City Council Work Session Transcript – 11/13/2018 Title: City of Austin Description: 24/7 Channel: 6 - COAUS Recorded On: 11/13/2018 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 11/13/2018 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [9:09:46 AM] >> Mayor Adler: So I think we have a quorum here. It's 9:08 and today is November 13, Tuesday, November 13. We're in the boards and commissions room here at city hall. Council, we have two items that are pulled. We have some things to discuss in executive session. We have two briefings. Since we have folks here from the public, some of the commission members, we're going to start with the water forward report. And then we'll do the government that works. Manager, do you want to lead us off on the discussion of water issues? How do you want to do this? >> Mayor and council, as you know this past month our city issued an historic water boil notice that really allowed us to think differently about our water treatment facilities and ensure that we are prepared for the future and in a more resilient way. I'm going to have Greg Meszaros and his team present the water forward plan, which is the culmination of years of work that looks at the resiliency of our system. Before that I would like to ask ray Arrellano, our assistant city manager, to walk through two memos recently distributed about the water boil notice. One was distributed on October 28th that talked about next steps. And the other was distributed on November 9th that talked about the timeline. They are going to be in front of you if they are not already so you can walk through them with the assistant city manager. Although these are descriptions of what happened when, I also wanted to make clear for this council and the public about when they will be getting more information as we continue to do our after action assessments. So with that I'll turn it [9:11:46 AM] over to assistant city manager ray Arrellano. >> Good morning, mayor and city manager. What I'd like to do is give you an overview of the two memos that the city manager described. One is to talk about what happens next now that the boil water notification event is over. And then to go a little bit into the detail at a high level of the consequence of vents that led to us determining the need to do a boil water notification. It been two weeks since the end of the boil water innovation was lifted on October 28th. And in that time the water department, Austin water, has been performing systemwide operation tall checks. Cleanup, wash down activities to restore their water treatment plants to normal operation and as importantly giving their staff a time to rest and recuperate from all that activity. They've also started their activities around their technical review about what happened during that time frame and what they can do to prevent the current where the turbidity upsets the water intake chemistry and so forth. In parallel, homeland security and management, they've been demobilizing the water distribution points. Also have been starting to get the documentation together in order to make reimbursements to the state and to FEMA. They've issued a preliminary damage summary outline, which in fact right now is a preliminary estimate, rough estimate about seven million dollars in potential reimbursible expenditures that we incurred during that time frame. We've also gone out for a consultant to help with the after action report, which is one of those items that's very important to us in terms of identifying how we proceeded along this event and what improvements can we make? We anticipate FEMA coming down in the next couple of weeks to do a preliminary damage assessment, again to [9:13:46 AM] verify that damage summary outline. And then to make sure that we have the proper documentation going forward to be eligible for the reimbursements. The after action report is a significant piece. It follows the guidelines of the homeland security evaluation program. It's very thorough. It goes over things like what happened, when did we do notification, how were the logistics handled and so forth. And again, it takes some period of time. As I mentioned -- as is mentioned in the memo, these after action reports, which includes a corrective action plan, were completed for both the October 2013 and 2015 floods, the memorial day flood of 2015 as well as hurricane Harvey, even though we did not have significant impacts from hurricane Harvey last year, well spun up a significant amount of resources in order to assist those that were sheltering or evaluating from the coast coast. So let me now transition into the timeline that occurred in anticipation of the October flood event, which did start as a flood event. So on Tuesday, October 16th we got our initial indication from the lower Colorado river authority, lcra, that there was a flooding occurring up on the llano river, and at that time we had stationed the situational assessment team in the eeoc. At any time activated the eeoc. This is an effort that we staff up when we see things happening that we need to be concerned about. And there was more concern on our Travis county partners because of the flooding that might happen along Travis county where there are county residences. So this transpired along from Tuesday to about the Friday time frame. You may recall that on Thursday I provided council with an update in anticipation that the lcra [9:15:48 AM] might open an initial four Gates, over the four that they already had, open at Mansfield dam as the lake Travis lake levels started to rise up to a critical level that required them to open floodgates. At that time the city manager authorized the activation of the emergency operations center so that we could anticipate the flood that might come down and inundate both lake Austin, lady bird lake and downstream at longhorn dam, which would certainly have significant impact to our communities. So during this time frame particularly up and until about Friday time frame, water treatment plants were handling the load in terms of what we were seeing in intake water. Austin water staff started to see the rise in turbidity, so taking the proactive action to increase their treatment of the water so that it could keep up with system demands. And in fact through Friday water treatment plants were keeping up with system demand. It was on Saturday that we started to see the significant impacts to water treatment capacity. The systems were having to be taken offline to start to address clogged filters and so forth, and additionally the systems were -- Austin water was having difficulty maintaining the turbidity outlet. During this time frame let me stress at this time that the issue at hand was the clarity of the output water. At no time during this entire event I want to again compliment Austin water as well as their work with tceq and our wholesale customers that through this event they were able to maintain -- maintain output such that there was no infiltration of bacterial components. It was really a matter of the clarity of the water so we can maintain certified by [9:17:50 AM] tceq to produce potable water. So it was Saturday that we really started to see significant impacts. Sunday morning on the 21st the decision was made to start -- let me make sure I'm tracking here. So on Sunday then realizing that there was a significant impact to water capacity production based on turbidity, Austin water started issuing press statements in order to reduce consumption so that they could stay ahead of being able to produce water. They had a press statement. They also released or had media availability in order to stress this requirement or this need through this water consumption. But it was still not having the effect that was being desired. So right up until about the eight P.M. Time frame on Sunday the 21st, Austin water director Greg Meszaros had a conversation with the city manager recommending that we institute a preemptive boil water notification. So this is just to get in front of the fact that should the water coming -- being produced by water treatment plants exceed the threshold set by tceq, we would be positioned with a boil water notification in place and certainly addressing the need to reduce water consumption so that the water treatment plants could produce water that could meet system demand. So once that decision and recommendation was made, the city manager concurred with that. We started spinning up a number of resources. And between 8:00 P.M. And midnight that time frame, started calling in additional personnel, created a conference call in order to do certain things. First to apprise stakeholders about the situation. Two to determine who were the critical water customers that would have to be addressed. Three, where we might obtain bottled water in order to [9:19:52 AM] provide supplies. And four, developing a communication strategy so that we could notify the public and have all the necessary backup materials that would be required once we made that innovation for a preemptive boil water requirement. So in the wee hours of Monday morning all of this was coming together. We determined that the Chris kel customers were the medical and hospital facilities, you can imagine the water requirements and it was certainly a critical requirement. Schools, it turned out that we wanted to make sure that the schools, not only k-12, but also the higher education facilities also had access to water. Then the restaurant, food establishments, certainly there's a water for potable water, clean water for them to be able to provide their services. And then after that how do we accommodate those that might need water because they don't have access to it or for some reason can't boil water on their own. So those were the priority critical customers. We went about trying to determine how we might get the water. First reaching out to the Texas department of emergency management as well as to making the retailers aware that there's going to be a demand on bottled water. And then preliminarily focusing on developing the faqs, the frequently asked questions, press statement and other information that would be required so that once we made the boil water notification those would be ready on our website in order for people to look and see what needed to be done in order to the information that might be passed along on TV, social media, press statements and so forth. On six A.M. On Monday morning we made that press conference availability and told people that this was [9:21:55 AM] necessary. Later on that morning at 7:44 in the morning the Austin water director declared the need for formal water use restrictions. Seeing that demand was continuing to out strip supply -- demand out stripping supply, he deemed it necessary to put in place further restrictions like no watering of lawns, no car washes and so forth trying to minimize even further the use of water inside the homes. At 12:45 Austin water did release a statement requiring that additional restriction and then at 5:25 late that afternoon on Monday, seeing that the demand was continuing to out strip supply, we utilized our reverse 911 system in order to notify people of the boil water notification and to look at the emergency water use restrictions requirements. Moving on to Tuesday, a lot of emphasis here, Austin water continuing to try to get ahead of the turbidity situation within the water treatment plants, continuing to see high silt and debris level in the raw water. There was a press conference held at 3:45 that afternoon expressing some cautious optimism that we might be able to recover and lift the boil water notification by the weekend. However during that afternoon as well we saw a brief spike in turbidity in the output water that met the threshold, just hit the threshold for the tceq requirement to put in a boil water notice as mandatory. Austin water coordinated with tceq to take a look at that data and then at 6:49 P.M. That evening tceq did verify that a mandatory boil was required within 24 hours to -- to be announced within 24 hours. [9:23:56 AM] The next morning at 6:30 in the morning Austin water released the tceq required mandatory boil water notification. So between Wednesday and then Saturday, a lot of effort focused in terms of the communication and activity at the emergency operations and within the city to put in place the water distribution channels, the continue -- continuing to inform the community about the requirements for boil water and reducing consumption. And in parallel Austin water staff working closely with the tceq and its wholesale customers started to get into a position where they were going to be able to meet the requirements for lifting the boil water notification. And so starting in about Saturday, Austin water started to do I think -- if I recall correctly, started to do their testing in order to prove to tceq that they could meet the criteria. And then at 12:34 on Sunday, we received tceq notification that Austin water did meet the requirements. Shortly after at 3:00 P.M. On Sunday, we received notification that the last of our wholesale customers had met the criteria for lifting the boil water notification. A number of the press releases, again, faqs and updates that were prepared were made ready to go coincident with our announcement that we could lift the boil water notification, that notification was made at 4:15 on Sunday. So throughout this -- again, throughout this event, we concerned. I think the community responded well to our request to reduce demand. I want to also recognize the work of Austin water, again, in collaboration with tceq and its wholesale customers to quickly as it could, you [9:25:59 AM] know, notwithstanding mother nature and the effects of the rain and the silt and so forth having an impact on the intake water, were able to get to a place where we could lift the boil water notification in relatively short order. I also want to recognize the work of the homeland security emergency management team, especially Juan Ortiz. He in fact had specific experience in this area coming from Corpus Christi so that we recognized right away or he helped us recognize right away the significance and what would be required in order to get through this event. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. >> Mayor and council, just before we go to that, again the purpose of this was really to provide an articulation of these two memos that were recently released. I think it's important for the public to see at that high level what decisions were made at what point in time, but just to go back to the October 28th memo when I really outlined what those next steps are that we are compiling an after action report, we're looking at corrective actions that could be taken, lessons learned, we could do that. But we wanted to take the opportunity this morning to ensure that this information was out in the public's interest as well. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. That's good. That will then take us to the water forward report itself. Leslie? >> [Inaudible]. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Pool: First off, let me express my sincere appreciation for all the extra efforts that our water utility staff took and the line folks that answer up throughout assistant city manager Arrellano. It was a huge effort and everybody in the city appreciated the overtime and the extra efforts that went into kind of getting us through this. [9:28:00 AM] Could you -- I just wanted you to amplify two -- one timing item and a reason. One is the timing of the notice to the food establishments that first morning, probably the most concerns that I heard repeated were that restaurants weren't ready. They didn't know. And their prep folks had gotten early in the morning and they didn't get the notice about the boil water need, the order, until after they had already started their day. So I realize that the timing -- decisions and everything happened around midnight and everything, but could you talk a little bit more about the timing of that first innovation that went out to the -- that first notification that went out to the public? >> Certainly. In terms of the timing, essentially when we got the notification that this was going to be recommended at 8:00 P.M. On Sunday, it took us awhile to be able to put in place the things that we needed to be there so that the public could be informed and there were multiple avenues for the public to reach out to. I think primarily it was getting the [indiscernible] Ready to so it could be posted online and also 311 ready so people could Dahl into 311. We worked as closely as we could with the greater Austin restaurant association. It and to be our best avenue in order to notify or be able to address concerns or questions specific to the restaurant or food establishments. It wasn't the perfect situation given enthe time that we needed, but also remember that this was a preemptive notification and we didn't exceed any specifications until Tuesday. So we felt that we had the appropriate messaging and timing so that people would certainly be aware and start thinking about what they [9:30:00 AM] would need to do in a boil water notification, certainly for food establishments. And it wasn't until Tuesday that we actually met the mandatory requirement for boil water. And by that time food establishments as well as the community at large was certainly aware of the requirements. >> Pool: Right. Everybody had already accommodated at that point. And then if you could give some additional information on the reasons why the reverse 911 system wasn't used Sunday or early Monday morning? >> So I think specifically to that point what we think of in terms of reverse 911 is really for an emergency warning. What we had here was a notification, a preemptive request of the community that you needed to boil water just in case we couldn't meet the clarity requirements. When we think will reverse 911 at least from a staff perspective, we think about perhaps there's an amber alert that's required or silver alert, or flooding is I imminent. We didn't believe we were in that kind of a situation that required that early going and particularly since it was early in the morning. Certainly as you will see in the timeline I think later on in the day or the next day, we did use reverse 911 because supply was not keeping up with demand at all and we needed to reemphasize the emergency water use restrictions. >> Pool: And this may be a question that we can take up when we do the water forward conversation, but it may be about Mr. Meszaros, it's about the membrane filters and how they performed and are they the technology that performs best in a high turbidity situation? >> I'm Greg Meszaros, director of Austin water. So we'll be doing a technical evaluation of the event and how it affected our treatment systems. All three of our plants are lime softening plants. [9:32:01 AM] We don't use membrane technology. That is something we will elaborate but I would not jump to conclusions that a technology is better than another. I think we'll take a wide range look at those things in terms of short range things we can do and maybe longer term of changes we can make if we potentially have more risk of this in the future. Membrane technologies have up sides and down sides. We'll have to look through those and we're not near a recommendation on whether we would do a wholesale change of treatment technologies. That is a huge undertaking and there's a lot to sort through as we would work through those kind of things. >> Pool: I remember membrane was a component of the discussion and water treatment plant four so I'm just curious to know especially since technology has improved in I don't know how many years it's been, more than 10 certainly since water treatment plant four was first on the books, when you get to those assessments and reviews, I would appreciate just some information. Hopefully it will include an assessment analysis as well. >> As we do a full technical review -- on December 11th we'll be reporting out a film review of some of the science and the data and what we experienced in some of our findings and then we'll do a full after action review in terms of reviewing from an engineering perspective all aspects of our system in this event. >> Pool: Great. And the last question I had was if -- Mr. Arrellano, could you amplify or give us additional information on our collaboration with other local governmental entitie you mentioned homeland security, but like rollingwood and Westlake hills and Travis county, for example. >> So certainly Travis county is -- >> Pool: And aid. >> Yes. Let me see how I wrap my answer around that broad question. Clearly we have partners in the emergency operation center whenever we activate that certainly include Travis county, sheriff's [9:34:06 AM] department -- Travis county, aid, who represents in a safety consortium the other school districts that are within the city of Austin, the hospitals and so forth. In this particular case with Austin water we needed to bring in other communities that were essentially the wholesale customers of Austin water. So that made it a little bit unique in that regard. And in fact, certainly this was happening I think in the background with Austin water as had event transpired it became more significant when we're doing the recover roadway so that we could coordinate lifting the boil water notification all at the same time and not cause confusion should one organization or another go ahead. So there was a lot of emphasis and coordination amongst those governmental entities and wholesale agencies to make sure that we could bring up the system at the same time. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Pool: I thought the provision of the water at the distribution centers, the seven of them or however many there were around the city, was a really good move on the city's part. It really made -- I think it really made a difference and helped people kind of get over the surprise that they weren't possibly able to drink the water out of the tap. So thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. If there are questions before we get to the water forward report, Jimmy, you were up first and then Houston. >> Flannigan: I want to remind everyone that water treatment plant four is you now the hancocks treatment plan. >> Burl. >> Flannigan: I was hoping we could honor that choice and continue to refer to it in that way. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you, councilmember Flannigan. I was going to remind them. Mr. Meszaros started doing that, the burl hancocks water treatment plant. I appreciate it when you started that. But I also appreciated all the work that you all did. I wanted to add to your list of the senior facilities. That's where I got most of [9:36:07 AM] my calls from were people who were in a residential care facilities and not knowing how to get water. They didn't have cars to go get water. So if we would add those types of residential living facilities to the list the next time. >> Will do. >> Mayor Adler: Sounds good. Thank you. Ellen. Troxclair thanks for this higher level overview. I appreciate it. I look forward to the more detailed conversation as y'all have the opportunity to put that information together, and this was unprecedented for all of us so I don't think there was -- all the staff did the best they could in the situation and I'm hoping to figure out together kind of what we can do definitely in the future. I want to ask about the reverse 911 system. I wanted to know why it wasn't used on Monday morning. I guess knowing what you know now, would you if you were in this situation again or something similar, has it changed your view of whether or not it should have been used or would you use it again? >> So I would say we made the right choice for the time, but each time is going to be unique so we have to factor in whatever was going in at that time in the future for this specific event. I do -- I think I would emphasize reverse 911 is when something imminent is happening that we want to make sure that people are taking action right away so there's a balance there between that objective and maybe hearing or getting reverse 911 so frequently that people may not necessarily pay attention to it. >> Troxclair: I guess I would encourage you to kind of err on the side of using it -- when in doubt using it. I get notification for road closures and things like that. While I heard you describe it as the city's request to boil water, at the time it was -- it wasn't a request, [9:38:07 AM] it was a mandatory thing. Anyway, I guess I would just encourage you I think more information is better especially when we're in a situation like that. Two more quick questions. Do you know when the additional restrictions will be lifted or have they been on the -- today >> Today. They're lifted as of today. >> Troxclair: And the last question that keeps entering my mind and again hindsight is 2020, so maybe you didn't anticipate this happening. It seems like as we were going through Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, leading up to that our consumption was saying the same, but our -- the amount of time it was taking the water treatment plants to clarify the water due to the turbidity was slowing down. So was there a conversation or a contemplation about asking the community to conserve water on Friday or Saturday when it really became apparent that our use was far exceeding our ability to clarify water? >> I'll respond. I think a couple of comments here, councilmember. One of the after action reviews we're going to sort through is when we see in the future a major water quality upset event, I think one of our considerations is that's likely a trigger for us to earlier request volunteer reductions in water use. You know, we've never thought about that. We've always thought about it from a drought polar vortex or maybe a -- drought perspective at a plant. We have to think both on the quantity side in addition to the drought side about how to do that. In this particular instance our plants were running pretty much normal, albeit under heavier turbidity [9:40:11 AM] loads up to Saturday morning. We had had any problem or plant shut down. It was really a Saturday morning into early afternoon as we started to experience more turbidity loads, our plants -- you will Rick shut down for a -- Ulrich shut down for a period of time. That's when we saw the mismatch with the demand. We did issue a voluntary request for demand reductions that way and we had immediate requests and we also had a media Q and a at waller creek in the early afternoon on Saturday. And there was some modest demand reductions, but it didn't substantially go down as the period went on. I made some false assumptions. When we issued the boil water notice I expected demand to go down and it did not go down, it actually went up. So