Board of Public Utilities - Regular Meeting

Good evening. We'd like to welcome you to the Board of Public Utilities meeting. This meeting is called to order. We will now play the inclusion statement.

I think.

Pursuant to the City Council rules of procedure and order of business resolution, the members of all Boards and Commissions and the public are reminded that they must preserve order and decorum throughout the meeting. In that regard, members of the Boards and Commissions and the public are advised that any delay or disruption in the proceedings or a refusal to obey the orders of the Board or Commission or the Presiding Officer constitutes a violation of these rules. The City of Riverside is committed to fostering a workplace that provides dignity, respect, and civility to our employees, customers, and the public they serve.

Okay, Jordan, will you please lead us in the pledge? Please stand. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Roll call, please.

Good evening, board members. Board Member Wright.

Here.

Board Member Goldware. Here. Board Member Rand. Here. Board Member Montgomery. Here. Board Member Evans. Here. Board Member Becker. Here. Vice Chair, or I'm sorry, Board Member Cruz. Here. Vice Chair Wolgenmuth. Here. Chair Sayana. Here. Thank you.

We will now move to public comment. Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star 9. When called to speak, press star 6 to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

OK, please send the caller through.

Good evening, everyone. Melissa McKeith with CURE. First, thank you very much for having the presentation on the Climate Action Plan and the Urban Water Management Plan at this meeting. The two documents should be fully integrated and RPU's relationship with planning and the Office of Sustainability should be strengthened. I'll talk a little bit more about that in the context of the language in the Urban Water Management Plan later. Obviously, if our weather were always like it is today, we'd be very lucky and it would otherwise be known as Newport Beach. But unfortunately, we are getting increasingly hot and our ability to mitigate against heat depends largely on the maintenance and expansion of our tree canopies. I believe because RPU has significantly more resources at its disposal through the public benefit dollars that it receives, that we should be allocating a set percentage of the public benefit dollars to ensuring that there is water at the lowest possible rate for climate approved projects, most of which should be implemented through the city public works and or planning in the $34 million that's going to go before council. You'll hear me speak to this 0.2% of that was going to studies relating to trees and climate. I don't really think we need any more studies. I think we know the issue firsthand and any money I think should be utilized by either RPU staff or by our own city employees to implement tree planting for areas that would benefit larger communities, not just one property at a time as we have with our current by a tree program. You've all heard me talk about this before. I don't think this is a controversial issue. The public really is behind more tree planting. It's a lot to do with leadership and coordination between our agencies. So I appreciate the fact that it's a good start tonight. I do wish we had had a workshop. We've been asking for it for some time, both myself and some of the members of the RPU board. We're not going to have a lot of time between now and when city council has to approve the urban water management plan, which means that there's no time for this board to really make changes. And I think that's unfair because it's a very, very meaty document, lots of issues. You have plenty of notice. This is the same thing that happened last year and it's disappointing and it doesn't only happen on this issue. It frequently happens that we're up against deadlines and Neither the commission nor the public really get a lot of meaningful time to work with staff. But all things considered, the glass is half full. Our aquifers are very full. We have plenty of water. We didn't use nearly as much as we projected in 2020. And I'm hoping some of that can be targeted for trees, green spaces to combat heat. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Do we have any other callers? No?

Okay. For item number two, I will ask our board members if anyone has any conflicts of interest to disclose on our agenda. Okay, seeing none. At this time, the Board of Public Utilities will hold two public hearings to receive public input regarding the 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan and the Urban Water Management Plan. The public hearings will be conducted to allow public comment on these issues. We will now hold a public hearing for the 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan. We open for public comment for item number three.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star 9. When called to speak, press star 6 to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Okay, we call for presentation of item number 3 by Melody Morgan.

Good evening, Chair Siena, Vice Chair Wolgamuth, and members of the board. My name is Melody Morgan, senior water resources analyst. Tonight's public hearing is for the board to consider recommending city council adopt the 2025 water shortage contingency plan through a resolution. Before beginning, I'd like to give you a little background about three different things. First of all, this is a state required planning document. It explains how the city would respond to water shortages and supply emergencies. And second, the action that I'm presenting tonight, it doesn't change any water rules or add new restrictions, and it does not modify enforcement under the city water conservation ordinance. And third, the city currently has reliable water supplies, but this plan also prepares us for emergencies such as drought, pipeline failures, earthquakes or contamination events. So with that, we'll begin. State law requires urban water suppliers to update their urban water management plan every five years and submit it by July 1, 2026 to remain compliant. The updated state guidebook was released in January of this year. Noncompliance can affect eligibility for certain state grants and federally supported funding programs. As part of the urban water management plan, agencies are also required to include a water shortage contingency plan. This plan must be adopted as a stand-alone document. State requirements also require the Water Shortage Contingency Plan to address a full range of shortage conditions from 0% up to greater than 50% with defined response actions at each level. The city's Water Shortage Contingency Plan framework is established in ordinance 7556, which aligns the city's shortage stages with California Water Code section 10632. Ordinance 7556 was adopted on May 11, 2021, and defines the City's current shortage stages and response structure. In addition, the City prepares an Annual Water Supply and Demand Assessment, or AWSDA. This is completed every year and compares projected water supply with expected demand. If it identifies a potential shortage, it can trigger the water shortage contingency plan response actions and planning activities. So this slide here shows how Riverside's five shortage stages align with the state's standardized system. The city's shortage levels are already established in the Water Conservation Ordinance, and they are not changing with this action. The key difference between Riverside's levels and the state's levels is that Riverside's shortage levels are operational and require city council action to be declared and implemented. the state's standardized levels are there so that all the water agencies in california report and plan using consistent framework the water shortage contingency plan simply connects the city's existing local system to the state framework for compliance and reporting so these are the stages stage one is normal conditions when the city can meet all water demand conservation programs still continue Stage two is used when there's a chance that we might not be able to meet demand or when shortages reach up to about 15%. And any shortage stages still require formal action by city council to enact. Stage 3 is for moderate shortage conditions, or when shortages reach between 15% to 20%. Stage 4 is severe shortage conditions, or when shortages reach 20% to 50%. And stage 5 is emergency conditions, when shortages are the most serious, exceeding more than 50%. These stages are already part of the city's ordinance and they are not being changed. The water shortage contingency plan simply documents them and aligns them again with state requirements. So again, tonight's action, we're not trying to change any water policies or restrictions. The water shortage contingency plan mainly documents the city's existing system, and it includes minor formatting and updates for clarity and state compliance. There's also two items marked with asterisks in the document, and they're included for transparency and possible future discussion. They are not being approved tonight, but we do want to go over them. So again, these are the items with asterisks there for informational purposes only. The first item relates to possible future changes about watering non-functional turf, such as grass that is not actively used. This is related to state policy direction, part of assembly bill 1572, which focuses on reducing water use on non-functional turf in certain areas. The second item relates to clarifying wording about watering trees and shrubs by removing the word minimal to make the language clearer. This item is not tied to a specific state law. Both of these items would require a separate amendment to the water conservation ordinance and would return to the board and city council for review and approval before any changes could be implemented. I'd also like to note that any minor technical or formatting errors that are identified in the plan, if you let us know, they can be corrected prior to the July 1st submission deadline. However, any substantive changes tied to the ordinance, including the two items marked with asterisks, would occur through a future update to the Water Conservation Ordinance, which is expected to come to board later this year. At this time, staff anticipates that the two items shown on the slide are the primary ordinance related changes that could affect the Water Shortage Contingency Plan. Once any ordinance amendments are formally adopted, the changes would take effect immediately and be reflected in the next Water Shortage Contingency Plan update. So it is our recommendation tonight that the Board of Public Utilities conduct a public hearing to review the 2025 water shortage contingency plan and recommend that City Council adopt a resolution adopting the 2025 water shortage contingency plan prepared by the City of Riverside's Public Utilities Department. And this concludes my presentation. We are happy to answer any questions pertaining to this item.

Thank you. Do we have any public comment? Okay, send the caller through. Thank you.

Hi, again, Melissa McKeith with CURE. I don't have any specific changes to this particular document, which we are required to do by law. I do have real concerns about this idea that

Riverside should be conserving more water.

I've raised it many times both with the regulators when they were adopting the California's conservation of the California way of life and also with this board and I know that Western and Corona and Riverside also commented to the state about how inapplicable the idea of our conserving is given that we should be using water for outdoor irrigation when it comes to green spaces. Asking us to conserve is like asking people in a country that is suffering from famine to have to reduce their calories. We have enough water within our water rights, as you will see. One of the reasons why we are using so much less water than in 2020 is because of all of this push to conserve outdoor watering and also because we have raised rates so much. because we have a tiered system which penalizes people for using more water for outdoor purposes. And we need to rethink that because as we sell less water in our city, you also generate less income for RPU. And so this is not a sustainable business model in the long term. I'm sure the general manager could explain that because of the amount of water we have, our strict requirements with this conservation of the California way of life are probably not even going to kick in for many, many years, even though we have to fill out the paperwork and waste money. The point I'm trying to make is we need to talk about optimizing our water demand and management so that we can stay cool. You don't want everybody planting cactuses. You don't want everybody reducing their outdoor irrigation for both financial and air quality and heat related purposes. We need to sort of change that dialogue because our city's particular needs don't fit into this larger concept that the state promulgated and forcing people to use that don't have any water. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any other callers? No? Okay. If there are no other comments regarding this matter, the Board of Public Utilities will close the public hearing. Do we have a motion to close the public hearing? Okay. Second? Okay. Roll call, please.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

You know, I meant to just close public comment, not actual comment from the board. So, yeah, that's okay. Okay. So, all right. Any comments or questions from the board? Pete?

All right. Thank you for the fine presentation. Could you reiterate and emphasize that this is a regulatory compliance document primarily?

Yes. This is a regulatory compliance document.

Okay. As far as the asterisk exceptions, could you give an example of non-functional turf?

Grass? All grass? I'll refer to a tree. It's not, but I believe I'll let you respond unless you want me to.

So, Board Member Willemus, non-functional turf is a grassy area, say, between warehouses that's not used for recreation, lunch breaks, etc. It's ground cover purely for the state of just being ground cover. It's not grass at a park. It's not grass that's being used, say, at a playground or other areas of that nature.

Thank you for clarifying that. Because I was wondering about, does that include parks? Does that include soccer fields? Does that include other public areas that it's still grass, but maybe that's the functional turf as opposed to non-functional turf? What about street medians?

Straight medians would also be non-functional, and that's why a lot of them have changed to the drought-tolerant landscaping and rocks.

OK. And AstroTurf. OK. Once again, thank you for the fine presentation and I'm glad we were able to clarify things. Oh, just one other thing on the asterisked items. We're removing the term minimal from watering, Trubs and trees?

Minimal survival of trees. We want it to say survival of trees.

All right. So, we don't want the minimal survival. We want.

Right. We'd like a healthy tree.

Vigorous survival. Yes. Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. Seemed to go back and forth, at least in my mind.

All right.

That's all. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other?

Tom? Yeah. Thank you. In 2016 or so, we were in a mandated reduction period, I think. Was this policy in effect then? And my question is how did it work? How well did it work? I can't find it.

Good question, Board Member Tom. I'm going to give a little bit of history, I guess. During the drought mandates between 2015 and 2016, The state kind of reacted to the drought episodes, but then they realized that they are not treating every agency as fair, and I think we kind of see that they kept changing the percentage that every agency has to reduce their consumption or conserve across the state in the same number. And then they started doing some modifications, And I think what followed is this new framework, what they called Making California a Conservation New Way of Life, in which the idea is to put this conservation practices and removal of non-functional turfs among them to be ready for when the next drought happens and they don't have to react, but there will be some framework there.

Okay. And just for the sake of it, regarding this non-functional turf, I thought it was ornamental turf, which, I mean, there's a connotation of ornamental is perhaps more visible or more obvious than non-functional. Because ornamental turf works. It sounds like it's doesn't working when you say non-functional. But anyway, just for the future sake of... I don't intend to change it here, but I think it means more to say ornamental. We don't want ornamental turf. So that's it.

Okay, thank you. Any other comments, questions? Okay, I had one brief question or comment, I don't know. Given that our water supply is from an aquifer that will last much, much longer than the time scale worried about in these documents, our water shortages will not come from a lack of a water supply in that aquifer, at least on the time scales here. But it might happen from some infrastructure issue, a pipeline, or an issue at Linda Nevins or something like this. Okay, so I say what happens, but we know what happens. You have the lists of actions that happen, but this suddenly goes from stage zero or one or whatever it is, everything's fine, to pretty dramatic, right? Because we are dependent on a handful of pipelines that are bringing in huge amounts of water, right? So this is our primary concern that we're worried about here? Is that right?

Our primary concern is in the event of an emergency, such as pipeline failure or drought or earthquake or contamination, and the timeline to repair whatever damage was caused.

How frequent are these things? I mean, when's the last time something like that has happened? I like that you're looking around. It means it's infrequent. That's good.

