Sweetwater Authority, California

Thank you, Board Secretary. Good afternoon, everyone. This meeting is being held on Wednesday, June 24, 2026. The meeting of Sweetwater Authority Governing Board is called to order. Board members and members of the public may attend in person. Additionally, some board members may attend a meeting virtually pursuant to the Brown Act. As a convenience of the public, the authority provides a call-in option, an internet-based option for members of the public to virtually observe and provide public comments at its meetings. Instructions for virtual observation and participation were included in the agenda. Members of the public attending the meeting in person may submit a public comment slip and submit it to the board chair or secretary prior to start of an agenda item. Members of the public attending virtually via the Zoom webinar or call-in option may also make public comments on an agenda item during the meeting by raising their hand via Zoom webinar by clicking on the raise hand button and via phone by pressing star 9. Remote users can change between gallery and speaker options by clicking the view button on the Zoom platform. Please note that in the event of a disruption in a call-in or internet-based option for observing and/or participating in this meeting, the meeting will continue unless a director is attending the meeting virtually pursuant to certain provisions of the Brown Act. Prior to proceeding to roll call, I would like to make sure that our general manager who's online can hear us loud and clear. Then, board secretary, please call the roll. Chair, we have Director Martinez Perez attending remotely. Oh, Director Martinez Perez, can you hear us loud and clear, ma'am? I can. Okay, may I provide my statement, please? Yes, please, Director. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm participating in today's meeting remotely under recent amendments to the Brown Act due to child care obligations that prevent me from participating in person. There is no one 18 or older in the room with me. Okay, thank you, Director. And that is to comply to the brief statement regarding their remote participation pursuant to some provisions of the Brown Act. So, board secretary, please call the roll. Director Castaneda. Sure. Director Cox. Present. Director Delgado. Present. Director Martinez. Here. Director Martinez Perez. Here. Director Morrison is absent. Director Imani. Here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Director. Moving on with the item number three, opportunity for public comment. We will now hear public comments on items within the subject matter jurisdiction of the authority that are not on the agenda. Board Secretary, are there any public comments? Yes, Chair. We have a public comment from Robert. Okay. Testing. Sweetwater Authority. Pleasure to have this meeting. You guys do a lot of good things for transparency. And I always like to highlight you guys for your efforts. Um, at the same time, I've just come to tell you how much trouble I have with other agencies, and we're trying to hope to get those fixed so the public has free access to meetings and things like that. And so through many times I have been here. I've probably even made this comment once because it's such an easy one. But on the speaker slip for, you know, public comment, and especially items, it's always best to have like approve or agree disagree neutral position. So that way we're not relying on staff to tell us what our public comment means as far as a position. Um, some agencies write a detailed description of what the public commenter said. Other agencies just write public commenter and then whoever they signed up as. Uh, I've even had, uh, some agencies add more information to my name, uh, hence doxing me. And, you know, somewhat I'd say it was malicious in that sense of I didn't write my name and they filled out my entire full name. So, you know, I'm just making you aware so that way we don't have these problems, but it would be great to get this, uh, updated so that way positions could be reflected. Uh, and the, the main reason why I bring that up is because if you expect 50% of rate payers to show up here in this little building with no parking lot, I mean the, the, the level that you guys put up for us to petition you guys is so extreme that I would at least ask for my position to be noted, uh, by myself and not staff. Um, there, there are other things on this agenda. Um, there, there are other things on this agenda. I'm trying to stay, uh, generalized right now. But, uh, as, as far as Sweetwater authority goes, um, some of the issues I'm seeing right now is like the member that's virtual isn't on the screen right now. Whereas she's supposed to be visible during the meeting the whole time, whether that's going to be you guys minimizing her or her. I know she is there. I did see it for a second, but everybody else online can see her. And if she walks away during this meeting, do you lose quorum? Right. These are the things that I hope that everybody's thinking of when we're having these virtual. I saw the hand right raise, uh, you know, announcement for the public checking a couple of things to make sure it's working. Uh, other agencies like Oti water district. They had to stop the whole meeting because I put my hand up and they couldn't take my public comment. So once again, uh, acting as a community member that's trying to give you good information. We just want to make sure that the public is recognized virtually and that the cameras are viewable, especially her camera in this room. Thank you. Thank you. Um, moving on to, uh, item for, uh, chairs presentation for that one resolution by supervisor Paloma Gary honoring Sweetwater authorities customer appreciation day 2026. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 4. 4.1 board secretary. Are there any public comments? There's no public comments chair. Thank you. This is a board. This is an information only, and we have here to representative. You may, um, you may introduce yourself, Ms. Delatore, but please have the, the, um, perfect. Um, good evening, esteemed board. My name is Marianne Delatore. I'm the senior community representative at the office of supervisor Paloma Gary at the county of San Diego district one. Um, it is my honor on behalf of supervisor. Aguirre to commemorate, um, Sweetwater authorities customer appreciate appreciation day 2026. Um, I will read some, um, whereas statements that really outline your impact from this proclamation. Uh, whereas launched in 2024, the Sweetwater authority water affordability program is the first and only water affordability program of its kind among San Diego County water agencies delivering critical financial relief to qualifying households and disadvantaged communities. And whereas the Sweetwater authority has reached a major milestone of assisting more than a thousand South County households through this unique program, reflecting a year long dedicated outreach effort to connect local families and seniors living on fixed incomes with essential aid. And whereas the County of San Diego is committed to recognizing and honoring those individuals and organizations that are dedicated to the best ideals of public service. And that's the only one such worthy organization. Now, therefore, be it proclaimed by chair Tara Lawson Reamer and all members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors on this 10th day, 24th day of June, 2026, that they commend the Sweetwater authority for their outstanding service leadership and commitment to the residents of San Diego County. And do hereby declare this day to be Sweetwater authority to be Sweetwater authority customer appreciation day throughout San Diego County. Thank you so much, um, for the work that you all do. Congratulations on this milestone. Directors, any comments, please? Well, I just wonder if we can get a picture with, uh, yeah, and, uh, that was under the dice here. Yes. Thank you, director. Any other comments from the directors? Uh, director, um, Paloma. I mean, uh, Paloma. Director Martinez Perez. Paulina, do you have any comment, director? I'm sad I'm going to miss that picture. Yeah. Pin me on the background, Leah. Yeah. GM, GM, you know, I mean, you all, this is all you also. That's been the, the forefront of our, um, of our office. And of course your team that made this happen. Any comment from you, uh, GM? Well, of course, um, you know, my appreciation to, to staff really for putting all this and putting all the effort. So, and then for the board to be supportive of actually approving the program using our non-water revenue to do so. So really a team effort. And, and I think this is a testament of everybody working together on behalf of the ratepayers. So. Thank you, GM. Thank you. So, um, yes, director Martinez. I just wanted to say that I'm, I'm really excited about this. I mean, it's, uh, we've been working on it for years and it's just, uh, taking off, uh, exponentially recently. And, uh, I know staff is putting a lot of effort into it and we were celebrating the results right now. And I'm hoping that other water districts. I mean, I'm, I'm getting questions, you know, how do you do it? Is it legal? Can you know us? Oh yes. I mean, I, I give them the, I explained to them how we did it, you know, with non non revenue water, uh, resources. And, and, um, I I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that we're not the only one and I hope that we can share the knowledge with all the other water districts, uh, everything that we have learned. And that, uh, pretty soon this is normal, you know, taking care of our neighbors that need help. Thank you, director. Yes, director. Please. So I, I want to thank you. Obviously we just, um, came off a statewide election last, uh, you know, or a couple of weeks ago. You know, or a couple of weeks ago this month and, um, the buildup, you know, all of the politicians all the way from statewide down to the local level. Everybody's talking about affordability, everything, but there's very few agencies that actually do anything about it. There's a lot of talk. And so, you know, the water, uh, assistance program, the rate assistance program, I think is, is proof positive. We put our money where our mouth is the fact that we, and I don't know if, uh, and, and please, tell, um, your boss supervisor, um, that, that, that our, uh, rates here at Sweetwater will be a 0% increase. And, uh, we are doing everything we can to, uh, ensure that people to the best of our ability, uh, can afford water. And so when we look at everything from SDG and E and the rates, uh, going up there, um, you know, the county water authority, I'm going to talk about that a little bit more. You know, as much as they call it relief, their rates are going up. So I, you know, I just, I want to just appreciate the supervisor for recognizing us and, uh, we'll, we'll keep working on it. Yeah. Thank you director. Thank you. Ms. De La Torre, uh, from, um, Sweetwater authority. Um, please extend our, um, appreciation to our supervisor for district one, Paloma Aguirre. And of course all the supervisors for Count of San Diego. So thank you so much for this, um, acknowledgement. And, uh, we do, uh, work so hard for our rate payers. Thank you so much. So now directors, if we can take a picture and, uh, our, um, Angel Marquez will take the picture for us. Thank you. And the official Sweetwater camera phone. Okay. There you go. Go ahead. Madam Chair. Go ahead. Thank you. GM, you are pinned so, so that we can take the photo. Can you smile? Oh, I'm going to be in the photo. Okay. Yeah, there you go. Thanks. Yeah. All right. Have a very good evening. Thank you. Oh, you're my, oh, sorry. Sorry about that. Let me repeat that. Um, moving on to agenda item number five items to be added withdrawn or reordered on the agenda. GM. Um, no, sure. Thank you. Moving on to item six approval of minutes, six dot one special board meeting of June 5th, 2026 six dot two regular board meeting of June 10 2026 and six dot three special board meeting of June 11 2026. Um, this is the opportunity for members of the public speak on items six dot one through six dot three board secretary. Are there any public comments, ma'am? There's no public comments, chair. Thank you for approval. Thank you. I have a motion soliciting for a second. Thank you. I have a motion and a second. Any other comments from the dais? Seeing none. Board Secretary, please call the roll. If I may clarify, this is a motion for approval of 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Director Castañeda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Director Morrison. It's absent. Director Imani. Aye. Thank you. The motion passes unanimously with Director Morrison absent. Thank you. Moving on to item 7, consent calendar items. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on the consent calendar items. Board Secretary, are there any members of the public that would like to speak? Yes, Chair. We have a public comments for item 7.1, 7.2, 7.7, and 7.8 from Robert. Okay. Madam Chair. Yes. I just want to go ahead and register recusal for item 7.1, which is San Diego Gas and Electric, our monthly bill. And I have a financial relationship with the parent company. Thank you. So noted, Director. So that's 7.1, 7.2, 7.7, did you say, Board Secretary? Yes, 7.7 and 7.8. 7.8. Mr. Robert, if you would like to speak, sir. Thank you. Through the chair. Yes. Would you like a motion to move the rest of the consent calendar and pull those items that have public comments? Is that the, well, do we want to listen to him first before? We do. That's what typically we have in the past gone ahead and moved 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6, and then gone back and had the public and board discussion on the pulled items? So, directors, do you, I just wanted to hear what he's wanting to say. Absolutely. We will. Yeah. Okay. Okay. A little different. Okay. Okay. Go ahead, sir. Point of order. Is that correct that no members want to pull this item? We wanted, we wanted to hear. He was hinting right on the point of order, though. I hope my time hasn't started either because I'm in a point of clarification. Well, we're asking you, I am asking you to speak as the chair. Go ahead, sir. On what item would you like me to speak? On 7.1, 7.2, 7.7, and 7.8. So, point of clarification, again, I don't know why my time's running if we're having a point of clarification. Go ahead and speak, 7.1, 7.2, 7.7, 7.8. Right, but if you allow me, does that mean I only get to speak once on all the items? Do I get to speak on each item? Like I said, I'm looking for a procedural clarification because the member, Ms. Cox, just asked if we were going to pull the items so I could comment on them individually. Go ahead with your 7.1, Mr. Robert. Not going to say anything? Madam Chair, are you running this meeting or is the speaker or- I just want to ask. Just a clarification. That's it. Mr. Robert, please speak on 7.1. And then do I get to speak on the other actions? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Just start to speak 7.1, right? And I will call you for 7.2. Is that good? Yeah, I think it should just say all the time in one run and then I just go on. But if you want to call me back each time, I guess- You can stay there, sir. Do the procedural. You can stay there. Okay. Yes, I run the meeting. Especially when you guys are lacking the ability. Just so the public's aware, it's $245,738 with 78 cents. That's one line item. $966.70 is the second line item. The third line item is $57.11. Now, I think this is very important because the water district claims sustainability, claims these words of affordability even. So when we're thinking about sustainability within the water district, why would you guys not be with the other company that pushes renewable energy? And why would you guys be paying the fossil fuel company, SDG&E? San Diego Community Power is the alternate. I mean, if you guys have solar panels, you guys are part of them. So, you know, I can't see the bill, right? I see the bill on my end when I go home, pay the house bill at my house. But it tells me that I have two companies, SDG&E and San Diego Community Power. Now, as far as I understand it, the claim here now is that we don't have solar panels and we're not paying San Diego Community Power. We only pay for big oil money or whatever. You know, I'm using climate justice words. You guys love to do this. So I'm trying to stay within that vocabulary. You'll understand. The efforts to maintain status quo for SDG&E, hence a member benefits, right? He recused himself from it, which is required. But I don't think you guys are fulfilling the role of the sustainability. I mean, am I supposed to speak for everybody else to say that without the bill, I won't know if you're part of San Diego Community Power? It doesn't say it here, so I'm assuming you're not. So your choice is to stay away from the renewable energies, right? And only use San Diego gas and electric. Does it say how much is renewable up there? You know? I'm going to stay up here and go back and forth. Are you done with having that one, sir? No, I just got 30 seconds left, so I just thought I'd get ahead of it. Sometimes we just need time to think, too. Appreciate you running with my time and restarting that. Secretary, thank you. Okay, 7.2. Mr. Robert? 7.2 is an itemized list of expenses. And one that stuck out to me that I thought should be brought up is... I don't see it on where I screenshotted, but it's an expense for travel and meetings for the board member, Ron Morrison. Right? And it's for like $1,200. And in the clarification of that, is that just for the month of May? Because it doesn't specifically give a date on when the payments are made. It just tells us, you know, the customer refunds or, you know... If that payment is for your guys' expenses, it would just be nice to have clarity into... Like, up there, it gives more details. At the very top is what I'm looking at, I guess. And it says, like, Canyon Spring Enterprise. $515,000, right? And then it gives you a basic understanding. Construction, central wheeler, tank, construction, and system improvement. So there's a little bit more of a description to the item. And I think for the public good of your guys' position, you should be more transparent to your payments and what you receive. Or else maybe the public might just FOIA all of them and figure out if the expenses are actually related. Because that is definitely what the public could do if they wanted to check on all of your guys' expenses. So maybe a little more transparency on that. I do like the line item. It's a lot more transparent than other agencies. But I think the scrutiny of the public is more towards the directors, board members, than it would be about, you know, other individual companies. But, yeah, you guys do have a lot of money going out, it looks like. I wonder sometimes if, like, we can't see where the power comes in from. We can see where the water is coming from, right? It comes in from the pipes. You can actually physically see it moving sometimes. And then I just wonder, can we visualize and see how the reverse osmosis systems, you know, and so, like, here I can visually see the money moving around, right, on context. So, you guys want to make it affordable. You guys want to say all these nice keyword things. But we're going to come back to those statements later because we have a rate increase. So, wow. Thank you. 7.7, Mr. Robert. You can start now. The consulting. I'm on the right one. Okay. I'll check. Yeah, this is the media consulting one. Okay. So, as a good understanding, it's always good to have good publicity, right? And formatting strategic communications and message development. But on purpose, manipulating words to always favor yourself and never admit any wrongdoing is another way you could say it. There's going to be a quote I'll tell you guys later and hopefully you guys laugh at it because it's your guys' own words. So, you know, I think you guys' outreach does do pretty good. Let's see. Is it in here? Is it in here? Because the media relations, strategic communications, message development, coalition building, research. I mean, like I said, they're all great buzzwords, you know, but what does that actually entail? I think the contracts for $6,000 some odd dollars a month, not to exceed $70,000, right? And, you know, a lot of the times we just need to verbalize this for people because it's hidden in the document, which is available. I will say that. It is available. But without telling the public, we're all just kind of like, you know, keeping it to ourselves instead of sharing free and open information. You know, that's why I think sometimes it's better to pull the items so we can have the discussion. And now I'm going to say something. You might want to come up and talk about it, and then you're not going to be able to because you didn't pull the item. And then if you get a staff presentation, we'll do a little procedural talk right now. If we do a staff presentation during a public comment, oh, yeah, I've caught people doing that, too. If we do a staff presentation after this, does that not make it pulled then? So, you know, like I said, I have to be able to speak on a fair, equal ground with you guys. And if you guys have a staff presentation after I've made my public comments, it's going to upset me. Because I'm trying to speak on the items with no information, no other comments. And I've had situations where then it becomes a comment, and then I don't get to speak on it. So I do appreciate Ms. Cox kind of wanting to pull these maybe. I don't know if that was her intent. But, you know, we need a little bit more dialogue sometimes. And I do appreciate all of my time, as you can tell. So. We got one more. 7.8, Mr. Robert. And you can speak now. Thank you. Um. I think this was the other. They're kind of similar. Because it's a Sweetwater Authority communications plan. So it's along that same line of messaging. And, you know, in the paperwork, if I have the right page, I think I do. Uh. It mentions key political stakeholders. Uh. The mayor, John McCann, is listed. Tiffany Allen, the city manager. And then all the council members. And then, uh. National city at list. Uh. Ron Morrison, national city. Uh. Leslie. Uh. Denise, uh. City manager. And then all the council members. And then it goes into Benita. And, you know, there's a good community there, too, that does have representation. It is listed here. Um. Where was it at? I think it's this one. So Sweetwater is aware of the. This is a sample holding statement. This is kind of what I'm talking about, about propaganda sometimes. Um. Sweetwater authority is aware of an issue affecting our water systems and is actively working to address the situation. Public health and safety are our top priority. We are coordinating with local and state agencies. We'll provide updates as soon as more information becomes available. And so, like, you're giving someone, like, a stock line. When you ain't got nothing to say, say this. Right? Like, you know, there was another page in here. Uh. It might be in a later item because, obviously, I've pulled a couple of items today. Um. When I think in this one, it says, uh. Media engagement. Correct misinformation quickly. What if you're the source of the misinformation? Yeah. You guys don't want to face that fact sometimes, right? Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Establish, uh. Uh. Uh. Single messaging points. Provide fact sheets. We'd love to see some of these fact sheets. And then, uh. Another good thing I think the public should know is, uh. Stakeholder notification protocol. First, it's the board of directors. Then it's the customers. Then city managers. Then mayors, council members. Then it's state regulators. Uh. County public officials. Regional water agencies. And then the media. You know. Crisis response structure. Activate crisis communication team. Uh. Verify facts. Like I said. Some of this, I'm just reading. So the public knows. Thank you. Um. Board. Chair, I move for approval of all consent. Calendar items. Thank you. Thank you. I have a motion and a second. Second. Oh, sorry. Thank you, uh. Director. Uh. Director Cox. Thank you. Um. I had questions on 7.7 and 7.8. That's why I asked earlier if we wanted to. You want to pull that, director? Thank you. Okay. 7.7.7.8. Pulled by director Cox. Any other? Seeing none. Uh. Madam Chair, since I got a recusal on the first one, I'll just go ahead and defer my, uh. Second to director. Director. Director. Director. Director. Director. Did you get that board secretary? Yes, Chair. Okay. Got it. So then, um. There is that a motion and the second, um, board secretary, please call them. Director. Castaneda. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Director Morrison is absent. Director Yamani. Aye. The motion passes unanimously, but director Morrison absent. Thank you. Um. Director Cox on 7.7. Thank you very much, um, for the opportunity to ask a couple questions. Um. The previous contract with Affinity was within the GM signing authority at the same amount of that this one is. And so I'm just wondering why this contract is coming to the board when past years haven't. I think that's a legal question. Yeah. I, I don't have the answer to that. Well, my understanding, if he continued to do that, it'd be a serial contract. Yeah. I haven't looked at it. Yeah. I can weigh in on that chair if it's okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the first time the contract was awarded is within my authority. So that's the authority that the board has granted me. So I awarded a contract for 75,000. And to me doing so again would be as director Castaneda pointed out, uh, will be a serial contract. So that could basically be undermining the, uh, authority that the board has given me. So I decided to bring it to committee for consideration. The committee made a recommendation to the board to approve the contract. So here we are. Okay. Thank you. And if I'm not mistaken, this is the third contract with this agency, right? With this firm? Uh, not for, uh, communications advisors, uh, advisory, um, purposes, director Cox. Okay. Yeah. This has been the second for us, a communication advisor. Okay. Um, I thought they had done some previous communications work. Um, there was a recent solicitation for communications consultant services that was put out, I think, to the world. Um, is this contract just for clarification, a result of that solicitation? No, that'll be a separate contract coming to the, to the board. Okay. So we are awarding a contract for communication services ahead of awarding a larger contract for communication services. That is correct. This is a communications advisory contract for, um, affinity public affairs, uh, affinity public affairs. And there'll be a second contract for general, uh, uh, public affairs, um, support services. Okay. So the difference between advisory and general support services. Correct. If you want to see it that way. Okay. And are there, um, any vacancies or current gaps in what our public affairs team, um, is, is able to do? I'd just like to better understand what this firm will do versus staff and then what the ultimate general communications services firm will do. Uh, there is currently a vacancy that we intend to, uh, look at and possibly reclassify director Cox. Um, and then this consultant will provide skills that we don't, I don't think we have in house and that'll be the support that we're looking for. Mm. Okay. All right. Thank you for the questions on that item. So you want to move. Move that. I'll let the members of the committee. Okay. The recommendation. Um, what recommendation is basically to, uh, prove the manager's record, the general manager's recommendation. And I'll go ahead and move, um, the recommendation from the committee. Thank you, director. I have a motion. I'll second that. And I have a second. Um, any other comments? Seeing none. Board secretary, let's vote. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Director Morrison is absent. Director Yomani. Aye. The motion passes unanimously with director Morrison absent. Thank you. Director Cox 7.8. Thank you again, very much. Um, first I'd like to clarify what the requested action is on this item. The agenda asked, um, for the board to approve the plan and the actual report says, um, provide input. Um, this is the plan that, uh, that, um, the charity. Yeah, I can go ahead and basically answer that. Um, I mean, I didn't write it. So I, I, I don't know specifically how it, it all got done, but basically this is something that we have been working on for some time. We've asked our public affairs, uh, and public communications, uh, folks to give us a plan right now. We, we don't have a specific plan. Um, they provided that, uh, and a presentation to the, uh, communications, um, committee. Um, and we unanimously recommended, um, that the board approve it because, um, and affinity, um, also, um, will be assisting in the implementation of that. Um, because the world and government's full of plans and unless they're implemented, they don't really mean much. So we want to make sure that we have the right kind of expertise and we have the right kind of resources to, to make this all happen. And I want to thank affinity and, and angel, uh, Marquez for, uh, doing that. And, uh, it has gone through some revisions and some refinements and I think it's very good plan. So I, I'll move approval. I appreciate the attempted answer to the question, but the question again is the agenda says approve. The recommendation is to approve the Sweetwater Authority communications plan, but the report says staff recommends the governing board provide input on. So I'm, I'm again, just seeking clarification. I can I. Well, it's really up to the board. Do we present it a communications plan? The board can either provide input and we can come back and bring it or the board can approve what we presented. So I, I, I defer to the governing board on direction. I'm moving it without any additional input. So I'm looking for a second. And I'll like to register a second. So does that mean that there's no opportunity for their board input? Yeah. Okay. So, um, yes, there is just like what the general managers, there are any, continuing, this is a living document that we can improve, enhance as we move on with our communications plan. But in the meantime, right now, we have this plan to be able to follow for our government affairs and our communications team to be able to move forward with, with this. If there are things that you see that can be enhanced, that fits with the plan, then of course, you know, I mean, it's a living document. All of us can make recommendations. Okay. So we can do that now. Yes. If you, um, want that, you can, um, you know, I mean, you can email the general manager so we can. So it's all in, it's all can be, um, in writing and they can, you know, general manager and secretary and our chair can, can go over it. And then it will come back to the board. I mean, to the committee. Okay. So no opportunity for, for board comment at this time. Um, it's, I think it's better if you just send your, your, um, um, recommendation to the general manager. So, so that will go back to the committee. Okay. Would you be willing to put a timeline on that? Cause I've had several times where I've provided input and items just haven't come back. So I'd appreciate knowing. Okay. The input this week. When might that come back? When you, when you send that, um, director CC me. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So that is the, uh, that is that, um, comment there. We have a motion in a second. Any other comment, uh, general manager? Uh, none of this, my chair. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Uh, board secretary, please call the roll. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Abstain. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Director Morrison is absent. Director Yamani. Aye. The motion passes with directors Castaneda, Delgado, Martinez, Martinez Perez, and Yamani in favor. Director Cox abstaining and Director Morrison absent. Okay. Thank you. And I'd seen your note, um, board secretary. Thank you. Um, moving on to action and discussion items. Eight, uh, item eight, new business. Eight. That one presentation of draft 2026 water rate study proposed water rates. Um, eight. That one. Who is this? Uh, general manager. Oh, hold on. Uh, this is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item eight. That one board secretary. Are there any, uh, public comments? Yes. Chair. We have a public comment from Robert. Through the chair. Yes. May I offer that this is a really complicated item and it comes before us only every few years. Would it benefit the public for them to hear the presentation before comments are provided? Okay. Um, let's hear this. Uh, let's hear your, um, public comment, please. I hope you guys are getting ready for lawsuits. That's what I hope you're getting ready for. Right? Just throw out the opportunity for me to get any of the information. Madam chair. Are we being threatened with, uh, with litigation here? Is that a great concern? Are you going, are you going to speak, Mr. Roberts? I'm giving you the opportunity to. Yes. You have an opportunity on public comment before the presentation. It's come, come forward and you have an opportunity to speak on it. All right. We'll send you a cease and assist letter. You know what the process is, man. Come in here saying some good things and we want to end it this way. Right. This is how we want to end it. Preventing the public from hearing presentations and making comments before the presentation. You guys have habitually done this to me. Just let you know, this is not the first time I've made this comment. Thank you. Ms. Cox. Recognizing the public's need to hear the presentation before I make comment on it. Hence, they could say things that could answer some of the things I'm raising. You know, transparency. Man, don't you love it when I show up? We'll just drop the mic everywhere. What do you run the meeting? All right. All right. Let's get into this. Wasting my time. I'll waste your time. So, the proposed rate increase is 5%. Then it's, you know, it's another 5%. Then it's another 5%. Then it's another 5%, which ends up being 21.55%. I mean, I love it. You guys can dip into money. Not many people can. What's the fractional penny? You guys got any on you? I'll take a fractional penny from you if any of you can produce one right now. I doubt you can. How about the fact that from last year's budget to this year's budget, it went down in the costs. And then you're going to say the total funds need to be higher, right? Did you guys go to the San Diego Community Power and listen to them, how they're saying that rates are going down? Oh, but no, you pay SDG&E, right? So, rates are going up. That's how it is. Is it the 4.5% rate increase to the employees' wages, too, that drive all this need to actually make more money and not provide more water? The only thing, the product you sell, which is water? You know, I find this highly offensive that you would do this to the public. Hiding the presentation and the lack of me to be able to see it causes damage. And this is the only three minutes I get. So, when I say it's going to make me angry the last time, it's going to make me angry this time, too. Every time you take away the opportunity for the public to hear what you guys have to say, don't be surprised when we're sitting here just talking shit. Highly inappropriate. You guys need to learn how to run a meeting. You guys are lacking the ability to run meetings. Thank you. General Manager, I defer to you, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. You know, just for the record clarification, we do include the presentation in the packet. So, that way the public has access to it. And having said that, we do have Sarah from NBS that will give you an update on the latest cost of service study. Okay, Director. And Carlos said everything I needed to say. So, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Sarah. Yeah. Lee, he is going to set up the PowerPoint presentation. Rich, if you don't mind, just for the record, I mean, this is – when we identify a certain rate increase as part of the cost of service study, it's not that we're going to raise the rates that much. It just allows us – it provides a guideline, a roadmap, if you will, or a framework for future years. Can you clarify that, please? Yes, that's correct. And in Sarah's presentation, she'll show that the first year of the rate study was 0% revenue increase. There's some finer points to that that will be brought out during the presentation, and I'll have some final comments to it. And then the latter four years, we have that set at a 5% increase for those latter five years. And what we'll do is, every time we present the budget that's corresponding to one of those rate increases, we'll evaluate if we really do need to increase the revenue by the 5%, or if we can reduce that amount through use of reserves or cuts in spending. So, right now, it's – you know, water rate studies aren't cheap, and the public notification process isn't easy. And so, we want to make sure we're set up for the future, and we can always make adjustments to lower revenue requirements into the future, as needed. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Sarah. I will be back up with some comments on next steps, because there are some finer points, and I want to be able to provide the board with some options for future steps. Thank you, Director. Ms. Sarah, please. Thank you. Good evening, Board Chair, Board Staff, members of the public. My name is Sarah Mares with NBS. It's my pleasure to be back here with you this evening to bring you the proposed rates. Last time I was here, we talked through, generally, what a rate study is, how it works, that sort of thing. And so, now we're ready with some numbers to share with you. So, I will get into my presentation. All right. We will also spend a little bit of time going over the methodology, not as in-depth as we did previously, but just recapping that in case there are folks who didn't hear that part. We'll go over the financial plan, which is where we're setting our revenue requirements. We'll talk about the cost of service analysis, which is what's required for Proposition 218. We'll talk about the rate design and then have time for questions and answers. So, first, we have an overview of the methodology in terms of our approach, some of the key issues, Proposition 218, as well as the primary rate study goals and objectives. Of course, rate setting is governed by Proposition 218. And that does a number of things. That is a proposition that was voted into law in 1996 by the voters in California. And that limits the authority of local government to impose taxes, assessments, fees, and charges. And it requires that when you're adopting property-related fees, that they be limited to the cost of providing the service. And revenues may not be used for other governmental services generally available to the public. Property-related fees are subject to the noticed public hearing and tabulation of written protests. If you have a majority protest, then your rates may not be implemented. The primary goals and objectives of a rate study are threefold in terms of process. First, we develop a financial plan. That's where we capture your operation and maintenance costs, your planned capital improvements, rehabilitation, repairs, that sort of thing. Any debt service and ensure that you're maintaining sufficient reserve funds. Once we understand what that revenue requirement is, we go into the cost of service analysis. That's where we take those costs and allocate them to the customer classes based on the characteristics of each customer class. So you have single-family residential, multifamily residential, you know, and so on. And so we're allocating those costs to each of those customer classes. Lastly, we look at rate design. That's where we are looking at the share of cost that you're collecting from each customer class. In terms of how much you're collecting via the fixed charge and how much you're collecting through your variable charge. The tiered rates. And then also looking at setting drought or revenue stabilization rates. Should we be in a situation in the future? I don't know. We're expecting this super El Nino. So maybe not this year. But in the future, there could be drought situation. And when your sales of water decrease because there are drought restrictions and usage goes down, then obviously if you're collecting revenue based on consumption, your revenue goes down. And so those provide you rate stability during a time where drought may occur. So just, again, as an option. So we're looking at all of those things as we go through the rate design. Just to recap, the last rate study was in 2023. And there were a few policy changes at that time. The first was to shift through the rate period from having a lower percentage of the rate revenue collected via the fixed charge to a little bit higher percentage. So we went from 13 to 19%. So, and through this study, we're looking at maintaining that 19%. The phase in was modified and you adopted a rate period that was only three years, not five at that time. There were also some changes to the single family residential fire flow meters and some of that non-rate revenue. You heard about that earlier and got that wonderful award that some of that non-rate revenue was allocated to that assistance fund. So our baseline going into this study is we're looking at a five-year planning horizon. We are not anticipating changes to the current rate design or cost allocation unless they are recommended. And so we'll go through any of those recommendations. We plan to continue funding that water affordability program. So let's get into the financial plan. So this is the financial plan that shows your budget for 25-26 as well as your projected rate period, which is 26-27 through 30-31. So this is the financial plan that shows your budget for 25-26. So this is the financial plan that shows your budget for 25-26. So this is the financial plan that shows your budget for 25-26. So this is the financial plan that shows your budget for 25-26. So this is the financial plan that shows your budget for 25-26. So this is the financial plan that you're going to be able to do that. So this is the financial plan that you're going to be able to do that. So this is the financial plan that you're going to be able to do that. So this is the financial plan that you're going to be able to do that. So this is the financial plan that you're going to be able to do that. So this is the financial plan that you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. So you're going to be able to do that. 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Through this process, we take all of your costs, literally line item by line item of the budget, and allocate that to five different components. We determine for each line item what share of that cost is associated with capacity, the commodity, the customer cost, things like billing, fire protection, or your pass throughs from CWA and MWD. So once we allocate those costs to each customer class based on the peaking factors, the percentage of consumption, the number of accounts, then we can see how those costs should be allocated to those customer classes. So I've got a couple of tables showing that information. The first table shows the share of the volume. So this is the amount of consumption that is allocated to each customer class based on the historical information. It is noteworthy that your consumption is down in 2024 from what was in your last rate study by about 25,000 HCF overall. So you are seeing some shifts in your overall consumption. So we're also looking at those peaking factors there. And it is notable that the peak monthly factor is down in several of the customer classes. But interestingly, it is higher in the study for irrigation than it was in the prior study. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes. So we're looking at the cost of the customer classes based on the actual data. The other piece here is looking at the number of customers in each class. So we're actually looking at the number of meters associated with each of those customer classes. And then lastly, we're looking at the various sources of supply because that's how we determine those tiers. And some of the changes that we've seen is that the cost per acre foot of the National City Well water supply source is actually less than it was during the last study period. But the cost of desalination, the reservoir and CWA is higher than it was before. So once we have this information, then we can determine what our tiers are and you'll see the rates. But first, what we do is determine the total consumption by customer class. Then we determine the volume by the source of supply, how much water is coming from each of your sources of supply. Third, we allocate to each customer class their share of each source of supply. And then we allocate the residential share from each source of supply to the various tiers. And so the way I think about this is I thought, gosh, it would be fun if we actually had a demonstration and gave people buckets to represent the well water and the desalinization. And then we're filling up, you know, little cups and that's that's really how we're looking at this is we're taking those water supplies and allocating them to each of those customer classes through the tier calculation. And then we get into our rate design. Again, our goals here are to follow the cost of service, make sure that the rates are equitable and non discriminating by following that cost of service. So we want to ensure consistency and ease of administration and understanding. So these are consistent with your prior rates. We want to look at your revenue stability. We don't want to make changes that are giving you unstable revenue. And we are considering, of course, any recent legal changes that we need to. So as I mentioned, we're keeping that 19% fixed, 81% variable structure. And without further ado, we'll go through. There's several of these. Obviously, you have several different rates here. So the first is the bimonthly fixed charge. And I do want to make a point of clarification here that even though we have a 0% rate revenue increase, through that cost of service analysis that I mentioned, when it reallocates costs among the customer classes, it does mean that the rate that is calculated in year one changes. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in terms of implementation and how you can approach the implementation. But I just want to mention that because you're not going to see the same number in the 2526 column and the 2627 column. Even though you're not increasing your rate revenue, we've gone through this cost of service analysis for you. So this is the bimonthly fixed charge. Then we have your bimonthly fixed irrigation charge. And you will see that these increases are a little higher. And I mentioned that peaking factor for the irrigation. That's what's coming into play here in terms of the irrigation rates increasing more than some of the other customer rates. So this is the bimonthly fixed. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. So this is the bimonthly fixed rate. That's not true. The national city well cost had decreased a little bit, but some of the other costs have increased. And so we refreshed that analysis of the tiers to consolidate the desalination. I don't know why I always want to call it desalination versus desalination. Apparently, I looked at Google. They're the same thing. That's what I've heard. So. Okay. So I guess I'm just old. I'm old school. So there are similar costs for those two sources of supply. And you can even see that a little bit in the last study. But the way that those costs shifted, they were also still similar. And so it started to make more sense to consolidate that tier together. So that's what you're seeing here. Then we have that wholesale water purchase charge. And this charge is recognized by the cost of the water. And this is recognizing the potential need for additional purchased water. So that what we're setting here is a maximum rate that can be revised and reviewed, as Rich mentioned, on an as needed basis. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. So that's the way that you're seeing the cost of the water. And then the next slide is the pass through charges, which is what it sounds like. These are charges from other agencies that are being passed through. And so that is I mean, it's literally a straight pass through calculation. So those costs are set by those agencies and we're just calculating how much they would be for your customers. So we did want to give you a bill comparison because I know what the rate sometimes it's hard to understand. What does this mean to an average customer? So we looked at the single family residential less than one inch meter, which is your standard residential meter size. And we looked at the various consumption levels. The we have an average winter bill, an average annual bill, an average summer bill. And you can see the difference between the blue line, which is the current bill, and then the green, which is the 26, 26, 27 rate. And so you can see how much those are increasing at various consumption levels. And then it's also important to understand how this impacts your customers over time. And so for that typical annual bill, which is 18 HCF, we're looking at what the rate increase would be over the full rate period. And again, we'll talk a little bit more about that implementation for that year one. So we're here today to provide you with information about the proposed rates. This is the first time you're hearing and seeing about this information. This is an opportunity for you to ask questions and provide feedback and what have you. At this point, the the legal process to adopt rates is would be coming back later in the year. We would be coming back to a future board meeting. And at that time, we would set the public hearing and order for the notice to be mailed and that sort of thing. So that process is not starting today, but would start in the future. And that does include that noticing period where we're sending out those notices at least 45 days in advance. I think we talked about last time and your legal counsel that was here also talked about the exhaustion of administrative remedies process. And so that adds a little bit of time to the process than what you might have been familiar with last year or two years ago. But we'll guide you through that. That's part of the noticing. And then you would hold your public hearing. And I'm assuming no majority protest, you would adopt your rates. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Sarah. I really appreciate it. And, you know, it's tomorrow we're dealing with this at the County Water Authority. Believe me, it's they've made it far more complicated than what you have done. So I really appreciate it. But but I think that there needs to be a distinction, because when we say we adopt rates, that doesn't mean we implement the rates. We've established a ceiling based on 218. Yes, because a lot of people say, well, you know, they look at this and they said, well, there's a fine. Increase in rates. That's not necessarily so that basically it allows us some latitude. Should there be a drought or we have some malfunction of a system or whatever, and we have to purchase more water and so forth. It gives us a little bit of an ability to absorb those costs, you know, over our customer base. So I just want to make sure because director Martinez knows this. There's several times that we didn't. We had a ceiling, but we never implemented, you know, that full that full range of increases. So I just want to make sure these are. This is a function of the law. This just requires us to set a ceiling so that we don't. We don't. We don't exceed that. And we give our customers. Some confidence that, you know, that they at least under worst case scenarios. This is what it would be. So absolutely. This is a maximum that you're setting over this five year rate period, not and you have the opportunity on an annual basis, as Rich mentioned, to go up to that 5% increase. And we can always go below or implement rates that are lower. Right. Correct. Thank you. Thank you, director. Dr. Martinez, any questions? Oh, great job. Thank you. Very good presentation. Thank you. General Manager, you have any other comments? Well, just a comment. Looking at the other example, say something came up that required us to go above the 5%, then we would have to go through this process again. So that's what the process will be. There is recourse, but it does require us to go through this process again and notice 218, notice all the residents and so forth. So, but this is overall the based on what's planned for projects and so forth. Our expected water demand and water sales. This is, you know, what shows that we will be in a good path to meet all of our financial obligations. Okay. Thank you, GM. Sure. Yes. Director, can I ask a couple questions? Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation. I think I mentioned the last time you were here. It's my first water rate study. So I probably have more questions than the average board member. So thank you for answering them. When I saw the staff report and the presentation of the draft water rate study, in my mind, I expected a draft report. And that's, that's not here. Is that coming in the August presentation? Correct. That will, that'll come in August with that full report. This is, this is the presentation where we're giving you this first look and making sure that we provide you with information and give you an opportunity to ask any questions. Okay. And we are here for the right reason. You'll have a very many, many long pages long report in August. Fantastic. I look forward to it. Um, the GM has mentioned to us several times how Sweetwater is a learning organization that can always do better. And so I'm not, I don't believe you were involved in the 23 rate study, but you are, were aware of its results. And so I'm wondering if there's any assumptions from the previous, the 2023 rate study, um, and how they compare with the actual water rates. Is there anything that we learned during the 23 that we can apply to doing a better, uh, forecasting in 2026? Um, I don't know that methodologically there's anything that, that we learned, but we're obviously always looking at the current data to understand that. And so that's where, um, those, those tier calculations, for example, are changing a little bit based on information that is more current today. Looking at those costs, looking at how the costs have shifted among the various sources of supply and how, um, how that all was impacting those rates is, you know, again, just sort of looking at that with fresh eyes. And, um, and then taking in that new data is, you know, is the impetus for making that change to the tiers. So that's just one example. Um, but I mean, I, I don't think there were, you know, huge lessons learned necessarily, but we're certainly, you know, looking at that fresh data. Okay, great. Um, and then I know we've talked a bit tonight and in past, in the past meetings with the FY 27 budget adoption and the press release that went out and we, we talk about zero water rate increase, which I see on page 131. But if I look at page 145 and 146, these appear to show an increase. So how do we explain the difference to the public? So there's, so first I'll say there's, there's two separate things. Looking at a rate revenue increase is not the same as increasing rates because we're reallocating costs among customers. And then I'll say, I'm going to go to the consumer classes based on the new, the current data, right? All of those cost of service pieces that I went through. So that's the first point. So now, um, if you're, if your decision is that you do not want to increase rates in 26, 27 as well, then you can do that. And again, it goes back to the comment that this is a maximum that we're setting. And so if you are keeping rates in place, um, and, and, uh, making those stay at the level that they are today, then that would be implementing a rate that is lower than the maximum. And the maximum being zero in this maximum being the rates that we have in the 26, 27 column of each of those rate tables. That is the maximum. That is the maximum. So again, that rate revenue is not your rate. The percent increase on your rate revenue is not a rate. That's just how much your revenue is increasing or not. But the rates themselves are what we're establishing as your baseline. And so these are maximums. And if you implement rates that are less than that, which would, uh, mean you're carrying forward your rates from this year without change, then you're implementing rates that are less than the maximum. So I hear what you're saying. Okay. It's just gets so, I think it's complicated and how we explain that to a member of the public, because I think when you hear the simple words, 0% rate increase, I think a customer anticipates if I use the same amount of water in the same amount of time, I will have the same total bill. So is that what you are intending to convey or is that a little different based on the, the rate revenues moving around? So that's up to you, um, in terms of the implementation. So again, this is what the rate study calculates the rates to be, to have a Z to have your rate revenue stay the same. The rates presented in the 26, 27 column are what would need to be implemented. If you would like to implement lower rates, it means that you will have a little bit less revenue. Um, so the proposed design that you've come back to us with has a three tiered system for residential customers down from the four tiered that we currently have. Um, is there a reason for moving away from the four to a three and not to a flat rate structure? Um, I know there's been legal cases and appeals and whatnot. So, um, I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. And I know the staff report said that legal counsel reviewed the study. So I'm just curious if that was our current counsel sitting at the table or our former counsel that started this process off. Um, with us, I know that's a two part question. So, um, the legal counsel who has reviewed, this is your special legal counsel, um, that has been working on this. Um, and so he was involved in the conversations. And I think, um, based on the, uh, we are frankly in a little bit of a weird situation with the court cases. And I know that, um, legal counsel talked about that last time. Um, so, um, without going into that, because I am not aware, um, we felt comfortable based on the various sources of supply that you have being able to set these tiered rates and ensure that they reflect the cost of the water that is allocated to the residential customers within each tier. Thereby following the cost of service principles of proposition to 18. Well, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong. And this may be a question for Justin. Um, there's no water drop tracer to know that a drop from Purdue went to Bonita versus Chula Vista. We know the closer to the source, the closer you are, the more of the water that you're going to get. But how, how can we defend that if we don't truly know which amount of water at which source is reaching which customers in which incremental tier? Uh, we're deferred illegal counsel on that. Um, Lutfi, uh, will be with us at the August 12th meeting. Um, and in just very general terms, um, there's numerous, uh, legal cases going on right now. And they're contrary to each other. There's no clear direction. And so our recommendation is to continue on with the tiered structure for single family residential at this time, since there's no clear direction. Okay. I, um, shared with the board and the public, uh, a document earlier. It's a couple of slides excerpted from, um, LAFCO meeting. I believe director Martinez was at the special districts advisory committee meeting earlier this year, where they talked about the draft water rate comparator study. Um, and it was reported that many of the inclining block rate structures, which I believe is what we have, um, are found to be illegal. And that agencies are increasingly reverting to flat rates where the charge is the same per unit volume of water, irrespective of how much is used. So it's sort of that, that question of like, how, how is delivering incrementally more water to my neighbor costing the agency more than incrementally less water to the neighbor on the other side. Um, for, for our tier structure, as Sarah had went over, it's based on the, the, um, the cost of water that's allocated to each of the tiers. So more it's us buying and making more water that gets incrementally more expensive. There's, um, there, there's, we have a certain amount of very inexpensive water and everyone gets a bite of that, but we only have so much of that to go around. And so then our next most expensive, um, some people may not need it cause they don't use over a certain amount of, um, of, um, sorry, there's a bit of a bystander. Um, and you know, not all customers may need to go into that second tier, but that's, that's a little bit more expensive, but everyone will get a chance to get a bite at that little bit more expensive water. And then in the third tier now is our most expensive water and, um, everybody that needs to, we'll get a bite of that most expensive. Okay. So on paper, we're all getting a sip of the national city water. That's the cheapest. Um, but as more and more is consumed, we're paying more for Purdue water. And then even more for the desal water on paper, even though we're not, we're not getting any national city water. Correct. We're not counting molecules. This is a way to allocate rates. Okay. All right. Thank you for that. Um, so page one 31 mentions that there are no rate funded capital expenses that are projected until FY 30. In that chart, there's, um, blanks all the way across, but I went back. Um, it triggered something in my mind from our June 10th agenda with the board adopting the budget. Um, on page seven 14 of that, it says the capital investment budget totals 7 million, 138,000, including a million in capacity fee funding resulting in 6.138 in rate funded capital expenses. So I'm, I'm just trying to understand two weeks ago, we had 6 million in rate funded capital expenditures. And here we have nothing in the rate funded capital expenses column. In those years where you see the zeros on the rate funded capital expense line, those are being funded through reserves. So you mentioned the capacity fee reserve, you know, so those capacity fees are paying for some of that capital. And then your other reserve funds are also paying for the, uh, some of that capital. So maybe rich, this will be a question for you to help me clarify if the budget says it's rate funded, but the water rate study says it's zero. Yeah. It's the method where, so we have, uh, two different financial plans. Um, MBS is a financial plan is, is, is more complex. And so, um, the capital is, uh, drafted through the reserve funds, even though all of it may not be coming directly from some of the reserve funds. Um, but, uh, uh, in large part, it, they are, are coming from either the rate funded or the, um, um, I think maybe my, my point is that comparing our five year financial plan to this five year financial plan, there's some, uh, some differences, but it reaches the same conclusion. And so it's just the way the capital, um, funds are, uh, uh, uh, allocated through the, um, more complex financial plan. And what was the acronym that you said? MS. W. MS. Um, I may have, I may have just misspoken. Okay. I don't know if I wanted to, I don't know if I said it. Okay. Okay. All right. Um, since you mentioned the rate stabilization reserve page one 32, um, slide 10 of the presentation shows the rate stabilization reserve ending at about $5 million this year, but the treasurer's report later in the agenda has, uh, a May 31 balance of nearly 18 million. So again, just trying to understand the difference. Yeah. And, uh, that difference is allocated, um, in other, other, um, areas of the, the, and we'll, we'll look at, uh, getting a better, um, explanation of these, but, um, or I meant to say the, the, the full water rate study will have a more detailed, um, a map of, of how these, uh, uh, reserves are used. But, um, so, uh, but yeah, the, right now we do have that $17 million, but looking into the future and establishing the water rates, um, we're, it's going to be looking a little bit different because we're, we're using, um, a different basis to, uh, calculate our revenues. Sure. But even in this fiscal year, it's showing 5 million on slide one 32. So is there a difference between a revenue stabilization reserve and a rate stabilization reserve? Um, it's. They, they are. They are, um, they are the same as just, we're making different assumptions on, um, starting points for those because some of those reserves are. Um, I, if I, I'll, I'll make a point to make sure we explain this better once we come back in August. Okay. You can appreciate that. Off the cuff. I understand the question you're asking. Okay. Thank you. Um, yeah, I was surprised to see that $0 on the rate funded capital expenses, considering that, that low. I was considering that, that laugh co presentation. Um, and I, I just wanted to highlight for the, for the board and the public. So. Their presentation said quote appropriate capital spending increases water rates. And if we look at the charts, um, that I provided in the handouts, um, you know, they say that traditional rate comparisons can be misleading. Right. So when you're looking at one customer type at one consumption, I just, I hope that we can do, as you said, right. A better job of how we can explain this to the public between rate revenue and rates. And when you say 0% rate, it's like, Oh, okay. No increase. So I'm going to use the same amount of water next year. My bill's not going to change, but in reality, it sounds like it actually will. So just so that we can be really, really clear for the public. Um, it, the charts also show that, um, between the CIP to depreciation ratio and the CISB CIP spending, um, how they compare to operating expenses. Sweetwater is one of the three agencies with a lower ratio than a one to one, um, which was about 0.5. And then comparing how CIP spending compares to operating expenses. We were the second lowest in a five-year average, um, around 8%, which being low might sound good in theory, but the, the reports had taken together. If an agency is consistently on the lower end of both charts, which we are that, that, that would raise a flag for, um, LAFCO refuse reviews. So thinking about the capital expenditures and the ongoing maintenance, this is why I kept asking earlier this year for a capital priority projects assessment so that we can make sure that we are keeping up with, um, the pace of our, our equipment and getting ahead of that. So I just, I share this because I thought it was really important for the board to reflect on this as we are considering this water rate study and the potential rate increases, um, down the road. If you're spending less than 15% of your operating expense, you're probably spending too little, the report said. And if your ratio of CIP to depreciation is less than one, you're probably spending too little. So we're, we're under both of those. Um, I'm not advocating for wild and crazy spending, but I, I do think, you know, as we look at this, we need to make sure that we're investing and keeping up with, um, our, our maintaining our system in good working order. Um, so the budget that was approved earlier this month, I know it didn't consider the non-functional turf, um, changes that I had asked about going into effect on January one. I'm wondering, given the comments you made about the irrigation changes, um, in the rate study, if any of that was considered in terms of the non-functional turf that will have to be removed in the coming year and the years that follow that will therefore reduce the irrigation consumption. Um, yeah, we'll have to, um, not, I'm not sure, um, about the, when that removal actually starts and I'll have to look for, for our agency. Um, but it's, it's something we, that, uh, we can look at, but I don't believe that was, we, we didn't consider that, um, that, that there would be less irrigation due to that. Um, my understanding is it's a longer timeline, but, um, Um, okay. Yeah. They do have a couple of years for different types of, right. But some of the public agency deadlines are earlier. So. Because we've seen your consumption fee increasing. We've also assumed that, um, based on the total consumption, we've assumed that there's a 5% conservation, um, factor reflected in. So when we're taking the total, um, revenue that we need and dividing it over the consumption, we've assumed 5% less overall because we're seeing the trend of the consumption declining. So, um, so we're, we're building some of that in, but not specific to that. Okay. You answer my last question then the 5%, because it doesn't say if it's a 5% up or down. Um, so maybe it's needs to be in brackets that it's a 5% decrease that you're anticipating, um, based on that factor. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Any other comments from the board? General manager. You have any other comment, rich. Um, none of the center. Just to reiterate, we'll, we'll come back on August 12th with the full water rate study. And, um, we'll also have a draft, uh, proposition to 18 notification, um, for the board's review at that time as well. This is what would be mailed out to all the customers. And then, um, we would probably also be asking the board to set a public hearing, um, that first board meeting in December, um, to, to adopt the water rate study. Um, we, I, I, I, um, you know, some very good questions from director Cox. This, this is always a complicated, and anytime you do a rate study, um, it's, it's not a clear cut path from last year's rates to the new year's rates. Um, with, with a clear percent increase. And so we, we, we really do focus in on the 0% revenue increase. Um, a lot of time that's, that gets conflated with a 0% rate increase, but it's a 0% revenue increase. And so, um, and just because that's, that revenue is, is not increasing, that doesn't mean the rates are, are adjusting between the different customers and different tiers. And so there's going to be different, um, effects on customer classes. Um, the one thing that we can do as was kind of mentioned, um, if we really did want to stick to a 0% rate increase, um, based on the rates that are presented, uh, we could maintain the rates as they are currently, um, established on right now as maintain those on January. Um, and that would fall within the bounds of, of this rate study. Um, and that, that way, if, if, if, if that was a real concern, we could actually say a 0% rate increase. Um, and we would probably have to use some additional reserves to make up any, um, changes in revenues that we might not collect because of different, um, water assumptions that were based on the, the, the rates. Um, but that is, um, that is an option that we have if, if we wanted to, um, make that conversation a little easier with the customers. Um, and that being said, then the second year in 2028, that's when we would implement the second year of the water rate study. And those, those impacts would be felt at that point, those changes. Um, so with that, and then we'll have legal counsel here on the 12th. And those are my only ending comments. Um, and really tonight, it's just, uh, um, if there's any comments to incorporate, which we did receive some, but other than that, there's no further court action needed chair. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, director. Um, and I think those questions from director Cox with zero rate increase, um, versus zero revenue increase. Um, you know, of course we cannot deny there's cost of service all the time. Right. And so those are the things that, um, maybe, um, can be clarified in order for that zero rate revenue versus zero rate increase. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Um, we are, uh, what are we doing with this one? No business, um, or there is. Just informational. No action is required. There is no action is required. Possible motion discussion. Okay. No action. Thank you. Moving on to eight that to consideration to adopt resolution. 26.09 adopting a salary schedule for all represented employees effective July 1st, 2026. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item eight that to board secretary. Are there any public comments? Yes, share. We have a public comment from Robert. Mr. Robert. Thank you, miss Sarah. I take it. I take it. There's no presentation. I mean, that should be an easy one for you guys to answer yes or no with. It's not rude for me to ask if there's a presentation. Uh, this is your time for public comments, not a discourse between the. There's no presentation is what you're saying. It's your time for public comment. Right. Well, make sure that we point out the fact that you guys are discriminating against the public right now to hear the presentation and remove. You guys even ask questions. What you think you're better than me or something. You think you guys have more privilege to hear this information and then give comment and then restrict my ability to do the same. That's the case right now. You know, make sure you note this discrimination. You're supposed to help them not get into legal trouble. Chair. Um, I'm ready to walk out. I don't have a lot of tolerance. My stomach is hurting and I don't feel like being here with all this violence and all this aggression. Aggression. I apologize, director. If we can't. I mean, and also, I mean, I'm embarrassed to have put the staff through all this craziness. If we can't run a civil meeting, let's just shut it down and come back on another day. I apologize. I don't want to get sick. I don't want to. Uh, I don't. I don't want to put up with, uh, uh, violence and aggression and insult and all that. So if we can't be civil and, and, and have a civil discourse, then I'm just going to go home. I apologize, director. Um, but continue your message or your comment. You have a minute and 52. Mr. Robert. It's disgusting. What you guys are doing up here at this dais. It's disgusting for this member to think to interrupt the public comment and think he can restrict the first amendment. You know, you know, they can't do that. It's a high bar to kick me out of this room too. Very high. You know, the, the, you guys are supposed to err on the side of the right to access for the public. That's supposed to be the highest level. I'll speak to the item. Cause you guys don't want the public to speak to any. Only you guys get to hear the presentation, right? So the assistant board secretary could make 8,000 to 10,000 a month. The assistant general manager could make 19,000 to $23,000 a month. Associate general manager and special assistant to the board can make 19 to 23,000 a month. Board secretary. Could, uh, administrative assistant could make 9,000 to 12,000 a month. General manager says makes $25,000 a month. Office assistant 5,000 to 7,000. Public affairs manager, 12,000 to 15,000. I mean, you guys get paid a lot of money to treat the public this way, right? How much do you guys get paid? Doesn't show your guys this out. Oh, you guys aren't, you guys don't work for the sweet waters. You guys don't do it. You guys are just here to obstruct the public from hearing the presentation and being able to make, uh, you know, any remarks. Are we losing quorum yet? Is that what we're doing? Are we losing quorum yet? Have we lost it? Are you guys still going to hold this meeting with no quorum? I mean, I'd love to see it right now. Sure. Thank you. So we should, um, we have a break. Uh, I would recommend till calm people calm down. Um, I would like to finish a tattoo council if I may. Uh, we need a quorum. Oh, we need a quorum. Oh, I director. Director Castaneda went to the restroom. Okay. I have, uh, Polina. No, chair, you need, you need, you need, you need, you need, you need majority in the boardroom. Sorry. It's okay. Thank you. Just come in back. Just come in back. Just come in back. Yeah. So I think we can resume from the pause and resume the meeting. Counsel, would you please reiterate that the board's not able to dialogue with any speaker? What was the question? That the board is not able to dialogue with any speaker. That's just the rule. During public comment. Yeah. Usually it's commonplace not to, but you're not prohibited from answering questions during the... Okay. Thank you, counsel. So we're going to... General Manager, do you have any comment on that too, sir? Yes. Well, I'll present the item. Chair, this is... We do this every year per an agreement with the labor groups. Yes. So we agreed to a cost of living adjustment for an amount of 4%, 4.5% for IBW members and 3% for middle management, excuse me, and confidential. CalPERS requires that a resolution be adopted by the board. So that's why we're bringing this resolution. All the information you need is in the report. There is no staff presentation except what was provided in the packet. Along with the resolution, we do bring the salary schedule for information to let you know how the agreed upon cost of living adjustment will impact the salaries. And just for background, this is year 3 of the MOU with all three groups. And for middle management and confidential, year 1, the agreement was a 6% increase and a 3% on years 2 and 3. And for SAC back before IBW and now IBW, it was 4.5% per year. So we're on year 3 of the agreement. I'd be happy to answer any questions the board may have. Okay. Thank you. Board, any other comment? Question. Go ahead, Director. Thank you very much. I recognize this is a formality in the CalPERS resolution requirement. I would love in the future to see the staff report include the percentage increases for the current year. We've got the history of 24 and 25. But I appreciate that GM verbally stated the increases for 2026. But I think if those could be included in the future, that would just help, again, with clarity. I did notice some strikeouts of the word unfunded on attachment 2. And I was wondering, GM, based on the conversation at one of the recent budget discussions, you had mentioned there's a legal requirement for all positions to be budgeted. I didn't say there is. I think I said