in person so I'm excited about that without getting everybody's attention early on while we're talking and mingling and I did too and some people hadn't seen in a while and I really am excited about it I know our future meetings might be on zoom again but I'm really excited to be in person for today so I believe you all got a copy of the minutes mailed out to you so are there any questions or discussions about the minutes that you all received If not, I will accept a motion to approve the minutes. So moved. Thank you. And a second? Second. Awesome. I don't even know who's taking minutes. Where is Denise? Denise. Okay, you good? All right. Any more discussion about the minutes? All right, all in favor? Aye. All right, any opposed? Great. Well, good job. We've started this fantastically. So we are going to first talk about Town Branch Waterloo Watch focused monitoring results. So I'm excited about that since it's right in our backyard here. Matt Colbert, Renly and Corey Bluoyd from Third Rock. Are you all here? Are you ready to...I don't even know. Yeah. Good morning, everybody. My name is Matt Call. I'm an engineer at Third Rock Consultants, and today with me I have Burt Remley and Corey Bloyd. They're some of my co-workers who work there. We have the opportunity of being able to dissect some of the watershed focused monitoring program results and kind of talk about the program a little bit as we get into it for Town Branch. So in today's presentation, we are going to be talking about the LFUCG's watershed focused monitoring program specifically in Town Branch and today we'll talk about why we monitor where LFUCG monitors when what and how LFUCG monitors in this program and please hold all questions until the end we'll have some time set aside from that and there are a lot of slides that we're going to try and get through as quickly as possible so some of the monitoring goals for this program are as follows We want to characterize the pollutant loads of streams and tributaries and major outfalls in Lexington. We also want to characterize and rank stream habitat and their hydrogeomorphic function. Enhance elucid discharge identification and prioritize subwatersheds. And one of my favorite parts, I get to engage the volunteers and the scientific community in data collection efforts. And from this most recent sampling results, I know some of you all may have even been there, a big turnout for North Elkhorn. Although we're talking about Town Branch, we are currently in North Elkhorn sampling right now. And then from all of this, we get into laying the foundation for a watershed-based plan and TMDL implementation. So these are the watersheds right here. As you can see, Town Branch is in the purple. Let's see if I have a pointer. in the purple right here but these are all the watersheds that are encompassed in Lexington's urban service boundary which is this red line right here so today we're going to be talking about the results from this purple area which is in our backyard and this is a schedule for all the watersheds that we will get to screen monitor and report on so far we have done cane Run, South Elkhorn, West Dichman Creek, East Dichman Creek. We are reporting on Towne Branch as part of this presentation and a report and currently right now we are monitoring North Elkhorn Creek and starting next week we are actually going to start the foundation for screening Wolf Run. And there are five big elements that the watershed focus monitoring program encompasses one in its water quality at both in streams and major outfalls which are just big storm sewer pipes we also look at the stream corridor habitat the substrate and a general presence of macro invertebrates or the bugs in the water then for the stream biology we get into a more in-depth look at the stream science and we do a more a more in-depth view of the presence of different species of bugs and their tolerances and everything. And then after that we get into looking at neighborhood sources and potential generators and upland areas of these major outfalls and the watersheds. And then finally we we look at the microbial sources and optical brighteners as a method of tracing illicit discharges. Now we will get into all of these in the presentation. So starting off with that first element we have the water quality monitoring element. We start off with phase one screening and these are four dry weather events and dry weather for this program is consists of 72 hours without rainfall and sometimes it's hard to get in Kentucky especially during the first part of this so everybody's on standby to get out and sample. Two of these events are done by trained volunteers and they will go through some training to learn how to grab these samples and to report to the lab for that, but the other two are done by LFUCG staff. As a part of the town branch monitoring, there were 11 end stream sites and 82 major outfalls. The stream sites were distributed across the watershed to target major tributaries and try to get all the drainage areas by isolating them too so if we picked up on something we have an idea of where a potential illicit discharge may be and we'll get into that once we start talking about the results the big part of this screening is to determine flowing outfalls and those are going to be outfalls that were flowing 50 of the time or more during dry weather events. The reason that's important is if it's not raining or if it hasn't rained recently, that water has to be coming from somewhere. It could be a broken pipe, it could be a sewer connection, and that's kind of part of the idea of determining if these are flowing when it's dry out. But during phase one there were 86 samples collected and if at any time during both the field or the lab analysis a result was above the action limit which are detailed down here there was an illicit discharge investigation initiated to try and find a potential illicit discharge and these are all the phase one water quality sites as you can see here the red dots are the major outfalls and those are the large storm sewer pipes that we were talking about and then the blue dots here are stream sites and these are all the 82 major outfalls and 11 stream sites and you can see that they are spread all throughout the watershed and encompassed in the urban service boundary but after phase one we get into phase two water quality these are ten events regardless of weather and the regular regularly scheduled every other week until ten events are collected. This was May through September in 2021 by Lexington staff and volunteers. There were 11 in-stream sites, so all the in-stream sites carried over in the phase two, but only 26 of the major outfalls from phase one went over in the phase two, meaning that they were flowing 50% of the time or more. From all this, there were 295 samples collected, And these consisted of in-situ measurements, which are taken on site with a water quality probe or a field kit. And those were flow, dissolved oxygen, water temperature, pH, and chlorine by a little HANA checker. And then for the lab parameters, these were grabbed and taken to the lab. Ammonia, nitrate, total suspended solids, total phosphorus, detergent, fluoride, and E. coli. And once we start looking at the results, we will break those up, and I'll tell you a little bit of where those may be coming from. And these are all the Phase II sites. You can see several of the red dots have fallen out. That's because they weren't flowing 50% of the time or more during Phase I. So there were less, which is usually a relief for the volunteers, and it helps us focus our data collection efforts and analysis. But once we get all this, we want to do something with the data. no use in just having to sit on a shelf and doing nothing with it. So what we do is based off of Kentucky Division of Waters analysis methods we have used this grading scale and color coding as you can see is helpful for the analysis but based off of the percent exceedance of the outfall meaning if that outfall was high in a parameter and above the action limits if they were exceeding every time you can see here they would have gotten an f and if they're pretty good and all the way in the middle and these are based off of kind of a standard deviation this is which is you can see some of the percentages are different for each parameter here and so zero to five percent is an a for one while zero to ten percent is an a for some but we don't want to get two in the weeds on that. Well once we take these color codes and we apply it to drainage areas for the outfalls and for the outfalls themselves we start to get an idea of you know what outfalls and this is just a snippet because there were several others but what outfalls are high in certain parameters where they're doing fine on and this will help you prioritize which outfalls need attention and and which needs to be traced for illicit discharges before the others. And then once we take those colors and we apply it to the drainage areas for major outfalls and in-stream sites, we get an idea of the area where potentially this illicit discharge is coming from. And so as you can see here, this is for corine, which is common in water lines. You can see this area here is a red, which means it's scored an F. So there may be a water line broken in that area or some other source of chlorine that needs some attention. And that helps the illicit discharge crew focus their efforts on locating and hopefully fixing that or contacting the individuals who need the corrective. It can also be applied to the stream sites here, as you can see with the chlorine. And this gives us a much larger area. And this is, again, the stream, not so much a major outfall, but it does encompass a larger area. And again, can be from water lines. And this is for fluoride. Again, it's common in water lines. It can be also associated with some sewer evidence, but it's mostly water lines. You see right here, this little area had an F as a score, and then down here the D. And this was also the one that had an F in quarry. So since fluoride and chlorine are associated with freshwater lines, it's likely, although who knows, but it's likely that it's being influenced by a freshwater line. And then fluoride as well for stream sites. There was a lot of influence here, which this little area here is actually Wolf Run, and it is encompassed in Town Branch. But we are having a separate effort for that upcoming. so we can get into the weeds a little bit more when we start looking at that watershed but if since this is a stream drainage area if it's just upstream whatever the influence is or all the way upstream that could be picked up in the stream so typically the major outfalls are easier for identifying where an illicit discharge is coming from but streams are also helpful detergents typically associated with car washes or any other kind of subs from gray water lines or sewer but detergent scored A's across the board here for the major outfalls and only a little