City Council - Regular Meeting

Okay, I think we'll get started. Welcome everybody to the May 26th, 2026 City Council meeting. Item two is roll call the agenda. I'll ask our city clerk to please call the roll.

Councillor McLaughlin.

Present.

Councillor Ring. Randall. Councillor Richardson.

Present.

And Councillor Runyon is absent. Mayor Mayes.

Present. Item three is pledge of allegiance. I'd like to ask Councilor Ben Ring to please lead us in the pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Item four is approval of the agenda. Anybody like to make a motion to approve the agenda?

Mr. Mayor, I move to approve the agenda. Seconded.

Moved by Council Richardson and seconded by Council Randall to approve the agenda. Is there any discussion? Everyone in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carries. Before we go any further with this meeting, I would like to take a moment to recognize the very tragic and unexpected passing of Phil Brady, our Wasco County Commissioner. Commissioner Brady dedicated much of his life to public service, education, and this community. Many knew him as a teacher, mentor, advocate, and thoughtful public servant who cared deeply about people and about Wasco County. His work touched many areas of our region, including housing, healthcare, education, and support for rural communities. Those who worked alongside him, including yours truly, knew about his kindness, his curiosity, and his ability to bring people together with respect and compassion. On a personal note, when I moved here 11 years ago, when I was even thinking about running for mayor, I didn't really know that many people, and I reached out to people in the community to ask who I should talk to, who I should get to know. wanting to know about people that were especially community leader types. And almost everybody I talked to said, you should talk to Phil Brady. And I did. It was in February. I looked it up. February of 2018, Phil and I got together over coffee, and I was very happy that I talked to him. I got a really good sense of his values, his grasp of what makes our town grow and prosper, and his compassion. So on behalf of the city council and the city of the Dalles, we certainly extend our condolences to his wife, Mary Jo, his daughters, his fellow Wasco County Commissioners, the county staff, and all that knew and cared about him. So at this time, I would ask for a moment of silence in remembrance of Wasco County Commissioner Phil Brady. Thank you very much. Moving on. Item five is audience participation. During this portion of the meeting, anyone may speak on any subject which does not later appear on the agenda. Interested citizens are required to sign up in advance to be recognized. Up to three minutes per person will be allowed. Citizens are encouraged to ask questions with the understanding that the city can either answer the question tonight or refer that question to the appropriate staff member who will get back to you within a reasonable amount of time. If a response by the city is requested and that response is not immediately provided, the speaker will be referred to the city manager for further action. We have one person signed up and he is on Zoom and his name is Richard Wolff. So Mr. Wolff, I can see you've unmuted yourself. You have three minutes and you're on.

Okay. What I want to present here, this is what's called a Roman Coloca, C-O-L-O-C-A.

And it's a storm drain.

And it's got some problems. That soil right there is sand and little rocks. It's a drainage system. If you've ever built a sandcastle, Once that it dries out, you'll know why we, on this road, you'll know why we have, Mayor, about 20 seconds before I get done talking, could you please let me know? I appreciate it. This is, I don't know how to deal with this one. I've dealt with a lot of work, but... In my opinion, we should have lifted the sidewalk up with a purple forklift and taken care of that. But this will use a wooden, let me make it simple. It's a wooden deck system. Some call it a boardwalk. And it will be a lot less expensive than putting the gabion walls in here. where we're going to get all that rock. But this is this was a boardwalk at one time. And it actually kept that system away from these buildings. I probably won't make it over to the other side of this one. But maybe we'll see. But I could walk down the street when it was available. And you would be able to see the front of the buildings were actually destroyed to where the facade front had to be replaced. And well, I'm not sure if anyone knows there why.

Mr. Wolf, you got 45 seconds.

Thank you. But I would bet on the reason that the homeless don't sleep on this because of the seismic activity. that's transferred from the drum head basically, including the sidewalk that was attached to this building. Now we all know what building this is. But you can see the work on the building that's been replaced the facade. Now I can't make it over to that.

You got 15 seconds.

Well, can I reclaim any time of that? No, I'm good. Anyway, I'll stop right there. Okay, sir.

Thanks for your suggestion. I think I'm sure you're talking about the first street project and our staff is taking notes and some will get back to you. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay. Item six is a city manager's report. Mr. Cleaves.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just a few items this evening. Last week, we had a Federal Street Ad Hoc Committee meeting where we talked about a public process to solicit input on the name for the plaza, which the community should see in the coming weeks and months. we received an update in direction about the uh recognition of uh of the recognition bricks in front of the transportation building for volunteer contributions we did go down and try to recover some of the bricks to be reused but they're very kind of more thin one inch thick decorative bricks that have really been mortared down into the ground. And as kind of expressed, they broke up in the recovery effort, and we got some direction to move forward with a new plaque to honor the volunteer contributions to the transportation building as part of that project. And then the committee had continued discussion about the grand opening and ribbon cutting for the plaza sometime in October and some of the celebratory aspects of that event and how the community and downtown business owners and property owners can best benefit and make use of the plaza. So it was a pretty good meeting. Tomorrow we have a meeting with North Central Regional Solutions on the public works team to talk about our water system and learn more about the different state agencies that could assist and support us in those efforts. Later this week, there will be a QLife board meeting as well as a budget meeting. This year is a little bit different. We'll be doing a budget process for approximately six months as the books in essence of the financials for QLife will be shifting from Wasco County to the PUD and the PUD operates on a calendar year. So that'll take us through the end of this calendar year and then we'll follow that schedule after that. Your next agenda packet will have a new update, new feature. We'll be rolling out the city's new logo and city brand in June. So that'll be one of the first elements that will incorporate that work. And there'll be more to come as that is fully unveiled. And I'd like to turn it over to Jonathan to introduce somebody new.

Thank you. For the honorable mayor and the city council, I just wanted to introduce the city attorney's office new legal intern for the summer. His name is Gabe Hanson, and he's in the back. Gabe, stand up and embarrass. Don't be embarrassed. There he is. Perfect. Don't be embarrassed. No, please no. I sent Gabe into the dinner earlier by himself unattended, and I think he survived. He's better for the wear. Gabe is entering his third year of law school at University of Oregon School of Law. And our office is excited to have him here with us this summer and to see about becoming a city attorney one day, maybe. Ooh. Yep. High standards. Welcome aboard, Gabe.

Thank you. All right. We'll move on to city council reports. We'll start on my left with Councilor Richardson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I attended the Federal Street Plaza subcommittee that our city manager already reported on. Pretty excited about that, about construction getting underway there and also a public naming process. So I encourage my fellow residents to come up with some good ones. Last week we had an urban renewal meeting and I'd just like to report that To those who may not follow that in great detail, that we've had a number of store, a number of downtown businesses, maybe about a dozen, who have taken advantage of a $7,500 per property grant to make repairs and facelifts and just kind of take care of some maintenance or maintenance. improvements to their storefronts and I encourage you to take a stroll around downtown and maybe notice a few of these and if you don't mind Mr. Mayor I'd like to just say a couple brief sentences following up on your thoughts about Commissioner Brady Just for myself, I found him over the years to be a very heartfelt and honest person, both in private life and in public. And as commissioner, he worked very hard. He got out to many different corners of our community, including places that I don't think other community leaders maybe had and met people where they were. I've always seen him as a model for community leadership and just for being a kind, decent person generally. I believe our community will miss him for a long time to come.

Well said. Councilor Randall.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. No report this evening. Councilor Ring.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Previously, the 11th and 12th, we had our city budget meeting. That'll be going to council. I was also at the urban renewal meeting that Councillor Richardson mentioned earlier. as well as the plaza committee meeting last Wednesday. And I too would like to say something about Commissioner Brady. My children grew up here and went to school here and it was Commissioner Brady and his wife were both teachers that our children learned from. And I think they're certainly going to take Lessons from Commissioner Brady, you know, throughout life that they've learned in his classroom and even outside the classroom. And I think that, you know, coming off of... memorial weekend and whatnot can be kind of somber for some people, rightly so. And I think it was interesting to me to think about Commissioner Brady's sacrifice and selflessness in serving our community. Because it's very similar to what some of, you know, what our service members are remembered for this last weekend. And while he was never in the military, I think it's important to remember that. Yeah.

Thank you, Counselor. Counselor McLaughlin.

