talk to deborah about a number of different options when i start to hear about multiple purposes not just recovery but protection commissioner borofsky's comment about almost in perpetuity those become rate discussions as opposed

2:45:28 to surcharge discussions um and uh we might be looking at a couple different options there we we do have some headroom relative to other utilities i think we just want to make sure that we we if there's a dedicated fund for a dedicated purpose we can definitely that is very easy for the community to understand especially right now and so a surcharge would make sense for that but if the board is looking to just beef up the amount of watershed work that we do that could be a combination of surcharge and rate action so i just want to let you know that there's different ways to approach this and and i'll get with karen and rod and deborah and figure out what's

2:46:15 the best mix for what we'd like to do john brown you had your hand up again do you have yeah if i may just a real quick comment uh you know carl and i go way back on some of these topics and i just want to make sure that um because of budget limitations or perception a bunch of limitations that we don't go out and pass up an opportunity this is you know it's um it's unfortunate the the loss that everybody suffered up there but it could be an opportunity for us and i don't want to lose that opportunity if there's some critical properties that are that it's questionable whether they're going to be redeveloped or we could acquired through a conservation easement on or whatever i would hope that rather than pass on those opportunities that you would at least come to us and say hey here it is it's kind of like the

2:47:00 finn rock property when we had that opportunity i just i just because this is you know once they're built on you just told us what the priorities were and it's it's you know it's urban runoff and it's development and it's and timber is way down there and and if we can say okay we can take you know 10 or 20 septic tanks with stay away from that river and make everybody whole um i'm all for that and i don't want to lose that opportunity because once they're rebuilt they're there for 50 to 100 years and uh and it's it's not one it's death by a thousand cuts is what will hurt that river so i don't want to lose those opportunities to maybe help people financially and also help the community in the watershed yeah i think that's an excellent point i think this does give us the ability to take advantage of these opportunities

2:47:46 because it's not just our money like i've been talking about we're leveraging millions of other dollars with this money so yes thank you matt i just have um two um questions to propose for uh when you come back to us uh the next time on this topic if we have any community attitudes surveys that would help inform our decision um that would be really helpful they may not be you know specifically this question because i don't think we can spool up a survey in time to ask that maybe but if there are surveys that could give us some sense of how our e-web customers might respond to a surcharge that would

2:48:31 be helpful to know um and then i know carl that you aren't gonna have a sense of how much that this can be reimbursed um because the machine just doesn't move fast enough to know you know whether fema dollars are going to cover this or cover that however it'd be useful to know um in the best case scenario how much of it you think could be in reimbursed just so we have a sense are we you know might half of what we're talking about spending be um be reimbursed or a quarter of it just to give us a sense of scale would be useful thank you yeah i think um the short answer is that of our initial response you know we're looking at probably half a million to 700 000 being reimbursed of that million that we spent um

2:49:19 but moving forward basically what we're doing is we're we're covering like for the floodplain efforts you know that's mostly fema money and then we're paying that 25 match as kind of our contribution as well as doing the design and other things um so it's not really reimbursement but it's it's adding more to ours to allow us to scale up and then i mean we right now we're in in the process of about half a million dollars worth of grants and other things requests that are out there so you're right it is hard to uh to put a figure on that right now because so many moving parts as you're aware of but i think by may or april uh when we come back to that longer term vision i think we'll have a lot of that dialed in and be able to to help you understand that a bit more

2:50:05 and i i would i think mr mcrae that we do have access to uh some data that shows our uh customer affinity to increasing investment in in what the watershed and what had to do with watershed protection and not specific to fire recovery which i think would even be a higher affinity to do that so we can supply that as well yeah that'd be great to see thanks so much john brosky do you have any other comments sonia i'm not sure if you're there you have anything else i don't have anything else thank you great all right well thank you very much carl and karen hopefully you got the information you needed

2:50:50 yeah thank you great all right then we will move on to agenda item number 10 correspondence and board agendas frank that's you yes it is uh president schlossberg thank you you know first of all you know thanks to to karen and and carl and the whole team there they've they've you know we've we've had a tremendous influence in the watershed through the years and developing partnerships and and part of this is to get to the question that sonya answered asked earlier about you know can we can we influence some of these i think some of the purpose of our strategic investment is to move along the continuum from just influencing to actually controlling some

