Water Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay. I think, out of courtesy for everyone that is in attendance at this point in time, we're gonna go ahead and call the meeting to order at 03:32, and we'll get started. First thing we would like to do is take a roll call. Before we begin, I'd like to say that Harold Smithles and James Eklund and Mickey Conway will all be online joining us today. So if you don't see him, that's why, but they will be here. And Sean Tanner is excused. He happens to be in New York, on business. So, anyway, good luck for him and safe travels. So at this point in time, let's start the roll call and we'll start with Jim.

Jim Morris here.

Don Langley here.

Jack Hilbert here.

Roger Hudson, Castleman, from Castle Points. And you're here. I'm here.

Clark Hamilton here. Tricia Bernhardt present.

Evan Ella, present.

Evan Ella just walked in and said present. So that was good. So, we are definitely ready to get going here. Appreciate everybody being here. Just remember one thing, when we do speak or ask a question, if you could give your name or some sense of identification so that for the purposes of the record, people know who's talking. And at this point in time, what I would like to do is, have approval of the minutes for the, January 28 meeting. And one moment please. Excuse me. This is for the I'm sitting there looking at the wrong agenda. I said, I'm looking at that one.

So this would be for the August 25 meeting. Any changes, edits? Seeing none, I look for a motion to approve.

So moved. Jim Morris.

Can I second?

I'll second, Clark Hamilton.

Clark Hamilton seconded. All those in favor please say aye.

Aye. Opposed

nay. Abstentions, none. Okay, it passes. We're now moving on to the first item on the agenda. And I will tell you this, there are no referral items this month. So that made it easy from that standpoint. Let me rephrase that. Let me ask, that's correct. Okay. And now, we're moving on to our agenda items. We do have three items today. Parker water sanitation presentation, we do have the Douglas County water plan update. And we do have an upcoming meeting scheduled discussion because we're now entering our holiday season. So their staff has put together some suggestions for that. So we'll be talking about that also.

So at this point in time, I'd like to introduce Ron Redd, who is the Director of the Parker Water Sanitation District. And he's going to give us a presentation on what the Parker PWSD is doing regarding water. Ron?

All right. Thank you. I'm really glad we reserved the overflow parking for today. So I have I have a presentation today that covers a lot of area, and I talked with, chairman Albert about, I think we think it'd be great if questions come up. Let's just let's hit them as we go through there. So today, what I wanna do is just get everyone up to speed. It's who who we are, who we serve. I wanted to touch base on master plan since you guys are doing one. I thought I'd talk a little bit about ours. Talk about water resources, conservation programs, long term water solutions.

I wanna dive a little bit into our groundwater characteristics. I think that might be of interest. I was also asked to talk a little bit about, Ritterask Recreation. And I thought I would pull that together with Parker Waters partnerships. And I have a surprise. There's a partnership that we've had going for a couple years. I don't think anyone in this room knows except for, one of my board members. But I think it'll be fun to to let you the reason I wanna bring it up is it encompasses, how I think partnerships should work. So let me first start off.

Later about holding out. So okay. No. No. I just said, we'll talk to him later about holding out on us here. Yeah. Thank you, Ron.

You bet. So we we have a strategic plan, and we do quarterly updates with our board, and that really sets the tone for the overall district. But my main point is I want to let this board know, this, last year, we completed our water and wastewater master plan. I tested out this q QR code. It will take you to that plan. If anyone in this room wants a copy, be sure to ask. We think it's a great plan. We are updating our water resource plan right now, and it should be done in 2026. But the key point that I want to bring up on this is we have this really cool tool. We call it our water supply tool.

And if you ever been around master plans a lot, they tend to be static. They're a picture in time. Here's the growth rate you're assuming and here's what it is. So this water supply tool does a couple of things for us. It makes these plans more interactive.

We can assume different growth rates, faster, slower. We can model different types of flows and we can just get a better sense of what's going on. But what I really love about this tool is we know ways to inject a water supply, when we need to, whether it's wells or alluvial wells or some type of project that develops a water supply like another pipeline to bring things in. And we can use this to see what's the best value. And I'll talk about a little bit.

You know, it's easy to put wells in the ground, but we have, you know, a lot of reuse in alluvial water, and we're currently building a pipeline to be able to capture all that. So that's a water source coming in, and this tool helped us look at that and say, this is a really good value. So that's something we have. So who who we who do we serve? Everything in this red line is within Parker Waters District.

So you can see we serve most of Parker. Lone Tree, and Castle Pines mainly East Of I 25, but we do serve a portion above Cabela's. You see on the West Side Of I 25. And then we serve county enclaves as well. So three cities and county enclaves, and those enclaves are in the southern part of our district.

We have a little over 76,000 residents over 44 square miles. And I thought it'd be of value to see our average day demand is almost 10,000,000,000 gallons a day. But the big one, the hard one to meet is our peak day, is 25,000,000 gallons a day. And I'll refer to this as we go forward. This is the area we put a lot of effort in to try to shave that peak because you only have a few months out the year you need to supply it, but it requires so much infrastructure.

So if we can lower this, we can save our customers quite a bit of money. So our build out, we we anticipate 2050, based on growth. It feels like it'll be next week, but you never know. There's just a lot of stuff going on in Douglas County. We anticipate a 138,000 residents when we're done. The average day goes to 21 MGD, and our peak day is over 55,000,000 gallons a day. And this is assuming we do know nothing different than we're doing today, and we're doing a lot of things to try to pull that peak down. So any questions on that? Yes, sir.

Jim Morris. So have you or do you plan on serving any residents outside of your red line?

Well, it's an inclusion process. We do get a we we haven't got that many in the last couple of years, but we do know of a few of them. They're smaller, but that is what we do is we bring that to the board for discussion. We do have one. It's a more of an internal inclusion. It's a few 100 homes coming forward. It's an interesting one. It's easier for the Pinery to serve them wastewater, but it's we can serve them water. So we have those type of partnerships. So that's probably the next one.