We're pointing to David, since he's the one who's been here.

Yeah, great question, Board Member Sayana. It's great to have a plan that we can put into place if needed, and it's great news that none of us here can remember the last time it's been utilized. But practicing the plan, discussing the plan, making sure everybody's involved, if we do actually have to use it, we'll be ready to implement it.

Okay, so I'm not getting an answer on the last time. Okay.

There was a connection made under the freeway, the 10 and 215 freeway. That was about a two-week-long period where the coordination of bringing down that line was done during a low-demand period. But still, at that time, we were relying on one pipeline to bring water into the city. So that was about 2010, 2011.

Okay. And that was planned? That was planned. Okay. And that was 16 years ago or whatever. Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I have no more questions. Do I hear a motion?

I move to approve.

Okay. Okay. Roll call, please.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

OK. Thank you. We will now hold the public hearing for the Urban Water Management Plan. We open public comment for item number four.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star nine. When called to speak, press star six to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Okay, we call for presentation of item number four by Fareed Boushaki.

Good evening Board Chair Ciano and Vice Chair Wigumuth and the esteemed members of the Board. I am Fred Bushaki, Principal Water Resources Engineer with Riverside Public Utilities Water. The item for your consideration tonight is to conduct a public hearing on the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan. I recommend that the City Council adopt this plan prior to submitting it to the California Department of Water Resources by July 1st deadline. So an Urban Water Management Plan is required every five, is required of every urban water supplier as defined in the California Water Code 10610 and is updated every five years for calendar years ending zero or five. And then just background on October 27th of 2025, the Board of Public Utilities approved a professional service agreement for the preparation of the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan with the consultant Civil Tech Engineering and the 2025 Urban Management Plan update must be adopted and submitted to the California Department of Water Resources by July 1st, 2026. So the intent of the urban water management updates is for water suppliers to share information with the Department of Water Resources related to water supply reliability, updates the changes in demand, supply, population, and any relevant information to ensure that there is a reliable water supply to the needed demand within their service area or within city's service area in this case. So the urban water management plan are five years required compliance document to support long-term, in this case 25 years horizon, water supply availability and or reliability. And by meeting the requirements set in the California Water Code, it makes the city eligible to receive water-related grants and or loans. As an example, we have applied for a few of these grants in the past, and we are in the process of applying for several grants, programs mainly for PFAS removal and treatment plant, construction and design, and where state-funded grants are among them. So DWR published the 2025 guidebook late or mid January of 2026 with the latest required update, the DWR. provides detailed spreadsheets that water suppliers must populate with their specific information along with the required coordination and notifications with stakeholders. And as an example, RPU notified about 26 neighboring agencies and some other stakeholders. This slide summarizes the 10 chapters in the document. And as a side note, the water shortage contingency plan was presented separately and is referenced here in chapter eight, as Melody did. So this slide shows the changes from the late, from the last 2020 guidelines publications, like the compliance with the 2028 water loss standards and the groundwater recharge activities. So one of the requirements of the submittals is to show the last five years of demand. This table summarizes the potable demand and the non-potable demand for the RPU. And the more detailed table is included in the draft report. And it will be in the final report as well. Usually, residential demand accounts for 60% to 65% of the total potable demand. This is used to estimate the gallons per capita per day, what we call the GPCD versus the residential GPCD. And the non-potable demand includes water sent to Gage, for example, and other non-potable demand customers. We can notice here in this table that the 2023 and 2024 demand gets reduced, and that's due to back-to-back wet years in those years. And just to refresh your memory, I think we presented that in one of the previous reports with the hydrology data, which we showed that the 2023 and 2024 were very wet years in contrast with the 2022, which we had like less than four inches of rain. So now for the projection of demand, we have to estimate the population first and its projection for the next 25 years. And this table shows the estimated population change following a projected growth model that gets corrected by the State Department of Finance population data estimates. And the Department of Finance, they publish their data on an annual basis, on a six-month basis, I believe. So now for the projection of demand, we have to estimate the population projection for the next 25 years. I think I talked about this, sorry. This slide translate that population data that we showed in the previous slide into projected water demand by factoring the expected gallons per capita, the GPCD, consumption and any specific projected project in the city such as the UCR expansion or the sport complex project. And as before, a detailed table is given in the report for all the subcategories of services. This is the famous slide that shows the familiar exhibit of Riverside Current Extraction, right? Distribution from all groundwater basins. And currently, the city of Riverside has 85.770 acre feet of water per year to pump. This slide is a little bit congested, but it shows the current available pumping and the planned water supply project and the potential imported water purchase, if needed. This project will be more refined in the future integrated water supply and demand management plan with detailed feasibility and how much they will yield. These are projections for so far. And that will require coordination and working with other city departments as well as regional partners. Individual projects will be brought back to board to be discussed in details as we move forward. So this slide, this slide basically summarizes what we talked in the last previous three slides as far as the projection goes. And it compares our projected annual water demand against actual usage. No, sorry. This slide summarizes all expected projection from population increase to demand change and also available supply in the identified project, if the identified project move forward. This slide we wanted to throw it in here to compare our projected annual water demand against actual usage since now we have the annual water supply and demand assessment and we have to submit our projection year by year and then we put an exercise to compare that to how did we do by looking in hindsight. Overall, the data shows a strong match. Our winter projection shows we are slightly higher in our projections. And this actually reflects a conservative planning approach that ensures we reliably meet riverside water demands. This slide shows a future supply and demand comparison in a tabular form. As you can see, there is more than 22,000 acre feet a year of access supply, which can be available to support future demand and not relying on imported water. So the imported water is about 21,000 acre feet, potentially. This comparison is valid under the assumption that the projected supply projects will be built according to the five-year segmented timelines. So in conclusion, RPU identified that the supply exceeds the expected demands through 2050, provided that it continues conservation efforts, implement long range planning, and develops a new water supply project, and that RPU continues to meet customer demands in a cost effective and environmentally responsive manner, and that RPU effectively manages water resources by proactive planning and participating in regional supply projects. So with that, the staff recommendation is that recommend that the Board of Public Utilities conduct a public hearing for review of the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan and recommend that the City Council adopt a resolution adopting the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan prepared by the City of Riverside Public Utilities Department. At this stage, I will conclude my presentation and I would like to thank the RPU staff who are here, who prepared some of this project, some of this, who prepared this report along with the help of our consultant and we have a representative here from Civil Tech and we are available for questions. Also our AGM, Glenny Robin and And our AGM, Tracy Saddle from Strategic Initiatives, are here to answer questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have any public comment? OK. Send the caller through, please.

Hi, Melissa McKee. First, I want to thank Farid for talking to me from home late Friday evening. And Robin, she's always available to answer questions on these issues. I think we should take a hard look at what our stakeholder engagement is and why it's working so poorly, because I'm frequently the only person calling in. And this is an important document for no other reason. It really allows developers, environmentalists to understand how our water is being managed, which frankly is quite good in many respects. and what's available.

The second comment I have on engagement is I cannot upload documents to our portal.

So I did send out a memorandum earlier today to Denisha Gause and some of the board members about omission in page 6-20 of any real allocation of demand for URBAN TREE CANOPIES AND GREEN SPACES. WE DO FINE AS IT RELATES TO RESIDENCES. WE HAVE POPULATION VERSUS GALLONS PER DAY.

WE'RE GENEROUS.

BUT THERE'S A LOT OF TREES IN OUR CITY, AND THERE'S A LOT OF GREEN SPACES THAT ARE MANAGED BY THE CITY. THAT IS A DEMAND. IT CAN BE EASILY INCLUDED. IN FACT, BOTH THE LEGISLATION THAT WAS EARLIER REFERENCED AND IN DWR'S GUIDELINES, IT CLEARLY ANTICIPATES THAT GREEN SPACES AND TREES REDUCE CLIMATE. impacts and heat impacts. This is going to be an increasingly serious issue for us, particularly since many of the other efforts that were undertaken to transition to EVs and other screening strategies are not going to happen. The document, I also sent a document which was an AI-generated document, which was great. It compared the 2020 to the 2025 plan. It really showed how our population did not increase the way we had anticipated. Between the last general plan and today, the population was down by 17% from the projections. And we have projections here. We also use significantly less water overall than we had projected. There may be reasons for that. I really do think it's in our cost basis with the tiers. I'd love to be able to discuss these issues in detail more, but I can't because I only get three minutes. So good luck digesting this big document. I hope to be able to talk with staff some before the city council meeting to put in some language about coordinating better with the climate action plan and how that's going to relate to our future. And I'll see you in 2030 on this. Thank you. Bye.

Thank you, Ms. McKeith. Do we have any other callers? Okay. If there are no other comments regarding this matter, the Board of Public Utilities will close the public hearing. Do we have a motion to close the hearing on the Urban Water Management Plan?

Motion to close.

Okay. Second? Thank you. Roll call, please.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Any questions or comments from the Board? Tom?

Yeah. Thank you. I guess maybe start with this question that Ms. McKeith brought up about engagement with others. You indicated you sent the report to others, but you didn't tell us what the comments were. So maybe you could summarize or identify those besides the ones that I would assume this document from CURE is considered an official comment piece. But what did the other people, other entities have to say?

Good evening, Board Member Evans, Robin Glenny, Assistant General Manager of Water. We received four letters or public comments. The Gage Canal Company requested consideration of 10,000 acre feet per year of shareholder rights be reflected. UCR wanted to ensure that we use the 2021 LRDP water demand projections. San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District wanted us to correct a typo. And then the letter from CURE, as Ms. McKee summarized, discussed the urban tree canopy, climate resilience, coordination among city departments, and recognizing water use for trees and green spaces as a climate adaptation benefit. And those are the four comments we received.

What is you? I assume you fixed the typo. What about the other comments? Did you consider them or reflect them in the plan or say, we disagree? What what? What did we do?

So when the comments are re-received, we take them under consideration. Some are received up until the last minute. The typo will be corrected. It is not prior to this agenda publishing, and it is already published or will be published soon for City Council, but it will be corrected prior to being uploaded. due to our internal review process. With the Gage Canal Company comments, that information is already included in section 4.1 of the Urban Water Management Plan and table 4-3, which is actually a little bit more than the 10,000 acre feet per year. UCR, we did use their 2021 LRDP data, so that was already incorporated. And then the information from CURE, there are several ongoing discussions with multiple departments to address the items that are brought up, and they will extend into the future. This document is one of the many planning documents we use, and we are coordinating with other city departments to make sure that her comments are incorporated going forward.

Okay. I mean, I think it's really important that if you're going to engage, if we have public engagement, that it's a two-way communication and that at least the person or the entity know we heard them. And if we disagree, we should tell them. If we agree, we should tell them that as well. So there's got to be a closed loop in this process. So am I hearing that you're doing that?

Yes. Um, so we will be communicating if we have not already with the individuals are the groups that have responded. And then the letters were also be attached as part of the public record of, uh, the comments we received during this process and any changes would be recorded prior to uploading to the department of water resources.

Okay.

Okay, that's good. I'm kind of surprised that BIA and others who are in the development industry didn't comment on something like this, because they're dependent on will serve letters and those kinds of things. Did you ask them? Were they ones who sent a copy, for example?

Board members, what do you refer to?

Building Industry Association. I'm surprised they didn't comment. Or did they not get a copy of it?

So we sent out letters to 26 surrounding agencies that might have an interest in commenting. We also published it in the Press Enterprise twice, as well as on the agenda of the public hearing. But I don't believe they were one of the people we directly reached out to with the letters.

Okay well you might think about it in the future because if we're projecting population growth so are they. And it just seems like with an entity that's responsible for particularly residential building you would think there would be some opportunity or interest in having a mutual discussion and sort of meeting of the minds on how things are going in the future. Okay, so the next, would you go to the slide that you, I don't know if there's a number in here, yeah, page six or slide six. How are those, the new DWR updates, How are those reflected in the plan, particularly six that talks about low-income issues and then groundwater matters? But how are those reflected in the plan?

They are reflected in the plan according to if they apply to, sorry, I'm trying to get to that slide. If they apply to Riverside or not, and I think. So do you have a particular one, Board Member Tom Evans, or you want to go all over?

Well, six particularly, and seven.

yeah so we actually added the section in chapter four on the on doing analysis on the lower on the low income housing and on chapter or you said on seven so item seven right I mean that yeah and then on item seven we also addressed the mainly the The recharge potential and also the recharge project that Riverside already participated in, as an example, the enhanced recharge and the potential of the future one, like what they call the PERC. It's another stormwater recharge, not from the main stem of the Santa Ana River.

Okay well I remember this wasn't in the last century but it was pretty close to a thing called SARCA, Santa Ana River Conjunctive Use Project. Is that still alive and would that not be something that would occur under number seven?

So that's still alive and I think Western refers to that more in their urban plan than Riverside. That program looks at the whole Santa Ana watershed as one entity in which agencies they can trade and exchange water for during dry years and replenish during wet years. For Riverside, for RPU, representing the riverside interest. We have, I think, one project potentially to be part of the SARCUP, and we will see how it goes in the future.

