City Commission - Special Meeting

Okay, it is, sorry to break up the conversation, but it is two o'clock and we have a full agenda. I will call the special study session of July 1st, 2026 to order. Today's study session is on the Salina water distribution system. I have a few comments before I turn it over to staff and I want the public to know that the commission has been talking with staff, and we take this very seriously. And we do believe that clean water is not a luxury, but it is a necessity, and we want to address it. And today will not be the only, probably, study session we have. Can you not hear? No, we don't. At Study Station, we usually don't do it. Sorry. Study Station is to bring the commission and the public up to date on what we have done in the past and what we have as far as maintenance and replacement scheduled for the future within our water system. We need to look at what our short-term goals and our long-term goals are starting today. We need to see how we have... in the past, how we have funded prior projects, and how we will fund future projects. So that's a little bit about what we're going to do. What we'll do is we'll have a presentation by staff, followed by questions and comments from the commission. And then we will open it up to the public for some comments. And I'll make some other comments when we get to that point. So I guess I'll turn it over to the city manager, Jacob Wood, to start.

Yeah, sure. Just to start off, I do want to mention that we do have a limited amount of time today. So there is a law enforcement community review board meeting that starts in this room at 4 o'clock. Even though we have that meeting scheduled, we felt like this was the only time that we could get in here and get in front of the city commission. So we wanted to go ahead and get it scheduled. So we do have a two-hour time frame, just so everybody is aware of that. So I'll kick this off. Obviously, I'm Jacob Wood. I'm the city manager here. We acknowledge that we've got water quality issues in our system, and I think Martha is going to take you through kind of some of the things that we've done over the past, kind of where we've been and the history of how we how we handle these things. We do get water quality complaints, and when we have those, we have a crew that goes out and takes a look at the quality of the water. And we do as much as we can to try and increase that quality. That includes things like flushing and testing at different times, doing different things. And at some point, we get to the point where There's nothing that mechanically we can do on the system really helps anymore, and that's when we have to get lines really in the replacement schedule. We've got a lot of lines that are old, 50, 75, 100-year-old lines. We have started a process of replacing those lines, but it is a costly endeavor. And so not only are we replacing lines in our water system, but we are also doing other system enhancements. We're cleaning water towers. We built a new wastewater treatment plant. We built a new water treatment plant. I think we've expended over $100 million on the water system in the last 10 or 15 years. So we are spending a lot of money on the system. And one of the things that we do every year is sit down and have a conversation about what we think water rates should look like. The water system is an enterprise fund, which means it is fully funded by user fees. So we don't use any general taxes. We don't use sales taxes. We don't use any funds outside of our user fees to fund and support the operations of our water and wastewater system. So that means we have to be very cautious about what we do with our water rates. So every year it's something that we sit down as staff, make recommendations to the city commission about. And I will tell you we have been, we've tried to be cautious about doing large increases. There's places in the state that have done you know, 40 and 50% increases in their water rates. And I think there's probably some people in this room that would tell you they feel like their water rates are already too high. Um, so we're cautious about that. Um, and that means when you have a wastewater treatment plant that has to have work on it, um, that's mandated by the state that you can't avoid, you have to, you have to take into account what your rates look like. And so, um, Water main replacement competes with all of those other system enhancements. And at this point, we have expended about $30 million, $27, $28 million on water main replacement since about 2010. Certainly, we could expend more. But it's really a question about, it's a value proposition about how much we charge for our water and whether the public can support that. So with that, I will turn it over to Martha Tasker. She's been our utilities director for a long time. She'll talk a little bit about her history. And then we'll get into some of the details about the water distribution system and kind of where we're at today and then our future plans and how we plan to address some of the concerns that have certainly come, you know, have come up to the public eye over the last few weeks. So with that, Martha Tasker, go ahead and take it away.

Thank you, Jacob. Again, Martha Tasker, Director of Utilities for the City of Salina. I'm going to go back in time and give you a little bit of history of where I've been, what I did, and how I got here. Previously, I worked for Wilson Engineers here in Salina, and about the last 15 years of my time with Wilson and Company, I was housed in a city of Salina facility. I was involved in the construction and upgrade of the wastewater plant in the 1990s. Then I moved to the water plant and was involved in the water plant upgrades down there and pump station rehabs around the city. So being housed in the city of Salina facilities made me handy for them to ask questions and gave me a lot of opportunity to learn about Salina and our system. So when I came here, some people thought I actually worked for the city of Salina because they'd call and, don't you know where Martha is? Well, she went back to her office and she doesn't work for the city. But I truly was housed in the city facility for those years because we had a lot of projects in Salina. Now I'm going to start with talking about after I first when I first got here, we seem to have a lot of firsts here. I was here started in 2003 with the city of Slina and had not been here very long and we were in drought conditions and The river went dry. So I'm thinking, people in the past, this surely must have happened once before. And the answer was, no, we've never had this. But we had a water conservation plan and kind of a concept of what we were supposed to do, but it had never been tested. So we were kind of flying to get that done. So that was one of the first big emergencies that came about. Working for the city. We'll talk a little bit more about that. But when I came here, now I'm going to move to a study that we started in 2007 with PEC out of Wichita. And it was really a water distribution system model. And it had really two phases. One was to take and put all of the piping in our water distribution system into a model that we can actually run through the computer. And it can see what velocities are in the pipe and fire hydrant flows by flowing the fire hydrants and gathering that information. And so in a result, when you do that, you get to see areas where flow is restricted. And typically, we're looking at those areas with cast iron pipe and tuberculation. So that was the idea of that report, is we knew there was an issue. And when I came, and when you think back, the big part of the city was built while the air base was a boom here in the 40s and 50s. And so a lot of pipe was installed in the ground back at that time. And basically, at that time, we had, you know, in today's city, we have over 340 miles of pipe, but a big share of it is cast iron pipe and 6-inch pipes in the 100-plus miles. So cast iron pipe is inherent. It was not lined. And so the water is exposed to the cast iron pipe and it has a tendency, since it's not lined, to rust. And those rust particles end up in the water. And so that's kind of the issue. Even when I first came to the city, we were dealing with red water but didn't take it as much of a plan. I'm going to say water main replacements were not, they were more reactive than proactive. If they had a lot of problems, then they worked on them or replaced some, but it was not something that we did. So bringing this plan into play really was our first challenge. water main replacements, and that was in 2010. So the document is available if anybody wants to read it. I think it's a couple hundred pages, but it talks about all the work that we did. Basically, there was two phases, one to get all of our piping in a model, so that we could look and see what flows, fire flows, water age, storage of pumps, all of that data. And the second phase was to develop a capital improvement program for replacing water mains. So that's kind of the story of that study. on the next slide just kind of gives you a page that came out of our study that we wanted to do, started in 2010, and we wanted to do approximately about $4 million a year. You don't have to read that information in the little chart there. That was just out of the report to give an example of what we did for defining water main replacements for several years. And so this is just out of that 2007 report. The next slide, just to give you an idea, as you look at the magenta color kind of in the center, all of that pipe is over 100 years old. And this came out of that report, so this is 10 plus years old, but it does a nice job of kind of telling you the age of our pipe in the city and where it's at as you move out into the new areas. The blue color takes you to less than 20 years of time. So that's still in the report from the beginning. Next slide. We talk about the cast iron pipe replacements, and this information I took out of that report. And basically what we determined with all the flow testing and work that we could do, that cast iron pipes with six inch diameter or less and an age of 50 years was where we needed Those were going to be problems for us. Well, if you think a lot of this pipe was installed in the 40s, 50s, early 60s, by the time 2010 came around, we already had 50 years on that pipe. And the expectation is it will last longer than that, but you need to start thinking about replacement because some of the cast iron pipe that was in the pre-World War II area wasn't of the best quality. And when I talk to people throughout Kansas, we're all similar. When we talk about cast iron pipe and issues, we find that it's in that 50s, early 60s age that the pipe is of the least quality.

And if you can go back one slide just for one second. So if you look at the chart where the green is, even though we have some 100-year-old plus pipes in the magenta area there, really our quality issues seems to be in that 40- to 60-year-old green area. And you'll see in some slides as we come up that that's really where we focused on the replacement because that's where we've had the most issues in terms of water main breaks and then also just quality issues and complaints.

We'll have a couple of slides that kind of show that information here.

It's just interesting that it's not necessarily the 100-year-old lines that are causing us problems. It's really the ones that are in that, you know, 50 to, well, 60 to 70-year-old range.

More like now. What kind of pipe did they use prior to that, and then what kind of pipe did they start using after that?

Prior to cast iron pipe, back in the good old days, some of the pipe was made out of wood timbers. So cast iron goes back. In our system, virtually, that's what we have is old sand cast. They took that pipe, and they had a mold, and they poured the metal in there and casted in that. So that was early on pipe, and then as time moved on, but cast iron pipe in our system is all we have. We don't have anything future to that that we're aware of in the early years. But in other cities that I've talked to from across the nation, Some of them go back to old timber, and they have photos of that and that at their plant. But we're not really into that. And then the next phase was ductile iron pipe for water. Ductile iron pipe has a... interior coating of concrete, so the water cannot contact with the metal. And the ductile iron was used maybe starting in the 70s. We have some up on Hillside, I think, that was ductile iron, and it's in the early 70s. And then I think about 19, or the end of, right about 2000, late 90s, early 2000, the city moved to PVC pipe for water mains, give or take in that range.

