Waterways Advisory Committee - Regular Meeting

And you're in. Now you can push your name.

That's it. Good afternoon. I'd like to call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities for the City of Santa Rosa to order. If we may have a roll call, please.

Board Member Wright.

Here.

Board Member Meisler. Here. Board Member DeWitt, absent. Board Member Badenfort.

Here.

Vice Chair Arnone.

Here.

Chair Govan.

Here.

Let the record reflect. All members are present with the exception of Board Member DeWitt.

Thank you. Any statements of abstention by board members? Very good. We have no study session. We have the minutes for the July 16th meeting. At this time, we will take any public comments on those meetings or any comments from the board. Seeing no one rise, the minutes will be approved and entered. We have a couple of staff briefings. Director Burke, 6.1.

Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. Our first staff briefing is our Community Water Academy, and Jennifer Nesbitt, our research and program coordinator, will be presenting.

Good afternoon, Ms. Nesbitt.

Thank you, Director Burke. Good afternoon, Chair Galvin and members of the board. My name is Jennifer Nesbitt and I'm the Research and Program Coordinator on the Energy and Sustainability Team here to present about our Community Water Academy Program. Our team received a technical assistance grant from Water Now Alliance and River Network to help develop the Community Water Academy series, designed to give community members an inside look at how our local water systems function and how we can collectively support long-term water sustainability. For this pilot session this summer, we collaborated with Latino service providers to engage graduates of their youth promotores program, ages 16 to 25, in this hands-on learning space and highlight pathways to water careers. Our objectives with this pilot group were to learn from the youth that participated, to build future academy opportunities, inspire long-term education and workforce interest, empower participants to be community leaders, and to build trust and connections with our community. Santa Rosa Water professionals led our group through hands-on activities and learning experiences on each of these topics in this six-session series that will conclude on August 17th. We learned together about some of our local water supply and infrastructure, the wastewater out at the Laguna Treatment Plant, stormwater and creeks teams, and some of the regulation policies and sustainability. And today we would like to congratulate our summer pilot 2026 participants of the Community Water Academy for completing this program. So I'd like to say congratulations to our 10 participants, Ellie Cordero, Yesenia Carmona Brito, Melanie Torres, Alisa Quintero, Jocelyn Villanueva, Evelyn Cerda, Daphne Perez Ruiz, Leilani Cortez, Teresa Perez, and Jose Rosales.

Congratulations, graduates. Thank you, those of you that are here. At this time, we would like to have you come down and receive your certificates, and then we'll have a picture taken with the board. So please come on down. I neglected actually to open it up for public comment or board questions or comments. So if there's anyone that wishes to make a comment, feel free to do so. No, no.

Is this on, okay, hi, good afternoon, board. My name is Stephanie Manieri. I'm the Executive Director of Latino Service Providers. We had one of our young people, one of our graduates, Teresa, can you wave your hand, Teresa? Teresa is our graduate representing the 10 who went through this program. They couldn't be here today, but we're really proud of them. And I just wanted to say thank you to Santa Rosa Water, Peter, Alicia, Jen, for bringing this in. I'm sorry, I'm out of breath. for bringing Latino service providers into this really special project. Our young people are really interested in being a part of the solution to climate change and other climate issues locally in their communities, and this was a wonderful opportunity for them to learn more about what careers they might be interested in or what is accessible to them here locally. So we're just really proud of this partnership. We hope that we can continue to build ambassadors for water here in Santa Rosa. And we just hope that this is a long-term partnership. So thank you again for the recognition.

Thank you for your comments. Any other public comments or board questions? Yes, go ahead.

I just want to commend you for not only seeking out opportunities, because the world is full of them, and so many people don't seek them out. And I think this bodes well for your future, that you are the kind of person who has done so, and I encourage you to continue to be that kind of person throughout your life. Congratulations.

Thank you. Vice Chair Arnone?

And I just want to add to what you just said because it's really refreshing for me to see a group of young people who care about things as on their surface that look kind of dull, like infrastructure, like water and sewage and electricity, those kinds of things. They're not really, you know, front headline page news usually, but the fact that you're taking interest in them and you wanted to learn about them and you spent your own time to do so is very impressive and it makes me more hopeful for the future of important services like water and utilities and other of these boring things. So thank you.

Any other questions or comments? Very good, that'll take care of item 6.1. We'll move now to item 6.2. Director Burke.

Thank you, Chair Govan and members of the board. Our second staff briefing is the Water Supply Alternatives Plan Annual Update. And Claire Nordly, our Water Resources Manager, will be making the presentation.

