February 27, 2023 Board Meeting
Transcript
Describer:
Board Meeting Agenda
Monday, February 27, 2023, at 6:00 p.m.
7404 Yorkshire Drive, Castle Pines, CO 80108
I. Welcome. Call meeting to order. Pledge of Allegiance.
II. Roll call. Determination of quorum. Disclosure of potential conflicts.
III. Consider approving the February 27th, 2023, board meeting agenda.
IV. Consider approving the board’s January 23rd, 2023, board meeting minutes.
V. Public comment period. (Three-minute maximum per person).
VI. Presentation of Lift Station Rehabilitation findings
A. Greg Sekera to present plan, district manager to provide comments and
staff supported recommendations.
VII. Parks, Trails & Open Space Manager's report.
VIII. Finance Director's report.
A. Overview of 2021 Audit Status
B. Consider approving claims for payment including check numbers 27567-
27640, and electronic payments issued from January 13 through February 22, 2023.
General Fund/Open Space Approve $394,738.36 Ratify $22,028.54 Totals $416,766.90
Enterprise Funds Approve $372,709.82 Ratify $163,466.99 Totals $536,176.81
Electronic Payments (all funds) Approve $0 Ratify $60,668.28 Totals $60,668.28
Total Expenditures Approve $767,448.18 Ratify $246,163.81 Totals $1,013,611.99
IX. Legal Counsel's report.
A. Parks and Open Space IGA
X. District Manager’s Report
XII. Director Lewis- Discussion regarding moving Water and Wastewater functions to the City of Castle Pines, or “dissolving” CPNMD into the City of Castle Pines.
XIII. Directors' matters.
XIV. Adjourn.
Board President Chuck Lowen:
Welcome, everybody, to the board meeting of the Castle Pines North Metro District. Monday, February 27th. Before we get started, I'd like to have you join us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
All:
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.
Chuck:
Thank you very much. We'll do a roll call and let me know if you have any conflicts.
Board Member Director Jason Blankaert:
Director Blankaert. Present. No conflicts.
Board Member Director Chris Lewis:
Director Lewis. Present. No conflicts.
Board Member Director Tera Radloff:
Director. Radloff. Present. No conflicts.
Chuck:
And I am Chuck Lowen. Present. No conflicts. Item number four, Roman numeral four. We have no January 23rd, board meeting minutes. I am told we will get that soon. Counselor.
Legal Counsel Kim Seter, Esq.:
Yes you will. I apologize for not getting them.
Chuck:
Email it to us. Or how do you know?
Kim:
I only email them out to you, and then we can deal with them at the next board,
Chuck:
with the next board meeting.
Okay. Thank you very much. Public comment period. Do we have it? Yes.
Chris:
We still have to approve the agenda.
Chuck:
Thank you very much, Chris. Item number three. I didn't want to forget approving tonight's board meeting agenda. Can I hear a motion.
Board Voting All Speak:
I make a motion to approve the the board meeting agenda for February 27th. Second. I'll second.
Okay. Director Blankaert would Approve. Director. Crew. Crew. ..... Director Lewis. Approved. And Director Radloff. I. Thank you. The February 27th, 2023 board meeting agenda has been approved.
Chuck:
We'll move over Item Roman numeral number four and go right to the public comment period. Do we have anybody signed up to speak?
District Manager Nathan Travis:
And nobody on zoom.
Chris:
Is this the new zoom or you we were talking about. Or is this did you originally.
Nathan:
Yeah. So we're using the new zoom protocol. The biggest difference is the, prior one required you to sign up at noon the day before, and then you'd get zoom credentials later in the day. Now all you have to do is click a link.
It'll drop you in a meeting and say that you'd like to speak. The link still goes through the existing website, so it's much simpler using the same links and spots that it was before.
Chris:
Thank you. I just wanted to make sure to we had made it as open and as easy for the community to join, and sounds like we made it easier.
Correct. Folks just decided not to join. Got it.
Chuck:
So no, nobody wanting to speak during the public comment period will go from, Roman numeral five to Roman numeral six. The presentation of the station rehab rehabilitation findings. Greg Sekera, you're on. Thank you for coming tonight. And thank you for your report.
Nathan:
And, just for board clarity, this is the, presentation that Kennedy Jenks has been working on for a little bit more than a year.
It's kind of a jumping off point for us to decide what direction we want to take. This is also directly related to the compliance advisory that we've been under from the state, since early August, late July.
Tera:
So this is that plan in response to the letter. This is the part of it.
Nathan:
Yeah. This is the options for that plan.
So they've done an initial design review. And then we kind of select the path we want to take from here.
Chuck:
We will select the plan we want to take from here for the for the state.
Nathan:
Not the specific total plan but the direction we want to go. And you'll understand more as we go through the presentation. All right.
Thanks, Greg.
Greg Sekera, Kennedy Jenks:
Thank you. So I don't really have anything formal prepared for yet, but I assume you all have the memo. And, that we prepared. Lisa Swain is is showing as from this, her and I work jointly with this, but, she's she's very familiar with the district. Is is I am as well. And so, we worked on this together.
I guess I would just start by saying, you know, we reviewed all the district's existing lift stations. And really reviewed it, reviewed them with the, the current regulations in mind and how they these are, are consistent with the current engineering standards for the Colorado Department of Health and Environment or, and or the Cherry Creek base and Water Quality authority that the, the lift stations lie within that we also have to conform to as well as looking at, you know, the past reviews that were done by, by Jacobs as part of the Parker, inclusion review and then also with, the Hayes Sawyer when they also looked at them as well.
Really, in a nutshell, all of the the seven list stations, the district has eight lift stations. The ninth list station is the Legae of station. That's the newer one. And that's all that that list stations all in conformance with, the current engineering standards. The other the other seven are are not. And the biggest issues are really there is no overflow protection.
If there was a catastrophic, failure of any lift stations, unable to pump wastewater, they would overflow and go into a drainage way, which is a major violation. And so the state and the Water Quality Basin Authority require overflow protection for that to not happen. And give the district time to respond to make the lift station run again.
The other big
Tera:
Just one quick question, Greg, because that's what happened when we had the spill that we were written up before. Correct. That there was no overflow.
Gera:
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't the cause. That wasn't the cause of the lift station overflowing. But yes, that's correct. Yes. Because the because it overflowed into a drainage way. That's a violation.
Nathan:
Yeah. And just for, just for clarity, leading into the, the, the state document that was sent to us that wasn't in response to any single event. It was much more driven by the number of events that we had in a short period of time. So over a period of like two, two and a half years, I think we had 7 or 8, 7 or 8 overflow events.
The last one, at lift station two is what triggered the city to send a letter. And so, we were already on the state's radar before that. So we've been reporting these. The number of we were getting was really unacceptable. And so the state was had already kind of given us a heads up that we might even see a compliance advisory come down.
And it was just a matter of time when. And so the the driving cause of them is really just that the stations are too old and need a lot of upgrades, which is what's causing the overflows. There's just absolutely zero room for error. So when you have aging stations and no overflow protection, every tiny mistake on a really old building ends up directly on the ground.
And that's where we were getting so many violations from. So we would have likely been able to avoid SSO's if the sanitary sewer overflows, if we had overflow containment, but we weren't able to. So it's, it's kind of a chicken and egg situation. One causes that, the other one stops that. If either were in place, we probably would have been.
Okay.
Tera:
I appreciate you providing that context. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt.
Chuck:
That's Greg on the, page five, table two. is it, my understanding that items, on the lift stations one and two are recommended to be decommissioned
Greg:
So that that was an option? We looked at, that, that was really requested by Nathan to look to see if one and two could be, removed from the system.
Abandoned. And, and and a line, built from those, those two locations over to lift station five. We did look at that. And it is possible. However, it's, it's, very costly and,
Not sure it's really, really something we want to do. I mean, it's just it's very costly, very disruptive. It would take a long time. We'd have to acquire right away property to do it. So, I mean, it's an option that we could consider further if, if desired. But really, I think our recommendation is not to go that route.
Nathan:
Okay. And for for context, for context on that, I did look at that a little bit further, and I apologize. I hadn't had a chance to talk to Greg about this. But I did want I did want to kind of run out the timeline. It would extend the timeline, which is a negative. It would also require some higher engagement.
There are some properties, like Greg mentioned, that we'd have to look at easements for. I think one thing that's really important to note on all of this, you know, if we're looking through for the, the, the difference between those two costs. So in the initial, without decommissioning, with stations one and two, you get to about 6.5 million and then with condition with, decommissioning those ones, that brings you up to 9.3.
So that is a substantial increase. A couple things that to keep in mind.
Chuck:
Let's get to the cost in just a minute.
Tera:
Yeah, yeah. Can we I feel like we skipped ahead a little bit and we jumped in the middle of Greg's presentation. I'm sorry to interrupt. Could you kind of continue with your presentation and then that might answer some of our questions?
Nathan:
Thank Tera, sir, I apologize.
Greg:
Yeah. So,
So as far as deficiencies go with, with all the lift stations, we, we talked about the overflow protection. That's the number one thing. The other the other big thing is, is the state and and Cherry Creek Basin Authority require meters on both ends of the force main. So at the lift station and then where the force main, ends and turns to gravity.
Those are those are two large improvements that would, that would that need to be done on all the lift stations. And then as, as Nathan mentioned, there's, you know, there's aging equipment, equipment that, needs to be upgraded pumps, electrical instrumentation, SCADA which, which communicates the alarms, to the operations team so that they can respond quicker and, and, have have greater ability to, to see what's going on at the lift stations themselves and anticipate any problems.
All that needs to be upgraded. Additional power backup in some cases. So, you know, that's that's kind of a high level of of what we looked at and what needs to be done on all the lift stations. And then we prepared, opinions of cost, which, you know, I have to really add a disclaimer with those these days.
I mean, as you know, its costs are extremely hard to, to estimate in this environment. And so,
So we we looked at the cost, we could talk about those. And then, we also looked at an estimated schedule to design and get approvals from the state and the Basin Authority, and then also to construct. And finish the improvements.
Chuck:
Thank you. I wanted to go back on locations one and two. Where are they?
Lift stations, one and two.
Nathan:
Yeah. So lift stations one and to sit right in the middle of our open space, they're both off of Hidden Point Boulevard, roughly. So one is, it'd be the South east corner out in the out in the field of, Monarch and Hidden Point Boulevard. You can kind of see it out there.
It's about eight feet off one of our trails. And then Lift Station one is directly north of that. It's further down, Serena Avenue. And it's kind of like if you visualize when we talk about the Douglas County property that the city's been talking about purchasing, and Coyote Ridge Park, it's like right in the middle of those.
And it is actually physically on our trail system. So while you're going down the trail, you have to avoid that building to continue along.
Chuck:
Okay. Thank you. Greg, on page six, the, capital costs and the decommissioning cost, table three and four. Would you explain those to me a little bit more?
Greg:
Sure. So the the first table that has a total of six, 6.5 million, that is that is to keep all seven lift stations the way they are, or keep them, but but improve them to add the overflow protection the meters and upgrade all the equipment so not decommission any of the lift stations and then and then table
table four the 9.3 million is if we were to decommission one and two and reroute their flows to five, which would require upgrading station five, pumping capacity, to do that. So
Chuck:
Okay, I get now.
Okay.
And your time schedule. I know those are always guesstimates. How how accurate do we do? You, feel that Kennedy Jenks that these are realistic?
Not putting you on the spot? Yeah.
Greg:
It's. No, it's a it's a it's amazing to do that. Yeah, it's a very good question. And you know, I mean.
Knowing that the district really needs to get this work done. And as you know, Nathan is really kind of pushing us to, to keep going on this, you know, we, we we tried to be we tried to balance, you know, how how aggressive to make this, really the final design that that's really all we really have control over on this schedule.
CDPHE is. Really just, you know, they're. We have no control over them, and it's really a guess of how long it's going to take them to review. I mean, this would be a big review project for them. They're very short staffed and very, backed up. Okay.
Chuck:
Yeah, that's what I was wondering about. Yeah. Employee. Yeah.
Numbers. And exactly parts. Okay.
Greg:
And then, you know, construction is has all of its challenges as well. material delivery is probably the biggest issue right now, especially on the electrical side of things.
Chuck:
Are there are all of these lift stations. Another leading question. Is there one worse than any other or is there should we start one at a time?
I, I or do you even know of that answer, or are they all bad?
Greg:
Honestly, they're they're they're they're they're all bad. They're all bad. They all have the same, same major issues. And, honestly, if you do one, the state and the Basin Authority are going to ask, why aren't you doing the others at the same time? I think it would be efficient to do them all at the same time.
But I, I don't know, Nathan, if you have an opinion on which is worse. I mean, I think maybe the two that have the Smith and Loveless pumps maybe. But.
Nathan:
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things when we when we evaluate that and when we talking about that in terms of like the asset condition, we're looking at a COF scale which is a consequence of failure.