that's when we -- I declared an emergency and we were more assertive in terms of that demand going down. So looking back on those things, we'll adapt our policies and procedures to get ahead of that a little bit earlier I think in the future. >> Troxclair: Thanks. >> Mayor Adler: All right. Let's go then to the water forward report. Thank you. I'm sorry, mayor pro tem, did you have a question? >> Tovo: I did. First of all, thank you. As several of my colleagues said, you handled the situation really beautifully and with calm, and that was just enormously reassuring that the community in an unprecedented situation. I wanted to clarify something that you had said. As I understood your conversation about the stakeholders who had been notified on Sunday about the upcoming boil water, I thought I heard you say that it was schools, hospitals, universities and retailers so that they could start to stock up. Is that accurate that that's when retailers were notified? >> So on Sunday morning we had access to two of the major retailers that we thought would have the most impact that the community would love to go to. So they were in the loop in terms of it was going to require a boil water [9:42:12 AM] notification. >> That's great. I don't think that -- I at least wasn't aware of that and it didn't make it into the media and think that's very proactive planning and I appreciate it. Do you know why it took the schools and at least the university a few days to actually get water distribution on their campuses? >> Well, it a logistics effort so we first had to make sure we could get the water there. And we actually -- purchasing staff went out and placed an ready for up to over one million gallons per day should we need it. The schools and universities and so forth could -- as we tried to determine what the demand or need was going to be that that they could last at least a day or so. When we went through first couple of days, obviously with their conservation effort as well, they were able to stretch that out a little more until we could get water to them. >> Tovo: Okay. Thank you very much. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. We'll move on with water forward. You guys did a very good job. Thank you. >> Thank you, mayor and council. It's water day today so we're here to speak and update you on our water forward plan. And I'm joined with not only Austin water staff, but the chair and co-chair of our council appointed water task force. Maybe I could take a minute and do introductions here real quick. >> Mayor Adler: You have to press the button. >> Good morning. My name is Marissa flores Gonzalez and I was the project manager for the water forward plant. >> And Theresa lutes, Austin water. I was the project sponsor at the staff level for water forward. [9:44:17 AM] >> We're already on? >> Here you go. >> I'm Charlene lurig. I chaired the water task force. I was appointed by councilmember Casar. I professionally work in water infrastructure finance and water markets. >> Hi. My name is Jennifer walker and I was the vice-chair of the water forward task force and I was appointed by mayor pro tem tovo. And I served the predecessor task force as well in 2014, which we'll talk a little bit about. And in my professional life I am a water program manager at national wildlife federation. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. >> So mayor and council, we're going to tag team this today. Austin water staff is going to do part of the presentation and then our task force is going to do part of it and we're here to answer questions. We'll also have some time on the 27th for another work session and additional Q and a and discussion of water forward and then we're scheduled for a vote hopefully on the 29th and to adopt the plan. So we'll get started today. We're going to start a little bit with a little background and a reminder of why we undertook the water forward planning process. This water forward plan is we spent the better part of four years putting together the water forward plan, working very closely with the council appointed task force and really it all starts with the focus on our water supply. Austin water provides a retail and wholesale water services for nearly 1.1 million people now, and all of that comes from the Colorado river system. It's really two parts of our water supply. We have senior river rights in Texas. Whoever draws first from a river system has the rights during times of low water flow to that water, and we have some of the earliest rights on the Colorado river system, but we also have long-term contracts with lcra to supply water from the highland Lakes during times of low flow and drought. The two storage Lakes are lake Buchanan and lake Travis. They form the storage of the [9:46:18 AM] highland Lakes and it's roughly two million feet of storage when full. That's been our water supply for over 100 years. And it's served us well. But the Lakes can be fickle companions. This is an example of that. This is the same part of the lake during the drought. You can see how that cove looked on the left and then you can see on the right . How that looks when full. As a matter of fact, just a couple of weeks ago if you had gone out there they would have been another 20 or 30 feet of water on top of the lake. So the Lakes can change very sharply between drought and flooding and quite frankly climate change is sharp earning those risks into the future. We've been doing a good job attempting to that. Austin water, working with the community and orthopedic stakeholders, has world class set of conservation programs and reuse and other kind of approaches. It's been very effective for us. This is just one graphic to highlight this. This graphic shows total water use in acre feet each calendar year and our population growth. And you can see from this graph in calendar year 2017 we used about the same amount of water. If you go back nearly 20 years. So our conservation programs and reuse programs have been offsetting a lot of the water use. We're serving now nearly 300,000 people more in 2017 and '18 than we did 20 years ago, yet our water demand from a total perspective is about the same so that's something to be very proud. But we can't stop there. There's significant risk as we look into the future. One of those is Austin remains a popular place for people to move as families and invest in businesses. One of the things we did in water forward is we look thed at our task force, our community and our city demographer and we did a 100 year look at out youth for Austin water. [9:48:18 AM] This is not the region, just our service area and these are very reasonable assumptions and we own over this in great detail with our task force and our demographer, but we're forecasting over the next 100 years over reasonable assumptions our utility service area would grow from roughly a million now to almost four million by 2115. So quadrupling of our service populations. So that's one of the things we have to prepare for. And the other thing we have to prepare for is climate change. Really that is a key driver and the biggest risk that we face in the future. How do you express that? How do you communicate climate change. For the first time this water forward plan we had a climatetologist paired with Austin water staff and our hydrologists. We had Dr. Richard hoffpair doing our water study. She helped us develop a climate risk scenario for water forward. This particular graphic, I think sums it up in a way that you can really see the signal of climate change. This is a chart that shows the lowest inflow years to the highland Lakes. These are the years where the least amount of freshwater flows into the highland Lakes. The highland Lakes has really been in service since the 1930s, so 80 something years of service. Anou can see that the bulk of the low inflow years have all occurred since 1999. Nine of the 12 lowest inflow years have occurred since 1995 and the top five lowest, the very first years, have all occurred in our lifetime here since 2006. So you can see that's one of the signals that you can see that we're in a different future in terms of how the highland Lakes and our water supply is going to behave and we have to prepare for that. [9:50:20 AM] One of the ways we prepare for that is planning a path forward. How might we go about managing risk into the future? And in 2014 we had a task force that was set up and one of the recommendations they made and the utility concurred with was to develop an integrated water resource plan since renamed water forward. And in council appointed a task force to help guide that. And we're going to turn it over now to our task force members to describe H they worked with the utility to develop this plan. >> Thanks, I'm up next. I want so give you some context for how we got here and this plan because I think it's important to understand why did we spend so long doing this effort. So as Greg mentioned, Austin and central experienced a deep drought with 2011 being the worst year on record. By 2014 the source of Austin's main water supply was quite low with no signs of relief. So in April of 2014 city council passed a resolution creating the Austin water resource planning task force. This is a different task force than the one that Charlene and I currently serve on, so just hang with me while I give you a little background. So the task force was created T I looked at this from the resolution. To evaluate the city's water needs, to examine and make recommendations on future water supply and to evaluate potential water resource management scenarios for council consideration. There was a concern in the community that emergency water supplecisions related to the drought might need to be made and that those decisions might not necessarily align with our community values and the imagine Austin plan. Charlene, myself and Dr. Lauren Ross served on that task force in 2014. And we had six weeks to complete our work. It was a very different scenario than what we faced here. So planning in the midst of a doubt is not easy. [9:52:21 AM] There are few options and the stakes are high because you're in an emergency situation. And one of the reasons that the 2014 task force was formed that we were making water quality decisions may set us on a course of water management that may not have been the best course for Austin. I'm happy to report that that situation -- that emergency was alleviated so we've actually been able to spend some time doing thoughtful planning, which is right here, and I'm really glad about that that we didn't have to make decisions under an emergency sc in 2014 about water supply. So like I said, luckily it began raining in the latter part of 2014 so we didn't have to immediately implement solutions that we had identified that customer. However, there's one strategy that we felt was very important regardless of drought status. The task force strongly recommended that Austin move forward with developing an integrated water resources plan and we developed a set of guiding principles and evaluation criteria to guide that work. So I'm happy to report that Austin water and city council concurred with our recommendation and passed a resolution directing the development of an integrated water resources plan that allocated found this project and created the citizens task force to support that effort at the end of that year in December. Shall be Charlene and I served on that task force and the mayor and mayor pro tem tovo were both there for that. That was also right around when council switched to their new configuration so there was a lot going on right then. I also want to stress that Austin has done a good job with water management, securing senior water rights on the Colorado river and entering into a long-term contract with lcra to back up the water rights and to supply additional water supplies. However, as our city grows and climate changes, we realize that we could no longer rely on a single source of water and that we must plan and plan wisely [9:54:21 AM] for how we're going to supply water to our growing community wle being good neighbors and leaders in the region. So I really believe that water forward is the plan that is going to get us there. So the Austin integrated water resources community task force, we call it water forward now, because it's a mouthful, began meeting in 2015. And Charlene and I served on that task force and bill Moriarty is back here, he was the mayor's appoint tee, he was on the task force as well. We had a really great group of people. We're composed of 11 members. And like I said, everyone is really dedicated to the task. There's a really great group of professional water folks and folks from the development community and representing a bunch of different interests that are on the group. So in addition, recognizing that water planning implementation is a job that will be shared among many city departments, we invited representatives from those departments to actually share the dais with us at the meetings and participate fully in the planning process. Staff from watershed protection, Austin energy, the sustainability department, resource recovery, neighborhood housing and community development and others joined us throughout this effort and really participate in the process. And there were many city departments that did that because that's what we're going to need to do in the future to manage our water supplies is all work together. It's not just Austin