All right, good afternoon, Chair Galvin and members of the board. I'm going to be talking about the implementation of the Water Supply Alternatives Plan. You may all remember this plan was adopted in 2023, and basically the goal was to understand and enhance Santa Rosa's water supply reliability, specifically related to drought, other kinds of emergencies, and mitigating peak day demand. There was quite a lot of community involvement through the development of this plan. We had an internal water department team, quite a large stakeholder group. You can see the 19 organizations that are listed here, as well as public input from the community through various different webinars that were hosted. So there was a lot of community input into this plan and how it was developed. Through that input, there were numerous water supply options that were investigated, ranging anywhere from options discussing groundwater, water use efficiency, stormwater, et cetera. Those supply options were ultimately narrowed down to a list of about eight. And through input from the board and from the city council, portfolio four, which is considered the most adaptive, was the portfolio that was chosen to be investigated by the water department. So I'm just providing this background because it has been three years since the plan was adopted. So this hopefully will ring some bells for you all. But today we're gonna talk about what we've done since the plan was adopted and go through each one of those various different supply options that were evaluated and chosen into portfolio four. So one of the options was to add extraction wells, groundwater wells. Right now, we are working on a request for proposals to conduct a study to understand where potential production wells could be sited. As you all know, throughout the decades, Santa Rosa has investigated many different areas of interest to install production wells. And so we want to narrow down that list of areas of interest. So we hope to be able to release that request for proposal in the next month or so. We also have a consultant and a contract already in place to perform the CEQA analysis for those various different sites of interest. And that work will begin once we have the list of well sites from the previous bullet. One of the other supply options was to look at converting our existing emergency wells into production wells. So for example, we've looked at Carley Well, and that is currently in pre-design, and we are planning converting that from emergency to production. Peter Springs Well is also in pre-design, and we've decided to use that well only for irrigation. literally almost right next to Carly well and so there's no need for both of them to be operational into into production so that well will be used for the irrigation of Peter Springs Park we also have leet well that well is offline and has been offline for a while and we are currently we have a contract with the consultant now to study the feasibility of converting that to production where that water might go for example We're also in construction already for a place to play well, and that one is in construction currently for an emergency use only. We also have numerous other test wells throughout Santa Rosa, and those will be studied for potential conversion during the well siting study that was discussed on the previous slide. I believe the board is already aware of our aquifer storage and recovery pilot program, but this was another supply option that was studied. We worked on a pilot study in partnership with the Groundwater Sustainability Agency for Santa Rosa. The final report will be due soon, but the draft report findings were very promising. Basically, ASR, or aquifer storage and recovery, is hydraulically feasible at the Martha Way test well. And we could potentially get up to 300 gallons per minute in wet months of being able to recharge water into that well. And the good news is that the current, during the pilot study I should say, the storage of the water didn't mobilize any water quality concerns for us. So this is good news and basically helps us understand that this test well could potentially be used for ASR in the future. Direct potable reuse, both satellite and regional options, are portfolio or water supply options that will be studied in the future if needed. We are also working on a stormwater capture and recharge project. So we're dovetailing from the Storm Drain Master Plan to understand some feasibility on potential stormwater capture and recharge options. And we have a scope of work that we are finalizing currently with a consultant and we expect that work to begin in the next month or so. the last option that was discussed as part of the water supply alternatives plan is in further enhancing our robust already robust water conservation programs you can see here that we've had a direct install program so free toilet and free installation one of the phases was already completed and the other one is currently in process but enormous amount of millions of gallons of water savings I'm sure you all are also aware of the code revisions that the city is required to do based on the state requirements to prohibit irrigation of non-functional turf within the commercial, industrial, and institutional accounts in our service area. The State Department of Water Resources, DWR, estimates that we have 7 million square feet of non-functional turf in our service area. So potentially that's an enormous amount of water savings once those customers are no longer allowed to irrigate. And then the water use efficiency team also recently conducted a demand and conservation analysis. This was a sort of a study of what future water savings potential options are out there, demand hardening trends, and then opportunities for enhancing and receiving additional participation in our programs. And those findings will help inform new water use efficiency programs in the future. So we want to make sure that our good work is not just in a silo. We want to make sure that our customers and the community are aware of the work that we're doing on their behalf. And so we do have a dedicated web page that describes both the water supply alternatives plan, but also this implementation that I'm describing today. We also have a brochure, which is here on the screen. We have a video, which I'll show a clip of in the next slide. And then I do plan on coming back annually to this board to describe what we've been doing so far and what the implementation is like. So with that, I will attempt the video. All right. It's not showing up on there. but it's showing up on my screen.

Sure.

Hi, I'm Claire Nordly, Senior Water Resources Planner for Santa Rosa Water. Today I wanna share how Santa Rosa Water is planning a reliable water future for you and the rest of our community. In Santa Rosa, over 90% of our community's drinking water is sourced from the Russian River. The rest is pumped from groundwater wells located here in Santa Rosa. During normal to dry years, we have plenty of water, but extreme droughts and natural or human-made disasters could potentially put our water system at risk. That's why it's so important that our community take proactive steps to secure our water future. Nothing stranger than watching yourself on video, but there I am. All right, let's see if I can get out of here. Okay, and with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. Any board member questions or comments? Vice Chair Arnone.

Just a quick comment. I appreciate these periodic updates on the status of this plan because my biggest fear when we adopted this plan was that it would just sit on a shelf and be forgotten. So seeing it's a living document and that it's continuing to guide what we're doing is good to see. So please continue giving us these updates. Thank you.

Agreed. Anyone else?

Sure. So I'm curious, I know you have the turf replacement program to reduce water use, but I'm curious if you have that same kind of individual parcel level incentive thinking with respect to groundwater or stormwater capture.

I know the Water Use Efficiency Team has a rainwater harvesting rebate, so in some ways that's sort of stormwater capture. There isn't a stormwater related rebate other than the rainwater harvesting rebate.

Yes, Board Member Badenford.

I think I jumped in at a weird time. Thank you very much. Just to echo Vice Chair Arnone's appreciation for the updates. We will eagerly await them every year. I just wanted to comment on the strength of the stakeholder engagement. I really appreciate the list, but also just the really intentional inclusion. It will look like a really robust and a diverse group. of voices and so often i think with with public engagement what can happen is we can kind of miss really critical sectors and voices but that list really spanned users a broad range of users but also experts public official public engagement public entities and also the business community and regulators so i just want to thank you for being really intentional about that I think it's really important and it'll bring in some really important input that we might have missed otherwise. So, thank you.

Thank you. Any other board member questions or comments? All right, we'll open it up for public comment on item 6.1. If you wish to make a public comment, please move to the podium. If you'd state your name, please, and wait for the timer to start.

