August 23, 2023 Study Session
Transcript
Describer:
Study Session Agenda
Wednesday, August 23, 2023, at 5:30 p.m.
7404 Yorkshire Drive, Castle Pines, CO 80108
I. Capital Project Update- Alex Page, Sr Staff Civil Engineer, Kennedy Jenks & Nathan Travis, District Manager.
a) Completed and Future Projects
b) Planned Upcoming Projects
III. Board comments, questions.
IV. Adjourn.
Board President Jason Blankaert:
Good evening, Castle Pines. And welcome to the Castle Pines North Metropolitan District. This is our study session for Wednesday, August 23rd at 5:30 p.m. or corrections probably 5:32 p.m.. Now, we have just a couple things on the agenda tonight. first are called the study session to order, and then next we will get a capital project update from Alex.
Alex, are you ready to give your presentation great.
I suppose that's okay, to..
District Manager Nathan Travis:
Right? Yeah. You guys get stuck with me up. So different for me being slightly over there. So you guys know who I am, Nathan Travis, I'm district manager here. With me, they have Alex Paige. She is with Kennedy Jenks and the primary engineer that we've been working on, with a lot of our capital projects, but more specifically, working around the water treatment plant.
And so what we want to do to do today is a couple things. I'm going to go over just kind of a general history, really more focused on the, like the status of our equipment, like, how did we get our facilities to the position that they were in about a year and a half ago.
So we'll kind of go through a brief history. And then what Alex and I have actually done is, just slightly modify, and abridge the presentation that we're going to be doing at Rocky Mountain section of AWWA next month. So we kind of want to kill two birds with one stone there. And then after get you guys up to date on that project, give you kind of an idea of where we're, by that project, I mean the presentation and then, get you and I the general idea of what we've accomplished so far and where we need to go from there.
And so we'll kind of trade off. this is our first swing at this. So you guys are also our unfortunate guinea pigs. I have a feeling she will be, much more articulate than I am, as she always is.
That's us. Yeah.
So today's story is really just. How did we get to be where we are? That's a picture of me rock climbing. Alex thought it'd be fun to throw in there, so that's me. Really? Going back to the formation of the district inside the early 80s, this has been a very politically driven environment. As I'm sure none of you will be surprised to hear.
One of the unfortunate kind of effects of that is that there hasn't been a large amount of attention really ever paid, especially to things like capital planning and capital forecasting. There's been a lot of drastic changes since we were since the inception. Districts formed in the 80s. By the 90s, we're going through a bankruptcy. In the, you know, late 90s, we we had been jointly operated with the village that split apart.
Shortly after that, the city came into formation and there was a dissolution, an effort that came after that. After the dissolution fell apart. We only really had a couple of years of stability before we started moving directly into the inclusion. And so without spending belaboring that point and spending too much time there, where I'm really going to start digging into the timeline is really just in like May of 2021.
So it's. Really at that time. Oh, sorry, what I missed. Oh, I was free to press the buttons. Sorry. I jumped ahead. So back to the formation of the district. So these are the original drawings that we have. I don't know how many of you are familiar with blueprints. These are the, blueprints that we had for the water treatment plant.
Describer:
On screen.
CASTLE PINES NORTH METROPOLITAN DISTRICT
WATER TREATMENT FACILITY
JUNE 1988
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
ERNEST F. FAZEKAS II
ROBERT M. McMULLEN
C. ROGER ADDLESPERGER
THOMAS A. JONES
LARRY E. REICHERT
DISTRICT MANAGER
PAUL V. DANNELS
Nathan:
These are literally the only drawings we have for this facility. They're the original construction drawings we do not have as built that were completed. The plant has undergone two expansions since that time, we have virtually no information on those. And so you can see these are like, very old school, like actual blueprints is just kind of cool.
Describer:
History of Plant, a picture of the plant building.
Nathan:
In and of themselves. and so now we're to the history of the plant. See, I told you was going to be jumping. It's my first time through this one.
Describer:
History of Plant, an internal picture of the plant building. Nathan describes.
Nathan:
Yeah. And so.
We'll go. We'll kind of jump in here a little bit. So going back to like May of 2021. We're approaching the inclusion. And really that is when or where we're well into it. But that's when our former operator who had been here for a really long time, retired. It may have been April, April, May, but early that spring.
And it wasn't long before we had our boil water notice. And so we have some photos that really kind of highlight what the treatment plant looked like. Everybody's had a chance to view it since then. These are photos that were taken really on or around the time that that operator had left. And then moving into the boil water
Notice. One of the things that is maybe not immediately noticeable about this picture, but is really important to draw attention to. If you see the the brown pipe on the right hand side of the homer bucket with the folded, that's a folded street sign. I'm not even sure where the street sign came from. and then in that blue pipe above that, that is one of our chlorine injection points.
So that line sprung a leak. And the solution to solving that leak was to fold the street sign in half and stick it in a five gallon bucket underneath it.
Describer:
History of Plant, an picture of a blue pipe, Nathan describes.
Nathan:
Here you can just really see like a this is from the original construction of the plant. This is filter 1 or 2. And you can really just see like even just the, the degradation of the pipe, like it's things as simple as paying attention to pipe coatings weren't being done. And so that the leak you can even see in the top right corner, you can see the edge of the homer bucket that was catching our chlorine leak.
Describer:
History of Plant, a picture of the corner of a blue container which appears to be leaking. Nathan describes.
Nathan:
One of the projects that we have coming up, relatively quickly, is the LAS project. That's the liquid ammonium sulfate project. One of the defined reasons that we have that was, this was a ammonium storage. Drinking like, drinking water tank. Like, this is, this is a tank that we would add granulated ammonia to.
We would stir it up, and then that would be injected into, our treatment process to bring us from chlorine to chloramines. And this tank was in absolutely horrible condition. The the hopper on top of it was rusting out. The inside coating was falling off all over the place. There was probably about, I don't know, a good foot or two of physical sediment in the bottom.
There was even a I don't know, honestly, I don't even know how long it was. How long this was happening. But there it was on one of our sanitary surveys. Even part of the degradation caused here was because the former operator, we had lost our, granulated ammonia supplier. When that happened, he went from a where they went the operator went from a 99% food grade, granulated ammonia to a, I think, 18% ammonia fertilizer.