Okay, thank you.

Mm-hm, so. Cast iron pipe was the thing in the days when Salina was developing. Interesting fact, probably doesn't mean a lot to some, but our water treatment plant was a private water treatment plant down at the same location it is today on 5th and 4th Street down there. And it was private. In 1926, the city of Salina purchased the water plant. So prior to that, it was a private company. Some of the records back that far aren't as clear, but we have some information on those facilities. But that's just a tidbit of information. So really, as we went through our study and looked at the velocities, of the water in the pipes, we could tell where we had issues and kind of where to hone into. So we use the six inch cast iron pipe with 50 plus years and we've learned over time we need to be looking at the 50s and 60s pipe. So we looked at that and then we look at calls that we get for taste and odor or red water. So next slide, please Scott. And these are going to be a little bit difficult for you to see, but this is what we use as staff to decide where we need to work. So on. That side of the screen, I'll call it left if you're looking at it from here, that shows where water quality complaints came in in the years of 2010 through 2015. And on the other side, it's water main breaks between 2011 and 2016, because typically as the pipe corrodes away, it becomes weaker and water main breaks do become kind of an issue that runs a little bit hand in hand with the water quality. So what you see on this when you look at the screen is what you're looking at is the yellow areas are where we're starting to see that's where we had either main breaks or water quality calls. And the main breaks on the right side, we kind of have some areas that show real definite for main breaks, but when we look on our water quality side those don't show up initially and then i'm going to show you the next round of years and then we start seeing water quality but the yellow areas and then as you move out gets to where there's less and less water quality calls so to jacob's comment when you look in the heart of downtown that's not where we have water quality or calls or a lot of water main breaks we replaced the 12 inch water main right down santa fe here a few years back and that was pretty that pipe was uh clean inside but it's 12 inch moved a lot of water every day so this is the kind of information we take so every time someone calls us we try to write it down i'm i'm not going to tell you that every time somebody called we got it documented because we have a lot of people out in the field that do that but we've tried to We went through stacks of paper to develop some of this information. So that's just what we saw initially when we started. And then the next slide, the water quality again is on the same side of the screen. And now you start to see water quality showing up in those areas where we had main breaks over on the western portion of the city and up on North 9th. We have a lot of water quality in those areas. So these are heat maps. And so if someone calls in four times from one address, then that's going to get tagged as four times. So it isn't tagged by individually just one address and they're done. It's based on the number of calls that we get in different areas. I just wanted to give a little information on how and what we do to do what we do. And the next slide, I had staff look back and kind of go through the years and say how many basic water quality calls did we get every year. I WAS GOING TO TRY TO DRAW A CORRELATION TO THIS SLIDE, BUT IN TALKING WITH STAFF, SOMETIMES TEMPERATURE AND THE WEATHER MAKES A DIFFERENCE IN THE SUMMER WHEN WE HAVE A LOT OF HIGH TEMPERATURE DAYS IN THE HUNDREDS. YOU THINK ABOUT THOSE WATER TOWERS, THEY'RE KIND OF A BIG POT ON A PEDESTAL WITH THE WATER GETS HOTTER. WHEN WATER GETS HOTTER, IT HAS AN EFFECT ON THE WATER QUALITY AND THE CHEMICALS THAT WE USE IN THE PROCESS. That's kind of a look, I tried to put a trend line on here. And obviously 26 isn't for a whole year yet, so we couldn't trend to that. But it's up and down over time. But it's the information that we use to make the heat maps. So next slide. uh... every time we do a water main replacement project we uh... carry this information forward in every staff report and uh... this goes back to our projects that we started in twenty ten through twenty twenty six gonna try to highlight some of the importance on this but when you we when you look Over on the one side of the screen to the right, we talk about the cost per mile. And we also talk about the cost per foot. And I showed the number of bidders because over time, we've seen that change. So when we started, we were in that $73, $74 a foot for replacing the pipe. Our goal when we've worked in these projects, we just haven't went in and just replaced the pipe where it's at. We put in a new service line so that we're prepared for the lead service line replacement program that we have to fall under with EPA right now that we have a lot of deadlines and schedules for. And a new meter pit and lines with fire hydrants. So we don't really want to go back in this street or in this neighborhood and excavations in the future because our service line failed or a fire hydrant failed. So I don't know if you want to call that the gold standard, but when we put it back, we're trying to get this back to where it's good for many years to come. And I'll talk a little bit more about how we install the pipe. But as you look down through here, when we get down to about the years of the last 24, 25, and 26, you start seeing those pipe costs per foot increasing greatly. And when you look at the project one, third one up, you'll notice there we were about $164 a foot. Then when we got to project two, it's $255 a foot. We only had one bidder. When we started out with these projects, we had eight bidders. The last project we bid, we had two bidders, Smoky Hill and Mies Construction. Mies was the low bidder, and they came in at about $280 a foot. Smoky Hill was about $100 more a foot more than that. So we'd like to have competitive bids because that helps us do better with pricing. But with this, I'm just trying to show that we've done about 44 miles of pipe and spent a little under $30 million.

And I think, you know, this tells the story that we probably need to think about whether we increase rates in order to spend a little bit more money on water line replacement because we're not getting as much bang for the buck as we were, you know, early on. So when we first started this plan, $2 to $4 million a year was getting us 2 to 4 miles. Now it's getting us half that, so we need to think about whether we need to expand that a little bit.