bit of a snippet here for this string side just a little bit of influence but again that's A's and B's passing grades and then getting into ammonia ammonia can be caused by several different things sewer line influence. It could also be a byproduct of nitrification from fertilizers being used, but again A's and B's across the board for major outfalls. So they do not need to be prioritized for tracing. And the same with the stream sites. A lot of the times the stream sites will reflect similar results to the major outfalls. And then once we start getting in the nitrate, this is a a very common pollutant in urban areas and residential areas because everybody likes a nice lawn and a lot of the times that fertilizer that's put on that lawn gets washed off into the streams washed off into major outfall drainages and you can see here there is heavy influence more downtown but also when we get into the more residential areas resident nitrates for both stream sites and major outfalls were a common problem we didn't have an action limit for that because it's so prevalent but that is something that can be reduced with public campaigns for using less fertilizer things like that phosphorus as well is typically associated with fertilizers wasn't as prevalent but there are still areas that had some hot spots for fertilizers and especially when we get to the streams because everything whether it goes to a major outfall or not gets washed to a stream and the streams around here typically do have high nitrate and phosphorus concentrations. Petal suspended solids which is typically due to soils anything suspended in the water column could be algae could be plankton anything that's not dissolvable that gets carried down the streams typically it's due to sediments that get washed off of stream banks or get washed off of construction sites but for the most part outfalls were good as well as streams and town branch ecoli now this is when we start getting into kind of one of the big focuses for this program but it is also a common pollutant in urban waters this is the primary contact recreation goal which is set for direct contact with water whether you're swimming or wading in it and it's 240 mpn per 100 mils which it was on here but must have fallen off but in the urban area here and once we start getting further out here everywhere pretty much has some influence from e coli that could be from sewer lines but it could also be from dogs it could be from waterfowl could be from anything that you know poops and so that's where that comes from and then once we look at the streams again for that same goal pretty impacted with exception to this which is still a d but would receive less priority for trying to find an illicit discharge now this is e coli as well but with a different benchmark this is secondary contact recreation which is for indirect contact with the water such as fishing or boating where you're going to touch the water but not the entire time for the second contact recreation there were still some s and d's but some of the other sites that had s and d's for the pcr has received a b or even an a and so those are outfalls and stream sites that while they are still not meeting that pcr goal are meeting the SCR goal so that means the sites that are still being impacted for the SCR goal need to be focused on first for tracing discharges or correcting those issues and the same for the streams again all that gets into the streams and so while outfalls are getting better in that drainage area the streams are still showing high levels of incoli but at this point i'm going to hand it over to the Bert. He's going to talk about the stream corridor characterization. Hi I'm Bert M. Williams with 3rd Rock. I'll be talking about the stream corridor characterization and the stream biology results. First I'd like to acknowledge Dr. Wes Morris at BCTC and his students. They collected the vast majority of the data for the stream corridor characterization. Basically the watershed was split out to half mile segments the students would go to attempt to go to the midpoint of each segment and evaluate stream habitat the substrates and the macrourbits at each of these locations stream habitat would be evaluated by completion of a rapid biosystem protocol habitat sheet which looks at things like extreme cover repairing zone erosion those kind of things the substrates were just evaluated visually within the ruffle run pools, whether it's mostly bedrock or silk. And then the students would collect macro-work samples of the dip net and then identify them to order level and then calculate a rating based on one metric. And that's a little bit different than what we'll do later in the stream biology section. So if you see here, the habitat rating for the Bracktown branch was all poor. whereas the main channel of the town branch down here we did get a few fairs and good habitat ratings. These were the weightable sections so it's possible that they had a little bit wider repairing zone versus these headwater sites which are in a lot of times in people's backyards. The repairing zone is very narrow and that was one of the main parameters that was impaired for most of the streams. streams. This is the substrate results. As you can see the main fork, I'm sorry, the main branch, the town branch over here has had some coarser substrates, that's more bedrock, whereas up in the Bracktown branch section there's a little bit more vine silts. And then as far as macroburgrants, they're somewhat similar to the habitat results. It's all four up here in Bracktown and four in the headwater sections of this section of the town branch, but the main wadewell sections, there was a couple of fairs in there. Stream biology is a little bit more involved. It involves a collection of two samples, a riffle cake sample and a multi-habitat sample. The riffle samples are where a lot of the organisms are going to be. And then those two samples were used to calculate a macro group assessment index, which involves seven different metrics. They include, oh, sorry. And it comes to an MBI score rating. Similar to what the students got, we didn't get anything about fair. We did have a very poor, which was at this coast headwater section. The only thing to kind of note is TBS2 receives this stream from Bracktown branch and this stream. They both go through Masterson Station Park and it did improve to a fair versus the poor in the upper section. Maybe there's some moderation effect on where it's going through the park for a decent distance. TB1 is our annual routine monitoring site and it's score four. and we've been learning that for a long time and it kind of fluctuates between fair or the Mac River community and with that I'll hand it over to Cory so once we take those results and everything we want to look at some neighborhood sources that potentially neighborhood activities could be looking at our neighborhood activities could be influencing some of these results and also for potential generators and these are businesses and commercial properties that do not have a permit to discharge pollutants and so the neighborhood source assessment that effort for this watershed focused monitoring program we looked at six neighborhoods and they were visually assessed for indicators of pollution they were selected by the water quality results and these methods were based off of the Center for watershed protection And from this effort we developed, or we were able to give them a pollution severity rating. And this considers things such as house density, percent types of impervious cover in the neighborhood, presence of pet waste, density of driveways, sidewalks. There's a lot that's taken into account for this rating. And for the potential generator investigation, these sites, we went and visually observed them as well to look for potential signs of pollutants that are being washed off site or they're influencing the waterways around them. And so these are all the results from that upland visual assessment here. There were the neighborhoods which are selected here and are denoted by the yellow and the yellow boundaries. And then for the businesses and commercial areas, there were these dots, both based off of the severity and the hotspot status. The hotspot status was for the potential generator investigation, and the pollution severity was for the neighborhoods. Overall, for the neighborhoods, there were some moderate pollution severity, which is a little bit, but all but two had high pollution severity ratings. Again, this takes into account a lot of things and pretty much this was just a bunch of small things that each of these neighborhoods had, such as litter, pet waste present, organic matter in their ditches and in their stormwater system. And all those kind of culminated into a higher rating, things that can be corrected. And then for the hotspot status, if these potential generators are or could be putting pollutants into the waterways, some were not hotspot. We went and there were no signs of anything washing off. They had good storage techniques for storing their materials. But for most of them, they were potential. There were some uncovered, they were storing materials, non-undersheds, kind of out in the open. That could lead to some runoff from their store materials. They could be washing all their fleet vehicles outside. Just a few things that say, hey, this could be a hot spot. But there were two cases that were confirmed hot spots. There were evidence that materials were leaving their sites. and there was a landscaping company here and then a mechanic shop here and in the landscape company there was a fence a wooden fence that went all the way around the property and the storm water forced their mulch and their sediments under that fence and it was running out into the street into the drainages and then for the mechanic shop there was a large parking lot that had some vehicles that were currently being made uh get undergoing maintenance some that were broken down and there was some petroleum products that were leaking off of that and going into the ditch that was surrounding their property so those are sites that should be addressed and visited for potential of applying for a permit or correcting those issues at this point i'm going to hand it over of the Corps who's going to talk about this part of the watershed program. So good morning everyone. So Mac and Bert just kind of talked about the stream biology and the water quality monitoring component. I want to talk now about the discharge prevention investigation. So we used a couple of different techniques for this, the optical brightener survey, and the point of the optical brightener survey is to try to detect laundry effluent in the stormwater system. We do that by trying to see if there are dyes that are added to the laundry detergents to increase the brightness of the fabrics. We do that by putting these cotton pads in the stormwater network for a period of three days during dry weather. The premise