you want to keep talking what's on the on the ballot for this november and i would like to talk a little bit about what we've done to keep this thirty million dollars plan which is certainly a big number but to do thirty million dollars o one has enjoyed at all the unplanned just charges and the series of things that went wrong this past summer were were were very frustrating and challenging for everyone who has responsibility here one  upside for me personally on this is i developed a greater understanding of the history around this issue and it really is quite an interesting his shoe it history and one that i hope people have in mind if they go out to the vote on this and weigh in on this make decision on this burlington in many ways our whole city history revolves around these water services a lot of the and i'm a little vague on some of the early steps of it but you know creating a water system creating a sewer system were major years there wasn't a lot of attention paid to protecting the lake in the you know there's a lot of effort put into making bronze and work as a city a dynamic thriving city a place of of commerce place where people can make a living but the system wasn't the wastewater treatment plant that was our first effort really had you know a generational effort to start treating sewage before it was discharged into lake champlain it was not in the next big thing that happens in history as in the one nine hundred ninety s we create made we became dissatisfied with the fact that even though we were treating sewage we were not really doing anything to protect the lake during rain events during these storm flows into the same pipes as the sewage at least in a big chunk of the city to this day in one thousand in the one nine hundred ninety s a big bond more than fifty million dollars bond was passed to change that in two ways first of all we we we we separated some of this sewers and created a partially separated system where it was impractical to do that what we did is is build this war texas ability to treat storm water during these wet weather events and ever since then hundreds of millions of gallons of combined waste water storm water flow has been treated out of that mean plant that is at the base the city right by by the bike path down by that even in a tough summer like this we have treated where where we had these implanted discharges and we had some significant amount of combined flow flow into lake that we not happy about and want to fix even with that this summer we treated historically high amount of water three hundred million gallons or so million gallons of this combined flow because that system that was built then the next big thing that happens in the in the history is in two thousand and nine when the city of burlington became the second city in the state to create a storm water utility a utility in addition to our water utility and our wastewater utility that's purpose was to make further progress with our variety of storm water issues because what we did back in the ninety's took us a long way in the right direction it didn't address everything we still had these combined sewer overflows  we actually created a new utility with new fees that appear on your water bills that give us resources and capacity to make further progress and we have since two thousand and nine we there are still five of these c s o points around the city that used to go off dozens of times every summer you know whenever there was a larger rain event now it's a pretty rare event that the c s i shows for four of the five it is very rare that they go off at all there is one on pine street that goes off frequently and that's that's part of the plan to try to address that will say more about that in a second i put this two thousand and eighteen initiative now this thirty million dollars seven point plan that is you know the council voted on monday to put before you as the next significant chapter in this long effort now more than seventy five years old to find a way in which we can have a a thriving healthy vibrant city that is in better balance with the natural resources around it and specifically is in much better balance with lake champlain we've come a long ways over the last seventy five years this plan well first of all make sure we don't backslide go in the wrong direction which is what in some ways this summer was we had things breaking and things going wrong that you know haven't been going wrong in recent years not only to do that but actually continue the forward forward progress they say a little bit about this thirty million dollars plan without the details will provide i just want to talk about i think in some ways this may feel like this plan came together quickly and i've heard some sense out there that this this this this it came out of nowhere it did this is an effort that we have been working on for years i as you know i look around the room i know many of you are a long time roland tony and i think you're well aware that this summer we are doing more infrastructure work then we have been doing in a long time we have more road work going on more sidewalk work going on then in many years if not ever and really for the first time in maybe ever certainly in decades we are proactively replacing water lines that effort we can all put under the umbrella of sustainable infrastructure plan and that work is being funded by the votes as a couple votes that you made back in two thousand and sixteen to make new investment in these areas when we were developing those plans that that two thousand and sixteen vote was a function of about three years of work leading up until that point of a comprehensive infrastructure plan for for the whole city was a plan that went through lots of public process many different public bodies and was at its heart was the result of a lot of professional work we commission studies for each of these different asset areas of the city is responsible for we started and did a lot of that work that were is now part of this plan began back during that effort at a certain point it became clear that there were  reasons to delay the waste water and storm water work and not have it part of that vote back in two thousand and sixteen but a lot of the work a lot of the professional work a lot of that there's and some behind some of this is this really interesting modeling work where meghan has led an effort to where we really know what all the pipes are underneath the streets know their sizes can do computer modeling and kind of animations and projections of  that system will respond in different events you know there's been a that all of that work factors into this plan as well the we had talked with the city council in the last two budget years about the need to come forward with this work relatively soon we thought that that was going to be next spring or maybe the spring after that what has come together quickly is in response to the events of the summer these unplanned discharges that took place this summer we accelerated those plants and we accelerated them first we made an announcement that we're going to try to get this plan done by december first so that could be on the town meeting day about and as we got deeper into it and as some additional frustrating events took place we made a decision to accelerate it still further so that it could be ready for this november bout that would not have ha up into something that we feel is is is comprehensive is solid and you know we'll see how the session goes tonight but i think will hold up to scrutiny and will get done what it we in needs to get done it is a plan that really prioritize been have put in huge work nights weekends to get here and i just want to say thank you again to the whole team for for what you've done to give us an opportunity have this conversation and hopefully make this community decision in the weeks ahead final thing i want to hit on is affordability again it's a thirty million dollars plan that's by any measure a big number in a community of our size in some sense when you hear thirty million dollars know that we have work to make the the financial impact to bring down the financial impact to a plan that is forty percent smaller essentially we have found mitigation strategies that will relieve the rate payers you that you will you will not see you will not see the full increase that thirty million dollars plan would otherwise have and that is why we say with confidence that when all this work is done about five years from now forty five years from now the difference between your water bill today your total water bill today versus the  waste water and storm water bill that part of your water bill in the future those areas of the bill will go up they only go up by about five dollars a little more than five dollars the main way we have achieved that is by first of  taking a very