And so it's really two separate questions left station four, which is a tiny little lift station down the hill here is probably in by far in the worst condition. We can't keep rats, rats nests out of it. It's got all kinds of crazy issues. It's old, it's dilapidated. But it's actually pretty low on our COF scale.
It only has 12 houses. If it completely fails, it barely even fills up the little wet well that it's in right there. If it fails, there's really not a large negative that we could probably keep it pumped down with back trucks for a number of months if we really, really had to. So like, it's our assets, our worst condition. One of our lift station three, which is actually doing much better than some of the other lift stations, we've had the most upgrades there.
It's got the newest pumps. We've done some pretty decent SCADA upgrades. It still has the, complete and total lack of any kind of overflow overflow protection. So even though it's probably in better condition than, most of the other lift stations on, this list, it's the most dangerous because it has roughly 485,000 gallons of wastewater that go through it.
So when it goes down, the the event is bad and it's bad instantly. And so that's kind of like what Greg was pointing to is you can there's a lot of ways you can look at this, but really all of them need to be renovated pretty significantly in some way or another. And the faster we can get that done, the better.
I don't know if that answered your question.
Chuck:
No. Thank you. Yeah. I'm assuming with my limited knowledge that the the most critical issue is the vault overflow storage for each one of these units. I know that that was, a hot button with Parker, and, obviously it should be a hot button for us. Is that is that correct in stating that's probably one of the most critical issues to get after sooner than later?
Nathan:
Exactly. And so since all of those sites need improved overflow protection, that doesn't make a lot of sense to not get all of them. And so, you know, once you do overflow, you move into that adding overflow protection. You're going to have to do a permit application anyway. When you do a permit application, you have to make sure the entire site is brought up to speed.
So we can't just fix that one issue because it's going to trigger your trigger, a permit process that requires us to fix all of them and bring them all fully compliant. Questions.
Chris:
So on the two options, right. You've got the first one where we just upgrade all the lift stations or the other one where we eliminate one and two.
What's, why are we suggesting eliminating one and two?
Nathan:
So this is the the path I would prefer to go. And there's a number of reasons that you'd want to do this. So one, it corrects a poorly designed system in the first place. So when we started as a district we really looked at everything individual filing. So that's why we have so many lift stations in the first place.
And lift stations one and two. If we did decommission them it would require an upsize of lift station five, but basically all of those flows would go there. And that kind of sits down at the the back part of Hidden Point. And even with that higher financial lift, you know, if we're looking at a difference of, you know, roughly $3 million, I did some, some kind of baseline, like cost projections.
And so over the projected life of a lift station, you're looking at like 25 years before you're going to have to do either a full replacement or a significant upgrade, which is where we're at right now. So over the span of that 25 years, you're looking roughly at $1.1 million in savings just over maintenance costs. So we're reducing a huge amount of maintenance that has to be done.
And then at the end of that 25 years, you're back to where we are now. So you're looking at probably like another 2 to $3 million investment. So in the worst worst case scenario, by eliminating those two now over the life of that asset, you're you're going to break even. And then the other side of that is just public, the general public benefit of getting two wastewater lift stations out of parks and recreational areas, you know, where people walking on their trails, they've got their kids and dogs and bikes and all of that other stuff.
Having to walk through our amazing trail system, which will, with any luck, be long the care of the city then, and not have to walk past a lift station which is invariably just not a pleasant experience to go past so we can get get these things out of like public view, get them out of really critical areas. And then over one life cycle, at the very least, break even with the higher cost projection and then moving forward beyond that, you're just forever stacking that savings.
Chris:
What about the actual capacity requirements going down from the reducing those to just a current system or exist the future system we have have the capacity to accommodate all the.
Nathan:
Yeah. And so part of the part of that, rerouting of those two lift stations to lift station five. So one and two would be eliminated. That flow would ultimately end up at lift Station five.
Lift station five would be upgraded to handle all of that capacity for forever. There are some other considerations to put to think about along those lines. So we do have, like Greg mentioned, it requires us to get a lot of easements to move through a lot of different things with homeowners. There would have to be on our part a pretty heavy public outreach to really talk through people, through the talk this through people.
Tera:
That's one of the things that I was hoping that you could add some clarity. It didn't look really clear because, I mean, on the map, you're you're you've got people's homes identified, and I, you know, it does say, you know, would likely require acquisition, which could be not only problematic, but we don't know how much it would cost.
And we don't know how long that would add to the schedule, how long it would take to get those acquisitions. But if you could I know there were maps that had identified some of that, but if you could help me understand what we're talking about there, and maybe that's why, Greg, you were saying that may not be the recommended.
I mean, operationally, absolutely understand why that makes sense. It just I would need a lot more information to understand how we're going to get this. You know, these acquisitions and people's homes have been identified. So what are we asking? What are we asking from them?
Chuck:
Nathan, did I understand you to say you preferred, the decommissioning table or the capital cost table to three or table for table four?
That was your. That's your preference,
Nathan:
Correct? Yeah. And it doesn't come without its headaches. And also my background is operations.
Chuck:
So based upon what Tera just outlined. Yeah. And I just know more a lot more detail about that.
Greg:
Yeah. I would just say, you know, we did this is a very, very high level look at, look at it that, you know, those alignments and those options and what properties we, you know, we would definitely need to do, some additional, surveying, actual field surveying and some, looking at some property parcel information a lot closer to really kind of tie all that down to really see how this, this
would work. And,
Chuck:
Well, we're looking at,
pumps one and two, decommissioning them or not. And the studies need to advance on easements and property acquisitions. Is there anything to stop us from, working on the other pumps based on the use recommendations? Except for, lift Station five, which is going to be combined by, potentially adding two and one and two.
We can still start the work. Can we?
Greg:
We could we could still start the work. And, you know,
Chuck:
they can run in tandem with each other.
Greg:
That's correct. And and even on one and two and five, we would we would be look we could look at both options as you know, in more detail as, as we're going through the design of the other ones as well.
So it's just it is it is more engineering time and surveying costs, to do that. But to do to, to look at, to look at decommissioning one and two.
Chuck:
I get that, I understand that, it will take more time, but rather than wait until that work is done, we could address the other pumps simultaneously. Absolutely. Yeah.
Chris:
So I guess this question is for both you and Nathan.
And, so I understand where you're going with this, Nathan. And, I definitely share the same concerns that Tera brought up on the homeowners and the property tax, the property out there that we might have to acquire or just rerouting anything through there. Right. I guess what is the recommendation you're recommending? That we eliminate those two?
What? What are you recommending?
Greg:
I agree, if if we can see if we any any time you can get rid of a lift station, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. Yeah. Because it's really it really is O&M. They're just, you know, they're the most intensive part of a wastewater system.
So, you know, it's a good thing, but it it is more cost and time to do that. Right. And disruptive. You know, we we could be looking at pretty significant disruptions in, in that in that Hidden point roadway if we have to put a sewer line in there, you know, so
Chris:
Alrighty, that’s the only thing I have, what do you need from us?
We work on and you need us. I'm sorry. What do you need from us? What kind of decision do you need? And, do you need us to give you direction tonight? One way or the other? Just tell me what you need.
Nathan:
Yeah, I think that at this point, I would ask for direction to move forward with the design on all of the lift station, like the full design, getting ready for permit application on all of the lift stations, with the exception of lift stations two and one, and do a deeper design feasibility on the stations two and one to really have a better understanding of the probabilities what the actual like paths would be
Impact to homeowners and stuff like that. So get capture, capture the time we have right now and really get moving on everything else. But also, take a deeper dive on that lift station one and two possible decommissioning.
Chuck:
Before we do that, again, I'd appreciate if you could placate me a little bit. I'm looking at the pictures of Lift Station.
one, and the outside building in the inside building. Help me with, what? What are the issues? Is is it the piping? Is it the underground? equipment? what? Those those look really nice, and I think they look like they're very well kept up, which I appreciate, Nathan, but something's hidden in there that I'm not seeing.
Nathan:
The biggest issues with lift Station one are all going in are going to be just the higher level issues. So those the pumps in there are relatively new. They're in decent condition. I think we replace the actual pumps within the last ten years or so. That's why they're a different color. The, it doesn't have any overflow protection like the rest of them.
It also needs the upstream, uphill and downhill, downstream, meters to be or something. Sorry. The discharge and outfall meter is meters to be installed. So there are some compliance issues in terms of like pumping reliability and like the actual condition the pumps are in, it's really not that bad. It's going to need some upgrades to the SCADA system.
Which is the, you know, the way that that plant communicates, with us and the, the data, the data that it keeps. But in terms of the actual like, pumps, it's not in awful condition. So the majority cost that we're looking at in these seven lift stations, if we, aside from, decommissioning two of them and bringing them to, Pump Station five is primarily the the overflow situation, correct?
Greg:
Correct. To, well, the other those are, you know, that we got to bury we got to bury big faults in the ground.
Chuck:
Okay. And that's it. It's surrounded by concrete and everything else so it doesn't leak. And how big are those vaults? Just out of curiosity.
Greg:
Well, yeah, that's you know, that's really going to depend on what the land area we have available to bury these vaults.
But, typically the most efficient, most cost effective is to do precast vaults or, and they're usually ten by ten, 12 by 12ft. That's the footprint. But then, you know, they're deep. They got to be deeper than, than the existing lift here. So yeah. Interesting. Okay. So yeah, it's they're, they're they're costly.
Nathan:
I had, one question.
Is there, last, last I checked, CDPHE hadn't done anything with allowing them. Are they have they started to look at, standalone dry fire systems as a possible alternative to overflow vaults. Drive fire. They're like the like it's basically a lift station in a box that's diesel powered. And they have, and I don't understand the mechanism how it works, but they've can basically go from not primed to instantly self priming, and then you tie them back into the force, main it like a wire with a check valve.
I didn't know if that was something they've looked at or if that's even remotely cost effective.
Greg:
You know, it's it's it's a really good option. And I think, you know, we'll be looking at that at with station three where we can't where we really can't get to the land area to put in overflow protection. And really what it is, is it's a completely separate pumping system to be used in an emergency with a so it's like it's, it's it's own pump and it's own on it's own power supply that's independent of the other, power main power supply for the, for the station.
So if, if all that station fails and the power supply to the main live station, this pump would kick on with a complete different power source and then pump into the with a force mains.
Chuck:
Which raises a different another question in this regard on these costs. Greg and Nathan, are we if we did this, are we looking at, the newest and best or are we just using old standard stuff and hoping we get by for the next hundred years?
Nathan:
I think is a is a district and certainly, Greg. And correct me if I'm wrong, I've worked with them long enough to know that, generally speaking, we don't ever approach anything looking for either of those. What we're looking for is the best application for the situation to get the best results. So I don't necessarily want to take the newest and greatest everything and throw it at a specific scenario, because I don't want to spend a lot of money on something that could be extreme overflow for overkill for a project.
At the same time, I don't want to do it the way it's always been done because that's the worst reason to do anything. And so really trying to find that, happy medium by coming up with the design that's, you know, as cost effective as it can while being, you know, very operationally feasible for a long time is important.
Yeah. And, you know, I don't, you know, compliance is the compliance is a baseline. You know, that's the minimum you have to hit without getting out of trouble. And I think when you aim for compliance as a goal, you can really put your hurt yourself in a lot of other ways. So you start looking at like operational efficiencies and ways that you can make these stations last longer with the lowest maintenance level possible.
All of those are factors that we just routinely kind of matter of factly pull into these and these discussion. So we don't want to automatically go for the most expensive new technology, because honestly, it may not be the best for our, our application. Or it might be, it's just one of those things that we, we evaluate on a station by station problem by problem basis.
Chuck:
Appreciate a good comments I understand it. Why are we going? Why would we go take out one and two and go to five. Why not just it looks like three is a straight shut down. So yeah.
Nathan:
So one of the things that you miss on this type of graphic is topography. And that's what's 100% driven by all of these.
So lift station five is at a lower elevation. And lift stations one and two between lift station three and the station one and lift station two is a big hill and so that's what lift stations are designed to do, is just pump wastewater uphill when it can't go anymore. And so that's why those are really the only two we could actually look at eliminating anyway, just because of the elevation of the flow patterns.
Chuck:
Thanks. Greg Kennedy Jenks has done this kind of work before. I'm assuming your company does this all over the state or the nation or.
Greg:
Absolutely. So our Colorado office. Yes, we've done we've done a lot of lift stations, and we we also, operate and maintain, oversee the operation and maintenance of lift stations in other, other districts.
but we've done design and design reviews. Upgrades O&M on lift stations.
Chuck:
So, so, so I'm assuming that, the recommendations that you make to Nathan relative to the design and, and to the basic infrastructure, parts and material are not necessarily the latest, greatest, but the most appropriate for this use in this district.
Greg:
Absolutely.
Yeah. And really. Really? No. No one else is doing lift stations any different than these than we're recommending. I mean, we all have to use the same equipment. We all have to live by the same engineering standards at state. The state just last year, updated all of their engineering standards for lift stations. So, okay,
Chuck:
So a lot of people are doing a lot of work.