here is that if there's an illicit discharge of laundry, if not, these cotton pads are going to absorb that and then we can detect the optical brightener. So we bring them back to the lab afterwards and this positive control here is what a cotton pad looks like with the optical brightener added to it. So this was just a pad that was exposed to laundry detergent at a rate that's comparable to what you use at home in your washing machine. And then the negative was just an unbleached cotton pad. So the premise here is if we bring these pads back and under the black light we see the glowing like that, that's indicative of illicit discharge of some kind of laundry if learned. So for the the town branch watershed, we looked at seven locations. We also used microbial source tracking, or MST, for this watershed. We looked at four stream sites, five outfalls for this. We used the water quality monitoring data that Mac just talked about. Basically, we tried to pick the worst offenders, so where the E. coli was high, where ammonia was high. We used MST because it allows us to differentiate between the various sources of bacteria. This graph here, it's pretty simple and basic. I like it though. It conveys the message pretty well. All hosts have E. coli, but all hosts also have a specific bacteria in their gut that we can then use through the MST sampling to trace that back, that specific bacteria back to a specific host. There's a variety of markers that you can use. We've used different ones over the years for various watersheds. For this watershed, we looked at human, bird, dog, and then also a sewage-specific biomarker. that marker looks at a bacteria that grows only in the sewer pipes. Sewer pipes and then also septic systems as well. So here are the results. All these maps are going to look kind of the same, so you can familiarize yourself. If you see a white dot, it's a negative result. Red is positive. It's kind of hard to tell here on this, but the point here is there are no red dots. This is the optical brightener, so everything was negative. That's not a surprise for this watershed or any watershed in general really. The optical brightener is a pretty conservative sampling method. It's only going to pick up a major influence. So the fact that we didn't see any hits on this, that's not surprising. The rest of the watersheds have been similar results. So here are the human MST results. Out of nine locations, we had seven positive hits for human bacteria in the stormwater network. Six of those were high. One of them was really high, as in maybe the highest we've ever seen. That was, I don't know, 40039, this guy right here. That one's a problem. Here are the sewage markers. So once again, this is going to pick up bacteria that grows in the sewer pipes. So if you have a hit here, it's telling you that there is some connection between the sanitary system and the stormwater system. Nine for nine on this one, unfortunately. And back up. So we had six that were really high here. We also had six that were really high here, coincidentally the same six. So they're looking at different markers, but it's telling you that those six areas, you're having a cross connection. The dog marker, seven of the nine were positive. Low level hits though, that's pretty typical for the other watersheds. We've seen similar results there as well. Lastly, the bird, all nine were positive. That's not particularly surprising because this bird marker is picking up bacteria from all species of birds. So not just ducks or geese that we like to typically blame it on, but it's all species of birds. So with that, that's kind of a real quick hit the hot points over to you, but we'll open up if you guys have any specific questions. Yeah, Charles. With a wastewater charge of about 20 million gallons a day in the main channel, did that the Tamerance treatment plant. Yeah, did that take any consideration into some of the analysis you guys did as far as water poli in the main channel? Yeah, we do take into account those situations both in this watershed and in West Haidman. In West Haidman we sampled downstream of the wastewater treatment plant and that's typically where those high levels of E. coli, nitrates, phosphorus, things that are byproduct of treating of sewer water, yes, we took that into consideration in the analysis of potential sources. I'm surprised about the E. coli just because you obviously monitor for E. coli on a continuous basis. The phosphorus doesn't surprise me at all. And the related part of that question is, as you guys know, there's a TNPL that's ancient for phosphorus on the town branch and whether or not any of the data that we collected would be useful in trials. reinvigorate that whole TMDL discussion. Right, yeah. It's not included under these efforts for this, but the idea for this entire program is to take each of these watersheds and use those to either reinvigorate or start a TMDL or watershed-based plan to, and it will take into account the older TMDL as well for that. What was the time frame of this this this was done in I have to get back 2021 I believe yes it was in 2021 we have right here time branch yeah first started in 2020 monitored in 2021 any other questions All right, well if there are no further questions, thank you all for letting us do that. Thank you all very much. I was a Kentucky River Watershed Watch volunteer for a long time, and at one of the conferences my site had the highest equal eye, and I got awarded a toilet brush as my award. So the highest one that you found is there's one to give that to. I can pass it along, actually. Start doing that. All right. Thank you all very much. That was really interesting. Next up is Charlie Martin. I think you all know him. Remedial measure planning update. It doesn't like my fingers or something. There we go. All right. Mac, you didn't get away from the unscathed. I got a lot of questions for you, but we didn't have no time for it. Talk to me anytime. You'll be hearing from me. I'm particularly interested in that as far as the impact of Town Branch. I mean, Town Branch has basically been without. It's still working on the same discharge permit that was expired in 2003. And part of it has to do with the TMDL regarding phosphorus. We're just kind of stuck in neutral as far as what to be able to do moving forward. But anyway, that's another discussion for another day. Thanks for having me. I will say that this is probably a presentation that some folks may have seen parts of. Council Member Plumman's here with us. I know that I gave something similar to this a couple of months ago to the Environmental Quality Committee. Denise had to remind me that I was supposed to do this today. She reminded me yesterday morning. So I kind of threw all this together. Excuse any typos or anything else that I might have in there. So, yes, we still have a consent decree. Some people, surprisingly, will say to me, oh, that's still in effect because they haven't heard anything about it for a long time, particularly because of the pandemic and everything. But, yes, we still have one. It's still, in effect, to some level. And we'll try to walk you through where we are today and where I think that we're headed. So the overall consent decree status, the remaining capital obligation, kind of give you an overview of where we're at with that. Highlight some specific projects and projections for the near term and then leave some time for questions. Okay, so when I talk about the consent decree for the last 15 years or so, I've always tried to break it into these four main categories. We had stormwater compliance obligations. We had supplemental environmental project compliance obligations. We had sanitary sewer obligations, which were often the 800-pound grill in the room, especially when it came to costs. And then we always have the ongoing reporting obligations. But under the sanitary, I skipped over that, there's the CMOM program, which is something we, it's a management program that you have to do all the time. They want to make sure that you're operating your program as efficiently and effectively as possible. And then there's the 800-pound grill I mentioned before, the remedial measures plan, which we had originally estimated to be $592 million in completing that. So those are the four highlights, and basically the first two are done, check marks by those. The stormwater compliance obligations, we basically resolved that. Jennifer, what, 2021 was when they finally released us from that. I think that a lot of that came from the pandemic. When the pandemic came on, we were still under consent decree obligations for stormwater. There was a lot of concern about whether or not we could continue to do the things we needed to do with everybody shut down and basically evacuated and sent home. And I think EPA didn't really want to deal with the force majeure aspects of it and stuff. We had already done all the things that we needed to do. It was just a matter of when they finally released us from that part of the consent decree. So that's what they chose to do, and we took them up on that, obviously. We continue to have compliance, I mean, permit obligations associated with it, which are very similar to consent decree, just not as restrictive. Okay, so I'm going to focus more on the capital program right today, the remedial measures program. You can see there, 115 projects were roughly, slightly halfway done as far as complete, 64 projects. Design and construction, I've got 28 there. What I basically, I kind of treat it a little bit differently than some other people do, is that if we're actively working on a project, either in easements or design, Basically every week it's on our mind. It falls into that design construction thing. And then pending are the ones that we're not working on every week. I'll give you an example. We started down the process of working on the Merrick trunk, which goes from Green Tree and Armstrong Mill on up Tates Creek Road under New Circle. That project is really, really hard. And so we basically set that one on the back burner, and we're focused on some other ones to try to get them a little further. but basically is that we're in pretty good shape my concern and I'll talk about this here later is that we were really doing well when we came up to the pandemic and we almost we basically hit a brick wall when we got to the pandemic everything changed we all know that everything in our lives have changed and basically it's changed the dynamics of being able to finish those remaining projects on the schedule that we had agreed to so there you see the dollar amounts as far as where we are, as far as expenditures are concerned. This is the mayor's favorite slide. I try to give this to her whenever she goes out and talks to people because it's really good numbers. The governor came to the treatment plant last year relative to a grant, and when she mentioned this, he said, well, can we hire you? And I'm like, no. To make this list, basically