County Board - Regular Meeting

Welcome, welcome, welcome to round two of 2026's set of work sessions. And this is, as you were just, as colleagues were just reflecting, this is, Mr. Karantonis is on his way. He's coming within five minutes, but I think he said okay to do preamble and get at least all position to get started. So, We are now onto the Capital Improvement Plan, which is our infrastructure, our capital that we invest for our residents. That context I hope is helpful and for any listening along. Today we have a set of slides, three buckets of slides, one on stormwater, one on utilities, and one on the Arlington Neighborhoods Program and colleagues, grateful that you at least didn't vociferously object to 12 o'clock as a start time. We will try to be efficient and we'll go right to it. Just for context, I sent an email this morning just, we have a run of show and for our clerk and for everybody here, I'm sort of game time decision after you get through the first 14 slides. We may just keep going. I think that one round could be enough of questions, and we can have as multiple questions during that round. But if folks feel strongly after the first 14 slides that you'd like to stop and take a breath, I hope that gives context. So that's perhaps as much context as I hope ever to give in this arena but do wanna just orient folks and grateful for our staff for all the work on the capital improvement plan. It's over to County Manager for your introduction and thoughts.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the board. I'm glad to be here to kick off the conversations on our capital improvement plan. I will not have much editorializing to make during today's presentation, so we're gonna turn it over to Jason Papacosma, who will walk us through the stormwater program. And over to you, Jason.

Thank you, Mark. And we could move to the first slide. Good afternoon, Chair DeFerrante and members of the board. Thank you for the opportunity to present our proposed FY 27 to 36 capital improvement plan for the stormwater management program. I'm gonna start us off here with a quick grounding in our main program goals, which focus on weather and climate resiliency, risk reduction, state of good repair, and regulatory compliance and environmental stewardship. And our guiding planning, analytical, and regulatory framework includes the 2014 Stormwater Master Plan, the 2023 risk assessment and management plan and the requirements of our MS4 or municipal separate storm sewer system MS4 permit. This is our third 10 year CIP following the severe and repeated flooding in 2018 and 2019, which ultimately led to the board's decision to significantly increase capital funding and establish a dedicated source of funding through the stormwater utility. Next slide, please. We're gonna cover the three main programs in our proposed CIP here today. These include stormwater maintenance capital to maintain and reinvest in our physical infrastructure, stormwater infrastructure and capacity improvements to reduce flood risk where it's most acute, and streams and water quality to protect and improve water quality and the conditions of our natural stream systems, and to comply with state and federal regulatory requirements for clean water. Our stormwater system consists of both constructed and natural assets, and this slide presents some key highlights. Our approximately 300 miles of storm drain pipes and nearly 20,000 structures collect and convey stormwater runoff to our remaining 32 miles of streams. And our regulatory programs for development activities help to mitigate increased runoff and pollution from new impervious surfaces, complemented by capital projects in our streams and water quality program that you'll hear more about today, which target existing developed areas. Overall, nearly 50% of the county is covered by impervious surfaces. That's a lot of stormwater to manage and to keep us all very occupied in both our capital and operating activities. Our CIP investments, both to date and looking ahead, are driven primarily by risk, condition, and opportunity. Through a combination of direct inspection, analysis, modeling, citizen reporting, and community engagement, we've built an understanding of where our investments are needed most and can have the greatest benefits. And at the same time, there are constraints to getting our work done, mostly involving the themes of access, ownership, and physical space. So we pursue our work within this overall context. How this approach plays out geographically in the county is illustrated here with a sampling of recent projects and also previous investments. Projects are located where they are because we continue to make some more capacity investments in the areas of highest risk, maintenance capital investments where the assets are most in need of repair or replacement, and environmental investments where we have opportunities to capture more runoff and address the most severe erosion. Again, all influenced by access, ownership, and space constraints. Also highlighted here are previous investments made in the four mile run stream valley, primarily in response to severe flooding that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, which resulted in a decision to acquire floodplain areas along the stream and to partner with Alexandria and the federal government to build a flood control project along the lower two miles of the stream. These investments continue to pay very valuable dividends to the Arlington community today, protecting private properties from flooding and providing public spaces for recreation and nature. I'm going to hand that off to Jennifer now for the next part of our presentation.

Thanks, Jason. We want to highlight a few of the significant projects completed since the last CIP in each of the main areas. The first image is a storm drainage improvement at North Monroe Street. This project repaired portions of the stormwater outfall, stabilized stream banks, and relined stormwater pipes. We've also been making progress in the voluntary property acquisition program as well, which is part of our capacity and infrastructure improvements. We'll get into more details in a few slides from now, but to date we have acquired 13 properties with seven of those demolished by the end of fiscal year 26 to provide overland relief. Finally, Sparrow Pond wetland restoration was completed, which restored the pond to its original depth by removing sediment, adding a sediment collection pool and habitat structures in conjunction with outfall construction and drainage improvements. We also have a number of different types of projects that are actively in construction, which we're very excited about. This slide groups some of our active projects by type of improvements, including culvert replacements, green street projects, stream restoration, and outfall rehabilitation. We'll highlight a few of these projects a little later on as well. This chart shows our trend of increasing capital execution. In those earlier years, we were averaging around $4.5 million a year, but in recent years, that average has increased quite a bit to closer to $12 million a year. Each color on this chart represents each of our three main program areas, although we broke out Cardinal Vault there in red in fiscal year 22 and 23 as one of the largest projects at about $11.5 million over those two years. As we put together this proposed CIP, we reviewed our execution rate, lessons learned from completed projects, and challenges we often face, many of which are not within our control. Some of these challenges include easement timelines, timing of voluntary property acquisitions, final design and procurement estimated timelines, project management and engineering resources, public engagement timelines, and also grant timelines. Based on these lessons learned, when compared to the previously adopted CRP, our proposed CIP is slightly reduced to recognize a more realistic pace of capital execution and project delivery. The CIP does not reflect a reduced financial commitment to the goals of the program or our watershed level investments. While many of these timing challenges are outside of our control, like easements, we can increase project management and engineering staff to help with the pace of project delivery. Next slide. We are recommending adding a total of five new FTEs over fiscal year 28 and 29. These positions are shown on the slide, two for OSIM and three for Engineering Bureau. Additional FTEs will allow the program to scope more projects, allowing us to be ready when opportunities arise or to pivot if needed. Since these positions are assumed to spend more than half their time on capital projects, the direct rate impact is relatively low and also shown on the slide. The chart here shows each unadjusted CIP annual total per year. We had previously planned for about $10 million a year, and in the past few CIPs, that planned number was closer to $30 million a year. Our actuals followed a similar trend increase. We have not quite reached that $30 million a year level. While our CIP and actuals both ramped up, our capacity levels have not increased proportionally. The orangish-red color line there shows roughly the number of FTEs supporting stormwater capital. We'll come back during the budget process to formally request these positions. However, the proposed CIP in the following slides does assume the addition of these positions to support the proposed level of investment. Now that we've set up our approach to this 10-year CIP, this slide shows the total 10-year investment of $265 million over 10 years. Our CIP is split into those three main program areas, maintenance capital at about 19% of the total, streams and water quality at 11%, and capacity and infrastructure improvements, which is our largest area and accounts for about 70% of the CIP. On the right, our primary funding sources, bonds, both authorized but unissued, as well as new bonds, make up the largest funding source, almost 80%, followed by stormwater utility fee revenue, as well as some grants and some smaller sources. With that, I'll turn it back to Jason to go through our maintenance capital, capacity and infrastructure programs, and streams and water quality programs.

Okay, thank you, Jennifer. I'll pick it back up here, and I'll be going over our three main program areas. Under our maintenance capital program, we apply a risk-based approach to system inspection and reinvestment, focusing on a combination of factors that include pipe material, age, location, and co-location with other capital work. To date, our inspections tell us the system continues to be in good shape overall. Looking ahead, there are some challenges to be aware of. The system continues to age, some pipes can't be accessed easily, and it can be hard to find contractors to get this type of work done. We'll continue to report on our progress over time, and future CIPs may request additional resources for this program area. We're highlighting work here that replaces three stream culverts. These are the portions of streams that go under roads with a combination of features to highlight. All three projects will increase flow capacity and significantly reduce the frequency of road flooding and associated damage during severe storms. Both the downstream Dumbarton culvert and the military road culvert coordinate with other capital investments in the same location. And the upstream Dumbarton culvert includes an approximately $5 million federal grant administered through VDOT. Here are the key details for the main program areas in the maintenance capital program, which includes a combination of general pipe replacement and repair, a targeted program that focuses on upgrading older pipes made from terracotta and corrugated metal materials, investments in what we call the nodes of the system, catch basins and manholes, and a specific program area to maintain the condition and function of the four mile run flood control project that I highlighted earlier. And here are all the proposed investment, excuse me, all the proposed projects and program areas in this program category shown together over the 10 years. Overall, the requested amount is similar to the current CIP with various adjustments and reallocations made to reflect experience and learning to date with needs and our capacity to deliver. And I'm noting, Mr. Chair, that slide 14

Thank you very much, Mr. Papakosma. Any burning questions? I don't currently see lights, so let's keep going if you have them. Oh, you do, go ahead, Mr. Carrington.

Just a technical question on the covers that you just mentioned, Dumbarton and Military Road. They are around about average five million each, right? So what makes them so expensive? Because I understand that they're relatively cheap. you know, small and we are replacing the existing structure, so I guess we have to account for re-foundation, make them, you know, storm resilient, but is that that expensive?

I can say some general things, and we can dive into some more detail if needed, but I think one of the key pieces is we're basically rebuilding the road as well. Yeah, I get that. Oh, that Jason Road. that covers that area where the culvert will go and the utilities that go with it.

The existing culverts are... Come on up, please.

Yeah, that's good.

The existing culverts are...

The existing culverts are corrugated metal, and they've exceeded their lifespan after every major storm. We have to repair them. The proposed structures will be precast concrete, and they're going to be much, much bigger because they're all in floodplains, and we have, especially in the DeBarton culverts, we have properties very close by, so we had to make sure we weren't increasing the flood elevation.

Mm-hmm.

So the structures are going to be much larger. They're going to be reinforced concrete. That's why they're more expensive.

So in general, for me, just for my edification, the average lifespan, the useful lifespan for a 1940s corrugated tube and cast concrete is what, like 50 years, 60 years?

25, 30, something like that.

And the replacement would be?

They're going to be precast concrete. They're going to look almost like arch bridges.

Right. So 100 plus... How long will they last?

They should last 50 to 75 years.

75 years.

Yes.

Okay. I would love to know how many of these we have because I know that we have a lot of these that will probably say...

I think those are the last three old ones. Some of the others were replaced previous, like to 2006 even, or 2006, 2009, or before. There were several at Williamsburg. There's several of them, but these are the last three really big ones we had to worry about.

Fair. I was just starting a little bit by the price.

Thank you for the question, Mr. Karantonis. It was In my notes too, I think there's sort of, the cost seems to have gone quite up quite a bit, maybe three or four times. So Mr. Spain.

Yeah, just real quick. Thank you for the brief. I'm curious to know, and I know you talk about this in additional slide, but on slide six, where we have the voluntary land acquisitions, can you just tell us really quick, what is the total amount Spent to date on these property land acquisitions Associated with the overland relief just do we have a finite number on that?

I'm up we spent we do I'm looking at see here Upcoming slide to its yeah, we don't have that in the in the slide deck I think what I have from what Jennifer were looking at this recently on the purchasing and closing cost to date. It's about a Little under 14 million for the properties that we've accrued costs on to date. These are the 13 properties that owns?

That's for 12 of the 13 properties.

Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Spain. Other questions? Yeah, yeah. The door's open now. So if you have a question on this section, go for it. Ms. Cunningham.

I wanted to ask about slide 10. So I know the stormwater utility is still a relatively new concept. Is the long-term goal for it to cover more of these stormwater needs, or is the balance between bonds and the fees likely to stay at this level going forward?

I think it depends on the type of project and improvement we're doing. We tend to use bonds for those projects that have longer lifespans, where the benefits will continue to be enjoyed for generations of rate payers, whereas our stormwater utility fee revenue or our stormwater pay go covers more of our maintenance capital and those replacements.

And so it may vary over time as we have waves of things that are needing 30, 50 year replacements. Gotcha. Can I also ask, do we know how big the breadbasket is? So I think if we'd asked 20 years ago how much stormwater deferred work do we have, it would not have been this number. This has been sort of a surprise how much we've needed it, both because climate has changed and development has increased. Do we know... what the like 30-year costs are, are they going to continue to climb up, and how are we managing that outside of the 10-year period?

And the first part of your question, did you say deferred?

Yeah, so it seems to me at least that certainly if we were in 1960s, we didn't think we were going to have to do a lot of this work. And maybe 20 years ago, we probably still didn't know that. 10, we started to have some ideas. Just how big is the beyond the 10-year price tag, and what are we doing to kind of mitigate that for the community? It seems like this is a growing need, and given the climate, probably continuing to grow. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. I can take a crack at that, and others maybe can chime in, but I think one way I think about it is, you know, stormwater is kind of like a little bit, and that's not just for Arlington, kind of late to the game in the utility space. I mean, you're going to hear about water and sewer utilities that have been around for a much longer time period, and so, you know, they're a little more mature in that regard. I think we're We're getting going though and I think, what I highlighted earlier, I think maintenance is a space we're gonna see more investments in. The system is aging and it's gonna need to be replaced over time. These pipes at some point have a useful life. So I think that's one area where we'd expect to see increasing investments. In the other categories, and we'll talk more about it as we go through it, I mean there's a pretty robust level of investment we're putting into flood risk reduction. And at the same time, it's a long-term program. And so that level of investment certainly spans multiple CIP cycles. Whether it goes up in the future, hard to say. But I think where we are with this cycle proposed, next cycle, subsequent cycles, we're going to continue to be sustaining this work and dealing with risk reduction projects. in the watersheds we've identified here and possibly in other watersheds too that could experience storms of their own that they hadn't seen before or patterns could change. So not a complete crystal ball answer, but I think we're looking at this as a sustained body of work and then potentially increasing needs as the system gets older.

Great, thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Vice Chair Coffey.

Yeah, thank you. What an exciting presentation to kick RCIP off with. But on the proposed five additional FTEs, is that being proposed to be paid for essentially fully within the stormwater fund such that there's not a general fund, general revenue impact? Correct. That would be out of the stormwater utility fund. OK, great. That is my only question.

Great, thank you. I think there's context that will be added. I did see your light, Mr. Karantonis. Is this on the first 14 slides or do you, or do you?

I'm fine, I'm fine.

Okay, we'll go to the rest because all of these questions, I might have one about 10, but I want to hear the rest of the slides too. That still is, I'm glad that all the questions got surfaced there. This is organic, this works. It's back to you, Mr. Papakosma.

Okay, thank you, Mr. Chair. I think we're picking up with slide 15.

Yes, okay.