Yes, yes. All right. I appreciate that. going back to Chris's question, Nathan, what what would you like to see tonight?
Nathan:
Yeah. So tonight, I just, ask that the board approve the, move toward the final design on all of the lift stations, with the exception of lift stations one and two. And look at a and, also approve a feasibility study for, a deeper dive into one and two so we can get a better handle on, the feasibility of decommissioning those and the process
Chuck:
Before we do that, board, any further questions?
Tera. Chris. I'm good. Okay, good. Can I get a motion to move to a final design? And secondarily, a feasibility study. Nathan. That. Correct? Correct.
Chris:
So I make a motion to move to final design for the either the upgrade, or the elimination of 1 or 2 of the, the lift station. So from the recommendations you have here, I kind of like two I think you seem that that's the best solution.
It's a little more expensive, but I want you to go ahead and do that design, move ahead in the design and then the feasibility study to, support that. And, we want you to do that with the least impact on the schedule. So we want you to keep the schedule the best you can.
Board Voting All Speak:
Second, do I hear a second? Oh, second. We will call a vote director Blankaert. Yeah. Director. Lewis. Yeah. And director Radloff. I. The motion pass.
Chuck:
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Say. And, Nathan, is. Is there anything else you have regarding this item?
Nathan:
That's all I have for that item.
Chris:
I just want to confirm, Chuck, your vote is a yay or nay.
So then we are 4 to 0 or whatever.
Chuck:
I'm kind of keeping it under wraps. Motion carried. I'm happy to approve it. okay. I like the report. Greg. Thank you very much.
Greg:
Thank you. Thank you for, reviewing it and the good questions and and the confidence you have in us and Nathan to get this, this done.
We'll we'll do our best to accomplish the goal.
Chuck:
I hate to spend the money, but we are, What a community that's over 40 years old now. And, as you get older, your pipes don't last. Trust me. So, thanks again very much, Nathan. Nice report.
Nathan:
And Greg and I take back everything that we've ever said about you guys behind your back, so we appreciate that as well too.
Chuck:
Okay. All right, that being said, we have completed agenda item number six, the, item number seven. David Anderson for parks, trails and open Space.
Operations Manager David Anderson:
You have my small report. It's been pretty, pretty slow with the weather and stuff. So, trying to gear up for the the summer.
Chuck:
I noticed going down, Castle Pines Parkway, we've got quite a few trees with orange or blue tapes around. And what's the difference between an orange and a blue?
David:
Orange? It's eliminate. You can't. We don't think we can save it. And, green and blue or we're we're trying some different methods of injection into the trees and with fertilizers and insecticides just to see if we can, to save it.
Hopefully we can save it. It's never been done here in the district. So we're gonna we're going to try.
Chuck:
Give it a try. So, thank you. And I personally, I think the snow removal, has been excellent. Am I missing something?
David:
Oh, no. You're it. It's been pretty tough. It's been. It's the toughest year I've had because it just didn't melt
Chuck:
And then doesn't melt.
But, I mean, we've cleaned them pretty good.
David:
Yeah, we we've had a couple issues, but we've addressed them and we're moving on. So yeah, it's it's been a tough year for snow.
Chuck:
Well I think you're right. I think you guys have done a great job. Thank you. Regardless of whether it's tough or not. That's the climate we live in and we deal with it.
That is where I think you guys dealt with it. Thank you. Nice job. Any comments on, David Anderson's report?.
Tera:
Yeah, I just want to, commend you for taking your getting certified for the playground safety inspector. I, I like that you're always want to increase your skills, and I think that sounds like a great benefit. Thank you.
Chuck:
Playground safety inspector. Does that mean that when a kid falls off the slide, we're all in trouble?
David:
Well, we make sure that it's to code, and then if he falls off, that's his problem.
Chuck:
Okay. All right. Congratulations on that. Any other questions? All right. Let's close.
Chris:
Just one also on item three. Does that mean we're going to go ahead and do it.
David:
I'm not sure yet. I'm going to try to find if I can get somebody to come in and laser grade it. And and we use the same material that is out there. I think we're going to probably go that route this year. So.
Chris:
Okay. Well, the reason I ask is I want to make sure that whatever your solution is and I'm not going to second guess you, but this is part of the parks, trails and open space that we're going to transfer if we decide to go that route.
No, I want to make sure we we are actually providing our assets in the best, state that we can. Correct. Okay.
Chuck:
And but I still believe we're obligated to maintain them. Oh, absolutely. Thank you. Anybody else? Close this item number seven and move to the finance director's report. Good evening. Phyllis.
Phyllis Brown, Director of Finance and Accounting Community Resource Services of Colorado (CRS):
Hello. How are you? All good.
You're up. Okay. first overview of the, you guys have, pages with the financial reports on it. We do. Okay. I'll go over the audit first for, you know, pretty much the same spot we were last month. We're waiting for the auditor to be able to complete the audit. Well, it's getting closer now because they're saying, April,
And if they could squeeze time in before that, then we'll continue helping them, continuing to work on getting the numbers sorted out for 2022 as well as keeping up on 2023 current activities. So we're doing three years all at once.
Chuck:
So quick, quick question on the audit. Phyllis, this is for 2021, correct? Correct. And we're now in 2023, are we what, in violation with anything.
Phyllis:
We are or which we talked about that before that that there's, the repercussions of that is not because they would withhold your property taxes until you get the audit in which, fortunately, we're not in a cash crunch position, but that does, not work for a
lot of districts. And then we're, not supposed to be able to get an extension for this current year for 2022. Audit. But as time ticks on it, the repercussions don't get any worse. It's just those are the repercussions.
Chuck:
When that 2021 audits completed. And closed what you estimated that date for that particular year for 22. Well, for 2021.
Phyllis:
Oh, you say that again,
Chuck:
The 2021 audit, which, we're doing right now. Right. And when will that be complete?
Phyllis:
Well, if they start at the beginning of April, I would hope we'd have it done by the end of April. And then I want them to start right away on doing the next year, because as soon as we get final adjustments for 21, we could complete the accounting work for 22 and get back to them as quickly as possible to get them started on that, because I would like to have that one done by July 31st.
Chuck:
Do we submit those to the state? Yep we do. Would we submit them together or independently?
Phyllis:
They go separately? Yep. You just upload each one as you get them completed.
Chuck:
Okay.
Okay. All right. Let's go ahead.
Phyllis:
Okay. On the.
I'm going to go over here to this page, hold on. On the financial report where, you know, at the beginning of the year, and although I said, they were going to hold our taxes, we had 120,876 so far this year, which is more than what we had at the same year. And enterprise usage is up 30, 31% over the prior year.
Going bills usage.
And next would be claims.
Unless, I don't know what page it is on your budget, on your agenda because I don't have that copy.
Chris:
So, I mean, Phyllis, can you help me here? Which page are you on as you're reading that? Because if I'm looking at the property tax ownership here, I thought it said a total of 120,876.
Phyllis:
That's what I said, 120,000.
Chris:
I thought I heard 80. Sorry.
Phyllis:
No no 120.
Tera:
So do we know why I were billed usage was up 31% year over year.
Phyllis
Well, I don't know why. I mean, because we can ask, but, a lot of times. Yeah, it's just has to I. I can't answer that. I'm going to look. It's gone up, up, up here.
Right. Each year it's gone up up and up I don't know. So I could I can ask our billing people to look at that or Nathan may know.
Tera:
I mean, January doesn't seem like it would be a high water usage month.
Nathan:
Yeah. So we're talking total usage over. last year we did have, and I'd have to go back and look at the total number.
But we did issue many, many more taps than we had originally projected. So we we issued a we issued a ton of taps that I think we were somewhere in like the like the I don't know, I don't want a ballpark it I can get that number.
Phyllis:
It was 200. It was 204, I think I remember. So yeah. So over 200.
Nathan:
And then we might also be, we might also be seeing the kind of the repercussions of some, just equipment issues that we were fighting for a bunch of reasons. We had a and I just I'm not exactly sure when a lot of this hit, but we did have a period of time where we had a relative number of accounts that we weren't able to capture the usage on, and we were waiting on all kinds of stuff.
A lot of it was equipment that we were trying to get from census that had been ordered a year and a half ago. And so as we got all of those in, there was, a number of accounts I don't remember the the total number of them that we were captured, that we just didn't get any usage numbers.
So they were still getting billed for all of their minimums. But we had this, like, we got it kind of all caught up on once on a bunch of them. And so all their, their usage basically for some of the accounts, six months, some of them almost a year, all showed up on one bill. And so that's also going to artificially kind of raise that number.
And it's a revenue that we should have captured last year that we're capturing at the beginning of this. We've been working with, a lot of customers on that issue specifically, we went through manually identified all of those bills. We sent them a letter that, you know, we had a lot of internal discussions on the best way to handle that.
We obviously needed to recover our costs for producing that water, but we also didn't feel great about slamming somebody with all of their usage for an entire year at once. So, from a customer perspective, to offset that, we basically worked with them to set if they needed to, and we didn't really have that many ultimately decided to do it, but basically put a give us a zero interest payment schedule for however far out they needed to, to kind of balance, you know, the immediate impact of that.
And then we also obviously took away any tiered penalties. And that was part of the trying to catch all of those, especially in January when your indoor usage budget is 6000 gallons and you've got 70,000 gallons of usage, the bills insanely high because, you know, all of that is billed at that highest tiered rate. So we stripped all of that out and then worked with those customers individually to make sure that we didn't didn't hurt them too badly and begged for forgiveness and gave all kinds of apologies.
But it went it went pretty well. I think we're, well past, getting caught up on that. But those are the two biggest factors.
Tera:
Thank you. And I don't know who added the screen over there, but thank you for that. Phyllis. It's good to see you. I could never see you because you're at the end of the table, so hey there.
And thank you.
Nathan:
That that would be our awesome man behind the camera in the back who was able to solve that issue when I brought it to his attention after. I think pretty much all of you mentioned that you couldn't see anybody on the screen at some point. So.
Phyllis:
Well, I, I'm all right with you not seeing me.
All right. That's fine. You can see me if you want.
I don't know about you guys, but having the the zoom meeting has just been hard having to look at yourself all day long. Kind of hard anyway. So, where are we at? We're at Claims. And I need to go back to the agenda. Hold on. because that's where the numbers are.
So I haven't been getting the a copy of the agenda that you guys have. So I'm working on our documents. So I apologize for not being able to tell you the number, the page numbers. So on your agenda, item number seven shows the claims that need to be paid. You want me to read those numbers off so you can see them?
Chuck:
I can, I can handle that. okay. I think, you've given us an overview of the 2021 audit status, and, other accounting and financial updates. Do you have any other items you'd like to add before we get to the, payment of checks? Nope. Okay, let's, let's take on item number, B of Roman numeral eight, and consider approving claims for payment checks.
Number 27567 and 27640, and electronic payments issued from January 13th through February 22nd, 2023. The general fund. We need to approve $394,738.36. Ratify $22,028.54 for total of $416,766.90. The Enterprise Fund $372,709.82. Ratify $163,466.99, for a total of $536,176.81. Electronic payments Ratify $60,668.28 for a like total.
Total expenditures for the dates previously given were 700. And, we're approving $767,448.18. Ratifying $246,163.81, for a total of 1 million, $1,013,611.99. Can I hear a an approval to that motion, which was just made?
Board Voting All Speak:I'll move to approve. We have a motion to approve those expenditures. Do we have a second that we have a second, call a vote.
Director Blankaert. Ye.... Director Lewis. I. Director Radloff. I. And I am also an I. Motion passes.
Chuck:
Thank you very much. Phyllis. Is there anything else you need to add, or are there any questions that we may have for Phyllis?
Phyllis, thank you for your your efforts. Appreciate it. Okay. Thanks. Let's close out, item eight and move to item number nine. Legal Counsel's report.
Kim Seter.
Kim:
You have a copy of my report in your packet. We definitely need to talk about the facilities. Recreational facilities, IGA. And then I also have an update on the election. t]Today was the last day for riding candidates, and Friday was the last day for self nomination forms. And we have, quite a few people running.
Their names are JD Labu Jr, Matthew Vogel, Thomas Coffey, Jana Krell, Martin Olson, David Becker, Leah Enquist and James Mulvey. So that's for two positions. So it's very unlikely we're going to get to cancel the election this year.
Chuck:
I think it's for three positions,
Kim:
Three positions. Right okay.
Chuck:
What's the next step with that counselor?
Kim:
Mitch will close out the nominations as she priority did today. And then, she'll take care of getting the ballots and everything together. And we'll have an election in May, and we'll see who fills those seats somewhere between now and then. And I'm not sure what the deadline is. She'll have a lot drawing for the different, terms, different lengths of terms.
And then we proceed to the election. Okay. Okay, Then, with regard to the IGA, you have a copy of that with some of my handwritten notes on it. And the second item in the status report are the I tried to pull the questions that I had with regard to the draft IGA for you to give me some guidance on, and we can either go through the IGA, kind of a high level if you want to, or we can just go right to the questions in the memorandum, your preference.