It was about 18% ammonia, like somewhere in the neighborhood of, like, 60% sulfides, like literal, actual fertilizer, and didn't really see a problem with that. But like, those kinds of things certainly accelerated this type of degradation. And the degradation of aside this system, even working properly, has a lot of issues. When we're talking about ammonia dosing. We're talking about like, you know, like in sometimes less than 1mg/l per minute that we're dosing out, like really, really small, accurate doses of a very, very defined chemical.
The way that you try to mix this old batch system was literally bags of ammonia per inches of water in a site glass. And so there's no guarantee that we were even able to in a perfectly operating system, there's no guarantee that we're able to take that ammonia dose, get the concentration correct, and then get that into the water, let alone with the delivery system that was left in this condition.
And so we've already replaced all of that. All of that is out. We were able to at least, temporarily install liquid ammonia sulfate. We just need to make that a permanent room with all of the appropriate spill protection. Make us put us in a position where able to take any deliveries and stuff like that.
Describer:
On screen. A picture of a messy room. Nathan explains.
Nathan:
This is the future workshop and the future liquid ammonia sulfate room.
This is downstairs. It's right above. A lot of the work we're doing now has been in and below this room for the backwash reclaim tank. So ultimately, the new ammonia room will be moved in here. All of the shelving will be pulled out. Spill containment will be put in place. Delivery structures will be put in. We'll reroute, we'll reroute the the pipes that deliver ammonia into the, mixing plate right before everything leaves.
Leaves the plant. And it'll it'll drastically improve our operation in a lot of different ways, but so that's what ultimately will end up in that room.
Jason:
Sorry, Nate. What was the timeframe on that?
Nathan:
LAS. we just signed an, an amendment to the proposal and looking to bid in October.
Describer:
On screen. Looking into a whole down a ladder with a pipe running along the wall at the bottom of the picture, and a valve connection running up from the pipe to the ladder. Nathan explains.
Nathan:
So that is scheduled to get done this year while the plant is offline. likely begin construction, the December. November. It depends a lot on, equipment availability, delivery contract schedules, all of that. But. And then also, I guess it's not really affected by the tank coating plan. So that's just kind of a quick overview of, like, just a few snapshots of how that plant looked.
Describer:
On screen. Castle Pines North Metro District
Team Building Fast Friends Using a Trust Fall
A group of logos of contractors that work for the district and logos of organizations in which the district participates including:
Kennedy Jenks, Semocor, Inc. Mountain Peak Controls Inc. M.Gilmore Electric, LLC, Advance Mechanical Systems, Inc. American Water Works Association Rocky Mountain Section, Rocky Mountain Water Conference and Rocky Mountain Water Environment Association.
Nathan:
And it was I mean, if you walked through it for especially for being a water treatment facility, the plant, it felt gross, for lack of a better word, like there were every piece of equipment in that building had some sort of issue or trick it needed to do to get to get, to get functional and for example, my my favorite one, was the high service pump.
So in the clear, well, would get high enough for the high service pump to kick on every once in a while. The main pump that we needed for that all the time, would just fail to start. And if you were physically at the plant and hurt and got the failure alarm, you would have to turn the pump off upstairs.
You have to turn the pump off, turn it in hand, which basically says, like, I want this thing to run no matter what, and then sprint downstairs to physically push a plunger on the discharge side of this valve that was broken and leaking all over the place to get it to open in time so that the pump would continue to run.
There were I can't even begin to tell you there were countless little things like that. And so that brings us into July of 20 or June of 2021 when we get the boil water notice. This is kind of a twofold of that, but so the plant is in this condition, we have at the time we had three chlorine pumps, installed.
The idea being that you're only going to be using two of them in any given time. If you really have to, you can run the entire plant on one, and then you've got a spare of the three chlorine pumps that were there. Only one of them was barely functional. when that chlorine, that chlorine pump had failed by then at this time, our operators gone.
We're primarily we're getting mostly help from Parker, and we have just brought on Ramey Environmental to serve as the ORC for the facility. So it was actually Parker operator that responded to the call of low chlorine. Got there. There was really no way to get the one barely functioning pump we had running back up and running.
So we made the decision to rather than send water out of the treatment facility that is unchlorinated, which we can do, we can actually do that for up to 72 hours. We can send water with no chlorine out of our treatment plant for 72 hours because our, our source water with our deep well aquifers is such high quality, we don't catch a, we don't catch a boil water notice level violation.
So we would catch we would have to do a public a tier two public notice. We'd have to send out a letter basically saying we sent water out. We have a distribution. Residual that's too low. But we wanted to avoid even to having to do that. And we have this awesome interconnect pump station. So we shut down the the treatment plant, went out to the interconnect pump station and fired it up.
Everything was working fine at the interconnect pump station until it wasn't. To this day, we don't really know what happened. The the IPS has three pumps. Only one of them was running. That pump was fully capable of meeting our entire daily demand. That pump failed. It was actually the the drive. The electrical drive that fed that pump failed, and so did the other two sitting next to it without them being on the exact same component
Failed in all three drives at the exact same time, even in the two that were running. The manufacturer couldn't tell us what happened. We brought in two separate electrical engineers to do evaluations. Neither one of them could tell us what happened. We really just have no idea. Our solution to that ultimately was like, well, if you can't tell us why these things all failed at the same time was to just replace all three of them with a newer model and a manufacturer that we trusted, a little bit better when those failed.
It could not have been at a worst possible time of day. It was approaching like six, seven, 8 a.m. Somewhere in there. And if you look at our tank levels by design, that's just our lowest tank level of the day. So like our highest level here, probably around like 9 or 10:00 at night, 8 or 9:00 at night.
Everybody starts to water overnight. Our tank level comes down, gets to its lowest point in the 24 hour cycle. Around that eight, nine, 10:00 people stop watering. Everybody goes to work. Our levels climb back up, usually about 80 or 90% capacity. And then that's how we that's how it flows because we lost these pumps at the time we did, we had as little water in the tank as we were going to in that entire 24 hour period.
