well the water resources committee meeting please come to order today is wednesday feb seventeenth twenty sixth and it's just a couple minutes after nine in the morning before we get started i'd like to everyone to please put their cell phones on the side mode and i'll do that too so we will not be interrupted i am glad this place of the chair of the water resources committee and my members that are here today this morning i agenda here today and a first it'll be great for sitar and then the department is going to give us a presentation on its leak detection program and am really excited to hear this presentation all of us remember when we were in budget that there was a request for funding for this leak of the texan unit and you'll get a report on what they're doing and how they're doing so it'll be really really interesting i'm going to be in the morning this morning by taking public testimony members with no objections no objections thank you testimony will be limited to the item on our agenda today and if you wish to testify peace sign up at the desk and be a floor lobby or one of the district offices testimony will be limited to three minutes two and a half minutes to like will turn yellow and it three the like will bring grid if you're still talking when it read like  you have anyone wishing to testify good morning mysteries good morning and he chaired by sir and council members and thank you for this opportunity to request your support for the passage out of committee of this amendment to the maui county code my name is cindy reeves and i am the m our research stations rather they serve the county and its farmers by conducting parietal trials at different growing elevations in environmental conditions conducting research on remediation of past edible crops growing germpla for the developing export market conducting beginning farmer programs on mola ca and ny and offering field days to farmers to learn the results of this research and gain skills and techniques that they may apply to their own crops i ask for passage of this change in the maui county code to see time may retain its ag water rates in support of all of these efforts being conducted in support of maui county's agricultural industry thank you so much for your support thank you very much mr reeves members an for water use that you achieved our experiment stations sitar experiment station serves as a critical connection between worship research and farms to radical concepts developed by researchers turned to practical production practices by extension agent so farmers and ranchers can improve their productivity and viability new crops and varieties irrigation practices and pest control some of the impact in functions like experiment stations for example the recent crops growing areas testing for control measures are done at the park the experiment stations are critical to development of mali's agriculture their use of agricultural lands for this purpose is recognised in state law thank you there does not appear to be anyone else waiting to testify to thank you very much is there anyone else in the chamber who would like to testify so you know when approaching podium here we have no one in the district offices wanting to testify and no one in the chamber who has not testified members without objection i'd like to close public testimony here thank you very much so ordered members committee is in receipt of county communication fifteen dash two ninety seven from myself transmitting a proposed bill entitle a bill for an ordinance to authorize agricultural water rates for properties upgraded or managed by the university of a college of tropical agriculture and human resources the purpose of the proposed bill is to authorize agricultural water rates for properties managed by university of  chair department supports this bill and let me say that this is a see tar is basically caught in some sort of some house keeping within the ordinances the general provisions in chapter fourteen point zero one define an agricultural consumer as someone who has a minimum gross income of one thousand dollars so that's basically who qualifies for aggregates have to make a thousand dollars under fourteen point ten point zero one five waivers it allows a charitable organization who donates a thousand dollars to also qualify those are essentially the rules that we were stuck with in the department as the chart doesn't fit either of those categories we certainly recognize that the work they're doing is doing research for agriculture in an educational way but it doesn't fit the ordinance so if the ordinance is changes proposed they would be exempt we would have no problem with that but under the current ordinance we don't really feel that we have the authority to grant them a waiver because the the reasons for waiver are also pretty clear just from a number standpoint they use about one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand gallons of a wall of water every month their annual rates if they get aggregates are about four thousand dollars and if they don't get aggregates are about twelve thousand dollars so it's about an eight thousand dollars difference to taylor you said this happened because of a housekeeping thing you went through maybe housekeeping isn't the right word the ordinance was written with this idea that a thousand dollars of revenue or a thousand dollars of donation is the trigger to be called an agricultural consumer the ordinance doesn't say anything about providing education in the fields of agriculture etc etc and it doesn't give any leeway to the director to use discretion so from that aspect it's sort of housekeeping from a sense that it's my belief that if this had come up when this bill was written somebody would have probably written you know experimentation or educational activities relating to agriculture if there was no money he would probably have been written in and when was this bill written i was here so it can't be that go ok or maybe it is a long time ago when you consider i mean like to hear it's i would say in the last three or four years ok that's it was a very heavy discussion about what that threshold would be you know and a thousand dollars was a kind of a compromise because we had to use something and so we used what the farm people throughout the country use it's a national standard because we tried everything we started with