City Council - Special Meeting

I call this special session tonight to New Braunfels City Council to order. Today's date is July 20 and the time is five o'clock. And we requested all cell phones and other devices be on solid except for emergency personnel. Madam Secretary Gale, can you please call roll?

Yes, sir. Council Member Carter? Here. Council Member Capizzi?

Here.

Council Member Edwards is not present at this time. Council Member Spradley?

Here.

Council Member Lebowski? Here. Council Member Shaw? Here. And Mayor French?

I am present and we have a quorum. Right now we're going to have the invocation followed by the two pledges of allegiance and council member Carter will lead in the invocation.

lakes and renewed water for our community. Tonight, we ask you for your wisdom, peace, and discernment to rest upon this council. Calm anxiety and fears guide our conversations and help us approach every decision with humility, integrity, and respect. May those entrusted with leadership faithfully steward the resources of our taxpayers, ensuring accountability, transparency, and sound governance for the benefit of every resident. We give thanks for the men and women of our police and fire departments whose courage, sacrifice, and dedication protect us each day. Bless them and their families, keep them safe, and strengthen them in their service. Amen.

We're going to lead into the workshop, the presentation. I guess we're going to start off with item A. And presentation amending chapter 130, article 4, divisions 3, 5, 6, and 7 of the city's code of ordinances to adjust residential and landscape irrigation drought surcharges, revised drought stage destinations. Is that what it is? Oh, distinction, sorry, my hand triggers. Clarify definitions and related provisions, repeal conflicting ordinances, provide a savings clause, and establish an effective date. Brian Kelso, go ahead.

Thank you all for having us tonight. We are presenting on the topic of the drought contingency plan. We're proposing some modifications just for some history. New Braunfels has had a drought contingency plan dating back to 2006. It's been modified probably a half dozen times since then, and we feel it is necessary to make a few more tweaks to it to make it even better. So I'm gonna start the presentation off and then you're gonna hear from Andrew Cummings. He's our Director of Customer Solutions and really the technical expert whenever it comes to this topic. But I wanna preface things, just kinda center us on why we're talking about these things today. And so the proposal, it has been in the works for about a year, year and a half actually. And it has since gone through our community advisory panel and the MBU Board of Trustees. We've gotten their feedback, made modifications, and now we're here before you today to get your feedback. And at a very high level, the proposal that you're gonna hear details about provides clear guidance to our customers. It protects essential users, does not impact those that are just using water in their household for essential uses. And it also creates alignment, creates alignment with the Edwards Aquifer Authority and their staging. I figured we'd lead with this. I wanna make sure that everybody knows that New Braunfels is not running out of water. Based on our most recent water resource plan that was conducted in 2025, the results, the engineers, their results showed that we have sufficient water supplies to last us through 2075, which is our planning period, 50 years and beyond. In our approach to date, you've noticed over the last three years, even though the aquifer has gotten down to pretty low levels, 626 I believe is the lowest it was, over the last three years. We've stayed in stage two and we've done that intentionally because we've acquired a significant amount of water resources. We feel that it's appropriate to not move to a more restrictive stage such as stage three. Stage three requires once every two week watering. And so whenever you go to that stage, we've witnessed historically at MBU that It creates scarcity, just like toilet paper during COVID. If you create scarcity, folks tend to hoard it or use more of it than necessary. And what that does to MBU is it creates higher demands on our system, requires higher pumping pressures, and as a result, creates more water loss in our system. And on the customer side, if they're irrigating twice as much as they would otherwise, you have water running down the street, it's just not an efficient way to manage the resource. It's not a good conservation policy. And in fact, our neighbors to the south, San Antonio Water System, have pivoted from once every other week watering for those same reasons. And we're planning or we're proposing to follow suit. And so we've stayed in stage two. Customers have retained flexibility to use water resources that their dollars have secured, and we've intentionally avoided unnecessary restrictions for our customers. And we've also shifted our philosophy as far as enforcement goes. Whenever I took over as CEO in 2023, one of the first things that I asked the team to do is to stop our drought patrols. We don't need to be the water police. Instead, I wanted the teams to come alongside our customers and use education in place of enforcement. And so far it's worked out. Our water demands year over year are trending flat and actually down. Folks are using less water and practicing good conservation without us driving around, taking pictures of violators and sending them fines. And so we have found education to be an effective resource in lieu of enforcement. And again, why are we updating the plan now? Right now we feel the triggers are the drought staging, it's unclear to customers. When we're staying in stage two, even though the signs on surface show that we are in a more severe drought, we're looking to modify that and change that so that we can advance in stages but not have more restrictions. And then it also lacked clarity and regional alignment. Like I said, with the EAA, we wanna stay in lockstep with where the Edwards staging is. And then last slide for me before I turn it over to Andrew. I wanna be clear of what this is and what it's not. What it is, it's simpler rules, more consistent standards, aligned drought triggers for complex conditions, conservation signal to discourage excessive outdoor irrigation, and protecting essential household water users that use 6,000 gallons a month or less. What it's not is a tightening of restrictions, an expansion of enforcement, a declaration of scarcity or a response to a supply failure, a penalty for essential indoor use, or an excess revenue generation strategy. What you're gonna hear in just a bit from Andrew is the new proposal includes an increase in our drought surcharges for stages three and four. Any excess revenue that's generated through those surcharges will be utilized for customer utility bill assistance program. So it's not gonna go towards any other projects or towards pay raise for me or anything of that nature. It's gonna be directed to help those that are truly in need in this community. And so with that, I'll pass it off to Andrew and I'll be back up here in just a bit to answer any questions you might have.

Good afternoon, Council. My name is Andrew Cummings. I'm the Director of Customer Solutions for New Braunfels Utilities. We manage our conservation department as well as our customer service departments. Before I really get into the meat and potatoes of this, I just wanted to kind of frame up what it is we're talking about today. We've mentioned the Drought Contingency Plan. This is one of two plans that we use to manage drought in our area. We have the Drought Contingency Plan, which is exactly that. It's only contingent upon drought. If we're not in a drought, if we have a good rainy year, it's not necessarily utilized. We have another plan you may have heard of is our water conservation plan. Both of these are locked tandem, but the water conservation plan is a year-round, multi-year commitment for water conservation projects projects and programs that we hope to utilize. So two different plans, but two different goals as well. They are hinged at the hip there. This also is not a holistic revision. This is just an amendment. We're tweaking things here and there to kind of adjust for 2026 water use. This is a five-year plan. The last that we submitted to our state agencies is 2024. We submitted as an unchanged plan. Prior to that was 2019 when we did do some holistic revisions, not completely, but enough to where I would say it's more holistic than just an amendment. And then this, Ryan had mentioned the drought contingency plan being on file for a number of years. 2006 is when the current format appeared. Prior to that, our drought management tools kind of initiated around the mid-90s with the evolution of the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan. It does have some history. This is nothing new. This is just an interim amendment. Let me make sure I can use this, all right. So I'd like to start with some history and project background. Like I said, this is just an amendment. We're not really dismantling the entire plan. We're really just focusing on three areas, is we're gonna revise our trigger levels and events, update our drought surcharge, hadn't been updated since 2014, so long term, we want to align that with current rates, and then updates to the customer response for drought stages zero through five. All of those things, They can be big in nature, but when you look at the entire ordinance, this is just an amendment. The project intent, like Ryan had mentioned, we really wanted to provide that clear and easy understanding of the document. If you've ever read anything in ordinance, sometimes it takes some legal guidance to understand what it's really saying. We've trued up some things in there to make it a little bit more readable for just your average consumer. I know I have difficulty in reading some of those legalese documents in the ordinance. We've also attempted the alignment with our neighboring entities. Ryan had mentioned Edwards-Ockford. That's the primary entity that we're trying to align with, but we do have neighbors up and down I-35 who do have shared media markets. So you may watch news that comes out of San Antonio or Austin that talks about SAWS has gone into stage two, Austin has gone into stage zero. That doesn't necessarily mean we have. So we've tried to look at that and how we operate and see are there consistencies that we can follow to where it's a little bit easier for a customer to understand. And then we're balancing that customer lifestyle with drought and the empowerment of the voluntary conservation. We talked about the drought surcharge, easing the every other week watering into a once week watering for infrastructure considerations. So that's a part of that. Protecting essential water users I think was maybe the biggest thing for us when we looked at a surcharge. We didn't wanna impact anybody who actually doesn't water their grass, didn't have an irrigation system, things of that nature. So those folks are gonna be completely unaffected by this change. And then also preparing for a formal drought contingency plan revision in 2029 if needed. These changes that we're doing right now may suffice for our submission in 2029. We'll be able to gauge and see if we have any effect on our overall water use, but 2029 would be when we need to resubmit for our formal submission through state agencies. All right. A little bit more context around drought right now. I think it's very much in the news. We've had significant rain here the past week. But to kind of give you a little bit broader scope of what we're looking at as far as drought, I've grabbed the three biggest droughts of record and put them in order. And you can see that big orange arrow pointing at our current drought, the 2020s drought. I don't know if it'll be called that, but that's what I'm calling it today. but that is after the drought of record in the 50s. You can see that was a seven-year drought. Our Edwards-Ockford dropped to 612 feet above mean sea level, and the Comal River ran dry from June to November in 1956, which would have been an interesting concept today, seeing a Comal River being essentially a Comal dry creek bed is what that would have looked like. Currently, we haven't been as low as the drought of record, so the intensity really isn't matching the drought of record in the 50s, but we have got down to 623, that was in May of 2025, and we currently have the hottest year on record for the same time period. That's 3 1⁄2 degrees over the state average. You talk to your neighbors and it felt a lot hotter than that, but the official number was 3 1⁄2 degrees over average. The one that's also fairly recent among a lot of people's memories is the drought of the 2010s, so 2010 to 2015. The aquifer didn't get as low, only 625, so just a two feet difference, but it does have the driest year on record. So we're kind of splitting hairs at this point, who has the hottest, who has the driest, what drought was the longest and most intense. This is just some really basic information to kind of understand. But I wanted to go a step further. What you're looking at right now is the Palmer Drought Severity Index. This is an image that kind of gives you an idea of the intensity and duration of drought. So there's a middle line that goes across that. That would be considered an average year. We don't really have very many average years. That's not what this graph is intended for. But as the chart sinks below in the brown, that indicates years of drought. This is a combination of air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, a few different things that they'll put together and make this chart. And then the green is gonna be our rainy and cooler years. If you can see from since 2011, we haven't had many of the green years as we all, I think, would have hoped to see. But this kind of gives you an idea. So I've also overlaid the droughts on this graph. So that drought one, drought of record in the 50s, you can see how it sunk there and stayed for about seven years or so. Also at the top, the drought, or I'm sorry, the bottom, the drought number three, the 2010 drought, It did eclipse the drought of record in severity. You can see that that valley is just a little bit lower than the one of drought of record and then brings you to our current drought. It's 2019 to date. I say 2019 even though I call it a 2020s drought. Year 2021 was somewhat of a combo breaker. You can see that. Little peak of green right there. We did have a little bit of reprieve early on in this particular drought. We had a cooler year and a wetter year. I don't think that year we actually officially hit 100 degrees, which would be nice this year. I don't think that we're gonna meet that, unfortunately. But if you remove that green, you can see the duration and the severity of this drought. This is number two because we're knocking on the door of the duration, comparatively so to the drought of record. So if we get another few years of this, we will be in first place as far as worst drought, which is not something that we like to brag about. Hopefully this rain will continue.

So does this really show feast or famine, basically? Pretty much, yes, sir. And pretty much every single drought always ends in a flood, unfortunately, for some folks.