And kind of to add on to that... I've been gathering data from other cities because I'm a part of a national AWWA board and was just at a meeting here a little over a week ago. I serve as the Kansas director on that board. And these are the type of things we talk about those meetings as cast iron pipe, lead and service lines. So we all share a lot of information about this and um so we don't work on this just in the dark we're and we have our kansas american waterworks association that we work with so we share a lot of information and try to learn from others so we're not starting from scratch all the time and I'm going to brag a little bit. When we started this program, we were kind of the first people really working serious about water main replacements, and I had many cities call me. In fact, we have a city engineer upstairs that called me from Hutchison that asked me, how are you doing your water mains and getting them through KDHE? Because a set of plans through KDHE and waiting for approval 10 years ago was a real, really lengthy time. KDHE has allowed the city of Saline and some other communities to be in a pilot program to where we have one engineer design it, which we have a separate one that worked at the water plant, and then we have an engineer in public works that reviews these, and we can turn those plans around a lot quicker, and that's been in the last couple of years. So that's cut a lot of time off on review to keep us from moving plans forward, but... This is what we've done and the other thing that I've talked to the finance director and she may have shared it with Jacob but I'm waiting for my turn for the budget conversation and I've given her some numbers as kind of what I think we might need each year. I know she's looking at the rates and we'll be talking with you about that shortly but There's, this is what we've done. All I can say is that's what we've done to date. And then the next slide is, it's crooked in here, but in those of you that have a package, you're gonna, north is over on that direction, this is south, is the arrow points. But this shows the lines that we've replaced to date. And then the Munetta, I'll come paint the Jetta color, is a project that Mies has done. And the one up in the corner there is the project on the upper end in that area is a project that Smoky Hill's working on right now. And they're getting close with their project. Mies won't be done until probably November of this year. Smoky Hill still has some final work to do, but they're getting closer to having that project done. But this gives you an idea, and I know, you know, if you take your papers home and you overlay and look at this, you're going to see where we've replaced have been areas of water quality concern. So it's just an easy way to see it. So those last maps did a little bit of looking at earlier years. Now this map here starts to look at... water quality complaints through 2016 through current and so as i mentioned all the water quality calls get a red dot on there and then those turn into heat maps and we're still still seeing north salina is an area with issues the area is over in On the western portion of the city, we still have some yellow there, but not a lot of the dark red color, which is where we're. We get the most calls from it at the current time. And you look over on the west side in Redwood and that area, we see yellow and shaded. But the most number of calls we get right now is up on the north of Salina area. And so just to add a little bit of information to this, and this may be hard for you to see, but if you look in the red area, there's kind of some white areas. That's our next project that we'll be talking to. So there's some up in North Street and then down on Dover Drive. And then there's a little piece down on Larson. that's the Dover Drive area and the little piece on Larson's just up there you go Scott thank you for doing that but those that's our next project that's the area that we're working in trying to finish up piping in those areas so this is water quality we'll flip to the next slide and then this'll now turn into the main breaks and remember earlier on we didn't see a lot of main breaks and issues over in this area on the west side of the city, but now we're 10 plus years later and we're seeing more main breaks and more water quality concerns. So as that pipe gets older, I'll say the corrosion of the pipe and the age of the pipe starts affecting us. So that is kind of the reason that we're bringing up the issue of need more dollars because it costs more and just to catch up to get through all of this pipe in the time frame. And then we have the other pipe in the ground. Some of the cast iron we think we've seen last 100 years. But this 50 and 60 year, 1950, 1960 area in there, a little before, a little in the 60s, just is what gives us trouble. And if you pull up our maps and look on GIS, you can click on the pipe and it'll tell you what year it was installed. So if you're really interested in learning a lot more, our GIS mapping takes you through this. Next slide, please. And these are pictures that come from work that we've done. And somebody said, boy, that looks really bad. But I wanted to show the honesty of what we see when we cut these pipes apart out there and the tuberculation in them. Over years and years, this iron attaches and it's... It is what we have, but these are areas we've worked. I just put them in. The one in the upper corner on that side, you'll look in the back of that pipe, it looks pretty clean, doesn't it? And then you look up in the front, you see some tuberculation. We're thinking there's obviously something different in each of those pieces of pipe because we're not seeing the same thing. So that's not on the beginning of a block or that's not at the end of the block. It could be in the middle of the block. So... Next slide. But these are truly, and I hope they're all of a scale in the handouts that you have. You can see where these were. And it will tell you whether it was a main break project or if we were doing one of the replacement projects. And it'll give you the project number off to the side there. It'll say a main break. So that's just for you to look at and see what we really see in the pipe when we work out there. And if you Google this, if you like to, you're going to see this is kind of what you see in the photos when you talk about water piping that's this cast iron unlined. Unfortunately, it's kind of what it is. So next slide. So in our world today, our current replacement plan when we put the project out is to open. We allow the contractor to select whether he wants to open cut, which means they're going to dig a trench and then lay the pipe in. And where they dig, if your driveway's there, sidewalk or whatever, that would all be removed, open cut. The other option that we use in those that live in an area where it's done is a horizontal directional boring. That's where we put a ream rod through, has an interest pit and an exit pit. Then we pull the pipe back in that place, so we don't open cut the whole area, but we do have to have an entrance and exit pit. And then from there, then we tie in all the new service lines, install the meter pits, fire hydrants, and make those connections. But every project on that list was bid doing it this way. So we're feeling like that's what the contractor thinks is the best method because they're all bidding the same concept. Over the years, we've looked at different things. We've looked at can we line that? It's a sewer projects we've lined here in the city. Water's a little more tricky because we have to meet KDHE's requirements of NSF 61, which is for potable water. Materials that come in contact with potable water have very special requirements. And the other issue is a water main in lieu of something sewer, it is under pressure. And when water moves in the pipe and have a main break or we have a fire, sometimes there's water hammer and that pressure can, you know, go way, way high up to our pipe is designed to handle up to 300 pounds of pressure. So if you have that, this new lining that you would put in a pipe has to meet those requirements. And the other issue, when you line, you have to remove all of that scale. And there's a lot of ways to remove scale, but when you remove the scale, you've got to have an area to get it out. Then you've got to take and... You know, get it cleaned out, get your liner in, get it back in place, and then get disinfected. And in the cities that I've talked to over the United States and areas, that's maybe up to a week's worth of effort to get that all done because that pipe is out of service. It can't have water in it. So... In areas where they do that, and residential is dense like we have here in Salina, they put in some type of a temporary pipe system on the ground to connect up homes. And again, things that KDHE asks about and being careful. And the other method that we've looked at over years and still look at at times just to make sure where we stand is pipe bursting. And that's where they take kind of a head that has, we've used it on sewer, we haven't used it on water here. And it bursts a pipe and then you're able to pull a new pipe in that same location where the old pipe was. But, you know, sometimes they just compare costs to doing that, but you still have to get services connected, you know, to that. A lot of times they'll use a robot and try to go through there and cut where the water taps are and just connect back to the old service and leave all of that in place. But we've been replacing all of that just to get everybody connected. So we're not back in their yards in time. So we constantly look at different ways to do this. And we've even, I know someone probably has asked this question, why don't you do it yourself? We have, over time, and more than one time, and just recently, staff looked at What would it cost to have a crew to do that? And it takes some specialized equipment. If you're lining, that's a different thing if you're bursting. But if we're doing the horizontal directional boring, which seems to be, I think people would be happier with us if we are tearing out their driveways. It makes a lot more inconvenience for different individuals. So we would need to have a boring machine. But as we looked at the costs, we couldn't really find where if we did it internally, you know, with city employees that would have the city benefits because we do have, you know, health insurance and some of that. Not all contractors provide all of that. So the numbers that we've done, I did one, and then Jeff Schamberg, who's the assistant director of utilities, did one recently. And I think, Jeff?

Yeah, it was... was close enough to identical to where when you when you evaluate other things like uh yeah go to the podium please yeah give us your name yes yeah and your job jeff shanberg i'm deputy director of utilities and uh yeah as and i've i've been a contractor i worked for a boarding contractor in the past so i'm familiar with some of these topics but uh um when you look at the costs of the of the city for self-performing this work versus a contractor performing it There's different things cities cover that contractors don't and vice versa. But it comes up close enough to equal to where when you look at the other kind of intangibles, you look at the shift of risk. And then really the biggest one that comes into play is equipment and labor utilization rates. More crews work off utilization rates and try to maintain utilization rate when you're working in a defined piece of a city or even maybe one or two pieces of a city versus having multiple customers in multiple cities. Maybe it rains in Salina today but it doesn't in Hutch and you can send your crew down there and work. Those sorts of things come into play. Utilization rate really eats you up really quickly. So even when we get close to cost, sometimes close to cost isn't good enough. We kind of lose on the other things.