But, you know, our boundaries were pretty were somewhat landlocked, but there is probably opportunities out there, but they all go through a public process. All right, water resources. So I thought I'd go over this. It might surprise some people, the water rights that we do have. So we, in our Denver Basin groundwater portfolio, we have almost 39,000 acre feet of water dedicated to us.

And I always want to caution when I talk about this, this is paper water. This isn't actually wet water. This is what's been dedicated to the town of mainly through growth. When developers come, when our builders come in, they have to dedicate water to us. So it's around 39,000 acre feet. We're trying to figure out what does that really relate to. We know it probably won't be 39,000 acre feet a year forever. We're we're working on some modeling of that. But it's interesting. We had we it's there's a professor from CSU, doctor Sale, and he's helped Castle Rock when I was there, and he continues to help help Castle Rock now.

You'd ask him, and I always loved his response. He goes, I don't know. It's dark down there. So it's it's got a lot we got a lot of work to do, but we do have quite a we have quite a bit of dedicated groundwater out there. We have Cherry Creek native flows, about 4,500 acre feet a year. That is playing out. Typically, we pull that off and put it into Ruderhest outer diversion structure near Stroll Ranch. And so and we're seeing that we have some years where there's nothing, and we've had years where it's 10,000, 12,000 acre feet a year. So on average, it's about 4,500 acre feet. We have Cherry Creek alluvial water.

This is somewhat senior eighteen sixty nine and eighteen eighty three. It's about 1,000 acre feet a year. And this water is just shallow alluvial water, but it is great wells. The our wells will produce 3,000 gallons a minute in the alluvial and Cherry Creek, where if you go to Plum Creek, you'd be lucky to get 30 gallons a minute. It's just a different geology.

These are these are great wells that have especially with the capacity. And, but we have those. We have our LRRS, our lawn irrigation return flows, not a lot of water, but it's all about getting every drop we can. And so anytime you have runoff in neighborhoods, we can count that as our water right and collect Our reuse component, we are set up a well to capture all legally available reuse water from our wastewater plants, and I'll talk a little bit more about it. We treat it to really high quality.

We put it back into Cherry Creek to get it really poor quality, and then we move it up to up up to, Ritterhaus Reservoir. Currently, the permitting requires that we go back into Cherry Creek. So 4,800 acre feet currently, and a build out and we're about half built out is a little over 10,000 acre feet a year. So that's a great water source. If we had to go buy that 10,000 acre feet a year on the market today, that would be a lot of money.

So reuse is a big part of our component. We have 1,600 acre feet of Wise water, as part of the Wise program. Right now, it's a great, high quality water delivered to to our borders. This is from the Denver and Aurora partnership that we have. This next part, I think people are surprised to learn about.

So currently, cat or Parker owns 9,400 acre feet per year of a junior '20 2003 water right. And this is located on the Isle Of area East of Sterling. And this is a you know, 2,003 is a junior right, but out there, it's it's a good water right. And this has already been adjudicated for municipal use. So what that means is we if we had a pipeline, that water could be pulled back today to be used for our uses.

So that's a a great water source and it's a significant amount. And this is why I sleep good at night knowing that that is sitting out there. So we have that. Along with those water rights, we have some senior water rights back into the eighteen eighties, nineties. And it's funny. You think that's really senior, but, you know, it's it's the eighteen sixties would be ideal, but the eighteen eighties are good. We have about 5,000 acre feet per year water. This has not been through water court. We currently use this to irrigate our farms out there. We're trying to prove up the water supply.

But ultimately, and you'll as we move forward with our Platte Valley project, this will be our no action alternative that you have to provide, and that's developing our our current water rights out there. We prefer to go with the junior water right as in the Platte Valley partnership, but this is something that we can rely on if we need to. So that's a great water supply we have out there. And I always have to thank Frank Jaeger for the foresight in buying that. Ron, quick question.

The Lurfs, I'd just like to ask one question about that because last month, we had a conversation about rainwater. What is Parker Water's viewpoint on people collecting rainwater?

It it's, it's allowed by the state. I mean, there there's the pierce in me that says it's not your water right to collect, but it's a small amount of water. And I think I think it's not a bad practice. We we certainly don't see any impact to the stream, but there is there is a little bit of a problem. People are capturing that water, and it's not their water right. But, we don't see a real huge impact. Actually, the biggest, complaint I hear about it is they're mosquito breeding grounds, and people have a problem with that. But we don't see a lot of those.

Great. Thank you.

And then then I'll talk more about our Platte Valley partnership. The goal on that is, a junior water right, a 2019 right. We are partnering with the Lower South Platte Conservancy District and we're we're estimating each of us get 17,000 acre feet a year on average. Some years nothing, other years more, to bring back and use. Hence, we're currently in water court.

And I don't you may or may not have heard, our court case was August, but our lead attorney had a heart attack a week before the court, and so he's doing fine. He's doing great. He's tough. And and so we are delayed in the water court. We're working with Castle Rock. Castle Rock is October 2026. We've all agreed to see if we can consolidate our projects. It's the same project, two different water rights. We've talked to the 20 plus objectors, and so far, most of them are in agreement. So hopefully, we'll go together to Watercourt in October.

I truly think we'll settle before then. The the issues are a few as we're getting close to Watercourt. We're getting close to settling. So hopefully, we can settle, but we are still on Watercourt. Any questions on that?

Ron, Evan, Hila, can you explain more about the 5,000 acre feet of senior rights? I mean, are those farms that you own and are leasing back, or how's that operating?

That's a great question. So we bought the Ditch Rights. It's an interesting story back in the early two thousands. So back then, we didn't have the, South Platte SPRAP, the ability to provide money to an organization to take care of environmental concerns. And so what Parker Water did was buy water rights to mitigate for Rudra S Reservoir wetlands.