significant amount hundreds of thousands of of dollars he existing revenues that flow to the storm water and waste water utilities and repurposing that for this for this this debt service on this long term plan this twenty year plan twenty year bond and then the other the other is that we are quite confident we will succeed at securing some submarket rate financing that will further bring down the cost we're hoping we're doing even better than this there is a long list in the plan of additional cost mitigation measures that we're going to pursue additional federal grants possibly changes in in other areas o city finance that could actually mean that the bill never goes up that fall five dollars and thirty six cents we've tried to be conservative in the way we've projected that but that doesn't but we are going to continue we hope to beat expectations in did a great job of encapsulating roughly what i'm going to talk about tonight but i'm hopefully going to be putting some pictures and some numbers to everything that he said so that you guys can really understand where all of this came from going take a quick look at just the overview of the bomb proposal look at that trajectory of water quality progress that burlington really should be proud about even if we aren't proud at all about the summer talk about the specific issues around what happened this summer and what some of the root causes of our are so that you can understand how those played into the current plan that we have will dive a little deeper into the bond proposal and the highlights of what we're looking to stabilize in modernize and then talk a little bit about that rate impact in affordability strategies for those  coming a little late like coffee hard copy of the presentation we do have some available it will also be online afterwards if there's folks who don't really feel comfortable asking a question i will say now there are no dumb questions we are here to talk about your system to educate you about your system and hopefully help you guys become stewards of this information in your own communities the more everybody knows the better we're all going to be when we go to the polls and when we flush the toilet use our water use any part of the our aging every single day older and older and for structure you'll learn how even though as the mayor said it seems sudden like this came out of nowhere this is based on multiple years of work that i have done and my team has done and i want to reiterate the thinks not everybody has a gray shirt on but most people have agreed on back there those are the folks who after after the presentation if you do have questions please pull one of them aside and you can have a one on one to get all of your questions you ever wanted to know maybe about the water system answered the thirty million dollars plan is roughly comprised of about twenty million dollars for waste water and ten million dollars for storm water and does represent approximately a five dollar and thirty six increase for the typical single family property homeowner on your water sewer storm utility bill this is not on your tax bill this is on the bill that you receive every month and is based on how much water use and based on what your classification is for storm water in the city one last thing in this map i believe is on the website that we will put the link up but it's important to note that these investments are throughout the city we're not doing them only in the old north in are only at the wastewater treatment plants they are going to be benefiting the entire city so this really cool trajectory of our progress as the mayor said before in one nine hundred fifty three our sewage went in to burlington bay and into our rivers completely and totally rock no treatment whatsoever pretty gross in one thousand fifty three main plant was constructed in the sixty's it took us until the sixty's to actually get to building the plants that the north plant which is at the end of north abbot the very tippy top of north of and then riverside which is the plant on riverside avenue right next to the barbecue joint a place my little joke is you're on riverside you smell donuts you smell barbecue and then you smell something else that's east plant one thousand nine hundred four really great year from the perspective that folks realize that we had a continued problem we had handled and improved how we are treating our sewage but we were letting go millions of gallons at least one hundred seventy million gallons estimating more in the three hundred million gallon range was going into lake cham plain every time it rained two thousand and nine storm our utility and then this intensive capital planning effort so backing up a little just to make sure everybody's using the same jargon what is a combined sewer what is a combined sewer overflow so part of being an old city and we're one of about seven hundred fifty remaining c s o communities in the united states it was an old city and when it was built people were just excited to get the water and the sewage away from them they put one pipe in and that's where the sewage went and that's also where the storm water went under normal conditions and under small storm events this works fine the sewage coming from your house gets to the treatment plant and gets that treatment that we established in one thousand fifty three and then upgraded in one nine hundred seventy under really large storm of vince the system can't handle it the pipes not big enough and if we didn't have relief points which are called combined sewer overflow outfalls the mixture of sewage and storm water would be surfacing on streets would be flooding many more basements it does still sometimes flood people's basements if they don't have a backwater prevention valve on their home but that would be happening on a much more frequent basis without these relief point it doesn't mean it's not gross it's just the way the system was built and it's something that we inherited as a lot of new england communities did doesn't change the grossest but it is important to know that combined sewer overflows when we have to report them  after two thousand and sixteen the state passed a law where and we're very much in favor of this law of public notification that when these things happen we have to tell the public and we have to post it in a public place those overflows when we report them they have to report the total volume about ninety to ninety five percent of that total volume is stormwater so if it was a separated system it would be like all of the other storm water outfalls it does have sewage components about five percent of its sewage but it helps a little bit when you're looking at one hundred thousand gallons to know that it's not all raw sewage which sometimes gets depicted in the media so as as we've said prior to one thousand nine hundred four there were about eleven plus or minus ia so point these out falls most notably at the bottom of maple and college and then a really big one right where main plant is today and about one hundred seventy million or more gallons million gallons of sewage was going into our nearby water bodies completely utterly unacceptable i don't know if anybody was here in those days i have heard people talk about being on beaches and seeing things washed up does not surprise me that that might have been happening in this time period with the volume that was going on right near on shore inside the breakwater so what did we do the mayor mentioned this fifty million dollar bond one of the first things that we try to do with our collection system was to try to eliminate the through separation so a lot of the city about seventy five percent now after the separate after this phase of the project did put into separate pipes so there's a pipe that goes and carries only we're also edge to the plant and then there's a pipe that carries the storm water from the storm drains this is good for mitigating the acute impact of the c now know it's very bad for a long term water quality perspective storm water is not clean it's cleaner unless it then sewage but it is not clean it has nutrients it has said a minute has bacteria from pet waste it has all these different things that is not getting treated for the vast majority of the separated system that gets into the lake ok so in part we knew that it wasn't necessarily the best idea to separate everything additionally complete separation was going to be really really expensive i don't know how much that bond would have been if we had tried to separate the entire city but it probably would have had it at least a one in front of the fifty two it's that expensive if you can imagine trying to dig up all of the streets and put in new pipes in downtown where there's already all these existing utilities in some cases buildings are they have their wa and storm flow combined within