I attended a senior citizen informational meeting on Monday the 18th about developing a second story to and expanding the senior building itself because of expanded use of the building and it's just bursting at the seams. So I'm very pleased to see that underway. Airport commission meeting on Friday got postponed, but I didn't get that message. So I was there. KODL Coffee Break. I was on with Mayor Mays, what, last Friday. And Rich and I had a meeting earlier in the week. Rich Mays, our mayor, and that was a briefing. I attended the Memorial Day Veteran Recognition at Kelly Viewpoint. and i did of course attend the budget committees for two days and that will be coming to us for approval and i too um i was principal at the watonka campus when phil brady was a staff member at my school and he and i worked closely together with our Hispanic population that was only Spanish speaking. And if you put a student in a classroom and immerse them in English without having the capability of being able to learn in dual language, well, Phil and I put together a program where students were taught in Spanish and directed towards the English. And what happened was it opened the doors for a lot of students that would not have been able to move into mainstream teaching. So it was because of Phil Brady, and he was an amazing teacher and a great guy. Miss him a lot.

Thank you, Counselor. For my part, in addition to what's already been said, the city manager and I had a Zoom meeting with a close aide of Congressman Cliff Benz regarding the status of Bill 655, which we're trying to get passed in Congress, which would allow us to acquire free of charge 150 acres in the watershed. And I did two radio interviews with KACI, one on April 28th and one this morning. Mark Bailey. Okay, with that, we'll move on to, excuse me. Okay, Rod Runyon has now appeared. And Rod, do you have anything as far as council reports, did you like to comment on?

There I am, okay. No, I've been across the country and I did have a chance in Washington, D.C., to meet with some military and Veterans Affairs Committee people from back there. And the subject was Oregon. And I'll talk more about that another time.

Okay. I hope your trip is going well.

I'm in Colorado.

Okay, item eight is the consent agenda. Items of a routine and non-controversial nature are placed on the consent agenda to allow the city council to spend its time and energy on the more important items and issues. Any counselor may request an item be pulled from the consent agenda and be considered separately. Items pulled from the consent agenda will be placed on the agenda at the end of the action items section. Tonight, we have six items on the consent agenda. Number one is approval of the April 27th city council meeting minutes. Item two is approval of the April 30th special city council meeting minutes. Items three and four are two resolutions assessing properties for the cost of nuisance abatement. Item five is a resolution regarding an addendum to a lease agreement with Meadow Outdoor Advertising. And finally, a project change order with Ajax Northwest for additional waterline utility and installation work associated with the First Street project. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda?

I always ask, are the people represented under resolution 26-17 real property? Anyone here to speak in their behalf? All right, thank you.

Thank you, Councillor McLaughlin. I appreciate you doing that. You've done that pretty faithfully over the last five years.

Just the right thing to do.

Well, it is. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor. Okay, do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda?

Mr. Mayor, I'll move to approve the consent agenda.

I'll go ahead and second. McLaughlin seconds.

It's been moved by Councilor Randall and seconded by Councilor McLaughlin to approve the consent agenda. Is there any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye or raise your hand. Motion carries. Item nine is the water management and conservation plan update. Our public works director, Dale McCabe, will be presenting the staff report.

There you go. Good evening, honorable mayor, members of council. Tonight, this presentation is for the recommendation of plan adoption of the 2025 water management and conservation plan. Water management and conservation plans are mandated by the state of Oregon to provide municipal water suppliers with the guidance and processes necessary for the municipality to manage their water supplies in the most efficient manner possible for meeting their existing and future water demands. The Oregon Water Resource Department is the department with it that has the authority for directing and overseeing the development of the water management conservation plan that's ultimately to be approved and adopted. The city's first water management and conservation plan was developed back in November or improved by OWRD in November of 2014. Typically, the water management conservation plans have like a planning life of a 20-year plan, but they're required to be updated by the state every 10 years. So we are now in that from 2014, we began the plan update for this current one. in 2024 we received the approved plan or the final plan from um owrd in february last year of 2025 we had a couple questions we had to get with our consultants on and get back with owrd and some of the clarifications for that So that process took a little bit of time and we finally received the final order from OWRD and gave us that final order and approved plan on April 2nd of 2026. So with that, we are now... bringing this plan before the council to recommend adoption. There's several guidelines and deadlines that are associated with that master plan or the water management conservation plan that we have to adhere to based on that final order. One of the items is that this plan is again going to be in effect for 10 years. So we'll have to have our updated plan to this completed through April or completed by April 1st of 2036. One of the items that's in the plan is that the city's water loss is supposed to be at 10% or less. That's what every city, you know, strives for is to have that. In our previous plan in the 2014 plan, We were below that 10% value, but in this plan and through the information that was gathered and part of the water system master plan update and provided for the development of this, our unaccounted for water or water loss has increased above that 10 percent value and threshold so with that we are being required to submit an analysis identifying some potential water loss factors and then what our proposed corrective actions will be by April 1st of 2028 so we've already begun that in-house working with our water distribution manager and our regulatory compliance manager and putting measures in place and things that we can do with checking our meters, checking the water transmission lines between Wix and the city as it goes to Garrison Reservoir and also Sorosis Reservoir. There's actually two transmission lines. One's the High Line and one's the Mill Creek Line. so there's seven miles from the treatment plant to town so with those two lines you're you're looking at 14 miles and they're old lines that as we know from our water system master plan update that they are you know set to be a high priority for replacement so we're trying to be diligent about going out and investigating those lines for any leaks and unaccounted for water as well the city is also required to submit a progress report to the department of oregon water resource department by april 1st of 2031 that details the progress made towards the implement implementation of the conservation benchmarks that are scheduled in this plan And then finally the city must submit an updated water management conservation plan to the department by October 1st of 2035 This council adoption of this water management and conservation plan is needed so that Oh WRD has the approved and city adopted plan that can then be incorporated to become part of a The future city adopted comprehensive plan to ultimately allow the city to be in compliance with the statewide planning goals, so the comprehensive plan is something that I believe is going to be. brought to the Council by josh Chandler and the Community development department. In later this summer at some point, and we need to have this water management conservation plan adopted prior to that, so that it can be incorporated into that. Comprehensive plan. And then also with the adoption of this plan and adopted into and are incorporated into the comprehensive plan, then that allows the city to seek future funding options such as seeking grants or low interest loans, both statewide and federal loans for future projects that are identified and related to our water management and conservation plan and also the water system master plan update and the projects that are identified in there such as the replacement of the wicks water treatment plant um the replacement of the two transmission lines that i just talked about from wicks to town um those are are two of the the big main projects and then also um including to incorporate our asr capabilities and system are the ASR wells. Right now, we currently only have one ASR well in the system, and that's the new Riverside well number one. Ultimately, with the adoption of this plan, we can have up to four ASR wells in the future. And so that would help with being able to pursue funding and to be able to get those additional wells incorporated into the system as well. So it is important to get this adopted into the plan so that we can utilize that and seek these other funding options. Right now, there are no budget implications with the adoption of this. That will be handled later on when we, go after other funding options, but there's also gonna be funding work that will be required to support the five-year benchmarks that are included in this plan, but those will be budgeted for on a year-to-year basis. With that, the staff recommendation is to adopt the 2025 Water Management Conservation Plan with the final order in its entirety. And with that, I can try to answer any questions.

Questions for our public works director? Council Richardson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Dale. Can you speak to the ASR capacity and the, I don't know what you'd call it, is it the exploration phase we're in now to determine capacity and look toward a future where we might be trying to fill that up?

yeah yeah so the asr well was completed, along with the riverside water complex facilities that were constructed over the last year and into last summer, so the actual. water riverside water complex didn't get completed and go in into service and in online until mid-july of the summer of 2025 which was already past the season for doing asr last year we did have a asr test period that was like a week long like May of 2025. So it was like a test that we were required to do through the state and with our consultants, GSI, to make sure that everything was going to respond appropriately to meet the ASR requirements. So we passed that cycle one test period, which again was like a week-long process or a week-long period late last spring. And then the wells in that facility was approved, passed all the inspections and came into service like mid-July, like I was saying. So we weren't able to do the first real season of ASR contribution into the system and doing, supplying water and sending water down hole over this winter.

Our goal was- No, not true.

