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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2008-04-15 Prei f E IDIAN-- CITY OF MERIDIAN CITY COUNCIL PRE-COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. City Council Chambers 33 East Idaho Avenue, Meridian, Idaho "Although the City of Meridian no longer requires sworn testimony, all presentations before the Mayor and City Council are expected to be truthful and honest to best of the ability of the presenter." 1. Roll-call Attendance: / David Zaremba O Joe Borton -~ Charlie Rountree ~ Keith Bird / Mayor Tammy de Weerd 2. 3. Adoption of the Agenda: ~-~~" ~ 3`"`~ Public Works Department Report: Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting Agenda -April 15, 2008 Page 1 of 1 All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian. Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearing, please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting. MayorTammy de Weerd NOTICE OF PRE-COUNCIL MEETING MERIDIAN CITY COUNCIL City Council Members: Keith Bird Joe Borton Charles Rountree David Zaremba NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the City Council of the City of Meridian will hold aPre-Council Meeting in the City Council Chambers, Meridian City Hall, 33 East Idaho Avenue, Meridian, Idaho, on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 5:30 P.M. The Meridian City Council will be discussing the following agenda items: ^~ Public Works Department Report The public is welcome to attend the meeting. DATED this 11th day of April, 2008 ~~~.~~,~~ ~ ~~, ~A~ JAYCEE HOLMAN -CITY CLE $~~L - '`~' i*t~~ ~ ~. ~ ~. p `` ~~~rrrrrn n~~~~~''~~~~4\,` Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting Agenda -April 15, 2008 Page 1 of 1 All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian. Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents andlor hearings, please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting. I.JC.. NOTICE OF PRE-COUNCIL MEETING AflERIDIAN CITY COUNCIL I'~~~1a5~~or~"a~^nm;~~ ~Je ti~'u'eer~l Cull'ar Coaauro~cfif J'W'leu~vbers: 6(eithv Bird Joe Borton Charles Rountree David Zaremba NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the City Council of the City of Meridian will hold aPre-Council Meeting in the City Council Chambers, Meridian City Hall, 33 East Idaho Avenue, Meridian, Idaho, on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 5:30 P.M. The Meridian City Council will be discussing the following agenda items: Publ®c Works Department Report The public is welcome to attend the meeting. aat,~~~NNU11~~ir~,, DATED this 11th day of April, 2008 ~~~~°,~•~ ~ ~o JAYCEE HOLMAN - CITY CLE ~~.~ R ; r Est . ,~ ~. ~, ~. 4 Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting Agenda -April 15, 2008 Page 1 of 1 All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian. Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearings, please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting. i~gU~'~s+~~ I~I~Uc l~RCe ~ ~ ,~l~ . ~`~' .r~-fit, ELY' ~."N CITY OF MERIDIAN CITY COUNCIL PRE-COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. City Council Chambers 33 East Idaho Avenue, Meridian, Idaho "Although the City of Meridian no longer requires sworn testimony, all presentations before the Mayor and City Council are expected to be truthful and honest to best of the ability of the presenter." 1. Roll-call Attendance: David Zaremba Joe Borton Charlie Rountree Keith Bird Mayor Tammy de Weerd Z. Adoption of the Agenda: 3. Public Works Department Report: Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting Agenda -April 15, 2008 Page 1 of 1 All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian. Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearing, please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 A meeting of the Meridian City Pre-Council was called to order at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 15, 2008, by President Charlie Rountree. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Charlie Rountree, Keith Bird, and David Zaremba. Members Absent: Joe Borton. Others Present: Bill Nary, Jaycee Holman, Tom Barry, Stacy Kilchenmann, Rick Clinton, Clint Dolsby, and Kyle Radek. Item 1: Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X David Zaremba Joe Borton X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird X Mayor Tammy de Weerd Rountree: I'm going to open up the pre-Council meeting of April 15th and happy tax day to everybody. I hope you all got filed soon enough. First item on the agenda is roll call attendance. Item 2: Adoption of the Agenda: Rountree: Need a motion to approve the agenda. Zaremba: So moved. Bird: Second. Rountree: All those in favor? Opposed? Approved. MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT. Item 3: Public Works Department Report: Rountree: Next item on the agenda is Mr. Barry's show. Barry: Thank you. Council President, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I'm not sure if we are on here or not. Rountree: You are. Meridian City Council Pre-Council Me~4ng April 15, 2008 Page 2 of 24 Bany: Thank you for this opportunity to present to you information from the Public Works Department. As you know, I'm Tom Barry, the Public Works director for the City of Meridian. I want to first recognize my staff whom have put in a great deal of time into making this presentation possible. I am grateful for their diligence, their patience, their professionalism as we have put this presentation together for Council as an update. I also having only been with the city now I guess going on three months, would like to take an opportunity again to recognize the Council and Mayor for your support and as well as your guidance and leadership during the transition in the Public Works Department for the last several months. Grateful to you for that as well. Tonight we have several various topics that we would like to share with you regarding Public Works. The agenda I'd like to share involves presentations from a couple of different areas of Public Works. First, we will focus on the Enterprise Fund and the finance director is here to assist me with that presentation. Then, we will move to the wastewater division and we will talk about generally the status of the division in a division report and, then, we have a guest speaker here as well who will speak to us about the phosphorus TMDL, which is the Total Maximum Daily Load, which has some bearing on what we do at the wastewater treatment plant from a regulatory standpoint. We will, then, move to discussing the water division in a water division report and, then, move onto Public Works engineering where we will share information regarding the NPDS phase two program. NPDS is the National pollution Discharge Elimination System. P-2 is phase two. So, we have a guest speaker, one of our consultants, who has been doing some work for us, who will be able to provide additional information on that. And, then, while you did get an update the last Council meeting regarding the FEMA and floodway program, we do want to just synthesize that quickly and more for the purposes of integrating that with what we see as a comprehensive surface water program and so we'd like to speak to you briefly about some of our thoughts regarding how we can integrate two different mandates into a similar program where there is potentially some redundancies and some overlap. And, then, we'd like to offer an opportunity for questions and answers. There is -- this is an ambitious agenda. I'm aware of that. We will try to keep the presentations lively, spirited, entertaining, all of the above. Feel free to ask questions along the way. This is really mostly informational. We are not asking for direction with regard to decision making at this point in time, but we certainly welcome your ideas and your thoughts and your questions as it relates to the good things that we are doing in Public Works at the moment. So, with that we will go ahead and get started with a discussion briefly of the Enterprise Fund and I'm going to tum it over to Mrs. Kilchenmann for a brief overview of the Enterprise Fund status. Kilchenmann: Okay. We are starting out with the most interesting, spirited part and everything won't be after this. We just wanted to briefly call your attention, again, to the fund balance report that we have. I presented it to you before and it's in your report in your monthly financial statements and something we just started doing this year. And what we are trying to look at is we are looking -- you take the unrestricted fund balance from the audit report as our starting point, we look -- we subtract everything that we have budgeted and all the revenues that we have budgeted, so we can project what our ending fund balance is going to be, and as we have discussed before, we have budgeted several large projects, completed several large projects, we have had quite a Meridian City Council Pre-Council M~g April 15, 2008 Page 3 of 24 substantial change in our fund balance, so we are looking at going from a beginning of the year fund balance unrestricted of 36 million to, if we completed every project that we have budgeted, to an ending fund balance of 2.2 million dollars. We also have projected -- we are looking at -- as you know, we have a shortfall in our connection revenue, so we have taken that out of -- we reduced the projected revenue by that amount. We haven't changed the expenses from the budgeted just because of certain uncertainties in the operations and some different expenses we have, we don't want to be conservative and not change that balance. And, then, I wanted to -- I just wanted to briefly go to the difference between Fund 60 and what we call Fund 62. Fund 62 has a name which, accurate or not, now we call it the latecomers fund. But, essentially, what that is is when Brad left -- redid the structure of the assessment fees, he took part of that fee and set it aside