their their internal plumbing system so you can't necessarily just snap your fingers and do the separation but it's also because of this long term water quality impact so this is a map the purple area is the remaining combined sewer area that drains to main plant there's a little bit of combined sewer that drains through riverside or east plant and then a little bit here in the new north and that drains to the north plant so because we couldn't separate them we didn't think it was cost effective the other strategy was to provide the best treatment possible to these combined sewer flows that were previously running off into burlington bay the main feature of this was to enhanced the capacity of the plant overall to actually be able to provide full treatment to the full treatment to small storms and to a good portion of any storm that even happens when the storms exceed the capacity of the whole plant so all of the treatment practices it still gets really good treatment through enhanced screening and what we call vortex which basically the the water comes in and it comes in at angle at a tangent so it swirls around which enhances the amount of solids that will settle out the most of the solid material that comes out of that actually goes back into the plant to get full treatment the other thing about the vortex is that it has a really quick acting disinfection agent so the main main acute water quality issue with c s o's is the bacteria the elevation of bacteria in the water  at the discharge point because of this vortex we're able to keep those bacteria levels well within like well within water quality standards when everything is working well we also as part of that project extended the outfall further out into the lake i believe steve it used to go used to be right on shore then went about a thousand feet all and then with this project we extended it and another sixteen hundred feet beyond the breakwater and put in another diffusing system so it it helps to diffuse the area so you're not having just a pipe with material coming out we do after that project still have those five c s o locations there's the pine barge canal  much more active it's gone off now with last night nine times all of these intense rain storms that we've been getting even though it's been a dry ish year when we have got marine it's come all at once over like thirty minute periods that's the type of thing that makes those go off and this one in particular it discharges into the southern end of the superfund site the barge canal superfund site and travels about twenty one hundred feet before it enters lake champlain two thousand and nine that's when i got to join the city so i really like that year when we created the second in the state storm our utility which created a dedicated funding stream which enables us to leverage grant funding have dedicated staff all these different types of things it was created largely because there were all these new regulations that were coming down the pike but also because we had this continued c s o problem and the c s o problem is really a storm water problem it's driven by rain not by anybody doing anything wrong just by the rain which unfortunately is on an increasing trend as this intensity piece one of the major fab benefits of creating the storm or utility as we use that as an opportunity to create a much more stringent  storm water ordinance so if if we didn't have the storm water ordinance people would still have to get storm water permits from the state but the state only require storm water permits at this point for projects that disturb  or create an acre of impervious there's a ton of projects we all know in burlington that are well below an acre you know and so we needed to create a program that we were going to capture more of the projects and leverage them how do we do that not only do you manage them to refer to or require them to manage one hundred percent of the runoff from their new impervious the biggest advance was that we started requiring them to manage some of their existing runoff so i don't care if you have a parking lot and you're doing a building in the old days you would not to do anything because you weren't making anymore storm water runoff we're actually asking you to make it better by through models you can show you can show what the runoff would be if half of that parking lot was grass and come up with what your sort of release rate is so with every one of these redevelopment projects we're actually filling the hole in that we've dug for ourselves large projects in addition to meeting those water if they're adding if they're increasing their overall sewage flow substantially we require them to take off even more storm water in most cases they've already taken off all of their storm water from their project and so we say  we've got these two catch basins on north avenue that are still connected to the combined sewer system you're going to need to pay to help us infiltrate that water so that you're making things even more even more better making things better  our storm water system so examples of that would be cambrian rise city place burlington those are projects that yes are adding to the overall dry weather sewage but they've made substantial gains as far as the storm he still sticking with me still interesting enough we've been able to do a lot about one point six million dollars worth of what weather mitigation projects first in two thousand ten the project almost killed me but two years of american reinvestment and recovery act money we were able to take off i think about three and a half acres of impervious surface in the old north and and what we do is only a problem when it doesn't get to do what it wants to naturally which is fall and then run off and soak into the ground right it's a problem because we've covered the sponge with all of our impervious surfaces so any time we can implicate that water so in this example there's storm drains and instead of the storm drains collecting the water and going to a pipe which then rushes to either the plant or somewhere else the water is actually allowed to infiltrate in now we're very careful about where these infiltration practices go there's a lot of contaminated soils in burlington we're aware of that we do we scrutinize these locations to make sure that we're not going to be causing an unintended consequence we look for soils that are highly absorptive we're not going to put one of these likely in the south end where everybody knows there's clay soil and high ground water things like this are really great for places like the old north and where there are sixty five feet of sand and you can really soak up a lot of water so because of that work this is just a frequency sort of count of c s those you can see in particular park in north champlain really used to go off quite a bit and since we did that projects we are seeing those frequencies  one cool thing and kind of harkens back to what the mayor was saying in addition to the model that we've had we've recently been able to install specific flow meters at these before we were estimating the flow based on some characteristics of the pipe and now we're actually able to tell you exactly how much came out of that pipe that's really important for us figuring out what solutions right if we're just doing estimates we don't know exactly what size things to build upstream but if the tighter numbers we have the more optimized and hopefully the more cost savings that we're able to  implement for for you guys the rate payers are you ready for my super wonky who here likes numbers and graphs ok i'll keep some of you have so this is my graph that kind of captures the current picture of our water quality world even with the really terrible illness of the summer and as the mayor said it's probably been the most professionally disappointing six months of my water resources career thus far but what is showing is if you think over here this is the graph of what what we know was going into the burlington bay one hundred seventy million we it's likely more which is why  has the arrow and when we start to look at how much combined sewer flow we've treated this blue bar two hundred eleven million gallons of combined sewer that has gone through the entire wastewater treatment plant so rich greening primary biological systems secondaries and the disinfection area like it's getting the same treatment that you're sewage is getting which is a lot cleaner than any of the separate storm water outfalls about one hundred five has gone through that vortex system not as great a treatment but we can ensure that at least the bacteria issue has been addressed when it goes through there these this red bar here is what went wrong this summer and which we had planned infrastructure and process issues which did cause overall the release of about twelve point three million gallons