We couldn't in any way turn the treatment plant back on quickly enough. The interconnect pump station was down. We had seven feet of water roughly in the tank, and it only took us about 30 minutes before we ran through that and had a full system pressure loss event. So it was actually the pressure loss that as a reason that triggered the, boil water notice.
There weren't any, initial water quality concerns. The disinfection residuals all look good, but when you have enough of your system, lose pressure. If there are leaks or compromises to our piping that we're not aware of, those are all places the potential contamination. And so we had to go do a bunch of sampling and everything to get out.
We get through that whole boil water notice, we make it a whole five weeks, get to the end of July and we have a second. And for the second time, we had a full system for an almost full system pressure loss of almost the same thing. We didn't lose quite as many homes as we did the first time.
This time was directly related to operator error. Ramey Environmental was, running the system at the time. The operator that we had from them and present with us just really didn't show up to the call. So we we ran out again. I really don't know why the state didn't order a second boil water notice. It was so incredibly similar to the first line of events.
I had instantly started lining everything up, getting ready under the assumption that we were going to have one. For whatever reason, they didn't issue one. Maybe they just felt sorry for me. Maybe somebody else got the call. I have absolutely no idea. But we were certainly in a position where we could have had 2 boil water notices inside of five weeks.
Describer:
On screen. WTP Timeline
• WT Single Operator Retires -
May 2021
- Engage Ramey Environmental for ORC
• Boil Water Notice - June 2021
• System Pressure Loss - July 2021
- Emergency Triage - July 2021 to October 2021 (Maintained Operation)
• Large Scale Emergency RepairsOctober 2021
• Kennedy Jenks Engaged - November 2021
• Semocor becomes ORC - January 2022
• WTP Start-up - May 2022
• On-line for Peak Demand -June 2022
Nathan:
Next slide. Hey, check this out. There's a whole slide dedicated to this. That's why Alex is here to continue to poke me. Okay, so that brings us to the second bubble up there. System pressure loss. And really, from that point on, and even moving back into June, we were just in full emergency triage mode. The we fired the operator.
We we can't fire them because they're a Ramey employee, but we immediately told Ramey Environmental, like, get this dude out of here. We literally sent a Lyft or an Uber to go pick him up at the water treatment plant because he had one of our trucks and take him home. Ramey Environmental ended up sending us another operator.
And really stuck us in this Like we are limping to keep this plant alive. We managed to get chlorine up and running enough that we could go. We couldn't swap out any of the other pumps, so we're still doing crazy running up and down stuff. It's a really heavy operator involved, just to make sure that we can get this plan up and running.
And, interestingly enough, I'm looking back on everything and even especially looking back at like the former, like, treatment plant operator, I can't decide if they were the like one of the worst operators that I've ever met or like legitimately one of the best because I don't really understand how they were getting water out of this thing consistently at all.
So we do emergency triage, and we're really just like, we're fixing what we can, but plants full bore, full bore, we're at the peak of our demand season, and we're trying to just keep going through until we get to October. And we shut down. Once we shut down for that October and Centennial took over, we started disassembling that plant like absolute crazy.
Ramey environmental pulled out pretty early. They let us know around this time that they weren't going to continue a relationship with us beyond the end of the year. Mostly they what they told us is they got some new contracts up north and they just which is much closer to their operating base, and they wanted to pull their operations up.
What they what their actual reasons were, I can only guess. In November of 2021, Kennedi Jenks was engaged specifically to start helping with the water treatment plant, and that is when Alex came on board and really started like helping us begin the process of moving out of this emergency triage and into working toward moving into a much more proactive phase.
But from October, really from that October, pushing all the way into that, like following May and even early June, we were still in a very reactive place where we were effectively designing the water treatment plant on the fly, so we would identify things that needed to be replaced. We we had Alex, thankfully there at that point to make sure that we were putting things in properly that would meet all of the specs and codes, but we were really not operating with much of a plan.
We had like a white board based system, like there was a whiteboard in the office of the plant and like, we just kept everything that was going on, what status it was in. We had, you know, the MCC, which is the motor control center needed to replace. We replaced all three high service pumps. We revamped the ammonia system on the fly.
We actually ended up painting the interior of the building. We were doing a ton of scada and controls. We did security, we did grounds maintenance. We installed the fence. We, got on. Well, we got on contract to install the fence. We got the sidewalk, all of that stuff up and running. Anything that we could touch and get after we were.
And so while we were going through that process, one of the things that we were also doing were identifying what we needed to get, basically to get the plant back on that May or June, and then what future capital projects can we build coming out of this? So June or May of 2022? We do start up, we're online and operating for peak demand.
Describer:
On screen. The Road Ahead, A picture of a road into the mountains.
Nathan:
By early June. And that is really the point that we were able to kind of make that actual pivot. So once we once we got through that 2022 year and into that early summer, we were able to change our focus from this. You know, we'd move through triage and emergency. We gone through, like figuring stuff out on the fly.
And this is really where we were able to finally transition into a place where we're being much more proactive with our planning. We started putting together the capital projects that we're now working on, and I think that's where I turn it over. And I will turn it over to Alex again.
Jason:
Hey, Nathan, couple of questions real quick. So besides this LASproject that you have planned, coming up later in this year, there's also you know, seeing the water plant a couple weeks ago.
There's also a couple other projects that probably need to happen. What is a time frame on those before that water plant is maintenance only and no longer going in and repairing.
Nathan:
And with that question, I'm going to turn things over to Alex, because that's exactly what we're about to jump through.
Alex Page, Engineer, Kennedy Jenks:
Yeah, we should be able to answer that through the next couple of slides, but if not, we can have more questions.
So, thanks for having me. Nice to meet all of you. So once we could catch our breath, so to speak, we got the plant back online in time for the 2022 peak demand. We, Nathan and I and Semocor kind of hit the pause button. And because we still really had kind of a blank canvas, so to speak, of, okay, where do we start and how are we going to, you know, bite the elephant off one bite at a time.
And how do we do that when we don't even have, you know, your standard, typical documentation and that normally engineering firms walk into for a rehabilitation project? So we first created a PNID by just simply kind of walking the plant and quote unquote re reverse engineering the facility. and so. Oh, sorry. A PNID is a process and instrumentation diagram.
