Board Meeting
May 28, 2024
Transcript
Describer:
Board Meeting Agenda
Tuesday, May 28th, 2024, at 6:00 p.m.
7404 Yorkshire Drive, Castle Pines, CO 80108
period. (Three-minute maximum per person).
VII. May 15th Boil Water Advisory incident report. Nathan Travis,
District Manager.
A. Board discussion and questions.
VIII. Parcel Transfer Update. Level Engineering, Jay Blackburn P.E.
IX. SSO Violation Supplemental Environmental Program Options.
Level Engineering, Jay Blackburn P.E.
X. Executive Session- Upon motion and 2/3 vote, the Board may enter into executive session as allowed by Section 24-6-402
(4)(a) and (e)(1) of the Colorado Revised Statutes regarding possible renewable water partnerships and agreements.
XI. Communication Director’s report.
A. Emergency Communications Planning.
B. CPNMD Communication planning and approach.
I. Finance Director's report.
A. Ratify claims for payment including check numbers 28533
- 28622 and electronic payments issued from April 18, 2024 through May 20, 2024.
April May Totals
April Checks $872,517.54 May Checks $1,095,804.27 Total Checks $1,968,321.81
April Electronic Payments (all funds) $31,717.13 May Electronic Payments $24,287.70 Total Electronic Payments$56,004.83
April Total Expenditures $904,234.67 May Total Expenditures $1,120,091.97 Total Expenditures $2,024,326.64
II. Legal Counsel's report
III. District Manager’s report
A. Consider: Douglas County IGA, GIS mapping imagery use
B. Consider: Plum Creek Water Reclamation Authority Amendment #7.
C. Discussion: 2021 past due invoice from PCL Construction.
D. Update: Interconnect Pump Station, electrical equipment
evaluation.
IV. Director’s Matters.
V. Adjourn.
Board President Jason Blankaert:
good evening and welcome to the Castle Pines North Metropolitan District Board Meeting for Tuesday, May 28th, 2024, approximately 6:00 pm. We'll call this meeting to order and start with the Pledge of Allegiance.
All Speak:
I Pledge of 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.
Jason:
All right. Thanks. Let's, proceed with roll call.
Board Member James Mulvey Off-mic:
Jim. present. No conflicts. Great.
Board Member Tera Radloff:
Tera. present. No conflicts.
Board Member Leah Enquist:
Leah present. No conflicts.
Board Member Jana Krell:
And, Jana, you're online. Virtual present. No conflict. Great.
James on-mic:
Okay. present. No conflicts. Great.
Jason:
And I am Jason Blankaert, and I'm present.
No conflicts as well. next item of, business. Let's, go ahead and amend this agenda to include under under the district manager's report, the, parks IGA, concerning costs, billing for parcel transfers.
Board Voting All Speak:
Motion to approve the agenda. Second, having a second go to vote Jim I Tera I Jana I Leah I and I as well.
Jason:
So we will go forward with this new agenda. All right. And then our next roll of our next item for business is to consider approving the, board, the board study session minutes. And we can probably combine that with the, April 22nd, 2024 board meeting minutes.
Tera:
I'll make a motion to approve. And then I have some non, just some grammatical, changes that can be made on the, the study session minutes.
the second paragraph, I think there are some words missing in there. Just needs to be have more clarity. I think what you meant to say maybe is Mr.. drew agreed with Mr. Travis's summary of the settlement conference, and also noted that the district received as many concessions from the agency as we could based on its regulations.
Just a few words on there for clarity. The way it reads doesn't make sense. And then on the paragraph that starts with Travis should to be consistent, be Mr. Travis. and those are the only changes that I propose.
Jason:
Very good. I'll make a motion to approve the, board study session minutes and the board meeting minutes with Tera's edits.
Board Voting All Speak:
Do I hear a second? Second? Having a second? Let's move to a vote. Jim. Approve. Tera. Approve. Jana. Approve. Leah. Approve. And I approve as well.
Jason:
So the motion passes, and we can. check off items three, four and five. We'll now open this up to a public comment period. there's a three minute maximum per person. Does anybody wish to speak?
Do we have anything online that's wishing to speak? All right. Having nobody to no speakers will close out the public comment period. And we'll move on to our May 15th boil water advisory incident report with Nathan.
District Manager Nathan Travis:
All right. so you guys have the, advisory incident report that I put together in your packet? just so everyone knows, this has also been posted online, and, so you can get to it right on our main page if you just click the same page that we've been keeping all of the updates on, we will be, Bailey and I will be working on kind of on making this a little bit more digestible.
and we'll also include, QR code in our upcoming, bill insert. just to kind of make sure that people have access to this information. I think I'll really quickly I'll just go through the event summary. I'll probably stay out of the detailed timeline. and then we can, address any questions that anybody has from there.
but. So, Tuesday, May 14th at 8:00, we had scheduled a shut down to facilitate tying in our existing water system to the new water transmission main that we've been installing as part of the monarch reconstruction project. that was scheduled at 8:00 at night because we anticipate it impacting service to, both the school and the Retirement Legacy Village Retirement center.
so we worked with them to make sure that we were late enough to get on the other side of the school events and kind of evening, evening activities. so at that time, the the line was pretty well already exposed and ready to go. So we had, we sent two operators on site to shut everything down.
they closed the valves that were necessary. And then we do a process called shut down verification. So we want to make sure that there isn't any pressure behind that line before we cut it or move it. There are two fire hydrants that were within the area of our shut down. Neither one of them had any water come out of them.
So we went ahead and gave the contractor the green light to cut the pipe to drain it, and go ahead and pull it out. when we cut it, we didn't. We got water, but not necessarily a ton of pressure. It wasn't more than we would anticipate draining a pipe. and then they went to go pull the pipe apart to attach to the valve that we were going to connect to.
And when that happened, water started coming from everywhere. or at least inside of the excavation. There's, not really a good explanation yet as to why that portion of waterline had pressure. It really doesn't make a lot of sense. we're going to be working with T.W. summit, our valve contractor, to go through the system and, figure out if we can find where that error is.
And we'll just be going two valves at a time. We can't really effectively do that process until we complete this entire run of the water line. So we need to make sure that our system is fully reinstated and back up and running before we start going through and doing the bubble testing to figure out where whatever that loop is.
so because we got water and we weren't sure what that source was, are really our only recourse was to start closing valves beginning at that intersection and moving back. so we called, additional help from Semocor. They were able to send an additional operator. And then we also called T.W. summit, because our valve operating guys and they were able to send, three guys, which is two separate trucks and then a supervisor, they all got out here relatively quickly.
we fell back until the water stopped flowing. And then we went forward with making the repair because we weren't sure where that water was coming from. We couldn't really trust what we were and weren't shutting down based on our mapping system. so I talked to Will Parker, operations manager, pretty early on in that. And so we decided to track the neighborhoods that were losing service through the phone calls that were coming in, the after hours call service that we had put in place last year.
Daupler has a really, helpful call tracking feature. You can pull up a heat map. And so we were able to get like a real time visual representation of where those calls were coming from. And that's when we what we used to estimate the percentage of the district that is out. the reason that that is, important is because once you hit the 20% of your 20% of your service connections are out of service, that's an automatic boil water notice for low system pressure.
and so especially as that morning, people were waking up, the the call area that we had determined expanded rapidly really, really quickly. So as soon as we knew we were going to clear that 20% mark, we reached out to, CDPHE to report to set to do our self report. they, it took them probably half an hour to actually issue the boil advisory officially, but they were able to tell us on the phone like, hey, this is going to be an automatic notification.
Go ahead and get moving. the Bailey was, was on was on board with this since the previous night when we started to have to fall back, I was able to get in touch with her so she could get some website postings updated and some some things sent out through our, at that time through streamline, so that we at least had a general awareness that there was a larger system issue that was progressing.
Once we got the boil notice, we went out on basically every channel that we could. We, we sent out, press releases. We, contacted Douglas County Emergency Services. The city was aware because they were on site. We went over it over Facebook Nextdoor. Well, Nextdoor was the only one we couldn't get on. There's, for whatever reason, we try to log in to Nextdoor.
It's not sending us the email to confirm that we can get in. but we sent it everywhere else. We ordered sign board, so we within a few hours, we were able to get signboards posted at the entrances and exits of this district. I'm sure I'm missing a few. but as we went through that process, it took us a little bit to get parts for the waterline that needed to be repaired.
once we got those in, got the system back up and running. or once we got those in, we were able to finish that connection. while they were finishing that connection, we went through and kind of identified some areas that we were really fairly confident or really confident that we could turn on without impacting the job site at that point.
So we already started the process of reinstating service before we had the repair fully done. once we got the the green light from the repair being fully done, we continued opened everything up. TW Summit stayed on site all day. and so did Semocor operations team just to get everything flushed out and pulled back on line.
So we got, we ramped up production at the plant. We flushed the system kind of working from the plant outward, checking for chlorine residuals. And then we needed the state asked that we take eight water quality samples that were bacteriological. we took those from eight of our already established sample sites and so as we were flushing and got to those sample sites, we took those residuals, or we took those samples.