and said this is about the amount -- this is the amount we will need for city construction projects and this is the amount we will need to reimburse developers for their projects. So, what's happened to that fund is it has built up to -- by the end of the year about seven million dollars and because we have done several large developer reimbursements or budgeted as amendments, that fund has dropped to 3.7 million. So, we have wanted to just, in particular, call your attention to those changes in the fund balance and how much they have decreased, so that those are the kind of issues that we will need to deal with going forward and deciding how we are going to fund for the projects. So, are there any questions on that? That statement? Bird: I have none. Rountree: It looks about the same as the last time we saw it. Kilchenmann: It does and this is just -- Tom has taken out and isolated those amendments we did this year, those significant amendments. You can see those total about 4.3 million dollars. So, this is kind of how we got from the seven million down to the three million. And I'm sure you all remember approving those and what they are for and so forth. Barry: The current economic climate that we have -- or that we are experiencing now has provided a great opportunity and some challenges for the Public Works Department from a financing standpoint and I'd like to share some of those challenges and opportunities. This is not an exhaustive list, but I did want to at least sort of hit the highlights, if you will. One of the opportunities -- and I see these as all opportunities, really. One of the first opportunities is for us to decide whether or not we want to segregate utility funds in the Enterprise Fund. Now, this could be something that's done internally to the fund as an administrative change or it could be something that's done externally by creating two different utilities. We don't have a recommendation on that. But, essentially, there is -- there are some advantages associated with identifying revenues and expenses as they relate to each of the utilities, so that we know that one utility is not subsidizing the other. Now, this is particularly beneficial, when we try to work at a cost of service recovery model, that way insuring that all operations are covered -- water operations would be covered by rates and fees and all sewer operations would be covered with their rates and fees, that's very beneficial to solvency Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meng April 15, 2008 Page 4 of 24 -- long term solvency of the overall fund. There is also an opportunity now to look at operational reserves, building in some operational reserves to cover our operations and maintenance requirements and needs into the future and, thus, giving us some cushion, if you will, or some buffer to various economic highs and lows as it relates to both, internally, our ability to raise revenues and, externally, as it relates to development. There is also an opportunity for us to take a close look at depreciation financing. While we do allocate depreciation financing, we would want to make sure that we are identifying all of the infrastructure needs and repairs and replacements and infrastructure replacement even associated with say increased regulation are things that we should be paying close attention to. So, staff will be working on putting together longer range plans as it relates to infrastructure to insure that we have adequate financing for the upgrading or replacing or repairing of existing infrastructure. One of the benefits, however, to our growth in the last five years, the outstanding growth we have experienced, is that most of the infrastructure in the ground is new and that puts us in a really good spot as it relates to depreciation financing. So, we wanted to take advantage of that and make sure that we plan appropriately for the longer term repair and replacement now, so that the impact currently is not as great as it might be if we didn't take advantage of that financing strategy until later. Capital improvement financing or project financing, investment financing, is another area that we could look into as it relates to anticipating needs. Right now we are -- we have -- come off of a very large growth spurt and so we have this wonderful opportunity to -- to insure that we have, essentially, anticipated all of the needs and embrace various strategies that allow us to meet this financing strategy or develop financing strategies to meet those needs. We also can look at several altematives to capital financing. I mean there is a whole gamut of different things and so we want to -- we want to take advantage and have staff look into various strategies that would help us to identify appropriate altematives and bring that forward to the Council for discussion. We also can look into cost-of-service recovery. You know, insuring that rates are where they need to be to cover, essentially, our operational and maintenance and administrative and engineering costs. That fees are appropriate with regard to the financing of whatever capital infrastructure program plan that we wanted to develop and that we insure that there is -- whatever balance we want to achieve with regard to growth accommodation between fees and rates or even other altematives, like that financing, for example -- and I'm not suggesting we need that, just you want to keep your options open and that would be one financing strategy that we could discuss at a future time. And that gets us to sort of putting this all together in a strategic fiscal package where we want to position ourselves strategically for the long term viability of the -- of the utility, both water and wastewater. And so with this we will just highlight a couple of the challenges and opportunities that we can that we will be working on and committed to working on and we hope to bring this back maybe in a Council workshop in the future at some point and discuss -- get your input and discuss further how we might be able to take advantage of current positioning at this time. So, in the interim what we would like to do is my staff -- both myself and my staff will be working with the finance director and her staff to -- to, essentially, evaluate how we report and how we track various funds and financing and we'll be working on refining these reports, so that we can glean out a little bit more information as it relates to how we might identify various strategies to get us to the long term. Then, what we Meridian City Council Pre-Council Me~'Rng April 15, 2008 Page 5 of 24 would like to do after we identify various altematives is to engage the Council and the Mayor with a presentation and also have some discussion as it relates to what strategies and what altematives the Council might want to consider for further investigation and we can bring that back at some point in the future. So, we really do see financially an opportunity here with the economic conditions that we have to devote some time -- some time and attention to the fiscal strategies that we have as a utility and make sure that we are taking advantage of those strategies that get us to the long term -- that support the long-term planning needs of the utilities. So, we are excited about that and look forward to working with you, hopefully, on moving those directions. So, thank you so much. Be willing to take any questions or comments you have at the moment. Rountree: Tom, I guess I will just say I agree with the direction you're going in terms of the strategic planning in identifying some kind of CIP for the strategy for fiscal requirements in the future. And, yes, I think that as soon as we can -- probably not this budget cycle or before the budget preparation that we have a workshop and discuss the possibilities. Barry: Thank you, sir. Look forward to it. Other questions or comments? Bird: I have nothing to add. Rountree: Press on. Barry: All right. Thank you so much for your time. We tum it over to Clint Dolsby, our acting city engineer, and he will share with you information regarding our wastewater treatment plant and without further adieu I will tum it over to Clint. Dolsby: All right. I'm here to give a summary of the wastewater division and the wastewater division report. I'm going to start off by looking through the sanitary sewer collection system. The wastewater system is split up into the collection system, which is all the tank and the lift stations that are around Meridian and the wastewater treatment plant and throughout the collection system we estimate that there is about 350 miles of pipe. We have got approximately 11 or 12 lift stations. We have got one under construction up in North Black Cat. And about 24,500 sewer accounts. Now, I mentioned that there is 11 lift stations. We have got two of those that are more regional lift stations. The first one being the Black Cat lift station that was put into service about a year and a half ago, May of 2006. And, then, we had that open house in August of '06 and invited the Mayor and Council to where we took a tour of the lift station and showed people around and went through the wet well and the pump room. Yeah. And this lift station serves -- will serve much of south Meridian and help to take out a lot of the smaller lift stations that we have got around the city. The other lift station that I'd like to speak of is the North Black Cat lift station that we are building currently. Located out on Black Cat Road between Ten Mile and McMillan, it's pretty far along in construction. We are getting to the point where we are going to start putting in the mechanical equipment. Since this photo was taken they put up the next set of walls and they are Meridian City Council Pr~Council Me'~ng April 15, 2008 Page 6 of 24 now building the next deck, which would be one more level up, and doing some more back filling. Then, we are going to start putting the electrical and mechanical