of in most cases partially treated but not fully disinfected so the bacteria levels leaving the plant were unacceptably high this other little number and i have a chart to break it out so i guess this isn't my only geeky slide this is what the c s o those combined sewer overflows in the system discharge this is not abnormal for what we've seen in the past so yes big problem yes problem but not because something was going wrong we knew about this and we're trying so what we've been doing with the last few years as the mayor said we have been working really hard to develop better plans two thousand and seventeen we did it in your capital plan for all of our wastewater systems our pump stations and our three  plants the period two thousand and fourteen to two thousand and seventeen even until today where people were out looking in and out fall we did a story meant we did the first phase of our sewer pipe assessment we're actually putting cameras into pipes looking at what the pipes look like and using that information to make better decisions we've shifted our thinking from it's about to break let's fix it to a risk capital planning where we look at not just the likelihood of failure but the consequence of failure certain things can break and it's ok certain things can't break and if they do bad things happen like happened this year and then all behind the scenes in this sort of as a foreshadowing of the future we've been working on integrated planning which is all of these new regulations that are coming down the pike the lake champlain cleanup stricter combined sewer overflow regulations stricter storm water regulations we have to figure out how to deal with those in the long term not ready with all the answers for that it's work that's ongoing and will continue to happen while we're implementing this plan when you look at the results of our capital planning you know it is a little stark there's been no comprehensive upgrades made to the wastewater plant since that  so they are approaching or well past in some cases their useful life and these are just some examples you know a bromine pump which is twenty four years old that's really critical to making sure we disinfect the combined sewer flows corroded metal components literally band aids corrosion of metal that so bad there's not a lot of stuff left to even if we got the welder al these are things that have to be addressed because they're really they're part of making sure we produce the high quality water that we do every day there are about eleven critical pump stations we have about twenty five total stations in the city these are our pumps that are in low lying areas so if you live in crescent beach or  if you go to north beach those areas are lower than where the plant is and so you have to pump the water back up to the gravity system to get it to go to the plant so they're pretty critical if they fail you can have discharges to the water a lot of them don't meet the storage requirements we'd like to have more storage on site so when a pump failed we have a little bit more time before the guy in the pump truck comes and has to literally stuck it out and take it to the plant there's about thirteen miles of what we would consider high risk collection type systems these are just some examples of sewer pipes with cracks probably about the separate a corrugated metal storm pipe with a hole in it this is what causes sinkholes of folks remember the d p w truck tipping up in the air caused by that where the hole forms and then as the storm event happens it erodes the soil it's above the pipe your pavement ends up looking like it's fine but something heavy drives over and can fall through and this is an example of a storm water outfall because of the erosion has actually separated and once this happens it's a very bad cascade process now every time when it rains this whole of this ravine gets worse and worse and worse which causes more part of the pipe to break off it's not a good situation not going to dive into this a ton but to let you know the organic loading issue that we had contributed to the june second june fourth discharge we had been tracking the increasing trend of what they call biological actions demand this is the the amount of organic that are in what somebody puts down the drain so a typical residential system puts in a certain amount other industries not because they're doing anything wrong but because they're handling food products so whether whether it's breweries or site or ease or bakeries or chocolate factories or anything that puts more down the drain than a typical residential area is going to have higher loading we so we knew this was happening and we had started to address it by developing internally  a improved framework it didn't we didn't improve we did not develop in time we had communicated to the council and to the mayor that these challenges were coming we knew in f y twenty twenty so that's next year that we were going to need to act but this summer happened and we discharged almost in total thirteen million gallons a large portion of that was that one a vent or two event two days of want to vent in which we were having trouble with our biological process due to the high strength the waste the infrastructure failures that happened approximately as the mayor was saying approximately seventy five percent of that total volume was was storm water so we have to report the total volume but in certain instances it is in fact largely storm water doesn't mean it doesn't have bacteria and that we shouldn't close the beaches and then this little slice up here the nine events that we've had which is about ninety percent storm water is there are those collection system in each case we've taken quick action but those quick actions and short term actions aren't enough in order to really fix them and make sure we're not going to be going backwards we have to do more which brings us to our clean water seven points of investments not going to go through all of them just going to give you some of the highlights you have the handouts or you don't have a handout they should be up at the the swag table where we also have dog poop bags and stickers and all sorts of things that we would love for you to pick up and take home this graph shows the approximate distribution of where the money is going the large majority of it are the wastewater treatment plants in the pump stations with another significant chunk on the collection system and the highlights the large pool the majority of this money is going to that stabilizing and modernizing our existing infrastructure so nothing new yet we just got to keep the roof on the house our initial focus is going to be those disinfection systems that failed the ones that caused the yellow slice we're going to be upgrading our computerized controls that was one of the things that fails and we're going to be upgrading him to make sure that they're smarter more redundant more alarms more backups automatic backup so that even if somebody is not standing right there switch over automatically we're going to be upgrading the mechanicals for those systems so one of the issues we had this summer was that a valve had failed at the disinfection system in the disinfection agent couldn't get to where it was supposed to go so that's going to be upgraded we're then also doing all of the other high risk critical infrastructure at all three plants main north and east we're going to be working on eleven of the most or the highest risk pump stations and upgrading the thirteen miles of sewer combined sewer and storm  collection systems as well as five of the worst eleven out falls as far as the improvement side how are we making things actually better not just preventing backsliding we're going to be continuing our mitigation work on that untreated collection system combined sewer overflows and the combined sewer flows to main plant so anything that we can do above is going to help that c s o but at any point anywhere in the city if we do a project at the combined sewer system it helps main plant provide even more treatment to more of the flows that that reaches because pine street is challenging and will likely continue to be a challenge because of the nature of the geology and the bedrock and all of the characteristics of the south and we're going to look into the feasibility and cost benefit of actually building a satellite disinfection station so if streets going to keep going off for some likely extended time period is there something that we can do to knock down the bacteria even further if we determine that that is driving beach closures there's likely other sources of bacteria in the canal there's a ton of birds that hang out right in the canal and also right at the alpha all those bacteria so we're doing some additional studies to determine ok what are the biggest components because we