City Council - Regular Meeting

We'll get started in tonight's City of Grants Pass Council meeting for September 2nd. We'll start the proceedings with an invocation and Kathleen.

Yes, I'd like to invite Angela Mayer to the podium to pray us into the meeting tonight. Thank you.

This wet and rainy night. Thank you, Lord. God of wisdom and peace, we ask you to be present with us tonight. Give us the humility to listen before we speak, the wisdom to seek understanding before victory and the courage to serve rather than be served. Help each person in this room to remember that we share one community. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. May our words tonight be marked with grace and our leadership by a spirit of service. Amen.

Thank you. All right. Please rise for the flag salute. Remove your covers if you have them.

I pledge allegiance.

Okay, we'll go through a quick roll call. We got Victoria, Kathleen, Indra, Rick, Eric, and Rob. We are missing Joel and Seth, but we do have a quorum, so we will proceed. Do I have to read this now? Is this our new protocol? Okay, very good. This city council public meeting is expected to proceed in an efficient and courteous manner and all participants and attendees are encouraged to act accordingly. Threatening conduct, violations of law, signs or placards, outbursts of applause, campaigning for public office or other disruptive behavior will not be tolerated. Individuals who engage in disruptive conduct will be warned before they are asked to leave the council chambers or be removed. All right. First on the agenda is a public hearing for the Urban Area Planning Commission decision to deny application for Eden Glen PUD subdivision. Street variances at 1907 Fruitdale Drive. We are not proceeding forward with the hearing because it has been requested to continue this hearing on a later date, which would be September 16th. So the hearing will not proceed this evening. It will proceed on September 16th. Next on the agenda is council action item resolution Authorizing the city manager to enter into an agreement with control systems Northwest for water systems remote SCA da upgrades and I will give it to Jason Came up faster than I was expecting Thank You mayor So it is SCADA