We can also do this in executive session if you want to. I personally don't see any reason to because we are, we're going to do what we want to do, and then the city is going to respond. So they're going to hear it either way.
Chuck:
I think that's fine. I do have a few comments. If.
You would placate me. I'm interested in how we are handling, item number articles two under excuse me, under the the whereas is page two. The.
Whereas in oh, it's halfway down the page that, talks about the parties desire to enter into this agreement to memorialize the district's obligation to contribute on an annual basis toward defraying the city's costs associated with the recreational properties as set forth in this agreement. My question to that one, where it says contribute on an annual basis, is is there a drop dead period?
Chris:
Can you give me page number?
Chuck:
It's the second page before it, before article one. It's the, fourth Whereas up there.
Kim:
o at the moment, the way the agreement is drafted, the city will go to an election to get their own mill levy in 2020 3rd November. If they don't get it, they'll go again in 2024.
And then the language in here states that after that point, the city can choose to flip the property back to the district if they can't get a mill levy. That was one of the items that I think we have an issue with. Not sure how you want to address it. The last time we talked, there was discussion about not wanting those properties to come back.
So the issue would be whether will continue to contribute the mill levy if it goes beyond 2024, which I think we have to, because you're going to want those properties to be maintained. But keeping in mind always that when the city goes to election, we're going to tell people our mill levy is going away, of course.
So they should vote for it, but who knows. Right.
Chuck:
So yeah, of course. So we're it says contribute on an annual basis. This is contingent on the city's vote being approved and everything transferred. And our annual contribution terminates. Yes.
Kim:
So if the if the voters approve their mill levy this coming November, then January 1st of 2024, we will not impose our mill levy.
Chuck:
Right. Okay. And then next one on the, to two more, whereas is down. That is, a question about the mill Levy. Nathan. And you might have a suggestion on, 19 Mills.
Nathan:
Yeah. I handed you guys a quick break down. I also gave this to Kim, too. And I think, for clarity, when we talk about our mill levy going away, ultimately, what we're really saying is that our, our mill levy will reduce exactly proportionate to whatever the city's ultimate mill levy is.
So if they get 15 mills, we would ultimately reduce ours, really wherever we needed it to. But so when I ran down, there's inside of our existing budget under our general fund, there's roughly the, I've got like $979,648 in our existing budget that aren't necessarily directly related to parks, trails, and open space operations.
Inside of that, there's things like salaries and benefits. There's, our accounting and payroll director, compensation, legal services, some communication stuff, and then a lot of things that are associated with billing, shipping, freight, all of that kind of stuff, lots of kind of administrative functions that service both the water and wastewater and water and waste wastewater, which is why they've always kind of resided in the general fund.
So we do need to make sure that we're still leaving ourselves in a position where we can meet those financial obligations from an operational side. One of the ways to do that would be to basically retain a certain portion of the mill levy for ourselves. And so we've got, of the 19 mills, the most that we could legally hold on to, without having to worry about running into the exceeding the 10% of your annual operating expenses coming from a public funding source, would be about four and a half mills.
And so I did some breakdowns. I think you guys have, some copies of what that would look like. The one that I'll highlight here, though, is the if we retain four mills for our operational expenses in the city, voted for a mill levy of 15, that would not only put us in a position to cover those costs.
Snd there's a some financial tuning that has to be done on this. And I think that, I spoke with Phyllis on this earlier today. One thing that we may need to do in the IGA is include some sort of language that these final dollar amounts are dependent on the results of the upcoming audits. Just to make sure that we have those dialed, we may not be able to get those, numbers absolutely perfect in terms of what the budget looks like.
We could put the general mill levies in place. And so if we retain four in the city successfully, got a vote of 15, from, from a district perspective when moving into next November, what that would look like is us, voluntarily, permanently reducing our mill levy to four. And then we would capture, roughly $838,000.44 or $838,044 annually
to cover those, just those administrative costs. And that would also involve us having to do some reductions in the way that we're currently spending. Some of those expenses will automatically go down, just because we're moving staff over to the city. We've already cleared $85,000 of that, which is the portion of the communications director, line item that resided in the general fund.
The rest of that was defrayed out into the water and wastewater and stormwater fund. So there's already been a pretty heavy reduction of that number. But we really do need to make sure that we're accounting for these costs while we go through this. The this general idea, this table, the same information that you guys have has been communicated, through to the city through an email.
Michael is actually the one that kind of brought this to my attention is something that we need to deal with. And so I told him that, you know, we would, that I'd come back, talk to the board about it, talk to our finance department about it. And Phyllis is also, I don't know if she's has been in contact with the city yet, but I know that she had, I gave her direction to go ahead, and they were calling her, and I gave her direction to go ahead and answer those calls.
Just to give them the kind of financial information that they need to evaluate it on their end. I think the other thing that
Phyllis:
Nathan, Nathan and I talked to him on Thursday, I just sent him an email.
Nathan:
Yeah. So that's scheduled. And so the from the city perspective, if they do take that 15 mil number based on our current numbers, that still leaves them, a like $1.2 million a year annually above our operating costs.
And so they should see, you know, some efficiencies of service reductions in those contracts as they expand them to match the city properties as well. They've got 1.2 million for their own future capital plan capital projects and planning. And then after the, capital projects that we have approved for this year would be completed, it would also be like $3.75 million in the bank that they would receive for, they're going to be doing some things not dissimilar from Parker's inclusion, where they're going to be looking at like playground evaluations, looking at our equipment, seeing what needs to be upgraded, where we need to get ADA compliant.
And so there may be some additional, like, kind of closer up front dollars that they're going to want to spend faster just to take care of some of those compliance issues or upgrade update equipment. But it does leave them a pretty good chunk of cash covers our operating expenses going forward. And yeah,
Chuck:
Nathan, I just want to clarify one point.
I thought I heard it made me a little nervous. You you opened up your comment by saying on the 15 mills, we will reduce our mills proportionately with the city mill levy. We're not allowing the city to dictate where our mills are going to be, are they? Or what we give them, or if they come in at 18 mills?
Or are we going to accept that?
Nathan:
I think that that's where all of the IGA comes in. I don't know that we actually have the ability to require the city to ask for any certain amount of mills, but I also don't think it works. I think both entities are probably reasonably understand that the chances of this being a success are much lower if it results in a net increase to the mill levy, and so I think that, you know, really just getting this number dialed in beforehand so the city knows that they need to ask for 15 because we've got 19 to work with is pretty well understood.
So we know that the we can in the IGA and Kim can correct me if I'm wrong. You know, basically say like, you know, the city is going to do it. November election for 15 mills Castle Pines North metro district, pending the results of that election would reduce our mill, our current mill, by 15.
Chuck:
I understand all that, but what we,
I guess if I'm hearing you correctly, what we will be doing is, establishing the mill levy that the city, will then try to, receive from, their mill levy. Correct. Or, so we need to be, sharpen our pencils and be consistent with what we, we come up with that we offer the city that is, that is appropriate, and and not, usury, so to speak, and that, the constituents then that turn around and pay the mill levy back will not see an increase correct between the two city, the city and the district.
Correct. Kim.
Kim:
I think that discussion is right, but I would look at it more as we're going to we are going to decide what we need to retain.
Chuck:
That's my point. That is my point.
Kim:
And then the city can do whatever they want
Chuck:
Thank you. That's my point. Yeah. Thank you. Okay.
Chris:
So I do have a couple questions, but, I think we were jumping all around, and I kind of would prefer we just went down your list so we can answer all the questions, but we are all over.
So I guess we'll start with the 19 mills. And since we were there, and then we'll go back up to the top. But under 19 Mills, can you explain this exactly what you're trying to say here, Kim. And then I know that'll lead into my questions for Nate in here.
Kim:
Are you talking about the memo now, Chris?
Chris:
Yeah, the memo I'm looking at the IGA. I'm trying to make sure I ask you questions.
Kim:
I put that that question in there specifically because the the IGA is talking about the 19 mills, but we have been imposing a mill levy, a reduced mill levy, 15.35 or something like that. So I wanted to make sure that that the board was aware that the IGA is talking about the 19 mills.
And, if the city does not get its mill levy in 2023, you would be looking for that 19 mills or whatever we less whatever we decide to retain in 2024 and beyond, if it continues beyond.
Chris:
So is this saying that the city district shall cease to impose and collect the district's 19 operation mill levies, and shall amend in service ban to modify the district's authority to impose and collect the operational mill levy consistent with the city.
Vote authorization. Are we saying that we need to change the 19 here or. Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. So that leads back to this comments here, which is I get what you're saying, Nathan. And then my question is kind of like, shucks, which is today we're, we're imposing, what, 1579 so that's the total. We're imposing and that's this is what, second or third year we're doing this.
Nathan:
I have no idea.
Chris:
Yeah, it's at least a second and third year. Last year's budget was the same thing in the prior year. Budget could have been in this, but I might I'm going to say it at least for two years. So for two years, based on on what we're providing funding for this, service, it's been 15.9.
So I'm with, with Chuck, the total amount that we're given to that the community should be paying should be this. Unless of course, next, next year, whatever the board decides to do if they decide to increase it. But I would say from our perspective, and I don't know how you you memorialize this in IGA, it should be total this 15.79, which is the inclusion of whatever costs we have to cover for our administrative plus whatever we're going to have go over to their enterprise fund.
And then my question would be, so from an administration perspective, we're covering the administrative costs on, you know, whatever we're covering here for parks, trails and open space, whatever we're collecting for, the property taxes and so forth. Right. How do we make sure that we're covering. And I don't want it to all come out of the mills?
Is that all coming out of the mills right now to cover the administrative costs?
Kim:
I don't know the answer to that, but probably Phyllis is all the district administrative costs are coming out of the mill levy. Is that correct? Correct.
Chris:
Okay. And today we're spending 1579 and covering the administrative costs in addition to parks, roads and open space.
Correct. Okay. So if you think we need four, Nathan, right, to cover your 838, then then we're seeing parks, trails and open space can be done with 11 seven something.
Nathan:
Yeah. And so that would roughly come out to be 11.79 mills today that we are using for parks, trails and open space. which roughly comes out to $2,465,890.
And so, you know, with the operating costs, annually sitting around, whatever that was right around, I think 1.9 million. You're just really at that point, if you wanted to, you know, have the you have the cap set, for lack of a better term at that 15.79 mill Levy mills. We're just going to divide it up.
And I think that it goes back to, what we were talking about earlier is really like, this is what the district needs to in order to continue to cover our costs, which is that four mill mark. And so whatever's left after that, I guess, is for you guys to decide between you and the city. Okay. Hold that.
Chris:
All right. So I think that's kind of what I wanted to clarify and make sure that that's the the ceiling. And what about,
Chuck:
Let me answer that one. Yeah. The only thing that I'm concerned. Chuck. Mike, turn it off. The only thing that I'm concerned with is that whatever we give the city, what's left over covers the rest of our administrative expenses in the district. I couldn't believe that. I couldn't imagine that, we could do this deal with the city.
Give them whatever, mill levy we think is appropriate. And then the following year, have to raise the mill levy because we didn't capture enough the prior year. So I need to feel comfortable that what we decide to put in this spot is appropriate and comfortable, that, we don't have to go back to the constituents and say, oops, we missed it by a half a mil.
We, you know, raise it. So concerned with that, we need to do the math.
Jason:
And to piggyback on that. So if I understand your, second paragraph on your memorandum here, you're saying that right now, if we gave them 15 million, that's 1.2 or 15 mills, that's 1.2 million extra that they would be getting captured. So if they went down to 11 mills, then they would still be at what we're spending now.
Nathan:
Yeah. Correct. And so my focus really in this memo, was really more like trying to capture like this is the amount that we need. And then what that would look like projected out for the total mill levy. So I'm not trying to make any argument at all on what the city needs or doesn't need for operating costs.
I just wanted to make sure that I identified like, this is what we do need to retain in order to meet our costs, but, yeah. And so that would, you know, like the, you know, the reduction, like I said, if the if with using the 15.79 mills as a cap, if we retain four, that leaves 11.79 for the city, which is roughly just a, just a hair under $2.5 million total.
annual revenue from that.
Tera:
So I, I heard you say that you will go back and you will work to figure out what exactly we need. You've already taken into consideration, you know, the parameters that we can't exceed the 10%. I just want to, you know, remind everyone that what is approved is 19 mills. That's what the that the voters have approved that it takes to run everything that we've been running, you know, at 15 or whatever because this, this board previously decided to lower it for a year.
We need to keep in mind that is really difficult to go back and ask the voters for money. And what Nate had mentioned before is that if our, properties need to be upgraded because they're not ADA compliant or whatever, they're going to need the bandwidth to do that. I've heard you say you're going to ensure because we are still going to be doing water operations, we still need to make sure that we have enough money to do that.
You I've heard you verbalize that you're going to make sure that we have enough money. We don't really care. Right? The the part of the equation that we care about is to make sure we retain enough money, that we can do the water and wastewater operations that we need to do.