So I'm gonna talk now about our capacity improvements program, which we were talking about a minute ago. It continues to be the largest program area of the proposed CIP, and our core strategies to reduce flood risk also continue, which include a combination of capacity, detention, and overland relief. We're also increasing our efforts to help the public understand and act on their flood risk. We've added our ramp inundation maps to the county's website alongside other flood risk mapping resources from the state. as well as First Street Foundation's flood factor tool, which is also referenced on many real estate listing sites. And we plan to provide voluntary flood adaptation design guidelines later this year with practical strategies that property owners can use to help reduce flood risk and damage and improve their resilience. The proposed CIP includes program level funding at a watershed scale for the five priority watersheds shown here, rather than allocating dollars to specific strategies. This approach is essential because there are key uncertainties that come with working to reduce flood risk at this scale. These reflect the constraints of a system built at a different time. Flexibility is essential because of what's outside our control, especially access to pipes. granting of easements and acquisition of properties on a voluntary basis. The ability to move to Plan B or C allows us to keep moving forward. And property acquisition is an essential strategy for the properties at highest risk because there are limits to how much water pipes and detention systems can handle. These properties are often co-located with critical stormwater infrastructure. By acquiring properties, we not only can eliminate the risk for those properties, but also can access the pipes to make improvements. Arlington is a leader in this core approach to resiliency, and this program takes both the near term and the long view, acquiring properties one or two at a time until there's enough contiguous space to access our pipes and design an overland relief pathway. and in the interim, reserving use of these properties for these future improvements for the primary stormwater purpose that they're required to provide. A critical point is that any interim use of these properties in the near term cannot create barriers to overland flooding, for example, by adding fences and or other structures. We also don't want to create circumstances where structures, extensive landscaping or other features would have to be removed for future work. In their interim state, the properties are available to the public to enjoy passive recreation uses like that shown in the middle photo in this slide. Lastly, the voluntary nature and uncertain timing also reinforce the importance of having flexibility at the watershed scale to make investments in CIP dollars. It allows us to be ready when opportunities arise and to pivot when we need to. Here are the locations of the 13 properties acquired to date. The initial phase starting in 2021 focused primarily on spout run and we have acquired seven properties in that watershed. With the current phase, we've sent letters of interest to the remaining priority spout run properties and have added properties in the Torreys and run watershed. With an agreement of sale approved this month and which closed just this past Tuesday and another agreement of sale moving forward targeting the June County Board meeting. This slide and the next, excuse me, highlight the five watershed scale program areas. Based on analysis and engineering work to date in each watershed, the suite of strategies we're pursuing differs. In spout run, for example, overland relief with property acquisition is the primary strategy. In Torrecent Run, in contrast, we had the opportunity to install the Cardinal Vault to provide detention for a portion of the watershed, which helps reduce some of the flood risk downstream. And at the same time, we're also pursuing voluntary property acquisition at the farthest downstream part of the watershed, which receives all the runoff from upstream and where flood risk continues to be very severe. And then, for example, in Lubber Run, pipe upgrades and detention are still being evaluated with potential future property acquisition depending on the feasibility of these strategies. In addition to the watershed scale program categories, this slide lists the remainder of the projects and programs within the capacity improvements category. You'll notice a new category as well of public private partnerships. We're proposing this as notional flexible funding to support these partnerships as opportunities arise. The general context is that in many locations, our infrastructure connects to infrastructure owned by private property owners or other entities like VDOT. Think for example, the culvert under Langston Boulevard. Making capacity improvements in these locations will require participation from these multiple parties. And here are all the proposed projects and program areas shown together over the 10 years. Overall, the requested amount is less than the current CIP, but as presented earlier by Jennifer, our intention is to actually increase the on the ground rate of execution by adding more delivery capacity. The five critical watersheds are highlighted in yellow. These are where the most severe and repetitive flooding has occurred and the focus of our current watershed scale efforts. There are additional targeted projects located in other watersheds, for example, Little Pima Run and Doctors Branch. Capital maintenance projects are also spread throughout various watersheds. It's possible, as mentioned earlier, that other watersheds could be added in the future as flooding patterns and impacts change. Next, I'm gonna cover, excuse me one second, please. Next, I'm going to cover our third category, the Streams and Water Quality Program. This program works to meet multiple objectives, both regulatory and stewardship driven, with a growing emphasis on creating resiliency to climate change. Projects are strategically identified to align with infrastructure protection and integrity needs and address related public safety issues resulting from failed slopes, eroded trails, exposed and broken sanitary sewer lines, and collapsed stormwater outfalls. We've highlighted three specific projects in the proposed CIP here alongside their community benefits. These projects represent the upland to downstream gradient we work in to create more resiliency in streams and at the stormwater outfall interface with those streams and to mitigate stormwater flows and pollution in the watershed areas that drain to those streams. And at the same time to fix co-located infrastructure. We think of it as a both and dynamic that deals with severe infrastructure and stream damage now that can only be fixed by direct intervention and make sustained investments over longer timeframes to mitigate stormwater inputs to the streams. This slide and the next summarize our progress in meeting our MS4 permit requirements for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, throwing another acronym in there, otherwise known as the TMDL or total maximum daily load. It's basically a pollution budget for the bay. Through fiscal year 25, we've exceeded our second permit cycle targets for phosphorus, nitrogen and sediment. And this puts us in a good place for the third permit cycle, which, along with nitrogen specifically, I'll talk about in a minute on the next slide. To wrap up this slide, I'll also point out the proportionality of credits shown in the three bars and how stream projects play a significant role because of the dramatic reduction in erosion and downstream export of sediment and nutrients. And here's our compliance progress over time. Projecting forward, the Gulf Branch project, which is currently under construction, will lead the way towards 100% compliance for phosphorus and sediment. Nitrogen is hard to remove from stormwater, and we're fortunate to be able to take advantage of the investments in performance from our water pollution control plant to borrow nitrogen credits to extend our compliance timeline. And we're also able to borrow phosphorus credits if necessary. Important to note, for the third permit cycle, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality is moving up the timeline to meet the 100% target to an original date of 2028 that was established in 2013. There have been some delays with permit issuance and other things that extended that timeline, but it's been moved back to 2028. There are additional projects and programs in the CIP that will add to the compliance project we're projecting here conservatively. Our compliance calculations and projections will be updated as those projects proceed through design and construction and will be reflected in annual reports to DEQ submitted each fall. Also important to note, we expect new targets from EPA and DEQ after the 2028 deadline. More to come as we learn more of the next, we expect two to four years. And these are the summaries of the rest of the projects and program areas in the proposed CIP. They span the upland and downstream landscape with a mix of green infrastructure, outfall work, and stream resiliency projects. We have a new program called Stream and Wetland Capital Maintenance to specifically identify and enhance funding to maintain these projects in the critical first years after construction as vegetation gets established. This includes replacing vegetation and also controlling invasive plants for up to five years. This category also includes funding for small stream repairs and capital repairs for our growing inventory of water quality assets. I'll note just briefly here that we also invest in a high quality maintenance program through the operating budget to keep our water quality assets performing well over time and also looking good because they're very visible across our Arlington landscape. As we continue to put more of these important water quality assets in the ground to manage stormwater impacts, we'll need to keep up with operating budget investments as well. Together, these capital and operating budget investments and maintenance are needed to sustain the stormwater and ecological functions that these facilities are intended to provide and to ensure continued credits towards our regulatory compliance targets. Okay, the last slide for me before I turn back over to Jennifer. Here's the proposed streams and water quality program by year over the 10 years, totaling just under 29 million. The new line item for stream and wetland capital maintenance I just covered is a reallocation from other programs. And while also less than the current CIP amount, the message here is the same as for capacity improvements. Our goal is to increase our execution rates by adding more delivery capacity over the next few years. I'll turn it back over to Jennifer now to take us through the end of our presentation.

Thank you. So this slide shows the total for the three stormwater CIP categories broken down by year. The 10-year total is $265 million before the implementation adjustment. This is a decrease of just under $70 million compared to the last CIP. The majority of this decrease, about 58 million, is in the infrastructure and capacity improvements, as we've taken a critical review of our watershed-level programs, lessons learned from completed projects, and realistic review of timelines. I want to reiterate this isn't a change in commitment to the program, but instead recognizes a longer timeline than 10 years for some of the potential improvements, given the uncertainty and possibilities still to pivot to our plans B or C. The capacity improvements program, although decreased from the prior CIP, is still by far the largest program at 70% of this total proposed CIP. As mentioned earlier, and like other areas in the county CIP, we are recommending keeping the 20% implementation adjustment to account for execution delays and unforeseen circumstances. These delays can include things like easements, design challenges, procurement or public engagement timelines, coordination with other capital projects, working in VDOT right away, and more. Since we don't know which projects the delays might affect, we take it as a 20% reduction on the program as a whole. This cash flow adjustment also keeps our rate forecast lower. Net with the implementation adjustment, the proposed 10-year total is $212 million. Next slide. Here we have our funding sources to support the CIP. We include some notional state grants in the future, but are constantly looking for new funding opportunities to help mitigate rate impacts and support our programs. Apart from grants, the vast majority of our funding is bonds and the stormwater utility fee revenue. Both of these have an impact on the annual stormwater utility fee rate that property owners pay. We consider the right balance of these sources, factoring in the duration of benefits the projects provide. Our annual maintenance capital and planning studies are primarily funded by stormwater utility fee revenue, and bonds are used for our projects that will have longer-term benefits, including our infrastructure and capacity improvements. Since generations of ratepayers will enjoy the benefits of these improvements, they are also the ones to pay the debt costs back. Based on planned need and available bond authority, we are not seeking an additional bond referenda for 2026. Next slide. This chart takes these proposed funding sources in the CIP and projects out future debt and rates. For every $1 million of debt issued, the rate increases about $1. However, debt is not the only factor in determining the annual rate. It also includes personnel costs, contractual increases, and other things. Rate will be determined in each year's operating budget The rate forecast shown here do, however, include the proposed FTEs we highlighted earlier. Next slide. And as we're talking about rates, it's helpful to have the regional comparison in how we are in our regions. We're the green line there, kind of in the middle. The costs shown here are based on the average home in each jurisdiction. And next slide. And to wrap up, I want to highlight our main takeaways. Our CIP focuses on our main goals of resiliency and risk reduction, maintaining a state of good repair, and meeting regulatory and environmental stewardship commitments. The proposed $265 million CIP seeks to increase on the ground rate of execution while still adjusting the total CIP to better align with capacity and our lessons learned in recent years. Our largest program in the CIP, Capacity and Infrastructure Improvements, provides us with program-level funding to provide essential flexibility to manage uncertainties. Maintaining a state of good repair is a critical piece of our program and will need increased funding over time. Finally, it's important to note we have complementary efforts underway to promote flood risk awareness and provide tools for private action. Thank you for your time, and we're happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Ms. Schultz and Mr. Papakosma. Colleagues, feel free. I see Ms. Coffey and then Ms. Cunningham.

Thank you. One that I think should be very quick, just confirming that what you said on slide 30, we're not going to have a bond referenda question this year on the ballot at all for stormwater. Is that right? Correct. Okay. Got to make sure people understand that because I think there's going to be some of our advocates who are looking for that. And then another... funding-related question. Did any of our last CIP assume federal funding that may no longer be available or incorporated? I'm thinking especially about the green infrastructure and MS4 work, since there had been theoretically grants for a lot of that stuff out there. I just don't know if we had assumed that the last time we were working on the CIP.

No, I think the short answer is we did not assume that and to the extent that we have grant funding Which we do have some for that particularly infrastructure and stream work It comes primarily from the state the stormwater local assistance fund Which has been very helpful in a pretty streamlined grant program as well And then we've had we have a current grant as well from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation NIF with grant and that's for the grandma's Creek project and that's also a fairly what I would call low overhead GRANT PROGRAM, TOO.

AND ALREADY BEING SPENT, THEREFORE, UNDER THE WORLD WE CURRENTLY CONTINUE TO BELIEVE IN, VERY DIFFICULT TO RETRACT THAT MONEY. GREAT.

YEAH.

AND IF WE'RE BACK INTO REGGIE, THEN THERE'S A POTENTIAL ADDITIONAL FLOOD FUNDING AS WELL, POTENTIALLY.

Great, okay, that's good to hear. Yeah, I think as we adjust from the state of the world at the last time we did this to now, just wanted to make sure we assess all of our various risks.

We'll do, you can have another, but then I would suggest we do two or three at a time, but go finish and we'll do two rounds.

I can pass along, my next two are gonna be related to each other, so, but I'll have two more.

Okay, let's do Ms. Cunningham then. I think I saw Mr. Spain. Yeah. And we'll go to Mr. Karantonis after that.

My first question is about, well, first of all, to celebrate, the confetti should fall down because we miraculously, wonderfully, expertly got AAA bond ratings reaffirmed from all three agencies. So standing ovation for our DMF team. Thank you.

Miraculously? Maybe not. We've had it for 30 years.

That's right. But it's a very, very... Scary time. So great job there. And so my question is actually how, we have different funds and then we have the bond funds. It is often confusing to community members how our debt ratios are calculated and whether everything's included or if we're moving something from one fund to the other, are we in some way working around those limits? So it'd be helpful for some explanation there if anyone could-

Very broadly speaking, the bonds here are supported by revenue. Excuse me. So they are separate from the 10% calculation that we have. I know Ms. Coffey asked the question. We oversized the bonds that we put on the referenda a couple of years ago. We were saying this for purposes going forward. That's one of the rare times we've said, put enough money in the bank so that we can have enough to take us through the next five to 10 years. And also, as Jennifer mentioned, we're also acknowledging the fact that our hopes, dreams, and desires, as expressed a few years ago, sometimes we have bigger eyes than we're able to actually execute. So those are the combination, the reasons why we're not asking for bonds. But people should just realize that those bonds that we're getting are supported separately and don't count against the 10%.

Got it. And so the difference is really if there's a specific fee stream that's covering it, then it's not coming from the tax revenue. Thank you for clarifying that. My other question is about water quality. I think on page 26 or 25, you noted the nitrogen targets we just barely met this time and they're gonna go up a lot. What's our plan of attack there? What do we need to be doing? Are there capital improvements or behavior changes that are needed?

Yeah, good question. I'd mentioned just generally in my talking points that it's hard to remove from stormwater. And the reason it's hard is you have to have anaerobic conditions like the plant can do for denitrification. You basically have to make it into a gas. So not really easy to happen in a stormwater environment. And so our plan is that we have the ability, the plant is overperforming relative to its permit and allocation. So we can borrow those credits very nimbly Other communities don't necessarily have that that ability to be that nimble. They may have to go to a water authority, a place, water authority or even a credit provider. But our situation, our investments set us up well for nitrogen. I don't in the near term, we're not really too concerned about it. We can give ourselves a longer time period.

So even on page 26, where it looks kind of scary that we're far from the target, we're able to buy that down with a plant. Yeah, essentially.

And I think of it like it's a borrowing and it gives you more time. Your books say you've met the target with the borrowing and then we pay it back.

Gotcha. And then to be, if I can, there's also often confusion in the community about our measurement of some of these metrics. So some of it's sort of in a spreadsheet and based on modeling versus actually measuring the outcomes. Can you say anything about how we're managing both of those to make sure that the actual nitrogen and the actual phosphorus are lower, not just the modeled? I think this particularly comes up in stream restoration.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a common question. And for the audience, if you will, there's a compliance calculation that we have to do. The state gives us the parameters. We do the calculation, and then we can get the credits. And so when it comes to... Measuring outcomes, I mean, we look at it a variety of ways. It's sort of the question, broader question, how do you measure success? So for a stream project, we can look at, and we do this post-construction, how stable is the stream post-construction? Is there erosion? Is the vegetation filling in? So we do all those things that allows us to keep claiming those credits while we actually see the benefits in place, you know, the stability, infrastructure protection. One of the hardest things to do, to be frank, is to measure direct cause and effect in a real world environment with water quality. It's so variable. It's hard to isolate. There aren't really a lot of localities that do that. It's a large sum of effort. So I think one of the things we try to emphasize is build the projects well and then maintain them very well. So we invest in that maintenance program to keep them in the condition they need to be in in order to claim the credits. And I will say the credits come from scientific studies. If you design a rain garden a certain way or stream a certain way. But those studies took a lot of investment to kind of demonstrate. And, you know, we In an ideal world, unlimited resources, we might do that too. But with the resources we have, we're putting it into really the build them right, maintain them well, and keep them doing what they're supposed to do over time. It's not that we don't do monitoring. There's biological monitoring, bacteria monitoring. It's more sort of ambient level. But the cause and effect kind of monitoring, that's the hardest to do. You need a lot of time. And to really show that causality, I think it's really difficult. So we kind of look at it a little bit different way with the resources we have.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Mr. Spain, and then to you, Mr. Carantones.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I'll try to be brief. This is my first CIP. Wow. I'm just gonna tell you, both Jennifer and Jason, thank you for your presentation. But something that I'm kinda taking in here is there's a couple areas that are really near and dear to my heart, right? So, CIP capital maintenance, that's important to me. Property acquisition, I asked a question about that. Streams and water quality programs. Those areas I'm focusing on. But as I'm thinking about how the community receives these 33 odd pages of PowerPoint and content, and I heard Ms. Cunningham just now talk about measurables, nitrogen, phosphorus, whatever. I'm thinking about where were we at the last CIP? Where are we today? What did we achieve? What is it that we can tell the public about the good news stories? Because what I'm taking is there's a lot that we need to do to preserve for maintenance and investments, and we have goals. But what are those good news stories as it recalls? We talk about taxpayer dollars being used. What I'm looking for is evaluation of how all of these investments are meaningful, how they're improving flood mitigation, water quality, resiliency, because I think the average community member has no idea. Now, if you're an environmentalist and you're all into this, sure, but I'm not hearing the good news story. from the last CIP to now. Could you talk a little bit about what have we achieved since the last CIP as it relates to stormwater, some of that? I would love to see that like in an ex-sum up front, just for me, instead of having to digest all of this, which the community has to as well, but can you talk to that a little bit? Sure.

No, it's the right question. You know, like you said, the deck is more forward looking. Yeah. Right. Here's what's coming and proposed investments. And it doesn't spend a whole lot of time and what we've done. And I mean, we I would say, you know, a few things about it. I mean, we certainly communicate with the community, engage with the community in a lot of ways with projects. And those are opportunities to then talk about what we've also done. And so we have those opportunities to talk about projects we've done and projects we're planning. I mean, we certainly have a lot of work we've done in the flood risk reduction space. We've acquired a lot of properties. done infrastructure improvements, we've done capital maintenance work, so we've made the system work better. We've invested in it, it's in a better state of repair than it was. Anywhere we've done capacity work or flood risk reduction work, I think by its nature, we know that it's increasing the capacity of the system because you can understand you make a pipe bigger, you remove a property, you've increased capacity, you've reduced risk. So we kind of have those metrics right there. For Streams and water quality, I think those can be a little more tangible. Like when we do the Boston Wetland Project, people see that we can do a ribbon cutting. We do tours. I recently had several school groups go through there. The same was with our stream projects as well. You know, so those are a little bit more visible and we try to celebrate those as well. You know, we like Grandma's Creek Project I mentioned was a really strong community partnership. you know, driven by the neighborhood and we're able to partner with them and get get projects done on the ground. Like that whole neighborhood is very aware of that project. But someone who doesn't live in that neighborhood might not, to your point, might not be as aware. So I think there's a lot we could provide. And I mean, there's things on our website, there's places we show our progress. It wasn't in this space today. Sure. So I do appreciate that perspective that, well, maybe you need a little more of that context to show where's the where's the money gone over the past couple of cycles?

to the point Jennifer made, you stated, you know, lessons learned over the past couple years. My question would be, what are those lessons, right? Because I don't see that, you know, here. And y'all are doing great work. It's just I want to, you know, bring that question up. Maybe we can talk later about it. But that's what I would want to kind of see. Just one of five more minutes.