Yeah, there's some science behind that. We won't get into too much of that. I don't want to. Get anybody nervous. We're seeing a lot of rain this year, which is great. Hopefully we can get it not all in one day or a couple of days would be nice. Yes, sir. Okay, and then project date or project progress to date. You can see we've been very busy. Started back in May of 2024. We submitted our unchanged DCP to the TCEQ, which is Texas Commission Environmental Quality. We started the work on this revision December of 2024 and lasted through May of 2025. We had an internal working group. We wanted to see what can we do, what should we do, what will have the most effect for water use or water capacity and the least effect for your average customer. In August of 2025, we previewed this project to our MBU board just to kind of give them a heads up, hey, this is what we're doing. We spent the next few months with our community advisory panel, getting their feedback and input to try to guide us through this project. In January and February of 2026 this year, we presented to our board and had the ultimate approval, which is why we're here today to present the same to you folks. Okay, I've broken this out into three different sections, so there are some title slides so we don't get lost, but these are the proposed changes. First I'd like to cover is the trigger levels and events. What these slides going forward will show you is there's black text, that's what's currently in the ordinance, this is summarized by the way, and then the green text are our proposed additions or changes. This particular slide shows you our current drought status trigger levels. We have the Edwards J17 Monitoring Well and the Comel River Flow. Both of these are authorized by the Edwards Aquifer Authority, so two different numbers that lead to the same effect. Generally, They're fairly locked hand in hand. If the Edwards moves into a stage, the Comal River is right on its heels. We don't see very often that either one of those will be much different. After big rains, the Comal River, the spring flow is much more dynamic, but it's generally only for a few days. The Edwards is more static. So Edwards is primarily where we look for those numbers in looking to either move in or out of stage with the Comal River just on its heels. What we've added here, if we look at the columns to the right, stage four and stage five. We've always had stage four and stage five in our drought contingency plan. However, it's been more of an alluded to kind of a thing. I have spoken to a few people that were there when the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan was established and what I've heard is stage four and stage five was, that's kind of an ugly thing. Hopefully we never get there. Well, we're here. Another record drought has kind of forced our hand to really just call it out. It's always been there, but now we're just making it very explicit. The MBU reduction targets, the row on the very bottom, this is an entirely new addition. What this is, those numbers are not arbitrary. When we're looking at the amount of water that we need to conserve per the Edwards Aquifer, those numbers are in 20, 30, 40, 44%. If the Edwards offer were to go into stage five, which is a 44% reduction, we could not reasonably expect the community to reduce water use 44%. Really, this is a piece of a pie. So if you look at our water portfolio, we have a number of different water sources. We're just looking at that piece of the Edwards and judging, all right, if the Edwards is asking us for a 20% reduction in stage one, If we compare that to the rest of our water, that really just equates out to a 7%. So that's how that math works there. Not to get into a whole lot of detail there, we'd all go to sleep with the math. But this is kind of where we are. Nothing new, really just breaking it out and adding those reduction targets so we can justify going in and out of stage and meet those conservation goals, which are becoming tighter at the state. The next slide here, this is an expansion on the trigger levels. This is our trigger events. So these aren't tied necessarily with any levels. So if Edwards Aquifer were to declare or not declare a certain stage, there are other extraneous factors that we would look at to say we may need to go in or out of a stage. So starting at the top, the drought conditions, we always think about, oh, is it raining or is it not raining? That's just one piece of drought. We look at a number of different meteorological conditions to determine if we are in a drought. Unfortunately, that's all over the place. I was Googling earlier what defines drought, and depending on who you talk to, it's completely different. So we've left that in there, and we've expanded on what was already there. So everything in green, already there, we're just making individual bullets. So water quality. If water quality turns out to be unsafe for any condition, there's a lot of times where we'll have really big rains. Our wells are in the ground. On occasion in the past 10 to 20 years, we've had influence on rainwater infiltration. That is just a potential, right? Supply availability, we have a number of different water resources. If there were ever an issue with one of those water resources, we could look at that and say we just lost a portion of our water supply, we need to go and stage. It would be the equivalent if the rain stopped as if we were to lose a supply potentially. Now that's a very stretch, that's a very big stretch that that could happen. but we wanted to call that out specifically. And then infrastructure issues. The analogy that I've had a little bit of fun with is you can imagine somebody backs into a water tower with a golf cart and knocks it over. Well, that's an infrastructure issue, but really we're talking about a mainline rupture that would lose pressure in a certain part of town, that kind of a thing. And then other considerations. This is really just kind of a catch-all. If anything comes up that we did not predict in this verbiage, we would still have the option to move in and out of stage. It's also important to note that with this, there is flexibility not to call broad stage. So let's say if that golf cart example, right? If it's just one part of town that's affected, but every other part of town is unaffected, we could call stage just for that one section of town until we get things back up. So it is modular in nature. Okay, moving on to the next topic is our drought surcharge. So this is a little bit more in the weeds. We've had a drought surcharge since 2014. This isn't anything new, we just not updated it since. Now what has happened since 2014 is we've had a number of rate increases, but mainly we've changed how we bill for water by reducing those tiers and breaking them out to where we have more tiers now at lesser amounts. But really, the intent for this drought surcharge is to maintain that financial stability. We go into a drought, the way water is purchased is we purchase it ahead of time, so we were paid for it. If we're asked or mandated by one of these regulatory agencies to reduce pumping amounts, which is conservation, this surcharge is intended to fill in that gap right there, so it's not impacting the entire community. And the way we built it out is it really does focus on high volume irrigators in town. It'll also reduce our landscape watering while safeguarding those essential water users. So we're not intending for this surcharge to be applicable to anybody who just uses water to clean, cook, bathe with in their own home, and they don't have anything to do with their lawns. That is definitely something that we've made sure to keep at the forefront of this particular proposal. We also wanna send a clear stage-based conservation pricing signal during the declared drought conditions. So as we move into drought, it's one thing to say we're in stage three or four, but not to have anything that increases with it, doesn't necessarily send a signal. So this sends a pricing signal during the most severe droughts. And then like Ryan had said, any kind of excess revenue collected with this surcharge will be redirected to go to affordability programs or conservation programs. If we can continue with any excess revenue to bolster those programs, it ultimately helps the community health at its whole. Okay, this is a little bit of a busy slide, but I want to really focus on the highlighted areas first. The surcharge is not applicable during stages zero through two. We are currently in two right now. The Edwards Aquifer is on a trajectory to potentially meet one here in the next couple of weeks with the infiltration, and now there's a storm in the Gulf that we're kind of keeping an eye on. If we hit one, it's the same thing. If we were to declare this right now, there would be no surcharge even with our current ordinance. This is not changing that. Also, the essential users below 6,000, we've been harping on that, really wanna emphasize that those folks will not be impacted by this. So getting that out of the way, looking at the tables, I have two tables to your left and to your right. If you look at the left, that's our current structure. Now, once again, the surcharge, only applicable through stages three through five, that's why only three through five are here, shows you the threshold that you would have to meet monthly, so 15,000 or 7,500, and a $1 or a $2 surcharge, depending on if you're in stage three or four. Stage five has N.A. on it. N.A. is because stage five is not necessarily indicated in our ordinance right now. that there are surcharges, but there is a legal interpretation we would just carry over stage four surcharges into stage five. So we wanted to address that as well. Looking at the proposed structure to your right, everything in green is new. So we have reduced the surcharge threshold from 15,000 to 12,000 and 7,500 to six. This is in line with our current water billing tiers. We made that change a few years ago just on irregular rates. This is truing up just a little bit of a loose end to make that, really to make that in alignment. This will help us with our billing system and it'll help once a customer does get a surcharge, it's easier to explain instead of having a completely separate rate table. The reason that we have two different thresholds is in the domestic use, we talk about that 6,000 gallons never being applicable. 6,000 gallons is also our average residential water use per month without an irrigation system. Anything over 6,000, it's implied that you do have an irrigation system. That's fairly common. Our ordinance really didn't start to enforce a separate meter until about 2019. So there's a lot of legacy homes that still have just a single meter with both a domestic system and an irrigation system behind it. So we've kind of cut the difference, multiplied that by two. So that's two times the monthly average, that 12,000 gallons. The irrigation is 6,000 gallons. That's consumptive use, meaning it's discretionary use and it's non-consumptive use. Non-consumptive means the water goes into your grass. We do not get it back in our treatment facility. That's a completely different topic, but that's why that threshold is lower at 6,000 gallons. As you go into three, four, and then five, you'll see that that threshold does cut down from four to five. That's intentional. Five is our worst case scenario. 6,000 gallons, we are still insulating essential users from having any kind of an impact with the surcharge. then the irrigation says one. One really just means any. Any water used on an irrigation meter will be assessed a surcharge. With the surcharges, you can see that we've increased it from $1 to $4.18 or $2 to $4.89. We're not unique to this. Saw's is probably the biggest local example of having a drought surcharge. Theirs is $10.37 per thousand gallons at the same threshold. So ours is still very conservative. We don't want to sticker shock anybody and we believe that this particular surcharge model will be pretty effective knowing where our average water use is compared to SAWS. SAWS does have a little bit higher water use in general than New Raffles does. So that's a very good thing. Now this chart, bear with me, it reads from left to right and then right to left. So first off, the bullets there, no surcharges for stages zero through two and essential use never affected. That indicates 73% of our customer base. You can see those two columns there, the zero to three and three to 6,000. Those are the indoor users. Those are the users that are not using irrigation system and are just using it just to live. Now, as we move over to the right, you can see where surcharges stages three and four. If we were to implement stage three or four right now, it's only affecting 7 1⁄2% of our total customers, and that's over 12,000 gallons. Those customers generally are gonna be irrigating with a single meter. It's fairly common, like I'd mentioned. If we do go into stage five, that 7.5% goes to 27% of our total customer base. So still not impacting over 73% of our customer base. So we really tried to focus on insulating that surcharge from just people who don't use irrigation. This is a huge table, and we're not gonna go through every single one of them, although I'm sure you'd love to. This kind of gives you an idea of what this surcharge will do to a bill. Before we focus in on a use case, just remember, zero through two, no applicable surcharge there at the top, and this is focusing on high volume irrigators. So our example right here, if we were in stage three, and we had a water customer that was using 25,000 gallons on a domestic meter, so let's just say one meter. This is gonna be an older home, older system. Would see a total bill increase of about $45 with the surcharge update. So 25,000 gallons, their bill without any surcharge is about $315. With our current surcharge, it adds just $10 to their bill. Very likely, if they're already in that that ballpark of a billing amount, they wouldn't notice another $10. The surcharge is intended to get your attention. We're in drought. This is something that's very serious to us in our community. With the update, we go from 325 to 370. So you can see where that $45 increase comes in. It's about a 14%. INCREASE UNTIL YOU GET TO STAGE FIVE AND YOU CAN SEE THERE THAT THE PERCENTAGES DO GO UP. THAT'S BECAUSE WE'VE HALVED THE DROUGHT SURCHARGE THRESHOLD ONCE WE GET INTO STAGE FIVE FOR DOMESTIC USERS. STILL, ONCE AGAIN, 6,000 GALLONS AND LESS IS NOT IMPACTED. THESE ARE JUST REALLY, REALLY HIGH USE CUSTOMERS. FOR IRRIGATION IT'S VERY SIMILAR. WE ONLY HAVE THREE IRRIGATION BILL CATEGORY OR BILL BRACKETS. You