this mean in the budget and finance committee will please come to order members today we will be going through the department of water supply budget and the department's rates and fees schedule so i would like to begin by w good morning and excused for a little while this morning as a member goes men and members and victory no are on a trip and are excused as well so with that we'll move into public testimony starting here in the chambers and then we'll go to the district office after the first several so our first test far this morning is daniel to noc tunes thank you for your support for conservation and watershed efforts in protecting our our water supply and our rivers and waterways in mali and your continued support will ensure clean drinking water   a clean drinking water supply for future generations and your support is vital for providing opportunities for us to do this  manager i mean here to thank you folks for the support that you folks have done from alicante to provide safe clean drinking water for west mali and as we know the prefer in that len underneath the mount in effect central in all the other places and we wanted to thank you folks and ask for your continued support you know when we look at water resources we look at the aesthetic beauty in tourism coming here but who wants to s waterfalls and when they don't get one they complain you know they want to go back to their room and flush toilets that shall wash face none of us go throughout the day without a coffee tea saw glass of water something that we can all buy into is clean fresh drinking water we're blessed we have one of the weirdest spots on earth that truly kicker has blessed us with  and we're in charge of stewarding that we've been working well and thanks to the support of the department of water supply in their guidance being more efficient and doing an awesome job that we really appreciate helping to get the job done currently our crew is walking out of one of the whole valley and there they'll do about ten miles today after being deployed in for a couple days he missed the family of the young fathers and they rely on new folks to be able to continue to support that effort and we know there's a couple new propose wells in that area and kohan and so forth and just want to make sure that as we're talking about distribution it's always been talk from times of the cooper not to current litigation and propose wells and so forth that we've got to catch it for us we've got to catch it and remember how to steward it properly so i ask for your folks continue funding in support for that it's a interesting time as we see the state with the changing governor and so forth and deal in our budgets molly county has been the biggest support in the state and continues to be the biggest support and we want to make sure that we're doing our best so that as customers are paying for that water that we're giving them every time to turn on the tap that water's coming out of there because we're providing that service was that before secondly we have for the west my always sort of water conservation district which i'm a director of the rest of them are meeting the new and r c s person in charge for pacific island region so west and the rest and couldn't be here wanted to ask for your for support for the s w c d s every time somebody wants to build something these great big plans are made and they're told that they need to go through a s w cd before they come to the county and we review them ok and me personally i cannot do that alone as you guys all see these plans are thick every development in the state puts up two thousand dollars that's not enough all of our needed each of us average maybe eight to ten thousand dollars worth of donated time but without those county staff may be cramped and so forth everything was shut down and to be called become a big problem in thousand water should protection by thirty four thousand but it added a seventy five thousand appropriation to one of course a cruelly watershed management so it looks like a new grant so for you how is that new seventy five thousand helping assist you i mean it's looks like they've taken fifty from your group to create to this new section correct for water should preserve it is a reduction in that efforts that we're going to be able to do between but as a for medical partner and a pie of the we always try to look how we can advocate without being competition with one another we support our partners which are to lose insights and so if one part of the region is being supported god bless them although as preserve that feed the machine he no water treatment plant to that site and so it's a matter of how can we better serve we all collaboratively work together in the water should partnerships  she took the time out of her day to greet them we've had a lot of response come back to assist in watershed protection and tree planting because of that they felt that the chair the council members cared about what they were doing committee has been considering rates and fees over the past few days i sat down and said well what effect does that have directly on me each of those these you consider individually so i added them all up and i calculated that next year based on what's been proposed i'll pay the county seven thousand five hundred thirty five dollars that's a two hundred ninety five dollar increase from what i paid the county this year or about four percent and to be honest with you i'm perfectly fine with that ok i'm not complaining about that amount or about the increase that's there but when i look back three years and i say well what did i paying two thousand and twelve two thousand and thirteen two thousand and fourteen i realize that over those three years there's been a sixteen hundred fifty dollar increase over those three years and that's twenty percent so to that extent you know when you see these these percentages compound being you realize i really do appreciate the work that you guys do to make sure that the money that you're spending of the county is well spent because it doesn't take too long before those numbers become doubled and tripled and really out of out of whack so i appreciate you making sure that the money is spent efficiently specifically in those calculations i found that two hundred seventy five dollars of the fees that i pay to register my car are going towards the county road tax and that the proposed increase would be twenty five dollars great i'm happy to pay twenty five dollars more in order to have the roads kept in good repair i also calculated that ninety four dollars of the fuel that i buy is going to or towards the county tax that sixteen cents per gallon tax you want to increase it to eight hundred per gallon that's going to be twelve dollars more again i am perfectly fine paying twelve dollars more a year if that's going to ensure that we have you know roads that are that are kept in good repair today you'll hear from our water director and i could not be more supportive of his proposed rates and fees in particular the water development fees for the five a synch meter which you all know we dial back last year i personally feel that was a big mistake the director has been very clear in what he needs in order to promote you know the growth that that is going to have in the future and once we give him the money he needs then it just becomes a policy decision as far as where you want that growth to be ok and how you're going to pay for it and those are where you know you can you can slug it out but until we give the guy the money necessary to do that he can't really support the growth that's going to happen i note i notice on my particular water bill that my three quarter inch water feed my my fee that i pay each month for my three quarter inch water thing has going to be many hundred ninety two dollars up to a proposed three hundred sixty dollars next year and that's an increase in three years of eighty seven and a half percent but again i understand that that increase is necessary to support the aging infrastructure of the lines that are out there and to continue to give me water service so i have no problem whatsoever  increasing you know in paying that increased amount the water director will change oh i just want to know one more thing as i run out of time here there's hundreds i know dozens of people maybe hundreds of people waiting for water meters those people are anxious for those water meters you know why because they can't wait to subdivide their property and sell it for a huge profit i know i see that i see them in the in the real estate ads out there this one when it gets a new water meter it's going to be it's going to be subdivided bill that will mean hundreds or mountains of dollars of profit for each of these folks and twenty thousand dollars for a water meter is a drop in the bucket to you know to to make a pun there on what that that those profits would be so thank you thank you very much mr crowley any questions mispricing thank you very much mr crawley for being here this morning and i hear what you're saying but i do want to say that there's another side to that  well we can you know agree with you totally and we need money to do it we have to do there are people that are on fixed incomes and the people we were worried about we have to be concerned can they afford these increases so there's that other side and tell us about burke i think that we need to have programs to help those people specifically ok but make sure that we're not opening the doors to all these people who are honestly for every one of those there's probably one hundred that are saying i want to make a profit on this they're out there and we just can't open up the whole country to all that growth that's not going to be supported by by the funds so i totally agree with you dan you know it seems like no matter what we try to figure out to help people people always figure out a way to abuse it or get around it or take advantage of it but we cannot relinquish our responsibility to take care of the people that need our help and so that's our dilemma we sit here is how do we do what we need to do and not impact the people that we don't want to hurt and so that's the other part of it we deal with i understand the numbers that make perfect sense we gotta have money to do what we gotta do but how do we do that so that we don't hurt the people we don't want to hurt is the question and that's why you're welcome thank you very much and you for the questions for the test fire  thank you very much and our wake council members i am ted ted a man with the mowing basis species committee and i'm just so impressed that you're all as awake as you are after your long nights doing budget hearings every night so i will try to be as brief as i can  plants than we have in the past so the work that we're doing to protect the watershed is working and also just to support the very good work of all the different watershed partnerships and the other thing that i really wanted to do is the question was raised about making sure that the money is spent well and i just want to give a shout out to the department of water supply because they continue to look at that they continue to look at our the funds they're giving all these different projects really making a difference and they've recently started initiative to bring in folks from the u s geological survey to have us do look at whether or not we can do some studies where they can do some studies to determine the to make sure that the work that we're doing they're getting the best bang for the buck in terms of are we helping to  keep water in the water should we believe that we are we wouldn't be doing that but it's always helpful to have that rigor that the scientific approach to make sure that all of us are being the best stewards not only of our watership but also of our financial resources so again thank you so much for all of your support and again it's just really been a pleasure to work with all of the staff of the department of water supply the whole thank you members questions for the test fire scene and thank you for what you do aloha aloha council chair white and county council members mahalo know me for the opportunity to provide testimony today and for all of your hard work on this year's budget my name is alice and co and i've worked for the nature conservancy maui knew a program for eight years i'm here today to voice the nature conservancy strong support for the counties watershed grant program i first like to take the time to extend my hope my most heartfelt thanks to each of you for being such generous supporters of watershed management my county has been and continues to be a leader in the state for environmental and watershed protection since the start of the east my watershed partnership in one thousand nine hundred one my county has led the way in supporting these partnerships with support from the county we've made a lot of progress over the years and reducing the impacts of feral animals and invasive weeds to our native forests we recently completed and three mile western boundary fence on our new easement area in east largely due to your support all of us in the environmental sector appreciate your efforts and accomplishments and we the work that the watershed partnerships in our crew do is very difficult work and rugged terrain often in pouring rain but it's necessary to protect our native forests and provide us with our water sixty billion gallons of fresh surface water is harvest annually from east my watershed streams alone from always businesses and residents as you know fresh water is essential to every aspect of our life on maui and is critical to supporting local ag the visitor industry and our recovering economy we need to continue to work to protect our watersheds in order to ensure a continuous supply of fresh clean water for all of us our children and our grandchildren what we don't want is a situation like that in california currently drought lack of watershed protection and water over use has resulted in a severe water crisis continuing to invest in watershed protection will make certain that such a crisis doesn't affect my county county funding has allowed us to leverage millions of dollars  funding just for the watershed partnerships on maui alone continuing this level of funding is critical in avoiding setbacks with our basic watershed protection and achievements in keeping maui county free of more serious invasive pests mahalo again for your dedication you smart water should protection will decrease seventy five seventy six thousand five hundred dollars what kind of impact would that be upon your services yeah you know i'm not sure if that's directly to the nature conservancy or east my watershed partnerships budget specifically either way it's really critical funding right now we were able to just barely squeaked by with leverage in county funding to get additional state funding and a little bit of federal funding to do this three mile western boundary fence this fence was critical and enclosing essentially the twelve thousand core area and use my watershed that is the source the headwaters of our most precious pristine streams so without that extra seventy five thousand dollars for example that last one mile a fence wouldn't have been able to be completed and we would have continued and grass from feral animals and the himalayan ginger and other invasive weeds like strawberry guava just moving in and taking over continued support for everyone funds from the department's program support our watershed partnership along with east mali leeward pool kukui the nature conservancy east and the more invasive species committee altogether we protect over two hundred thousand acres of upland forest in watersheds to safeguard fresh water resources as well as national cultural and economic resources but the department's funding can prizing a significant and critical portion of our budgets we leverage these funds for state private and federal funds several times over which is a super brief turn on the investment and speaking of investing for the future it takes about twenty to twenty five years for a  of rain water to filter down into our aquifers thus ensuring the health of our watersheds now is critical when we are planning for an ever growing population which brings ever increasing demand and in doing rainfall which decreasing supply our mountains in need of forests are a giant living sponge is that catch the fog mist in rain clouds that provide all of the fresh water that you and your constituents all depend on every single day the healthier our forests the healthier our community and the healthier our water into the future our healthy our water supply into the future so no on water supply fresh water produced by the west my mountains monica hall of ice supplies approximately combat water hugging invasive species like strawberry guava blankets thousands of acres in compromises aquifer recharge monitoring our forests and streams to gauge recovery over time collaboration's with organization are going to iran mali across the state to share knowledge resources and new technologies community outreach and education in partnership with to build awareness in engage the community in saving our fresh water resources also addressing human impacts like wildfire trailblazing and dirt biking that cause surprising in widespread damage and last but not least volunteer we control trips to cultivate stewardship by the community watershed protection program going far beyond every other county and hawaii for that we are both proud and grateful and we hope this leadership continues for the betterment of our water supply our islands and our future thank you very much support or watership protection and what have you are you aware of private entities because we all it's not just us the county that service people but there's private companies out there and other users of this source so do you know if there's you folks gains contributions from outside sources besides the car i mean here not talking federal dollars private companies and things of us or yeah there is in the past we've got n and we're going for in the future now too but funding from like private foundations like fred baldwin in ones in the state but those grants are normally smaller like in the ten to twenty thousand dollar range kind of for a more specific projects but it's the funding from my department water supply that's a huge and significant portion of our budget that we really rely on for our basic programs and also used for good morning chair way more down some members thank you for this opportunity to support the department of water supplies source protection grants program and  stakeholders to manage the one hundred thousand acre watershed with our limited resources we target the highest priority threats to the health and sustainability of the watershed this is resulted in construction of fifteen miles of fences to keep feral animals out of the most fragile parts of the watershed and those areas that most directly impact the water collection infrastructure and aquifer recharge our efforts this year focused on maintaining these fences and now removing isolated populations of invasive plants and really remote parts of the watershed before those plants displace more native forest and become too abundant to remove we also look forward this year to working with the department of water supply and the united states geological survey to design a study to assess the effects of various invasive plants on the hydr maui watershed partnership primarily accomplishes our goals through on the ground natural resource management most of our field sites are assists sibel by helicopter only so to make the most out of each trip staff members often camp for three to four nights away from their families and homes this type of work is often cold wet and frankly unpleasant to most people despite these challenges most of our field staff has been fighting on these front lines week after week for over five years each they love their work because they love the mountain but they love that they have a commitment to the goal of protecting the source of maui's water supply the grants program also helps us fund part time education and outreach program which instills respect and understanding of the watershed function to the next generation of front line workers through classroom visits we acknowledge that the department of water supply is a user fee funded utility for this reason we're extremely grateful for the forethought focus on sustainability and long term planning it takes for g w s to devote boat part of their budget to the protection of the malco watersheds for many years we have respected this by proposing projects for this grant which most directly address the threats to the sustainability of the municipal water supply with your continued so generous thank you mr chair but we are week or so ago committee chair a column mentioned that he thought it would be a good idea for departments before budget to give presentations to the appropriate