If I could add one thing, and you can think about that if you want to add something. One of the challenges with this program, a lot of us have the images of what happened in 2019 when there were cars and other large things floating down Washington Boulevard. And so it's hard to say what our success is because what we're trying to do is avoid images like that. So if they don't occur, I'm not gonna sit here and say that we've done a fantastic job, we've controlled all the weather and everything's fine, but there are some things I think we've avoided. The Cardinal Vault, which is three, four years ago, was a significant investment that hopefully, and I'm not trying to be funny about this, there'll be fewer cars floating down Washington Boulevard the next time. So, Mr. Spain, your question is spot on. I just don't know, I mean, Jason talked about water quality, which we can actually measure and things that are tangible, but I think some of the things that are going to be realized from this actually will be things that we don't see.

Thank you, Mr.

Thank you, Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Emanuel.

Yeah, I'd just like to add, if I may, one edification of Jason's modest comment that he made about the stormwater acquisition program. And I'd like to publicly thank the board for its support. I think he mentioned it was kind of a benchmarking thing amongst, I just wanted to share with the board, we get calls all the time with the program and policy level. How did you do that? And how are you working with your board to make that happen? Because they're jealous that we're successful. And since the last CIP, we have progressed that program substantially. Like any new program, it has its questions and fits and starts, and people have to get comfortable with it. But that is a huge success, I think, that others are modeling to us. I don't know if you get questions at the board level, but if you had to choose one thing that's kind of extraordinary about the program and very successful, I think I would tag that.

Thank you. That's why you're a deputy county mayor. I like you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I think we may have additional sort of comments. Colleagues were here in 2019. Not all of you may have gotten to walk through a lot of the homes, which I did, and some of them are coming up or have come up for voluntary acquisition. And it's hard to unsee when you've seen some of that, but that doesn't, it's not the end of the story. There's lots to it. Mr. Karantanas.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Actually, I wasn't here in this seat in 2019, and not during CAP in 2020, but I clearly remember the shock and awe that we all got from the county manager's response to that that was, oh, this is now a $300 million project for the next 10 years. And actually, this is still true. I mean, if we see the order of magnitude, the assessment under shock and awe was not so off. It was actually pretty accurate. And the other thing that I have to say to the... I politically experienced the very hot discussion about how we do our stream restoration and the Donaldson Run project, etc. And we see today that actually... we are in the right path. We see progressive stream restoration going on with very good results and very good community acceptance as well, continuing discussion, but acceptance of the scope and the benefits of the program. which is a great thing. And I have to say, actually, over the last 25 years that I've experienced the Potomac River here, just anecdotally, the improvement of the quality is actually visible. Even the turbidity of the stream, of the river is better. One can actually fish even. The measurements of that are showing improvement. What I have to say on the nitrogen of our entire system, there is a factor that is deteriorating, which is the climate change factor. Unusual droughts, the people are fertilizing more because they want to counterbalance the loss of vegetation because of that, and then immediately we see the value is going up. And we haven't designed yet a system that actually has intermediate stages of interception, like bioretention ponds, like wetland management, where we can, where we have natural agent, like bacteria and grass, et cetera, helping us with maintaining more stable water quality as we go in. So one of my... just remarks, not really a question, is whether, looking forward, we should be including that in our designs to the degree we can. When we build a vault and we spend millions to do that, we may also think, when we do the outfalls, et cetera, where the outfall goes, and if we build an intermediate stage, et cetera. These are lessons that I learned at Dolce & Gabbana, actually, that intermediate stages actually are a good practice, and they have good results at the end. A financial question for me. So the stormwater utility fee contributes over 10 years about 40 million. The new bond issue is 144, so this is three and a half times more than that. And if I add the authorized but unissued bonds, this is even more. So... Is that a hint to us, a policy hint that we need to begin to think about the stormwater utility fee in a different way? Because this is the idea of supporting more of the program as we go. I understand the difference between capital projects and the narrower scope of the storm utility fee, but for me this ratio one to four, 1 to 5 is a stark ratio of new debt or bonds towards what the utility fee is contributing to that.

So the ratio concerns you as being high?

I'm concerned that the utility fee is probably, you know, we should probably begin to think whether we should, we are low balling the utility fee, whether the utility fee is too low and it should be a little bit higher in order to contribute. The problem is that debt today begins to be more expensive, so I want to avoid the additional financial costs by moving it to the regular revenue.

Yeah, and I think we consider that those aspects, propose the funding to put together for which programs. I think as well as the stormwater utility is relatively new, we don't have a history of bonds in the same way that the utility fund does. So you can see our existing debt is already very low. So we're beginning to layer in the debt. We also have a debt coverage ratio we try to meet the same way other programs do. And we're well above that. We're not in, as far as what the... utility can support in the debt versus sort of utility fee ratio.

Okay. One of the reasons why I'm always thinking about that is because the utility fee also is more equitable because it shifts some of the burden or significant part of the burden to those who produce or cause the problems. So that for me is something that is important. Not everybody has the same contribution to So I always found the utility fee to be a good regulating instance.

One of the parents of the stormwater utility fee wants to speak.

I JUST WANTED TO QUICKLY ADD, IF YOU LOOKED AT THE LAST CIP WHEN WE PROJECTED OUT OUR RATES, WE LOOKED AT A DOUBLING OF THE RATE OVER THE TEN YEARS, AND YOU'LL NOTICE THAT THIS IS NOT THAT. SO THAT'S BECAUSE OF THAT EXECUTION THAT JENNIFER SPOKE ABOUT, BEING A LITTLE LOWER THAN WE EXPECTED. BUT I WANTED TO BRING THAT UP AS A POINT THAT, YES, AS WE SEE DEBT INCREASE AND WE WILL HAVE TO RAISE THE RATE TO SUPPORT THAT OVER THE CIP PERIOD. I think you see our projections here. We were a little too aggressive in the last CIP, but when we're talking about issuing debt for these projects, along with that will have to be an increase of rate.

Yeah, and I understand that. I also, and with every constituent we have this conversation, I tell them every dollar we invest in capital here actually reduces the likelihood that your utility bill will go up in the future. So I just want to have a good balance and find what's the rule of thumb ratio that should be flagged. For me, being at 1 to 3.5 to new debt, or 1 to 5, It's still a ratio that raises my eyebrows at this point. I'm not insisting in changing that. I just keep it in mind because it's significant.

Yeah, and the rate not only, you know, is not just paying for PAYGO. It's also paying for all the operating things in that fund. So, you know, when you're comparing, I think, bond to PAYGO on this slide, you're not comparing bond to the overall operating side of the fund as well. So I just want to point that out.

I'm comparing the part that the table shows that the storm utility fee contributes

So the rate payers are paying both the debt service on the stormwater debt as well as the transfer.

The other powerful instrument is the permitting system that we, you know, whether it's the, what's called the Dirt Disturbance Ordinance, the LDA, et cetera. This, for me, these are contributing factors on how to keep that manageable, and I believe that these two reforms, the LDA reform and the stormwater fee reform, are among... the key contributors to the fact that the order of magnitude of burden here in the last five years has remained actually stable in an environment where everything goes up. Last question, this is specifically on the Bailey's Run project on the Western Columbia Pike. So in the implementation of that, the Bailey's Branch stormwater capacity project, I see an unusual pattern of spending. It has some initial spending in 27 going all the way up to 2030, peaking in 29, and then coming back again in 32 and going all the way to 36. while you know normally these capacity projects have an initiation they peak in the middle and they in the end in one in one line so why is that the case

I can touch on that a little bit. If we need to get a little more detail, you can bring Liz up as well to add a little more color. There are multiple moving parts to that project. There's work in the watershed looking at pipe capacity and potential detention, as well as working with the property owner itself on overland flow and easements. So that's just a lay of the land. And Liz, you want to add a little more detail there?

Yeah, that's essentially, there's multiple aspects to that particular watershed and what we're planning to do there. And so they're in various stages of completion and are projected to go to construction or whatever at various times. So we're currently working with the property owner to try to get an overland flow easement. We are also looking at some easements that will be needed for some flood wall. And then we've put some inlets in along Greenbrier, but we're going to have to put another couple of them in. We've also done flow monitoring, and then we do eventually have some upgrades for the pipe system.

The reason why I'm asking, besides just curiosity, is I want to minimize the disturbance for neighbors. They have had to go through enough in the last six, seven years.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Karantonis. We'll go to another round. I have one question that I want to just see if I can fit in. It's sort of linked a little bit to the 10%, and I think it's for Mr. Schwartz. You talked about debt service and so for me, really appreciate Mr. Emanuel's comments and the properties that we have acquired have been aligned. The dollar figures are challenging to stomach when you think of our annual investment in our safety net and we're doing big investments. They're different buckets. but the debt service is the link, right? So what you shared with us is if we go if we do too much in the CIP, that is debt service every year that ends up putting us in a hole every year for our ongoing funding.

Can you give us context for how stormwater relates to that? Yeah, I think Jennifer touched on this, which is that we have, and the board's adopted financial policies that talk about how we set up our stormwater fund and the debt we incur there is paid for by essentially the stormwater rate that's levied on individuals. So it's not coming out of the general tax rate that you set every April, it's coming out of the stormwater fee you set every year. So as you noted, they're separate buckets. The acquisition of these properties, and I think the total was $18 million. Was that the number you had stated, Jason? $14 million. Assuming that we had to debt finance that, the debt service with that is being picked up in the stormwater rate as it's paid every year. So that's separate and distinct from what you're going to do on setting the tax rate.

And you had the $1 million... figure in that one slide that sort of i guess it's my impression that you know there's a one penny on the on the tax rate is eight to ten million dollars right but the debt is a some large multiplication number of that five six eight ten times that results in the concern that you're mentioning, right? So if we get to that scale of increase in CIP or that scale of increase in the stormwater fund, I felt like you were looking at a dollar increase in the stormwater utility. So it seems like investments here are are relevant but relatively minor compared to your overall concern. Is that a fair description? Yeah. Go ahead.

Yeah. For the stormwater utility fee for every million dollars of debt issued is an additional dollar on the rate for those 25 years. And then it falls off. As opposed to other things in the stormwater rate, it's about $68,000 to a dollar in the year. So if a contract goes up that much, you're adding a dollar. So you can see there's a big difference as far as the debt impact and things funded out of the rate.

Great. I think there's detail there, but I tried to get my big picture mind without focusing as well on the details that you mentioned, is try to get scale because...

The scale is important. Also, and I know we had a lot of conversations about moving to this utility. It was meant to at least, it did in my mind, I don't know if it does for our residents, draw a direct link between the fact that they're paying this fee and it's going to remediate the aspects specific to stormwater and what's going on, whereas before when the funds were being funded out of the general fund, the connection wasn't quite as direct. Now, I just say it still costs money.

Sure, sure. And mindful, others will have other questions. I would just note, as we go into Ms. Coffey, slide 18, if we can pull it up, I just always feel like in the course of 2019 and 2020, you could say, oh, they're all North Arlington. Well, in 1972, we had a massive hurricane that flooded the southern part of the county, and to my recollection, we put a pretty significant amount in today's dollar terms, infrastructure. And we also have projects in the slide deck there about that as well. So it's telling part of the story, but I think that as we think about equity, we also are thinking about serving everyone in the county as well. So Ms. Coffey.

Okay, I wasn't sure if that ended with a question.

No, not a question, just a point that I think is worth lifting.

I had two questions. Mr. DeFerranti's question actually created a third question for me. No, it's okay. I guess one of... Picking up on his questions around the stormwater utility fund and debt service and our general rules, since debt service is contained within the stormwater fund, and I don't know who this question is for, does it count differently as far as our broader financial policy rules because it's not being carried by general fund revenues?

Well, our financial policies have a separate section that talk about, so what we do there is we have, and Jennifer talked about this, we have debt coverage ratios, which make sure that we have enough money in the fund to meet whatever debt payments we have to make. And we are really conservative there in a good way. In other words, we have debt coverage ratios, which I think, you know, and the rating agencies look at those kinds of things, even though it isn't about selling bonds, that we have some, you know, really, when I say conservative, that's good. We have enough in reserves there to make sure we meet whatever would happen in the debt market.

Yeah, okay, but as we're thinking about kind of the broader CIP questions and the 4.5% growth and 10%, like, this kind of is backed out of that since it is self-contained.

Right, right.

And we could recirculate the adopted financial policies if that's helpful. Always is.

That was the voice of Maria Meredith, everybody, not God.

Is there a difference? Okay, and then... Back to the property acquisition program, because I do think it is one of the more unique things we're doing. And obviously, we have a really comprehensive long-term view on what the benefits are and will be. But thinking about in the interim as we do these kind of one-off transactions, is there Is there something we could say about how much space or properties are required in one location to really have a benefit on the localized flooding and stormwater impact? Is it every single individual one has an immediate benefit or is it we really need a critical mass in one location? You know, what is that interim benefit for the community?

It's a good question. I think there's a couple of ways we look at it. I mean, the immediate benefit is the risk reduction for that property, that acute location is is gone. That's the obvious piece. But then there's this longer term goal to create these overland relief pathways for floodwaters to go. And so that takes more time. There's the. just the part we don't control, it's voluntary, right? So who comes to us and when do they come to us? So that requires some patience in the community. We know that that can be a challenge because it's not... as Greg said, we're kind of pioneering here and it's not a typical situation to acquire property and then not have it be turned into some direct public use right away. So we understand that challenge of patience that we're working towards and communicating with folks along the way. So SPOUT runs a good example where you've acquired a bunch of properties, but there are not enough yet to then design that overland flow path that we're looking for, but that's the goal over time. Whereas in Torrey center on we're making more progress all at once there may be a you know a faster move there if we acquire enough properties together I don't that's fully answering your question, but no I think it does and and my my last question is directly related to that in terms of you know I

not everyone is going to be ready to sell their full property. And have we ever considered partial acquisitions or easement acquisitions as part of this kind of voluntary program where we could maybe, especially if we're seeing like, WE'RE STARTING TO GET A CRITICAL WE'RE STARTING TO GET A CRITICAL MASK SOMEWHERE BUT WE KNOW A MASK SOMEWHERE BUT WE KNOW A COUPLE OF PEOPLE ARE NOT READY COUPLE OF PEOPLE ARE NOT READY YET AND THIS IS THEIR PRIMARY YET AND THIS IS THEIR PRIMARY RESIDENCE. RESIDENCE. THEY DON'T WANT TO LEAVE. THEY DON'T WANT TO LEAVE. TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE BUT MAYBE TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE BUT MAYBE WE CAN ACQUIRE PARTS AS AN WE CAN ACQUIRE PARTS AS AN EASEMENT ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE EASEMENT ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE ACCESS CONCERNS. ACCESS CONCERNS. IS THAT SOMETHING THAT IS IS THAT SOMETHING THAT IS INCORPORATED IN THE PROGRAM AT INCORPOR

No, that's a great question. And it is both. There are situations where, depending on the lay of the land of the property and the infrastructure, an easement could work for our needs and also the property owner. But I'll also say there's obviously hesitation for property owners to have an easement. on their property too, but we're actively looking at it. I know when Tories had run, for example, in other places. So it's part of the toolkit over time. And if we get to that very point you mentioned where, oh, we could finish this if we, you know, we would pursue that as well.

Great, that's awesome. I'm glad we're thinking flexibly about how we get there. And then the last thing I'll say is I'll just kind of pin, I think, post-CIP in a non-urgent way. I'd be super interested in just an informational briefing on the MS4 permit work. I remember it from our last CIP. I know we've talked about it broadly, but especially as there's deadlines approaching in our plans and processes, it would be good for me to fully understand that.

Absolutely. Thank you, Ms. Coffey. Ms. Cunningham.

Yeah, just following up on the overland relief properties, do we have a measurement plan of like how we're thinking about the return on investment or the success of the program? I know we kind of agreed we're gonna do a bunch of them and then pause for a little bit and see how it's going. How does that work get done from here?

And just for some clarity, do you mean as sort of an opportunity cost to another strategy or?

Yeah. So what, you know, we're spending tens of millions of dollars acquiring the properties. Is it paying off? Right. So I know there was sort of a back of the envelope early on to say, but is there is there sort of a measurement plan for that?