Our goal was to hopefully be able to get somewhere and upwards close to what was about 100 million gallons down hole through this last winter, but we weren't able to do that. We reached a little over 30 million gallons throughout this winter period. And again, this was just our first year. We still had some glitches in the system, like our SCADA system that we were working through that prevented us from being able to you know, sometimes make the most out of what we could be doing at time. And we had delayed responses and things like that that we had to do manually rather than instantaneous with the SCADA system. So we were a little short of what the goal was this last year. But again, this was our first season. And so... You know, we'll be beginning that again, the cycle three season, basically this next late fall, as soon as we can. and ultimately i guess to expand on that right now we just have the one asr well at the riverside water complex with our limited license for the asr we can have up to four wells um at some point but before we can do that we're going to have to have the improvements of the waste of the water treatment plant and those transmission lines to town to be able to have the capacity to take advantage of future ASR wells. And that's all part of, you know, projects that are identified in the Water System Master Plan and talked about in this Water Management and Conservation Plan. And those are why we're going to need to be seeking future funding options and things like that to be able to go after and get those improvements and infrastructure paid.

Thank you for that. To my mind, that's a savings account. That doesn't pay for everything, but if we can fill it up in times when we have excess water and excess capacity someday, hopefully, we'll be glad and better off for having that as full as possible. For sure. Do we have any... operational number in mind. Do you have an assumption for how much ASR, what the capacity is for storing?

So we can store up to, I had that number. I don't mean to do pop quiz on you. 1,200 million gallons is what our limited license agreement is for. So 1.2 billion gallons.

Bill, could you talk directly in...

So yes, the limited license that we have for the ASR, it allows us to store up to 1,200 million gallons or like 1.2 billion gallons. We can treat that much. Yes, and then we can recover that through those four wells at 2,500 gallons a minute.

Thank you. I'm just trying to do quick math here. That's many, many days of maximum daily demand, even at the greatly increased estimated maximum daily demand of 10 or 20 years from now. So we want to make that. And essentially, it's another reservoir. Correct. Equivalent to Crow Creek Dam Reservoir.

Yes.

Thank you for that.

Any other questions?

I think I'm good for right now.

Okay. Anybody else? Councilor McLaughlin?

ASRS stands for Automated Storage and Retrieval System. Aquifer Storage and Recovery. Right. And that's taking surface water and storing it underground in aquifers for use in a later time. Yes. Great thing.

Yes.

All right. I've got a couple questions. To your knowledge, has the integration of Google Data Center caused any significant structural capacity challenges? By adding those, has it put demands on our system that we haven't been able to compensate for? Challenges.

You were saying structural?

Well, it could be structural. It could be capacity. By adding the plants, has it created any problems? Not that we've experienced. That's what I wanted. I needed to know that. Have we faced any influent or effluent pumping issues due to the construction of the data centers? Have they caused any overruns to the river systems? by the capacity of having them sitting in our area, urban growth area. So you're talking about the wastewater treatment plant? Yeah. Are we able to handle adding all of the infrastructure in our region? Can our system handle all that expansion?

right now i mean like for our master plans correct you know both the water system master plan and the wastewater facility master plan that is going to be being talked about in the very next item Those facilities have been taken into account with the values and the numbers that are within those master plans and those updates for the projects that are identified and associated in those plans.

What I'm trying to get at is do we have the capacity to add the infrastructure to our current or expand to look at the future for where we're going with our water treatment facility? And so we have the capability without taxing it for anyone like residents, commercial. So by adding that to the overall usage, we're able to compensate, we're able to expand, we're able to provide services.

Yeah, the only thing I might add is, you know, the system has the capacity, and that's something that's evaluated when they pay their system development charges and they pay their water rates just like everybody else so there's not like a subsidy going on, and it's within the capacity of the system that we have.

That's what I wanted to hear, because, you know, there will be some criticism that we've added in national news that, you know, data centers are putting challenges on on municipality infrastructure besides power, besides water. And I just wanted to establish that we're able to handle the capacity by our system that we do have now in existence.

And I think part of that conversation was the infrastructure agreement and the infrastructure that Google paid for and transferred over to the city. That was part of that component. But to your point, yeah, I've been following, and Roger Klein, the CEO of the Northern Wasco County PUD, and I have talked about in other locations, not here, how in particular power rate payers are – allegedly subsidizing some of this data center development growth and that's not the case here when it comes to northern moscow county pud or the city of the dallas when it comes to water

The reason I ask these questions is because we will be part of the challenge nationwide. And, you know, we have expanded and we have partnered with Google. But I just want to make sure that residents know that it's not adding to their overall usage. They'll have plenty of water now and in the future, as far as I can see, with all of the efforts that we're going through with storing. I mean, we're taking... good action in order to make sure that we have something in the future.

Well, and if I can add to that maybe a bit in terms of like the total context here is, you know, we are facing significantly reduced or lower snowpack more so than we've ever seen before in the last few decades. That's not a city of the Dalles circumstance, really Pacific Northwest dynamic. And part of the water management conservation plan is water curtailment steps should that occur. And I want to emphasize that we manage one holistic system for this community as a whole. And this is one part of many steps that we've been taking over the years, as Dale mentioned, from the water system management plan to the water management conservation plan that you have before you, but also making adjustments to water and wastewater rates and council action and the resolution that you passed allocating some of the revenue from these abatements to these generational needs to mitigate those rate increases to the benefit of the community as a whole. That House Bill 655 legislation that we talked about a little while ago, that was aligned with a master plan in the 1990s, identifying the need to raise the height of the Crow Creek Dam, the Riverside Wells, the aquifer storage and recovery system, even the investments that we're making in IT to better support our SCADA system so we can be more efficient. And finally, the council support and the budget committee's support and allocating resources for an owner's rep to expedite or to move the water treatment plant replacement project forward. That's a lot of work there that staff has been doing with the support of council with your engagement and represents a long-term planning and very strong moves, I would say, to make generational investments in infrastructure that's at the end of its lifespan, and we need to replace it. Whether or not data centers were here, the water treatment plant is at the end of its life. And making these prudent decisions and allocating these things appropriately, making sure we have the revenues in place and the staff in place to get it done is part of that collective work.

Any other questions, Councilor?

Sorry to rant for a second. No, but that's the exact response that I needed to hear, publicly needed to hear as well. Yes, and I'm fine.

Well, I'd just like to also point out that this infrastructure agreement that the city manager alluded to was passed almost five years ago, and for whatever that's worth, and was discussed at length at that time. Any other questions, Councilor?

No, I'm fine.

Councilor Ring?

I'll let Councilor Randall go first.

Councilor Randall. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Dale, can you explain a little about the diversion permits, the two different diversion permits and how only one is going to be able to be implemented?

Yeah, so as part of the final order for this, the two different diversion permits are, one is for the Columbia River water right that the city has pursued and received. I believe it's like a water right that would expire eventually like in 2073 or something. So it's like for way out there in the future. But associated with this, it was, just a second, let me, I think it was for, it says the Water Management Conservation Plan authorizing the version of water for up to 24.1 cubic feet per second, which is 15.9 MGD. for the um columbia river water right the other one is the 2100 acre feet and that's for the expansion of the crow creek dam and so basically with those two right or those two um diversions you you you can only like go after one of them but not both you can only like uh improve one or develop one of them you can't develop both of them and so we will in the future have to do you know have some more planning some discussions over this like next 10 year period of which one the city is going to you know be directed at and go after is whether it's that columbia river water right or the expansion of the crow creek dam

So does going after one or the other, does that forfeit the other one? If you go, whichever one you choose, the other one is forfeit at that point?

It doesn't forfeit it. It's still out there and available, but you would have to go back to the Oregon Water Resource Department and you know, go through the process and provide justification of what your water need is, why you need it and all of that. Um, and get approval from OWRD to be able to, um, go, you know, like get that water right, brought back in and approved at that time. Thank you.

Other questions? Councilor Ring?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Dale, you mentioned something earlier that was interesting. Previously, it sounded like in our 2014 water conservation plan, we did not meet the 10% criteria. We did.