can see zero to six, six to 20 and 20 plus. If we were going into stage three or four tomorrow, only 20% of those customers would be impacted until we hit stage five and then 100%. If we're in stage zero through two, once again, no surcharge. So this is only for high drought. Contingency is the key, right? Same thing for an irrigator. These bill amounts are gonna be significantly higher though. You can see we're using an extreme high-use irrigation customer as our example. They use 30,000 gallons. This is less than probably 2% to 3% of our total customer base are in this usage category on this particular service side. $426. With that surcharge, it brings it up to 471. That's our current $2 surcharge. If we get the update, that 471 turns into 534, which is an increase of 7356, or once again, about a 15, 16% increase on their total bill. So being realistic about who we are targeting are the very high-use irrigation customers, not everybody, and really not even all of the irrigation customers to a point. So the key takeaways with the surcharge is essential use, I know we're harping on it, but I think this is very important, essential use never affected. If you're just cleaning, cooking, bathing, you won't see a difference. There's no applicable surcharge for stages zero through two, so as long as we continue to get the rain, this really won't even be in effect until it starts to go the other way. That moderate to high use customer can see that billing increase of anywhere between eight to 15% in stage three and four. And that extreme high use customer that we talked about, increase of about 24% in stage five, worst case scenario. And then also that surcharge. If we do have any kind of over collection, which we probably shouldn't, the way we've done the math is a revenue neutral. We're not expecting people to use more water in a high drought, especially with a surcharge. But if that is the case, those funds are then rerouted to our billing assistance or conservation programs. And the last section of the actual proposal is customer response. What we're asking the customer base to do with this new proposal. Ryan had mentioned regional alignment, and we're really aligning first and foremost with the Edwards Offer Authority. If they go into stage one, two, or three, or four, or five, we're gonna be lockstep with them. The second piece of regional alignment is how can we align ourselves better to be more consistent up and down 35, and I wish I could say that it was an easy thing. After 2024, that five-year drought contingency plan revision process, all the utilities in the state submitted their plans and proposals and kinda mixed it up on us and so you can see all the utilities down the column uh... and then across the top you can see what they do in any respective stage so it's really all over the place uh... you can't point to one stage and say everybody's doing the same thing anymore. It used to be, but there's just so much evolution in it. And that is respective to that utility's unique water supply portfolio. We pull primarily from the Edwards and the River and Canyon Lake. Other utilities pull from reservoirs or more of long-term agreements. So their situation is different than what we would have. but you can see how we are currently. In non-drought, you can water twice a week, generally Monday, Thursday, or Tuesday and Friday with non-dresses being on Wednesdays or big commercials. Goes to once weekly and then once biweekly with that surcharge that is fairly antiquated at this point. It's also important to note that stage four and five currently in our ordinance has no provisions around it. It's really just kind of left open to what do we think will work and let's see if it will. What we're proposing is a little bit of a hybrid solution. We're taking the best of Austin Water and the best of SAWS, how they model their drought management. We're going once weekly through stage five, we're still having the twice weekly and non-drought, but then we're having that progressive surcharge once we hit stage three and four, stage three, four, and five, you can see how SAWS does that as well. So we're not, once again, unique to this. We're still very consistent with most folks up and down 35. It's just more of a hybrid approach since everybody's doing it a little bit different at this point. We keep talking about stage four and five. These are our worst case drought scenarios. We haven't really been in those scenarios with the aquifer for a little while, but here in the past three or four years or so, stage four has definitely been on the radar and we did dip into stage five for six days. I looked up this morning. But the Edwards Aquifer did not declare stage five. I wanna say that we had hit stage five territory and we got a little bit of a rain that came in. It seems like that's generally the case. To your point, Mr. Spradley, droughts are very often broken by floods. So we did not hit that, but let's say that we did. What this proposal does is it leaves open a little bit of operational flexibility, a toolbox of sorts. to where we can pick and choose to say what do we feel may move the needle and get us out of this most severe drought. It's also important that we're talking about Edwards Aquifer. New Braunfels Utilities represents less than 4% of the total pull from the Edwards Aquifer. So even if we were to turn off every single spigot and every single customer today would not immediately turn the aquifer around. There's so many players and stakeholders in the Edwards Aquifer. We do what we can and we feel like this is reasonable. But let's assume we went into stage four and stage five. We could potentially prohibit spray type irrigation. Spray type is irrigation that sprays above the ground. This does not include drip, soaker, bucket, hand watering. So if we were to move into that, we could prohibit spray type irrigation, but still allow customers to keep their trees alive, keep their foundations watered, maybe some beds. That really means a lot to them as long as they're not using spray type irrigation. So there is flexibility in this. It's a little bit modular in nature. And then the last proposal, this is somewhat common sense to me. At MBU we've been dealing with this piece in the ordinance. Once we hit stage three and beyond, new construction is only allowed to have 50% of turf grass, nothing more. That's where it ended. What we're proposing is that other 50% needs to be approved ground cover that's already established in the ordinance. These are drought tolerant landscape packages, different plants that a customer could pick and choose. And then it eliminates a few different issues. One is just because they didn't put grass there does not mean that the builder did not put an irrigation system there. So last time we were in stage three, We saw a lot of bare earth yards being irrigated. All that mud would cause erosion in the backyard. That mud would then find itself in the road and then in our streams. And working with Phillip Quast at the city's watershed department, those were some fun conversations. So this is a little bit of let's meet in the middle right here. So we're adding that other 50% as has to be approved ground cover, not bare dirt. We're also proposing that commercial properties, which are generally bigger in nature, would be 25% instead of the 50% with that other 75 being that approved ground cover. But this is only in effect for stage three, four, and five. So this is not an all year thing. If we get some rain, this is not applicable. So just summarizing the proposed changes is we're improving the alignment. We talked about Edwards Aquifer and then the attempted alignment between our neighbors up and down 35. We're expanding our MBU operational flexibility just in case those other considerations, you know, the golf cart hits a water tower. That could be something that we could look to. We're adding stages four and five explicitly into the trigger levels where they hadn't been before, although alluded to, and we would have gone into stage four or five if we had to, but we just haven't had the need yet. Establishing those MBU water reduction goals, that sends a good message, I feel, to the community and our surrounding neighbors that we are doing our part. We do have goals when we hit these stages. This is something, the next one is something I didn't really hit on, a little bit funny. We're changing the Roman numerals to standard numeration. We're the only ordinance that I could still find that is using Roman numerals. We're just making it simplistic one, twos, and threes. That's just peer alignment is really what we drop that into. With our drought surcharges, the updates protect essential use customers entirely. It increases the applicable surcharge from $1 and $2 per thousand to $4.18 and $4.89 per thousand. and then updates the thresholds to meet our current water tier rates, the 3, 6, and 12s, as opposed to the 7,500 increments. With the customer response, we've created the strategy for stages four and five for flexible worst case scenario possibilities. If we absolutely had to, we would still have a toolbox that we could say no spray type irrigation, and that may get us out, but you're still allowed to water your trees and your foundation. Additional language on the new turf grass allotments for stages three through five, and then a clarification of verbiage throughout. So where we changed one section, if it impacted another section, we just echoed those changes throughout. The next section just kind of speaks a little bit on our community advisory panel feedback when we worked with them. The project started in September of 2025 and ended December of 2025, so four months. Really the focus areas, we're talking about drought management approach, what does that look like for customer impact, and communication clarity, how we talk the talk and walk the walk. The engagement when we went through it included surveys, small group discussions, full panel deliberations. We tried to leave no stone unturned. If you had feedback, please provide it to us. And we got feedback. So like I said, we used our survey initially before we even met with them and asked them Do you know what the drought contingency plan is, the DCP? And if you do, do you feel like it's working? Do you feel like it needs to be changed? We also had small group virtual meetings. Everybody has a busy life. We know a lot of these folks are working professionals, so we were flexible in order to meet all of them individually to be able to get their feedback without peer pressure. We also, after we met and virtually met and surveyed and surveyed and surveyed, we synthesized all the feedback into this write-up that was provided to our MBU Board of Trustees back in December of 2025, which was adopted. But what these folks told us the most was their priorities remain in sustainability. The ordinance had to be easy to understand, had to be forward looking and tied more into our outward reaching water plans, had to be community focused. If we're gonna change anything, have we thought about the folks that are impacted? And then it has to be transparent. So if you have any questions about the ordinance, MBU is always happy to walk you through the what's and the whys and the hows and how to get there. There was additional emphasis, to Ryan's point, we've moved away from enforcement, and the CAP really agreed with that approach, let's look at an education first strategy. Clear customer signals, let's make it clear, let's talk with them. Most of the time being in conservation, when we would reach out to a customer, it was just out of pure mistake, sure mistake. They just moved in, they didn't realize that they even had an irrigation system, much less how to work an irrigation system timer. We have a number of free programs, we have home assessments, those kinds of things where we can go out and actually help a customer rather than just sending them a blind water violation with a sizable fine on it. We wanted to protect that essential household use. We were on the same page going into that room with them for household and business needs and long-term reliability and quality of life. So focusing in on how we can intertwine this DCP going forward with our forward-looking water plans. So the summary of what we got back with this, RCAP told us that they do support the proposed changes. We work with them. We did make small tweaks here and there, but mostly we were on the same page. We had the same mindset going forward. They did endorse our forward-looking diversified water support portfolio. We talked about those water conservation goals being a piece of a piece of a pie. not necessarily a broad restriction on all water sources based on just one restriction. Commends the shift from punitive to education. We kind of talked about that a little bit. And then supports that proactive outreach to high-use customers. This is something that's not in the DCP, but it's rather in the water conservation plan. We have an initiative. We call it our top 300. We look at our top 300 water users by volume, and we just make a phone call. Hey, did you know that you may be number two in the entire residential sample pool? And if you didn't, we're here to help. And most folks don't realize that they are that high in use. And we have a lot of free resources. We found some really overactive irrigation systems, some uncontrolled leaks, run the gamut and we've been able to find it with just a phone call. But the CAP also recommends to continue using the clear and plain language, to continue to build the rate structures that signal stewardship for discretionary irrigation, and then keep protecting that essential user base, that 73% of customers that will never see a change with this. So they expressed appreciation for MBU staff transparency and board commitment for community engagement. So next steps, we've done a lot of work leading up to today. You can see we're July 20th. We do have some placeholders. Now those placeholders, we have ideas of those dates to come back with you. The first formal reading with a vote, we're not asking for a vote today, this is just presentation, would be August 10th for the first one and August 24th for the second reading. The goal is to have the new DCP implemented by October 1st. This gives ample time for customer communication, staff training and systems testing to make sure, hey, we've made these changes. Let's not break our billing system. Let's make sure before we turn it on. So that gives us a little bit of time before we get there. And with that, that is my proposal. I'm gonna hand it back to Ryan now for closing comments. Do you mind going back to slide 46? 46?