Okay. I think here's how we think about it and trying to message this, and I think it's important to re-message it, is when we get to the space of property acquisition, it's because there isn't another flood risk reduction strategy that's equivalent. And even when you can make a pipe bigger, it can only be so big, and then it's going to overflow. And so we mentioned... One of the ways you think about the analogy, like the acquisition of floodplains in Four Mile Run in the 60s, that was overland relief for the stream, and that worked. And now we're in a space where in parkland, like in Bluemont, for example, the restrooms have been removed from the floodplain because the stream kept wanting to take take those restrooms back. So it's a similar dynamic here where this is a place where flood water is gonna want to go because the system capacity can't handle all the storms that come to it and there's not space for the water. So in that context it's more of a strategy and risk reduction goal dynamic as opposed to comparing this level of investment versus that because there isn't an equivalent way to achieve that long-term resiliency with the same dollar. Got it, got it.

So it's life safety and the only resiliency path. Can you share, I think we often hear, you look at that map that I-66 is kind of right in the middle of all of those. Is that part of the puzzle? Like did we create a dam with I-66? And if so, is there any federal liability or support for mitigating that?

What kind of expression does Liz have on her face right now? Hopeful. Do you want to come up and talk about that briefly? Because it's worth noting a little maybe exclamation point on some of those challenges.

Well, so, yeah, I-66, they intercepted some of the water, and then some of the water goes through along very large culverts. Some of them have problems. And then some of the water goes under I-66 and crosses over in Torres and Run. In particular, there's large culverts that go under I-66, but they're not big enough. And so it backs up, and it causes issues along 14th Street. And the issue becomes, well, how do you get VDOT to improve a culvert under I-66? And are you going to spend county residents' tax dollars or stormwater fees to improve FEDERAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT. AND IT'S A VERY LONG PROCESS, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU DECIDE. AND SO THAT'S WHY WE THINK SOMETIMES IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO ACQUIRE PROPERTIES IN SOME CASES BECAUSE YOU MIGHT BE LOOKING 20, 30, I THINK TO GET INTO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ONE OF THOSE HIGHWAYS YOU HAVE TO BE IN A 20 OR 25 YEAR PLAN. AT LEAST THAT GETS YOU TO TALK TO THEM. So in the meantime, it can flood, you know, multiple times.

But do we have a place in line so it's 24 years next year and 22 the next time?

Not that I'm aware of.

Okay. That might be a follow-up question just to see, because it does seem to be growing in significance, and it's not all our doing. So it might be good to share the load long-term. Last thing on the overland relief. I know community members are curious about the zoning, the use, the maintenance. How is that process going? Are things staying with DES? When do they go to DPR? Can people do community gardens is the biggest question I hear often.

Yeah, no, we know that's on people's minds. I mentioned in the comments a few minutes ago about the patience piece, because it is a long view exercise. I think a few things I'll say about the near term, definitely stormwater fund dollars for stormwater mitigation purposes, DES, stormwater is taking on the maintenance of those properties. We don't have any plans to turn them over to parks because of that stormwater piece and the funding piece. So I think the piece of emphasis is we're going to Maintain them for this passive recreation use now to hold space literally from when we have the ability to create a more formal You know overland relief pathway to provide that longer-term Stormwater benefit and I know that takes some time so we don't want to put things in there that could block the flow that could cause hazard or you know be investments that then get cancelled out and lost because they get removed and down the line, you know, so as we get to a space where we have enough and we can start having design conversations, I think that's where we can advance, you know, what comes next, but we do understand it's hard for people to kind of think about a holding pattern perspective, but we do try to emphasize like they're available for use. It's just, you know, like the picture showed inflatable dinosaurs and cornhole and, you know, community activity and throwing a ball around as opposed to something more formal yet.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Mr. Spain. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll make it quick because I think we're a little bit beyond time. I just want to circle back to slide eight and nine. And you referenced earlier about execution capacity and potentially looking for five FTEs within this CIP. Just for the record, Mr. Manager and staff, I would like to have maybe a brief just to talk about those positions and also kind of contrast that to our last budget cycle and some of the cuts we have had in the past couple of years. I just want to get a better understanding of like where we were, where we are, where we're going with these particular positions outside of the scope of what's going on now, if that's possible.

Sure. And I would just say that the FTEs, which have not been proposed yet or adopted by the board, are meant to address the work associated with that. And so in a perfect world, once we finish all the work, those FTEs disappear. It's a little bit different, but that is absolutely a fair question. And the fact that this is funded separately and on the capital side makes some of the trade-offs different, but it's certainly a fair analysis.

Thank you very much. That's all I have, Mr.

Chair. Thank you. We are about 15 minutes, and I contributed to a little bit behind, but we can follow up with questions. I will say that for my part on the big picture that Mr. Spain asked about, The fact that we are reducing the amount of capital that we're projecting and increasing the maintenance is actually heartening for me that the ramps process and your over time analysis has really fine tuned, seems to have fine tuned some of our program. it is awfully easy to say we're fine tuning when we haven't had an event like July 8th, 2019 in the last few years. So that's just really grateful for the presentation. We will move on to utilities. We'll have a shift change, something of a shift change. Thank you very much Ms. Schultz and Mr. Papakosma. Utilities is next.

Yes.

Okay, so we're gonna have Mike Collins come up and I think Jennifer, you're staying. John's coming, John and Lisa are here. And I think, Mike, are you starting?

Yeah. Okay. Mr. Collins, to you, when you're ready.

All right, good afternoon. My name is Mike Collins. I'm the Deputy Director in DES for Operations. Joining me today are John Lawler, who is our Chief Support Engineer, and Lise Racey, who is our Principal Engineer down at the plant. And of course, Jennifer Schultz is sticking around. So we're happy to present the 2027 to 2036 utility CIP. And we hope that our priorities, got the slides up. We hope that our priorities of systematic reinvestment, resiliency, reliability. Yeah, I'm sure they're getting there. Getting close. There we are. All right. So yeah, our priorities in this CIP are systematic reinvestment, resiliency, reliability, and sustainability. And we intend to achieve those priorities through systematic reinvestment in our existing infrastructure. We're fortunate in that our water and sanitary sewer systems were really well designed by our predecessors. They make maximum use of gravity, we have good inherent redundancy in our critical systems, and we have more than sufficient capacity for the foreseeable future. The greatest sources of uncertainty that we do have, they have to do with regional dynamics, particularly around source water, and regulatory risks, particularly around PFAS, and we'll talk a bit about both of those. But I do want to stress, even in those areas of uncertainty, our utility systems are well positioned to continue to provide fully compliant services. Our investment in this CIP does address those future risks, and if achieved, we'll be passing on to our successors a system which is well positioned to serve future generations. So you can see here on this slide that our largest program in this CIP is maintenance capital. Hopefully that is consistent to everyone or apparent to everyone that that's consistent with our goals. This covers reinvestment in our 525 miles of water main and our 470 miles of sanitary sewer. The next largest investment that we're proposing is reinvestment at the water pollution control plant, including the regen program, which will replace and upgrade our aging solids processing equipment. The water distribution program includes significant funding anticipated for major investments in source water and or finished water redundancy. And John will talk about how we're looking to achieve those. Go to the next slide. So of course our programs, we rely upon and we impact the environment. So our environmental footprint is an important consideration. A couple ways that we strive to manage and minimize our impacts on the environment include our system design and operations, which I talked about, and they're very gravity-centric to minimize pumping costs. I'd like to highlight here the chart, the inset chart here, which illustrates how one of our engineers implemented a weir structure in one of our manholes that diverted wastewater into a nearby gravity line resulting in direct and immediate electrical pump, electrical savings from pumping. This creative project alone is saving us more than 200,000 kilowatts annually, kilowatt hours annually. Continued maintenance, we're still on the other slide. Continued maintenance capital investments, they allow us to replace aging equipment with up-to-date energy efficient processes and equipment. For example, the regen program at the plant will have significant positive environmental impacts through greater resource recovery from our waste streams, reduced trucking in chemicals and biosolids, and net energy positive performance. So now we can go on to the next one where we'll talk about PFAS. PFAS is a major concern for utilities everywhere and we'd like to take this opportunity to educate our community and you all about how it impacts us and how we're managing those impacts. So to start with, PFAS are a class of more than 10,000 chemical compounds that have been manufactured over the last 50 years or so. These compounds have very useful chemical properties that have been utilized in innumerable industrial and commercial applications over those 50 or so years. One of the particularly special properties of PFAS is that they are uniquely persistent, meaning that they do not biodegrade, nor do typical environmental or industrial processes destroy them or degrade them. A quick sample of historical and current applications of PFAS include Gore-Tex, Teflon, food packaging, cosmetics, building materials, and countless others. These PFAS are literally everywhere. They are in the air, they're in the soil, they're in plants, and PFAS has been detected in the blood of nearly every person ever tested for it, including me. So the ubiquity of PFAS in the natural and built environment, it's also present in our source water, it's in our waste water, it's in our solid waste streams. The levels in our drinking water are absurdly low compared to the levels in things like food packaging and mascara and so on. Go to the next one. So in the past couple decades, public health professionals have identified a number of health impacts from exposure to various PFAS compounds. Given the volume of unique PFAS compounds, again, there's 10,000 of them or more than 10,000 of them in the many different exposure paths, the science right now is far from clear of understanding the relative risk of different exposure paths and exposure compounds. So it is, however, it is clear that PFAS exposure can have negative health impacts at some levels. Regulators to this point across the nation have concentrated efforts to regulate PFAS at utilities. That's really just a consequence of the relative ease of doing it at utilities as opposed to other places. We've been actively engaged along with our partner utilities and industry experts to collaborate with regulators on appropriate and feasible regulations. To date, all of our commodities and products have tested far below any existing or anticipated regulatory levels. What we would ask and what we would encourage is both regulators, for our regulators and for our customers to consider the source of these chemicals. Again, the sources are the chemical and industrial products which create and distribute these compounds and that all of us literally use every day. Treatment or control at the source will always be the most effective paradigm for any contaminant of concern and we urge people to keep that in mind. All right, so we'll move past PFAS for the moment, and we'll start talking about resiliency and systematic reinvestment in our systems. And this chart here illustrates the age of our water system. Of course, the majority of our system was built in the 40s and 50s. making it 70 plus years old, or the original investment 70 plus years old. You can see looking at this bar chart here that we have made progress and added substantial miles of new water mains in the last 50 years, which indicates investment, but John will talk to you about how this current CIP does propose increased investments in our water system replacement funding. go to the next slide please and this one illustrates similar similar message uh... about our sewer system but you'll note here on our sewer system it is uh... functionally quite a bit newer and that's a result of our significant investment over the last three decades and a really uh... really transformational uh... infrastructure technology called cured in place uh... pipe lining which allows us to renew sewer mains and really install a brand new sewer main inside existing. So we've employed it effectively to renew our system at a fraction of the cost of replacement. Unfortunately, no directly equivalent technology exists for water mains. So water mains, that's why our water mains are somewhat older and why we have to invest in replacement to really renew the water mains. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to John, who will go into greater detail about our programs. Mr. Lawler.

Yeah, thank you. Yes, we'll highlight each of these four programs over the next couple slides. So we'll just go to the next slide. All right, here's some of the few projects that we completed since the last CIP, including the North Lexington Street Bonair Park water and sewer improvements project, the interior and exterior rehab of the Fort Bernard water storage tank, as well as a few of the projects at the water pollution control plant, including replacing five chemical tanks to improve disinfection and odor. Next slide. Here are the program totals and funding sources graphically. Over the 10 years, the CIP is 972 million. You'll see the plant is about 40% of the total CIP due primarily to the region project, which is about 70% of the plant's 378 million. We dedicate considerable funding to the maintenance capital, rehab, and replacement of the water and sewer systems. The Washington aqueduct is included in this category. We also have a sizable investment in water distribution, which includes our regional resiliency and interconnection efforts. On the funding side, bonds are significant funding source. Authorized but unissued bonds is primarily for region. The other funding includes, among other items, our IJA partner contributions, which account for approximately 17% of the 378 million funding for the plant. Next slide. On this slide we're highlighting a few of our water sewer maintenance capital replacement and rehab projects and programs. On the left is the water main replacements program. Funding for this program has increased approximately 38% since the prior CIP to 108 million over the next 10 years replacing aging cast iron water mains with new more reliable duct iron pipes. Even though, as mentioned previously, that approximately 59% of our system is still cast iron pipe, our unaccounted for water rate is only 8.6%, which is very impressive for a system of this age. It allows us to keep our billing rates so low. Over the next year, we are hoping to improve our decision making for determining what mains we target for replacement by using new technologies that analyze past water main break history, pipe attributes, and geology to determine which pipes have the highest likelihood of breaking. In the middle is our sewer force main replacements program. Due to Arlington's advantageous topography of high ground in the north and low ground in the south, the vast majority of our sewer flows by gravity to the water pollution control point down the south, and we only have four miles of force mains. We're starting construction next month on constructing a larger redundant force main for the 60-year-old Gulf Run force main, which is our second longest force main in the county. This project will use a combination of slip lining, which is shown in the photo above. That's where you're installing a smaller pipe and a larger pipe by pushing and pulling it via various access pits. In addition to some open cut construction where we don't have a larger pipe to install it in, in the Gulf Run project we're utilizing an abandoned 20-inch water main from kind of when our system flowed a little differently on the water side. It's just been sitting there abandoned. We were able to TV it, make sure it's good to go for hosting this new force main. This added redundancy will be great for us because it will allow us to easily inspect and rehab the existing force main in the future. On the right is the water tank rehab program. Arlington has 32 million gallons of finished water storage, which is far in excess of the state requirements and is much higher as a proportion to our 21 million gallons a day that we typically use than many of our regional neighbors have when you compare how much storage they have. It is important to proactively inspect and maintain our storage tanks to prevent external corrosion as they're either steel or concrete. External corrosion could eventually progress into internal corrosion and cause water quality issues. We recently rehabbed our Fort Bernard steel tank with a zinc coating that is corrosive resistant and has a 30 year service life. Over the course of the CIP, we plan to rehab the elevated Lee tank, which is still in FY28. That's in the photo above where you're looking at the top of the tank down to the Lee ground tank, which was rehabbed in 2019 and is made out of concrete. We'll also do the Minor Hill storage tanks in FY30. Next slide. All right, so the Washington Aqueduct is our water supplier, and we pay for our share, approximately 17% of their operating and maintenance and capital improvement programs. We get the vast majority of our water from the Delcarlia Water Treatment Plant that was constructed in the 1920s before the EPA existed, and has many components that require replacement and modernization to keep up with emerging EPA regulations. The project picture on the left is the old conduit that was recently rehabbed for 25 million. It is the older sibling to the parallel new conduit, which is actually their names. These two nine foot diameter conduits are approximately nine miles long and convey 100 million gallons a day each via gravity from the Great Falls intake all the way to the Delcarlia treatment plant. You know, earlier this year, the Potomac River was impacted by the DC water Potomac interceptor collapse that occurred between the Great Falls intake and the Little Falls intake. The Little Falls intake is located right at the Fairfax Arlington border, really close to the Del Carle treatment plant. Had this break occurred while this project was active, because during this project the old conduit was out of service while people were literally inside it making repairs and rehabbing it, it would have greatly impacted our water supply because it would have created a deficit in how much water Arlington and DC use on a daily basis versus how much supply was available for the plant to treat. And that would have lasted over two weeks while DC Water was constructing an adequate bypass system. The project pictured on the right is the East Filter Building, which was constructed in the 1920s and has both short-term and long-term plans to upgrade it. And the parallel was filter building. In addition to these plant upgrades, the Washington Aqueduct kicked off last month a big project to add advanced treatment. Advanced treatment typically consists of adding either ozone and or UV into the plant's treatment processes. These greatly help during large algae blooms that seem to become more common with climate change, in addition to treating various pathogens in the river. As this project just started, little information is known at this time on the cost and timing, but we have programmed placeholders for our share of the cost in FY32 through FY36. The Washington Aqueducts has always been a great partner to work with and has very competitive wholesale rates, so we're very alarmed when we heard about DC Water's acquisition attempts earlier this year, and we hope that doesn't materialize. Next slide. This year we finished piloting using advanced metering infrastructure, more commonly known as AMI, to remotely read our water meters via the cellular network. With this pilot at 125 locations throughout the county, we replaced the existing drive-by endpoint, known as an ERT, that is connected to each water meter and sends the reading displayed on the water meter to our mobile collector via radio frequency, RF signal. That's kind of in the picture above there. You'll see the endpoint that's just mounted to the bottom of the lid Ours are really nice because they don't we don't have to drill through the lid like in some cities You'll walk around you'll see something like a mushroom sticking out of the water meter lid and it kind of creates a tripping hazard But we don't we don't have that here So yeah, we install those, you know really nice flush mount under the lid and they send the signal to us via the cellular network and so we installed these 125 at locations throughout the kind of it are known for poor cell signals so we really wanted to stress test this during the pilot and everything went really well. We had over a 96% read rate and so therefore we're planning to expand AMI to our 3,600 commercial customers over FY27 and then transition the remaining 34,000 residential customers over the four years between FY28 and FY31. AMI offers many benefits, including real-time monitoring of water usage, which allows us to reduce our carbon footprint due to decreased truck rolls from not only regularly collecting the billing reads, but also having to send our crews out to collect manual reads from the meter every time a resident starts and stops their service during a move in and move out. It also allows the county the flexibility to consider potentially transitioning to a monthly billing cycle for our residential customer class. While the AMI technology we're piloting requires zero meter replacements, we will replace many of our residential meters during the transition as they were installed between 2012 and 2014 when the county began using its drive-by meter reading technology. On our commercial meter side, the commercial meters account for about three quarters of our water, billable water consumption. We actively stay ahead of water meter replacements and that's another huge factor in us just having only an 8.6% unaccounted for water rate. Next slide. All right, here's our two partially federally funded large diameter sewer trenchless rehab projects. The HUD gave us 1.5 million in funding for. The $4.7 million Roslyn large diameter sewer project that's currently under construction and is on track to finish in the fall. This project consists of rehabbing the half mile section of our 33 inch Potomac interceptor downstream of the Spout Run Deep sewer and several projects where developers upsized and realigned the same sewer. The sewer shed for this pipe is shown in blue. The time of this project shifted back a year because we bid it out in February 2025 and received only one bid for nearly $6 million. We looked really at the bid package, eliminated some unknowns and re-bid it and that resulted in a savings of over a million dollars but we still only had one bid. Essentially the federal funding adds a lot of requirements and complications to the projects and that may have contributed to the higher cost. the four mile run relief project. That's the second federal funding project and we'll start that after Roslyn's complete. Now it consists of rehabbing a one mile section of the 57 year old 30 inch diameter four mile run relief sewer between Route 50 and Columbia Pike. We rehabbed the segments through Sparrow Pond in 2023 prior to the pond restoration project there. Its sewer shed areas are shown in light green, red, and pink. We're also currently rehabbing over one mile of older sections of the parallel four-mile run interceptor sewer upstream of this location near Bon Air and Bluemont Parks, although this is not part of the federal project. Next slide. Besides the projects highlighted in the previous slides, we also have many more maintenance capital programs which we invest in annually. This slide shows the water programs to ensure excellent water quality, adequate fire flow, and reliable service by keeping our pipes, valves, hydrants, vaults, and pump stations in a state of good repair. Next slide. All right, this slide shows the sanitary sewer collection programs to structurally renew our sewer mains and manholes and reduce inflow and infiltration into the sewer system, as well as our trade center improvements project and the frame and covers program, which adjust the valves and manhole covers in conjunction with the county's annual paving program. Next slide. All right, this slide shows the overall 10-year funding totals for the whole water and sewer maintenance capital program, which totaled $408 million over the 10 years. The water main replacement and Washington aqueduct capital investments consist of approximately two-thirds of the funding in this program. Essentially, with these programs, we're really investing into our existing infrastructure to maintain a state of good repair. Next slide. All right, now we'll talk about the water distribution program, which primarily focuses on expansion of our water distribution system to improve the reliability, redundancy, and resiliency as the county demands continue to remain steady despite consistent population growth and development. We're highlighting these two major projects. The finished water reliability and interconnections program consists of constructing new interconnections with our neighbors that improve the resiliency and redundancy of our system in the event of major transmission main breaks or water treatment plant issues. Finished water is treated potable water, whereas source water is raw, untreated water. You want to have both as raw water is good for droughts and contamination events. For example, the water in Potomac River is raw water, and that's what I'll talk about now, highlighting the regional source water resiliency program. There are a couple of concurrent efforts to study and scope short-term improvements, such as the Delcarlia Reservoir expansion, which are nice, but not all that impactful. There is another study with our regional partners looking at the Trevillia Quarry, which can sustain the region for weeks. It is anticipated that the county would be responsible for its share of the costs on the source water resiliency improvements and that those placeholder costs are programmed into the CIP in years FY2032 and FY2036. Next slide. These are the water distribution projects. The Water Pump Station Improvements Program consists of funding to upgrade many components at the lead pump station, including the generator and FY27. Following that, it will replace the generator at the Minor Hill Pump Station and upgrade the seldom used Little Falls Pump Station so that it can reliably serve as a backup to the Ethan Allen Pump Station. The transmission mains resiliency program was introduced in the prior CIP and is based on the hydraulic modeling done as part of the underway water distribution system master plan update where we simulate breaks on our transmission mains to determine the most critical ones. This program will construct new redundant transmission mains so fewer customers are impacted in the event of a major transmission main break. In that CIP table, the regional source resiliency, those are just estimates as far as the timing and magnitude. And let's go to the next slide, yeah. So you can kind of see FY32, we have the 5.7 million, FY36 is the 57 million. There's really not good data on the timing of those, but those are just kind of placeholders. And then we also have the river crossing inspection program. And that's where we'll, you know, we have a 48 inch transmission main under the Potomac River at the chain bridge. And that basically we like to inspect every 10 years. We last inspected it in 2019. So we insert like a eel like structure or eel like device in there. And while it's in service, it can like flow down it and tell you, you know, there's any issues in the pipe and whatnot. So that's what that's been added back into the CIP for. Then I think we go to the next slide. All right, now we have our Sanitary Sewer Improvements with Developments program. It's a very small project portfolio. Improvements needed for development are typically instructed by developers triggering that need. As mentioned previously, our sanitary sewer system has excellent capacity due to the reduced flows attributed to our sewer rehab program and increased water usage efficiencies. Now I'll turn it over to Lisa Racey from the Water Pollution Control Plant to talk about their CIP programs.