Chuck:
I think that's what I was trying to tell you.
And I think you. Yeah. Sharpen your pencil. Good. Appreciate that.
Chris:
I just want to make one comment on what, Director Radloff said, and that was we, the board and the district did a full evaluation of the parks, trails and open space for the last two years now, of which this current board have been together on the last one, and determine that we're fully funding the parts to have an open space.
So regardless of what mill levy we passed originally at 19, anything we decide is above and beyond what we can we are funding the services at today is an increase in taxes. It doesn't matter if we have a ceiling of 30 mills, if we're providing the service appropriately. what it is today, 15.79, that's what it should be.
And then if we decide later that, okay, we're going to do additional stuff or whatever needed. That's why we're doing an IGA now. We're not going to shortchange the city or the community, but at that point, you know, the the city has to go back to the community to get the mill levy passed. So they're going to go back and say, okay, it's item 15.7 whatever, or 11 point whatever it is.
Or they can say, you know what, we want to add another Elk Ridge Park or something like that, right? And include that in their ask, but not because the mill levy is at 19. We have to spend it. We're spending what is appropriate today.
Tera:
Right. And where we diverge is we're spending what is appropriate today. There may be things in the future that are more than what it's costing to run them today.
Chris:
I agree, and we go ask for more money at that time.
Chuck:
Okay. All right. Moving along. Okay. Yes.
Kim:
Mr. chairman, can I. I want to just clarify this, because this is one of the issues that's been bothering me about how to go back to the city. And I think what I'm hearing, at least Chris, say, the only time this is going to matter is if their mill levy fails this November, and we have to fund them for 2024 and 2025 and 2026 or whatever it happens to be.
What I'm hearing Director Lewis saying is the city needs to know that we will assess a million of 15.79 for 2024 and not 19. And and I'm not sure exactly what the rest of the board is thinking as this is written now. It talks about the 19. So the again, the only time it matters to us is that interim period before they get their mill levy.
So for this year we've done our 15.79. They're okay with that as this is written in 2024 we would do 19. Now
Tera:
I don't know I don't know that we can commit future boards. I mean, that's that's something that we make on a, on a year by year. How does that work legally? Kim.
Chris:
Well, I think I would agree with that.
We can't really commit the future board. We can just say that, the current funding we're at for the last two years, at minimum, has been the 15, whatever it is. But for to I know the question and and that's that's a good question. I'm going to still vote for 15. Whatever on the 2024. So I guess we'll hear what the other.
Tera:
I thought you I thought you had some. I thought I heard you verbalize some really great language before. Did you have a language suggestion on that?
Nathan:
I'm a little bit tongue tied with all the changes.
Tera:
When you said subject to. Oh yeah. Yeah. Putting it in there. Subject to our final audit.
Nathan:
Right. And that was, that was more directed around like, you know, once we establish what mill, you know, if we we establish the mill levy that we need to keep, what the actual dollar amount that would be transferred to the city along those lines would be, it would be really pending the results of our of our 2021 and 2022 audit when we have those final dollar valuations.
And I think that there may be opportunity to expand that language. I'll admit that once we're we're talking about the legalities of the contract and what we can and can't do. I'm a little bit out of out of my depth, but I, Phyllis and I did talk today about going through and really dialing down at least that mill portion and figuring out what's sitting where in the budget.
But outside of outside of the water, wastewater, what we need to move forward. And what's in that, administrative fund budget? I don't really have a lot of background or knowledge of what the parks, trails and open space Space needs that kind of stuff. I get a little lost.
Tera:
So as I read this, Mr. Seter, it says that we would cease to impose and collect the 19 mills.
So we're not going to see the 19 mills. We're going to cease to impose whatever mills rate we need to keep.
Kim:
Yeah. And that's exactly the language that concerned me. And I think this discussion just clarified for me what that language needs to say. And that is, we've imposed 15.79 for 2023 out of that. We need whatever that is the four mills.
The rest will go for the city to use for parks, because that's what we had budgeted for that purpose in 2024 or for for collection in 2024. We will budget appropriately to pay for the cost of the Parks and Rec, as well as our own expenses, and thereafter until the city gets its mill levy. Yeah, whatever that levy is, right?
That sounds. And then after that, we cease completely. Except for our four mills.
Chris:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's fair
Tera:
How I heard that's not how I read this, though. It says we will cease to impose the 19. I'm not saying that we should..
No that's the language that is in question. That's why I raised these questions, because I want to change that language.
Chuck:
Okay. One thing that was said, if the city does not get their mill levy to fund parks, trails and open space, isn't the deal off?
Kim:
Not at the moment, no. And, we talked about that a little bit at the, at the study session. The way it's written now, the city can decide to return the parks and recreational facilities back to the district.
If they can't get a mill levy.
Chris:
So let's go down in sequence here so we can answer all the questions. And that's that. That's further down the line. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah. Let's answer that question because that's further in a couple pages back. So let's make sure we answer all the questions on this page. So I think we've answered the whereas for the 19 mills.
Right. You you've gotten feedback on us. Yes. And what about all the way up on top where this ownership and maintenance. What what's what do we need to answer that.
Kim:
Okay Initially when we talked about this, we were going to keep the parks and all the facilities and then pay the city to do all the maintenance. This draft says we're going to just turn it all over to this city and then fund the maintenance until they get their mill levy.
And then if, they don't get their mill levy and they choose to not continue, they will then return all the property. I don't think it matters. It's neither here nor there which way we do it. But I wanted you to know that that's what this says. So we would actually be conveying the parks and the open space to the city in the next couple months.
Chris:
Okay. And and the decision here is also dependent on the later compensation, where it says that essentially what you're saying at some point, if the city decides they can't get their funding or whatever their their turnover to hold the hold assets now because we would convey the assets in addition to the services that we'd have to provide back to the district.
Yes. Okay. All right. So maybe we answered this question with the one when we get to this, the further discussion, because you guys tracking what I'm saying or no okay. All right. Let's answer this question on the next I further discussion in a couple of pages over.
Nathan:
What about the second one?
Chris:
District contributing money. Contributing money talked about. Yeah. We decide what we want to do. There you go.
Kim:
Yep. Yeah. Are you looking at my memo? Yes. Yeah. Okay. That's great. That's perfect. Because those are the things I need to have some guidance on. So, we would be down to number five.
Chris:
Yeah. Whereas the parties desire to enter into this agreement.
Director Lowen says that we've already answered this.
Kim:
Now you're looking at the draft agreement, not the.
Chris:
Yeah. I'm looking we're looking at this.
Kim:
Can we go through?
Chris:
Yeah. Okay. This. Where do you want to go?
Kim:
Because these are the questions I need. I need answers to. And then we can go back to the agreement and talk about other things.
Okay. So, at the bottom of the first page of the status report, item number one, district conveying the property now rather than the city. Then after the city gets its mill levy. So that's what we were just talking about, that the way this is written, we all convey everything to the city in the next couple months, and we'll just be giving them a portion of the mill levy to maintain it.
Again, I don't think it matters either way whether we keep it or give it to them. So at this point,
Tera:
My question with that is, does that because I know one of the things that was going to make things easier is really all of the, is it like the assessments or easements? Easements? The easements. So if we convey the property now, is that conveying all the easements?
Does that why we want to do it now.
Kim:
Yeah. So we'll be figuring out what easements we need to retain. Okay. Rather than us figuring out what easements we may need to retain and then conveying the property. So we're not going to convey it until we know what the easements are. So either way, I don't think it matters.
Tera:
So we're going to retain some property.
Kim:
We will retain some property which will be the the current Well sides. The current lift sites, station sites.
Tera:
Because that didn't look like that was the way that this was written.
Kim:
Well it's all included in that, that language. So there's property that we have to retain because we have water and sewer facilities on it.
Tera:
Does it seem when I read through it, it seemed like we were turning those over to you, and then they do something bad. Okay. So we're going to retain that. And then like this building for instance, would we retain this building
Kim:
The way this is currently written, they'll take this building and then lease it back to us for a dollar a year.
And why would we do that? That's this isn't part of the parks.
Kim:
That's why I put it on the list.
Tera:
I don't know, is it on your list?
Kim:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you if you want to do that or you're willing to do that or not.
Tera:
We still need to do water operations. This building is what houses our water operations and billing and whatnot.
So, Yeah, that's a no for me.
Kim:
You would you would just be changing again as this is currently written. But we're negotiating this. We're going back and forth.
Tera:
Okay. Well, if only until we get there. Just seemed like we were talking about all property. I wondered, understand what that meant?
Kim:
Yeah, at the moment, that's what this says, that this would be made also and then leased back so you would have a, a lease interest rather than an ownership interest.
Chris:
Okay. Okay. My comment on that one would be related, I guess, to the city, whichever one district maybe whatever the pages are, I think we conveyed the properties. But my answer to the question further down in the list would be the same. Once we convey the properties, everything goes to the city. We don't take it back because at that point we've already moved our our services, our people.
Right? We've moved people over to the city. We've move, all all the process and everything else. Maybe the building, which we we don't agree in that, but you do. So for us to take it back now we have to go hire back new staff and everything else. So we convey it to the city and we'll help the city, you know, because as they're going for their levies, make sure, they're the mills to make sure that they're successful will be on the other side saying, as you mentioned, yeah, we're not going to be double taxing you at the same time.
All we're doing is transferring those mills from us to the city. So we want to make them successful. So there should be no reason to have to transfer this back. So I, I, I'm in the opinion that we transfer all the assets to them for good, the ownership.
Chuck:
Or is it possible not to transfer anything until we know they get their mill levy?
Kim:
That's the way we had our initial discussions, that we would wait until they have the mill levy and then everything goes.
Chris:
Yeah, that was less problematic than conveying everything and then waiting for them to get the mill levy approved and not getting it. Then it's in limbo with them and we don't own it and we're paying them.
And I just seems like it's more problematic, to transfer the property after they've succeeded in getting a mill levy, a vote from the constituents. That's what I would suggest. Okay.
Chris:
I'm okay with a that, yeah.
Kim:
Anybody else? Any thoughts on that?
Chuck:
And going back here, memorandum Kim says what happens if the city does not get its levy in 23 or 24, but they don't get their property until they get their levy right.
Chris:
And we keep funding them, with our mills, whatever the boards decide to on our budget to fund them, to maintain it. Yeah. We're not going to leave them hanging.
Kim:
Yep. And that was our original discussion. And this draft came back differently. I'm not sure what happened, if anything, at the city to change that notion, but we'll go back and find out.
Chris:
Okay. You guys okay? Tera.
Tera:
Yeah. So do you have your number one, Number two, Number three then Kim?
Kim:
Yep. Yep. Okay.
Chuck:
Or number four?
Tera:
I guess I just want to make sure
Chuck:
We've already discussed number four. I think you're okay there.
Kim:
Yes okay. Yes. So we're now on number five. clarify our intentions with regard to the pickle ball courts and the tennis courts.
And then of course, the next one, number six, is the skate skate park.
Chuck:
So, what is it? What do you mean, clarify our intention what?
Kim:
Do we, do we want them to complete the construction. Or are we completing it? If we expect them to complete it, we're gonna have to give them the money that's been set aside for that in the budget.
And, I don't Nathan and I haven't really talked about this, but there may be a simple answer, we just have to choose one.
Chris:
They need to finish reading.
Nathan:
Yeah, I think I think it's probably easier to .... I think it's the pickle ball court may not matter as much. It's going to be nearing completion. I think we're looking at May April, May, probably May.
Yeah. So I mean we could we could continue we could complete the construction on the pickle ball court ourselves and then, turn over responsibility for I think we're looking at the tennis court and then the skate park, to the city and allow them to kind of finish that process. We haven't done us have spent a substantial amount of work on either.
We can give them what we have in terms of, in terms of design, but let them finish complete those contracts. And then that would only leave, the question of what you guys want to do directly related to the yellow location of the skate park and the timing around building it.
Jason:
Okay. Where to begin on that?
We've got, 1.2 million allocated towards the skate park right now. Is that correct?
Nathan:
I believe that's correct. Let me. I've got the budget right here. Let me verify that quickly. Yeah. 1.25.
Jason:
And we haven't really done a whole lot of community outreach to make sure the community wants it in that location.
Nathan:
And so that was part of the when we had those initial discussions around the skate park, part of.
One of the advantages to moving that project fully over to the city is they do have the existing Parks Commission in place. They've got, just kind of some legs to do a much more broader public outreach directly regarding the skate park. And so they would be also responsible for taking over the public messaging, all of that stuff.
The question ultimately comes down to, do we want to require them specifically to build the skate park? Do we want to require that they put that skate park inside of existing district bound bounds? And really, I think it's fair to apply that same logic to, the tennis courts as well. I just don't think that the tennis courts are nearly as contentious.
So I think, whatever we decide with one, it would make sense to do with the other. There, are considerations around, you know, ensuring that the dollars that's spent here stay inside of Castle Pines North for capital and that kind of stuff.