seventy five thousand new we went to fifty thousand and we were five thousand and there was discussion so much discussion we finally decided to take the national standard which was a thousand but nobody talked about exempting this kind of activity at the time that it happened and i think that's how it was overlooked and so i think this is more like directors saying housekeeping i think it was just an oversight at that time because we were so and broiled in how much we didn't think about you the dollar value not on non dollar value activities that people wanted to encapsulate so i think it was probably just an oversight that no one thought about an educational activity as being needing to be wrapped up an assortment and last question mr madam chair so with this the way this ordinance is written then subsistence farmers do not yet agreed that correct under the current ordinance unless they were sure no they would not they would not qualify under this ordinance for a great snow they would not ok perspective in the sense about on the national level or in other municipalities whatever it within even our own state i guess how did he address experimental research type facilities on ag lands and are they getting ag reach or not i know that university and farm here or are speaking towards the state law which for them qualifies them to receive aggregates on such land so i think that line of questioning deserves an answer or some kind of comment it's possible that we have some folks in the audience who lived able to help  that's a very good place identify yourself sorry this is city reeves i'm the maui county administrator for you know a c tar i don't know the answer for the national level i do know that when i was in corporate extension of the university of maryland our farm facilities did get aggregates there i don't know whether it was a function of state law or county ordinance at that time but i know that in maryland we had a number of farm facilities across the state i'm not sure if somebody else can speak to the national picture but what about state within the state and other counties do you know the answer to that i i don't know the answer to that because i i know that we're the only ones that had ag rates that were rescinded and i don't know at the other counties if they've been in a similar situation as far as i know they're receiving aggregates but again i'm not sure if that's specific to their counties or visit as is related back to the state law in maui we were fine you know we had towards your microphone miss miss arias if you can wait mr taylor would it come in nationally i would just say that everyone i've talked to across the nation we're sort of on the leading edge of potable water systems for agricultural yet in fact the upcountry system where we're roughly half of the water goes out for agricultural rates i've been unable to find any other utility manager who has anything close to that you know usually agricultural use from potable water such a small amount that frankly your utility managers can't believe it when i tell them that roughly half of our total water on a system goes for agriculture so i don't know that we're going to really find answers somewhere else when we are in such a unique situation that probably explains to me why i don't remember us this thing is that really what we did discuss nationally was the idea of  watt to not be in your testimony talk about the use of agriculture last for this purpose is recognized in state law which are you talking to a five and were into a five yes i think that's the section that and so you know i think you know when you do when you talk about this kind of benefits and i think you know for our us as farmers and ranchers it is critical because you know when i was farming i'll use myself an example when i was farming and i would be interested in developing a growing a new crop i did the research on my farm and that research because it will take you at least a couple years because you have to understand what your market capacities what your cost of to recommend passage and i would support passage on this you know first of all they're using agricultural lands but on a site point i'd like to us the director why is it that we don't have are we able to utilize water we're using particle do we have i guess we don't have the potable water system as everyone knows is far flung it goes to a lot of places so essentially when people are wanting to farm the only water system available much of the time is the county potable water system if everyone farmed along irrigation ditches or long recycled water pipes or things like that there would be a different solution i think one of the difficulties the upcountry community has with farming is that in most of the country farming is a long irrigation ditches it's a long on public water transmission systems and in our up country region a lot of the farming is here and there and the only real way to serve it is with a pressurized system that can go to various elevations which is the possible system times he has to do with issues like what what kind of seeds to plant and what do they need what kind of fertilizer you need what kind of pest control you need and that's always available through a c ter they are really helpful in many many ways so i think a lot of our long term local families know about them and i'm sure that our new farmers that we have a whole lot of new families they're going to come tomorrow we are also aware of sitars capability and so i personally would like to support them but again this is this in both money it's a small amount of money but i think more than the money is the fact that you know real estate we want to support eggen this is a real concrete way to thank you and so chair i'm just trying to figure out if there's a way to write this so it's not just allowing one particular entity what if other people come along and want to do you know something and they're not really producing but they're on the research experimental educational grooming farmer level also but they're not called c tar they're not part of you age so i you know i think there's going to be a discriminant maybe that's the wrong words from a nation but you know i'd like to if we're going to do this then let's take it open for everyone across the board member cochran that's something we thought about and i hope in my saying we supported this if there