SCADA, which is Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. This is a project that's been in the planning stages for quite some time, and it's finally ready to be completed. So a little summary on goals, and we're just going to provide a brief summary of what the work is, which is extensive. And it is at the water treatment plant, the new water treatment plant, and all of the remote water sites, of which there are 23 of them. and it is to ensure continuity of operations with the SCADA system prior to the replacement water treatment plant coming on board. So what is SCADA? SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It is a complete system of sensors, machines, logic, basically software controllers, and a human machine interface, basically a computer screen. It is all of those components together, and it is crucial to the operations of modern facilities like water and wastewater plants. Sensors are essentially everything in the field that read something, do something, touch the water in any way. They can be everything from a valve actuator to a complex instrument like a turbidimeter that is reading data and bringing data back to the control room. PLCs, we use that term a lot in the water and wastewater industry, is a programmable logic controller. Think of this like your cell phone. It is an industrial computer, and it is the device that connects all of the field sensors to the HMI, which is the human machine interface, or basically that computer interface, which allows us to see that data, make decisions on that data, and then take action. HMI, I kind of just covered that. But it is basically the interface for our operators. It's how we interact with the data, store the data, and provides that graphical interface between the computers and humans. Because most humans don't do computers very well. The computer wants to give you a series of numbers. I can't look at a series of numbers and make a good decision. But I can look at a line that goes up and down and make a much better decision. And that's what the HMI does for us. So going back a little bit, in 1999 and 2000, our original SCADA system was replaced with the system that's currently in place. Our original system was a proprietary system built by a local resident and was a pretty amazing system for what it was. The new system greatly improved the communication rates. the data collection capabilities of our pump stations and reservoirs and that really allowed our operators to make much better informed decisions about the water system as a whole, improving water quality and water usage rates. Just as a little bit of an anecdote, when I started here we were on our old SCADA system And we would turn a pump on in the control room at the water filtration plant. And then we would drive up to Madrone Pump Station, which was at the corner of Beacon and Madrone. There's a little concrete building. It's a pump station. And then we could watch the pump turn on. It took it that long to get the signal from the water plant to the pump station. We could then drive back to the water filtration plant in time to see it enunciate on the screen that it had actually taken that action. The system that replaced it, which is the system that is currently in place, is actually providing near real-time data and we talk to all 23 sites collecting multiple words worth of data and we do that all in less than 30 seconds. So we can turn a pump on, the very next scan we see that that pump turned on and reported back. It's really improved how we operate. However, This equipment is now 26 years old. And I don't know about you, but my home computer didn't last 26 years. Most of this equipment is very much at the end of its service life. In 2015, staff worked with Corolla engineers to develop a water and wastewater SCADA system master plan. So both facilities have extensive SCADA equipment. We need to have a plan for moving forward. The plan did recommend a number of projects to bring both water and wastewater SCADA systems up to date with current technologies. The wastewater plant SCADA upgrades happened mostly under the last update, which happened just a few years ago. Water is lagging a little bit behind. We had far more remote sites to deal with and the SCADA at the wastewater plant was mostly in the plant, so it was easier to take care of. So the programmable logic controllers, PLCs, are really the heart of the system. The PLC, again, is a compact industrial computer which takes all of the inputs from the field, connects to some sort of communication interface, and then receives that signal back and then takes action in the field. They are designed to operate in very harsh environments that are found in industrial facilities and remote locations, including water and wastewater stations. As you can imagine, and I'm gonna use, let me get my laser pointer real quick. This facility right here is actually on top of Reservoir 5, and it is out there in the rain, the sleet, the shine, the snow. It is in a box and it's enclosed, but as you can imagine, it takes a beating from the elements. And so these computers have to be able to withstand that. So life cycle definition, a PLC, like any piece of hardware, has a life cycle. For the purposes of PLCs, they have what's called active. So that means that that is the manufacturer's go-to flagship. This is what we're producing for the next foreseeable future. And when it moves into active mature, that's when the next, the manufacturer knows that there's something coming down, but we still are making these. We're still supporting them with parts. You'll still be able to buy them off of the shelf and we'll support them. When we get towards end of life, the manufacturer is still supporting them, but you're no longer to necessarily buy them off the shelf. They may have some remaining and they'll deplete their inventory. And then when you get into discontinued, that's when you can no longer get factory support, nor can you get parts. And in fact, all of our equipment PLCs are now in discontinued and have been for four years. They are well past the prime the last failure we had our repair parts came from believe it or not eBay Which they're still a pretty thriving market, but there's some used parts out there that can be gotten and So moving to communications, all of those PLCs have to go through a radio. Our current radio communications don't meet current remote site needs. And by that, what I mean is that the data speeds are just a little bit too slow. We're transmitting far more data. Even though that 30 seconds is very fast, we need to get a little bit quicker. And then also, we're unable to transmit video data, which is becoming more and more needed as we do intrusion detection and try to ensure that our water sites are protected. They also lack specific protocols. And what I mean by that is if there were a detection were to or if an intrusion were to occur, we're unable to detect that. It just does not have the tools to diagnostically tell that somebody entered that radio. I don't want anybody to worry. Our radios are very secure. I trust them implicitly. We use what's called a spread spectrum technology. And what that means is that every couple of milliseconds, it's broadcasting on a different frequency over a pretty broad range of frequencies. That means for somebody to be able to intercept and detect that, they actually have to know which frequency to be on at any given second, and it's random. But all of the radios know what that random is. So it is very secure. But again, a little slow, and if it were to get through, somebody was to get through, we would not be able to detect that. So project 6415 was created in 2021. As I said, we've been working on this for quite a while with the goal to complete the remote site upgrades prior to the replacement water treatment plant coming online. The goal of this is we don't want to move all of our old equipment and our old radios over and have to build a radio tower at the new facility. We want to set it up for the new equipment with the new antennas and everything complete before that comes online. In May of 2022, Council did approve Task Order 3 with Control Systems Northwest, which did a detailed inventory of all 23 remote sites and laid out our path forward to today. So Task Order 17, which this is, will upgrade all of the remote sites over the next, I wanna say about six to eight months, perhaps a little bit longer, in preparation for the replacement water treatment plant coming online. We are gonna have to work very, very closely with Control Systems Northwest and staff. Some of the sites we cannot take down for very long. And when we talk about how these work, these are the hardware that makes the pump stations actually function. So we have to plan each one of those upgrades very very very carefully Understand what our process is going to be to take that offline Put in all the new equipment get it back online and tested and hopefully work without a disruption to people's water supplies The task order does include the purchase and installation of all hardware included with 23 remote sites and that includes their PLCs, their cellular radios, power controls and conditioning and enclosures. It also installs and programs all of the hardware and provides plant staff with updated electrical and control drawings for future troubleshooting and maintenance. Total cost for task order 17 is $1.646 million. Funds are budgeted and available within project WA6415 and authorization today would allow control systems Northwest make the improvements over the next 12 months. And with that, I have some alternatives and I'm glad to answer any questions for you.

Thank you, Jason. Any questions from council? Eric.

Thank you, Jason, for the very detailed presentation. I appreciate it. I had a question in terms of the, you know, obviously this is a great cost to the city. And I know this is, this looks like, or it is very specialized equipment. So I guess the obvious question is, is there, are there other competitors, are there, other ways of possibly doing it to where we might be able to save a little money? I know the answer is probably no, but I wanted to make sure the public understands.