But then SB wrap came around, and we were able to buy into that. And that's how we mitigate for Rudra Hess. But Frank Yeager at the time was like, wow. This water is a lot cheaper than it is up in Greeley. And so he started buying farms for future water supply, and that's where this has come from.

And are those in they're in the Sterling vicinity or further?

They're just downstream in the Idolith area. So I'd say it's probably 20 miles downstream, fifteen, twenty miles.

So presumably, you can bring that water back if you get a pipeline.

We we we have to go through Watercourt. But, yes, once we had a pipeline there. The the 2,003, like I mentioned, has already been through, so we can bring that back already. It's the 5,000 that has to go through Watercourt.

Okay.

All right. Conservation. You've heard this from the other speakers. It's It's very important. And so I just wanted to kinda give you a high level where we're at and and, some metrics, and then I'll jump into our programs.

Currently, our indoor use, the winter use is 4,600 gallons a month in the wintertime, and our outdoor use fluctuates. The weather has a lot to say with this, but it's around it's a little less than 17,000 gallons in the summertime. The the the graph that I'm showing on the left is, the two bars. The the gray bar represents the, total water use, over the last ten years. And you can see it fluctuates.

If you blur your eyes, there is a trend down for most of it. But it just shows you, like in 2003 when we had our wet year, there was a great reduction in use. We like to say our conservation program is very effective that year. But then a couple years before that, we had some dry years. I always like to point out 2020, that's the COVID year.

It wasn't a particularly dry year, but everyone is home. And while we speculate, they're looking at the dry spots in their grass during the summer. And so we had a lot more use than we were anticipating. The blue bars shows the indoor use over the last ten years. And I'm and I have to admit, I'm surprised if you would have told me ten years ago that the indoor use could get less.

I would have been skeptical because there already were in place if infra or fixtures that use a lot of less water. But I tell you, technology is awesome, and you're seeing, those numbers ratchet down. So the graph on the right is is the same, total use over the last fourteen years. Our average, over that period of time is a 123 gallons per capita per day, which is great. It wasn't when I came to Parker in 2013, we were sitting at a 138 gallons per capita per day.

And somewhere in Castle Rock in the early two thousands, we were happy if it was a 165 gallons per capita per day. So you're just seeing that come down. But you can see our goal is to get down to one twelve or lower. But, really happy with the one twenty three and but to get to the one twelve really, really helps, with our future infrastructure costs. Any questions?

Alright. So I I wanna talk about some of the programs, and let's go into a little more detail. So we have a lot of the same ones you've already heard about. We love slow the flow. I think it's it's a great program. If you haven't heard of it, Resource Central, I believe, is a state group. They'll come into your house, and they'll evaluate your system, your sprinklers, your clock, everything. And they'll produce basically a to do list on how to become more water efficient, and they'll prioritize it for the biggest bang first. It's a great program. And people people that go through it love it.

What we're seeing, however, is there's no back inside of that. Sometimes to do lists get put off. And, so we have some ideas how to do that. But for for providing what you need done, this is a great program. Garden in a box is one of our most popular.

We sell out this every single year. We have a spring and a fall version, and this is where you can we'll help subsidize it, but you can get the plants needed to to take an area of your yard and turn it into since I'm in Castle Rock, I'll call it, Colorado scape, landscaping. And so you can take that dry area on the side of your house or that area that won't do anything, and you can plant this Colorado scape that's professionally designed, and you get the actual plants with a plan on where to plant them. And and it's very, very popular. I tell you, I love handing these out, especially in the spring.

There's not there's no one more optimistic than a gardener in the spring, and it's just fun to be around these folks. So it's a great program. Turf removal, we participate in this through South Metro. And, we've had, I believe, 15 over the last couple of years customers take advantage of this. And it's a great program.

Removing turf is very difficult. And again, I think there are some things we can do on the back end to make it more efficient, but we'll continue to work with South Metro on this. We have rebates mainly for equipment controllers, water sensors. We have those. We have an inclining residential rate structure that mimics a water budget.

And so what we do instead of individual water budgets like we did in Castle Rock, we take the average and create the tiers to mimic, an incline or a water budget, And it seems to be working pretty good, out there. The, outreach programs, we do a lot of the same that you see out there. We actually, a few years ago, hired a public relations team to help get our story out. Last year, we hired a conservation tech, and she does some amazing presentations. And I'm thinking as I'm speaking here, I need to let the county know, so you guys can let you guys know.

But we've had some really, really good presentations on, things from, birds to bugs to what what works best plants wise. So it's, she's doing a great job. And finally, a current program we have, and I think it's the most powerful tool that we have in our in our toolbox is AMI. And that's basically smart meters. And we were very, very fortunate.

Our board approved replacing all meters to all customers. I think it was 2015 and 2016 with smart meters. And so, our entire system is now smart meters. And a lot of people are trying to get there, but we caught it before the prices, shot up. And we are fortunate that all the meters in Parker were outside.

So it made a lot easier to switch them out. So what a smart meter does is it allows the individual water user to set guidelines or goals where you wanna use. If you wanna be, notified of using too much water or if you have, you know, a leak happening throughout the middle of the night when no one should be using any water, it will alert you. We have the ability to put some parameters so we know when there's a larger leaks out there. This is a very popular, program.

I checked right before I came. Half of our 24,000 accounts are signed up, and a large majority of them have set guardrails on what they're willing to what they wanna be notified if there's certain water. So I have a couple examples. Again, you know, a lot of times people's toilets will leak. They'll pop on every twenty minutes all night long.

This thing will tell you, hey. Something's going on, and they can get someone there to fix it. But my favorite one is the town of Parker. A few years ago, they built that ice park over by the library, and they had some large irrigation, siphon valves. One of them broke, dumping 400 gallons an hour right into a storm drain, and no one knew it because it wasn't flooding anything.