I think, what's the number? Is it 1,500 acre feet of potential?

Yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't.

I think it's $1,500. I don't remember exactly, but it's in the report in the projected project, supply project.

Okay, so you're continuing to integrate with those because that gets back to this whole regional concept.

Yeah.

Okay, then sort of moving along, I'm sorry. This is fine. Maybe math is wrong or a problem on this, but it looks like Water demand projections are going up at a higher rate than population growth. Population growth is growing like 3% or 1% or something, but the demand is at a higher slope. So am I wrong?

Not a board member, Tom Evans. I think, yeah, that looks tricky if you look at this between, and you're probably referring to the section from 2025 to 2030. After 2030, it looks like the similar trend is moving forward. So what happened between 2025 and 2030 is we added those specific projects. as on top of the population increase, like the sports complex, UCR expansion. And that's why we see a rise between 2025 to 2030. And then after that, it kind of follows the population increase.

OK. And in the projection for customer use, Do you have it all assumed that it's going to be potable water, treated water?

I think we have both categories. We have the, what is the demand? So we have both categories. What we call the raw water, which is basically non-potable, and then the recycled added to that. I think that's how the DWR. wanted their tables this time around. But they are both included, the potable and the non-potable.

Well, but if there was a higher, Riverside has a fairly low, other than the Greenbelt, Gage Canal Company customers, shareholders, a fairly low use of non-potable water. But as time goes on, that might increase. So that gets back to this whole idea of collaboration and discussion with people who are actually driving the demand, who are building buildings, building water parks or whatever they might be and being more refined with the projections particularly the first in the earlier years as you get out towards 2030 I mean that's a long time from now but in the next five years or the next 10 that's that's like tomorrow and it just seems to me that we need We need to understand that those projections are based on collaboration or discussion with people who are actually going to do the things that cause the demand to go up, as opposed to, well, that's sort of end of statement. And I don't know how to reflect that in the plan or in the discussion. I mean, the time is so short. We can't have a further discussion about this. You couldn't bring the BIA in here. And I have no relationship with the BIA or anything else. But they do represent home builders. And most of this is driven by homes. So I just think that... The future needs to be projected based on information from people who are going to help either drive it up or drive it down. And I don't think the plan does that from what you said.

Thank you for your comments. The 2025 to 2030 to 2035 increase of the non-potable or raw water demand does include any future projects that we are aware of and their predicted timelines. For example, the Riverside Habitat Parks and Water Project, which has been discussed for many years and will be brought back with future changes and some of the other demands that will come from that. as well as that jump in 2030 is due to the new development that we are aware of that is most likely going to be completed by that timeline and any land use determinations with an estimated population for that type of area. But duly noted that we will coordinate with other groups more thoroughly in the future to have better predictions.

Okay. Thank you. That's it for me.

Okay. Pete and then Rebecca.

Thank you again for a fine presentation. I would ask you to once again reiterate and emphasize that this is a regulatory compliance document.

Yes.

Yes, I'm hearing.

Okay.

Thank you. And the woman whose name I don't know in the front row, you're from Civil Tech? Yeah, okay. Thank you. So as Civil Tech was developing this project in the format that was specified by the state, Do you or does any city staff see any deficiencies here in this document?

I can bring Ms. Gretel to answer that question. The city staff, we didn't see anything.

OK.

Since you asked her to answer.

Oh, hello. Hello, Board of Directors. Thank you so much for having me. Can you repeat the question again? Sorry about that.

All right. Given that you were given a format for fabricating this document in the various chapters.

Yes.

Do you see any deficiencies here?

No, sir.

Okay. I just wanted to make sure and clarify that that was the case here. Thank you for that.

Mm-hmm.

I would echo Ms. McKee's concern about public engagement here. I fully expected to see a room full of people clamoring to have input into this public workshop. And I don't see anybody at the dais and one phone call. Board member Evans pointed out that there are construction people who might also have been interested in weighing in here in terms of their idea of what future water demands might be. But except for the fact that there was public notice in the press enterprise twice, Most people don't read the paper anymore. So I'm not sure how many people that reached. I guess I'm thinking that if you're going to have a public workshop, the public needs to know about it. And I don't see that here. Because I'm pretty sure that most people don't know about this workshop at all. And that's sad. Not to say that for a regulatory compliance project they would have much to offer, really. But their ideas would be important, perhaps for documents in another context because as it was pointed out somewhere sometime that this is not the only document that addresses future water needs and issues so I don't know it seems pretty straightforward here that Riverside has enough water in terms of the potential supply and the projected demands with the table that shows the delta. So I think that the city and RPU has done a good job. Noting that all this is taking place, I'm not entirely clear on why we would have a public workshop on this at all. But if you're going to have a public workshop, you might as well get people to come and weigh in. OK. Maybe in the 2030 plan, we can incorporate some of these comments and make it so that more people are aware and will attend and weigh in. All right, that's it. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you. Rebecca?

So we've had this conversation on the dais with multiple calls. And I appreciate that this is a regulatory document, which is great news, because that means that we can go out and do all the public comment feedback now. So I think you should still have public hearings. I think you should still reach out to the BIA. I think the modeling is all going to change, as I think I've said before, because it was bad science based on current technology. So all of these things are going to have to be somewhat updated. And I would say that it's at the discretion of this board to ask how frequently you all come back with updates. But it's... It's super important to be doing these community meetings. It's not like those of us sitting in the room, we've done these community meetings. And being out and going and talking to people, I don't know if the neighborhood conference still exists, but it can't just show up in the GM's report of what public benefits has done. As much as those people are great, they're my people, they are not the technology people. They are not the brilliant minds behind making sure this utility works. They're your public face. So to multiple of the comments that have been made tonight, I don't care about the required regulatory documents, file them, do what's necessary. But the bigger issue is, are we planning correctly? And if you all tell me yes, because you are the smarter people in the room on this topic, great. But if you're doing it without consultation with the people who are driving development, then I will tell you the same thing I told the planning director. Your plans are as good as what the utility can do with it. And if we can't provide, then your plans aren't worth anything. So the modeling can't just wait for this five-year renewal. So I don't know what it looks like, but I don't think it requires an action of the board, but I would task you all to go back and figure out how we can get better community feedback because I don't personally want a chambers full of public comment on the topic, but I would love for you all to have letters of support from all of those people saying, we have already talked with staff and we concur with their recommendations. Or we think X, Y, and Z, which is the couple of public comments you got. But go seek them out. They're just as responsible for this community as we are. So let's do it collectively and it'll be more sustainable. Thanks.

Thank you. Other comments? Yeah, Sean.

I just had a question, kind of piggybacking off some of the comments here. What resources are you guys tapping to get this engagement? Are you just going off of an existing list? Are you engaging with the city marketing department? How are you finding these people to get engagement and establish these public hearings to try to get the public actually out to voice their opinions and their thoughts?

Yeah, thanks for the question, board member Sean. Yeah, we follow the process that is outlined in the guideline documents of the DWR. And we also utilize the the city communication team to publish these documents online and I think we published the draft in April 4th or 5th and along with that we put the notifications in the newspaper a couple of times I think the first notification was in May and the second notification was The second one was in May 18th, newspaper-wise, and the first one was in May 11th. And as far as the stakeholders and neighboring agencies of interest, we send the first notice of preparation in January, January 27th, and then the second notice of preparation, we send a reminder after the documents start to build, and it was, when was it? April 27th.

So it seems to me we might need to evaluate the resources we're using. Look at what the city – the residents are tapping into. If Preston Enterprise isn't the optimal – I'm not saying – move away from it, maybe bring in an additional one. Look at the Raincross Gazette. Look at your social media channels. Look at some of these other avenues to get this message out. The other question I have is what is the lead time to the public hearings you're giving the people you want to have come to the public hearing? In my estimation, setting up events, you know, if you're too far out, it becomes lost and people forget about it. So... or sometimes it's too close, they've already got their calendars booked. So what's your lead time that you're giving the public to come give their comment?

So the notice of preparation that went out to the 26 agencies in January and the second notice in April was the first indication. The posting in the Press Enterprise was May 11th and May 18th. The board agenda is posted. The website was updated prior to. You can see all the past urban water management plans, and that was updated as soon as we had the final documents. And we did all of the notifications for our standard process for public hearings. We did receive all the comments tonight, which were great, and we could look at changing that in the future. But our public hearings are standard notices in the press enterprise, notices in the agenda, and then making sure that people know where to come and how they can comment.

Thank you.

Yeah, other comments? I have one comment. Okay, go ahead.

Hi, thank you. So I'm hearing a lot about publication, and publication and engagement aren't the same thing.

And so I wonder, as you engage communities, they have research, and research are used to disseminate information to appropriate people.

So I think that's just one way to look at it and say, we are publicizing this, but we're not engaging. So there should be some kind of engagement thought process around that.

I guess the only question I have is, as you publicize this, are you also publicizing it in different languages for community members and community groups?

Question received, Board Member. The question, just to restate in case anybody did not hear, is to ensure that we are engaging with the public, not just publicizing, and then if it is published in multiple languages. This item was not, it is not a requirement of this item, but we can take that forward for future consideration.

Okay I have a few questions regarding what Rebecca was saying. I had a question about this as well. On the slide it said that this is a foundational document or something like that for planning and development and I just wanted to what that meant uh obviously there's a lot of data and projections and models that are useful for planning development but i mean is it something that is required and that might limit developments for example if there was a new Project new commercial interest that wanted to use 10,000 new acre feet that and it went far beyond this plan. Does that restrict the development in the city? Or if somebody wanted an urban canopy, you know, is that restricted because it's not here?

Yeah, I think I can take some of this. For a specific project that we know how much the expected water needed. So there is a different venue that is called the water supply assessment report in which they send the the developer, per se, they send their estimated needs, and then we do an assessment to see if RPU can sustain that water. And obviously we refer to the urban management plan as a guideline, but it's on a case-by-case. and i think uh i forgot what's the name it's sb 150 115 that uh that talk about that and uh and and there is some like minimum requirement if it's uh if it's a development for more than 500 units and then if it's uh a development that will use a certain amount of water or within a certain square footage. I don't have memorized them here in my head. But within those frameworks, I think we will go and work with the water supply assessment.

Okay, so it's more of a guideline than a rule, right? That's what I'm hearing, that it's not like, okay. Secondly, I had a question about kind of accounting. I was looking at sort of related to Board Member Evans' comments about recycled or non-potable, potable? This is a real question. Non-potable water. In the, uh, tables, it shows a large increase in the amount of recycled water, uh, from 2025, 2030 to 2035. And that's listed in, uh, under demand. How does that work? Okay. This is recycled water that is going to, there's going to be a demand increase But it's recycled water, so it's – so we're projecting a demand, but a lot of that – an increase in demand of water generally, but a lot of it will be new recycled water that we make available. And so it's not an actual demand – right, it's not coming out of our – I think I'm figuring this out in real time. But I just thought it was weird that recycled water, which is not new water, was in demand. But I get it. It's not coming from our underlying resource. OK.

Yeah, thanks Chair Siena for that comment or question. And for this specific item, this is kind of like what is driving that demand is the future project related to the riverside habitat and water project. And basically in this case, whatever is coming as a demand is also used as a supply. So they cancel each other very much. And it's a projected demand that will require the city to engage with the State Water Resource Control Board to reclaim some of the recycled water and use it for beneficial use. And so that's why. So it's a demand based upon this. It's a supply that will be that is dictated by the future demand, but at the end they cancel each other.

Yeah, okay. Thank you. And then my final comment is on Ms. McKeith's, you know, the big picture, you know, question that she, I agree with a lot of what she's saying that I think we should be, I think the city, it would be great if the city, maybe the sustainability office and in conjunction with utility would be planning to, I don't know about, you know, completely transforming the entire city but i could definitely see targeting specific places that do not have shade and addressing those heat issues and you know obviously the whole city is a very large thing but um you know you could imagine targeting very specific communities or a specific road or you know and addressing this and i would be quite happy to have the utility you know endorse or help where we can i'm not sure that public benefit funds can be used for that but i don't know i'd be very happy to endorse and encourage that we've been hearing from her for a long time about this i know it's difficult to make make these Projects especially on the whole citywide scale. I'm sure there's a grant where you can do like one block at a time and then 4,000 years we'll have it all fixed, but I'm talking it's my knowledge of bike lanes that is informing me on this but the Instead yeah So anyway, I just want to say that I, you know, we hear from her a lot about this and I want to say I generally sympathize and agree with a lot of this. I do not believe that it's something, I don't think we should be using, I don't think legally we could probably use public benefits funds for this. if we can i'm happy to hear about that but i do think it would be useful to have the city coordinating between offices and utilities to try to increase this at some level because it's true riverside is hot and it's gotten very hot mostly just from urban heat island not from climate change actually but it will continue to get hotter because of climate change and uh Yeah, as my wife and I always say, Riverside, it's nice in the shade. We should make a larger fraction of it shady. Okay, any other comments?