were three or four even one other that we did that had been in the same situation we probably would have needed to change the language to try to catch them due to our knowledge these are the only ones that fit into this category it just seems more practical to put their name in rather than do define a category that it seems to storch we at this point no one else is going to be in that category so we're fine with this now and if it turns out others come in we would certainly be more than willing to try to come up with some language that encapsulated all of them but to our knowledge they're the only ones that it just seems again more more practical just to write them an exemption rather than to try to figure out a more general definition saying that they could be cutting out county services because of the flat budget and whatever that's going down so again they may not be even there are the only ones so i'm just saying because you've got subsists subsistence farmers that mr college mentioned they're not subsidized you know i mean i know people who are crude doing their own research experiments and stuff growing i'm doing that myself i don't get ag water rates in my mother's home you know in the line of people that work for me they create home lotions and products that they have you know home grow their their own ingredients and doing experiments and stuff so can they get ag water rates you know i know this is focusing on the cool ag park but i mean this concert presidents would open the door for others to  covered under the cool our park rules so no one has to be potable rates if they're using water to cool our park this is for their site that isn't in the cooler part so as far as your other issues if the council under another item wants to take up the general definition of agricultural consumer which does include this thousand dollars limit and wants to change that you have a department will be more than happy to be part of that discussion i would note that the board of water supply independently recommended some changes to the costs and they came up with their own bill and that has been transmitted to budget and financial camas committee for discussion so there are ongoing issues about what is an agricultural consumer obviously that's not on the agenda not what's on the agenda today but we will be more then willing to be part of that discussion if the council feels that something should cool ag park itself and that is subject to the agricultural water rates that cool ag park users pay then they have two others in kula at their site one i believe is for their foreign operations and the other is i think for their office operations that seems to be the numbers the big one is this hundred fifty thousand to two hundred thousand gallons a day usage in kula that is really what this is about it's really about that meter the other meter is such a small use it  doesn't even because the first couple tiers of general meters are the same as agricultural meters and it doesn't trigger the agricultural rates so it's really this one meter in kula that is using one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand gallons a day that is really what this is about which is not even in the cool ag part that's correct it's not in the cooler work the one in the cool their site in the cool ag part gets those right say ok i mean that even opens up the door sort of can get agricultural water rates this would just create an item so that c t r would be considered an agricultural consumer like like the other hungry cultural consumers who get our cultural rate they are doing agriculture for as an income no that's correct ok well i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm the way the ordinance is written agricultural consumer is by definition someone who does agricultural for a thousand dollars or a charitable donation of a thousand dollars that is the definition so what this does is create a special circumstances special circumstance for c t r that even without the thousand dollars of income or thousand dollars of charitable donation they will essentially be an agricultural consumer so they would be the only ones ok thank you thank you madam chair and i'm not sure maybe mr chair white would know the question but i believe we fund c tar to a certain extent i don't know how much it is compared to big time i think we really do appreciate the counties that again state your name before you talk just for the record straight sorry this isn't the reeves i'm the maui county administrator and we really do appreciate the support of the council this year the the amount that we were awarded by council was forty thousand dollars this coming year the council increased that to one hundred thousand dollars those phones are specific to programs so those funds go to support expanding the programs they don't go to support any of our operating budgets at all and so that's kind of the difference between then and here i am channeling mr holcombe again what is the state provide how much of your funding does the state provide ninety seven percent of our funding ninety seven so the hundred thousand dollars is three percent of your funding about that you know while yes so it's very small the state provides ninety seven percent and the majority of that about eighty six percent is tied up in salaries said you're the only entity that does something like this right now is that correct that's correct as far as i know ok that's all i have for her but i have some agree with miss cochran as far as maybe we should do this in all encompassing kind of language to somebody who wants to do a to i mean we have to figure out how to make it a research facility only because with the news about a scene as etc and there's going to be openings a lot more potential ag lands and somebody may want to start doing their research as a group as well i'm fine with passing this out right now but maybe we should come back and take a look at some sort of thing to include somebody else that might want to do this as not necessarily as a adjunct to their farming but as you heard mr watt now he said he used to do it himself and if see tar goes away i just don't like having to go through you know we were going to do a procedure right now and then eventually some other time we may do it for somebody else just trying to get it all at once but we can we can definitely look at that you know i suspect