Thank you, Jeff. Jeff Chamberg's been with us a little bit less than a year, but his first involvement on the Salina project was with the finished water line from the south, or the raw water line for the south water treatment plant as a contractor. So he's been on that side of fence and kind of knows how to calculate the costs and the calculations. So I asked him to do that. I've done it in the past, but thought a new set of eyes and somebody else to look at it was a good idea so we've done that again probably a couple weeks ago we went through that so we're always we're always trying to get we have a limited amount of money so we always want to get the most bang for the buck and so now i'm i'm going to move to jacob talked about projects that are in our water and wastewater system that that are competing, or all of these projects compete for the money and the rates that we charge to our customers. So looking back, we spend an annual maintenance on projects from about two to two and a half million dollars a year. And that's anything from painting a water tower to painting pumps to roofs to cleaning lime lagoons. It's the smaller projects that we do over and over again in their maintenance. And on top of some of those numbers, our operating budget has maintenance items in it that are for things that are like less than $50,000. So a lot of money goes into annual maintenance and sometimes something different breaks and we have to fix it. But we do try to start with a budget and a plan. I mentioned the river went dry in 2010, which coming from an engineering firm, you know, we got to figure out a way to have water for the next 50 years. That's important because without water, your city struggles a lot. And I always joke with former Governor Brownback because we did a 50-year plan for water in Salina before he did his 50-year water plan for Kansas, which I helped with those documents on that project. So familiar with that. So out of that raw water supply study, um downtown water treatment plant upgrade at the water plant we upgraded the air strippers and we did some work to the well field so that we had a redundant line coming into the water plant we only had a single 1935 water line that brings water under the river channel and under the railroad tracks and into the plant so it made sense to get us an another line in case something happens to that Soon to be 100 year old pipe. So that was something that we did as a part of that project. The other work that we did was Canopolis Lake. We worked for over a seven year process with the Kansas Water Office and US Army Corps of Engineers to find a way to buy some storage in Canopolis Lake for when the river actually has no flow in it. that took legislation to accomplish that and we're probably the only one in kansas that's done that but it was like a seven year process and we bought that storage for a tool to have it was 2.5 million gallons we've used it some in the summer to kind of polish when we're in low flow times but we haven't exceeded what we ever purchased out of the out of the lake and the other project we did was the south water treatment plant It was adding about 3.5 million gallons and had a price tag of roughly 32.5 million. And we were off on a trail. We did a study in 2007 on what would it take for our wastewater plant to meet nutrient removal. And KDHE worked with us on that and they said, Martha, you have a drought-stricken community that when you lose the river, you're very limited and you're one of the larger communities and that can have a water issue without the river. Well, we were kind of aware of that too. So we've done a raw water study and they suggested that I do the south water plant first because of our drought vulnerability before we did the work at the wastewater plant. so we kind of switched gears there but we did that south plant and recently when we had the trees that fell on lots of power lines and we were without power some of our facilities were thursday night before they came back on so we were able with our water at the south water plant and all of our towers and such that were in service and sharp staff that made sure everything was full, we were able to work through that. Our river pump station was out of service for until Thursday about 10 o'clock at night when we got that back in service. So having the south water plant was a great help to get us what we needed for flows. We use about six or seven million gallons a day average and then in summer we peak out at eight and a half um and that south water plants is well groundwater correct that's correct yeah yes it's groundwater facility our downtown water plant is groundwater and surface water yeah you're you're correct uh... and all of those projects came out of that raw water supply study and we put those in place so we have a lot of tools when we have if the river goes dry and the time since that i've been here in two thousand and twelve we practiced what we were putting in place for using the access district and that with all of us working together with the irrigators and the other users in the water to make sure we all had some water for what we needed and uh so it became obvious that that access district in those things all had value to us over time So those are kind of those projects. And then another thing that was on my eye when I got here was water meters. Our water meters were well over 30 years old. And our water meters are our cash register for collecting our revenue for being accurate for water used. And some say you should replace them every 15 years. 20 years. I think in our performance contract that we have with Siemens right now, when we put in our new meters, they considered that to be about a 15-year cycle. And we did that project, I think we wrapped it up I was saying about 2013, but we put in all new meters and we used AMI, which is an advanced metering infrastructure to where we don't have water meters that go to the site. And with that project, we also moved the water meters outside because it's very difficult if there's an issue with the water meter. You know, a lot of families have everyone that works, so it's kind of hard to get in and meet up with them. So we put meters outside where we have access to them. And not everyone wants you to come in their home. So we made all of those changes when we did that. That was about a $14.65 million project. Santa Fe streetscape, when we got ready to do the downtown redevelopment. we replaced the 12-inch water main that was cast iron 1930s vintage i believe was a year we replaced it and put all new water lines to the front of every building under all the concrete in the streets just to prepare us for the future we've done a slina airport fire protection system out at the air base that has a 500 000 gallon capacity tank and fire pumps that can put out 150 pounds of pressure and So all of the airports, planes that they have in their facility, we have enough water and pressure to take care of fire protection for them. And then I talked about the wastewater treatment plant. It's one that KDHE asked us to hold off on. And BNR stands for biological nutrient removal. We've always removed ammonia. Now we remove nitrogen and phosphorus and much lower limits on ammonia. But that's what that process was. And that's a regulatory requirement that was in our wastewater discharge permit. So we've accomplished that. we have done a ton of subdivision work for water and sewer in greenfield areas throughout the city and staff is involved with all of that work and water taps and water meters and such so those are kind of the things that we've worked on over the last 20 years to some of them are pretty monumental projects that we've done and then as we move forward uh it's not i we worked with you and you you signed an agreement for black and beach to do a downtown water plate water treatment plant study that treatment plant the main work done there was back right before 2000 and about to that the year 2000 so here we are in 2025 so we're 25 years later and the equipment requires some replacements and so that study, as you may remember, is we're looking at equipment that needs replaced for a capital improvement program. We're looking at, is there better technologies? Is there better things we can do that are more cost efficient or safer for the community or the employees? And that project right now, we haven't worked through it step by step, but the preliminary numbers are about 65 million over the next ten years to get that you know, kind of up to where we'd like to have it, working through a priority of issues through time. And I think in our water rate study, we put $10 million in for some of our first year to start getting that built into the rate, so we've worked on that. The other big issue that we're working with is lead service lines replacement, and it's a federal EPA requirement. and i don't know if i've worked on anything that's any harder than that because it requires to know what the service line is into a home and what our service line is we have very good records on our information for ours but not so good on the private property and their require their requirements require us to know that by 2027 so if anyone wants to help us out with they know they have led service lines we'd be glad to know about that because it's a huge challenge for us And another project we're working on is some wastewater treatment plant maintenance equipment. We didn't include it in the $41.5 million project because it didn't require the overhead and the markup and the insurance from the contractor. And it's a project that we can hire local contractors to come in and do maintenance replacements. We've done that several times here in Salina already at the water plant and the wastewater plant. We're replacing some water lines out at the Salina industrial area, about $4 million worth. It's kind of down through K-State and They've had a lot of water main breaks out there over the last bit, and with the development they're doing, they're not real happy when we have a water main break and they can't get their students in for either food or into their housing and such. And it goes as far south as down to Schwann's Spice Factory. That's their one and only factory, and a water main break creates a lot of issues for them. So we have that project in the future. A piece of our water main replacement we want to expedite is under Aerospace Drive. And that's for, the airport's building a new street out there and we want to get our water main in so we're not an issue with them. So these are the kind of things that we're always working on that we have to plan for in the future. So now we'll talk a little bit about Dover Drive. Over time, we've done some proactive testing. We've looked at different times of the day, automatic flushers. We've put flushers at different locations trying to do water, and not just Dover Drive. We've done it up on the north part of town and other areas of town. But I'm just going to talk about Dover Drive because that was kind of the interest of what I understood from the last meeting. And so we've completed that design. In fact, on June 12th, I had provided a set down with a couple of the property owners there and showed them the drawings of what we had prepared for that street. I mentioned to them I wanted to get additional dollars, but I don't get to make that decision. But I've talked to Debbie and she thinks we've got a good chance in finance. that we can work through that, so I think we're there. We've used funding from the capital reserve fund. We have the project, we've put the plans and specs together. We'd look at advertising the project. I just put in late July to give us some time to double check on quality control on our drawings, but we have them developed, have them here. have a bid letting and award the construction as quickly as we can after we get the bids. Sometimes we have to evaluate a new contractor or work through that. So I hate to tie down when they start construction and some of that ties into how they put their bid and the time frame of the project together. But we'd be in construction. Shortly after we award the contract so depending upon contractors schedule the Projects that are included that I showed us a little hard to see white lines and that was Dover Drive 10th and 11th Street Larson Avenue and those projects are estimated to be about two million dollars Dover Drive is an area where we have about a 40-foot right away so We don't have a lot of room to work in the parking like we've done in a lot of other cities, so we tend to be under the edge of the curb and gutter and along the edge of the street to make that all work. But again, the plans are developed with the thought of open trench and horizontal boring for the project. So got there. So some of the testing that we did, one of the calls that we had went back to 11-1-23 and that they describe as three NTUs and that's really how the light reflects through the water and the particles in it and what that means. Some would say if you're one is really very clear water and the hope would be to be under five is you can't really see the color in it under five. And so just that's just for information and Richard. Sims, who's here, our water distribution supervisor. Probably don't want me to call him out, but he has done all of this proactive testing in their area up on 11th Street and many other locations. So if we have any questions on that, we can talk with him. And then he went out. And so then that was a low number. Then in 2025, we really started getting a lot of calls from this area about water quality. And the water was rusty, but it really hadn't been highlighted before that. We did 33 tests. 13 of them were below 5. Then they were between 5 and 10 at 8 locations and 10 to 16 at 12 locations. And that was just the testing of that area over a couple of month period. Had with the flusher in place and doing that kind of work. That's the information we try to use when we're looking at designing areas and working at it. We're putting a lot more effort into deciding, trying to figure out where is the problem and how big is the area. We tested areas that might be a few houses south that have clear water in the same block. So that's why I showed you the picture of the joint. Here's a good pipe, here's a bad pipe. But have an area where we've seen perfectly clear water. We talked to people over on Vassar. And they have clear water, so it's a real challenge to figure out where does it start and stop, just to be honest with you. But we know that pipe is 1950s and been there for 60 plus years.

A question for you, Martha.

Yes, sir.

Like in a block, like Dover, if most of the homes have water that looks terrible but one home is getting relatively clear water do we dig deeper to see if they have a whole house filter or a culligan water system or something of that nature or do we we're just we're just taking a look at the water coming out of the tap we we didn't

Take that into account because we're going to come in there and we're going to replace this whole area because the pipe is that 50, 60 years old. So I'm just making that as a point. We didn't, just because they have clear water, we're still doing the project.

Okay.

Yeah, because we have that in that area of pipe. And then I'll maybe get in the weeds a little bit. But when we do testing at our water plant, everything that we do there is where the requirements are for the treatment side. And then the water distribution system is where the point of entry. So the treatment plant has requirements, and the water distribution has less requirements. Basically, in that we test. I think it's 50 areas around the city trying to get out on the outstretches of the town to where you actually pull samples every month and you look for either coliform or some type of bacteria in there and those samples. So we do that to make sure that there's nothing harmful, health hazard in the distribution system. when they do the consumer confidence report and kdhe does that testing basically a lot of that is about the water treatment plan so i just want to make that clear so everybody understands when we do that that's that's what it's getting at and the water distribution system I've looked at, talked with about a half dozen other cities and we all talk about red water and we talk about how many percent of pipe do we replace, how many main breaks do you have in a year, in a mile. That information we compare to see if we're in line or out of line with them. And we look at what's our total infrastructure. So have some of that information probably when we do our budget. I'll get more in the weeds with you on that. And then Kansas Department of Health and Environment, I think, received a call. So they called us asking, is there something there we need to know? And they checked with the local office. And they looked back through their records. So I had Rob Gavin from KDHE write us a letter. And that letter's in the end of your report there. And I shared that with everybody. You all, if you need a copy of this packet, just let me know and we'll make sure you get this whole packet. And they talk about all the things we have in the letter about cast iron pipes and We really have a daunting task because the number of miles that we have. And the 2007 study that I referenced earlier, KDHE reviewed that because we got state revolving loan fund. And you can't get state revolving loan fund money unless you've got a engineering report on your system. But we already had it because we'd done it before we got to that point because we're working on another issue. so we had that report so they've been through this report and know what we're doing and that process i just want to make sure so when they're writing the letter they do have information about our system and i'm not going to go through everything because everybody can read and draw their own conclusions but kdhe really makes the comment that They've reviewed our required drinking water standards, and once you know that's for the water treatment plant, they went back to about 2020 just to have that, and that there are no health-based violations in the report. That's on the second page of the letter. They also comment that our iron level and manganese in our treated water leaving the water treatment plant are pretty low. So they're not doing a lot of buildup in our pipe. It's the old cast iron pipe corroding away. And he notes in this letter, because they review our water plant. They know well about it. But we do feed a phosphate. The purpose of that is to coat the pipe. And it helps us in our lead and copper sampling that we do. They call it corrosion control. So they're familiar with that. So that's another thing that does. But the old cast iron pipe is so rough and turbulent that it just doesn't catch all of those nooks and crannies and coat it.

