Transcripts For SFGTV Public Utilities Commission 20240713 :

The minutes . Move approval. Second. Any Public Comment on the minutes of 23 of january . Hearing none, all those in favor . Aye. Opposed. The motion carries. Secondly, the january 28 minutes of the regular meeting. Are there any additions or corrections . Second. Public comment on the minutes of january 28. All in favour . Aye. Opposed . The motion carries. Lastly, the minutes of january 30, which was the special Budget Hearing number four. Any additions or corrections . Move to approve. Second. Public comment on the minutes of january 30. All in favour . Aye. Opposed. The motion carries. Next item, please. Item 4 is general Public Comment. Members of the public may address the commission on matters that are within the commissions jurisdiction and are not on todays agenda. President caen so i have two speaker cards in front of me. The first mr. Pecasa. Commissioners, my name is francisco de kosta. One of the positions i had in my life is i was six army and procedural San Francisco congressional liaison. When i did that job, i had to interact with congressmen and senators from this great nation. I learned a lot. You know, my heart is heavy because as a citizen, i come here to monitor some of the projects as best i can. Im not paid to do it, nor will i receive remuneration for that type of work. But it saddens me that in the southeast sector of San Francisco, people are suffering. The San Francisco Public Utilities commission profits a lot from what is happening in the southeast sector. There are designs that are brought so that housing can be built, Recreation Centers can be built, a lot of money spent on art while our children die. Our children are dying. Our elders are dying. Some of them are pushed to live on the streets of San Francisco to die. And i know every human being has a conscience. You dont have to read some law or some book. Your conscience will tell you what is right and what is wrong. Now finally it has come to my attention many times, but now more common, people reaching out to me and saying about the corruption thats going on in San Francisco Public Utilities commissi commission. And ive never done this before, but i reached out to two elders who know a lot about the San Francisco Public Utilities commission so they can read what i get, so they can do something and put this thing on track. We are not supposed to spend taxpayers money on having a picnic and having a special thing offsite and spending thousands of dollars. Thats wrong, simply wrong. President caen the next speaker peter drakmeyer. Hello. Peter drakmeyer with community trust. If i could have the overhead. I came across a chart with different demand projections. Its interesting. I put that red dot to show what demand is now. If you look at four studies that went out in 2020. They range from 350 million gallons per day to 450 million gallons per day. We looked at what would happen if the sfpuc contributed for two years and then maybe we got nervous and hit a third year of drought. You could make it through the design drought, 8. 5 years. So now is the time to make that decision for this year. Were in february. Its the beginning of the o outmigration of the baby salmon. Last year sfpuc entitlements were enough to last seven years. We came into the system with full storage. The alternative is what happened in 2012. 2011 big water year. 2012 i think the unimpaired flow was 12 or 13 . That continued for another four years. We averaged 12 unimpaired flow and then in 2017 had to dump that water. The unimpaired flow was 79 . Here is an opportunity to avoid that, but we have to act quickly. Thank you. Excuse me, through the chair. I know that we dont have an agenda today, but i would like at the next meeting to get a response to that possibility. And if that is, indeed, something that we could do while staying within the design drought scenario. Yes, we can provide that for you. Thank you. I would just like to comment that the data is quite old. One back to 1969. Thank you. All right. Any other Public Comment . Next item, please. Clerk item 5 is communications. President caen commissioners, any comment . I had a comment on item h, the sewer inspection. Why cant we be like 2016 2017 . Were way behind on that. Id like to know why. Good afternoon, commissionerings. Greg norby, assistant general manager for the wastewater enterprise. Commissioner caen, youre referring to the last row of numbers, the pipes replaced . So this chart in front of you, this is information on miles that have been put out to bid or into construction so theyre not actually miles completed. What youre seeing is a essentially the impact of a couple of considerations here where if you look at the Bigger Picture and were considering changes to this report for future versions to address this, weve wrestled with whether it makes more sense to share with the commission the contracted mileage thats been achieved each year or the completed construction mileage, because they do vary. For example, i think this is one weve noted in the past. Weve had a significant portion of mileage tied up in the joint projects, like vanefs and m. T. A. So those we book the credit in a sense for when they go out to construction, but the timing of that getting completed can be substantially delayed depending on the timing of those projecs. S so if you look at a running average of the last approximately three to four years, were just below the 15 mile target and this data doesnt quite convey that. Ill put it that way. Does that answer your question, commissioner . President caen right. And its going to be an ongoing problem . Correct. Yeah, thats why i think i mentioned this before that were thinking about moving towards how many miles were contracted out. Because if its a joint project and its delayed a year, we cant book that mileage on sewer replacement until its actually installed. As long as were contracting out 15 miles a year, eventually youll get down to a year after. Thats sort