that this council is going to be embroiled in a lot of the legislation that involved with farming in agriculture in the months ahead as we go through dealing with the changing the way the news is looks fresh now and i think there will be a lot of activity we can handle it at that time if cochran brings up a good concern but i think at the same time the bill before us takes care of the one issue that's been brought to us and i think all of us would be comfortable that somebody else comes to us with  similar proposal similar concerns will be willing to make an exemption there but i think if we make the language too broad we're going to have a whole lot of people jumping on it saying this is what i do this is what i do this is what i do and  departments can be left in a position of having to sort through it all i just don't think that's necessarily the right thing to do at this point but as things begin to develop before us like they're doing now then we need need to be sure we do our due diligence as to how credible they are in providing the kind of service that farmers need especially look into new crops that's been talked about and resolutions that we've passed through we're going to need some sort of guidance with research and what have you saw i strongly advocate because personally  forward director a guest what is that showing in the organizations annual agricultural charitable donations or does that mean exactly so the organization the have donors to their organization of at least a thousand dollars will qualify them also i believe that refers to a charitable organization that gives a thousand dollars of food away so let's say i started a charity and i give food to needy people if that is a value of a thousand dollars that it's meant for someone like an organization like that now what they receive but they give away product of equal value to a thousand dollars ok what they produce and then give out deputy director to come down he sees every single one of these and he may be able to give some insight into is there anything else that even comes close to this because he sees every one of these applications and i thought it might help to hear from him his thoughts about whether or not this is likely to be a growing problem or whether or not this is sort of just a single item ok in my view thank you madam deputy ladies and gentlemen we've been i've been processing these applications every year for what five years now and this is the only organization of its type  authorization going back into time but when we look at the ordinance the only they didn't need the qualifications and that's the reason as director says that we feel that an exception should be made and they should be called out as  's an exception by name but this is the only one we know of it's the reason for this of course is that most agriculture's conducted air on maui with untreated surface water  at a cost of five cents to say fifty cents per thousand gallons and to use treated potable water that costs between four and six dollars per thousand and put that for the historical background on that but your i guess just overall just since you know it's possible a country without water is like more worth more than gold and using possible and church gave you know getting cheaper aggregates for not doing agnostic on land for me just as a set well for all and as i mentioned you know to name specifically an entity when there's others who and i know you aren't aware of any said there's changes happening in our agricultural world here and i can forsee things and there are people that are looking you know looking to run the horizons here so and i understand share that is something that we can always revisit and we can always revamp and rewrite as we go along but you know i sure would like to see that board of water supplies i don't know recommendations are suggestions mr chair that you were discussing that the had been talking about in the past and i would prefer if we could you know sort of stall this for a moment to see what that is and maybe incorporate it all into one nice pretty package  but that's just my recommendation and my thoughts chair just to put it on the table thank you very much mrs cochran and i think we all understand the point that you're trying to make but it's my feeling that i think most of the committee is somewhere else so i'm good if there is no further discussion i'd like to make my recommendation with the idea that this can be revisited and we will look at making this kind of accommodation for others if there is a request to do that so my recommendation of course is that we approve the eve of the decision before us i need of motion and mr victory in my  discussion seeing none of those in favor say aye right pose no no we have one two three five my one no and one member excused so the motion passes thank you very much committee and would you guys like to take a little break now before we get into the presentation shall we just move ahead ok we're going to move ahead the council's been supportive over the past couple years in budget allocating money to buy equipment as well as two positions so we're going to talk about what we're doing with that in general leak detection is a way to save water save money and find problems before they happen and mr de rose is going to go through the mechanics of what we're doing and what the future looks like we're very excited to have him here today you know a lot of us have seen this beautiful vehicle and if you turned on that cover of your package you see a picture of it i've seen it and it's an impressive so tell us all about it morning m process analysis leak detection methodology suspected leaks in the built environment selecting priority areas equipment types are current could touch in g i s mapping systems and becomes more frequent as the system ages today most system water systems between forty to eighty years of age and very age throughout the united states  not an exception the average annual water loss to lease could range from between five percent to thirty to more than thirty percent based on aid that we do a findings and a collaborative approach for it and part of a greater conservation  there are various types of issues that can cause water leaks so as you can see here ten year monthly average building has made progress with its conservation efforts so far as you can see  probably beginning