Yes, sir. Is that the tower you're mentioning that the golf cart's gonna hit and knock over? That'd be a big one. I'm just asking, yeah.

All right, thank you, Andrew. You covered it quite well. I don't have any other remarks to make. We're here to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. Is there any brief discussion from city council?

Well, first of all, thank you very much for the presentation and forward thinking as y'all have been doing for such quite a while. So my first question is, were we in stage three at any time during this 2020 drought? Andrew?

Andrew?

Yes, sir. I believe it was 2022 was the last time we were in stage three.

And how long were we there? I want to say we were there for just over two and a half years, if memory serves.

Yeah, that drought really kind of put an impact on us starting in 2020. 2021 was a brief reprieve, but 2022, it just went downhill.

But we've never been in stage four?

Not officially, no, sir.

Okay, yeah. And then my other question is, occasionally I get phone calls or emails from people that have, and you've mentioned it a little bit, accidental use, toilets overrunning, someone messed with irrigation and it's just going crazy. And a lot of those instances, whether it's the toilet running or irrigation would fall in those categories of stage three and four. Would y'all still be working that through to make sure that those charges are adjusted properly?

Yes, sir. So we do have a leak adjustment program for residential water users. So if that is the case, that's a part of the process. If a leak is identified and repaired, We'll go back and true that up to where the leak essentially is not recorded, per se. It's recorded, but they're not paying for a leak with the surcharge. We would rewind the clock, reset them based on historical use. That's a courtesy that we provide to our customers once a year.

Okay, yeah, and that's it. Thank you.

Go ahead, Councilwoman Shaw.

So you talk about the education piece, what's your plan to educate the citizens that this is forthcoming and gonna happen? I get a virtual bill, I don't get it in the mail. So do you guys have a plan to spread the word effectively?

Yeah, we certainly do. We have a communication campaign that's built and ready to go once we get approval from council, and we'll be hitting them on the social pages, of course, our website, Bill Stuffer's. Every point along the way, we'll be educating folks, and of course, we've had these recent rains, by the grace of God, and so that will delay any drought staging into the future, you know, One thing that we can count on though is droughts to return. So it may be four to six months before we get into the territory of stage three and four again, but we'll certainly be communicating with our customers. And there's a handout that's on the dais in front of you that's a pretty handy little one pager. That's just an example of some of the collateral that the team's developed for education.

Any further discussion? Go ahead, Council Member.

Yes, sir. Thanks for that presentation, I appreciate it. One thing I wanna say first off is that I like that the additional funds will go into the assistance program. I think that's, I appreciate that. I noticed on, I think it was page 25, when you were talking about conservation goals and I believe you said something about that conservation goals are becoming tighter across the state or coming from the state. Can you talk about that just a little bit about how the state has conservation goals and how those are maybe passed down to MBU and what kind of lanes you have to play in as far as those conservation goals go? Go ahead.

Yes, sir. So conservation goals with the state. These goals are established by the utility and reported to TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and TWDB, Texas Water Development Board. For the past few years, the state plans have become a little bit more robust in looking at long-term supply. Thus, the conservation piece is a penny saved is a penny earned. And so there's a lot of focus on conservation at the state level to say if we can keep rates lower by not having to continuously build out infrastructure, well then it saves the communities in those areas money. And so that's where those higher expectations are coming from. They've not necessarily hit mandate yet, but I do feel with the state's growth that I think that it's in the near future. Just kind of reading the room. Yes, sir.

And then just one last thing I just want to comment on is page 41, when you were talking about the, when we get to stage three, mandating the differences in education for new construction and that sort of thing. I would encourage maybe looking, not tomorrow or next week, but as a long-term strategy, exploring what we can do beyond even just stage three. Obviously our droughts are getting closer together. We're having hotter years now. We see that right now. We're at a three and a half degree increase, hottest year on record. And as we grow and with these bigger swings in our climate, just kind of looking at what that might look like long-term for us.

Yeah, your mind's exactly where ours are at. And we're working with the City of New Braunfels through their LDO, the Land Development Ordinance revisions, to do potentially just that. So you'll see recommendations in the future because, No matter, I mean, it doesn't make sense to only do it when we're in stage three, four, and five. We're in the same climate, right, in perpetuity.

And I appreciate the step that you've made so far. It's not to, it's not a nod against that at all, just saying, you know, looking further long-term down the road, but great job to all of you, appreciate it.

Council Member Carter, you have something?

I need a clarification on, at what point does the $4 plus surcharge kick in? How often is that surcharge applied?

Only when the aquifer is below 640 feet, which would trigger stage three.

Right.

And so as far as... how frequent that occurs. I don't have that data right here in front of me, but anecdotally, it's, I wouldn't call it extremely frequent, but it, you know, whenever you're in drought, as you saw on Andrew's page, we probably spend 50% of our time in some form of drought. Now, whether or not you're below stage three or not.

Okay, I wanna just clarify my question. Is it $4 a gallon of usage? No. Or $4 every 5,000 gallons?

Per 1,000 gallons.

Per 1,000 gallons.

Yes, $4.18 per 1,000.

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear on that. And you said we're never officially have been in four or five. Now is that because we made an elective choice to not go into four or five?

Correct.

Okay, so how many times would we have been in four? My point being, we have selectively not gone to these stages, but now we're formalizing the stages, so they're gonna trigger. how many times would we have gone into four or five over the past five years, five or 10?

In the past four or five years, stage four was intermittent about a year and a half, not altogether. Generally, it was a couple months here, a couple months there, maybe a span of six months in one particular year, I think 2023. Generally, it's not consistent over the course of one year though, not lately.

You're being evasive, but okay. And I noticed that there is a change in the gallons of water from what was to what will be. How many people will that affect and move into the surcharge territory? Because before you had a capability, and I don't know if that slide is handy, But there's a chart that says this is what the current stage one, two, three, four, five usage is. But I did notice that there's going to be a reduction, as I see it, by 3,000 gallons per household. And that goes across the chart there. So there's gonna be a shift in how many affected people there are. How many is it?

Yes, ma'am, I don't have that number offhand. But that number there, that 12,000 gallons, like I mentioned, that is a doubling of our general average. So our average is 6,000 gallons for residential indoor water user. This allows for double that before a surcharge is in effect.

and I understand that, but there are an affected pool of residents that sit in that category for whatever reason. I'd like to know factually in your next presentation or your update in August how many affected citizens there are because that'll be the, you know, the touch point of which we're gonna get a lot of questions.

I was trying to log into my NPU bill. That's all I have. To look at that.

Sure, if you have questions, we'll bring that information back. Ms. Walasky, go ahead.

I was trying to log into my NPU bill to look at that also. but I wasn't able to. But one thing I did wanna say, thank you for your presentation, but also, I also wanted to thank y'all for the customer service calls, letting us know that we have leaks. And I will tell you, it happened to me, but it also happened to two of my constituents that were like, I'm so glad that they called because one, they found out they had a leak and then it saved them money and then they got, y'all worked with the customers and reimbursed them and so thank you for working with the customers.

Anyone else? I just have something, just one question because they kind of answered them. I guess in slide 41, You had surcharges 50% for residential, then you had 25% for commercial. I'm just wondering why it's not both 50%.

This is not surcharges, this is new grass allotments for new builds.

Okay, hold on, hold on. Oh, sorry, sorry. That's what I mean. It's 50% turf for new construction, I guess for residential. Now, I'm trying to understand, you have 25% for commercial properties. Yes, sir. Why wouldn't it be the same?

So commercial properties are generally going to be larger in nature. The goal for this is in high drought, stage three and beyond, to reduce the amount of new grass coming onto the system during high drought. So we don't want to add gas to the fire, knowing that commercial properties generally are going to have significantly larger lots that aren't necessarily used the same way as a residential property.

Okay. And just one statement, you know, the stage right now for... The J17 well is like 650 feet, and the flow of Comal is about 224, that's CFS, and that's pretty good right now. But that's all I got. Thank you, anyone else?

One more. Who at the city makes the determination of what stage of drought or not drought we're in?

Yeah, so ultimately the mayor, in consultation with myself, make that decision. So the ultimate staging authority rests with the mayor.

Okay, so hopefully we'll be coming out of drought restrictions?

Yeah, once we hit the threshold to rescind stage two. What are we waiting on? It's a 10-day average that we work on.

Oh, okay, so we're waiting for that. Okay, I think in 10 more days it'll be even higher.

Yeah, yeah, so we're hoping to roll back to stage one, and if we continue to get rain, we'll be in no stage. Yeah.

I'll be looking forward to that, Mayor French.

Oh yeah, stage one sounds good to me. Zero, I don't know. Zero is a different thing, right? When it comes to.

It allows twice a week watering for our customers.

Yeah, twice a week. And that's what I'm looking at. Right now, when you have the Edwards Aquifer at stage two, how can it go to stage one? but I would love to go to stage one. And we haven't been to stage one in a long time, but I see we have a lot of water. From all your presentations, everything looks beautiful, so I'm like, why aren't we in stage one? But anyway, thank you for the presentation.

There's really not much of a difference between stage two and stage one, right? All right.

Thank you guys, thank you. Mayor, council member. Go ahead.

I'll speak up next time. Couple of things. We require separate irrigation now and all new construction for landscape. If they zero scape, can that be avoided? So if I zero escape the entire yard where I don't need that, there would be a cost savings between the impact fee on the meter and changing that yard to save long-term. Is that something that could be considered A?

Yeah, to my knowledge, if there is no irrigation system and only a single meter is required for the track, then I don't believe that we would require installation of that meter.

Because at the same time, the cost of irrigation system now in a standard house that's on a .2 to .5 is running $3,000 to $4,000, depending on who's doing the installation, plus the tap fee, that's 20 grand. That would incentivize me to rock that whole yard on a small track.

Right.

Okay. And thereby creating a greater amount of conservation long-term is the first thought. The second thought is, When we take a look at the impact fees that we have, and when somebody comes, development comes to you for an LOC, for a letter of capacity, what are we calculating as their amount? So if I'm sitting here going, we're at 6,000, I mean, we're at 7,515, which is 22.5, and I look that against an acre feet, and we're calculating that house coming on in a standard family, not an apartment, is half an acre foot per annum, which it is in several of the surrounding areas, what's the exchange point where we are? Are we lowering it too deep that we're gonna trigger more people into the surcharge on the mid to upper range? A lot of our communities on the hill in my district, large tracks, that kind of thing, and expanded lots. There's a percentage of, People in the public, their analysis of growth is we don't want small lots, which actually provide for more conservation matter than it does when you have bigger lots. So I'm just trying to understand to make sure that we don't rob from Peter to pay Paul, but we also want to be revenue where we need it to be and to create conservation. It's just a question.

Right, and in fact, there was some legislation passed this last session regarding impact fees and credits for conservation practices. So we're developing policy internally about how that's to be handled, but to your point, there needs to be, I guess, incentives in place and a recognition. If people aren't installing landscapes that are water thirsty, then maybe their impact per LUE on the system is lower and thereby should be charged a lower impact fee out the gate to acknowledge and recognize those benefits to the utility and the community because that's water that we then don't have to go buy in the future, so. I think that was the direction maybe you were steering in, but nonetheless, there's constant progress and a more common sense approach to making sure that the cost of growth is allocated appropriately to those connected to the system.

The last would be in commercial projects, not residential, but in commercial projects where they have interior walkways. is there a possibility we can work with the city on a change in the LDO to allow for walkways that are crush and run with some underground detention? It's very common in Australia and New Zealand around where we actually trench in the black soil, drop in a crate which uses Gore-Tex, wraps around it, and then we put layered crush on top water runs off the yard goes into the detention keeps it into the aquifer and then releases it as it can be absorbed or percolate and it cuts down on impervious cover and runoff which helps on the drainage size as well as it gives us a way to provide moisture back into the greenscapes So it's just a thought, it's a conversation.

Yeah, we'll take note and we'll carry that forward with the city as we look at LDO revisions.

There's a few places in Houston that have gone to it, but it's something to consider in your overall plan. Okay, thank you.

Any further discussion? Hearing no further discussion, thank you guys. Thank you very much. Right now, I'm gonna open it up to citizens. If you wanna line up behind the podium and speak on this topic, just state your name. If you live in the city, non-resident ETJ. All right. Here in Nolan, I have on item B, presentation and update from the Humane Society of the New Braunfels Area and direction to staff regarding the FY2027 contract for services, Jared Warner.