Jason:
I'm, my opinion is, we give the city the free reign to choose wherever and whatever they want to do about a skate park.
Let's just get that off the table. But that $1.2 million that we've collected for our for our district, I think we need to tell them that that money needs to be spent in our district on an improvement or, a new, a new amenity or some sort.
Chuck:
Is it the feeling of this board that they, we would rather, give up the skate park to the city and let them decide where they put it, or are we so inclined that we'd like to have it at on Coyote Ridge Park and, and, and pay the city, the budget amount that we had allocated for the skate park.
Jason:
Well, I think we let the city decide what they want to do about a skate park, period. And where they want to put it. And but just make sure that the funding that we've that we're giving them for that the, the 1.2 million that we have saved up for a skate park, if they choose not to build the skate park where it is or where we had recommended it be built, then use that money towards something else in our community.
Chuck:
So in our district, yeah.
Tera:
So, because when we were in discussions about the skate park and we got a lot of feedback, you know, what we were saying is that the city was going to do a, you know, public engagement, you know, on a full survey and public engagement, which, you know, they have done in the past.
They they do that very well. And I agree with Jason. I'm not sure exactly what the right terminology is, but, the whatever the amenity ends up being, the value has got to be kept within these boundaries. It's kind of like the legacy Parks Authority money, these 3300 homes and businesses that have been contributing to this, they are the ones that have paid into that amenity.
So I don't know that that amenity is a skate park necessarily, because the public hasn't been engaged. I don't know that any, you know, whatever research needs to be done, you know, it's difficult, to build these amenities that have longevity because, I mean, who knew a while ago that pickle ball was going to be so crazy and, you know, maybe skate parks have have had their life.
I don't have any idea, but I do feel strongly as, Director Blankaert does, I feel strongly that the value of all of these assets that are mentioned in here, these and these amenities, that value has got to be kept within what these boundaries are today. And I don't know what that language looks like. \
Chuck:
Yeah, I think that's very valuable.
Because just as Tera said, and I couldn't agree with her more, those funds were paid by the constituents here in the district. The funds stay in the district. I don't care if the city is running them or we're running them. The funds stay in the district. So how you want to word that.
Tera:
I don't know that we have the mandate that they build a skate park.
And as you said, the, you know, the pickle ball courts will be already completed. But, but it's not okay with me that we would give this money and they would build them on the east side.
Chuck:
Exactly. So you you get the gist Kim?
Kim:
Yeah. Okay. All right. what's going through my head right now? And I don't know if this is where it would go, but, maybe we want to maintain control of that money until we know what the city would do with it.
Chuck:
That's that's that's that's fair. Yeah. If you can write that in somehow.
Kim:
Yeah. I don't know if they'll agree to that, but it sounds like the way to go.
Tera:
I mean, I don't even know that I think there can be language in there that basically says that these the value of this has to maintain within, because there was something like that in another agreement where it basically stays within the borders that exists today.
Kim:
Yeah. Yeah. It's just difficult because I think, you're using that word value in a, in a sophisticated way. And I understand what you're trying to say.
Tera:
Well thank you for saying that was sophisticated.
Kim:
In a legal document, to say that value has to stay in the district, that's hard. Yeah. But we'll work our way through it and see what we come up with.
Nathan:
So I do have a question just around that legalese. Would it be appropriate to just put in a specific dollar amount rather than use you know, the term value? We have X number of dollars plan for project capital or we have X number of dollars available for capital projects in total. It looks like the difference between that would be like, I don't know, four and 6 million, depending on how you look at it.
Can we use a specific number?
Tera:
And and add the language that says whatever. And I can go back and find what I've seen before that basically outlines that that amount of money has to be spent within the footprint as it exists today. And I can I can look up something and tune it to you.
Kim:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
That's a little different than what you were saying before when you were talking about the value I was envisioning. You know, maybe a skate park right outside the border of the district. The value is in the district, but the skate park is not, which is kind of a good thing.
Tera:
You know, I was talking to I think what, Mr. Travis captured was correct.
I'm looking for that money that we have, the 1.2 and the 897 and the 850, those dollars. I'm looking for those dollars to stay within the district.
Nathan:
And so is your concern only with the capital dollars that we have planned spend, plan to spend for 2023. So the numbers that you just mentioned, or is that something that you want to extend to the entire because that doesn't eliminate the capital funds that we have in the general fund.
So above and beyond that, I'm assuming we use my numbers from earlier. There'd be roughly $3 million ish that would also be transferred. So is that something you want a blanket statement on on that other $3 million or we just want to maintain the capital projects that we have planned for this year, and then they can use the other 3 million as they like.
Or do you want all of that money to stay here?
Tera:
Well, I think. Like I recall back to reading the Parker inclusion Agreement and the, the, the whatever language they had in there. Basically it was like whatever money was from over here has to be used over here.
Chuck:
So I think that answers your question. Yeah, yeah, well, there's a dollar or $3 million if it's, if we, if we collected it in this district, it stays in this district.
Okay. Does that answer. We're 4567. Where do you want to be.
Kim:
Yeah. It does. And I think, on number seven again, that was just specifically talking about this community center. And we've answered that because we're going to propose that we keep everything until they have their mill levy, and then we'll come in. And that resolves my issues.
Chris:
So does that resolve everything in here? Yes, it does. Okay. So does that resolve everything in, this document?
Kim:
It does. Okay. And of course, we'll be bringing this back to you will negotiate with them. And then we'll be back at the study session to talk about where we land, and then we'll come back again at the board meeting.
Chuck:
So I thought I had
Tera:
Did it answer your question about the date, though? You had the closing date and you said, is that going to still be March 31st of 2023?
Kim:
No, that was this documents says March 1st, but it is the 31st. That's what our original agreement said. So
Tera:
So you're anticipating that we will get this back with changes and we will have enough time to review it at our next regularly scheduled board meeting in March and vote on it then.
Kim:
You'll have a you'll go through it at the study session, and then we'll bring it back for a vote at the end of March. If we're not done, we'll just extend the deadline. Okay. Thank you.
Chris:
We'd like to keep the deadline to March 31st.
Kim:
I agree, it's time to finish this.
Chris:
Right. And we're waiting. No, we did sign the other one, right?
Yes. Okay. One down.
Chuck:
Kim. Article four. paragraph number one. You highlighted, the sense just passed exhibit A in bold, subject to the city's grant of an easement to the district in the form approved by the parties for water and wastewater infrastructure and access and maintenance. Clarify that for me.
Kim:
Yeah. So the idea is, again, this is going back to the easements that Director Radloff mentioned.
We would now remember again in here that they're taking the property. That's that's all gone now. Right. But we need to figure out what the easements are that we need when the city does own the property. And then we'll have those, written up and put in place. The way this was written, they were going to take the property, and we were going to have a blanket easement over everything for our, water and sanitation district
facilities. And then we would define what those are either where we could go find them and be done with it. But now if we change that ownership situation, we don't need to worry about that. Okay? Yet we will need to worry about.
Tera:
But does that complicate that for them because we're not giving them a blanket easement?
Kim:
I don't know why they change.
That will. We'll have to see. I think this way we'll give them a blanket easement, to maintain everything.
Chuck:
Okay. And then that's okay.
The article six, paragraph A, when we're talking about, that last sentence that you highlighted on the quick claim, that's, that's changed now. Yes. Okay.
Tera:
So can I ask about, three point four the conveyance of district recreation records? All district recreation records, including maintenance warranty, financial relating to recreation have to be delivered within 15 business days of the effective date of this. Are we ready to that?
Chuck:
Where are you Tera? I'm on 3.4 under what section? Article four.
Chris:
Looks like 3.4.
Kim:
I think what we would probably.
Chris:
Yeah, I got it for him right before. Right about assignment of contracts. Right above assignment of contract.
Nathan:
We've, Yeah, it wouldn't be that difficult. Even the the assets that come over in terms of, like, the vehicles and stuff, that's not going to be too hard to generate.
We've already talked about what some of those lists will look like. In terms of like maintenance histories, we can get them everything that we have. It's relatively little. We haven't maintained a lot of records, just historically around any of that stuff. And one of the things that the city is looking at doing, is, going through and doing some evaluations to see where to get a good idea of, like a current condition of all of those parks.
And so they'll have that, we'll get them whatever we have. And then the finance, stuff is pretty easy to get over, just past year's budgets. We'll work with crews to get them whatever they need on that side. But it's it's really not going to be a huge amount of data in terms of like maintenance histories and records.
We just haven't been that specific in the way that we've tracked those assets and kept. That's been much more of a see broke thing, fix broke thing approach.
Tera:
Checking. And then, it does say that the assignment of contracts. So at the closing date, which is what march that we, will have obtained approval or acknowledgment of the assignments of the assigned contracts.
Does that have to be in writing?
Kim:
Yeah. Certainly would.
Tera:
So Mr. Travis would have to be working with all of our contractors, and they would be aware and they would have to sign something.
Nathan:
Yeah. In terms of defined annual contracts from an operations and maintenance side, I think we really only have one. Yeah. Yeah, one big one.
Yeah. Land Tech. And that was something that, in our initial conversations with Land Tech, we let them know that this is something that very well may be happening so that they're they're already aware of it and know that it's coming down the line. It's it's not hard to go to somebody and say, hey, we'd like to make your contract bigger, if that's okay with you.
Ultimately. So, we can we can work through that. It's it's not a ton of people.
Tera:
Great. Thanks. I do want to talk a little bit about article five transition of personnel, because this, as this reads, it says that a provided such employee meets the city's requirements for employment in accordance with the city's personnel policies and within the city's compensation policy.
So that, to me, sounds like even though we fully intend for them to, have our, in them to employ our parks and open space manager, I feel like we need to provide some protection in writing. Because that that to me, reads like that's a an out if if they know our intent and in good faith, we are saying this is a competent employee and they're saying that provided that it meets their requirements.
And so we need to provide some protection there.
Kim:
I had suggested in the margin there that maybe we need to, to, provide for at least one year of employment and whatever the salary should be, as well as, severance package of some kind.
Tera:
Right. So if they decide within that that it doesn't pay them, let's do that.
I'd like that in writing.
Chris:
Okay. Just add to that. Just to add to that, is it one person that's affected by this?
Nathan:
Yeah. Currently David is the only employee that would be going over. We did have a parks and open space for him and Colin. he left, I don't know, roughly two weeks ago or so was was his last day.
He got a job in California and went off over there. So, in the meantime, while we figure all of this stuff out, we're holding off on replacing that, and we've got Colin duties being replaced by, contract, contract labor. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Kim:
I hope he didn't go to California to avoid shoveling snow.
Nathan:
He definitely did.
Tera:
So. And then, Mr. Seter, in article seven, there's something that,
Chuck:
That's where I'm in. Okay, I have a question, too.
Tera:
So, yeah, the, the that we will accept the city's designation as the approving authority for the district. Why would we do that?
Kim:
Yes. under the Colorado statutes, they changed, a few years ago.
And this actually came up at the time we talked about the stormwater IGA, and of course, the board makeup was different at that time, and we refused to do this under current statutes, it's recommended that rather than having the county be what's called the supervising entity, that they don't really supervise the district, that the city become that.
So what it would mean is, if you want to amend your service plan to add other, powers or take away those powers, we go to the city and set it to the Board of County Commissioners.
Chuck:
And the service plan and disregard is our water. Water. Right?
Kim:
Yeah. We would we would actually go in and get rid of this stormwater power, get rid of the parks power eventually and just have water and sewer.
Chuck:
And do they have the authority to monitor that, or approve anything relative to that?
Kim:
Yes. So at that point we would if we needed to amend the service plan, which is very unlikely. or if you decided to incorporate, which is not the word we use, but to include more property into the district, it would be the city that you'd go to to get that approval rather than the county.
It's it's very hard for me to see where once we've gotten rid of the parks and the stormwater, that there would be anything you're going to change because you're a water and sand district, you provide water and sanitation services. There isn't a lot of other power you need.
Chris:
So and just one could just clarify. And again, so are you saying that the law changed to say that it's moving from the county to the city, or we can reject it.
Kim:
So we can petition to make that happen? The city we can the city can also petition to make that happen. So the law was changed to kind of encourage that a district that is entirely within a city have the city provide that supervision rather than the county, because the county, they have no idea what we're doing.
Chuck:
Read paragraph number two.
Modify the district authority to impose and collect district operations Mill levy?
Kim:
Yes. So that is, they want us to go back and amend our service plan to get rid of the parks power once they've taken it over, and to get rid of the, the stormwater power and then reduce within the service plan our mill levy number,
Chuck:
but proportionately with with parks, trails and open space and stormwater.
But it doesn't affect our ability to control the mill levy necessary for administrative and, correct water and sewer.
Kim:
Yeah, yeah. So really what's what's happening is. We would be just saying that we had the right to 19 mills, and now we only have the right to whatever we decide, 5 or 6, and we're going to only impose four.