council committees on their operations so things could speed up in budget with the help of water resources chair before or water resources chair victory you know we've been doing that for four years we've gone through i think every part of our operations we've gone through in detail in many many meetings our rates and fees just a few weeks ago we gave a presentation before the budget was even transmitted and we showed exactly the big things that were in our budget so i'm just going to reiterate my main points from that presentation because everything else on our budget is pretty much what you'd expect the big items in our operations budget this year that are different than normal our one million dollars to start the building replacement project we talked about that policy in our governmental affairs as several months ago honolulu's been doing our billing for more than two decades we're going to shift to doing our own so we've got a million dollars and six unfunded a p s to start that we want to use the unfunded e b s as temps both of them and the consultants working on this will come out of that million dollars once we finish the project in a couple of years we won't need those limited term appointments anymore and you know will be on the other side of the shift it will be normal operations so that million dollars is something that you've never seen before it's going to be in there for a couple of years until the projects finished we have one expansion position in our engineering building permit group because we've recently completed a reorganization of the group and in order to keep up with building permits we found that we need one more position for that as building permits are picking up in the county we're going to have an increasingly hard time staying up with that we are when you look at the thirty day reports we've caught up recently but historically were one of the worst departments when it comes to keeping up with the ordinance that the council passed saying that first review be in thirty days so we take that very seriously we've done a reorganization analysis plan we also need is one position the big issue today are going to be when we get to rates and fees and i think we've talked about extensively so i'm happy to answer any questions about specifics but i think you'll find that almost everything in our budget is what we've been talking about over the past couple years in water resources committee so with that will be more than happy to help you along in any way you like thank you ok if you would please start us through the you mr chair i think the big change you'll see in the area counts is those five unfunded d p s as i talked about which are to support that temporary aspect of the the billing program and again what we're thinking there is in order to build our own billing system get that tested get it working get everyone trained and then switch over people have double duty we recently a couple of years ago switched from buy monthly billing to monthly billing so that's already been a strain on our staff and you've got twice as many bills going out every single month or every over every time period and we're going to need our people to help build the new system get it tested trained et so that's why what we want to do we use this million dollars which will be later in the b account probably rent some space locally have a few of our people trained these temps i call them the limited term appointments to do the normal work while our people work on the new system and again go on for a couple of years until we're finished and the other expense and position was  the what was called it was it was the buildings plans examiner i think it was called specialty plans examiner so this is interesting usually when we think of building permit review we think of engineers we did a very specific analysis of what is  work we do when we're reviewing building permits and we're separating the engineering review from the what are called the non engineering review so that way engineers will be doing engineering work we can use not engineers that cost a little bit less to do not engineering work and that's what we're looking for here so what we're short is this one specialty plans examiner which will allow us to catch up on that work without having higher paid engineers doing that do listen carefully to his presentation that he gave the committee so i understand the positions that he's looking for so anything that i think we might want to clarify is would all of these people be hired  right away and you would you need all of them i understand engineer probably the sooner the better but for the folks that are going to do the billing we do need them right away or later in the year they would be later in the year that's why they're unfunded everything is coming out of the million dollars we are currently finalizing a request for proposals for the billing system itself so based on the procurement of that what the time schedule for that is these might not come in t even maybe the last few months but maybe all of twenty seventeen and a few months in f eighteen something like that we're going to play by your but again that's why we're talking l t s they'll be there for as long as we need double duty and we will stop using them as soon as we've trance for over to the new system in a couple of years so when you get the new system you're not going to need them to run it we're we're going to run it we don't we're not going  essentially what we're doing is tempted to do our normal work while our people build the new system ok we do expect that we will probably end up with at least one of her minutes on the other side of the billing system because thank you for being here with this new billing system be  compatible with the existing system from one a little bit to handle the transition mr sure i'll take your direction we can talk about the billing system now with the economy or specifically when we get to the b account with the appropriation for it it's up to you go ahead ok so it won't become it won't be compatible meaning they're not supposed to work together but the data that currently exists in ho going to be transferred into the new format so it's not going to work with that system but it will transfer the data from that system to the new system thank you  looking to issue it this spring so in the next month or so we are coordinating with the county of quite a department of water supply because they're in the same but we are they're also outsourcing to  being partners on it we're trying to coordinate our p s so that if one company is interested in serving us both we might end up with the same the same vendor which would help in cross training possibly control costs but we we're not partnering with them from the sense that we're not going to serve them they're not going to serve us but we're trying to work out the r f p so that they are similar so that there is a chance that will both get the same vendor ok and on what basis do arrive at your one million dollar estimate we hired gartner who's been services primary consultant to help us frame out what's out there on the market what would this cost etc and we're looking at implementation costs probably between two and three million dollars over the first few years over or to implement to get it going and then some sort of management cost as we go along so this is really just the starter cost to do the first phase we know it'll be at least two million dollars so this is enough to get us started and we'll probably put the rest in next year's what is out there what are our options and to help us frame what options we should be targeting on but and i don't believe any of this money will go to gardner i think we're basically finished with them ok  it seemed like a very significant cost for you know it seems like a fairly straightforward system we one of the reasons we at the meeting when we went through the cost for honolulu i had all the numbers i didn't bring them with me today we showed what it would cost to stick with honolulu for ten years and these are integrated systems i mean it's not you know something you buy off the shelf install in a p c so again that's why we work with gartner to find some terminology the financial people use for this about the year one tier two tier three i think what they call it as they get more complicated we're looking for a certain level that enterprise software that deals with our particular problems but doesn't get too big so that's why gardner helped us find the vendors who are likely to match our needs without a cadillac that we don't need so we counted on them their expertise along with some of our staff expertise doing some research about targeting this roughly a collet between two and three million dollars implementation cost that is what it's going to cost to have an integrated system for billing the ties to you know record keeping our meters and all these other kind of things but it is targeted for just what we need not too much and too little ok is the waste water department sharing in the cost of the system yes we will continue to do billing for waste water and their share of the costs of what they transferred to us will work out with with them are you asking them for some of the upfront cost or is that just going to be recouped through charge once it's up and operating i suppose that would be you know their share that would be recouped based on whatever their their monthly share is or their annual share is once we get it up and running ok so we won't we won't find a shared charge in their budget this year know that the call it the true year three year cost is going to be much more than that this is really just to get started once we get the vendor some see what we're thinking as well contract you know with for phase one at that point we'll have a better idea of exactly what phase two and you know phase three if it takes costs and that way next year we'll be able to have a more detailed breakdown of what it cost to finish but we know it's going to cost a lot more than one million dollars to finish so we felt that was a round number that's just a you know there's no question we need that much so we felt comfortable requesting this much money this year with you know will will tie up the details next year and i think some of us have a question whether you need that much if you haven't detailed what it's going to be used for if you could i would appreciate it if you could provide some detail as to how that how you see that money being spent on what timeline  deputy director paul myers been taking the lead on this so he's coming down and he can probably shed a little bit more light on some breakdowns ok thanks and their estimate it was on the order of at least a million dollars possibly as much as to start finish for completed installation that compares with the cost of the existing contract with honolulu which will average over ten years about six hundred sixty thousand dollars a year and we have had most supply is has found to be sort of their favorite if you will a leader and we've had three sort of all day sessions with them we have not gotten into we have not issued an vendor has estimated the installation costs at eight hundred thousand to a million dollars we don't think that estimate is a teaser we think they're very forthright and it's a reasonably conservative number that does not count the additional payroll costs for interim staffing because is is should be evident we are staffed for day to day operations and that's all building a new computer system requires taking your key people in effect and asking them to do two jobs one their existing jobs with the existing system and developing designing coding and implementing a second system and then running parallel for a while to make sure everything is is going to work well so we do need the additional staffing positions too so we don't burn people out and lose key people and that's a critical sort of concern in this kind of project i've supervised a few of these  our staff is has very extensive experience doing this kind of thing it's a very difficult job it involves a lot of sacrifice on people's part and we wouldn't be undertaking it if we didn't absolutely have predict a good example is the honolulu project that project started out being budget seven million dollars they stopped counting the capital cost it seventeen million dollars it started out being estimated for about a twelve to eighteen month project and it has gone on for over three years and it's still not performing some of the functions that were initially specified and that's  undertake this project if it were not absolutely necessary for ourselves and the environmental management department as well i hope that's helpful it is what is the installation time table  closely estimates that this will take nine to twelve months i think that's optimistic just because of the human side of these installations the one i personally handle most recently with another employer was estimated at about nine months and it ended up being eighteen months so it was almost double the duration came in on budget but it was it was a very difficult exercise and what is the name of the vendor that you guys are doing most with at this point mr chairman i i like if possible to avoid answering that because we have not issued an r f p at this point and i don't wan with you that's a good question no it's certainly not the vendor for honolulu's oracle systems that that's a name that should be familiar to you and they are a tear one system they're made for operations utilities with a million or more customers and it's a very very complex and elegant system  is not only way too expensive for us but it's way too elegant and complicated we don't need that for our operation which consists of about thirty six thousand customers so what is the projected start time of the insulation we're hopeful to be underway with an r f p within about two weeks that would be a goal is out there we are hopeful that we could bring it to a selection in as short as a month possibly a month and a people from the vendor to do the coding and the installation the matching up of accounts and the data conversion etc and if you don't get the right people who are competent really know their job and have done this before are efficient at it it just gets much more complicated having a few really key competent people on a project like this is most very important simply adding bodies sometimes adds costs and extends the time for completion so we just don't know when and when those key people are going to be available whether they're going to be available it depends we won't know till we get to selection and and really sit down and and get sort of the people installed to to move this forward ok so if they if the total dizzy eight hundred thousand dollar estimated price from the bender include their support people working with hours or just the software costs very good question  that the initial license for up to i believe twenty five users that is their estimate as to the time and staffing that they would provide  including their living expenses etc while they're here and stalled and sort of their bill for the total installation and again it's  it's i think eight hundred thousand to a million and it could be less depending upon whether there's some efficiencies from from working with kolob quiet on a similar contract ok you know i don't think there's any any real disagreement with how you all are approaching this but knowing the chair he's going to want to know what the what the timing is going to be what the estimated monthly cost of the five folks that you're bringing on to to work side by side to take on the day to day tasks that are now being done by existing employees so if you could provide us with the breakdown of if you start on such and such a date what's that what's the likely start date what's the employment cost what's the front payment what's the time that not i'm assuming that if this might take a year to do we're not going to be paying out the entire amount in the first in the first payment course it probably has to be encumbered that's correct in terms of the vendor we'd have a schedule  meyer we prefer having you in the hot seat mr taylor not just to follow on that question of the positions are there standard county positions i mean do the same job titles of the ones that are in there so the costs are asking you guys a do the same  us do it right now i mean it's there the same we we have the same kind of positions in here they're going to be the same cos they just want any long term that will be more than happy to do that but it also includes when they're going to start but will be more than happy by we i mean holly will be she's probably working on it right now i'm sure holly's already done it have we'll have done it by the time we break this morning gay members any questions specially plans increase for that if we were to put that position you know i did not bring with me the follow through analysis that the engineers did somebody we did a similar analysis to what we do with water flow and they did it for you know permit flow if you want to call it that  and you know it's a standard industrial engineering application that works just as well for people as it does for a for process and they just showed that there was a bottleneck and by splitting things we said you know we can increase our throughput by x percent  don't remember what the numbers were but i remember that it was bottlenecking at the engineers versus these other people could do this work and so we're separating the workflow like i mentioned before to have engineers only doing engineering work but it there's no question we need more bodies this is just a more efficient body then a more expensive engineer body so i don't know what it is but we have to do something because the way it is now is unacceptable even by by county ordinance you know we were a so that the their seller can be paid for out of the building permit review revolving fund chair before he answers i can tell you that we just did a reorganization through the union and we've been going consulting on that and this this is part of the chain of command that is already been part of our consultation to pull somebody out of there and put them in another department technically puts supervision from the human resources standpoint under another department and then they can supervise people in our department so i i think of lance was here he would tell you  that you really can't take somebody from one department and have it in the supervisory chain of command of a different department from a from a civil service standpoint so i'd be concerned about i don't care the money's coming from obviously but  they're going to have to be a department water supply employee in our chain of command it was made clear to us the other day by personnel that nothing happens very rapidly when you're moving try to reassign or move people around or can pay for this specialty plans examiner person but the lines of authority have to be as mr taylor described you cannot have a different department different funding  source in the line of authority i was reviewing that specifically for the transfer of the budget office to finance and had that discussion and found that that was not possible this year were increasing you know that the proposed rate increases increasing in revenues that the department by one point nine million dollars but the budget also is pointing to an increase in overhead charges of one point three million and last year we rates and fees we implemented increased revenues by four point two million but it really didn't stay in the water department and got sucked out in an increase in overhead charges to the tune of four point three million so here we have over the last two years total of six point one million dollars in revenue increases that were all the users of pain but five point six of that six point one is being transferred out to the general fund so i'm concerned with leaving the water to far more with very little of the work with just because we are following some overall cost guideline  or you know cost allocation guideline and what we're what we're doing and just this short amount of time is probably equivalent to what's going to cost to drill two wells out for them but at least mean that's i would just mr chair bring up and this is sort of a big can of worms that's been sort of brewing for a long time because when you look at building permits subdivision review you've got fees and fees and planning but when you look at the routing of those plans they go to all kinds of different departments they go to state departments and those fees don't get distributed to all those other parts so all of those of us who are in the plan review process somewhere we don't usually top those fees so to pick one position and say ok well every we're going to top the building for a review fee where you do that for i mean planning reviews building permits deal on our reviews building permits fire reviews building permits so i think