the project either has to be done or actively under construction. And so the green bar is either how much those projects cost or the bid amount for them, and then the black column is what we said they would cost originally. So basically we're trending more than $100 million less than what we projected to spend when we first started down this path, which was really, really good, especially in today's inflationary times. I wonder how we're going to finish when we get to the finish line on this, But the fact that we're paying a little bit with house money is not such a bad thing. So some of the active projects that we're wrapping up right now. I didn't see Ken here. I was going to tease him about this as far as this Wolf Run DE project because I know it's the first he's heard of it. This is where we've been working out in the Wolf Run and Garden Side area. Wrapping that one up. Southeastern Hills and the Upper Cane Run wet weather storage tank. You wouldn't necessarily know about them unless you were out there in that neighborhood. They're a little bit more confined where they are. Southeastern Hills is in West Hickman, and Upper Cain Run is actually on Lexmark's property, kind of tucked back in the trees across from where Amazon is. I list on there as far as the abating the overflow inspection sites. In the consent decree, it talks about reoccurring SSOs, and they're defined in the appendices of the consent decree. Over time, I've kind of gotten into more talking about the sewer overflow response plan inspection sites because there are more of those than there are reoccurring SSOs. When we started down the consent decree path, we evaluated the entire system. What we found was that we verified some of the SSOs that are listed in the consent decree as being true and factual ones, but we also found some other ones that we didn't necessarily know about before. And so as part of the CMOM program, we were required to put together a sewer overflow response plan, which requires us to go out and inspect all those locations every time we have a rain event. We've modified that a little bit. We've put alarms into the system and stuff, and now we use those alarms, those triggers. But now that these projects are being completed, the alarms are going to come out. We're going to leave select ones just to make sure that everything did what they were supposed to do. But that basically is that these will then become non-monitoring systems because they're not supposed to overflow like they did before. Good news. Saves us a lot of work. Active and ongoing projects. This is an aerial photograph of the West Hickman wet weather storage tank at the treatment plant on Brandon Road. Existing tank is about 22 million gallons in capacity. We're building an 18 million gallon tank right next to it. if we can get concrete. The win for 2021 on this is that we got our loan that we got for the original project expanded to where now all of this is KIA funded. Kentucky Infrastructure Authority has funded the entire project roughly to the tune of $85 million. The original estimate for the project was like $116 million. So number one, we saved a bunch of money. But number two, we've got really favorable conditions. But you won't see this. It's one of those kind of projects that you won't see until you drive out there. But 22 million gallons of storage that gets offloaded into the storage tank instead of overflowing at the manhole at the head of West Hickman Waste Water Treatment Plant. Really, really a real positive thing for water quality, I guess, in Jesmond County. You think 22 million gallons, that's a lot. We've filled this thing up three times in the last four years. So the 18 million gallon tank that's going to go right next to it is well needed. Another active project we've got going on right now, we call this the Liberty Road Trunk, but if you look closely at the map, you'll realize Liberty Road's not even on there. This is Winchester Road here. This is I-75, so this is the Hamburg area here. This is Frederick Douglass High School campus. It's called the Liberty Road Trunk because Liberty Road's down in this area, and it all drains into this area here and ultimately goes to North Elphorn Pump Station. You probably won't notice this project. I was out there on Tuesday, I guess it was, and they're doing the bore pit under Starshoot right now. And also, I keep trying to find my pointer, and under Winchester Road. So if you go out that way, look closely, you'll see they're digging holes on each side of the road, and they're drilling under the road with a new pipe. This is one of the first projects that really tried us as far as the supply chain issues. We bid the project in late 2021, and the contractor, the low-bid contractor, immediately told us that the pipe supplier said he can't supply the pipe that he said he was going to supply. Period. Can't supply it at all. And if he goes to someplace else, that it was going to increase the bid price by $163,000. So, we've kind of now, that's become more commonplace than it has before. We actually delayed the award of this thing for almost six months, negotiating a different pipe material and a different pipe price. Because what I don't want to get into with any of these projects, it's kind of like doing home improvement. If you let somebody rip up your kitchen and they don't tell you how much the cabinets are going to cost, but then later on they tell you how much, I mean, you're already committed, you can't turn back. And that's what we're finding with a lot of these projects on pipe delivery is they won't give you a firm price unless you take it all at one time. And some projects maybe we can take full delivery of it, but one of the projects we're talking about here in a minute, you'll see why we can. All right, so another active project that we've got going on right now that also most people won't see, this is the Heartland 3 pump station. This is the Heartland Neighborhood Association, the pool and tennis courts. we're back this driveway back here basically this was an overflowing pump station when it rained and so we're building a new one next to it and we'll be doing away with that one again because it's back tucked behind the other things i wanted to make sure i highlighted it because you don't know these things are going on 1.1 million dollars that nobody except us will see so some of these 2021 winds that are impacting upcoming work i had mentioned before when the governor came to town branch. That was a big thing for us. Usually the governor doesn't come to see water quality. But anyway, you may know this, is that basically the Cleaner Water Grant Fund for Kentucky, all the different counties were encouraged to submit a project. And so we got in early on this because we have wanted to convert our chlorine gas to ultraviolet disinfection for a while. And there's a variety of reasons for that but mainly is that we store 12 one-ton cylinders of gaseous chlorine at each one of the plants on a regular basis. The risk management plan associated with that is pretty hefty because the potential exposure of citizens if there were an accidental release. We all know that chlorine is an affixion. It hangs in low areas and stuff. So over the years, not only at Town Branch but but also West Hickland, the neighborhoods have gotten closer to us, and there's this unknown risk associated with, for them, the people that live there. And then add in our employees as well. So we were working on trying to come up with a concept to try to be able to fund a UV conversion project, and then along came the grant. So dial into today, we were getting $11.8 million of Recovery Act money through the Cleaner Water Grant Fund to be able to eliminate gaseous chlorine in both of the treatment plants. That is a huge win. I can't even begin to describe how good that is on an outcome it's going to be. My only concern, again, back to inflation and supply chain issues, I hope that $11.8 million is actually going to pay for it. We'll see. Okay, another big win for us. The consent decree, the remedial measures plan we had, had sewers going through over Brook Farm. That was necessary to handle four main reoccurring SSOs, One of them being an Armstrong Mill Road. That's right now the worst overflow pump station we still have in the system right now, along with three pump stations that serve the Heartland neighborhood. I mentioned one of them before. So originally the project was to go and actually put sewers on Overbrook Farm, and starting in 2015 we started negotiating with them. And it took five years to figure this out, but it just came to my realization it doesn't make any sense to try to put sewers across a working farm. We've done that on a couple of other ones, and it has been an unmitigated disaster. It's just heavy highway construction and horse farms don't mix. If you're ever going to put sewers on it, you might as well wait until they've decided to get out of the farming business and start doing the development. So basically we pulled back and we came up with an entirely different project that is going around the farm as opposed to through the farm. That will be challenging. It's going to be disruptive for neighborhoods and things like that, but the win for us is it's going to save us about $30 million. And so when I told everybody we're going to save $30 million by doing it the other way, they're like, I'm good with that. So this is the project. Basically, this is the East Hickman Force Main. We've got a pump station here at the dead end of Alumni Drive. And basically, we're in the process of going to build a 36-inch pipeline down Squires Hill Lane here to Armstrong Mill. Come up Armstrong Mill behind the Heartland Park. This is the air navigation system that you can see from Armstrong Mill and Man of War there. And then we start working our way down through neighborhoods. This is the Heartland Kroger on down Kennesaw to Tates Creek Road, down Tates Creek Road, and up Brandon to West Hickman Treatment Plant. Six and a half miles of 36-inch diameter pipe. Wow, that just goes in rain. Yeah, there's a good example of where we can't buy all that pipe. We're trying to bid this thing right now, and the feedback we're getting from some of our contractors, they're too much afraid of the risk as far as being able to put a dollar amount to it. So we're kind of pulling back now and trying to figure out maybe a different way to be able to advertise and award this. Historically, what we've done is we've awarded projects for pipe installation. The material and the installation, it was the same cost, whatever many hundred dollars a foot. We're pulling that out now and having a separate bid item for material itself because material may go up and down because of the economics, but installation shouldn't. We want to make sure that gets to be a fixed cost. So that's one of the things that we're looking at, trying to be able to limit the exposure risk for the contractor so they don't throw a bunch of money into the