Describer:
On screen. The Road Ahead - Progress Not Perfection
A schematic of the water treatment system. Alex explains.
Alex:
So, whenever you look at a set of plans for any type of a treatment plant project pump station, they're usually the sheets actually at the back of the set. And that's really the quote unquote, brain of the project that shows you how, water and chemicals flow. It shows you how electricity and scale of communications flow between the equipment and the computer.
And so that's really like where you start is the with the PNIDs and the process flow diagrams. So I'm showing you this first, to talk first about our facility documentation program that we kicked off this year. And so through that, what we've been doing is going kind of from, like, if you were to build a drinking water treatment plant from scratch, you would have a full set of drawings with different disciplines.
They would have civil drawings, structural drawings, mechanical drawings, electrical and PNIDs. And those represent different areas of what we call disciplines that all come together to build a plant. So as if we were doing that, that's where we started. So we currently have underway, a PNID program going on where our in INC engineers local to this office have gone through and have created, about 20 sheets of drawings that represent your current plant.
And then we're working with your, the system integrator mountain peaks to document how they're controlled. And then from that, we're going to move towards the other disciplines. And at the end of this program, what's going to have you'll have is basically a guidebook of what your facility is. So when we get into maintenance mode, then future engineers in the district have somewhere to start.
Does that make sense to you?
Tera:
Do you think you'll complete that this year?
Alex:
The PNID portion and the civil portion are intended to be completed this year? we have some upgrades going on to the filters that are going to take place next year. And we have structural upgrades going on now that we're trying to get through those to finish those disciplines.
So in a way, by completing the construction projects I'm going to review, we're doing it, but just kind of like in parallel. And then we'll take all the drawings we're creating to to complete the whole water treatment document. Does that make sense? Yes it does. Okay, thanks Tera. Any other questions on this?
Describer:
On screen. The Road Ahead - Progress Not Perfection
CASTLE PINES NORTH METROPOLITAN DISTRICT
CASTLE PINES, COLORADO BACKWASH RECLAIM TANK REHABILITATION
A vicinity map of Oxford Drive off of Monarch Blvd going south depicts the project location. Owner Consultant and regulatory agencies are listed in print too small to read. A Drawing Index is on the left side of the screen from top to bottom. 11/16/2022-CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS by Kennedy Jenks is listed in a table below the drawing. Alex explains.
Alex:
Okay. Okay. So the first we're going to now we're going to talk about the two projects that are in active construction that we're actually wrapping up.
So the Backwash reclaim tank is the tank that receives the wastewater after your filters Backwash. So you have what's called a direct filtration plant. So groundwater comes into your plant and runs through a media filter. And that collects sediment because you groundwater typically has iron and manganese that are oxidizing out and forming a grit. And so once the filter is reached, its treatment capacity, you go through a backwash cycle.
So that's quote unquote wastewater at a water treatment plant. And so that water then flows to a tank where it's settles out and so what you end up with after it settles is at the top. You have, fairly clean water that you can recirculate to the front of your plant and solids at the bottom that you eventually haul away for landfill application.
And so we started with this project because it was it's an outdoor asset at the plant. Access is outside and it's original concrete lid was at the end of its life. And we were very concerned that it was literally going to fall in on itself. The benefit that we had going for us with this tank is this is the only asset at the plant that we can bypass.
So what that means is we can operate the plant while this tank is not actively in service. So we just said, okay, this is the worst like structure and we can deal with it now. So we're going to go for it and charge ahead. And so this project is almost completed. And so pictures are worth a thousand words.
Describer:
On screen. A picture of a dirty tank and rusted pipes. Alex describes.
Alex:
So this is what was inside this tank at the start of the project. The concrete had not been rehabilitated since the original construction. And you had a very old school we'll call it sludge collection and decant system. Slightly DIY is kind of how some of it came off. And now you have a beautiful tank that's properly coated with the right coatings, and an upgraded automated sludge collection system and decant system that is up to current codes and standards and with the times.
So I wanted to show you guys this because your district's money is going to good use and we've got a big project that we could check the box off of.
Describer:
On screen. The Road Ahead - Progress Not Perfection
CASTLE PINES NORTH METROPOLITAN DISTRICT
CASTLE PINES, COLORADO
WATER TREATMENT PLANT - HVAC SYSTEM UPGRADES
A vicinity map of Oxford Drive off of Monarch Blvd going south depicts the project location. Owner Consultant and regulatory agencies are listed in print too small to read. A Drawing Index is on the left side of the screen from top to bottom. CONFORMED by Kennedy Jenks is listed in a table below the drawing. Alex explains.
Alex:
And then so the other project that we're wrapping up is the HVAC project. And I know that's not necessarily what you first think of when you think of water treatment plant.
But HVAC systems are extremely important in treatment plants water or wastewater. They're not just there to make the operators comfortable. So you guys use chlorine to dose and oxidize your water. Not all chlorine is consumed for oxidation, and chlorine likes to go back into a gaseous form. So if you guys have been at the plant, when you're on the filter floor, it smells and it burns your eyes, right?
So the HVAC system that's attached to that area we've installed, and I believe they're almost up and running. Exhaust fans that will be pulling that gas out of that room like most water treatment plants would have. That not only is more safe, chlorine gas is highly corrosive to metal equipment. So you have control systems up there are brand new MCC up there, pumps.
And so we're trying to quickly get that on line so that that corrosion is stopped. And then in addition to that, electrical equipment and pumps, their motors like the motors that are downstairs on the high service pumps. They're sensitive to temperature swings. And so the HVAC system is also going to be, you know, controlling the climate to protect your equipment.
And so that should be we're waiting on one more part. And we're working with the contractor to get everything but that one part that controls a water heater to an eyewash station. So not mission critical. But we should be having that on line here in the next couple months. So those two, by the by Halloween, you should have both those projects completed.
So that's, That's great. Yeah.
Describer:
A large white tank with a pulley system on its floor, a construction worker holding a plywood board, and a steel ladder on the wall of the tank. Alex explains.
Board Member Director James Mulvey:
Can you back up to the tank? What I think I see that it looks like some sort of rake system for getting sludge off the bottom. Yeah, it's just wonder if you can kind of take us through this picture and. Oh, yeah, describe what's actually in it.