Thank you. You moved quickly, Mr. Lawler, through a lot of material. And I think I'm okay with that. I just did wanna give space if folks have a question or two. And I'll hold, I have one for you, but I'll hold that. And we got an engineer and a sort of interested engineer and then just a lawyer. So we got some people who are gonna have good questions, science questions. Ms. Racey, we'll go to you next and we'll go forward. unless colleagues have burning questions. I don't see it. Oh, Mr. Spang. Everybody except everybody. We'll do one round of questions. If we can do one round of questions, go ahead.

I'll make it quick. And I'm not the engineer, just so everyone knows. Slide, just curious. Slides, I think this is 13 and 14. Understanding there's been some challenges with, you know, perhaps federal government with the build out for four mile run. I guess my question is, As we take these new innovative approaches and putting in pipes and all those great things, and that you just made reference to, there's some pipes that have been here for like 50 some odd years. I need to understand a little bit more about this investment that we're making and some of these rehabilitation efforts. Are we using iron, HPDD, high proficiency? What type of materials are we using and what is the lifespan of some of this new that we're investing? Are we coming back in another, I doubt it, 20 some years? But just so people can understand the lifespan of these new projects.

So the sewer relining that we use is called cured-in-place pipe, and it's a fiberglass and styrene and mesh epoxy enclosure. Those have been used steadily for 30 years now and show very minimal signs of wear. So we expect those, you know, and that's where we're significantly renewing our system. That technology is like 50 years old, and the design life for a lot of these is like 75 years.

Okay. We would think it would last somewhere between that and then at the end of that span, you could reline it again as long as you have the capacity in that pipe.

And historically, we've seen with infrastructure pipe that the stated or estimated lifespan has typically been very conservative. So, you know, cast iron mains are lasting well over 100 years. Right. They can be a little bit more brittle and break a little bit, but they do have very long lives. Likewise, we're using HDPE for slip lining, which is another technology or another material that every indication has been around for likewise 50 or 60 years and shows plenty of remaining life.

Yeah, I do know a little something about that. My dad did some plumbing back in the day. Okay, thank you. That's all I have. Thank you. It's coffee.

Yeah. one thing is more of a suggestion, but on the PFAS issue, I think maybe that's an opportunity for some joint DES public health collaboration around education, just thinking about some of the work we've done on like food waste and other things to get the community up to date on what they need to know individually. I think PFAS is something that is fast moving in the scientific community and there's a lot of mis and dis info out there as well. And so having some form of you know, here are the things that are really contributing. Here's what you as a consumer control about this. And here's what you also don't control about a lot of this. That's just a suggestion. And then... you know, also in current events, the Potomac Interceptor spill really, I think, freaked a lot of people out. Obviously, we were fine. We're all good. We've learned. I've learned a lot since that. But one of the questions that I think has come up is just around do we have any similar risks out there as far as where we do pick up our water from within the Potomac? And do we have any risks of one of our pipes having similar problems or damage that could lead to such an issue?

Yeah. If I could start with PFAS, I'd like to mention one thing about PFAS for some scale. The levels of PFAS that we see in our drinking water is two parts per, well, for many of the chemicals, it's zero. The few PFAS chemicals that we do pick up are in the levels of two parts per trillion. That's equivalent to 10 days in the life of the universe, which is 14 billion years old. So for scale, 10 days in the life of the universe, not even the life of the Earth. And compare that also with food packaging has levels of hundreds to millions of parts per trillion. So we're really talking scales of Compare your drinking water to the food packaging. It's hundreds of thousands of times greater or millions of times greater in the food packaging. So the levels are extraordinarily low. Moving on to your next question about the Potomac Interceptor collapse. That did really clarify and focus the region's attention on various concerns that could happen in the river. That pipeline extends all the way from Dulles Airport, as you all know, and there are many other places where it could have broken which would have caused more significant problems. The location of the break was pretty fortunate for the entire region. And that really just focused the whole region's attention on reinvigorating our interest in source water, source water redundancy. As for its potential to happen here in Arlington County, Yes, we don't have pipes quite that size. We do have, you know, our largest pipe is 60 inches down very close to the plant in four mile run. That would be a significant break. It would significantly negatively impact four mile run. That's why we're investing in our large diameter and wanted to highlight the amount of work that we're doing in large diameter. relining and as we've made such progress with our relining in our small diameter pipes, we've started to transition that funding into those large diameter pipes. Last thing I'd say on that is With all of our utilities, the pipes are underground. We have limited knowledge and awareness of the exact condition. What happened in DC, we are all very sympathetic to that. That could have happened to any of us. They wish they could have done this. But really, we're all very sympathetic to what they went through there and could can picture ourselves being in that role and are all very grateful we were not the one it happened to.

I appreciate it. And I appreciate that no one wants a disaster to happen, but sometimes it prompts us to start thinking ahead for the next one. So I'm sure we'll have more of those conversations to come.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey. Ms. Cunningham.

Yeah, just building on that, great progress on the small diameter pipes and we're moving towards the large diameters, but I think with the Potomac Interceptor, we're all on the edge of our seats about the large diameters. Which other ones are potentially at risk and what would be the price tag to accelerate further or would it be possible?

So a couple of responses there. We have been upgrading our large diameter sewer mains, particularly our own. We have a potomac interceptor, totally unrelated. We might rename it. It runs parallel. And it actually runs through Arlington Cemetery. Fifteen years ago, we replaced it all the way through Arlington Cemetery with another new technology, a pipe, a plastic pipe, which is corrosion resistant. John's done a number of other relining projects all along four-mile run, other portions of four-mile run, and also the spout run project. So we have been investing in them. One other benefit we have is... Our sewer system, our large diameter sewer pipelines, they themselves have a lot of redundancy. So for example, all along Four Mile Run, we have two systems. We have two pipes. So it gives us a lot more flexibility. There are some portions of piping in Long Branch, I want to say. So some areas where we would have a higher risk, a little bit less redundancy in terms of what it would take to accelerate. you know, funding, but also the project management of these is really remarkably more a higher magnitude than its corresponding 8-inch pipe. Primarily, you know, 8-inch pipes are really very easy to do, and that's why we're able to knock out so many of them, primarily because we do not have to reroute the sewer. We can actually just plug it and let it back hold it or do a very simple pump around. With these large diameter projects, the big cost is arranging the pump arounds, which are both large pipes, large pumps, but also large pipes that you have to find places to route. So that's what makes them very complicated, expensive, and takes a lot of time to plan and manage.

So in terms of bandwidth for the team, we couldn't really, without adding people, go any faster? Is that what I'm hearing?

We have limited ability with our current resources. I think we'd all be eager to do more. So we'd be happy to do more with more funding, but we do think what we're proposing here is a responsible level of funding.

I guess just given how top of mind it is, I'd like to ask that we consider an option that would accelerate within the ability to do so. Just because, as you said, you're very sympathetic. It's a matter of chance, and you can't know where a rock is about to break a pipe. So I would just ask for that on the sewer side. And then rounding out sewer, I know the pipelining technology's been around for a long time, but I also know in an urban area, the odors, actually anywhere, but particularly here, we're closer to each other, the odor of that relining can sometimes be problematic. Have you observed that? Have community members brought that to your attention? How do we mitigate that?

Yeah, so we do get very occasional complaints of odor from the relining. Now, in a properly functioning private system, the existing water plumbing traps will block any intrusion of odors. But as we're encountering tens of thousands of houses every year, we find a couple dozen where it's not working quite right and they get those odors. So we do get a couple dozen complaints about it a year. We assist the residents and, you know, give them advice on open up the windows. All indications are that very limited exposure to those odors have no health impact, so it's just, it's a nuisance.

Great, and then one last trivia question for the sewer. As we realign the sewers and have less infiltration of stormwater, does that, it positively impacts the sewage treatment dynamics, but does it negatively impact our stormwater in some way? Like is it, was that actually serving as an informal channel?

The only negative impact I could foresee in it, which would be a very small one, is actually it reduces the amount of flushing volume in our sanitary sewers. So it could, in theory, slightly contribute to the potential for backup. However, that's entirely offset by the fact that you've got a much smoother finished pipe now. I don't know. Is there any other?

It helps you kind of flush some of the grease out, but that's a good thing. But you're wasting energy at the plant treating it and stuff.

Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Mr. Carringtonis, we are... Go to it.

I will try to be succinct, Mr. Chair. I understand. So on the relining, I just see that somewhere there is an age limit after which probably relining is not the best option and replacing is the best option. I see that... I mean, with... I see that you prefer to line the younger pipes first so that they last longer and then the older pipes come after that, right?

No, it actually, relining a pipe has to be pretty badly damaged before relining is not functional. So we actually have been going at a lot of the older pipes first.

So there is no tipping point in age?

No, because one of the characteristics of this relining pipe is it is a fully structurally sound pipe that doesn't need any structural benefit from the outside pipe. So the only time we can't, or pretty much the only restriction is if there is a significant enough collapse of the host pipe prior to us doing it, in which case we wouldn't even be able to pull the liner through. But we rarely encounter that.

Yeah, in those cases we just make a spot repair on that bad section of pipe and then we re-line it right afterwards.

Yeah, I understand. When the pipe is collapsed, what are you going to reline? I mean, you have to replace a pipe. What I've seen, that was slide seven, where you have the miles that you relined and the age. And it was important for me to see that what we relined first is the younger part of the systems.

That is actually, if you could pull up that slide, that is actually, we did not characterize that properly. What's happening is that the green on top, that is all actually pipe that was over to the right, and we've now moved over into the left column. So that's important. We did not describe, yeah.

So because I was trying to read into that some sort of a management practice or management thing.

No, it's essentially that whole mass of green would be farther over. It actually was the outside pipe was in the 50, 60, 70, 80 years.

Awesome. No, no, no. It actually has a line underneath that says once the pipe is lined, the age starts at zero, which I don't know. I mean, I understand because, you know, lining is one thing. It adds a lot of time to the useful, you know, the life expectancy of the pipe. However, the initial materials, I mean, 1940s concrete and this kind, they may have other liabilities down their line, right?

Yeah, and so sure, concrete actually gets stronger in time. Terracotta does the opposite. Yes. So we do feel very comfortable that that is a brand new pipe with an expected life of 70, at least 70 years.

The next, very quick, I'm really impressed and really happy and looking forward to the AMI pilot. I think this is the automatic measurement, so I want to be able to communicate to everybody what the benefits of that are. are and what they could be as a system. So you said that we are going to be deploying this in the commercial customers of like 3,600 or something. But then in just four years from fiscal year 28 onward, we want to cover everybody. There is then short customers. So how many are these? I mean, this is a very... I mean, this must be in the tens of thousands.

That's an ambitious schedule. I will be impressed if we meet exactly that schedule. It's 38,000 meters in total in our fleet. So... If we focus on the commercial, which John explained why we're doing that, that's 3,700. And that includes a number of townhouses, actually, also. Yeah, it leaves us with 35,000 to do. Now, the actual work that needs to be done at each site is quite quick. It's connecting a simple device called Inert. So it's probably 20 minutes at most at each site, 15 minutes perhaps. But yeah, it's a lot of work.

So for me, staying in the realm of this projection is important because I think that the benefits are very, very important. Also, you talked about storage and the availability of water and the general access. We have been now in Virginia through an unusual drought. We haven't felt the impact so much, but we could easily be in the orange or red zone. I begin to be more jittery and apprehensive about the possibility of actually running out of water, which was absolutely not a thinkable scenario just a few years ago, despite up and downs and climate change-induced irregularities. So you said that we are well-served or we have higher storage than we should.

then we're required.