bid hoping to minimize their risk. But more importantly, not putting us at a bunch of risk. We need to do this project, but we don't need to do it at any cost. That's the balance of things in kind of the world that post-pandemic world now that we're facing. But I will tell you this. I mean, I'm committed to where I think this is the right project, even though it's disruptive and it's going to be expensive. That little L-shaped street right there, that's where I live. So I'm going to be driving right through the dirt and mud every day. I promised I didn't tell my wife. I'll have to blame somebody else for it. I believe it enough to where I send it basically didn't go right in front of my house, but it virtually did. $30 million and it will solve the problem and that's a good thing. I'm going to highlight this circle right here. This is at Armstrong Mill and Squires Hill Lane because that's where the existing Armstrong Mill pump station connects to the system. It comes up Armstrong Mill from roughly about right there and ties into it right there. I highlight this is because this project has to go first in order for us to do the project that is associated with Armstrong Mill because it's obviously got to have someplace new to pump to. But it will change the character of things out, most likely lead to the changing of character of things out, Armstrong Mill Road extended to DeLong Road. Right here is Armstrong Mill. Right here is DeLong Road. The existing Armstrong Mill pump station is located right there. The plan is to move the pump station, build a new pump station down here. This is the edge of the urban service boundary right here, so we're taking it all the way down to the edge of the urban service boundary. We're in the process of negotiating with Overbrook Farm about acquiring roughly about a five-acre tract right there. We have to have that because we've got floodplain issues here, and we also have a required setback in the zoning ordinance. There's a required setback that has to be between urban area and rural area, and we obviously have to follow that like everybody else does. But this project will come on sometime after we finish the East Hickman force main, because again, it has to have someplace to go to. We can start it and we'll start building it. So probably sometime in the next year, if you go out that area, if you're a bike rider like Doug is, you'll eventually see all this flurry of activity going on out there. That's kind of what it's going to look like. We're going to try to make it look like a barn. That was one of the things that we spent a lot of time with the folks with Overbrook. We try to do that if we're putting in heavy infrastructure to try to make sure that it blends in as much as possible. here's the thing that I can't really figure out right now but I try to make sure I point out to other folks the existing Armstrong Mill pump station is roughly about right there and we're building a new pump station here and you see all of this land here which is all over Brook Farm area that all drains to that star down there and if you've paid attention you know that there's been a development plan out there along the Armstrong Mill Road portion already. When we build this pump station, the likelihood of things happening in that Armstrong Mill corridor from a development standpoint, I would say are fairly high. When you listen to the discussion about available land and the urban service boundary and what's developed and what's not, Overbrook always comes up. Sewering the rest of Overbrook, I know from a five-year experience, is hard. Sewering this part of it will not be as hard, especially when we put that pump station in there. So I just want to make sure that everybody knows that. Again, like I said, I've hired this from an earlier presentation. It's probably not as important to this group as it is to others, but I wanted everybody to know that sometimes overflowing lead infrastructure related to the consent decree, development's kind of a byproduct of it because if you put the lead infrastructure in there, they will follow. Okay, change of gears. There's near-term challenges. We've got some struggling projects. I won't go into great detail, but the why is probably more of it. Easements are probably harder to get than they ever have been. I find that people are generally not as interested in engaging the government as they were before. It may be kind of an offshoot of the pandemic. People felt so restricted because of the closures and restrictions and stuff like that. They don't want to have things that impede them. The supply chain disruptions, like I said, I've got a whole folder full of these things. Inflation, I mentioned that about the pipe situation, but dialing back to the chlorine, we can't get the UV in fast enough. Chlorine, a year and a half ago, was $485 a ton. It is now $1,511, and we go through about 8 tons a month. So it's tripled in its cost. You know, it makes trying to do major projects like what we're doing here in the consent decree really, really difficult because you want to do what needs to be done in order to be able to resolve the consent decree, mitigate the overflows, and improve water quality. But as I said before, do you do it at any cost? I mean, at some point in time, you've got to be responsible for the people who are paying for it. So these are the big questions I have for this year going into it. Have we exhausted all the remedies to complete the 51 projects by the deadline that was proposed by the consent decree, which is December 31st of 2026? And is there regulatory relief available if we can't do that? Those conversations are going on now, at least internally, kind of off the record with the state as well. you know nobody would have contemplated that we were going to have a pandemic and the byproducts of that pandemic nobody would have foreseen those either and so as i said before i mean you know it's it's almost caused us to hit a brick wall we've we've kind of started emerging from it a little bit but these inflationary things and supply chain things have thrown a whole different monkey and the wards that would make it difficult. Going into 1999, it felt good. I had this view of, you know, I'm an old guy. I've been doing this for a long time. 39 years in government, 15 years of the consent decree. I always had this vision that, you know, we were going to finish this. This was going to be my end. And this is when the confetti fell out of the ceiling and they dumped Gatorade on me and carried me off the field. I'm not so sure that's going to happen now. But I'm still proud of what we have done as a team so far. Basically, we check the box on stormwater. We check the box on the supplemental environmental projects. We continue to do everything that we need to do. The schedule for the RP, we've gotten pretty far into it. We've done 64 projects over the course of this. Spent almost $400 million on improving the sewer system in Fayette County. So I try to keep reminding myself of that, you know, because sometimes you get caught up in the negative and you live too much in the negative and not necessarily focus enough on the positive. But moving forward here, I said this is where I'm at today. You know, the math said in 2021 we needed to do eight projects a year. And the new reality says I don't think we can do eight projects a year. If you think of the earlier projects I listed, I highlighted about seven over the course of two years. The pace just isn't there, along with the fact that they're hard projects to begin with, supply chain, inflation, all that. So basically what we're going to ask EPA is, you know, what's their position on this? That last bullet is it. In 2008, we signed a consent decree, and we agreed to do a very aggressive schedule. And we have worked our tails off as a community to get to that point. Nobody would have contemplated the global pandemic and the residual impacts of it. Is there any kind of relief into this when we look at that 2026 deadline? Okay, questions? There are my sets in stunned disbelief. Jack? Charlie? Yeah, you know, I think are to be complimented on the many achievements that Lexington has made under your leadership. of the consent decree, clearly. And I can't imagine that both the state and EPA will not have some, have to have some flexibility going forward. What it will be is, I'm sure, another whole question. But a specific question. I'm not sure I understand on the East Hickman Forest Main issue, if it's so much cheaper to go the way you are going now rather than across Overbrook Farm in the first place, why you didn't do that other than the whole issue of disruption. the reason why Overbrook planned to go through the it was number one it's in the urban service area and so there was already kind of a preliminary plan for doing infrastructure on there in the first place so in the rush to get remedial measures plans to EPA and the state in the short time frame they gave us it was easier to take the existing plan and scrub it up and say here we're going to do this There wasn't any discussion with the Youngs or anybody about how to do that. And when we got into the discussions with the Youngs about how to do that, that's when the costs started going up. And I'll give you one example was that rather than doing conventional easements, they wanted to lease us the land for the period that we were there. And if we took a field out of service that we would have to pay for it for the entire year, and if it went into the next growing season, we'd have to pay it for the following year. There were a lot of, just things started adding up, the cost here, cost there, risk there, all the risk being put onto us, and because it was a developable area, one of the things I was pushing hard for is there's a portion of this that you're responsible for. They didn't like that part of it either. Like I said, they negotiated well. And don't misunderstand me. I respect Overbrook and I admire and I really appreciate the opportunity to work with them on this. But it just became clear to me is that they're still in the horse farming business. And trying to work in an environment where somebody is still leasing to third parties and all that, it's just expensive and really too hard. Someday there will be infrastructure out there, but it'll be done when they're one to put roads and all the other stuff out there, not just us. So, you know, you're right. I think that EPA and the state will be open to the discussion about amending the consent decree. The problem they have, I think, and you understand this from your time with the Division of Water, is that they've got to go back to the judge. And then when you go back to the judge, then everybody else who has been in front of similar judges are going to look at this and say, well, wait a minute, what about us? And you worry about the precedent setting and the piling on. And I'm sure it's probably DOJ that's more worried about it, the Department of Justice, than it is EPA or