if you were to look at all the man hours ago into building permits there's an enormous amount of man hours in departments that don't come anywhere near the building permit revolving fund so it's just  i'd love to have money from other from another account to help pay and it's fine with me but just be aware that that this is a very big can of worms that you're opening up we like worms members other questions specially plans examiner ok well i'll let you keep the expense but i still wouldn't like us to discuss further the overhead cost allocation but we'll get that we'll get to that in a minute director if you'd like to go through the to be accounts for ministr oh i'm sorry i forgot to ask you about your increase in overtime on page nineteen dash ten increase of fifty thousand budget amount last year of fifty one thousand ok i'm sorry i mentioned earlier we're talking about the billing system when we changed from buy a monthly billing to monthly billing we put out twice as many bills every month in order to make honolulu's  time frames of when we have to get them data we've got all kinds of overtime between the meter readers and the people processing these things to get them that data on the monthly basis i want to emphasize that when we went from buy monthly to monthly we did not hire any new people so we just doubled the workload and they tried to keep up but they're finding that you know the only way to keep up is over time and that's one of i would say it's one of the reasons we want to do our own system but once we have our own system we set our own timelines we'll be able to be more flexible with do we want to go back to buy monthly you know in the weekly they want to change how we do billing we'll be able to make those modifications to optimize this as we mentioned to you a number of times before when honolulu says this is how bills are going to be done we have no choice but to modify our operations to meet them and that's what this fifty that's what this particular fifty thousand is for so you suggest go to quarterly you know what's funny is i like every six months personally i mean every but it would save so much money you could wrap it up with the trash bill and the property tax bill but i know we're not going to do that but it might be smart to go back to buy monthly it's a choice we can make in a couple of years when we have a new billing system my point is it's not an option now but once we have our own system we'll be able to make those choices ourselves and have that discussion in this room rather than us just saying it's an extra  strain ok members questions on the premium pay for the projected expenses years about eighty five thousand so it's probably not too far off moving into the accounts on page one hundred twelve i think we've discussed the first item there enough for the first change so you can go to electricity and this may be the first time we're hearing the budget director's explanation of his inflationary and deflationar adjustments so either one of you can take the electricity charge increase nine actually on page ten of the departments will use an allowable inflationary increase rates which i provided to them which mr holcombe i think read on the floor the  other day based on the rate increases are based on an analysis of things that we we know and things that we're guessing  if you look on page ten there we have the rate at which we're expecting an increase  from the excuse me from the basically what we're doing is taking f y fourteen actual expenditure and applying a rate to it now that's the general rule and with with every rule there's an exception to that rule but the general rule is that we are applying this rate to through those items the department of water supply we worked with because they have some different of variation from those those items but in general if you go through the calculations of electricity it's a ten point one zero rate which is basically a ten percent increase from the fiscal year two thousand and fourteen actually i implemented this a few years ago because i saw huge variations in especially in electricity in the actuals versus the budget in amounts  and we wanted to try to keep some way of controlling expenditures in those categories you know as well as we saw that the county was starting to implement efficiency operations in the you know for the water supply it was different different things like pumps that are more efficient the p v installations that we see in other departments with a inflationary rate based on actual expenditures the deficiencies savings will eventually catch up to the budgeted items and so as those actual expenditures get reduced the budgeted expenditures for the electricity in those areas will be reduced as well so that's kind of a general explanation of how we came up with those numbers and my staff after the question came up on the floor went back and analyzed and  i believe back in ninety ninety five percent of the cases it is a pretty strict ten percent increase from fiscal year fourteen actuals where where you see some of the differences where the fiscal year sixteen proposed budgets are kind of all over the place is because if they're fourteen actually were significantly lower than their fifteen budgeted you're going to see a reduction in the inflationary schedule even though we're proposing it's an increase in in from the fiscal year fourteen actual as it may be a decrease from the fiscal year fifteen budget and that's where you'll see the sixteen proposed budget actually have a negative amount to that ok so you didn't go through the actual cost for this year because it seemed like at ifas that some of the changes were driven by lower spending this year  i produce the budget i don't even have six months worth of data for the current fiscal year so i they really don't look too much at the current fiscal years operating expenditures to to match unless there's something really particular the department brings if someone could share with us you know they've done a lot of work in trying to cut costs and we've installed p v and we buy more efficient pumps and those kind of things is there more of that that's coming is it being planned good question have we kind of done what we paid to public works for our share of the electricity in this building i mean that's what this is this is not our palms or any kind of stuff so what you're talking about when we get to there's another line item where this issue so i'll talk about it whenever you like this item we're talking about is for this of those efficiency or alternative energy production areas but it has kind of slowed down a little bit right now i think we have another set of them coming up here shortly  that we're going to be you know working on our piece to do the power purchase agreements and different things like that but yeah so so we haven't hit i think the last time i looked at the electricity we had saved i think is going to be about three million over five years or so from the three different things that we've done from when we first came into office in two thousand and eleven to i think was last year when i looked at it and then going out for the next next five years based on those efficien ies other we've already garnered so you know it's significant but it's not it's not huge i mean we wonderful if i could save you know that kind of across the board but we're looking at that kind of things but i think it's also safe to say that as they're purchasing new pumps the pumps are going to be much greater efficiency and roofs cost but we're not going to go on replace a pump is still working just fine just for the drop in the bucket compared to some of the other decisions that are being made pump efficiency hasn't changed much in you know thirty years we get slightly more efficient electrical motors but it's just a little tiny bit we've covered every horizontal surface we can with p v panels whether or not it rains and whether or not we have to pump more drives the electric budget more than anything i mean rainfall and then you know back to our favorite issue up country going to add more up country electric usage is going to go up because it's all going to be pumped water you don't do a lot of country and then all of a sudden that's not going to be added there is no way to make up that additional humped water upcountry with p v panels and efficient motors and things like that so the bigger issue is do we grow at higher elevations or not that's what's going to drive electrical usage and there is just no practical way to generate electricity on our own pretty for small sites for the enormous amount of power it costs to generate to pump water uphill thank you i think that's a very relevant piece of information and in the right context because we all know we're the biggest custom of my electric and we're probably going to continue to be a customer of whoever is our electric company thank you between waste water and water department it's a big bill  on the next item is a fifty thousand dollar increase in water meter inventory we have thirty six thousand meters we're trying to be catch up on our replacement schedule they only have a limited life transponders have a limited life so in order to accurately charge for meters have to change them on a routine basis and so based on the schedule we have to catch up you know we could use a little bit more this is i think eventually once we catch up we'll get into more of a and even plan the same number every year you know that kind of thing but we're still behind and it's important to note that when meters get old they spin freely and they read low so that's something i would emphasise is old meters we are not charging what we should be so it's important to get them are placed in a timely basis otherwise people are basically getting water for extra cheap because we're not charging them enough that's their failure only last fifteen thank you know thank you so how many meters have you replace this year i'm sure the fiscal officer can come down and talk to you about thousand year to date expense of one sixty two so you still have forty nine almost fifty percent of your budget left ok i believe you year members questions asked any questions on stores inventory expense or director if you could buy the explanation there we have a we have a warehouse that we operate under the fiscal division all the pieces and parts are all for the mostly for the field operations division so this is where we store and keep an essentially treated sort of like a almost like a business warehouse when the guys have to come in and they need copper pipe or various materials they sign it out and check it out for the job it's tracked it's inventory it's accounted for so to keep a slightly higher amount of pieces and parts in there so the crews aren't waiting on things this is these are things that they will eventually be used so having a little more you know your buy this year you buy it next year but the idea is to have enough that the crews are not being held up by lack of a couple small pieces that they can keep working efficiently and not have to put off jobs because you know there isn't you know quite enough of one basic material or another but it's revolving stocks that are really the same thing all the time so based on that analysis a little bit more will you know keep up the stores remembers questions them and i do why you've been covered so much more this year than last you know i don't know the details but i'm guessing that there was a bunch of extra stuff from the year before and as they drew it down they ran out and bought more because that's that's how that operation works again it's a it's a i mean just imagine as as our in house hardware store that we stock up and use as we need it a lot of these are driven by customer needs emergency brakes etc etc so you you drive as you need it and because they're not they tend not to be planned maintenance they tend to be emergency response maintenance it's sort of at the the statistics  of breaks and customer issues services this is what we pay to honolulu for processing of our bills so as per the contract that you saw on policy in our governmental affairs this is our contract with them and we pay what the contract  ok any questions members it does bring up the question of what are the ongoing up or new expense increases for the new system told us it's going to cost one two and a half million dollars for the system to set up what it's going to cost us on an ongoing basis not not including the current employees but how many additional employees you need to run it and and what are the ongoing maintenance and support costs for the system my staff has told me about one hundred thousand a year and probably one one  cities so probably you know assuming so probably a couple hundred thousand dollars a year so that will be offset by the savings were more than offset by the savings he had told that the ten year you're looking at from a ten year cost per year standpoint going on our own looks like it is a even if it was apples and apples it would be better to go on our own because it's better apples if we do it our own it's even more than that questions members hundred sixteen you see eighty five hundred dollar expansion request for annual fees of some of our key engineering software this is our g i s software our hydraulic computer modeling software  so they are just annual license renewals so those are n ual why are they not already covered in the base of the initial eight thousand you were budgeted this year because they go up over time think the c so the from eight thousand to synergy is new so that's seven thousand of it and then the g i s software went up fifteen hundred ok so the synergy is not right the synergy is the hydraulic modeling software so that's that's a new cost of seven thousand dollars and the other one's an increased cost of fifteen  which is you know that software has been around so it must be an increase it's not a it's not a new software is clearly an increase if you get back to us i'm not sure why it's doubling and maybe it's because the software is no longer supported you have to go to a third party supporters something and i don't know it just seems a little odd that if you have to have a doubling of the support mr chang our engineering program manager knows and he's coming up ok as he wants his turn also annual maintenance church so we just made it more clear so you know where where would we find that similar charge on last year's budget fourteen i guess i believe it came the challenges that we have with doing this year is water budget is because we we allowed mr taylor to talk us into taking the cuts all out of electricity so we have over one hundred lines and i  lot about what we're at and this is not for you mr chang didn't have any questions for mr chang i don't need mr thank you thank you mr chang interesting i didn't get to vote anyway we allowed you to talk us into it so just to be quick to be clear and fair enough you know there's i don't know what there is more than one hundred of these line items there's only two programs the programs are too big to manage the line items in my view are too small to manage what we do just so everyone knows how we're i think we're being fiscally responsible we group all of these sub object codes you're going through into about thirty groupings the groupings are assistant fiscal officer graphs for us every month in these year early projected versus actuals of the groupings and it's these that we have the managers try to track not the individual line items there are so many things more than i can count that for example we're thinking that we're going to do something on overtime so there's premium pay but something comes up and we hire an outside contractor so that money shifts from a premium essentially what i'm doing is trying to translate from our groupings which all tracked pretty close to these items which fluctuate massively i you know frankly i think we get through budget a lot faster if the whole county would ship shift to my method but we probably good budget in two days good luck but it is very difficult to answer these questions because running the utility we were basically just averaging what's happened the last couple of years but then shifting it due to what's happening today again trying to keep these groupings which are going out the programs are much much tighter than that but keep each one of these on track so i realize that some of the ifas expenditures versus budget are way off but the groupings for deliverables are actually really close but you don't see those so that's i just want the counsel of the public to be clear that just because some of these line items are widely varying we are trying to manage pretty close to and unicorns i'm not going let you get away with it but just to put it in perspective the electricity in we we took the cut out of electricity last year and what we adopted  was a million dollars less then you proposed and if we take the usage thus far and extend and extend it to the the school year year end the appropriation that was adopted was fifteen point almost fifteen point nine million and what it looks like you're going to end up using is twelve point seven and twelve point eight million so we're about three point one million dollars under the projected usage and four point two million dollars under what what you had requested last year so you know again i would just point out that it's been a rainy winter and if we've seen the last of the rain up country we could end up just making it so i'm glad you asked that because one of the things i was going to ask you for if you could go back and plot when you had the dry times and what your what your expenses were for those months because  you know you use upcountry as a whipping post a little more often than some of us are comfortable with i don't mean to use it as a whipping post it is really i think you kind of enjoy it i don't i don't i just it's it's this single area where the variations are just really large between whether rains or whether it doesn't it changes costs millions of dollars the other areas because they're either like west maui groundwater is very constant and the other areas have very west my surface water is very constant centrum on the surface water is just a small portion so that is just our one area because it's so prevailing on the surface water that it just changes the whole dynamic of the costs whether or not it's raining a lot there because it shifts from surface water to the groundwater just overnight you know we have the mechanics of i'm not sure that we have a great understanding of the cost you know the changes in c us what we could do is we can certainly graph and i think we probably have this data the amount we're pumping versus costs but the rainfall is in areas that are not necessarily where we are you know the rainfall down in in the he ends up getting to our plant so it's the rainfall in the watershed areas that affects whether or not we need but not the rainfall at our sites so we we could probably put something together with you know ditch flow vs electricity use or something like that but it wouldn't really be rainfall because it's it's the the watershed areas is huge no we understand that and i would appreciate whatever you can put together for us because it's you know when and when there is rainfall for a good portion of the you know generally happens for a good portion of the year and we've got like a boy back up and running so we've got a significant amount of upcountry water that is provided by gravity flow and it's only when the when it gets dry that it gets pumped whereas central maui as you said has very little surface water so we're pumping that water on to the basin so maybe i don't know if you have the ability  to to separate the electrical charges by by district but that might help us understand too and i'd like to ask for that for you know for the last five years or so if you can graph what those expenses top of the page mister director sixteen thousand five hundred dollars expansion request for a one time appropriation to replace obsolete auto ca all of our internal blueprint based records up to date members questions for the director i think that's pretty straightforward a question on you know the grant changes so let me just back up a little bit and if you need more information i'll bring on staff who is on the grants review committee we have i think over the last few years fundamentally changed how we deal with watershed gr the first thing was philosophical ideological we recognize that the watershed groups the watershed partnerships do a lot of good for the community they the water healthy watersheds protect ocean water quality for the runoff they provide to scenic vistas and things through through you know people hiking and their use of nature but that's not why we funded the department of water supply should be funding it because that healthy watersheds grab more of the water and get it into our systems so we've shifted a little and said our role of funding