Martha, could you touch base because I know our KDHE, we get a clean bill of health on our water, but individuals that have filter systems turn red. And could you explain why that happens and what's in there, what type of chemicals? I mean, those chemicals that are being filtered that I don't filter at my house are not harmful based on the KDHE report?

What truly what we're trying to filter out there would be the iron particles that have came out of the pipe and they're reacting with the minerals in the water and are in the water because water has natural If you look at a water quality report or if you look at that, it'll tell you that that comes from natural occurring in the groundwater and different things. So those minerals and items, and they're not contaminants all of them, they're just in the water. And they all react together and that makes a little particle. trying to make this as simple as I can and that's what that's what the filters in the house yeah we're trying to catch those that that iron particles and some will be small some will be larger and but the filters you know truly might have you go back a slide kind of talk a little bit about path forward and some of that. I'll just talk and he'll look for the slide. But basically, when we work through this and we come back to put stuff together, we are truly going to be trying to know towards the end of the PowerPoint. Scott, please. one more and then one more. This is kind of where we're at and so we've thought about the filters that are in homes and you know is that something we might be able to look at in the future but they do require maintenance and if you have one that's really going to stay clean much they require some kind of a flushing system of their own that would need a drain line so there's a lot of consideration that goes into that but you know if you look at a household treatment system that's basically there's a lot of ways to do it and have a bunch of information from USGS and they do a lot of private well so there's a lot of information out there about treatment and we've talked about that and is that something that we want to look at and that's we're going to internally gather more information and come back to you obviously we'll be We're always evaluating where do we get the most bang for a buck no matter what project we're working on. And we'll pull all this together and then we'll talk with Debbie and we'll be trying to develop the rate analysis and all of that information. We're coming back to make a recommendation on the amount of dollars we would like to be able to spend to get caught back up with what inflation's doing. And if numbers get better in the future and it costs less per foot, We can back down on our numbers, but for a couple of years, we've seen some pretty high costs. So we still have work to do, but I have to say, Richard and his staff have spent a lot of time out in the field trying to flush the pipe. move the flusher figure out should we do it during the day and we'll talk to people on a block and one will say it doesn't help and a couple others will say it does so you know everybody has their own service line and we don't know what those are made of so um Together we could be, but we're not going to disregard that the city does have a red water problem in our old cast iron pipe. That's fact. And if we had a magic wand, we'd make it all go away because we truly don't care. We'd like to have good water, clean water, clear water for everybody. We're trying to manage it in this big picture of budget, and I don't need to tell you all that because you get to hear from us about that all the time. But we just have a lot of infrastructure between our plants and in the ground. We try to look ahead and be prepared for what's coming next because there are new regulations coming that we'll be talking about in our report for future on disinfection byproducts rules and different things. So there's always regulatory that we've got to think about. So sometimes we have a pretty good heads up on those, not always, but... so that's that's my story and I'm sticking to it okay you know I've tried to just give you what I what we've done over the time that I've been here to I think that's good because there's I know uh Commissioner uh ramps new and and the community doesn't

tuning to every commission meeting to hear some of this information, so I appreciate that. So I know we have some questions and comments from the commission, so I'll just go ahead and start to my left. If Commissioner Rims would like to start.

Martha, I'm going to start backwards a little bit.

That's fine.

I'm looking for a clarification. You said Richard and his staff. Is Richard in your department?

Yes, Richard Sims is- So it's part of your staff? Yeah.

Okay, just wanted that clarification.

The only ones I get to boss around.

Okay.

The ones that work in my department, or they get to boss me around, yes.

If I heard correctly, you mentioned over 100 miles, I believe, of cast iron pipe.

Yes.

And then the KDHE memo, I think it represents 123 feet of sixth inch or less.

123 miles left. to work on a six-inch pipe.

123 miles. Okay.

And there may be a little variation in miles because different over time we find errors in our GIS piping and mapping and we'll fix that whether it's And whether it's ductile iron or whether it was cast iron pipe, we'll see the people that entered it might have got off, hit the wrong button and identified the wrong pipe. So over time, those numbers change a little bit because we correct as we find things wrong.

And out of that 123 miles, how much of it is at or beyond the expected service life?

Well, cast iron pipe, I'm going to make this statement, was probably ending in the 19, was probably out of service in 1970. Are you going to go with me on that, Richard?

We have it in the 70s, yes.

Yeah, so if the last of it was installed in 70, and we're in- 56 years of age. And some of it, we don't have any issues with the real earlier pipe. It's been in good shape. So we don't think all 133 miles has to be replaced. But we're just working through main breaks and water quality and the velocities that we find at fire hydrant flows to try to make good decisions on which area has the most concerns.

How many miles are we going to replace this year?

Well, this year, what do you call this year?

Well, the 26th calendar year.

Okay. In the project that we have out right now, because that work's been being done partially in 26 with Mies. That project was about two miles.

Okay.

And then we hope to start on this project, and we have... Oh, it's in my pile of paper here I have. Do you know off the top of your head how many feet? About four miles we'll be working on.

Okay.

Three and a half, four miles.

How many miles a year do we need to do to catch up?

Well, it depends upon the cost you're working with.

Well, forget about the cost. How many miles a year do we need to do? Because we find money for, I mean, I hate to say roundabouts and river renewal. Yeah. We find money for a lot of things. And I think we could agree that water into any citizen's home should at least be clear, clear to the naked eye. And I don't know, I know I wouldn't be, I don't think you would be comfortable drinking from the tap at home on Dover. I know I would not be, especially with the water that I've seen, and I think we probably would agree that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. When I hear you talk about pipes bursting, to me, it kind of reminds me of the game of whack-a-mole, where you got a mallet and you're, when different moles are popping their heads up, you're knocking them back down.

When you say pipe bursting, are you talking about the process or having main breaks?

Yeah, you talk about a main break and when you've got to return.

I want to make sure I was on the same page with you.

So forgetting about cost, how many miles a year do we need to do to catch up?

Well, right now, and I don't know if I want to talk because Debbie hasn't, and you all haven't given me the estimate, but I'm looking at about $5 million a year.

Forget about- And try to- Forget about the money.

Yeah.

How many miles a year are needed to catch up?

We'd like to do about, our goal in the beginning was about four miles a year.

Is that going to catch us up?

I'd like to do a little more than that because we fell behind with the cost of this. We're not getting as much done as we want to.

Our time is limited, so I'm going to move down here a little bit with your own- That will be information that comes to you when we have the next meeting.

We'll be talking about what we'd like to do as our plan down for years to come.

With your own numbers, it seems to me we get much better pricing per mile. when we're doing a larger project. I guess if I were a tree trimmer and I got a customer that needs two trees removed or trimmed and I have a community that needs hundreds, I'm going to make sure that I really work on that big bid.

we have uh... when you kind of look at this it there is a little variation when you look at cost per mile we did six point nine miles and it was about a half million dollars and then we've done uh... Nine miles, we see the cost per foot coming up over time.

And we've actually did larger projects and smaller projects and- But I'm going to cut you off a little bit because I want to save these guys some time. To me it seems like if you're working with a couple million dollars a year that the projects keep shrinking- Yeah, that's the issue. When they really need to be growing.

We made a decision in, I forget what year, that we struggled with the contractors getting the work done. And we've tried to make the projects sizable for local people. And we found that we haven't got that many outside contractors bidding on these projects over the time.

What if we're looking for 25 miles of water line? Would we have more bidders coming to the table, you think?

I can answer that and they might do 25 miles, but we'd have to have more than one contractor to really gain a lot of momentum. Because you can only put so many feet in the ground. Well, there are some- We could get more contractors, more crews.

There are some huge contractors across the country.

Right.

What percentage of our water is currently coming from the river?

I thought somebody might ask that because we had a and I would only know that answer because we just recently had a request for that We gave this information for the last 12 12 months in June of 25 We had, I'll just give you these numbers because back then in June, we had a river intake. Shortly after that in September, the log jam took our river intake out of service. So I'm just going to give you those numbers. In June of 25, the downtown wells pumped 89%. million gallons of water in June and the South well pumped 40 million and the river pumped about six, rounded up 59 million. So all of these numbers, so we've been using water from the river through September of last year, then it got We were out of commission with the intake because the log jam covered it up. And we got the log jam squared away and the river intake structure. It went back in service in February because they got done around the end of that.

We're currently drawing?

Yes.

Is the pumps, if I take a walk up on top of Indian Rock, it looks like a big concrete vault. The pumps are down below?

The pumps are down below in there.

Would you hear anything if you were walking? quiet morning and you're there and you hear nothing?

I can't answer about somebody's hearing, but I can show you where the pumps are running because I have data. I don't know when you're talking about.

My hearing is not the best. Nor is mine. I've been up there recently and I did not hear anything humming.

So in February we started using it. I'll just give you May. We used 71 million gallons from the downtown well and 74 million gallons from the river. And then the south plant was about 24 million gallons in that month. So from February through May, We've been using it pretty full force. We did some repair work on it to get it back in service with the gates. We had the gates and the, I'll call them the grates on the front of the pump station in our sub-CIP. So we've ordered those. We hope to get paid funding through FEMA for those, but we've ordered them. The grates are here. The gates, I think, are in shipment on their way here on the truck. So when we get those, we'll be taking it down again to get those installed. But we've been using it.