Yep. If I could, just to reiterate this collaboration question, under the city charter, the park and rec department is responsible for the street trees and the trees in the parks. And they're the ones that are driving the demand. They're in the position of deciding where some of those trees might be, not RPU. repurposing some of those public benefit funds that are just now spread around one by one to a Specific area might work might be appropriate. But again, it goes back to collaboration and being and having that collaboration be Obvious to us that yes Park and Rec has commented Park and Rec is thinking about how they might change the tree canopy or expand it or whatever, including street trees and trees in parks. So it's just one more example of what is an invisible collaboration, invisible to me as a board member. You may be doing it. like the duck on water. You're just sliding along and paddling like mad underneath. But it needs to be visible. And so that others say, oh, gee, they're making comments. Maybe I should, too. And so anyway, end of my soapbox.

For now.

Until we get to the item on the general plan.

Okay. Okay. Do I hear any motions? Okay. Second? Second. All right. Thank you. Roll call, please.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Okay, we will now move to the consent calendar. Does anyone wish to pull any item on our consent calendar? Okay, so do we have a motion to approve the consent calendar? I'll move. Thank you, and a second? Second. Thank you.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Okay. So moving on to discussion calendar, we'll now open for public comment for item number 16.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star 9. When called to speak, press star 6 to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Okay, we call for presentation of item number 16 by Matt Taylor and Fortina Morales.

Good evening, honorable chair, members of the board. My name is Matthew Taylor. I'm principal planner for community economic development in the planning division, overseeing long-range planning efforts, including the subject of tonight's discussion item, the Riverside 2050 General Plan Update and Climate Action and Adaptation Plan project. I'm joined by my co-project manager, our sustainability manager, Fortino Morales. Thank you for having us. So I'm gonna go through this background quickly because I do understand that this board has received a couple of presentations on this project previously, but Riverside 2050 is, again, a comprehensive update of the city's general plan and development of a climate action and adaptation plan together as sort of parallel track projects that are closely coordinated. The general plan is the city's strategic vision and blueprint for growth over a generation. It deals with physical growth, development, preservation, and conservation of the built environment and all of the policies needed to support that vision and make it a reality. The general plan consists of a number of elements that are you know, think of them like topics or chapters. Some of these are required by law, housing, land use, safety, parks and rec, conservation, those are all, and mobility, those are all required by California law. Others are topics that we elect to cover because they are important to us as a community, the arts, culture, and historic preservation, economic development, public facilities, and infrastructure. All of these things are additional elements of the plan that we will be including because they have an important nexus to the things that the city does and how it operates and how it grows and develops. Each of these elements consists of some guiding principles. um and policies and implementation actions so they direct city decision making staff operations and the work that we do over a long period of time our current general plan was adopted in 2007 its last major update was adopted in 2021 and that was to address state mandated requirements to a plan for housing But other than that, this general plan is coming up on 18 years old now, and it's time to be updated. And that is what we are here to do today. In addition, as you're aware, we're preparing a climate action and adaptation plan. Climate action is related to the city's impact on the climate and reducing that impact, specifically as it relates to greenhouse gas emissions from sources of all different kinds. Fortina will share more details about the progress on developing that plan in a little while. And adaptation. We've been talking about extreme heat and the urban heat island effect that, you know, these are effects related to climate change that will continue to occur and get worse over decades. Even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow, we would still be dealing with impacts related to climate change. And the adaptation component of this is to identify strategies to help us adapt to those changes, not just from extreme heat, but also climate. drought extreme precipitation wildfire and a host of other issues that we face that will be addressed as part of the adaptation plan it's important that these two plans work closely together because the general plan update at its fundamental is a plan for growth and growth creates emissions and and the climate action plan is an opportunity having a climate action plan developed in tandem with the general plan update is an opportunity to achieve emissions reductions through the general plan and to support emissions reductions in the cap through the general plan as well. Complete policy integration between the two documents. And that is the primary reason why we are pursuing both of these projects simultaneously. The project schedule is evolving, as I'm sure you probably have noticed. However, at this point, we are looking at plan adoption with luck, fingers crossed, if things continue in the direction that they're going by the end of next year. We spent the first year or so really doing background data analysis and collection and developing and launching a robust community engagement plan. Over the past year or so, we have been really heavily focused on land use, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a minute. in terms of the general plan and then in terms of the climate action and adaptation plan developing and refining our greenhouse gas emissions inventory. We're at the point now where we're beginning to kind of pivot to policy development. And so there will be a couple of things coming out later this year that will be key to moving this project forward into the CEQA analysis phase, which is necessary for us to get through before we can present anything for adoption later next year. Speaking of community outreach, it's really incredibly key and central to this project. 25% of the project budget is dedicated specifically to outreach and engagement, and we do a lot of different things. We are, Fortino and I and our teams are all over the place as much as we can be for just a couple of people. But we do have a dedicated consultant on board that just deals with public outreach and engagement. This is something of an overview of what we have done so far. We do all kinds of different things. We've collected over 4,300 comments on all various aspects of both plans up to this point, and we'll continue to do that throughout this process. We always make it a point to take the project to people where they're at. So we do pop-up workshops and events at other community activities that are happening so that we don't have to ask people to come to a community center and walk around a multipurpose room and look at boards all the time. We'll get out in front of them wherever we can when there are other events happening. But we do do more conventional workshops as well. Those are important to have more focused discussions and more in-depth discussions with folks about what their priorities are, what their vision is, that kind of thing. We also do make it a point to do everything, basically a copy of everything digitally in addition to in person so that people have the choice of how they want to engage with the plan and provide feedback and input. And we are, you know, we're always looking for new creative opportunities to get the project in front of people and get them involved and sustain that involvement especially for a long-term project like this. Just a couple of more highlights about some of the things we do. I always love to point out that in addition to all of the comments and stakeholder engagements and events, we've also had pets, five pets adopted as part of our outreach activities through a partnership with Marius Roberts Foundation to bring pet adoption to events. We're always trying to make these more engaging and appealing for people to participate in. So, you know, we try to bring in other things for folks to do, including things for families, for children to do activities, and also multilingual, you know, and American Sign Language interpretation available. The project website is the primary way that we drive engagement with the project outside of the events that we do. We would encourage you all, if you have not taken a look at it previously, to please visit riverside2050.com. You can sign up for email updates and share that with your friends and family. The email communication and e-blasts are the main way that we let people know what we have going on. but you can also find a number of different resources on the project website including an existing conditions inventory that we have we have prepared some some fun YouTube videos about what is a general plan what is a climate action plan that are designed to you know kind of explain it to the average person summaries of all the outreach activities that we do and a whole lot more So for the general plan update, as I mentioned, I'm going to talk about a couple of different things here. I mentioned that the first year or so of the project was really developing a vision and working with the community to kind of get feedback on what that vision should be. So we've drafted a vision statement. It has not been finalized yet, so we're open to feedback on that as well. The overall vision for the general plan update will then, you know, will be supported by some key, some core values. We're calling them vision values that kind of are overarching across all elements of the plan. And then each element will have guiding principles that kind of inform the policies that go into it. And so the first one and the one that we have, you know, kind of gotten the furthest with in terms of developing those guiding principles is the land use element, which I'll talk about in a minute. This is just a little bit of an illustration of how the vision, the vision values, and the guiding principles are kind of structured to work together. The vision is an overarching statement for the entire document. The vision values are key themes that will be, you know, that will have more or less of a nexus to each of the individual elements depending on what the topic is. And then those inform guiding principles which then relate to policies and implementation actions. The draft vision statement is presented here. The vision for Riverside in 2050 is a thriving city that honors its distinctive history and character while embracing a future of innovation and inclusivity. Residents envision a city where walkable neighborhoods, well-connected open spaces, and a diverse mix of land uses create vibrant and connected communities. Investments in sustainability ensure a greener, more resilient city where natural resources are protected and innovative solutions drive progress. Access to parks, essential services, and fresh food is prioritized, fostering a city where all residents can thrive. Dynamic mix of entertainment shopping and recreational opportunities enhances quality of life, while a strong sense of place and neighborhood character is maintained through thoughtful growth. Riverside will continue to be a dynamic and welcoming city to live, study, work, and play in for future generations. This, again, is a draft. We do welcome your feedback during the discussion portion. So land use is the core of the general plan. This is what determines what kind of development and growth will happen or not happen where. And it really underpins the future economic vitality, prosperity, and livability of the city. What you're seeing here on this is the current general plan's land use plan. And this has been amended here and there over time, but primarily in its major form was adopted when the general plan was adopted in 2007. In order to explore some options for land use, we took some of the feedback that we received through a number of different channels, including a couple of public workshops that we held, pop-up activities and online engagement activities to understand what some key themes that we were hearing from the public and stakeholders were that we should explore further with land use in addition to addressing things that we have to do like state mandates for housing and that sort of thing, kind of blending those two things together. The three scenarios that we have developed focus alternatively on innovation and economic growth, on housing choice, availability and affordability, and on connectivity and on greenhouse gas reduction. So each of these three scenarios tries to you know, emphasize one of those more than the other, although these are really core important themes across all scenarios, so it's a matter of degree, really, between the scenarios. There's also some common themes that you're going to see across all of the different versions of this, of the draft land use. Scenarios that we've developed, you know, downtown is going to continue to be downtown. Focusing on mixed use and, you know, transportation focused corridors is state policy that will be reflected through the general plan. Strengthening our campuses and our medical hubs is our key employment and innovation drivers. It's going to be an important theme throughout. Preserving established neighborhoods and agricultural areas and open spaces. Retaining productive industrial areas and expanding access to everyday services through a concept that we're calling complete neighborhoods are common throughout all three scenarios. We would encourage you, all of these are available online for everyone to explore. If you visit the project website and click participate or you can scan this QR code here, to access a viewer where you can look at all three of these scenarios down to the parcel level, what we've proposed in terms of land uses for the entire city in three different scenarios. There's also a survey that goes along with this that we're collecting feedback on about how residents and stakeholders respond to each of these three different scenarios. whether or not we find ourselves making a selection from one of the three or composing a hybrid fourth scenario that takes sort of the most well-liked or successful aspects of each and blending them into a new scenario. The next thing that's going to happen surrounding land use, we held another public workshop and are currently collecting survey feedback right now. We will refine these scenarios again. based on that feedback. And then what we will do is we will compose a report of basically an analysis of what each of these three land use scenarios would do in terms of housing production, population growth, and a whole host of other metrics. And that will be then summarized and rolled up into a presentation that we'll make to the city council over ask their direction on selecting a preferred alternative scenario so that we can begin the next phase of the project, including the CEQA analysis piece of it. In the meantime, we will continue to develop guiding principles, policies, and implementation actions for all of the other elements, but really everything kind of builds off of the land use, which is why it has taken up so much of the focus on this project up to this point. That is the very, very short version of the discussion of the general plan component of this. I'm going to turn it over to Fortino now to talk about the climate action and adaptation plan in some more detail, and then we'll be happy to discuss with you all. Thank you very much.