Chlorine residuals were looking really, really good. We were actually getting the water to clear up relatively quickly. we got the samples dropped off on, early in the afternoon around 2:00 or so, 2 or 230 on the 15th. And then from that point, it was really just a waiting game to get the samples back. So, we put a rush on them, but there's a 24 hour incubation time for that type of sample, so you can only rush them so much.
we got those. Got the verbal all-clear from the lab. The state allowed us, based on our verbal, to move forward with lifting the boil water notice. And then we did.
Jason:
So. All told, I think I think personally, I think our house was down for less than 12 hours. The whole event of water outage probably was at the maximum, like 15, 16 hours.
Nathan:
Yeah, yeah. in terms of, in terms of service, yeah. Actual system pressure loss by the time we got it all the way to the highest points of the district, that's that's pretty close.
Jason:
Questions.
James off-mic:
Yeah. Usually it covers me in,
Tera:
I don't know if I'm going to cover you this time. I don't. You've answered most of my questions. and I would like to say thank you for putting together this report. It is really thoughtfully laid out. It really gives all the details of the incident, what happened in a very factual way.
It also acknowledges what we've already learned from the the lessons learned and how we mitigate that going forward. So it's very well done and very thoughtfully done, I appreciate it. I encourage all of our residents to read it. I did want to, with the board's indulgence, read a couple of things into records. because to, President Blackaert's, point well, it's certainly unfortunate that, this was not caused by lack of maintenance on our part.
It was when we were in the middle of a project, trying to do good and lay the new water pipe and save money overall to this community in conjunction with the road. it happened, but it wasn't because of neglect on our part. and that, you know, despite a lot of the feedback that we received. Quote, the notification was posted on our website, an email blast was sent out, press releases were sent to all major local media.
Douglas County Emergency Management Services were notified, a code read or a reverse 911 was sent out. Traffic sign boards were posted to all interested entrances and exits of the district, and notifications were posted on all of our social media accounts. We also worked to update the City of Castle Pines as frequently as possible, as they also posted information diligently.
And I know when the lessons learned that you have some some ways that you're going to, you know, expand that reach even further. and I was thinking, as you were talking about the social media, if there is a way that you aren't able to get into social media, like Nextdoor or whatever, I think if you reached out to the board, you know, I'm, I'm not on Nextdoor a lot, but I can get on there and post things as well as I think some of the other board members would post there.
If you want to kind of add that into your plan. so I do encourage everyone to go and read all the detail. and then, you know, if that spurs more questions and people are certainly welcome to come to public comment and talk to us. But the other thing that I would like to read into record were, the, the final thoughts.
So, you know, we as an organization owe a debt of gratitude to several partners that were vital in navigating this emergency. Michael Penny and his staff consistently asked us to verify information prior to the city releasing it, essentially giving us an almost zero effort additional avenue to reach the community with this vital information. So thank you to Mr. Penny and the City Council.
Douglas County Emergency Management Services couldn't have been more helpful with quick, concise communication, web postings, Nextdoor posts, and even assistance driving the reverse 911 messaging. So a sincere thank you to all of you and the county and Sheriff's department for your assistance. also worth noting that we were commented. We were commended by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Safety staff.
They thought that the district did a very good job and a long time State of Colorado employee had never seen in all their years with the state. a district issue, a tier one public notification this quickly. So thank you for all of our partners in there. Thank you for our communication staff and our district manager for putting this together.
And I'm I'm proud to represent this organization. And I think despite being thrown a curve like that, we absolutely responded. Well, we couldn't have been more timely. And I'm proud of our organization. So thank you for that.
Jason:
Thanks, Tera. Jim,
James:
I'm just gonna pretty much echo and I already responded to to Nathan via email, probably within the first couple of hours about appreciating both. You know, the social media side of things as well is, it seemed like he was very much on top of things as it happened. so much in the same vein, I really appreciate how fast, you know, both the engineers that are working with the town, as well as, town management kind of jumped in and, and kind of, really took care of things rather rapidly.
the only thing, you know, in the here comes the bitter portion of it, the only part, and again, we touched on this and I think, you know, this is not and really a negative it's just a reminder. I think we maybe just amp up our mapping activities, and I think you already had it on your list going forward.
And I think this year has been super busy with all the stuff you guys have accomplished. So again, it's, you know, it's just a mirror, mainly a reminder. And the only other thing I'm dragging out of this is missing operating nuts. it's the engineer in me. when I read stuff like that, I kind of. It bothers me of, you know, why they were missing, and the fact that we had to go find parts to kind of turn valves off, it sounds like, and again, that there's stuff here that's probably predates you by 10 or 15 years, you know, it is what it is.
But, you know, we would be remiss if we didn't point out these things and see if we we couldn't do better, as far as you know, that falls into meeting mainly an inspection maintenance type thing. So again, I'm not at all giving you a hard time. In fact, just the opposite. I think you guys did a great job, but I have to point it out.
And then final thing was process to verify pressure is actually zero behind a pipe. And and maybe there's other things or equipment or something like that. You know, what was the pipe material itself that we basically cut, ductile iron. Ductile iron? I don't know. Can you hit it with a hammer until it's pressurized or not pressurized?
I don't know, you know, is there anything we can do there besides cutting into it? You know, in for future types of tie ins and things like that? But again, those are really minor. And I wouldn't want you to take away any real negatives there. Just, you know, stuff I saw that, you know, kind of, you know, kind of makes me think a little bit, you know, what can we do better as we move forward overall?
Fantastic job. Really. You know, everybody that kind of chipped in the media side of it, the engineering side of it, the management side of it. So it was appreciated. Thanks.
Nathan:
thank you, to both of you for that. For, the comments are much appreciated. for the operating nuts. and I think I was probably remiss in not including this detail.
one of them was a valve that we did not know existed. we actually found it that night. we don't it doesn't show up on any drawings as-built or construction drawings as right or otherwise. The other missing operating that we had identified when we just completed our valve maintenance, we just hadn't gotten back that far down the list.
So we went through, normally we do. And what we did this year as well as we do our valve maintenance, we touch and exercise every valve that we have on our mapping, and then any issues or identified, and we kind of keep those in one working, Excel spreadsheet or, or monitor it through, Ames. I think it's been a while since with the Excel spreadsheet.
we just hadn't gotten back to that maintenance point yet, so we were already replacing a bunch of different broken valve boxes, and, it was on our list. We just. We didn't get to it. yeah. So just wanted to point that out briefly, and then. Yeah, I agree with you. certainly we need to, you know, continue that that commitment to our mapping project and really, you know, double down in a couple of areas that we thought we had a good understanding of what was going on.
And one thing that's helpful about the current work that we're doing, work we have planned over the next two years is, at least for those large distribution piping, the ones that go from, go up and up and down Monarch and Castle Pines Parkway, anything that was installed prior to the year 2000, will 2001 will be replaced, by the end of 2026.
So if we do have some kind of ghosts in there that we don't even catch through this process, we'll certainly catch them as we go through and and kind of pull, pull all of that old pipe out of service and put new lines into service.
Jason:
Great. Jana, did you have any comments?
Jana on zoom with technical difficulties:
no, I actually didn't. I had a bunch of questions for Nate.
I mean, it sounds like we all probably on the side after have questions, but, my biggest thing was, regarding to as-built that we’re using. So the as-built should have recorded where the valves were but, should have isolated the that the water main. But the thing is that, mapping, doesn't exist. And we feel like we could record the mapping better of moving forward so that was kind of my big quote from this is we should know where valves are and what they isolate.
So but we can't fix what we don't know. So but Mr. Trask is already working on that. So.
Thank you. Jason.
Nathan:
I am surprised we don't have we didn't get any community members, here tonight. But I do think that it's worth, at least making the board aware that we have gotten a number of requests looking for some sort of, restitution, I guess, for lack of a better word. either, you know, credits for flushing water bills.
We've got a lot of requests for, replacing house filtration systems, those kinds of things. we we had there was one, a couple of residents had some kind of more significant damage issues that, are likely related to the boil water. Notice one has an irrigation system that's jammed up. Another one, had some, pressure fluctuations that caused and RP backflow device to discharge.
I just wanted to make the board aware of that. I think for the and I, it's more probably more of a question for Kim to, but I think for the larger ones generally we just have we just refer them to our insurance company, and let them go through that process. But I don't have any more to add to that sentence.
I'll leave a hanging um.
Jason:
Nathan, I just wanted to personally thank you to you, did a great job. And all of our contractors out there that, jumped in on this. It was amazing. it really could have been worse, but you guys had us back up and running in minimal downtime. So, I really want to say thank you for that.
Nathan:
Absolutely. Sorry. Sorry I jumped the gun with my additional tidbit there.
Tera:
So then I guess a question for the board and for staff. Should we, I understand some of the greater impacts should go through our insurance process. Does it make sense? And do we know the financial impact? Should we be considering a across the board? I know like a thousand gallon budget, you know, adjustment or is I don't even know if that's meaningful.