two thousand and twelve we start implementing more of a conservation effort in terms of some of the things we've initiated and there's been a decline in twelve month average building over  several leaks in this area and instead of doing it one by one side or just you are replacing touch street because it was just leaking everywhere the r locations for our fire hydrants meters valves and fittings service lines main lines crossings and bridges water tanks and reservoirs and of course reports from customers and their outlets now leaks usually could start usually starts with a corrosion so many pipe rupture started small corrosion leaks as you can see here the chemical reaction and just rust basically from being under the ground here some photos of the detection program can help find leaks like these as you can see on the top left there just corrosion rust and that could have been some some kind of geological event or maybe just  with all the leaks that we just left of the picture yeah ok you know i know i'm on certain things they have certain metals things like ships and whatnot they have what they call sacrific i forget what they call it they have they put a lump of metal to have that be the one that's corroded and what not can you do that with water pipes or is that is that so that you can't do it pipe you tend to get these little circuits every so often they're not everywhere the problem is pipe comes in twenty foot links and the gasket does not conduct electricity so each one would have to have its own everything you can do is you can invoke current through the entire thing reversing the normal current to put enough current so it doesn't cross but also and you've got this whole other engineering problem what we do is in our industry we wrap them with plastic to keep this from happening if that plastic this is because of the reason it corrodes is most of your pipes in good shape and it every so often you get this hole and that hole gets bigger and bigger then it bursts it's why you see in honolulu these pipes bursting but they're just fixing on the not replacing the whole pipeline because the rest of it's in good shape the leak detection program can find them when they look like this before they get bigger and burst but that's a key is is the most of the pipes in good shape you've just got these sections these individual points here and there where is corroding but there's no way to calculate where those are going to be it has more to do with the metallurgy of the pipe little inconsistency is plus the soil etc etc there is no way to predict its not always exactly you know thirty one feet or the wet dry cycle of tides makes it worse wet dry with salt water but it's really about whatever the soil conditions are and you can have a dry place where it's still happening thank you an approach this is a proactive approach and help scope out technical solutions to reactive approaches warranted and developed managing cording might be that we were us water resources and planning department the legal action will be executed by two train pipe so before this was started i looked into of the major stakeholders who would be involved in the program because see them on the left there and calm as a very small but for me supposed to be a larger loops around the information and consultation through various departments who would be involved in this program but logical steps would be to gather personal information about the us system collect new data and reconcile previous data sets collected analyze the data identify system issues from consulting the stakeholders identify the ws priority areas for early detection identify the leak detection constraints train field leak detectors which is an ongoing process conducted district by district leak detection record unmap leak detection sites and detected leaks or troubleshoot approach and equipment issues which is very common identify and implement improvements needed for leak detection communicate informed improvement solutions stop water leaks and then restart the methodology once again so suspected leaks in the built environment usually what spots and landscape areas and potholes and even floor grading or leaning of a structure and explain building changes over several building cycles and galvanized areas where unexpected pressure flux of cause pipe breaks and recommendations from b w s engineers and field operations supervisors sensors on two ends and listen with the with the listening device or the computer actually compiles all the information from those little sensors you see on the top right and over a course of let's say twenty four hours or sooner so it's not an exact science so it takes a lot of practice and a lot of troubleshooting to do this and then on the bottom left there you could see there's some more simple form you just drop a little magnet onto the valve or that's in so it takes a lot of practice what we have a trained pipefitters who are on the least attention program and then of course is internal internal to pipe h two gas which is not something that's commonly used because you have to use gas that goes into the many many more leaks than our crews can possibly get to so we are keeping a database we're building we're building a list of where these are we will be requesting some more funds for outside contractors to attack some of these in a priority basis but we are as we're doing a lot of other things recognizing a lot more problems than we have resources to get do we could our crews now their priorities are to take leaks that are reported in breaks that are reported by customers and get those fixed ideally we'd be sending crews to deal with these but we are barely able to keep up with our trouble calls much less these that aren't yet trouble cause we could probably use a whole crew that would do nothing but a takis and it would probably be a couple of years so there is much much more work than we have resources to get to over the long term probably almost every one of these will be dug up at one point whether we dig them up proactively or whether it breaks and we have a trouble call we now have this resource problem now we're identifying problems how are we going to get to them but that's not an issue for this presentation it's probably more of an issue that will take up in in budget this year so i'll leave it so we have something to talk about them i think you know when we