equipment in the lift station and hope to have it operational by late summer or fall. This is an aerial photo of the wastewater treatment plant that was taken approximately a year ago by the consultant and, then, sent over to us. It shows the status of the construction at that time. We had most of the first phase of improvements finished, which -- I don't have a pointer, but it was a couple new clarifiers and aeration, basins. The other half of the construction would be on the left side of the screen where you see those concrete tanks. So, the first phase of the construction would build this clarifier to settle out solids. This one up here. And, then, we retrofitted all four of these basins. These two are new and these two we tore out all the guts and put in the new processes into those. The construction going on right now is focused on this area of the plant. These two large tanks now, which hold the solids, they are quite a bit further along. We expect to have them running this summer. This shows more of a schematic of the flow path through the plant. The black arrows represent interception sewer lines that carries the wastewater from the -all the piping collection system into a central box there where they all come together and, then, it runs through the primary clarifiers, which are these tanks here, and goes into these four basins that are shown into the secondary clarifiers, which are here, through some filtration and out to the river. I will go into a little more detail here on the -- all the circular tanks are more used to settle out solids and, then, the liquids keep moving through the process with solids or -- essentially, they are disposed in a land fill or on farmland. The four tanks -- the four basins -- the two new ones that we put in, along with the two that we retrofitted, are more geared for nutrient removal and we have also retrofitted them so that we can remove some phosphorus in the system as well. We have also added a filter last fall called an aqua diamond cloth media filter and it helps to polish the effluent before we take it out to a stream. We also have the added benefit that it will take down the turbidity, which is the measure of the cloudiness of the wastewater to a level to where we can use the water as reused water and we have to meet some other regulations, as well as some chlorine, but a residual to go out to be able to use it as reuse water. We are in the process of getting a permit to be able to reuse the water and we should get approval soon from DEQ on the permit and on the construction project, so that we can build that this year. This diagrams the plant flow. We have got -- as you can see, there was a big growth spurt between '05 and '06. It was kind of slowed up last year and this is what we estimate that might be our flow growth this year. The green line represents what the -- our current permit limit is. Our permit has been expired since November of '04 and the red line up here is what the plant capacity will be as soon as we are done with the upgrades that we are doing now. We have also applied for a new permit with EPA several years ago, actually. This permit expired in November of '04 and we have applied for a new one. They have sent us a letter saying the application is complete quite awhile back and we don't really have any estimate for when we would get our draft permit from EPA. Also, we recently discovered through some calibration that our effluent flow meter that measures the flow going out to the creek was reporting a little high. We estimated it at up to about 400,000 gallons high. And that's been -- yeah. That was -- we recalibrated the meters a week ago, the chief operator of the plant, and brought out some people to recalibrate the flow meter, so they were recording actual flow. And it's made anywhere from .25 to .4 million Meridian City Council Pre-Council g April 15, 2008 Page 7 of 24 gallons a day high is what it was reporting, so that will help our -- help this figure here. This shows the wastewater treatment plant efficiencies. So, we show two different parameters on here. One of them is BOD, which is the Biochemical Oxygen Demand. It's the measure of the strength of the wastewater. The other is TSF, which is Total Suspended Solids, a measure of the solid content, the floaties in the wastewater. I wanted to point out that EPA requires us to remove 85 percent of both of these constituents from the wastewater, but we are removing a much higher rate than that. We are doing better than our permit requires. Removing more than is required by the permit. So, I wanted to point that out. This shows our treatment plant flow versus growth. Over here on the left side is flow in million gallons per day. On the right side we have got population and the green line represents the population equivalent. We have assumed a seven percent growth rate if you go past '07. The blue is our maximum flow at the plant as measured. We have also assumed that as going up to seven percent past '07. And the red line represents the plant capacity as we have increased it over the years and which these upgrades are complete right now. We are estimating at 9.1 MGD maximum, but we are also working on some optimization that could go bring it higher than that. And also we have estimated -- like say if you want to grow at a -- if we assume a four percent growth rate, which we would hit this nine MGD plateau out here at 2015. It's not shown on this curve. And with our optimization that could be even pushed out further. But with this current growth rate what we have assumed here, we would hit it at about 2011, 2012, but we would deal with it with some more optimization and we can raise the red line up in the next six months to a year. I'd like to go through a couple of challenges that we see. The first would be continued growth in the city. We feel that we can meet this challenge through more plant optimization. Eventually, we will have to do plant expansion, depending on how much the optimization will give us, which would require more of a capital investment into -- into that plant expansion. Or there is always the option we can limit the growth or maybe the growth won't go as fast as it has been. The second challenge would be the operational efficiencies. We are going to bring an enhancement -- budget enhancement in as kind of an option to bring our sewer TD and camera work in house. It would have more of an up front cost, but we would re-coop that cost over the course of several years and, then, it would end up being cheaper in the long run to do that. But there will be more to come on that when we go into budget enhancements. Also infrastructure replacement. Tom had mentioned that most of our -- when you think about an infrastructure you think of most of our sewer system is pretty new, which is right, but there is also -- there is some areas that are older, especially the downtown area, that we are trying to develop more of a Comprehensive Plan on how we are going to retrofit that, more focusing on that area, so that we can come up with a plan to replace sewers that need to be replaced. Maybe with this downtown redevelopment there is some lines that we should up size or move as we redevelop downtown. So, that would also require a capital investment and the benefit out of that could be that we would decrease the infiltration and in flow, which is extra flow that comes into our system and goes through the plant that's not really necessary out of the groundwater. And the last challenge, which ties in with the next presentation, is regulatory compliance. We are going to get a new permit from EPA at some point. It's somewhat tied in with the total maximum daily load, which is the TMDL for Boise River, which Cheryl is going to go into more detail on Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meg • April 15, 2008 Page 8 of 24 that here in a minute, so -- and depending on what permit regulations and permit limits that we get, we might have to add technology at the plant, we might have to do more chemical addition out there. It's all kind of dependant on that. With that I will answer any questions. Rountree: Do we have anything in the optimization piece or in the capital improvements plan for the new permit anticipating the need for more phosphorus removal? Barry: Yeah. With the improvements that we are completing now we have added biological phosphorus removal -- biological nutrient removal to the aeration basins, which could take us down to a level of about one milligram liter reliably. Beyond that we have added -- we are adding more cloth filters, which if you add chemical addition ahead of those, you can get down to a pretty low level. It's kind of dependant on whether the permit that we receive is on an. average monthly or is it a not to exceed daily limit or -- that all plays into it. If we can get more of an average limit, then, we are confident that we can get down to less than .5 milligrams per liter coming off our filters that we are adding now. If we.get a limit as low as 70 micrograms per liter, we will have to add more chemicals, might have to add more processes, too, like such as a membrane. But what we are doing now is getting us part of the way. We don't want to -- we aren't in favor of adding membranes at the moment, because we are not sure if our permit is going to require us to go there and they are very extensive. But we need to add filtration, so we are adding the cloth, which will get us part way there, and it could meet the permit if the permit is a little higher than the average is what we are hoping for. Rountree: Thank you. I don't see any further questions or comments. Thank you. That's good news about the flow meter. That's good and bad, but it's worked out well. Barry: I'd just like to introduce Cheryl Zom. She's with the CH2M Hill and she's here to give an update on the phosphorus and lower waste ratio. Zom: Thank you. Again, my name is Cheryl Zom. I'm