But in your opinion, should we, do something like that? for for all the extra water for all all the flushing. Give up, I guess. Give a little relief on the monthly budget, the water allocation.
Nathan:
Yeah, I think I think that those kinds of relief can be helpful in the short term as. But so when we had, for different reasons, a boil notice, in 2021, the board at that time did issue a thousand gallon credit just to take care of the flushing.
I think something that is important to keep in mind, or at least worth keeping in mind, is that we're not a for profit company. So when we have an event like this that has negative, the tangibly negatively impacted our customer base. we don't have a profit margin to take that out of. so I think that while it can, it can, you know, feel good to the residents to get a small credit on their bill.
Our rates and fees and the revenue we collect are directly correlated to the services that we provide. And so because we don't have any like, profits to take that out of, in reality, those kinds of credits back to accounts are moneys that we're going to have to collect at some point. So even if we do a billing credit now, those, you know, on, on a long enough balance sheet, those lost revenues from that payment out are going to be re collected in rates and fees anyway.
I don't know that it would have like an actual substantive impact, in the near term or even really get us to the point where, like, this is something that's going to directly impact a rate study or anything like that, but it really is kind of taking, you know, they give us money for their water service. And then we could we would credit it back to them because of this issue.
But we're going to, you know, collect those fees again at some point in the future to pay for operations, capital projects, things like that,
Jason:
and a thousand gallons, a thousand gallon credit. We're really talking about four bucks per per household.
Nathan:
Yep. So yeah. So that wouldn't have nearly that kind of impact. I think that that's something that would, you know, not really have a longer impact if we just want to give a thousand gallon credit to cover the flushing.
if we were talking about replacing, you know, everybody's home water treatment filter systems or anything like that, you know, and I, I can certainly understand the frustration of having an unanticipated expense for those kinds of systems and also. For many people, I would imagine that the reason that they put those systems in place in the first place was for these kinds of protections.
and so, you know, the any system you buy has maintenance costs. And I don't know that it's remarkably different from a standard maintenance item, if that makes sense.
Jason:
You know, my analogy here is that, we're more of a utility. And like if we look into the electric company Core, for example, if I get a power surge going through my house and that blows out all my electronics, I'm probably not getting reimbursed from, Core, for that.
so I think we got to kind of treat this the same way. Yes. It's unfortunate that this has happened. but for us to take on the responsibility of, of of fixing everybody's private stuff, I think we're doing the best job we can to make sure that they're getting clean, renewable water to their house right now. And anything that goes beyond that is up to them to, to, fix or repair, maintain.
Tera:
Yeah. And I appreciate where you're coming from. I had to ask the question. And also, I guess as I was thinking about as I look at, you know, our, our volumes or whatever, and we're using less water, overall that we, we might be able to make that type of adjustment in our water budget. It wouldn't have a significant impact.
And I'm not trying to, you know, cover maybe just the additional flushing or of that thousand push somebody into the next tier. And they had to pay more for water, that kind of thing. If they went over their their monthly budget because of the extra, flushing type of thing.
I don't know how many people that that would actually affect.
Leah:
Well, and to that point, is that something we could even determine or track?
Nathan:
We wouldn't know until billing processes and goes out how many people are, you know, like a thousand gallons, over their budget? It wouldn't be hard to find out. We can do all kinds of queries on our billing system. and generally generally speaking, we do have we we do we do adjustments related to the water budget as, pretty par for the course things around here.
If we have, a resident that has a severe leak in their house or something that has driven their, their usage up, if they give us, you know, some sort of proof that it's been repaired, we'll we'll still charge them for the water. We'll just take the tiered structure away from it. So that's something we do fairly regularly.
probably 2 or 3 times a month for people that have had big enough leaks that have pushed them into higher tiers. but those are adjustments that aren't wildly difficult to make.
Leah:
okay. I mean, I would be in favor of something like that. either kind of crediting, those gallons, or if it bumped somebody up into a higher tier, because I don't know it.
James:
Can we, you know, at least talk about that as a policy? I think that's reasonable. I think we're all. It sounds like we're all in agreement that if you get bumped into a higher tier, that shouldn't be on them, you know, and they can just notify you, or you can do it automatically through the billing system.
If, if, you know, figure out which is less work versus getting 50 phone calls. But whatever, whatever form that takes, I think it's reasonable that that makes sense.
Jason:
Yeah, I like that idea as well. Do we have any more comments for, number seven here?
Nathan:
I will, update you guys. We have a I have a couple meetings this week.
Well, Bailey and I have a meeting this week to talk to the Daupler. I think the one more thing worth noting is the biggest, complaint that we got in terms of our public outreach was, hey, you guys have our email addresses. You have our phone numbers. Why didn't you reach out to us directly? the after our phone service that we already use.
Daupler. The guys that do that heat map tracking stuff for us also have an available module that will allow us to pull all of that information out of the billing system. and then they can use that in an emergency notification system only. I think the and I'm not an expert here, but the hang up on doing that with like, with streamline pulling all of that data out, which we could do and putting it into our public notification, is that we would have a large number of people that have not given us permission to send them newsletters and updates along those lines.
And I think having that avenue to separate those out, makes a lot of sense. And so through Daupler, we'd be able to, which is a service we already use. We're already fairly integrated with them. We'd be able to push out at least those emergency notifications, almost instantly. It'd be a lot faster through everybody's email and phone number.
So we'll we'll look at that. I don't I can't imagine it's a wildly, wildly expensive module to add.
Leah:
would they need to do that? What's that? Would they need to opt into that? I don't like is would a user need to?
Nathan:
I guess that would be a question for him. Would they need to opt in to emergency notifications on the billing system, or can we?
Kim:
I don't think there's any correct answer to that, but if it's an emergency notification, I would just send them. You're not going to get complaints about that and they won't. Hopefully they won't be very frequent. So.
Nathan:
All right. That's all I've got
Kim:
okay. Great. We'll go ahead and close out. I have number seven and we'll open this up to item number eight. the partial transfer update. Welcome, Jay. Thank you.
Jay Blackburn P.E., Level Engineering,
There you go. Is a working awesome. Well thank you, board. And thank you, Nathan, for having me here. To give a quick update on the Parcel transfer projects. I believe I was here in March, getting our first task order reviewed and, submitted for you guys approval. And so that has been done. We do have, a spreadsheet here, which is more or less the basis of our tracking for this project.
Describer:
On screen. Parcel Tracker V7 work in progress, Excel Worksheet. Jay will explain.
Jay,
So I've got it on there. It may be difficult to see everything in full, but there are some colors and I'll explain what those are. I don't feel we need to get into the the weeds on every parcel here, but, essentially this is showing the 105 parcels that the town owns, which we had originally identified. We've broken those out into several groups.
We call them priority groups one through three here, which is essentially top to bottom, but it's going to be group one highest priority. Those are the parcels for which there are nine there, the red or orange color at the top of the screen there. Those are all going to require a land survey plot, which is our surveyor going out and actually surveying the property corners boundaries, providing that land survey plot such that collectively, Nathan and I can draw up new parcel shapes and easements for those parcels such that either the districts retains, new easement for the utilities on a certain parcel, or we're actually going to create a new parcel out of the larger
parcel, or, I guess, create two parcels out of one current large parcels such that the district can maintain, one that will house all their facilities, and the rest of the parcel can just be deeded to the town. So we've done that strategically for these parcels. Being that there, I guess really all the lift station and pump station parcels across the district, so high importance, highly accessed, preferred to generally own those than to have an easement for for future reasons.
So we've gotten
Tera:
so Jay can I ask you like on the first line of priority one and it says district no. Does that mean it's not in district or your column N says district it,
Jay:
yeah column N here is district that actually says district utilities. And here is district that actually says district utilities. If I were to expand it all the way. And that means does the district own any utilities on that parcel or not.
So a no would indicate there are no utilities on that parcel. so for all of these parcels, I guess I should say all of the parcels, except for the blue ones at the bottom, which are just simply going to be kept by the district. So our water treatment plant parcels, a couple well sites are just going to be kept because it's easy.
They're small enough. There's not a large parks influence on any of those. But for the remaining 99 parcels, we have ordered title work for all of those. We're starting to see all that come in pretty quickly now. So I think we've gotten 10 term title work, title reports, excuse me to date. So as soon as we get those, I am uploading them to our cloud.
They're going to be accessible for all you guys through the links here in the spreadsheet. So as soon as I have this kind of double checked finalize, I'm going to share the link, what you know to everybody who needs access to this. So we can all look at kind of real time status and get an idea of where we're at as a whole.
But, if you remember back to our original task order and our original proposal for the project, we were talking somewhere in the $1.9 million all in. And it's looking at this point to be, well, less than that. I would say half or less based on kind of going through the parcels, understanding there are so many that don't have utilities on them, cutting down the number of surveys that really aren't needed.
And that's been done in coordination with the town or, sorry, with the city. So we've met with Larry on numerous occasions to run through the process, make sure he's he's good with it and not needing any additional steps or documentation throughout. And that's been really great. We did reach out to Douglas County as well, just to make sure, hey, there's nothing from zoning and planning that's going to come in in the ninth inning, which might hold us up from doing these and nothing but good news from them in that they have really no purview or jurisdiction to get in the middle of this.