Yeah, I mean, we evaluate continuously, you know, newer technologies. One of the things that we have tried to do is standardize all of the skate equipment so where it's the same. individual pieces of equipment being different amongst them. We believe that what we have presented you with is the lowest cost option. Is there probably another lower cost option out there? Yes, you're always gonna get somebody to come in and tell you that yes, they can install something. Is it better? I can't speak to that. What we have tried to do is ensure that what we have installed, Allen Bradley is our service provider, or the manufacturer. To get a piece of hardware to last 26 years in an environment like that is incredible. What I can tell you is that the wastewater plant that they had originally installed other types of equipment, those equipments have had a much higher failure rate than the Allen Bradley equipment, which leads to us replacing them far more frequently. So I mean that's the other thing that we try to weigh Could we redesign to a much cheaper standard? I think the short answer to that is probably so but I don't think in the long run it benefits the water system because the reliability would decrease significantly Thank you, yeah further questions Rick Thank You Jason so

I guess all systems require connection to the internet, but is this one also standalone if the internet goes down?

So I knew this question was going to come up. All systems do not require connections to the internet. That's for starters. We do connect systems to the internet for convenience sake. I will say our SCADA systems do connect to the internet, but you or I cannot actually access them. because they're behind multiple firewalls. These radios are actually Ethernet radios, so they're like a Wi-Fi router, so technically they're on the Ethernet, but it's called a private network and you can't get access to them.

But if the internet or Wi-Fi or anything goes down, can we still operate? Are we standalone?

Yeah. So that's the other thing. When you send all of those parameters to that PLC, that PLC sits there and run until you give it new parameters to change. long as everything's we can be down for quite some time our current radio network goes down periodically and everything stays running really good until we have like a more than a day's outage we don't really have an issue there's a couple of up sites that have problems but they're self-contained so as long as it can read the sensor that it's connected to and take an action and turn a pump on then it's it's all good thank you any further questions injure

So is there a reason this wasn't included when we budgeted for the water plant? Like, it seems like this goes together.

They do somewhat go together. This has always been on a separate track because the 23 really remote sites, they're not really related to the treatment plant, but they are, right? It's all part of the overall water system. And because it was on a separate track and it's very specialized work, we just did not include that with the current contract. it's a fair question it could have been lumped in there it just didn't make sense because they're all working there these are scattered throughout the city um so okay and and you said it started you started working on it in 2021 putting money into this fund where exactly does that money come from from the water revenues so we've just been putting a little bit aside each year

So when we did the water rate increases, we took this into account?

Yeah, it's been part of the overall capital project. It is already included in our water rates. Absolutely.

Thank you.

Yep.

Excuse me. Any further questions?

Kathleen? Just to follow up on Rick's, what he brought up there for a minute, this sounds very highly secure. Yeah. Is that correct?

Yes. I mean, that is definitely something that we watch. I will say our IT folks and our SCADA integrators are really keyed into CISA, and I'm going to get the name wrong, but basically it's who watches hacking on the internet for industrial computing. It is a very serious issue. We know that Iran is currently threatening water and wastewater facilities. um so we have currently disconnected all of our systems essentially from the internet and only plug that back in when our integrators need to access the systems and then the future systems as we go into the new water filtration plant have further barriers not only do we just physically disconnect them but when they need to be connected there's multiple points of authentication that you would have to get through to be even able to access it's inconvenient as heck for us but it needs to be 100%.

Any further questions? Indra?

Just one more. Will this cost more on an ongoing basis to maintain than our old system?

Slightly more, mainly because of the cellular communications, but it's on the order of a couple hundred dollars a year. It's not significant at all.

Further questions? Victoria?

So this is just for the public. From everything that you, the information that you've given us, it just seems like, I like what Kathleen and Rick said, that this is very secure. And is there anything that you can say just to the public to tell them a little bit about how this makes their water source secure?

It actually makes it, in my opinion, personal opinion, and I am not an expert in this. We had an hour and a half meeting on SCADA security the other day with five people in the room, and I left with my head just swimming and it was horrible. It makes it safer. A, the radios that we are moving to are literally their own private network that nobody else has access to the frequencies, nobody else has access to the IP numbers and so that sets up our own private network. The firewall tunnels that we're building are even more secure and you have to get through both the city's VPN and then our own VPN, so there's multiple ways in. This is a huge improvement over where we were, and we're implementing that both at water and wastewater.

Thank you. Any further questions from council? All right, seeing none. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. At this time, we afford the public an opportunity to comment in regards to this specific council action item, which is upgrading our SCADIS system, remote system. Anybody from the public? All right, seeing none, I'll bring it back to council for further discussion and or action. Indra.