Division of Water because they, like many of us in the room or technical people, they understand the challenges of that and all that. It would probably be the attorneys that would be harder to be able to deal with. That's my guess. Other questions? Yes, ma'am. In replacing the powering gas, did you ever consider parasitic acid or a combination with parasitic acid and UV? We did. Parasitic acid can be sometimes expensive as well. I think the idea of trading one chemical for the other wasn't necessarily super attractive. We went to Evansville and saw how they were using ultraviolet. and it seemed like a cleaner and more direct operation. You know, if we were in California or something like that, it might be different, but still with electricity rates cheap in Kentucky, the UV won out, basically. That's a good question, though. Yes, sir? This might be an easier one for you. You don't have any easier ones. It's something that is not even within the relative consent decree. But when you were showing the slide of the Liberty Road trunk line, a thought that came to my mind is the connectivity that these sewer easements have in neighborhoods and kind of this linear connectivity as far as having an easement. and connecting that with, I think there's some interest along the Liberty Road corridor to connecting multi-use trail systems to Brighton East. And if that came to mind, what would be kind of after everything's said and done with the installation on these things, but using the sanitary easement as a means for trail systems or connected greenway corridors? I'm always open to that. I am always open to that because I'll be honest with you, having a trail on top of our pipeline is a whole lot easier for me to deal with than it would be when people put buildings right up against the edge of it and stuff where I basically can't work on it anyway. You know, the challenge obviously is that you get those easements from those property owners and that easement limits your rights of what you can and can't do there. And so as hard as easements are to get right now, I'm a little afraid to begin the conversation with somebody. Oh, and by the way, we want to send all these bicycles by you too. Is that okay? I would be concerned. But I think under certain circumstances and certain instances that when the opportunity presents itself, I'm all for it. One in particular that I was always interested in was West Hickman. You know, through Veterans Park, I mean, basically we blazed a trail from man-of-war all the way to the head of the plant. And even today, I mean, you can still see the corridor with the manholes sticking up and stuff like that. If somebody wanted to put a trail through there, I wouldn't be the least bit concerned about it. It was a good question. Amy. I actually just saw this last night on TV, the March version of it, so this is a real help. It's clarifying it. And the reason I was looking at it was I noticed there was a reduction in budget and expenditure in the mayor's kind of last-minute tweaks. and it was to take $3 million for the West Hickman wastewater treatment plant, cut it by half? Is that just a capacity issue? No, and you're probably seeing that as deferrals. You know, if we're pushing a project back and pushing another one forward because the path is clear for it, we'll take that money and move it over there, realizing that we'll be back asking for the council to reappropriate that later. I mean, basically, I hate to say this, but we're basically working with a $590 million pot. And so the council has been very cooperative in allowing us, as we close projects out, we'll take the remainder and move it to the next project. We'll take it and move it here. And as long as they can see transparently where are you with the overall expenditure of it, they work pretty well with us. Well, that's great. I've seen you do that before. it's just efficient to try and you know use the money not to ask for more money than you can use you know move it around right the KIA has been great about that too because when you have a loan you know obviously the conditions are a little bit different but they've been pretty workable with us as well about when we come in under budget that we are able to move money to other projects that's what happened at West Dickman I also had a question about going back thinking about more time to complete what you've engaged to complete. And I think anybody would understand that that just has to happen. My question is, do you have to give a specific and concrete plan of how and when you will do it differently? And the question behind that is, do you have any sense yet, any crystal ball, to say when the costs may stabilize or the delivery and the timing may be predictable? If I had that crystal ball, it wouldn't be working here. Whose guess? You keep wondering why. My personal opinion is this, is that as long as we keep pouring money into things through these infrastructure bills, there's no motivation for anybody to reduce their costs. That concerns me a great deal. And I've said this to a friend of mine yesterday, that in some ways we maybe ought to just stop spending all this money and we'll see if the markets correct themselves then if we weren't throwing money at it all the time. But as far as having a specific plan, And as a former regulator, I would expect that, and that's what we're working on. I can't imagine they would not let us have more time and kind of give us a blank check. The sneak preview is this, is that basically we're working on reworking the plan that we have right now. There'd be a couple projects that were added in that weren't originally in it. There'd be a couple projects that would be taken out because we have fixed the problem in a different way than what we originally contemplated 14 years ago. My plan would be is that while we are asking for more time and spreading it out, the projects that have the biggest impact on the most frequent SSOs stay in the front. They have to. That's what this was about in the first place. So don't take a project that gets rid of one that overflowed 40 times in the last 10 years and put it at the end. That's not going to fly. So I think that hopefully they will embrace that as far as that it's a project, it's a plan that would allow for more time to manage all the complexity of these kind of projects, but still is focused primarily on improving water quality by eliminating reoccurring SSOs. That's the plan. Yes, ma'am. First of all, I just wanted to say, when Charlie gets in front of council, So, you know, he does just like this. He's so good. And just gets a really expensive name of the terms. Thank you, Charles. My question in reference to what you just said about the money that's being spent, federal government infrastructure that's coming down the pike, any timing on that and what that's going to look like to the state of Kentucky? Well, and I don't swim in that pool because, like, the UV money, that came through the cleaner water program, and most of those things come through KIA and stuff. That's the main one that I'm aware of now. Folks like Doug and I think even Jennifer know there are other funds of money that are not directly related to sanitary infrastructure that are out there, and I don't know where they are in the awarding process. You know, there's usually the press release, and sometime way after that you actually see any money. We're constantly monitoring that, and Nancy had convened us as a group to try to talk about what kind of infrastructure type of projects that you could dovetail into multiple winds, which kind of goes into Russ's question about trails and sanitary sewer infrastructure. What can we think of that might be a signature project, I guess, for our generation, being able to use this money in a way that checks a lot of boxes, not just our own little silo? So we're watching for it. I don't know as much about it as probably, like I said, Doug does or Nancy does. Okay. It looks like a lot of question marks at this point. Yeah. Like I said, we're looking at that. I got excited about it just because there's got to be an opportunity. There's got to be a, I'm close to the end of my reign here, I guess. I've probably got about five or six years left. But it would be nice to be part of something that was a generation-defining project for Fayette County because as I get into my twilight to know that I had part of that, that'd be really cool. Are you done with me? Yes. She's done with me. She's giving me the hook now. I think that everybody should agree that you've done a great job explaining it, like Council Member Clements said, and also managing it, too. So I really appreciate that. Thank you. On a personal note, I drive DeLong to Armstrong Mill to Squire's Hill to take my daughter to school every day. So I'm really excited or interested to see Michelle. Next up, we have Krista Citron from Kentucky American Water, and she's going to talk about the water, the Qualified Insurance Infrastructure Program. I don't deal with insurance. Yeah. Do you have a presentation? I do. All right. I'm not. I can't. You see the X is over there. Where is that? Super small. There you go. It doesn't like me or something. I'm a terrible millennial. I'm just going to figure it out. We've hit that twice. Don't say it. No, literally, you don't push down on us. That's all you need to do this. Thank you. I'm Krista Citron. I'm the senior project engineer at Kentucky American Water. We'll be talking about our qualified infrastructure program today, which thank you to the first group of presenters talking about potential water leaks in the system because this is one of the efforts we've been taking to reduce the amount of those occurrences. So we're just going to talk about that a little bit. So what is QIP? Like I said, it's a qualified infrastructure program. I know we call it QUIP. It's a great mechanism on our tariffs. So Kentucky American agreed to dedicate more of our capital budget investments towards water main replacements. You'll see it as a little monthly surcharge on your customer bill. It actually calls out QIP surcharge. and the reason that we have started doing this when you look at infrastructure across the country not just Lexington but it's aging we have a lot of pipes in the ground that have reached the end of their useful life and beyond and they've performed admirably but it's time for them to retire specifically in our system this program looks at cast iron mains specifically so cast iron material is a lot more prone to breakage than others and at current rates before this program was in place we were looking at hundreds of years before the entirety of the system could be replaced so what this program does is allow us to accelerate how quickly we're taking those mains out of service replacing them with new ones at this current rate we're looking about 25 years to have all the cast iron out of our distribution system. So I love this table. This was from a study in 2018. It is the miles of main in our