Thank you, Mayor, members of council. Just a little bit of history and background before we get into this annual update, but the city and the Humane Society of the New Braunfels Area have partnered in some form or fashion since 1980, essentially since they came to be. They are a separate entity, and really up until about four years ago, the relationship between the city and the Humane Society was really more so of a contractor-customer, contractor-client type relationship. And as you'll hear this evening, about four years ago, they ran into some pretty significant financial struggles. And I think it was a wake-up call for all parties and all partners included, especially the city and the county. We learned very rapidly that we needed to be a more collaborative partner with the Humane Society. We also needed to be funding their operations at a much higher rate if we wanted to avoid having to run our own shelter operations internally. That's exactly what we've done. That's what we continue to do. Part of that collaboration also included as you'll hear tonight involves our team analyzing the Humane Society's financials on a regular basis. We are invited to their board meetings to get to participate, and it also requires the annual update, which is why we're here this evening. As the caption states too, we also plan to approach at a high level what our recommendation is for next year's annual contract, as we've been kind of on a one-year renegotiation cadence for the past several years, and it's worked out well for both parties. And again, we'll make that recommendation to you this evening. But myself, and as we have done the past couple years, myself and Executive Director Sarah Hammond from the Humane Society are going to tag team this presentation. So I'm going to go ahead and turn the floor over to her now, and then I'll come back up at the end and drill down into the financials and, again, what we're recommending for fiscal year 27. Thank you.

Hi, for those of you I haven't met, I'm Sarah Hammond. I'm the executive director of the Humane Society of New Braunfels. I started with this organization in 2015. Prior to that, I was 10 years at the Austin Animal Center, so I've been doing this for a little while. We, again, we were incorporated in 1979. We serve the city of New Braunfels and the entirety of Comal County. We're taking care of about 4,700 animals a year. Our neighbors in Guadalupe County, just to kind of show the difference, they have three brick and mortar facilities in Guadalupe County. They have the City of Seguin Animal Shelter, they have Guadalupe County Animal Services, and they also have the Guadalupe Humane Society. So there's three brick and mortar facilities in Guadalupe County serving less residents than we do here in Comal County. So we are the only brick and mortar facility in Comal County outside of Canyon Lake Animal Shelter. They have about 14 kennels for dogs, but we're pretty much serving as the municipal animal shelter for Comal County in the city of New Braunfels. Again, we've got over 200,000 people here in Comal County. We are contractually obligated to take whatever strays the city and the county bring us Regardless of what kind of medical condition they may be in regardless of their behavior concerns We can't say no we cannot turn stray animals in our community away. That is a Our commitment to the community that we are not gonna let dogs and cats just ramp it all over the county. That does, as you may have noticed in Bexar County, causing some issues, causing some problems and some public safety issues that we wanna make sure do not happen in our community. We sit on 16 acres on the southeast side of town. The current facility was built in 2012, we opened in 2013, it's about 11,000 square feet. Just to give you an idea of our intake, about 50% of the dogs and cats are coming from within the city of New Braunfels, about 37% of them are coming from the county. There is a small percentage of animals that we take in that we don't have to. Most often, those are going to be feral cats that we're taking from outside of our jurisdiction for our TNR program. Occasionally, that's animals who are born in care, who the mom delivers a litter before we're able to spay and neuter them. And then, of course, there are owner surrenders. If we have room and a citizen finds themselves unable to care for their pet and we have room, we can take those in. So that's what's going to get you to 100%. Some of your constituents may ask if our local animal shelter is a no-kill animal shelter, and there is a lot of discussion about that term. I'm not a huge fan. I'm going to be honest. But what no-kill actually means is that 90% of the animals entering a shelter leave alive, and we have been saving over 90% of the animals since 2020. I am very big on transparency. Our numbers are posted on our website at least quarterly, every head in, every head out. The community needs to know what's happening at their local animal shelter and transparency is definitely one of our core values. Our intake is climbing and that's getting a little bit more difficult to navigate and of course more expensive every year. 2025 we took in roughly 47 animals. A lot of folks don't realize, you think of the animal shelter, you think about dogs. For every one dog that comes in the shelter, we get three cats. So we're dealing with a lot more cats than we are dogs. Typically litters of kittens are all coming in at once, especially this time of year. um as far as outcomes go coming in is important going out is just as important so about 818 dogs got adopted 506 dogs were reclaimed by their owners again most of these dogs are just lost so they're they're getting picked up by their owners which is which is great we do work with a lot of rescue groups so we're able to transfer certain breeds of dogs to breed specific rescues we do work closely with other Nonprofit shelters in the area, if they happen to have a little bit of room and we're struggling, we can maybe send them four or five dogs to help alleviate some of our space issues. So live outcome rate for dogs last year was 94%. Cats have a few more options to get out of the shelter. We did adopt out nearly 1,500. 72, you'll notice not very many cats get reclaimed. National average is about 2%. People don't think about looking at the animal shelter for their lost cats. So that is what it is. They don't get reclaimed at nearly the higher rate. We do transfer some cats out of the shelter and into rescue groups or other nonprofit shelters. Another big way we get cats out alive is the trap, neuter, return program. That's when cats are feral. We can't handle them. We can't put them up for adoption. We're gonna fix them. We're gonna vaccinate them. We're gonna treat them for parasites. We're gonna tip their left ear put them back where they came from so they can stop reproducing. So if you're out in the community and you see a cat and you see that left ear tipped, you know it's probably been through our program. I'm not going to lie, there's a few out there that have their right ear tipped because I was helping and I got in a hurry and I just did the wrong ear. Sorry, it happens. So 92% live outcome for the cats. So overall 93% live outcome for 2025. I've been hanging my hat for a good many years on our intake remaining steady over the last six to eight years. I attributed to that for a very robust spay-neuter program. If we can get our hands on it, I'm gonna spay and neuter it. That is the way to reduce intake moving forward is spay and neuter. However, the population of people in this community, the inevitable is happening. So 2024 to 2025, we saw a 6% increase in intake. If the second half of the year looks like the first half of the year in 2026, we're gonna take in over 5,000 animals this year. That's gonna be another significant percentage increase. Keep in mind, we're dealing with the same number of enclosures with a lot more animals. How are we managing that? More couches, less cages. We are reaching out to our community for help. I could double the size of my facility tomorrow, it would be full by the end of the month. That's a bandaid. Do I need a bigger shelter? Absolutely. Do we need more room to do what we do well? Absolutely. But when you build more cages, they just fill up. So building a strong foundation with the community to get help when we need it is an important component in reducing overall intake. Again, if we wanna support the community to help us, we need staff to help them help us, support them with behavior concerns, veterinary concerns, just basic training for some of these animals so that they can successfully transfer out of a shelter environment into a foster home and then into a permanent adoptive home. We're running out of places to work. There is simply not enough workstations in our building. We're also dealing with some facility challenges. We have used that building hard since we moved in in 2013. We've got some roof issues, we've got some plumbing issues, some of our dog kennels are kind of falling apart. We are often over capacity. Right now I've got, I believe, 16 dogs in crates in the hallway because I don't have any other empty kennels. That bottom right, that is our stray cat building, or our stray cat room. That's where cats come initially while we're going through the process to make them adoptable. You can hardly turn around in there right now. Obviously our laundry is never ending, so the laundry room and storage is also an issue. This is hard work, these kids, starting pay for these animal care technicians and the line staff that help answer the phone and assist adopters and citizens reclaiming their pets. $13 an hour is what we start at. And this is an awfully hard job to do when you are making $13 an hour. So when we see these increases from the city and the county, I absolutely, that's the first thing I do. is solidify those those salaries and up those wages for for the we have an amazing team and they work so hard and they put so much of their blood sweat and tears into taking care of these animals um when we do get increases from the city and the county that's the first thing we look at improving is is those salaries um again overall percentages um the the the partnership that jerry spoke to earlier um over the last few years we are eternally grateful. Jared really stepped up and helped us see through a very, very scary time. We really did think we were going to have to close the doors. We owed so much money to so many people, and there just wasn't enough money at the end of the month, every month. And Jared recognized that was not great, because you guys don't want to do what we do. And worked together and collaborated. He brought in the county, got everybody on the same page, and said, hey, guys, we don't want to do this. Let's support them so that they can do it better. Nonprofits typically do things more efficiently than municipal governments. So in 2025, our city and our county revenue was about 48% of our total income overall. which means we were relying on gifts, donations, fundraisers, grants, to make up 35% of the basic operating expenses that we need to do what we do every year. We do take a small amount of money in what we call over the counter, so that's gonna be your adoption fees, your reclaim fees. We do quarantines. We do rabies quarantines. If your dog bites somebody and we have to quarantine it, there is a cost associated with that that we collect. Reclaim fees. If citizens find themselves with their pet at the end of its life and need some end-of-life services, we do have a small fee for that that we take care of, a little bit cheaper than they can get at a full-service veterinarian clinic. 87% or so of the animals are coming from the city and county, but 48% of our income is coming from the city and county. So Jared and his team and my board and myself have been working towards getting that gap a little bit smaller. Because when we're forced to rely on gifts for the basic operating expenses like staff and utilities, and insurance and things like that. We can't use those gifts for what we really wanna do, which is to expand and improve our facility, which is desperately, desperately needed in this community. I think the citizens are expecting more for animal services. And at this point, our hands are kind of tied with an older building that is kind of falling apart. If we want to improve, we've got some great plans in the hopper, but it's going to take a considerable investment, and it's going to take a considerable amount of time for us to do a capital campaign and raise the kind of funds to build the facility that this community deserves. So do we ask for more money every year? Absolutely we do, and that's why, because we do want to provide more for the animals and the citizens of New Braunfels. Just kind of breaks down a little bit about where the money goes. Obviously, it goes to payroll. It takes people to look after the animals, to take care of the customers, to administer vaccines and medications and get them the vet care that they need. Maintenance has been pretty slim because our margins have been so small, we haven't really been able to spend very much on maintenance. because there hasn't been any extra. So we're kind of getting by with duct tape and bailing wire right now. That services obviously animals get sick, animals get injured, animals need to be spayed and neutered. So about 20% is going towards veterinary services. We do not have a veterinarian on staff. We are getting by with a mutually beneficial relationship with Creekry Veterinary Clinic. They give us a great discount. Doesn't matter when it is, we've got something that needs to be seen. They get us in. They also run our spay-neuter clinic, so every animal that leaves the shelter is spayed or neutered, thanks to that partnership. They also help coordinate the trap-neuter return program for us as well. Yes, 20% sounds like a lot, but it could be a lot bigger without that relationship. Supplies are going to be everything else. Food, cat litter, cat boxes, gloves to stay clean, cleaning stuff. And then you've just got that miscellaneous that's not going to fit in any of the other columns on the spreadsheet. So again, we're looking at our contract revenue, and this is from the city and the county. You guys aren't out here all by yourself. We got Comel County on the other side that we're all doing this together. But that's about 63% of our total operating expenses. We'd like to get that That number a little closer to 100% because, again, we are still relying on the kindness of strangers to pay the most basic bills. And that's where we'd like to get that gap moving a little bit closer to 100%. I think Jared's going to talk a little bit more about that.