Hi, my name is Fred Allabuck. I have a question and comment about the aquifer storage and recovery piece here. I'm glad to see that the well is functional. I know various ASR wells have been shown that they will work But the remaining question is, where is the water gonna come from to do the recovery? And so for years, people have been talking about extra winter water. And one of the objections of, is that if they have to pay full price to Sonoma Water for aquifer storage and recovery, then it's not really worth a municipality's money to pay that price when they can drill a well and get water for a lot cheaper. So they would maybe want to, if they want to be sustainable, they would pay more for it. or else drill a well and pay less. And so the Sonoma Water is working on a regional water bank. And so I was just curious when is this extra water gonna come to these ASR wells? I mean, it's been talked about for a long time. I would love to see it, but it just doesn't seem to be happening.

Thank you.

Well, I can't predict when Sonoma Water's water blank study will be completed. We're all waiting to. I don't know if Director Burke has anything else to add.

Director Burke, anything further?

No, I think we're continuing to work closely with Sonoma Water. We're looking at the regional groundwater banking opportunities. It is a good point. We need to figure out what those relationships are going to be in terms of how we look at aquifer storage and recovery. through Sonoma Water itself, is it individual with the retailers? So there's a lot of moving parts that we still need to figure out.

Okay, thank you very much. Any other public comments? Very good, thanks, Ms. Nordley. So we will now move to our consent calendar. We have two items on the consent calendar.

I'll move adoption of the consent calendar.

Second.

We have a motion by Vice Chair Arnone, seconded by Board Member Badenfort to approve the consent calendar. This time, if you wish to make a public comment on the consent calendar, please feel free to move to the podium. Seeing no one rise, may we have a roll call vote, please.

Board Member Wright.

Aye.

Board Member Misler. Aye. Board Member DeWitt absent. Board Member Badenfort. Aye. Vice Chair Arnone.

Aye.

Chair Galvin.

Aye.

Let the record reflect, the consent calendar has passed unanimously with Board Member DeWitt absent.

Thank you. We'll now move to our report items, item 8.1. Director Burke.

Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. Our first report item is approval of a professional service agreement with the Catalyst Group. And Sean McNeil, our Deputy Director of Environmental Services, will be presenting.