Yeah, but is that still safe, looking at huge oscillations as we go forward?

Yes, I think your characterization of our risk from drought is really entirely right. Historically, we felt very safe, especially we have massive reservoirs over in the Jennings Randolph Reservoir, which provides weeks and weeks of available water. in months of available water. So we have always felt very secure. We are starting to see, you're right, we are in a very significant drought. We're not seeing impacts yet, but it is opening our eyes to the future where we will probably be more, less secure than we have been historically, which is very secure. Now having said that, so you're right, and the whole region is becoming much more aware of that and really focused on that and committed to seeing drought as an emerging risk. Our storage in our system is great. We have 32 million gallons. In actuality, on any given day, we probably have 25 to 28. That is only one and a half days of storage at best. So that's not going to solve our drought issues. That does protect us against a sudden, unexpected, and manageable emergency in our infrastructure, but... It's not on the scale of protecting us from drought, although the regional facilities of Jennings-Randolph does provide us a lot of protection.

Since we're talking a lot about PFAS and about educating the public, etc., I think that... saving water is a more attainable educational achievement here and learning how to do that. By the way, we have seen huge improvements over the last 10 years just because we are installing more water saving. The plumbing is more water saving. We could do far better than that. And the AMI program actually allows us to measure that for starters on the individual level. And I think that this should be a priority as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Karantonis. We will turn to Ms. Racy, I think, for the remainder of the presentations or for the next step, I should say.

Mr. Chair.

I didn't see. Go ahead, Mr. Spain. Go ahead. My apologies.

It's okay. I just want to duck tail off of what Board Member Carantona stated. Being in Penrose, many of us were recipients a few years ago to the automated meter reading. My question to you is with the investments that were put into these programs, What is the fail safe? Meaning, we can go digital, I love technology, but I am curious to know if that little meter inside of that water box that was put in there took 15 minutes, If that fails, what's the second and third order of ensuring that my water, and then we want to stage up the commercial, et cetera, et cetera, what does our fail-safe if all things go wrong?

So our meters, especially for our residential accounts, remain what are called positive displacement meters. So they are actual physical meters. We're not actually changing the meter technology, and that meter technology is... 100 years old and proven to be extremely reliable. So actually our meter technology remains the same. If the ERT technology, which is simply reads an electrical signal off of that, if that started to fail, we can still go to the meter. It still has a digital, it still has a, I believe they still have a physical readout, like an odometer.

Okay.

Yeah, mechanical dial. And so we have that. And then, to be honest, in a worse case, because failures do happen, we have 38,000 devices out there, and sometimes they fail in remarkably peculiar, unexpected ways. That is, you know, the resident doesn't bear any problems there because, you know, it's a zero read. And, of course, we then handle it. We deal with that as our billing process. Gotcha.

Sure. Thank you, Mr. Spain. My apologies for not having you on the list first. Ms. Racy.

The Water Pollution Control Plant's Capital Sustainment Program invests in our wastewater treatment infrastructure. The program ensures that the plant has the funding needed to continue recovering valuable resources from the wastewater while complying with environmental regulations. The first project we wanted to showcase for you today is the planned upgrades to our activated sludge effluent pumping station one. This equipment pumps the partially cleaned wastewater from our biological nutrient removal system onto further treatment and disinfection. This pump station was installed in the early 1970s and is showing signs of wear, including piping leaks and valve issues. We are currently evaluating alternatives for the necessary upgrades with a focus on keeping the system operational throughout construction. The next project replaces the software for our asset management system. This software is used to track maintenance activities, parts inventory, and equipment history. This tool helps us get the most out of the equipment we invest in. We are very much looking forward to deploying this software early next fiscal year. The last project on this slide is related to our solids improvement program, which we'll talk more about in a minute. The plant refers to the organic material that we remove from the water as solids. The solids are nutrient and carbon rich and can be treated and recycled back to the environment. Gravity thickening starts this treatment process and these facilities date back to the 1960s. Since we will continue to use the gravity thickening after our upgrades, we need to bring this aging equipment up to current code requirements to ensure the safety of our staff. One such upgrade is relocating electrical equipment to a climate controlled environment to reduce humidity and corrosion. Next slide. Most of the funding at the plant is dedicated to the Arlington Region Program, the result of our solids master plan. This program replaces the solids treatment equipment that is beyond its useful life and increasingly challenging to maintain. This program was divided into three phases. Phase one focused on our immediate needs and is now complete. Phase two focuses on site preparation, so clearing the area and relocating utilities to make way for the new buildings and processes. Phase two is currently under construction, and once it's finished, will move directly into phase three. Construction will continue at the plant for the next five years. Phase three is the bulk of the program. The backbone of these new processes shown on the right is thermal hydrolysis followed by anaerobic digestion. County staff and a community stakeholder advisory group undertook an extensive selection effort to select this technology and recommended this technology which was adopted by the board in 2018. We are working on the detailed design for these new processes and facilities. The new processes will be safer, more efficient, and generate a higher quality and more marketable end product, as well as recover biogas from the waste and upgrade it to be able to be beneficially reused as a renewable resource. Collaborating with the community from the neighborhoods closest to the plant and commissions such as C2E2 have helped minimize the community impacts as well as identify and get the community's input into design elements like architectural preferences. Stakeholder engagement includes regular meetings, website updates, and even two outreach efforts that have won national awards. But stakeholder engagement is just one of the positive outcomes of this program. Next slide. The thermal hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion process allow us to recover more resources from the wastewater. The processes produce a consistent, higher quality soil amendment product that can be used on farms or throughout our community. In addition to producing a higher quality product, the new processes also eliminate the need for chemical stabilization and reduce the quantity of the final material that needs to be managed by about 50%. This means less chemical usage and less truck traffic in our neighborhoods. The biogas produced by anaerobic digestion will be further cleaned and treated to produce renewable natural gas, or RNG. RNG is a sustainable energy source that moves the county towards the goals of locally generating energy and using renewable sources of energy. The RNG produced by this project will be put into Washington Gas' pipeline and reduce fossil fuel-derived natural gas use within the county. Next slide. As I mentioned earlier, we have been scoping and planning this effort for several years. Since the last CIP update, the design, shown in the images to the right, has progressed from conceptual to detailed and will be completed next year. As we've worked through the design process, we've refined our scope and we've made decisions on things like building layouts, equipment specifications, and our operations and maintenance needs. The region costs have increased since the last CIP. One reason for this is inflation. While inflation pressures are high in all areas, industrial construction inflation has been greater than previously forecast. During design, we have been deliberate in our decisions to ensure the best possible processes for our community, our employees, and the environment. We undertook a process called value engineering to confirm our decisions. Value engineering is a systematic process that ensures a project meets its fundamental requirements and that right-sizes the equipment, tanks, and buildings. This project will be constructed using the design-build delivery method. The collaboration allows all members of the project team, so the owner, the program manager, the engineer, and the builder, to be engaged earlier than traditional delivery methods. This allows better collaboration to address project issues such as process complexity, site constraints, and the continuity of operations during construction. At this time, we are negotiating the guaranteed maximum price, or GMP, for the work with the design builder. We expect to bring the negotiated GMP to the board for approval later this year. Next slide. I wanted to share a few of the renderings of the new facilities with you. We selected finishes that tie into the community and at the board's direction we reached out to surrounding civic associations and our stakeholder advisory group. These renderings are for illustrative purposes and show our design intent and may change as the scope of the project is finalized. The large rendering on the left shows a new building from inside the fence looking north. The images on the right are street views, both from 31st Street and from Southeast looking south towards Glebe Road. We are excited to be finishing the design and starting construction of the new facilities soon. And I personally am looking forward to startup and commissioning where we actually get to see the new processes in action and start reaping their benefits. Next slide. Besides the projects highlighted in the previous slides, we also have several other capital sustainment programs that we invest in. There are no new projects identified during this CIP cycle. One area where funding increased is our maintenance capital program. This program reinvests in our equipment outside of major projects. Example maintenance capital projects include rebuilding a pump replacing flow meters or repairing aging pipes Our rate of execution on these smaller projects has increased in recent years Next slide And here is the 10-year overview for our whole capital sustainment program totaling just under three hundred and eighty million dollars And we can pause or I'll turn it over to Jennifer I

Thank you, Ms. Racy. Back to you, Ms. Schultz.

Thank you. Here's our total CIP by year and by program area. The subtotal is about $972 million before the implementation adjustment. This is about a $91 million or 10% increase from the last CIP. This increase is primarily driven by an increase in the water main replacements, transmission mains resiliency regen, and the water pollution control maintenance capital program. As we started out this presentation, these increases support our main priorities of maintaining and modernizing our system and addressing future risk. Like other areas in the county CIP and like stormwater, we recognize that there are execution delays and unforeseen circumstances which may slow down capital execution, many of which are outside of our control. So we are proposing again a roughly 20% cash flow implementation adjustment. Since we don't know which projects the delays might affect, We take it as a 20% reduction of the program as a whole, excluding region. Given the magnitude of region, we are not applying the implementation adjustment here, because once construction starts, we'll be full steam ahead. With this implementation adjustment, the utility's 10-year CIP is about $830 million. Next slide. And this slide shows our funding sources to support the CIP. Our largest funding source is bonds. We consider the right balance of these sources factoring in the duration of benefits the projects provide. Our annual maintenance capital projects are once again primarily funded by Utilities PAYGO, and bonds are supporting our larger efforts, including REGEN, the Washington Aqueduct, and our finished and source water resiliency projects. Bonds are used for our projects that will have a longer term benefit since generations of rate payers will enjoy the benefits of these improvements. They're also the ones to pay the debt costs back. Other funding here includes contributions from our inter-jurisdictional partners as well as interest income. Next slide. Our current authorized and issued bond authority is intended primarily for regen in the aqueduct. For the next two years, we are seeking 21 million needed for water sewer maintenance capital projects, including our contributions to the Washington Aqueduct, water main replacements, water tank rehab, and trade center improvements. Next slide. And speaking of issuing debt, this chart shows our projected debt service. The blue and red wedges are existing debt that we are actively paying off. The red wedge, although labeled geo debt, is not paid out of the general fund and is paid out of the utility fund. That's true for all of the debt on this chart. The yellow and purple are the new debt to fund the programs in the CIP. And the purple primarily funds REGEN. Debt service makes up approximately 30% of the utilities fund operating budget. Because the old debt is currently rolling off faster than the new debt is coming on, our FY27 utility water sewer rates increase was able to stay low this year. With the old debt significantly decreasing, it allows us to layer in new debt without intensely impacting the rate. Next slide. And as just mentioned, our fiscal 2027 water sewer rates are relatively low increase as the old debt drops off faster than adding the new debt. However, as projects move forward, our current projected rate increase ranges are shown in the slide. Debt and the transfer to capital are only a portion of each year's rate. They're also impacted by personnel, water purchase costs, indirect and overhead costs, and non-personnel, including contractual increases. I want to also emphasize that this rate projection does not include potential significant increases to electricity costs. Electricity rates were not known or not finalized until after the fiscal 27 water sewer rate was advertised, and we anticipate these will have an additive impact for fiscal year 28 and beyond. Next slide. And then once again, it's helpful to see our regional comparison. In this case, our green line, once again, is towards the bottom. Our current projection of about 5% in the next few years is lower than the average increase our neighbors saw in FY27. I'd like to...

We're just about to wrap up. I actually want to pause on this slide for a second. Jennifer talked about some of the factors and rates. And we are extremely low. That's due to some of the things we talked about of our fortuitous system design and investment over the years. Historically, we've been in the bottom half of this slide and we'll remain down there. Conversely, you'll see District DC Water has historically borne the most expensive rate and by a large margin. And again, that's the result of innumerable factors, some of which they control, many of which they don't. But I want to point that out because There are, DC Water has proposed several initiatives which would drastically increase their influence or even give direct control over regional resources. And given this massive discrepancy in cost structure, it's really hard for us to imagine any such actions having anything other than a negative impact upon the rates that our residents would incur. So that's something which we and our regional partners are paying close attention to and I think it's something we need to highlight. With that.

Thank you Mr. Collins. There's one more slide and you've covered it.

I think that has been discussed already.

So still you were foreshadowing or omniscient or whatever. Colleagues, I'll just venture to say that probably all of us, if you ask us to be attuned and ready to help on the issue that you just mentioned with respect to water rates, we will be eager without wanting to be outside of our appropriate and best lane. But others, colleagues, we got questions. We're running a few minutes late, but do wanna surface the questions as there's there. I see this time, I'll go to Mr. Spain and I'll come right back all the way through if we can.

I'll make it quick, Mr. Chair, and thank you. Just real quick. Slide 23, we start talking about region. I'm just curious. Really phenomenal work there. Has there been any thought given to how we can kind of work in a more closed loop way? I think you're going to produce what we got here is some renewable natural gas and I think some of our fleet is using, at least the bus fleet, is using CNG, compressed natural gas. Is it possible, and you may reference, Lisa, to we're going to somehow Washington Gas is involved? I hear that, but is there a way to do a closed loop type project where we won't have to work or go through Washington Gas and let's say even for our fleets of buses, right? With the energy we're producing, we can do that to fuel our actual, our art fleet. I mean, I'm just curious to know a little bit more about that.

We looked. There are a number of different things we can do with that gas.

And you can modify.

Go ahead. Including using on site, shipping directly off to our art fleet, or putting back out in the distribution network. And we did a great deal of analysis on that and found for a number of reasons putting it back into the network is by far the most favorable for us, both from a financial standpoint and particularly from an operational security standpoint, our ability to ensure that we're focused on treating the wastewater, and that's the most effective use of that gas. What would you add to that, Lisa?

I would just add that we are located right next door to both the ART and WMATA bus fleets. So the actual molecules of gas that we put into Washington Gas's pipeline would likely go to them. Some of the things that we looked at during that evaluation were that the digestion process makes gas 24-7, essentially. And so the bus fleet does not necessarily map up with those needs. You would end up needing either more storage on site and given the different implications of that, being able to put it into the Washington gas pipeline offer some storage buffer as well as some financial incentives as well.

So when was this analysis done? Probably before I got here. Good.

Yeah, 2018 to 21 frame.

This one was a little bit later. So this one was in the 2022 to 2023 time.

Can you get that to me? Just point me in the right direction. I'd like to look that over. Thanks. That's all I have, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. And I remember a time when the answer that was just given was not the answer that the experts had. So just, if that gives you any confidence, because I was one of those who said, you know, if we don't have electricity in every bus, the world's gonna end. And there were colleagues and others who felt differently, but I think the answer you gave is particularly persuasive to this non-engineer that If you add storage facilities, that could be an additional cost and I'm not gonna step in the shoes of actual engineers. So, if that gives you a little context from the old dude who's here, Ms. Coffey.

Great. Yeah, first of all, thank you to the team. I think these are the areas in which I feel most lucky to have some of the best experts probably in the country working on this because it gives us a lot of confidence on things that we ourselves are not experts on. And I think continuing on the region, conversation is there positive revenue impact from the region implementation since we are giving plugging into Washington gas and the the soil amendment as well are we compensated

Yeah, we do get revenue both for the gas and also for what are called RINs, but a renewable energy number. So there is positive revenue. Now, in net, it's not significant. But yes, we do. And there are potential revenue sources with the solids product itself. D.C. Water, I think, does that right now, and I don't think they've seen a lot of uptake on that, is my understanding. So we're not expecting meaningful revenue from the solids product and anticipate continuing to do land application.

Got it. And is there a ballpark on the natural gas composition? I know it all washes out because we're users as well as producers now.

In terms of the revenue? Yeah. I think that would be in the report we owe Mr. Spain. So we'll make sure you get a copy of that too.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ms. Coffey, over to Ms. Cunningham.

I'm also keeping with regen because it's the most exciting thing happening. Can you talk a little bit about the PFAS on the overland application? I know the General Assembly had a number of conversations this year about setting limits of zero. Is there a risk that we end up with a lot of material that we have no place to put or kind of how do we think through that risk?

So that's a great question. Our numbers at the plant, and we've just, one of the challenges of PFAS is the testing itself is so complicated and so expensive because literally you cannot have flushed your teeth in the morning and done testing. You cannot use anything that's plastic because that will contaminate the testing. Those are the levels we're testing at. So it's very expensive, but we have started testing and all of our tests have come back well below the levels that the state legislature has introduced. If those levels continue to go down, to a level that we would not meet, we would still, we will still be in a more favorable position because part of the regen project significantly reduces the amount of material that we would have to deal with and dispose of. So it would still be a positive. Now nationally that is something we're watching and it's certainly very appealing and if just offered, would you like to not have PFAS, anybody would say yes but the consequences of not allowing any land application of biosolids regionally or nationally are enormous in terms of chemical costs uh... for replacing you know replacing the natural fertilizer with chemical fertilizer uh... what you do with that material the only viable technology right now is pyro uh... pyrolysis you know pressure and heat destruction extensive energy costs. So it's a complicated, as with all PFAS, it's a complicated issue, but the short answer is the REGEN program will put us in a better position for it, and we currently are well below the levels that are regulated.