Thank you, Sarah. So again, just especially for our new members of council, wanted to provide some historical context into how the financials have evolved over the past five years. As you can see, it really is showing in fiscal year 25, but really in 26, how the projections show that overall revenues are going to exceed expenditures, allowing them to established a reserve, of course, which they did not have before. But again, this graph not only demonstrates that, but also demonstrates how they've been able to increase those expenditures from fiscal year 22 to fiscal year 26 to address a lot of those needs that Sarah was referring to earlier. I spoke earlier to our current contract and how it provides us the opportunity to do some financial reporting. I wanna thank Becky Viatrick, who's our Assistant Director of Finance, who does that on a monthly basis. Again, I think both agencies get benefit from this, being able to look. at a deeper dive into the financials each and every month. I think the takeaways from this slide, of course, is seeing that total revenue in fiscal year 26 for the Humane Society is increasing about 29% overall. Again, contract revenue, that was by design. You, along with the county, authorized a 20% increase in their payment year over year last year. Again, I think the biggest takeaway on this is that their net operating revenue, right, revenue less expenses has increased 86% year over year. Again, that's gonna give them that opportunity either to make some, any emergency repairs in the facility, or again, as we've been discussing with them, establishing or increasing their end of year reserve. So kind of in closing and some takeaways here, as you can see, since fiscal year 23, we feel like we've really stepped up, increasing the payment by $300,000 from fiscal year 23 to 26, almost 100% increase, but we acknowledge we still have a ways to go. The county aligns with that as well. That's why for fiscal year 27, you can see they're recommending a 13% increase. So for fiscal year 27, again, that should continue to close that gap as, Sarah was referring to earlier. Again, I want to definitely applaud Sarah and also her board. She has a very, very, very strong board. They're definitely focused on the right things, have really enjoyed that collaboration over the past several years. And then lastly, as Sarah said, she mentioned it, this is not just the city and the main society. This is a kind of a tri-party kind of partnership with the county as well. And Our understanding is that the county is also planning to align to the current methodology for 27 as well, which, if they do, would actually result in actually a much larger percentage for growth for fiscal year 27 as well. So with that, Mayor, Council, we're, of course, happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Is there anyone from Council who would like to speak? Councilman Carter, go ahead.

woman tonight that's a woman sorry okay um i've been to this facility and visited um it's right over there off of ruckle and morningside and if i could encourage city staff and even council to support You know, the EDC, we often, everybody doesn't like them very much or like that principle very much, but I think that an argument can be made over quality of life for citizens of New Braunfels to not have stray animals on the street. I don't know if that can be utilized for a facility, but their facility is packed. They have a very high, efficiency rate on usage i think they use every nook and cranny in that building and i see county and city vehicles going in and out of that operation all the time so as city government you know i would hope that we could give them as much help and support as we can

One comment, I'm sorry, Mayor, can I respond to that?

No, go ahead, go ahead.

One comment as a reminder, looking back to the 2012 facility, when that facility was constructed, there was actually a facility use payment that the city made to the Humane Society that aligned to the amortization of the loan of those facility improvements and construction. So when the Humane Society is ready, for a major capital improvement in that facility, there's certainly an opportunity for collaboration and participation from the city. And we can certainly consider any alternative funding sources for that as well.

I agree with you. I've been over there several times myself. In fact, I adopted my cats from there. But they do a wonderful job and I just want to say thank you to the board and obviously your staff, $13 an hour. you have to do that job with a love and a heart of animals, right? There's no other way around it. I remember when I visited there probably a couple years ago now, y'all had a portable building built to the side to do all the operations and all that stuff and your operation spot inside the center was stopped doing that and that ended up being a place to put animals because you're just out of space.

Yeah, we do our trap neuter return clinic. It's a shipping container that we turned into a surgery suite, and then we bought a, it's a third grade classroom, one of those modular buildings that we do the spay neuter surgeries in every week, and when we did get those 64 chihuahuas in May, we did end up putting them in, yeah, in one day, 64 chihuahuas. Just FYI, that was not a good day. We did end up using that surgery building. We canceled surgery that week because we literally, I mean, 62 chihuahuas, yeah. So we did use that surgery building. So yeah, we're held together again with duct tape right now and using every square foot we can to save as many animals as we can.

I agree with Councilwoman. that we need to do and look, because the situation's certainly not getting less. It's only gonna continue to grow as our community grows, and you definitely, you needed a new facility or a bigger facility.

About eight years ago.

Yeah, a while ago, so I agree with her. We need to look at different avenues to try to, a capital, some kind of capital campaign to get it to where it needs to be.

And I would certainly invite any of you who are in the neighborhood, drop in, take a look. I love to show off my shelter. I know it's falling apart, but we are really proud of what we're doing every day. And I would love to give anyone a behind-the-scenes tour. Just shoot me a message, shoot me an email, get that on the books, because I really would love you to see my team in action and see what we're working with every day. For those of you who haven't been in, and for those you have, probably have only seen the front of house, I'd like to show you guys what happens in the back.

It's really awe-inspiring, in my opinion, probably her too. When I went over there, I'm like, wow, I actually do a lot. And you can't wrap your mind around it until you literally go in there and you see what she said. Every nook and cranny is done. You've got staff running all over the place. You've got animals running all over the place. I mean, they're in cages or whatever, but you're like, holy smokes.

Oh, there's a few free rooms.

Y'all are busy, very busy.

Which is great because we have an amazing community support. We have an amazing volunteer team. We have amazing foster homes that are coming in and out. But I stepped out to just to use the ladies room today and there were 12 people in my lobby that was designed for about four.

And I would also like to mention that it's not just cats and dogs. I went over there one time and there was a pig.

Goat, we have a rooster right now, anybody? Rooster, anybody? Yes, pigs, goats. We got a couple of peacocks from the county last month. If it is homeless in our community, it ends up at the shelter and we do the very best that we can for them.

Councilwoman Lebowski.

Yes, thank you for what y'all do. And how many employees do y'all have? 26. 26? Well, I've adopted twice from y'all and I have Mosquito. which we call him Mo, and he wears his Mo tie, and he's very spoiled, but I'd love to come back and do another tour. I've done two tours already, but I'd like to catch up, and I'd love to visit with you.

Anytime. I see a lot of new faces that I haven't met personally, and I'd love to have you come by. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Anybody else?

Thank you.

Council Member Edwards?

Yes.

I had something I wrote down, because I was trying to look at your 25%, I forgot what slide that was, where you had Comel County and you had the city putting in, then after all expenses, you had, am I right, 25% of something left? Or is it for?

Are you thinking about the percent of animals that come in?

No, it was something with the combined expenses.

It might have been the second to the last slide, Jared, is I think a slide that you might have covered. Keep going, Sarah. Keep going. One more. Mayor, is that the one you were referring to? There's the 25.5%.

So I was looking at the total revenue increase for this year, 28%. So everything that we're giving you, I'm starting to see, because I've been there several times. I've dropped a lot of little kittens off, too. And you're right, it's always completely full. I would like to see us give a little more than what you're asking for.

Not going to argue with you, Mayor.

And I'm not kidding about that, because you're talking about 6% year after year of more pets coming in. And If your pay is very low for the employees there and you guys look like it's always jam packed, I think we need to fund it a little more than what we're doing. And we have to get with Comel County to do the exact same. So I think we should increase it all the way to 35% of what you're asking there. Revenue increased 28% year after year. I think we should do it to 35% if that makes any sense at all. I would love to see that facility get better.

I probably should defer a little bit to Jared because I can feel him having a little bit of a hard time.

Whatever the expenditure is on that, what can we do for that, Jared? Because... I'm looking at a number here. Whatever we can do to make the facility look more roomier than what it is, because I know exactly what you guys are talking about with those pictures. That just doesn't say what really, when you walk in there, it's a lot worse than that.

So that 13% increase that we're talking about right now that we're proposing, we're proposing a 13% increase, which is around $75,000 to $80,000 of additional cost just from the city, okay? That's incorporated into our proposed budget. Again, I think the conversation about one-time improvements, we actually had some conversation with Sarah and her board about if the Humane Society has a list of capital improvements or repairs that they would like the city to consider, and we could look at what funding sources we have available for that. We talked about doing that this fall, actually. You know, Mayor, the comment about increasing this to 30% or 35%, as we were talking about in our budget. How many combined with Comal County? Oh, I see. Well, maybe what we could do then is go back and once we have, because we certainly can't speak for Comal County. Once we have a better understanding about what their payment will be and when they're going to take action on that, we could report back to this board on what the overall increase in contract revenue is for fiscal year 27. And again, the Humane Society runs their fiscal year on a January basis. Of course, as you know, we run ours on October. So they always get the benefit of that higher payment for those last three months of their fiscal year, a little bump for them the first three months of our fiscal year. So once we have clarity and action's been taken by both, and you know what that increase in contract revenue is, if you do not feel that is sufficient, nothing prevents you from amending that contract in doing so. It just forces us as city staff to find those funds and balance it against all of the other demands and needs for services in the general fund for fiscal year 27, which we talked about last Friday at your workshop. Is that fair?

Oh yeah, thank you. I was asking about 18 cats. They keep bringing them down there.

When Councilwoman Carter mentioned the EDC, that is something that's kind of been rolling around in my head because I think that could be a very interesting partnership between the Humane Society and the city when we do look. We've got some expansion plans. We've got some renovation plans. We've been working with a designer company We know what we want, we know what we want it to look like, we know what we need, but again, the time it's gonna take us to raise the $12 to $15 million is probably gonna cost, could go into six or seven years from now. So perhaps a collaboration with the EDC and the city as well could get that goal a little closer to what we really, really need based on the intake numbers going up.

Ms. Hammond, have you ever considered raising the fees, adoption fees or anything like that, or do you think that would...

I have to pretty much give them away to get them out the door. Once a month we do, just this weekend, we do our Meet Your Match waived fee adoption weekends. We did move 65 animals in two days, which is great. But again, what gets the people's attention is that we're waiving those adoption fees. Often reclaims, people will say, well, you got my dog, but I can't afford the $45 to get it out. Well, guess what? Just take your dog. You love your dog. You can give it a home. Just take it. So raising fees kind of goes against us being able to get them out the door alive, which is the most important to us.

Right again, Councilman Spradley. Thank you guys so much, I appreciate it. Any other questions?

I was just gonna, when you do bring those percentages back, if you could also have the dollar value with that percentage, what that percentage represents in actual dollar values, and then have some potential impacts where it would be in the budget, does that make sense?

It does, and again, I wanna.

So we can understand what that looks like.

I do, and again, right now our contract, as I said at the very beginning, we do one year contracts with the Humane Society. That is scheduled to expire at the end of September. What I'd like to do is bring the contract forward based on this proposal, wait until the county takes action, and then come back and report to this council on how much that actual contractual increase is, and then it's your prerogative if you'd like us to go up, and then we can tell you what the trade-offs are, dollar amount. That's exactly what it is.

Absolutely. So you say, this is what the impact is, but then here's the potential trade-off. We might have to pull some money from here or pull some money from there.

Yes. So we can see that complete picture. But that way, we can also measure that up against their 2027 calendar year budget. We're comparing apples to apples. I think that's the right time. I know Sarah and her team will hold me and my team to making sure we come back to you all in the fall. But I think that's the right sequencing of events.

And Mayor and Council, we would also bring back to you then an evaluation as to whether the use of 4B funds would be an eligible use for this facility as well. We do need to evaluate that. Okay.

It's all ahead. Thank you. Anyone else up here? Right now I'm gonna open it up to the floor if anyone would like to talk on this subject here.

Line up behind the podium.

All right, item C, presentation on Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan Incidental Take Permit Renewal. And that would be Amy Niles. Thank you.