watersheds should be focused on practices which save and increase water that goes to the department of water supply systems so that doesn't mean that the rest of the work they're doing isn't valid but our point is that should be funded probably from general fund we should fund them based on the same would be fun preventative maintenance is this something that helps our core mission so we've shifted to try to and you've heard a number of the water shed testifiers mentioned specifically that what they do they're focusing these grants on helping us do our mission so that's one of the things that we're trying to get them to do also we've initiated a very formal grant processing methodology so i just want to read a couple key lines from our requests for proposals for grants so because these are really the keys that we're looking for support initiatives to reduce or eradicate threats to our sources implement the existing watershed management plans address specific threats and problems to result in quantifiable improvement science based projects to measure things implement measures to to prevent degradation of watersheds practical cost effective etc our criteria for judging how to distribute the grounds were the following some some breakdowns of how we distributed points degree to which the public this would help the public drinking water supply twenty five points out of  hundred cost to benefit ratio projects that have the most bang for the buck twenty five points twenty five percent the ability to administer our grants meaning their ability to administer the grants based on our management criteria twenty points capacity to complete the project in a timely manner fifteen points prior performance ten points and quality incompleteness of the application package five points so based on those criteria that evaluation process we evaluated the grant proposals within our rough budget number of trying to keep it at around one point nine million dollars and awarded the grants based on those criteria so it wasn't random from the sense that we didn't say well we like you we don't like you we have these criteria we really true nd how we do this for a very specific purpose if there's more questions than on the specifics what's in there and what isn't i'll need to bring staff down i was not on the committee but that's in the big picture what we're trying to do focus on how they help us accomplish our goals and focus on that deliverables and that verification that this money goes to those deliverable questions you have on  this thank you and thank you for being here so i happy to hear opening comments from director taylor as in the criteria because that was one of my top questions how the amounts were determined  per each grant and i guess you have that criteria so my next question is if there's a way for us to see how that create here how these different groups matched up in that criteria  concern right now is definitely the decreases overall you know across the board of course you know i'm going to highlight west maui stuff especially poor kukui the newly created  focuses primarily in that area has been cut so i don't know how that criteria was reached you know where that fell into play when that decrease heard  kukui i see the change from last fiscal year what the ground committee recommended for fiscal year fifteen was two hundred twenty five thousand so in fact what they recommended for this year was a twenty five thousand dollars cut  i believe that most of the pertains to not having the full cost of payroll on the back of the county should it be hundred percent but a portion to be more consistent with the other grounds to the watch of partnerships  the redistributing between the partnerships based on the acreage they cover and the number of staff that they maintain to do that so more cost effective management of the area but that answer a question for so you're saying yeah so it was started at two hundred and i guess i increased it to if i added that fifty so i think they got a total of two fifty last year and now you folks are dropping it down to two hundred my understanding is that big grand committee last year awarded the contract that they were awarded was for two twenty five out of the two fifty that  council appropriated so the ground committed this year lowered it by twenty five thousand to two hundred report reflects that there is twenty five thousand dollars left in the appropriation that we provided last year so what she's relating is correct they've looks like they've gotten the and so you're the grants committee has decided that twenty five thousand should be cut because it's not our coolie honor to pay their payroll is a no no just that the county should pay one hundred percent of payroll for any of that what typically the portion of payroll that the county covered is any any thing between ten and fifty percent but not hundred percent payroll that was a recommendation from the ground committee both the previous year and this morning was that they have a certain amount of their own staff a certain amount of county funded staff so when you say a hundred percent payroll are you suggesting that that's just for a is for this the services they do perhaps some pair i'm not sure but i know they get so i don't it's you know it's the first time i'm hearing that it's about payroll and you know i my the dollars were strictly for the watershed protection activities of this entity you know not paying for the bodies per se but for the work that the people do to allocated to the county grant so the recommendation from the ground committee it was to cut that to about twenty five percent instead of one hundred there are additional staff for those three positions committed and feel that hundred fifty thousand countywide has been used as additional needs come out open the year whether it's new projects new threats or threats that were became more significant then known some of that fifty new native plant deceases as those threats come up that's been typically used from the general kind of white fund to which groups in particular  committee had some additional funds from the general kind of point i didn't like it when it appears that the countywide fund we set aside two hundred thousand dollars for last year if it's been fifty thousand of that for the physically or fifteen it was for heart cos it propagation and for this fiscal year we're planning to use some portion of that for a the policy setters typically was the first to be so if we were to say you know what hundred percent payroll is fine with us is that something that the grants committee would would then those that i just would like to come up figure out how they came up with the fact that it went from one hundred percent funding for personnel or payroll to twenty five percent unless i misunderstood what you said but that's not sound like she said it went from hundred percent to twenty five percent thank you very much well mayor as the director indicated we really do try to make sure question with respect to who couey is a question of balance and an evaluation of the committee receives i believe it's over four hundred thousand dollars from the large program which is a state funded program and i believe they still get when you say one hundred or one hundred sixty five thousand dollars from the land owner which is my land kind of a company they did make a number of changes in budget i believe they canceled a vehicle purchase they did a number of things but in the interest of trying to balance the water utilities expenditures and support with the other sources of funding and make sure we get the maximum benefit there wasn't a cut it was simply a question of what is the proper allocation to make sure we're getting the maximum benefit we can from the program overall and it really was a committee decision we try and balance these things we score them or try to be as objective as we can and this is the way it came out it wasn't view disick cut it was viewed as an appropriate evaluation in the public's interest of the amount of money without a spend for the value contributed for this watershed so that sounds like then it instead of the county paying a still not clear as to whether we're paying twenty five percent or seventy five percent of the barrel last year the committee did come to the conclusion that twenty five percent given the balance of other funding was the appropriate limit on our share of personal expenditures yes ok so the other funds are paying the rest the rest spread out however many they are but we're not the program isn't being cut correct in their overall amount so somebody else increasing yes the seventy five percent that watershed partnerships are in effect nonprofit businesses on their own and they can shift sources of funding sources of revenue to match their expenditures and that's exactly what happened ok so i guess at least my concern and it sounds like ms cochran's concern is that they're the fund that the amount of money that they're cut the fifty thousand dollars here something else don't get me wrong these watership partnerships do good work and a lot of that is promoting biological diversity pressure varying endangered species including animals and that sort of thing that her necessarily in the direct line of sight of the water department as a public utility so they have other objectives other funding and other activities that appropriately have funding other than the water department we have for example in the canadian limitation on overhead expenditures other source sources of funds don't have that same limitation for example we won't pay twenty or twenty five percent overhead burden we don't think that's appropriate using the county's money we have much more severe limitations on the amount of overhead  paperwork processing and that sort of thing that we will allow and it's really an interest to trying to make our program as effective as we can thank you chair can i make a request of the the committee or at least the thousand dollars cut from the county because we got it more from nars or whatever ok things it's by so thank you very much joe i'd like to offer some information that i think might be helpful you know the nonprofit sector has been required to do what we call cost a location plans and this is the reason because when you go to the various grantees they none of them and county would be unusual if we said ok we're willing to pay all the salaries most grantees are not what they want to pay is that the direct proportion that they get the benefit from so if they had say two grants one from us and one from nature whoever and they would say ok we want to appear will break down as to how much actual time your people spend on doing our work and doing the county's work and if we say if we can prove the nonprofit can prove that they do fifty percent well then that agency is willing to pay fifty percent they don't want to pay one hundred percent or even sixty percent and so every nonprofit has to work on a cost allocation plan to show how costs are charged to various grants and this becomes very important so what i'm hearing is this grants committee apparently looked at the various grants that the water should partnership had and said ok you're spending seventy five percent of your time on county requirements and twenty five percent on something else so we're going to reduce the amount from seventy five to twenty five i think the error here is maybe communication that you know we didn't give them the message and say ok we're going to spend you know we really need to pay for the hundred percent but this is not unusual in the nonprofit sector and it's becoming more the rule that you have to have it cost allocation that is approved in order to charge the various grants for what you charge them and you have to have the documentation one of the things i heard when she first started was well we didn't want to or we receive grants i mean they receive grants like to handle rare species whereas our work of course is we're trying to watch out for the invasive species so we're more concerned about stopping the growing of five or of kalak you're eating the stuff or whatever it is we're but we are less willing to pay and we will somebody else is willing to pay for us to make sure that we don't trample on the name is a whatever it is that we're trying to birds or we're trying to protect and so i think there's is a very complicated question but what we might want to see is a cost allocation plan so that we know what we're supposed to pay for and that should exist department's efforts of concentration although watershed is a major priority some of the work that's been done is not in line can we say there are specific projects that are less important although they go hand in hand rare species protection may not be the focus of the war department but it goes hand in hand with maintaining intact made ec system so just trying to get a better breakdown of the type of area and more direct or indirect impact that that would have on our customer base so if you were to deduct the twenty five thousand that was appropriated by counsel you know if it's every every bit of work for the watershed my understanding is  for future water resources and for the present so whether or not it's collecting the super day share or the transpiration of the root system or what have you we benefit today and we benefit tomorrow and it's all about protecting the water shit so where do you take this twenty five  and if not for the amount that we've actually put aside for in particular this quickly my understanding from the grand previous committee recommendation wasn't specifically taken a certain amount that represented work on rare species protection and if it was more to make it in line with the portion of payroll that's covered for the other what are set partnerships  has some pretty specific requirements such up to three point three six in the water department has really taken to heart the root the especially three point three six point zero seven zero which talks about  the public purpose is to be serves the objectives intended activities and services to be performed you know reasonable inus of personnel and compensation and costs efficiency effectiveness you know they the i mean they have a grant review committee that's really looking at those different items and so that you know it we kind of we want to con ability of you know making sure that the gran o you know understand that yes there are there may be some differences in the mount of money that's allocated versus what's been granted to the organization but the intent is there is really to and it sure has a couple of questions one of the one of the first questions i had was grant it sounds to me like the grand committee plied the same  evaluation criteria to each of the watershed partnerships i see some went up and some went down some is it correct for the committee to assume that you applied the same criteria to each of the organizations quite ok thank you and i and members in listening to even paul's explanations i think it is appropriate for them to focus watershed monies on things that specifically protect the watershed and protect the water resources so just to remind you that if that's the way that if that's the direction that they're heading it probably makes some sense but as we go through the budgeting process if there are other tasks that these organizations are undertaking that are not those projects can be funded through other means and guys are all familiar with what those means are i would like to ask if you had any models that you generated the twenty five percent labor allocation from because i know we we have a lot of grants that we give out and a lot and a good portion of the grants are a very large of out of labor cost so if we were to limit it limit the counties expenditures to twenty five percent of labor i think that would be a real problem for a lot of the organizations that we're funding used for more than twenty five percent of their total payroll or more than twenty five percent of the county funds or no more than twenty five percent of the county funds can be used for people in the former that out of the payroll total costs for each grant the pay the payroll portion shouldn't be hundred percent covered by county funds so somewhere in the order of twenty five percent less that dishonored portion according to the grant committing ok so it's twenty five percent of the total payroll twenty five percent of the three that are specific grant right ok member mr couch thank you mr chair so i understand the whole twenty five percent of the payroll that's fine but let's just say we said ok we would like to give two hundred fifty thousand to this let's just which is what we had in the budget for last year so you take the twenty five percent which you figured out was twenty five thousand dollars i guess and say that goes to payroll so there's the seventy five thousand dollars of payroll that's left over to get paid by somebody else so that twenty five thousand dollars they could we still want to allow them to have two hundred fifty thousand dollars so that twenty five thousand dollars could be used for equipment for services that they're doing to help protect the watershed but instead you're just pulling twenty five thousand out or or through the process you're saying that that they're not doing two hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of work for the specifically for the water department mission no i don't believe that there was a specific twenty five thousand dollars that translate reducing payroll it's these these are all but director mentioned earlier there are multiple criteria this was one of them i think the one that weighed most heavily not putting that none of their what shots had one hundred percent of their  payroll assigned to that county comes other considerations were a fair distribution of grant money for equipment so not anything it would be justified by  right you couldn't find another twenty five thousand dollars worth of work that they could do that would fit under your criteria i'm just concerned that there's twenty five thousand dollars out there that we said that they should be able there's a lot of work to be done and i would rather then go ahead and it's either expand the scope or do something else the watershed protection is the number one thing that we want to have happen with this money we don't want to go anywhere else and we don't want them to be able to spend it as much as they can on that and it sounds like you're saying they can't spend two hundred you know no i think i think in fact most of that was a push up could spend more if there was more we're trying both to make sure that that ground funds are evenly distributed again based on the size of prize area the staff the quality of work they do and also  keep us somewhat consistent funding levels rather so we know that this is going to be something we can they can expect and that we know it's an appropriate level of funding so it's more that solid  consistent over the years this was the same amount that we granted for fiscal year fifteen ok i just see a disconnect there and i well the disconnect the way i kind of look at this is that there's not really a disconnect the department has a responsibility to spend the money in a way that is appropriate for the use of water revenues so to my earlier point i think they've done that three through the watershed areas have gone up and three have gone down right so there they're trying to balance it in a way that is fair to all three and i don't think that's ever been done before so i think that's probably a very appropriate thing to do at this time if and to my earlier point if there are out of water and we can't transfer it to so there's a disconnect in amounts this year but that that should should even itself out over time i would think us and what they're going to spend with you know a certain amount of money either allocated to them or how much they think they're going to be needing to do the the project that we've proposed and supposing  again i know i didn't sit on the committee and i don't know but the the committee received an application from the grantees and reviewed there that application right so if that application stated this is what they were going to do in this was the possibilities and you know based on the criteria certain things were allowed will you know number of percentages or whatever it was then that application was funded based on i mean you know so that based on their application not necessarily based on the available funding but yeah i mean it could have been done a different way but that's i think i'm pretty sure that's the way it happened was so in essence they said we're going to this much work for two hundred twenty five thousand whatever and the grant committee said well that work we're only going to fund this much because the rest is payroll as opposed to they're saying give us two hundred  so thank you very much terry i think that there's a i think we probably didn't understand fully what that grand