So as long as we're satisfying the needs of the city should be all ready to submit these, we did have kind of a process question that came out this week when we met with Larry in that, as you know, some of the yellow parcels which we're not serving, we're just getting title reports and essentially deeding those through to the city for all of those as the title work comes in.
You know, we're going to at some point here have 20, 30 of those just sitting there ready to be transferred. So the question was raised, do we want to come up with a number or some sort of check point for where we're able to transfer those in groups or as one comes in? Do we want to send it along and just keep knocking them off as they come?
So I think Larry's going to talk with his group, have some direction for us on that. But I wanted to ask if the board has any thoughts. regarding, you know, how to go about that?
James:
not really thoughts. again, go into process. as you, you know, just as an example, you say you have a property and you're ready to transfer what happens at that moment.
Like what do you do, just pick up the phone or you do emailing documentation. What is the actual, you know, process for transferring that property?
Jay:
That's a good question. So some with the land survey plot, essentially we need to have a deed which is going to convey that parcel to the town. And so my understanding is there will be some work on, on Kim's end, to kind of make sure we're organized and keeping all of those clearly defined.
But it shouldn't be anything other than really recording those at the county. And we're done.
James:
Okay. I mean, my question and follow up would be is what is a timeline to say transfer one property versus ten properties? Is it more efficient to do them in groups with the county or is, you know, is one take, you know, half an hour for the county to kind of record that and move it over, or is it more efficient to do them in blocks, manageable blocks of, of properties?
That's kind of where my head's at. That.
Jay:
Sure, I'd be curious to hear Kim's thoughts as well, but typically that process is fairly quick. I want to say a week or two, usually for it to kind of work its way through on the county's end,
Kim:
Nowadays we're actually recording all of those electronically, so it's a matter of minutes.
my paralegals do. Then we get back the stamped recording. They don't really go through anybody at the county anymore. the issue with regard to recording them in blocks versus single documents, where it really becomes difficult is later on trying to research which properties were conveyed when because you've got, you know, 15 pages of legal descriptions, or 15 or 20 properties with one piece of paper, and it makes it much more difficult.
Nathan:
So is that something we could set up so as they come in, is that something we set up through DocuSign and then have, you know, Jason or, whoever the appropriate person is on that signature list. And so just kind of as we process through them, just send out emails, go to the doctor, sign process.
Kim:
Yeah, we can certainly make that work.
As long as we have a good checklist like that, that we can just be checking them off as we record them. And then the recorded copies, can come back here and we'll keep them in our records anyway. And of course, they'll be in the county's records, the county clerk and recorder's records.
Jay:
Right. And if I'm understanding correctly, the groups there, meaning if we were to go and have 50 parcels that we're going to transfer under a single agreement or a single deed that creates definitely a lot more confusion in the future.
If you were to get that 9000 page document and have to go through and actually break out where each parcel is, right, okay.
Kim:
Yeah, it's kind of a set up for future errors.
Tera:
That's a great question because that's what I was trying to determine is if I understood you correctly, you were like, there is no benefit in doing batches.
It's better if you just wait and do all 99 together, unless you. Yeah, all all at one time, not 50 here and ten there and whatever.
Kim:
Yeah. What what I'm saying is for me, because of the future confusion, it's easier just to do them. Each one would be done separately. They could all be done, you know, when they're completed.
We could do them all in one day or a couple of hours, but not have a single quitclaim deed with 50 property descriptions on it, because that, that I guarantee will not be picked up by the title companies in the future. And then there'll be a lot of running around trying to straighten it out.
James:
Yeah, that's where I was kind of going with the nuts and bolts of things.
because a lot of times you don't really understand until you do the first one. So if it was me personally, just for timelines and process, I would just punch one through as soon as possible. And then when you get through one, maybe you guys have a conference call to say, you know, what is the best process? I mean, it sounds like singles.
and then I have a follow up question is, how many subdivisions are we doing right now? And it doesn't have to be an exact number, but a handful. Yeah. Okay. and this is goes to Kim. Really is, when you subdivide a property that we're. Now, we were going to transfer the property to the town, and then the town would effectively own that whole property.
Now we're subdividing that property. And again, it goes back to things like insurance, maintenance and the costs associated with that new subdivision of a property. I don't know if, you know, it's probably not you. It's probably Kim to talk to that question. That's kind of where my head was, is what happens there when we start subdividing.
Jay:
So I'll jump in real quick because that was a little bit in what I had said regarding the county's determination that we won't have to go through their subdivision process in any way.
So that is good, right? It's going to clear up everything on the county's, but in terms of are there additional hoops to jump through to be able to subdivide a parcel here?
Kim:
Yeah, I think when they said you wouldn't have to go through their process, what they're really saying is you'll have to go through the short process, which is an administrative process, because ultimately that subdivision has to be recorded with the county.
The county assessors have to map two separate parcels, they have to get new parcel numbers, and all of those things have to happen. but as long as it's an administrative process, it won't be, you know, terribly expensive. And they should be able to stamp it through the, through the, staff instead of going to the board of county commissioners.
Nathan:
The city also manages any subdivisions that happen inside of their boundaries. So, that'll be done through the city, and then they'll let the county, they'll give that information, the county, so that it can be recorded at that level. But the city has the the authority to do this up to the property subdivision. that was what we were told both by the county.
And then I was able to confirm that with, Michael Penny as well.
James:
Okay. real quick, insurance, maintenance, that kind of thing.
Kim:
Depending on what's on the property, we'll work with Nathan to make sure that the insurance is reduced or put up, put in place whatever we need to do.
Nathan:
Yeah. So we do an annual review with our, insurance company, usually somewhere around, October, November.
And they basically send us their, our list of everything that we have coverages for and included in that right now, we're still carrying the same insurance that we were as a parks, trails and open space district. so through that process, once we've got those, those parcel IDs all run out, we'll just give them the list of parcels that we own, what facilities are on them, and then they'll update our insurance policy accordingly.
Tera:
So what do you need from us then to make the, as they're completed, to be sent over? Do you just you have consensus of direction. Do you want to, you know, check in? I don't know if you want to check in with each one of us, but it sounds like, it doesn't make any sense to kind of push off the paperwork that we can just send it through as goes, follow the process.
Kim:
I think at this point, you've already authorized all of this to take place through the IGA. So the only thing that will be needed will be signatures on the deeds. And that can be done through DocuSign or however we choose to do it.
Nathan:
And those signatures would be Jason and Secretary or Jason and Tera or,
Kim:
Jason. And it won't have to be a secretary.
It'd be good to have an attestation, but that could be you or any of the directors.
Nathan:
for the attestation to support, have a preference on who signs that?
Alrighty?
Jason:
No preference. I'll do it.
Nathan:
Let the record show that you all wiggled your heads. No.
Jay:
And so, just to be clear, I think as we get these title reports for parcels that aren't requiring surveys, we're able to proceed with recording those on an individual basis. We'll get going on those as soon as we got one to make sure our process is intact. And then it feels to me like maybe, a two week or three week kind of recurring cycle for those might be the most efficient way to do it, because, I mean, we're gonna have kind of everything happening all at the same time.
So it'll be nice to have a little bit of, a recurring deadline for those.
Nathan:
Yeah. And then Jay, I also like the idea while we get that set up, since we already have some title work or title paperwork and we're kind of moving that direction, as soon as we get one that's ready to go, let's go ahead and fire that one off and kind of, do a litmus test with it to see how smoothly that goes in and areas that we can improve It.
Jay:
You got it.
Kim:
And Jay, one of the comment if you could set it up so you have like something called exhibit A with the legal description, exhibit B with the drawing. Then we can just slap that on a deed and perfect.
Jay:
yep. So pretty standard.
Jason:
All right. Is there still more of your report that you need to discuss?
Jay:
Not Unless you want to get into the spreadsheet more?
James:
Well, I got one final question. One here. and then if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Feel free to smack me. But, and I don't. Oh, here it is. Invoices right now, look at 416, 550.
And I think I saw another one for like, eight grand or something like that, for level engineering. And, is that those tasks associated with this right here.
Jay:
So the 416 is associated with Task Order one, which is purely for the parcel transfer project. And so yes, that is essentially paid in advance of this work happening. So we're able to pay title works surveyor things as they happen.
But at this point back to the overall budget based on what we know, that 416 appears to be what we need to accomplish. This whole project. Okay, with the caveat that the green ones in there, until we get our title work, we don't know if we want to go and do further work on a survey or if we're going to all be happy with it, and there's no encumbrances, and we can add those to the transfer group right away.
But we've started with, you know, the ones we know we do need to survey in that budget of 416 should cover all of that. No problem. Okay.
Nathan:
And then, just for clarification, there to the the splits in those pricing. So when those invoices come across from level, there's also costs associated with the sanitary sewer overflow. and then every once in a while, kind of some miscellaneous engineering stuff.