I think there is. I don't think I stated that as fact, Dr. Cox. I know, I know, interestingly, we got a request from a member of the public asking for any information related to my statement. So, I reiterate, I didn't say, I didn't state it as fact. Okay. So, sorry, we don't, I'm not privy to what requests you get from the public. But the question being, what has changed with regards to positions that were unfunded that apparently now are, and it may or may not be a requirement that all positions in the budget be funded based on what you've just said. Yeah, I'm not necessarily sure which positions. Let me look at the, which positions are you referring to? There's several of them in the track changes attachment 2 that had parenthetical references to unfunded. Like which one? Can you give an example, please? I sure can. Special assistant to the board, office assistant, program analyst, training clerk, water, let's see, equipment service worker, buyer 1, welder 1, welder 2, water quality clerk 1 and 2. Yeah, these are probably positions that we don't have. I like to think that we put them, they were, they were a position at some point in the org chart and they're no longer used. So they're there as placeholders, if you will. But we're not using those positions. And maybe Leticia can weigh in on this if she's in the audience. She has to come in. Thank you. Good evening, Chair and Board, General Manager. So CalPERS has provided us guidance several years back that in an effort to have a business practice that any position that the authority has previously held stay on the salary schedule. Indefinite. Oh, okay. So one of the designations previously was for, it was a practice that was followed by the HR team at the time. They would list and cite it as unfunded. The reality is that those positions have been vacant and have been vacant for a number of years. Right. So the reality is, is in an effort to maintain the integrity of all of the job classifications that we have, that's where it's still listed here today. And so the designation it's proposed as we move forward per compliance with CalPERS guidelines of maintaining a full integrity listing of all of our classifications we've ever had. It is why you see them there. Most of them, in accordance with the General Manager's previous statement a minute ago, they are in fact vacant. And I think that's an important noted fact for all of your knowledge. Additionally, if I may, General Manager and Chair, there was a comment made about the, the board agenda item delineates list each employee group that's represented and it goes back to the original attribution of the salary schedule per the MOU on page one and two of the board item. So the salary schedule that's attached to this item actually reflects the proposed increase that's before you for your awareness, information, and that scale upon your discussion and decision here today will be then submitted to CalPERS. And then we would go through processing upon your review and approval here tonight. No action is taken until your governing board has the opportunity to not only make the schedule public, it is actualized to reflect IBW at the 4.5% for all of its unit members, middle management, MMG, and CG equally included, and it's already actualized before you to include those increases. So Leticia, just to clarify, are you saying that because it's not yet board approved, you cannot put in the staff report that the contracts were negotiated to include this 4.5 and 3% rate in 26? Well, no, it is referenced on page one and page two of the board agenda item. If you look towards the bottom, it kind of rolls over. Like I delineate the salary increases for IBW for 24, 25, and then if you turn over, you see the rest, right, listed? Yeah, but not 2026. That was just the question. Yeah. Right, because that's before you, right? I mean. So why not? I'm just wondering, is there a reason you can't tell us that? If I may, Chair, if I may. I think it's what Director Cox is referring. There's no mention of the 3% for middle management for this year, so for fiscal year 26, 27. On the report. But it might be just a minor admission, but I'm letting you know that it's a 3% for middle management and confidential and 4.5% for IBW. Okay. Thank you. Right. Just, again, clarity, right? Right. Well, I'm providing clarity now. I think I am. Appreciate it. All right. And the last question I had, I had heard that there was a water supply development advisor that had been hired, and I'm wondering if that is like a working title maybe of what's on page 158, the Associate Engineer Water Resources and Environmental, or is that maybe a new position that's... I don't think we just annuitants. Leticia, can you clarify that, please? Yeah. Yeah. So, just to, through the chair, to clarify, there is a designation under the CalPERS guidelines that under meeting a certain level of a definition, there we go through a process of presenting the position, the scope of work in CalPERS designates the propriety to identify a position, which in this case is a water advisor. It's considered a retired annuitant with a very fixed number of hours that they're allowed to work for their agreement with CalPERS. They work with us as a retired annuitant, but they would not be reflected in our salary scale or mentioned as a... It's supplemental support to the agency, but not what this item that's before you, which is represented employees. That position is an advisor with a very limited end time to their service contract. Okay. Thank you for the clarification, Leticia. Yeah. As I recall, it's like half time over the rolling 12-month period for annuitants, right? It's like 900-ish hours. Yeah. I was going to say, just to clarify and for the record, through the chair, if I may, CalPERS guidelines are very specific. We have to track through a separate matrix. It's not to exceed 960 hours of this particular retired annuitant. And we pretty much, we not only monitor track, but we advise that at the commencement of their service contract. Okay. Thank you very much for answering the questions. And if there's no further, I want to thank our employees for all of their work in FY26. And as we turn the calendar year into FY27, I'm happy to move approval of this staff's recommendation. Thank you, Director. I have a motion to approve or adopt of this Resolution 2609 for adopting a salary schedule for all represented employees effective July 1st of 2026. I have a motion. I'm soliciting a second. Second. Thank you, Director Martinez-Perez. I have a motion and a second. Any other comment? Seeing none, Board Secretary, please call the roll. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez is absent. Director Martinez-Perez. Aye. Director Morrison is absent. Director Yamani. Aye. The motion passes unanimously with Directors Martinez and Morrison absent. Thank you. Moving on to Item 8.3, consideration to authorize repairs for Filter 4 at the Purdue Water Treatment Plant. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on Item 8.3, Board Secretary. Are there any public comments? There's no public comments, Chair. Thank you. I defer to you, GM. Thank you, Chair. We are doing some work. We are doing some work, maintenance work with the filters at the Purdue Plant. And as we remove the filtering media and did an inspection of the area below, we found out that there's some damage that we're recommending repair at this time. We think Justin has a presentation. Oh, he does have a presentation to share with you. So I will defer to Justin if you're to mind, Chair. Thank you. Director? Thank you, Chair. On the floor. So consideration to authorize repairs to Filter 4 at the Purdue Water Treatment Plant. So the Purdue Water Treatment Plant is rated for 30 million gallons per day of production. The primary or the pretreatment process is dissolved air flotation where we remove most of the suspended particles from the water. Most of the removal occurs there. And then the filters kind of polish the water before it goes into the clear well and ultimately becomes treated water. In total, we have four filters of the plants, each capable of producing 10 million gallons per day. So 40 million gallons per day of capacity. It allows us the ability to have a filter offline, still meet maximum production, backwash the filter, wash it, meet maximum production. The filters were originally installed in 1959 when the plant was built, but they went through a major rehabilitation project in 2008 where all the filter media was replaced. A new supporting underdrain system was installed. And we also improved the backwash capabilities by adding an air scour system to help dislodge attached particles off of the media surface. So just a diagram there to familiarize the plant. So you can see the filters there as you drive into the plant, sort of right there in front of the clear well, the four boxes. It's indicated on the slide there. Filter number four is the first filter you would see as you're driving into the plant. Just so you know, the photo there on the left is what a typical filter looks like. The filters have a channel in the center where the water flows in and then they're divided into two filtering cells each. So this particular filter, in fact, all the four filters, none of them were experiencing any catastrophic issues, nothing alerting to staff, but we did become aware. We were informed by Helix Water District, who has a similar underdrain system as ours. However, 10 years older than ours, but still the same system that they started experiencing failures. And so they gave us a warning that, you know, because you have the same system and not just Helix, but some other water systems as well. You might want to take a look at your filter. And so we put money in the budget to go ahead and do a filter inspection. And so we, at the staff level, issued a request for quote for the filter inspection and ERS industrial solution services was selected. And they do have experience with Leopold underdrain systems. They also inspected and performed work at Helix Water District. We selected filter number four to be our representative filter to see what it looks like. To do a filter inspection, it's not something routine, like where we just look from the surface to actually do this underdrain inspection. We have to remove all the sand and the anthracite filtering material from the filter. And so sitting behind the dissolved air filtration process right now, I have a photo later in the slide. We have 62 bags of media, about 100 tons of media sitting out there right now. They had to be removed just to see what we need to see. And so photo on the left there, there's the 62 super sacks of sand and anthracite sitting there that were removed from the filter. The photo on the right is what the filter looks like without the media. And that's a unique view because, you know, we've been on tours before. We're always looking down through the water and seeing anthracite on the top. And we never see the sand because it's more dense and heavy and it sits below the anthracite. But the black caps you see there, that's what the media sits on. And they look like asphalt, but they're actually very porous. And so the point there is for the media to stay in the filter and the water to pass through, of course. And what's happened at Helix Water District and the reason they believe they started having failures is those under drains started clogging. And so as you send water backwards through the filter to clean the media, it starts creating extra pressure and eventually can start dislodging those caps. And you can start losing filter media through them. The good news from the inspection as far as the results is there is no widespread system failure. But we did identify things why we have the media out. It's a good opportunity to go ahead and, you know, be proactive and make some repairs before something does become problematic operationally in the future. And, you know, since we're already dewatered and we have all the media removed, we're bringing this item now because it would be efficient to go ahead and do the work now versus put the media back in and do it at a later date. We would just have to pull it all back out again. And I think I have it in the fiscal impact section. So sorry if I repeat myself, but it'd be probably about $55,000, $60,000 or so to take the media out and put it back in again. So, like I said, overall, good condition, 18 years since the last rehabilitation. The anthracite and sand media were actually meeting original specifications. So that's great. So we don't have to replace the media. That would be very expensive. But they did find what's called an imperfection in the ceiling of one of the caps that's allowed some sand to get underneath what's called the gullet of the filter. So underneath the filter, that was actually confined space entry. We had to drain that, and the inspectors go in there, and they found a pile of sand. But also under all those black caps, there was sand. And to remove the sand from that part is much more difficult. If you can imagine, you have sand trapped behind those black caps. Every time we wash a filter, it pushes that sand up against the bottom of those caps. And over time, there's concern that that could cause dislodging like others have seen. And so overall, we estimate it's about one inch of sand is what it looks like we've lost, which, you know, we don't know if that's been occurring over 18 years, five years, one year. There's really no way to know. But it's not a lot of loss, but it could get worse. And so here's some photos of what that cap looks like when it's removed. So you can see the underside of the cap is, you know, fouled with, you know, manganese and other contaminants that the filters remove, but they kind of get stuck to the bottom of the cap. And that's something that would increase differential pressure, for example, over time. And then the photo in the middle there, you can see how the sands underneath the cap. And to remove that sands actually not so straight. Well, just labor intensive. All the caps have to be removed in order for that to be taken out of the filter, essentially. So all those caps have to be taken out individually. And then all the grout has to be put back in. So there's a lot of labor involved there. The photo on the right is the gap they found. It's only about a quarter inch. It's pretty small. But that's how the sand was migrating through the caps to the bottom of the filter. So a photo on the left there is the underneath those caps, what we call the gullet of the filter. And you see the pile of sand there. A little bit of anthracite, but mostly sand. Sand's more dense. And it sits on top of the caps. The anthracite sits on top. The photo on the right is a crack that's like on an expansion joint on the wall of the filter. It runs along the north and south side. I noted here in the presentation, it wasn't a recommendation of an urgent repair. But for, you know, I believe $5,000 an extra cost, it's, you know, the crack goes all the way to the bottom. And to the, you know, pass the media, something we wouldn't be able to repair unless the media is out. So to reduce potential for any future water leakage out of the filter, we feel right now that would be an opportune time to go ahead and take care of that. And so the recommended repairs are to remove and clean all those black supporting caps. Remove the sand and anthracite from the underdrain system. They would actually take the caps off site, clean them, chemically clean them to restore them to like new condition. Replace all the caps with stronger hardware. So they would reinstall them with oversized screws. And then repair the seals that were damaged. Re-seal everything. All the grout in between all those caps has to be replaced. Repair the concrete joint that I identified in the previous slide. And then it's also an optional task, but we're recommending it is just to grout and epoxy all those caps down into the filter. It makes them much stronger and much less likely to move in the future. And then replenish the one inch of sand that was lost to bring it back to regular specifications. And so ERS has performed similar inspection and work for Helix Water District on their Leopold underdrain system. So they've spoken with Helix Water District. They've been very transparent in the work that they've had done there. And so we feel comfortable recommending ERS to the governing board to do this work. Helix spent roughly a million dollars in rehabbing four of their eight filters through the same method. And so far, you know, staff's found them to communicate well, work safely, and been performing well. So we did a budget in the fiscal year 2025-26 to do this inspection. We didn't have the funding for repairs. We didn't know what we were going to find. And if we had repairs, we had no idea what they would cost. The repair on ERS is quotes coming in at $181,230. And so staff's recommending transferring $185,000 from contingency, which gives us close to $4,000 just for contingency. If there's anything in foreseeing, we need another sack of sand or anthracite or something like that comes up. But to transfer that from the operating expense contingency funds into the operating reserve at the fiscal year end and appropriate those funds into the fiscal year 26-27 water quality budget, because this work would be mainly completed and commenced in July. ERS still has material on site. They're ready to move again should the board authorize this work. And like I mentioned earlier, deferring the repairs would be $50,000 to $55,000. Sorry, misspoke on the previous slide. But it'd be expensive. Most of the inspection is just labor to remove everything and crawl under the filter and all the confined space entry. And so the alternatives or next steps would be to award, number one, award a contract to ERS Industrial Services, Inc. of Fremont, California, in an amount of $185,000, $181,230 for repairs, and $3,770 for contingency to perform the work described in the filter inspection results and scope of work repair section of this board memo and authorize the transfer of $185,000 from the fiscal year 2025-26 operating reserve to the fiscal year 2026-27 operating expense budget to fund the work. Or option two, other direction is determined by the governing board and staff's recommendations. Option one, and happy to answer questions at this time. Thank you, director. Comments from the board? Yes, director. Less comments, more questions. Thank you, Justin, for the presentation. And I really appreciate the relationships that different water agencies have with each other. The fact that Felix reached out because they knew what you had and you're sharing that information. So kudos to them and kudos to you. I hope we continue to offer those kind of sibling sharings. You said one of the filters was inspected this month and we have four, correct? So what about the other filters? So we did put money in the fiscal year 2026-27 budget to perform another filter. Okay. So subsequent inspections to determine if there's any different kind of repairs that you're seeing or needing. Correct. So at this point, of course, at this time it's unknown. We might get in the other filter and find that there's, you'll have to make some decisions. If we get in the other filter and we don't find that there's any damage to grout and our caps and those sands move through. Each filter may be different and some may not require any repairs. Will you be able to see any difference in water quality coming out of filter four versus the other three that haven't been? Possibly. Possibly. However, like I mentioned, this filter wasn't taken out of service because it was not filtering properly. So, but that is a good question. And that's something we'll have to look at carefully once we have something that we can kind of consider baseline. Right. When Helix first let us know about this, we used the tools that we have to see if we had a problem. And so we looked at our wash water rates and the percent open a valve would have to open to meet a certain flow rate. And we went back many, many, many years in time and compared those rates, you know, going back probably 10 years to current time. And we didn't see any change. So that kind of gave us this early indication, just looking at the data we had available in SCADA, that we probably don't have a problem. So we did find, in fact, that we do have a problem, but it's very small and probably something that wouldn't be picked up in instrumentation. Okay. And the filter rehab program was done less than 20 years ago, about 2008 or so. 2008. So what is the expected life expectancy of the Leopold system? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know what the expected life is. I mean, I could just tell you filter under drain systems, you know, in 2008, my understanding is that was the original 1959 under drain system, right? So it lasted a long time. The old systems, they kind of were known to lose media. And also the reason we had to put in this type of system was we wanted to add air scour. And this type of system allows an even dispersion of air for backwashing. So we wanted to make other improvements at the time. But I don't know if that's really answering your question. Every filter tracing system is going to be different, but the first original one lasted for decades. Sure. What I'm getting at is with the failures that Helix experienced with Leopold, is there any sort of warranty or should we be exploring anything if we all got faulty products? Right, right. So, you know, ERS will warranty their work for one year. There's, I did ask this question, you know, from others. But there's not anybody that has, you know, 10, 10 years of proven track record after doing these repairs, for example. But I could tell you to replace the filter under drain systems would be a very expensive capital project compared to the repairs. Okay. And so I know ERS proposed to complete the inspection. Was the repair work anticipated in that? No, it wasn't. It was not part of the RFP. Okay. So this is really a sole source. Yes, it's a separate item. I think maybe for clarity, just to say that in the staff report in the future. I mean, you've made the justification, but just connecting the dots, I think, would be helpful. The bottom of page 163 mentions that, quote, media and biological mineral fouling was identified in the under drain system. And it just reminded me of that strange PFAS increase that we had a couple months back that you didn't know why the PFAS was actually increasing from the intake to the effluent. And it just popped into my mind, like, could this have been a contributor to that? I don't believe so. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for the questions. Do my colleagues have any others? Thank you. There is a, any other comment? Otherwise, staff is requesting for a recommendation for. So move, Madam Chair. Thank you. I have a motion and a second. Seeing no other comment, Board Secretary, please call the roll. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Yes. Director Martinez is absent. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Director Morris is absent. Director Yamani. Aye. Motion passes unanimously with Directors Martinez and Morrison absent. Thank you, Director. Thanks, Justin. Thank you. Moving on to item 8.4, consideration to approve the fiscal year 2026-2027 strategic plan, detailed work plan. This is the opportunity for members of the public. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 8.4, Board Secretary. Are there any other, or are there any public comments? There's no public comments, Chair. Thank you, Board Secretary. Thank you, Board Secretary. I defer to you, General Manager. Thank you, Chair. Yeah, we did have a workshop to talk about the proposed strategic plan. I'm presenting pretty much the same version. I did some cleanup work on some of the tasks that were duplicate. I had identified them with a line, strikethrough font. The only other change was the change to the community advisory work group to the Sweetwater Authority Forum. Other than that, this document is pretty exactly the same as what was presented during the last day of the workshop, or the last workshop day, I should say. I'd be happy to answer any questions. We have staff available. Also, there's specific questions on any of these tasks. Okay, Board, do we have any questions or comments? Chair, you asked me to bring up the item tonight that I had emailed about. Sure, yes, so then we can discuss it. Okay. Yeah, no, I had just reached out to the Chair and GM Chair. As you know, I reached out to the GM on Monday to ask for the track changes version coming out, since there wasn't a staff report to kind of guide us towards what changes were made. I didn't hear back before the meeting tonight. So I appreciate the GM verbally summarizing where some changes were made. In the future, I would love to actually receive the red line version. Okay. Okay. Any other comments? Okay. Seeing none, I would... What's the direction here? I need a motion to approve this. Consideration to approve the fiscal year 2026-2027. I'll go ahead and move. Okay. Second. I got that. I have a motion and a second. Seeing no other comments, please vote. Madam Secretary. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez is absent. Director Martinez-Perez. Aye. Dr. Morrison is absent. Director Yamani. Aye. The motion passes unanimously with Directors Martinez and Morrison absent. Thank you. I'm moving forward with 8.5. Consideration to approve the editorial. The editorial affordability doesn't happen by accident. Sign on behalf of the governing board. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 8.5. Board Secretary, are there any public comments? Yes, Chair. We have Robert. Mr. Robert. Robert. You want to know this is the funny part, right? Where I was going to make a joke about how we have a rate increase study and then you go about affordability. And so, like, are you the misinformation? Ha ha ha. Um, yeah, I don't know what to say at this point. I mean, I think you guys are walking yourselves into a hole. You don't know how big it's going to be. I mean, did you not think I ran the meeting? You walked out of the room leaving no quorum. Like, I wasn't going to call that out. On the item, Mr. Robert, please. 