water's responsibility, it's their main responsibility, but we've all got to work together. So the task force has been very hands on throughout this process. Austin water has been responsive to our input and I really feel like this has been a team effort. I want to give y'all one example of this. Early in the process we developed a scope of work for the entity that would assist us in developing this plan. The task force was involved in shaping and refining the vision and the scope of work for this process. We even put a clause in the scope of work indicating that the prime contractor that was awarded this project would not be allowed [9:56:23 AM] to bid on building any other projects identified in the plan. We very much wanted to have a process solely focused on planning outcomes and we felt that was necessary to do so. And we wanted the plan to be shaped by community input, reflect community values and reflect on what we really need. So the task force has really worked collaboratively with Austin water and the other city departments. We've had special subcommittees, have dug into issues like developing the scope of work from the very beginning or understanding the disaggregated demand model that the city built. I just wanted to convey that unlike other task forces I've served on and stuff, I think everyone really rolled up their sleeves and really got to work on this one because it's really important and folks really invested in it. So we spent the better part of a year getting a strong baseline of college for the entire group and we wanted to understand better how water is being managed across the U.S. And across the world. We had presentations from cities that are leaders in water management and really learned what was happening beyond Texas and in Texas and tried to take the best of what we thought would work for our community and evaluate it here. So that's -- and then we really got all the consultants hired and started getting going probably about a year after we started meeting because it took awhile to get all that to happen. So next slide. Do I have it? Oh, here, my assistant will help. [Laughter]. We're chair and vice-chair, we help each other out a lot. So I'm particularly proud that very early on in the process we put together a set of guiding principles for our effort. The 2014 task force that we both served on had a longinger list of guiding principles and that's one thing that I'm particularly proud of that we actually set like the context within which we want to plan and what our communities sags you. I encourage you to go back and look at THA I [9:58:23 AM] don't know if other cities do that. I think it was a really great thing. We tried to collapse them and summarize them for the water forward plan because there were two pages of them in the 2014 task force we recognize the Colorado river is Austin's core water supply now and into the future. We intended continuous strong partnership between the city of Austin and lcra to ensure the Colorado river's reliability. We will continue to -- Austin's focus on water conservation and water use efficiency. This means we're gonna stay focused on managing water demands. I see this as a core principle of a water forward plan and the way Austin has been operating in the past and will continue in the future. Austin's per capita water consumption will continue to decline over the planning horizon. One of our goals was to strengthen long-term sustainability, reliability and diversity of Austin's water supply through maximizing locally available water supplies. This strategy is particularly important because by fully utilizing our locally available water supplies, it means we can avoid bringing water from other regions. Oar plan is as much as we are able to live within our means and to get innovative in how we use water that we already have in our community. Another principle as to avoid severe water shortages during times of drought, I mean, this goes without saying, this is what Austin water does among getting clean drinking water to our homes, they also want to make sure we don't run out during times of drought. We wanted to focus on projects that were technically, socially and economically feasible. This is important to our community. A project has to work. Peopleeed to accept it. We need to be able to be in control of it and people need to be able to afford it. We want to continue to protect Austin's natural environment, including source and receiving water and quality. So we've heard time and time again this is very important, Austin water did a lot of and task force [10:00:23 AM] members helped and other folks did, a lot of community outreach and this is something that was very important to folks. We're one of but many users in the region. Water users. We want to make sure we're doing our part to ensure everyone is taken care of, and that include people in the region and the environment. So I appreciate Austin's dedication to that. We want clean and healthy drinking water. So one of our guiding principles we will ensure the water supply continues to meet and exceed local and federal health regulations, goes without saying. The plan should align with imagine Austin's goal to sustainably manage our water resources and we want to maintain coordination and communication with regional partners. Austin is not the only community relying on this shared resource. So as much as we can get everybody on board with managing the water resource in a really efficient manner, that will help us all. And we want to engage the public and the stakeholders through development process. This plan won't work without public and community buy-in and participation. Managing water supplies is a community effort and even more so under water forward it really is a community effort. This is my final slide, it's about public outreach. Public outreach and participation is something we identified early on as a priority and being very, very important to the process. I just want to outline a few of the efforts we undertook. There's appendix a and the plan has tables with every place that Austin water and folks went and all the outreach efforts they did. Austin water provided monthly updates to the water and wastewater commission and we have the chair of the commission serve on the task force as well so there was a nice conduit. Austin water participated in over 90 public outreach events. They hosted water forward specific events such as workshop, meetings and open houses. One example that I [10:02:23 AM] particularly liked that they did is they did a summer series in the libraries. They did one in every councilmember's district, and they actually provided child care at those so folks could come to those and, you know, have -- so I thought that was really great and a really creative way to enable people to attend. Austin water attended numerous community events and sought input on water priorities from attendees and passed out surveys seeking input on Austin water's priorities. I drove by carver library one weekend and saw Teresa and Marissa out front talking to people and passing out surveys. They really were beating the pavement. The task force met more than 40 times and we always had a lot of people at those meetings and public comments and tried to engage folks, tried to hold a very open process. Austin water and the task force members provided briefings on the draft plan to seven boards and commissions. And I wanted to say, too, that the appendix, plan appendix a, actually has detailed information on which council districts were visited and demographic and all kind of -- they've sliced and diced the data in different ways if y'all are interested in doing that. I'll pass it over to Charlene now. >> Thanks. So as Jennifer said, we were meeting for all together about three and a half years. The first year we were diving into global water management themes, best practices, kind of cutting edge work that was happening everywhere from here to Australia. We were wrestling as a task force with what our own values with associated with water management. What we thought were going to be the important ways of measuring the various trade-offs, knowing that no water plan will ever be perfect. It will always involve trade-offs. And so as we went through that process, we developed a set of kind of indices, which I'll talk about next, [10:04:24 AM] but we were really pleased that through that intensive public outreach and engagement process that Jennifer just described that the types of community values that were brought forward by people who were not water professionals but were members of the community really aligned with ours and that those -- while they were parallel processes, that they seemed to have a great amount of harmony. So for us that was a great indicator that we were headed in the right direction. People don't just care about the affordability of their water services. That certainly came through in the public engagement that Austin water invested in. Affordability matters. Reliability matters to people. Is the water going to come out of the tap when they turn the tap on? Are they going to have enough water to keep their live oaks or mature trees living during prolonged drought? Those things matter, but we also heard from the community that they deeply cared about the conservation of our resources. They cared very much about being good neighbors, not only to others within the city of Austin, but to those of us in this surrounding central Texas region who have water resources that other communities are looking to bring to their own homes. And that they really cared about being good environmental steward. So it was that complete picture that we were trying to bring to a thoughtful and deliberative process, evaluating the many, many options that were in front of us. Before I talk about what some of those options were and some of the ways that we were thinking about trade-offs, I wanted to give you just a snapshot of the sorts of criteria that we were looking at. This was incredibly important because what we did through this process, even having inherited a set of values and value statements from that 2014 drought relief, doubt emergency response task force, which had very clear cut statements around we do [10:06:27 AM] not believe we should import conventional groundwater as an example. We believe our responsibility looking out at a hundred year time horizon at a population that will quadruple against climate change, that we needed to look at all options. But have a deliberative process of looking at the real trade-offs between all of those. So we kind of categorized that into four buckets. We believe that the purpose of a water supply plan is to provide reliable water supply so the highest weighted criteria was the reliability of the portfolios that we put together. We also, though, strongly believed that given affordability challenges within our community, given climate change and the way that that is going to affect the performance of all of our infrastructure, that it was important for us to look at water infrastructure not just as sometng that helps us turn on a tap and have water come out, but that our infrastructure and the dollars we spend on it need to work harder. And so we needed to understand the economic benefits of different options. Is it creating employment options? Not just during construction phase for large treatment plans, but is it creating reliable jobs, well-paying jobs for people in the community to maintain those assets over time? Is it creating flood mitigation benefits, urban heat island mitigation benefits, other sorts of investments we need to make within our community? Is it attempting to minimize energy use or even generate energy where possible? Those were all of the sorts of things that we were trying to take into account. And also recognize that some of the options we were looking at are really profoundly different from the way that water use [indiscernible] Including Austin water have traditionally looked at providing reliable water services. We have all grown up in an era in which our clean water services are provided by a monopoly that has -- the way [10:08:28 AM] it recovers the revenues for that. Some of the options we're looking at, you will hear about today, are not options that are solely pursued and implemented by Austin water but actually open up innovation and implementation to the community and the private sector at large so we also wanted to look at the trade-offs related to implementation. So as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of ways to skin a cat, right? You're trying to provide water for a future population that is going to quad couple in climate change, none of the options we knew we were finally going to be presenting to you were perfect in every respect. In order to do that we worked closely for probably a year with cdm Smith our prime, developing a set of portfolios. So these are five different water portfolios that were structured to be able to meet all demands during our historic hydrology, historic rainfall, but we will you threw them into a future of 100 years of worsening climate change, higher temperatures, greater evaporation from the Lakes, more volatile rainfall and we tested them against those scenarios as well. And the way we were encouraged by the consultant to design those portfolios was to really test the extremes. So we built portfolios that probably none of us would have said yes to on their own, right? We built