could disinfect the c s o all we want and still end up with a bacteria problem right there we are going to be implementing a tiered industrial pollution prevention program not just for breweries we're going to be looking at all of those industries that handle organics and coming up with appropriate programs to make sure they're managing and diverting their waste instead of putting it down the drain in affecting our public system and then so that we do better in the future we're going to be trying to implement a more modernized asset management system using a computer based maintenance management system where all of the records and all of the information lives in one place instead of people's heads which unfortunately is the nature of the business so thirty going to be even less because of a number of different strategies that we're looking into the maximum impact on your water sewer storm water bill not your tax bill after five years would be five dollars and thirty six cents a month this is calculated for  a property that uses about six hundred cubic feet of water so if you want to know if yours is going to be five dollars or four dollars you could look on your water bill and see it tells you exactly how much water you use and that's going to be a driving factor this this impact is after we've already applied to key medications strategies which are saving you forty percent over what it could have been we are leveraging that clean vermont clean water state revolving fund which has about a two percent admin or interest to be compared to typical bond market rates which are now in the four percent range it's not without its challenges it has a lot more paperwork than just buying a private bond but we believe the cost savings are significant enough that we want to do this and we're also leveraging existing capital funding that we've we've been building our capital line over the years it's not enough to really get us to the thirty million but it has enabled us to have funds that we can kind of reapply to the debt service there are additional state grants we're going to be you know looking at looking in seeking and applying for all the grants that we can and one thing that we were already interested  in the council actually put in the bond resolution as a requirement of us having this bond vote would be to look at alternative rate structures and affordability programs to make sure we're doing everything we can to keep our water as affordable as possible that might be discount programs it might be figuring out plumbing conservation programs if we can help people use less water by having low flow toilets fixtures that helps your water bill we're even looking into whether or not there may be funding to help people pay for or provide loan money so that you can improve your private sewer a lot of whole lot of folks don't know that the pipe between the street and your house that carries your sewage is entirely on the property owner and so when that breaks it can be thousands and thousands of dollars and we want to figure out a way that we can hopefully bring that cost down through helping folks understand more about their pipe maybe aggregating contractors things like that when this bond in the work is implemented you know the benefits minimizing permit violations i can't say that we will never ever ever have a permit violation ever but we're working to minimize it so that what happened this summer is something that only happens once in a blue moon we're going to be upgrading those disinfection systems that all three plants major rehabilitation of all other critical so high likelihood of failure high consequence of failure clean water systems and we're going to be implementing more green infrastructure and storm water runoff reductions in both the combined sewer system in the separate system to be transparent and i had foreshadowed this you know beyond tw two we still have work to do we have to figure out how we're going to actually reduce even further our phosphorous inputs from our plants from our storm water systems from our our our roadways so we are  actively looking at phosphorous upgrades at the wastewater treatment plants you know full build out of combined sewer projects how do we get it so those don't go off except once in a blue moon looking at other separate storm water runoff management strategies streets in street sweeping leave collection programs downspout disconnection programs and then you know we're continuing our capital planning and we're probably going to have additional investments that are needed for the next round of critical infrastructure i want to stress the drinking water is not included in this bomb proposal you did vote for that in two thousand and sixteen and we've been actively replacing pipes there are more pipes that need to be replace theirs are high tanks the tank that that you b m and at redstone need investments and we also need to make sure that our water plant which is running really well and we've been investing in incrementally we need to make sure that the that remain stable lastly just a couple of answers to some common questions there has been clear progress in reducing our footprint on the lake over time this summer is a terrible terrible blemish but we can get back on track we still have a over a million gallons of sewage processing capacity or plants so the issue is not the connecting of of toilets and sinks the issue is storm water and to the extent that with all of these developments which i know people are concerned about from the sewage processing standpoint can help us reduce our stormwater we leverage private dollars to help us with our stormwater problem we're really making things better the collection system c s those are caused by intense rainstorms not by a mistake not by a valve not o's they're not a key driver of cyanide bacteria the algae blooms those are driven by phosphorous the major issues with our releases this year were our bacteria issues the wastewater treatment plant does release some phosphorus but we  implants as a whole all in vermont only represent only represent three percent of the total phosphorus load phosphorus is every sector every person problem it's a urban system with storm water runoff it's it's farms it's anything that discharges phosphorous and those are largely driven by large rain rain storms throughout the watershed and with that we wanted to draw attention to it's under construction it gets better every day or every five minutes with our incredible public information manager robert golding also wanted to announce we've been talking about this for a while for the next two months every third thursday of the month we're going to have open house tours  wastewater the best way for you to understand the system and see what we're up against is to come visit us will probably take a break in the winter time and then pick it back up in the spring but it's something we want to continue in the long term thank you for listening you meghan for that great presentation we will also be for folks who may know have been able to come tonight you can tell them that we will be taking a tour of all the n p a this coming month as well so the neighborhood planning assemblies are other i my name is fifty kaplan i am a new citizen of burlington very happy but also first of all i want to say i commend you for the excel aeration of this bond this is so important as you can well imagine i was flabbergasted what happened this past summer but what i'd like to speak with you about is something you touched upon but did not really utilize it as a major component of how to deal with storm water first of all burlington is a growing metropolis and it's been so for a long time in the last ten years i've been living out of vermont around the world and believe it or not i've lived in tropical places where they are running out of water climate change  part of it but it really has to do with the concretize ation of the world and aquifers not being allowed to be recharged so i did see that there is a new regulation that you were saying for projects for example you used of a parking lot perhaps not being all used with mcadam and doing that way but you also showed a picture of taking up surfaces that were impervious and one of the places i suggest that we be innovative in a very low tech way now i'm not an expert on this but as i said i've traveled the world in japan which is a cold gets very cold in frost in the winter so many of their surfaces are some kind of up cycled rubber tire or something so the water goes through it but it's i mean you could walk for miles and miles and not feel it on your feet and the water is again recharging so i am asking you that when you think of these regulations for these new developers that they start looking at innovation but you know of course they're going to scream about the cost the cost the cost because