Alternatively, we can just keep our 19 mills knowing that we've told everybody that we aren't imposing, that we're only imposing four you know, we're not we keep talking about the city's mill levy as being something we're giving them. And and that's not what's happening. They're going out and getting their mill levy. And when they get their mill levy at that, we're agreeing with the taxpayers that we are we're not imposing anything for Parks and Rec or anything else that we will be, not anything else.
Tera:
But we will be imposing for water and wastewater.
Correct? Right. And, so.
I understand what you're saying about the, approving authority, but I don't think we're there yet. And for our, you know, in Douglas County, we we're small enough and the county knows us. I don't I don't want to do that at this time. And since we are not conveying any of the properties or anything until they get their mill levy, this language does not make sense to me to be in here.
Kim:
Yeah, we definitely wouldn't do it until they get their mill levy under what we've talked about tonight.
Tera:
And it doesn't say that it says on or before the closing date.
Kim:
We have we haven't changed this yet. That's again why it's all being discussed. But I'll also talk to them about it. Just say we don't want to do this.
We'll stick with the county. If they want a petition to change it, they can do that. And, you know, I'm not sure who the deciding authority is at that point, but,
Tera:
Yeah, just brings me back to when. Yeah, when that was a nonstarter with this community before.
Kim:
Yeah, yeah. And when we did this stormwater, it came up in the board.
At that time you said, no, we're not doing it, which they accepted. So. Okay.
Chuck:
Any other questions on the balance of document Kim, do you have any, other thoughts you want to lay on us?
Kim:
Nope. I think that gives me what I need. And, we'll jump back into it tomorrow.
Chuck:
The balance of your report. I don't have anything on.
Anything in there that you want to add that goes down into the other matters?
Kim:
Nope. Nothing at this time. Okay.
Chuck:
All right. Thank you very much. board. Anything? Okay. Then let's close out the legal counsel's report number nine and go directly to district manager's report. Roman numeral ten. Nathan.
Nathan:
Yeah. So I do have a couple items I want to cover that, aren't on my report. We've gone through most of it. But before I get,
And they're relatively brief before I get into those, are there any questions on my actual report?
Chuck:
How long was Collin with us? Half a year?
Nathan:
About. Yeah, about six months. You.
Chuck:
He's going to a golf course near his home. Right? I know what he's doing.
Nathan:
So one thing in my report I did want to, directly talk about is, the conservation plan. So in order to really, really take a broad sweep at our entire conservation program, we are going to need to get through, both of the audits and then get to a point where we can do a full, full rate study.
So we're far enough away that we're probably not gonna be able to get away with just doing a rate update. We'll need to do a rate study, and we can look at kind of the implications and, ups and downs of some broader conservation topics that are some bigger, heavier stuff. One thing I did want to look at was just considering, at least getting it on a future board meeting, agenda to consider these.
So it's nothing, specifically like how much we're, charging for or how much we're allowing for rebates. The total program costs, the price per square foot of sod, individual. David would be able to use these words a lot better than my eye. Conservation based rebates.
Got it. As I understand it, we need to have at least 30 days notice before we talk about those types of rebates program. So, I needed to get the board's permission to consider expanding the rebate program, at this meeting so that we could potentially put it on the April agenda, which would be about as late as we want to go
before irrigation season starts, people start replacing their lawns and stuff like that. So I'm really specifically asking to just look at the how much we how much we spend, total and how I had it written down better here. I'm getting tired at the end of the meeting, but basically look at, our like so look at increasing the sod replacement rebate from $0.40 a square foot to $1.25, including some minimums and maximums in there.
Looking at making our, watering schedule mandatory, whether or not we attach any fines to that is, would be a conversation that we could have at that time. And then also looking at increasing, that total amount we spend on that program from 13 to, about $30,000 would allow us to kind of keep pace with the increase in the Sod rebate.
We do have a number of customers that have been kind of waiting on turning in their applications to see if this is a program that expands, and then there's also an opportunity, that I've got to I've started doing some digging into. I need to figure out exactly how this program works, but there are state dollars available for, like matching money that can be provided inside of these programs.
So if we increase our 13 to 30, there may be an opportunity to have at least some of that matched. And I can't remember the name of the organization that's been doing that's been administering that program. But really just need to get it on an agenda more than 30 days from today to have an actual discussion where we can talk about it.
And there'd be opportunities for additional information to come out in the interim. I can get much more hard data at study sessions and things leading up to that, but we'd really be looking at that April board meeting.
Chuck:
Have we had much interest in our current rebate program?
David:
Yes, we've got 10 filling right now. That are filed.
Chuck:
Ten, ten homes?
Out of 3700.
Nathan:
Yeah. This is and this is a line item we routinely we routinely spend this money every year like we it's not a it's not a program that sits unused.
Jason:
I remember talking about how much should we budget for this this go around.
Nathan:
Right now we're at 13,000.
Chuck:
And your request of us is to approve these bullet points for discussion at the next board meeting.
Nathan:
At the board meeting after that, we'd need a 30 day window to talk about rates. And then that gets us hopefully on the other side of the stormwater IGA. But still, before we get into the meat of irrigation and landscaping season.
Chuck:
And this is for, I guess I don't understand. Bullet point number three is they make the watering schedule and guidelines mandatory for all non single family homes. So are you addressing commercial?
Nathan:
More directly. That's the bigger issue that we have. And so really what it comes down to is when you make something mandatory, that's all well and fine.
You also have to figure out how you're now going to enforce that and what that fine structure looks like. And so the biggest issues that we have on a recurring basis, where we actually get resident reports that would be actionable or that staff sees, and even if it's the city or the commercial irrigations and specifically the HOA as we have HOA, is that, routinely water multiple times a day, seven days a week, all hours of the day.
And so putting something in place where we can actually right now, there's really no I have no authority. The district doesn't have any authority to go to them and say, hey, stop. We can tell them that we're getting complaints. We can tell them that we'd like them to address the issue, but there's really nothing we can do to say to to impose fines or penalties
up to and including service disconnection where we could really just go, like, look, this is your third violation of violation. Number four, we shut the water off or however we want to define that, define that structure.
Chuck:
We have mandatory, watering schedules and guidelines for residential units.
Nathan:
It would be the same. Yeah. We have we have a suggested.
David:
It's suggested.
Nathan:
All of our watering schedules are currently suggested today.
David:
We have no way to enforce.
Chuck:
Are you are you? We have no way to enforce that. Okay. Well that says a lot.
Nathan:
Yeah, yeah. And so once the commercial is something we could probably reasonably enforce residential, we can make it mandatory. But also, you know, we can make it mandatory, put everything in place just with the understanding that it's nothing that we're really going to have the time, capacity or ability to enforce.
And even if we were watering at that scale, when you're talking about individual lawns is something that isn't really that fruitful for the amount of time staff would have to put into it.
Chuck:
So you're addressing this to multifamily, commercial and HOA associations for a single family. But the association is paying the bill, correct?
David:
Yeah. Or just raise the water rates for them.
Jason:
Are the surrounding.
Are the surrounding water districts doing something similar.
Nathan:
The surrounding water districts by and large, have been doing something much more aggressive than this for decades. Castle Rock had mandatory watering schedules starting in 2000. So we are way behind in terms of this type of enforcement. We're also lagging pretty far behind in terms of the amount of money that we're offering for rebates.
Chris:
Yeah. So one of the things we found out when we went to meet with, like Aurora. They're actually not even allowing people to put sod in their yard. Right. So it's being a lot more aggressive and it's kind of eye opening. How far some of those, districts went. And then of course, recently you can see the ones that are going on just here in Castle Rock.
So, you know, one of the things when I came back, I had asked, Nathan to look at is how can we, here in our district, become a little more aggressive with the way we were doing it? So the points that I see here, I think the money, 30 million, $30,000 is kind of little. But whatever your recommendations are, you know, I think it's going to go far more than what we're doing today and at least get people thinking in the same direction.
And the other thing is, is on the HOAs. The HOAs have been stopping people from essentially going more zero-scaping because you got to water your lawn. It's got green and stuff, so this will help in that situation. I'd like to see the plan go to the fact where it's it advocates for, you know, some of the things that some of the other districts are offering, which is reduction of sod and stuff like that in different areas.
Nathan:
Could've said it better.
Chris:
So if you want me to, do you want us to make a motion to, for you to go ahead and, increase expand a rebate plan so that you can get it on whatever schedule you want, as indicated to here, to the current rebate budget, a minimum of 30,000 to start agreement rebate from 0.4 per square foot to $1.25.
Well sorry. $1.25.
Nathan:
So it's it's just to have the discussion. So we yeah we need to we need to do public notification more than 30 days in advance.
Chris:
Yeah. Got it.
Chuck:
Okay. We'll discuss it in April and you can refine it. Sounds good. Okay. Thank you. And you had more?
Nathan:
Yep. Just a few things.
Following the, study session last week, one of the things that had come up was the issue with the duty pager, and kind of the way that whole system works. So, I've got a pretty solid plan on how we're going to change that. The first step that is going to hold us off for a little bit before we really jump into changing that.
And, I apologize. I was just caught off guard by the question. I didn't expect the pager to come up. So I didn't really have a lot of well-spoken answers. We are already in the process. We're well, we're well into the process of working with Avaya to move over to an IP phone system. Anyway, so we're getting to the point now.
All the documents have been signed. It's basically a cost for cost exchange. That's going to give us a lot more just options and functionality inside of our phone system. It'll allow me to an all of our staff better work remote capabilities, better access on and off district. And so one of the things that'll come with that, is porting all of our existing numbers into that IP system.
And then we'll also be able to take a really good look at the call tree for the, for the pager. And so for, when they come in, we'll, we'll be able to much better define how they get to the pager, what that looks like. And then, I've already reached out to, I forgot to write the name of the company.
But basically an answering service that works with multiple municipalities in an after hours capacity. just to take those calls that come in for residents to satisfy the request of actually getting a person after hours when you're having an emergency. I think it's a great idea. It solves a lot of issues that we currently have. The largest of which is probably just getting incomplete pager numbers.
And people, fewer and fewer people understanding even how pager systems work and how that runs. So, that should all come together relatively quickly. We're, working on, like, with a bunch of accounts I had today. Had to get myself added to the Comcast account because, again, we didn't have anybody else on there. So Susan was actually able to get that taken care of today.
And so we can sign all the documentation we need to move that over. So once we have the documentation, documentation submitted to our Avaya rep that will trigger about a three week process before we have an official swap over date. And we all get fancy new phones and, stop having a lot of the internal processes.
So, we we've got all kinds of weird little issues. So everybody is currently on this, like, bizarre, like, we all know who used to work at all of these various desks. So, the Susan's actually, like, if you go call Susan from an internal phone, she pops up as a finance director that hasn't worked here since six years before I started.
And so we'll be able to get a lot of that stuff corrected, and you'll actually be able to find people and call them a lot easier. And the only other one thing I want to do address. I'm sure you guys saw a myriad of emails come back, come across from an event that we had a few weeks ago.
They caused a massive amount of brown water to go to kind of get stirred up all at once inside of the district.
Chuck:
You call it your worst day?
Nathan:
Yeah. That was, sincerely, the most terrifying day that I have had in my 20 years in this industry. And so I just wanted to kind of talk a bit, give you guys a, a picture of what happened, and how we're going to like the results of that from what we're going to do to resolve it.
So we had a fire hydrant in the King Soopers parking lot right there in front of Berg House that has been smacked by every semi-truck that's driven past it. As long as I've been here. We've repaired that hydrant multiple times a year for a very long time. And so we looked at, how far back we could move in the easement, all kinds of stuff.
And we so we ultimately decided to just move that fire hydrant directly back, about six, six, eight feet from where it was. And that would be enough that those trucks coming through there wouldn't keep smacking it. When you're in an 18 Wheeler and you barely graze a hydrant like that, you're not really going to feel it. So it's not like these drivers were like hitting this thing and then driving away.
They probably didn't even notice they were hitting it. And so we've done a bunch of intermediate steps. We've put traffic bollards in front of it. Those just as easily got knocked away. And so we finally decided to move this thing back. So we didn't do any public notification leading into the replacement of the fire hydrant. It didn't have any traffic impacts, and it wasn't going to require us to shut down any service to any home.
So generally speaking, if it's something we can dig up without turning water off to for anybody and we're not going to have any major traffic implications. It's there's really just not a lot of value in us, like kind of going out and letting everybody know that this thing is going to happen. Unfortunately, what happened for that day is we have, protocols in place for when you work on fire hydrants like most districts do.
And so one of those is like, shut down the fire hydrant no matter what, because, it's not like the, it's not like the movies where if you run over a fire hydrant in a car or water shooting all over the place, they're dry barrel fire hydrants. And so they're actually designed to get hit by cars and break off.
And then there's a valve actually sits all the way down where that line 90s and goes up. So it's five and a half, six feet deep on this hydrant. It was closer to eight. And so there's, our mapping clearly showed the hydrant valve that was sitting out in front of the hydrant. This is a valve that we need to isolate it.
