City Council - Regular Meeting

Here we go. All right. Good evening everybody. I have 6 o'clock and I will go ahead and call the Anacorta City Council meeting for March 23rd, 2026 to order. Would you all please join me in the pledge of allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Uh we'll proceed to announcements and committee reports. Mayor Walters, Mr. Courier. Uh, may I move to excuse Mr. Young? Yes, now is a great time. Uh, motion

and a second to excuse Mr. Young. If there is no objection, Mr. Young is is excused. All right. Now, we'll move to announcements and committee reports. Next slide, please. Uh the Anacortis Senior Activity Center has a couple of uh notable activities going on that they want to highlight for you. First of all, recreational ukulele. Uh class for beginners, no experience required. It's Fridays starting April 3rd. Uh you can um make a $5 suggested donation to get into that class and away you go. Uh also their renowned Aging Mastery Program will be Wednesdays, April 15th through June 3rd. You can find out about both of these classes and you can register at anacquartersw.gov556. Um, also this week, March 23rd through the 27th is a Meals on Wheels fundraising event. Um, so as you can see on the on the screen here, there are any number of events this week related to Meals on Wheels where they are going to be soliciting fundraising from you. As as council knows and others may know, Meals on Wheels in Scadget County will be entering a period of transition in the second half of this year, making fundraising for Meals on Wheels all the more important. Um, so for more information, you can learn uh more at the senior center or at anortiswa.gov/2019. The parks and recck department is having the egg dash at Stovvic Park on April 3rd at 6 o'clock till 6:01. Uh so be there or you will be very late and there won't be any eggs. Uh the youth track and field starts April 20th and registration is now open and all of their summer recreation programs are listed and you can sign up for them at anacortiswah.gov490.

The community development block grant that the city receives is um subject to an annual plan process whereby we determine how that money is spent on various uh projects. The project application period has closed, but public comment on that will resume uh is is currently in progress. Written comment is in progress and there's a public hearing on April 27th. You can learn more at anacordiswah.gov174. The Gimis Ferry will be out for maintenance May 4th through 17th. Uh this is a particular uh annual favorite event for Oldtown. They will have passengeronly service uh that'll be provided by Aer Launch beginning May 4th at 6:30 a.m. and they'll follow the non- peak sailing schedule. Uh next week we don't have a meeting, but the week after that we will have information about um uh how we will handle traffic and parking in the area during the Gimisferry maintenance outage. And we'll provide that during one of these announcements and um through distribution to neighbors. If you want information about that and other projects and issues that the city's got going on, you can learn that at anacordiswah.gov/projects. We're really trying to get that information out onto our website so that you can learn it there instead of through strangers on the internet. And finally, if you have unwanted firearms, you are required under the statute to safely store those firearms. But if you don't want them anymore, Anakors Police Department will take them off your hands. You can call 360428-3211, the non-emergency number uh and arrange for you to drop off your firearms at the police station. You want to call that number in advance. Don't just walk into the police station with them. Um but we

will take care of them. We will dispose of them for you. Again, this is voluntarily. If you would like to dispose of firearms you don't need anymore, we would love to get them out of circulation. Uh so you can make arrangements with APD to make that happen. Uh council, I understand that there are no committee reports this evening, but we do have a couple of upcoming events. Again, no council meeting next week because it's the fifth Monday. And then the state of the city address and a normal council meeting will follow on April 6th. And then the all department quarter 1 update work session will be April 13th. And that will be nothing but the all department quarter 1 update work session. Uh so you can plan on that. All right. Uh, council, it is now time for public comment. We had nobody signed up in advance and I'll ask staff to check to see if anybody is online. Is anyone interested in the audience at making public comment at this point? Seeing none and staff any and nobody online, we can skip ahead through public comment and proceed to the consent agenda. Council,

Mayor Walters, Miss Hunt. I move to approve consent ag consent agenda items A through C. Second. We have a motion and a second to approve the consent agenda. No discussion is allowed on the consent agenda. So, if there's no objection, we'll take a vote. All those in favor signify by saying I.

All those opposed say no. The eyes have it. The consent agenda is approved. All right. Our first item of other business is a update from the Scadget Tourism Bureau. This will be presented by Kristen Keltz of the bureau. Go ahead and adjust the mic so it's at a comfortable location. And welcome. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, uh, Mayor Walters and Council. Uh we're excited to be here tonight to do a brief update on what this gadget tourism bureau has been working on uh for the past couple of years. So I'll start with uh just a quick introduction an introduction of our staff. We've got Elizabeth Tyler here. She's our VP of marketing and operations. Uh Cody Herd's our sports development manager. And then we just brought Jennese Funston on as a part-time marketing and communications coordinator. Uh we also have one of our board members uh Jessica Kaiser here with us tonight as well. Uh so I'll just start with some marketing and advertising. So we've got our market marketing highlights from 2025. We've had some really good results. Our return on ad spends about 110 to1. Uh we had almost uh $18,500 overnight stays and our visitor spend was about $12.1 million. So, we're able to capture that number through a media attribution program that we have where we are um directly targeting um visitors and then retargeting and then we're actually tracking when they come into town and spend uh credit cards. So, it it's it's countywide, so it's all aggregate. We can't, you know, dive into specific businesses. Um but that's up from about $3.6 million in 2024. So, we had a a pretty nice increase. Um we're able to see where our visitors are coming from. You'll notice um a majority of that is from Washington state kind of that Seattle uh metro market area, uh California, Oregon, uh Texas um is a bit of an anomaly that um as many of you know will be a lot of our refinery stays um that show up in some of that data along with that six plus days stay is a lot of the refinery turnaround as well. We do have the two refin refineries geoence so we're able to pull that out for some visitor tracking as well. Oh, there we go. Uh so this is just a quick list of what we're doing. Most of our advertising is digital so that we can really see that return on investment. Uh we've got uh some print magazines that we do with Northwest

Travel and Life, uh the State Visitor Guide, the Cascade Loop, and The Scenic Washington Travel. Uh our social media uh continues to grow. We're up about 11% on our Facebook and uh 14.5% on our Instagram. Uh we worked really hard to get all of our handles aligned. So at visitscadget valley is what we're using for all of our platforms. And then if anyone has anything that they want promoted just hashtag magagic uh gadget. We try to share as much as we can on our social media. Um uh one of the big things that we were able to accomplish last year is a brand new website. And so we were able to wireframe that to the back end of our CRM platform. Uh, and so our stakeholders have an extra net where they can go in and update their listings and photos and add events and things like that. Uh, we're super excited. Our website actually won an award at the state of Washington tourism conference in October and Elizabeth won the Rising Star Award as well. Uh, we've got some print publications that we do. Uh, we, uh, work now with I Love Scadget is the official visitor guide for the county. Uh we are hopefully going to have some of those uh 2026 copies in our hands in the next week. We reformatted it. It's a book brochure booklet size now and we'll be able to um spread out our distribution a little bit more and hopefully people will hold on to it um in that smaller format. So we're very excited about that. Uh we also uh did a birding brochure through a grant through the port of Seattle and uh along with a brochure we were able to create a video and do some targeted marketing for bird watching during the offseason. And then of course we updated our um just our evergreen brochure that had not been updated in about 10 years. So we also have a hiking guide that's going to be um out hopefully beginning of April. So we're quickly working on that. Uh we worked on an always here campaign for our um Canadian visitors. So as you know

some of that traffic coming down south has slowed down quite a bit and so we are just letting folks know that we respect their decision not to come but we'll be here when they're ready and so encouraged folks to put the flyer up. So we have two um sides to our website. We have the stakeholder side which is all the data um statistics messaging um if any of our stakeholders get called by the media that kind of thing. And then we also have a visitor facing page for Canadians to plan their trip. Uh we are doing public relations. We work with a great firm out of uh Edmonds that knows Sky Valley really well and has a great regional and national reach. We had 93 stories covered in 2024 up slightly from 2024. And we've hosted writers um in the county from 11 different publications including some national and international media. So our data, so this is one thing that we're really really diving into. We started using Datafi last January and so we're able to get some really good information. We've geoenced several locations throughout the county and so we're able to pull some reporting for a lot of our stakeholders on events and and different things like that. Uh so we can get, you know, visitation by years, total trips, where they're coming from, that kind of thing. We also get reporting from the Smith Travel Research, which is hotel stays. So, we can get occupancy and um average daily rates for our hotel years uh in the area as well as the AirDNA which tracks all of our short-term rentals um in the area. So, we have been able to put together a lodging t rubric scoring sheet that we've shared with all of the lodging tax committees throughout the county and then a um report that uh we can um it's a template for reporting for any of the events that they can use for their application and their end of the year reporting. So, our tourism economics um impact data. So, this is from 2024. Uh we expect to get the 2025 information the first week in May. And so, we'll share

that at our tourism summit. So, you'll see the savings per household is about $673. It's up 2.5%. What this means is they take all of the revenue from uh visitors and tourism in the area and they they calculate that um revenue that's brought in from taxes for that spend. And that's just an estimated savings that people are seeing on their um their um property taxes. It it's not a like a line item where you get to deduct it. It's just an estimate. Like if we didn't have visitors, property taxes in Scadget County would be about almost $700 higher. Uh we provide about 3,800 jobs in Scadget County and uh sales for tourism is about $386 million. So it's a pretty big important thing in Scadget County. So I'm just going to run through this real quick. We've been very successful with the state of Washington tourism on receiving several grants. Uh we were able to get all of our photography and videography um purchase. We didn't own anything that we could use for marketing or a website. So, we got that done. Uh we had got two uh data grants. The first one was to have somebody come in and help us analyze all of our data, put together reporting and things like that. And the second one was to help with the feasibility study for our indoor sports complex and an economic impact calculator for sports tourism. So, we were able to track a couple of our tournaments that happened this year. We also got the Port of Seattle grant. Um, so we had a couple billboards up at the SeaTac airport in Concourse C. And then the birding campaign as I mentioned. We also received the rural tourism support program grant through the state of Washington tourism. they choose one county per year. And so we were very blessed to do that. And we went through uh a steering committee process and then some uh different um uh workshops that we held from about October into November. And then we were able to receive a finalized report that's up on our website. Uh we had a now have a