cement to face it it's cheap and it's available but there are so many other ways and we are in the state of vermont which prides itself on innovation for the environment and these are the kind of mitigating factors that we really need to start utilizing or else this city is going to begin to have a lot more big city problems as we increase in population which means more development let's do smarter development one hundred percent i agree with everything that you said and one of the reasons and i didn't talk a lot about it is our strategy for dealing with storm water our primary strategy the one we look at before we look at anything else and the one that myself and gen a gen olson who's the stormwater program manager only meet with development our place that we start from is green stormwater infrastructure which he does does similar to the sustainable urban development some of the other things in europe it's the same idea that we don't need to put in tanks and ponds and what we call grey infrastructure if we can leverage mother nature and do what she's been doing all along so some examples and you can't see perfectly here but a lot of what we're trying to do in those projects that there that on the the new park the redo of the retrofit of the park right here yep so more and more and more we hope that you're seeing examples of that south and city market anybody been there it's awesome you don't die  parking that's why i go there the median in the middle of the city hall south and that's a buyer attention so that water is running from the impervious surface and it instead of medians that are perched and do nothing other than just sit there it's actually a functioning area with perennials planted all of those things that we can never recreate that mother nature does so i am one hundred percent on board and should have reemphasize or emphasize more that  major strategy is green infrastructure not just because it works better for store monitor but because of all of the other cool benefits if i'm going to take your dollar would be great if you wanted to give me all the dollars just to managed our monitor but i need to be managing other things i need to be doing traffic calming increasing greenery you know decreasing the urban heat island adding tree canopy we're totally on board with what you're talking about well that's great but i will say i did look very very closely at the plans for the park and talk about city hall park city hall park and there is an increase in hard skate there is there is a lessening with the taking out of the trees there will be less trees and those two things are in direct opposition to what you just lead on balance because both myself and jenna have scrutinized that plan on balance the amount of storm water treatment that is being provided is going to be much greater the erosion so if you go into the park right now all of the compacted areas after any there's there's dirt deltas that every sidewalk so that plant is not going to only be handling the increase in pervy impervious surface there is some increase in pervious surface one of the ring gardens the central ring garden is a buyer attention area just as we talked using and i do now and it's actually going to be taking water from st paul water that currently just keeps going so i just want to say to you that again i think we do share a lot of the same concerns and we are heavily involved in that project and we are making sure that we are doing so much better from a storm water perspective even if there may in the park be less trees on balance the entire downtown with some of the strategies that we're doing i believe there's going to be not just more trees but healthier trees we can plant all the trees we want but if they're not healthy and their tree canopy is are not substantial and they don't have supportive soil environments they're not going to do as much for stormwater as they could with where we're going with or how we manage urban trees well i will just say that the storm the soil around the world is dead because of the policies a thing about bond because the last question that we do if you're on the jury why is there no part of the pie for what we were just talking about for either mitigation for ripping up  old places that have the macadam and the cement removing it and allowing there for it to be more a water penetration into the aquifer so the green slice of the pie the make sure that we're able to do exactly the practices that you're talking so removing so exhausting i don't know if we're going to do there's there's a couple of roads that if i ever get my hands on them i will do a road diet but the major strategy there is if you have a roadway that currently just has dorm drains to implement things like bump outs so removing the impervious and allowing the star modern access mother nature ok thank you very much for your work  since two thousand and nine you're making went through some of the regulations that we have unique to burlington no requirements on developers we in the recent zoning work happening over the last couple years of sure double down on that strategy and for developments in the downtown essentially the new sizable new projects in the downtown need to function have the stormwater characteristics as if they were meadows as if they were green fields and in some cases that's exactly what the developers are planning to build in response to the regulation if you look at the plants abroad to see place burlington there's a lot of green roof as part of that plan which is you know explicitly using kind of these plantings to provide that storm water function where that can't be done there they find ways to do that other ways with these big tanks and with with greater retention so you know it really is it is a frustration that so often there's this misconception about what's driving our problem megan head on it several times in the last slide but our main problem is storm water and  the solution one of the solutions for our storm water problem is new new development it is it is one of things that helps us move in the right direction and we're trying to maximize that opportunity thank you f terrace my wife and i have toured the sewage treatment plant the manager pointed out two problems with the the rotating tanks that area at the water one problem is that the smell is unbelievable unless the wind is blowing directly from the east which doesn't happen very often i can attest to that because i had at one time a moring on perkins pier and every time we went to our boat it was it was noticeably very bad smell the other problem with those tanks the a robotic tanks down there is that vandals go along the bike path and throw stuff over the fence into the into the rotating tanks which then blocks the  rotation which means the tanks have to be drained and the jam cleaned out and then the tanks refilled so it's a down time for those for the aerobics system the city of rockland maine which i'm very familiar with has a plant sewage treatment plant the same box proxima the same size as ours it's one block off the main street there's absolutely no smell and that's because it's an anaerobic tank in other words has a roof on it and does isn't open to the air so my question basically is does your bond plan include plans to convert our plant from an aerobics system to an anaerobic system it does not it does not currently  i actually had a conversation with somebody today they can raise their hand about about the feasibility or at least running the analysis on covering our primaries i believe that's what you're referring to for the order mitigation and also to protect against some vandalism it's not something that is in this this plan but if there's money for it and it's cost effective i do think there would be benefits because it's on the waterfront because it's close to the marina and i certainly would love to have one less problem of managing a challenge which is that we swatter is made of people's sewage so it's something that we are looking into but it's not explicitly in this plan so i would suggest that you look into putting it on the plan because it's very critical you have have you been down to vermont tech to see their anaerobic system i have not october eighth two thousand and thirteen i wrote tomorrow with this invitation from vermont tech to come down and see their system as it was being constructed it is a digester wastewater treatment plant anaerobic treatment system digester yes ok so they died a digester is a component of wastewater treatment that is something that we are looking at to manage or bio solids to my knowledge and i don't know if one of my people in the gray shirts wants to chime in i'm not sure that we could replace our primaries with an anaerobic digester it's not doesn't quite quite work that way i believe they have a digester for other reasons but i would love if you can leave