Okay, well, I think we all would agree that we should be drawing every gallon of water right now we can out of the river while the flow is very high before it is gone forever.

The river is a little bit tricky if we use too much water from the river and the temperature is warm. It has effect on our disinfection byproducts, which we have to test for quarterly. So we have some magic. Over time, we've learned that about 50-50, maybe we can pull 60%. But if the water's warm, then we can have issues with disinfection.

Just so I don't monopolize the time here because time is limited. In your opinion, are there other major projects that are kind of on the radar in the community that are less important than tap water and they should be back-burnered, shelved, or even eliminated?

That's probably a question, you know, in my opinion, in our department, when we ask for money for different things, we have a true need for it. So I can speak to the utility department and what we try to do to keep that going together. That's my main focus in my job, to make sure we have water and sewer.

Well, earlier a little bit you were, I forget the one topic you were bragging on, but obviously the people on Dover probably aren't bragging to one another about the quality. If they're bragging about the quality, it'd be, which is dirtiest, I guess. No.

We're not happy about that.

Just... I mean it's a study session, but I'm hoping we as a group can do something sooner versus later. And we might have to. We might have to take a look, and I'm one commissioner. But to me, it seems like we need to reevaluate our priorities or take a look at wants versus needs. I've said that before. This year we've talked about river renewal multiple times. We have money that we're putting aside. Quite frankly, I think there's more money going into that bucket, I'm going to call it, than what is being spent. on replacing water lines. And I think to anybody that their tap water is not good in our community, that's messed up priorities. Thank you, time is limited, so I'm done.

And certainly part of the budget process every year we go through a list of priorities and we talk about prioritization and we can shift things around for certain. I mean if that's what, the water system has always been supported by Yeah, it's an enterprise fund. It's always been supported by user fees We've never been directed to take you know Property tax dollars or sales tax dollars and put it towards the system if that's if that's the will of the City Commission We certainly can take a look at those those sorts of things Commissioner

We'll try to get through this and get to some public comment. Give us just a second.

Just a good portion of the time by telling us the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Go ahead. All right. Well, I'd certainly be in favor in looking at maybe reallocating some funds, at least prioritizing the Dover Drive situation. The question I have is a little bit more.

It's not just Dover Drive. It's just not Dover Drive.

Okay. This is incredibly rude. I mean, I'm...

We're going to take a chance on comments being cut off completely. And I don't think anybody wants that to happen.

I'm jumping out a little bit because I have a rapport with quite a few of you. But let's try to be respectful to one another. And the process right now, we got a lot of information to go through. So I think it's important one at a time, and it's the commissioner's turn right now. And if you're going to get a turn, we got to move through this.

Thank you, Commissioner.

All right. As I was saying, pertaining to Drover Drive, I had a citizen contact me. He resides on Bel Air Drive. And as memory serves, that's roughly one block east to Dover Circle. And the way this is all interconnected, you're more privy to that than obviously I am. But if we address the issue on Dover Circle, are we going to alleviate that problem on Dover Drive? Or is it kind of, depending on how things are connected together, is that going to change

dynamics of the water quality there or is it just kind of a you're really stretching my memory here but we have done the area of dover circle and we have replaced water mains on bel air and so we really those areas you know we're not getting calls anymore so it's there it is a little bit of we're moving through the age of the pipe and uh trying to clean up areas as we go through it so well i guess what i'm asking is done those yes is it more of a systematic approach or is it a little bit piecemeal because maybe some of the records aren't as precise you know from back then when we started doing this put Water main replacement. We tried to spread it out over the community, some for north, some for out east and different areas. And we found that we don't know that that was our best plan in the beginning, that maybe we should be working in an area and trying to finish that area up instead of a little bit here and a little bit there. So it's just an approach that we made in the beginning to try to cover more areas, and we might have been better to focus in areas. But you're seeing we're kind of wrapping up and filling in these areas with time.

Understood. I appreciate that.

It does. It helps. Is that what you're after?

my my uh question kind of commissioner rent covered a lot of that but i was wondering myself if we could get better um better bids with with higher cost projects because i was kind of looking at the same thing here with the six and or seven and eight mile projects and i know that was years ago but the prices are they were more bitter so that's going to say obviously

We are definitely, in fact, in what I'll be bringing back to you, hopefully, if Jacob agrees with everything I put together, will be for a larger project. Just because we need to to cover that area.

So when we first started this project, we actually debt financed. So we debt financed a larger portion of those earlier projects, which allows you to do a bigger project at one time. Probably five years ago, we started to have quite a bit of cash available. And so if you have cash available, it makes sense to use the cash so you're not paying interest fees. And at the time, we were getting... We were getting what we needed out of the – I mean, we were getting several miles, and now we're just not. So that will be part of the discussion as we talk about rates is do we go back to the debt financing model and take that $2 million to $4 million a year and do a larger project now? And that will be a function of whether we have contractors that can do it. And then also we have to be able to administer those projects and get – You get the design done and all those sorts of things. So there's there's a lot of stuff that goes into that It's not just it's not just we have a project and go I mean there's there's a lot of legwork to get to the point where we have a large project ready and available So but we certainly can look at that again and see if debt financing and you know front loading it I guess a little bit Would would make a difference.

I

I think in conversations looking at, you know, if you borrow money every year and you have a debt of $400,000, that just continues year and keeps compounding over year. So we felt that trying to put some of those costs into the operating budget was important because that's more sustainable than... You know, we have a lot of debt with the water plants and the wastewater plant and the future projects, so we were trying to do the water main replacements so it's sustainable, but due to the costs that we're seeing today, we need to make that a bigger project. And we can, we'll plan based on your comments here to talk to the contractors that we see in other communities bidding and see what where we think we might be because uh we're we don't have a lot of contractors in our area so we typically get contractors from the wichita area got a couple that have been in town doing other projects so i'm i i would welcome a larger project because that means i'm going to get more pipe in the ground

So evaluating the cost for the lining and pipe bursting methods, is that something you are going to look into?

Yeah, we're looking in. We look into that on a regular basis over time, talking to other communities.

Is it a faster process? Faster method of doing it or just cheaper?

Lining it and doing that may or may not be cheaper. It depends. If you were out in the open in a big area, when you're in a residential area and you've got to deal with being able to provide the customer service and no hassles to their area, it may not be cheaper because there's costs that go into each facet of what you've got to do for lining because you've got to get the pipe clean before you can put a liner in it. And then some would tell you that when you work on that brittle old pipe that you use a mechanical cleaner to clean that out of there to get a smooth surface that you might create some holes or breaks in the pipe. You know, there's pros and cons, but we've talked internally about we could bid one project one way and another project to see what we get. When we look at lining and directional boring, that will be more of a limited – there are certain contractors that do that. But I would not say – I can't tell you with surety that it would be a lot cheaper because – We're doing service lines, meter pits, and fire hydrants. We're making it a complete package for that area and getting that done. But we'll look at that, and we can talk to contractors and gather more information. We do that every few years just to make sure we're doing the right thing. Because technologies change, and sometimes there's better ways to do things.

I probably have more, but I'll pass it down to Commissioner Davis.

Thank you. I guess I could say my block is just about completely finished with borderline replacement on Hillside Drive. And after having lived through it for about a year, I remind you, anything in that grass between the sidewalk and the street, While you may pay to put it in there, you can't protect it when that new pipe comes through. So your sprinkler systems will get torn up. But also having lived through that, and this is a theoretical question, I'm guessing there is a maximum amount of miles a city our size could hope to do in one year just because of the street closures, the parking disruption, you lose sidewalks. And what we found in that area, when you fix one part of the pipe, if there's a weak area nearby and that pressure comes back, it pops. So there are lots of little unexpected emergency breaks and the project goes on and it becomes longer than what you originally planned. I don't know what the theoretical maximum that a city of our size should attempt to get done in one year, even if there were enough crews to do it. We could replace all 130 miles in one year. It's not being ridiculously expensive. God knows how many crew that would take, and your streets would be a holy mess.

Traffic control.

Traffic control would be hard, but just a theoretical question over the weekend when you've got nothing to do and you want to work with some math figures. Just a few questions. When there's an emergency break, let's say February 10th, it's cold outside and you see water coming up from the sidewalk or from the street, is that our city crew or do we call in an emergency contractor crew to fix that?

The majority of time, that'll be your city crew in residential areas. Unless we have five breaks or six breaks, then we will call in contractor to help us get them fixed because we try to limit the amount of time that we're out of water. So some areas, we have a few areas in town and some out at the air base where the pipe is very deep. And then we'll get a contractor to help with that trench box that may be able to go in the ground deeper than ours does. So it varies, but for the most part, we're fixing those mains.

So we can handle the emergency repairs in residential, but we have not stood up a crew big enough to commit for a long project of replacing, let's say, two or three miles on a street.

to replace a water main would kind of take a separate crew with separate skills and separate equipment, a boring machine and that type of thing. So we do look at that and we have looked at it. So we have to ask ourselves every time what's the best way.

All right. It looks like the project on Dover is moving. Is it on as fast a track as is practical at this point?

