Board of Mayor and Aldermen - Regular Meeting

Maybe the two holes that take this place down.

I had Sally I don't know. Tell me what you actually made up. She said she What goes in

What do you think about What are you doing? It makes me feel good. I just think I'm glad I'm happy. Holmes.

What's up? Francis food. Thank you. I think

they're not. show One thing he There's another I'm not sure.

I mean somebody else. What's up? I can't even complain. Everybody else like I just sit

Everything worried. Exact. I thought you were Look at those bills. I'm sorry.

I'm That's I don't know.

Is that picture? I'll figure out what she did.

It's 6:00. Brother email. Yeah. Oh.

Next item approval agenda. entertain second. Next item says comments. encourage motion Okay. First and second right now. Motion second last report this month into budgets. Everything's looking good. You guys revised of your budget. Biggest change is we

took a little bit of money out of repairs and learned that we didn't have to take all the money that was spent the cash balances. So it actually changed your fund balance up about a million and a half dollars. So we will get the revised to the packet and then we're going to hit on the other subject that I have down here under new business. I'll wait that. Other than that, I think everybody's doing a good job. We're learning that some of the reports and things that had previously been used hadn't been filled out for a long period of time. And I'm not going to go into all of it, but doesn't seem that chronic manholes and some of those things are as bad. has been reported. We'll get into some of that later.

So, best we can tell is, you know, we used to use St. John engineering to help us with all type of reporting and there was a lot of good spreadsheets and stuff that they kept that we kept up with when something overflowed. They had a very detailoriented spreadsheet. I think that under Bill Miller kind of went away from that system and tried to do some of it internally and I believe director Perry kept the same type program now that we have gone back to using it probably explained a little bit better finding out that because they didn't always report everything correctly now that we've gone back out sheets were as bad as we thought was being kept up correctly. So chronic manhole is pretty easy to track today is we have manhole overflow today and it's never overflow that starts the clock. So you have 12 months. If it overflows five times in 12 months, it becomes chronic, right? But if it overflows four times and then May 11th of the previous year, it overflows again that starts a new clock from the second months. If it's overflow time, it's chronic. That's what we're trying to figure out, right? Because everything we can tell is some of them that we've reported that are chronic are not chronic. It's been reported over an 18month period. So,

we know we were and we know we have told on oursel that we're doing worse than we truly are. by data that we report monthly. So now that you go back and you pull the monthly report that you send to the state and you start putting it into the spreadsheet, you start finding out that what they were actually saying we did wrong, we weren't doing wrong. So are you going back what we reported monthly was correct, but what we've been reporting through our moratorum is incorrect. And yes, I'm going to that we didn't have the five mans that we turned in on the report based on what we had in hand.

It's not going to affect the mortorium because moratorum just says that any new flow above a manhole. So it actually makes it better to caps through the state when there's no man there. So yeah, I mean just like maintenance some of the other We just have a we've got a lot of cleaning to do. We're going to do it. But that's the crux of not using all the tools you're getting. And to those guys' defense, right? They're not going to sit here both up and say they were bad people. Neither one of them were there very long. They didn't have a good system when they got here. If they had just went back to what we were doing with the been here 15 years of reporting and kept that up. I think we wouldn't have reported ourselves into a worse situation than we probably are.

So, okay. The way the moratorum reads is if you want to add flow above a chronic manhole, you have to submit it to them. So that's what we've been doing. Any new tap request that's above a chronic manhole that we told them we have, we have been doing GIS data to show them where the tap is, chronic manhole is, what work we've done in that area so that we can have that approved. Once we amend what actually is chronic and nonic, we just have to report the taps to approve. We're just going to report that we're giving tabs just as a blessing so that everybody feels good. But our permit is only about above but just so that we stay on the good side of everybody. Anytime somebody requests or not, we send it into the state just for blessing. Yes. And what you have to do if it's above a chronic manhole, you have to prove you removed flow from the system that was. Okay. we fix something so that we could add the flow back. That's what you have to prove. If it's above They're going to give us another

25 25 and lucky knock on wood since I've been in office, we've not had to address anything like that. There's been no new subdivisions. There's no nothing. They're all ones and twosies. Okay. That's what I assume

because You told us that you only no new subdivisions. We annex the property. We've not added anything. Okay. And then I seen something somewhere about bread, right? That we didn't do that correctly. Well, I want to be clear about that. There was a restaurant there. They tore the restaurant down. There was been a tap there for how long? All they did is hook back up to it. Okay. So, there was no new tap approval needed. There was nothing that we had to do. It's just like houses inside the city. If one burns down and we tear the house down and somebody builds one back, that's not a new tab. Okay.