So we do code those to the account code based on that. So not all of the 416 certainly was part of that. I think. there's the 8000, which is the 416 doesn't include the level, staffing left, basically. Right. And so that breaks that out. And then you will see, budget items coded for the lift station stuff, in there as well.
Jason:
Okay. you're good. All right. As long as Jim's good. so I guess we can, close out item number eight now and move on to this. SSO violation. Excellent.
Jay:
So to recap, we had essentially received the settlement offer from CDPHE, which says there's two options. One is pay the fine and full, right around 130,000. I believe, was the penalty. You can also apply that money to a local supplemental environmental project, which must be in Douglas County. There's a list from the state for some pre-approved project ideas, ranging from electric vehicle charging stations to, you know, new parks and restoration of habitat for species, things like that.
We also came in contact through the state with, Douglas County funded projects and managed project through the county to restore a portion of East Plum Creek, which has historically been abused. That might not be the right word, but if you read the information I had sent, there was like hundreds of old cars lining the banks, and it was environmentally a disaster.
So they it's one of their special projects. They called it the county, but it's needing funding to go into its future phases. essentially today they've completed phase one, which took, I believe, a quarter mile section of East Plum Creek, ripped out all the old cars from the banks, trash, restored all the vegetation, and in, I believe is four years since the project was completed.
They've had, over ten times measurable impact on the the ecology and the environment in terms of species diversity, you know, all sorts of flora and fauna measurements. So that's been a really cool project, actually, for them to to show that what they're doing is working. And it's been quite cost effective in that they have volunteer contractors who are part of that, SAP program who've done a lot of that work.
free of charge, essentially. So it's looking like they need an additional I think 400,000 is what they had said to complete the project. it did have a setback which caused some additional cost in the estimate last year due to flooding. A whole section of their project got blown out in one of the big rain events. So they're in some ways a little bit back to the drawing board with with what to do, particularly with that section.
But projects managed by Zach Humbles, who is, special projects engineer for the county. I've worked with him on a number of similar projects over my time, and, Joe would recommend working with him and this project in general, due to its impact on the Douglas County community and, you know, kind of being in theme with making right what happens during the overflow event.
So, not necessarily we have to do that project. There's also other ones we can we can look at. I believe I'd send some information with, the Butterfly Pavilion, who's managing, a habitat restoration site. It's for abandoned gas wells. So there's hundreds of abandoned gas wells across our state, which are still just there and have never gotten any attention.
So essentially, that program through the Butterfly Pavilion is to train local staff, develop plans for these nearby well sites and restore them to increase biodiversity for pollinators and specific. So it's definitely, a cool project as well. It tends to be a little bit smaller than the county's projects in terms of cost needs. They're more like 25 to $35,000 per site.
They do say it's scalable. And so I could imagine we could do one really big site, or maybe two decent sized sites to make that $130,000 applicable, but it may end up requiring more staff time. There will be a training aspect to it, so it is. It's not quite as easy as partnering with the county, where essentially you would give them funds and they go and complete the project
Tera:
so Jay how how does that work?
So and I forget what it is. It's like 130 and something 100 and 131. Let's say if we were to pay the fine, we were just pay that directly to CDPHE be done. But it goes into a big bucket and they put it in somewhere all around Colorado. is it a one for one if we were to pay, I guess basically pay the restitution to this project with Plum Creek, it's just the same amount of money.
The 131 would go to that project and then we'd be done.
Jay:
I believe there for certain projects is a multiplier of 1.5 to 1. So if if you were to just pay $130,000, you would need to allocate more than that. So $190,000 to apply for some of these special environmental projects
Nathan:
was that I'll have to go back and look.
I thought on that on that list, maybe I can pull it up really quickly. I thought that both of these, when we met with the state, both of these were ones that had been listed as 1 to 1. I believe both the ones we were interested in are 1 to 1. Yeah. So I think. Yeah. And but we can certainly confirm that if we decide to go this direction.
But I'm pretty sure that both the butterfly Pavilion wall restoration project and the Plum Creek were 1 to 1, meaning that there's not a cost multiplier and we can verify that.
Tera:
because that would be that would be good to know. And I see Jana has a question. So, and then the other other question I have with Plum Creek, then, that's the same plum Creek that basically we run our treated water from the Plum Creek plant through.
Nathan:
Yeah. So this is this would be upstream of the Plum Creek water Reclamation Authority treatment plant. I'm not sure how familiar everybody is with Castle Rock geography, but it's roughly the Plum Creek section that is close to Crystal Valley Ranch. So it's on the, southern end of Castle Rock pass, south of the Plum Creek exit.
Jason:
Yeah. Yes. Jana. We're Ready for you.
Jana:
Okay, so, I participated in the CDPHE meeting where they discussed this, and so for Jay, and Nate
Tera:
hey Jana can you can you, like, get closer to your mic or something? I'm sorry. It's not real. Super clear.
Jana:
How is this at all better or no better. I can talk louder. That'll work. Okay, so, I participated in the meeting with CDPHE, but,
But Nathan and Jay are referring to. And I really don't remember anything about a 1.5 multiplier. and so I just because I was really interested in these opportunities because it's kind of the best of both worlds. We pay only what we owe, but we still get to put back something better than the way we found, you know, that for the instance of this stream conservation or the butterfly pavilion for pollinators.
and so that that I would like confirmation on that part to make sure I didn't over overlook or misunderstand that 1.5 multiplier.
Tera:
Right? I mean, I definitely am interested if it's, like if we pay what we owe one for one if there's multiplier there, then I would need more discussion.
Jana:
I'm with Tera. Please.
Jay:
Perfect. I'll confirm that for you guys and get it over to Nate so he can get it to us ASAP.
Nathan:
Great. Thank you. So, so with that, I think. I'll take a question for Kim, but would this be a good time to go ahead and do a board action? Directing us to pursue the supplemental environmental program, assuming that it is a 1 to 1 ratio and move forward? I think we need to at some point soon, we're going to need to tell the state if we're going to pay the fine or if we're going to do an SEP.
Kim:
Yeah, yeah, you could do that now and maybe just approve doing an SEP. And then when we get this settlement agreement will bring that back to you. And that should contain any other terms that we're not aware of at the moment.
Jay:
And I believe the deadline for making that decision was September. So we have a good amount of time there.
James:
Okay. can I, could you maybe expand on some other, project types? Because, when I go in and I look at there's a this is more federal and state, but I go and look at these SEP projects and there's literally thousands of them. if you look nationwide and some are exactly what we talked about the first day of planting trees and stuff like that.
but there are also tons of them. We're again talking about going from a diesel bus for the school to going to a gas powered, like natural gas powered bus or something electric, whatever. but there's also, for whatever reason, it just sticks in my mind. And I copied a whole bunch of them into a spreadsheet. from the existing spreadsheets that are available online, where, many, many towns in funded, fire departments, for whatever reason, to buy fire department equipment for doing things like emergency response.
And, some of them specifically state some of the, chemicals that we actually use in our, water treatment plants and buying them specific equipment so that they, if they ever had to go in there and respond to a spill, fire, what have you, that they would have an appropriate, equipment and training to handle that type of environment.
I'm wondering if that falls into these categories or is that a one of the categories that are may require a multiplier or what have you? not that I, I mean, some of these things are great. I mean, they kind of, you know, they but I also wanted to just before we shut the door on things, explore some other options.
I just wonder if you can talk to that.
Jay:
Absolutely. I'd be curious to look at the list if you wanted to send that to me. To. My understanding is the project needs to be in Douglas County specifically, so there may be some larger, even nationwide projects that could be applied to something in Douglas County. But as far as the list we were given from the state, it was just a statewide list, and I believe there were 20 or 30 projects on there.
Only four of them were approved in Douglas County. So that was the the butterfly pollinators. and then I believe two of them were electric vehicle charging stations. And the idea of those was putting more charging stations at office buildings so folks can charge their cars at work who don't have access to charging stations at home. So maybe not the most life changing thing.
and then I can't remember what the fourth one was, but it was it was such a low limit. It was like a $5,000 max on that project that just really didn't look like a starter even. But we can definitely look at the national list and talk with the state, see if there is anything. If we applied to Douglas County would be applicable for sure.
Tera:
With respect. I mean, I thought we kind of had agreement from the board on the direction that we want to do instead of having further resources. I mean, it sounds like, you know, while there is an a universe of opportunities, they may not all be, focused on Douglas County. I thought that the majority of the board had expressed interest in, the Plum Creek project, so maybe I'm not well.
Jason:
And what I like about the Plum Creek project over the butterfly one, as you said, that the butterfly one is going to require staff and our staff is already stretched. so I think that kind of leaves that one out of out of our purview. And I think that we if we do anything, we should look more specifically to the Plum Creek project.
provided that it's a one for one, if there's a multiplier, then I think that would be a deal killer, too.
Nathan:
And one of the advantages to the, the state I their SEP idea libraries, these are all projects that are, for the most part, shovel ready. So there's, very little effort on our part. We don't have to identify design, kind of go through any of that process.
So it also, accomplishes the goal of, keeping our cost to as close to the, fine amount, as possible without having to dedicate expanded resources to that.