Alex:
Yeah. So the the thing so Nathan is pointing to the kind of tan item that's called the decant system.
And so that actually has no mechanical moving parts. It's like a floating mechanism that rises and falls with the water level. And it sits, it's buoyant enough that it sits at the highest water point, whatever it is in the tank. So the cleanest water that the sediments falling out of goes in there, and then it goes to pumps behind that wall, that will take it to the back of the front of your plant to be retreated for drinking.
It's pretty simple system. And the new one that we have, the old one you had, I believe, is PVC, and this is, FRP fiberglass. So much more durable and strong. So should be in there for a while and then, yes, the metal kind of rake thing that looks like it goes back and forth because it does on a pulley system, that's the sludge collection system.
And it's kind of like a really big version of a pool skimmer, for lack of a better term. And so there's, sludge pumps on the other side of that wall. And then when they kick. So we know we have monitoring devices in there for level, that we're working with our integrator to figure out kind of exactly how we're going to operate it.
But at a certain sludge blanket level, we will kick on the pumps, they will pull sludge through that system. And then above, we've installed a haul truck station, and so a haul truck or vac truck will come and connect to that, and the sludge will go right to his truck and be taken away.
James:
Are all these materials, I mean, like, do I do it at my job at galvanic compatibility?
You look at all the materials are using there and all your bolted joints and things like that. And second question would be, what is the actual material on the wall now? The coating.
Alex:
Yeah, the coating is an NSF 600 coating. So it's like the highest standard that you can have right now in municipal systems. NSF 61 is commonly what's used for drinking water applications for mechanical equipment.
And so that means it's rated to be in contact with your typical drinking water quality without causing corrosion to leach into your water. Coatings Because of volatile organics that tend to off gas from paints. They they call it NSF 600. And that actually that standard came out in the middle of our design. we knew it was coming because we had some coding experts within K.J..
And so we designed around that to cover our bases. And so that's like the NSF, that's an NSF 600 coating, that should be installed for many years to come. Okay.
James:
And what is the lifetime of that, roughly?
Alex:
You're usually looking at, like, a 15 to 20 year lifespan.
James:
Okay. All right. And then I got one more question on HVAC, and if I'm overstepping, you know, you you made a point of talking about removal of of gaseous, you know, is it chlorine or.
Okay. Is that area segregated or is that going to get circulated through the rest of the facility?
Alex:
The exhaust fans that are over that area go straight out to atmosphere and won't be recirculated. And then the door thresholds are being retrofitted with the LAS project to be, sealing at the bottom.
James:
Okay. Excellent. Thank you. Yep. It.
Nathan:
Yeah. there is there's one thing I want to mention about the Backwash reclaim project before we move on. well, it's a, you know, obviously a significant capital expense. This project does come with a very, very large, ongoing savings. We can't I can't exactly quantify that for you, but one of the changes that's been made since this plant was originally built is that our regional wastewater treatment facility, PCWRA, does not accept treatment plant solids.
And so the way this is, this is designed specifically for this reason. So you be, you know, you backwash a filter, it comes out red water. I think I showed you guys all the little shake bottle. And so all of that settles out at the bottom. And so these sludge pumps are something we'll probably run quarterly ish.
We'll have to figure that out. I'm just with some trial and error and matching. But one of the really, really important things about that is, is, you know, we're right. Even where the, the fiberglass intake sits, it's about five and a half, like, five feet off the ground ish. So right now, because we can't send that sludge to our wastewater treatment facility, all of this stuff has to be disposed as hazardous material.
And, I mean, like, all of it. So if we have six feet of water in there, five feet of water in there and a foot of sludge, all of that has to be disposed as if it's hazardous material. We actually just did this. It cost us $192,000 to dispose of that. So this is going to allow us to do is rather than have to dispose of that entire six feet of water to get the sludge off the bottom with those sludge pumps tracking on the bottom and our ability to put it directly in a tanker.
We're only going to be dealing with about a fifth of the total material, so they don't care what you give them, they just charge you for 1000 gallons. So we're going to give them one fifth of just the stuff that we need to get rid of, you know, four times a year. If that actually tracks that, we could be saving, you know, five, $600,000 a year.
Just from this project in only hauling the sludge material off. So that's also a really important component of this.
James:
So, Roe, based on what you did here in, updating things and you're saying, you know, 4 or $500,000 a year, where's the payoff time frame, roughly?
Nathan:
We'll have to track it. So, I mean, if it's if it's $500,000 a year, it's a, I think with a bid on this one was 1.23.
So a little bit over two years we'll know once we've track it. We know how much we've spent the last couple of years to get rid of it. We have to figure out how often we have to pump this thing out. There's, you know, a certain amount level of sludge that we can't that will start to fall the system.
So we can't go above two feet. So we're just going to track and see how long it that fills up. And then we'll have a much better idea after a full year of operation, what it actually cost us versus what it actually, what it currently costs us versus what we've historically spent on it.
James:
Do any facilities like this?
The water, I mean, this isn't sludge the way I think of sludge, but, this material that's left on the bottom, do you ever put that into, like, you know, basically dewatering tank or pit or something like that to reduce that even further? Is that not economical?
Nathan:
Some facilities do you if you've got the, you know, if you have the footprint to pull this stuff out and do, you know, line drying beds and let all of that stuff go and pull it out?
It's it is something that some plants do. It's much more common in wastewater and surface water plants than it is ours, especially since our sludge is, primarily just iron. I we're just barely over the team Normal T-norm requirements for it, but..
James:
I was just wondering if there's another reduction there you could potentially do. But I think we're sort of geographically limited over there.
So yeah, this looks like a good Medium.
Nathan:
Thanks for letting me interrupt.
Alex:
But yeah Jim. That's correct. Your land the land situation is what's hindering go in that direction so we can look at the future time. But I think you're in good shape now. Okay. So next we're going to talk about the water treatment plant rehab project.