It was going straight into a storm drain. We knew within fifteen minutes, and it was fixed within four hours. And in the old days, we would have known once we read the meter, and they would have known once we mailed it to them. And it could have been two, three, or four weeks before. So this is a wonderful, wonderful tool. And I know a lot of our neighbors in Douglas County are trying to get there. It's it is a difficult process, especially when you have to go in customers' homes. So we ask yes, sir.

Evan, Hila again. Can you explain again a little more detail the inclined residential rates? So is that that's based on your overall system average?

No. It's it's based on our residential use pattern. So we know because we measure you know, we have good records on what people are using. We know the winter consumption's 4,600 gallons a month. And so that's our indoor use. So that's tier one. I think we actually bump it up to 6,000. So people get a little bit more for indoor use. And then we know the average is 17,000 gallons a month. So we then have tier two that takes it to 18,000.

So tier one is zero to 6,000, then we go 6,000 to 18,000. That's your irrigation tier. So in a water budget, it tries to break it down, like Castle Rocks individually, what they use in the winter and what they based on their irrigated area. And then we have a third tier, which is a conservation tier. So it goes from, I think, the second tier is in the $6 range, and then the conservation tier is over $10. So it gets your attention.

But but it is based on your system wide average, or at your system wide residential average.

Residential adds, the key. Okay. Yeah. We take an average customer and apply it.

Each customer.

So we have a we have an interesting demographic. We have some really small users and then we have very, very large users. Usually, play football or basketball for one of the pro teams around here. And, so, you know, it's interesting. I I would like to get to the point where someone else pays my bills for me. That would be nice, but but there's some pretty high bills. So we we have some customization customization that we're working on. Again, I I I alluded to it. Slow the flow is a great program. I just feel there needs to be a back end to it.

And so ideas that we're looking at is slow the full flow type of program where you identify and give a to do list on what you you can do on your, system to make it efficient. But can we somehow do that with local landscapers to not only come up with the list, but provide a discounted rate to fix it? What I found on Parker is people would happily pay to to make improvements. But if we can lower that cost, I think we get more participation. Same with turf removal.

It's gotten better. The turf with the state yet to come in and remove the turf, you have to, plant, Colorado state back in its place. And it's getting better. What I had seen in the past is no one likes to mess with plumbing. And I hear you on that. That's no fun. But what happens is you remove all the turf, you plant bushes, barks, and rocks, and then you use the same sprinklers to water. And so can we get some more support on the back end of that with with it? And then we could start measuring it and see if there's a real a impact. AMI, we have a lot of people on there.

We want more, because this is such an important program. We will be starting classes in 2026. We're doing a software change, and that's postponed it for a little while. We'll bring people in, that don't like technology, and we'll help them. We'll walk them through so they can utilize this powerful tool.

We are two years into a three year project on water budgets for large irrigators. This is your HOAs, your streetscapes, could be your schools, parks type of thing. And what that does is it looks at what's needed, and it provides a water budget. So right now, we do not have a tiered system for large, irrigators. This would create a tiered.

If you stayed within your water budget, you'd have a lower rate rather than if you go over that. We see a tremendous amount of waste in, like, especially HOAs. A lot of runoff and it impacts our customers. We get a lot of calls from our customers asking us to do something. I think this will help rein it in.

Almost every HOA has professional, landscape folks. And if we can work with them, I think this would be a great thing. If you've never seen it, drive a motorcycle in on a weekday morning, and you'll be soaking wet before you get to work. There's so much overflow, into the streets. And then one of our more aggressive programs we're working on, again, these are in development.

This one's more complicated, but the goal is to significantly reduce landscape area for the next half of our population. We are where we are today based on the past programs, but we're only half built out. We want to when I say significantly reduce landscape area and use, it's it's similar to what Castle Rock has done with no turf. Something along those lines similar to Aurora where they significantly reduce that. And so we're trying to find a way to do that that's that works well with our developers and our builders.

And, the goal is literally to cut the irrigated area in half. This alone, just if we capture the next half of our customers, that reduces that peak demand by 5,000,000 gallons a day. And in a water treatment plant world, that's about $70,000,000 right now. And so you can see where there's significant savings.

Ron, Clark Hammelman. On reducing that, landscape for the next half of the population, who has to approve that since you are not a municipal provider? Know in Castle Rock, it's town council gets to approve those kinds of changes. I assume it's more difficult for Parker.

It is. So and I should have mentioned that as a special district in charge of water and wastewater, we do not control land use or what the cities want to look like. But we have developed pretty good relationships with them. We're already seeing a lot of this happen in some of the newer developments, especially in the Shea properties, down there off at Richgate. You're seeing a lot less irrigated area.

So it is more difficult. But what I think will help is one of the things we're putting together, and our conservation tech used to do this for a living, is let's cut, you know, typical, again, averages about 12,000 gallons of water a month in the summertime is used for irrigation. If we took that down 50%, that's 6,000. So we're developing landscape plans that show what that looks like. Let's say you have total Colorado scape.

We wanna show what that looks like. It's surprisingly a lot of your ground is irrigated. But if but if it's irrigated for more of the Colorado scape, you get more to a little patch of bluegrass or even just bluegrass. There's different sizes. We wanna show that to them. I think that helps convince them. Yes. Your neighborhoods will still look good. And it and, again, it's just trying to find out because we don't have total control, it's trying to find that compromise and show people this is gonna look good. And then you got the problem of, well, who puts them in? Who pays for it? So it's not an easy process, but that's the goal. Let's try to get rid of 50% of the irrigated turf for the next half.

Ron, Jack Hill. Just a couple quick questions.