portfolios that mad out reliability. So they were testing out what could we do if we were importing sea water desalinated at the gulf of Mexico hundreds of miles away and piped in Austin if we were coupling that with brackish water that we were desalinating here closer to Austin, if we were building a direct potable reuse plant [10:10:29 AM] to take treated eh fluent from wastewater plants and put it directly into our drinking water stream. You can build a portfolio like that highly reliable and extremely costly and might include trade-offs that community doesn't want to embrace but we tested those sorts of options. We tested extreme conservation options, where we were really putting every egg in the basket we could and reducing our demand. We tested options that included things that we knew were not going to be terribly cost effective but were highly effective in what we were trying to maximize was our local control over our water resources. Part of our challenge with -- depending upon the highland Lakes is that that is -- those are resources that are relied upon and influenced by many communities outside of Austin. So we were looking at options like community scale rainwater and stormwater catchment, not terribly cost effective but let's max out local control. We ran all those portfolios against a hundred years of climate change. And a hundred years of population growth. Then we tested them against those indices I mentioned earlier and we saw what shook out, what performed best, what the trade-offs were. And from that we were able, with our consultant, with Austin water, to construct two hybrid portfolios that really took the best of all possible worlds, attempted to find a middle ground between all of those extremes that we tested out within the first set of five portfolios, and it was hybrid one that we were bringing to you today, presenting for your consideration. Greg will talk to you more about what is within that hybrid portfolio. But what I would like to summarize my component of this presentation by saying is that I truly believe that the water plan that you are considering today is the most important water plan [10:12:29 AM] that's been produced in the United States. And I don't say that just because we've spent more than four years of our lives getting to this point. I say it because we are turning on its head a fundamental nuthatches governed all water planning within the state of Texas, nearly all water planning within the western united States, and that is that for a city to grow it must take water resources from other communities. That has been how we have grown all of the cities within the state of Texas to this point. And for us, one of the primary objectives, one of the core values that we brought into this work was to try to create a plan that we felt was actually going to make the city of Austin more resilient than we are today to climate extremes, both drought and flood, that was going to strongly invest in the investment we have already made as a community, which is in our conservation of our resources, but to deepen that commitment. That was going to allow us to diversify our supplies in a way that would ensure that we have clean water 365 days a year, including in extraordinary doubts we have never experienced before because we know those are on the horizon, but that at the same time can be a basic conto the world, be a beacon within the United States, within the state of Texas, that cities can actually provide their own water supplies. That we can be self-dependent, that we can capture and harvest the resources that are within our own community to help us be better neighbors, to be more equitable within our own cities, to be more adaptive, more resilient, and through innovation to be able to continue to enjoy abundance, even in times of great scarcity. So this plan has been unanimously recommended by our task force. We're very proud of that. [10:14:31 AM] We're very happy to answer questions today. I'll turn it back to Greg to talk abouthat W the plan entails. >> Thank you, Charlene. This slide summarizes all the core recommendations from the plan. Obviously the plan document is very quick and if I would point the council and mayor to one of the best documents as you're wrapping your head around this it's this kind of executive summary pamphlet. You have a link to it and hard copies to. This really distills the plan and its recommendations and some of the background and this would be the one document that I would point you to as you're seeking to understand this more. I'm going to linger a little bit on this slide since this has all the core recommendations of the plan. We structured this slide along two columns, demand management strategies, which you might think of in terms of conservation and managing demand into the future, and then water supply. And then horizontally we have kind of more near term things, things we would do roughly over the next 20 years. The bottom part of the slide is things we would do in the farther picture through about 2070. I'll start on the demand slide and break these down for you a little bit. On the demand side there's two items that are recommended that the utility is already doing and that the task force concurred that these are appropriate strategies for managing demand into theuture. One is investing in our meter infrastructure. As the council knows we're well into the process of converting all of our meters, nearly a quarter million meters, into advanced meter infrastructure, where we would give customers more digital data, customer portals, hour to hour water use, notifications of leaks, all kinds of new ways that the community could -- to get feedback ow much they're using water and make good water decisions. That's a big project for us, roughly $80 million that we [10:16:32 AM] would complete in the next three or four years and the task force concurred that that's a good investment. Also another demand management strategy is the utility continuing to innovate and invest in water loss. We have an extensive system, well over 4,000 miles of water infrastructure, pipelines, and investing in ways to manage water loss, detect water loss, repair waterlines, replace waterlines, do advanced infrastructure investment and technologies is another big part of what we have done and what we're going to continue to do in the feature to manage demand from the utility side. There's also a series of recommendations to shape new development. You know, you look at new development in maybe a -- kind of a different perspective, is, you know, we serve about a million people now. We will grow to 4 million over the next century. So you think about it, three quarters of the austinites that are going to be using water aren't even here yet, and that gives us a chance to shape those behaviors and to put into place land development code changes that we would work on over the next five to ten years to make sure that, as that development occurs, it occurs in in the way that is maximizing water efficiency and innovation and diversity and where I will resiliency. In the next 20 years we have four primary recommendations. Two are closely related, alternative water ordinances and dual plumbing. This is getting at kind of fit for purpose. We want to try to work with new development to get them to use water that's fit for purpose. So, for example, when it comes to non-potable water uses, cooling towers, toilet flushing, irrigation, you don't need to use fresh highland Lakes water, that we want to get water that's more fit for purpose for that. That's things like our traditional centralized reuse system, our purple pipe system. If you go to the new central [10:18:33 AM] library you see fit for purpose in action. If you go to the new central library roughly 10% of their water they use every day is fresh water, 90% is a reuse water. Some comes from our purple pipe we wired right into the library. Some of it comes from stormwater that falls on their roof they capture and store and reuse. But on average, think about that, 90% of the water they use at the library isn't coming from the fresh potable system. It's coming from those reuse strategies. I think that's the core vision of these land use ordinances of the future, is that we shape these to get people to use stormwater, to use rainwater, to use centralized reuse. Maybe even small water treatment plants right on the site. That's what we're doing with the new development services center. Austin water is sponsoring a pilot demonstration project where the bulk of the water at the new land development building that's being constructed is going to be treated on-site and reused. Charlene and I had an opportunity to go to San Francisco and see that at the utility headquarters, that's what they're doing, they have a drinking water plant in their basement. Not necessarily potable reuse but the bulk of the water isn't potable, it is non- potable. That's a big part of the land development ordinances, landscape transformance, you start off with the right landscaping, more data capture, water use benchmarking, when a land development comes in they'll submit in the water what's their water use goals and we'll be able to better track what those goals are and if they're meeting them and ultimately shape some of our billing systems to create more financial incentives over time for them to meet their water budgets. The last part is three items focused on existing customers, continuing to enhance incentives with existing customers to get them to convert to alternative water uses, to get them to convert landscapes and to get them to convert irrigation systems. We do that already, but water forward is recommending an enhancement to those strategies. That's the big four or big three water demand, utility [10:20:33 AM] demand,eak management, new development strategies, alternative water, dual plumbing, landscape and water budgeting and then existing customers, really enhancing incentives. On the right-hand side is water supply. These are augmentation strategies to add more resiliency and strength to our water supply. The first one there is really the biggest recommendation. Aquifer storage and recovery or asr. What we would do over the next 20 years is plan and design and ultimately construct a major asr facility. What asr is in concept is you take water that we make drinkable out of our plants. And you transport that to an underground aquifer, and you pump it deep underground. And you ultimately over a period of years store billions of gallons of drinking water jumped ground, owned and managed by Austin water. And then when you have a drought or like the water quality upset we just experienced you have this strategic reserve of fresh ready to go drinking water stored underground and you reverse the flow. Instead of water going in you take the water and bring it back. By the tens of millions of gallons a day. Think what 20 or 30 million gallons a day of water for a few days what it meant for us during this river upset. That water is safe from evaporation, safe from upset from stormwater events, it's this bubble deep underground of water that Austin water manages, that we make the decisions for how it goes in and out. This isn't a new technology. Others use this. We spent time visiting San Antonio water. They do this for their groundwater system. They have aquifer storage and recovery. Other utilities are doing this in Texas and across the nation and the globe. And Austin water would join them in this regard. This is a big, new project. I mean, this is a significant investment, hundred of millions of dollars of piping and [10:22:34 AM] treatment infrastructure to take this water and then bring it back. But it's the most resilient thing we believe we can do and works across all strategies, all climate strategies. The biggest risk we face from climate change is evaporation. As it gets hotter more and more water will evaporate from our Lakes. Today we evaporate in a typical year more water than we use. And that's going to intensify in the future. 