outdoor recreation task force, an arts and culture task force, a food and farms task force, and our sports commission. So those are kind of our four main areas of focus and each of the different task forces have a list of projects and programs that we'll be working on. So we also do travel um travel shows and conferences and so uh Elizabeth is going to go west summit next week and we'll be meeting with international uh tour operators and some domestic tour operators. uh the IITA um IPW are all also tour operators so really focused on getting on their um itineraries uh to get them to bring groups here. We also attend the travel and words conference. Um we did that in 2024 and 2025 and we're super excited to actually be hosting that conference um this September. So uh it was a a really great thing that we were able to do. Uh we've met with over 150 tour operators in our appointments. We hosted 19 tour operators from uh several different com uh countries in partnership with the state tourism office and the port of Seattle and uh had several media and tourer tour operator fams that came through as well. So just real quick film. So we are the official film liaison for the state film office and so we were very excited to host a fam tour here in November and we were able to take them from Anacortis all the way up into New Halm. uh this QR code, if you click on it, you can actually add to our database. We're always looking for places that are film friendly, houses, old barns, the good, bad, the ugly. They want to see it all. Uh and so we are in talks all the time with different uh location managers. So this is just some of the you'll recognize some of these faces here. I've mentioned the sports commission. So we stood up a sports commission in January of 2025. And so we're about a year and 3 months in, and we have put together um a full database of our fields and facilities in the

area, a calendar of events for all of the tournaments, so stakeholders know when to prepare for large uh activities. Uh we've joined the sports ETA, which is the national association for uh sports commissions and uh tournament directors. And so we're going to be going down to that conference next month and meeting hopefully with about 40 to 50 tournament directors from all over the country to try to get them to bring tournaments here. We also completed the feasibility study for an indoor sports complex which we're looking at. We've almost nailed down a location and hope to have a um facility that we can use year round for a plethora of events. Wrestling, basketball, volleyball, um cheerleading, dance, all the things um there. So, it's one one thing that we are lacking is that indoor space. We also uh last year hosted the ultimate frisbee uh championship for the D1 and the D3. Uh and we know that with our economic impact calculator, it was about a million dollar impact to our community. And then we've sent out several RFPs for events in 26 and 27. So, just a quick plug for our tourism summit. We've got some great speakers coming in. David Blandford, the CEO for the state of Washington tourism will be there to speak. Um our datify um contact who will talk about data and trends and all of that will be there and then we'll have a presentation on um SEO and Google changes that are happening that impact businesses. Oh, so that is my quick presentation. I know I flew through a lot of the slides. I'm happy to answer questions and then I just have a video to to end. Council, any questions? Mayor

Mr. Fantini,

I just wanted to give a little bit of appreciation uh specifically around the always here campaign that you did targeting Canadian visitors. Um I thought that was really awesome and very timely for us, especially here in Anacortis. Um I'm also very interested to learn more about that film liaison things that you have going on. Um, and one other thing, and we don't have to go through it right now because it sounds like at the May 7th forum you're going to address it. I would like to hear a little bit more about that tax break number and where that kind of comes from. Um, but thank you for the work that that you guys are that you're all doing. It's it's timely and important right now when we're looking for more tourists. So,

yes, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, we can we can certainly chat about the film. So, we really are just that that liaison with the state film office. Location managers will call us. We'll try to help navigate, you know, permitting and where who they need to contact, where they need to go. Um, find, you know, I get emails all the time of I need a old style logging cabin to film some, you know, we had the history channel up and so, you know, it's our job. We know our areas and so, um, they count on us to help kind of find those locations for them and, you know, work through permitting processes and things like that.

Yeah. Um, you had a $12 million number on one of your earlier slides, but then a $386 million in sales on the 13th slide. Can you talk about Yep. the difference what each of those numbers corresponds to?

Yeah. So, the 12.1 million number comes directly from our attribution from our marketing campaign. So, that's the dollars we spent and the dollars we bring in. That 386 million is a tourism economics study that the state of Washington does for every community. So that three is that's everything related, hotels, restaurants, anything visitor related. They they add up those through um sales tax numbers um through the state. So but that 12 is just the particular advertising we did for that year. So you you didn't do $12 million in advertising, right?

No, no, no, no. That's that is what they calculated in for credit card spend in Tusca County. So, we spent um gosh, Elizabeth, I think one of our one of our ad account is about $60,000 total for the year and then another one's about 50,000. So, okay. Yes. And I'm happy to clarify Yep. Happy to clarify that for sure. Council Walters, Miss Cleland McGrath, sorry. Sorry. she hit the button faster.

Um, could you uh one of the things we always find difficult is understanding what our return on investment is. So, can you talk about how you're using QR codes or the the geoloccating geo fencing um and who has access to that information um whether it's the chamber or other nonprofits that are putting on events? I just could you share some more of how that whole technology works?

Yeah, so um we so datafy does two things. It's our data dashboard which shows us where people are coming from, how long. Then they also have their media attribution site and that's where we do a lot of our advertising campaigns through. So they're t we are like specifically targeting specific visitors based on the data that comes from our dashboard. And so let's say we spend $25,000 in our ad spend. They're able to target, retarget, and then they track those credit cards. So they say, "Okay, from this $25,000 ad campaign, you were able to bring into Scadget County through they their proprietary credit card spend, you know, $2 million or whatever that number is." So we can kind of correlate our advertising campaigns to what is actually spent. And they give us very conservative numbers. It's about 60%. Um, and then also we know that a lot of the hotel spend is actually made online like through third parties. So they're only cap capturing credit card swipes in the community.

Mr. Courier.

Yeah, I was just curious too. Um, we've certainly felt the impact of a decrease in Canadian tourism here in Anacortis and I didn't see anything listed there as far as their impact in our in Scadget Valley. Do you have data that shows kind of how that's declined and and so forth? Do you track that? Just curious. Yeah, unfortunately with the data that we have um the the laws in Canada are very different for track cell phone tracking and so we unfortunately at this point they don't have the mechanism to do the international tracking. We track on our website border crossings um Longwoods Internationals do does a lot of um resident sentiment surveys and things like that. So we're able to track like okay at this point 61% said that they would not come. Now we're at 56%. But as far as the actual number of visitors, we unfortunately don't have that data yet.

Do you have what data do you have that measures that impact? Like you're saying border crossings, have you kind of looked at the impact of that on? Yeah, it's really tough. Right now it's border crossings and then any of the information we're getting from some of these bigger third parties. It's not it won't specifically be in Discount County. We just don't have the technology yet to track exactly how many um less are coming right into SketchUp County. And Elizabeth was going to correct me on something. Not correct. I just can you can you Elizabeth could you come up to the mic? Sorry.

Hello. Thank you. I just wanted to address one other question you had about what nonprofits and chambers have access to. Excuse me. our dashboard in marketing and actually so the dashboard we have that event template reporting set up for any nonprofit or organization that would like to request some of that data and then we do have a partnership with nonprofits and chamber organizations. Jessica is actually participating it in it this year to take advantage of some of that co-op marketing um with that digital tracking. You know, someone sees an ad on their cell phone, we can track that exact cell phone into the county.

Thank you. Sorry, I did not get to that. So, I just have a twominut video if I have time to do that. Council, sound like we're ready for that.

Let's go. Take me home. Heat. Heat. Heat. I go there. Heat up here. Take me home. Don't let go. There ain't no let's go.

Take me home. I'm holding on dear. There ain't no love like our love. There ain't no love like brought a tear to me. I looks like a visit. our grant um through the state of Washington tourism, we were able to bring on a film crew and and uh cover the whole county and putting it in two and a half minutes is very challenging to capture everything. Nice job. Okay. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thank you very much.

All right, council. Uh we're going to move on from that to our waste management annual report. I assume that there will be a fancy video at the end of this report though as well. We'll see. We'll see how lucky you get. Uh Mr. Ludman, uh do you want to go ahead and introduce this item? Yes. Good evening, Mayor and Council, members of the audience. Uh most of you know I've been working on with Waste Management on the new 5-year contract we have coming before you in the next council meeting in two weeks. Um but tonight, we thought it'd be great to bring them forward and have them do their annual report. So, if there's any questions for me ahead of time, I can um introduce our speaker. Sounds like no questions at this point.

Okay, I'll introduce Robin Freeman from WM. Thanks, Will. So, I usually work in teams, so I'm going to have to ask for a confirmation. Do you see me or the slide deck? We see you. Okay. Now, do you see the slide deck? No. Okay, let me need to uh let's see. I'm in share screen, but it doesn't say share button.

Um, have you been have you been promoted to a presenter? And if not, can some Yes. Okay. Staff indicate you are a presenter. Oh, wait. Oh, there we go. We see that you have started screen sharing. Okay. Do you see power? Me or my We see your desktop. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Sorry for that. Let me just move this. There we go. Now we see your PowerPoint slideshow.

Thank you so much. Okay. Sorry about that everyone. Good evening. My name is Robin Freriedman. I am the senior manager for public sector services at WM. and me and my team, Grace Fletcher, who will introduce herself, and Chris Clark, are also here this evening to walk you through our annual report from 2025. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to speak this evening.

Good evening, council. My name is Grace Fletcher, and I'm the education and outreach coordinator for Anacortis uh with WM. And I'm very excited to be here tonight. Thank you for having us. And good evening everybody. My name is Chris Clark. I'm the district manager for WM of Scadget which services the city of Anacortis. And I think this uh I will go right into it Robin if you're good. Okay. So thank you.