So, we don't even have to send those in. But I read something somewhere that said that I guess TK and us are just not doing the thing right there. There was a restaurant there. They've been there forever and they tore part of it down. They didn't have to approval because there's very interesting when everybody starts trying to govern it for us and tell us what's right and wrong. But I mean it's pretty pretty standard. We have chronic manhole. We have to prove that we remove flow, add something to it. If there's no chronic manhole, we all just ask for permission just as a courtesy call. Okay? Because at the end of the day, the Capacity is about 50%. We're going to be able to remove a couple of them and res the other side too. So that we're transparent here. We've had drought. I've had no rain for a long time. You don't have rain for four or five months. That counts against something overflowing, right?

So, luck of the draw, call it what you want, you know, but that is time that takes off the time since that overflow. As I've stated before, if it doesn't rain in Manchester, nothing overflows. We work extremely well. We're at a 50% capacity. It's when it rains is when all our trouble starts. Yeah. I mean, we're working on we're replacing stuff, but we we've been very fortunate to or you're a farmer, unfortunate, but for the city of Manchester uh to not have as much rain in the first part of the year. So, that has helped us out tremendously. And that's that's I mean, I don't have anything else. We're gonna talk new business, but I've got something else. 10 months into the year.

If you'll remember when we passed the budget last year, we passed it on revenue start July 1st

and we lost six months of that because of not getting that pass. So yes, you are you're correct. Can I ask you a real quick question? So when you took over director, how many people were in the lab? How many do we have? So in a short period of time, I just want to highlight that we have upped our staff with license so that we're not just in need of one person. Okay? And they've done a real good job. taking four people qualified and that's through the whole system with the different license.

Yeah. I mean, we've had some really good hires, people that are extremely good qualified that came here, you know, when you rely on one person or they're out and you got to rely on somebody different. It it truly that type of a system can really affect what we've been doing. They worked extremely hard over the last six months and added redundancies. That's why we're catching reporting problems and all those other things because you're not pulled in 10 different directions to get make Yes.

I think it is certification.

Yes, absolutely. Anybody else have any questions? We had very good presentation. You know, at our last meeting, we had some really good conversations about going to just like Duck River. We've had those folks in. They're working on our quote. We should have that for this commission next meeting. It was very favorable being that it's the same type of meter. Feel like 25% of the meters are still new enough that we would just retrofit the piece to it versus having to replace the So there's some savings into that. And the goal would be that Lonnie can sit in his office or Jamie can sit in her office and you can pull it up, see how much water's being used. It will send us information and emails if the flow is up in a 24hour period. Customer actually sign up for it and get a notice as well. So, so we should have some of that type of quoting for you guys at the next at the next meeting. And it's kind of like Duck River went to, right? They don't come out anymore. It's on the screen and then it helps him understand when we have leaks, we don't have to go try to search for them. We can kind of narrow down. So, I did want to update you on that because that was a very good presentation. I've asked them to send it to me when I I'll send it out.

Yeah, they'll be able to log on their daily usage every day. And like I said, it'll give you updates to let you know that, hey, yesterday you used 500 gallons. Today you used a thousand. You may have a problem. And it'll notify us as well so that we can send people out and be proactive on those things. Hopefully it'll cut down on some of the discrepancies on actual bills. The software itself will do like rivers. It'll give you a roll in 12 months. Your spikes, your usages and all that will go on to the bill.

So, and the software itself, they talked with Bill, they showed them some different things. So, so yeah, we'll get that to on the services. What does that mean? We had 59 instances where we lost We sent a new one out. Thank you, Zack. Zack, we sent the same one again as we did before. We apologize for that. So, we sent out a new one. You got it. Latest and greatest came through email yesterday, I believe it was. questions.

And then since we met last time, we did have an emergency repair that was $94,000. We did We had a drive go out on the classifier clarifier at the plant. So we couldn't wait to get approval to get that back up and running. That's a piece of equipment that we needed on that repair maint. change. We're trying to contact A lot of things that we're doing now with the new contracts and stuff that we're putting in place equipment is we're at like a 24hour it go to the first list if it becomes an emergency like something like that. When the whole drive went out, it went to the emergency status and we had to put a new drive. But to answer your question, we're starting to contract service for eies for us. We haven't had that.