Our repair contractor, EPR, who has done a lot of work for us for a number of years, was assigned to the project and EPR came out to do the work. We'd already isolated it when it got hit by the car. EPR called us to come out and verify that it had been isolated. So, Semocor's operator reached out to me to get a copy of the map for the area, which they now have, access through an internet portal.
They can look at our mapping. So I sent him a copy of the map. He went out, double checked field, verified that that fire hydrant valve, had been closed so that it was safe for them to move forward. EPR got out to do the job. They exposed the hydrant, they built their trench, they put their trench safety in place.
They had their guys going in, and they went down to unbolt the fire hydrant so that they could put in a stick of pipe and move that pipe back. And they got about two bolts in, and that hydrant was 100% fully under pressure. So with a 19 year old kid in the trench, a 1,500 pound fire hydrant fired across the trench hit the back.
We lost roughly 300,000 gallons of water in 11 minutes. And, if it wasn't for, like, seriously, one of the largest, strongest human beings I know, one of the guys on Shannon's crew fishing around in this torrent of water. He would have lost his life. So on the heels of all of that, the massive amount of water that we had pushed through that system that fast, we've talked a lot about the iron processes.
You guys are pretty familiar with iron scaling and buildup inside the line. When you move that much water that fast, it is going to create an incredibly large system disturbance. And so that's why we got a huge number of brown water calls, was just because the velocity of water that we had going through our system in all kinds of different directions caused basically any iron that we had to get stirred up and redistributed through.
They did a great job. Our we, both Semocor And then we brought in TW Summit, who's done a lot of that type of does a lot of that type of work and maintenance for us anyway, we had, I think, 5 or 6 crews ultimately going until about 1 or 2:00 in the morning, flushing until we got everything cleared up.
Since then we've had a lot of very intentional conversations around like that safety protocol and what we can do to make sure that that doesn't happen again, both with EPR and Semocor and kind of looking at our own internal stuff. So for hydrants shut down specifically, we're going to make sure that we're counting the number of turns on valves.
The you can tell how big a line is by how many turns it takes to get it to close down on a standard gauge valve, you get pie per inch. So we're going to make sure that we count and recount those valves. Those valve count turns. And then the other thing that Shannon and we're going Shannon's going to mention, I apologize, Shannon is the owner of EPR is going to have his guys do moving forward.
And something that we'll talk to our any contractor that we use on any shutdown that we can't verify. So any other shutdown you've shut it down, you can like check to make sure you go turn on a faucet. You check a hydrant in the middle, you can tell it's shutdown, with a damaged fire hydrant, that's really difficult to do because you've shut off the only water source to that hydrant.
And the hydrants damaged. So you don't want to open up the broken hydrant. Try and test it. So what we're going to do from now on is when we have to replace the entire hydrant, when it's under pressure, we're actually going to cut the pipe. So we'll take the, we'll take a demo saw and notch just a small slit
right in front of the fire hydrant and make sure that we don't have any pressure on it before we start unbolting stuff. And that's something that we can really easily repair when we're doing a full hydrant replacement. So it was a super scary day. Definitely caused a lot of headaches for the staff and, all of the brown water stuff.
But I did want to give you guys a report on kind of what fully had happened.
Chuck:
Yeah, well, fortunately, we didn't lose anybody or send anybody to the hospital, so.
Nathan:
Yeah. Correct. Yeah. The side from being a little bit shaken. Some good news. Yeah. Nobody was nobody was seriously, seriously injured. Aside from being pretty shaken, the, the kids dad actually works for the company, and he was on site, so obviously there was a lot of, like, shaky white faces.
But all said and done, we we came out of it a safer organization and we were able to respond to an emergency pretty well.
Chuck:
You know, an eight foot bollard, six inch diameter, stuck four feet in full of concrete will stop a semi.
Nathan:
That's exactly what they moved.
Chuck:
That's what we did over in Inverness. And we lost. Yeah.
Nathan:
So that's that's the standard hydrant spec that we use. And it's the way that they come across that those. And so they had we had 2 eight inch bollards. They've four feet up, six feet down. And the way they come across they just pushed them over because they can cantilever into the soil. So without like putting the entire hydrant in a solid block of concrete, you believe me?
We, we wanted to try all kinds of things that would have probably gotten us in trouble. But we didn't. So.
Chuck:
All right. Thank you. Nathan. Yep.
Jason:
One other thing for Nathan. Yes? Before we finish up, how's the website? And are we good morning. Life on Friday still?
Nathan:
We may not be going live on Friday. We did come across one issue, so I've been working with, actually, Terrence, on the video portion of everything.
So the process that we use to download the old videos, we made some assumptions that were incorrect. And so we're, we're working on setting up a meeting, with Terrence and, I think Corby, I can't remember Corby was going to be there or not but will be there along with streamline to make sure that that video information gets ported over.
That's really the only other thing that we've got holding us up. So it may be a little bit past Friday. But once we get that resolved, we'll, we'll move forward on it. All right.
Chris:
And so I actually went today looking at it, you know, based on our study session, I didn't notice that we were supposed to go check that out.
But I have and it looks pretty good. So, it looks good.
Chuck:
Like the idea that the screen moving in, getting rid of the trees and get something different. That was a good suggestion, but, you know, I thought it was good. okay. District manager or anything else. All right. Thank you very much. Close item ten. Going to 12, it says.
But maybe it's 11. Director Lewis. Yeah.
Chris:
Thank you, Mr. President. So I kind of just wanted to say sorry. Thank you, Mr. President. So I kind of wanted to just tee up since we're moving forward, our IGA on, the stormwater and now parks, trails and open space where we left with our good old, water and sewer and, and then continuing on all the visits that we did, you know, we did the visits with, the different districts.
It looks like the, you know, the this district out there that we're that still rises to the top as a district that we could do an inclusion where is still Parker, but they're still two our two years away, two and a half years away. Right. And, Looks like we're tracking on those left stations at about the same time.
Two years to complete the lift stations. So that's good. So I wanted to just, tee up for the board here. Okay. So from our perspective, the district's perspective, you know, what would be the best for the community here in terms of being able to have a successful negotiations with Parker so that we come out, getting the better deal or the best deal we can.
So I'm suggesting that we, have, counsel investigate, you know, what would be the opportunity for us to essentially either to do an, a disillusion into the city or to do an IGA with the city for water and sewer. And then if we do that, essentially the city will now have a bigger center of gravity to negotiate with Parker for, right, for, on our behalf.
So it would also reduce a bunch of confusion as to who owns what, you know, in terms of the city and the district and, and it takes us to the other, level of us reducing the level of government that we have in the community. Right? So we when when I joined this board, way back when, you know, one of the things we said is we want to reduce all the levels of government.
And we started it all the HOA and the mass, HOA and the city and the district and so forth. And, I know there's a history back where when the city started because, you know, and having join in with the district and there was, whatever happened here, but I think we progressed from there. We now have an ... We have two IGAs now with the city, and now I'm suggesting that we go further and we explore doing parks, doing water and sewer with the city.
So I sent out a little, email on what the benefits and so forth would be. And I just wanted to to bring that up for discussion tonight.
Chuck:
Has everybody's seen the, email that yeah Chris sent out. Obviously, my take is that we've got our plate full with, the two IGAs that are still outstanding.
The parks, trails and open space that we want to complete. I also think that it would be appropriate if the board elects to further a discussion, we should, request, a meeting with the city instead of just spend our spinning our wheels on something that they may not be interested in. I also would like to.
With that being said, defer to Tera if you wouldn't mind having been responsible for the city for quite a while. Is there is this a viable opportunity or is it, would just give me your your thoughts because I think you have some experience, at least more than I do.
Tera:
So, Director Lewis, I do appreciate your passion for always trying to reduce costs.
However, I think, you know what I heard this board discussed tonight in their direction on the IGA. One. The what? The city is not in the water business. They don't want to be in the water business. They have no interest. The president met with mayor. There was no interest there. Why would we wanted to have a discussion with.
They made it clear they don't. They're not interested in water. You know, we've been talking tonight about continuing water operations, and I, you know, I know you think the you had mentioned something about this building, this building was evaluated as, you know, a potential city hall and it was disregarded as that not being a possibility. I mean, I don't this this building was not set up as an office.
We can barely keep the stuff that we have in there. The the city has way too many staff. This would not be functional. You have to totally take it down and rebuild it, which would cost more than just building a new building. So from that aspect in your note, that's that's not has been explored and was not a viable option.
You know, I remain committed as the rest of this board to really, finding a, you know, water is a life source. We need it not only live, but we need it to retain our home values and our community and finding, a sustainable water source for the future is paramount. You know, we are still putting together our documentation and in pipe assessment studies and all of the things that we said, in order to go into a negotiation, we have to know what our value is.
And we are still in the process of doing this. And I have to commend, you know, Mr. Travis, on all the work that he's done. And I think we're moving that direction. But for me, I'm not interested in having that discussion with the city because the city has made it very clear they're not in the water business and they don't want to be in the water business.
So, getting the other IGA’s going and in place was, removing some of the lower priority items. And, you know, our priority is still, you know, finding this renewable water, at the best cost. I actually wrote down, you know, what is important to me, if I can find it, as I thought through what you had said and really.
I'll find it here in just a second. I saw my writing.
But it really is, you know, Getting an honest and complete entity assessment for us to move forward in executing whatever is best for our subscribers and for the benefit of a regional, long term and sustainable water supply. You know, and and I feel like we're moving in that direction. We've moved a lot faster in that direction than we have, you know, since, Mr. Travis has taken this role and, and I feel like we are making really good decisions.
You know, made on the best possible information at the time. We don't have good possible information from Parker. It's been a long time. We're getting good information on us. It's a nonstarter that we have to continue work on the the lift stations because we have to bring them into compliance. So we have to keep doing that.
And, I just think, we have, you know, this board is, is moving in the right direction. And hopefully whoever gets the new seats will also, be wanting to do what's best for this community. And, and I just don't I don't see that your suggestion is what's best.
Chuck:
Chris, I think, that your suggestion is, is is very valuable, but, I don't feel personally that it's appropriate just to push off our water, requirements under the city so that they can eventually do something with Parker.
I don't think that it gives them more buying power. I think that we're on the right course with what we need to do to be valuable, to be attractive. And that's, take care of our infrastructure the way we're currently doing it, with the repairs and replacements we've had when we take care of the lift stations, that's a huge, burden that will be off any entity that takes over
this, district, water requirements. But, in, in that, in itself, if we could do something eventually with another water district that will get this district, out of, another governmental entity, and so I think eventually that's going to happen. I think the timing is, a little too soon to consider anything else other than that.
And I think that, it would be appropriate having, shot the first cannon over the bow. I think it would be appropriate to take another shot at another district when we get our plate clean.
Tera:
And not to mention the city has plenty to do. They don't need to start trying to do due diligence. And the water farm, I mean, they they're they got lots to do there
Chuck:
And whatever in term time that would be that they would have to run water or take care of the water.
Who better knows the water than us right now? we are the water source in Castle Pines. Just handing that over to the city, I think would be somewhat disruptive, at least in my mind. So, I think that the course work following, is an appropriate one.
Jason:
I have to echo both Tera And, the president here, it seems like a rabbit hole.
It's just something that we don't need to distract ourselves with. So I'm not, I'm not for it.
Chris:
Okay. Well, I appreciate, the comments and the feedback. I, I would say that, from an IGA perspective, we are. The city is not in the parks and trails open space. They're not in sewer business. They're not in the water or or wastewater business. But we're still doing an IGA to move the parks over to them. So it's not that we're not going to give them the.
All the, the assets, the experience we need because Travis and the rest of our staff would be there, just as we are doing with parks, trails and open space guiding them. So I, I'm totally, you know, hearing what you guys are saying and I'm okay with that. I just wanted to make sure that we understand that we teed it up that from a overall entity perspective,
At some point we're growing. The city is in the water business. They have more homes on the other side of the parkway than we have here in their providing water and sewer to them. Yes. Guess who's doing it, Parker. Right. So they just hire a consultant to do it, which is? It would be the same with what we do.
But, just wanted to bring that up and make sure that we.
Tera:
I think the difference is the city has a park. The city doesn't have any water. The city is not a water provider. Just as Parker made it perfectly clear, they only want water. They didn't have any interest in our parks. Right. I think there's a clear, delineation there, but.
I think since there's not majority support of it, we we don't need to explore it further.
Chuck:
Jason. And get more comments. No, Chris, thank you very much for your, your suggestion. with that said, do we have any directors matters? That was one of them. Anything else under directors matters?
Tera:
That can I always I just want to thank the staff. I know you guys, you know, work really hard for us and for this community.
And, I appreciate all that you're doing. I appreciate you coming with, not only to to, you know, advise us of situations that have happened, but work on a mitigation plan so they don't happen again in the future. And, I want to it was great to have contact with Phyllis. So thanks for making that happen.
Chuck:
Thanks, everybody.
Motion to adjourn. So moved. meeting adjourned. Thank you.