Good evening everybody. Yes. So I'm the district manager of WMF Scadget. Um and our operations service the recycling and compost in the city of Anacortis. And I wanted to start the presentation to go over uh a few of our commitments and values uh that our company and our employees lead with every day. And it's it's our commitments and values that we utilize to strive for worldclass service, safety, and and providing the service to to your great community there. So I I want to share a few of the values and then I'm going to get a little further into safety. So our core values are people first, success with integrity, diversity and inclusion, our customers, safety and the environment. So that's what we lead with every day. But I want to I want to stick with safety for a minute because uh as a team uh I could speak for our team in WF Scadget. Safety is what we really strive for and is at the forefront of our mind every day. Um, our safety vision is we strive to make health and safety the foundation of our work, guiding each step we take. We value every voice, protect our communities, and get home safe every day. And that's the goal. That's the mission. Each one of our employees, we want them to get home to their families, get home to their loved ones every day. And the safety promise you see on the screen is the promise that we all take as employees to provide the service and to lead every one of our actions. And and it's something that uh again that we strive for and it's at the forefront of of all our employees minds to really be safe for our employees but also safe for the communities that we service including Anacortis. Um if you go to the next slide Robin I want to talk a little bit about some highlights from our operations in 2025. We were uh successfully able to service

both curbside recycling and compost uh to over 11,000 uh customers both residential, multif family and commercial customers. Um from our drivers, you know, to our public outreach team, uh we provide a reliable outstanding customer experience for all residents and businesses in Anacortis. Um, some highlights from our service are we support uh events such as the Anacortis Arts Festival with recycling services. Um, in 2025 we also uh now accept paper and plastic cups in our curbside recycling. So those are things like Starbucks cups that can now go into to the recycling bin, which is great. Um, and another cool uh update in 2025 is we included a a new technology called Smart Truck. and and getting a little into that. What that is is it's a it's a full 360 degree camera view of our trucks. And what this allows us to do is for one, again, it's back to safety. We can now see what's going on around the whole truck when when our drivers are servicing. So there's a huge safety benefit to that, but it also allows us to see what goes into our trucks and it also which allows us to provide, you know, more efficient and clean recycling. Uh but it also allows us to provide really great customer service because we can see when every can is dumped and again what goes into our trucks. So, uh, through that technology, um, you know, it's it's allowed us to, you know, have visibility to a lot of things to again provide better service and and be more safe out there. Um, I would also just like to say on behalf of of the team at WMF Scadget, we really truly do enjoy servicing the city of Anacortis and uh, my guys uh, knew I was going to be on this call today. They wanted me to say hi to everybody and uh, yes, we we really enjoy servicing

Anortis. So, I think I'm going to turn it over to Grace now. Um, and you're going to go over some some stats here, right?

Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. Uh, so yes, on this slide here, we are looking at the tonnage from Anacortis in 2025. And this really tells a success story about Anacortis. So, in 2025, the community diverted nearly 4,750 tons of material through recycling and organics. Um, and what I really want to draw everyone's attention to is how much Anacortis residents are using the organics program. So, if you look at that pie chart on the far left, um, that's where I'll be focusing. So, in 2025, residents alone diverted more than 2600 tons of organics. And that's important because that's food scraps and yard waste being kept out of the landfill and put to real beneficial use. And this is one of the most impactful actions a community a community can really take with their waste as organics diversion keeps this valuable commodity out of the landfill and supports healthy soils. Seeing organics also outperform recycling in the residential sector tells us that people in Anacortis understand the food and yard waste program and are using it correctly, which is amazing. And these results are really driven by Anacorta's commitment to offering organic service and your residents consistently participating. Um, our role at WM is really just to make sure the system supports the success both operationally on Chris's end and educationally on mine. Um, and we are super excited to be in your community doing so. And then Robin, you can kick it to the next slide. Awesome. So behind these tonnage numbers, there's a lot of behindthe-scenes education work with both recycling and compost that's highlighted on this slide here. So each year we contact residential customers who are flagged for contamination or non-recyclables in their recycling cart or non-organics material in their organics cart. We also send recycling

education letters to multifamily property managers around the city. So in 2025, our outreach staff provided direct technical assistance to 35 residential customers who had three or more instances of contamination either in their recycling or their organics cart in each quarter. And this outreach was based on what was actually found in their recycling organics carts, not just kind of a general message. And in the science-based framework we use in our education, this we know that this specific feedback is what keeps Anacordis educated and accountable. This is what really drives the behavior change. So for multif family properties as I mentioned we sent uh recycling education letters to 223 properties across Anacortis giving managers and residents very clear consistent recycling guidance that they're able to use all all year round. Um, and the goal of all of this work is to equip Anacortis residents with the tools to recycle correctly, reduce contamination, and just help everyone succeed within the recycling system. And this kind of targeted outreach is effective in improving material quality of our recyclables and reducing contamination for the residents in the city. And education is a really essential step of our process because when customers understand the why and the how, contamination goes down and this system just works better for everybody. Next slide, please. Now, it's super important to us that Anacortis residents can reach our team easily. So, on the WM Northwest website, residents can reach out to us to ask questions, whether it's about a cart replacement or service level adjustment. As you can see on that screenshot on the slide, residents can contact us really easily through virtual chat, email, and phone. And they can easily request changes to their account or their service through an online form we

created to make sure that requests are streamlined in our system. Residents can also use this web website to learn about what can go into their recycling container, organics cart, and garbage containers to improve their own sorting habits. And we also up here have holiday schedules, uh, recycling, compost, and garbage guides in eight different languages. And we have service alerts as well so that residents can stay informed and up to date.

Awesome. And I will pass it over to Robin. Thanks, Grace. So, I'd like to just give a real shout out uh to the Anacorta City staff. I've been working with them over the last few months on a potential new contract and we're so thrilled um that Anacortis would like to continue working with us and it has been a real treat to work with will as well as other staff. So, thank you so much. Um I wanted to point out how we'll use smart truck for contamination monitoring in potentially the new contract. So, as Chris described to you, we use smart truck cameras all around the vehicle as well as GPS so that we can capture images not only of the driver and of our surrounding our surroundings, but also the recycling carts and the organic carts that actually get dumped into the truck. Even though it's an automated system, the driver pulls up and what we can see now using cameras is what's deep inside the cart, not just what's sitting on top. These images that we capture allow us to really look at contamination, whether it's incorrect materials that are in the cart or overflows or even extra material next to the cart. And then it gives us a really good understanding of how we can provide technical assistance to customers through education and outreach. The data will help us confirm where the contamination is occurring. We will be able to track trends by route, neighborhood, or customer type. And as I mentioned, we can target education and outreach to customers who may have three or more times in which they've had contamination in their carts over 10%. And we'd also like to support fair and accurate service auditing so that we can apply a contamination charge where applicable.

This approach will be consistent, objective, and proactive, helping us improve recycling quality without adding work for our dryers. And as I mentioned, these cameras will capture images of recycling. And these images will be available to customers as well as city staff so that we can really walk through where the contamination charges are coming from and how we can support the city and our customers to ensure that the contamination is decreased over time. That is our 2025 annual report summary and we truly appreciate your business and we look forward to having a new contract with you and if appropriate, we'd love to open it up for questions if there are some.

Certainly. Uh, council, do you have any questions? Mayor Walters, Miss Molton, thank you. Thank you for um the presentation all three of you and I really appreciate the information about how you're tackling contamination because we know that's a that's an ongoing problem and you almost can't do enough education and outreach. Um my question is when you respond to contamination say a driver will see on the spot over 10% I think is the is the number you mentioned when you reach out to that customer how in what way do you do that like phone or mail or email or how does how does that work?

Yeah, great question. I can take this on. So each quarter, um, I receive a report back from our drivers on which residents had those three or more contamination incidents, and I go into their account and contact them via phone. And if they have an email on their account, I will send out an email as well. So both email and phone.

Oh, that's great. So that's quarterly. And then do you ever um I know some some places use oops tags, but those are that's like tagging a cart, but that would require drivers to get out of the truck. And I don't know if that's something that's practical for you to ever do so they know on the spot like, "Hey, I threw Christmas lights in my recycling, for example." I just add, oh, Chris, you go ahead. We can all contribute.

Yeah, I will say we will use oops tags, but that's when it's a very blatant um and the driver could actually see it because they're dumping it into the the back behind them. They have a little camera. They don't spend a lot of time. We're asking them, again, back to safety. I'm asking them to focus on everything going around them and not spend so much time looking at what's in their hopper at all times. So, if it's blatant, they'll see it. But that's where the third eye technology really comes in because it takes care of that for us. It's a it's a, you know, it's the uh camera that's just constantly looking at the material that goes in the hopper.

Okay, great. And so have you found success with those outreach efforts or is it too soon to tell? I mean with the people that have contaminated a high percentage more than three times. Do you can you can you follow up on that in any way and see that it's diminishing? Yes. Grace, do you want to follow up?

Yeah, I can go ahead and take this. Yes. uh we can measure that and that's also a benefit of um smart truck technology. Uh Robin spoke about targeting education and outreach um and how it can help with that. But one other thing that's really cool about smart truck is that we can measure how effective our campaigns are. Um so it is something that we are we are able to measure and we are able to see those numbers go down um and see that the people who are contaminating three or more times they're not the same people that I called last quarter. So, we're not getting a high volume of repeat contaminators um every single quarter.

Great. That's really good news. Thank you. Um and my last question is more of a general one about recycling and garbage. I noticed that the 2025 tonnages for recycling and organics are slightly lower than they were for 2024. And I'm wondering if you have a theory about why that is. And um I think it would be a good question for city staff at some point for our total garbage tonnage. Is it all going down a little bit or is it just the recycling and organics going down and how does that compare to the to the garbage tonnage? I don't really expect an answer right now except for if you have an idea of why the organics and recycling tonnage has gone down that um that amount.

So I'll take a stab at that. Um, I'm curious to see what Chris and um, Grace say, but a lot of it has to do with the weather, to be honest. Um, sometimes, uh, when it's wet, um, more lawn service, more uh, more cutting in the lawn, more gardening, and that increases the compostables, the organics. Um, if it's in if it's extremely dry, there's less lawn mowing. So weather has a lot to do with what goes on in terms of year-over-year and the trends that you may see.

Yep. I was going to echo that. It has to do a lot to do especially with organics. It's a very cyclical seasonal uh commodity and so it it tracks with the weather. Uh and recycling could be the same way. It could be, you know, a lot of rain. Depends on when we, you know, it'll affect our tonnages depending on how wet that recycling material is as well. Oh, right. Okay. Thank you. I also have an answer from the staff side of that. Thank you to Mrs. Hunt for asking that question earlier so we could check on it. Um, but our tonnage for garbage is actually down about the same percentage as recycling over that same year period. So, it's kind of interesting. Seems like all disposables were down over the 25 versus 24.

Good. I'm glad to hear that the garbage didn't go up. um by the same amount recycling and organics went down. Thank you very much. Council, any other questions? Mayor Walters. Mr. McDougall. Yeah, actually kind of a curiosity because I like stats and trends and stuff. Uh since the deployment of the smart truck technology, do you have a sense for how much reduction in I guess contamination? like has it gone from 10% of uh loads down to five or or um yeah, do you have a sense for like what the trend line looks like?

Well, um most of your neighboring cities actually also have contamination monitoring and a contamination charge, but some cities don't have that. Um the smart truck technology is not ubiquitous. um it will be in the near future and so it's hard for us to answer that but I will say that in the cities like Anacortis where we're implementing a robust education and outreach plan plus a contamination charge we are seeing a difference as Grace said we have very few repeat customers and so we do think we're making a difference and we do we do truly believe that there is a decrease in contamination and an increase in recycling, but we believe that it's because of the holistic approach that we're using.