system by the decade it was installed and the material type. So if you look, we have a lot of, initially had a lot of pre-1900s cast iron main that was still in service, still providing water. The problem with cast iron, and you'll see lined and unlined, so that you can have two options. The line has a lining, like it sounds, that helps prevent some of the deterioration. But the unlined pipe is prone to tuberculation. It's like plaque on your teeth. It just builds up over time. So even if you have a four or six inch diameter main, you may only have a usable half inch of flow through that pipe. So the areas where they have the really old mains, they're not seeing a lot of the water flow that they really should be. And so as we've gone through this program every year, we update this table. At this point, we've eliminated all of the pre-1900 cast iron, which is awesome. The early 1900s numbers are starting to come down. In addition to some of the later ones where we have streets that are in the same vicinity as the really old ones, we'll take some of those out occasionally. This, Paul, that you can't see super well, but this is really just indicating, you'll see all of these pipeline segments that are showing up, those are the cast iron mains throughout the system. Predominantly downtown Lexington inside New Circle, which makes sense. That was the part of the city that was constructed first. And the dots on here are main bricks. So the correlation with where we see a lot of those unexpected interruptions is really highly populated with those cast iron. In looking at this table from that same report, number of main breaks by material type cast iron water mains accounts for over 60% of our main breaks and by mileage it's only about 15% of our system. So it's really disproportionate and that's the background of why this program was set up specifically to address those types of mains. So just looking at how we select projects, there's a lot that goes into that. I have on here coordination is key. I have been probably personally driving Doug and his group nuts as we've increased all of these projects. It's been a big change for others and other utilities and groups with the city. We've been working with water quality and streets and roads and just trying to make sure that construction is inconvenient and is disruptive. but trying to make sure that we're working with everybody else who might also need to be in the street so that we can time those projects and be as minimally disruptive as possible. The way that we rank those cast iron mains, we have a prioritization model. So every street in our distribution system that has cast iron on it, we go through and re-rank it with these eight factors. It looks at the pressure on that section of pipe, number of breaks for the last five years, fire flow, the age of the pipe, the type of material, the size of the main, water quality issues. If we're having to constantly flush or we get a large number of customer phone calls, there's a score for that. And then customer impact. So if it's in a highly residential, very dense residential area, if there's schools, hospitals, we use those eight criteria to score all of those streets. And then the goal is for the ones that kind of have the worst concerns, those should sort out when we do that list. And so this is just an example. I'm sorry, it's very small, you can't see it. But just looking at a couple of streets and their score for those factors, it puts out a total weighted score. And then we look at a couple of other external things too, like I mentioned. If we know there's going to be a sewer project that's coming up soon, we'll try and align our schedule with that one so that we can both get our work done in a timely manner. From year to year, these rankings do change. We had just last year, there was a street that had, I think in one winter season, had eight main breaks. It was extremely disruptive, so that score brought it up to the top of the list pretty quickly. Something else we'll look at in terms of project selection that doesn't really have the score but in looking at all the cast iron we have in the city we do try and spread out projects from year to year so we're not fatiguing neighborhoods like I said construction nobody loves it so trying to spread that around but this is my map so these are the projects that we've completed so far we're just finishing our second year of this program and like I said you can kind of see there's at this point we've been able to tackle some bigger pockets of cast iron and as we get more of those completed we'll be kind of dialing down to where we just have you know some single streets that have been left over the years but at this point like i said it's uh largely inside new circle um trying to be around the city and addressing those other factors with the prioritization and coordination with other utilities the first year of this program we completed just over six miles of replacements this current year we're about to finish up 15 miles so it's been a really big effort and like I said it's required a lot of coordination with pretty much every group that works in this city so a lot of people and then what we have proposed with our regulators for years 3 through 25 it's basically that 10 to 13 mile mark that will allow us to complete all of those replacements in that timeframe And so at the end of the day, what we're really hoping to do is, like I said, we're trying to eliminate those pipes that are most prone to breaking, that are already the leakiest. So we have seen this in the last, I think, 12 months that we've been looking at our number of main breaks. They are starting to turn the corner and creep down, which is fantastic. The areas where they did have mains that had been restricted or in some way less diameter than they were used to, they are seeing improved flows and some better water quality in situations where they didn't used to have that. In most cases, we've been replacing, if we have a 4-inch diameter main, we're going back with an 8-inch. That's just kind of a standard. and that allows us to add hydrants in areas that didn't used to so we've been able to add I think more than 20 fire hydrants around the city that didn't used to be there which is a huge benefit for people I guess I'm going to talk about insurance that does help your homeowner insurance so and then just the extended service life of the new main so we've had pipes that were already 80 90 years old they're they're at the end putting new ductile iron in place gives us another hopefully 80 to 90 years on that pipeline. So that's all I have. Are there any questions for anyone? I'm not going to let you get away without any questions. What do you think moving forward that the other utilities could do that might help make your program more successful? That is a great question. It would be really cool if they would also agree to replace all their veins on my same streets. but we've had a lot of talks and just trying to coordinate construction schedules are the way that we have to submit our projects to our regulators gives us a little bit of flexibility that i think other utilities don't have as much so when we're in our planning phase we're trying to talk to them and figure out where they're already going to be so that we can either come in right before right after and have that opportunity to minimize it um would it help if we followed you more often than you following us? Because I didn't know that you had this scoring system and stuff like that. And so, because I wonder whether sometimes that we put you guys in a reactionary mode way too much. And if you were planning to say, we would like to do these, can you come in and assess yours at the same time and then we do it together? That's what I, I guess that's kind of where I believe with that question. Maybe we'll talk about that. Absolutely, yeah. Well, we've been working with some of your consultants with the RMP program to get those projects scheduled so that we can do that? The reason I ask that is that, you know, it goes into what Jack had mentioned earlier about dealing with EPA and otherwise. My guess is that when we do go back and ask for more time, they're going to want something. And they're probably going to want something in the area of asset management. And so, you know, the sinister thing of the water quality issues and stuff like that, I don't believe that it's manhole overflows that are driving some of those E. coli things. It's more of an exfiltration, more of a subtle type of thing. And so going in and us replacing some of our old infrastructure, which our table probably looks a lot like yours. There's certain stuff that's really old and only kind of old. So I guess maybe we'll talk another time about that. And if we start getting more aggressive in doing our 8-inch collectors on random streets, that somehow we're coordinating that to where we're prioritizing ones, where there are cast-iron mains, where we're getting that more bang for our buck. Yeah, I agree. That's usually where we have old infrastructure, so does sewer and so does gas. So it just makes sense for us. Yeah, a couple questions. I think you may have mentioned it. What's the new material with pipes and the life expectancy? We're putting in ductile iron pipe. And so I think the published life expectancy is maybe 50 to 60 years on that, but historically you can get 80. Okay. And I live in Robinwood neighborhood, and they're turning. Is that you guys? Which neighborhood? Robinwood, Clay's Mill, near Manowar. Clay's Mill Road is... I don't know if it's you guys or maybe if they're putting new sewers. Is it the sewer, or is it the street widening project for Clay's Mill? There is a street widening project. I don't know if it's the UIP, but it's Kentucky. Yeah, I know we're doing a lot of relocations with the place mill. It's like going to the neighborhood. It's not exactly on place mill, but yeah, it's to the streets. Yes. This is kind of related to Charlie's question, and I wish I had something more definite, but we just actually had a water repair done. and the guys came and did it and then the fellow came along later to tidy up and so on and to schedule it and he said, a water guy, that's all I know, my husband told me, that the state recently instituted an incentive program to get all the utilities to come in at the same time and if they would then the state would pay practically everything, by which I think he meant in terms of putting the street back. I'm not at all sure, but have you heard about this? The guy said it hasn't worked at all because everybody wants to be first. They want to set the schedule and the others fall in line. It's just too hard to coordinate. Is this something you know about, the state aim? My guess would be that his understanding of what we've been doing with this program is when we talk about being on roads at the same time as other utilities or departments with the city. We've tried to do some cost sharing of the pavement