Sure. AMI, Aquahawk AMI, totally different? Aquahawk. No. Same thing. I I can't remember what AMI stands for, but you know it as Alcoholic. That's the, specific program. Right. Okay. Okay. Great. The the smart meters are AMI, the program you use. So Alcoholic is changing. And so we're gonna let them overlap. We have a better solution. It's AQUAHAK on steroids coming soon. Yep. We use it

a lot. So, now reducing the irrigate, I just wanna do a shout out for Castle Rock here on this because I will tell you, Macanter, the canyons, what they did with those home, they're all xeriscaped in the front. But I'll tell you what their developer implemented. You can tell. It looks really, really good. I I was impressed, actually. In fact, I didn't even notice it when I first came in the community. Usually, it stands out like a sore thumb, but these don't. Looks really nice. So just an FYI. Derek Clark, here's one for you. Thank you.

It's it's amazing to see the community embracing it. You know, in the early two thousands, it was like, don't tell me what to do type of thing. And even ten years ago, there there were elected officials that wanted all this green everywhere. And but the the consumer is they want the lower water use, and they're they're beautiful. Problem with them is they tend to be a little harder to maintain.

And so we're trying to trying to trying to find a way to help that. Alright. Long term solutions. I just, want again, maximizing local water sources. This is the, the the the alluvial wells, the, reuse. We want to put this into Rooter Hess. We're plumb to put this in Rooter Hess. The only thing preventing us, especially with our reuse, is permitting. We've talked to the state, and they will or if you haven't heard, they're behind, and they think they can get to us in about three years. But this is important to us.

So we are building infrastructure to capture capture every drop. Right now, the pipelines are are built for a earlier phase. So we're paralleling that. And we want to once we treat the phosphorus out of the water, we go the natural phosphorus level in Cherry Creek is point two milligrams per liter, and, we have to treat it to point zero five milligrams per liter. And that's a huge that doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a huge difference.

And it costs a lot of money. In fact, Parker Water has your typical wastewater plant followed by a water treatment plant to polish that water to that level. And to have to put it back into Cherry Creek. You lose some to stream losses, and you you immediately get a point two back. And then we pump it up and put in rooter hess, and then it helps all the algae grow.

So we're working to make this more efficient. But our major long term project we're working on is a Platte Valley partnership. You guys have seen this a million times, know, but it's it's still moving forward. But just for the audience watching it and those who haven't seen it, I'll just quickly, touch on it. It's a simple idea. It's working with our egg partners out there. It's a fifty fifty project on water rights. And and it helps. It benefits the egg. It benefits Parker Water.

But it's it's simple. I remember presenting this to senator Bennett. And when we're all done, he looked at us. You know, he said, guys, I it was myself and, the egg partners. He says, guys, I know you're all geniuses, and I I remember that part really well. I keep that one. But how can no one else thought of this? And it's true, but it took us forever to get there. So what this project does is pull water off of the Lower South Platte with a junior water rate. It's a twenty nineteen rate.

We don't get in the way of anyone else on the river. We're last in line. We pull it off somewhere. We have four locations in our water court application. Somewhere in the Pruitt area, that water gets pulled off. We can stuff it in that big blue dot you see in the middle. That's Fremont Butte. That's a future reservoir about the size of Ruta S, a little smaller. It's 70,000 acre feet. Or you can stuff it in the pipeline and move it back upstream.

The the our agricultural folks would put it in basins to let it flow in, or they could use it for picking up in other ditches, or we would pump it all the way back to Reuterres Reservoir and store it. And so it's it's really a simple concept, but it's it's it's what I love about it is it benefits a community, and a lot of our projects don't. And so we we love that. If you look at the top right, you see a smaller blue dot. One of our options puts a small reservoir on our property out in the Isle Of Forest area.

I think this is in the 6,500 acre foot reservoir. This is where our senior water rights that I talked about earlier can go in. And it only really works in one alternative. And the water rights in Pruitt owned by farmers that are by our farm, we could switch those papers, which trade them. And so our water rights could show up in Pruitt, and theirs can show up in our reservoir.

This is really simplified, but what it does is they save 50 to 70% of losses to get it to them because it's about 25, 30 miles down there. And they get their water right there, 100 you know, almost a 100% of the water. And we save infrastructure costs if we ever want to move that water. We think it's a great option, and that's definitely part of the water court case that we're discussing right now. So that's I don't know if you have any questions on that.

I love the the two pictures on the right. You know, people ask, is there really excess water? This was these two pictures were taken a year apart at the at the state line into Nebraska. And it's just amazing the difference a year can make. I was asked by our board presidents a couple years ago, just look back the last three years, how much water would it went went to or how much water would this system have collected?

And so we did. And the and the the the the, throttle on this was our infrastructure. This project has 225 c f c f s pumps, cubic feet per second pumps, so 250 total. And so we we looked at it. And so we looked at three years. The wet year, life was great. We had to pull 35,000 acre feet off. I believe it was in a twelve week period. Free River, we could have pulled off with our 2019 ride in Free River. The other two years were interesting.

They weren't particularly they weren't wet years, but they had averaged to a little bit lower snowfall in the mountains. But one had more of a quicker melt. We have flooding, and the other one had a slow amount, and our water rights never came into place. So one of those, we would have got zero water that year. And the other one, is a short, I think it was six to eight weeks free river. We would have pulled around 20,000 acre feet off. So that's 55,000 acre feet this project could have collected if it was in place. And just to put that in perspective, we would we have 26,000 in Reuter Hess right now. Oh, that would have spilled over Reuter Hess.

Ron, Evan, Ella again. Have you factored in the Perkins Canal in your modeling?

So Perkins Canal and I know you're probably more familiar than most. So, we are outside of the district that's in the, compact. So our diversion structure is not impacted by the Perkins Canal directly. I think it's it's at District 64, and we're in District 1. But it does impact our egg partners downstream, and we think this helps them.

Being able to collect water helps them to use in the future. And so we think that's a benefit to them. That's how we read the compact. We did look at how it impacted us you know, in the wintertime, and it's it's pretty minimal. Out of the 20,000 acre feet that we applied for, we think 34,000 is average.