of what were going to move more towards or keep track of both probably. Yeah, perhaps in your reporting to separate that. Thats what we talked about. So for your next Quarterly Report on this, youre going to see a modified version of this table, both contracted out that fiscal year and completed that fiscal year. I think that will give a more complete picture. The bottom line is were right between 13 and 14 miles per year. Anything else . Next item, please. Clerk Public Comment. President caen seeing none, were moving to the report of the general manager. Good afternoon. The first item is the bay delta Water Quality control plan update, steve ritchie. Steve ritchie. What im going to present today is information that was presented by the two secretaries of the california Inspection Agency and the california e. P. A. To a group of stakeholders last tuesday. It was kind of the biggest the very statement on the voluntary process. So ill be presenting the information here. A lot of it, were still delving into the background of it and what supports it. There are a lot of Unanswered Questions as well, but we wanted to share this with the commission so you had the sense of how the conversation seemed to be proceeding with the state. So weve been working on refining agreements. This is one of the statements of recovering fish populations than regulatory requirements and less social and economic combam intacts. The refind agreement that will be talked about will build a package that the state believes will be scientific and legal adequacy. We have collectively made progress towards securing the assets that are required. The state agency team performed a preliminary assessment in what they believe is needed for scientific adequacy to implement the bay delta update. The framework will be displayed in a couple of tables following this, but it requires 900,000 acre feed for new flows of the environment above existing conditions, dry and above normal water types and several hundred feet to help recover fish populations. Restores over 60,000 acres of new habitat from targeted improvements and tributaries to large restoration in the sacramento valley. Enables new collaborative science hub, expands tools to recover fish populations and more adaptiveness to changing fish. And also gets water and habitat quickly. It enhances a goal to achieve a doubling of the salmon populations by 2050. This slide shows how this state is improving. Increased flows above the base line inset. The sand flows from the sacramento inset and then the exporters. Each one of these columns represents a different water year type. C is critical, meaning the driest years. D is a dry year. B is a below normal year. W is wet. Going through that in the top lines, in the sanjoaquin basin. Youll note that there is 63,000 acre feed of critical year water. This line is intended to be water purchases from willing sellers. I would call it a public number that that is what is needed. When we get to the money piece of this presentation, youll see there is money set aside to try to acquire water from willing sellers. Again, the exporters being the state and federal water projects have a small amount that theyre contributing here to the subtotal of new outflow above baseline. Then the next line is new water projects and programs. This is the notion there will be money available to build new projects and develop new programs for water that can be shared between water users and the environment. So the green line then is total new outflow above baseline for years 1 through 8. Because the next line, exporters, spring baseline maintenance is the amount that the exporters believe will be able to be made available eight years from now. So thats where you get another increment of water. All this leads to what the total new and reoperated levels. The bottom is the state team adequacy target. I would suggest the state team suggested those numbers, but did not provide any backup as to where those came from. Both of these are the water elements discussed last tuesday. Again, you have the area of the whole area that were working in, acres pursuant to the planning agreement, which is where we were at in march of 2019 and then additional acres per the framework to support more than 50 of the doubling objective. Quen the san joaquin basin talk about the new agreement numbers. The state agreement says we need 246 additional flood acres. The san joaquin basin is where you see large, large amounts of acreage for different types of habitat. Thats just another indication that within the bay delta system, the sacramento side is kind of the big area of opportunity. And then the last line is called the north delta marsh. Various scientists have been proposing for quite some time that the prime habitat that can be developed that might help the system would be in the north delta area and close to suisun marsh. These are habitat improvements that would be coupled with the improvements the state is suggesting would be appropriate. Going back to text, the governance science and Adaptive Management is a key part of this. The Government Department to increase flows and develop strategic plans and annual reports. This is basically how this whole thing would be managed, would have dedicated staff and would have an Environmental Water trustee, which would be someone responsible for making sure the waters show up. A comprehensive Science Program guided by structured decisionmaking process to determine and or to adjust flow and nonflow measures. When we say nonmeasure measures we mean habitat development. And to test specific outcomes, learn from those experiments, and facilitated habitat and transparent process. The idea is you would do better in the future based on learning from the past. This is a total of 5. 2 billion. 280 million for science and Adaptive Management. 1. 7 for Habitat Restoration. 1. 6 billion for new waters and programs. 1. 