Oh, OK. We did previously. OK. But for some reason, over the data that was provided for the last five years, we've exceeded that 10 unaccounted for water so that's why we're being required to have that condition that we have to provide by april 1st 2028 of what we've found what our plans are for mitigating for that

okay and i'm also curious um to define the water loss right so we finished the dog river pipeline so we don't have you know 100 year old wooden pipes leaking millions of gallons of water but like What's... That wasn't part of it. I could be totally wrong, but my understanding is it's like the water treatment plant to the city. Correct. That's where the definition... That's where the definition is. That's the measurable...

that loss is between what is, you know, being accounted for, for the water being produced, both by wells and by the water treatment plant. But then where the difference is, is when for that unaccounted for water after doing all the meter reads and accounting for like we give an estimate like when we are flushing hydrants for the system around town, you know, we're accounting for that water, but it's not metered. So you're, you're given an estimate of the volume of water that's being used.

So the dog river pipeline improvement does not count towards that. Sorry. Yeah, you're good. And okay. So that means that,

that means that everything, so everything from the water treatment plant to the city, not including like water, once it reaches like a service point, like you're a meter at your house or a commercial building and whatnot. Um, are there, um, I guess, do we have an idea? I mean, I know that like the year before I was on council, um, We went through the, I'm forgetting the name of the report, the water treatment, the master plan update. Sorry, it's been a long day. Is there anything that's identified in our current plan that would speak to what we could be doing, like what would go into that report in like 2028 and whatnot? In other words, are there things that we already know that we...

Yeah, I mean, that's where, you know, we're looking and, you know, I brought Jerry and stuff here to expand on if we needed to, you know, on our meters and our meter replacement program, looking at that. I mean, so like, you know, the water treatment plant has meters up at the plant of... this is what's produced. So when it goes from the treatment plant to the clear wells, and then what's discharged out of the clear wells into those transmission mains, you know how much water is coming out of the water treatment plant. Then by the time it gets to town, then we got meters that are going into the garrison reservoir, the cirrhosis reservoir, but then there's also meters for residential customers that are off of both of those lines. And so that's where, you know, we're, We're developing programs to go test those meters, those big meters that are on the water infrastructure, such as the reservoirs themselves, making sure that they're reading accurately. Then we have our meter replacement program. And also, you know, checking those to make sure meters system wide are being read accurately and accounting for accurately accounting things. So those are some of the things that we have in place that we're expanding on and trying to, you know,

build upon okay one last question um i'm not sure that i drew the conclusion or the connection between the uh crow creek reservoir dam and reservoir as well as uh the like that permit plus the one to pull the rights from the columbia river where's the connection for me that that ties that together if we're talking about from the water treatment plant to the city um the dam is prior to that right so i guess how does that all the dam right is actually a storage so currently like from the water master plan the the current capacity of the crow creek dam and the crow creek reservoir is um

it's like 260 million gallons or 800 acre feet. We have a right to expand with a 35-foot high dam raise, then it's going to increase the capacity of that reservoir from the 260 million gallons to about 640 million gallons or 1,970 acre feet. What this in the water management conservation plan, what this value is, is to actually give us even a greater storage value at the Crow Creek Reservoir.

And that's the connection then because we're not going to be able to, even if House Bill 655 does pass and Congress gets through the Senate and everything, we still have to address this before we can do anything else for our storage. So there's the connection then.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That's just giving us the land from the U.S. Forest Service to the city so that that land then becomes completely city-owned property.

Yeah, and it's part of that generational investment, right? It's a sequence of events that needs to happen, but the things that we need to do at the state level to address our water losses from the treatment plant to the city and that transmission of that water need to be addressed before we can ever actually do anything to increase the capacity at Crow Creek Reservoir.

mean it's that's all part of wait again we have you know basically at two years that we we have to start reporting on this to report the plan yes yes and to get that um water loss value like below that 10 percent i'm just trying to understand the connection and like sequence of events that happen so before we start breaking ground on the dam

and increasing capacity, whatever happens with the bill happens, but like, I'm trying to make sure that I've got.

And so, and that sequence, correct. And so maybe putting it bluntly, you know, replacing the water treatment plant and its transmission lines is, is a project that's first. Correct. Before raising the height of the crow Creek dam. That being said, These are long-term projects, and they require a substantial amount of work and time to get them to a place. And money. Where they could break, and money, to get them to a place where you could even be talking about breaking ground. So again, this is part of that long-term planning effort. And then I think the only other connection I might highlight is, again, back to the aquifer storage and recovery system in terms of our overall storage capacity and new resources that we have, ASR being a chief one.

Thanks. I've got a couple. Based on my knowledge of unaccounted for water, it seems to me that I've always thought that there aren't very many cities that have an unaccounted for percentage of under 10%. Apparently, we were there once, and that's great. I mean, I would have never imagined that we'd ever get

Yeah, I believe that's like the state threshold. Yeah, right. You have to be under 10%. I just don't.

My instinct tells me that there aren't a whole lot of cities that have that percentage under the 10%. Well-

I don't know for sure because I don't know what other cities are, but I do believe it's a pretty good number that do meet that requirement because it's the requirement that it's set for.

Okay. I have a question about meters. Obviously, all of our residential and industrial and commercial customers have a meter. But we also have other meters that measure the flow of water. Is that right?

Yes.

And I get the impression that many of those are aged. Yes. Old.

Yeah, basically the big meters that we have, like on our reservoirs and the wells and like the city-owned ones, those have to be replaced every 20 years. And I think, is that correct?

Every 15 years. Okay.

And some of them have not been replaced in a while. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And we have that meter replacement program that, what's the percentage that you're trying to replace every year? 8%. Yeah.

Okay. So 12 years, 13 years where you should be, then we'd have to do it all over again, right? Yeah. Okay. How are you doing on replacing meters for residents and businesses? Is that on schedule?

Yeah.

We have with us Jerry Anderson today.

Hello, Mayor and City Council. Yes. So I actually brought a few numbers. So the meter replacement program has been on track. We started it in 2013. And to try to keep that 15-year replacement program, we should be at that 15 years in 2028. There's a lag since the... meters were all installed at the same time in the 90s. There is a lag on those meters, so we are starting to catch up to that. As far as the well meters and the reservoir meters, we do keep those up to date. We actually try to replace those at the 15-year mark. We just added the

And you have those tested every year.

Yes. Those ones are actually checked. Checked every year. Yeah. Okay. You know, the, the large meters are three inch above the commercial meters. That's the ones we were kind of ran into the later in this program. So we added that commercial meter program to the budget. I think it was two years ago. So we increased that because those meters all cost more money, but.

Okay, great.

We also got a leak detection system this year that we can go and set out in our meter valve cans. And it listens for leaks overnight.

Last question. We have to do this every 10 years. Is there any reason or do you see any cause, anything that would happen that would cause us to have to do it more frequently or before the 10 years is up? Some event or some issue? Is there a state that says if this happens, you're going to have to come back and do this again?

No, I don't. I mean... Okay, you can.

The water management, my name is Jill who younger regulatory compliance manager for city of the Dallas, thank you for for having me here I the municipal. Excuse me. The Oregon administrative rules specify 10 years. In our final order, we have some additional reporting that Dale has already mentioned. As far as the Oregon administrative rules go, there is the 10-year interval and there is a five-year progress report required. That's the only thing that the Oregon Water Resources Department can require of us. So they can't require us to make an entirely new plan. However, they have pulled out the concern about the leak or the overage that's over the 10% that's written in the Oregon administrative rules. And so those reports are the only ones. But as far as doing the whole plan, Oregon Water Resources Department cannot require us to do an entirely new plan any sooner than every 10 years.

Does that answer your question? Yes, it does. Thank you. Any other questions? If not, would anybody like to make a motion?

Let me take a crack. Mr. Mayor, I would move that we adopt the 2025 Water Management and Conservation Plan with final order in its entirety.

Is there a second?

I'll second.

The move by Council Richardson and seconded by Councilor Ring to adopt the 2025 Water Management and Conservation Plan. Is there any other discussion? All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Council Runyan has raised his hand, so it passes five to nothing. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Good job.

Thank you. I'll just go ahead and stay here, though. Thank you, Dave.