50 years from now that may increase 50%. We have to manage that. Aquifer storage and recovery does that. In addition we continue to grow our purple pipe system, it's going to continue its expansion. That's another recommendation. These decentralized wastewater systems, smaller treatment plans to mine water out of a sewer system and create non-potable building scale, that's a big part of this plan. There's three to 5,000-acre feet a year that comes to out of Barton springs into lady bird lake that's unallocated. We want to recapture that water, envisioning through water forward we would create a new intake on lady bird lake and capture those flows from Barton springs and bring them back to our treatment plant. That's another recommendation of this plan we would try to get done in the next 20 years. Every gallon marries. Three, though, thousand feet of acre water isn't the end of the world but it's important we look at that water and recapture it. We also have an emergency worst case scenario option. Something we evaluated in 2014 and also the task force endorsed again. But if we ever find ourselves in a circumstance worse than we've ever imagined we can take our existing reuse program and convert that into a potable system by using lady bird lake. It would be only in the worst emergencies and only for the shortest time possible but in that instance we would take reuse water, put it into lady bird lake, it would get buffering and ultimately take it back to our drinking water [10:24:35 AM] plants. That's kind of our worst case scenario drought response, something we recommended in the plan and the task force also endorsed. As you get farther out past 2017 there woulding other water supply strategies, treating brackish groundwater, brackish is a term for groundwater that has a little saline into it. As we get into the bigger picture we would look at that as a water supply augmentation. We might build another off reservoir to compliment the water supply. Those strategies are much farther into the future. I'll switch now to this graph and this is a complicated graph and I'm not going to linger on it too long but I do think it gets at some of these themes. You can see over the next hundred years what's going to happen. Population is going to grow, as we've described. We're going to climb to about 4 million. That's the green bar. Our conservation, our per capita water use, if you take the water, the potable drinking water system, divide it by the population, that's per capita per day, we have been following, on a nice trajectory there, if you go over the last ten years our peak to valley per capita dropped over 35%. We want that to continue in the decade ahead. We want per capita water use to continue to fall and water reuse strategies or excuse me water forward strategies are going to continue to drive that and we want this fit for purpose to grow. You see that in those -- the blue bars is potable water. Purple and white and spotted, those are conservation. Those are reuse, decentralized applications, land ordinances. You can see how fit for purpose water, non-potable water grows as this plan is implemented. It goes from a small portion now through our conservation programs and reuse and continues to accelerate into the future. So what's gonna happen the [10:26:36 AM] next five years? You know, the short-term? What are we gonna be working on in the next five years? Well, these ordinances. We're gonna be working on developing some of these land use ordinances to shape new development for wise water use. And these are ambitious ordinances. These are gonna take time and effort to develop. We don't have the language written. We haven't gotten stakeholder input on this. We're gonna have -- this isn't the stopping of stakeholder input. This is the starting of intense stakeholder input as we work to shape these ordinances, as we focus on alternative water, as we focus on dual plumbing. For example, we would take an approach that we would focus dual plumbing applications on bigger land developments. We wouldn't start doing it everywhere. We would start with, say, larger applications. That's what San Francisco did with great success. We want to run some of those same play books. We want to continue to expand our purple pipe system. That's gonna be a big focus over the next five years as we make investments in that. We're gonna monitor progress as we're implementing strategies, we're gonna be getting feedback. We want to start getting data about water use and being better able to make decisions as new development comes in. We're going to expand these incentives that I described, getting new customers or existing customers to continue to switch to better irrigation systems and landscapes. And we're gonna start implementing these projects with asr. We're gonna start -- we've already started asr. We have dollars in our capital budget to do asr planning and design and ultimately gearing up for that facility to be in service by roughly the mid2030s to 204 at the latest. It's a huge project but we're gonna be starting on that. We're gonna continue with advanced meter infrastructure and you can read through the lists. We'll be exploring these community scale option that's a lot of activity in the next five years. It's really gonna be a strong push for implementation. The other recommendation we have is that the water task [10:28:37 AM] force continue. It would continue on a less frequent basis, instead of monthly meetings sometimes bimonthly meeting or biweekly meeting, we would go to more of a quarterly framework, but we have really a very thoughtful task force that's well-educated on these issues and we want their continued help as we move forward to implementing that. They also -- we want to continue to update our plan. Every five years weekend to undertake an update to our water forward plan, get in a natural rhythm of continuing to update our plan as we're going into the future. Everyone is interested in sts and how much is this plan gonna cost us, and we have that. Again, that's in your material, but this is a summary slide where we talk about the costs. We have it broken down both in terms of capital as well as o&m and we also have a summary of the acre feet of water, volume that those strategies would yield. I'm just gonna walk through this a little bit with you. But a part of the cost is continuing the programs that we're already doing. I've described that but over the next 20 years Austin water is going to continue its investments in advanced meter infrastructure and our water leak program. All good utilities replace waterlines, do leak detection strategies, they align waterlines, they work to manager water leaks. We're going to continue to do that. That's roughly $600 million of investment over the next 20 years that our utility would do irrespective of water forward. These are complimentary strategies no matter what. New initiatives that the utility would undertake from a capital perspective would be about 429 million of capital investment. The vast majority of that is asr. Asr is probably 80 to 90% of that investment. That's not in our plan now, other than planning, we have, like, roughly three to 5 million for that, but this would be the full implementation of asr by 2040. That's the bulk of that cost. There's private development cost. As we develop new ordinances [10:30:39 AM] and ask private development to use more rainwater, more stormwater, install new plumbing, more requirements to hook up to central reuse, that's gonna impose costs on new development. It's hard to estimate. We've estimated about 274 million of capital. All of these programs have o&m expenses also, you know, over the next 20 years there will be a need for staff to manage facilities and implement projects. There's gonna need to be some -- it's gonna be more challenging in the future with water. I mentioned the central library. When you go to the central library and you have all these diverse water supplies, it takes more effort to manage all of that, to kind of have the different water supplies, to have the filters cleaned, to manager those systems, to have a more infrastructure in your building. So there's additional o&m costs that the private sector will face with regard to those investments. I will say this isn't a rate strategy, and we'll be rendering this down into rates as we do our five and ten-year rate plans. We do anticipate several things happening. One, I don't anticipate any rate changes in the next couple/3 years. We've made a commitment to 0% rates, we did a rate reduction in 2018, 0% rate in 2019, committed to 0 percent in 2020 and that's not changing. This isn't going to have an impact in the short-term in terms of rate strategies. Clearly as you go farther out you're gonna have to work through rate issues. We'll be working very closely with the state of Texas to borrow money at the lowest rates. They've will have committed to borrow us 80 millions dollars at the lowest possible interest rates we can get. We're imagining projects like asr will be strong considerations for that type of low-interest funding. We'll be U csiapital recovery fees as we have been, as much as reasonable and feasible, to have capital recovery fees pay [10:32:40 AM] for appropriate portions of new infrastructure that we implement. It's not all new development, though, that as we adapt for climate change we would do these things irrespective, some of these this, of land development but where appropriate we'll be blending that into our capital recovery fees. We're gonna be retiring debt in the future. As you look out over the next 20 years there's gonna be considerable debt retirement, and when we retire debt, comes off the books, we'll be putting that back to work in recess resiliencyinvestments and we'll be managing this from an affordability perspective in addition to getting these projects done. As I mentioned, we have a few more steps to go. We've gone through all of our boards and commissions and task forces and have gotten just resounding approvals, unanimous approvals. If you saw that picture we were all smiling when we voted on this so, you know, after four years of effort I think we're really, really pleased. The council will have another discussion on the 27th. We're available for that at your work session. Then we have a vote on the 29th programmed for you with regards to that. And kind of the end of the rainbow here, I would say before we get into q&a, you know, a few closing thoughts. One, I would express as director my appreciation to everyone that participated on this, particularly Tracy and Mari, they were warriors. If you knew how much time they put into this over the last four years, you would be afraid. They really worked. [ Laughter ] Of course my task force represented here by chair and co-chair, literally thousands of hours of volunteer time, very faithful companions all throughout this almost four-year process. You can imagine the work that they've done. I was smiling, Marissa and Charlene both had babies during this time, and now they're both in high school. [ Laughter ] So -- no. Not quite. Not quite. But it was a long haul. You know, we were there and all the task force members I [10:34:41 AM] would thank and the community. You know, again, hundreds of community hours and involvement in this process. This plan is ambitious and is bold and it's the kind of thing, as Charlene said that, no city has attempted before. And when you do something like, that you're gonna have some challenges and you're gonna have some setbacks and you're gonna have a lot of policy discussion, and this is gonna be a lot of hard work. So I don't want you thinking today that, you know, this feels good but story is over. This is just the start of all of the hard work that we're gonna do. But we're ready for it. I think our community is ready for it. I know our task force is excited as we get into the implementation. And with that we would open it up to any questions you would have. >> Mayor Adler: All right, colleagues, so we have this set on our agenda for the work session in two weeks. I think that at a really high level if the staff was hoping for was identification of issues or things that they needed to make sure they cover or can respond to over the next two weeks. But not to treat this as kind of our exhaustive q&a one details of this. So we can get to the other things that we have, but it's coming back for that. I want to just kick it off by saying thanks so much for the work on this across multiple councils. And surely not anything more important that folks are working on in this city than this 100-year plan. I'd like to ear mark for me not necessarily to discuss today but maybe in two weeks the question of the business model of the water department and whether or not or how that evolves or changes over this period of time where we're looking to conserve more and more water. What is a business model that works with trying to sell less of what you sell to make income? So how do you diversify that? How do you start selling [10:36:44 AM] services? How do you -- the business model itself, how do we look at that evolving over a period of time? So I'd like to have something on that. To understand that better. Okay. Ann will go first. >> Kitchen: I'm just going to identify issues to be answered later or perhaps we can share information between now and the work session. So and I just -- I have two that I want to raise today. First I'd like to understand in more detail what we're looking at in terms of implementation and oversight over the next, you know, X number of years. So I'd like to understand if we're coming back later with a specific implementation plan, for example, like we've done around the housing or, you know, those kinds of things. So that's one -- and the related question to that is I'd like to understand the extent to which we can accelerate some of these recommendations. You know, we're growing very rapidly right now, and so I have some concern about the length of the time line. So I'd just like to understand what options we might have for accelerating some of this. So then my second question is just -- I'm curious and, again, you can speak to this later, but I'm curious about how our water forward planning aligns with our flood mitigation planning. And I understand they're different things, but to some extent, you know, we're talking about water, stormwater specifically for flood mitigation, I'm talking about flood mitigation beyond buyouts. I'm talking about the different kinds of mitigation strategies that our flood mitigation task force was involved in, and I'd like to understand how these -- you know, these two very critical activities on the part of the city align [10:38:45 AM] over time and how some of what we might be doing under water forward might be useful for flood mitigation, vice versa. Anyway, I'd like to understand how that