Thank you, Jennifer Burke, Director Burke, and good afternoon, Chair Galvin, members of the board. I'm excited to talk about this today. I do want to give a little bit of a... Hold on, let me find it. There. I'm gonna talk a little bit about regulations in this presentation. And to some of you, this might be old, and some of you, this might be brand new. So I'm gonna try to hit it in a way that everyone can understand and not get bored. But I may not make it, but I'm open to your feedback. So we'll talk about a little. We're rooting for you, Sean. Thank you, that's gonna help. So we'll talk a little bit about the background on the regulations, talk about the Laguna TMDL process, I'll talk what that is, and then I'll talk about the contract before you today, which is with the Catalyst Group and the scope. So just to kinda go back into history, 2006 was the first time that the city received a no net load requirement on our final effluent from our wastewater treatment plant. And what that means is that When we treat the water, there's some levels of nutrients still left in that water, and we have permits that allow us to discharge that water into our local waterways following a lot of rules. And one of those rules is a seasonal discharge, as well as, in this case, that it couldn't have any phosphorus in it, or nitrogen, according to that permit. Well, it's impossible for the city or infeasible for the city to pull all the nutrients out of that water. So we worked with the regional board and they gave us some time to come into compliance with this requirement and developed a program called the Nutrient Offset Program. While we weren't able to take all those nutrients out of the water, we were allowed to go out into the into the area and find ways to remove phosphorus and nitrogen from the watershed at equivalent to what we would be putting in. So we would arrive at what's called a no net load. So there's no additional nutrients coming into that waterway. So that was approved in 2008. 2009, we were given some time to come into compliance. The city started implementing nutrient offset projects. These projects have been... difficult to get started, expensive, and there's a lot of uncertainty in developing those projects. But we've been doing them for a while now, and I'll give you the different projects. I'll give you a slide on those. In 2013, we went to the board and said, you know, scientifically speaking, the real limit of pollution in this watershed is really just phosphorus, not nitrogen. And so nitrogen was removed in our 2013 permit, and so we've only had to account for phosphorus since then. In 2018, the regional board wanted to expand, needed to expand this project to other wastewater dischargers in the watershed. and the nutrient offset project through our years of implementing and feedback with the board had some difficulties and so we smoothed out some of those with the regional board for 2018 and this new program, the water quality trading framework has been kind of the law or the regulation around this requirement and now includes Windsor and a small treatment plant for the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians just outside of Windsor. are the three entities that are under this regulation right now. The city's compliance strategy of meeting this is first to maximize our reuse and minimize our discharges into the water. That's a clear way to reduce the amount of phosphorus we're putting in. And then also recognizing that Weather doesn't allow us to reuse all of the water. Sometimes we get more water than we can handle and we have to discharge. So we wanted to have some changes to our treatment process to reduce the amount of phosphorus in that treatment and that water. So the concentration of phosphorus in the water came down. So we've done that. And then we would go and offset discharges via phosphorus offset projects. It's important to understand our discharge history and this graph on the bottom part of this graph is also known as the x-axis, is the year, the discharge year. And on the left side, the y-axis, we have volumes in millions of gallons per year. And the three different colors that you see on here as red is denoting the amount of water that's discharged into our local waterways. Green is the amount of irrigation, both agricultural and urban reuse. And then blue is the amount that goes to the geysers. One of the things you can see here is right around 2004, that's when the geysers came online. And you can see our discharge went from three and a half to four billion gallons of water a year to less than a billion gallons in many years, no discharge at all. so we are doing a great job in um reusing beneficially reusing most of this water and occasionally you see in the the other years when there's too much water coming in at us in the winter time and we can't get it up to the geysers fast enough due to limitations with the geysers pipeline size we end up having to discharge and That's all within our permit guidelines, but this is how we've been meeting this. I do want to highlight that we did not discharge last year, but this water year is not complete yet, so I don't have all the recycled water use data. So it looks like I'm a year behind, but we're just still in the 25-26 water year. Phosphorus controlling projects are not cheap. The city of Santa Rosa has really invested in a number of these. And the cost per credit has varied quite a bit. I don't want to go through each of these projects. I've presented that to the board in the past. But I will say one of the trends that we're seeing right now is the cost per credits are going up quite a bit. A lot of the lower hanging fruit projects we've done. And so the cost per credit we're anticipating to continue to rise significantly. And so we are concerned about the water quality trading framework into the future as far as its costs go. On another line, the regional board in 2023 put out their triennial review of the water quality control plan. And one of the items, so this is a plan that they put together. It says over the next three years, these are the things that we're going to be working on throughout their jurisdictional area. One of those items was working on the TMDL for the Laguna, and I'll talk a little bit more about the TMDL, but it's basically new regulations for the Laguna. And some of the concerns that showed up in that report are that nutrients in the Laguna too high the temperatures too high there's an increasing amount of sediment in the waterway and all those together are impacting the dissolved oxygen dissolved oxygen is extremely important for aquatic organisms because that's actually how they breathe and many times of the year the Laguna has absolutely no dissolved oxygen in it through large stretches of the creek so it's just not a healthy habitat for aquatic species And so the plan is to look at that. We're currently only regulated under phosphorus for those pollutants that I put up there. And so part of the process is that they have a couple of options to develop a regulatory program to address this. One is to use the TMDL action plan, and I'll go through that in more detail, advanced restoration plan, and an action plan. Under a TMDL, which stands for Total Maximum Daily Load, which oftentimes is still confusing to the layperson, but it basically says that an environment has a certain amount of pollutants that it can handle and continue to function. And if the pollutants get above that level, that environment, in this case a waterway, is considered impaired. we've identified or it's been identified that the Laguna is impaired for the constituents that I talked about, plus mercury, and that the total maximum daily load, or the TMDL, would then say, look at all the sources of those pollutants, identify those, identify all the dischargers of those pollutants, identify what they think the system could handle and still maintain the beneficial uses of that water, and then provide waste load allocations, which means you, industry A, can put this much of that in there. Anything above that would be not permitted. Well, we already know what the phosphorus levels are, would be no additional phosphorus. So we also anticipate and have reviewed a number of the reports, there's no additional nitrogen that could be added into the waterway either. So we could see these regulations under TMDL requiring the city to have enter into this water quality trading framework, these other pollutants as well. What I'd like to do is kind of step you through some of what that might look like for not only the city of Santa Rosa in our stormwater program, that could fall under this under the TMDL process, but our other sister cities in the county that drains to the Laguna. So this is a table that's a hybrid from a report that the regional board published from their consultant Tetra Tech and on the first column is the land cover type and you see different kinds of land cover types and then the next column is the median load of phosphorus coming off of that land cover type per year and then the third column there is the number of acres in the watershed. That data is straight out of the report. The last column I put together, and that's if our current cost of treating phosphorus for the wastewater treatment plant were applied to all those land cover types, that would be the annual cost based on our current cost of credits. And I wanna kinda highlight these three land cover types. It's not divided up into municipalities, so it doesn't say this is what Santa Rosa's part, this is what Rohnert Park's part or Cotati, it's divided into these categories that combine us all. So residential with sewer, that's going to be all of the cities. Residential without sewer, that's going to be all the places that are on septic that would be in the Laguna that would fall under this regulation. And then commercial would be a mix of both of those land cover types. And so it's broken out by that. And you can see If you total this up, it's about a quarter of the total loading of phosphorus is coming from what would be our communities. And that would, if these prices came together, would be over $3,600,000 per year cost for all of our stormwater programs just to meet phosphorus compliance. And I also mentioned there's nitrogen, temperature, and sediment. Since we don't have a program for that, I can't estimate what the costs of controlling those pollutants would be, but we could assume it would be more than this. So there's some concern of just going forth with the TMDL process. It could put us at some jeopardy of being able to afford these regulations. So fortunately, there's other alternatives. And so one of those is an advanced restoration plan. This is an EPA program. It's focused on defining restoration goals in advance or potentially in lieu of developing a TMDL. It's really a near-term plan that has schedules and milestones. If you're meeting that schedule and milestones, that's how your compliance is measured. It doesn't have to be adopted into the basin plan, which makes it a little more nimble for the regional board to do. But they, of course, can adopt it into the basin plan should they want to. It does not necessarily impose waste load allocations, but it's not blind to the relative contribution of pollutants by each of the entities as far as developing their responsibilities under this. It's designed to be more immediately beneficial to restore the water quality objectives, in that we're no longer saying you have to do this pollutant, that pollutant, and this pollutant. You can start looking at the system as a whole, develop restoration ideas and goals to tackle the real issue that might also have these multi-benefits of better recreational activities, but it just is a lot easier to implement. And as of April 2025, it hasn't been updated on the federal EPA website, the US EPA has approved 115 advanced restoration plans in 28 different states. And most of these advanced restoration plans are really to address nutrients and or pathogens. And so we think it could be an appropriate tool for this. But of course, in any kind of program like this, the details will matter and how they would affect our operations in our community. A hybrid between the TMDL process and the advanced restoration plan is kind of a program called an action plan. And this is just basically a program that's just created for the situation. Action plans exist across the state. Not any one of them are exactly alike another. So they're very adopted specifically to that water body. and it does get adopted into the basin plan, and it amounts to, in a quick summary, you look at the sources, you do everything you can to reduce the sources of pollutants, and then you take some kind of actions to make the watershed better, and that is how you arrive at water quality objectives. So this, like the Advanced Restoration Plan, it's the details and what the requirements are that will matter in how these programs get developed. And so we're hoping to have a say in that process, and we've been working with the regional board, and today the contract before you is the city's attempt to collaborate with the regional board to help build regulations that are both good for the watershed and good for our rate payers. So we'd like to convene a task force which would include a whole host of stakeholders, cities and towns in the Laguna that drain into the Laguna watershed, agricultural entities, because they're an important part tribal we'd love to have some tribal wisdom as a part of this process and come in and help build a program that the tribes could support numerous regulators will be involved the regional board is is committed to participating and then nonprofit organizations whose missions are in alignment with you know issues around either environmental protection or business opportunities. So the business community could also be a part of this. The goal of the project would be to identify these regulations that could help support these water quality improvements And under like an advanced restoration plan, it allows us to blend the funds that we are spending on our regulatory compliance with funds that we might be spending to restore our creeks, like with our stormwater and creeks program. And grant funds. So under an advanced restoration plan, it's different than other kinds of regulations. These are allowed to receive grant funds into that mix. So our regulations could help set the table for making big changes in this watershed and bring in funds from outside the area to help support that effort. So to implement this, it's gonna take a lot of meetings and meetings tend to need a facilitator and they need an independent facilitator that can play a neutral role for all the stakeholders to feel heard. And also we need technical and scientific guidance. So a team of six people reviewed, we put out a request for proposals, a team of six people reviewed We received six proposals. They were all very good. Any of them probably could have delivered this project. But we found three that were particularly important, or we found through the written part that we wanted to bring them back and have an interview. So we interviewed three of the candidates. And it was very clear that the Catalyst Group, combined with the San Francisco Estuary Institute as their technical lead, was our top-rated proposal. It was well-written. The staff demonstrated that they had relevant experience for this type of stakeholder-driven regulatory project these are not that common and that the san francisco estuary institute is also a well-respected organization of scientists they do a lot of work in the san francisco bay but they also do a lot of work in the russian river watershed including drafting you know being the technical drafter of the laguna restoration plan So it was really a great combination of the prime catalyst group and their sub, the San Francisco Estuary Institute. So the contract would have the catalyst group develop a core team. The core team would be the entity that makes sure that the stakeholder process and the task force, which I'll talk about in a minute, prepared and all those meetings are organized and that information that is shared in that group that's making the decisions building programs identifying processes happens and in a way that that we can get to an end product we draft a charter the Charter would be Basically dictate the rules of how engagement Would go and how decisions are made within the task force They'd conduct a stakeholder analysis where they'll meet with many members of our community to see if they should be members of the task force if they have an ability to be a part of that or if they should be part of the core team or if they should be just alerted to the process as it develops And then they would also provide scientific guidance to the task force while the city and the regional board would also provide some of that. It's nice to have somebody like the San Francisco Estuary Institute that has lots of scientists that can come and speak about the various science that would benefit this type of a program. the scope and timeline in this contract and for the project, because some of this is beyond the contract, is the group would form a core team that would be their facilitator, key stakeholders, including the City of Santa Rosa, Laguna Foundation, Regional Water Board, and tribes. We'd have a task force that would have about 13 meetings spanning about a year to a year and a half. Not part of this scope, but we're hoping that this would inform the regional board to modify permits in the future, to adopt some of the principles and practices that we adopt that are developed through this process, and then we'd implement new work plans and that would drive our regulations into the future. So the recommendation is recommended by Santa Rosa Water that the Board of Public Utilities by motion approve the professional services agreement with the Catalyst Group to provide facilitation and water quality science services to support changes to water quality regulations in the Laguna de Santa Rosa. Contract amount is not to exceed $441,979. And I know that was a lot and I'm here if there's any questions.