Great. Thank you, council. Any other questions? Uh, well, thank you very much for your presentation. Um, thank you for your efforts with respect to education as well. If there are opportunities for us to collaborate on that, please don't hesitate to reach out. uh cuz there's certainly no end to how much education that we can do uh to get people to recycle correctly. Thank you. And thank you so much city of Anacortis for your business and city staff. It's been wonderful working with them too. Thank you. Yes, Will is Will is particularly a treat. Yes,

I would agree. All right. Thank you all. All right. Thank you. Good evening. All right. Our next item is resolution 3206, authorization for ship harbor grant applications.

Nicole, take it away.

All right. Thank you, mayor. Good. Don't need the glasses right now. Good evening, city council members and mayor and members of the audience. My name is Nicole Johnston and I'm the parks manager and I'm the project manager on the ship harbor um project. For those of you who don't know on count on council back in December 27th of 2022 about 100 ft of the boardwalk washed away after a epic king tide. And so we're going to take uh advantage of this opportunity to not only replace the existing boardwalk, but also improve some of the trails that you see from the ferry, Washington State Ferry terminal side that lead down to the beach. Um so I'll get into that a little bit more, but to me being here tonight is basically basically checking a box for RCO. They want me to come in front of you guys and let you guys know that I'm applying for two grants. I'm getting your support. So I'm going to talk to you guys tonight about these two grants. Okay.

And RCO is the Recreation Conservation Office.

Yep. So, we're looking for we're looking to get $1 million for phase one of the Ship Harbor Boardwalk. To reach this amount, we're applying for two grants with, like Mayor Walter said, the Washington Recreation and Conservation Office. Uh the first grant is the Aaliyah Grant, aquatic lands enhancement account, and the second grant is a WWRP, Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program Water Access Category Grant. The AIA grant, I'm going for 500,000. The WWRP, I'm matching the AIA grant with a WWRP grant. That's for 400,000. 10% of the match must be non-state, non-federal. So, I'm going to be asking um for 100,000 from Parks Foundation or other resources um to reach that 1 million for the first phase. The deadline to apply for these grants is April 30th, 2026. And to be eligible to apply for these grants, I need the city to agree to this authorization resolution. And RCO funding board approves the grants after the legislature adopts the budget, which is in July 1st of 2027. Um here tonight you see a sorry it's so small, but 15% drawns that we we have received from Grain Osborne. The highlighted in yellow areas are what we're hoping will be phase one. So, we're um replacing the boardwalk and then we're also going to start the process of from the Washington State Ferry Terminal uh a paved trail down to the beach area to a viewing platform. And then I just kind of circled the project site for those of you who want a more visual of that. This is a project that we have support um not only from the city but from the Samish and from the Port of Anacortis. Um phase one will be like I mentioned

will be replacing the damaged boardwalk. Uh essentially following the same footprint of the boardwalk that used to exist there and the installation of the ADA access pave path from the ferry lanes down to a viewing platform near the beach. During phase one, we will also apply for the requiring permitting. Any questions? Uh Nicole, could you talk about why it's important to provide a path from the ferry terminal?

Absolutely. because there's millions of visitors that come to the Washington State Ferry Terminal and they have formed their own paths down to the beach and we just feel like it's responsible of the city and to work with the port um to come up with a plan that is ADA and is going to protect the area of the wetland, keep people out of the wetland and hopefully get everyone safely down to a viewing platform and then eventually phase do steps down to the beach. Thank you, council. Any questions? Mayor Walters. Mr. Pantini. Um, I'm very happy to support this. I mean, I think it's an easy one. It's grant-f funded

cultural partnership with the Samish Nation, ADA access, ferry terminal connectivity, environmental restoration. Sounds like a pretty good one to me.

Council, any other questions? Uh, seeing none, you have a resolution in your packet that would authorize the grant applications that Miss Johnston described. Uh, Mayor Walters, Miss Cleveland McGrath, I move that resolution 3206 authorizing the mayor to sign applicant resolution authorization forms for the ship harbor boardwalk restoration project grants. Second. We have a motion and a second to approve resolution 3206 as presented. If there is no discussion and I see no discussion, I'll go ahead and call for the vote. All those in favor of approval of the resolution say I. I.

All those opposed say no. The eyes have it and the resolution is approved. Thank you, Miss Johnson. Thank you. Our next item is a presentation on our annual storm water maintenance plan. Aaron, go ahead. I'm getting her up here. Oh, is it?

Good evening, Mayor. Uh, city council members. I'm Aaron Estril, the stormwater program manager. Um, I wanted to talk about the storm water u management program that we have to do every year. You might want to adjust your mic so that you can keep it keep it close to your All right. A longer mic has been ordered.

First, I just kind of want to show you kind of an inventory of our system we have here in the city. Um, just for reference, um, all of our inventory for public infrastructure, we have to inspect yearly. Um, our private permanent BMP, there's 194 of those we have to also inspect annually. and um catch basins we have to inspect every two years. And our we got our um uh source control. We have 233 businesses in the city that we have in our inventory. We need to do 20% of those a year. Mayor Walters. Miss Walter,

sorry. I'm going to ask for an acronym check. Can can you remind me what BMP stands for, please?

Best management practices. And those can be permanent or uh temporary. Uh detention ponds are permanent BMPPS. Uh bio swells. Um one thing we have to really get people more educated on is there's so many people in the city that still believe we have a combined storm water and sewer system. And they believe if it goes down the drain, it ends up at the wastewater treatment plant. And so you'll hear that all the time. Um oh, I thought this paint would just go to the wastewater treatment plant. I didn't know the concrete didn't goes out to the bay. So, here's just a little uh flyer that we try to get out to people to let them know, hey, this this is everything that touches the ground ends up out in the bay. So, federal and state requirements. So, we're under the Clean Water Drinking Act, um which produced the MPDS um it's a national pollution detection and elimination system. We are a phase 2 permit with the state. Uh goes by population. So most phase one populations are 100,000 and bigger. Um every year we have to do an annual report and part of the annual report is our storm water management program. In the SWIMP there is storm water planning, uh public education and outreach, public involvement, our mapping, our elicit discharge, development review, existing de uh development, retrofits, source control for businesses, operation and maintenance, monitoring and reporting. And we have to report to a college and how we're meeting all of our requirements every year. Each permit also each new permit has new regulations that we have to do. So, we're working on those for this year's uh this permit cycle. So, I just kind of gave an overview of a few things that we get a lot of

questions on. Public education and outreach. We pay into a program with we worked with Scadget County Conservation District. Uh we also do our in-house um public outreach events. Uh we work with again the Scadget County Conservation District, Friends of the Sailor Sea, Samish Indian Nation, and Port of Anacortis. These programs all help us meet our permit requirements. Uh pollution and prevention, elicit discharge is a big one. Um we give an annual citywide training every year. We've done that for the last 3 four years. Uh fire police. This year we had a good turnout for it. Also part of pollution prevention is our source control inspections, uh construction inspections, public and private facility inspections, street sweeping, and plan review. uh our plan review right now we're doing a lot of those through third party um they I it helps us keep in our permit compliance um it it's an extra step but I believe it helps us meet meet our permit compliance operations and maintenance that's another big one um John Kramer's our storm water inspector uh he does the majority of the source control and uh inspections uh whenever We go out we got private and our city owned. So city own we put in our chartraph system and our maintenance crew gets out and uh gets the maintenance done. Uh when we work with a private we an HOA private homeowner we work with them. A lot of times they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. So we help them work through that. Um a properly maintained system helps reduce flooding. Um it removes pollutants before reaching the waterways and improves overall water quality. So putting a having our storm water facilities work as they were designed um helps overall water quality. Uh so with routine inspections, cleanings and repairs um ensure

long-term functionality. Street sweeping is a big one. That's another we have a new permit requirement. Uh mostly what how we record how much how many miles we go um what we pick up. We're have to start reporting how much we after every street street sweeping event we have to let them know how much we have in the in the sweeper. So yearly we'll have to report that monitoring and reporting. We inher 3 which is water resource inventory area 3 in the city of Anacortis. Our waters are pretty healthy. We do not have any TMDLs which is good news. But in order to keep it that way, that's why our ID program needs to be strong, our source control, maintenance and inspections. And we also participate in the SAM program with which is the storm water action monitoring program. We have our storm water master plan that we hope to be adopted the spring of this year. This will help identify drainage issues, plan future capital projects, prioritize storm water retrofits, and support long-term water quality goals. So, in closing, our storm water program goals protect marine water quality, reduce pollutants entering the S of the Sea, maintain regulatory compliance, and provide confidence the city ma remains in full permit compliance with NPDS phase 2 and state storm water regulations. And that's all I have for you guys now. If you have any questions.

Well, thank you, Mr. Estold. Uh, council, do you have any questions? Mayor Walters, Miss Molton, thank you very much for that overview and for underscoring that a lot of people don't know that things that go on the street don't go to the water treatment plan. I that's obviously really important to be called out. Um, so thank you Uh, Mr. Hold, occasionally we get questions about the street sweeper and uh what its schedule is, so we could all move our cars to avoid the street sweeper and allow it to sweep more of the street. Can you address that uh question?

We don't have a schedule per se on which street we're going to be on. Um, a lot of times it's also areas we haven't hit because we have to hit areas so many times a year, but we do not have a schedule for that re to help with that right now. But we will be working on that with our new mapping that we have to do for ecology. We'll try to at least get it within a a time frame. There are certainly schedules in other cities, but they usually come with mandatory uh requirements to move your cars, and that would be a significant change from what we have now. So, yes, sir. Uh, careful what you ask for, I guess. Uh, council, any other questions? Mayor Walters. Miss Hunt.

So, I was interested to see that the mapping is such a significant part of the plan and that tree cover is something that we're studying. Can you tell me a little bit more about where and how that helps? Yeah. So, right now, last uh last year, we worked on getting the the tree canopy maps. We have that now part of our layer on GIS. Um this year, we're working on um how that would fall into watery policies and uh that we have already. Um we haven't we've just started that, but uh right now storm water they're really saying that storm water is part or tree canopy is part of storm water treatment. So, we haven't put that all together yet, but we do we have started the mapping process here in the city.