2:51:35 of this through easements or acquisitions so i think there's a good opportunity there there were only two items of correspondence one had to do with updating some board policies these are relative to references that to statute or code primarily uh fairly minor we typically ask for any input that you might have that can be either offline or through this meeting and and then would bring back um likely these were pretty minor so as a consent item and then the other one was a legislative update it's it's early in the season as jason would describe it and a whole stack of bills probably more than we would have expected in this kind of environment and we're starting to wade uh through

2:52:20 some of those and and i think he provided an update and so if there were any question on those two items we'd be happy to answer them otherwise we can move on to the agenda planning i don't see any questions from an agenda perspective i know the board is getting together i think that's a great move we we do have a second meeting planned for this month this is this is mostly to give you an update on our customer experience improvement project this is customer self-service we'll give you a demo just to get your feedback on that that's a going to be a new product for how customers pay bills and things like that

2:53:05 so that's that's an orientation and then um i was waiting a little bit to see the outcome of tonight and see if we we got to a stage i felt comfortable with on especially on leigh berg i think we did we can move forward with what we got but i might also suggest as part of the meeting in february i'd i'd like to go through where we are with the strategic plan now um kind of give at least a little bit of history as to where this came from um and uh now there's a couple of commissioners who went through the process so but i think there's enough new people on the board to just give you a feel for how the plan was developed and and why

2:53:50 it prioritizes the things it does and doesn't do other things so a little bit of a a strategy history and then discussion and kind of q a around that so that we can set up future strategic discussions um on where we want to go from here and and maybe why so that that would be probably an hour to an hour and a half meeting um on the third tuesday um and so that if that works for everybody we can start scheduling that we've tried to reserve those dates um we won't do it every month but i felt like this was kind of a good time to do it since we got a lot covered today and we've got some some new board members who are now in the fray of it

2:54:35 um january was kind of a hey welcome to the to the club and now it's oh you got to work for this so um a lot of things start to to happen great thank you all right moving on to number 11 board wrap up um john brown do you want to go first well thank you i apologize for joining everybody late but it was a technical glitch and i'm technologically challenged and so it's it's got to be my fault i'm sure um that said i i just want to remind people that i know that several of you uh have not seen things like uh seneca and uh and i i personally would like to

2:55:20 see the new biomass generating facility in junction city it's huge it's i think one of the biggest ones in the west and not a lot of people know about it but um those are things that i know that it's uh you can social distance and you can stay away from people but they're i think it's really especially seneca to see because i think that re-licensing that license is going to come up in the tenure of a couple of the board members is that not correct frank yeah that's that's actually a power purchase agreement that expires i believe in 2025 and so um so yeah but it it's got some interesting characteristics i think that would be good as well as the other tour that you mentioned in junction city which is primarily right now used for renewable natural gas injection as opposed to generating electricity so

2:56:06 that would be a good one as well okay well thank you very much and then just as a as an update i think frank gave you an it but i think the the the transaction on burleson is going well so uh kudos to staff for making that happen real quickly so thank you that's it great i'm just going to go clockwise on my screen and um matt you are next uh i'll just say thanks for queuing up the softballs today frank that was great yeah that's all i'm thrilled to be here and we're thrilled to be here and working with uh this board it's uh it's a privilege

2:56:55 all right sonia you're next i don't have anything to add i'm a great meeting tonight thanks aaron john borowski yeah thank you the learning continues uh each one of these packets is uh is eye-opening and i look forward to learning more as the months go on and just one quick thing for me we have a board retreat coming up on february 21st and believe me i understand that the last thing any of us wants is any more time on zoom or any of these virtual meetings but i promise that we'll keep it short my goal is to keep it

2:57:40 maybe an hour yeah we'll say an hour and um i'm just thinking that it will be a time for us just to kind of get to know each other a little bit better and just strengthen that relationship we're not allowed to talk anything policy or anything like that so um we'll keep it light and fun and i promise we'll keep it to an hour so mindy is that the 21st of the 22nd i think 21st is a sunday oh it's the 22nd yes thank you yeah i'll send out more information about that in a bit um and otherwise that is it unless frank you have anything else that you want to say i just wanted to thank the board i i know we we took like half a step

2:58:25 down a mini mile journey on some of these issues and it's really valuable to have this interaction and get questions and understand where you're coming from it's a it's a great test for us and it it helps staff a lot so but a lot more to come sometimes you you answer one you know you ask or answer one question and it creates eight more um and you know that's the journey we're expecting um over the next two or three years which i expect to be pretty intense on some of these most of these and other issues so um thanks for your input and and patience and questions and look forward to the journey

2:59:16 great and with that we are adjourned thanks everybody thank you mike mccann yes thanks mike