8.5. You know, if the member on Zoom walks out, too, you lose quorum again, right? Madam Chair, if we don't basically focus on the item and I will be walking out and this meeting will end. Oh, it will end it because my public comments. All right. Mr. I'm gone. See, this is the maturity level of the board members. They're going to walk out because no quorum. I can't handle public comment. You have the ability to comment on this particular item. Yeah, I did, but you just lost quorum. Are you done with your comment on this item? I mean, my timer's still running. I was going to get back to you. You can't just talk. You just can't talk about anything. I can say whatever I want to say. Are you trying to infringe on my First Amendment ability to talk? Mr. Robert, we have an 8.5 item that you said you wanted to speak, sir. I have it right here. I was, I mean, I was just pointing out that if she walks away, you lose quorum. I don't know why that's such a problem. About another minute, right? Are you finished? No. I have to load the page, so I'm trying to get to it. Sorry. The fiscal year 2026 budget includes more than $7 million in capital investment to strengthen critical infrastructure and ensure the long-term resilience of the regional water system. Projects such as improvements and the sodium high, high chloride, whatever, chlorination system, Purdue, clear water, rehabilitation, and the urban runoff diversion systems represent investments that protect the public health and prepare the community for future changes. You know, I think it's great to have that as the idea of protect public health. But do you know how many chemicals you guys put in the water? I mean, it was up on the consent calendar earlier. You guys had a lot of chemicals going in there. That's why the governing board also reauthorized the Sweetwater Authority Affordable Program, which remains fully funded through non-rate revenue sources. And I'd assume some of those rate revenue sources could be like state funding. They could be, I don't know, maybe donations. Thank you. Thank you. Counsel, I still have items, but I don't have a question. If I may, did Director Castaneda leave? He stepped out of the room. Okay. So you need to pause the meeting if I don't. There's technically no quorum. Yeah, we can't take further action. I think Director Martinez is coming back. Yeah. I would recommend we take a 10-minute recess. 10-minute recess. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. are we coming back oh are we not officially someone text me i just we the chair said that directors martinez and castaneda are returning so we're waiting for them to return got it okay technically thank you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you unmute okay here we go martinez barris can you hear us can you hear us i'm here sure thank you okay uh director martinez barris okay uh council yeah due to the nature of the meeting i would recommend to the board that we table the remaining open session items and move directly to closed session chair thank you council um that said the board will be going into closed session following the announcement by legal council members of the public are welcome to continue to stay on the line while the board is in closed session however they will only hear silence following closed session an attempt will be made to make an oral announcement of any reportable action and announcement on the time of adjournment of the meeting if there are any technical difficulties a written report out of closed session which will include the time of meeting adjournment will be posted on the authority's website by the end of day thursday members of the public that would like to speak on any closed session items please raise your hand board secretary are there any public comments yes chair looks like we're we have a public comment from robert okay mr robert public comment for closed session yes and uh thank you for addressing me i know uh the meeting has changed so i wanted to at least get one more comment in i had uh put for 10 and 11 i believe and so if we're gonna skip those i have to kind of react kind of quick so i apologize and i thank you for hearing me um as far as uh the ibe local 47 and conference with labor negotiators i think that's an interesting item to come up after you just had an item about them right and uh you know it's i wonder how you're gonna go to closed session when members will leave the regular session and then expect to be let into closed session so you know i would just advise that uh all the members dig deep in themselves and realize the public can say some you know things and uh you know if not there could be more litigation who knows right so you know i hope you guys have a successful closed session meeting i you know i'm just surprised it's even happening i thought you know someone ran the room definitely isn't me who runs the chair runs the room and uh you know i appreciate her for what she does at other meetings too we are quite familiar with each other so yeah maybe i'll give you guys this last minute just as a little hoorah to the team tonight for a great video we're gonna love it thank you robert um with that said uh i defer to you uh council thank you chair uh the board will now convene into closed session uh pursuant to items 18.1 18.2 and 18.3 on the agenda conference with labor negotiated pursuant to government code section 54957.6 on 18.1 on 18.2 again conference with labor negotiations pursuant to government code section 54957.6 and on 18.3 for public employee performance evaluation pursuant to government code section 54957 thank you chair thank you council um let's have a brief uh three minutes to uh you know i'm in change uh our our and and we'll disseminate the closed session okay rich if you can send the link please that would be helpful so so i can have it and director martinez-perez can have it too yes we'll do that thank you so much three minutes break council yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

This meeting is being held on Wednesday, June 17, 2026. The meeting of the Legislative Affairs Communications Committee is called to order. Committee members and members of the public may attend in person. Additionally, some committee members may attend the meeting virtually pursuant to the Brown Act. As a convenience to the public, the authority provides a call-in option, an Internet-based option for members of the public to virtually observe and provide public comments at its meetings. Instructions for virtual observation and participation were included in the agenda. Members of the public attending the meeting in person may submit a public comment slip and submit it to the chair or secretary prior to the start of an agenda item. Members of the public attending virtually via the Zoom webinar or call-in option may also make public comments on an agenda item during the meeting by raising their hand via the Zoom webinar by clicking the raise hand button and via phone by pressing star 9. Remote users can change between gallery and speaker options by clicking the view button on the Zoom platform. That's the main statement. I don't remember that one before. Yeah. Please note that in the event of a disruption or a call-in or Internet-based option for observing and or participating in this meeting, the meeting will continue unless the director is attending the meeting virtually, pursuant to certain provisions of the Brown Act. We can now proceed to the roll call. Is Ligia back there? Yes. Director Castaneda? Yeah, here. Director Delgado? Here. Director Yamani? Here. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chair, Yes. Remember that sentence was added because they said they cannot see it. Oh, is that what it was? They told them how to press that button. So that's why the manager and Angel added that. Okay. All right. I wonder if we could just sort of audio tape this thing and just play it, you know, instead of going to drive a signal. But anyway. You know, the laws that we have to follow? It has to be live? Yes. All right. All right. All right. So item number two, items added, withdrawn, revised, no, re order, no. Three is public comment opportunity. We will now hear from public comments if there are any on items that are in the subject jurisdiction of the authority and that are not on today's agenda. Board Secretary, do we have anybody wishing to speak? There is no online public comment, Chair. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Action agenda. 4.1. Public affairs monthly report for the month of April, 2026. This is an opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 4.1. Board Secretary, are there any members of the public that would like to be heard on 4.1? There's no online public comments, Chair. Wonderful. Wonderful. Okay. Okay. Is the information item, Mr. General Manager? Well, we have two reports for you. Yeah. The public affairs monthly report for April, 2026 and May, 2026. They're included in your package. Okay. We're to answer any questions. Any questions from the committee? Mr. Chair, I think since we are a member of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, I don't know their position on any water programs or items or anything that they can provide us. And I see in April, do they have once every two months meeting? They do. So they do. So they have different committee meetings. And so one of the committees is the sustainability committee, which I believe will meet next week or the week after. They meet every two months, Thursdays at 8 a.m. I will get the full details for the board if any interested in participating in those meetings. All right. Thank you. Anything else? No, Mr. Chair. I think we're everywhere. And also, go ahead. I was going to say, I'm liking the community engagement. We're out there four to five events every month, which is phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. So, I mean, what's the difference here? I mean, community engagements like a community fair, street fair, whatever. So what constitutes our engagement? Do we have like a, I know some of this stuff, we have a booth. But do we have a booth at South Bay Earth Day? We did. We did? Okay. Chula Vista State of this. You were there. No, I wasn't there. Earth Day, I think you were. No, I was there for Day of the Child. Oh, Day of the Child. Day at the Park, I was not. Yeah. Norman Park Senior Resource Fair, I was not. And Chula Vista State of the City. Is that the one where they had the people flying in on that ? Yes. That we read about? Yeah. I'm glad I wasn't there for that one. Anyway, so the stakeholder meetings. So sort of the issue with me is, it's great we're going to these things. And I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it. I'd like to know which one of these events we make some sort of formal presentation. Where do we have? I know that our general manager was at South County EDC. You were there in the month of May, right, Carlos? Yes. That was June 2nd. June 2nd. Oh, was it June? Okay. I wasn't here. I don't remember. But anyway, I mean, just sort of notations that, you know, if we have any kind of formal speaking engagements or anything like that, that's going to help. Because like I said, it's great that we go, but, you know, tree falling in the forestry, right? You know, so. And I think that we ought to try to, to the extent we possibly can, is get on some of these agendas. You know, it's great that we're at the regional chamber, but we need their help. You know, and so we need to make that ask. And I think these opportunities are at least a way to get people understanding what we're, what we're needing. So, and that way we get a better bang for our buck with respect to our memberships. But anyway, that's, that's it. So, and I see the San Diego County Water Authority legislative liaisons meeting. What is that specifically? So it's the, pretty much the individuals who handle public or legislative affairs for the member agencies. We meet with San Diego County Water Authority. They give us federal and state updates. And then it's an opportunity as a round table for discussions on certain bills. One of the bills that has been pretty much percolating the last two meetings has been SB 1125, which is the Lira consideration. Okay. Which would be pretty much mirroring our ratepayer assistance program. Mm-hmm. That's kind of gotten a little bit of pushback, but I have my understanding is that County Water Authority voted to support that legislation. The actual board? Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I wasn't at the last meeting. So I don't. There's an opportunity just for the member agencies to discuss certain bills being proposed. Do we see any opportunity for us to move any of our issues forward? Because, you know, the CWA is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. You know, they suck up all the oxygen. That's why I'm concerned about them finding PFAS, because all of a sudden they step right in front of us. Mm-hmm. And we have to make sure that we use our elbows in there. And so I, you know, perhaps when we start talking about the outreach and engagement plan, we start to look at metrics on how we continue to, and document how we continue to do that. Because if we're making those positions and our desires needed, then, you know, the chair is not on CWA any longer. I can't really speak for the mayor, but I'm more than happy . It's kind of like the McNerney bill, you know what I mean? Fortunately, that died a death in Sacramento. But I just want to make sure that our voices are being heard, because like I said, it's, you know, in many respects, CWA is like SDG&E. They can fill a room with all kinds of lobbyists and lawyers and all that kind of stuff. And it's just us. You've been there before. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You know that. Mr. Chair, I know. And so the politics is so strong there. And that's why I think you're right. You know, I mean, having that, you know, I mean, making them feel that we really matter. Yeah. Right? Yeah. That they cannot just push us aside. I think, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, Angel's appearance or participation with this legislative advocacy and their marketing, Mike Lee. Right. He's got 13 people under him, right? Right. And we only have Angel and Gabriel. Right. And so Angel is the one that is going out there, you know, making representation and our general manager. I'm sorry. You said they have 13? 13 people under. Staff members? Mm-hmm. Yeah. One three. One three. Wow. Yeah. And they have a bunch of consultants, too. I thought that was including consultants. No. No, no, sir. The staff. That's our position. When I was there, I was there for three years. And I said, wow. You know, I mean, why do we need this big of a staff in this department? So anyway, that's your problem now. Yeah, I know. I know. But anyway, I think it's, yeah. For our public affairs and our general manager, I think now Angel is what going in. But look at the traction. No, no. We're, you know, we're getting, we're being seen. And that's the important thing, you know, but we need to kick it up. And so one of the things we used to do, and I don't know if we still do this because I don't recall, we adopt as a board a legislative program, right? The guidelines? Well, not the guidelines, but actually specific bills and all of those things that we want to support, we do? We did. We bring those as we encounter them. And we bring those through the bill. All right. It'd be nice to have them all in one place, though, once we do that, right? So we just have a, you know, a document where we know. We did, last time we did, I think there were three bills. Yeah, no, I know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I just want to make sure that we all are on the same page as we're here. Because we are in this position. Remember the presentation that we had for our clean energy thing, you know, and building those relationships because they're- Last week, yeah. The G&E and Cendia Community Power. I sit now as acting chair of the community. Yes. You know, I mean, I think the relationship with our government affairs and our general manager with their public affairs as well will help, you know. I mean, usher or facilitate those relationships. So is that, I mean, I've never been in one of their meetings or so forth. Once we have our energy strategy that I guess Hazen and Saw yer is helping us with, and we start looking at whether it's solar at Sweetwater. I mean, do your board meetings lend themselves so we can actually go there and provide? No, it's open meeting. Okay. We follow Brown Act. It's a public agency. Yeah. But I'm just wondering about, I've never seen an agenda whether or not any entities actually do that. I know, but you're the- Yeah. And so it's thick. Okay. Like it's all the time. It's a lot of reading. And you know, I mean, I'm still- Right. Facilitating to be able to understand. I'm three and a half years old there right now as a board. I'm sitting as acting chair, but there's a lot of opportunities that we can- Understanding it now. Okay. There's a lot of opportunities that our agency and their agency can take a look and explore if there are better opportunities for us. Yeah. And this solar or this clean energy that we're doing right now that we're studying, I think they will be able to help, you know, if they needed SDG&E and or community powers help. Okay. We can facilitate those. Great. Thank you. All right. So let's- Yes, sir. I was just going to say that I think we appreciate the constant communication with our local elected officials and school districts. Yes. It gives us an opportunity to hear feedback from them that they hear from our same constituents, but also it's an opportunity for us to feed them information that they could disseminate social media or newsletters or just out in public, you know , about a water affordability program, how our rates are the lowest in the county. So it's good stuff for them to get out as well. So thanks for keeping that dialogue going. Yeah. And we'll hear more about that when we go through the communications plan and so more specific. Mr. Chair, last night also at the council meeting, I again, you know, I mean, announced the celebration of 1,000, you know, I mean, rate payers that we have, you know, I mean, that are benefiting to that program that we have right now. I remember you mentioning about the high school photo contest at one of our meetings, at our last meeting. You or, or, or. What did you mean? Director Martinez. I said, why are we getting only these schools? Right. Right. And I am, I'm, you know, I mean, glad to hear from our public affairs that, you know, I mean, he's been reaching out to the superintendent. Right. To make all the schools participate in this contest because it's a good contest. Right. But sometimes you also look at the economy part of it, where sometimes the kids may not have the resources to have a camera or have those equipment to be, or the school doesn't have those programs anymore because they're cutting arts program right now. So I think those are the, the things that, what are we going to do? How are we going to be able to help those programs? Yeah. Well, I guess a good idea. Maybe we find out what, you know, what the needs are and how we get an opportunity to get more kids involved. But, okay. So that's, that's April. Let's go to May. And I, you know, I mean, I would just, I don't mean to reiterate what I've said before on May. You want to go ahead and talk about May? Well, we have the report. Okay. If there's questions. Okay. We're happy to answer them. Or we can go through the report. Oh, great. The events and the stakeholder meetings. We did have communications and media and our, what was it? Yes. As lean as we can, that we are right now. Okay. I mean, in our public affairs with, you know, I mean, the general manager helping and, and angel and gab. I think, you know, the traction that we have in our community is more robust than before. Oh, yeah. So, you know, I mean, yes, we need help because that's the, that's the will of the board is to put us out there and make us, you know, I mean, no, it'd be noisier of the things that were the good, all the good things that we are doing to serve our rate payers. I think that's where, how else can we make it noisier? Right. Well, I think that's what we're going to talk about is communications plan next. So can we, do we get anything else on the public affairs outreach? Do we have to approve this or accept, Mr. Chair? Well, there's, there's, we have 4.3, which is consideration award. But what I'd like to do is the chair, I would like to move to 4.4 first. Okay. And talk about, you know, what the, because based on what we do with 4.3. So just, just for orderly purposes, we went through 4.1 to allow for public comment. And I don't think we did that for 4.2. Oh, 4.2. Yeah, sorry. So you might want to offer. I think we did 4.1. We did 4.1. Leah, is there anybody that wants to speak on 4.2? There's no online public comments, Chair. Okay. Which is sort of an answer because everybody wants to talk after the reports, right? So we let them do that. Anyway, I'd like to go ahead and move 4.4 to ahead of the next item there. So I'm a little mythic here. Thank you. This is an opportunity for members of the public to speak to 4.4. Board Secretary, do we have anybody that would like to speak? There's no online public comments, Chair. Okay. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Thank you. We did put together a proposed communications plan for the consideration of the committee and also make a recommendation to the board. The memo has a brief summary. Yeah. Bullet form of the highlights. But then starting on page 15, we have a more detailed plan. There's no presentation per se, but we'd be happy to go over each one of the sections on this plan. Well, this is critically important. Right. So I think we should talk about what we're going to do. And I think, you know, because I've looked at it and I agree with much of it. I think the important thing is who's actually going to do it. Okay. That's the thing. Implementation is where we really need to focus. I think we've got the bones of a great plan, but that doesn 't mean much when it's sitting on somebody's desk. And so perhaps we can hear about, you know, what the elements are, but, you know, how they're going to be executed. And how we're going to measure that, I think. Well, I'll defer to Ian. Yeah. So I'll just go ahead and just to kind of like preface it and then I'll defer over to Ian. So Ian and I have been working on this plan, kind of drawing on from the, you know, customer service focus groups and survey that we did earlier this year through Competitive Edge, drawing on some of those key metrics. We came together with, you know, this plan that pretty much lays out our strategic priorities, key messages for us to focus on, strategic initiatives, our priority campaigns. And also enveloping there to sustain a crisis communications plan moving forward. We're pretty much kind of adopting this plan as a 2026 plan , following on the recent, you know, strategic master plan from the board, as well as the budget that was just recently approved. So if it's the pleasure of the board, we can, on an annual basis, revisit this communications plan. That way it kind of keeps in line with the board's priorities. With that, I'll go ahead and defer to our consultant, Ian Stewart, who can speak more into detail on that. Thanks, Hitchell. Well, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you so much for having me here. And before you start, I'm glad you have your visitor badge because you just got trained on that last week. Well, whoever is up front did a great job because I wasn't aware. Wonderful. He was like, nope, you need to put this on. They're following the plan. She did a great job. So I put it right on and I understand. I remember those days as well. So with respect to the plan, I'm not going to go through every single line item, although I'm happy to do so. But I kind of want to hit on just the key elements of it and then turn it over to you all for any questions you might have, concerns you might have, things you think that might be missing that we want to address or add into the overall plan. I want to level set just real quick. So as you may recall, shortly after I started helping Carlos and Angel, I kind of wanted to see where the customers were, right? And so that became apparent in the last survey. It had been a few years ago. And I was very happy to see that you had used John Neenst ead previously, who I had a lot of familiarity with and worked closely with on a lot of issues at Sempra and SDG&E. Personally, I think he's one of the best in the business. So we brought him back on board to not only sort of dust off and redo a survey, but to do one additional thing, which was focus group analysis and research. The reason I love to do focus group is it allows you to delve even one level deeper into customers and their sort of reactions to key things or awareness of key things, initiatives, individuals within the authority. And so after completing those two, and John came, I know, and presented to you all at a board meeting kind of with the findings, we then took a lot of that, digested it, and then began working on the comms plan. The backbone of any communications plan is, in my opinion, data and analytics. Understanding your audience is the only way to effectively communicate with your audience. So as we started to look at this, it became clear through the survey work and through the focus group work, the sort of the core values to customers really fell into three buckets. Not surprisingly, but, you know, affordable water service. Not surprising when you think about all the other pressures that are on customers these days in terms of affordability, right? Increasing energy bills, which, speaking from just experience, aren't going down anytime soon, right? There's a lot of reasons for that, but it's just a reality. You know, increased costs around grocery shopping. We've seen gas prices, you know, so affordability is probably paramount to your customers, not surprisingly. So that means that's got to be one of the core values we talk about on a daily basis, anything that comes