see th do you have a can you with this method of detecting leaks can you determine how much water we ultimately will be saving by fixing all these leaks  picture that had little to go where the water is coming out is or can you by site estimate if that were to go on for a month how much water we would lose yeah or you did occupation like that but it was a rough calculation yeah because we see some of the leaks don't show themselves and you have to dig it up in order to actually make an evaluation how much water is actually being lost ok in the sou way you can i mean just you would it really if it's if it's a large rock rupture you could have a better understanding of the kind of flow you're talking about when it's underground and it costs money to take yeah you just kind of have to get gas understood and one of the reasons i'm asking this is because if it's significant enough i mean any water loss is significant but if you get enough of these red dots everywhere versus the cost it would be to hire in somebody in and clear all that out that would help in the in the budget session to say look we're going to save miss million dollars and so many million gallons a day if we spend however much to to fix those leaks remember couch the the struggle we have is as as mr de rose was saying is we can do a sort of an engineering calculation of how much water it is based on the pressure and the size hole that we're guessing but even a small difference in the size hole from an eight inch to a quarter inch has an enormous range of of the actual volume coming out the data we're getting from the sound doesn't give us enough information to judge that it would really just be a guess on the whole leaks are probably fitting into sort of two categories in real general terms either the joint is leaking let's say the joint wasn't connected properly and it will stay that way forever won't get any worse won't get any better but if it's a rust hole it's going to get worse so from a cost standpoint if you look over the next twenty years every single one of these that's caused by rust which is going to be most of them is going to be dug up it's either going to be dug up by a crew that we send proactively or it's going to be dug up by an emergency call middle of the night on overtime even without running any numbers i can tell you that it's cheaper to just get to them rather than having them pop up every week you're in there on overtime because we are going to dig up every one of those over the next two decades so i think that's the way i would approach cost is that it a cruise going to go out and do it we're going to do on straight time are going to do our overtime and for me what is even more important is the conservation you know water is being lost and we're always worrying about where we're going to get more a lot of it could be cannot have a whole lot of lost water and i think this nick detection thing is really really important but we've got to fix it you know there's no point in knowing and turning to the way to deal with it so this is important and that's why i wanted us to take a look at this city and see this is a real concern go ahead sir so you know just to add to that as well i mean when i mention the peak driscol issue that those leaks have been going on for a really long time what we did i mean over the entire island were peter a school were installed so it's nothing new so you can imagine it's been leaking for a long time and if you consolidate all the little lea it's been occurring you can imagine how much loss was occurring that's why we just decided that entire street and now was you know money constraints we could have done a lot more than that but it's not just us even though it is very valid are bill go from what it normally is to everything amount cannot take a look in your yard and see if you can find squishy area or if the grass is extra green or something you may have a problem and it's happened with us so i  know it makes a huge difference and it's not just the pipes and so the fittings valves you know here is where the pipes come together usually could leak as well so you know you have to choose and systematically attack one of these leaks could occur and it's a long long term but you know project to try to isolate all the leaks and replace things says when you need to joking but in the heart of just you know i remember when i started and i got my first tour of on a system what i'd driven and hahn along the coastal road that out of the corner of my eye in the past i thought was electrical conduit i didn't know that that was the waterline hanging on the above ground water lines that we have and we don't need a leak detection equipment to find those leaks but that is not our our standard we're trying to bury things but lines like how to call valley are easy to find the leaks when obviously they're visible and people can access them the way they as they're exposed and my other thing i noticed the i didn't see how having any progress there are so as i was just visited i just visited with to go find that we could just figure out if there are leaks by reports because a pressure would just drop if there was a major leak on one of those critical but if you go up there you see just sheer cliffs are going to share close we don't know where it's going the and we can't do leaks we could touch it on a nonmetallic pipes at this point without the equipment for that so visual reports things like that we have to rely on because equipment is only one portion of the investigation tool anybody else go ahead so this was a start in two thousand and fifteen miltie does in fifteen and two thousand and fifteen two thousand and sixteen right now they started looking a little more in a country as you could see  and this one doesn't include who was there before but you could see there are leaks are out there occurring and we have to rely on visual inspection as well not just using the equipment one thing to keep in mind is that the  the leader texting crew their experience pipefitters they know what to look for they just don't use the equipment and just depend on sound in possible leak sounds that they hear they actually have make a determination question on terminations if that is the case so it's difficult and you know a tech technique technique needs it could be improved it will be improved over the course leaks so know who we are in the water are