Good evening, Board Chair Siena and Vice Chair Wolkenmuth and the rest of the board and the public as well. Excited to be sharing about the Climate Action Adaptation Plan update here. So I wanted to start first here with the timeline. So looking back at 2025, we did develop our baseline greenhouse gas emissions inventory, which we'll review a little bit today. We also have been working on the climate vulnerability assessment, so understanding what are the climate impacts that we expect here in our community. and then spring 2026 we're working on projections our greenhouse gas emission projections moving looking forward and then comparing them to state targets as well this summer kind of where we are right around now we are developing the cap measure the cap measures so we're having internal workshops to review our authority and feasibility of the measures. We're doing community outreach as Matthew mentioned earlier, and then consulting with our CPAC, which is our advisory committee on the measures themselves with the idea to have a final draft of the cap this fall. That'll be a public-facing report, and it'll kind of present in all of the city's actions when it comes to climate mitigation, adaptation, and risk. And then 2027, we'll start the SQL process with the general plan update and the climate action plan environmental impact report process. And then in 2027 is when we start to get into implementation plans, monitoring plans, and then developing a status dashboard that's open to the public. So moving a little bit into the greenhouse gas emissions and where we are now, we did a greenhouse gas emissions inventory in 2027 or looking at 2027 data and 2010 data. And then our most recent one that we just completed is looking at the year 2023. One of the aspects to notice here is that the energy reductions, which are represented by the dark blue, light blue, green bars those were all reductions on the electrical grid and really that's that was because of incorporating more renewable sources transportation which is the yellow bar has been stable but this is also with an increased population and an offset with stricter vehicle standards over that time And then lastly, just a little note here about the inventory and how the inventories were prepared in the slightly different methodologies. So it's not exactly apples to apples, but they both did use the ICLEI methodology for all of the inventories. So I did want to provide an update here on the greenhouse gas emissions inventory. We did make some changes to this slide and really about the categorization based on feedback from our CPAC, our advisory committee. So we broke out the electricity use and natural gas use, whereas before it was in commercial and residential were the breakout categories. But nonetheless, transportation here, as you all can see, is 57% of our total emissions as a city. So this is essentially the city's carbon footprint. Electricity in particular is 30%, with natural gas representing 9%. And then solid waste and wastewater, and wastewater being only 2% there. And then we'll dive a little bit deeper into some of the details here. So the first thing to notice here is that passenger vehicles make up 45% of the total emissions inventory, with medium and heavy duty trucks following up with 13%. And then all the other transportation emissions are all less than 1% after that. So it really is passenger vehicles that's kind of leading the way when it comes to our emissions. And this is just a little bit more details on that and why that is. And it really has to do with the vehicle miles traveled and them being internal combustion vehicles. That's representing, like I mentioned, the 45% of the total there. And we do take into account the off-road equipment, fuel use, aviation fuel use, rail, and transit vehicles as well. I think the aspect to note here, because this is something that comes up in all of our public and community meetings, is that the VMT does exclude pass-through traffic. So it's limited to origin and destination trips within the city limits. Rail does include pass-through traffic, but it is limited to just the miles of rail within the city itself. And then the aviation is based on all the aircraft fueled at the Riverside Municipal Airport. So energy details here are, this is where we start to break them out again from residential electricity, residential natural gas, commercial electricity, commercial natural gas, and industrial electricity. So here you can see that the electricity piece of it, again, is about 30% with natural gas representing 9% in total. A note here is that RPU does classify customers as commercial or industrial based on energy demand. and that SoCal gas did not provide industrial natural gas due to privacy concerns. Looking at solid waste, so we do calculate this and the methane emissions from the landfill waste, and then also when it comes to compost, the methane and nitrous oxide emissions from biowaste and green waste, because there still are emissions that come off of that as well, but you can see here that those are all relatively small portion of the total emissions here. And then the water and wastewater details, this really has to do with electricity and natural gas needed to essentially move supply, water supply through the system, and the same with the wastewater and non-potable water. But again, these are all very small percentages as a piece of the entire greenhouse gas emissions inventory there. Some water is provided by utilities outside the city limits, but Riverside is responsible for its share of emissions that occur due to water used by city residents and businesses. So there are additional sectors that were not included in the inventory. As mentioned earlier, there are some industrial processes with the South Coast Air Quality Management District and EPA records did not identify industrial sources that produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to require annual reporting. There's also electricity uses included in the industrial energy sector, though. When it comes to agriculture, because this is another one that comes up in a lot of the community meetings, we do have the emissions from livestock and soil management are not available at the city level and assumed to be negligible. We have also looked at carbon sinks as well. So vegetation that removes greenhouse gas from the atmosphere are not included in the inventory, but we are including measures that promote carbon sequestration in the cap itself, but just not used to compare the CEQA targets there. And in terms of the inventory summary, this is really just looking at all emission sources kind of listed by, you know, from highest to lowest. You can see again that passenger vehicles and then electricity are the two top emissions factors there. Just some quick highlights here. The general plan will impact future on-road VMT, and so that's why it's so important and critical that we're working together with the general plan and the climate action and adaptation plan. There's also the greenhouse gas from electricity sources will be reduced as the grid moves towards carbon neutrality by 2040 with a lot of the state goals. The same with the on-road vehicle emissions will be reduced as fuel economy standards and emission standards and EV mandates are phased in. And then lastly, there are cap measures that can be developed for most of these sources. So getting a little bit into the greenhouse gas projection summary. So these are three different forecasts and projections that we'll be doing. We've completed the first two. The first is the business as usual forecast. So this is looking at population growth and economic growth, but assumes that there's no greenhouse gas emissions actions taken. Then there's the legislative business as usual. So this, again, includes the assumptions about the population growth and the economic growth. but also takes into account state and federal legislative actions. And then the third one is the one that's forthcoming, that we'll be developing, is the cap forecast. And this applies the greenhouse gas reduction measures to the legislative business as usual. So that's essentially saying, what are the city's actions to help reduce that? And so that's what we'll be developing this summer and into the fall. And then on the right here, you have the graph of the comparison of the business-as-usual. This is kind of the do-nothing scenario. And then the legislative business-as-usual projection that takes into account state and federal legislation to make those reductions that you see there. So kind of diving a little bit deeper into this, the baseline for the 2023 greenhouse inventory, each sector scaled according to the Southern California Association of Government's growth estimates. And so you see those in the chart below, and you can see the projected growth of greenhouse gas emissions for each of the sectors that were mentioned earlier in the slide out to 2050. And so then now taking into account the legislative business as usual development, you see that each sector is scaled according to the SCAD growth estimates again, but this includes impacts from state energy legislation and also impacts from federal and state vehicle emissions legislation as well. The kind of important thing to note here, too, just in terms of why we started to separate out the natural gas and the electricity is that you can see, hopefully you can see this, is that that green bar kind of stays consistent. And that's really due to the fact that there's not, you know, while there's state and federal legislation for electricity and for transportation, those state targets or federal targets haven't been mandated when it comes to natural gas in the same way. So this is a list of all the different legislative business as usual details. So this is kind of the different regulations that are impacting electricity usage, natural gas usage, on-road vehicles, off-road vehicles, and the like. And so we also outline the emissions impact that we expect from those pieces of legislation and then the resources or the entities that are guiding that. This slide is also just in terms of developing greenhouse gas emissions reductions projections right now. There is an evolving regulatory landscape. There are multiple vehicle emissions regulations that are being repealed and challenged, including California waivers for federal preemption, the CAFE standards, EPA's greenhouse gas endangerment finding that are all going to have or are having impacts on that legislative business as usual. CARB also permanently adopted the emergency vehicle emissions regulations. And then also just a note here that we are following CARB's lead in assuming that the pre-2025 regulations remain in place as of now. And that's kind of in line with using 2023 as our baseline as well. So what are those targets and how does the legislative business as usual match up to those targets? So these are the targets outlined in AB 32, the Climate Change Scoping Plan that has 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. And you can see that yellow dotted line there. at 2030, and then 85% below 1990 levels by 2045, which is on the far end of that graph there. So you can see that we're just with the legislative business as usual getting close to meeting those. So what are some of the strategies that we might expect when it comes to mitigation and reduction when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions initiatives? We have the reducing vehicle emissions. So there's shifting from driving alone to transit, shift from gasoline to electric vehicles, developing communities that do not require driving to work, school or shopping. And on the energy side, really reducing energy consumption as much as possible, which includes replacing natural gas appliances with electric options, making homes and building more energy efficient, and then increasing the amount of renewable sources used to generate electricity, which RPU has been leading. We also are going to be working on reducing waste, so diverting waste from landfills by increasing recycling and composting, meeting state mandates and goals there too, and then reducing water consumption, utilizing low-flow water fixtures, designing water-efficient landscapes, and the like. And then at the last year is the carbon sequestration, so planting trees and creating green spaces to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, as we've heard tonight. And like we've mentioned before, at almost every community event and program, we've heard about carbon sequestration and planting trees, which is really great to hear that it's a priority for the community. So those are all more in the mitigation bucket. So how do we reduce our emissions? This is now getting into the adaptation. We understand that climate change is here, it's happening, and it will continue to happen into the future. And so how are we impacted, for one? And that's really where the climate vulnerability analysis comes into play, is understanding how the climate is going to impact us when it comes to different hazards, including extreme heat, drought, and wildfire. It also evaluates the exposure sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the community as a whole. And then from there, that's where we'll develop strategies to address climate vulnerabilities. And that's kind of like I've mentioned this summer and into the fall we'll be doing that. But we've also begun doing that outreach now. And so we've been working on getting a couple of the different measures for both the mitigation and the adaptation side out to the community to get a sense of the level of support, unsure about the different measures, or not supportive of different measures. And so you can see six here that were brought by city leadership to put out to the community to really get a sense of the support for these measures. I will say that these are not all the measures. These are just a small subset that we wanted to put in front of the public to get a sense of their thoughts on them. So there is a link here that you or the public that might be listening can click on and be able to provide feedback through that mechanism there. But you can see it has measures like expand bicycle and pedestrian paths, supporting expansion of electric vehicle charging, adding dedicated bus lanes to major streets and thoroughfares, providing incentives to switch to cleaner vehicles. So there's a variety of different mitigation measures, which we're looking at here. And then this slide here is looking at more of the adaptation side. So implementing aquifer storage and recovery systems, organizing community resiliency centers in the case of climate emergencies and disasters, using climate resilient landscaping, recycled water habitat restoration, which has been mentioned earlier today. And again, there's a separate feedback link here for that as well. So as Matthew mentioned, we have been doing climate and CAP-focused outreach as well. So we have been to every ward now. This slide's a little outdated when we submitted it here, but we have done all of these outreach now. So we've attended different pop-up events throughout each ward. We are also working on a statistically valid survey from our subcontractor team FM3, they'll be doing a statistically valid survey of 100 residents in each of the wards for 700 in total. And we're working on developing that question set right now. So with that, the recommendation to the Board of Utilities, receive and file this update on the Riverside 2050 General Plan Update and Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and provide feedback. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Do we have any public comment? OK, send the caller through, please.

I'm laughing because, yes, I am still here. I swim laps in between to stay awake. OK, every time I hear climate resilient outdoor landscaping, I want to just scream because it's the opposite of what we need to combat climate impacts in our area. We have ample water. The Office of Sustainability, if you tried to find it as a line item in our city's budget, it is completely underfunded and understaffed. And it also covers a broad umbrella of issues from natural resources to just a wide variety of recycling paper. My point being, for a long time, I have really advocated that RPU, because of our larger budget and resources, and because we manage water and electricity, that we play a much more active role in really developing sustainability models and plans, which of course includes the tree canopy issue. Short of that, I really hope we can coordinate better with and more often, like monthly with Retino and Nathan Mustafa and Matt Taylor to really look at these issues. In terms of better funding for them, I plan to submit an analysis we've done on why public benefit dollars can be used for tree planting. It's a question of how you quantify the reduction in electricity usage. And with AI, it is a lot simpler than it used to be because you can poll models from other places off the system in order to justify those numbers. I would like there to be 10% of our public benefit dollars going to tree canopies and green spaces. That would roughly be a million dollars a year and it would be a sustainable flow of resources. The entity that regulates public benefit funds, the California Energy Commission, has no enforcement over what we do. It really This plan, these monies, though you have to collect them, we have a lot of discretion how we use them. And I think we can do so legally. And that might get some of the money that we need in order to do some of the projects that are being discussed. So thanks, Matt and for Tino for presenting this evening. Thanks to the board. I know, you know, we all want to see these things happen. And we just need to really direct and motivate our staff and make sure they know it's a priority. Because unfortunately, it is not an issue that council is focused on these days. As you can imagine, they're focused on lots of other issues. So which are a lot more fun to talk about. But, you know, this is a lot more critical for my generation, the next generation, everyone's children and grandchildren. So I appreciate everyone's hard work this evening and the public service that you provide. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. McKeith. Do we have any other callers? Okay. Comments or questions from the board?

Rebecca? I echo Ms. McKeith's comments. Thank you, Matt and Fortino, for coming. I know that you have been out and about and collecting things even if people don't show up. So to her initial point of better communication, yeah. That would be great because like I said the plans only a plan Without what can be done and you can't do anything without the plan. So I think that's great if if there's a way to use Public benefits for the tree canopy. I'm all about it just in general Hey Fortino, can you go back to that slide that had the gas company and the green line and Yeah. I know they're not a public agency, but they do respond to a public agency. And for lack of a better phrase, it's not fair. So I feel like this is where our advocacy comes in in a legislative project, because the gas company has been keeping things under safety security, and I don't see why an aggregate number is a safety issue. So, seeing as they represent so much for the state of California, it seems like a legislative fix is necessary since all of the other investor-owned utilities have to supply their numbers. So, and frankly, they told me a million dollars to a rebate a really long time ago, and this makes me feel better if we can do this. So that doesn't make any sense to me. So there's got to be a path forward. I don't know what Robert needs to follow, but it's a disservice to the utility as a paying customer of said gas company. And it is a disservice to the city as a government entity because they support all of this. Can you go to whatever the next slide that kind of looks like this is? Yeah. So on this one, the natural gas is blue. And that was very confusing to me. I know that's minor, but it was, I know the planning people, you get it, like you know. So I don't know that it needs to necessarily, I mean, you're still doing collection, but so, and then if you can go to the vulnerability analysis in a couple more. So I can't tell what all of the colors mean, but usually green means good. And I can't look at the coast and talk about climate change and think that that's good. I know we're gonna catch on fire, but can you help me with that slide?

Yeah, and I apologize about that. I didn't mention the graphic. So this is the regional urban heat island map from CalEPA. So this is looking at urban heat island in particular. So you can see, yeah, the coastal communities and how they're impacted. And this is really about the magnitude of urban heat island. So it's saying that the coastal communities, the magnitude of urban heat island is a lot lower, understandably, whereas it's a lot higher for us, for the city of Riverside.