This was in the hundreds of acre foot impact. So not a big deal. Now the state has a different view on their reading. I don't think that goes forward, but they're like looking at any water right even outside of District 64. But we don't we don't see a huge impact, but it definitely impacts our farming community.

Tricia Bernhardt. Hey, Ron. What is the length and the width of that pipeline that would be coming back to Ruderhest?

So the pipeline you see, the solid line, I believe it's, 120 miles. And I think we're looking at a thirty thirty inch to thirty thirty six inch. I have a little I have support.

You, or have you seen where, you know, during some of the summer thunderstorm period, is there free river time during the summer as well? Or are you discounting the snow melt period?

Yeah. No, unfortunately not. Where where we do see so a lot of times that we're we're looking at March, April, May, June, early June. But and and we might see it this year, if if the, if the reservoirs downstream fill up. And, you know, we're gonna get, you know, three quarters of an inch of rain here, and they're supposed to be more in the Northeast part.

If those fill up in the fall and then you get some major storms, then then there's significant water that we can collect. And and I can point to, I believe it was 2014 when we had that major storm roll through. We didn't get we got a lot, but we didn't get what, like, Loveland got. We're wiped out a lot of, of the area up there. That what that did is filled up all the ag reservoirs, and we had free river for almost eighteen months. We went and we put away in that eighteen months, probably 18,000 acre feet. I mean, it was wonderful. Of course, outside, right when I got the Parker water, I thought, this is easy. You know? And then and then it wasn't.

So but, yeah, the end the quick storms, they don't we have to fill up the senior folks downstream. Alright. Groundwater. So so so what we tend to look at groundwater as a bridge to a long term water supply. We've been blessed to be where we are with the Denver Basin Aquifers.

And then we we look at this as what a awesome resiliency for droughts in the future. And I often say this because I've I've I've only I've grown up in the West, so I can't say much about these. But my first job is LA, and, so I I know the West pretty well. Once we achieve our goal of long term water, we still have groundwater that's pretty robust. And that is a great place to be as a community, and I don't know any others that have that type of a of a supply and resiliency.

So it's a great thing. The key is getting that long term renewable water supply in place so we can get there. So right now, we have 39 active Denver Basin wells. You see I call out three are an emergency. They they work fine. Everything's good. They just have high iron, and they're too far away from our filtration to be economically feasible to treat them. But in summer high use, we can turn them on. The iron gets blended, they're they're in emergency use. But of the 39 active, that's 16,300,000 gallons a day.

Two are being, built currently. And by the 2026, there'll be over 18 MGD, in Parker's, toolbox for Denver Basin wells. And as many of you know, it's excellent water quality, meets all drinking water, primary drinking water standards. Without treatment, we do filter for the aesthetic side, the iron and manganese. A few years ago, we tried to do that at the Wells.

We were just not successful. We couldn't get the iron out. The board approved about a $45,000,000 capital project to put treatment facilities to consolidate and treat, and our calls for red water have really gone down. And we have high production rates. It would never surprise me if we get an Arapahoe well over a million gallons of water a day. So we are sitting in a really good spot in the aquifer. We do monitor these wells. I think it's four times a day. And, so we collect that data, and I'll show you some graphs. And there's an interesting idea we're kicking around.

Laramie Fox Hills, our wells over there actually have pretty high production rate, two fifty to 300 gallons per minute. Problem is it's not the best water quality. It has that sulfur smell. It's high TDS and high TDS sulfur. Seems like there's one more. But not the best water. It it for whatever reason, our customers aren't particularly excited about this water. And so we don't use it a lot. But we're looking at drilling a well or two and dumping it into Rooter Hess twenty four seven, three sixty five. We believe it could blend.

The oh, it's warm. We think the fish will love the warm water, but we don't wanna compromise rooter hess quality, but that's an idea. I always look at this in ten year terms, 300 gallons a minute, 500 acre feet a year. If we had started this when I first came to Parker, we'd have 6,000 more acre feet of water in Rooter has. So it's definitely worth looking at. So that's what we're thinking. So here's a couple of well logs. Again, we measure this. The x axis is time as eighteen months. Where where the blue lines are higher is winter.

Where they go down is summer. So you see, two winters and one summer and a part of another summer. The, white graph is water levels over our not transducers. I I wanna say piezometers. Transducers. So that measures how much water is over our our pump, essentially. We we have transducers transducers on all our wells. And so when the blue lines are high, that means, the the well's off, and then you can see when it gets pumped down over time. And so these things are so variable. These two wells are about two three miles apart.

And so we I just pulled these two. You can see they recover pretty well after a summer's use. The first one that has the difference between the two winter recovery periods, it's about 12 feet. So we dropped 12 feet in, one year. The Newland one is five feet. And so they're they're different. But I I just caution, those who look at these. These are not good indicators of the aquifer levels. They're active wells. Depends on how hard you pump them, how long you rest them.

But one thing we do use out of this is we look at the reduction in well productivity. We know it's 2% or less. So to put a put a number on that, if we have an Arapahoe doing a thousand gallons a minute, a 2% reduction means next year, we'll do 980. That's a real number that we count on and look at. But, I just wanted to show you how they rebound.

Ron, Evan, Ella again. Are these two wells under piezometric heads still, or are they water table conditioned? They're under pressure still.

Still under pressure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We have a few that have gone unconfined, but most of them are still confined. So recognizing what groundwater isn't our long term future, but we need to take care of it and use it as that bridge, we have changed our credit policy for developers and builders. And this is gonna look very, very familiar if you know the Castle Rock, version. But we don't give full credit for all water that that comes to us for for builders.

And so I put this chart up there. So Dawson Water, we don't have a lot of Dawson wells. We rarely use them. They can impact our, county neighbors. And so but if we did get Dawson Water, we give half credit.