Any any opportunities to and it looks like wouldn't be cutting out more than days or weeks at this point Well, that's however fast we can get it out to bid get Get bids back in depends on the contractor Whether we if we're somebody we worked with we don't have to evaluate their qualifications So that makes it simpler if it's a new contractor, then we we evaluate their qualifications and just make sure they're they do this kind of work and

So the Dover, the 10th and 11th Street, and the Larson Avenue have all been engineered. Yeah, I have plans for those, yes. So those are ones that should be. Those are first on the list, and they should be done as early as possible in 2027 probably.

Yeah, there's this project, and the contractor. know getting it to him before winter allows him to get all of his materials ordered and his shop drawings and all that approved so that when the weather breaks and you know when they bore pipe in there are some really severe cold days they can't do that work so but it allows them to get all their materials and get their and for us to be on the list when spring breaks so for uh transparency's sake practically speaking even if the contract

Besides tomorrow, you really don't expect construction to begin until about when?

If the contract was signed tomorrow, that's the agreement in place. They still have to go through a shop drawing process. From the bid letting to the contract sign, that can be two weeks to a month. Because they have to get all their bonding and insurance in place and then match up with the city commission meeting. And then once that's all awarded, we get those documents back and they go through the legal review and risk management review. Then they're off and running to start, you know, working on their shop drawings and ordering their materials. And sometimes materials have been, have some pretty good lag times. So it's an advantage to get that bid as soon as we can so that they can get their materials. Now they might not move dirt, or they could. Depends upon whether we have a good winner or bad winner.

So it would be less than 50% likely they would start before New Year's?

I don't know if I can make that wild guess. Depending on the contractor, if it was Mies and they finished in November and they had ordered their materials, they may attempt to go on. Or Smoky Hill in town if it's another contractor. I don't know. But those two are in town working right now.

All right. So then assuming residents, let's just say, have a six-month period of time that they know they have to have a plan B, what mitigating steps could we employ in the very near future at the individual house level to try to

reduce what is reducible and and and that is one of our things that we're evaluating is what what might we look at for a home system but then there's maintenance that goes with that we got to determine maintenance and drain piping and different things to know one shoe one size doesn't fit all so there's some considerations there to give but there is there's options for that type of thing we have not done that on any previous projects just be honest there and that's something we we could look at in a two week time frame or i don't know

Yeah, I think we're evaluating it as quickly as we can. It's not something that's been done. I think we asked KDHE, and we're not aware of any other community providing at-the-point kind of treatment or filtering or anything like that. So we're looking at it. We'll process it as quickly as we can and try to figure out what that might look like.

But it's on our, I hedged to give a date because we still have, you know, we're gathering information and to make a good decision we'll want to call other, make sure we call other communities and call different individuals that have these systems to know, you know, what's the, What's the maintenance involved with this? There are companies that sell a maintenance service per month to go with the unit. So there's a lot to look at to make sure we don't have a plan that creates a headache in maintenance for people, too.

But we're certainly committed to doing that review as quickly as we can.

Yeah, we'll do it as quickly as we can. The two weeks is... Sometimes. I've been working on this for a few days and I hate to say I have a couple other things that's piled up or permits that need to go out. So I will work as quickly and work with Jeff and try to put it together.

But two weeks is... We've had folks who have sent in a lot of... would look like well thought out solutions. One of those was involving the use of an external source of water for each house, basically a tank or something like that. Are those systems or have those types of systems been considered? It would have to somehow, I guess, be hooked up to the piping coming in the house, if it's a huge tank, or just a source of water people can walk out to and bring in when they need it.

We just got to think about how that fits into keeping it potable and meeting KDHE requirements.

Have you heard that done in any of your projects, Jeff?

Yeah. So, but, I mean, there's just considerations to give to that if you do that. Because that water, everyone uses a different amount of water every day. And some use a lot, some use less, so... You don't want the water to sit in there for a long, long time because it will lose its chlorine and disinfection residual. It has a life.

All right.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, just long that the radar is wide open and all reasonable considerations would be viewed. And again, theoretical question for today, but between you and finance and city manager, if we bumped up to 10 to 15 miles a year, what that would do to either property tax or water rates?

Debbie's been scratching her pencil on that, so she's...

Beat me to it. Already ready.

Yeah. We've been talking about that. Debbie and I have been talking about that. Martha and I have been talking about that. And currently, we budget $4 million project every other year. And that's what we're supporting through current water rates. If we bump that number to $5 million a year, that, in the estimations that we have, could raise waterways as much as 18%. which is 20 on an average customer is about 20 a month um so you're talking about and when we talk about property tax and we look at not wanting to raise property taxes that number is much less i will say we may need to look at legal for some direction because as a utility statutorily directed by the state, there may be inabilities for us to move money from one thing to another because it is a self-supported function. So that would be a consideration that we'd have to look through as well from the state perspective. But the numbers I came up with just off in the last week is at least an 18% increase the first year and probably a double digit increases for several years to get to a $5 billion a year project ability for the water rates to support that. And for the number of miles that we get out of our current- The number of miles would depend on the cost per contract. So if we decided to do 10 miles a year- Double that or triple that. Yes, we'd have to project what that might cost us next year in order to raise rates to be able to get that money either reactively or proactively to collect that money. And so we wouldn't know until that was bid how much that cost might be on a specific number of miles. So that's why it becomes difficult for rates and things like that to be able to do it on a mile rate as opposed to a dollar amount.

So either we pay for it while we're drinking it or our grandkids pay for it after we're gone? Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Thank you.

Okay, I don't really have very many comments. I do want to open it up to public comment. I do want to know that I think as a commission we need to figure out a way to do some type of inventory, whether it's through a questionnaire in the water bill or something to figure out Where we do have issues, I'm sure we haven't heard from everybody. We need to kind of put dots on the map so we know what to address. I do think the cash versus the debt service means of replacing water lines. We're going to have to look at that and try to put some kind of plan together. We have been addressing it, obviously. I'm glad to hear that Dover is in the works. I was glad to hear that engineering is complete. So we'll continue. This won't be the last conversation you hear up here about water. This is just the beginning. But we will take this very seriously. We'll be working with, obviously, not just the water department, but we have to work with financing also. It all goes hand in hand. So with that, and because of the time frame, we're going to do two minute comments. so we can get more people up here if we would.

So, name and... Let's talk about dollars. You have kept saying that let's raise the rates of the water rates. Okay, so everybody in the town is going to pay for this. Let's look at the money that we have in reserve that we could cash out on this. We have $26 million in the general fund right now. You guys want to get it down to $15 million. There's $11 million that can get switched over. You can take out the $5 million that you took to the river renewal project and the $1.3 million that's been taken out since 2017 for this same project. Move that over. Roundabout, almost $4 million. Let's move that over. Okay, so with that right there, we can get a good start. Now, what Martha does not talk about here is the fact that the water department, even though they're self-sufficient, is wasting a lot of money, basically, on what they're having to do right now because these water lines are in the shape they're in. One, breaks, breaks, multiple breaks. They happen at any time of the night. Overtime to fix these. Band-Aids to put them on. Nothing is done. These flush systems... Let's talk about that. You are wasting, that is not being paid for, that is treated water, that's not going as money into the water department, thousands of gallons a night on these systems that are flushing. That is water down the drain. Really, water down the drain that the city's not even collecting money for. So when you take all this stuff into perspective of basically bombarding the city now, and I understand streets and everything else, but bombarding the city now and getting this done is something that I, As a 45 year career plumber have been dealing with since 1979 with complaints, 79. So this should have been done decades ago as far as replacement of cast iron lines. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi there, I'm April Padgett. I live on North 11th Street. I have been dealing with this water for about six years. A few years ago, I purchased a whole house filter. It cost me over $1,000 to put in. Each filter is rated for six months. I get one month out of it. That is a $60 filter that I have to spend money on every month. I brought in some examples. This is from last month. This is from last month. It is disgusting. And when it clogs, I have no water pressure. It fills fast. This one is from today. Even darker. I have reached out to the city multiple times. Richard Simmons, super amazing man, has put an automatic flush on our block every summer. It doesn't do anything. It helps some houses. It does not help others. Unfortunately, they have to remove it every winter. So we have a few months where we have no aid at all. I have taken samples from my house. This one I happened to find at the top of my fridge. This is from 23, 2023. This one, oops, let's not open that, is from today. It hasn't gotten any better. I personally know that I have a lot of elderly people in my neighborhood. They're on fixed incomes and have mobility issues. They can't get out and deal with this. I'm hoping that something can be done soon because it is not just one neighborhood. It is multiple neighborhoods that need to be taken care of. Thank you.

Ma'am, could you give us your address? I know there's some stuff on 11th Street, I don't know if yours is included.

916 North 11th Street, it is in between Harsh and Pacific.

916 North 11th. Yes. Thank you.

That address is in the project we're talking.

That will be part of this project? Yes. Thank you, okay.

Because they have provided this information to us, so we're well aware.

Sherry, Dover Drive, in our last commissioner meeting,

Excuse me, could we please allow Sherry to talk?