Great. Thank you. And then my other question is about point source emissions and odors. So, you know, obviously we have residents right up against all of our uses in this county. How does Regen change that? You know, is there sort of whatever the burn off? And can you say a little bit about what's been studied there? I bet it's in the report, but maybe a summary.

Well, I'll add to your question.

Yes, I'll add you to the report. So in terms of point source emissions, our plan for the digester gas is that the converting it to biogas and then converting it to RNG, that equipment we estimate will have a 95% uptime. So it will not have emissions with that. The biggest, sorry, when you start making biogas, The biggest constituents are methane, which is what you want, that's the natural gas component, and carbon dioxide. The other constituents in there, like the volatile organic compounds or the sulfur-containing compounds, you're able to treat those, remove those, and then you're also able to essentially combust any waste gas from that. That's the 95% uptime. What we're legally required to have when we have that process is also a flare. And that flare is able to fully combust that gas just in case there's a problem with that equipment and convert it into carbon dioxide. Yeah, all of it.

And so how often would that flare happen and what impact would that have on neighbors?

We would, for many, many reasons, try to minimize that. It would happen when there's equipment downtime. Okay. Okay. So we would try to minimize that as much as possible. The emissions evaluations that we've done have assumed that it's a 95% the treatment that we're looking for and a 5% flare.

And that, we would think, is a conservative number. We would be shooting for a much higher uptime than that, right?

Yes, yes.

Got it, thank you.

Both for environmental and financial benefits.

Thank you. Ms. Raci, Mr. Karantonis.

I will pass, Mr., Ms. Cunningham has covered my question.

Thank you. My question to conclude us here is about the people. With due respect, to your engineering expertise, Mr. Collins, really enjoyed it, and it's important, and it showed a range of engineering that I have not seen to date in all of my seven years here, but it's super, and it's super helpful. I don't recall whether you presented before, Ms. Racy, but Mr. Lawler, you have been in my mind in this sense. What if you aren't there? I mean, just, if I think about the humans that we could do without, I put myself Things will work if you don't have a board member. If you're not here, you don't know everything in your brain, and I know you have team members, but I don't know whether this is to you, Mr. Collins, but it's both as principal engineer for the water pollution control plant, but also what you stated earlier about our water and the 38% increase. I remember Richmond. The city of Richmond is a thing that happened in the past year, and so... I guess you're going to have, but can you help me with a little bit of, like, do you have people, given that engineers and lawyers, for that matter, like to work on their own, but do you have people that can help us in this case? And I don't want you to go anywhere for a long, long time, but I'm just curious about that.

Yeah, we do. We've got really amazing staff at all levels, including our staff that are out there in January fixing water mains, right, and just the most... brutal conditions. You mentioned Mr. Lawler. You said you were really impressed with what I was able to cover. If I let John talk, you would be blown away. And John's only been in that role for five years now. He knows so much, and he's also, I think he will, I'll turn it over to him to brag a little bit about the staff that he's built of young engineers that are Great. An amazing next generation. Likewise at the plant, Lisa and her boss, Mary, are extraordinary, have many years to go. They have excellent engineers with them. And our technical expertise at the plant, which Antron Sutton has been building, and our trades leaders and our maintenance side has just been a real blessing and something that's been really inspirational to see that unit grow. Great. Really achieve.

Just to confirm, I want you each to say so that I don't worry about Richmond every evening. Do you have engineers who can do, priest together doing a lot of what you do, even though we want you to stay?

Yeah, I mean, I have multiple teams. Usually they specialize in the drinking water side or the wastewater side, but we do a lot of cross-training, so they pick up both sides and become more versatile. We also have really detailed emergency response plans for a variety of different hypothetical tabletop-type situations with detailed SOPs and things like that. So we're, you know, we're, I think, really well positioned for the future. We have really excellent asset management, so we're

really good records of where everything is and we know where the critical valves are and things like that I believe you I just want to make sure is that true for your team as well your team members as well as that's yes I am privileged to work with an amazing group of people both in the engineering department as well as the rest of the plant staff that we have operators we have mechanics electricians instrumentation it's a very robust team that helps us do the work that we do every day

Fantastic, thank you both, and I think it's apt that you mentioned, as I think our son was four months old, and during Snow Creek, we lost water, and there was an hour there where whoever answered that phone We had a decent number of water and sewer issues, but the people who are working on it, I think all five of us would wanna really thank those people in addition to you as engineers. So I've filibustered as long as I possibly can in this. Thank you so much for the presentation and the time. And we'll go on to the next program. And my apologies for at least asking those couple of questions. I thought they were important for us. So thanks to each of you. And thank you Ms. Schultz as well for hanging out for an additional. So Arlington Neighborhoods program I believe, and we have, for this we have, had a few of our residents. This is the area of the three today where our residents have sent the most CIP messages into us.

Yeah, sort of the question is, like, come on, Mr. Manager, why didn't you put in any money in the bond for the first two years? We're ready to address that.

I'll try to go on record again as wanting more for less all the time. But go ahead.

Yeah, I'm going to turn it over to... Jim Baker, who... This is the... Jim, you've been in this new position for how long?

I think I'm at... Five and a half months.

Yeah, so Jim was at the Department of Human Services, and now he is the chief financial guru over in CPHD. He's going to do the presentation. I think all of you know Laura Simpson from the Neighborhoods Program. She's the manager there. So I'll turn it over to Jim, who I think you're going to start, right? Actually, Laura's going to start. Laura's going to start. Okay, well, that was the first good decision you made.

I'm turning it over to the brains of the entire operation. So, Laura. Thank you. Ms. Simpson.

Good afternoon. I'm Laura Simpson, the supervisor of Arlington Neighborhoods Program. And with me is Jim Baker, who is CPHD's finance manager.

Could we go to the next slide?

The Arlington Neighborhoods Program and ARNAC represent 49 of the county's 61 civic associations, which is the county's largest standing committee comprised of resident appointed volunteer representatives. It is because of that and our collaborative approach that we reach residents broadly and efficiently on a regular basis. Since 1989, this program has constructed 539 community infrastructure projects, totaling 114 million in Arlington County neighborhoods. This demonstrates county government and neighborhood communities can jointly plan, organize, and implement substantial infrastructure projects. Next slide, please. The value of the program to both residents in the county was reaffirmed through the neighborhood conservation program review, which was completed in 2021 with a well-documented and informative report produced at the end of the review process. This has had a great benefit for all of us, re-energizing the advisory committee and the work we do with ARNAC's executive committee to improve their capabilities. It's also raised the priority of neighborhood plans, excuse me, which is the foundation for projects. We're continuing to build the capacity of the program and ARNAC increasing its value for the future with greater ability to execute and scale up our work. Next slide, please. Utilizing recommendations from the program reviews report, staff have identified areas of the program that can be improved, and the primary components of the program, which is comprised of neighborhood plans, the committee itself, ARNAC projects, and our engagement with residents. These are continuing to be addressed over the next several years, and our next equity subcommittee recently completed their pilot for identification and support of projects in equity areas, and this has been formally adopted by the committee in April. Next slide, please. As part of CPHD, this program creates places for people, and we're doing it at the neighborhood level. from neighborhood plans to priority projects to connection and collaboration and neighborhood improvements. There's a cohesiveness brought about by and through this program, bringing neighborhoods together with lasting countywide benefits for everyone. Next slide, please. For a small program in the county, we do a tremendous amount of work in partnership with committed resident volunteers. We collaborate and develop relationships with residents in almost every civic association in the county, regularly communicating directly with them, sometimes for as little as two to three years with many that continue to be actively involved and engaged with the program 10 and 15 years. We're able to get valuable neighborhood projects done through working with project-related staff that fill out our small team in primarily DPR and DES and occasionally other divisions within CPHD or other departments, such as historic preservation and AED. Next slide, please. As you can see in the blue section of the diagram on the left, we deliver many project types that involve all the departments I mentioned on the previous slide. In response to civic association and neighborhood identified needs, we do many types of projects including parks, public art, neighborhood signs, rain gardens, tree planting, and placemaking. In one category, which is the intersection of Vision Zero, Neighborhood Complete Streets, and A&P on the left slide, we have neighborhood street improvement projects. This is where we share a limited area of overlap, which are important improvements, but the way that we each do them is fundamentally different in each of our programs. You can see from both of these diagrams some of the similarities as well as the important differences in what we do and how we work. Vision Zero and Neighbor Complete Streets are designed to solve important transportation problems, reducing traffic fatalities, and enhancing multimodal access, respectively. AMP addresses the problems of community atrophy. by requiring residents to organize, survey their neighborhoods, and reach consensus. On a 10-year vision, AMP builds the social capital necessary for a functioning democracy. For AMP, the process and planning is as valuable as it is integral to the physical product. Next slide, please. Everything we do in this program begins with a neighborhood plan. This is a benefit to the county in how this program was set up and continues to work to this day. Initially, residents come together in their civic association to identify, discuss, and convey neighborhood needs through their plans. Next, civic associations determine their top priority and submit it as a first priority request through our program. Next slide, please. These requests are reviewed for feasibility, ranked, and added to our next first priority proposed project list. with 49 member civic associations that have approved neighborhood plans, all of which are sources for projects based on community identified and vetted needs. Currently, there are 42 civic associations with active representation on ARNAC, each of which is eligible to submit a first-party project request from amongst their identified needs. Next slide. This map shows the broad distribution across the county of currently proposed AMP projects. Currently on the list there are 25. Of those proposed, three have identified, have been identified through the newly adopted equity process. Each of these will be funded from unallocated capital improvement funds. Some examples of current projects on our next first priority project list, Arlington View's first priority project is a street improvement request. And through the new equity process, they have a second project on the list, which is a park request. Three others, Columbia Forest has a first priority proposed project for intersection improvement. Barcroft has stormwater mitigation with invasive species removal. And North Highlands, our newest civic association member, has neighborhood signs. Next slide, please. Part of the uniqueness of how the program works differently than others in the county that deliver capital improvement projects is that the county commits bond funds in advance, which are considered unallocated. The community proposes projects for recommendation by ARNAC to the county board for funding authorization, and that draws down on the bond amounts. And next, those bonds are issued when design and construction funds are needed. And I will turn it over to Jim for the next section.

All right, thank you. So our total program funding, this is a nice summary table here. The proposed funding for the 10-year Arlington Neighborhoods Program, CIP, is $77.1 million, consisting of two funding sources, PAYGO and bonds. Our PAYGO plan is 9.8 million, and the bonds are 67.3 million. I want to note that the 67.3 million includes new bonds for FY 29 through 36 and authorized but unissued bonds as well as unspent bonds. Next slide, please. For the program summary table here, the county manager's proposed CIP contains reduced new bond issuances in FY27 and 28 while existing approved funding is spent down. This strategy supports the broader objective of minimizing additional debt service while prioritizing the use of existing bond funds and savings to the current pipeline of active projects before pursuing new bonds. I want to note that this does not reflect a reduced commitment to any projects in particular, but a more direct spend plan for existing funds. The total funding sources listed are supplemented. I want to also note they're supplemented by prior year savings. So I believe now we're going to turn it back over to Laura to talk about recently completed and active projects.

Over the past two fiscal years, we've completed 10 projects, four street improvement with sidewalk or intersection, three park projects, two streetlight projects, and one missing link project. The first three here you can see, the first one was in Fairlington. And this was a sidewalk project. Tara Leeway Heights, also a sidewalk and street improvement project. And in Alcova Heights, another sidewalk project. These are the two streetlight projects that were completed, one in Rock Spring and one in Claremont. And then in Columbia Heights, we had a school bus stop An intersection improvement project that also had a placemaking component to it. Next slide, please. These are our three park projects. Hillside Park, Woodstock Park, and 11th Street Park. Next slide, please. And we had one completed missing link project in Arlington Heights. Next slide. These are the projects that we're currently working on and will continue over the next couple of years. We have 12 that are in design, four are preparing for construction, and two are in construction. Next slide, please. And one more, please. There are two outliers in the group that I just wanted to note at the end. The first is Callaway United Methodist Church Cemetery, which was originally approved back in 2015. That one had a delay due to needing a permanent easement, which was acquired in the last year. And so that's been reactivated with design work. And then the last one, which is just a little unusual to be brought quite the way it was, this is a neighborhood sign package, which had county-wide improvements to all the civic association signs that were in need of repair or replacement or relocation, as well as two new sign packages. Next slide, please. Turn it back over to Jim.

Okay. Going back to the previous slide about the previously approved bonds or the 22.3 million, I want to point out as Laura was discussing earlier that we have 14.8 of that money goes towards the allocated and active projects that Laura just discussed, which leaves us with 7.5 million in unallocated funds. The unallocated balance, this will be used in projects recommended in subsequent ARNAC funding rounds. Next slide. SO THIS IS A LIST OF THE PROJECT TYPES AND NUMBER OF PROJECTS WITH ESTIMATED COST FOR PROJECT IN TOTAL. AS YOU CAN SEE, AS LAURA NOTED EARLIER, THERE ARE THREE ON HERE THAT RESULTED FROM OUR NEXT NEW EQUITY PROCESS. We're looking forward to carrying these out. There's 25 in total. And now I'll transition it back to Laura to detail the unallocated funding that I just referred to.

So from the past two years, we have $7.5 million in unallocated funds, which we will be utilizing over the next two coming years in up to four funding rounds. And the way that we do that is we just divide the total up into the four, which gives you 1.875 million for each of those funding rounds. Any funds that are not utilized in a funding round get added to the next one. And we wanted to kind of give you a sense of what that could do and what we're able to build with it. Using the estimates from the previous slide, For the different project types, we can typically get one to two street improvement projects, we could get two to four intersection improvements, we could get one to three park improvements, four to 10 street light projects, and four to 20 beautification projects. So to kind of give an example of what may come to us and what we might be doing with each funding round, On the right, underneath the example column, you can see in one funding round, we might be able to do a sidewalk project with two street light projects and beautification and a couple other sort of breakdowns similar to that to just kind of get a feel for what we might be able to do depending on what gets brought to us from the residents working on projects. Next slide, please. So our broader program goals are to make community and county collaboration more effective through the leadership of both the program and ARNAC, and to broaden and enlarge the program to achieve equity goals to reach residents and increase participation in ARNAC by all of Arlington civic associations over the next decade, which starts with neighborhood develop plans. Next slide, please. So in conclusion, the Neighborhood Conservation Program review ending in 2021 reaffirmed the importance of capital improvement investments in Arlington neighborhoods and the program. ARNAC and our program staff are jointly working to reinvigorate oversight and management of capital improvement investments, implementing all of the recommendations that were covered in the program review report. Civic associations and their leadership continue to demonstrate resident and neighborhood commitment to participating in expanding successful investments in our community. And that concludes our presentation.

Thank you Ms. Simpson and Mr. Baker. I will give Mr. Schwartz the glory of starting on the unless you want to pass it to others, there is the question of your recommendation on the amount of funding and the letters that we received. We will have a later, just in case not all of us have read all six similarly themed letters, I just wanted to see if you could provide a little context that might be helpful.

I'll ask to let Jim add here. So the question we posed when we went through the reviews were, for the next two years, do you have enough money, given the pace at which you go and the capacity that you have, to perform all the projects that could go through the process? And the answer was yes. So, I mean, we didn't stop talking then because the question is, what do we have for the rest of the years? I've been here long enough to know that there's a very strong and I think appropriately vigorous advocacy for this program in the community because of it is a neighborhood based community. that people want to see additional bond authority. But I think that if the board were to provide bond authority here, it simply wouldn't be used or spent. So that's my take on it. And Jim, you can add or subtract. and dare to contradict me. I'm just kidding. Go ahead.

Mr. Baker, Jim.

I will not contradict you. No, I completely agree. You know, there's a number of reasons why we have these savings of this result in funding. You know, sometimes there's changes of scope. Sometimes there are just surprise lower costs involved. It doesn't, you know, when we're scoping out the project, it turns out that it's just not going to cost as much as we thought. albeit rare. But yeah, I think in the two subsequent cycles, we can utilize what we have as well as savings. And then, of course, as you saw from the summary there, we will ramp up again with, I believe it's 3.5 million in two years, 3.5 million in those next two years, and then back up to five and seven in future years. So it's not as if we're saying that we can continue at the unfunded you know, level, but we really want to put a focus on utilizing what we have right now.

Thank you. Thank you both. Not unfunded, unissued level. Correct, unissued. Yes. Got it. So I'll open the floor to you, Mr. Karantonis. Why don't we start with you? I'm mindful of Mr. Spain's liaison, but we started... Okay. Then we'll do Mr. Spain and then Mr. Karantonis. Who's gonna do the dishes? I mean, sorry, Mr. Karantonis, you go ahead, please.