Jason:
So, Kim, what was the motion that you said we should consider?
Kim:
I would make a motion to, I don't think even need to do a motion. Just direct us to go ahead and pursue an SEP, and then that will fold into the settlement agreement with the state, and then we'll bring that to you, you know, hopefully in the next 45 days or something.
if not, it doesn't matter before September, and then you'll just to approve that agreement. And that way if if there's some multiplier that shows up in the agreement, we'll get back to you earlier and say you still want to do this.
Jason:
All right. Well, if the board agrees, I think we should give directive now. And,
Jana. You Ok with that?
Tera:
Yes. For me.
Jana:
I support giving directive to, pursue this for sure. All right. Very good. Yeah. I think we, it's unanimous that the board like to, pursue this.
Nathan:
and then just for information, I did go ahead. I was able to find the, document, at least that contains all of the SCP library for the pre-approved projects.
And you guys all have it in your email.
Jason:
Thank you. All right. anything else? Board. Jay. You did you complete,
Jay:
Yes, I believe that's everything on my end. But I do want to commend the board and Nathan, again for your efforts on the the, boil water notice. I too have never seen one lifted so quickly, so.
Jason:
Thank you. Yeah. That was, Nathan did a great job, and the whole team did, so appreciate that. All right, we'll go ahead and close out. item number nine, the assessor violations supplement. now we're going to open up, item number ten.
Where we need to convene for an executive session. Let's see what, Yeah.
Nathan:
So the exact language is right on the agenda.
Jason:
Thank you. I'm looking for it. Guess. Scroll through all the stuff.
Tera:
I'm making a motion to go enter to executive session, as allowed by 24-6-4024A and E-1 of the Colorado Revised Statutes regarding Possible Renewable Water partnerships and Agreements.
Board Voting All Speak:
And I'll second it. All right. Take to a vote, Jim. Approve to approve. Jana, I think you have to say it, Jana. Approve my microphone, I thought, was bad. Thank you. Leah. Approve. And I approve as well. So we will adjourn to an executive session now and be back in a short bit.
Nathan:
And then we are actually going to head upstairs behind us.
Describer:
On screen. Board Executive Session Please Stand By.
Kim:
You may go ahead. Yeah. Let's go. the board has exited the executive session at 11 8:11 p.m. and will be reentering open session. The discussion in the executive session was limited to the purposes authorized in the motion, and there was no action taken during that time. The recording of the executive session will be maintained for 90 days in case there is a court request, and then it will be destroyed.
We're ready to go into regular session.
Jason:
All right. Thank you. Kim. So, I think, with the boards of, agreement that we should make a direction to pursue matters discussed in the executive session to Nathan and for it not to exceed 40 K or $40,000 sorry, I wrote 40 K. so unless anybody on the board objects to that,
Board Voting All Speak:
I agree.
I agree, I agree. I agree.
Jason:
All right. Very good. Nathan, I think you know what to do next. Perfect. Thank you. So we will close out item ten now the executive session, and we'll move on to item 11. The communication Director's report. Thank you so much for waiting.
Communications Director Bailey Budnik:
Hello. so yeah, today for the communications report, in addition to the normal metrics that we always report on, we also have the overarching communication strategy outlined as well as the additional, new crisis communication, outline that we created.
So, if you had any questions, just with the overall communication strategy, our past communications these past few months, as well as our future ones, are always guided by the three principles of whether something falls into public education projects or baseline communications. So public education, you know, ranges from, you know, talking about our board meetings, you know, questions and concerns, billing, inquiries, anything that really resolves around that type of process.
and that also includes, you know, proactive updates. So anything that Nathan and I see that might be coming down the pipeline, whether it's, you know, the water source change or flushing notices, and then as well with that as reactive responses. So, you know, like our, issue with the, the boil notice and along those lines and then additionally, so the second category that all projects, or all communication falls into is the projects.
So monthly capital projects, that's where we're focusing. A lot of our videographer work, photography, talking to a lot of the subject matter experts. And then those are also projected, you know, on email, website, social media, and linked in the connection and billing inserts. So just keeping, you know, things a little bit more light and informational there where you might almost are peeling back the curtain on topics.
and that also goes to what were, you know, at first we focused on the Yorkshire Park, the Yorkshire line going on now to monarch and then we'll work on those lift station updates and, the wastewater treatment plant updates as well. yeah. And then lastly out of that three is the baseline communication. So, you know, every year we'll have communication about the annual budget, seasonal information, whether it's the rebate programs that we are doing or the watering schedule, consumer confidence report that's coming out.
We're working on that and we're planning to spread that, by mid June and then just year in review. so those are kind of the three guiding principles that all the communication flows through. And then as well, you can see under it is just the additional emergency notification. So, you know, the reverse 911 press releases, anything additional that's outside of the bounds of that normal digital and print communication.
Jason:
Okay. All right. Thank you. does anybody have any questions or comments?
Really appreciate all the extra time you had to put in with our, outage the other last week?
Bailey:
No. No problem, no problem. That that kind of leads into. Nathan. I were talking about the crisis communication, plan. So then, you know, we did feel like we addressed all the areas we could last week and, you know, through all the means.
So then, to take that one step further, just to be prepared for the next, eventually, hopefully, you know, not soon. but just, you know, if something like that does happen again, we have a very strict protocol. Okay. We checked this off. Check this off, check this off. in the report and strategy, you can see that, you know, it's split up into kind of our team coming together and figuring out, okay, what's actually going on here?
What does the public need to know? What's the most, you know, pressing matters and then the internal communication from that and then also putting that externally. so, yeah, first, first, order of that would just be making sure the first 911s are activated. Any press releases that go out, we have the key contacts listed below with that as well.
and with that below, there's certain official state forms that I have been learning alongside of Nathan with, you know, when we first issued the boil water notice, there's a certain form that you have to include on the press release. And then there's you know, a few other ones, depending on the situation. So just making sure that we have all those just right on hand to, to fill out and, email and attach to the necessary contacts and then following that, you know, digital and online updates.
I think one thing this situation showed us is that the streamline platform with some of, the more integral like photos and mappings and just what we want to really highlight, things like that, it gets a bit blurry when it's sent through that email, system. So since then we've created a email system with flow desk, kind of interim.
We're, we're using it now for the flashing notices, and the pictures are coming through a lot clearer to the residents. and it's a better, honestly user experience from there end to, just more clean lines and, just very easy to see what the information is. so that's one thing. And then we will be talking with, the technology on Wednesday just to overview what we can do with more text message and, you know, email marketing that necessarily, you know, they don't have to opt in to.
But it's still we can legally contact them with emergency services. yeah. And then on top of that, just with correct crisis communication, making sure all media entities are aware of everything. I know Nathan had a few interviews, so just, you know, making sure that all is accounted for and then we're we're kind of are right now with the public is just focusing on follow up communication.
So we'll put together a really great comprehensive FAQ page on the website. And share that through the sources as well. taking all the information from that packet you received, and just making it a little bit more digestible and then putting QR codes in the appropriate places, of communication in the upcoming billing cycle as well.
Leah:
Is it for the FAQ?
Is it, around like the incident that we just had?
Bailey:
Correct. Yes. So that's awesome. That'll be great. Yeah. So if anyone has any specific questions about, you know, why did this actually happen or why was it addressed, you know, the next morning or just any, any of those creeping questions that residents might have that are totally natural?
Leah:
That's awesome. Love that.
James:
yeah. Question. Earlier in our meeting, we talked about, people that may or may not have, you know, it sounds like not everybody gets these notifications. The reverse 911 or what have you. Is there something that you can include in some of these communications you could do about a QR code? Is there any way that somebody can assent to receive those?
Or, you know, at least sign up to receive all those notifications if, you know, if we're not doing it through a billing insert or it's not effective, you know, can we at least provide that in, say, this FAQ? If you want to sign up for future notifications, click here and type in your email address. So it's something simple
Tera:
I thought you guys that are already out of that to the website.
Nathan:
Yeah. So there's the that's the the option to jump in to add yourself to our list is on every form questionnaire that we have online. I think the, the gap that we're trying to close, and that's the meeting that Bailey alluded to, is the meeting we have on Wednesday or Thursday with Daupler is that, hey, there's the a lot of people that didn't get the reverse 911 because all they have is a cell phone and they haven't proactively signed themselves up for that.
try and close that gap. And that's where the, Daupler emergency response module will come through. And that's that's the one we can draw information directly from our billing system to kind of close that gap. And then we'll we'll continue to put, you know, options to sign up for our emails on absolutely everything. but I think that it's one of those things that like, yeah, who wants to get another email until you didn't get an email that you really wish you had?
James:
Okay. That's all what I saw Nextdoor. And then a few of the emails that popped up on our, you know, in our, Castle Pines north was, you know, you know, this just 2024. Why don't we have a better system kind of thing?
Nathan:
Yeah. And what's nice about that is, well, I mean, the reverse 911, all of those things were fantastic.
They also took time. So, you know, we we contacted Douglas County Emergency Services and by the time they kind of got their wheels up and running, which they did amazingly quickly, but it was still a few hours that went by. with the Daupler system in place, I mean, we we had our email alert out for the boil notice within like within the hour.