That's what I thought she was asking. I just make sure that I mean as we're redoing those purchasing been working with all our vendors, upgrading our approved vendor list, people that are already state contract type of levels where we don't have to get quotes and those things. And that's part of the language that we're adding to our contracts. Yes. Like a time response for emergencies only.

Do what we got to do, right? Stay out of trouble.

Well, It was an essential item. Otherwise, we could have had some violations. We were having to engineer new hangers. I don't know where we are in that.

Hey, I'm going tell you what. tell you a little funny story about I was coming down that middle highway on a Sunday afternoon and I got looking over at my gateway tire and I see this guy out there with sunglasses and measuring tape as I went by. Anyway, I seen him maybe that Tuesday or something that you say I tell you he's accurate on that project. I did see him out there on the Sunday with me getting after you know that right there is a case to where we've been doing our business right. It's not like it they fixed that bridge overnight. The hangers should have already been in place. They should have been improved and state would have installed them for us if we' have been running our railroad correctly, but we weren't. So, now we're having to re-engineer it. We're having to get approval of the hangers because they're not the same ones that were going to be in there, but we're close. It's nothing but positive. Is February

I guess January. So the average is February. He's got the first Everybody Second,

second. This is not

Yeah, we're just revising this one. Yeah, we're just going to revise it. Part of what we got, you know, our EPA order, we're about six months into the EPA order. Part of that order has to do with these type of plans. So St. John and those guys did us those back in 2012, 2014. There's probably going to be about four more books of these that come through here as we update them. We have to send these plans into the EPA as part of part of what we're responsible to do. So So we're just updating them to make sure that What we say in here is what we actually do because that's been 15 years ago since

it'll go to resolution or resolution or summ bond. You know, we've been talking about this. I've mentioned it several times, and Anthony and I and Lonnie are moving forward with presenting a bond to this board and to Bulma. Um, we have a bond that pays off in 2028. So, we're going to look to borrow $20 million to continue the upgrades in the sewer system, the plant and water system. We've turned in three year plans to tack on our system to improve it. And part of that is we need money. We've spent all of our grant money. The way this bond will work and we'll get the resolution I think hopefully soon. to present to everybody. We're going to borrow $10 million. It's $20 million bond. Get $10 million July 1st. And once we've spent the majority of that $10 million, the next $10 million will be there already approved for us to use. So, it'll take us a while, believe it or not, to spend that $10 million. maybe Adam's put some stuff together and we're putting a lot of pressure on him so that we can pull those projects out bring them in here and say hey guys want to replace this this and this and it's going to be two or three million and then we move forward. So that's why the payment won't affect us for a while because we won't pay on the whole $20 million until we've taken it. It will be a bond that's preapproved $20 million. Take 10. Once we spend that biggest part

of that 10, we'll go back and get the next 10. So I think that it could be six, eight, 10 months before we start looking for the next 10 million. So

I think it was 4 something%. It was actually pretty good. Get all those specifics for us. I think the current one we have is It's a little lower, but there again, it pays off. And so there will be probably an extra 5 to $600 a month payment which we can cover. So I just kind of want to let you know that that's what's coming. I assume you guys will need to approve us going to for that, but I would like for you guys to do that and we'll get you all the specifics. I Nothing happens overnight, but but I'm trying to get all that rolling and I'll have all the Scott Gibson is our financial advisor, I mean Knoxville, and they're the ones that are working on that and the resolution for us.

Categories. Okay, we don't have every project defined as of today. That's what Adam's doing. They're surveying building different projects with estimates. We will show you that we're going to spend as an example $3 million here, $5 million in this part. We need water tower 41. That's $2.5 million. All those things out to what we're going to do with the money, but we just want to keep the ball rolling to get all that define each project.

Yeah. I mean, and I can tell you today that 80% of it will be in the collection system, which is our biggest problem. We talked about a million bucks to get the whole use of the pit. That's going to be in there. There's going to probably be close to a million or so bucks in new water meters. That's going to be in there. Those are all things that, you know, as we continue to upgrade the city infrastructure, they're all in this $20 million. Now, that doesn't mean we're not going to quit asking for grant money and stuff, right? I mean, we're going to continue down that path, but you know, as I reported in Bulma, I mean, we spent probably $14 million over the last year in this department. There's no sense in slowing down now. We're making really good strides. And the only way that is to borrow some money and we have a bond being paid off. So, it's not we don't need to talk about rates. We don't need to talk about any more money from anybody.