out of the water authority here, the agency here. So reliable infrastructure and operations. Again, what's the infrastructure that is in place? What are the needs for the infrastructure moving forward? And how does that infrastructure lead to number three, which is safe and reliable drinking water, right? So those are the three concepts that we kind of clearly identified through all of that work with John. So then it's about taking those and figuring out what is the message platform and the communications strategy around disseminating that message platform. So then, you know, the number one thing, it came, if I recall, shortly after that. I don't think we knew it at the time, but we knew you were one of the lowest rates in the county. Shortly after this was all done, we identified that you were the lowest rates in the county, right? That is something that customers aren't aware of. They know, I think by and large, most customers, we saw this in the survey work, most customers have a very strong feeling towards you all, a high reputation, which is great. A's and B's. A few C's, you know, but mainly A's and B's. Again, speaking for somebody who spent a while at a different utility, we would have died for A's and B's, right? So it's that's also important to understand that you're already starting from a great starting point. But there are obviously channels and avenues to pursue that will make that even stronger. Right. And to take that to even the next level. Right. And so that was sort of the insights that were coming out of this. Customers recognize 86 percent, all generally positive. But grades have softened slightly since that last survey. A lot of that is also outside of your control because external pressures also attribute to some of their thinking around that. Right. They're paying more for everything else. Therefore, your bills are worse when they may not be. Right. So it's understandable, but still very positive. Cost, as we already talked about, and quality are our top of mind for customers. Ninety three percent are unaware that SWA has some of the lowest rates countywide. That hence the tagline lowest rates in the county should be on every single thing that goes out. It should be on every marketing piece, whether that's digital, social media, everywhere. Right. And that's and we've rolled that into this plan as well to make sure that we are doing that. Um, PFAS treatment was another one getting ahead of that. Talking about you talked about with the Water Authority. Right, Steve. So. You need to take that and be the leader in those communications efforts around that so that when PFAS comes up with the Water Authority, they have no other choice but to look at you all as the leaders on that issue and to take guidance from you all as opposed to trying to, you know, push the agenda on what it 's going to be. So that created our messaging platform all around afford ability. And these, again, don't get me wrong. These are sample messages that we were drafted here, right? So affordability. We deliver the lowest water rates in San Diego County while helping customers manage costs. Reliability. Our system works every day, supported by long-term investments that protect supply and service. And safety and water quality. We provide safe water, proactively address emerging contaminants, and maintain transparency. Those are all three areas that we know from the survey and the focus group are issues that resonate with your customers, which means you, therefore, need to have a message strategy , if you will, on addressing all of those topics so that they are continuously hearing all the great work you are doing. And, you know, there's obviously always supporting themes under those three key. You always want to keep these things simple. It's the old lobbying and public affairs world to kiss, right? Keep it simple, stupid. You know, you always want to keep it as simple as possible to digest for customers as well as to disseminate for you all. So then we go into sort of the strategy and tactics, right? So, and as I talked about earlier, quote, unquote, lowest rates in the county campaign, we've already begun doing that. Angel and Carlos are on that. They're getting that out there. But it literally should be on every single thing that goes out there. Banners in the lobby so that anyone that comes in to pay a bill is, they're seeing that first and foremost. You know, social media, utilization of things like LinkedIn , Facebook, everything else. It needs to be everywhere to reinforce that. Bill inserts, website, homepage banner I mentioned. So, you know, social graphics, email headers, every email you guys send out, you know, I assume has a... Oh, okay. We're not allowed you to send out emails. That's a sore point. We'll work on that next time. Okay. Well, when you get to that point, it should be in every signature tagline, right? Not him. He just gets blamed for everything. Anyway. On a point. Apparently, I hit a point there on the email. No, no, no. Sorry about that, Carl. No, sorry. So, but yeah, on everything that goes out, that's what you want to be reinforcing. Again, what makes Sweetwater different? That's number one. You're obviously different than every other agency out there because you have the lowest rates in the county. So, that's just one example of making sure you're sort of hammering that home to customers. They're aware of what's going on. Doesn't mean everything is perfect. And you understand that. But you're doing a lot of great things and you want to reinforce that with your customers. Yeah. The program awareness. And we just saw some of that recently would be the event here out front, right? So, the rebates and other things that are out there, that was something that also the survey sort of identified is that we need to get greater awareness of all these great benefits you guys are providing to customers. So, if they qualify, they can take advantage of it and save even more money, you know, on their bills. So, communicating those, again, through all these different tactics we'll talk about here coming up. But these are just examples. So, a program awareness push, which kind of already started with that. But maybe it's an editorial that highlights things that are going on right now, like the water affordability program or , you know, the budget, you know, no increase to rates signed by the entire board saying, hey, these things don't happen by accident. This is what's going on. This is the scenes or the work behind the scenes you don't see to ensure we're delivering the lowest rates in the county, right? And it's safe and reliable and all those message themes we aved in. Tap water confidence campaign. And I also want to just say that some of these things, even though I know we're still coming to you while we want your guidance, your approval of them, of course, we've already started putting parameters around them so that we can hit the ground running if and when you all approve this plan. So, I don't want you thinking we're just kind of waiting in the wings until it's blessed. We're already putting the structure around it to get out there and do a lot of these things. Part of this is media, right? So, whether that's earned media, paid media is leveraging media to its most effective capability. Now, I'll preface that by saying we are in San Diego. So, it's, you know, and I've handled and worked in media relations in Dallas and in Washington, D.C. and other areas where you have a lot of different channels to sort of pitch the story to. Here, you're very limited. I won't go naming names since we're on here, but one of them really doesn't have sort of the reputation it used to. There are others that are a little bit smaller but are starting to build up awareness. There are some that are focused really on political issues. And so, we have to be cognizant of what we pitch to them. And then, of course, we've got television. And television is a great medium and we have everything here to do that with. But television is a fickle creature, right? So, you can do everything right, set it up on the right day , have all the right visuals to draw media in, meaning television. And God forbid something goes wrong that morning. There's a plane crash or there's a major car wreck. And all of a sudden, all those media outlets that have said , hey, we're going to be there are gone. So, best laid plans, but getting out ahead, pitching them early, making sure you've got what they want, which is the visual aspects, the location. What are they going to get that maybe other networks aren't going to get or other media sources aren't going to get? Those are the strategy elements that go into when we start to pitch television. And, Todd, I think you raised a good issue, right? One thing we have to understand is what our space is, right ? We're in the South County or small district, you know. I mean, you know, the media is always just sort of inclined to report on bad things. You know what I mean? That's what they're, you know, somebody screws up here and they'll have every station down here immediately. But I was reminded yesterday and I was a little bit of, I was a little bit concerned and we need to think about this a lot. And your plan talks about that. I want to hear more about it, not today, but as you, you know, if we move forward on this and, you know, obviously further engagement with you kind of understand. So I'm, you know, I always watch, I don't watch a lot of TV . I watch the local news, you know, I watch the, you know, and so what do I see on KUSI? It's Teresa Penundry on there talking about they changed the valve. Okay. And so she's like three and a half, four minutes talking about they changed the valve. Right. And it happened to be an old valve. We got a lot of old valves. All right. It was a positive story. But then I look at, okay, we have the lowest rates. We have no rate increase. We did a thousand. We get nothing. Right. So I'm not saying your stories aren't good. Well, first of all, it's Rachel Santa Fe. Right. Right. We're going to get there. You know, we have to understand we're the stepchild here. Right. So we got to work harder. We got to be smarter. We got to be more strategic. So I'm not passing any blame or anything like that. What I'm saying is, is that we got to figure out a way, whether we got to buy Joe Little dinner every other weekend or whatever, you know, whatever. We've got to develop those relationships knowing we're not going to get everybody. You know what I mean? We have, we have to basically focus on those media outlets that have specific South County bureaus, which Joe Little is, you know, the op-eds come harder all the time because, you know, Chris Reed, he's the gatekeeper. And he doesn't want to read any self-serving stuff. And so, you know, we're dealt with, you know, the times and voice of San Diego. And so I just, what I'm saying is we really need to sort of hone in on, on a strategy to do that. And, you know, you, you talked about that. And so I think that, um, yeah, we're on the right track. Yeah, no, I, and I think so it, like with anything else in public affairs, media relations is also about, um, sort of relationship development, you know? So it's the same. And I guess, you know, like you said, we have a press conference here. We're not going to get anybody. Yeah. Yeah. I don't care whether there's an earthquake or whatever. We're still not going to get it because they don't care. Yeah. You know, we have to focus on our favorite person that we know and, you know, cares about South County. And again, that tends to be Joe Little a lot, you know, and he's happy to do it, but, uh, you know, so we really need to figure out ways to, you know , different ways to cherry pick and to be more effective at getting exposure. Sure. And I know, and I know that like Angel went to the meet the beat recently. You've got to go to these different events where you get to meet the journalists. That's how you begin to build those relationships with them and everything else that could come into play. We've also put together, um, you know, sort of some different ideas. Like I said, we've already been moving just in case you all approve and we're ready to go. And we can obviously come back to the, or back to you all with those as well. Once the overall plan is sort of approved. Um, but that's exactly what it is, is there have to be unique different ideas, like, you know, a behind the tap, what goes into the daily operations of a, of a water agency, right? Not only just any water agency, the one with the lowest rates in the County, right? The one that just passed a budget with no rate increase, you know, I've got some right here. You got to go. Um, and then it's, you know, and then it's also understanding, like, I mentioned as well with, with media and especially television has to be visual in nature. Um, and so even like changing valves, they can get B roll of right. Of, of somebody in the, in the, in the quote unquote dirt with their hands doing work. Right. Right. Same thing here, getting folks out to the reservoir, seeing behind the scenes, getting good. That's what ends up poking them and saying, yes. Also, if you're going to have an event, just timing sometimes, you know, I will tell you like Saturday and Sunday mornings, television networks locally are starving for things because they're like, they've got Monday through Friday. You know, the assignment desks takes, takes care of it usually, but it's, you have a better opportunity on the weekends. Doesn't guarantee anything. Right. You have a better opportunity sometimes just because they 're starving for, for stories, but it still has to be visual. It still has to have those hooks that they're looking for. Yeah. But you're absolutely right. It's all about relationship development. And just like with anything else, media too, although maybe a little less frequently here, but media does change over as well. Right. Your beat reporters change. They move. It used to be in the old days. They would move from the Union Tribune to the LA Times, right? Or to the East coast. Same thing with television. People move around. So you do have to build those, maintain those. And then when they leave, you build the new one with the new one that comes in. And I know some of that has been going on already. Our chair has a... Yeah. Thank you, chair. Yesterday, I read to the council, our press release about our no, no increase in our rates. Yes. Yes, it went out there. But who picked it up? Right. Right. You know what I mean? That's supposed to be a full page. You know what I mean? Like front page. Yeah. At least the South Bay papers. You know, South Bay County. Right. T. You know what I mean? Even if we pay for those, it is worth it. Right. Yeah. No, I... You know, and that's part of what the strategy you're going to be working on, right? Yeah. How we do that, because you have a party, like you say, and nobody shows up, right? So we've got to focus on one reporter or one television individual that is interested. And then, look, when are you available? Like I said, Saturday at 10 o'clock. Right. We'll be here. You know? It's those kinds of things. Because, again, we're not Rancho Santa Fe. We're not the city of San Diego, like you said. We're not. We're very small. We're, you know, pretty insignificant as it relates to the regional... We should be in front face of Star News. There you go. Yeah. Right? Zero, no increase. Zero rate increase. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, and the Star News is the shell of what it used to be. It was never much of a shell, but, you know, but the thing is, is that we've got to find a way to get a push down, too. And they still, they do run. I mean, like the one that we got into the Star News that was under... That was... Carlos's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so we can get Star News in there. In fact, they also are looking for content, but we have to make sure that we're hitting them constantly with these different issues. So that, you know, you try to get one out of three. And then force feed it with our social media platforms. Absolutely. And then to our... And I was... And I told Carlos, I was very happy. I got a call from Irving the other day. He was just checking up on our account, making sure our contact information and all that stuff was good. And... Because that's gold. Yeah. That's gold. Our... I mean, we have, you know, an interest group. Yeah. You know, 36,000, you know, contacts. Right. You know, and we should be working the hell out of that. Yeah. You know what I mean? So... And leveraging partnerships that you all have in the community as well. It's another great way to deliver media stories. If you've got a partnership with some entity out there in the community that's doing something is to make sure that you're working with them. Hey, we're a partner with you. We want to be there as well. Right. Let's get our, you know. So yeah, this is what we do. We give back to the community that there's the messaging as well so that you can piggyback and leverage some of the work that they're doing. Right. Okay. Thank you. So... Absolutely. Oh, no. That's... Absolutely. Some people, like the people who face the bill still wanted to hold the newspaper. They're not under, like the younger... I like to hold the newspaper. I do like to hold the newspaper. I'm not working, right? Yeah. I like to... I want to see and hold and read it. Right? That's why I'm still one of those. If we don't print it, I print it myself because I like to read it. This is your quick question in regards to that. When people call in to the authority, hopefully they don't wait too long on hold for a service or get something answered. What do we have programmed? What do they hear? Do we know? Oh, you mean like the music interlude? Yeah. No. We get picked up right away. Sorry. I do. So there's no... No. There's no music on hold. None. Well, good. We get picked up. I know that because I call. Right? They don't know it's me, but I call. Sorry. Good. I don't know. Well, that's good news. We should have something canned. Something that says they're working on something. That says, you know... Proud to be delivering the lowest rates in the county. You know. Or, you know, rebates. Yeah. Exactly. Rebate.com or whatever. Customer service. No. I mean, when we're at these events, you know, that's the number one thing we get asked. Yeah. I want to... What rebates, you know? Well, I'm like a parrot out there, Mr. Chair. Yeah. Because I have the sheet that I read that GM and Angel provide instead. So I know what to say. Right? Because they tend to, you know what I mean, call me. Right. Because of that word chair after my name. And so they called me. And so I'm so glad I know what to say. Yeah. Right? Because of those literature that I have. I'm ready with it. Wonderful. That's good to know. No, I was just going to say, people that call in are probably not the ones that are... No, sir. I talked... Offline paying their bills or they're not, you know... Now they know. Now they know that I called. Good. I want it. That's good to hear that. You don't have to wait too long. No. You get to answer right away. You don't get put on hold. Good. We have good customer service. Well, the surveys bore that out, right? Yes. So, you know, but I mean, let's be frank. We don't get 10,000 calls a day like I'm sure your former employer does. Especially after the story yesterday about the rate increases that are on a slow day. Yeah. I think that banner that says zero rate increase should be in the front of our building. Well, anyway, we're going to hear more about this stuff because it's all part of the plan. That's what I'm reading. Yeah. The branding is... Yeah. All those things are out there. And like, so the next one was the community relations and public engagement. Kind of what you just saw in the updates, right? Getting out to more events. And to your point, it's not just... And I know Angel's already doing this, but we're going to continue to enhance those materials. Right. You know, it's not just attending National City Council. It's getting on the docket to spend five minutes. I've got a quick presentation. I want to just make sure that you all are aware and all your constituents are aware. Right. We just passed our budget and, you know, there'll be no new rate increase. Right? Right. So it's a five minute quick spiel. You're on the record. Oh, and here's what we're doing for the citizens of National City, you know? Correct. And boom, boom, boom. So... Exactly. It's participating in all of those, getting in front of the different chambers, getting in front of the different business and community organizations, a lot of which are listed in here. They're not all, but making sure that you're disseminating all of that information. And I believe you mentioned it earlier, right? That they then send out that information as well. So now you're increasing your impressions, which are always an interesting term, but you're getting that information out through their social media as well as what you're already doing. Yeah. Many of these organizations have newsletters and things like that. Absolutely. To be involved with the people that actually produce those things. The churches too. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So now there's a lot because, you know, a lot of these, like the chambers, you know, the community, first Friday breakfast. Yeah. It's the same 40 people. Oh, always. You know? Yeah. So we've got to figure out new sort of ways to get that out . But no, I think you're on the right track. Yeah. You guys are on the right track here. Yeah. So it's just getting out there. And like I said, I know I listed a bunch in here, but there are others, obviously, but this is just sort of a snapshot. Sure. Right. And the public agencies, education partners. Again, working through the city of Chula Vista and the city of National City, the National School District, other things to disseminate this information. And then, you know, we talked about these are some of the materials that we're going to be creating or have already begun. We're creating at least the parameters of, you know, just to make sure that we're, you know, what is a packaged PowerPoint presentation that can be done on water afford ability, right? On PFAS, on all these different issues. On PFAS, on all these different issues so that they're ready to go as well. They need to be constantly, obviously, updated and dusted off occasionally. But, you know, so you have that tool chest, if you will, to get that information out on an ongoing basis as well as an as-needed basis. So when something pops and somebody contacts you, you're already ready to go as opposed to creating it and hoping to get there in time. Right. So getting out ahead of things. Board visibility was another thing, and we kind of hit on this as well. But board visibility was one of the things that was kind of striking in the survey and the focus group stuff is that positive views of Sweetwater, but not a lot of recognition for the board members, right, and who they are. And so I think there's an opportunity, which means there's an opportunity. And again, that's where you use not only social media, which is an easy one to target, but you can also utilize the media and press and op-eds, you know, those types of things with board member signatures. Individual sometimes, sometimes collectively. Well, we remember there's a limitation on some of that stuff that can be put out with our names specifically on there because, you know, but anyway, yeah, I, you know, but I fully believe, you know, if the organization looks better , we all look better. Absolutely. You know what I mean? It's just by osmosis, we're going to get there. One thing you were talking about a little bit ago, and I know Chula Vista does this, they have message boards, you know, automated message boards, you know, it's basically just television monitors and have different information and so forth. And I was able to do this in areas work in the Bay Area where we gave information for the air quality district regarding some of the policies they have. And then they just upload, you know, we just upload a graphic and it's, it's, it's in the cycle, right? So somebody's sitting in a rec center, you know, waiting for their kids to get out of the pool or whatever. And they're looking at it, you know, they're looking at the sewing circle, they're looking at the social media stuff. And then all of a sudden pops up sweet water, you know, whatever we want to tell them, you know what I mean? Questions about your water quality or, you know, stuff like that, you know. It's like bulletin boards. I like our stuff. Yeah. New boards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I know that at the Loma Verde, cause I take my kids down there, they have them there, you know, where you just, and it's just, you know, and I would imagine they would be supportive of, of putting a graphic or two of ours in there. Just, just, just, just that that's just a little additional exposure to research. Absolutely. And it's all those different things that, again, every communications plan is a living, breathing document. Sure. Right. It is absolutely meant to be updated every year. Right. But oftentimes it needs to be updated or tweaked during the course of a year. Right. And so it's constantly sort of paying attention to where you are and to your point on metrics, that's kind of what we closed out on. You can do that a couple of different ways. Obviously you'll know if, you know, with the water ford ability program, are you seeing numbers tick up? You know, that's a good thing. It means there must be greater awareness about it and they 're calling in and jumping onto that. You know, the next time you do a survey, I'm a big believer , but, but every entity has to decide that for themselves. I'm a big believer that that kind of survey work, not necessarily the focus groups, but the survey work every two to three years is kind of important. It allows you to level set from the last one. You know, here were our numbers on, you know, we were at A and B. We were at 88 percent. Right. Now we're at 90 percent. You're going in the right direction. Right. Or if it's not, why not? You know, and so but that's another way to test these metrics. Right. If