aligns. So. . . >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you. Delia. >> Garza: On page 18, what are these units? Is that -- if this, I guess, regulation [indiscernible] That would be the cost to the development? Is that what those -- >> Councilmember, I couldn't quite hear you. >> Garza: Page 18. What are those? >> Mayor Adler: Page 18 of the briefing or the book? >> Garza: This book. >> You're talking about the unit cost that's stated at the bottom of the tables? >> Garza: Yes. >> What's included here is what we call the community cost so it include the cost to the developer and the cost to the utility for these lot scale options. In particular most of the costs, for example, an ordinance that would require an alternative water strategy, that would be mainly costs that would be borne on the developer side. So for this, for example, for rainwater harvesting at the lot scale, this is showing that it would cost $2,864 approximately per acre foot of water that is produced from that strategy per year. And just for some context there, an acre foot is about 325,800 gallons. >> Garza: Okay. I think what would be helpful as you continue the community conversation to give a -- maybe a more -- I know this is probably basic at your guys level, but a more basic understanding of what all these possible new regulations would cost new [10:40:48 AM] development. >> Mm-hmm. >> Garza: Then just broadly -- then it says require or incentivize. So is that decision being made in these coming up conversations in the next five years whether we require or whether we incentivize? >> Part of of that decision has been made in laying out this roadmap and this strategy framework. Part of the recommendation would be that we would require alternative water to be used on-site for larger commercial and multi-family developments, for new development. And then we're focusing incentives at existing development. So that split has kind of been targeted based on whether you're existing development, we're looking at incentives to try and encourage developments to take on these strategies and then ordinances targeted at new developments. >> Garza: Okay. So in the -- both at the end of this month in that will be requirements to implement some of these new regulations? >> No. I mean, this is just a plan and kind of a roadmap. As we ultimately work through recommendations on new ordinances and go through the stakeholder input and ultimately come back to boards and commissions and councils on all of that, you know, there's a lot of work ahead of us before -- this isn't, like, again, the end. It's just the starting of those things. This was just kind of the concepts through the planning that we outlined, but the details of exactly how all those lines are drawn isn't all sorted out yet. >> Garza: Okay. And then one concern I've heard is what these new requirements and new development -- the concern of maybe our workforce may not be ready for, for some of these things, so we would -- so I hope that that continues to be part of the conversation to make sure that any new requirements keep in mind that our workforce needs to be ready for that so we're not [10:42:49 AM] slowing down any kind of new development. And lastly, just generally, you know, I really appreciate the comments flipping the script. I think that's great. I think, you know, I appreciate it that you recognize that we're growing, we will continue to grow, and thinking of how we grow and how we make sure that we aren't going to other communities for water is very, very important. But when some of the examples given are buildings with -- that cost millions and millions and millions of dollars that were heavily subsidized by the taxpayers -- it was all taxpayer dollars. The library was all taxpayer dollars, and then hearing an example of a building in San Francisco where the median home price is over a million dollars I believe now, I'd like to know if there's examples, you know, with this affordable housing bond that we passed, we have an amazing opportunity to build more affordable housing, I'm concerned how we're getting the best bang for our buck if we're starting to require all this additional that could cost, you know, developments like that. So if there's a way to tier developments where, you know, if it's a affordable housing project. You know, I'm somewhere between incentivizing and requiring because I don't want us to be -- San Francisco is great but I want working families still to be able to live in Austin and I'm afraid commercial buildings and multi-family are where renters live and renters are people who can't afford to buy homes. If we're increasing the cost of of that it's a concern. Obviously environmental concerns, protecting our water. I think another part of this conversation, you know, has to be in those -- in new developments, in these P.U.D.S, maybe that needs to be talked about, how we -- the landscaping there, you know, we need it flip the switch on what people think a single-family home is. It shouldn't need a giant yard anymore. [10:44:50 AM] It can be row houses like is being done in Miller. Anyway, thank you for all your work, and congratulations on your new babies. [ Laughter ] >> Mayor Adler: Jimmy, then Alison. >> Flannigan: I think Delia pretty much covered what was in my head as well. Thank you, councilmember, for laying that out so eloquently. I wanted to add on your public engagement, and you guys did such a great job reaching out to the community, I still have constituents coming up to me saying how much they appreciated that meeting. I think it was almost a year ago now it feels. It's something the community really appreciated and just to double down on Delia's comments, I think having this plan approved as we go through whatever process the manager is going to bring to us next year, I think it's going to be very valuable so we can look at all of these pieces together and ensure that as the city grows we're keeping that chart level about total water usage even as the city grows. I think it's a really testament to what this city is willing to do, really putter our shoulder to the stone. >> Mayor Adler: Alison and Ms. Houston. >> Alter: Thank you. I want to say I share the mayor's concern about understanding better the evolving business model and I think I've talked to most of you about that, and so I would like to better understand how we maintain Austin water as we decrease the amount of water and -- that we're producing over time, which is a good thing, but it does require us to adapt the business model. I would like to better understand the assumptions that went into some of the timing for implementing the different pieces. I'm eager for us to get moving and moving more quickly, but I don't understand some of the assumptions. I understand that we need to stage it and we can't do everything at once, but I would like to better understand those assumptions and what was driving some of those choices. One thing that I'm interested in seeing is that there may be a step before [10:46:51 AM] the ordinance that requires it, which is incentivization for new buildings and some of that has to happen with demonstration of best practices and demonstration projects like we're doing with the development center, but that it will be easier to adopt an ordinance if we have examples of this ultimately being cost effective and ultimately making sure also that we have the workforce that's prepared to do the kind of work. So one of the things that I'm thinking of potentially bringing forward with the plan is some direction with respect to workforce development. We don't have the plumbers who know how to do this work, and that's really important if we're gonna start to make some steps forward on these things, and that's an investment that the city can make that achieves multiple goals at once, which I always favor. The other thing that I wanted to raise with my colleagues and I'm not sure exactly where it fits in with this process for adopting water forward but it's something I've been thinking about for a long time is that we don't have a good council process for oversight of Austin water. And I don't mean that into pinative way but we don't have an opportunity even to champion things through a council oversight process, and so I will be putting together either an ifc or bringing forward an option when we redo our council committees so that we have some more oversights of Austin water. And as we adopt this plan I think that's gonna be really important that we make sure at each step that we have those check-ins with council. I think that, you know, Austin water is a huge part of the budget, and, you know, as you said, it's Austin water day, but we don't really have that opportunity to have the discussions to champion and to look back at what you're doing. And I think we need to have [10:48:52 AM] more of those opportunities because this is critical for the future of the city as this report and plan recognizes. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Ms. Houston. Then Ellen. Then Greg. >> Houston: First of all, I want to thank you for all the hard work that you've been doing. Some of you for a very long time. And you can tell it in this document. So I really appreciate it. Clint Dawson, who is my committee person, enjoyed being on the committee and learned a lot from the experts and the conversations that you had about water. Because if we don't have enough water we can't bring but so many people into Austin, and so water is a critical feature. What I'd like to know is about the aquifer storage and recovery. I realized the Wilcox aquifer is very large and how do we keep other people from piping, from getting the water that we're reclaiming out of that? So that's one of the things I'd like more information on. >> Mayor Adler: Ellen. >> Troxclair: Again, wanted to dish love it when I can agree with Delia. [ Laughter ] But I really agreed with her comments on the additional costs to developments, I mean, not just the affordable housing units with capital a, but there's other things that are being developed that are more kind of market -- the lower end of the market rent that I think these additional costs might really impact. So and if we can -- is it possible for us to get a better idea of the impact that this might have on rates going forward? I know that this is still a preliminary plan and it's really hard to get specific about what that might look like, but you do have kind of a general outline of the [10:50:52 AM] central costs which looks like a billionish dollars and then the additional development costs on top of that. And how I feel like I would need to know what that looks like for the end of the repairs. So if any information that you can provide us within, you know, the next briefing would be really useful. And then I wanted to understand, what does it mean when you say not -- we don't want to take water from other places? I mean, is it -- I'm trying to understand how this all plays into -- especially coming off the conversation that we just had about the kind of water production side of it and the water that we're treating and providing to the community, how -- okay. I'm struggling to articulate this. Like, are we not -- how do we have this conversation -- it seems like the elephant -- that there's a missing piece to this puzzle and it's not because -- and it's a new piece, right? You all have been working on this for four years before we had this water issue, so this is something that was completed and on our way to us and wasn't really -- this conversation wasn't happening in the context of the boil water notice sosy completely understand that. But now that our community just has gone through that, there are a lot of questions out there about are we going to increase the capacity of our water treatment plants? Are we going to update our technology? What does that look like? Unfortunately, just because of the timing, this plan doesn't really incorporate or answer a lot of those questions. It's focused a lot on conservation and some new ideas, which I think are also important and great, but how do I articulate this plan to I think a constituency that is mainly focused now on the city [10:52:53 AM] being able to produce more water and have -- and protect against those kind of emergency times that rarely happen but, you know, happened recently? Can you just help me with how I should think about this? Because it's hard for me to think about a billion dollars being invested and all these additional costs and not having water capacity -- investment in our water treatment plants as part of of that conversation. >> We'll follow up, obviously, at our next council session too, but some quick comments. One, this is a water resource plan. It's focused on kind of the natural water resources that we have and managing how we invest in those and improve the resiliency 37 it's not an infrastructure structure plan in terms of technologies and how much tank storage we have. Clearly, these strategies are related to all range of issues the utility faces but I think there will be more particular findings and discussion points yet to come from our work on breaking down the boil water notice and what happened. And in terms of your first question you asked, like, what does it mean to take water or something to that effect? Was that -- >> Troxclair: Yeah. I guess I've heard that phrase said a couple of times and so I just want to understand really what we're saying what we use that term. >> I'll respond to that. So there are a