I think that we when we saw the forest management plan a couple weeks ago, they also have some longitudinal shots that they're looking at how tree covers changed in the forest lands. So, I don't know if Yeah, we worked with them last year. They I forget the they had someone from the one of the colleges and so we worked with them on that. So, we're sharing a lot of we shared that data. Mr. Courier, I was just curious. You mentioned that you have to monitor and report the contents that the sweep street sweeper picks up. Can you elaborate a little bit? I'm just curious. Is that, you know, you're picking up more debris that's a negative mark, you know, how

Well, I think they're look college is looking at it two ways right now because they've they've updated how often we have to street sweep. So, I think they're trying to get numbers now of how much pollutant comes from the roads and how much we're picking up and if that's going to change any of the samplings with heavy metals and sediment loads. So, it's more of a study, but we're going to have to report exactly what we pick up. Okay. So, they'll test that as well as Yeah. just look at the amount of material that's picked up.

And then that material that you pick up, you use to uh fill potholes. No, it goes to our decant and then we have to haul it off and it goes uh I think we take it to the transfer station, but it it can't be put in the land. It's considered uh pollution. It's got a lot of We don't know what's in it. Whatever comes off the roads or heavy metals, off your roofs, uh fertilizer, it's got everything in there. Okay. Thank you. I have one I do have one question. One of the compliance activities is to conduct annual inspections of high-risk outfalls. How how do we determine what high risk out?

We started that last year. So we filled all of our data gaps uh filled verified missing outfall information this year. We have to map tributaries, basins, and convenience areas with pipes 24 in and bigger. So, we're going to look also PCBs is a problem and we got to look pipes are made out of concrete and eventually going to have to test for that. Uh, that's probably going to be on the next permit, but right now we had to have an inventory of everything and our outfalls and what they're made out of. So, that's that's step one, but that's coming. Yes.

Uh, this item is open for public comment as listed on our agenda. Is there any member of the public that would like to provide a comment on this item? Anyone online? No one online. All right. Well, if there are no more comments and no more questions from council, I will thank you, Mr. Estalt, and uh we'll see you back again in a couple weeks when we do some more storm water planning. Yeah. Thank you.

Our next item is interlocal agreement. Uh, I'll skip reading the number for Scadget County Multiple Agency Response Team, the Smart Team, uh, contracted administrator, and Chief Floyd will present this item. Thank you, Mayor Walters. Good evening, council members and members of the audience. I'm here tonight to ask for your approval for uh, interlocal agreement with Scadget County for our multiple agency response team uh, contracted administrator. And I wanted to give you just a a brief overview of how we got to where we're at today. So, if you recall back in 2019, as you were walking into Safeway or whatever other store you were going to, there was signature gatherers out that were asking for you to sign uh approve um supporting initiative 940. And initiative 940 uh was advertised as let's uh try to get the police more uh training. One of the things that came out of that was the independent investigative teams that we have now. Our local team is made up of agencies in Scadget and Island counties. And the purpose of that is if there is a a deadly use of force incident by an officer, we have an independent team that comes in and it is made up of detectives and seasoned investigators that have specialized training and experience investigating those types of incidents and the involved agencies detectives are excluded from that particular incident. So for example, if we had one here, all the other detectives for the agencies in Scadget and Island counties be part of that investigation and our detectives would be excluded. Uh thankfully it is a low frequency uh requirement for us to fulfill. Uh I

think the um busiest year we've seen was two investigations and those were uh from agencies out of Scadget and Island counties uh because they had conflicts with their teams and so our team responded in two uh cases in Snomish County and I would say that our team is recognized in the state as one of the uh premier teams. Part of that is because of the leadership that we've had in our teams locally uh from its very beginning. We had some very uh uh detail oriented individuals that were commanding those teams and that has benefited us as these teams have continued to grow. The structure of the team not only is the detectives that make up that but also there's a command structure. Currently, our command structure is uh a lieutenant from the Mount Vernon Police Department, a lieutenant from the Oak Harbor Police Department, and Captain Fuller from our own Anacortis Police Department. And those positions are uh mid-level managers that respond with the team to those scenes to make sure that all the industry best practices are being followed, proper investigative protocols are being adhered to, and they generally oversee the team's activities. As this has continued to evolve, the requirements each year have become increasingly more burdensome for the command members of those uh of our team and the requirements that they have to meet as far as training, uh making sure all of the proper paperwork has been filed, that we're meeting all the requirements set forth in the Washington Administrative Code and the RCW. And it has quickly become more than just a collateral duty than any one agency's command staff can meet. And so

collectively the executives for the agencies and make up these teams uh decided that it is probably not cost-effective and time efficient for any one of us to dedicate someone to that position full-time because we still have needs with our individual agencies. And so that is where we get to the interlocal agreement that's before you tonight. It's expanding on our current interlocal agreement where this team was created. And it's the participating agencies contributing towards a contractor to come in uh and fulfill the administrative roles making sure that training is being done making sure that all the appropriate paperwork and the proper vetting of new detectives that are coming to the team is occurring in the proper manner. So the total amount for that contract would be 50,000 and that is divided equally amongst the participating agencies. with our share being uh $7,142.86. So uh with that, I'm available for any questions and I ask for your approval on the interlocal and our share of the 7,000 doesn't require you to seek any budget amendment. So, I will uh I will tell you that the um discussion on this happened uh prior to the the budget being adopted, but it wasn't until just about two or three weeks ago that uh Mount Vernon, who's currently in the lead uh command role, got all the appropriate uh documents to the the rest of the participating agencies. So, my goal is to find this money in my current budget. Uh, and that may require us to maneuver uh categories, but I I think that it's doable for us to do.

Okay. Thank you. Uh, council, any questions or discussion? Mayor Walters. Miss Hunt. Chief Lid, I just wanted to clarify. I think we all understood what you were saying. The contract is only for administrative work if there were an incident that needed investigation. The the real staff would do the investigation.

Correct. Yes. So, this person is just overseeing and then making sure our team is in compliance. Whether we get called to an investigation or not, uh the requirements from the state don't change. And uh just as an example of some of the the work that this person uh would be taking on is uh we have the two investigations I mentioned previously that our team went to Snowomish County for. Uh there's a state auditor that comes through and reviews all these cases that we have completed making sure that the proper protocols were followed. uh this contractor would get all the the uh information necessary for that audit to occur and make sure it's all in the proper order so that audit goes smoothly.

Mayor Walters, Mr. Mantini. Um if there's no other questions, I move that the city council authorize the mayor to execute interlocal cooperative agreement 20-198-appd-002. Second. We have a motion and a second to approve the interlocal agreement for the smart contract administrator. If there is no discussion, we'll go ahead and take a vote. Hearing none, all those in favor of the interlocal agreement say I. I. All those opposed say no. The eyes have it and the local agreement is approved. Thank you, Chief.

Thank you. Our next item is another interlocal agreement, this time with the Washington Department of Health for an overdose data to action grant. Assistant Chief McDonald, thank you for being on deck. Take it away.

Thank you. Thanks for welcoming me. Uh, city council and members of the general uh audience. Hey, I've uh I'm coming here to present uh uh uh support for uh interlocal agreement uh between the Washington State Department of Health and uh the city of Anacortis. The the grant is actually the name of the grant is OD2A lots of pneumonics in the fire service and it stands for the overdose data and action in states. This is a federal grant that was originally available back in 2024 that came with a lot of uh requirements and uh uh since uh since the initial dispersement of granting funds uh some residual money was left over and uh our community paramedic who is phenomenally well connected not only in our community but just uh countywide and even statewide heard about this uh money and the money is some uh leftover money that uh uh the Department of Health, Washington State Department of Health was willing to offer to any CARES program of which our community paramedic program is a CARES program. Uh initially uh there was about $15,000 available and after uh Steve went ahead and applied for the grant, there were some additional funds that were being offered to him and the total amount is 19,696. uh dollars. Now what do we have to do for this? We actually do we meet all the obligations of this grant. We provide education. We uh leave Narcan uh leave behind kits. We also provide uh resources for uh families or or people that we go out and

take care of that may have uh overdoses. Uh so uh what I'm asking for tonight is uh that that you would support this and uh it does not uh there's no match to it and it is a very very short window and we have some reporting to do uh two uh reporting periods. One is going to be in June and one is going to be in September and all of this information we currently collect. So it it is not that we have to go out and create new analytics to fulfill this uh grant. Thank you. And council, as you might recall, this is one of the grants that we are relying on uh to help support the 2026 expansion of the from.5 to 1.0 FTE of the administrator administrative assistant position. in case you were thinking of voting no uh that you um already gave a head not to.

Mayor Walters, Miss Hunt, one question about this contract. It does name our current wonderful community paramedic by name. If that position were not held by Steve or had some vacancy during the term of the grant, are we at risk of losing some of that funding? I I don't believe so. Uh, I think it is for the program, not for Steve. Okay. We would want to make sure of that before we sign it. We want to make sure that we have the funds regardless. A good point. We we will make sure of that before we we we sign it. Yeah. Mayor Walters. Mr. Fantini.

Um, just a kind of a quick observation that I wanted to to mention. And it's not so much a question, but we I got a lot of questions when we allocated that $250,000 to the Star Center with our opioid funds. But what I think is really great about this is it really shows how Anacortis is kind of taking more of a layered approach with the opioid epidemic. We've got that great regional partnership now through the Star Center, but now here this is money coming through a federal grant which is a different source of funds to help create even more help with the the opioid epidemic. So, I just think that's kind of great as we get a lot of questions of why do we put money regionally versus just locally and here is a great example of why because there's other opportunities out there where we can get some some money to be specifically used here locally. Well, that and very clearly the the regional facility is an important component of that whole cycle.

Mayor Walters, Mr. Courier. Um, I move that city council authorize the mayor to execute interlocal cooperative agreement number 26127- AFD-001 between the city of Vanic Cortis and State of Washington Department of Health. Second.

We have a motion and a second to approve the interlocal agreement uh with Washington DOH for the overdose data to action in states grant. If there's no further discussion, I'll call for the vote. Hearing none, uh the vote is on the interlocal agreement with Washington DOH for the OD2 grant. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed say no. the eyes have it and then the local agreement is confirm is approved and I will verify that bit before signing it tomorrow. Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right, council, you really have been moving right along here in our agenda and now it's time to slow down and uh strap in for a presentation on our wastewater treatment plant alternatives analysis. We are taking a methodical, measured, careful approach to changes to our wastewater treatment plant. And I think you'll you and the audience will see through this pres the dwindling audience. I see uh we'll see through this presentation that there are some alternatives uh here for us to choose from and we will make a careful choice.