we, you know, lowest rates in the county awareness of that was at seven. Are we now at 10? You know, it's those types of things that help you ensure that you're getting your bang for your buck in terms of your communications, marketing and branding. So, so that's kind of what everything was in here. And then just reinforcing constantly. The first line here I had in here, Sweetwater Authority delivers safe, reliable water at the lowest rates in the county. Right. That should be the message every single time, just ing rained in everyone's brain. So when everyone's out there talking in communities, whether it's a forum or a neighbor or whatever it might be, that just rolls off the tongue. And then they end up, it's amazing. They end up when they're in the community or in a conversation, rather, excuse me, with their neighbor or their associate or their business partner. They're regurgitating it. Right. And saying it. And that's how you begin to disseminate that information on a wider scale. So I, you know, Ian, one of the issues is the crisis plan. Right. We have a bar quality issue. I wouldn't call that a crisis, but it's an opportunity to provide information. You know what I mean? We can't shy away from providing people with what's really going on. But the other issue that may be crisis, because I'm starting to see them more and more, is this whole Super N ino, El Nino thing. Right. Or Mega, whatever they're calling it. You know what I mean? And I was watching a graphic that was on one of the network television stations. The climate change. The climate change. But what it could mean in terms of our annual rainfall, which when I say annual, it's within the course of like two months. Right. Yeah. And we have a river system that, you know, once we get a lot of water, it starts to swell and, you know, properties will be affected. So that, you know, I mean, you know, the general manager is talking about we need to get out early. We need to tell people, look, because when their properties start flooding, because we saw that last the last time, they think it's us, you know, that's basically releasing all of our water, which. Right. It isn't, you know, and so if anything, you know, connection with and not just communicating with people within our service territory or the areas that are affected by our operations, but also our partners like the city of Chula Vista, city of National City, you got, you know, and all this kind of stuff just to get that information. So I would be interested in seeing exactly because I think you've got a lot of good things in here. You guys do. And so I, you know, that's going to be a real challenge for us to basically get that information out. Yeah. So. And it's an interesting good time that you brought that up. I mean, so Angel and I have even had conversations about that very thing about, you know, hey, look, maybe that's something you pitch to a McKenzie at The Voice who covers environment. Right. Right. What is a local water agency doing to prepare for a Nino, Super Nino, whatever they're calling it. Right. That could be an interesting piece. Right. That she would do. So it's those types of things and coming up ahead of time and then getting out there and starting to pitch, you know, and getting ahead of them, hopefully before anyone else is getting ahead of them on those types of issues. And then they do a story and then oftentimes what happens with print to television, print goes first, television sees it and says, okay, there could be, there could be an interesting story as well. We could do a visual around that. So KUSI would be a prime example. Even if they throw us in as part of a story. Right. A broader story. Yeah. Exactly. You know, here's Sweetwater Authority and they put Angel or Carlos on TV and say, look, this is the things we're doing. We're the partners. Exactly. We're notifying our people. We're providing resources regarding sandbags and things like, you know, whatever. You know what I mean? That kind of stuff. Right. And that's where exactly. So, you know, some of the different pitch ideas that we've already been formulating, you know, we didn't want to get the cart before the horse because obviously this hadn't even been viewed or approved yet by you all. But, you know, if indeed it was to move forward, those are other things we can get back to you almost immediately. Right. Because that's going to start materializing. They're talking, what, this winter, I guess, that there may be. Yeah. There may be effects from that. That's what they're saying anyway. Yeah. But, you know, every time you get prepared, that's when nothing happens. Right. Quote, unquote, Y2K. Right. Right. But it still doesn't. What's that? We can certainly bring this item specific for further discussion to the committee. Sure. Sure. August time frame. We're looking at it. No, I know you are. And that's why I raised it because, you know, I thought you were kind of out there and then I started seeing it from Noah and all kinds of stuff. Now it's starting to get serious. No, this is something that will be coming to the board. Yeah. As far as once we know more about it, we can bring it with some of the communication strategies. Sure. No, it's great. No, but I like the fact that we're focusing on it. Yes. And I'm just looking at the generic. Yeah. As the generic. Anything else? No, that's kind of a snapshot of the plan again, other than unless you all have any additional questions, thoughts, concerns, happy to. Madam Chair? Answer. No, sir. I'm good. Building trust through affordability, reliability, and safety. Yeah. It's very strong. And Director Delgado has been in the communications and PR business a long time. He's. Well, no, just one thing. So, you know, out of the survey, the results was that people associate water quality with the taste and the look of the water. Yeah. Which doesn't equate that it's unsafe. It's safe to drink. I like how we're looking into that. Maybe having some sort of targeted communication when it arises. Yeah. We're ready to respond at all levels. Right. Right. To educate people that. It doesn't mean it's unsafe. Right. It happens, right? Right. So, like the White House. I just heard this morning. Reflecting pool? Yeah. So, algae blooms. Algae blooms. It's common. It's common. Are they asking for Justin to go over there? Right. But it's copper. That's right. That's right. That's right. This bag. It's not just, you know, our issue. It's happening everywhere. Right. Right. So, I like that. No, no, no. And I think that, you know, and again, I think these are really good opportunities to educate our customers. So, if we ever have to go to them and ask for money to basically upgrade our systems or to do something, you know, because I'm not completely convinced that the federal government nor the state is going to basically save us. Right. And, you know, what we're seeing is, and I saw an interesting graphic. There were like 80 different requests or ballot measures in the primary, you know, election just earlier this month that asked for money. Right. In terms of whether it's a bond or whether it's, you know, it's a sales tax increase or whatever. 80% passed. Yeah. And we kind of think that that's counterintuitive because everybody's focused on, you know, and all this kind of stuff. But the focus was typically 88% of them pass. You know what I mean? So, it is kind of winding down a little bit. But what we do know is that South County voters will support these kinds of things. Yeah. If we make the cogent argument. Right. It's going to improve their quality. And, you know, so now we're just trying to get people to understand that we have the lowest rates. Once everybody majority knows this, the next thing is, well , how do you do that? Right. How do you achieve that? That's what we're getting to. You're exactly right. It builds upon you. Right. And I just know that a conversation I had with my neighbor, and I've told Carlos this a hundred times, you know, once I explained to her, look, she had no idea that we had the lowest rates in the county. She didn't even care that much because she's not poor. But the thing is, is that she said, the water comes from a lake. I said, yeah. She did know that lakes get algae and all that kind of stuff. And, and, but she didn't realize that if we have to go to imported water, the cost triples, you know, and so, you know, that's going to impact her costs. And she said, okay, well, that makes sense. It still stinks. It doesn't taste good, but it makes sense. And she wasn't, she may even take a long sign this year from me if I have to run. So anyway, because she wasn't going to. So anyhow, you're right. I mean, these, all of these things are underpinnings for a good campaign that all fits together. And we've always talked about, we've got a good story to tell them. We just need to go. Absolutely. Yeah. Water and energy are very similar. I mean, energy, people come home, they flip the switch, they expect it to come on. It's the same thing when they get home, they turn the tap on, they expect water to be there, and then they expect it to be safe. Right. They're safe and reliable, right? It's, it's, it's an education, it's an effort around education to ensure they understand what all goes into that . And that's, you know, that's what this has said. Yeah. So, okay. Well, what's the pleasure of the, this has got to be heard by the full board, right? So what's the recommendation that we have? I think we have to compress this a little bit. You know, I'm inviting it. Right. Well, you're going to get, you're going to get a lot of, well, I think we do have to have a lot of, you know, we have to have that. But I mean, a presentation, the board's got to be. Yeah. And I just don't know that we're going to be able to get away with, if we adopt this here, that we're going to be able to get away with putting on this. I don't think that's going to happen. So, Mr. General Manager, you might want to look out for a meeting more, because we're going to get some questions about it. Well, we can have, I'll speak to the chair. Okay. I mean, we certainly have the option to do a specific workshop just for communications. When we come back. It may be completely appropriate. Yeah. We add it as an item next week. Well, this committee item will go to the board next week. Right. Okay. We can certainly try to summarize this in a brief PowerPoint. Yes. And send it to the full board. And certainly the proposed communications plan will be included as part of the report. Great. Yeah. Okay. I move to approve. I second. Okay. Motion second. Any other discussion? Olivia? But this is for that force. This review. Do we have to propose? We'll make a recommendation to move it to the full board. Okay. So, you move that second. I concur with that. Okay. Okay. Director Castaneda? Yes. Director Delgado? Yes. Director Yamani? Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Back to 4.3. And I, you know, Ian, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about the plan that Angel and yourself had worked on before we started to talk, because I think your help in this is critically important. I think, you know, we can have all the great plans in the world. We can do all kinds of different things. We can have everything on paper, but it needs to be implemented. You know, and as the chair said, we're a little short staff . We need to help. Thanks. So, okay. Yeah. I'm just giving an editorial up here. So, I'm just introducing the idea. Yeah. So, anyway, Leahy, any questions for, I mean, any comments from the public? There's no online public comments, Chair. Thanks for keeping us in the lane here. So, anyway. So, our passion to, like, the topic. Well, let's get moving. You know what I mean? It all sounds good. I want to get it going. General Manager. Thank you, Greg Cusena. So, the recommendation from staff is to authorize the General Manager to award a contract for $75,000, not to exceed $75,000 for the next fiscal year, to Affinity Public Affairs. I'm represented by Ian Stewart. Ian serves as a communications advisor to the authority. He's been, as you mentioned earlier, Greg Cusena, instrumental in helping us provide high-level guidance, work very closely with our public affairs manager. So, we'd like to continue that relationship with Affinity Public Affairs. And we're here to answer any questions. And so is Ian. Mr. Chair, I have a question. Yes. Because I look at the amount. Isn't this under your jurisdiction, General Manager? It is. But we awarded a contract last year under my jurisdiction, so we're bringing it to the board. I see. So, it doesn't appear to be a serial contract. Okay. That now exceeds my signing. My signing. So, it's to be, it's to make sure that we're. Thank you, Jim. Because I just know. That'd be a second guess as far as. I just know your jurisdiction. And I know it's always positive. It's something that this incredibly important, the board needs to be part of this, you know. And that way we don't, we don't run into questions or people have issues. So, anyway. I'd like to go ahead and remove approval of the staff's recommendation on this and recommend it to the full board. I'll second that. Okay. Livia? Director Castaneda? Yes. Director Delgado? Aye. Director Yamani? Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Great. And then this will go to the next board meeting. On the 24th? Yes. Yeah. So, it probably makes sense to do both of them if it's the same. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's okay. Wonderful. All right. Any director's comments? Madam Chair? No, Madam Chair. I mean, sir. No comment, Mr. Chair. Director Delgado? No. Okay. I have none either. Hearing no comments. Let's adjourn. And we'll schedule. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, good. It's morning for me. Good afternoon. This meeting is being held on Monday, June 15, 2026. This is the meeting of the Water Quality Committee and it is now called to order. Committee members and members of the public may attend the meeting virtually pursuant to the Brown Act, though that is not the case today. As a convenience to the public, the authority provides a call-in option, an internet-based option for members of the public to virtually observe and provide public comments at its meetings. The instructions for virtual observation and participation were included in the agenda. Members of the public attending the meeting in person may submit a public comment slip and submit it to the chair or secretary prior to start the agenda item. Members of the public attending virtually via the Zoom webinar or call-in option may also make public comments on an agenda item during the meeting by raising their hand via Zoom webinar by clicking on the Raytime button and via phone by pressing start-in. Remote users can change between gallery and speaker after the site by clicking the view button on the Zoom platform. Please note that in the event of the instruction in the call-in or internet-based option for observing and or participating in this meeting, the meeting will continue unless the directors attend the meeting virtually pursuant to certain provisions of the Brown Act, which is again not the case. Is it Ligia? Ligia, can you now call roll, please? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Here. Director Morrison is absent. Thank you. Can we up the volume? No. Ligia, can you say something? Oh, that should be good. Testing one, two. That's perfect. Thank you so much. Do we have any items to be added, withdrawn or reordered, General Manager? Perfect. We're going to go ahead and move on to public comments. We will now hear public comments on items within the subject matter jurisdiction and the authorities that are not on the agenda. Board Secretary or anyone here, are there any public comments? Not here. No, Secretary. There's no online public comments, Chair. Great. We're going to move on to the action agenda. Consideration to award annual contracts for water treatment and chemicals. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 4.1. Board Secretary, are there any members of the virtual public that would like to be heard? There's no online public comments, Chair. I'll be anyone here. General Manager. Thank you, Director Harris-Perez. We're bringing for the committee's consideration to make a recommendation to the board regarding purchase of chemicals related and required for water treatment. We need to have a presentation by Justin Basile. Perfect. We care to. All right. May I check to the presentation? Please. Please. Let's see. Okay. So, consideration to award annual water treatment chemicals . So, we issued a request for a quote back in April for one- year contracts. This would be for fiscal year 26-27 starting July 1. We used an operation of all three of the authorities' water treatment facilities and also our remote residual control sites. So, we have our Ode Arnold tank site. We have remote chloramination capabilities. It's been in service for a few years now. We have Vanita Valley Reservoir, which actually is getting really close. All the equipment's been installed and tested. Just pending the familiar from DDW and we've got that one going. And then the new central wheeler tank that was toured last week. That's also coming with a visitor control system. So, we included chemical costs in there for that site as well. We have a list for chemical vendors that we maintain currently at 4b4 vendors. And so, in addition to advertising on Planet Bids, we also made the 4b4 vendors aware that this procurement was coming . The bid opened on May 28th. We received 58 quotes from 22 different vendors. I apologize. I know that's very small. There's a bigger copy in the board packet. But there's a lot of different combinations. Vendors can choose to order. They can kind of mix and match how they want to bid on chemicals depending on what they supply. The bid results, these are the summary of the lowest responsible bids, which is essentially a summary of the award recommendation as well. As far as chemical supply and costs, our superintendent did do outreach to the vendors to kind of get a sense for why things are the way they are. And conditions in the market have generally improved. I mean, definitely from where they were in COVID, that was a really bad area for chemicals and availability was very uncertain. But there's still, you know, tariffs, global events, and transportation that comes up time to time that makes the area a little uncertain in time. And that can be reflected in chemical costs. As far as, you know, comparing what were the unit prices that were provided based on compared to what we're paying right now, it's kind of a mixed bag. Some unit costs are going up. Some are going down. It's almost 50-50. There's, I think, nine chemicals or unit prices went down and 12 or they went up. So it's a little bit fixed. And there's an attachment in the board member, also the board memo that shows the percent changes from the previous fiscal year. I heard questions at the end, or is it going to be? You go for it. No, I just noticed that that swing is quite a bit, I mean, from down 19% to up 66%. Yeah. You said it's kind of 50-50. So did it really net out? Yeah. I mean, another way to analyze it is you can weight all that together based on cost and everything. Yeah. The total, the 1.8 million total is around what they were last year. I mean, they cost what they cost. Right. We need them. And we didn't get bids for the hydrogen peroxide. Correct. Yeah. So we're, you know, in the process of working with a consultant on different algaecide applications, protocols, and we're still in the process of working on that. So, you know, for example, we did get bids on copper sulf ate, which is the industry standard. So we, you know, which is what we're still allowed to apply by permit in our plan. As we move into the peroxide world, we can certainly do individual procurements and solicitations that would fall within stats authorization to move forward on those. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. And so the combined cost, $1,815,200 funding. There is available funding in the budget that the governing board approved last week. We did, I just wanted to point out, we did update the specifications for ferric and ferrous chloride. And there's a kind of an important reason for that. And it was also a part of what we learned when we're working with Corolla on the PFAS study is we're getting into the weeds of kind of everything we're working on. And impurities from chemicals also contribute to operational problems. And we're able to actually find that not all vendors carry the same quality of product, right? And in this case, our iron products, just like we always say iron and manganese, right? Because they kind of come together out of the earth, if you will. And same with the product. It's mostly iron, but there's a trace amount of manganese in there. And so we put specification in there to get lower manganese content product. And what that means is less manganese we're adding back into the treated water. And so it's kind of comes from two places, right? It's source water, and then it's also chemical. So to the extent we can minimize it on either side just improves water quality. And ultimately color of the water. And not to mention also, although we're in full compliance with this new notification level that the State Water Resources Control Board put out, they did lower it by quite a bit from 500 to 50. We're in compliance with that. But this just helps us, you know, gives us extra insurance to stay within that new notification level. We talked about the algaecide products. And next steps would be to award contracts to the lowest responsible bidders for water treatment chemicals as follows. I'd be happy to read that if you'd like. Thanks. I mean, I can read it. I can read it. Okay. All right. I'll skip to the last part there. And direct staff to execute contracts and authorize the general manager to approve cost increases for any awarded water treatment chemical. The may care in the future that is within the general manager's approval limit. And other, number two, other direction is determined by the governing board and staff recommends option. And I just wanted to throw out that last part about the general manager improving cost increases. I don't believe we've taken any cost increases this fiscal year as of when I produced the last quarterly report. So definitely things have improved. Several years ago, we were, you know, due to fuel increases and supply. And we're getting asked for a lot of cost increases. That hasn't been happening, which again, shows more market stability now. Okay. I have a question. Oh, sorry. Do you have another place? When you get the, when you're able to get or figure out what we're going to do with the other that we did not receive it, would they come back here? Or we're assuming it's probably going to be within the... It should be within staff's authorization, yeah. But if it ends up being something we need to bring back, we certainly will. I would be just more curious when, if you buy it, does it work? How is it working? Absolutely. Yeah. Approved? I mean, I think you're testing things, so. Yeah. Yeah. That'll be exciting to try when we get there. Yeah. Those are the easy ones because what are we going to do? Say no. Do you have any other questions? No. If you don't, I'm happy to move over. That's probably short. Great. Second. Lika, can you please call the roll? Director Cox? Aye. Director Martinez-Perez? Aye. Director Morrison is absent. The motion passes unanimously with Director Morrison absent . Great. Thank you. We're going to move on to 4.2, consideration to authorize the scope of work for fiscal year 26-27, on-call SCADA integration professional services and on-call SCADA design professional consulting services. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on 9-4.2. Board Secretary, is there anything from the virtual world? There's no online public comment, Chair. Anybody listen? Here, General Manager. Thank you, Dr. Martinez-Perez. So, the next one item is equal importance to our processes. So, this all provides automation and more control and allows us to respond quicker to changing conditions in our system. So, Justin has a presentation for your consideration. Sure. If I made sure? You're made. Okay. So, consideration to authorize the scope of work for fiscal year 26-27, on-call SCADA integration professional services and on-call SCADA design professional consulting services. So, the SCADA system is an important asset for the authority. It's what allows us to reliably operate and monitor all of our water treatment facilities and a number of remote facilities. Our current SCADA integrators, Enterprise Automation, their existing contract is going to expire in August. However, on May 20th, the governing board awarded another contract for one year with four contract extension options. And then, our SCADA design consultant, which is Rockwell Construction Services, they have essentially extensions that would take us through May 5th, 2028, currently at this time. So, both on-call, but we don't do work with the consultant any fiscal year until we bring these authorizations to the board. So, we like to bring them in June. That way, when July comes, we can start moving and getting work done right away. So, there's tasks in here that some that are reoccurring. So, annual expense support tasks for the integrator. So, SCADA training. We like providing training on different topics to staff every year through the integrator. Programming enhancements. And so, these are, you know, we do interviews with the operators every year. And we also, as management, we collect ideas from the operator as far as what functionality can be improved in the SCADA system to make it better and more operable for staff. SCADA plan updates. This is the investigation that goes into developing budget and future projects and keeping things green and stable. Windows, SCADA server updates. So, just security updates that get sent out for Microsoft every year. But the integrator tests those on a platform in their office to make sure they're stable before they're released to us to deploy. It doesn't crash the system. And then general on-call support for any kind of other tasks or emergencies that may come up and be adapted on. As far as expense projects, which is all concluded in the expense budget, but these are beyond annual reoccurring projects. We have mobile operator rounds for the Purdue Water, actually for all of our facilities. That's a carryover project from last fiscal year, but we're still working on getting all those forms together. It turns out to be quite a task, but also very important that we get it right because there's regulatory implications there with data recording as well. SCADA interface software upgrade. I throw the picture on here because when you go to the Pretty Water treatment plant and you see the screens, that 's the interface we're talking about. It's basically keeping that software version at a current version that still can be supported in the future. And the current version is several years old at this point. Windows SCADA server software. So the servers are what's the back end that allows everything throughout the agency to communicate. And similar to the interface, same idea. The software version of Windows server on there is becoming obsolete. And we want to be able to say modern secure and protected on that. Network switch upgrades. These are just devices that allow the communication to happen within the server room with the Purdue plants and our backup server that's at the desalination facility. And then Loveland Reservoir Communications upgrades. So currently, the system does communicate, but it uses a le ased line from AT&T that uses an analog modem to communicate up to Loveland. It works, but it does go out intermittently. Windstorm, rain, line goes down, and then we rely on AT&T to restore that forest. So we'll be looking at what other options are available. Many years ago, we looked at incorporating this into our microwave system, but that turned out to be extremely expensive to find a mountaintop in between here and Lo veland that we could put a tower on. Leasing, helicopter access, very expensive. But now we have other newer technologies. Sales service has improved. There's Starlink now, so there might be other opportunities to securely allow us to communicate to Loveland. And then just, as I mentioned, residual control systems. We've had the OD Arnold site now going for several years. And just like other general programming enhancements, our operators have learned, like, hey, these are some other trending capability and control tools that we can add to make the systems function better. As far as capital projects, we have the desal PLC program. It's actually all the input-output, multiple panels of the facility. All the planning has been done for that project. We plan on executing it in the winter. We are asking for $33,000 more in funds, so we're going to try not to use as much of that as we can. But as we look at the budget more and how much work needs to be done, it's going to be really tight, so we wanted to put a little bit more in there. Air ratio destratification. This just goes into more input-output that we want for control and visibility of the system. Like, we want to make sure we can view differential pressure across the system, look at airflow rates and other things that are operationally important. And so that increased the cost a little bit, so we're adding $33,000 to that project. We'll be asking to. Hello. Welcome, Director Morrison. Good afternoon. The annual expense projects for the SCADA design consultant or Rockwell Construction, they're fairly limited this year. They assist with the SCADA plan updates as well as staff does and the SCADA integrator and general on-call support. They're also electricians, and if we have an electrical problem, they can provide us the resources to solve those types of problems. Now, their expense projects, there's a couple on here I wanted to point out, and these are actually the only two. So at the Pretty Water Treatment Plant, we have our own 12, 000-volt substation, so power coming in from SDG&E at 12,000 volts, and we step it down to 480, which is what we can use to operate pumps, motors, and the plant. It's original equipment from 1959. We're going to have Rockwell and a subconsultant investigate this and let us know what type of maintenance may need to be done to it and what type of spare parts or parts that can be rebuilt are necessary to have on-site to ensure that it continues to be reliable. We don't have staff on-site. Although we have electricians, we don't have high-voltage electricians on-staff like Weidman. Can I ask why now? Well... Like, did we not want to have that capability before? So there was a... Last March? We had an outage of the substation for a period of time, and fortunately we were able to get a part, but that was kind of eye-opening. Learning, you know, obviously it's critical. And something else I should point out, if we were to build a plant today, very unlikely that you would own a subst ation. This is what SDG&E tells us nowadays. SDG&E would typically own the substation and we would just take the power off it. We own this. Having any kind of an issue with that, even though it's just kind of this solid-state equipment, when something goes wrong, it can be really bad. And so we want to make sure that we're prepared for that. Great. Kind of piggybacking on that, like, would SDG&E want to take over and own the substation? How much more are we pouring into it? So we had planned on doing a further study on that this fiscal year, but as we started getting into conversations with SDG&E on that, before even spending $50,000 on a study , it was like looking like it probably in the millions of dollars to build a new substation. It's not a cheap endeavor. And then... And do they expect the customer to pay for that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that would be on us. Absolutely. And then, you know, just looking at, you know, when we have a renewable manager energy project going on right now, right? And what projects may or may not come out, I don't know at this time, but potentially that could even change what kind of equipment we need at the plant anyways, if we have different types of renewables there. So they're looking at that, the renewable energy manager. Yeah, they're aware of that, yeah. And it could potentially, I'd imagine, require infrastructure changes possibly, so, yeah. Yeah. Also, looking at, we have two backup diesel generators at the Purdue Root Water Treatment Plant. We also want support replacing the automatic transfer switches that switch over the generators and power falls off. They work, but the displays have went out. So it's not a very complex task to replace the displays other than, in order to do that, you have to turn off the power to the plant and the generator. So you have no power. Now, it doesn't take a long time to replace those, but if there's any reason you need any power during that one hour or it goes longer, then it can become a big problem. So they're helping us figure out ways to set up other temporary power, rented generators, smaller generators, and key areas of the process, like to keep the SCADA computers operating, the chlorine detection system operating, and critical equipment in the laboratory so that we can do that . So that's why, that change out safely without, you know, taking the risk that nothing will happen during that time period or if something goes wrong. But if anything can go wrong. I don't want to take that risk, right? Yep. That's the expense projects. Capital projects, we're not asking for any additional funding. There are projects the SCADA design consultants currently supporting on us, like Central Wheeler and Iron and Mangan ese, but we're not asking for any additional funding at this time. And so the fiscal impact for Rockwell with the reoccurring and the expense projects we just talked about would be $146 ,000. Well, no. Okay, no. Yeah. So the substation, that is just going to be for an investigation and report only. Yep. And then, so there may be an expense on top of that. Exactly. Yeah. They would come later, right? Okay. So we'd get a report and understand. Yep. They're not going to find anything wrong with it, Ron? No, of course not. What are you talking about? Same thing when I go to the dentist. I say you're not going to find anything. The key here is to not go. That's good. Yeah, we wish to. And then for our on-call SCADA integrator, we're looking at a total of $664,200 for the ongoing. And the expense projects and an additional $66,000 for the two capital projects we discussed, bringing the total to $7 30,200 for the on-call SCADA integrator. And staff's recommendation would be award the following contracts, $146,000 for SCADA design consulting to Rockwell Construction Services of Vista, California, and $730,200 for SCADA integration to enterprise automation of Irvine, California, for fiscal year 26-27 SCADA expense and capital projects. Or number two, other direction is determined by the governing company. What's that? Fundrains? Are we foreseeing any, not only in this year's budget, in the next few years, any major expenditures on SCADA? So, that's a good question. So, some of these projects that are in here came out of the next five-year master plan. Next five-year master plan is not finalized yet. But we wanted to take the opportunity for the brainstorming that we've been doing and start moving some of these more higher priority ones in this year's budget. Actually, I have a meeting this week where we're going to start reviewing to finalize that master plan. So, I'll have to take a hard look and see what other recommendations. Actually, I already know what some of those items are. Not all, some of them are expensive, but not all of them are items that we necessarily need to do next fiscal year. We could spread them, spread them out over time. If there's no further questions, I move with staff recommendation. Second. Great. Be here. Director Cox? Aye. Director Martinez-Perez? Aye. Director Morrison? Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Great. We're moving on to the Director's comments. Start on my left. Director Fox? None. Thank you. We had a water quality meeting. Once a year. We got it done. I was like, I feel like last time we talked about this was like a year. I am kind of close. That's right. It's like a deja vu. Director Morrison, anything? I am good. Okay, great. With that, our next meeting. August 17th. That's the plan. With that. I don't care about it. During the meeting at 426. Thank you. Thank you. Well, this is one of the most important things.

Okay, this meeting is being held on Wednesday, June 10th at South Bay Water Board of Directors and members of the public may attend in person. Additionally, some board members may attend and participate in the meeting virtually pursuant to the Brown Act. As a convenience to the public, South Bay Water provides a call-in option and an internet-based option for members of the public to virtually observe and provide public comments at its meetings. Instructions for virtual observation and participation were included in the agenda for this meeting, which was posted to the authority's website. Members of the public attending the meeting in person may submit a public comment slip and submit it to the board president or secretary prior to start of an agenda item. Members of the public attending virtually via the internet-based option or call-in option may also make public comments on an agenda item during the meeting by raising their hand via zoom webinar by clicking on the raise hand button and via phone by pressing star nine. There we go. Remote users can change between gallery and speaker options by clicking the view button on the zoom platform. Please note that in the event of a disruption in the call-in or internet-based option for observing and or participating in this meeting, the meeting will continue unless otherwise required by law, such as when a director is attending the meeting virtually pursuant to certain provisions of the Brown Act. Last, prior to proceeding to call roll, I would like to make sure that directors online can hear the proceedings. We don't have anybody online, right? No, director Martinez. Okay. Okay. Okay. So we will save that for later. So Ligia, we can proceed with roll call. Director Castaneda. Director Cox. That's it. Director Delgado. Here. Director Martinez. Here. Director Martinez Perez is absent. Thank you. Okay. We will now do the Pledge of Allegiance led by director Delgado. Thank you. Board Secretary. Board Secretary. Are there any public comments? There's no public comments present. Okay. And we don't have a president's presentation that I'm aware of. Do we have any items that need to be added or withdrawn? Okay. So let's do the approval of the minutes for the special meeting of May 20th. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item six. Board Secretary. Are there any public comments? There's no public comments, president. Okay. President. Director Martinez Perez is joining us. Okay. Let's have her join in. This is good timing. Is she there? She is here. She is here. Oh, okay. Do you want to do your little reading? Yes. Hold on. I need to find my thing. So I am participating remotely under new provisions of the Brown Act. Due to both. I'm hitting two today. A twofer. Child care and health. That prevent me from participating in PROSED. Okay. Well, welcome. And thank you for joining us. Okay. So we will. Oh, is there anybody older than 18 days? No, I'm just kidding. I only have a five-week-old in my lap. I don't even, I don't know if you have the hands here. No, but there's no one over 18 in the room with me. Okay. Thank you. All righty. So approval of the minutes. Do we have any discussion? Anyone? No. Okay. Motion to approve. Motion in a second. Ligia, please call roll since they don't want to discuss this. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Okay. Moving on to item seven, approval of demands and warrants. April 2026. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item seven. Board secretary, are there any public comments? There's no public comments, president. Okay. Do we have a motion for approval? So moved. We have a motion for a second. Second. We have a motion in a second. Any discussion? Seeing none. Ligia, please call roll. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Yes. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Okay. New business. Review the draft fiscal year 2627 budget and adopt resolution 667. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 8.1, board secretary. Do we have any public comments? Do we have any public comments? There's no public comments, president. Okay. I will defer to the GM. Thank you, president. Well, we do have a budget approval recommendation time. So we're rich Stevenson, our director of finance, put together the budget that is included in your packet for the board's consideration. Thank you, president. Thank you, president. As in prior years, this is a pretty brief budget just by the nature of South Bay. The only major real change in it is with the election, we'll have to pay election costs for the upcoming year. And last year was almost $12,000 for the one individual. So we budgeted about $26,000 for the two potential seats. But if we don't get, if we don't, I think if for whatever reason, if nobody is contested, then I don't believe we pay anything. But if they are, then we pay for them. So that's the only big change. So we're proposing a budget of $50,890 in expenditures. And we'll have about $1,960 in interest earnings. So that means about a little over $55,000 would be coming from Sweetwater Authority to pay for the remaining of the budget at the end of the fiscal year. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Do we have any questions? Go ahead. Thank you very much for the simple presentation. I appreciate, really appreciate genuinely having the last two years of actuals, the estimated actual for this year and the budget just side by side. It makes it really easy for the board to be able to review. The question I did have was on the community outreach line item. I know that's fluctuated from zero to budgeting for $5,000 in the last couple years. And just wondering what would communications for South Bay water entail that wouldn't already be budgeted for under Sweetwater Authority? What might an example of that be? It's really the direction of the board is what would drive those costs. So in fiscal year 2425, it was the logo contest that the funds were used for. And so if the board of directors had other initiatives that they wanted to have move forward for South Bay water, then those funds are available for those. Got it. So it's there if needed, but there's nothing anticipated. Okay. Thank you. That was the only question I had on that item. Okay. Any other questions on our large $101,000 budget? Seeing none. Do we have a motion for approval? Move to approve. Do we have a second? I'll second that. Have a motion and a second. Ligia, please call roll. Director Castaneda? Yes. Director Cox? Aye. Director Delgado? Aye. Director Martinez? Aye. Director Martinez-Perez? Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Okay. Next item, review policy 117, investments, and adopt resolution 668, adopting an investment policy. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 8.2. Board Secretary, do we have any public comments? There's no public comments, President. General Manager? Thank you, President. We'll defer to Rich again on this item. This is the policy that comes along with the recommendation for the budget. And Rich? Yeah, it's a big policy for not a lot of investing activity that goes on. The funds we have are just in LEIF, which right now it's about 3.8% interest earnings, which isn't bad for government investing. There were no... What I do is I take South Sweetwater's review from legal counsel and see if there's any changes that need to be made. There really weren't any changes, but there was one paragraph added per legal... It wasn't significant, but it's more of a clarification. Good. Good thing to have fresh eyes on it, right? Any comments, questions? Okay. Seeing none, do we have a motion for approval? Move to approve. Second. We have a second. Okay. We have a motion and a second. Ligia, please call roll. Director Castaneda. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Aye. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Okay. Item number nine. Approval of directors' attendance at meetings. Oh, 8.3. I skipped it. Review of board policies and procedures. Policies 111 through 116 and 118 through 120. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 8.3. Do we have any public comments? There is no public comments, President. Okay. General Manager. Thank you, President. We're bringing the first batch of policies for the board consideration. These have been reviewed by legal, and there's really just very minor changes. We can go through them if you choose, President, or allow for questions. Yeah, maybe if we have questions, yeah. Does anybody have any questions on the multiple policies? Overall, I don't see anything. Go ahead, Director Cox. Yes. On page 48 of 50 of the packet, page 3 of Policy 120, I think this is just maybe a clarification item L, the sexual harassment avoidance training, I think, by state law. That's called prevention, not avoidance. So maybe we can look at that. And it's not something to avoid. It's something to prevent, right? And then just a question, since we're having workplace violence prevention training tomorrow under Sweetwater, I'm wondering, would that qualify as something we should be thinking about adding for South Bay? What's the pleasure of the board? Do we have any? I don't know how to deal with that. Well, it's required drinking, right? Can we do it twice? No, but there's trainings that are on this, that are on Sweetwater. Like, we need to take ethics training. And by taking it once, we change it. But does the training go with the elected, or does it go with the agency? I can't imagine that if the elected officials or whomever is required to do this gets the training, that that would essentially cover all agencies. Yeah, I think, well, just to clarify. Is that, I'm trying to understand. No, I understand. You only have to take it once. It doesn't matter. You can, sometimes you go to conferences and take it, and that's sufficient. This particular one is regarding pre-approved events. So if you were to take that on behalf of South Bay, it's already pre-approved, you don't have to ask the board for permission, basically. That's what this is. So we defer to Sweetwater Authority for this training. But certainly, we can make that modification and add it as a pre-approved event for the South Bay water. Would we do this? So this is in case we don't do it with the full board at Sweetwater. If we'd like to do it separately. It just gives option to have, say, the training for South Bay water. So it just mirrors what we're doing. Rather than with Sweetwater Authority. You'd be consistent. That's what I was offering. We can certainly add this. And if we're not 100% sure, because my recollection is that it's by agency and not by individual. So I have to do it for the water authority for you have to do it for LAFCO and you have to do it for the person. The person in the elected that takes the training takes it once for all of their many hats. The reason that I that I'm that may not be correct is because, like, for example, I sit on LAFCO and I have to take it. Right. And then some of like, I don't know about JPIA or other. No, I haven't. But I know for LAFCO, I have to take it separately. So if we can just get 100% clarification just to make sure that we're doing it right. Sure. I'll look into that. But I believe it's it's, you know, kind of per the agency, the members have to take it. But if you've taken it already in some other format, you you comply with that agency's training program. Right. I'll make sure of that. But so you wouldn't have to take it three times. In other words, if you're on LAFCO and this. And I and I ended up taking it three times or like when we do the reporting, you reported for South Bay and then you reported for Sweetwater. Right. We'll have to double check. I don't know. Not that I'm aware of. I would. I would. I mean, I don't want to make any assumptions, but certainly South Bay shares the same workplace as Sweetwater. So to me, it would make sense to take it as part of Sweetwater and that would cover it. I mean, operationally, Sweetwater Authority is the agency that that conforms to. To the mission of providing water. So but we can we can take a look at it and there's a need. We can either bring it back or amend it or any direction from the board. No need to bring it back for my question. Again, just offering it since we have the required ethics training and the sexual harassment, what I think is prevention training, just to be consistent across both. But I'm happy to either move approval as it stands or grant the grace to our legal counsel to decide whether it should be included or not and move that amended approval. I would recommend we go ahead and approve it. If there's a problem with it, we can bring it back. I'll move. Are you moved? Second. OK. We have a motion in a second. Yeah. By Director Castaneda. Ligia, please call roll. Director Castaneda. Yes. Director Cox. Aye. Director Delgado. Director Martinez. Aye. Director Martinez Perez. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. OK. Item number nine. We don't have anything in financial reports. This is the opportunity for members of the public to speak on item 10. Board Secretary, are there any public comments? There's no public comments, President. OK. This is an information item only. Do we have any comments on it? Seeing none, we'll move to number 11, reports by directors on events attended. 11.1, I provided a report. 11.2, we don't have anything. Item number 12, report of LAFCO Special Districts Advisory Committee. Go ahead. Actually, I do have something to report. Go ahead. Or JPIA, which I attended as a member of South Bay Water. That was the ACWA JPIA conference in Sacramento back in May. So pretty much, you know, you go over all the reporting for the year, all the latest trends. And this year, the trend was the adoption of AI as a tool. We're heavily discussing the use of policy, which is critical. And talking about how as a board, we don't need to understand how it works. We just need to understand how it's governed. So they talked a lot about governance implementation. And talked about how we should really be open to some sort of a policy when it comes to AI. So that we can be innovative and move forward. So that's into my report. Yeah. The talk of the town right now. AI, right? Okay. Item 12, report of LAFCO Special Districts Advisory Committee member. I submitted a written report and I listed on there about MSR for the County Water Authority. My recollection is that we're going to be discussing it later on as part of Sweetwater. So I don't think we need to elaborate on that. And item 13, report of management. Sorry, Chair? Yes. President? Sorry, I haven't. I'm sorry. I didn't submit a written report for the San Diego CSD quarterly dinner meeting. Should I do that? Or can I give my report orally now? And I don't know if this is... Like, are we supposed to submit written reports? I don't mind doing that. I just haven't. Go ahead and begin. Director, if you charge the per diem to South Bay, then yes, you can do a report for South Bay. Oh, I don't know. Oh, if I charge it to South Bay. Are we going to be able to do this in Sweetwater then? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Talk to you later about it. Okay. All righty. Report of management. No report, President. Okay. And report of legal counsel. No report today. Okay. Any directors' comments on item 15? Go ahead. May my Chair or President have a go back on item 10? I just wanted to check. I was having a little deja vu on page 50. The South Bay water warrants for April. This is the same as page seven. So is that intended or is there something else? Okay. No, I will submit a revision online. Okay. So there is no financial report? No, there should be a financial report. Okay. So that will come to us at our next South Bay water meeting. I will email and upload to the website. Okay. Thank you. Okay. With that, meeting adjourn. Thank you very much.