And so as soon as that email would have got out, it would have hit every cell phone number and every email that we have. And so that'll kind of help close that time delay to the extent that there is one. Appreciate it.
Tera:
They have to be they have to opt in to code rather than 911. But also keep in mind that, some of those people could be renters.
So I mean, they may not the bill may not go to them, they may not be in our system, or they may not have received emails because they're not the homeowner.
Bailey:
Yeah, that's a really great point, actually. maybe, Nathan, we can discuss the percentage of rentals and maybe doing more outreach to those locations, just, you know, if you want to receive direct communication from CPNMD
Nathan:
the way that it I'm not sure what the rental breakdown would be right now. a large number of our renters do have what we call,
Oh, what's the word? basic, like complimentary. But the word escapes me that a lot of our renters do have accounts set up with us so that they can pay their bills directly for the properties that they're renting. that policy overall is something that we're looking at because that ability is something that we do not have to do, and it does cause a lot of headaches.
but that's something that I hadn't considered is how do we capture those renters inside of that kind of like emergency communication network? And maybe that's as simple as trying to get something set up with landlords on the account to at least get us that. You know, if we've got a line for, like resident phone number or something like that, we can we can work with that.
Jason:
Cool. anybody else have any questions? All right. Well, I thank you again for everything. And, having no more questions, we'll go ahead and close out this, thank you portion. Thank you. Now we'll move on to the finance director's report. Do we have there's a Andrea.
Nathan:
Thanks for hanging tight with us Andrea.
Andrea Manson, Community Resource Services of Colorado (CRS):
Yeah. No worries.
All right. Tonight, you need to ratify claims for payment, including check numbers 28533 through 28622 and electronic payments issued from April 18th through May 20th. Total expenditures for April were $904,234.67, and total expenditures for May were $1,120,091.97, for a total, $2,024,326.64.
Jason:
All right. I'll go ahead and make a motion to ratify the claims for check numbers 28533 to 28622, and for the total expenditures in April of $904,234.67. And for May $1,120,091.97, for a total of $2,024,326.64. I'll second
Board Voting All Speak:
having a second when you go to vote, Jim, I approve, okay Tera. Approve, Jana. Approve. Leah, approve. And I approve as well.
Andrea:
Great. And, starting on page 68 of your packet, we just provided a little summary. total tax revenues through April have totaled $613,309. About 61.42% of the budget. And then we are allocating 75% of those to the water fund and 25% to the wastewater fund. Billed water usage in the month of April was 25,517,000, which is a 2.73% increase from water usage in April 23.
And then the billed sewer usage was 18,771,751 for April this year, versus 19,209,652 for April of 23, which is a 2.28% decrease and then total water and sewer revenues for the month of April was $522,495, versus 515,322 and April of 23, which is a 1.39% increase.
Jason:
Great. Thank you Andrew. So anybody have any questions for Andrea this month.
All right. Not seeing or hearing anything. Thank you very much for your report. And we'll go ahead and close out the Finance Director's report section.
Nathan:
one thing to note, while we're talking finances, we did start the 2023 audit process today. So I've been getting a steady stream of, well steady stream. I got a couple documents to sign.
Phyllis and Andrea have done an amazing job prepping for that one. So they're basically have the vast majority of everything the auditors need to to fire through that. So we should be, right on target to get all of that done and in on time before the July 31st deadline. So,
Tera:
Andrea, I'm sorry, I do have a quick question regarding the property and specific ownership tax because it looks like, through April, we'd already collected more than half of the tax revenues recognized.
You know why we're ahead that much? Why were you as far ahead of budgets?
Andrea:
Really? Yeah. You get most of it in the beginning of the year. and then it will be way less for the rest of the year. So most of them come in, in the April time period. Great. Thank you.
Jason:
Great. Thanks again.
We'll move on now to section 11 the legal counsel's report. Kim.
Kim:
you have a copy of the written report. Nothing to update there. And there's only two action items. And those are already under Nathan's report as A and E. All right. Unless you have any questions. That's it.
Jason:
All right. We have any questions for Kim? All right.
Not hearing any. So we'll go ahead and close out the legal counsel's report. Thank you Kim. Now we'll move on to the, district manager's report. Nathan,
Nathan:
any questions about my report before I jump into the agenda items?
Cool. All right. First thing that I have on the agenda is, for the board to consider an IGA with, Douglas County. This would provide us access to a software called the Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye provides GIS mapping and, data imagery. it's really high resolution imagery. It also, this particular function wouldn't be integrated into our GIS system, but we've had we have access to it, where it's also that three dimensional.
So you can drop down and do all kinds of crazy things, like take actual measurements of buildings and trees or fire hydrants or whatever you want to do. currently we've hit if you go back in time. We, we used to actually fly and grab aerial imagery. that was really, really nice. It was also very, very expensive.
we did that in partnership with, Castle Pines Village, since they also moved away from it. So did we. So we've been using Google, Google Earth imagery for the last few years. it's really, a nice upgrade because it's, it's imagery that is built on GIS grading and network. So there's a lot of, image justification things that are already taken care of.
one the biggest advantage to all of this is that, I, we've actually looked into partnering or getting signed up with Eagle. I, I can't remember how much it was going to cost, but it was it was pretty expensive platform to put in place. Eagle eye allows the ability on their government services side. So if there is an entity that is contained entirely inside of the boundaries of an entity that already uses the service, they allow them to provide that to the whoever else it is for free.
so because Douglas County has a relationship and uses Eagle Eye, Douglas County is able to provide that imagery, and all of the software capabilities to municipalities that are fully contained within them, like us. when I went to talk to Douglas County about that, they're, more than happy to go down that road and get us access to those images and to those systems.
Their only ask was that there be an IGA put in place, that kind of guides that to make sure that we're following all, all of the appropriate eagle eye terms of service conditions and things like that. So the, they recently didn't actually the, IGA that we have in here is almost a carbon copy of the agreement that Douglas County used with Parker Water and Sanitation District, outside of legal fees and getting the IGA signed, they're not asking for any kind of monetary compensation or anything like that.
We just want an IGA in place so that both parties are protected, and we'd be allowed use of this service for no additional cost for as long as Douglas County has it. So I just want permission to do that.
Jason:
Is that a motion or just a directive?
Nathan:
that would be a motion since it's an IGA.
Kim:
Yeah. You need a motion to approve the intergovernmental agreement with the Board of County Commissioners.
and that's it.
Jason:
Okay. You want to make the motion?
Tera:
I'll make the motion that Mr. Sutter just put on record.
Board Voting All Speak:
I'll second it. Having a second? We'll go to vote. Jim. Approve. Tera approve. Jana approve. And Leah approve. Great. And I approve as well.
Nathan:
Great. Thank you for that. I'm super excited that the GIS geek inside me is very, very stoked to play with that.
so, so item B, I have, Plum Creek Water Reclamation Authority amendment number seven. I also included the previous amendments that address this. It's really just taking care of something that is honestly fairly silly. So the PCWRA is, managed by primarily by the town of Castle Rock, Castle Pines North Metro district, and the village of Castle Pines.
The current structure is that the board members of PCWRA are filled out by the district managers or utility managers of those three entities. So the current board, is myself, Josh, shackled for Josh Shackleford and Mark Marlow. like any special district board, there is a potential financial compensation. I think it's set to like $110 a month.
But because we are paid by our individual districts, we technically still get that stipend for being on the board. But because we're paid to be there, what we have historically done or done for the last several years is just have that that fund paid directly to the individual district. So it doesn't go to me. Josh or Mark. It gets put toward the district.
And so effectively where you guys are paying the three districts are paying us to go down there and go to the meetings. PCWRA Is paying us $100 or whatever it is a month to be there and then refunding that dollar amount back to the district. We just want to get rid of that process entirely. And so what this amendment would effectively do is eliminate payment for board members that are employees of districts.
It does leave a little bit of room if he ever does have a citizen board or citizen board members, that there's still an avenue for them to collect that compensation. But this amendment effectively just gets rid of the district employee board member compensation. So we can kind of get rid of this, odd check rotation that we've been doing with them.
Nathan:
So, I think it's also worth noting on this one. So I'd be asking the board to approve the amendment. this board approving this amendment doesn't automatically put it in place. It's the cumulative approval of the of our board of directors, the village board of directors, and Town of Castle Rock City Council. So, Josh and Mark are also bringing this to their respective legislating bodies, so that they'll get it approved and then we'll make the amendment with PCWRA.
Jason:
I'll make a move, motion to approve the PC amendment number seven.
Board Voting All Speak:
I'll second the motion. All right. Having second, we'll go to vote Jim. Approve. Tera. Hi, Jana. Approve. Leah approve. And I approve as well.
James:
I'm glad you went through that, because I read through all that stuff and it was a little bit like, what are we talking about?
Nathan:
Right? Yeah. okay. So, item C under the district manager report, I have a discussion item and, potential direction from the board. So PCL construction has done quite a bit of work for the district on and off over the years. in 2021, following our boil water notice, when we had taken our plan off line, we were, in a really, really tight time frame.