committee was going to do but i think you did what was responsible first of all you set of criteria and then you played it across the board to everybody and i think our misunderstanding was a reset you're going to get to fifty going to get to fifty and maybe we didn't communicate well sometimes you know that people just go along doing their thing you know the full senate about their attention but i think that this is why i keep talking about grant and i grant the vision and why we need to have people who do these things because they become specialist and can apply criteria across the board in handle all of this interviewing in assigning points and deciding you know developing contracts and read quick wire means for granted he's in monitoring you know we're not specialists many of us in these areas it's hard to monitor all of these grants and make sure that everybody is being treated fairly but you know i i think that what happened although i understand our frustration in wanting to be sure that they got the amount of money we gave them i understand what happened and i think it's very responsible if everybody it gives a grant was able to do what you're doing which is setting the criteria valuating proposals and then following up i think that we have a lot less with grants but you know it takes personnel and it takes people that have the time and the skills to do all of this so i that mr bonds chime in and then mr vice just one caviar to that is that that if there are certain criteria that we've made the grantee aware of that prior to them producing the application if we didn't then that can become an issue on our management side of things where you know the irish have to be very specific and the grand negotiation is another whole process yeah because you know they've got to understand what the parameters  voices committee but just to see how how the criteria technically works and how would a apply do these different organizations also is the leveraging taken into consideration like how much money do these different entities leverage off of our county dollars yes although every year that isn't known so it's an estimate from the applicant to what they think is going to be available in matching funds from other sources and so you're the higher perhaps possibl going to go there's a better chance of these guys to get better bang for our county books and others and so we'll give them a little more perhaps shoot for that leverage as well in case for the new grant that we have this year proposed for seventy five thousand there's no former history of of leverage so we can't really apply that criteria but you know if we know that there's gonna be a hardship to find matching sources or if there's a good consistent other source of funding would consider that and in reference to the new one how was that determined to be created in the amount just amount of  are is back he must have been just to let you all know if you want to keep moving we've got a lot more work to get done this afternoon and i i think this is a discussion we can continue as we get into decision making by that time mr crozier can can share his concerns are with us we can get you know whatever details you would like to see from the you know the the grant side of things but i think i'm at the point where we need to put things in writing if you have further questions and we need to keep moving water users are supplied by west so that's a nice nice number and i think do protection is called for in that area and secondly new if you could start with the view at the top of page nineteen dash twenty one i would have to double check on that if that's a consistent number not it seems a little high but there may be some unique criteria to water department computers than the fifteen thousand dollars computer equipment laptop for hannah fifteen thousand dollars that's the freight to get it there fiscal officer is coming down i'm guessing it has something to do with the these are laptops for the meter reader so it probably has something to do with the meter reading equipment but she can explain good afternoon  dave is correct this is the laptops that the meter readers use to go out and read all the meters are very heavy duty laptops are not like a typical little and we get him you know and budget him and i think we have three or four already ones on now and then we have three here and we're going to have one for honda to read their meters alls so it's more than just a laptop it's a it's  know somebody's going to pay for you and i yes i am a little concerned about that i mean you can go through like i said fifty i did the math right regular spend we're not going to go look for something that's fifteen thousand dollars they tend to use the same models that work for that purpose and you know maybe the budgets u i i don't think we've talked about this cost or we haven't purchased one in a while so we'll purchase that that same type and maybe it will be less  so unfortunately with the three hundred dollar ones aren't necessarily ones that would want to use on a regular basis or the capacity that we need them for and i did double check but the   a new reading system that you can use a phone application in everything so this is just a test and we'll pick i forget how many twenty sites or thirty and set up and see how this goes for possibly future the read center upgrade is to increase to upgrade our reading system for our program the meter reading program the range your do and then also we can go and do profiles of meters so they take it over and then we can pull off the data that people use daily hourly or by you know minutes you know we can get that data from him with this handheld we do have i think about four currently four or five and we want to get one just to stay on the jeep our meter readers use it jeeps daily to go out and read and this is to replace an old vehicle ten years old i think it has over one hundred thousand miles on it i have a picture of it somewhere h and you know the chair earlier sent out a request for pictures of all motor vehicles that are schedule for replacement it's an old blazer and usually we replace them with jeep seem to work the best for the readers they still have to go off road on a few places and with their meter reading equipment these large laptops they're not small they're heavy duty laptops that have to go with them you know when they read meters so that's replacement for that and then this is our computers we talk to m i a s we look at how many computers will need to be changed and then we budget for some if we don't spend it if we don't need it we do not buy it we're very frugal and as dave knows we do not spend money if we don't have to share that with us yeah doors are good for like five times as many opens and closes as regular cars because these meter readers get in and out so much that's i guess an example of how detailed some of our staff get into why it is not something else because i really have great faith in the movie to analyze it to that level of hey we've been rich we've been replacing hinges too often so let's get a car that that is more appropriate for so i have great faith that the people that make these determinations of what to buy are really looking at every it's like twenty two hundred versus five thousand is not the software yet it's basically they have a lot higher grade programs that they need to run on their computers and we do q thank you  questions thank you check says it says a jeep wrangler you're talking about for white expenses whichever one of you wants to explain the overhead charges and take a whack at it so mr chair based on the  full cost allocation plan that was produced last year the percentage of administrative overhead costs charged to the water department is forty six point one seven percent based on their salaries and we we are actually the lowest administrative overhead of any of the special funds sewers fifty five point forty seven highways sixty three point eight solid weeks is eighty one point eighty four and gulf is one hundred thirty two point five one percent for your information as we look at these that full cost allocation plan was  d and managed by the finance department the information is available on our internet and they can send the link to your staff and i believe was fully transmitted to the council for the review of those items functions and what services were provided to other programs in the cost allocation plan was appropriately assigned to the  that was that calculation was based on some percentage and provided into this to this cost allocation plan and then we take that percentage and apply it to you know the criteria that they set which is the salaries and wages and that's how we get to that total amount of administrate overhead to be charged to the special funds and the rest of those of the fica employee union trust fund retirement system and post employment benefits would all be directly tied to labor but i don't quite understand why the other would be tied to labor as opposed to an allocation of the actual cost i guess that the when developing the cost allocation plan to to set a rate they're using you know they based it on some criteria and the criteria they gave us to calculate that is salaries and wages once that criteria was set then you know we can just apply that rate to any changes there they when they did set the rate it was based on actual expenditures i think was from fiscal year two thousand and twelve one of the differences and why the cost allocation for the water department was so significantly different last year than in previous years was because the last time the full cost allocation plan was done was leave back in the ninety's when the water department was still semi autonomous this cost allocation plan on a more regular basis so that we can have better create tyria and better information and be more used to figuring out how to assign that overhead cost  it today but you know just in case you know so they they know ok they have you know one corporation counsel assigned to water department constantly they also have you know certain assignments or different things like that charge you know they can figure out you know an approximate cost based on that and then that's where we apply it to the rate that was given to us it was again based on  there could be other things like total budget or number of personnel in in the cost allocation in the study that you'll see that each i think i think i believe for personnel it was it was actually the number of employees that the department has not necessarily the salaries but the rate itself is based on the salaries so for the water department the total account total salaries is around thirteen little over thirteen million dollars and so the proposed overhead is about six million dollars members questions as i said earlier the just the increase in the overhead all the cation wipes out the entire rate increase we established last year so  fact the department got no additional revenue even though the rates went up so that it may be appropriate i don't know how many how many other places this matrix consulting group has visited do you know how many other well i guess the question is for the director have you any idea what other water departments overhead charges or lower i do not and we we frankly fee treat this as a fixed cost that comes through the budget office from the finance department and because we're not allowed to go out to requests for proposals for yeah but i'd look forward to further discussion on this item maybe it should be an item in the budget and finance committee for further review it is definitely a concern for me too in different arenas and something for furth yeah for this upcoming year we're generating one point nine million new revenues and we're giving up an additional one point three million and over to overhead charge so once again they're getting a net net increase of six hundred thousand dollars or thereabouts anyway thank you very much and we'll see you in a little bit spending somewhere in the two hundred thousand dollars range ok so it's worth noting that this is what we've been using for the item that's been talked about what a resource is this twelve and a half million mainline improvements so we have a current ordinance that has to pay those back this is the line item for that so if that program is expanded that's this is really would be replaced by that program if it if it is are created right to ask you to explain any of the fringe benefit increases i'm sure those are just given to you in fact everything on page one hundred twenty three and twenty four other than that main line are really just fixed cost we get from the finance department that we we allocate right members if you would like to take a look at the cost study this is it i'll leave it right here for yes i do it he did bring up another question i have on this whole cost allocation does that include the rent for your space on the fifth floor if you don't have to pay for rent for the space on the floor why should he have to pay for other services from other places are understanding it would be hard to not pay rent because the board of water supply bought it they contributed to the construction right from the beginning so sort of on the books it's still something we thought we don't pay rent for that ok i was just trying to see if we you know if if we don't charge if but if that's your then we should charge you rent for for the floor space we we the board of water supply bought it we pay as you saw earlier this morning we pay our share of the electric bill for this building so essentially we are paying ok moving to the it counts under the water operations program director if you could run this through that please i think we're on page one nine hundred thirty eight is i correct no nineteen twenty five twenty five yes we're not i don't believe we're asking for any peas in the operations account for the operations program so i don't think there's any changes other than you know collective bargaining creases and those kind of things ok there's no changes on nine hundred thirty nine hi there well there's the increase for gas deal diesel and oil and i think the budget director talked about his analysis and how he adjusted those earlier today and i would note here that under diesel we have one hundred sixty thousand dollars and  must be buying it out of a different account there's no draw down on the account at this point i think they're draining the gasoline diesel oil first so looks like there's still still enough in the oh i'm sorry mr share my understanding is the difference is that was used for that accounts for a portable generator diesel versus trucks and so we didn't use it so we didn't need the portable generators that's why there hasn't been a draw down ok dollars to fund completion of the laboratory information management system so what this is is another enterprise software set solution that runs on servers that allows our water quality laboratory data to be entered shared automatic reports written runs on the internet so anyone in our department anywhere can access it it's part of water quality tracking compliance report writing for department of health regulatory requirements etc so it's an integrated solution that moves us to the twenty first century and gets away from the  putting together all the data for various reports for regulatory agencies and this is something that we implemented when i was in wastewater we did something similar to get away from the massive amount of pages and pages that all of sudden that by hand have to be coordinated for various reports and regulatory compliance things so we did it you know previously in department of environment amount of environmental management and it's a huge efficiency timesaver once you get up and running members questions on that i don't i would appreciate if you would provide us an update on your own analysis of what you think you're going to end up using this year so what you forecast for next year this year have with me what i noted earlier is you know we track projected versus actual and so this update is as of just about ten days ago so it's a little it's one month updated from i think  the data you have and we are tracking i don't know if anyone can see this but we're talking just a little bit below expected so we're coming to a dry time if it rains once more in the reservoirs are full as of you know this morning we may track right on this if it gets a little drier we may get a little closer but what this is showing me is that we're about right with our electricity budget i mean we don't have a huge gap  so it's looking like we should make it through the year you know if it gets really really dry you never know but it seems that we're budgeting about right for electricity yesterday because we waited till we got the last report that included march that he was probably last day of march we show nine nine million five sixty eight assistant fiscal officer put the numbers together system chair you might want to know that we also propose the budget amendment that will be taking a fair amount of money out of this particular line item as well we have to have that budget amendment to accommodate the change to some of our debt service and overhead charges for the current year it let's not take it out of this line item right to get out of this this i remember it was coming out of electricity i don't know if it was this on or if we took it out of my five three six zero four i know it's coming out of electricity and i do believe that this year  in for this particular index code we're looking at eight million in actual eight point two million in actual charges the reason that we have to budget a little bit extra there is because it's not as though we can change rates midstream and ensure that we're going to have sufficient revenue to add more to this line item so we have a tendency to budget a little extra in electricity to accommodate that well as you'll recall we were talked into taking taking all the budget cuts for water out of the electricity line after doing that it still appears that you're only using sixty five percent or sixty percent of what was budgeted as opposed to getting to the point of seventy five percent by this time of the year anyway i would appreciate if you would provide us with your estimate of what the usage will be for the upcoming budget year based on your usage this year and i'm sure you'll give us a little bit of a cushion but i mean just looking and plotting out this graph to the end it looks like we're going to be just around twelve million dollars at the end of the year just by you know plotting this out it's a little drier and it looks like it's going to hit about twelve million dollars by june thirtieth and that would be my eyeball prediction of just extrapolating the next three that are our projection of us twelve seven so you're under ours but at twelve seven three point one million dollars under what was budgeted and so if if we come in at twelve the new year three point eight million under budget oh i think i think we might be we've got two big electrical budgets that are different in tax codes one for the pumps and ones for the treatment plants the pump systems are budgeted looks like from this graph a little over twelve million and the treatment plants a little over three million so the total electric budget for operations is about fifteen and those are in two different index codes for pump systems versus treatment plants so i'm not sure where we got both of them ok in one index code is nine five three four seven one of the other was nine five three six zero four right and share the reason that the nine five three six zero four actual number is a bit low is because one of our treatment plants has been offline for about six months well you can provide us that what that reduction would account for and you can add that to your calculation ok moving in on the top of the page nineteen forty two you have twenty thousand dollars for machinery and equipment that is taking about ninety nine percent left and their maintenance pumps six one four four you've got ninety almost ninety three percent of that left anticipate using that i get you know i showed you earlier how we lump these and all the the the totals are about right you know we're we're trying to get you to lump them because we fell for it last year and the chair this year is probably not going to be quite as flexible as i was last year so i'm just helping you prepare we'll be prepared and i just want to say that  have our operation works in such a way and that we do what we can with our own staff but we get similar services from outsourced stuff meaning that if we can't do something we'll hire contractors so we may be planning to do something with our own staff but due to circumstances maybe it's a little bit too big a job or for some reason we don't quite have the technical skills and we outsource it or vice versa so if we're doing it ourselves you're going to see us pull money from our air count or premium pay you know we're going