I think if I may, the purpose of this map is just as an illustration of the type of analysis that you will see in the climate vulnerability analysis.

For sure. Okay. That makes more sense. I feel like they should use blue. So all of these types of map slides will be in the larger plan.

Yes. So we will have the climate vulnerability assessment will be its own document that will be released to the public. And then that will be included in the climate action plan at the end of the process. Yeah.

So it's part of the general plan. Is it a piece of the general plan update or no?

No, it's a part of the climate action adaptation plan.

Totally separate.

Yeah.

Yes and no. The climate vulnerability analysis will be probably an appendix to the climate action and adaptation plan. However, adaptation strategies that are identified in the climate action and adaptation plan will have a policy relationship to implementation actions for the general plan. That's another kind of key point of doing these two plans simultaneously is we can coordinate policy between them like that.

Sweet. Okay. Maybe one more? Two? The blue spreadsheet. Yep. I don't go back one. That's blue, kind of. There are a lot of not easily understandable words. for regular community. With that said, I don't know how you change some of these words into, so I don't know if you're going to have a glossary or to, nobody knows what climate resilient landscaping is.

That's a really good comment. A glossary is a great idea and could easily be incorporated into the draft documents that are released to the public. We do work with our engagement team to try to make this as plain language as possible. The more technical the subject matter, obviously, the more difficult that gets. But we can always do better.

Sure. Ballpark, how many questions for outreach there are? Like in total, there's only like five or six on each of these sites. Like when people click on the link and they go to the survey.

Oh yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So the, the survey is the exactly the same as these.

It's only those two then.

Yes. Only these two. Yeah. And then I, like I was mentioning earlier that we're also doing a statistically valid survey and that will be a more lengthy survey for sure.

So those 700-ish people that FM3 is doing will be, they could be duplicative, but let's pretend that they're not, of the ones that come in through this. They will get more in-depth questions. Yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you.

Okay, other questions or comments? Pete?

First, thank you both for an extremely fine presentation. I know this stuff is really hard. So, great job struggling through to what's hopefully a happy endpoint for everybody. Your, what did you call it, vision statements or vision bullets. These are great kind of pie in the sky stuff, especially when you say you're going to protect neighborhoods. So the only way you're going to get these multi-faceted, interlocking, interconnected pieces of things if you're going to tear out some of the existing neighborhoods and put infrastructure there. So I think that's kind of self-defeating, and I don't think that's going to go over well with the public who live in those already existing neighborhoods. But it's a great vision. I'm not sure how we get there from here.

The devil's in the details.

The devil's definitely going to be in the details. You're right. And I'm just envisioning my neighborhood, which has like virtually no services. It's all residential. So, you know, how do you inject? business, commercial, all the other facets of an integrated plan without extracting some of the existing houses out of the neighborhoods. I don't see how that's going to happen. But good luck to you. And it's good to have a goal. Hopefully the end product will be commensurate with their goals. I just have a constructive criticism, hopefully, about the maps. These maps are, for the most part, unreadable. They're so small, even with my 3X readers, I can't, it wasn't until they were displayed on the presentation screen that I could even envision or even interpret some of these things. Because on the paper copy that I have, it all blurs together and the print's so small. I know it's hard because there's large geographic areas that you're trying to show small details in, but there's got to be some way to improve that.

If I may, we definitely recognize, especially at presentation scale, in a city this size, it's really hard to communicate, especially when we're talking about parcel-level data like what you're seeing here on the screen. We include these visuals on the presentations just to kind of show you what kinds of information we're presenting, but we do always try to point people to a web-based version of these, which is what this is, so that you can explore them on your own and really zoom in, drill in, look at those individual areas. When we do have focused presentations on a particular topic that has a geospatial dimension that we need to convey in a presentation format like this, what we will likely do is a series of blown up small inset areas so that we can go through area by area rather than trying to look at everything citywide because at this scale it's just too hard. But I appreciate that.

Well, okay, if you can do something to work on that in your various Presentations at various outreach events and you know, I'm happy to hear that though the website evidently you can zoom in and out and kind of take Nat's eyebrow look at some of this stuff, which is Again the devil's in the details, right? Okay finally You didn't really talk about this because it's still ongoing, but the CEQA stuff, there's illusions here that we're going to streamline the CEQA process, which makes me pretty nervous because it sounds like it's a license to like, you know, cry havoc and let's whip the dogs of war type of thing. So we're just going to run roughshod over environmental protections in order to meet the goals of the general plan. I have a huge problem with that. Not to say that the secret process can't be sped up a little, because it's a quagmire, and I understand that. But part of why it's so slow is because there's protections in there for various entities that need protection and wouldn't get it any other way. So be careful as you... streamline the CEQA process to make sure that there's still a CEQA process left at the end of the day. So, I guess that's it for me. Thanks. Again, once again, very fine presentation and I learned a lot and I didn't think I would, but I did. Thanks. Okay.

Thank you. Tom?

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate this. I've been looking forward to hearing this conversation for quite some time. One, sort of taking two tracks, you've got the climate action plan and the general plan. They don't seem to be on the same time frame, or are they? And I just missed that.

They are and they aren't. They are independent of one another, but there are key pieces that, there's key touch points where they intersect. For example, the land use plan as we've been discussing as it relates to the general plan is going to result in some amount of greenhouse gas emission changes in the emissions that we project. That are related to that amount of growth that that the plan that the land-use plan envisions but until we have like a what we are calling a preferred alternative selected for the general plan the climate action plan can't account for that until we've finalized settled on something right and Similarly, the circulation element of the general plan is going to have impacts on VMT, which is going to affect emissions that need to be accounted for in the climate action plan. So there's key touch points where they do intersect, although they are not proceeding on exactly the same pace.

Okay, well, where I was kind of going with this is that... We depend on a couple hundred megawatts of internally produced power via natural gas. Now, the general plan time frame goes way beyond the current life of the Riverside Energy Resource Center. And certainly, it's well beyond the current Springs plan. So what could happen, or what I guess I'm concerned about, is that the Climate Action Plan could say, OK, you can reduce to zero the amount of power, amount of greenhouse gases that are produced by natural gas or some other combustion system by eliminating those plants, and we go put ourselves back on the total dependence on the statewide grid, which takes us backwards in terms of reliability. So it seems to me that RPU needs to be, and this is the whole point of having this board talk about this stuff rather than us doing it individually in some community meeting someplace where our input is going to get masked by all the other nitty-gritty you're going to get. So we need to have a service reliability factor that says this is what we demand, 100% reliability. But to do that, we still need to have internal power production capability. Now, maybe it switches to individual solar. I mean, there's a lot of different scenarios. But it seems to me that needs to be one of the factors in whatever the statement of the plan is, that service reliability will not be diminished in order to reduce greenhouse gases. The other one relates to the use of non-potable water, whether the source is contaminated groundwater, whether it's recycled, or whether it comes from some other method that we don't know about at this point in time. But the land use plan, I believe, needs to consider that new development will include dual plumbing. specific, just like Irvine Ranch. I mean, if Irvine Ranch 40 years ago hadn't made that plan, they wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today in terms of the efficiency of that community and the use of non-potable water. But we're nowhere near that. And obviously, we can't go back and replumb the whole city. Well, we could, but nobody's got enough money to do that. But new development certainly can. And with the north side plan, for example, you've got this water park project, whatever it's called. Those kinds of things should, the first question should be, how do we use non-potable water in this before you, that becomes the second, third, or fourth, or 50th question that gets asked. So I think that, again, in general, the land use plan, general plan, what our infrastructure piece needs to be more aggressive with respect to the use of non-potable, either where it's currently available or where it could be in the future. And then I guess I don't know whether cost comes into this process at all, whether you say the general plan is wonderful, but it's unachievable because nobody can afford to do it. So that, I guess, has got to be some sort of a consideration.

If I may, I'm glad you bring that up. One of the work products as part of this project is an economic feasibility analysis of the general plan. So that will be one of the many, many appendices that get produced as part of the development of this plan.

Because that gets to the replumb the whole city for non-potable use. And then the final thing, what we don't do explicitly as a utility is have a program to put underground current overhead distribution lines. All the investor-owned utilities have a program for that. They budget for it. They allocate money. And the customers are paying for it. It's not free. But we don't have that as a plan. Again, you've got affordability issues. You've got other things. But it seems to me that needs to be one of the factors that's integrated in this because it really relates to no new development can go in with overhead construction. And that hasn't been around, that's been mandated for many years. But in existing infrastructure overhead conversion from overhead to underground should be, is doable and you don't, as Rebecca says, if you don't have a plan you're not going to do it. So that I think should be a factor in the overall city, the infrastructure piece of the general plan.

Thank you. If I can make a clarifying comment about scope. Okay. The policy choices like whether or not to pursue an undergrounding policy or whether or not to pursue a policy of dual line requirements for new development, both of those things are great examples of the kinds of things that we could set up in an element of the plan. But the plan for actually accomplishing those things would not be part of the general plan itself. That's a little bit too specific and a little bit too in the weeds, if you will, for a document like the general plan. But what it can do is include an implementation action that the city or RPU or both will develop those plans if that's the policy choices that are ultimately made. So I just wanted to clarify that, you know. This comes up a lot with parks, for example. Lots of the public feedback that we receive is, we want a new park here, or we want these specific improvements to this park, and that's great feedback, but the general plan park and rec element is not the park's master plan. Those documents need to be coordinated, and the general plan needs to provide the foundation, the policy foundation for what's in those plans, but it's not the plan itself, if that makes sense.

Well, it does and it doesn't. The only reason I say this is that using the example of the dual plumbing for new development clearly to me is a part of a The zoning or the plan or whatever, it doesn't say how you're going to necessarily do it. But if anybody's going to be planning ahead, they need to know, oh, gosh, I've got a project that's expected. They're going to expect dual plumbing, assuming that they adopt that. Mm-hmm. And then the same thing with the overhead to underground conversion. Again, that gets to the whole issue of aesthetics. It gets to public safety and so forth. So it seemed to me at least it ought to be called out so that you don't have to go to page 4,000 to find it.

Yeah, the plan can set policy for sure. If it is the policy of the city that we will require new development to do X, Y, or Z, that can be in the plan for sure. Just a specific detailed implementation plan for how to accomplish that is not within the scope of the general plan. The decision whether or not to do it can be, but the how is a little bit too detailed for a general plan.

okay well that's that's fine but um how does this so going forward how does this discussion tonight get reflected and then how do we as this plan gets refined when will the board be able to provide a um a vote on or whatever a recommendation says to city council you know we want dual plumbing and new new developments as an example, or the issue of service reliability. We will not reduce reliability in order to meet a greenhouse gas reduction goal.

Susan, you looked at me like you were going to say something.

This is a difficult question because technically the utility board doesn't have within your powers and duties review of the general plan. This is being brought to you for information. So, the better way to make your comments is to attend the general plan meetings and provide your comments there. And they have a very robust, I was just looking at their webpage with all of the, page with all of the different ways to participate, to participate in the surveys, to give public comment. That's the appropriate way to give your comments. And this discussion here gives you all of that information in order to make the effective comments.

If I could add, these kinds of presentations where we're having kind of subject matter expertise based feedback on different aspects of the plan, these are all comments that we take and incorporate into what we do develop. So there's a few options for this board specifically that we might be able to consider, including when we have a draft of the public facilities and infrastructure element, giving a presentation on that and asking specifically for board member feedback on what's included in that. We could do that. We could do, you know, a number of, you know, other subject matter focused, you know, kind of deeper dive technical presentations on topics that are within the purview of this board, you know, at the request of the board. So we have, and then of course, we may even be able to, you know, when there's a complete draft of the climate action plan, for example, give a presentation on that and have kind of a, you know, general fund feedback session on those so there's a number of different things we can do to continue to involve the board even though there's not necessarily technically a an authority of a recommendation authority on the on the general plan itself okay that's fair thank you okay other comments Rebecca sorry I have more things

So basically, this is the plan to then have deeper plans.

In a way, yes.

Okay. So we'll plan to plan. And then we will have plans. If one of the things that could be helpful, and maybe it's not to any of the larger groups that you're talking to, is have whoever send out the link so that they can go onto the Esri site or whatever the page is and then dive into, because Pete's going to care about where he lives.

Sure.

He might care about other places, but he's going to zoom in on certain places in and around said neighborhood. But Pete said something about protecting the neighborhood, and I did not see that on your vision side. I saw protect the resources.

I think what Board Member Wolgamuth may have been referring to was one of these sites. The vision.

Go to Mount Rubidoux there. There you go.

I see protect natural resources.

Go back another. Another. Nope. Or go forward.

I see livable, but the typo, which I did not see before. Sorry.

I think, um, could you be referring to potentially, uh, the, the second to last bullet that says, you know, enhances quality of life while a strong sense of place and neighborhood characters maintained through thoughtful growth. Sure.