So if a if a builder brings 500 or a 100 acre feet of water, we give them 50 fee 50 acre feet credit. Of course, we take all 100, but we only keep we only credit 50 acre feet. And then because it's such a small amount of water, the cost per acre foot's high, we'd surcharge that $12,500 per acre foot. Denver, we take half, but there's no surcharge. Arapahoe, we only take three quarters of what's brought to us.

No surcharge. And Laramie Fox Hills, we'll take half, but because of the poor water quality, we'll surcharge that as well. And so it's very similar to what you'll see at Castle Rock. It doesn't the way to look at it is I told you earlier, we have 38,000, acre feet dedicated paper water. This helps us realize that we're not gonna get all that water out per year.

So so my partnership slide. This started out as Rooter Hess Recreation update. But I wanted to put it because that that is partnership we have with Douglas County. But I wanted to bring one up that, it just flew under the radar, and I think it's a, again, a great approach to partnership. So so several years ago, Denver Water was doing a study to build storage capacity on this side, the East side of the divide.

And and so I was over in the corner going, hey. We have excess capacity in Ruta S. 15,000, maybe 20,000 acre feet. Maybe maybe you should consider us. A lot cheaper to buy our space or lease our space than to build new. And so we had that conversation. And and what we wanted to do, the partnership started off very simple. It was a pilot program with Denver. And and I always call it dating. We just wanna see how this would work, how we'd work together, what mechanisms need to be in place to make this happen.

And so it started off pretty simple. Denver Water would provide us water through the Wise Line that goes directly to our customers. And it's not a lot. It's capped at, I think, 300 acre feet a year. But, again, it's just testing how we work together. So when this pilot's up and running, our customers are drinking Denver water water high quality Denver water. It's great. And then we would book over in Ruder Hess that same amount of storage. And so what ended up happening is we got water to use. Denver got water in Ruder Hess.

They couldn't get out. And, you know, there were people whispering in my ears because Denver's like, it's fine. It's not that much water. Again, we're just trying to figure out how to make this work. But to me, that's not partnerships. That's taking advantage of a short term solution. And I think being fair has longer term benefits. So I went to Denver, and I said, well, I appreciate that. And there's a lot of people telling me, take the deal. You get a few 100 acre feet of Denver water, call that a win, and move on. So so it didn't feel right. So I called Mark Marlow up. I said, Mark, don't you have water stranded in Chatfield that you can't move back yet? It's like, well, yeah. So I have a deal for you.

Denver has water in Castle Rock. You have water in Chatfield. Figure out a way to make those that water exchange. Denver gets her water. You get yours, and there's no infrastructure required to get it here. And so it took us three years. That's not an easy process. And we had to bring East Cherry Creek in because we had to utilize their pump station to make this work. But long story short, we have now a partnership between Castle Rock, East Cherry Creek, and Denver working on how we move water into Ruder Hess. They've gotten very busy with their their, dam over there in Boulder.

They're they have a they're having a lot of environmental things going on. Once that settles down, my hope is we start this conversation on leasing space. As you can imagine, 20,000 acre feet of storage, we could absolutely leverage that to help pay for a lot of our long term water programs. So I'm very hopeful. The thing that made me very satisfied, I guess, that we did the right thing, the Denver board of directors had been presented where there's a stranded asset in Rooter S.

But when the final deal came through, they found out that we figured out a way that they could utilize that. And they had a board member comment on, that is how we do it. That is a great deal. So I think that builds great partnerships for the future. It might be decades before we see anything come out of it, but it it's, I think, the way to go. And I think it encompasses what I love to see.

Ron, real quick question. Sure. So you said that so are they sending, treated water?

Yes.

Okay. So and you're putting that in the reservoir?

No. No. So the treated water comes to us through the WISE pipeline, which is also treated water.

Right. Right.

Okay. And so so but then we book over. We already have water there, so we just assign their name to the same amount.

Okay. So they're using the same pipe. Okay. I understand now what's happening with the pipeline. I get it. Alright. Thank you.

So this brings

Why does EZGB have to be involved to get to get water out of the rest for Castle Rock's use?

No. It is used to get Denver's water into the Wise Line. They're they have a pump station where the two pipelines come very close.

There's Castle Rock at the pump station

Castle Rock can move water from Ruta Es to Castle Rock and actually to Dominion. There's quite a connection there. So my favorite partnership is the Ruta S. Recreation Authority. And and I have some numbers to show you on this, and it's absolutely amazing.

Long story short, we we, Parker Water, promised our customers all this recreation, but we had no way to pay for it. No one wants to raise water and wastewater rates to pay for recreation. And in 2013, we started discussions with the county, Castle Rock Parker, Lone Tree, Castle Pines. And this group came together and funded the improvements and created the the Rutgers Recreation Authority. And we had South Suburban help us out to manage that for a few years.

I appreciate Rob Ann and his team. We weren't sure how we're gonna manage it. They stepped in. It was a temporary thing. They came in and helped us. Ultimately, the county took over the the, management of all recreation. And I can tell you it is. They are a professional group. They do an outstanding job. And, the county should be very proud of them. The improvements that have been made are outstanding. When you go over there now, you're gonna see more paved road. You're gonna see amenities that keep you out of the mud. We have floating docks, all kinds of stuff. They're doing great.

But the numbers, I'll let them speak for them themselves. This this recreation did not exist seven years ago. So right now, this year, from January through August, on the reservoir side, we've had almost 7,000 visits there. This is canoes and kayaks over there, trail hiking. We've had 2,000 little over 2,000 fishermen.

In July, we allowed people to catch and keep, certain species, mainly walleye, I think bass, and yellow perch. And then we've had 3,500 plus special events. This is the five k dam run they had recently. This is your girl scouts, your a lot of summer camps use it out there. A lot of the communities have their community day out there, and this has blows me away.

We have our own incline. If you ever been to it, you can go up an incline. You can choose to come back or walk, go under Hess, thanks to the county giving us an easement under their bridge, and do a four mile loop around by the water. And we've had 60,000 visits in just eight months. It's just incredible. And and, again, the county staff has done a wonderful job. That's a lot of people, showing out there. So between the reservoir side and total visitors, 72,800 plus people have visited that area. So very, very happy with that. If you like walleye, I'm a trout fisherman.