Hi, Mayor and Council. My name is Amy Niles. I'm the River and Watershed Manager for the City of New Braunfels. I'm here to talk about our Habitat Conservation Plan and our Incidental Take Permit and what that renewal process will look like. And I'm going to try and explain all the steps as we go through this presentation. Oh, I maybe pressed the wrong button. There we go. Okay. So first off, the Comal Springs are located in Landa Park. When you see the water come up from under the ground in those spring run areas and in Landa Lake, that water is actually coming from under the ground in the Edwards Aquifer. The Comal Springs are really special. It's the largest spring system in Texas. And kind of the sister spring system is the San Marcos Springs. And both of those systems are attached to the Edwards Aquifer. The Edwards Aquifer and those spring systems are home to several federally protected endangered and threatened species. And these are the species that are located in the Comal Springs and the Comal River. Now, I brought these pictures forward today because they're kind of artistic drawings of them or watercolors of them instead of actual photographs. And the reason for that is the riffle beetle, the dryopid beetle, and the pex cave amphipod are about an eighth of an inch each. So even in photographs, they're kind of hard to really see what they look like, and so this kind of gives you a better idea of what these little critters look like. The fountain darter at its biggest is usually about an inch long. It's also a very small species. The difference between that and the other ones is that its habitat ranges not only in the Land O'Lake and Comal Springs area, but the entire Comal River. So from this part of the presentation forward, there's quite a few acronyms, and so provided in your packet, there's a sheet that kinda has like an acronym translator for you. I'm gonna do my best to say all of them all the way through and not use the acronyms, but in the presentation, you'll see them kinda shortened, and this may be helpful for you. So first off, what is the Habitat Conservation Plan and what's some of the history for it? The Edwards Aquifer and the endangered species there are required to be protected by the Texas legislature. So this is a little bit different than other habitat conservation plans in the state. In the 90s, there was a lawsuit, which then resulted in attention by the Texas legislature, which then later created the Edwards Aquifer Authority, which manages and protects the Edwards Aquifer and in turn, those endangered species. The Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan is a regional plan. There's five partners or permittees that are involved in it. And this next permit would protect seven listed endangered and one threatened species in the San Marcos and Comal River systems. The Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan gives us compliance with the Endangered Species Act. So as you know, through the federal government, if there's an endangered species, you have to protect it and its habitat, and this is how we get that compliance. An incidental take permit is a piece kind of tied to those habitat conservation plans. It's issued by the US Fish and Wildlife, and that allows for us to still have activities around and in the habitat of those endangered species while still having legal protection. Our current incidental take permit is a 15-year permit. It started in 2013 and it is due to expire in March of 2028. So that's why we're starting to talk about that renewal now. Working on the renewal process with the other permittees has been several years in the making. Our new permit is needed to continue to have that legal protection through the Endangered Species Act. So what is an incidental take permit? The Endangered Species Act prohibits you from interacting with endangered species or their habitat that could cause damage or harm to them at all. And so that can cause a lot of strain when it comes to economic development or any kind of activity that would happen in their habitat. And so Congress identified that that was a problem and then created the incidental take permit which will allow for you to still interact with their habitat or with the species themselves as long as you're doing other things that will help to improve their habitat or protect those species. So an example for us here in New Braunfels is the New Braunfels River. sorry, the Comal River is all endangered species habitat. Obviously we have river recreation that happens in that area as well as the area Atlanta Park where the springs are and there's construction within those areas as well. And so those activities are covered and the city is protected by having those activities because of our incidental take permit. So then what's a habitat conservation plan? These things work side by side. The habitat conservation plan is the actual document that will tell us what we can do. It'll assess whatever damages would be caused to those endangered species or impacts to them, how we would offset those impacts, what we would do to improve their habitat, and then provide these measures on how things would be documented and measured in protection so that if things change, like the environment changes, how we would be able to change those requirements We've been a part of the Habitat Conservation Plan since 2013, and most of our costs associated with the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan have been covered by the actual Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan itself. So I think that's a really important thing to note because this can be a very expensive process otherwise. I wanted to highlight some of the major projects that have been accomplished through the current Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan. The biggest one would be this biofiltration system. If you've been over to the Land O' Park Aquatic Complex, there's a nice pretty parking lot there that didn't used to exist. We were able to resurface, change the dynamics of that parking lot and allow the drainage to go to the center strip here that you see. This is like a biofiltration system where the water goes into it. There's a filter system that will take out all the contaminants before it gets just discharged into the Comal River. There's another smaller biofiltration system over by the mini golf and Elizabeth Avenue. And then another area when you go walk kind of on the off side of where the gazebo is and land a park, there's a spring run. So you can see the water come straight out of the ground and run down a little channel there. That area used to be very accessible to the public as in they could walk right to it and people felt invited to get in, although they were not allowed to. And so another part of it was that if it rained, all the runoff would wash straight into the springs there and take all kinds of sediments and contaminants with it. And so one of the big projects that we were able to accomplish was having this walkway and this vegetated strip put in there to help filter the water. It's all native plants. It looks really nice, and it helps kind of create this barrier between us, the humans, and the spring run there so you can still enjoy it, but you don't feel quite as invited to get into it. All right, so as we start talking about what a permit renewal would look like, I wanted to first cover what would happen if we didn't participate. So without the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan, we would have to entirely avoid impacts to those endangered species or be at a huge case of liability for lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act. So what does that look like? The key things, the biggest, most obvious things would be limiting or prohibiting any kind of maintenance or construction around Land O'Lake, the Spring Runs, and the Comal River, and then limiting or prohibiting aquatic recreation in those areas, especially the Comal River. And by limiting or prohibiting, what I'm really saying is like no contact recreation at all. So tubing would be out of the discussion. Paddle boarding and kayaking would be under great scrutiny and there would probably still be a huge risk for lawsuits for violation of the Endangered Species Act. The other alternative would be not participating in the regional partnership and getting our own incidental take permit from the city. This wouldn't be a great idea for the city because we would have to fund the HCP ourself. This would cost millions of dollars, especially over the course of a 30 year permit. It would be incredibly time intensive and we would need lots of extra staff or contracts in order to accomplish that. So moving into what are the proposed covered activities for the new incidental take permit in that regional partnership? The existing habitat conservation plan covers these activities, public recreation on the Comal River, permitted use of the aquifer and also use for the golf course, management of the ecosystem and the infrastructure, also allowing for water to be allowed through the old channel, which kind of runs by the golf course, Maintenance of the spring fed pool. Operation of boats in the Comel River and Landa Lake, but only for specific uses. And so specifically in Landa Lake, the only thing that's allowed is paddle boats. It's called out specifically in our HCP so we can't allow for other forms of contact recreation there. And then we can also allow it for scientific use or for protection like with enforcement. Also, we have the ability to implement these mitigation measures or our conservation measures. So a lot of times when we go in and do things to improve the habitat of the endangered species, it has a temporary impact on them. And even that has to be covered through an incidental take permit. One of the exciting things about the renewal is that one of the things that would be covered, it's still in negotiations, but it looks very promising at this point, would be for infrastructure maintenance and repair. So if we wanted to go in and do some retaining walls or one day, make improvements to the tube shoot or something like that, we would be required to get specific permits through US Fish and Wildlife. That kind of work would be covered under those permits, at least through the US Fish and Wildlife part for the Habitat Conservation Plan moving forward. So that would be a huge benefit to the city. So there's several steps on how this is put into place. You have biological goals and biologic objectives, and we'll kind of go through those step by step. So the goals are just like they sound. What are the goals of our program? And that would be to conserve the quality and the quantity of the spring flow, allow for good habitat for those endangered species, and then promote community engagement. So then your biologic objectives is how are we going to achieve those goals? So there's specific things put into place to say how we're going to maintain a minimum amount of spring flow from the Comal Springs. Water quality objectives for the Comal Springs and river which is really just tied to temperature because that's what the species need most is a constant and cool temperature. And then maintaining their habitat and specifically the habitat that they thrive in and can reproduce best in. Spring flow objectives is one of the biggest parts of any of these permits, and so I wanted to pull those out specifically. There's a long-term average for the whole term of the permit, the 30-year permit. The long-term average is 225 CFS, which is almost exactly where we are today. A three-year rolling average is about 174 CFS, which is good adequate flow. A monthly average and the daily average kind of work together. And so the thing to keep in mind when you're looking at the monthly and the daily average is this is in extreme drought situations, worst case scenarios. What are we planning to keep the springs above at in a worst case scenario? So the monthly average would be above 45 CFS for 11 plus months out of the year. So it could only dip below 45 CFS for one month out of the year. Then the daily average is over 30 CFS, which means it could only go between that 45 CFS and 30 out of one month of the year before other things would kick into play to try and push that average up higher. As we all heard that presentation earlier today, there's all of these drought contingency plans to try and keep things from getting to these dire situations. But in the event that we have another extreme drought, which we know we will at some point, these protections would be put in place to try and keep us from getting to an area where those endangered species would potentially go extinct in the wild. so the metrics for achieving those spring flow measures fall into a whole bunch of creative categories the first one is aquifer permitting and i'll talk a little bit about that in a minute these other ones i'm not going to go into great detail on but there's forbearance programs which is when the edwards aquifer authority purchases or people who have edwards aquifer rights can enroll some of their water in a forbearance program so that if we reach certain drought stages they will get paid to not use the water that they have enrolled into the program So essentially they get paid to keep their water in the aquifer and not pump it. The Edwards Aquifer Authority would also purchase water rights, which is similar to the one before to where they would actually own water rights that would not be used or distributed, but it would keep water in the aquifer. There's land conservation in areas like the recharge zone where it would allow for more water to get into the aquifer during rain events. and then the Aquifer Storage and Recovery Program, which is operated by the San Antonio Water System, and that's where they take water from the Edwards Aquifer, they pump it into another saline, salty aquifer, and it creates kind of a bubble of fresh water. That aquifer is extremely slow moving, and so that water just kind of stays there, and then they are able to go and retrieve that water through the San Antonio Water System in time of extreme drought, which then essentially leaves water in the Edwards Aquifer by taking, the stored Edwards water out of the other aquifer. So those are all creative solutions that help to keep that spring flow flowing at all times and help to prevent extinction for those species. So I wanted to talk about permitting for the Edwards Aquifer, because I think there's a lot of misconceptions there. The Edwards Aquifer permitting has been capped since 1996. So there are no new permits that have been issued to remove water from the Edwards Aquifer since 1996. And you can see this chart here. The dates kind of got cut off on the bottom of the presentation, so I'm sorry about that. But the orange line shows where 1996 was. So pre-1996, pumping was pretty much unmonitored at that point. There wasn't any restrictions on how much could be pumped out. And then after that point, this 572,000 acre feet was set into place. So an acre foot of water is one acre of land. That's one foot of water deep. And so that amount has stayed constant despite the amount of growth when you see from San Antonio to San Marcos. You'll see that not only is 572,000 acre feet the actual capped amount that can be issued, but most of the time we stay under 400,000 acre feet of water actually pumped out of the aquifer. And so because of this cap, it has caused the local communities to come up with creative solutions and diversify their portfolio as you heard in that earlier presentation. Here are some of our measures that we would be responsible for from the City of New Braunfels. I wanna highlight before I go through the list that anything with an asterisk on it is something that we currently receive funding from the EAHCP to actually perform the work. And we would expect to continue to receive funding for that moving forward. So aquatic recreation management, we don't currently receive any funding for it, but we have a pretty robust program here in New Braunfels. Litter management for the Landa Park area is covered from the Habitat Conservation Plan as far as funding goes, and then we do additional litter management through the city funds. Aquatic vegetation management means taking out non-native plants or even some native plants, but replacing them with plants that are best suited for those endangered species. There's floating vegetation management to move floating vegetation away from that critical habitat. There's non-native species management where we have a group that goes in and removes non-native animals like nutria, goldfish, tilapia, to name a handful of them. There's riparian zone management, which helps to keep sediment from getting down into the spring runs and plugging them up. And then that also goes to the next one where we can go and remove sediment if it does start to cause a problem. The flow split is what I talked about earlier, where the old channel is, where we divert water from land to lake to the old channel. That area is the prime habitat for many of the species, and so it's important we keep that area flowing. And then we have surface water diversions for the golf course at a very small amount, and that is also something that we are covered with here. One of the cool things about our program is that there's a refugia, which means there are some of those endangered species that are collected from the wild. They're taken to this area where they can either be bred to reproduce or studied. And so the more we understand about the animals, the better we can protect their habitat and understand what parameters they need to thrive first most, but then also just to survive, which is also an important distinction. This kind of compares what our current permit looks like and then what the proposed permit would look like. One of the biggest changes is that it would be doubling that permit term from a 15 year term to a 30 year term. It takes a lot of coordination and a lot of funds to go and get one of these permits put together, especially in this regional partnership. And so the longer permit term is very cost effective. The plan area is essentially the same. It covers the same partners in the same region. The covered activities are also essentially the same. They've been kind of massaged and looked at and kind of changed with some of the language, but essentially they're the same. It would just add the additional part of the construction coverage. The covered species is a little different. Sometimes people raise their eyebrows at this one. There was 11 covered species in our current permit. There's seven moving forward, and that's because four of them actually had listing changes from U.S. Fish and Wildlife. So four of them no longer require coverage, so they won't be covered moving forward. None of those impact, none of the endangered species impact the ones that we have currently covered at this time. The conservation measures are also very similar, but they have just been kind of massaged and affected. And then our adaptive management is also very similar, but they have more data now than we did in 2013, and so they're able to refine that and make it more specific. and then for cost and funding this is a big one for everyone involved they will have to update our funding commitments moving forward and like i said a few times through the presentation at this time the things that have been covered in the past look to be covered in the future that that we have negotiated and so there's a few things that they've helped out with in the past like our household hazardous waste or a couple of these really big construction projects where they've covered more than just the water quality aspects And we would expect moving forward that it would be a little bit more focused to just the water quality parts of those construction projects. But I still think there's a good partnership there for us in the future. So what are the next steps? I wanna say that this, I would take this with a grain of salt because this is kind of our best case scenario schedule that we would have moving forward. In September of 2026, the hopes is that we have a first draft finished and completed that will be submitted to US Fish and Wildlife for review. The schedule that has been provided to us through this process shows that by November or December, we would be receiving comments back, and I think that's very unlikely. We will most likely not receive comments from US Fish and Wildlife that quickly, so these next dates will probably be pushed. Once we receive comments, then there'll be a draft, there'll be some massaging for a second draft. If there's any major changes to what would affect us here in New Braunfels, then I would bring that back to you at that time. And then we would be able to start our environmental impact statements. There's several different layers of how that looks and that will impact the timeline. But we don't get to choose which category or layer we fall in, that's determined by US Fish and Wildlife. So we really don't know the next part of that schedule until we get the feedback from US Fish and Wildlife. Right now it looks promising that we would be in a shorter review period, but it could be up to a year and a half. For December of 2027, we would be reviewing again. And at that point, we would be coming to city council seeking a resolution to approve the HCP and the incidental take permit application. And then in February of 2028, we would be publishing a draft and sending that to US Fish and Wildlife in application form. So one thing I don't want people to be alarmed in is that you hear that our permit would expire in March of 2028, but US Fish and Wildlife has something in play to where as long as we have given them notice and we have an intention for application, then we still receive coverage until that application has been approved by them. So as long as we stick to this timeline and they understand that we're working on the process and that we're getting everything in and doing our due diligence to get it in as close to on time as possible, we will still have coverage until it's approved. So some people think you have to have it approved before 2028, but that's not the case. Okay, before any questions, I wanted to just really drive home the importance of the renewal process here. We need incidental take coverage in New Braunfels to have that legal protection under that Endangered Species Act. Getting our own permit would cost millions of dollars and it would be an ongoing effort. It would be an effort that never ends and it would be in competition with everything else that we need to fund here in New Braunfels. The Habitat Conservation Plan also has the spring flow protection measures that are super important for us to maintain spring flow in Land O'Lake and the Comal River. And the city has protection for river recreation and construction on the Comal because of our incidental take permit. With that, I can answer any questions.