Okay.

item 11 or 10a is a wastewater facilities master plan update so again uh hello honorable mayor and members of the council this one is the water facilities master plan update um and this is going to be a discussion item and a discussion item only for the council tonight um with me i have consor engineers or consultants there's austin rambin and patrick davis they'll come up here in a minute and give you a powerpoint presentation for a cip which is capital improvement projects discussion regarding this part of the water facility master plan update So similar to like the water management and conservation plan and our water system master plan, you know, these master plans are designed to be basically have a 20 year planning life. So that's, you know, what our wastewater facility master plan was. We had original plan done in 2013. when we did the 2017 kind of like phase one project, which was the design build project, an update to that plan got incorporated into that project that just focused on the wastewater treatment plant. so this update is again only focusing on the wastewater treatment plant it was decided you know back a couple years ago when we started having discussions about needing to update the wastewater facility master plan that we didn't really need to incorporate the collection system into that plan and that we just needed to kind of focus again on the water treatment plant itself. So that's what this plan update is basically focusing on is the wastewater treatment plant. And the collection system is still kind of under that 2013 update that occurred back then at that time. So basically, where we're at now is that CONSOR was contracted with the city a year ago, a year and a half ago in, I think, January of 2025 to begin this master plan update. It was anticipated that it was going to be an 18-month long process. And we'd be going through everything at the wastewater treatment plant. And then ultimately, like the the water system master plan update, we will be coming to the city council in a couple of future workshops to talk about funding. And Deb Gilardi, who did the the water facility master plan update, is the same subcontractor with CONSOR for this wastewater facility master plan update that she'll be coming and talking with them and with you based on the capital improvement projects that are being identified in the master plan update. Talk about the funding portions of it and how that's going to affect future Wastewater rates sewer rates and also future Wastewater SDC's system development charges and those impacts that will have You know being suggested in the future so right now We had the tour with the council back in April towards the end of April to like take you down to the plant introduce you to the plant and kind of walk around and show you how the existing plant is. operating kind of what the challenges that we're experiencing down there are and just you can lay eyes on it and see the overall condition of the plant and you know just see what the that existing condition is how it's operating and sit you up for prepare you for tonight's discussion that will then be bringing from CONSOR of what the projected and proposed future improvements are at that treatment down at the wastewater treatment plant. So then we can take the information that's being provided tonight and we're right now anticipated of meeting and having a special workshop meeting with CONSOR and Deb Gilardi on June 25th to kind of have that first workshop where we then talk about what you're learning tonight for the CIP projects and kind of the first workshop and phases of the funding aspects of it and what impacts that that will have for the city. And then we'll be looking at having a second workshop meeting, I believe is anticipated right now to be August 10th for that. so ultimately you know we get through those processes and those discussions and workshop the ultimate goal is to have the wastewater facility master plan completely completed and being able to go through the review back through review with deq and have it be able to be adopted by november of this year november of 2026. So that's kind of just a brief rundown of kind of the plan itself and where we're at. And with that, I'll let Austin and Patrick come up and give you their presentation. They'll be doing a PowerPoint presentation up on the screens, but we also provided with you paper copies if you want to follow along that way or take any notes or whatever. So with that, we'll go ahead and turn it over to Austin and Patrick. Thank you.

Okay, let's make sure.

All right.

Thank you for having us tonight, Mayor and Council. We are going to go over where we are with the wastewater facilities master plan and the whole process. And as Dale mentioned, I have Patrick Davis with me tonight and I am Austin Rambin, our project manager. So we wanted to get started by acknowledging the city staff that made significant contributions to this plan. We have Dale, David, Steve, and Jill. And from the Jacobs team, we have Oscar and Jeff, who were a great part of this plan. And from the consort side, we have myself and Patrick, Catherine Bacon, who's a staff engineer, and Frederick Tack, who is our national treatment practice leader.

I forgot to mention that Oscar Ferris has joined online, who's the project manager operator for the wastewater treatment plant. available for any questions about the treatment plan. So welcome.

Great. Thanks, Dale. So now for the overall agenda of what we're going to be covering tonight. We'll give an overview and purpose of the plan. We'll go over the existing system. We'll go over the growth and regulatory drivers, the key findings of the assessment, how we analyze the plant, the capital improvement plan, the next steps that we'll take to finish the plan, and then we'll entertain any questions you might have. So for the purpose of the plan, this is really a roadmap for the 20-year planning horizon. As Dale mentioned, this is a requirement from Oregon DEQ. They require updating the plan every 10 years for the 20-year horizon. So it develops flow and load projections working off of population growth estimates. It assesses existing treatment infrastructure, everything at the plant we looked at. And it culminates in a capital improvement plan. And finally, the financial analysis is needed for implementation of the capital improvement plan. So now for the plan chapters, I mentioned this is a DEQ required document. And so we followed their framework and their guidelines. And so these are the chapters that we have in the plan. The introduction and background, kind of just laying the scene of the city, the population, the industry that's here, the existing treatment plant description, which is all the unit processes that are performing the treatment. Future conditions, what's this looking like in year 20 from now, year 2045? We looked at the capacity of each unit process. And then we looked at alternatives for both the liquids and solid stream unit processes. Then there'll be a capital improvement plan chapter. And finally, wrapping up again with that financial analysis, how are we going to implement this? So high level takeaways, think of this as an executive summary. The plant is in fair condition and operating successfully today, meeting permit compliance. However, there are new permit requirements that are shaping future needs. There's some aging infrastructure that's near its loading capacity and the end of its useful life. And there's also limited redundancy in some of the critical processes. Now for the service area and system. The plant, as you all know, is located right in the middle of downtown, sandwiched between the railroad and I-84. It serves the city and urban growth area. It's got a sewer collection system that Dale mentioned that conveys flow to the plant downtown through a system of pump stations and gravity pipelines. And it should be noted that this plan is not covering any part of the collection system, just the treatment plant. DEQ's requirement does not extend to the collection system. It only extends to the plant. Your treatment plant supports residential, commercial, and industrial users. And the treatment regimen is conventional activated sludge, very tried and true treatment methodology. So now for the treatment plant unit operations, I understand that most of you made it out to the visit back in April. So that's great. You have a little bit of a frame of reference here. I wanna note that the liquids stream is in this orange color and the solid stream is in the blue color. And the easiest way to think about it is that the liquids grow the biology and the solid stream take it out. So now I'll walk through how the flow goes through the plant. So in the upper right hand corner, we have both the influent and effluent pump station. You'll hear influent and effluent a lot. Influent means it's going into the plant. Effluent means it's leaving the plant. So this pump station is dual purpose. It has pumps that pump wastewater into the plant and pumps that pump clean water out into the Columbia River. So after the pump station, it goes to the headworks where there's screening and grit removal, then to primary treatment, which is currently offline, then to the aeration basins. Now this is where most of your biological treatment happens. From the aeration basin, it goes to the clarifiers, and the clarifiers are big, slow-moving tanks, big settling tanks. So the waste solids drain, drop to the bottom, and the clean water flows over the weirs to the UV system, where the wastewater or cleaner wastewater is disinfected to remove pathogens and viruses. And then it goes out to the Columbia River via that same pump station. So for the solid side, the waste solids from the bottom of the clarifiers is pumped to a thickener. And from there, it goes into digestion into the main big tank in the center of the screen. And then the other tanks are for solid storage. And then they are hauled off to be land applied. So now to get into some of the drivers, some of the growth drivers. what's going to happen with the population. So we needed to look at Portland State University's Population Research Center. That's a DEQ requirement for your growth rate of the city. And it's about 6.6% over the planning period. The 2025 estimated population is just over 16,000 people. And the 2045 estimate is just under 20,000 people. And it should be noted that based on Public Works Intel, we did include a patch of residents that are on septic tanks on the west side of town for the planning period. It's not necessarily they're going to connect tomorrow. They might not connect at all, but we did take them into account for the capacity evaluation.

That 0.6% is per year, not over that 10-year period.

Oh, sorry. Yes, it is per year. Sorry. So now for the regulatory drivers. So the plant is mandated by a national pollutant discharge elimination system permit. That permit was renewed last year. And with that permit renewal, there is a ammonia removal requirement. This is driving some of the major near-term treatment upgrades. Another regulatory driver is protection of the Columbia River. There was a recent total maximum daily load update for temperature to protect salmonoids and biology in the river. We are looking, we are in the middle of a mixing zone study right now to see what the discharge does when it hits the river. And another thing to note for the river protection is the outfall is required to be rehabilitated or replaced by 2030. So now I'll hand it over to Patrick. Thank you, Austin.