Describer:
On screen. The Road Ahead - Progress Not Perfection
CASTLE PINES NORTH METROPOLITAN DISTRICT
CASTLE PINES, COLORADO WTP TANK REHABILITATION PROJECT
A vicinity map of Oxford Drive off of Monarch Blvd going south depicts the project location. Owner Consultant and regulatory agencies are listed in print too small to read. A Drawing Index is on the left side of the screen from top to bottom. ISSUED FOR BID by Kennedy Jenks is listed in a table below the drawing. Alex explains.
Alex:
So the in addition to the backwash reclaim tank, you have a raw water mix tank, a clear well and a backwash supply tank. And the raw water, mix tank and the clear well are below grade concrete tanks at the plant inside the building. And then the backwash supply tank is that metal tank out back. And so those tanks have not been really looked at and also upgrade since this plant was constructed.
And so based on just general timeline math, they're due for some upgrades in addition to their access points. Need to be rehabilitated. The backwash tank. We've been inside of that one. there's a lot of corrosion inside there. So these tanks got pulled out as their own project because they are critical to plant operation. There's no redundancy to them, so you can't fix them and offer at the same time.
So this project has been bid. And we will be discussing at your next board meeting for recommendation for award. And then the contractor will be getting underway after award, ideally. And, getting working on rehabilitating those tanks once the plant goes offline. We structure it because we've had limited eyes on these tanks from a condition assessment perspective, we've structured the project and the bidding so that, our structural engineer and the contractor will be entering the tanks as soon as possible to do give a true, real time assessment of the condition, and discuss with the contractor the work that needs to be done.
So we're not just, you know, rehabbing things to rehab things. And so that's it's not the.
Tera:
So you lost me a little bit. So one of the plant goes off line, what's the
Alex:
oh I apologize. Yeah. October 1st, the water treatment plant will come on offline. October 1st, you guys will switch to Centennial through the interconnect pump station.
And then. Yeah, you go into your standard contract here this year, you guys are operating year round. We worked with, Peter at Centennial to make sure we coordinating, you know, when we need to be down versus, like, they needed us to be online to get their project done. And so this project's been getting developed in preparation for when Centennial could supply the district with water again, like usual.
So. Yeah, no problem. Any questions on this project?
Jason:
So sorry. I was going to ask. I guess, can going to be able to take care of this in one off season or is it going to take?
Alex:
Yep. That's the intent, correct? Yeah.
James:
You can't you kind of went through it quick. This list of two tanks that we were talking about or was it more than that.
Alex:
Three tanks. Three tanks. So rainwater mixed tank is the below grade concrete tank where your source water or a you can call source water a raw water. But the water from your wells comes in. And the purpose of the mix tank is you dose chlorine to start the oxidation process of iron manganese. And so that mix tank gives time for that reaction to start happening before the water comes in contact with your media.
So you want the oxidation process to start because that's when these, constituents start to precipitate, which is what your media is designed to take out of the water. The clear well is once your water is treated, you dose chlorine prior to dosing ammonium sulfate to make chloramines. And you're required to have a certain amount of what's called contact time.
So you do calculation based on dose and flow and time. And that equates to like for log virus, for removal that you guys need to hit. And so that's the main purpose of a clear. Well. And then I think it's also provides you some equalization. And so those are inside the plant. The clear. Well, you know, that staircase that goes upstairs and there's like a that hatch underneath.
That's for how you get into the clear. Well that's the entrance point. The raw water mix tank is in that upstairs room, where the current ammonia pumps are. And then the backwash supply tank is a metal above grade tank. And that's the one that's outback.
James:
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you very much.
Describer:
A picture of a wall of pipes and meters or sensors. Alex explains.
Alex:
Yep. All right, so the liquid ammonia sulfate improvement project. We talked a little bit about this one already. but basically we're going to be. So this is a I found this picture actually right before our meeting here. So the blue things in the back, those are the hoppers Nathan was telling you about.
And that is so you can kind of get the gist just from looking at those. The operators would literally be pouring bags of like dried ammonia and, you know, dust would go everywhere. And it had kind of like this hand cake mixing looking mechanism on it. And so we're not doing that anymore. Currently your plant has properly like stored totes that your pumps have a suction line into.
And they're dosing with liquid ammonium sulfate. But that's a temporary solution. And so we're moving the pumps and we'll be installing proper permanent chemical tanks downstairs. We're also moving everything downstairs because that's really your only point that a chemical truck could safely back up to and fill these tanks. Versus the only real way to get to this room is, like, backing up on a hill, and you'd have to have a huge fill line, and it would wouldn't be good.
So, that's the purpose of this project. The design is currently going through a 90% QA/QC review. That's what we call it. So we have our experts reviewing it to look for fatal flaws and then, like Nathan said, we're looking to put it out to bid in October and that timeline jives with the backwash tank in the HVAC project.
And where this project's going to be are all like, right in the very similar area. So we also need to space them out so contractors could work around each other.
Describer:
On screen. The Road Ahead - Progress Not Perfection
A schematic of the water treatment system. A PNID. Alex explains.
Alex:
So those are the active projects at the plant that are being executed, whether they're in construction or design. Just kind of bringing this pad back up to talk now about the road ahead. So you guys are asking about kind of when do we get to maintenance mode? So the what we're rehabilitating at this point I would call the is the ancillary systems.
Next we're going to look at upgrading the heart of the plant which is your six filter beds. The filter media is definitely more older school media with large drainage rock. You got anthracite garnet, different medias, and there's more modern medias that are tailored towards, iron and manganese that we can install in there. And we can also install, more modern under drain systems, which is what's underneath the media.
That will allow potentially a lot of filters to be rated for higher capacity of flow. In addition, right now the filters have an old school surface wash. That's what filters started with, because having air compressors and was very expensive and not efficient, there's air scour systems that are much more energy efficient now and effective at back washing filters.
And so we're going to be starting work on getting ready to upgrade those filters to basically bring them from 1988 to present day. Is the goal, to proceed that similar to how we don't have any record drawings? We don't have water quality data historically documented. So to design a main treatment process, we need water quality data in general.
Also CDPHE through their submittal process. We've already talked to them. They require whenever you upgrade a major treatment process like this to talk through in the application what you're treated water goals are. So what's your raw water coming in? What are you going to treat it to. And so the way you do that is you do have to pilot.