that with me to make sure that i'm speaking from an informed place we i push our folks and they will attest to this to attend every weapon are in every conference and workshop  so i would love to get an eye on that we can always contact them and make sure that we're not missing something i'm sure it's running up to full capacity now because this was five years ago ok thank you thank you very think you very much thank  you i live in the south and thanks the presentation is great at all the good work and foresight about what we need to invest in the city so i'm really just in for a little bit of context so  i think the bond makes a lot of sense and i think one thing it's important for residents in the city to understand is if we don't pass the bond there are lots of needs that you identified that we're going to pay for one way or another and so i'm curious if you've done any modeling about the impact on reid's going forward if we don't pass the bond and we only do we have to do and i'm assuming that's not a zero number so when we say it's going to cost us five dollars and thirty six cents more per month if we pass the bond what's it going to cost us more per month if we don't passable we have not modeled it explicitly i would love to be able be able to do that but we haven't done it for this i can tell you without a doubt when we have emergencies our costs skyrocket one of the reasons one of the factors when we were evaluating our sewer system was depth of sewer system because when we have a sewer system that's eighteen feet below grade and it breaks and it creates a giant sinkhole the economic loss the traffic issues the cost to even get to that is huge so if we can get to these pipes before they collapse by realigning them in advance it saves us tens of thousands of dollars on an annual basis i think the bigger issue is if we keep having these discharge is the lake is a huge driver of our tourism economy people will stop coming to vermont they'll stop wanting to recreate here and that's not ok and that overall may not be on your water sewer bill but it's vermont and burlington is going to feel it if mayor wants to chime in any i think that captures a well i mean if there is the you know yes when there's the i guess you hit on the roads being undermined and just the difference in cost we're seeing it in some of the water work we're doing now when we're doing realigning as opposed to digging up pipes and trenching we're able to get for the same dollar substantially more mileage on the water side same thing is true here for reminding these proactively we're go great as we continue to develop our fact sheets even if we can't give you an exact number to give people examples that's a really good point examples of what things cost you know the cost of opening a sewer especially on an emergency basis versus realigning it's a stark difference you know just so one really quick follow up can you give me a sense for the order of magnitude of the potential fines that we would be liable for from the state or are there fines at the federal level as well  don't we did have a fine at some point i don't know what the magnitude is when it first comes then seventy million seventy thousand you know there has been a lot of chatter sometimes on social media about us being fined the challenge is is we don't make profits so that money does have to come from from the rate payers so the state has has been investigating the issues this year we have not heard back as to whether or not we're going to be receiving find they i hope that we don't and or if we do that the evidence of all of the good work that we're doing and heading in the right direction will somehow play into that but that's out of my  to be updated and if there's thought about as new people new more people move to burlington in the population grows if an increase in sewage would affect this project going forward  you so currently the investments are planned over probably a four to five year time period will we are working right now on that logistical plan of when we actually think what will happen  the issue of i think you said your second point was will there be more needed in the answer is yes we don't know exactly when that next round of investments will come the integrated planning effort that's combining our wastewater challenges with our storm water challenges that plan is due to be completed early twenty twenty part of the plan is is looking at the full build out and do we have enough dry dry weather capacity and if we don't what do we need to do about it so that is being considered i think with improvements in water conservation it's interesting because even as we add more people as more people have water conservation efficient appliances sometimes that increase in flow isn't as great as it would be and that's one of the reasons why we're interested in it hurts us on the drinking water side we'll have to figure out how to make up that money but the overall benefits of maybe reducing the overall flows to the wastewater plant and making sure that we retain capacity for it capital planning is a constant ongoing process so even the minute we do a capital plan we're continuing to revisit it with the new information that we get on any given week or day so yes it will be updated to make sure it's relevant to what the conditions are at any point and then also i think folks should be aware that there probably is something coming in the twenty twenty one twenty twenty two at least a conversation about what additional investments we need to make plants excess capacity that's total capacity that is total remaining an allocated capacity so our plant runs three million gallons three and a half million gallons a day the plant is rated for five point three million clear yes sorry we we also as projects come in we write capacity letter so if somebody has said they need a certain amount of capacity that's sort of on our books so when we talk about the million gallons i believe steve it's one million i did capacity at riverside riverside is only running at about fifty percent capacity so there's ample capacity there and then north plant i think is also fifty percent ish capacity yeah so those parts are less constrained that's comforting to know and flush is the one just i worry about that too so i mean i have been here twenty five years but i used to live in a  college town that had a stadium that held one hundred five thousand people and they had the size the whole plan for the half time flush yes like you know the amount that you would need on the half time flush is totally i don't question i know it's talked about a lot in the electricity utility world but i'm just wondering is there are there certain when it's not raining there are certain times of day when the load on the planet is more and and are there scenarios where like high volume discharges could be encouraged to discharge in the middle of the night when the rest of us are not flushing now or that that is exactly one of the things that we would be looking at and are looking at as part of our industrial program not just when you send us the stuff but can you send it to us in a more consistent stream at a better time so part of the problem is it just all comes to us at once and slug loads right that's a lot for the bugs to handle the bugs kind of get the biological system gets used to a certain level of nutrients and then all of a sudden people are throwing pizzas at their face and they can't keep up and that's sort of what happens when we get the slug load so totally part of where we want to go with the program and where what we're talking about right now even before we have an official program we've been collaborating a lot with the berries in the cider ease they know we have a problem they're invested in the lake and so even before we have the piece of had been helpful partners in this effort and the city from the city's perspective we do think there's an issue here that is first of all bigger than them that deals with other types of industrial users that are strength waste we want to maintain that partnership we want burlington to be a place where these kind of businesses can thrive we think it's been part of the success or a broad to recent years and we're looking for collaborative solutions that address this issue but storm water waste water and water we have been on the upward trajectory it's just not enough we need to basically turn those capital dollars into debt service dollars because we can buy and pay for a whole bunch more if we spread it out over time more over these are investments that should last twenty and in some case thirty years and so we don't want the current rate payer to be bearing the full brunt of the cost for something that somebody ten years twenty years from down the line of predictive models like ok when you know there's a major storm event coming there are