Mayor, council, thank you. My name is Brian Walker. I am the manager down at the wastewater treatment plant. I'm here to introduce our presenter for tonight, but a quick introduction first. In 1992, Anacortis built a brand new wastewater treatment plant and for the solids produced by that new plant, a sewage sludge incinerator. In the ensuing 34 years, this city has produced roughly 28,000 dry tons or 140,000 wet tons or 280 million wet pounds of bioolids cake. Don't ask me why we call it cake. That's roughly 14 to 15,000 dump trucks full of product. And in those 34 years, zero bioolids have been trucked out of the city. Every pound of bioolids produced by this city, plus quite a bit that came from off island, has been run through that incinerator and reduced to atmospheric gases and sterile mineral ash, which gets sent to a landfill. In an era when disposing of bioolids can cost anywhere from a hundred to $200 per ton, the city has certainly achieved a good return on investment for their machine. That all said, 34 years is a long time and in those three plus decades, many things have changed. The science surrounding all aspects of bioolids has grown exponentially. Many technologies have matured while some have not quite yet. Capital and operational expenses have obviously gone up and financial realities have become imposing. Regulatory compliance has become much more difficult and expensive, and the bioolids industry find itself at both a regulatory and a technological inflection point. But most importantly, the city's existing equipment is nearing the end of its service life. The repairs are becoming more significant and more costly, and a complete rebuild or replacement of the equipment is fast approaching. If the city wishes to continue incinerating bioolids, very significant expenses will be incurred within the

next three to five years. Now, 5 years ago in 2021, the city was presented with an opportunity to pursue an alternative bios technology. The city declined to pursue that particular option at that particular moment and instead deferred the decision-making for ongoing consideration. In those past 5 years, the team at the wastewater treatment plant has continued incinerating, continued ongoing repairs, and made significant improvements in regulatory compliance. But ultimately, the need to make a long-term decision has only increased. So today, with you, we are reigniting this conversation. Our goal here is to achieve an actionable plan for this city's future of bioolids handling. Our goal is a transparent, defensible, durable, and most importantly, actionable plan. A collective decision made not just by a single person but by an entire team of stakeholders including multiple levels of management, industry experts, the operators and supervisors that will be expected to run and maintain the system and the representatives of the taxpayers who will ultimately foot the bill. At the end of this process, the city will have made a clear decision to either continue incineration and fund it for an extended time frame or begin the planning and the funding process for another technology. Uh so without further ado, I'm going to introduce Greg Makos, our uh representative from team Brown and Caldwell. Your title is uh solids and energy practice leader, professional engineer, and an industry bioolids expert.

And uh importantly before we get started here, because this has come up before, um the question before us is about how to extend the life of the current water treatment plant for the capacity that it already has. that we're not talking about expanding the plant to accommodate new capacity. That's not really the point here. Um uh so this is not intended to uh this is not intended to cover the costs of new development. This is this is requirement whether we expand the city in terms of population or housing at all. All right, take it away. Mayor Walters Council, good to see you and also good to be here. Always pleasure for me to come up here. I met three weeks ago with a public works committee. Um I am a stakeholder also in Anacortis. My parents live here, so it's always a pleasure to come up here and visit them. They're great cooks. Um Brian touched on a lot of of the legacy elements of your incinerator. Um it's been loyal and faithful to you. It's been doing a great job at reducing your your bioolids waste that leaves the facility in the form of ash. But um as Brian mentioned, we need to look forward. Can we stay that path? Are there is there another path? And we want to do this in a way Brian mentioned defensible, transparent. Uh we don't want it to be one person's pet project. We want it to be durable. there's always not sensitive to succession planning whether it's staffing levels, technology changes and so forth. So today I want to present to you an update of where we what we've been doing for the last year working with Brian and his staff. Um also want to engage you through the form of a survey which I'll detail later on. And uh the idea here is to get input from everyone from executives to operations, engineering, management,

maintenance, and go through a prescribed planning process that Brown and Cobbell uses with clients all across the country, big and small. And you should go ahead and drag that Anacortis box off the screen someplace so that we can see all the slides. There you go. It's probably about as good as it's going to get. That's great.

Sorry for the small print on this slide. But I wanted to just give you a sense of where how does Anacortis fit in compared to some other utilities? Well, incineration's kind of unique. Not a lot of folks do it. Um there's five uh incinerators in region 10. Um you're one of them. Uh I should say past tense because Lynwood has turned theirs off. Edmonds has moved to a gasification system. Uh we're currently working on Vancouver planning to uh move away from incineration towards a resource recovery path and Bellingham recently we're working on the design for major air pollution control uh upgrades for their two incinerators. So there's not a whole lot of incinerators. Uh that's kind of a general statement. Um most of your most of the bioolids in the states 65 to 70% on a poundage goes east of the mountains. It goes to land application sites. One of the largest is Boulder Park. A lot of your neighboring uh municipalities send their digested solids there. It gets put on the ground and dryland uh crop uh as a as a source of carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen and they substitute uh petroleum based uh fertilizers. Other examples uh Tacoma uh Tagro program that is a a nationally recognized program that DC water and others have modeled themselves after. I live in Tacoma. I use Tagro in my raised beds. Great product. Um but other smaller outfits here most digest their their bioolids. You don't have a digestion process um that is more uh footprint intensive, labor intensive, costly. But uh the vast majority of of treatment plants generally digest whether aerobically or anorobically. Generally smaller outfits uh can do so get by with aerobic digestion. Anorobic digestion is typically needed once you get to a certain size.

Oh, did I maybe need There you go.

There we go. Sorry, just fell asleep. Um, so this is the just a road map illustration of where we are. We've been working with Brian since March and the orange boxes here are the activities that we've completed and the blue ones are the ones ahead of us. We were asked to pause our efforts uh uh in November time frame and have just recently picked things up again. Uh we brought in our national expert on incineration, Lloyd Winchell, who came in and did an evaluation of your incinerator. We looked at uh some options for how to bypass your incinerator in case of a an abrupt shutdown. And then we initiated the solids process uh the solids planning process during which the first step was to identify the mandatory goals and evaluation criteria. These are your musthaves. And so we created your staff through a series of workshops and questionnaires. And I'll I'll show you the the highlights of those later today. And those will be items that we're going to seek your input on down on in this process. We did a regulatory permit uh assessment of impacts uh that of permits that are impacting your system. And then we also uh did a survey an informal preliminary survey to get a sense of the bioolids market. What's the general awareness of businesses and individuals in the region around bioolids, biochar, ash, etc. other residuals. So, some highlights here from your incinerator evaluation, we looked at uh we qualified them as near-term or long-term improvements as you know 0 to 5year and 5 to 10 year and uh based on in March your incinerator was down for a pre-planned maintenance. So, we were actually able to go inside the incinerator. It's definitely a first time for me to poke my head in there.

Um, based on a interviews with staff, a review of your record drawings and your maint maintenance history, we identified a series of improvements. Um, I'd be happy to go in more detail on those or follow up with you on that if you'd like. Those uh improvements resulted in a this is a high range in cost because we're at the planning level. So we are creating uh association for the advancement of cost engineering or ACE class 5 planning level estimates. These are huge ranges because there's we don't know all the details and those this these costs therefore are always minus 50% plus 100%. On those numbers I am reluctant to give exact numbers because then that number will stick in everyone's mind. These are these are intentionally wide ranges and the idea is as we go through a project from class 5 4 32 1 that range narrows down to a final cost estimate which is typically plus or minus 10%. Um I would be doing you a disservice to just give you a number so I have to always tell you that number and that range. I've gotten in trouble for that before. Uh we also looked at solids bypass evaluation. This is in case you have an abrupt shutdown of the incinerator which has not happened. you've never had to truck your solids off site due to the awesome work that your crew does at the plant. Um, but they did want to have this added uh flexibility in case it got shut down and you didn't want to truck liquid sludge. So, we looked at an option on how you could bypass pumping your cake uh which currently now just gets pumped right into the incinerator to pumping it instead to a truck where it could then be sent uh for disposal. And that uh that that planning level cost range is shown up there at 180K to 730K. All these costs I should say also do include uh contingencies, standard uh uh adders, overhead, profit numbers. They don't include engineering, but these

include uh construction costs. So there's percentage adders at the planning level that that account for a lot of those what we call typically allied cost or soft costs. So, it's not just hardware. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the quad L or triple L subsections of CFR. Um, but this was one activity that Brian and his team had us look at and that was to understand how far we were below the 50% rule. So back in 2010 it uh sub uh subpar quadell was introduced uh so that continued investment in incineration facilities would not allow them to be grandfathered in into old emission limits. The point being is if I spend so much money on incinerator by the time I replace all the components in the incinerator I have a new incinerator but I'm going to be held to old limits which are higher and less stringent. So the quadell limits are more stringent require different air pollution control equipment to achieve. One of the thresholds that they put in there in that in this requirement is the 50% rule which has some gray areas into it. But we took a very conservative approach thanks to the awesome documentation work probably the best I've seen of all the maintenance records. It made it relatively painless because other times we have to dig into record drawings and data. It's the team was able to provide us a big chunk of information about all their maintenance costs. We compiled that with the original cost of the incinerator and we come up with a value. We even went conservative and grabbed certain subsystems that might not even technically be interpreted be part of that rule to to be to be more conservative. And we estimate that you have about another $4.6 billion that you can spend on the incinerator before triggering the 50%. Two caveats. You can't change the way you operate the incinerator and you can't change its capacity.