I see his point about, we got to break a couple eggs, which is really, I think, uh, what he was getting to. Um, and I think preserving the natural resource is super important and the flavor, um, of the neighborhood but sometimes the flavor of the neighborhood is supposed to change like like that's not necessarily what we want um so the conversations by neighborhood would be then subsequent plans for more depth is that fair

It could be, although I don't think that that's how we've necessarily envisioned it. I mean, so a great example is like the existing general plan has the land use element has policies and goals, objectives and policies and actions for every single neighborhood, 28 of them. It is part of the reason why there are over 200 policies in the land use element. It's frankly unmanageable. So if there are neighborhoods, like to use the north side for example, that need some kind of, have a need for some more special attention, a policy of the plan or an implementation action of the general plan can be, we'll develop a specific plan for this neighborhood. Other neighborhoods may not need it.

CUNY Press doesn't need it.

Probably not.

Although if there's, you know, a lot of public food. But Arlington Heights maybe. Maybe. Maybe it does. And I think you will see as a land use element, the policies of the land use element come together. Some specific policies related to the Greenbelt as well as what we're going to look at in the future and a number of other things. So I think the level of specificity and detail of the individual policies that are related to land use are probably gonna vary based on like what the needs are in that particular location. But to be honest, I don't think that we're gonna have a plan that has hundreds and hundreds of policies for land use that are detailed and tailored to every single neighborhood. It just is not- Feasible. There's over a thousand objective goals and policies in the current general plan and we have to report on them annually.

Super sustainable. Yeah, right.

Oh, slide 16. Okay. I can't see the slide numbers on here. Yes. Common themes. Yes. Thank you. There you found it. Yes. Yes. Well, part of this process of land use and the specific feedback that we're looking for from the public is these alternative options, the three different land use alternatives that we have developed, how well do they accomplish the things that we said we want them to accomplish? So there's an opportunity for people to tell us, hey, I don't think you're doing a very good job at this particular goal that you said that you had for these plans. So that's a question that's out there, right? Because to some degree is as board member Goldware has said, like there will be, especially if we're envisioning, you know, growth, there will be some changes. I mean, it may look different from neighborhood to neighborhood. It may be, you know, I don't think we'll see a situation really realistically at any point in the future where, you know, whole neighborhoods of single family homes are being raised, right? Necessarily, but there may be some changes around the edges or on the major arterials or you might see you know, like Primarily like vacant or under underutilized like commercial property get redeveloped with new things and that may be something that the plan supports as well That's why I said this is hard.

Yeah, it's really hard and my hats off to you if you can get it all done I'm just pointing out. There's some inconsistencies in the wants here, and hopefully we can balance everybody.

That's exactly right, a balancing act. Thank you.

I wonder if at some point there is, and maybe from your perspective, it's unnecessary. But I think if you looked back, and I do not have the history, maybe you do. There's some people who have been around for a while. But if you went to multiple decades ago strategic plans, or general plans, and how impacts, because this is glacial, right? There are things that you all are putting into place that you won't see in your careers. You just... Your retirement is hopefully sooner than this will happen. But Casablanca does not look the same as it did as when I was a kid. And a decent amount of that happened under previous city managers in the not too distant future or past Carvalho, et cetera, who ripped out the center and put in elements that were in an updated plan. So I don't know if there are wins or that you could reference from a planning perspective of, we know what changing a community, a neighborhood looks like, because these are things we planned from the community's perspective of what you all told us you wanted. And yeah, it took us 50 years to get a elementary school in the east side, but it's happening. And that happened because of a huge amount of community will consistent over time. And that's what actually changes the neighborhoods. Right. Like you can put it in a planning document and they're so big, but it's that neighborhood that says, no, I'm not going to let you dig your pipeline here or I need my street repaved to cover all the potholes that were left behind. So I don't I I feel like there are some wins that you could look back at and grab. I just don't know what they would be.

I think that's great feedback. I think having a plan that makes a case for itself in terms of its efficacy based on previous efforts is helpful to help the public understand, why do we do this? So I appreciate that.

Okay, any other utility-specific comments? Okay, I have a few. So my neighborhood, no, I'm kidding. Okay, so can you, okay, you couldn't see the slide numbers, but I think it's slide 34, maybe 14-0 you had it. I just wanted to make a few comments. Oh, that's not the one I wanted. Targets. Yeah, this is good. Okay. Well, actually, first of all, to address Board Member Evans' comment about, I mean, there is California legislation requiring, you know, SB 100 to be, you know, 100% carbon free by 2045, the electricity, I mean. And so that's why you see the orange wedge waning to – well, why isn't it going to zero at 2040? What is going on there? It's close to zero. There's a little – okay. Anyway, maybe it's a resolution issue. But the – So that's happening. And I think that includes our, you know, it has to include our peaker plants. And of course, I mean, Scott Lesh is in the background. We have plans for how we're, you know, in the long term going to address that. So... That is happening. I don't think it, but I don't think we have all the answers about how we're going to replace it perfectly today. But it is 20 years from now. And that, yeah, that's. But it also nicely sort of matches the kind of lifetime of the plants, right? So I don't think it's crazy, but that's what the diminishing orange wedge is there. Also on this front, I wanted to point out that the... It's a little unfortunate that the very slow process here meant that we're using 2023 numbers. And on the electricity side, it is already very out of date. So that doesn't include the fact that we no longer get 20% of our power from a coal power plant. And now it's almost entirely been replaced by a wind plant that is fully online as of a few weeks ago, right? So like our emissions, it's not quite half, but that orange wedge is decreased by not quite half, but almost half. since You know from what is actually being presented here, right? So, you know, you see this targets in 2030, you know the big scary thing about this that actually it's not very scary at all Like we have this greenhouse gas targets in that yellow dashed line that have to continue to go down and it looks like the most difficult thing to tackle will be in the near term in 2030 because we're missing it by much but actually we're not and We've already done almost all of that reduction, and it's not reflected in the census because things have happened so fast. It also isn't reflecting the fact that next year we're walking away altogether from Intermountain Power Plant, you know, the gas plant. So that's also going to be another reduction there. Yeah, so it's encouraging. It means that that 2030 scary missing the target isn't so scary. I think we'll probably hit it without having to do anything.

Don't listen to that, though.

Just continue to work hard on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. But it's because of electricity, and that's my bigger point. This entire climate action plan runs through the utility. Our electricity is quite clean now and mandated to get cleaner with time. And all of the other big wedges here, the ones that you can really obviously see, transportation and natural gas usage, both of those things we have electric alternatives for. And when we use electricity for those things, in both cases, transportation and heating, It also comes with a radical reduction in energy consumption. They're about three or four times more efficient to use the electric version than the gas or gasoline-based versions. And so it's like this win-win. You can use way less energy, and the energy is much, much cleaner, and you address almost all of the emissions. And so it just runs right through the utility. That's it. We should keep that in mind. Yeah. Okay. Sorry.

I could just say that you're putting more and more, more and more, we've become more and more dependent on the reliability of the statewide grid.

One hundred percent, yeah.

And that may not necessarily be the right thing to be. So I just say you have to – it's not us to answer this question tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But it needs to be considered, and do we want to make sure that our customers get the same high-quality reliability they get today? Yep. And by the way, oh, we cut the power off, but we sure cut those greenhouse gases. They're not going to be happy with that.

To be clear, the state grid hasn't had a flex alert in three years. That's never happened in the last 25 years. And it's because of batteries. It's incredible. Now, if you're talking about public safety power shutoffs that haven't affected the city, well, then, I mean, that hasn't affected the city. So, anyway, I mean, I agree with you. We do need to ensure, I mean, regardless of whether we're putting more things on the electric grid or not, the reliability of the statewide grid and the local grid and whatnot are critical, yeah, no matter what. So, I completely agree.

I'll move the item.

Okay. Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. Extremely well presented and very clarifying. Thank you. Second. Second? Okay. Sean, thank you.

Was there a motion and a second?

Yes. Oh, I didn't hear it.

Too busy talking.

Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much. Where are we at? Okay, we will now open for public comment for item number 17.

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Okay, thank you. We call for a presentation of item number 17 by Mike Roberts.

Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Mike Roberts, water quality manager, and I'm pleased today to provide a presentation on RFP number 2542, a services agreement for laboratory testing and analytical services. Just as a background, our drinking water must be tested to ensure compliance with state and federal regulations. Every year we take over 36,000 water samples from our wells, our treatment plants, and all throughout our distribution system. And those samples must be analyzed by a state certified laboratory and reported to regulatory agencies. We look at over 200 contaminants across our water sources. And so it was time to, you know, put this RFP out to look at labs that can perform the services. And we put that out. Five laboratories submitted proposals. And city staff with experience in working with environmental laboratories reviewed and scored the proposals. Babcock Laboratories of Riverside, California, here, was found to be the top-ranked proposers. This is the breakdown of points and price and rank of each of the five vendors that submitted proposals. This was based off of their qualifications and experience, which had a 30% weight to it, approach and methodology, also 30%. Professional references was 15%, and pricing was 25%. As you can see, Babcock was the number one ranked vendor. And so our recommendation is that the Board of Public Utilities recommend to the City Council to approve the Professional Consultant Services Agreement for the RFP for the term of three years in the amount of 3.3 million, with the option to extend for two one-year terms in the amount of 2.2 million. and with a change order authority that comes out to be just over $6 million, and also authorize a city manager or his designee to execute the agreement with Babcock Laboratories, including making minor and non-substantive changes, including extensions up to two additional one-year terms, subject to the availability of budgeted funds. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you very much. Do we have any public comments? No. Okay. Questions from the board or comments? Pete?

Just to be clear, these samples are pretty much mandated for compliance with state water quality issues. Correct. So we have to do this. Yes. It's not an option.

Yes, we have to perform these samples to ensure water quality.

Okay. I've said this before and I'm going to say it again. it would be helpful for us on the dais here if we could see the interim breakdowns of the criteria for the grading of the various vendors. So it's great to see the total points, but we don't know what the various breakdowns are for the, in this case, four categories of rating. So we know price, and we can see the price, and we can see the percentage that goes into the price, and we see that the Babcott is not the lowest price. It's, in fact, the second highest price or third highest price. So they must excel in other areas. It would be helpful to see what those other areas are so we can evaluate for ourselves what these final results mean. so i know i know we're not going to do it here but i bet something like this is going to come up in the future and i put in my plea now to have that breakdown hopefully it won't completely clutter the slide with too many categories and columns and rows but if there could be some sort of way to evaluate what the breakdown is so we can see why the various Total scores are what they are. Okay. Off my soapbox now. Thank you.

Thank you. I just want to follow up. Is there, can you comment on, you know, generally the specific reason why Babcock was chosen despite being a million dollars more?

Yeah. I think in general, like, I'm not, yeah, how much information to provide, I don't know, but in general I will say, you know, they ranked very well in their qualifications and experience and their approach and methodology to our sampling program and the efficiency for our processes and working with them and getting the results back in a timely manner. And yes, price is obviously a factor. That was weighted at 25%, and so that calculation was just done on a raw numbers basis on how many points that it was awarded to them, and it was 25%, and that's what it was. And they excelled in many of the other categories.

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't even close, even though others were cheaper. So they must have excelled, obviously, significantly. Okay, other comments?

Who had the contract before Babcock? Babcock. So they're a known quantity as well as being the highest rated.

Correct. Robin, is it appropriate to chime in a little bit in your discussions with the purchasing department regarding some of the information that we can provide further to meet Board Member Woegemuth's request, but at the same time chime in on maybe some of the deficiencies, like in the number two that we're glaring, that really put a damper in their score?

And I'm sorry, Robin, before you go on, can you go back to the slide that has the vendors so that we're at least looking at it?

Thank you. So a couple comments. The panel scoring the laboratories scores the different categories based on the proposal received. We do ask for a lot of information. They do have to be state-certified laboratories, otherwise we can't submit their data. They have to be able to meet certain rush turnaround times. For example, we need our treatment plant samples back within three days. So that way, if there's any issues, we could make adjustments before that water hits the system. The detections and the breakthrough in these would be caught within that timeframe. There's other... sampling parameters such as sample kits, the reliable timeliness of the data, performance testing or proficiency testing. Labs have to go through proficiency testing to make sure that they get a blank sample, they don't know what the quantity is, and that the results actually are within the accepted range. And so we do ask for a lot of data with labs. Our last vendor was Babcock. Prior to that, we have used urofins. Sometimes labs have to subcontract different analyses between each other due to an instrument being down, etc. We have also utilized WEC in the past through that sub-out process. So we are familiar with the top three labs. VSK has a local satellite lab, but most of their analyses are done in Fresno, and because of the shipping times, they're not always able to meet that rush turnaround time. So that could have a huge impact to us. If a lab accidentally drops and breaks a sample, if a sample bottle is not filled up appropriately, et cetera, it can trigger re-samples, and especially towards the end of the month, or if it's a weekly sample towards the end of the week. getting that sample resampled on time is very important as well. I did bring up the conversation of the individual categories and the weighted scores with purchasing. They did say that's something that we could discuss as a department moving forward and be able to provide that information, but it's the total points per category, so I hope that would answer the question. And then I don't have the details as to what the negative impacts to the different categories were.