to rent equipment we're going to buy materials etc but if we outsource it it just goes out in one lump as repair and maintenance so it's very difficult for us to separate what we're going to do versus what we're going to outsource a year and you know a year before because we don't know so we we try to look at previous full year to look at what we've done but there is this uncertainty of we don't know how we're going to do the work whether it's with our own forces or external or outsourced sources so it's very difficult for us to you by lumping them together we can balance it but by separating them it's really hard to know which way we're going to get the work done so i just want to explain that which is why it's very difficult for us to know where to put that money well i understand your dilemma but at the same time part of this process is putting numbers down and i mean to have it work with them and  so we're we're trying to make sense of the numbers that you that you've had from last year and helping us understand what changes need to be mean and i would just add mr chair we definitely try to give our best our best analysis however i would say that we put these numbers together in a sense that this was intended to be a program budget so although we tried to give a good indication of what we expected we didn't sharpen our pencils too much because we felt that look if one's high in the other is low we're allowed to balance them we didn't build this budget anticipating locking in index codes and i just want to say that if that's the council's intention we would be concerned about locking in these indexes going on as we did not talk together that way and we're not talking about locking in it's just that we need to understand what your needs are and when you haven't spent anything on various lin how do we know where you're going to need to spend it next year and you've got another two hundred twenty thousand dollars it's ninety nine percent available at the bottom of page one hundred forty three so we're just trying to get ourselves to a point where we understand what you're what you're asking for we certainly know we're not easy i think the utility groups aren't easy for you folks because last year a lot of things may  maybe this year hardly anything broken next year a lot of things break again because a lot of this money is reactive it balances over sort of the medium term but in any one year there could be a spike it's not planned work it's unplanned work so we definitely do the best we can and we understand the concern of the council i i don't know that we're going to be able to nail down repairers which are driven by basically emergency calls we'll do the best we can we just point out that based on this budget even though we we cut things from last year's budget and you and the entire rate increase went off and in and  overhead charges you still ended up with sixteen million dollar carry over savings so that's why we're trying to get a little bit more of a handle on what exactly it is you need to spend i think it's appropriate that we do so members any further questions on these accounts sigesmund i don't see i see that the rest of your eyes and i don't see any questions and staff do we need to go through any other areas before we move to this budget financed me to a please come back to order members we have just one more page to do in the details before we move to rates and fees and that's the last page of the last two thank you mr chair so first there's a number of vehicles that are part of our normal replacement of high mileage vehicles a riding lawnmower  you authorized in last year's budget both of those are within the hiring process they should be hired you know early in f y sixteen next several months and this will have a vehicle for them that's the expansion ok and you don't have another vehicle that they could use there's always there are always vehicles for people to use how we look at vehicles is there have to be we have our own i think us and maybe police are the ones that have our own repair facilities so we need enough vehicles so that when vehicles are off the road they're loners and the important thing i look at that is hard to get data on is when are people not able to do their job because there's no vehicle for them most of the people who are using vehicles report to a base yard where there's very little work for them to do their job is to get in a vehicle with their tools and go somewhere else to well sites to piper parasites so when people who should be doing work on their own are now riding together because there's not enough vehicles that to me is when we start we sting resources and we're paying people to be passengers in trucks that is incredibly difficult to quantify and it's anecdotally that i looked into this to try to get to the bottom of do we have enough  yes so my answer to chair white's question is yes there's certainly a vehicle they could use and we could it would just take it out of the sort of loaner fleet or take out of someone else so what my goal is is to keep people working in their trades not be passengers in vehicles or sort of tag along with somebody else when they really should be doing work on their own so i prefer to have enough vehicles to make sure that no one is stuck at the base yard when they should be out doing work in their trade because to me that's where the money sort of disappears and the efficiency disappears so yes there are there are some extra vehicles around but we think with this new program of the leak detection it warrants one more members that you guys are pretty high in your take on vehicles have you looked into mordor pulling those i mean not it's one of those situations where we're still very least i'm still concerned and you know you've got all those vehicles going into homes and in a worst case scenario would every one of those folks be going out to a call you know worst case  scenario i don't know that there's any single case where everyone would go to a call at the same time even even in a natural disaster i don't know that everyone because what an electrician gets called out to might be fundamentally different than a pipe repair crew so i don't know there's any one thing that everyone will get called up so those are way to you just they're taking home because in case they get a call that particular person gets a call that's why they get that they're taking them home that is why they're taking them home yes we're taking them home as part of the after hours response methodology so you know there's been a lot of discussion yet taken vehicles and it started with of government commission years ago and i'll tell you the same thing i told them that even though i was in wastewater that time ok taken vehicles are not a separate program apart from some other things there's one hundred sixty eight hours in the week we're only staffed fifty fifty six of those hours we've run normal staffing monday through friday there's a skeleton crew on saturday sunday just at the treatment plants so you have basically two thirds of the time the water systems in full operation everything's running on automatic and no one is at work roughly one hundred hours a week let's just call that so what do we do when something happens how do we respond we have a combination of all  three things the first is the skate a systems the electronic computer systems that monitor and alarm put millions of dollars into these that is the single biggest cost they monitor things alarm things they used to go to pagers now they go to cell phones they can make some decisions on their own about shutting things off as far as that that are programmed ok so that's the backbone the second part is a combination of premium pay standby callback procedures who get who's on standby who gets called back how do we manage that the third piece is the take on vehicles it's those three things and a program to use those three efficiently to cover those hours that's the whole the whole thing get rid of take home vehicles really easily just by putting on a second shift you know we could split our guys up have half of them work the night shift hire a couple more supervisors you know you could have you could run like fire department and always have people at work that's going to cost a lot more than letting some people take vehicles home so how i've explained it and this is why you know eventually i think everyone knows the managing director has been very serious about the takeover vehicle issue and he's been very serious about not having the  perks but he's also very serious about not compromising our after hours operations so that's why after going back and forth with him and this logic he eventually agreed that we have a solid plan to manage between our skaters systems standby callback and take on vehicles we are managing the after hours any reasonably efficient way so i would just i would just caution to whenever we're talking about take home vehicles we in the same conversation i call back and skate a systems that all is part of the after hours response that's what it's for it's there not perks what i can tell you is no one who works in this building takes a car and i don't take a car office workers take cars on people who respond to emergencies some of them take cars and it's targeted for those for that response take on vehicles it's something that you know i can speak about just for the comfort of people that want to know why do they say they got to come to vehicles on easter sunday we just sat down to brunch and my son who is a maintenance worker own call immediately got called somebody had hit a fire hydrant on columbia hill again and you can't let it go that water is going in the air over two hundred feet and it's just glad i've never seen anything like craziness when somebody hits a fire hydrant and you got to go you can't be driving to the base to figure out which car can take whatever it's going to go and these folks are located in in areas where they're reasonably close to whatever's happening so i understand that you know especially for people that have to respond to emergencies they've got to go other questions members a specific report from each department but we they did provide us a report or an update on the number of taiko because in other departments and for example wastewater had and gone from thirty six down to zero or something like that so i think there was always has been a question as to whether or not all fifty six or however many there are in the water department are  justifiable and i don't think any of us question the need to have folks home but i would ask the question if if you've got three pipe fitters on basically same area do all three of them need to have a have a truck at home and night you know there's a water main break in line and you don't have any pipe fitters that live over there than what do you gain so i'm not satisfied the what the potential timeframes may be written response time frames may be but i'm not quite accepting of the of the explanation myself  moved down in the next section mr chair the final section is for plan operations division it's there's one one replacement vehicle laptops for the electronic technicians or laptops that they need  to access the skater systems and then various you know pressure transmitters korean analyzers and electronic starters for various equipment member's questions page so on the final page are security systems some security system upgrades i'll call them for the treatment plants flatbed truck and  section purchase an installation of security system so i would hope there's already currently one there so you said upgrades you know without getting into security right open session right let me just say that that and again i don't think this is i don't really want to get into what we have and what we don't have where but everything every place has something and there have been some there has been some faffed some break ins and some theft at d will continue with the discussion on water rates and fees so director star and everyone off on page thirty nine of  single family so let me just walk you through that first of all we are proposing what would essentially be for an average user a three point eight percent increase for the five s and that's what is sixteen thousand gallon user would see is there difference from f y fifteen f y sixteen that comes out to it from change from sixty dollars and forty cents per month to seventy one dollars even the breakdown of that  you can see that in there is just my calculations of the numbers that you see you see what we tried to do is put more of that increase into the meter feed it's about halfway down the page the seven hundred fifty to one nine hundred fifty that's the thick cost so we're continuing our program to make the fixed costs be paid for by the fixed revenue and then the variable cost the variable revenue so you have to calculate it out to see so last year there are current f y fifteen a sixteen thousand gallon user would pay seven hundred fifty they pay nine dollars and to a flat rate of seven hundred fifty the current rates a dollar ninety times their first five thousand gallons which is nine dollars and fifty cents then three sixty times their next ten thousand gallons thirty six dollars and their last thousand gallons at five forty for a total of sixty eight forty under the new proposed rates that same sixteen thousand dollar user would pay in one thousand nine hundred fifty charge that's from seven hundred fifty to one nine hundred fifty so that's where the two dollars is and then really small increases for a total of seventy one so that again that comes out to three there are some other similar increases for the other sized meters and of course we have the stage two and stage three shortage rates that we talked to at length over the past two years and water resources committee members questions mr couch thank you there those numbers look fairly reasonable as you know we've been discussing back and forth multifamily rates and this is where it would fall in mr fortunately the question i have is you know we talked about it a lot in committee and then in committee they said ok fine we understand where everything goes we've got to bring it up and rates were now in rates and fees so i would like to bring it up a little bit past out what honolulu has done in the sensually say further multifamily residential and unfortunately the copy is not very well but underneath multifamily residential he says monthly rate per unit so they essentially divide out the total amount of water that's used by the number of units and bill accordingly what effect would that have on your revenue and all in the potential rates and fees if we did if we did something like the general rate does not so to take all of those units translate all of them into a different rate structure which is not necessarily higher or lower it's different because it has that fourth tier you'd have to see how it crunched out homeowners circuit breaker homeowners exemption i think was around a third if i recall so we know that only a third of the multifamily tenants are owners i think we also found that something like another third had filed something like that so we know a third are definitely rented out as transients the other third we don't know are they renters or people who didn't file or people who are in filing anything we don't really know what we do know is that going to take we would have to take all the multi families and put them in one category or another there's no way for us to realistically determine this multifamily seventeen of the thirty units are you know single family and other ones are it's all or nothing so what we've said previously is we can look into that if the council serious about it it's going to cost a little bit of money to do a rate study crunch that out if it's something that you really want to look at for next year we can do that when we talked about this in water resources committee i think chair white asked at the time for us to pull ten or twenty individuals and compare them and i think the discussion of the committee was you felt it was sort of six of one half a dozen of the other and that you didn't ask us to go do that if that is changed we can do that but i sort of thought we'd bookended this by saying that the members  whole had said well you're pretty you're ok with the way it is but again we can run it through the model it's going to there's no way we can do it for this year's rates but we could do it for f discussion and i'm pretty sure yeah that that time when you did the comparison the direction that you went in the comparison was different from the direction that folks who live in multifamily units were talking about and we subsequently had another meeting and i could've sworn we were going to talk about it here just to see what the differences were going to be i guess mr chair we'd have to do a study because you know there was some  concern as to how they came up with the comparison numbers versus how a group of us came up with the comparison numbers and they were apples and oranges and i have to go through it again and and  redo the calculations to show that there is a bit of a difference in the way they came up with the numbers so i don't know you know i'm i still think that this needs to homeowners one third is trying to make a sure mentals and i'm be willing to stake a lot on the fact that the rest of the the last third most of those are rentals are long term rentals that's where a lot of our long term rentals are are in condos and so those folks are paying more for water and usually in the long term rentals there are the folks that sometimes can't really afford that so it's not that they can't afford it just takes more out of their income level so i you know i don't know how you want to approach that mr chair and i have a suggestion yeah if you like so my suggestion would be to take it up in water resources and in want to resources very specifically come up with two or three sort of lay ts of what if what if what if and tell us what those three are we can then go run models on those three and get back to you know be some cost to it but what i'm concerned about is coming up with three different options and then we come back and you go with that those are the three we wanted what about this this other one if you can give us i would say three different ways no more than three ways that you'd like to see it and say what would the changes be we can work with you on water resources to fine tune that request you know i think you know in six months or something we could probably get that done and then bring it back so you'd have it in time to make a decision before next year's budget i think that would be the best way to handle this we're not going to do it on the floor on the fly and we're really only get one shot at it so we need to be really clear of what do you want to investigate and then we could use our normal rate consultant to crunch through all the numbers and you know come up with this is what the impacts would be ok i think i can come up with that then if that's if that's the way or i could've sworn we did that in the water recently my left one or my recollection is that when we i don't know whether this is the final comparison but my recollection was that one that the the usage portion of the bill was higher in the in condominiums and and other than the some of the private residences but when you add in the fact that the residential users are painted a meter fee where the condominium and apartment folks are not that well no that's their pain with their condo may have two or three meters as opposed to everybody having a meter and writing a family homes my recollection was that when you add the fee to the usage that the the numbers look pretty much the same so i thought we had kind of moved past that but if if you'll go back and check your your notes  paid to bring up unicorns and rainbows but you know this is the say that we have to go through a rate study i'm sure he does to make himself feel comfortable with it but at the same time  you know when you're when you're dealing with a sixteen million dollar carry over savings as a little bit of wiggle room in the budget staff look up the moderates on the big island because they've got a broader reach than we do and i don't know how many people are on private water systems there versus the county water systems  but i found it striking that and unless i'm less we've gotten wrong information beguile it appears to be at eighty nine cents in their first year and the tears i don't believe necessarily match up exactly but they go from eighty nine where we're at one ninety two one eighty where we're at three sixty currently and three dollars where we're at five forty and they get up to three ninety five at the at their top here were at six o five  you have any information how our rates compared to those of the other counties mr sheriff you like we have copies for you of all the counties separated up and we have ten copies of that we can and i'm out right now so we have a