with CH2M Hill and I'm here on behalf of the Lower Boise Watershed Council, which is the water shed advisory group, a consortium of all kinds of dischargers, a lot of municipalities, industrial dischargers, agricultural, storm-water, and so the City of Meridian has been an active member of that for a number of years now. And when Clint was mentioning about how the facilities here might need to be upgraded to meet the phosphorus requirements, that's what I'm going to talk about and what I'm presenting to you is sort of the consensus of all facilities in a water shed about how to go forward and meet the targets that we all have to meet, because EPA is talking about having a consistent set of permits for each of the facilities in term of phosphorus control. So, there we go. So, in order to understand why Meridian needs to control phosphorus, I need to go back a little bit and explain what's driving this and the lower Boise water shed discharges into the Snake River and in the Snake River itself EPA and DEQ have come up with targets for how to -- how to restore some of the fishery uses in Brownlee and also restore the esthetic uses, so there is not too much algae in the Snake River itself. The lower Boise River itself is not impaired for nutrients, so our river is clean enough, but that load of phosphorus that Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meng • April 15, 2008 Page 9 of 24 goes to the Snake is not clean enough for what the Snake needs and so what's driving all of the reductions in the lower Boise water shed is what's required by the Snake River, Hells Canyon, and that will become important in just a minute. It will make more sense in a minute. Current phosphorus loads in the Snake River, which is the lower left-hand box, is made up of a lot of different sources. Lower Boise area, that purple pie, it's about 18 -- 17 percent, we have always got Snake in flows that are a certain number of -- there is a certain level of phosphorus that comes in from the upper part of the Snake and it goes through C.J. and Swan Falls. And, then, we have got other rivers, which includes the Payette, the Weiser, the Malheur and the Owyhee and, then, just other nonpoint sources -- and PS is nonpoint sources and those are just drains in agricultural runoff that drains directly to the Snake River and, then, we have always got direct point source, direct PS, and those are other wastewater facilities that are located directly on the Snake River itself. And so this is kind of the current snapshot of where all the phosphorus is coming from. And in the lower Boise River that 17 percent, then, is broken out into the pie on the upper right-hand comer. And based on current treatment levels, all of the wastewater treatment facilities together collectively contribute about 40 percent of the phosphorus in our water shed. Agricultural runoff contributes another large piece of that pie and the rest of it is a little bit -- a little bit smaller at this point. And so this next one, then, is so once we all reduce our phosphorus, because everybody in the water shed needs to reduce their phosphorus and discharges, including municipalities, as well as agricultural, and so this is sort of a picture of what it will look like in the future. And what it shows you is that as all of the sources to the Snake River decrease their phosphorus to the levels that are required, lower Boise will meet about eight percent of the load of phosphorus that will in be Snake River measured. And, then, within the water shed itself, wastewater treatment facilities will only contribute about 20 percent of the phosphorus in the Boise that actually reaches the Snake and so certainly everybody, as Clint mentioned, is going to be a lot of investment to reduce phosphorus water shed wide and wastewater treatment facilities are certainly doing their part to help that. Rountree: Excuse me, Cheryl? Zom: Yes. Rountree: The storm-water percentage went up significantly. Is that because you don't anticipate any improvement in the phosphorus runoff from the storm-water or -- Zom: No, because there is so much more acres that are going to be discharging storm- water as agriculture land gets converted to subdivisions. Rountree: So, you're equating that to hard surfaces? Zom: Exactly. Yeah. Rountree: Okay. Meridian City Council Pre-Council M~g • April 15, 2008 Page 10 of 24 Zom: And the new --the way the storm-water is dealt with is that there is a requirement for new subdivisions, in a land that used to be green fields, it's now going to be developed, they will have to control phosphorus to a level of 50 percent off of, you know, pre or an undeveloped condition, I guess. The lower Boise River, I might mention, at it's mouth, we are required to reduce our phosphorus loads by collectively 80 percent, which is a very challenging task, providing a lot of opportunities, I suppose one could spin it that way, 80 percent of reduction of phosphorus in the most heavily populated water shed in the state is quite a big leap there. Rountree: Is that allocation equalized through the other contributors -- I mean the upper Snake or -- Zom: No. They are different. They are different. Lower Snake has a little bit -- or the upper Snake has a little bit smaller reduction that's required. Payette has a little bit lower reduction that's required. It's just not as heavily developed. I will talk about some of the other sources along the Snake River, but that's -- the lower Boise definitely has a very, very big roll and it tends to be a fairly big target, frankly, for the regulatory agencies to say this is a big water shed, it's got a lot of resources, we are going to make sure we really focus on Boise River. For example, the Snake River -Hells Canyon process was completed in 2004. Lower Boise River is the only water shed that's done anything toward working towards that goal. All the other water sheds are sort of just waiting -- just kind of waiting to see and -- Rountree: If we pump some of the water out to the desert -- Zom: That's part of the strategy for us. Zaremba: Mr. President? Rountree: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Maybe you're going to come to this, but I'm just thinking of other places where I have lived in the past and they have been dealing with phosphorus, they generally focused on the consumer portion of it, not everything can be solved at the wastewater treatment plant. Places have mandated low phosphorus soaps for laundry and -- Zom: Yeah. Pollution prevention is definitely a big part of the strategy moving forward and what it's going to do is ultimately, as cities invest in that piece of it, they will have to treat less phosphorus at the plant, but you have to balance that against the growth that we are going to have and there is only so much you can get out of controlling phosphorus at the source versus just recognizing as your flow loads go up you're still going to have to treat phosphorus at very, very high levels, the phosphorus that does reach it -- that does reach the plant. I will talk a little bit about the efficiencies that we are proposing and how that compares with what EPA would like to see. Meridian City Council Pre-Council g • April 15, 2008 Page 11 of 24 De Weerd: Mr. President? Rountree: Madam Mayor. De Weerd: So, when are they going to start recognizing that the largest contributor is agricultural and, you know, we can do all we can do and it still will have an imbalance? Zom: Unfortunately, the Clean Water Act does not treat ag runoff the same as wastewater treatment runoff, and so that's part of what was in to EPA all along is that it's fair for the point sources to do a very large part, but they can't be expected to do everything and you'll see here that there is just -- after what we propose there is very little that treatment plants can do beyond what we are proposing and we need to focus on ag and some of the other nonpoint sources and EPA recognizes that, but there is no legal way they can make agricultural runoff stop running off. That's a voluntary program under our existing regulatory system and so it's a very frustrating thing, because it depends on how much money is available and that's another thing that the water shed advisory is doing is trying to get more funding in for that piece of the puzzle, given that it is voluntary, you need to have willing landowners, and it's a -- it's extremely personally very frustrating for me having been involved with this now eight years and not seeing like I'm making a lot of progress getting that to drop. It's a step. Agriculture is a very big piece of it. And if you think about the fact that the phosphorus controls are being driven by what's happening at the mouth of the water shed, everything we are doing in the upper part of the water shed here where the population is, by the time it gets through to the mouth and it's been allowed through -- you know, it gets discharged into drains or the river and, then, that water gets diverted out, gets put on ag land, what it gets -- runs off into the -- off the field and the problem is at the mouth. The problem is near the mouth as clearly an agricultural nonpoint source runoff problem. De Weerd: Uh-huh. Thank you. I share your pain. Zom: So, what we are proposing water shed wide, all the facilities -- all the wastewater treatment facilities, the water shed wide, is to do this is a phase approach, because I think DEQ certainly recognizes that this cannot be done overnight and there is a lot of engineering that has to go into it. There are bonds. There is construction. All kinds of elements and so what we are all proposing is that in the first permit cycle after this gets approved, which would be, essentially, the permit that you guys are waiting on, an 80 percent reduction from existing levels -- and that's consistent with what the Snake River - Hells Canyon discharges are being required to do, they are being required to go to 80 percent of their