I'll just do the dishes. So first of all, I cannot be thankful enough to you, Ms. Simpson, and your entire team, and everybody who has been doing two jobs at the same time here. First, providing the civic maintenance of this program, which is a job by its own right. This is one of the most democratically collaborative efforts in budgeting and actually getting simple small programs done, which by itself is for me an amazing laboratory of neighborhood policies, politics, and everything that has to do with planning, et cetera. I was myself a relative skeptic, despite the fact that my own neighborhood has been a a vigorous participant and beneficiary of this program over the years because I had issues with the equity balance of the program, et cetera. But your team has changed my mind many times on that. So that's number one. Number two is I always have the impression here that the bottleneck is our ability to absorb the projects, not only to fund them, but our ability to absorb them. So the ability to work on them and deliver them, et cetera. that this is a slow process. It is a complex process. These are different projects, so there are no economies of scale here easily to do, and sometimes things are changing. The procurement is changing. the cost structure is changing, et cetera. So where do I find now in the CIP kind of the strategic response to this phenomenon, that with the same money we want to continue doing the same or more? But for that, we need to widen a little the bottleneck so that we can get more projects done. Until recently, the biggest problem was the availability of funding. Now I have the impression that it's more procedural rather than funding itself. We've just heard that we are not going, even if we bonded that, we wouldn't be able to absorb that, to work through that. So what's the response to that?

So thank you for all those comments and the support. In terms of delivery of projects, it goes up and down. This coming spring funding round, we actually have more, but we're going to be able to cover those from savings. So the program's doing fine with all of that. We are working on building up the capacity of both the committee, both how we deliver projects. It is an ongoing process to get to where we ultimately want to be. And in terms of... how quickly the process is. Part of the time that people see when it goes on a first priority project list is actually what occurs in the neighborhoods in terms of their working through getting the support and doing initial designs and plans. And so sometimes there's a little bit of an illusion that the whole process is actually taking much longer than other projects would. But part of it is that what we include in our process has a whole section to it that isn't normally done with other types of programs.

All right, so the background of my question, and we don't need to debate that here. The background of my question is, question number one, are there adjustments in the procedural, including the neighborhoods procedural projects that we can envision to streamline? You know, there was, for example, a vigorous debate about how many signatures do you need on on the survey of the neighbors right uh that's an example the second the second question is are types of projects like a topology of projects that now are mature enough uh to not be part of the neighborhood program and be part of the general delivery like for example street lighting is something that comes to mind like it used to be something that the neighborhoods program has been pioneered and you know uh piloted, but I believe now that this is so mature and dispersed in the county that we could easily, I don't believe that any neighborhood will have the level of debate that there was in priority setting and trading off priorities on street language. So that's the second question that I have, whether there are typologies of projects that the program should rather be focused on and, you know, reduce a little bit the diversity of product and instead increase the intensity of delivery and other things that are maybe more desirable. That just as a thought.

So some of those questions were actually covered in the program review, and they are things that we are starting to work on with the committee. Some of that takes education and education increasing understanding of how to get support for projects in your neighborhood. We are also working on, in terms of typology of projects, we do have projects that we're interested in doing. We have two that we're piloting right now. One is to do more volunteer projects work by residents in some of our parks and another one is looking at doing either street painting or intersection sidewalk painting and those sorts of things. So we are very interested in having smaller projects that take less capital that could engage more civic associations actively at one time rather than just having these very long projects that tend to be a little slower to deliver. Did I answer both?

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Karantonis. We'll go to Mr. Spain and then to you, Ms. Cunningham, and finish with Ms. Coffey. Go ahead.

First, it's been a pleasure to serve as our County Board liaison to ARNAC for two years. And Laura, we just saw each other a few weeks ago when we walked out of project, you and I, along with Board Member Cunningham. I will have a question at the end of this, but I do have some comments for the record, right? One, to what the county manager has stated, I think this process, this one process, where we have 49 civic associations being involved out of 61 just about, is very robust. And a number of projects, 539, $114 million lower to make your quote. I think there's not many opportunities where communities can come together to think about in their particular neighborhoods, what we want to see. But one thing I have watched, right? So think about the 2024 pilot equity process that y'all embarked upon. Right? So you invoke equity lens and you also simultaneously start hearing pushback. You don't have to agree to that. Something I see. What I'm hearing, and both former Takas and I are from the same part, same neck of the woods in Arlington, it's not about lights, sometimes it is, or streets, it's about the process. I think what we need to really think about is for all the money that's going into this, whether it's, you know, people going around and participating on clipboards, they do these surveys and these petitions and there's a lot of folks write up, well, I didn't know about this or who speaks for us, right? There's all this uncertainty and people are a little flustered. So I think we need to get some additional clarity or education there because I'm finding myself have to explain a lot of that process to the community. But what I want to be, the question I have for you is in your summary, and thank you both for all of your great work. You laid out that looking forward in the next three to five years, A&P will produce technical expertise to develop materials and provide training to facilitate participation of underserved residents and communities in this program through development of effective civic association surveying, development of neighborhood plans, and participation in ARNAC. OK, three to five years. Talk me through that. What does that look like? Because it sounds good on paper. Right. But I need to kind of like visually think about intentionality and what that is really going to look like in the next two to three years in this process. If you can talk about a little bit now or we could talk about later. Doesn't matter. I CAN DO BOTH.

I CAN GET MORE INTO THE DETAILS LATER. SO FROM THE PROGRAM REVIEW FOR STAFF, THERE WERE ABOUT 13, I THINK, RECOMMENDATIONS, SO TAKING THOSE PLUS changes that we want to make with equity. So overlaying that equity lens on all of it. We have three primary components to the program. Neighborhood plans, ARNAC, and the projects. Then adding to that, you also have staff, funding, other pieces. So we... Once the review is completed, we took a careful look at what are the things that we could change, what could we affect, what needs improvements. So neighborhood plans is a really important one. One of the first steps in doing neighborhood plans is surveying, which typically 20% of the civic association response rate is considered pretty good. I would really like to see that go much, much, much higher. I would prefer to see something 80%, 90% range. So how do you do that? We would like to get some expertise in how to craft good surveys that have the types of questions that really elicit the type of information you want to get a good understanding of everyone that lives within those boundaries, as well as how to do good outreach and how to get a good response rate. So that's not expertise that we currently have within our staff, but it's something we're very, very interested in doing. And that being... Go ahead.

Sorry.

So that being an important first step in kind of developing the neighborhood plans. The second part to that is how do we structure the plans? They've gotten, I don't know if you've ever read some of the very, very first ones, but it's like maybe 10 pages or something. And they're great documents historically as well as just giving you a feel for the types of people that have lived in an area. Some of them have gotten very, very well. long, some can be 100 pages. So to have expertise, the time, people with the skill sets to create those plans, it's not always even in every civic association. So how do you... enable civic associations to be able to update their plans every 10 years so that they are more relevant and more useful to county staff, to all of you, to the neighborhoods. Some parts of it are pretty easy, like what was the history? But then getting into the current demographics, what are the needs, what are the issues, and then sort of evaluating that together. So we also want to create what I would call like a skeleton structure that can be used to plug into, which is something we don't have right now. We are very, very hands off because it's important that the plans really present a neighborhood's voice and their views. So how do you respect that and support that, but also make it easier and not take so long to do. So those are all areas that we're interested in doing. There are side benefits to doing the surveying and doing that outreach, because typically it's your civic association leadership that's pretty involved in whatever committee it is that decides to undertake doing a new plan. So by them having that better surveying done and having done that outreach, they are actually going to be getting to know more people in their civic association, which hopefully we can help draw more people into feeling that they're a part of that community and giving their voice.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think there's a lot of work for us to do collectively to help, you know, mitigate some of the issues that have come up, you know, i.e. projects come online. A project X is, you know, right outside of a, you know, said person or establishment. And they say or state that, look, no one came to me. Right. I didn't know about a petition. We really have to do a better job because when those individuals raise their concerns, we've got to also make sure that they are addressed appropriately. And I think you've been doing that. But I'm just hearing a lot of that as of late. And that's a bit alarming. I've been watching the meetings. And I'll be at the next one. You had around 27 folks. So your meetings are full. You have a lot of people showing up. People are engaged. And back to what the county manager said, I think this is a a really good space for our community to dive in. You know, Board Member Karantonis, you kind of stated about, you know, topography and things that, you know, we may need to reconsider and kind of look at. I think we also need to be mindful to something you said, Laura, about how these communities in their own character and their values and what they would like to see, that we try to be honest and let them kind of guide us to where they want to go as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Spain. Ms. Cunningham.

I had a question about, I think we have a bunch of projects that are going forward and I wondered how many projects do we spend time on that then don't go forward and has that changed over time?

You mean like how many failed petition versus?

Yeah.

I can get those numbers. Yeah, we can follow it up.

I'm happy to get that. And then I think the second piece is really you described the goal of the program is largely around democracy building and social capital building. What data do we have about the efficacy? Like do we do surveys? Have we tracked any outcomes of who's participating or whether? neighbors are more friendly after or less friendly. It can go both ways. How do we measure that?

We actually don't. I think that's a really interesting idea because I know over the years, everybody is much more data-driven. And it's because of the way we work, we don't have typical metrics that maybe other types of programs would use, especially, for instance, in transportation. And I think actually that would be a really interesting one for us to do and we'll definitely explore it.

Great. And then one last question is I think the costs for each of the projects is shared here. I assume that's the like project costs, like soft and hard for outside vendors. Is there an overhead, you know, internal staff, DES, overall costs of, you know, the time that we're spending?

That certainly is part of that estimate.

It's included?

Yeah. It would be part of that estimate because it would go through the design phase, which, of course, where we work extensively with our DES partners, and then into the construction phase, and then, of course, the finishing. Once we complete a project, of course, sometimes there's follow-up that we do use those outside vendors for, such as watering or the maintenance of the landscaping, things like that. So it would be, those estimates would be all inclusive, but it's an estimate at the time.

Gotcha. So like DPR, DES costs are included. Are CPHD costs included in each?

Can you repeat that?

So it sounds like DES engineering costs or DPR park specialty costs would be included. Are the CPHD staff hours also included in the cost?

You mean like for Laura? Yeah. Yeah, that would just be part of the normal business. I don't think we divide it up necessarily by projects. That's a little bit more in the weeds than we've gotten in the past. It's more or less their overall time and effort for those particular efforts. But certainly when it comes to the DES folks, the DPR, we are giving them the places to charge, the correct project to charge to. They are logging those hours. They are providing that in their timesheets, if you will, and then we're paying for that out of these bonds.

Okay, great. So I can add on to that also. PAYGO, as you know, is tied also with project work and capital improvement. So we have some of our staff are under PAYGO, which allows for that flexibility to be working with residents. It's not like they're actually doing the drawings, but all of that engagement, holding meetings, doing presenting, all of those sorts of things. So PAYGO supports that. And then, I'm trying to think what else. We do have a landscape architect on our team. Currently, she charges under PAYGO. She doesn't charge directly to the projects. But all of that work, I mean, again, our staff is really small. So we're spread across a lot. So I would not call the staff a big part of the costs on it. So most of it is captured in DES doing the work as well as parks.

Got it. So I think it's like you illustrated in the Venn diagrams. It's two different programs versus Vision Zero and slightly different intents. But from a taxpayer perspective, I think making sure that we're understanding the overhead and the value. We've gotten so much better at Vision Zero since 1989 when it didn't exist. Are we getting CRISPR there or on streetlights or on parks or other things? I think that is a question that the community would like to know. So we can follow up a little bit offline, but kind of how those overheads and how the elapsed time look so that we're investing in the right places.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Ms. Coffey.

I'll try and be as efficient as Ms. Cunningham was. I think picking up on a thread from Mr. Spain and a little bit Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Karantonis as well, I think this is one of those projects that in conception and an ideal is like such a great example of what community-driven engagement can produce, but I think there is general kind of concern and uneasiness about how uneven the reality of that can be, especially with different neighborhoods are differently engaged as far as their actual civic associations and different demographics are differently engaged within individual civic associations. And then also, you know, I note that not every civic association has an accepted plan or has an actively participating Representative and so I don't know that we're gonna sort any of that out here but I just I think I just kind of want to pin the conversation more related to broader cape and engagement and civic associations of you know, how do we get closer to the ideal version of everyone knows who their civic association is, for example. And how do we track and update and make sure these plans are actually recent? Because what neighbors 15 years ago might have wanted for their neighborhood may not be what people want today, and especially as some of our neighborhood demographics change over, making sure that the folks who live there today have a voice when we're spending pretty significant capital dollars to update things. That's just, I don't think it's like a burning fire concern, but I think as I contemplate our civic associations in general, it's like I, love the concept and idea of what they can be, and then my experience of being in them and in the Civic Federation may not align with that ideal version. And as we make these decisions about built environment and structural, just making sure that they're there is equity coming into that and that we know who is speaking for whom and that also, again, as we're programming not insignificant dollars, that we're not leaving people out of the ability to participate in that just because their civic association is inactive, or they have a president that is a little tuned out, or they haven't had elections in four or five years. And I think having the money follow the civic associations is really great in concept. But I talked to people. I was visiting a neighborhood. A couple of weeks ago, someone came to Open Door Monday and was like, we don't have a civic association because the person who was doing it got busy and they don't have time for it anymore and I don't know who to go to. And so, you know, is that really a fair, equitable way when that neighborhood now really has no... ability to participate in a program like this. And so those are questions I would just pin. And if you have responses, I'm happy to hear them. But it's kind of a meaty topic. So there are a lot of different things.

So I would say some of what you're talking about is what does the leadership make up? Who has time? Who has capacity to work on things? We do tangentially try to work on that, and that is something... that we want to support more through having representatives that do more caring back and forth between the committee and then in their civic associations. So that's some of that we've started, some of that's in the pipeline to kind of improve that. Some of the things I was talking about in response to JD on The plans will also be addressing some of that. And we hope it will have that broader impact of people really knowing what the issues are and the concerns and who lives in their civic association. Something I didn't talk about really in here very much is the fact that neighborhood college is a part of our program, which is a fantastic program. There are things that we would like to do that would overlay with how we educate and how we activate residents within the program and kind of tying some of that together, like having certain I don't know what you call them, sessions or cohorts that might actually just be whatever that current ARNAC makeup is. So those are some of the things we're interested in doing there. I'm trying to think what I might have missed.

That seems like a pretty solid start. Yeah, OK. And listening to your comments, the report and the equity analysis touched on some of the things you asked. But my recollection of the report, just being totally transparent, is that it touched on renter and ownership, but didn't get deep on that topic. There was a deep, from my perspective at least, there was sort of a nearly existential question about racial equity, which is appropriate in my view. but I don't know that the vibrancy, and there's more to talk about there, and I haven't gotten your specific experience with CIFED, but there's, you know, the history is more ownership than rent, or we can say that safely. So I do wonder if like a short conversation for you guys, and then a a re-scan of the report might be helpful. And then I also, you gave space such that Laura, if you want to follow up with Maureen, given that I have gotten us into the mess of being 30 minutes late, that's what I propose that we try to do if that's okay.

Yeah. And then I just have one last question. I really appreciate the Venn diagrams of all the intersecting efforts and Honestly, I think there could be a number of other bubbles for intersections. And so given the number of relationships of these projects with other programs throughout the county, do we ever go about a process of determining what is the best fit for ARNAC specifically versus other programs throughout the county? So thinking about tree planting, we have other pots of money that do that, or the pedestrian safety issues, or Some of the parks issues or environmental projects, you know, we have buckets of money elsewhere that do these things. And so sometimes it is a great fit for this. But do we evaluate that? And do we ever like refer neighborhoods out to say, we want to help you with this, but actually go over here?

So we do some referral to other areas because people that become a representative and become part of our NEC have relationships with everybody that is within our staff. We do often field a lot of questions for how to address things and we do sometimes redirect. I don't know if you saw, we had done a whole effort to find out what people's interests were in what we were calling expanded project types, which is something we are hoping to do more of. That does do some of the what are other funding sources and smaller projects. It is part of what we're hoping to accomplish. This is a little further out. But in terms of funding sources and making those connections to other groups, like tree planting is a great example. We haven't actively started doing any of that the program has in the last At least since I've been working here for the nine years Has been pretty focused on CIP for a long time But as we all know that doesn't Those are big slower projects and so to have that real engagement and and to keep people doing more actively and and really feeling like We're doing more throughout a civic association. Having those other things is really important.

Yeah.

Great. Thank you very much.

Mr. Spain to conclude. This will be quick. And I just want to lift up what Vice Chair Coffey stated about, in so many words, equity equity in this case spans more than just black white, right? When we're thinking about these programs to a point I think you kind of alluded to, we really have to be intentional in understanding which civic associations are not being heard from, right? And which, whether it's demographics and also to the renters. So I will be also very open and want to know more about how we're going to take on that approach to ensuring that it's not just a racial lens, right? It's also the socioeconomic lens and it's also, right, all of those things in consideration as these projects come to fruition at the end of the day to ensure we leave no one behind as these projects gets elevated. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Spain and colleagues. And thank you, Ms. Simpson and Mr. Baker, Laura and Jim, it seems more appropriate. But thank you, since you've been referring to, everyone's referring to, thank you very much for the work. And that concludes this afternoon's CIP work session. I hope everyone has a good afternoon. We are adjourned for today.