So the next portion of the presentation, I'm going to kind of dig into the weeds a bit on our analysis and kind of what went into the analysis. It'll then lead into kind of the projects that we're seeing to solve some of the problems that we've been seeing. And then from there, I'll kind of work through the near-term, mid-term, and long-term projects projects that we are currently expecting. But before I really dive into any of that, I wanted to start with kind of our highest risk findings. And so the idea is that if we start with the highest risk findings, as I'm going through our analysis, you can kind of fall along a bit better. So the first and foremost is our secondary treatment system. The aeration capacity is deficient right now. So the secondary treatment, we are growing a colony of microbes and those microbes are aerobic, just like us. And so if we don't provide them with the oxygen that they need to survive, multiply and grow, then the system just doesn't work. So the secondary treatment, the aeration capacity, it's right at 100%. And then during the warmer months, it just can't keep up. And I believe this has come up probably at a previous council, we've already come to about a temporary fix for that. The next key finding, the outfall. So the outfall underwent a temporary fix some years ago, and it is coming due for that temporary fix to become permanent. So that is a key issue that we have. found out there. Another issue is our lack of primary treatment. So right now, the primary treatment system that they have in the plant, it's not quite operating as it's intended to. And in fact, when they do try to operate it, it creates more problems down the line for them. Without primary treatment, that means Everything that comes into the plant is only getting treated in your secondary treatment process. And so in doing so, you end up taxing your secondary treatment process. It also means that the operators have almost no flexibility for if something nasty comes down the pipe or just if they need some extra space and extra time to deal with problems. Next problem, solids thickening and digestion reliability. So Austin touched on it a bit, but all the way through the solids thickening and digestion system, they are plagued by having a single piece of equipment that is critical to keeping the whole system running. So they're currently operating in a state where a single piece of equipment can shut down the entire process. This is critical infrastructure. We don't get the choice to shut it down. It runs 24-7 no matter what. And so being in a state in which you are relying on individual pieces of equipment, it's not a good place to be. So then the last point are influent and effluent pumping. So influent and effluent pumping is not too bad. There's quite a bit of capacity there. However, during peak events, which for this is when you get hit with a high intensity rainfall in a short amount of time, that can have the power to overwhelm the capacity of the pump station. And then that can have some pretty disastrous effects for the plant and plant operations. OK, so with that, I'm going to get into our analysis, what went into the analysis, how we came to some of these conclusions, and what sort of problems we're finding and how we're solving them. So the first part of our analysis is a data review. We collected about five years of discharge monitoring reports from the plant. These reports, they have influent flow, effluent flow. They also have the strength of the wastewater, which we'll refer to as loading coming out. So with the existing data and with quite a bit of our engineering judgment, we are able to project out what the future flows and loads for the plant are gonna be in the five, 10, up to 20 year timeframe. And so with those projections, we then can come back to do a capacity assessment. So we take what our projected flows and loads are going to be, and we run through the influent pump station head works, yada, yada, yada, all the way through the plant. And we see, can this system take this much flow? And can this system treat this much loading as it goes through? The next bit there, the facility evaluation. So with having our data review done and our capacity assessment in progress, we actually went to the site. We talked with Oscar and the rest of plant staff, and he took us around and he was able to kind of point out the specific deficiencies that they're seeing on the ground. It's a very different case. We're in the office, we're crunching our numbers and we're looking at our models, but our models only go so far without actually getting into the fence line and talking with the operators. And a lot of the stuff can even be just general general plant issues i mean sometimes there's just like a bolt sticking up and it happens to be right in somebody's walking path and so something like that is is always good to at least mention and get in the plan so we can make this plant as safe and um and easy to work with really um so with all this stuff in mind and we have all of our data we have all of our our assessments we then need to figure out uh We've found what problems there are, and in some of the unit operations, not all of them, some of them, there are pretty clear alternatives on direction to take. You can either go A or B or C, and they're all kind of mutually exclusive. You don't do both. Sometimes you can do mix, but I won't get into that. For some things out there, there is no clear alternative. Sometimes you replace a pump. Sometimes there's this stick of pipe, you take it out and you put a new pipe in. So a lot of that stuff doesn't actually make it into the alternatives analysis, but quite a bit of stuff does. So for the next bit, I'm going to go through the liquids and the solids alternatives, just kind of the alternatives that we selected. I will not bore you with every single alternative. That would be awesome. So on the liquid side, for influent and effluent pumping, our intent was to rehabilitate and expand your existing assets. There's already been quite a bit of investment into the influent and effluent pumping, so we didn't want to waste those investments. So what we elected to do is, instead of trying to build a new pump station or anything like that, we actually wanted to expand a portion of the pump station. It's the wet well, and this will actually come up later. And in doing so, that affords a larger space for the influent wastewater to come in, and it allows the existing pumps that you have on the influent side to operate a little bit better. The run times are a little bit more preferable, and it gives more buffer in the case of these peaking events. And then we would do the same on the effluent side as well. So just providing a little bit more buffer there. So on the headworks, we did assess a couple of different items about expansion or changing stuff up. And we found that the headworks was already in pretty decent shape and there wasn't really much to do. So there's just some minor refurbishment there. Oftentimes it involves bringing out some equipment rep, have them look at it and come up with a pretty, quick recommendation for that. Primary treatment. So currently the plant has a more of a, I guess you could call it an intensified clarification system. It's more of a filter filtration system and it didn't really work as intended. And so our recommendation is instead of trying to go through with another sort of novel technology, let's just go back to the basics, primary clarifiers. These will provide kind of the volume that will allow plant operators, it gives them a wide spot in the line so they can they can be quite a bit more flexible with their plant. And it should also be able to pull out some of the solids that are coming into the plant before it hits the aeration basin. So that way you're not completely taxing the secondary treatment process. And then on the secondary treatment, what we have identified is process intensification. And to put it simply, we're going to add media into the existing basin. And that media will be better at fostering the growth of our microbial colony. And it's able to treat more waste using the same amount of volume. So on our solid side, our recommended alternatives, starting with the thickening system, we want to replace some of the aging equipment, which is getting on 15 to 20 years old. And we want to install two new pieces of equipment. Two new pieces of equipment will provide redundancy in case one has to go down for maintenance or just to allow them to do regular scheduled maintenance. And then having new equipment in there just resets the clock on their lifespan. On the digestion side, we intend to improve digester mixing, heating, and reliability. The mainstay of this, as Austin pointed out, is we have three tanks that are intended to be digesters. Only one of those tanks currently operates as a digester. The rest are just solid storage. What we want to do is we want to take one of those tanks and get it back up to snuff. So make sure that the mixing is mixing as intended. Make sure that there's the ability to get heat into the tank. And that way your digestion process can actually operate. And so that will provide the plant with two tanks that can essentially do the same thing. Um, they'll be able to drain one of the tanks, uh, for regular maintenance. And when I say regular maintenance, I mean like every five years, um, digesters are kind of gross. So you don't want to do that all that often, but, uh, Then having two of them, it also means that if there is an upset, you just get more space to deal with your solids. The third tank, the intent there is to keep it as solid storage, but instead of it having a floating cover, which isn't really operating particularly well, we're going to remove the floating cover and replace it with just a fixed cover. That will give them a fixed volume for them to store solids and storage. It just, again, added flexibility, added capacity. Biogas. So what we want to do with the biogas is we want to remove their existing boiler and replace it with two new boilers that are intended to be used with biogas or natural gas. That way, what we can do is we can take the biogas and instead of just flaring it as we're currently doing, we run it through the boilers, we get the heat energy from that, and then that improves the efficiency of the heating and digestion process. Lastly, on that list, we have dewatering. Our selection for dewatering is to install belt filter presses. These are a mechanical means to squeeze the solids, the liquid solids, and turn them into something quite a bit more manageable. These belt filter presses will probably reduce the actual volume of sludge to be hauled out of the plant by times or so. So it will represent quite a significant reduction in the physical volume of solids that you have to truck hours and hours and hours. So with these alternatives in mind, skip this here. We use those to develop our capital improvement plan as a whole. So the capital improvement plan, what it does is we'll combine all of our findings, all of our analysis into kind of one document that I would like to say is easy to digest. We do our best to make it easy to digest, but it is a technical engineering document. But that we have our projects in mind. We have a pretty good idea of what these projects look like and what is supposed to go into them and what is excluded from them. And so knowing that, having that in our minds, we're able to come up with kind of these higher level planning level costs. The intent being that we can do our best to get the right amount of funding at the right time. And then with all these plans, we organize our projects by priority and by unit process, as well as by importance. And so our priority list, we develop in conjunction with the city and with the plant operations. So we come at it with our best intentions and what we feel with our judgment need to go first. And then we had some workshops with the city to figure out what their priorities are and make sure that we can kind of get these is ordered as best as we can. It's important to note that I'm gonna get into near-term, mid-term and long-term projects. Those are the next few slides that we're gonna talk about. What I have for near, mid and long-term is still in the works. These are not yet set in stone. We still have the financial planning part of this. And so there will be some projects that will probably shift one way or the other as we really get into that. However, what I am gonna present is kind of where we're at right now, heading into our financial planning effort. So near-term projects, How I've, you'll notice as I go through these, I have our near term, I have kind of the timeline there, zero to five years, and then I have these primary and secondary projects. Our primary projects, these are the big ticket items. These are the things that are going to be rather costly, but they are also the ones that are on the forefront of meeting permit and then meeting the growth targets. The secondary projects are still really quite important. They're very important for plant safety, plant operations, and plant maintenance. However, they are lower ticket items that we use to kind of bulk up the near mid and long-term projects as we go along. So without further ado, the primary projects in the near term, the first and foremost is our secondary treatment upgrades. The plant has to be able to treat ammonia within about five years, maybe a little bit more. And in order to do that, they need the upgrade of their secondary treatment process. That is the secondary process intensification that I mentioned before. Along with that, we have our effluent flow improvements. The effluent flow improvements, the big one there is the outfall. So that is something that also there's a memorandum of understanding that that outfall needs to get repaired within a set amount of time. And so those are our two big ticket items. Along with that, the effluent flow improvements, there's some gates on the effluent side that are barely limping along. And so with this, it's important to pull out those gates and then put in new ones on the effluent side. Getting into our secondary projects, we have our IPS electrical improvements. Right now, the Influent Pump Station has some issues on the electrical side. And so that is a placeholder for a specific project for the assessment of that electrical system to be looked into. And then from there, improvements can be recommended and improvements can be made to the Influent Pump Station itself. The second one there is disconnecting storm sewers. So we have a storm sewer that is currently connected to the plant. It kind of runs through the Oregon cherry growers. The intent is to pull that off of the plant's outfall and place it on its own outfall to reduce some of the peak loading events that we get during the storms. The last one there is RASWAS pump procurement. Austin mentioned the secondary clarifiers. They have a pumping system, which recycles the solids from the clarifiers back to the aeration basin. And a portion of that gets pulled off and sent to thickening and solids treatment. Right now, each clarifier only has one RAS pump and one WAS pump. And so in conjunction with the secondary treatment improvements, we will look into making sure those pumps still work as intended. They have the capacity that we need. And then we also want to make sure to procure an extra pump for each of those systems. So if something goes wrong, they can pull out a bad pump and put it in a good one without too much of an issue. Midterm projects. So these are the ones that are going from in the five to 10 year range. Probably the design happens before the five year, kind of in the near term, but they don't really get implemented until the five to 10 year range. So not up here, but very important to mention is a new admin building. Their current admin building is in an old job trailer that was never really meant to be a permanent building. And it's not adequate for treatment operations. And so one of the intents with kind of the early midterm is to build a new admin building, which will also have a new shop. as well as a skater room, mechanical room, all that sort of stuff. It'll give them the offices that they need, the workstations that they need, but it will also provide them with a meeting room. And so that way it can make certain educational trips easier. It can just provide more space for people to come to the plant and have a space to have meetings and discuss things. The shop, having the shop in the admin building, that'll free up space for another project that I will get to. And it'll also provide just better ability to maintain fleet vehicles that the city has that are important for land operations, but also city operations. So getting into our other primary projects here, we have our thickening equipment upgrades. That's pulling out the old thickeners and putting in the new ones. We have our installation of primary clarifiers. And then we have the dewatering system installation. So the dewatering system, that building is going to go right now as planning, it's going to go right where the existing admin building is. And so as you can probably tell, that's why we do the admin building before that. Secondary projects, we have our IPS pump lifting equipment. The influent and effluent pump station building, that pump station was built in the 1930s. The pumps are currently situated about 30 feet below grade, give or take, and they don't have a good way of pulling out these pumps. These are big pumps. They are seven feet tall, I would say probably six feet in diameter, weighing several thousand pounds. So what we want to do is we want to install a dedicated system within the IPS to allow them to lift out those pumps and get them serviced as they should. In doing so, it can lead into this next project, the upsize EPS, and you'll see I have it as potential. Having the pump lifting equipment would allow them to also lift out the effluent pumps as well and get those out and serviced as needed. I put potential there because that project is contingent on the results of a previous project from disconnecting the storm sewer. Our idea is that disconnecting the storm sewer might solve the problem that they're facing now with their effluent pumps. But it's still a good idea to have that placeholder in a point in time for that assessment. And then the last one there on our secondary projects is the UV assessment and improvements. Right now, we find that the UV system has the capacity to treat all the wastewater clear out to the 20-year time frame. But we have this project in here in this midterm as a placeholder to go back and reassess those findings and make sure that there's no surprises on the influent flow that we weren't expecting during this planning period. And so that's why this project gets a placeholder here. The other improvements that we have for the UV on that line item are to kind of improve the hydraulics of the UV system as a whole. Right now, the approaches to the UV system is it's an old chlorine contact basin, which means it's really deep. That makes it a maintenance nightmare. You get solids that kind of make it through the clarifiers and they settle out there, but there's not a good way to pull them out. So that improvement would be a way of making that UV channel shallower. And so that way there's not solids buildup or any of that sort of issue. So lastly, we get into our longer term projects. So the primary projects going into our 10 to 20 year timeframe are the digester improvements. That starts with looking at digester number one and improving the mixing and heating of that. That also includes adding boilers to the shop that was there. That was the shop and is no longer the shop. And then it also has an assessment of digester number three. That's actually the digester we're seeing now in that picture there. The plant has been having trouble with that digester for quite some time. And so this project here is it's an assessment specific to that digester to try to better understand what's going wrong with it, if it's anything. And if it's mechanical or something to do with the piping, pull out that equipment and put it in new. Another primary project here is the IPS-EPS wet well expansions. I already touched on this quite a bit earlier when we were talking about the IPS-EPS, but it's the idea of expanding the influent portion of that wet well to provide a little bit more buffer for plant operations. Secondary projects here, we have some secondary clarifier improvements. These are pretty minor touches on the secondary clarifiers. Clarifiers have some mechanisms that are up top that are intended to help kind of dissipate the energy into it, but it also has the added problem of trapping some floatables in there. And so the secondary clarifier improvements are just trying to better treats those problems, kind of give the floatables a way to get out and that sort of thing. the next one there mixed liquor flow split improvements so uh that's a fancy way of saying we're going to improve the pipeline that goes from the aeration basin to the clarifiers right now the flow split is a little bit odd and it doesn't really do its job particularly well and so these improvements are intended to to help balance the flows going to either clarifier and just make that system work a little bit better The last thing that we have here, the SCADA and automation upgrades. This is one that'll kind of come into play in the 18 to 20 year range. Throughout all of this work, SCADA and automation is going to be integrated into the upgrades. However, this last one here is kind of the overarching SCADA improvement and integration. It's the idea of we don't want individual unit operations operating well on their own. We want the unit operations to work well as a whole. And so this SCADA and automation upgrade is intended to just make sure all the kinks are worked out of the system as a whole, and it's able to work as we intend it to. So this one actually is the last one. Operations and maintenance projects. These are kind of the smallest projects that are intended to be just built into an operations and maintenance budget. It's not the kind of thing that's going to need a huge capital investment, but it kind of gives a lot of... A lot of bang for the buck, really. So the first one there is the grit classifier refurbishment. I touched on this earlier. It's not quite working as intended. And the idea is it's possible the installation wasn't quite how it should be. So pulling a rep out to take a look at that and making sure that it's to get their recommendations on improvement. The next one there is the hazardous environment sensors. So these are mandated to be on a number of buildings throughout the plants, and they're not quite working as intended. So this is a maintenance budget item that will go into making sure those sensors get up to snuff and are operating as we need them to. The plant water system, plant water takes disinfected water off the tail end of the UV disinfection system. And there's a little pump there and some piping around the plant. Plant uses it to hose stuff off. They use it for little sprayers that kind of help with some of the maintenance issue. There's other little odds and ends that plant water is used for. But in this case, their pumping system, it's just not working quite right. The pressure isn't at what you'd want it to be. build in the budget so that way they can replace the pump and do some small improvements on that system. Then the last one there, the secondary clarifier balance investigation. there's a possibility that the weirs on clarifier one versus clarifier two might be at slightly different elevations. And that would bias flow into one clarifier over another, which isn't really what you want. So this balanced investigation is about bringing out a surveyor, either within the city or it could be external to just come out, shoot the elevation of the weirs on both clarifiers one and clarifier two. And then if there is kind of a mismatch there to be able to come out and raise them up, raise them up or lower them down as needed. Okay, so this final figure, this shows everything kind of all together. And as we see, we are touching a lot of portions of the plan. An important thing to note is first and foremost, this is over the 20 year timeframe. So this is 20 years worth of projects that is hosted onto a single figure here. And the other thing is all of these projects are about meeting our compliance limits. And so it looks like a lot, but it is all very important to making sure that you all have a modern treatment plant that is up to modern standards. and is able to be run as efficiently and safely as possible.