final -- as their final treatment level. Now, you guys are already at 80 percent, because of the upgrades you have done, so you guys are ahead of the curve. There are others that aren't quite that far along. So, you guys are already in good shape for that first phase. Then, we are saying it's going to take us another two to three permits to actually achieve a 95 percent plus reduction, which is the final treatment level that we are requesting, and that's a very aggressive reduction compared to a lot of other facilities in the country. It's very, very aggressive. Meridian City Council Pre-Council Mee ng April 15, 2008 Page 12 of 24 De Weerd: And costly. Zom: And costly. And very costly. I will skip that in the interest of time. So, the water sheds proposal is to achieve a 95 percent removal. EPA wants all of the treatment facilities in this water shed to achieve 98 percent removal and we are concerned about this for a number of reasons. These five are listed here. I'll kind of get through them a little quickly, because I know you guys do have an aggressive schedule. But, fundamentally, what happens in our plans in the upper part of our water shed, by the time it actually reaches the Snake River and by the time it gets to Brownlee, improving the treatment efficiencies from 95 percent to 98 percent will not result in any measurable improvement in Brownlee, which is really what's driving a lot of this. And so, you know, I don't want to talk a lot about of analytical numbers, but we are talking about less than a part per trillion improvement in phosphorus levels in Brownlee over the summer, which is, again, not measurable. There would be no way you could tie that into any sort of algae reduction or lack of fish kill or anything like that. So, it's -- it's sort of a -- I think EPA -- it's kind of a feel good, but it's not actually resulting in anything. So, it's throwing a lot of money at a problem that will not solve the problem. Number two brings me to my point, additional removal, it's extremely expensive. For anybody who has worked in treatment of nutrients, once you get to a certain point you have what's called kind of the knee of the curve, where you can get some removal efficiencies and, then, it just goes vertical in terms of -- .you just can't get much more out and it's extremely expensive without a lot of benefit. So your event-to-cost ratio is very, very poor. Additional removal is also not sustainable. Clint mentioned one way to get down is to put more chemicals into your process and in doing so you really have this situation where you are having to use a lot more chemicals, which is expensive, you have to truck a lot more chemicals in, the bio solids that results from that process are a lot more -- there is a lot more of them and they are not as -- they are not as good for nutrient application. So, it really messes with the whole system. It also -- it requires a lot more energy and your green house gases and your carbon footprint go through the roof. And so, again, you know, if you look at sort of a holistic approach of how to get at this problem, we don't believe that additional removal is sustainable at this point. It might be in 20, 30 years, you know, but at this point it doesn't make sense to go to that -- to that level. And the other sources also need to be controlled fairly and equitably. This relates not only to sources within lower Boise water shed, as you were mentioning with agricultural nonpoint sources, but also the facilities that are actually on the Snake River itself. I'm talking about that in just a minute. And, then, just the idea that -- that we should really have -- have data drive these for the reductions versus just the fact that it feels good and it's the right, you know, political feeling for the agencies to come at it and I think that wastewater treatment facility, by offering to go to 95, are well within national standards or well within what's expected and certainly doing above and beyond what they need to be doing. So, I will get through here. So, to get to 95 percent removal, the water shed wastewater treatment facilities collectively estimate it might be over 500 million dollars water shed wide and that includes capital and O and M for the first 15 or 20 years. To achieve 98 percent removal is another 200 million on top of that 500 million might be required, so that's not -- it's not insignificant. It's not just a little bit of another bump in the financial. This estimate from Meridian comes from EPA published Meridian City Council Pre-Council Mee~ng • April 15, 2008 Page 13 of 24 literature on how much it costs to remove phosphorus for a given plant size and so certainly as you guys move forward in your wastewater treatment facility planning that number will be refined, but it's a big number. Here are those treatment covers I was talking about where this is -- on the effluent. On the bottom. So, that's the actual material that's discharged into the river. As you move to the left that means that your -- that your effluent total phosphorus TP is decreasing in concentration, so you're getting lower and lower concentrations and you can see that cost just goes right up that axis. So, it's very expensive. This is something I want to bring up real quickly. So, based on the Snake River -Hells Canyon document, the direct discharge wastewater treatment facilities -- it includes Nyssa, Hines, and some other small -- small communities, they contribute about 17 percent to the existing total phosphorus load. They are expected to average about a 70 percent reduction from their current levels and so that's going to result in a direct load of phosphorus to the Snake River in the part that's actually impaired of a 153 kilograms a day. Our proposal is saying if we achieve 95 percent of the water shed wide goal, we will have a load of 54 kilograms per day in our pipes and less than that is going to make it to Parma and so when you talk about equitable reduction, when you talk about what's really -- what really makes sense, we think this is an extremely reasonable proposal and this is -- this is based on a couple years negotiation to even get it to this level, because, as I mentioned, we are getting a lot of push back to even go lower and it just doesn't -- it doesn't make sense to us. I don't -- we don't see why you should have to do that at all, let alone based on what we know right now. So, that's -- that's an important piece of information. The whole process is based on this -- this approach that's all adaptive implementation. And what that means is that, you know, over the last 30 years that the Clean Water Act has been implemented, we learn as we go and we don't necessarily need to know exactly what our final limit is going to be 70 years from now, it shouldn't prevent us from getting to where we should be going now, and our point is that we really -- we really want to invest our resources into the water shed, into implement our proposal, instead of continue to go fight with EPA in legal courts and EPA appeals boards and all those sort of things. And it certainly means that if we have new information that is collected, that that monitoring of half atrillion -- I'm sorry, yeah. Part per trillion phosphorus does something in Brownlee, then, we will go back and take a look at it. But right now we can't make that claim and so right now it's not -- it didn't make sense to continue arguing about that with EPA. So, that adaptive implementation gives us some flexibility as we move forward. That's the summary, but I think I have already gone over that more or less. So, the process from here is that we have this allocation approach that's going to be out for public comment here in the next probably two to three weeks and, then, that approach -- by the way, I would like to mention that Idaho Department of Environmental Quality is fully behind us on this proposal. They believe that this is the right approach for this water shed. And so DEQ is going to publish this allocation approach and, then, once we get comments back -- once they get comments back, it will be incorporated into the state water quality management plan, which is, essentially, the state guidance document on how water quality has improved and we are going to try to continue discussions with the EPA. I don't have a lot of high hopes we are going to actually find an agreeable solution. And, then, EPA has told us that they were going to find -- or that they were going to try to issue draft permits expecting in the summer of 2008. Now, Meridian City Council Pre-Council M~g April 15, 2008 Page 14 of 24 those permits will be issued we are expecting with -- with a 98 percent removal requirement, which is when we will get into more of the legal rankling for why that's not appropriate, why it doesn't meet the state's plan and there is some issues there with kind of jurisdiction, but I mean we are -- we are sort of trying to move forward in a way, so that people can get some permits they can live with and also that they can get some certainty in their permit conditions and recognizing that EPA has been a very challenging partner. in this whole situation. Okay. That's all that I have. So, if there are any other questions I would be happy to answer anything else that you might have. Bird: I have none. Rountree: Comments? Questions? Bird: Very good. Rountree: Thank you, Cheryl. That was very informative. And keep up the good work. And maybe you could- get that down to 95. Zom: It's frustrating. I can tell you that when I was at the Boise City Council meeting a couple weeks ago, you know, I will say this up front, I believe this is the right approach. I believe this is the right way to go and I just have that passion that this is the -- this is the right thing to do and I don't think that you guys are on any sort of technical or legal low ground taking this approach consistent with the other treatment facilities in the water shed. Rountree: Thank you. Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Yes. Avery helpful presentation. Has there been any study or thought given to -- I don't know whether you would call it penalizing the producers, but there are places that encourage certain things like -- other places you buy a can of soda, you pay a nickel for recycling.. Is there any thought to if you buy a product that either has or produces phosphorus, there is a little extra fee tacked onto it and that would include fertilizers that go on ag lands, as well as soap you buy in the supermarket? Zom: Yes, there hasn't been -- I mean I think we thought about it, but it hasn't been at the forefront of how we go about solving the problem. Zaremba: I don't know how you would monitor or administer it, but -- Zom: Well, you know, comprehensive pollution prevention program, it's called P2, and that's something that a lot of municipalities are implementing as part of their pretreatment program, as well as their wastewater program, and, for example, some of the phosphorus detergent bands up in northern Idaho were a result of city and county ordinances mandating that and so it kind of comes from the local level and I would think that as we move forward in this process I think it's going to be hard for some of these treatment facilities even to meet a 95 percent level, frankly, and so that's going to be the Meridian Ciry Council Pre-Council Meng April 15, 2008 Page 15 of 24 next step of what else can we do besides continuing to upgrade our treatment facilities and I know that pollution prevention has got to be part of that equation in some form. Zaremba: Thank you. Rountree: Very good. Thank you again for being with us. Zom: Thank you. Appreciate your invitation. Rountree: Looks like next up is going to be Rick. You're next up? Clinton: I am. Rountree: Okay. Clinton: I have been told I speak softly, unless I'm angry. Can you hear me okay? De Weerd: Are you angry? Rountree: Are you angry? Clinton: Not yet. Council President, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I appreciate the opportunity to do this presentation. I have a moment to share a little bit about what we do. Just an overview, I'm going to cover the status of our department, our recent of accomplishments and our current challenges. We have 18 active wells, one of which is off line for rehab. We have pumped over 2.8 billion gallons of water last year. We had a hundred percent compliance with state and federal drinking water standards over the last year. We currently have over 25,000 customer accounts. You might note in the wastewater presentation that their account number was slightly smaller and that's due to the fact that we have irrigation accounts that don't pay sewer is the difference in the account quantities. We currently have 23 funded positions. We have over 500 miles of water main and 3,500 fire hydrants. Moving onto recent accomplishments, we significantly reduced brown water calls. We decreased them from 250 in January of '07 to 15 in January of '08. I'm really proud of that. De Weerd: Me, too. Clinton: I know so. This accomplishment was actually featured in a story in the -- in the spring '08 city newsletter. You will find more information on it there. We completed a new office building with a ribbon cutting in December of '07. We improved communication, security, efficiency. We are able to improve our customer service. We have also been able to boost morale and now have space for future personnel that will be necessary with growth. I do appreciate everyone that was able to attend the ribbon cutting. The implemented service order work zones, this improved efficiency and lowered cost by significantly reducing the travel required for a service order. Our zones mirror the billing cycles, which allows fast zone identification by account number. We Meridian City Council Pre-Council Me~tfng • April 15, 2008 Page 16 of 24 enhanced field information through GIS on our laptops. This enables us to have current mapping information in the field. Consolidated an entire wall of map racks into quick and easy laptop viewing out in the field. I think that's just awesome. Perhaps you have seen the racks of plans at Public Works or at the water department and I think it's really great that we can -- we can integrate that all into a laptop and have it at our fingertips out in the field. In the future we anticipate being able to have hydrant schematics, part numbers, and .maintenance information at an operator's fingertips as well. Recently completed drilling Well 27. This should provide an additional 2,000 gallons per minute allowing for expansion of our service area and improve fire flows. Moving onto touch read versus radio read, with the touch read program we, basically, had to go out and touch every single water meter in town with that wand and that was quite a technological advancement when we were originally having to remove the lid, open the dial or the lid on the meter, and manually hand write the account numbers. We have now since moved into radio read and that has improved our labor costs and the touch read was certainly a more expensive approach than radio read. I guess one other note on that. We have increased the quantity of water meters converted to radio read to roughly over 10,000, which is 40 percent now. These slides show the readings being gathered utilizing the drive-by technique known as vehicle radio read. A route is downloaded to the vehicle and meter readings are collected while driving without the meter reader even having to leave the seat of the vehicle. Then, the readings are transmitted back to the vehicle and ultimately uploaded back to billing, all by radio waves. The benefits of this -- this has enabled us to reduce one full-time employee to part-time just recently. This increased the quantity of meters read from 400 a day to thousands per day. One thing that I think is important to note here is that we haven't been able to actually achieve the ultimate quantity that they recommended or that they promised us that we could achieve with the radio read program to date. i have been told that 6,000 is about the best we have been able to do in one day of radio read, but that's still phenomenal compared to the 400 a day for manual. Moving onto current challenges. One of our challenges continued growth, meeting water quality demands, we can delay the need for new wells by increasing conservation awareness and enhancing zero escape opportunities. Pursuing surface water availability will supplement reliance on groundwater. Meeting more stringent environmental regulations, implementation of radionuclide rules may limit production on some wells. Lower arsenic levels have affected decisions on recent wells. Meeting source water protection requirements is also a current challenge. Water quality. Eliminating ground- water. As I just mentioned, we have made great strides in that area. Adding chemical sequestration to control excessive manganese significantly increases operating and capital costs for both water and wastewater. And you just were hearing the discussions on the TMDLs and sequestration would affect that. So, we have really been actively looking for other ways to achieve our reductions in brown water without resulting in chemical addition. Infrastructure replacement, if we don't ray place old and under-sized water mains in the older part of town, we increase the risk of flooding if a main breaks. Inadequate fire flows. You may recall we had one such flooding here a couple years ago with a water main break and the television got to it before we did. Our options. Collaborate with the Planning Department to encourage zero-scape. Anna likes to remind me that it's not called zero-scape, it's zero-scape. Pursue available surface • Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 17 of 24 water rights for future needs. Radionuclide rule may require blending of aquifers. DEQ is taking a second look at our source water protection plan and it looks favorable for approval. Adding more flush lines is the most cost effective approach to improve water quality. Budget for replacement of older and small diameter mains annually. I went rather fast. Does anyone have questions? Rountree: Any questions for Rick? Bird: I have none. Rountree: I don't see any. Thank you, Rick. Clinton: Thank you very much. Rountree: I will now tum this over to Dennis Galinato with Murray Smith and Associates. Bany: Dennis is with MSA Consulting. He's one of our consultants helping us with our storm-water program, essentially, identifying the elements of the storm-water program that we may want to consider as it relates to meeting the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System program, phase two requirements. So, Dennis will be speaking about that and I would like to, just for the record, make sure we have got his name right it's Galinato. So, thank you. There you are, sir. Galinato: I'll say it one more time. I'm Dennis Galinato with Murray Smith and Associates. Just a brief overview just to talk about why stormwater is an issue out here in the desert. Talk about the regulations that affect us in Idaho and specifically here in the City of Meridian. And talk a little bit about how ACHD and ITD affect storm-water program management in the city. So, first of all, why do we care? Well, storm-water quality affects, of course, the water quality of the water bodies and wildlife in the valley and, as we know, groundwater is the only source of potable water in the city and as storm-water a lot of times is discharged through infiltration basins, that can affect -- potentially affect the groundwater or the quality of the groundwater aquifer. And, of course, we need to meet regulatory requirements. All of the regulatory requirements for storm-water are based on the 1977 Clean Water Act and, then, that's part of that or the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System, the MPDES, is the program that manages storm-water and also the wastewater permit that Clint spoke about. I will be speaking specifically about municipal permits, but there are also construction and industrial permits that the EPA manages. As far as the municipal permits are concerned, there are basically two types, phase one and two, based on the type of -- or size of the municipal separate storm-water system or MS-4. And, basically, these were rolled out over time with the phase one permits going first in the '90s and, then, in 2003 the first round of phase two permits were required to be submitted and, basically, anyone under 100,000 was required to submit a phase two permit. There is a note there that small MS-4s who were required to submit the phase two permits, they were usually over 10,000 people and a density of at least a thousand people per square mile, Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 18 of 24 but EPA has at their -- can at their discretion require other people to submitted phase two permits, depending on the water body that they are discharging to. So a little graphic on the regulatory agencies that are involved. I will click on the next slide here. So, basically, in Idaho the region ten of EPA is responsible for managing MPDS permits and programs in Idaho. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality is involved, but, basically, are there for technical assistance. The MPDS phase one and two agencies are required to develop the local- storm-water programs. In other states, such as Oregon and Washington, the state actually is the primary agency for the program. So, in Idaho right now EPA is assessing whether or not Meridian is classified as a small MS-4 and whether or not Meridian has to submit for a permit. It will reassess all of Idaho after the 2010 census, which means, basically, that there will be more cities that are going to have to be involved in this process. And the last bullet there is just more of a general observation, that, in general, both for construction and municipal permits, the EPA is starting to pay more attention in Idaho. They've had a lot of time coordinating with state agencies as they were getting their programs rolling and unable to focus more of their attention to places like Idaho where they are the primacy agency. So, I don't think I mentioned yet, but only phase one permit in Idaho is for the greater Boise area and, then, you can see there are several phase two permitted agencies in the state, either with permits that get approved or that are pending, and you will notice that there are no irrigation districts that are part of that and Iwill -- that was going off of what Cheryl had said earlier, that, basically, the irrigation districts aren't -- don't have to meet the Clean Water Act. It's all voluntary. And as we talk about responsibilities for the storm-water program, that does play a little bit of a part later on, as most of the storm- water in the city is discharged to the irrigation canals. So, this map just shows what we all know that Meridian is part of that urbanized area, but even though it is part of that urbanized area that was identified, but had to submit a phase one permit, Meridian was not required to submit a phase two permit in 2003. Basically, a letter or some correspondence was sent back and forth stating that Meridian did not own or operate any storm-water systems and, actually, the ACHD and, well, to a lesser extent ITD, owned and operates all the storm-water systems in the city limits and they, in fact, had to apply for a phase two permit back in 2003. So, that's being reviewed right now by EPA. So, what is the current status? NSA, which passed in 2000 -- well, starting in fall 2007, to verify that that was still the case, that -- that the city still did not own and operate a municipal storm-water system, the first part of that was doing an inventory of all the city facilities, getting an idea of what type of storm drainage systems were on those facilities or what are they discharged to. The EPA also asked the city to coordinate with ACHD, because, basically, the county feels that they have gaps in their storm-water program that have to do with -- to do with enforcement, because they don't have jurisdiction outside of the right of way. And ACHD, through some other meetings, had asked the city to consider adopting a surface water ordinance, which would start a program that would help fill some of those gaps and as part of that project EPA will, hopefully, be making a ruling in the spring as to whether or not a permit is required, after reviewing the inventory that we are developing in our communications with the county. So, this slide here shows the six basic requirements of a phase two program or a storm- water program that's required to develop after you submit the permit or the permit is approved, basically. And the next slide shows where their -- and specifically within each • • Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 19 of 24 of those parts of the. program where the city maybe asked to develop a program that helps the county fill in gaps. So, there is -- you can see their out reach monitoring design standards for permanent storm-water facilities. And the next slide -- I mean this is kind of what their main concem about -- or their main concem -- or the county's main concem is their ability to control sediment ladened water and polluted storm-water to come up construction sites. They are looking for some help to help police some of these fittings and as can see sediment coming off of the site or stock piled chemicals, water running off of those, running eventually into their irrigation -- or, I'm sorry, into their drainage systems and running either into the river or into the canals. So, as far as the future of storm-water regulatory requirements, I guess I can report that the conversations with EPA and ACHD have been very positive. They have appreciated the proactive approach that Meridian has taken. I guess the note there that regional pressure on Meridian to develop a program speaks a little bit to the upper section, because it is the -- one of the only major cities that doesn't have to -- doesn't have to develop a program right now or participate in the program right now and there is also pressure from the imgation districts as far as if they are not required to meet the MPDS phase two rules and meet the Clean Water Act, but if there are unpermitted discharges that go into their -- into their canals, there is a possibility that they may be liable for -- for those runoffs. So, they are starting to look - and I think there was some news a few weeks ago where Caldwell was basically looking -- or one of the irrigation districts was looking to Caldwell to limit their storm-water runoff going into their canals, because of those -- because of that exposure. So, where will EPA go from here? I guess based on the conversations that we have had with EPA to date, I think the chance is slim that they will require Meridian to do a stand-alone phase two permit, but there is a fairly good chance that they will push for some kind of co-permitee status on the ACHD phase two permit. But we will find out more about that when they review the data that we will submit to them. And I guess both agencies, EPA and ACRD, will continue to look to the city to be proactive and help fill those identified gaps in their phase two programs. And with that I will ask if there are any questions? Zaremba: Mr. President? Rountree: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Thank you for those explanations. Meridian, actually, does have some storm-water control activity both in our current Unified Development Code and in our -- the previous planning and zoning ordinance that was before that. We require larger developments to have storm-water holding facilities and do a certain amount of upkeep on them, as in addition to other open space that they have to have that would help with it. The question I would have, if we have to go through the permit process, do we become responsible or liable for retention ponds or retention areas that are not supposed to be ponds after 24 hours, I don't think, but retention -- do we become responsible -- those are mostly operated by homeowners associations -- Galinato: Well, I think that's part of -- if a permit is required, a possibility is to simply identify who is responsible -- who is responsible for those -- those types of facilities. • • Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 20 of 24 Zaremba: But it didn't become our liability. Galinato: But it becomes -- automatically becomes the city's liability, as long as there is an identified responsible party. I would -- it has to go through the review process, but that's definitely a possibility. Zaremba: Thank you. Rountree: Any further questions? Comments? Bird: I have none. Rountree: Thank you. Radek: Madam Mayor and Mr. President, Council Members, first of all, we will let you know that even though it seems to be all you guys hear from me lately, I do more than floodplain administration. My job is other things. But tonight, again, I present as the floodplain administrator. I will be giving you an update on the program, including the status, recent accomplishments, challenges and solutions. Part of this presentation is review from what I presented two months ago. So, I will try to move it along rapidly at those areas. Before I discuss our program, I have two quick, but very interesting slides that I'd like to share with you. This is a portion of an 1879 map of the temtory of Idaho. The Ridenbaugh Canal was under construction at this time. No drains had been constructed yet. And we see that the map includes both Five Mile and Ten Mile Creeks. Ten Mile Creek actually seems to have a significant drainage area. And it, in fact, does have a significant drainage area. This graphic comes from the USGS stream stats website, which is dedicated to