Thank you, Deputy Director McNeil. I'll open it up for any board member questions or comments. Vice Chair Arnone.

Thank you. Let me start by saying you covered a lot of ground there. I mean, this is a very specific proposal to approve a contract, but what goes behind that covers a lot of years and a lot of different issues. And thank you for covering that so well and bringing us to the point where we can make an intelligent decision on this. And by the way, I think I agree with this recommendation and I'm going to vote in favor of it. What I wanted to address was how we got here in the first place and why I think we need something like this to move us to the next phase. Because my understanding is that we are in the only basin in the state of California which has to deal with a zero net loading requirement for phosphorus. And that no one else in the state has ever been required to do that, even though many other providers discharge phosphorus into the environment. Back when this was initially imposed on Santa Rosa, I think we started having to deal with it and I think over the years we have made incremental progress in making it a better process and in making it fairer and more achievable and this proposal seems to be consistent with that trend and it seems to me that we're at a breaking point now where we can perhaps move from this TMDL focus to you know a basin specific plan and a task group like this seems well suited to to accomplish that so I'm in favor of it but I just want to keep the eye on the fact that this is necessary for us to to get on a more even playing field with the rest of the state frankly thank you other board member questions or comments

Board Member Wright. I'm just gonna generally comment that I actually have a background in this subject matter, and the thing is totally confusing to me, even though 10 or 15 years have gone by since I had to deal with it. So the way I'm seeing this now is we're looking, our approach is gonna go to a source control approach as opposed to a numeric trading game? Is that the end game? Is that one possibility of the end game?

Yes. I mean, of course, source control is usually going to, at some level, is cost effective. And just like we do with our water supply, we wanna be efficient with the water that we're using before we extract it from the environment. So I think reducing the amount of pollution as cost effectively as we can with programs and things like that would be in the city's best interest no matter what. Because it's easier to, as I would tell my children, it's easier to clean up the mess you didn't make. it didn't help but but um so yeah that i think that would be the goal would be to no matter what we want to reduce and and our stormwater program and our wastewater treatment plant are both really good at doing those types of things and that we want to make sure that we develop programs that are in alignment with things that are of value to our community. I think the City of Santa Rosa is, I'm very proud of the amount of creek restoration that we do, the awards that we've won, and the latest creek restoration project really speaks to the values of our community, and I think having you know, using our community values and putting our money in those places is probably in our best, you know, is a better approach than just doing this per, because it's not very creative when you're doing per pollutant reductions. It can be very, very boring. You know, we're calculating, we're dredging channels to get sediment out to remove phosphorus. You know, here we could think, And we're only doing it where we can, where we can get the permits, where we can get the authorities. This program would allow us to say, what's the right thing to do? What things would be the best to do in this watershed to do it and take the time to develop that. You know, so we could be very strategic in how we implement and roll out this type of program. Compared to right now, it's like we're just in an accounting piece. What's the cheapest way to get the most amount out of the watershed? And here we just, it's what I'm calling a point positive. We want that and here's how we get there.

Then I would agree with you that the stakeholder process is probably the most critical piece of that puzzle, although it's gonna be extremely difficult, I think, to round up all the cats and make everybody agree to do the right thing. Thank you.

Other board member questions or comments? All right, at this time, I will entertain a motion

I move that the Santa Rosa Water Board of Public Utilities approve the professional services agreement with the Catalyst Group to provide facilitation and water quality science services to support changes to water quality regulations in the Laguna de Santa Rosa. The contract amount is not to exceed $441,979. Sorry for the interruption, Chair, but we do need to take public comment.

before the motion.

No, you don't have to make the motion again. My apologies. So yes, we'll take public comments on item 8.1. If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium. State your name and wait for the timer to start, please.

Hello, my name is Fred Allerbach. I'd like to ask where this phosphorus is coming from. That didn't seem to be in the report of what the actual source is. So is it like human waste and like there was a pasture list and showed that high phosphorus was, a lot of phosphorus coming from pasture. Is that from animal waste or I don't understand where it's coming from.

Deputy Director McNeil.

So there's lots of sources of phosphorus, and not all of it the city is responsible for. I can speak to the sources that the city is responsible for. So in our wastewater, we have trace amounts of phosphorus in it. And as I showed you, the discharge, when we discharge quite a bit of water, when you added up, it could be thousands of pounds of phosphorus in a single discharge. Our discharge might have anywhere from 3,500 pounds of phosphorus. I think the highest that I've seen in any one year was 14,000 pounds of phosphorus in our total discharge for the year. So while it's only in trace amounts, when we discharge large amounts of water, it starts to add up. The other land cover types like, say, phosphorus is strongly tied to sediment. So if you discharge sediment into a waterway some way, and you might see muddy water running down the side of a road on a county road or a dirt road, that's most likely carrying large amounts of sediment or that sediment is carrying large amounts of phosphorus with it. It's true that dairies also could have elevated amounts of phosphorus coming off their land as manure on the land. Manure is full of phosphorus and any manure that rainwater interacts with and makes its way into a creek would start to leach phosphorus into it as well. Also, it's naturally occurring. So the forest types will have phosphorus in it, and there's an appropriate amount of phosphorus. If there was no phosphorus in the water, it would be a bad waterway because the organisms also need that phosphorus, but it's at the levels that it becomes toxic to organisms. And so just like with anything, it's the dose that matters. And so there's naturally occurring phosphorus, and that's okay. But right now, this basin is way above the natural levels of phosphorus that are healthy for the watershed. And so there's a lot of different sources. And some of the things that we've done in the city is controlling the amount of phosphorus the way that soil piles and mulch piles and people who may put those in the street and then shovel them into their yard and we make sure that they clean it up before it rains. Street sweeping is another way we get sediment out from getting into our storm drains. So there's lots of sources and I'm sure I didn't get all of them in that answer.

Thank you. Other public comments? Please state your name and wait for the timer.

Thank you very much. My name is Matt St. John. I'm an environmental program manager with the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board and really appreciate the opportunity to make comment today. I wanna start by saying, well, first of all, that I'm here on behalf of the North Coast Regional Board, the board itself and our executive officer. And we really are grateful. We see this as a partnership between our agency and the city to develop really what will be ultimately effective way to address the water quality impairments in the Laguna. I wanna thank Director Burke and Mr. McNeil and other city staff. When they first came to us and proposed this approach, we were all in, we were really, really grateful. And so we've worked closely with city staff in developing the scope of work that's included in the service agreement. And I'm really confident that the process that's described in with the task force can inform the development of clear, effective and scientifically supported regulatory requirements. My agency is committed to continue to be actively engaged as part of the core team that Mr. McNeil described. And we look forward to continuing this close collaboration to advise the task force through this process. The regional board won't itself have a seat on the task force as kind of a voting as a vote. So ultimately we're there to support and then take the recommendations that come out from the task force and use those recommendations for what we then bring to our board. And I'm really confident that the future regulations that are developed to improve the water quality of the Laguna watershed, whether those regulations are that more standard TMDL approach, or the more frankly, more flexible approach of the advanced restoration plan, or an action plan that's adopted into our basin plan, all of those three options, regardless of which we take, I believe will be more effective at the end of the day through the process and the recommendations that will come out of this, the task force. So again, thank you very much. And we're really grateful for this opportunity to comment.

Thank you very much for your comments and thank you for being here. I have to tell you that in my 23 years on this board, I don't know that anybody from the regional board has ever appeared in front of our board. So it's nice to have you here.

I'm glad to be here. I'm really committed to the partnership.

Great, thank you. Any other Board Member questions or comments or any public comments? If not, we have a motion that was made by Board Member Meisler. May I have a second? I'll second. Second by Board Member Wright. May we have a roll call vote, please?

Board Member Wright?

Aye.

Board Member Meisler? Aye. Board Member DeWitt absent. Board Member Badenfort? Aye. Vice Chair Arnone?

Aye.

Chair Galvin?

Aye.

Let the record reflect. This item passes unanimously with Board Member DeWitt absent.

Thank you again, everyone. We'll now move to item 8.2. Director Burke?

Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. Item 8.2 is our annual stormwater enterprise charges. And, oops, sorry, Nick Lynn. Let's see, oh my gosh, I'm having... Our research and program coordinator will be presenting, sorry.

Welcome, Mr. Lin.

Thank you, Director Burke, and good afternoon, Chair Gallivan and members of the board. My name is Nick Lin, and I am a research and program coordinator with the Stormwater and Creeks team. I am pleased to be here today to discuss the annual Stormwater Enterprise charges. As you may recall in past presentations to the board, unlike other divisions in Santa Rosa Water, the Stormwater and Creeks team is not funded by the Water Enterprise. We are funded primarily by the Stormwater Enterprise Fund, or what is sometimes referred to as the Stormwater Assessment. Because of the upcoming annual City Council public hearing on the collection of stormwater assessment fees, I am here today to give a brief reminder of how the stormwater enterprise was established, what activities it funds, how charges are calculated and collected. The enterprise was established by City Council in 1996 as a long-term funding source to comply with stormwater regulations. Specifically, the city is required under the Federal Clean Water Act to obtain and comply with a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, or NPDES permit, and waste discharge requirements for discharges from the municipal separate storm sewer systems, or the MS4 permit. To meet these requirements, the council added Title 16 to city code in 1996, which created Stormwater Enterprise and Utility, or the Stormwater Enterprise, as an agency of the city. Doing this ensured a stable funding source to comply with permit requirements and gave the city resources to control and reduce flooding, property damage, erosion, and stormwater quality degradation in the city. The fee funds implementation of the city's stormwater permit, as well as other activities to mitigate the impacts of pollution that stormwater carries into the storm drain system, and ultimately into the creeks and waterways. This includes creek restoration and stewardship, flood protection, public education, storm drain maintenance, and storm water quality testing. It does not provide funding to evaluate or upgrade the storm drain system. Title 16 also authorizes the City Council to prescribe and collect charges for services and facilities of the enterprise, which I will talk about next. The stormwater enterprise charges are levied against each parcel of real property in the city and are charged annually. These are calculated using a formula outlined in resolution 22880 adopted in 1996 and are based on the equivalent residential unit or ERU. The ERU considers a parcel size, amount of impervious surface and its land use. The ERU is adjusted each year based on the consumer price index. This year, the cost per ERU is $43.52, which is also the average fee for a parcel in the city. This represents a 2.49% increase from last year in line with the consumer price index. The ERU fee amount was adopted by city council on June 16th as part of the city's budget process. Charges for each parcel in town are provided on the annual stormwater enterprise charges reports, which is made available to the public online and in person at city manager's office. For reference, the original charge in 1996 was $19. So the charge has gone up by approximately 82 cents per year since 1996. Again, in line with the consumer price index. So how do we collect the fees? In order to simplify the payment process for property owners and minimize collection expenses, the charges are collected on the Sonoma County property tax roll on the city's behalf. As shown on the slide, the charges appear on parcel owners' property tax bills and is collected by the County of Sonoma on behalf of the city. The charges have been collected annually on the tax roll since they were established in 1996. Every year, Santa Rosa City Council holds a public hearing to one, adopt the stormwater enterprise charge report that shows the amount of the fee for each parcel, two, approves placing the charges on the county property tax roll for collection, and three, allow the public the opportunity to protest the method of collecting the charges. They can't protest the fee amount since that was approved during the budget process in June, just how the fees are collected. Property owners may protest the placement of the stormwater enterprise charges on the Sonoma County property tax rule by either speaking at the public hearing or submitting a written protest. If the county finds that protest is made by a majority of parcel owners of properties in the report, the report shall not be adopted and the charges shall be collected separately from the tax rule. The public hearing on the Stormwater Enterprise Charge Collection is scheduled for this month on August 18th at City Council. A notice for the public hearing was published in the Press Democrat on July 31st and will be published again on August 7th. A hard copy of the Stormwater Enterprise Charge Report is available at the City Manager's Office and online. Therefore, it is recommended by the Water Department that the Board, by motion, recommend that City Council move forward with a public hearing on August 18th, 2026 to adopt by two-third vote the Stormwater Enterprise Charge Report and approve placement of the Stormwater Enterprise Charges on the Sonoma County property tax roll to be collected by the Sonoma County Auditor-Controller-Treasurer-Tax Collector at the same time and in the same manner as Sonoma County property taxes are collected, unless those charges do not meet the county minimum of $10 and our parcel owner contact information is known to be incorrect. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

Thank you. I'll open up now for any board member questions or comments. Seeing none, we'll open it up for public comments on item number 8.2. Again, please state your name for the record and wait for the timer.

Hi, Fred Ollebach again. This meeting's in the middle of the day and I took off work to come here so I might as well say something for my troubles. I live in a mobile home park and there's 170 units in the park and Mobile homes aren't listed on property tax. I think they're state motor vehicles. So I'm curious how this gets billed out to, does it get billed out to the mobile home park owner and then that's a straight pass through or how to on my monthly bill or how do I see this as a mobile home park resident? I'm a resident of the city. I own a mobile home. but I'm sort of like a second class citizen when it comes to being billed or seeing the actual costs of city services, because I'm one step removed. So I'm just curious if there's any way to clarify how mobile home park residents would see this charge.