I asked for a meeting. I asked you specifically, Mr. Woods, to set up a meeting with us and Martha. If this is it, it's not what I expected. I didn't expect you to show up in my house empty handed when we were unloading a U-Haul truck, but at least you showed up. I think that the citizens of Salina, the businesses of Salina have showed up tremendously. to help us. All those people that showed up to help us pay taxes, they pay your wages. They're going to vote next year, or next chance there is, if we can't get a petition to get rid of y'all. If you think that a new firehouse needs a painted mural on it is more important than our drinking water, how many years down the road is that mural going to chip, paint, and fade, and then we're going to have to do it all over again? I'm done with this. And I don't care what it takes. They can call us whatever name they want. And the last time since I left that first meeting, I've had over 955 phone calls and messages and people knocking on my door asking me to help them with their water. I feel like I'm the poster child for the dirty water. And that's not very fun. You don't even want to open your door. You don't even want to turn on the TV because you guys don't want to fix a problem. See you next time.

Hi, I'm William Hand. I live at 1323 Dover Drive on the corner of Broadway and Dover Drive. And I've been calling these for years to come look at the water, and they'll come out and look at it, and they'll say it's clear. And I'd have a cup full of water that's dirty and everything. And I've talked to, I don't know, at the water distribution center, I'd call them up and have them come out and look. And then I'd talk to the guys when they come out. And I'd talk to them. And they gave me chemicals from my washing machine one time. for my laundry. My laundry, when I wash it, the blanket, the sheets turn brown and I gotta rewash them. And I run my, to get clear water, I gotta run my bathtub, the cold water, to clear it out all the time. And I mean, it's just ridiculous. It gets expensive buying clothes and paying for water that you can't drink. I mean, it's ridiculous. We need to do something and do it fast. And I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Tom Wilper. I'm a citizen of Salina, a taxpayer. I'm a homeowner, a business person. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on Facebook that our community has a number of issues. And I hold you guys responsible for that, just like I hold myself responsible for speaking up. I thank you for being commissioners, because when you run and serve, it's a thankless job. So I thank you for that. But I think the city is really concerned about the direction of a lot of things. I would ask that everyone in this room who has water concerns or thinks they have poor or below average water just stand up. You guys say all the time, I take notes about when I hear from people and, you know, when I wrote on Facebook that we had challenges, Sherry and Linda called into a show I was on and they said they hadn't heard, they had called for four years. And so when did you learn about it?

I actually had a call from somebody. It wasn't on Dover. It was on Larson last year that I forwarded the city. So I'm not sure when I was.

When was the first time you heard about their water?

The Dover?

Yeah.

If I heard prior.

When Sherry brought it up?

What's that? When Sherry brought it up? It could have been. Although we've, Tom, I'll be honest. I don't remember. We've talked about prior. Jacob, when did you know? Prior water. Tom, can I finish? When did you know about Dover?

I don't know the exact time that I've learned about it. When did you know about it?

We started getting heavy calls in 2025. We did the study work out there.

And you promised them that their water would be fixed in 2028?

That was the budget numbers we had through the city. We're expediting that.

We need a new water manager. And I've written you. And you need to make a decision whether she's going to resign or go. Thank you.

Okay, is there anyone else?

Have you considered any liability? Yeah, please come to the – My name is Derek Huffman, 723 Osage Avenue. I've been complaining about my water for about three years. Richard's come out. He's been very good to me. He's been more than patient with me. I'm kind of a grumpy person. Do you all have any kind of money set back in case you get your pants sued off of you? Because it's getting pretty bad. I mean, and if you want to raise the water rates and fix a mile at a time, raising the water rates on the people that still have the brown water coming out of their faucets. That's more than defensive. We need to do something immediately. And what happens when we do this high pressure flushing of these things is it puts out all of the sediment and all the stuff that's in that pipe that's loose, it goes out to the individuals. And every one of those, and I have, my water flow went from pretty decent, I could run a hose out front to where it was like me peeing. And it lasted, it's just been like that. And I haven't been, I've had to put a pump online just in order to get my pressure up because I can't run a hose. I can't run my dishwasher. I have to reset my washing machine five, six, seven times just to get it to fill up. Then it has to rinse. And my clothes come out beautiful orange. And my street's orange. Everybody on my block has got problems, but there's just very few of them that want to come up and talk to you guys because you're kind of bullies. Mr. Thank you. You're kind of bullies. And people are tired of it. I'm sorry. I hope I didn't offend you.

Mr. Huff, what was your address, sir? Osage. Osage, okay.

I gave you my address.

I missed it. I'm sorry.

I'll get you after the meeting so we don't waste any more time with this filibustering where you don't even let the community speak. This is ridiculous. I'm sorry.

Go ahead. Thanks, sir.

I'm John Price, 829 Manor Road. I'd like to say something positive. I had a tree down across where you had to check my water and out in the street. And the city, boy, they were driving by and helped me get that. I couldn't get my chainsaws. And that was the Parks Department. Thank you, Parks Department.

Yeah, we're talking about the water.

And my water has always been good where I live on that area. And as far as our Martha Tasker, when I was county commissioner, I knew her then, and I think she's doing a very good job. Thank you.

Thank you.

And you guys don't look like your picture on Facebook.

Hi. My name is Loretta Barentine, and I live at 901 Plaza Drive. And I have bad water, and so does my neighbor. She lives kind of catty corner to me. And we've called numerous times about our water. And I'm 80 years old, and after I've heard this, I honestly don't think I'll live long enough to see it fixed. But I'm speaking on behalf of the other people because on the other people on my street, I know they're all dealing with this too. And I tried to wash my clothes and I ruined my clothes because it's so much rust in the water. And I can't get it cleared up. So I've been buying bottled water. But there's a lot of people that can't afford to buy bottled water. And I can't wash my clothes in bottled water. And it's ruining my clothes. And thank you for listening.

Thank you for coming forward.

Hi, my name is Nicole Skidmore and I live on 941 Vassar Drive. There's two sides of Vassar. There's a Vassar that's closer to Dover and then you cross Republic and then there's the other Vassar that attaches to Plaza Drive. We have had terrible orange rusty water I'm going to be honest my entire life. I grew up on Plaza Drive since 1981. My house I was born, brought home to is there. My sister still lives there. She has the same water. I have the same water. I have kids that I'm raising who I would say 70% of the time have dark orange bath water. My husband and I have taken a great deal of money that we've earned and worked very hard for to redo our house. We've redone the sinks, the tubs, the toilets. And in under a year, it's all rust orange. The caulking's orange. It's ruined. We can't stay on top of it. And my kids' passports. My son has a white uniform. His isn't white. His is orange. I just feel like we work really, really hard to get just this far in life, and then we just get knocked down with everything. And I can't afford to replace all of those things every day or every year. We've gone through two refrigerators and four ice makers in them because all of the All of the tubing that goes into the water, it's all orange. It's all bright orange and ruined. The water's rusty. The ice is gross. I mean, I'm raising kids. I need them to be healthy. I also happen to teach in the school that's in that neighborhood, and the water those kids fill their water bottles with is also orange. It's orange. I work there. I try to bring bottled water for myself, but I can't afford to do it for all those kids.

Thanks, Nicole.

What was your address? 941 Vassar. 941 Vassar Drive. Thank you.

Do you mind mentioning what school you work at? Sunset Elementary. Thank you.

I've been there for 19 years.

Have time for one more. Yeah, nobody could hear you back there. I'm sorry if we could turn them speakers up. My name's Houston Ross. I live at 645 South Santa Fe Ave. The water there is great. It tastes like bleach every day. I appreciate you, Martha Tasker. And it's crazy that everybody looks at her like she's Superman on this deal. Nobody needs to put all this on her. You know, that's crazy. I just can't believe it. The state needs to pick up. The city of Salina needs sued by the state over this. The state needs to overcome our water subject. Period. You folks have a wonderful day. Don't get too hot out there.

I just want to say, I do not do Facebook. And I know there's been a lot of comments on Facebook. I've been told a number of things that's been on there. I just brought some pictures. I can only get the ones that I went to photo. My internet is down to do my Google photos. But I cleaned my water softener again yesterday. And I don't know if you can see, but this is what the water looks like. It's only been a month since I had done it. And I printed some off, if you'd like to see them. And also on June 19, I had sent this photo from my phone to my neighbor. And I have checked the water tonight, if possible. The cold water is especially brown here. The hot isn't that noticeable. Are you having problems? But we have contacted and contacted the city. They told us that they had enough information. They would bring it before the commission. And we didn't need to notify them anymore. But then it changed, I guess. They said they had enough information to bring it before the council. But here we are. Thank you.

Thank you, Linda.

Mine isn't brown water, it's bleached out water in your machines, your water line, your clothes, the laundry, everything. It's having somebody come in and put chlorine in the water that is not qualified, and I ended up having to buy a whole new hot water heater, put in a new water line into the house, and have... Gaskets put back in the off-and-on water in the kitchen because they over-chloridined the water. And they just took it. They had the pump out there, and it was up the street, and they're dealing, had it hooked up to the water line, and they were just taking bags of this white. I got some chips here for you. of this white mix and just throwing it in the water line. And they weren't dissolving it or stirring it or anything. And my house happened to be the first one on the water line when it came down the line. And I got hit good. I'm sorry. $2,000 in repairs.

Ma'am, could you give us your name and address? I didn't catch.

No, I don't want nasty phone calls. I don't want people getting bugged at me. I just live on Millwood.

Okay, I just need to know an area. Okay, that's fine. I don't know where to look.

Well, anymore, you take a senior lady and a few other things, and you just don't give that information out.

Okay, that's fine. Okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Appreciate everyone being here, and I'm sure we'll be again.