All right. Thanks, Patrick. Now on to the project cost estimating and how we came up with estimates. So these are class five estimates we're going to go over in the next few slides. They're preliminary and conceptual. with a wide accuracy range from minus 50% to plus 100% is that range. Very typical planning level costs. The mid- and long-term projects need to be refined, and we're in the process of doing that now with our financial consultant. So some primary drivers as to how we got to the cost for the DOWs in particular. It's a very small plant site. There's not a lot of room for lay down of equipment or staging. The plant must remain in compliance. You can't call DEQ and say, hey, we're shutting the plant down for the month while we make improvements. No, it has to keep treating wastewater and meeting compliance. So that requires a lot of bypass pumping and extra manpower already on a tiny site, like I said. And couple that with the construction costs and how much we've seen them escalate since COVID, these are some pretty high numbers So for the near term, I'm not going to go through each one of these. These really account for most of what Patrick's already talked about. But for the near term, we're looking at around $14 million. And it should be noted that the outfall improvements are not included in this cost. So it's going to go up. So that's almost $14 million for the near term. For the midterm, we're looking at just over $50 million. Again, these are going to be refined. And these match the projects that Patrick went over. And for the long term, these are everything out in the 10 to 20 year range. We're at just under $30 million. Again, all this is going to be refined. Don't take these numbers and run with them yet. We're going to have that next workshop with our financial planner. Everything will be refined and we'll start looking into funding and how to pay for everything. So for next steps to finish up this plan, we're gonna finalize the outfall assessment and refine the costs, like I said, continue our financial planning efforts, and then we'll have that rate and SDC study council workshop coming up soon. After that, we will take all the comments, get them addressed and prepare a draft plan for city and DEQ review. And then after another round of addressing comments, we'll finalize the plan, we'll get DEQ approval, and then Dale and team will come back to you for adoption of the facilities plan. And that will be the end of this chapter for the next 10 years. So thank you for having us tonight and we will entertain any questions you may have.