2 billion for water purchase willing sellers. Voluntary fallowing would require 416 million. So were talking about a massive program in terms of funding to accomplish all of these purposes. Quick question, what is fallowing . That is someone who has an annual crop and they would take their planting out of production. The water used there to raise the crop would be devoted to the environment. Thank you. Sorry, i have a question on that one too. Where do these billions come from . Well, thats the next slide. There are three elements to that. The upper element is the federal government funding of 740 million. The rest, and i guess its interesting that they chose red for the color of it would be 2. 3 billion coming from water users. That would be some sort of dollars per acre foot that would be collected in some way. Were still trying to understand exactly what that means and what the implications are for us. Its not clear because were already willing to commit 78 million for the habitat for the Tuolumne River. How that fits in is not clear. The State Government would contribute 2. 2 million. I think that red arc would be some kind of a combination of new fees or voluntary funding from water agencies to actually help complete this package. And i should say, the presentation by the state, a lot of this was brand new for virtually everybody in the room. So this is very, very new stuff. Ill talk about where were headed when i get to the conclusion. On implementation, the voluntary agreements would remain in effect for a term of 15 years. The state water board will work with folks to ensure accounting procedures to ensure the flow is materialized. They will use their legal agreement against other purposes. Nonsignatories to the voluntary agreement would be subject to the state water boards regulatory requirements to achieve unimpaired flows. The last bullet is one weve talked about here. The state team would work with willing participants to expedite participation in 2020 or as soon as possible following applicable environmental review, et cetera. The idea of early implementation. Again, as weve talked about it, needing some clear signal from the state that were all kind of marching down a similar path. Theyve put that forward there as a statement. This is the recognition by the state that theres a lot of work ahead to finalize the voluntary agreements, finalizing them for pumping roles and working with our participants to refine the framework to finalize the outstanding governance, policy, and legal issues and submit the proposal to the state water board for a third party review, state review, and public consideration. So after the state released this, the final slide is what was in a joint irrigation district and sfpuc statement on the announcement, which is in effect we appreciate the governments leadership on this, we appreciate folks are working hard. We think weve got a good voluntary agreement to fit into this. We look forward to analyzing all the information and understanding what the implications are for us. Since last tuesday, weve had no contact with the state in particul particular. The state, frankly, as we understand it is busy in conversations with the federal government about state Valley Project and Central Valley operations because that is a big deal that fits into the middle of this and is far from settled at this point. This is to make sure the commission is aware that after pretty much silence since about midoctober, the state is kind of moving things along now. Theres something here to grapple with. Were trying to understand the implications for us and hopefully can move forward productively with the state and hopefully answer any questions about it i can. A lot of it i cant answer. So how does this differ from the p. U. C. Model, if you will, or not necessarily model, but the p. U. C. s proposal and position . The p. U. C. s proposal and position can fit into this. Were trying to figure out exactly how and if maybe a real key question is if it fits in nicely and the state says on top of that we want to charge you 10 per acre foot to put that much more money into the system. We just dont know whats envisioned in the package. This is a huge amount. Just at the super high level, there was this question around 40 release, which is where the state where we last left the state. Does this reflect that continued commitment or has that this is different than the 40 impaired flow. This is really at on the one slide it showed different year types you would be looking at different quantities of flow. I dont know if anybody has run the calculations to see what they constituted unimpaired flow, but its not the same type of block of water that we were talking about with the regulatory action by the state. Its i would say but its still a lot of flow. And more than we had counter proposed . Well, we had proposed a certain amount of flow for our contribution to the system from the Tuolumne River. This is the state looking at the whole picture, you know, the sacramento basin and the whole san joaquin basin. Thats what i tried to say more than once, were a fairly small part of the Bigger Picture. This is looking at bay delta outflows. How much is going into the delta and how much is coming out the other side of the delta as opposed to the tributaries. To stay on the high level, the request our concerns around the 40 and what that might do particularly in times of drought seems like this new direction somewhat addresses those concerns, but you havent really done the calculations yet. Yeah, we have to look behind every one of these numbers and see how they were developed, what they mean, and as i said, our proposal it can fit right into this. It looks like it does to some extent, but you have to peel back all the layers of the onion to know for sure if there is anything additional obligations that would be imposed on the p. U. C. As part of this. I am at some point going to be curious about the level of detail. I mean, i do remember a conversation we had around the doubling of salmon, for example. That was sort of discouraged and we had talked about whether baseline could be estab