estimating flows in drainages across the country and based purely on aggression equations with the stream status website, you can expect a one hundred year flood of 4,000 cfs at Meridian, which, just to give you an idea of the flood stage of the Boise River is 7,000 cfs. However, the New York Canal bisects Ten Mile Creek south of Meridian and the flood insurance study identifies that and identifies the fact that it would take the entire hundred year flood of Ten Mile Creek at that location. Therefore, luckily, we only have to deal with a hundred year flow of 440 cfs in Meridian. So, the points I want to make from these two slides is, yes, we do have natural drainage in Meridian and, yes, they have been altered and the flood insurance study have accounted for these alterations and is the best predictor we have of flood events. Now, to our floodplain administration program. We have plenty of room to improve our program, but we have come a long way and we currently have a program that includes the essential elements of communication, permitting, and monitoring. We have had a few accomplishments to be proud of. The new floodplain development code will help bring our program to the next level and we discussed that a week or two ago. We completed an inventory of physical alterations on our streams last summer that puts the data at our fingertips through GIS. Again, we are taking credit for a GIS, like everybody else does. So, I should put in a plug for them at some point. We are also exploring projects that will reduce flood hazards by, for example, improving, carrying ~~ Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 21 of 24 capacity of stream crossings, like we are contemplating at Ustick and Linder and Pine and Linder or preserving floodplain, like the Five Mile Creek restoration project. Oops. I guess I -- as I presented previously, we have several challenges to address in two general categories. The first category is noncompliant development. We have development located in the floodway of Five Mile Creek. We also have several locations where culverts have been put in, which cause higher base flood elevations than permitted by our code. The second category is the lack of dedicated resources. We do not have a position or a fraction of a position dedicated to floodplain management and we don't have any funding dedicated to it either. I showed this slide to City Council in my previous presentation to illustrate that the floodplain administrator's duties are comprehensive and, therefore, assigning to a person as an additional duty may not be the best way to insure our responsibilities are met. To address the noncompliant development we have had in the floodplain, we can: Continue on our present course, which is we have conducted -- contacted design engineers and tried to get them to participate in studying and addressing the problem areas. We have had some luck with one of the engineers, but even with them the scope of their commitment may fall short of actually mitigating the problem. Another effort we have underway is having a consultant take a critical look at the flood insurance study. This effort has so far not yielded any silver bullets for us and I don't expect it to. It's my opinion that a more aggressive, but still collaborative effort to call on design engineers is needed to be able to move these problem areas towards viable physical solutions. The current estimated construction cost to address identified problem areas is over two million dollars. To address the challenge of not having a dedicated person, we can, again, continue as we have been, which on one hand has been fairly successful, compared to our historic track record, but, on the other hand, might be considered a distraction from more primary Public Works engineering duties. Or we could integrate the floodplain administration responsibilities with other program responsibilities. Without the noncompliant development issues that we have, we would probably be able to get by and do the minimum required to stay in the national flood insurance program without dedicating a half or even a fourth of a position to us. But to be able to, number one, properly address the noncompliant issues we have and, number two, to have a proactive floodplain administration program that not only avoids making flood hazards worse, but actually mitigates and minimizes existing hazards, we need resources dedicated to that effort. The resources include not just a person dedicated to the effort, but money dedicated to the effort. If we want to move forward in the direction of conservation projects, like Five Mile Creek and floodway or floodplain reduction projects, like we are considering at Ustick and Linder and Pine and Linder, then, we also need funding. There is a lot of places we can get funding from several avenues. We will apply for FEMA grants in the mitigation projects that we are talking about. We do have a permit fee. When we identify projects that help local residents, we will try to form local improvement districts. Highway funds will provide funding for our Five Mile Creek project. I think the general fund should be considered, too, as the open spaces and areas generated from mitigation projects will be of benefit to not just people that live in floodplain areas, but to everyone. And I believe the comprehensive proactive and dedicated approach to floodplain management is an essential ingredient in providing a premier place to live, work, and raise a family. Are there any questions? • i Meridian Ciry Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 22 of 24 Bird: Mr. President? Rountree: Mr. Bird. Bird: Kyle, do you have any idea what cfs Ten Mile Creek runs normally or -- Radek: Normally, with the irrigation drainage, it's probably about 20 cfs. Bird: And can you tell me what it ran 20 years ago when there was more flood irrigating and more drainage? Is there any records on -- Radek: I have no idea of that. I suspect it ran a couple cfs higher than that. Bird: Very good report, young man. Radek: Thank you, sir. Rountree: Any other comments? Questions? Thanks, Kyle. Radek: Thank you, sir. Rountree: Tom, we are running out of time. Dolsby: Now, that we have heard an update on the storm-water phrase two program from Dennis and an update on the FEMA program from Kyle, I wanted to do a quick presentation on what we think we see as these -- the related elements of these programs. First off, this is a slide that Kyle just showed you. And off to the left side -- can highlight this. There is several of these responsibilities under floodplain administration that also apply to the MPDS storm-water phase two program, such as the understanding of regulations, monitoring activity, conducting inspections, administrating the CIP program. Conversely, we presented these six requirements for the MPDS phase two program and several of them also could apply to the FEMA. There is a lot of cross-over here between the two programs. So, what we would like to do is to take the elements out of both those programs and combine them into one, so we would take the MPDS phase two program, the storm-water program, and the floodplain administration program and we have proposed to combine them into a comprehensive surface water program for the city. The challenges with incorporating these programs together is, you know, of course, we would need to create the overall program. We are seeking Council's direction on whether we would go back and come forward with the proposal to do this and we haven't gotten to that point yet. And, then, some funding options for creating this overall program for the FEMA and the MPDS phase two storm-water program. So, with that I'd take any questions. Rountree: Questions for Clint? Clint, I would assume that it would be sometime after our spring notification that we maybe doing with NPDS? Meridian City Council Pre-Council Meeting April 15, 2008 Page 23 of 24 Dolsby: Yes. Rountree: Okay. Thank you for your recommendation and I will be meeting with Tom and I suspect we are going to be talking about it some more. Barry: Mr. President, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, it's my pleasure to conclude our presentation for this evening. We appreciate your time and attention and if you have any last parting questions I would happy to entertain them at this time. Rountree: Any questions for Tom? Bird: Very good. Rountree: Tom, thank you all for, thank you staff, and the staff that's not here tonight that helped put some of the numbers together in the presentations, they were well done and very informative. And your guest as well, we appreciate you taking the time to come in here. With that that concludes the pre-Council meeting. I would take a motion to adjourn. Bird: So moved. Zaremba: Second. Rountree: It's been moved and seconded to adjourn. All those in favor? Opposed? MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT. Rountree: We are adjourned. We will reconvene in -- De Weerd: Five minutes. Rountree: -- five to ten minutes. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:00 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) `~~`' MAYOR TA DE WEERD 05 / ®lo / ® ~ DATE APPROVED ,~~~'""'~"""'<<~,, ATTEST: JAYCE ,~~`~ O~ '~•• ,• ~`t q ~• o ~-~ HOLMAN, EI CL ,~~ 4 ~+[A~fT1 ''~~~~~hrrnrr rrta~~~~ ~ • • April 11,2008 MERIDIAN CITY COUNCIL MEETING April 15, 2008 APPLICANT ITEM NO. 3 REQUEST Public Works Department Report AGENCY COMMENTS CITY CLERK: CITY ENGINEER: CITY PLANNING DIRECTOR: CITY ATTORNEY CITY POLICE DEPT: CITY FIRE DEPT: CITY BUILDING DEPT: CITY WATER DEPT: CITY SEWER DEPT: CITY PARKS DEPT: MERIDIAN SCHOOL DISTRICT: ADA COUNTY HIGHWAY DISTRICT: SANITARY SERVICE COMPANY CENTRAL DISTRICT HEALTH: NAMPA MERIDIAN IRRIGATION: SETTLERS IRRIGATION: IDAHO POWER: US WEST: INTERMOUNTAIN GAS: MERIDIAN POST OFFICE: OTHER: Contacted: Date: Phone: Emailed: Staff Initials: Materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian.