City Council - Special Meeting

Good afternoon, today is October 20th and this is the City of Prescott's special study session. Please roll call.

Well, thank you very much, Senator. We really appreciate you coming up and speaking to us today. My pleasure, ma'am. And I want to thank you for advocating for rural Arizona because, as you know, sometimes we do get forgotten up here. But I think that with your help, the state legislature will start paying more attention to us because we are growing and we are thriving and we are interestingly working together and supporting each other so that we can have a bigger voice down in Phoenix. So you mentioned roads. Roads are so important for us out here in rural Arizona and we have so many in disre

Yeah. And also, thank you for supporting the trades and the workforce. We have Yavapai College here, and they are our pipeline for the trades and our workforce here in Yavapai County, because it's so important. Not everybody wants to go to college, and as you say, take on six-figure debt, and then they come out with a degree, and there's no market, and they'll never repay that debt.

Yes, I agree 100%. I don't know if you got a copy of our legislative platform. We just got a copy of this and I need to update it for you. Speaking of updating, on the bottom of it, we talk about funding priorities and they're in order of importance. NUMBER ONE, PHASE TWO OF THE NORTHEAST AIRPORT RAMP FOR WILDFIRE HELICOPTERS, CARGO, AND INNOVATION FOR THREE MILLION. THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT PROJECT. IT WILL BE IMPORTANT TO OUR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, IT'S IMPORTANT BECAUSE WE ARE A FIRE CENTER FOR ALL OF NORTHERN ARIZONA. SO IT'S IMPORTANT THAT WE HAVE THE CAPACITY to incr

I just wanted to comment. If you look at the map, we've already got a FedEx distribution center there, and we could work with them through the fence and accommodate them in the future. Any comments from council members? Mr. Gamboge.

Senator Fincham? Yes, sir. As a Caterpillar retiree, I want to thank you for mentioning a Caterpillar D9 and not a Komatsu. It's the truth, sir. Mike Rowe worked with us at Caterpillar. Now I have to confess, I do have a college degree in engineering, but I think even Mike Rowe would ask this question. We recently lost some water rights on the Colorado And I've heard that Arizona is thinking of building a pipe for a desalinization plant, which I would guess would be hundreds of miles, where California could run 100 yards into the ocean and desalinize. I'd like things to consider. cutting a dea

Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Senator, a couple things. I'm really uneasy about the idea of voting machine fraud. And I'm wondering what is being done about preventing that in the future. And, you know, there was an incident recently, if I understood it correctly, where Maricopa employees were inserting flash drives in voting machines after hours, and that makes me really uneasy. So that's a concern.

All right. Thank you. I got a couple more that are probably pretty brief. On the railroad you mentioned, the railroad extension, is that a right-of-way issue or is there a right-of-way there for it?

All right, thank you. And let me leave you with this. I'm a graduate mechanical engineer, four-year degree. And among the things I had to learn back in the 60s was I had to learn to run a horizontal lathe and a vertical milling machine and weld with gas and weld with inert gas. as a undergraduate at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. And their motto is learn by doing. So it's not totally lost, I don't think. Thank you.

Lois? Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Senator Fincham, for your advocacy and help on behalf of the city of Prescott. I particularly appreciate the money that you've secured for us, especially as you see our airport aviation economic development plan coming to life, and the future plans that we have are big. The other thing, though, I do want to bring to your attention, and it goes with what you said about the education needs, We are also super interested in advanced manufacturing technology and healthcare. Healthcare continues to rate, we just are fielding right now another survey, biannual surve

I see an editorial cartoon in the future.

Thank you. One other point, and I don't know if this new infrastructure funding mechanism might be of value, but I did have a chance last week to touch base with Congressman Crane and also mentioned it to Congressman Gosar's office. We received two weeks ago an update of what we would need to do here in the city of Prescott to remediate PFAS in time for the current federal government. I don't know if you got a chance to see that presentation. If not, I'll send it to you as well. But it was just little old Prescott. It was about a $70 million hit over the next two to three years. Totally not fu

Congressman Crane was kind of totally caught off guard. And I said, now think about everybody in CD2. How are they going to pay for this if the lawsuits are only giving us, you know, a sixteenth or eight more or less of what we need? Right.