restoration. So I think that's probably where he was going with that. There's no free money. I don't know. I don't know. Well, thank you all. Thank you very much, Krista. I really appreciate it. Our offices are on National Avenue and they're one of your places and it's been almost flawless. Anyway, with that I'd like to introduce Lindsay Nicholas back to the committee and back to work a little bit anyway and say congratulations on little baby Eden. So we'll let you finish us up. Yeah, and feel free to come see me after for pictures of why I've been away. We thought that's what we were going to see. I didn't get them in this. I actually sent them to my email just in case I could, but just come see me. I want to talk to you anyway. Thank you. It's good to be back. I had kind of a crazy morning. I forgot my husband put the stool on top of our car and then tried to park in the Helix garage on Mombraim. And that was the start and why I hustled in here at 9 o'clock. But it's all good. So I just wanted to touch base on a couple last-minute things. The expiring at-large or watershed at-large seats, there's two coming up in September. Right now we have no expired seats, which is kind of nice. We did an overhaul at our last meeting in March and got everybody back and renewed for three years in our other watersheds. But just a quick reminder, Cane Run and Kentucky River both expire in September before our September meeting, but we can just do the re-election at our September meeting, which is September 9th. That's a Friday. It's the Friday after Labor Day instead of it being the first Friday just in case people are away for the weekend. So just a reminder if you know of Jim Connor and then Eileen Burke with Kentucky American Water. So just a reminder to shoot me an email if you're interested in staying in that seed or have a recommendation to fill one of those seeds. I'm happy to continue serving one of the key to receive, but if anyone wants a child, I will pass the portion. If called upon, I will serve you. Who? I said if called upon, I will serve you. Awesome. Thank you, Jim. Well, sounds good. I'll go real quick to potential topics for the next meeting. I do have a couple that are on deck and hoping to have in September. That would be an update on our West Hickman Watershed Management Plan, working with Stephanie Blaine to kind of get her in here and do an update on that. I think when they were in the midst of it, we had a presentation probably several years back now, pre-COVID, so it would be good to see where that went and how it's going with EPA to get it as an improved watershed plan. And then the other thing that came up was UK PFAS sampling at our treatment plant. So I talked with Dr. Price, and he said they did some spring sampling, and they're going to be doing some sampling in the summer in July, and so that would be really interesting to see the results of that and kind of start having a conversation about that in At our September meeting, but I did want to open it up if there are any other thoughts on What we'd like to see in the next two meetings potential topics Etc. Feel free to email me as well Cool yeah I'll mention this just to see whether others have an interest in the topic too. It seems as though we are seeing, I would say especially in the Wolfman watershed, but probably because that's where I'm looking, we're seeing an increased number of applications for waivers to floodplains and floodways and so on. And it would be interesting to have a report on maybe 10 years of appeals and petitions. The committee, I think, was newly constituted because it hadn't met for so long that the stormwater, what is it called? No, the floodplain appeals committee. It just would be interesting to see what's going on, and it may well be that now that we have stricter standards, stream buffering and that kind of thing, it's only natural that people would feel more constrained by them and want variances and so forth. but it would be interesting to see the data, what petitions have been made, what have been granted, under what circumstances, or why or something. It may be as simple as collecting whatever staff report accompanies the final thing. I don't know if this is something of interest to others or not. Yeah, we can look at that. All right. The floor is always open. If you do have a potential topic and additional ideas, feel free to reach out to me. You won't get an out-of-office email anymore if you email me. But the announcements, just some things to keep in mind between now and when we meet next in September. I know that 3rd Rock, when they presented, were talking about our watershed focused monitoring program. Sampling is happening all summer, so we've had our first sampling event on the 24th of May, and our next one is June 7th. So if you are a part of this group and interested in sampling, feel free to reach out to me, and we can get you connected and do some on-site training and get you as one of our volunteer samplers. We can always use help. And then some other events and things happening. We've got Truckapalooza coming up on June 4th. I'm someone was here to talk about that but she's not here. Yeah. Do you have anything to add on that event? It's all in the front of me. I just work for it. It's a good thing. One to four. And we do have an hour before for folks that have him on his and the other. Crazy loud chaos and stuff. One, two trucks, little, and the electric truck. Awesome. You said one to what? One to four. One to four. Awesome. Can we set up a booth to recruit CDL drivers kind of off to the side? I tried to recruit somebody yesterday. I wanted a new maker that I was talking to yesterday, but I didn't have any left happening. Alright, we've also got, well I'm going to jump down and then we'll jump back up, but Kentucky River Suite, that's out of your queue. That is the 18th at the location of the new exciting park that we'll be purchasing. So if you've got a boat, bring it and help us clean it up. If you don't have a boat, we'll go to ParkSpring and we'll have some kayaks and things. Thank you. Go out loud. That's a smaller event, but always really fun. And hopefully the weather cooperates. Awesome. And there's an online blog. And they can just go to our website and find them. And then Blue Garth's Green Source has Green Fest coming up on Saturday, tomorrow. Do you want to say anything quick on that announcement? Yeah, sure. So Green Fest, I think this is our 10th year of doing Green Fest. We're going to have 16 green living workshops. The water quality ones. We have Terry Foodies who's going to talk about cholera and the history of cholera in Lexington which is interesting to you all potentially. We have an architect talking about interesting ways of doing rainwater harvesting so more than rain barrels kind of thing so that'll be really fun. Many other workshops as well. We have a green eco-friendly vendor section as well and then KidZone 10 to 3 tomorrow at Living Arts and Science Center. And then in July we've got two conferences coming up. The Kentucky Stormwater Association Annual Conference is in Louisville this year July 13 through 15 and if you really want to go on a conference free you can go to that and then come home and go to the the watershed professionals or the water professionals conference which is the following Monday through Wednesday July 17 through 20 here in Lexington so lots of conferencing happening in July yes I just want to add in the water for life event. We have Jacobson Park in association with the Water Professionals Conference. That will be Sunday before it starts. That's a great family-friendly fun event too. They always do a really good job putting that on. Also, if you've got kids and you want them to think what you call it is awesome and exciting, it's a good event to make them. Water for Life, Jenkinson Park, Sunday, July 16th? 17th. Oh, does the conference start on the 17th? Yeah. There you go. My bad. Sunday, July 17th. And then the last thing, the end of July, just a reminder that Class B infrastructure incentive grant applications are due July 29th. Anything to add, Frank, or just the deadline? Just the deadline as well. We will be awarding the Class A and B education on July 21st. Yeah, at that meeting. Will there be any workshops for people to ask questions on Class B infrastructure grant apps? Yeah, I plan to give it to Jennifer and Meyer to try to schedule a couple, like we do, like two sessions. So I'm not sure of the things yet, but I don't want to put that out there. Yeah, that's fine. Look out for an email from Frank and I on that as well. But I think that's all we've got. So if you've got any questions or things you want to add. Just an idea that just came up with my folks yesterday, that the opportunity of the Kentucky River Access, a potential partnership idea is to have a water quality monitoring station there because it's upstream from our intake and be an early warning system of potential contamination events and having that access to have something on site there would be a great opportunity. If anyone would be a person to reach out to, give me a shout. Where is that out? Is that out of the mayor's office or parks? I don't know. Jennifer. The purchase of the land for the park along the Kentucky River, I think in Kentucky American Water is only to partner on getting water quality sampling. I would say you probably need to go through the mayor's office. I would suggest that you contact Hillary Angelus. She would at least be able to get you to the right person. I have just two other quick announcements that didn't get into your PowerPoint. One is that through a water quality incentive grant, Bluegrass Green Source has mini grants to offer to neighborhoods throughout the city for riparian buffers or rain gardens. So we're going to be advertising workshops. We require that grant applicants come to a workshop, but it's citywide. So anybody that wants to do that, so pay attention to that coming to your inboxes. And then we also, excuse me, to follow along the conversation, we also have an event that we're doing for the third year called Kentucky River Fest, which is at Proud Mary's, which is very close to the new Patent Park area. And it's going to be on July 10th in the morning from 9 to 12. And it's really designed as an opportunity to get people out to the river that don't know it exists. and so we're going to have cruise, kayaks, paddle boards for people to try. It's very different than the river sweep. We're not really doing a litter cleanup as associated with it. It's more getting people to understand that the river exists in Fayette County and also that they can try it out and test it out. Awesome. Well, thank you everybody for coming to an in-person meeting for the first time in two years. It's kind of nice, but you'll get updates as far as our September meeting on whether that'll be hybrid or just Zoom, we're kind of going to work through that after July. So thank you, everybody. I appreciate you coming. Thank you.