talking paper if you like does that include the meter fees as well the monthly meter fees and then the best charts included well it's a complete breakdown of all  counties and how they compare to the great staff will take a short recess to take a distribute then let it but the members take a look at it before we continue say a couple items first of all to look at these first you'll see that in general the rates are comparative across the state specifically it's important to know that it's easy to keep rates down if you don't do preventative maintenance easy to keep rates rates down if you don't fund watershed production there's all kinds of you can borrow more money and you know take more debt so just looking at rates i would just caution everyone doesn't tell the whole story it's not something like you know what if you're speeding fines which are  artificially determined penalty rates are meant to recapture costs different utilities have different costs so although it's good to know that you're in the ballpark everybody is trying to match their costs not you know one up each other so and also it's also important that the big island i believe has a separate electricity charge that they add to their rates but in the case miss hole walk you through our comparison of all the different counties on the spreadsheet you can see what i did is we took each of the different islands and calculated single family with for us it's a meter size that we judged by like honolulu is a little different as well as the big island as director mentioned there is a surcharge for electricity that has to be added on all these do include like a billing charge for honolulu or meter you know  separate fee the fixed fee or the meter charges as well as a consumption fee and what we did is just compile this comparison and we base it on our single general ad  billion charge on a wahoo and like trickle charge on the big island which is down included in their rates correct and then the we also have the the  seventeen is that incorporated in these rates and the monthly bill is well correct yes so like for instance the big island they have their monthly standby charge then they have their general use rates and that's broken down by block and by meter size and then they have that you have to add on also this the electricity cost of power adjustment costs so that's how they get their rates how do they  they haven't done an adjustment for well i think the last one is two thousand and twelve we at one time did have a power charge that we used to charge our customers but  few years ago the power cost was actually higher than what we're charging some of our consumers so we have stopped we stopped charging the power charge mr chair understanding from my colleagues at the white water supply is that the it was said is they calculate the electric charge they go to the board every two months the board of water supply and get the board to approve the change in the electricity surcharge for the next cycle so it's a constant recalculation and re approval process ok so when we look at these numbers we can be comfortable that you've got all the all the various moving parts including yes ok thank you members questions mr carrol know if you look at these rates just what we're looking at it looks like you know these rates are good  what i'm really concerned about is you know i've been listening for a long time about water rates and participated in the water committee since i've been here and of course now i'm the chair which scares the hell out of me but  concerned about you know i keep listening to the director warning me about how much we need to have more income and also listen to the community that says we want water miners water system to be first class we want water when we want it when we want it and there's always this concern about who's going to pay for it i want to ask mr taylor because i think i missed it i didn't write it down when you started and you were comparing based on the proposal something about a seventy one dollar bill as compared with something else i missed that first number i'm sorry sixty eight dollars and it would be seventy one yes so so currently some a single family home that's currently using exactly sixteen thousand gallons in a month would currently be paying sixty eight dollars and forty cents and on the new rate under the new rates it would be seventy one dollars well you know i'm having a hard time getting my arms around everybody being upset about two bucks you know i know that it's cumulative i know everybody says it can't be any more but if it's two bucks or something like that for a regular family i just have a hard time feeling that we shouldn't deal with it i'm sorry you know there were there was many many years i think there are like ten years or something where we didn't do anything with water rates and that's what we paying for now we fell behind in maintenance we fell behind in getting ahead and i just i just can't have the energy to fight about that i'm sorry i'll fight more when we get to you know big meter fees and shortage rates maybe you don't even that i don't know if i'm going argue about that but i'm ok well i think they're looking at property taxes or water rates if you compare them to people's cell phone bills and cable bills they generally pale by comparison so  coffee it's four bucks i don't go to starbucks i don't just get any kind of money but you know i go to a good seven eleven minutes cup and i put two dollars and that's just one day that's not a whole month so you know i think we have to start looking at the value we put on water and should we you know put a little bit more in it so that we have it it is the most important thing we  overhead charges were being the inquisitive person i know i know i did not which but i can do that i would be happy to do that thank you i would appreciate that stephanie good question if if you haven't already done so ok thank you competitive with the others but in particular and you probably don't have the answer to this i don't know perhaps you do but quite in particular seems to be way high priced out of any other county is there underlying reason for that  ever cochran like everyone there nonprofit they're trying to cover their costs i would just guess that it's a matter of critical mass smaller is going to be more expensive your fixed costs are going to the same we all know how quiet spread out a little bit more some of their costs are going to be last because it's so wet but some of their maintenance costs are going to be higher i i think geography is going to be the first item that defines your water rates because it's your system but the second and this is what concerns me most coming from the problems we had in wastewater in the ninety's is it's easy to keep your rates down and i said before if you don't do preventive maintenance the other counties i don't think really do any water should protection and there's two million dollars right there that no one else is picking up so and i've said before that's a preventive maintenance technique you i'm not an expert in how the other managers run their systems but if you took that same idea saying it we don't have to worry about the watershed if you did apply it not saying they do you apply that same idea to your pumps and your  plans and said oh we don't have to take care of it of course you can keep your rates down this year and next year in the year after and five years hence and then when you're six the whole thing collapses and you find out you know that it wasn't that cheap just what you're hearing you know from me and some guys and you know solid waste and waste water because we all came from waste water we all remember this the the lack of keeping rates low in the eighty's cause system collapse in the ninety's and people like me are scared to death when we see it happening again which is why we tend to be very aggressive with rates preventive maintenance getting ahead on c n n we know what happens when every year you fall little behind you put on debt ten years later the whole thing falls apart and i think that's why you tend to see this more aggressive higher rates with more preventive maintenance if we don't spend it roll it over because we are deathly afraid of having that happen again because we know what happened last night right consent decrees occur on notice this though at the very bottom non potable missing but we have a couple very small the big one so we have a few systems that we maintain that we charge for that are non potable water so totally untreated water  counties the lowest in the state now for one inch we're higher than essentially quiet in the big island but certainly lower than honolulu so i  calm very comfortable with the rates were going on that and as mr white mentioned you know cell phone bills and cable bills and ms bice's coffee there's also bottled water that everybody buy at cash which is a ten or fifteen dollars a gallon and we're getting you know we're charging we want to charge a dollar what the most is six hundred fifty six dollars and fifteen cents for a thousand gallons so that we delivered to your house yeah and we deliver it to your house right so yes it nickel and  dimed you know add up but water is the basic and you know if you don't want to spend a lot of water and you know don't water your lawn because that's what sixty percent is landscaping sixty percent of water usage i think i don't recall the numbers but it's it's certainly the largest proportion right so you have ways to control it if you really really really want to do so i think refin think most of you were here at the water resources committee last meeting so the water shortage ordinance that the council passed recently sets up three stages stage one stage to stage three it mathematically defines those so what we're saying what we're proposing is in stage one no changes stage one would be equivalent to what has in the past been drought called drought morning sir just this please conserve you know please try so that's what stage one would be no cost changes for any one stage two you notice we keep the lower tiers the same what we're saying is that if you've already conserving water you're good you don't need to do anything at the higher t we need you to cut back so we've raised those twenty five percent and for ag ten percent so that is sort of the philosophy we're trying compared to you called the old philosophy that was used was that we want everybody to cut back a certain percentage and the complaints were hey i'm already being careful why should i cut back this methodology addresses that and then in stage three which is the higher level fifty percent again no changes in the first couple  years we're saying look no matter what that's the water you need to live don't cut that back the higher two years get a fifty percent increase twenty percent frag so as i think everyone's heard before we mostly this is going to apply you know to the drought prone areas mostly it will be the seasonal upcountry issue that we're concerned about and because in that area agriculture does use forty to fifty percent of the water we need some how to get some cut in ag as the drought gets deeper it's it's interesting that if you turn on the nightly news every day right now they're covering the california drought and what you see is hopefully it sounds familiar to you they're saying the same thing in california what they keep reporting is that eighty percent of the water goes to agriculture but they're trying to get the cuts out of the other twenty percent think they reported just a couple days ago that on average they got two point eight percent reduction out of that twenty percent and they're just not making it so now in an emergency situation the governors are doing these twenty five percent cuts but no one's doing them and they're trying to very quickly under you know under drought conditions try to pass things like this so this is just to me just close on this we don't want to use this you know it is my hope that this never happens but what you see from watching california is you got to be ready for have to happen and you can't throw this together i mean we're been at this for two years you can see we can't wait for the drought and throw this together so what we believe we need as an emergency plan to have this ready so if it is needed it was pre decided so i hope what's going on in california will show everyone why we're trying to get ahead of it and not be in the middle of it especially thank you very much thank you director taylor you know this whole water shortage thing has sort of grown on me in the beginning when i first heard about it i was kind of taken aback but i sat through all these meetings and i listen very carefully and i think i totally understand why this is necessary and if anything brought it home to me recently it's what's going on in california my sister lives there and so that she's affected by what's happening and they're all kind of appalled that didn't get ready like they didn't see it coming which is really strange because you know they've been importing water for a long long time and just growing by leaps and bounds in dealing with drought and just covering it up and so as much as i you know hate to do it is going to thing i think it's prudent for us to go ahead and i think it would be really helpful for us to hear maybe from a member guzmn who's been working with the egg working group but i thought they had softened their stance towards this and realized that you know this may be something we have to do but i don't have the latest information the if you look at the next page of rates the department has proposed a significantly reduced rate for  the difference is that four stages one two and three for residential use read off the egg is for anything over fifteen thousand gallons  and for agricultural users even during water shortage shortages stages one two and three the rates are one dollar one dollar and ten cents and then for stage three a dollar and twenty cents whereas for residential it compares to a dollar compares to five fifty dollars ten compares to six eighty seven and the dollar twenty compares eight twenty five from fifteen to thirty five thousand gallons and above thirty five it's six dollars and fifteen cents instead of a dollar nine dollars and twenty cents out of their one ten and ten dollars and seventy six cents instead of the one twenty so the chairs feeling is the department has come a long ways in their addressing of this issue so any further questions on these rates or the agricultur rates mr couch yeah thank you mr chairman and just a comment and as a that this is what is driving the condo thing is the so because it almost doubles even if the condo guys nine hundred each one of them in one hundred twelve units only use nine hundred gallons which is phenomenally low they pay twice as much as somebody in single family homes just one of those things that's the kind of concern that the was there and although this applies to them the chances of this being applied to central and south maui is so small i would be shocked if in the next fifty years we had to do this in central and south maui because central south now is mostly awkward for water even a drought that lasted a whole year i don't know that we would really have that big a problem dealing with you know if the drought went on year after year in the awkward first didn't get replenished but that could be a problem but unlikely that central and south because it's almost all awkward for water that has a long term stability are going to be affected by this so since there isn't much multifamily upcountry i don't know that that's a valid what about whether or not there's a lot like on those the west maui has lots of condos west maui also has a significant amount of surface water but when you it's called surface water from the state department of health because it comes out of the mountain and it's an open ditches and streams when you look at really where that water is coming from it's coming from the tunnel which although from a department of health standpoint it's surface water it's dripping out of the mountain which is sort of the source is really ground water that's filling this ditch it's not and same with the stream that comes to our line of plant you know is coming from so deep in the west my mountains the character of its flow is not like the east now the streams that flow and then stop those sources although again they are surface water they are really stable so look you could have a problem where the tunnel has a collapse and this and that maybe is a really really bad drought but even the surface water in west maui it almost behaves as awkward for water from a reliability standpoint so yes it is a greater chance and south now affecting west but it also becomes much much much less unlikely than an area like up country which is eighty percent  service i forgot to ask a question i noted on my page but do these on your spreadsheet do these raids reflect our current rates or proposed rates per pos thank you members any questions on the the rates are you ready to go to the standby charges for the service charge per misery churches in reference to mr taylor was discussing about the california problem and you know let's not go there but this is just in place for in case it happens here and you're saying that there have been a difficulty there not touching eighty percent which users because they primarily do grow most of the stuff we buy people buying costco and what have you so is that why they're not targeting and they're trying to go for more of the home the household i guess business people of sorts the twenty percent or so is that you know i don't claim to be any sort of expert and frankly i don't think there is any expert in california water because it's so complicated it's not like you're where you the state of california it's all your systems you've got all these cities you've got the aqueducts that come in from other states you've got these sort of water wholesalers that sell the other people you've got indian tribes and on and on it is so complicated that i've never even been clear on what exact authority the governor even has you know it's i think a lot of people in california aren't sure exactly what authority the governor has to order these things so i don't claim to be an expert what i  what i see happening is everyone agrees eighty percent of the water goes to agriculture if you watch what they're talking about now you can see they're getting ready for the next stage they are now dividing up that eighty percent agriculture and what it's being used for what's been hitting the news in the last week is all mins they've been saying that it takes one gallon of water to grow an element and they start looking at where there's always going well they're not being eaten by people in california you know some huge percentage of them are being exploited to asia so there's a new term that i never heard before and i think it was a secondary exportation of water or something like that meaning you're if somebody's got a pipeline from california to china everybody would freak but they're essentially packaging their water into all means and shipping them to china and you can see what they're getting ready for they are they are trying to divide up which of this water is going to food that we in california the people in the united states and which is being outsourced to foreign countries to make a few people wealthy you can see the writing on the wall there getting ready for the next stage of this gets worse which to cut and they're trying to separate lumber from leafy vegetables to things that are export in flowers i mean my guess is there is somebody putting a big spread sheet together to say look if this gets worse let's cut i get in this order so i think that's what's happening though i know most of this is from watching the media and i'm guessing that's what they're doing so it's pretty common sense a reasonable but sure what i'm trying to equate it to is our user users here as in our ag practices ranching practices and stuff so will this with the county sort of look towards that if it ever came to you know you know making us two years to get here so i know i'm really hoping we can get past this and then i guess i talk about that later ok but i mean eventually if it ever came to it there's going to have to be a choosing of sorts you know or figuring out what truly is water you use for and or not but i hear the pleas of the people who have ranching you can't tell the college to not drink water today or the horse to  so another thing that i've heard about this week because of family being involved is they're looking at swimming pools and premiums on to impose or possibly suggesting that they put cement in  you know when it gets known to we don't have it you got to do it you gotta do it hank we don't want to get there hopefully so members i know there's lots of lots we can talk about with respect to what ifs but but we are comfortable that we know enough about the rates and we can move on to