Understood. I think this council is very pro the rodeo. It was a 7-0 vote to approve the master plan. So we will be working with them and trying to find win-win solutions. It is part of our economic development plan to maximize TPT. So thank you.

Speaking of the rodeo, I want to thank you for saving the $15.3 million from being returned to the state treasury with your BIRB, your budget reconciliation bill.

Mary? Thank you, Mary Pro Tem. You stole my thunder. Here, I just wanted to bring up one of my pet peeves, which is unfunded mandates. Speaking of the PFAS remediation, when that presentation was provided to us a couple of weeks ago now, yeah, the numbers were eye-popping, and I don't know and maybe you can clue us in whether or not there's discussion down Maricopa way, as far as helping rurals deal with that unfunded mandate that came when the federal EPA dropped the parts per million, billion, I don't remember which it is. Is it million? Okay, when they dropped the- Four per trillion. I kind

Okay, whatever it is, the feds, the EPA dropped it down very significantly and have left municipalities that have a water system on the hook. And so I don't know if there's any discussion down in the legislature as to whether or not to help the rurals, the small budgeted cities and towns that are staring at eye crushing numbers.

I appreciate that. I know Prescott is not standing out in the field alone on this issue. There are many small budgeted municipalities and cities and towns that are going to be facing the same issue. Let me bring up one other thing, which is I really appreciated the comments you made earlier about your efforts to pull funding specific into the rural areas as opposed to the big pot of money down to the south of us that tends to get spent down to the south of us. So I appreciate that, and I'm... I would like to hear your thoughts as to whether or not that same kind of concern for the rural's smal

APPRECIATE THAT. THANK YOU. AND MR. GAMBOGGI, DID YOU HAVE SOME COMMENTS?

SENATOR FINCHAM, I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT PFAS CAME FROM FIREFIGHTING FOAM AND COUNCILMAN GARRING'S SHIRTS. BUT I'VE SINCE LEARNED THERE'S A NUMBER OF SOURCES FOR PFAS. AND WE'RE TREATING THE END OF THE PIPE. Every septic tank in Yavapai County is leaching PFAS into the ground. I beg your pardon? Every septic tank. Because people use PFAS, it goes into the sewer system. So the sewer system may be polluting our wells. So I think it's important that we take a look at how do we cut it off at the pass instead of just treating it at the end.

Cosmetics. Cosmetics. Councilman Gehring shirts, dental floss, it's all over. Pots and pans.

Okay, thank you. Is there any more comments? Do we have some public?

I got one more question. Oh, excuse me. This is my favorite question. So how do you grow vegetables without dirt?

Lois? I would love if at some point you have an hour or two in the next few months for us to be able to give and our staff to give you the work we're in process on on our long-term water management plan. And I think that would be helpful to you as you're hearing legislature emerging or negotiations emerging to understand where we're starting to work our way towards and the amount of really great engineering and science that has gone into, you know, and projections, I should say, of how much water do we have left in the city of Prescott for all of our plants. Yeah. moving forward. So I think th

Okay, if there's nothing more, Mr. Gehring.

Thank you, Mayor. Senator, it occurred to me to relate an experience I had in my early years as a water engineer. The State of California Department of Health Services suddenly reduced the maximum allowable concentration of nitrates in drinking water from 90 to 45 milligrams per liter. Part of the solution was that the municipalities did blending, which we do here in Prescott to the best of our ability, but also the Department of Health Services allowed temporary waivers for the various municipalities to be able to gradually spend the money required to meet that standard. So something to think

All right. Okay, thank you. If that's it, I want to thank you very much and we'll move to any public comments if we have them. Okay. All righty. If there's nothing more, okay. I think this meeting is adjourned.