to better understand losses is what i was mentioning earlier were the water distribution system leak and the contribution of water accounting data from the following because we we when we look at all the  system leaks we often we also have to look at all the possible vaso we're incurring from things that are not being reported and accounted for and that includes water supply build metered build  for how much water is being used and and and having essential database to be able to do a water audit once we do that and we'll be able to determine just how much you would take away some of the percentage deviation from the actual they're tapping into that hydrant there and that's a meter attached to that that hydrant temper but that when you go to that site there's a look like a very temporary spin there for a long time i think and so we don't know how accurate that tens of thousands of fire hydrants so in conclusion the leak detection is not a solution for a nation aging water delivery system it's a proactive approach really to better justify smaller reactive approaches to authorize an unauthorized so all the departments using water should be taken accounting of how much water they're using from the water system should be metered so we can kind of understand  how much you are losing in in actuality because just because your techniques we don't know maybe a lot of the water being lost by just not accounting for it so a water audit is a systematic kind of  operations or is that something on top of the day to day operations or is that something you would have to hire outside the do know we've already started the water out of here so it also includes data from production and billing and we have to reconcile that and if i can add is something part part of this program came out of a rough water audited audit that our staff did a number of years ago we have very good meters on our wells on our treatment so we have a very reliable number of how much how much volume we're putting into each system then we have meters on each customer so we know how much is coming out and there's a difference the difference between that is either meters that are not working right leaks people stealing water people using water without paying for it or rubber called non revenue water unaccounted for water there those terms are used interchangeably so once you know there's a difference between what you're putting in and what you're billing for what is that difference and then staff can go hunt that down as far as how they for example if the fire department uses water for training purposes and they're not monitoring that you know can we estimate that to get better an idea of how much is it where is it even just getting reports from them that we're working with just let us know just so we can at least account for it in our numbers things like that are part of the water audit so that's something that staff is undertaking to try to get a better idea of this something you might see in the future is some capital requests to put some meters here and there within the water system we have meters at the at the front end at the back end only we don't have any intermediate meters so there's really no way to know hey is the water being lost in the front end of the system or the back end of the system by strategically placing some permanent meters within the system you can at least start narrowing down which areas are likely to have more leaks around accounting for water so we have what we have we're doing the best we can with the data we have but it's not like what you see in the movies where there's gauges every hundred feet and we know exactly what's happening at all point to the system it just doesn't work that way so that's why we're taking more this surround about approach to try to do this without the huge expenditure of putting in meters every you know every hundred feet begs the question and i don't know if your have that number off the top you had you said here's what we bill here's what we say show going out do we know what that number is if you know i or twelve or something i got ours is significantly more let me just say that and so there is plenty to find in this current thank you chair and department so with the upcoming budget around the corner just wondering if there's anything you'd like to share at this point in time and relation to your one bullet point mentioning more so that we might need to be aware of now to help you here well as as you all know that merrill transmit the budget on march twenty fifth or before and  does i think roughly prescheduled one of the meetings in the future shortly before that for us to give usually a heads up about what to expect and budget and the mayor is usually very cooperative with letting me explain to you what's going to be in the budget that is our intention to do again this year so over the next month or so we'll probably have more information about what to expect in the budget or march sixteenth agenda will be a mentioned this intermediate meter per minute meter thing to try and track what's the loss between the input and output area and where do you environments incorporated just to be able to figure out what's happening in between and that's what the directors talking about district media pretty much and you could even do subdistrict metering  figure out what's going on in the middle there are we have been looking at some options to do not district metering but more on the longer lines that are in occupied areas because a lot of the so what would you have to do is install meters in the beginning of one of the long long sections and at the other end so to make it simple and you could kind of me make a determination those meters out to be calibrated based on you know flow rates and such but once that's done you'll have a more accurate accounting about what's happening in side the system and you could possibly think it's a scale so everybody has a better a count supply commercial on the radio and i mentioned the definitions of our hawaiian language words on it was improper was incorrect and i mentioned it and i heard it the other day yes it got corrected the detention program if not then i will defer the matter without objection because we'd like to kick kind of keeping an eye on this one and see how we perceive its members that covers our agenda for today support so without further ado i will adjourn the meeting