So right now we're doing raw water sampling campaign and then we're going to start walking through our plan for the pilot and the ultimate project. I've worked in water treatment plants across the country. And just in my experience to this project's going to be not slow, but like, we're going to have to walk CDPHE through what we're going to do and be transparent and in general, kind of no matter where you are, that's how you have successful projects, is not blindsiding regulators.
So that's why we're going to start with the pilot. You do follow their steps, bring them along for the ride and have their buy in so that we can get this filter project done through the next like year or so. And get them upgraded and then we can get the plant kind of where we want it to be going forward.
Nathan Off-mic:
So this is hopefully beginning construction October of 2024. Correct. So.
Leah:
I have a quick question. Yeah. Assuming that there's an inclusion with Parker some time in the future, what would happen to the plant? Would it just continue to, run as it does today? But just it would like the ownership would be different or.
Nathan:
Yeah. So for specifically talking about the Parker inclusion, you're not looking realistically at our system being physically connected to theirs for probably around ten years.
Their original timeline was a little bit faster than that. I think they thought they could do it like 1 or 2. As those conversations went on, that kind of kept getting spongier and spongier. And then their long term renewable project, assuming that everything goes as they assume currently assume it will, you're not even, like, really starting to actualize any renewable water from their, projected three quarter of $1 billion project until like, I think it was like a 20 year outlay.
And so as part of that, all of our assets would basically become their assets. Everything would fully transfer. It would be up to them whether or not they continue the operations contract with Semocor if they moved in their own operators. But, all of the work that we're doing now is going to be used here for the foreseeable future.
I don't really see any scenario inside of, like, the lifespan of most of this equipment where the treatment plant becomes something that we don't that we or Parker or whoever doesn't actively need.
Leah:
Okay. Thank you. Yeah. It was more just wanting to understand the investments that were being made weren't going to. Yeah.
Nathan:
Yeah. And so part of, I'm next anyways.
Yeah. So yeah, part of one of the early, early on, when we were doing this, one of the baselines we were using, we were selecting these projects was directly related to the condition. I set a condition at asset condition evaluations that Parker had done. And so a lot of these things that we were that were targeting, filters included the loss, almost everything that we did at the plant, functionally were all things that Parker had identified as needing to be changed in order for the inclusion to happen.
Not necessarily. They weren't necessarily asking that we fix them, but at a minimum, they were asking us to kind of check and to pay for those upgrades. One of the things that we've also been able to consistently do is do these projects in-house ourselves considerably cheaper than Parker had planned, had considerably cheaper than the money that Parker had asked.
And that's not to say that Parker was asking for too much money. It's more like they have to build their they have to build project liability into that number to make sure they don't get hit. that's something that we do as well. But we don't have to be as aggressive around it. And then we're able to compare actual dollars versus the check we would what had to cut.
So, everything that we're working through to some extent was mentioned in those condition assessment reports were going well beyond that in some areas. But.
Describer:
On screen. Groundwater Wells Rehabilitation - This is a map of well sites in the CPNMD. Nathan describes.
Waterline Replacements
2024 Waterline Replacement
- Improper Installation
-Improper Sized
-In conjunction with City
2023 Waterline Replacement
-Severe Break History
- Improper Install
- Going to bid next month
Nathan Explains
Nathan:
We're running a little bit short on time. So I'll go through these other ones a little bit more quickly. So, groundwater wells rehabilitation, this is another project that we're currently in design on. nearing design. And this is really more about the control systems for the, well vault. And one of the reasons we've spent so much time focusing on the plant is it's a really good kind of like case study for really what all of our facilities were like.
And so you can kind of take that model and apply it to basically everything. We have the wells, the lift stations, large portions of our distribution piping. And so we're going to be going through a similar process on the Wells system. We already went through a ton of triage, fixing a bunch of things that were broken and needed to be done.
We've done that for like the last year and a half, and now we're at a point where I'm actually at a meeting yesterday where we're starting to build out our long term, well rehabilitation program and plan so that we're back to a rotating through all of our wells every five years. And then, minimizing the number of emergency repairs that we have to do because we're actually proactively replacing things and staying on top of, those kinds of maintenance and capital needs.
And then these are the just a quick reminder. These are the two waterline, projects we have coming up. I threw this together in Microsoft Paint, so that's why it looks terrible. That one is not on a not one, not on Alex. It has existed since this afternoon, but the two waterline projects we have, one you're much more familiar with.
It's the Yorkshire project that was already approved and the other one is, much more heavily involved that we're working with the city on. We're pretty deep into design on this. we'll have to it'll be accounted for in the 2024 budget. But that is the the blue line from the left. And so that blue line goes basically from Castle Pines Parkway and Yorkshire Drive all the way up to Hidden Point, Boulevard.
That entire section of our transmission main needs to be replaced. This is also something that was identified in the condition assessments. When we run our hydraulic models on it, one one there are sections of that where the pipe is just simply too small to move water through it in the way that we need to, to make sure that the system's operating
well. That's because the original section from here to Hidden Point was designed with the idea that that would be the end of the district. And so then they built a bunch of houses after that and never upgraded the line. The lines also improperly installed. It's not bedded properly. We've had, not as many main break issues as we've had in other areas.
Just because we don't have a service line density. But because the city is also doing major renovations to that entire section of roadway, we also don't want to delay this and then have to go back in and tear out a bunch of new stuff. so those are the two waterline replacement programs we have going on are coming up the next. The Yorkshire one.
We're going to do everything we can to get it in this year. We do have we are building some capacity into that, a basically a bid allowance for, bypass. We're going to have to take a lot of houses into an above ground bypass, which is fine. utilities do it all the time. We just have to make sure that if we if we move on that as quickly as we like, we need to make sure that the contractor is set up to hit that if we need to.
So once temperatures start to drop, we have to keep above ground water lines from freezing. Yeah. And so we've got 5 or 6 minutes left. This is an incredibly not staged at all candid photo of Alex and our, lead treatment plant operator. Mark. Yeah. And so that's that's where we're at.
Leah:
I have a quick question.
What budget line items are funding these projects?
Nathan:
They are all, budget line. If you look at the look at our budget, these, all of them have the name is the, the budget line item. So if you look at the capital section, you'll see filter rehabilitation, lift station rehabilitation, water treatment, plant, HVAC. They've all got individual line items.