In addition to the 50% rule, I don't think there's any plans to change the way you operate the incinerator or change its capacity. There is no need to do so. Um, we did take an also a an estimate. This is again a planning level estimate. The last bullet there on the screen. What would it take to upgrade to a quad? This is a completely new air pollution control treatment train and require an extension of about 500 square feet of your building. This is a planning level cost of 8.4 million. Remember again 8.4 minus 50 plus 100%. That is not inclusive of the uh numbers you saw on the previous slide for five and 5 to 10 year maint maintenance improvements. So the planning process um this is a prescribed process and it's designed for us to be objective. I should say Brown and Cobble myself we are technology agnostic. I don't want to say we don't care what you go with but it's important that we remove ourselves from this process because you're going to operate it. You're going to own it and you need to be happy with it and you're going to pay for it. So we do not have uh shares or stock in any of these treatment technologies that we're looking at. We want to make sure to remove ourselves from that. So the mandatory goals I mentioned earlier, we take those and we screen a universe of technologies from tr tried and tested to embryionic the full suite. You have looked we have looked at all of those technologies. We apply your mandatory goals and screen them out. We then take those and the evaluation criteria that you identify and develop endtoend alternatives. That means end to end means from the moment we pick up the solids from the liquid side of your plant to the moment it leaves your plant. We then run uh that through our uh solids, water and energy evaluation tool or suite and that will give us uh the ability to tell you all the inputs

and outputs for that particular system. How much chemicals, how much labor, how much power, how much greenhouse gas emissions, cost, maintenance, all that. And that is based on years and hundreds of projects, maybe thousands of projects across the country for similar technologies. We then take that and and then vet that down. We develop six endto-end alternatives. That's what our scope with you is. And then you will be engaged down the road for a multiriteria decision analysis effort where we get to rank the criteria and and we can actually live play around with those criteria and see how the benefit scores of those alternatives fluctuate. This is a work product that's on the screen that you'll see. We'll we'll have a this is an example of course but you'll have as you see on the right your various alternatives and and alternatives you'll have a cost and you'll have a relative benefit score. The ideal is that you're in what we call the Goldilock zone, which is that green star, low cost, high benefit score. And that's how and that will you'd be surprised at how that will fluctuate around this around that grid based on whether maintenance is more important or greenhouse gas emissions are more important or u permit compliance is more important. We'll see where you end up. So, I mentioned earlier mandatory goals that your team came up with is the technology must fit within the physical space of the plant. There's a possible understand option of an off-site location owned by the city that could be available. Technology must have one installation that is operating that's of similar size. Technology needs to be able to uh adapt to uh changes in in regulations and prepare for future possible regulations. Acronym you might have heard is Pas. We can touch on that. Technology should not require anything that's proprietary or consumable. You know, if a technology provider goes out of business, you don't want to be stuck holding a technology that you can't uh

replace or repair. Technology needs to produce a product that can be sent to outlets. We don't want to produce something that only one outlet uh limits you. In that sense, that's a vulnerability. You become dependent on that outlet for your final product and generally can leave you stranded. technology also cannot be required to be staffed 247. It can operate 24/7, but it just can't have to be staffed. Again, this is what your your your wastewater public works team came up with. And um I'll touch on this again in in a bit. The evaluation criteria that they came up with as well are here on the screen. Environmental, social, financial, technical, regulatory, not in any particular order. The order will be decided uh down the street downline in this process. So this is a slide that How am I doing on time by the way? Good. This slide here

we're talking about tens of millions of dollars. You take as much time as you need.

Oh, okay. Just so this is this slide gives you an overview of the universe of solid stabilization technologies. This is all of them. There are some very uh embryionic ones there that are in orange like plasma synthesis reformers. I don't think that we'll be seeing one of those in anortis but to give you a sense that we we we're looking at everything. The the second column from the left anorobic digestion is the workhorse for solid stabilization technologies across the United States. It has been for years. It's the most mature. Um and then there's the green light green which are more innovative. um they might have less installations but are starting to become more and more proven. This slide shows you that initial screening that those mandatory goals cut out. So to meet those mandatory goals that your staff have, now we're down to these options. Okay. Uh one of the mandatory goals was that uh it not require 24-hour staffing, which I think is sensible because we don't currently staff 24 hours. However, if a process met all of our other goals but required 24-hour staffing, maybe we would be interested in considering it. I mean, maybe staff wouldn't be interested, but um uh

do you know were any screened out that happened to meet all the goals but that one? No. Most of the ones that typically would would be be the high temperature technologies that are in the right column. So none of those but none of those that got screened out um would apply to that. Okay. Thank you.

Where was I? U so as you can see we've cut it down quite a bit. All right. So this is a starting point. We're going to use these as uh ways to come up with those endto-end alternatives. We're going to come up with up up to six of those and eventually narrow those down. Um I wanted to touch on a couple things here. The bioolids market assessment had some interesting insight. I think there is a class A market out there and for the benefit of the public class A intends that beneficial use of bioolids is unrestricted. So a class A bioolid byproduct can be used by the public can you can use it in your own garden. You can use it as for farming. You can use it for a myriad of uses. Um class B not so much. Class B needs to be land applied. That means that there are still viruses, bacteria alive in it, but it can be used for land application and agricultural purposes, but not for direct public use. Um, so there was a a general sense that of a soil blenders in the general region that were had an awareness about bioolids that could be an opportunity for for partnerships. We felt like that the the number of them here especially in Scadget offered possibly a there's infrastructure for soil blending already in place. That might seem obvious to you but it's not obvious in other areas and local like in Seattle for example. Um I would say that there are some opportunities for bioolids class A use uh but there needs to be quite a lot of education a lot of quite a lot of outreach that costs that takes time that takes money. Um, class B outlets are, if you do go a class A route, it's always good to have a backup plan. Uh, case in points, Pierce County, for example, they do Sound Grow. It's a fertilizer product. Um, that is class A, but they also have a backup class B option in case uh they're unable to get rid of the product or case there's a malfunction

with their dryer, they can send it east of of the mountains. Um, I think that there's always an opportunity for networking. Uh Brian and his team generally participate in Northwest Bioolids on a regular basis. That's the who's who community of land use and beneficial use of residuals. Um the people that developed we're we're kind of lucky to have them here in the Northwest. Dr. Sally Brown from University of Washington um and Chuck Henry were the ones that created the bioolids rule in the first place that has led the entire country to use bioolids on the ground and in forestry. So networking there there's always a lot of uh technological providers that are there but generally it's a lot of utilities sharing ideas and thoughts uh on what they do. So the next steps um when I met with the public works committee they said you know what you should come here and talk to the mayor and the council and let's let's let's decision so let's all get engaged. And so shortly after later this week, we have prepared a uh an online form for you to fill out that will give you some background. It'll get allow you the opportunity to agree or add mandatory goals and evaluation criteria to what your staff have already identified and what I went over here. So your question about the staffing 247 I I would say that is a great location to document that that particular comment later on in the process uh later this year probably uh based on our schedule uh October November we'll plan on having the MCDA workshop and that'll be the workshop where we we'll be able to after some pre-work at sent out before that we'll send that pre-work to you as well in the similar form uh format. app your team will get that at the same time. That will allow us to understand what's most important. What's what's and then then once we get to the workshop, we'll

have the ability to tweak those weights just to play around with the numbers. Oh, maybe let's not care about cost, for example. Well, sometimes you'd be surprised sometimes that's that that elucidates some changes in the alternatives that might inform your decision. Um again, Toeer Jones, our uh PhD in decision science, will be the one that's leading that whole process. He's the one who's developed this methodology. Um he jokes that we use it, we should use it to buy our own personal cars, vehicles. In the same way, you care about mileage, you care about aesthetic, you care about uh comfort. Um we'll all have to we'll have to give and take a little bit on on all those different options. And we'll have to see we'll vet who care what we care about most as a team. So right now um that's where we're at with that's our first like formal engagement with you and we think that's really important to get a transparent result out of this entire planning process. Ultimately the end result of this is come March uh based on our current schedule we'll have a preferred alternative. So we'll we'll we'll we'll get your input on the the criteria. I should just mention what I presented here today could change if an added mand if a mandatory goal is added that screening could be impacted although based on what I told you today it's unlikely if that was the one if but if you have others that come up that could impact that screening we'll we'll circle back based on those results and then the next step will be we'll present to your team not not to you those six alternatives happy to uh happy to continue to engage you I'm happy to come up to anacortis anytime and present present those um in multiple steps if if the council would like me to as well. So that's all I had for today. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. And you have other slides in the packet that talk about how each of

those methods were screened out and none of the 24hour boxes are checked. Um council, do you have any questions? Well, this certainly will not be your only opportunity, but Mr. McDougall, Mayor Walters, um, question I kind of missed at the public works committee meeting actually looking I'm glad you're on slide 12 here. Looking at the these options, are they all standalone options or is there any like combination like maybe we want to do some amount of composting and then like some amount of some other or is it purely from a cost perspective or a pra pragmat practical perspective? you just do one.

In some of these cases, they're all going to be com there there's going to be some combinations, but there are some like uh meophilic anorobic digestion is is probably like a a typical standalone one, but uh we may have to combine that. For example, on the left column, thermal hydraysis with anorobic digestion. Okay, there we're going to be puzzling together several different ones. I've I've told the team though not to start that activity yet because we need to get your input and we don't want to have wasted effort on an alternative that might get screened out. So, Got it. Thank you, Mr. Cer.

I'm just curious to are the majority of these options ones that could be Thank you. majority of these options ones that could be placed on the current site with the adjacent lot or are there a large amount of these that would have to be created at a offsite location just based on the ones that you have identified on the screen.

So that's the that's the next phase when we develop the end of alternatives. We're going to vet those. There are definitely some here that are going to be challenging to fit on site. Um the mandatory goal will be to do so. Here's an example though. If that off-site location goes away and as part of this latest iteration on the mandatory goals, you say that's not an option. It not needs to stay on the site, then that would kind of as an example that would probably eliminate composting. Composting is footprint intensive. Um it's great, but it is footprint intensive. And that that's an example. Um if for example, you said um we want to make sure that the technology eliminates PAS because we hear a lot of PAS in the news. Uh well that that means pretty much only what's on the right there is what what would would manage to pass the screening. It would obviously simplify things a lot, right? Um some of these may not fit on site or some of these combinations will not fit on on the site. So when we're developing these alternatives, we're developing site figures, process flow diagrams for each one of those because we have to input them into our model. And so we we need to make sure that they do fit. we need to make sure that they have there are alternatives that are realistic and implementable. Did that answer your question?

Yeah, it's just helpful kind of getting a a broad perspective on it. And then one other question too as far as lead time on these. Do they vary significantly based on project? Is it like three to five year or I have no concept of that like what that looks like once you had something approved and we're kind of moving forward with it. When you say lead time, are you talking about equipment or you saying just overall project life? all project.