We basically had from the end of October until May to get our plant to a functional state. one of the things that we identified at the time, there has since been a completed capital project is the Backwash Reclaim tank. So we did a capital project just this last year to completely renovate that tank. part of that project was replacing the lid that covers the tank.
in order to get into compliance. Prior to that project, the tank lid condition was such that we could not functionally bring the plant online without doing something to seal the top of it. We actually had daylight coming into it, from a couple of different spots. so to fit inside of that tight time frame, we did an epoxy coating on top of the tank to really just bridge the gap until we could do the full capital replacement, which, like I said, has already been done.
that was done in the PCL. Had, two payapps, ultimately two payapps. for that, they only ever sent us the first one. And so we just recently got a bill for, 100, and I can't remember what it is off the top of my head after I've got the invoice here somewhere. but they sent us an invoice for work done in 2021 that we just now received.
I did run that up the flagpole with, Kim's office and just kind of asked the question, like, hey, this is three years old. Do we have to pay it? and basically, since certain conditions have been met, we're still on the hook for the remainder of the 100,000 change. Whatever it is. because of that, because PCL, when I talked to PCL, trying to get a really good understanding of why this happened, there wasn't really a great explanation other than it fell through the cracks.
PCL it's a large invoice, but PCL is a huge construction company there. They do multi multi-million dollar, infrastructure projects. They're, not just in Colorado. So really to them like 100 and whatever thousand dollars didn't jump off the page for the books. the other thing that I had them verify was make sure that it wasn't a, that it wasn't written off as an unpaid debt.
because then we wouldn't have to pay it. So they have not written it off. It's just sitting on their books as an unpaid invoice. my big is my my next concern around that was, taking that heavy of a hit in this year's budget when we had not remotely planned for it. I talked to PCL.
They didn't have any issue delaying our payment, for that until 2025, so that we can account for it in the upcoming budget and not have to worry about the budget implications for this year. so really, if there are any other questions, any questions about it, I'm happy to answer them to the best of my ability. and then we'll talk about the potential option of paying it next year.
Jim, what do you got?
James:
All right. I just want you to confirm. And Andrew is on now, but essentially just verify what we did pay and what we agreed to pay and make sure that the current invoice matches the delta.
Nathan:
Yep. And so we did. We went back I had Susan go back and pull any payments that had made to been made to PCL.
the total amount due was the rest, the estimated amount. There was one payment that we made that has been deducted from the total that we're being asked to pay. So the from an accounting sheet balance sheet, it does line out.
Jason:
All right. So yeah, I guess paying it next year when we can budget for it's what we need to do.
Nathan
Easy enough. next thing I have for you is an update on the interconnect pump station electrical equipment evaluation. This goes back to, the request to potentially replace the three variable frequency drives that sit down there.
I included a copy of the testing proposal that testing was done over the last couple of weeks. They finished it up on Friday. And so now I am waiting on the ultimate kind of summary and results. from the initial, reports that I've had and talking with, I can't remember the guy with Kennedy Jenk's name off the top of my head.
but it does not look like Kennedy Jenks is going to be recommending that we do drive replacement. So there are some, some cabling things that we can do and look at, and they'll have a complete list of their recommendations, coming up there. So there will be some work that we need to do out there. It seems like everything, at least for this year, might even be solid.
And we're just talking about items that will be included in in next year's budget. And, it doesn't look like anything on the on the scale. Certainly of replacing variable frequency drives. They were Kennedy Jenks was able to get, a manufacturer, get get in touch with the manufacturer, and they provided a bunch of documentation and recommendation for VFD settings and cable adjustments and stuff like that that may be causing the issue.
James
You know, I saw that you did a merger. I'm sorry. Go ahead Tera.
Tera:
I was just to say that that sounds like good news,
James:
but I noticed that they did a megger check of the cables and things like that. Did they note any leakage or anything that accounted for what we saw in your solar grams with these diodes?
Nathan:
That's the those are the details that I'm hoping to in the summary.
I thought I was going to actually have that summary, today, even though it would have been included in the packet. But I should have something from the from Kennedy Jenks this week kind of explaining what they found, what they, what they saw. okay. So, yeah, I'll send out an email hopefully this week that has a lot of those details.
And of course, feel free to respond with specific questions.
James:
Okay. do they have any indication what they thought the cost is going to be? Initially, we're talking a half $1 million and I think we spent what was the invoice here is like 20 something.
Nathan:
yeah, we spent 21,000 on testing. I have not gotten a, a cost estimate.
but my from the, any kind of, like, dial to cost estimate, but the it sounded like the high end of that. Just kind of in the passing conversations I've had, would probably be around like the, like a high end around the $100,000 mark. If we could get up there. Thanks.
Nathan:
All right. there are no other questions on that. Item E is consider the park's IGA concerning cost splitting for parcel parcel transfers. this is the. It would be the Second Amendment to this IGA. The first one was more concise. was the first one extending it? Yep, yep. Yeah. The deadline extension. This really just codifies that the city of Castle Pines and Castle Pines North Metro district will split 50/50.
the costs for the parcel transfer study every indication, that we've had with them. Everything is going well. at the last board meeting, that was something they come up with. Making sure that while things are going well now and everything's, flowing smoothly, that we still need to make sure that we get that codified in writing.
and so that is the, document that Kim has to that end.
Kim:
So that would be a motion to approve the Second Amendment to the intergovernmental agreement with the city regarding operations, maintenance and transfer, recreation properties.
Board Voting All Speak:
I make the motion as written, to record by our attorney. That's a pro move. I'll second that. Let's go to vote Jim approval. Tera. Approve. Jana. Approve. Leah approve. And I approve as well.
Nathan:
All right. the only other thing that I didn't have on the agenda that I wanted to mention, and we briefly touched on it earlier, but we are working to get ready to release our consumer confidence report.
that has to be out to residents by the end of June. basically. So it'll be a separate mailing that goes out, when I'm confirming this, because other districts have done it. but it looks like we're going to be able to save a lot of cost over how we have done this in previous years where we've sent out this full packet.
and so that will we'll certainly make the physical books available to people. but it does appear that the state is allowing utilities to send that more on like a postcard with a QR code or a direction to a website, along with some additional instructions. So, that will be monumentally cheaper to send 4300 postcards as opposed to print 4300, 12-page colored booklets.
the, boil water notice information will not be officially included in this report. So the consumer confidence or the CCR is covering the prior year's water quality data. So this is January 1st, 2023 to December 31st, 2023. for lack of a better term, we will give it some sort of honorable mention that will direct people to, some of the stuff that Bailey was talking about earlier with like, hey, how can we get information about this?
I just feel like if I get a consumer confidence report within a month of a boil water notice and we don't mention the boil water notice, it's going to it's going to raise some eyebrows. So that won't be officially included in the report. But the report will, include direction to how to get that information. especially since we're in QR codes, we're on the website.
We can even do live links and stuff like that for that. and I think that is all that I had.
Jason:
All right. Very good. Then we'll close out the director district manager's report, and we'll move on to director's matters. Does anybody have anything they would like to talk about? Report.
Jason:
.... The only thing I have to mention, we don't, we're supposed to put in here to talk about if we're going to do a study session
Nathan:
that, so, I was put a hex on the whole thing. Jason, I'm glad you caught it. So for the, study session, it sounds like we have, a a need to go ahead and have the study session as planned, so that we can potentially more than likely do an additional executive session related to, regional water planning.
we do have a a need to find a time to get the board out for the pilot study, so that we can kind of go over that. And then we also, wanted to talk about some potential engineering options and construction options with the filter pilot program. Alex Paige, with Kennedy Jenks would like to be here for that.
She and I had originally talked about, to kind of present all of that and walk everybody through the pilot station. She and I originally had talked about using the June study session to facilitate that, but moving it a day. so she does have some scheduling conflicts. so I know that right now, for her, the, where would that land?
So June 18th is available for her, if that's something that would work for the board. And you guys don't mind having to sit in a room with me two days in a row? we could do. We could schedule that the 18th. If that's something that you guys aren't prepared to, nail the time down on?
Tera:
What time ish?
Nathan:
that's open to.
We can do it anytime that day. we could also throw out a doodle poll and nail it down. Yeah.
Jason:
I'm going to be out of town the 18th to the 23rd.
Leah:
So I say we do a doodle poll.
Nathan:
Okay, well, I'll. I'll do that.
Leah:
Take that offline yeah.
Nathan:
I'll have I'll put it together and we'll we'll throw it throw it out there.
Are there any... Does anybody have any like consistent days of the week that they cannot do it before we put that poll out. Or times that are would be better to target weekday evenings, afternoons, mornings, evenings.
Okay. We'll throw throw some out there. And if I if I have to spend $5 to get the really fancy version of the doodle poll thing, I will.
James off-mic:
they're always out to spend our money.
Nathan:
I know nickel and dimes.
Jason:
All right. Does anybody else have anything else? Hearing nothing. We can go ahead and close director's matters and adjourn the meeting. Thank you all.