Leah:
So where is the money coming from Like a like a capital projects allotment or like reserves?
Nathan:
Yeah reserves money in the bank. One of the things that we need to, you know, outside of the, the operational stuff, especially one of the things we need to get finished getting our house in order around is definitely the financial side of things.
We don't really have a lot of really clearly defined, like individual, like, capital funds. We don't have, like, really, drawn out, like financial planning and financial programs. Those are all things that need to be much more clearly defined in today's dollars. They just haven't really been paid attention to. So we know how much money's in the water fund.
It's basically kind of one big pot now, though not all of that has been divided out into, you know, planned capital projects, capital reserve funds, all of that. That's something that we definitely need to look at. Before we get to that point, we need to get through, the current 2022 audit. And then we need to move into a rate study.
And we also need to complete, our asset management, capital forecasting update that we're also working on. So once we get through, all of those things will be able to look much more deeply at what our financial situation is, what our capital, what our capital needs are projected out 100 years. So not even just like in the immediate near term, and then build rates and fees off of that and then start to expand.
And I'm really nailed down more of our financial, financial plans, rules, internal processes, stuff like that.
Leah:
Who would be responsible for like doing that?
Nathan:
Right now that would fall to, Phyllis and Katie. So we'd go through CRS, we'll start having those conversations once we get their head out of water a little bit on this stuff.
And, I don't know, they may want to bring in some for the rate study. That'll be an outside contractor. but even for, like, some of those more in-depth financial stuff, we may need to bring in specific project management stuff that's kind of, cross that bridge when we get to it.
Leah:
Awesome. Those are my questions. And I also, this was really helpful.
I really appreciated the visuals. So thank you.
Jana:
Can I go, oh, also, Alex, you did fantastic. That was so well presented to us. So thank you. Oh, rock star. Yeah, for sure. I could tell absolutely that. You know what you were talking about. So, my question was about Lift Station three. So when we took our tour, they were working on the concrete apron around the building.
Did all that get finished?
Nathan:
Yeah. So the concrete, the concrete apron is done. The pump has been installed. We still have a little bit of control stuff to do with that. The problem that we're having is, Even though the apron did give us fall, we have a huge sediment problem on the rest of that lot
Jana:
because it's not enough grade.
Nathan:
Partially. you know, there's really no more fall we can get out of it. Yeah, a lot of it's just we have a, you know, a massive gravel parkway. We there's landscape storage. There's all kinds of stuff going on up there. And so what we've noticed is that, like, we're still we're still getting a little bit of flooding into the building.
The storms work fine for a little bit as soon as they pull. All that said, there's also a road that goes across the hill that's up there that doesn't need to be there. So we get heavy rains. It pulls all of that sediment around, and then the water slows down enough in that like very, very low slope area that the sediment starts to sandbar and then the water starts to back up and run into the building.
So we're working with, on that specifically, we're working with the city, Broken Arrow emergency pipe repair. We've had conversations with Kennedy Jenks, stormwater engineers on site. And so we have a plan to put all of that, fix all of that, and we're taking steps in that direction to to do that, we're gonna get rid of the road.
We're going to install some riprap channels. We're going to do some grinding on the existing concrete. And then the biggest thing we're going to do is honestly just take the door to that lift station, we're going to raise it up eight inches and then put platforms on either side.
Jana:
I mean, a simple fix like that would be huge.
Nathan:
Yeah. And so those are that's all the stuff we're going to do. But the the work that needed to be done, we did the tour. All of that's been done. Now we're kind of expanding. And so all of that will be, we do have $3 million set aside for the lift station, capital funds, capital improvement stuff this year.
We're not even going to come close to touching that amount. So all of the, the stormwater and site work that we do will be put, pulled out of that fund. So we don't need to, tap into anything beyond the budget for it.
Jana:
So the majority of that work finished on but ongoing. A few more just for the segment.
Thank you.
Nathan:
And I'll have a, at the board meeting on Monday, I'll have a much more substantial update on where we're at with, the violation that we received for that last spill and all of those projects. We had a meeting with the state on it earlier today. So I just need to summarize that.
Jana:
Is there anything you wanted to go over now with us for that or.
Nathan:
No. Yeah. We'll save it all into like just second compile everything. But it's going well. We're we're on point. We've got an engineering for our firm. that's taking lead. We had a meeting with the state today that went fantastic. So I'll bring you guys all up to up to speed on Monday.
James:
All right. I took like, four pages of notes on different projects and status and things like that, but I'm still going to come out and bug you for a timeline.
Again, I wrote this stuff down, but I'm really hoping to see something a horizontal line with months at least at that granularity. And what projects hitting at what point, what we're planning on working, just so I understand what we're planning on doing and when. And, and what those timelines look like. I don't think it has to be a huge amount of work.
But I would like to see, you know, a rough timeline if we can put that together to get a sense of what projects are ongoing, what are at bid stage. Thank you. I wrote all that down. And when those things could potentially kick off and stuff like that. And when's the next stage like, you know, some of these remediations on the wells and things like that.
When is that going to hit? And, you know, just so we can get a sense of when we need to have money for certain projects and what kind of money are we associating with each one of those projects. Not real fine stuff, but just a course schedule. That time tells us what we're doing and when.
Nathan:
Yep, absolutely. We and I certainly haven't forgotten about it.
Alex knows we're building a timeline. I talked to Greg and Lisa about it as well. and, Phyllis and Sadie are also aware that we need to get those financial, stuff pulled in there. There were a few things we were waiting just to kind of see how everything was going to line out, so we knew more precisely where they were going to fall.
And I think we're finally at a point where we've got, you know, at least a 10,000ft view of that stuff. So we can we can put that together. yeah. I mean, I would expect to see it in the next week or two. Well, I'll throw it out to you guys and then post it. It'll go up on the capital page on the website as well.
Jason:
Great. Any other questions? Those were some great questions. And thank you guys very much for the presentation, Alex. That was tremendous. And, Nathan. Yeah, I'm glad I have our average performance again, but, no, thank you guys very much. It's been great. So without any other questions, I guess we can adjourn this meeting. Thank you everyone.