things that the city does to prepare or that we as residents who contribute to the flow that we can do you know like predictive modeling where you can we don't currently have predictive modeling we will be able to once we have a more fully calibrated age in each model hydraulic and hydraulic model so we know what size or type of storm is going to produce a c s o the problem is the from my standpoint the weather data is still very it's not refined enough a lot of our issues it's not the you're going to get a two inch rain storm we can handle that it's the cloudburst where a thunderstorm pops up and dumps on us and we don't even have any warning that being said we do have on call staffing and we have always had on call staffing and staff are c there's a lot when certain things are happening the plan to let them know a storm of it is happening to get there because of the events this summer we have increased sort of their responsiveness so when they know that there is under storms coming people will respond earlier we are also looking into whether or not we can get better predictions of rain events or even you know not waiting until the flow hits the plant you know having our rain gauge tipping back at the minute it starts raining at plant at the plant having somebody get online and look at the storms and then determine whether need to come in but some day i would love to have like philly the c s o cast where you actually of a map that lights up lastly we actually have alarms at those c so we don't we don't have to we have to send somebody out we get text messages e mails the minute assia so goes off i know matt knows and then we go into response mode one other quick thing and some of the by products are there that does come to the waste treatment plant which is why we're a big proponent of take back program and people not flushing them down the toilet in particular you can't really change the fact that if you're ingesting them i don't have the study off the top of my head but if you see i think steve roy may be able to get you something u s g s did do a study where they looked in the effluent so it it's a what they call emerging contaminants of concern that we're keeping our eye on it's not something the wastewater treatment plant can easily handle it's almost more of a cultural like issue before we take one more question councillor hard to do you want to say something on th point ok ok at the end i'll definitely talk about we'll be happy to do that and try to take a few more questions and at seven thirty we told you we did and then and then were available for any call stay until eleven o'clock if you guys want to come and i live in north and i just three really quick questions to you v m and champlain college have to also follow the same regulations as far as building and pervious ground cover they do they have to go through the zoning office and we review storm water management plans when they do anything they have to talk to us even to the point of if they're doing a drainage efficiency project so there was like a basement project that they were going to be capturing the water that was currently going in their basement and tying into our combined sewer system they weren't even building any impervious and we had them put in a storage tank because we didn't want to accept any additional flow thanks also the concern about the barge canal and not the bacteria but the e contaminants the toxic contaminants is that an issue that's going to be addressed by this as well that's a little bit outside the purview of local entities it's more of a well i mean we can speak i mean  partners to make sure that the cap is continuing to hold back and your first question to discover not only are the yemen is the hospital and all of simply college all institutions and non profits not only are they subject the same regulations they also pay their full kind of fair share of the costs unlike on the kind of property tax size where we have many entities in town that don't pay for property taxes or in some piece any property taxes everyone who consume to use water pays for that water usage and that's part of the reason why you know it really matters whether some this this pond is being paid for by your water bill the water costs are spread out over all the water users as opposed to some of the other bonding with the high school on for example that or for the sidewalks and streets those are paid for that bonding is paid for just from property taxes and lastly this is this is a pun intended i don't know if it's just a drop in the bucket but would having rain buckets at all properties doing anything to help this at all is that seems like a fairly simple yes absolutely we  have and if you want to see jenna in the light gray shirt we actually have a residential stormwater grant program you know an individual house if that was the only thing that came to the plant isn't huge but you take ten twenty a block of houses and if they all captured and kept just a little bit of their water on the property and used it later for watering your gardens or for something else that would absolutely help anything anything that anybody does to keep the water on their own property and not let it get into the street is absolutely helping and we have programs to help incentivize that so yes thank you and also a really excellent presentation a good luck getting this passed at the same time as the high school that is a and very much appreciate the presentation and the efforts put forward here i just wanted to encourage you to use all the avenues you have before you when you're going out for the spawn and also when you're billing folks to use that to promote some of the really good educational materials that you have on your website i think every time you send a water bill out you want to be communicating those tips you have to encourage everybody to  have you know minimize their impact on water quality and you know one of the things that we often ignore particularly in the northeast where we see water is so abundant is water conservation that water conservation here is going to reduce people's you know rate it's also a really good thing to do to reduce the stress on the sewage treatment facility and it's something that everybody can get involved in and i know you have a lot of information on your website but i think you want to be doing an ongoing commercial with every water bill you send out we'd be happy to work with you on that to just change your chips around and not everybody goes on the website so it would be really great for you to be promoting those things with every water bill helping incentiv also showing people here's a great example where you can see you know city market south and explain that and to the extent that you're putting public dollars in there do take put an extra step in there with making sure you do some interpretive signage so you have those ongoing commercials saying this is how it's working for you this is why it makes a difference and i think that'll go a long way and again thank you and we look forward to rates if you look at your storm water bill and if you live in a single family duplex or triplex property it likely says in the storm water section flat fee because that is the basis of your storm water charge we don't measure everybody's individual house we come up with an average and then everybody gets charged the same if you're single family duplex or triplex anything more than three units we are actually using aerial photography measuring the amount of impervious and charging you exactly based on that however it seems it could cause some confusion as the individual thought that we was being charged for her waste water and her water as a flat rate and so she had concerns about the five dollars thinking that she was being unfairly burdened which i understand but that five dollars again is if you use six hundred cubic feet if you use four hundred cubic feet it's a smaller number your overall percent increase assuming you don't change your water usage is going to be the same as your neighbor but the dollar figure would be a little bit different and does that answer you think the question and also if you ever have questions about the lovely sewer water storm water bill that you get please call our customer service eight six three four five four five zero one and they are more than happy to explain various parts of your bill to you to make sure you understand exactly what you're being charged for thank you all for coming so i want to thank the city councillors who have been engaged in this process you see councillor paul councillor hartnett councillor bush are here tonight thank you very much there's the n p a tours coming up the website is a resource our wastewater treatment plant there thursday of the month and staff will he be here after the town hall event tonight thank you all very much for coming