I think just one of the glaring things was that some of these laboratories couldn't pass their performance testing, which is something that we look at in the details, in the weeds. That's really key. If you can't pass your performance testing, we definitely don't want them doing the water quality analysis for the city of Riverside. And that's why some of these laboratories would fall. Those performance testings come from the state of California. So we can compare those testings to say, hey, this is a better lab. So when we're looking at these proposals, the cost is blind to the evaluator. The evaluator doesn't know the cost of that proposal. They're going on performance only.

Thank you. Rebecca and then Tom.

When you look at this and you take the top and the bottom numbers away, Babcock is pretty much in the center and they're actually the second lowest bidder. I'm glad that you've used the top three. I guess if there is a way to provide additional information having said that with the process that you all all gone through and I don't know if this is her saying I don't know who gets to answer this question, but this is the process the city has gone through. Other than finding a legal reason why this bid doesn't mean would we be able to move forward with a different vendor.

So under the provisions of the purchasing resolution, and it provides that all of the proposals are ranked, and then you start with the number one proposer and enter into negotiations. And if you reach a satisfactory agreement, then you move forward with approval. If this board declines to approve this, then the RFP would be canceled and we would start again. Start over.

Yeah. That's what I wanted to know from a process perspective. So when it comes here, we're taking the recommendation. We're not making a change on the potential vendor at all. Correct. Just verifying. Thank you. If there are no other questions, I'll move the item.

Well, I had one real, just clarifying. Susan, the local purchasing preference, explain why that does not apply here.

So, the local purchasing preference is based upon the idea that if there is a local purchase, sales tax will flow back to the general fund. But in this case, because it is an enterprise fund, the sales tax does not come back to the enterprise fund. So, it's not applicable. It's prohibited by Prop 218.

Okay.

And Prop 26 for electric purchases.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. That was very useful. And I would just like to comment that just the, you know, Just the clarifications of some of the things you were looking for and some of the things that disqualifying or like the, you know, the timing, you know, Fresno versus Riverside. It's very, very useful for us generally. I mean, this happened with recently with the water COSA contract where AGM Brian's interior clarified all of the specific aspects of the proposal and why it was selected despite not being the cheapest. And it, you know, it was very clarifying and just useful to hear some of these things. I don't know how much you're allowed to say, but it's extremely useful. So thank you. Can I hear a second?

Second.

Okay. Thank you. Roll call, please.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. We'll now open public comment for item number 18. And, yeah.

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And we call for presentation of item number 18 by Brian Centurier.

Good evening, Board Chair Siena and members of the board and Brian Centurier, Assistant General Manager of Finance and Administration. Tonight before you are the proposed fiscal year 26-27 fees and charges. A little bit of background to start off with. In 2023, for the 23-24 master fees and charges schedule, a proposal was brought forward using a consumer price index increase for the Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ontario region. The CPI adjustment was to mitigate potentially significant increases to fees and charges until a formal fee study was adopted. So for 23-24, we adopted a CPI while we were working with the city and MGT of America on a full comprehensive fees and charges study. So then in 2024, the proposed 24-25 fees and charges study that was completed by MGT of America in collaboration with city and RPU staff was approved on June 10th, 2024 by the board. and then adopted on June 25th, 2024 by the city council. Since that time, a fee study or a fee increase was not brought forward for 25-26, and now being brought forward to you this evening is a CPI increase for the fiscal year 26-27 fees and charges changes. The proposed adjustments are based on a 5% or 7% increase in the CPI for again the Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ontario region. It's calculated using data from January 2024 to November 2025, so almost two years, because an update to the fees and charges was not brought forward last year. The CPI adjustment is meant to complement rather than replace a broader comprehensive fee review process that's conducted every three to five years. So this bridges the gap between the next full comprehensive study. These adjustments were developed administratively by city staff and are consistent with the city's prior CPI-based updates. Also for discussion and to consider this evening is a rounding. On November 12, 2025, the US Treasury discontinued penny production. Staff recommends adjusting the fees and charges to the nearest dollar for most fees, with some fees being rounded to the nearest nickel. None of the fees being brought forward tonight are actually round to the nickel. They round to the nearest $0.10. Rounding is reviewed to ensure that the fees or charges remain within the estimated reasonable cost of service, of course, for the electric and water utility, and the amounts are rounded down when appropriate. There are other fees that charge actual costs, so we do have some that are time and material that may include pennies. This evening, staff is requesting authority to round that final payment to the nearest nickel or dollar, whichever is more practical. So not at this time. And number five there, the timeline to implement this rounding for fees and charges is contingent on changes to the city's various payment processing systems and will be implemented at the earliest time possible. So the RPU, in collaboration with the city, is still working on that rounding mechanism. And it would just be to the nearest nickel rather than penny. The timeline and effective date. On May 19th, 2026, the city council, which last month, received and provided input on the fiscal year 6-27 master fees and charges schedule that included RPOs, electric and water fees and charges. They also provided input on a revision to the Riverside Municipal Code to apply an annual inflator to the fees and charges based on CPI. City Council was not very supportive of making a change to the Riverside Municipal Code, so that is not being brought forward to you tonight or to the City Council later this month. And the city council agreed to set the public hearing for June 23rd, 2026. So in number two, we're here this evening where the board will consider establishing the RPU electric and water fiscal year 2627 user fees and charges. And then on June 23rd, later this month, the City Council is holding a public hearing to consider and adoption, or for consideration and adoption of the proposed electric and water utility fees and charges, along with the entire master fees and charges schedule, with an effective date of July 1st. All right, the fiscal impact to the electric and water utility for the one year increase effective July 1st is $476,000 to the electric fund and $121,000 to the water fund for a total estimated revenue impact of $603,000. That's annually. So the recommendation tonight is that the Board of Public Utilities adopt a resolution to establish the Riverside Public Utilities Electric and Water Fiscal Year 2627 user fees and charges as further described in the resolution and that the Board of Utilities recommend that the City Council conduct a public hearing on June 23, 2026 to receive public input related to the Riverside Public Utilities Electric and Water Fiscal Year 26-27 user fees and charges and adopt a resolution approving the Riverside Public Utilities Electric and Water Fiscal Year 26-27 user fees and charges as further described in that resolution. And with that, I'm available to answer any questions. And the city's deputy director of finance, Sergio Aguilar, is also on the team's call this evening to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much. Do we have any public comment? No? Okay. Any questions or comments? Go ahead, Rebecca.

Slide four. What does practical mean?

Which number are we looking at for board member glassware?

Oh What is when appropriate mean I

Good question. Very good question. So say, for instance, I believe right now the fee for a remote turn on and turn off for AMI meters is, I believe, $6.20. So rounding that down the nearest dollar would reduce the cost. Rounding it up to $7, we thought we'd be over collecting. So we're rounding to $6.30. And there's only a few of those. Most of the fees are more than the $6 range. Sure. I hope that helps. That's just one. There was one on the water side, too. I believe it's the inspection linear feet for new construction, linear feet of pipe. It's $2.90. I think it was going from $2.80 to $2.90. It didn't make sense to take it all the way to $3 per linear foot. That could be impactful.

I guess the question is, are these being decided on an individual basis? Or is there like rhyme or reason?

Yes, individual basis and rhyme or reason. Gone through all of our fees through the electric and water appendix. And also updating an estimated meter read fee for the... Oh, geez. Uh-oh. Temporary meter or, yeah, temporary meters for water. Yeah. So, yeah.

So you're comfortable in approximately two-ish years when you go through your otter process that you will have all the necessary documents to meet the when appropriate and when practical. You feel comfortable in that? That's why I'm asking. Because when we get asked those questions, I'm like, ooh, I don't know how to find that word.

Well, yeah. Yes, I do.

So in your justification for how you're deciding up or down, how much to go up or down, you have that from a paper documentation perspective that you're comfortable with. Yes.

Yes. Yes, I do. We applied the CPA first and CPI first and then found a comfortable rounding amount. Going down. Yes. Thank you. You're welcome.

I mean, shouldn't it just be based on a dollar amount? Like if the fee is more than 20 bucks, rounding to nearest dollar is only gonna be a percent or two difference. But if it's significantly less than $20, like you said, $6, and you're rounding in there as dollar, then suddenly you're really changing things by percentage-wise. So effectively it should be if the fee is less than some dollar amount, we go to the nearest whatever it is, dime or nickel. Otherwise, dollar. Is that effectively what's happening?

Board Chair, you're exactly correct, and that's the approach we took.

Okay.

And just to clarify, the rounded fees are in your attachment. So staff will not have the ability to do it on their own. It will just be through. I appreciate. Yes.

I totally understand that. It was a question of how did the list that got in the staff report get in there? Thanks.

Yeah. Other questions or comments? Pete?

Slide six. Just rounded to the nearest nickel or the nearest dollar.

Oh, yes. Because it looks like the nearest thousand dollars. Board Chair Wolgamuth, we did keep this at a very high level because a lot of this estimating is based on the number of fees and charges throughout the year. So turn-on, turn-offs, 48-hour tags. So we didn't want to get too precise. I understand. Thank you.

No further questions. Okay.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yes. Board Member Cruz, yes. Well, under California Proposition 218 and Proposition 26, we're not allowed to overcollect the electric and water utility. So, yes, you're exactly right. In areas where we need to be more precise to not overcollect, we took that approach.

Yes.

Tom?

Well, I guess this goes to the blanket use of a CPI. Most of these charges are based on labor costs, right? We have to meet a meter or whatever. Why aren't we using our actual costs? We know what they are.

board member Evans we will again when we do the comprehensive study that is the plan so in the next couple of years to dust off all of those schedules and revisit the amount of time all of these all of these services take and and then as you mentioned add on the we have the hours, the labor costs, and the overhead, we will do the whole comprehensive study again. And this is simply intended to bridge the gap before doing that study again and avoiding any type of large fee and charges increases that may be needed. If we were to forego CPI,

Okay. And the CPI is, what did you say it was you're using, 5%?

It's 5.7% and it is two years because we didn't do an update to the fees and charges last year. Yes, that was my first question also when I heard the 5.7, but it covers two years.

Okay. Thank you.

I think it's very reasonable not to do the deep studies too frequently and to kind of adjust like this. you know, it seems like a decent compromise, but why didn't we do it last year? Why did we wait two years? Because if it's $600,000 in revenue, there was inflation between 2024 and 2025. And so it looks like we probably ate $300,000 by not adjusting annually. Is there a reason why we don't adjust, why we didn't adjust annually? It's been two years is

I believe you're correct. We would have recovered the $300,000. If Sergio is on the line and he would like to, I guess, address the question of why we didn't do a citywide, I could say that it was... There were competing objectives last year, and we didn't get to it from at least the RPU side. And we're doing every effort now going forward to address this annually and partner with the city because I don't think the master fees and charges went forward with the city last year either. The city was working on developer fees last year. BUT REALLY, YEAH, YOU'RE EXACTLY RIGHT, BOARD CHAIR. THERE'S NO REASON WHY WE COULD NOT HAVE BROUGHT BACK A CPI LAST YEAR.

YEAH, THIS IS SERGIO AGUILAR, DEPUTY FINANCE DIRECTOR. SO, YEAH, I THINK BECAUSE THERE WAS THAT COMPREHENSIVE UPDATE DONE IN 2024 AND THEY result in some larger increases. The decision was last year to not make increases other than truing up some of the developer fees. But I think in this case, just given that it is prudent to do these CPI increases while we do comprehensive updates, many other municipal governments do this where they do the annual CPI increases. So we're recommending CPI increase now and that hopefully will help mitigate any much larger need for an increase whenever we do the next comprehensive update.

Okay, thank you. Questions, motions?

I'll move.

Second. Thank you. Roll call, please.

Please vote. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. So on to board member and staff communications, I think, yeah? Yeah, okay. I was like, wait, we have another one? Okay, let's go home. Systematic reporting on meetings, conferences. Oh, yeah, sorry. Do we have any board or staff communications to report on for item number 19? Okay. Thank you. Are there any items for future consideration for item number 20? All right. We'll now turn the time over to David Garcia for the general manager's report.

Thank you, Chair. I have one update for you, just one announcement to make. If you are available next Tuesday, City Council, our own Tracy Sato will be giving the public benefits report discussion slated for 20 minutes. I know Chair and Board Member Evans worked very hard on that project. So if you have time in the evening, city council, we'll be there to get past the finish line with our public benefits item. We'll see what council says and what their suggestions are. And hopefully when we're done that evening, we'll have a plan approved to move forward to spend down that large amount of money that we have in the public benefits fund. And that's all I have. Next week on Tuesday the 16th.

Is it early on the agenda?

It is the first discussion item.

And that's all I have, Chair.

Okay. Thank you. The meeting is adjourned.

Yay. Good job.