the yes yes the service charge by meter  same same thing we've already talked about the agricultural rates as to if you can explain to us restoration charges you know a change in salacious i'm assuming that is a reinstallation correct on the top of page forty and this is just simply calculated from last year's costs are counts look at what it what it cost and they're not really subjective they're just calculated for all these miscellaneous pieces over the next you know several pages what we're paying for various materials and what it cost our crew to go out frankly i haven't looked at any of the numbers i just sort of flip through them the way they're put together are just from our actual cost so there's no ideological change in here it's just ok so that percentage increase it's all based on whatever the individual increases that's correct members questions on all those pages  thing which is good ok members and we move on to page forty nine and the water system development fund fees by a meter size department did you have you prove it produced a comparison between our charges and the other counties in this area no we have  not we have we have not because as you know i've explained many times this is about our costs of what we need to recover certain charges of what we would need to build to meet general p requirements and it's a cost recovery method to take the philosophy that the county gets out in front of source transmission and distribution improvements necessary for growth and coming up a way to pay for that so comparing them to other counties is something we could do but i don't know that there's any there'd be really any nexus in that so i've you know we've talked about this for so long i don't know that i have any more to say when you've heard from me before but i'll be more than happy to answer any  question well it's you know for us it's a little more comfortable to know that we're doing things somewhat similarly to the other the other counties and if i look county department water supply director and former department water supply director he was trying to get that forty six hundred raise to think twenty one or twenty eight thousand dollars based on his similar analysis to what we've done about what it's really going to cost so this is where the comparison gets tricky do you want to compare what they actually are or do you want to compare to what they've calculated they would need to accomplish the same thing so we know are we know there is are low but we also know that they are in the same problem we are is that they can't afford to get ahead on their infrastructure so we could put those together for comparison  i think it's more there's more of a nexus of what we showed you in water resources committee about how much we'd have to charge to achieve certain things and but if you want to see the counties we can certainly put that together yeah and i'd like to caution my colleagues about comparing to other counties because we in this department itself we do a whole lot more watershed  protection than other counties and in other places we do a lot more and we get a lot better service i think and we do a lot more for visitor advertising than the other counties and we get the benefits for that so i'm a little cautious about comparing us to other counties because sometimes if we if we want to stick with the other counties we might be dragging ourselves down as opposed to standing ahead of everybody that's all i'm just want to bring that out but i don't disagree except that having a i mean a baseline to compare to helps us see where we are right now compared to the big island where  we're about less than fifty percent higher with respect to you were about maybe thirty percent higher so you know it helps to compare and i understand mister taylor's perspective but once again we we need to find out what what is  what is something that's reasonable and affordable and unnecessary to be funding projects going forward and we'll get more into that as we get into c i p and i realize that maybe some of the fact that the other counties having higher monthly billings and usage rates provides that  taylor said we can either go with higher rates or go higher meters but that's that is a policy decision and if we if we want to do one or you know we want to go with higher higher rates and lower meter fees and that's that's a decision so with respect to actually both this item and on that and the rates could you provide us with a breakdown of the make up of your carry over savings you know two point six million dollars of that is and restricted funds that we put towards the  line expansion project it doesn't look like we're going to be spending but we can put that together but in general i because the mayor asked the same question when he saw our budget and so it was there was some debt refinancing there was a there was electricity which i think was three or four million and then we had one cash c a p project that because it wasn't right for construction we're bumping that to next year so that's where it is with a big box of it but we'll put that together for you ok thank you members questions comments on the meter fees spicer thank you i'm sure what i'm going to see another shock to anybody because everybody knows i feel but you know if a big fat joke and i know that we dumped it up and then we jumped it down again which wasn't a good idea but we did it and so we are what we are i don't have strong objections to paying this because i know what it's for and i think it's important but i do have concerns about the effect of that kind of a jump on certain people who will need a meter you know if you're go install or build something and you going to turn around and sell it well i'm i think i could live with that but if you're going to do it and you're going to give it to your kids that's a different situation because you're probably already you know difficult financial situation and the reason you're doing it is to help your kid have a place to live and get him out of your house so you know adding this kind of money  makes a difference it does make a difference you know you could use the difference between a six thousand and fourteen thousand maybe to buy furniture for the house or curtains or whatever it is that you need or put in that septic system that we  required to do now and so i am concerned about whether or not there could be some kind of a scale so that depending on what you're doing i mean if you're going to build a huge huge two or three million dollar home this is no bearing on him down there silly but if you're going to build a modest cottage and you're trying to figure out how you can be owner who there are so that you can you know not have to pay a lot of bills and altho to kick in and do the electrical and whatever they can it's significant so i don't know how to do it and i don't want to reject it out of hand because i know we need the money but  clever and figure out how to do this my recollection was that last year there was some discussion about the possibility of utilizing affordable housing funds solution to the probably bring up we could be very simple to come up with a relatively simple ordinance and program that once housing human concerns approves all of the fee some of the fee whatever the council wants they bring that letter to us and instead of giving us a check they give us that letter and we take an automatic draw from the affordable housing fund that way they don't have to bother you with it it can be pre determined we we think that is such an excellent idea it it will target the people you want to target without letting the it's really difficult it can be really determine tool two or economy we don't want you might think it's a small thing a normal small part building but it's a pretty big or affordable holding even affordable it's not an easy thing it's not it's something that we really have to consider and i brought it up before that this is probably not the way that we need to get make up and get the funds that we need for what we need to do thousand plus i i can understand why we have to increases but you know the water meter does not only involve the water meter the home owner have to come in with the cost of the infrastructure to get the water to the meter and that's another cost i my concern is overall within our county is we talk about affordable homes we talk about homelessness we talk about the high cost of the land you know you have to agree with mr carroll that  when do we all have the same understanding that what is it that we want do we want to hols our families do we want to be able  to provide for people who are in the waiting list and yes there's comments that the we want to sell but there's there's more to that people are waiting to have their families get on their property so i understand the department you know what a struggle it can be i think for me i would like to know you know because it's would have to get back to you but we we think it's about three million dollars or so thank you you mr couch thank you miss chair and you know i understand where everybody's coming from but we had this discussion when we went from twelve thousand down the six thousand that there was going to be huge resistance to go back to where it should have been in the first place which actually i believe in the schedule that we were shown before this year would have been sixteen thousand but now it's only going to fourteen thousand  which is what the true cost of the infrastructure is i now understand the need for affordable housing and the need for yeah i do i do know understand i work very hard on it ok so don't tell me i don't know i do know that's why we have an affordable housing fund or we can come up with another fund if there is a situation where somebody needs to get an affordable water meter then they can do it but it cost us this much money to put in a meter and all the infrastructure around it if we don't pay here we're paying it somewhere else so let's just do a fund whether it's the affordable housing fund i'm going to ask mr wilkie if that's even feasible or set up another fine for assistance for people who can't afford the real cost of a water meter we don't have affordable funds for people who can't afford the real cost of a car they have to go buy a car or get a used car so or catch the bus which by the way we're paying for  subsidize heavily so let's see the list be real to what the costs are and if there are issues for affordable housing you know family subdivisions of whatnot then come up with the extra funds from the either the affordable housing fund or another fund that we can set up so in that's the argument i had before and i knew this was going to happen when we wanted to go back to where it should have been but here we are you know i guess there are a couple of perspectives here the department comes to us with a bunch of c ip projects every year big c ip projects they don't come out of the water development fund they come out of the the fun so that's all right driven right because we've got to collect the rates to pay the piper so know whether we put it in the meters or we put it in the rates that's the discussion so you know the discussion is they need the money and at the same time we've got two ways to pay it we can either pay it generally through rate or we can pay it specifically through the media development or the water system development fee for a new meter  ok thank you chair well this body does have the authority to start up charter amendments and code amendments i want say you can't do it from there for the housing fun but the way both are currently written that concept as from what i can understand as you guys are discussing it would be a little difficult the way that the language is right now but again you guys can always amend language so that would be my comment would be difficult the way it's worded right as a follow up you know chair i would rather do that you know we did the whole get rid of the first time homeowners loan thing for for fifteen or thirteen people i bet we could put a bunch more into funding more water meters just with that fund alone and so i would rather work on that the numbers about the same another twelve or thirteen people be served  department how many meters were sold under this rate of six thousand and i'm sorry this is county wide so i think you're referring to our country about people who are waiting but it's only up country that there's applicants waiting everyone else can come in and get a meter tomorrow i  understand but i'm just wondering there is some people be they have to do their what have you to get there so they qualify to put in for their meat or their like i'm not sure  to get them approved for future it's all these people are sort of in the queue how many of them actually really intend to finish and get a meter we have no idea ok and you know the records of how many three quarter and one inch meters you sold as well quarter i'm showing two  that's that's three quarters two and five eight inches twenty we have funds for thirty that we've got this year so far six hundred twenty two thousand looking at the fees i'm thinking that she's has another accountant prepared this but it's not showing any one inch but there is some charges to it which could be reinstallation charges or so i'm showing a total of twenty five in five  member do you have any more questions you need answered before we end up in deliberations on this item i think we've probably discussed this as much as anything we've ever discussed before any further questions mr coach you've got you know we're talking about affordable housing units and that's very important you know if we don't raise these  rates it's seems like we're going to be short on water for fordable housing but for any kind of housing in that matter but i don't know mister taylor if we don't raise these wage what happens with affordable what effect does that have on affordable housing thank you mr couch and that's a layered question i wish i had my power point in front of me but ok i have to go back a year to the different options we presented one of the options that this is following is raising these fees up towards twenty thousand dollars and keeping controlling the monthly rates to read increase of you know roughly five or six percent a year that was that's what this options following there was a different option to raise exactly the same amount of money by leaving these system develop fees low and raising the rates to compensate to make that money ok and i think that was fourteen or fifteen percent per year compounded annually ok so i think for a second about the future of somebody that we're trying to help get an affordable home if we keep the meter fees artificially low at six thousand dollars let's say so everyone's like great i can now afford a house so here's a low income family that we got into a house now they're going to start paying their monthly water bill which is going to go up at sixteen percent a year  that's being used to compensate the next guy that gets a water meter who's a millionaire i know the intention is to help affordable housing and we support that but if you think about not doing this and putting in the meter fees  putting in the monthly fees you're not targeting people who need help anymore you're just artificially lowering the price for everybody and then charging everybody forever to compensate it so i think you'll get people into the houses whether or not they can and now afford their double digit rate increases for the rest of their lives i think that's something we should think about before we sort of egg them on to buying a house where they now can afford their water bill ten years later you the only thing i would say in response to that is that even if this was fourteen thousand dollars you get fourteen thousand dollars times twenty eight meters yeah the c i p requests that we have for this year far far exceed that so i just you know i'm kind of wondering what this argument really all about because yes this is a fixed a fixed number that we're putting into the water development fund but the reality is we're spending most of our money on water development coming out of c i p which gets turned into bond money which then gets built into the rates anyway keep in mind that twenty eight number is extremely low it should be three or four digits year just shoot i'm sorry there's something in the logic and i understand why it's hard it's really hard without you know my graphics but let me walk you through i think there's some discussion here that's not quite accurate first of all if no one pulls meters we don't need to build very much so we don't need very much money a lot of the c h p is replacement that's not what this is about this is about capital improvement for new meters if nobody wants a new meter well there won't be much costs that's that's step one the other thing to remember is there is a lot of meters out there that no one's built on cluing mine and i don't empty a lot with a meter that i bought years ago and i've yet to build a house if you add up all the meters that are out there and you allocate a reasonable out of water we're technically we only have enough capacity for what's there now we probably don't even have enough so when someone comes in for a meter today what's really happening is they're getting my allocation that i paid four years ago so if we were to keep sort of if we were to not charge and nobody who has a meter ever builds well everything's fine but we're essentially giving away now the capacity that other people paid for and we need this money to build that extra capacity for you know when i build my house that's happening also that most people are probably not taking into account so that's how utilities are operated when we allocate a meter we don't save the well you know we don't say well no one can use it otherwise we'd be running at seventy five percent all the time and say we're out of capacity so there's also this sort of statistical giveaway of meters to where we're basing on future growth just because you have a just cause you have a meter you know we're not saving that well capacity for you we're giving it out as it comes online so i think there is this misconception that just because a few meters are going out that we don't need to keep building source because there's a bunch of people who don't need already have meters that haven't aren't using water so i need to throw that in there because there's that's all in the mouth of what we need to meet  demand i would take some issue with the comment that it's all for replacement because i know we've funded a whole bunch of wells and a lot of other things so especially you had to go there i go again one more time  redrafted it whatever it has to be or there is nothing to stop us as a council and said in the money to take care of this problem we have some idea what it is and you know we did that  less and we've put some money in there and we haven't decided exactly what we're going to do with it yet but it's sitting there and i think that's a very viable option thank you ok anybody else i want to any wax of this old here before we close i guess is that what we're heading towards i have an overall question oh so i have an overall question in regards to and if i'd be remiss if i didn't mention the worker's compensation she that i bring up to every department that comes along and year and depart this department in particular is in the top five i think for claims so how are you folks addressing this you know if this came up last year i think you asked question last year and i think what we said is is we need to have a committee me at some point with risk management who keeps all of that i think those are mostly older claims that happened a long time ago we don't internally track that that's what risk management does we just have to pay it but our you know over the four years i've been here we've had a few small accidents and things but nothing major so i think most of those costs have to do with things up and major things that might have happened many years ago but again risk management is the best ones to ask about that ok well and i guess this might have come from risk management  and there's been already seven claims just since this in this year up till the end of this february seven claimants have already been through your department so that's not minimal and that's seven new claims alone just in these first in the first two months of this year but anyhow just hope hopefully department can look you know i'm sure you have safety trainings in everyone's you know competent at the jobs they do lifting and whatever but just from that's why and numbers we have a safety officer well we have constant safety training there are a number of accidents we follow normal protocols i you know i see every  safety every accident report what we're doing about it it is of major importance to all of the supervisors and they're constantly reminded you know bring up safety at the meetings and again we have a safety officer whose job is to train