When you're from Montana, you're not allowed to like warm water fish. It's just the rules. So I don't know much about it. But the walleye are three to four pounds, and the biggest complaint that I keep hearing is they exceed the size to keep. They're in the 20 plus inches range. So it's it's an awesome amenity right in our back backyard. So, again, partnerships are important, and, this is one of our best ones. So I wanna thank the county. With that, I'll open it to questions.

Do you board have any questions? Commission?

So much for my half hour presentation.

No, it's been great. Thank you. Ron, thank you very, very much. That has absolutely been excellent and very informative. I really appreciate that, a lot. It sounds like you got a lot of water going, but it's gonna be interesting when we get it all back. But what I really liked about the presentation the most is the partnerships and the trading, being innovative on how we handle it with this water. I totally like that aspect.

And it's great to have Mark Marlowe as as a partner because he thinks strategically all the time. So So it's wonderful there.

So Like, even should he let you in the door? Is that one of his notes? Yeah. Don, anything? Jim? Trish? Evan?

Nothing else.

Clark? Roger? Online. Harold, any questions? James? Mickey? I think we're covered.

Right. Thank you.

Ron, thank you so very much. Okay. With that, we're going to move on to the, this week's update. We have a quick update coming, regarding the plan that they're working on. So,

Good afternoon. I'm Will Koger with Forsman Associates. And I think that's on. Can you hear me okay? Okay. Good. I'm a Parker customer, and I've taken advantage of the Solo Fold program, the garden in a box, and turf removal. So all good programs for sure. I wanna give you a quick update on the water master plan. We have now compiled all of the information from water providers, the survey information.

We've got a little more information trickling in over the next week and a half, 've put all that together. And if you remember, we did have a discrepancy between the state demographer's office projections and the Douglas County comprehensive plan. Projections are very different. And so what we're doing now is is looking at how we can integrate the, projections from the water providers with those two different, projection analyses. And so we can come up with something that that, that's that's the bill and and is defensible.

So we'll be we're working on that, and we'll be discussing that with staff in a meeting next week. Okay. And for the, groundwater analysis, these are this is under phase one, water demand and supply analysis. And for the groundwater, we are, we finished computing the volumes of Denver Basin groundwater in Douglas County using the Senate Bill five criteria. That's the the state, the state way to estimate how much groundwater is there.

So we've got that quantified now. We also have the number of wells categorized by aquifer and usage type, be it commercial, residential, municipal. And there are a total of over 9,450 wells, Denver Basin wells in Douglas County. So those are now categorized in those different groups. Okay.

And then for phase two, the land use policy analysis, we've examined several case studies, many in Colorado, having to do with how counties and cities are enacting regulations and policies for water conservation. And then we are now considering how those relate to Douglas County, given that the, the policies that Douglas County already has in place and is there room for improvement, there we'll have some draft recommendations also to discuss with the staff at our meeting with them next week. Okay. And that's my update for you. Any questions or comments?

Tricia?

Tricia Bernhardt. So when you say that you're gonna be talking with the county about conservation, what about conversations about growth? Land use policies on growth. Development, not just conservation. How many houses are being built constantly? Is that a conversation you're going to be having?

We are having a conversation about the different policies that can save water. But as for the growth policies, that's not really on the table for our discussion on water issues.

I'm gonna have to disagree. We need to have some conversation about that. Conservation is a tiny bit of how we can save water. Land use policies in terms of growth are huge and how much development is happening in this county right now. So somehow we need to discuss it.

Okay.

Mister Clark?

Clark Hamilton. Two questions. Are we

still on track to have a first draft of the plan by the end of the year?

Yes, sir.

And secondly, I've been asked by a couple different organizations to you know, once we have the plan out to, you know, do a presentation about, you know, an overview of what's in the plan. And I guess that would be a way to get some feedback as well. Will you provide us with some kind of a a package that we can use to do presentations, you know, short to small groups and stuff?

We are as we complete the the draft of the plan, our our our plan moving forward would be to meet with the focus groups and and present the information to them and get their feedback before we have a, a version through public release. And so that would there'd be a vetting process that we would go through with the the, focus groups first. But then that could be a possibility we could prepare something for talking points that you could use with Yes.

So what point in the process would we be able to be in a position to, you know, do a presentation our ourselves?

I would think it'd be in spring springtime

Okay.

Once we go through the focus groups and

Okay.

Do another revision of the draft.

Roger, did you have a question?

No.

Good. Good. Don? Okay. Anybody online have any questions regarding the water update?

Harold? Mickey? James? Nope. Okay.

Okay.

Thank you very much. So at this point, we'll move on to the next item on the agenda, and that is talking about the schedule going forward. As I told you, we are entering the holiday season, so you know what that means. We're gonna have a little bit of a conflict. So the staff has, worked up with a recommendation they would just like to talk to the commissioner about.

This is Katie for staff. And when we did the schedule for the entire year, we did identify November and December as holiday months, obviously. So those meetings have been moved to the third week of the month rather than the fourth. So it'll just be a Monday earlier. So do plan for that with your schedules.

Okay. Anybody have any questions or concerns about moving those up? So that would be December and November. And, they left Halloween where it's at appropriately. So anyhow, no other questions? Okay. That point, let's move on to member discussion. Any items anyone would like to bring up for the purpose of discussion? Don?

Okay. This is maybe kind of a late question, but, that says our December meeting would be December 15, I think, is the right date. So does that mean that that's when we'll have the draft of the water plan to review on December 15?

That's probably we were working on through the end of the year, January.

So are you thinking more like January?

Yeah. So it'd be more like January, February time. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. With that, we will close our meeting at 05:45. Thank you very much for your time.