Questions for Austin or Patrick. Dr. Richardson.

Do I have to have one? No. Okay. Let me come up with one. What do your proposed improvements do with regard to sewage treatment plant odor issues? Increase, intensify, or decrease and ameliorate?

That's a great question. I think status quo or decrease, they will not increase. There's a odor removal system treatment system out there now that we've looked at. We did not identify any improvements that are needed for that system. We understand that Oscar and team change out the carbon. frequently. And anything, any project that will be implemented will need to either tie into that odor control system or have an odor control system on its own if it's required.

Status quo. Keep it. Or better. All right. Thank you.

Anybody else? Not a question, but a comment. Years ago, when we looked at the improvements to the plant, we looked at a biogas production. And it was, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was taking the biogas, converting it to steam, driving a generator, taking that electricity and running the... uh... the lights that disinfect that's one thing that could be used with the power and then the remainder of the power that's produced could be sold back on the grid that was that caught my attention at the time, and somewhat it has developed. However, as my tour of the plant, I understand that that's not always working that way. It's not working as we had envisioned.

Correct.

So I would like to encourage that we continue down that path of being able to convert it to electricity, to drive. That drives our... rates of electricity down that we're using just by the wasted gas. Currently it just now ignites and goes into the air, correct? Correct. Boy, it's make good sense to reutilize that. So that I just wanted to point that out, that that would be one thing that I would be looking for in the future when looking at plans.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

I'd like to ask about the term you use as redundancy. Redundancy, I get when you add a piece of equipment to another piece of the same equipment, it provides redundancy. How would you define redundancy as far as, like in a water system, you use it in the same context with the whole sewer system throughout the city? Is that correlate?

Kind of. So I'll take a piece of equipment that we talked about, the thickener, having a redundant thickener. So that would be the exact same piece of equipment duplicated twice. So when one goes down, the other one can take its place, or when one needs some routine maintenance, the other one can operate while it's down. So that's how we think of redundancy.

Okay, thanks. Anybody else? Okay, well, oh, sorry, Councilor Ring.

One of the two quick things that I noticed or that I'm curious about, one would be we hear a lot about SCADA systems and PLCs and things like that. And I know enough about them to be dangerous, but I am fairly technical. I'm curious as to... I guess lifespan, it sounds like some of those are maybe being recommended for replacement. Um, Is there anything related to programming, or are these things so old that we just can't find parts? Yeah, maybe this is good for Dale, but that's kind of the first question I have, is I'm hearing a lot about this, and It seems like it's not, I'm guess I'm a little bit surprised that so many of our SCADA systems are aging, uh, seems rapidly.

Yeah, we have a SCADA upgrade project that's going to be coming before the council, maybe in the end of June for a SCADA upgrade project, just like we did this last year for the SCADA upgrade up at the Wixwater Treatment Plant. We're looking to be doing a SCADA upgrade project at the wastewater facility plant as well, or the treatment plant. I think what they were having mentioning SCADA on their slides was a longer term project. So, you know, you typically look at like that 10 to 20 year you're, you're into replacement and upgrading. And so we'll be, like I said, bringing that upgrade project here to you in the next month. And then as part of the CIP, that's looking farther down the road for replacement and upgrade at that time as well.

Okay, will any of that upgrade have anything to do with our wastewater treatment plant in the future? Or is that just existing systems now?

Yeah, so the upgrade project that we're going to be bringing before the council is going to be a specific one for the wastewater treatment plant here in the next month or so. And then what they had identified as a long-term project, mentioning the SCADA in there, would be a future upgrade project.

Okay. That'll be part of the life cycle management. Correct. Treatment plan is what will come in your report. Correct. Yes. And like you're 18 to 20. Got it. Correct. Okay. Okay. That'll be it. Thanks.

Any other questions?

okay thank you all very much i i would just like to point out briefly you know thank you for coming out and doing the plant tour hopefully that you know helped to make a little bit more sense with what was being somewhat discussed tonight and we'll hope in the future meetings um you know so thank you for sitting and listening through this it's not super exciting um but it is necessary as well and um hopefully will help with the future financial uh discussions as well so thank you appreciate it thank you okay

The City Council will now meet an executive session pursuant to ORS 192.6602D, which allows the Council to meet in an executive session to conduct deliberations with persons designated by the City Council to carry on labor negotiations and We're going into executive session pursuant to ORS 192.6602 , which allows the council to meet in executive session to review and evaluate the employment-related performance of the city manager, city attorney, and municipal judge. Consistent with ORS 192.6604, representatives of the news media are not allowed to attend the portion of tonight's executive session. concerning labor negotiations. However, representatives of the news media and designated staff may attend a portion of tonight's executive session concerning performance evaluations. All other members of the audience may stay in the council chambers during the executive session. Representatives of the news media are specifically directed not to report on or otherwise disclose any of the deliberations or anything said about these subjects during the executive session, except to state the general subject of the session as previously announced. No decision will be made in an executive session. At the end of the executive session, we will return to open session and welcome the audience back into the room. We expect to return in... Two hours? One hour? Let's just say one hour. If any of you are still here, you deserve a lot of credit. With that, we will now convene the conference room. Okay, any other business to come before the city council? None. Okay, let the record show we are adjourning at 9.07. Motion adjourned, or meeting adjourned.