Yes, I'm going to move that council approve the resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into an agreement with CSNW to perform upgrade work on the water division's 21 remote facilities.

All right, it has been motioned to approve the action to grant A SCADUS upgrade with anybody want to second? Kathleen on the second. Any further discussion? All right. Seeing none. Andrew, how do you vote? Yes. Kathleen?

Yes.

Victoria? Yes. Rob?

Yes.

Eric?

Yes.

Rick?

Yes.

Thank you very much. Passes. Resolution passes. Thank you. Next on the agenda tonight is A motion appointing two members to the Small Business Task Force. So there is a pink piece of paper in front of you, and I guess sign it and pass it down. Since there's no contenders in this, I would just look for a counselor to step up and make the recommendation. Rob, thank you.

I'll make a motion to appoint Logan Roberts and Rebecca Nugent to the Small Business Task Force.

Thank you. And a second from Rick. Any further discussion? Seeing none, Rick had, I mean, sorry, Rob, how do you vote?

Yes.

Eric?

Yes.

Rick? Yes. Indra? Yes. Kathleen? Yes. Victoria? Yes. All right. The two members are appointed to the Small Business Task Force. Thank you very much. Next on our agenda, we come to general public comment. This is an opportunity for the public to address the city council on items not related to a public hearing or council action item on tonight's agenda. The intent is to receive information that is pertinent to the matters within the city's actual jurisdiction. Each speaker will be given three minutes to address the council. Council members will have an opportunity to respond to the public after the consent agenda is addressed. I have blue cards in front of me and we'll start out with Mike Pelfrey. Is he still online? All right, Mike Pelfrey's not online. David Dapper, step up to the microphone and restate your name. You have three minutes, sir.

Hi. Hello? You hear me? Okay. Hi, David Dapper, city resident. With the homeless thing moving to Parker's Place, Bernie's doing a job of managing inside Parker's Place, but it's our job as a city to manage the surrounding community. And I notice Riverside West and Parker's Place are having a big problem with the car campers and the junkies going down there during the day to do their drugs. We have car campers unloading their whole car over multiple parking spaces and the side, the walkways. And we need this to stop. And when we call this in, we need it taken serious. Not to be argued with. When a couple women are staggering down the street and collapse or lay down in the middle of the road, like the videos I sent you all, we need that responded to, not argued with. Some of us do call a lot, but there's a reason for that. And we need to, the two problem areas right now that I see are Tussing, because there's a part you can't get to from the parking lot without walking down towards the pedestrian bridge, and Riverside West. And I did see Officer McGinnis and that new tall officer. I don't know if he's seven foot tall like McGinnis said, but he's a big guy. And that's what we'll see these guys. Because the junkies, they don't go out into the light in front of everybody to do their stuff. They're good at hiding. And we really need... We really need to watch these areas and other areas. I'm sure Morrison isn't looking real wonderful all the time. I'm glad they removed that park bench in front of the bottle drop that was a campground of sorts. But can we please, please give a little emphasis on these two parks and these areas nearby? Because we know wherever these services are, It attracts people that need these services, and it attracts people that abuse these services also. And we really need to manage around the campground. Thank you. Thank you.

Patrick Rooney? I do not see him in the audience. All right. Dave Blakely? Come up to the podium, restate your name, and you have three minutes, sir.

All right, Dave Blakely, city resident. I'm here again to reiterate my concerns about a tactic being used by Grants Pass Police that consists of closed fist and elbow strikes to the head. Now, we talked last week about the liabilities associated with this tactic, and I did a Google search yesterday, and Eugene Police and Portland Police are currently under lawsuit for same tactic, traumatic brain injury to the head because of closed fist and elbow strikes to the head. Now, we all know that I wore the badge of law enforcement in the county, but what you don't know is I was a certified self-defense instructor in Las Vegas. Chief is from Las Vegas. He should be able to understand this really well. We taught security officers in the casinos to make sure that they weren't acting aggressively. We taught them armbar takedowns because they are extremely effective. Whether you're cooperative, drunk, or resisting, they are effective. and they do not bring the multi-million dollar liability that comes with the closed fist tactics to the head. I want it stopped. The community wants it stopped. I'm gonna again ask council to direct staff to look into cheaper other tactics that don't carry the liability this tactic carries. I'm gonna ask city manager, city council, city attorney to come up with a moratorium on this tactic until we get this figured out. every time an officer goes out.

But they've changed other things beyond what was denied.

Just push and hard work from our police department that we're going to make progress and it's not going to be overnight and it's