That's a great question. Um, this is going to be a this is a complex project. I mean, and I should also mention we are evaluating as a base case upgrading your incinerator um to Quad L. That is going to be something we look at and compare these two. Um, generally the next phase of this project once you select an alternative is preliminary design and an engineering report and then you go into detailed design. Um I'm reluctant to give you an overall duration because I don't know what technology is going to be selected. Some of these are heavy heavily reliant on manufacturers. So they are a box. An example would be a gasifier or a pyrolyzer. I rely heavily on a manufacturer whereas a digtor is pretty much a custom design. There's not as much package. So the the design window can change. I would like I would love to have the opportunity to come back and maybe present that at the end of this process once a alternative is selected. Then I can come in and tell you an implementation schedule and it would probably benefit the city at some point to once they make this decision to do a facility plan of the site to see how this all ties in with other existing facilities and what impacts it would have and how it would be implemented and phased in. I mean, just the last question I had, um, I had the privilege of getting a tour recently with Brian and Marsh and I both went out there was fabulous seeing what's been done and how everything's maintained. So, it was super impressive. But just your thoughts, like again, I'm sure it's part of this whole consideration, but taking what we're doing now and upgrading that versus looking at whole new methods. I mean, is there a sense that that is a a valid direction to go or um

I I want to remain objective on this process, right? I don't want to influence it. I I definitely know where the operation staff feels it's it's been a reliable, trusted piece of equipment, but it's getting it's not unheard of for an incinerator to last 50 years. There are several in the country, a lot in the Midwest and Northeast. Um, however, if if you're then going to ask me, if I invest this amount of money in upgrading this incinerator, can you reliably tell me it will last another 25 years? I can't offer that, right? I cannot offer you a determinate service life on an upgraded piece of equipment unless it's ent, you know, in the entirely replaced. So, if you're looking for that sort of comfort, you might not get that. But in reality, if you put money into this system up to the, you know, the 4.6 million that I mentioned that you have to play with until you trigger that 50%. You can definitely get several years that are more than enough for the planning and engineering timeline that I'm thinking this will have to take.

Thank you, Mayor Walters. Miss Molton, thank you for this presentation. I'm wondering when we see the survey if there will be sort of a pros and cons or any kind of ranking of the six mandatory um attributes of these or anything that shows which ones are the most space intensive or the most that create the most greenhouse gases or will costs is will there be any kind of an overview or is it just like this is these are the processes?

What we're going to give you is a series of questions. We're not going to we're going to tell you what your goals are. It's not important to even know the processes right now. It's what are your goals. So you'll see the goals that have been that I showed up on the screen. You'll have an ability to score those, you know, rank those in terms of your preference and then add others. The same with the evaluation criteria. And so once we get that then we can start considering what the options are. It it's important to not have prior knowledge, right? It's actually better to not have prior knowledge, right? Because that will inform what choices come forward.

Correct. Because I I see where you're going with that. It's like I don't want to add a mandatory goal that might preclude a pretty good technology. Right. I think that's maybe a concern that that your question comes from. Um that that's a that's a one. I wish I had Toeer Jones here, our decision analysis guy to to kind of dive more into detail, but that's intentional. It's it's a good thing. Um, we all arrive at the table with preconceived notions about technologies. Your staff does. I do. It's obvious, but we repeatedly made sure that we screened that out as part of this activity. So, it's meant to be that way. Okay.

It's not I'm not going light on the survey to hide anything. It's more to be to to split the two uh efforts,

right? And to prevent bias from making decisions for us based on what we think we know already, which we might even not. Okay. I I would say my experience in the industry has and it's happened to me on a on a project but when there's a strong bias by a one person or a small group of people and that those people then leave those typically those projects or those programs are not successful. We want something that withstands the test of time and I think that doing it this way it's proven to be the positive in my experience thus far in the industry. Okay, that's super helpful. Thank you. Mayor Walters, Mr. Fantini,

just a couple of quick questions. First, um, when it comes to, and maybe we're going to get some of this in the packet, but why are people moving away from incinerators?

Well, one of the challenges with incinerators is if you're going to build a new one or you're going to upgrade yours to a point that you get to this quad, one, they're not inexpensive. They are an expensive technology. Um they are also ownorous uh from a permitting perspective. There are elevated permitting costs that you don't have on other alternatives and some utilities uh just don't want to bear that cost both in time and personnel. I can think your your staff can speak. There is there is a a lift associated with the permitting associated with an incinerator. In fact, I don't believe that you actually have an oper uh an operating permit and this incinerator was installed in 19 or commissioned in 1992. So, uh that is definitely one element. Um they all are of the same vintage I believe generally in the '9s. Um there are trends in our industry where you know certain processes tend to have are popular or in vogue um as it happens in other industries. uh in the 90s incineration was popularized. Um as well as composting, there's not a lot of new composting designs that are going in, but there were quite a few. If you had the cheap land, east of the mountains, you have cheap land, a lot of space, composting is still used. Um but here, let's let's call on the on the western seabboard where land is expensive, you see less and less of those. So there are just trends that way. Um it's the technology is completely viable. There are new incinerators that do get installed. Um they are not it's not a lowcost option. Um does that answer your question?

Yeah, it does. Um another question that I had was so you've mentioned that 4.6 number a couple times of the estimate of what we have that we can spend going forward before we're automatically become the quad. We have to do the 8 million plus for the quad L. Yep. Um, do we feel confident that we 4.6 million will get us through until we have that new system? Like is that like how fast do we go? Will we go through 4?

Well, with regular annually planned maintenance, I would say you can would you like to comment on that? I can say that you don't want to go right up to the 4.6 million. Okay. because that is still a negotiation that would have to happen with Northwest Clean Air, which we have not done on this front. Okay. So, this is an estimate. It's a conservative estimate that gives you some runway um that allows you the runway I would say to to start planning for the next steps for the future of your plan and that you know that 5 to 10 year time frame. Okay. Um and then the

and those numbers I should say the numbers are based on all the maintenance information provided as of last year. Right. So so and it was very detailed information. I would say highly reliable. I feel very my team feels really confident in the numbers that we got and you know we've done these activities with other uh municipalities and not had near the detail of documentation that your team offered.

Okay. And then as as I'm going through and filling out the form that you'll send us, um just kind of one question I have is like so what happens if for instance we pick something that doesn't do much with PAS, right? And then the regulatory environment changes. If we've just put in a brand new or refurbished or whatever and then the regulatory environment changes and we have to do something more for PAS, we would still be on the hook for that. Yes, correct. So for the benefit also of the public, PAS is poly floral alkal substances or perforal alkal substances as a whole family. Thousands of chemicals generally found in cosmetics and food wrapping. Um generally associated in wastewater with landfill lee or ind heavy industrial areas. Um currently the law is uh SB5033. you are required starting January and you have about I think to June of 2028 to collect at least one PAS sample on your bioolids. Um I believe that the city participated in ecologies voluntary sample program and I looked at your PAS results and they are in line with and actually kind of below comparable municipal uh uh wastewater utilities. Uh so I didn't see any uh red flags with that data. Granted, it is one sample point, so it's a good idea to collect that that data. And it's even though those samples aren't cheap, uh I believe they could be anywhere in the 10 to 15,000 per sample, it is probably a good idea to collect that data over a period of time. Um to your question, right now that is the only requirement for PAS in the state of Washington. Um state of Washington, uh ecology representatives at various conferences have been providing regulatory updates. Of course, everyone's concerned about is there

going to be a limit? Um, I think that they're looking at what other states are doing. I think that if we would hope that they would look at a limit that is a numeric limit that is well be above what you have in your in your wastewater. So, it is unlikely that unless some large industry comes in town or you know some major change in your wastewater occurs that contributes PAS to it. it's the limit numbers that we're talking about are you're unlikely to to come close to those. Um but yes, you do rem if you do select an alternative where you rely on bioolids land application and as it has happened to some of our our clients um there is some reservation from farmers in receiving the bioolids just because of the association with PAS that is a risk. Yes, even if the risk is legitimate or not, because the exposure pathways with PAS, you have way more direct exposure pathways from cosmetics, other household products than you do from bioolids that get land applied, then up taken by crop and then fed to animals and then into your food source. So, um I would say that that is definitely that is a risk. It's a non-zero risk. Thank you, Mayor Walters.

Miss Cleveland McGrath.

Thank you. At our committee level meeting, um we talked about the fact that a a number of years ago when this first came when this came up this last time, there was a lot of pressure and urgency um to make a decision to go in a different direction because of some of our um reporting when it comes to mercury and cadmium. Did I pronounce that right? And fortunately uh staff has been able to make adjustments and get those those um levels below um the within requirements. So that's a really positive thing that we were able to make modifications. Um, the other thing that came up was the fact that and I or was mentioned that the Northwest Clean Air Area Agency will is now kind of the regulator. Is that correct? Can you

of your air permit for the permit? So, can you speak? I know we're talking about, you know, what we want and what what design works well for us for the cost we have and our limitations um of space, but once we make that decision, what is the process for permitting and approval by the state or the federal government? Can you speak to that at all? I assume that's pretty complicated.

Well, I'm not trying to weasle out of that one, but it depends on what alternative gets selected, right? Some of these alternatives will have minimal air permitting. So uh you will not have to deal with or deal with work with Noaka who promagates EPA in in this region of the state. Um when you when an alternative is selected as part of that preliminary design and engineering report typically we also do a a permitting matrix. So that informs you okay based on this design we expect here are the major permitting elements that you'll have to do. Um, most of the high temperature and thermal high temperature ones are the ones that are likely going to have to deal with some sort of more advanced air permitting effort with Northwest Clean Air. Northwest Clean Air still will be involved if you have like boilers or you know air emissions for odor and such, but those are much m much less tedious less cumbersome um permitting efforts. Um then there's also the permitting effort for with ecology and the engineer report process is an actual document required by whack. Um that has a specific list of things that you need to include in it and that is a process through which how ecology generally will review and approve this process and make sure that the city of Anacortis is making a reasonable investment uh in the for its community and in the environment. I'm sure I'm missing out. I'm missing some other environmental permitting steps in there, but that generally once an alternative is selected, we would we would hire a permitting specialist to review that and identify a whole permitting matrix. Council, any other questions? Uh, all right. All right. Well, this is going to be a long process that both

council and the public is going to want to track throughout its lifespan. So, I think that this would be an excellent candidate for a project web page on our website. Uh, including this presentation, the packet, the future survey where where we will express our affinity for meilic anorobic digestion and thermal chemical hydrarolysis. Uh, so that the public also has transparency into what um the council expresses as its survey results. and then the next steps all after that. So, um looking looking forward to getting to a result. Um but um we should all appreciate the process along the way. Uh thank you for your assistance. Anything else um from Brown Caldwell or staff?

Well, thank you for your time today and thanks for the privilege of presenting to you and the people of Anacortis. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for keeping the existing wastewater treatment plant running in the meantime. Uh this is our last agenda item. So I will uh go ahead and adjourn this meeting tonight. Thank you.