City Council - Regular Meeting

Welcome to the Laramie City Council quarterly Town Hall, we've called it a number of things. So we finally settled on Town Hall, which I like that. And so tonight we are going to look at briefly two issues to begin our discussion. One would be who's going first? Well, I'll just say what they are and we'll see who goes first. So, we have one presentation about the city's water usage and talking about the fact that it's down almost a third and describing how did we get there. And our second will be to talk about the fifth penny tax. And that is already in early voting and comes up for voting day

Councilor O'Doherty. So water usage went up. Is that what you... Yeah.

Is that water usage... Total. By the city of Laramie or by...

Another dumb question. It wouldn't be produced if it wasn't being demanded, right?

Councillor Shumway. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Bauman, just a couple of quick questions, just probably for general knowledge. The quality of water that comes out of the river, I would assume, is not as high a quality as what we get out of the Casper aquifers. That's my first question. And the second one that I have is if we have a high demand on the Casper aquifer, has historically it shown that it does not recharge well unless there's heavy snowfall?

Well, before you do that, let me ask you this. You say treat, it's easier to treat. Do we treat them the same with like chlorine? Is the amount of chlorine that we use on ground the same as on surface?

My second question, you've forgotten it, so have I. Okay, sounds good.

Thank you, Mr. Baumann. Councillor Lockhart.

councillor o'doherty yeah i remembered uh we were i my understanding is that you were trying to ease up on the aquifer so that uh the other people depending on the aquifer outside the city wouldn't have their wells go down is that did that have anything to do with being nice to people in the county

in in preparation for that thank you uh counselor shumway the question that we both forgot was do we have historical record historical records of the recharge of the casper aquifer is it have we ever had a point where it's dropped and then not re rebounded or recharged

Your answer is the same as I get from all the experts. Nobody knows. For some reason, it never has been an issue, but nobody knows whether it's recharged with snowpack, rainfall, or if there's 20 billion gallons of water or 1 billion. Nobody knows.

This this increased it wasn't there a big water break this summer on the south end of town where a whole lot of water was lost not city not on city property but on private property so could that account for some of the increase because that was this water period, right?

That was near the UW Transportation Center.

It was like a million gallons a day or something going on.

Okay. Greg, thank you. Yes, thank you. I appreciate that.

Yeah, I was going to see, is there any public comment or questions or anything on this topic? All right. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, so our next topic before we continue will be related to the fifth penny. And what we're doing right now is just presenting very briefly some updates. This is not a work session. But our next brief topic is the fifth penny. Would that be...

Okay, counselors, do you have any questions for ACM Wade? We'll try out a bunch of different ones.

See, that would be ACMA. Yeah. ACMA Wade.

I've been... somewhat surprised by how interested people are, how positive they are, and how educated they are about what this is about. And I know some of us have been out there at public meetings and handing stuff out and trying to provide good information so people can make informed decisions. Yes, Councillor Bollinger.

Thank you. Anything else? All right. Is there any public discussion on this topic? Very good. Is there any public discussion on any other topic? Okay. Well then, I say we're adjourned.