Council Member Edwards.

Yes, all right, so with this in this cycle and what we're doing on the vegetation and all our research on that, will we be able to have our information in time that if there's any requests or adjustments to this that we would have it in a time period to help us with the consideration?

The timeframe, yes. I mean, we'll have results from the floating vegetation study by the end of the summer.

Well, obviously we may get a different viewpoint than the public may think, but as long as we have the time to finish our research on that.

Yeah, the research will be completed before the draft. In order to get anything major included in the draft at that point would go to negotiations with the permittees. And so, I mean, it is possible. I think it could be cumbersome.

Well, sometimes you can get incremental, but this is a long increment. So any improvement that we could get during that time would be great. Obviously, it's a good thing to keep this in place because it's that trigger that helps us with the Edwards Aquifer on them not being able to take so much that they can have even more impact against our water supply. So this is a very critical document. that really provides a lot of protection for us, even though there's some complications with it and other issues. As long as we can keep on the process with vegetation to get our report in to see if there's any latitude, That would be very helpful.

Thank you. And that's why we have the Edwards Aquifer Authority involved in that process and the Habitat Conservation Plan in that stakeholder group so that they can weigh in on how it could or may not be incorporated in that document.

Councilwoman Lebowski?

Well, I had the same question about the vegetation project. But the other question I had was about will this affect the waiting area at Land O' Park and the fishing at Land O' Park?

No, it would still have the same requirements that we have right now. That's what's been incorporated into the future document. So it does exempt the waiting area. That's an area where we can allow contact recreation, but the other areas of Land O' Lake, we cannot. Okay, thank you.

Council Member Spradley.

Yeah, I would just like to say thank you for getting in front of this. Looks like it's a really extremely long process and it's better to plan early rather than wait too late. And so I guess that when we did the last tuber's exit, I guess it was covered underneath the previous or the one we have now.

No, we had to seek our own permit with US Fish and Wildlife for that. And so that's one of the great benefits is that moving forward, if we were to do a similar project, at least that one permit would be already covered with our habitat conservation plan.

And I also like the fact that it's a 30-year permit. None of us in this room should be working here 30 years from now. I mean, I like a one-shot thing because nothing's going to change, right? The same things are going to be endangered. The same people are going to be tubing the river. Everything's going to remain the same. So I appreciate your effort. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Councilwoman Shah.

You said it'd be very expensive for us to acquire this on our own. Who pays for it now?

So right now, the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan is funded from aquifer management fees that are collected by the Edwards Aquifer Authority. So when they permit out the water, there's a fee associated with being able to pump that water. And then those fees are distributed between the Habitat Conservation Plan and the Edwards Aquifer Operating Budget.

Okay.

Number two.

Go ahead, Mayor Votem. I just, real briefly, just wanna say I echo Councilmember Edwards. I wouldn't necessarily say concerns, but desire to make sure that whatever our studies are and the findings of them, that we can get those, if need be, incorporated into this at the end of the year as well, too.

Anyone else? I... I had a question about the species. It's going from 11 to seven. But I'm wondering, what does it matter what kind of species, even if there's just one? So does the number matter and how much you're being funded? Or how much money did you need?

Not necessarily. It's just you would be protecting the specific habitat for those species. So, you know, one of the potential threatened species was a comal salamander. And then it was found that actually there's an abundance of comal salamanders. They're not a threatened species. So now we're not required to protect the habitat at that extensive level. But their habitat is the same as these endangered species. So it's being protected anyways.

But it could change, right? Anyone could be added to it.

Yes, yeah, if a new endangered species is identified, then yes, it could be added to the endangered species list.

I guess one more thing, because it's something I noticed. I didn't even know, you guys, someone controls the aquifer, the springs. Someone controls the flow that's coming out of there, right? That's what I'm reading. I didn't know that there was someone had the ability to control the flow, like turn it off.

No, the amount that's permitted, that is allowed to be pumped out, that is controlled. And then how it impacts the amount that comes out of the springs is a combination of what's pumped out and then how much rain or recharge is coming in.

That's not your control, right? I'm just wondering, because there was no water coming out of it for almost a year. I'm just wondering, was that good, was that bad? And could you pump water out of there at the time last year?

There was drought restrictions through the Edwards Aquifer Authority at that time, so the amount that could be pumped out of the aquifer was very reduced, but there is no on or off for the springs. It's just a matter of how much pressure is in the aquifer to push the water up.

Go ahead. To clarify, though, even though we don't see visible water coming from the spring load, most of our water comes from underground springs in the lake itself, blow holes, so to say.

Yes, there are hundreds of springs in the Comal Springs system, and so only some of those higher level springs at the higher level of the aquifer were not flowing, but the lower level springs were flowing, which is why you saw water in the lake and water going downriver.

We were still getting flow out of there because of the level of the aquifer, but part of it was this permit really kept the Edwards from being able to pump catastrophically to us, except if Mother Nature works against us.

So the Edwards Aquifer Authority doesn't actually do any pumping themselves. They just permit whoever does pumping. And so they had drought restrictions to reduce the total amount that could be pumped at that time. But that 572 acre feet has been capped since 1996. So there is no increase. And there cannot be an increase without a force of the Texas legislature to change that. So it is very set in stone as far as that's concerned.

It's not an absolute. It's just a trigger to slow it down from...

The 572 acre feet?

The conservation plan for the EAA and that, this is just an influence on it. It's not a...

The 572 feet is set from the state level, and so that is an absolute, the Habitat Conservation Plan complements that to help make sure that they can't use all 572 acre feet despite low or drought conditions.

So yeah, I think that's. And the 572 acre feet, that's for the entire Edwards Aquifer?

For the entire aquifer, yes. So that includes all aquifer users.

And over the last several years during this drought, we've been talking about drought today, the flow never stopped on the Comel. What was the lowest cubic feet per?

I think we got to 42 CFS at one point.

So it wasn't close to what you had on the slide.

The 45 CFS, the lowest that we could get through the permit was 30, so yes. So it shows that the conservation measures in place did keep it above that level.

Okay, all right, thanks.

Anyone else up here? All right, thank you very much, Ms. Niles.

Thank you.

Anyone from the audience would like to come up and speak at the podium? I see no one. That is the end of our presentations. And in accordance with the Open Meetings Act, Texas Government Code Chapter 551.071, the City Council may convene in closed session to discuss any of the items listed on this agenda. Any final action and vote on any executive session item will be taken into open session. And we're gonna discuss item A and B. A is deliberate the appointment and duties of Nathan Brown as the interim city attorney in accordance with section 551.074 of the Texas Government Code. We're gonna talk about item B, deliberate the appointment and employment of the city attorney, including matters related to the search and selections of candidates pursuant to Texas Government Code 551.071. And I believe this is We're closing open session, and the time right now is 7.08. Thank you. All right, the council is introducing a motion for action based on our session in the back. And... We're going to appoint Interim City Attorney Nathan Brown effective immediately. I want to introduce a motion for that. Council Member Edwards seconded. Who firsted? Nobody did. Nobody? I motion for approval. I'll make the motion. Council Member Levowski seconded. All those in favor raise your hand. It's unanimous, and the vote is adopted.

Do we have to make that effective retroactively from last Tuesday, for the record?

You all can, and separately we can do that through a contract.

So what we just did was, do we need to do it again? It works how you guys did it right now. Okay, and I guess that's it, right? There being no further business to come before New Buffalo City Council, this meeting is adjourned. 804.