We just we need to continue moving forward with a threeyear plan right now. And he keeps the same type of payment, but he's got a brand new

car. I mean, over three years. Yeah, it be a $20 million spend over three years. And it's not that I don't want to spend it faster than that. It's just we can't get the projects done faster than that.

You know, we started Well, I mean, and look, I'm not telling you we're fixing everything with this, okay? But but I mean, we we've got to hit the spots that are causing us the biggest problem. And what we did with the the $2 million with Dukes over the last two years is now Lonnie knows what hot spots are.

It showed us our areas and so what we can't get to even to do internal work cost us extra pipe and things like that. We're going to put some of that internal work that Lonnie can do. But there's big projects that we just got completed like 46 or 700 ft of line. Instead of jumping somewhere else, we're going to attach to those continue that process through the city so that we, you know, when you jump around, you fix this and all you do is move the problem. I want to have a longterm position to where we go through the city with these bigger lines and the problems that this is done for the future. Let's quit trying to skim and put in a 10 inch or a 12 inch line when we really need to put in a 16 inch line because we're planning for 10 years worth of growth. That's what we're looking at right now. That's the prime example is is across John Roberts's property, right? What size line is that?

Yeah, but that ain't big enough. That's part of something we're going to have to redo that we did about four years ago because if he's ever going to develop it, we're taking all that flow down. So if he's ever going to develop it or anything else is ever going to come in that section of our thing, we're going to put in a bigger line. So So we're not just looking at how we fix it today. We're trying to figure out what the next 10 years looks like so that when we do this, we only do it one more time for 10 years and then we give it to the next part

and and we've done a little of that and and so now like I said it's you know part of what Lonnie and and and Adam and I talk about is let's stack these projects up okay because generally what happens is okay you say okay you got $3 million well look it takes us six eight months to get the project planned get it approved and then it's two years before we're finished. So now we want to stack them up so that when we have the money and you guys say yes, let's do this project, we pull it out and that's a sixmon turnound to get our permit and then we're putting a shovel in the ground and we're done in 18 months. So that that's some of that's some of what we're doing. But we we did submit a three-year plan that's pretty aggressive. We've already talked about the timeline. We may have to move it out a little bit, but At least we know internally how to solve some of our worst INI problems throughout the city so that it doesn't become an issue. That's what this is for. $20 and hopefully within the next, you know, three months, right? Start some projects that probably total five or six million. We're in the last design phase. on some permits and those are projects that are already on the books that we have

different grants for that aren't related to the ARP

and why it sits there while we're doing it longterm interest on to get some of it back. Sure. That's why we're not trying to take it all. That's why we're spreading it out over time.

And it'll take us to read. So, next month we'll be able to present you the two list and actual paperwork on the bond, right? And we'll have our first reading done hopefully at Bulma and then you can have the specifics and we'll lock in what percentages we're going to spend where in the final resolution and then we'll have the final one in July.

I mean I'm trying to get the first ordinance read in June. If you're okay with the concept to spend money, then we'll give you all the details in June and you can modify whatever. But as far as money, the concept is what I'm looking But you can change the list, but do you agree in concept that you need to spend $20? Yeah. I guess it depends on how we work that motion.

The motion should be you agree to borrow the money. If you do, then let's pass that. You'll get to see the list. You'll get to negotiate the list. And I can't tell you specifically how the second $10 million is going to be spent other than there's going to be percentages, right? And we will give you that list in June. If you don't like the list and you want to change some percentages, you do that and then that's what we finally pass in the July phone meeting is what specifically you agree to in June. I'm just trying to get the ball rolling. Let me process to borrow the money.

And your motion could be passing up. I just want the process to get started. I make a motion that agrees with the concept and that First, second motion to approve. Any questions? Yes.

And like I said, we're going to include a threeyear project proposal that we turned in to TC and we're going to have specific items on there by percentages, not dollar amounts. You guys agree that we'll still bring each project back to you once we get them quoted and you'll approve the projects. It'll just be like a running list of things we want to get accomplished. But each one of those project will still come back before you spend the money. Just trying to get the money part of it started to get it. Charge. They charge you. policy tours that I didn't know existed. I can show you where those lines have different sizes. appreciate you taking time to go do that.