Thank you, Mr. Lin.

each parcel owner again this is just kind of general information not specific necessarily to this individual but each parcel owner is responsible for the stormwater assessment fee so the owner of the parcel that the mobile homes would be placed on would generally be the person or persons responsible for the stormwater assessment fee. Again, that would be calculated if this goes through on the Sonoma County property tax bill and would be reflected on the property tax bill that is received by that parcel owner. Again, for more individual cases, we can look at that specifically, but that's just the general case for each parcel.

Thank you. So you should probably check with the owners of the mobile home park to determine what they're being billed and how they're passing it through to the residents. Okay, any other public comments? If not, I'll entertain a motion.

I'll move that the Board, by motion, recommend that the City Council, following a public hearing on August 18th, 2026, adopt by two-thirds vote the stormwater enterprise charge report and approve placement of the stormwater enterprise charges on the Sonoma County property tax roll for collection by Sonoma County auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collector, at the same time and in the same manner as the Sonoma County property taxes are collected unless those charges do not meet the county's minimum of $10 and or parcel owner contract information is known to be incorrect. That's quite a recommendation.

Second.

We have a motion by Board Member Wright, seconded by Board Member Badenfort. May we please have a roll call vote?

Board Member Wright.

Aye.

Board Member Misler. Aye. Board Member DeWitt absent. Board Member Badenport. Aye. Vice Chair Arnone.

Aye.

Chair Galvin.

Aye.

For the record reflect, this item passes unanimously with Board Member DeWitt absent.

Thank you. We'll move now to item number nine, which is public comments on non-agenda matters. If you wish to make a comment on a non-agenda matter, please move to the podium, state your name, and wait for the timer.

Hi, Fred Ahlebach again. Did you miss me since my last comment? I had a question ask for a little help from the expertise in the room. I'm aware that the city is absorbing the neighborhood in Moreland area, Moreland residential area between the Smart Tracks and Highway 101 and Bellevue and Todd Road. And that's the Eddie, the Robin way and Eddie absorption of the onto city water because they have PFAS and nitrate to higher readings. So that's happening. And so what I would like to find out is in Moreland, I believe there are some other small public systems that are on well water. And it's really difficult to find out who they are. And I don't have a lot of extra time. I'm a house painter. I have other things going on. It's very difficult to research that. So I was gonna ask if there's any expertise in the room that could help me find out in that particular area what other small water systems are and then, because I can't find out if their water has any bad readings unless I know who they are. so you can't do the research. And Peter Martin helped me out on some of the leads there. And I'm also curious about some of the mobile home parks that are in the Santa Rosa specific, South Santa Rosa specific plan area. There's seven mobile home parks that have wells, but I wasn't able to see if those mobile home parks were also on city water. So I'd like to find out if the mobile home parks that have wells are also on city water, because I'm curious what the readings on these people's water is, if I could research that, if they were in any way equivalent to the Robin Way or Eddy area, because I think it took them nine years to get on city water after they first started to see the bad readings. And so just curious if anybody could help me out to find out those two questions of what small water systems are in that Moreland residential area between Smart and 101 and Bellevue and Robles. Sorry, I said Todd, but the residential is Robles and also if the mobile home parks in the unincorporated area, but that is in the South Santa Rosa specific plan, if those are on city water or any type of municipal water, or if they're just on wells.

Thank you, I'm sure between Director Burke and Deputy Director Martin, they can hopefully point you in the right direction. I will tell you that several of the mobile home parks that you're talking about in the south area are either in the process or have been converted to city water. through a state program where we actually hook them up and then the state reimburses. So we're trying to clean up those as best we can. But as far as which ones have actual wells on them currently, I can't tell you. But hopefully Deputy Director Martin or Director Burke can point you in the right direction. Any other public comments? All right, we'll move now to, we have no referrals. We have no written communications. I don't believe we have any subcommittee reports. Do we have any board member reports? Nope. Director's report, Director Burke.

Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the board. I have two things to update you on. First, I want to just give you an update on where we are with our work to procure some more debt financing. So as the board may recall, as part of our last rate schedule that was adopted in 2025 for fiscal years 25 through 2930. we had included the potential to issue debt of 35 million to fund our electrical infrastructure replacement project at the laguna treatment plant we have started that process and so we are working very closely with water staff finance staff and our outside consulting team to get the bond sale ready to go. We anticipate bringing the proposed bond issuance to the board for consideration of a recommendation to Council at your meeting on October 1st. And then we are tentatively planning to bring an item to Council at their meeting on October 27th. If everything goes to plan, we anticipate that the bond transaction would be closing later this year, and we would be issuing a construction contract around that same time. So just wanted to let you know that we are making progress on that, and that will be coming before you before too long. And then the second item, I was wanting to provide an update to the board on our Mike Hauser STEM Academy, and we have a presentation that we plan to share. So every year Santa Rosa has participated, Santa Rosa Water has participated in the Mike Hauser STEM Academy. This year we hosted three days of the academy at the end of June. So we had eighth grade students from partnering school districts attending sessions at both the Laguna Treatment Plant and the Utilities Field Office. Students were introduced to diverse work environments and were engaged in interactive hands-on learning guided by our city staff of technical experts. We are honored to participate in the academy. It's always a great time every year and we hope that it motivates students to pursue higher education and careers in the fields of STEM and in particular water. and just thought we'd share some of the pictures and some of the thank you notes that we received from the kids and wanted to say a special thank you to the staff that led the sessions and inspired the students. And that is my director's report. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Any questions for the director? All right, we'll open it up for public comment on item number 14. If you wish to make a public comment, please move to the podium. I see no one rise. That'll take care of item number 14. That concludes our agenda for this afternoon, so we are adjourned. We'll see you in the two weeks. We're adjourned.