number of very [indiscernible] Projects being developed, many of them originating from the Wilcox aquifer to our east in bastrop and other counties nearby that are taking significant amounts of groundwater and pushing that water to both San Antonio and fast-growing communities to our west and to our south. And so that was the sort of project that I think precipitated the last task force that was created in [10:54:54 AM] 2014, was the recognition that if our Lakes were at a third capacity and that was our primary source of water that we might be in a situation where if the Lakes dropped to 10% we were going to have to implement something on an emergency basis that was probably going to be a project that really was a water mining import project like those that are being pursued by others in the surrounding communities. Those are very controversial projects. We have a number of people on our task force who are groundwater experts, and there's significant concern that those are not sustainable projects over the long-term so they could give you 30 to 50 years of water supply but not be reliable 100 years out. So hopefully that provides a little bit of context. >> Troxclair: So it didn't -- I guess I wanted to understand -- it doesn't necessarily mean that we're closing the door on additional capacity at our water treatment plants? That's not what you were -- okay. I just wanted to understand that we weren't taking that off the table because we hadn't talked about it in this conversation. Okay. Thank you. I don't know if you had any -- maybe it's more appropriate in the follow-up, but I don't know if you had any other thoughts that kind of speak more generally to how we think about this plan in the context of our water treatment infrastructure. Or whether that should be kind of a part of our total cost conversation going forward. >> I really don't see this plan in terms of a boil water treatment capacity, technology, polymer, storage discussion. I think those are -- there's some complementary parts but I think those are fundamentally two different questions. This isn't a plan designed to respond to the boil water notice? >> Troxclair: Oh, I understand that, yeah. >> Or evaluate short or [10:56:55 AM] long-term changes we would consider with regards to that boil water experience, other than storage is a risk that we have, and this has a substantial storage component to it. >> Troxclair: Okay. >> Asr. >> Troxclair: I guess they're connected in the fact that we're having a community conversation about how to plan for us to have adequate water supply in the future. And so I am just saying that my constituents are going to ask me when they see this, okay, great, y'all are going to invest a billion-plus dollars in water capacity going forward, how much are we putting -- how much capacity are we adding to our water treatment plant? And it's not a question that's answered in here, and so I just think that that's going to be -- I feel like the community is going to be asking that question. >> So a couple of things. One of them is a question of water infrastructure. And, you know, we keep talking about water treatment, and that -- maybe there's an impression that we've settled on a solution that increasing water treatment capacity at our plants is the solution that was going to be recommended from the boil water notice. We haven't reached a conclusion like that and quite frankly I think it's unlikely that that's the strategy we would be recommending. But this plan isn't -- isn't trying to but this plan trying to get at a water infrastructure issue. I think that's something we'll have to work through in the after processes and the llano river upset and the things we need to do with our water infrastructure and not our water resources. Those are two different questions, although similar. >> Troxclair: Is sounds like you would move forward with this plan regardless of what the outcome is of the other conversation. I'm thinking of it in a more holistic. I think we're taking a piece of the pie. >> Thank you for your question, councilmember. I think it's easy for us because we've been thinking [10:58:56 AM] about this for a long time to compartmentalize because this is a water supply plan and how we're G have water in the future and the boil water notice was this other event this happened and of course your constituents connect them because it's the water that comes out of their tap and that they expect to see. Totally legit question. I think if I was responding to questions, I would connect the fact that the water forward plan increases our community resiliency and we can definitely talk more about the ways that it does that. And it will allow us to respond more anymorebly to those kind of situations that we can't necessarily anticipate in the future because beer not going to rely -- we're not going to rely on a single source of water. What Greg is saying about the water treatment plants and the capacity and what's going to happen there, that's -- we don't get into that because we're talking strictly the water plan. And the capacity is over here and we haven't dug into that part. >> But it's important to recognize it is an important question. Looking back on it we weren't looking at flood resilience or extreme events leading to treatment capacity challenges. The benefit of a plan like this is through that infusion, the asr project that we talked about and where we could have that source of water for the highland Lakes you could have ridden out that two week process with your stored water. If we had more systems, more buildings connected to purple pipe, the capacity to pressurize that purple pipe to distribute water is based on water treatment capacity so that probably would not have been affected. If you had more buildings that were capturing their own water on-site and treating it, those buildings would not have been affected. So I think your question is important as we talk about community resilience, we should be able to think [11:00:58 AM] about lots of different scenarios, including future Tur events, but -- purred bit events, even dam breaks. We need to look at all system plans and how that would contribute to system resilience. I think your question is important. >> Councilmember, we can expand on that in two weeks at least how some of these strategies fit into the kind of things that we experience during the boil water notice. I think that's clearly something we can do. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you, Greg. >> Casar: First, I want to commend all of the work that you have done and I think my comment is to both echo what has been set by my colleagues like councilmember Garza and Flannigan, but also to add maybe a different take on it that would involve I think the city manager outside of just thinking about the water department because I think to summarize, I think generally what was said is that of course we know if they want to be both a sustain city that includes all different kinds of people, then we need to make it easier to have attached to lower cost housing types. And we know that the cost of those and the burdens of those are too high in the city and we want to reduce that. So I think one of the concerns that was brought up is this would make some of that harder. And maybe it would. But since water is such a baseline basic need that we have to get this done. We are made of water. I don't think it could be more obvious than that. I would encourage the manager to think about how it is that we can do this and what other things are lower priority that we can make change so that on that we are making sure that we are including more of our workforce, more of our effort working people inside of the city while getting this done. I think we'll have to work [11:03:00 AM] harder and make change in order to address the water issue so what are the things that we can peel away that are lower priority than the water supply so that while we're on that that we're planning for our water future, which we have to do, and ultimately still reducing the barriers and the cost of getting those types of developments that are better than the expensive environmentally costly, unsightly, big single-family home on top of demolished small single-family home that we're getting. I don't think that's ING that the water department can do on its own, but I think the manager would need to look at y'all's recommendations and hopefully we pass this plan in the overall crafting of how is it that we get both, securing our water future and being one of the most bold, innovative cities in the country when it comes to water, but at the same time not just being a city 100 years from now where it's only rich folks that get to enjoy that future. I think that would take a bigger effort to reduce that while addressing this issue. I appreciate y'all's work, but we just have to take it into that broader context. So thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Kathie. >> Tovo: Yeah. I wanted to add my thanks both to our staff and task force members. I appreciate the history and the context you provided and just to get back to councilmember troxclair's question, I had brought forward the resolutions that our vice-chair referenced that created the task force and then made sure that there was a community task force that would be guiding the consultant's work throughout this plan. But I think -- I use this as an example sometimes talking to community members about how lucky we are in stint to have such -- people who are really experts in some of these issues who are willing [11:05:00 AM] to dedicate their time to community because it was the community who stepped up and said we need to look at an integrated water resource plan. And in looking through some of those early materials I came across a letter that was sent to the council in 2014 that was the impetus for the solution, and it was the save our springs, environment Texas and Paul Robbins, who is with us today. And urging, urging that we craft such a plan, and it was in direct response to some of the conversations going on about importing water from other areas, specifically the [indiscernible] Wilcox. I want to thank our community for saying and -- really getting the council's attention and saying there are better ways of having this conversation and here's one and then sticking with it. And some of you have stuck with it as you've indicated for all these years and we're really grateful. I'm excited about the plan that's resulted. And I think the recommendations that are coming forward are really going to be important for our community. I did make copies of that letter if anybody wants to see it. I would also just reference in the Texas tribune at the time in 2014 talked about what the impact is on local residents of those decisions, of those potential decisions to import water out of their area into other areas, and you know, it is a complicated question. So I just so appreciate that one of the guiding principles was the reliance on local resources. I think that's critical role to a sustainable future and to an equitable future both for austinites, but also for those residents in our surrounding areas. I think Mr. Meszaros you've answered some of my questions. One of the things that I would like to continue to dive into is very similar so what councilmember kitchen mentioned about the timing of some of these. I appreciate that -- initially when I reviewed the plan it looked as if landscape transformation ordinances were on a later timetable. [11:07:01 AM] It seems to me from the presentation you've offered today that that is actually kind of a first phase of work. So I'm not -- if that's -- >> Yeah. We would begin immediate work on enhancing our landscape transformation incentives and then a few years down the line a little bit later we would begin work on the landscape transformation ordinance. And that would be targeting single-family residentials since there is a current landscape ordinance that's targeted at commercial and multi-family developments. And just to add to the conversation, in your reports there is an 11 by 17 packet at the very end. This is kind of an implementation timeline that does lay out how we would sequence strategies and all of the steps that we would take at a high level still to implement the strategies. And each of the strategies includes things like doing additional stakeholder outreach and further engaging our communities to gather those diverse voices to influence how we would implement those strategies at a tactical level. >> Tovo: I hope we can talk about timing especially since in the time since the water forward draft was finish and now we've gotten even more dire information about climate change and how our communities will be tasked responding to those changes and their impact on the environment. I regard those changes of things that we have control over as really a high priority and I do-- I want to have that conversation in a little bit more depth next time. And I think I'll just leave it there for now except to say I think the plan may go into this to some extent and I just -- I believe vice-chair walker mentioned it, that connection between our energy choices and our [11:09:02 AM] water choices is so critical so I'm glad that those have -- that Austin energy has been involved in some of these conversations because there is a lot of water use in some of our forms of energy that we utilize just as there is energy used in some of our water choices. So really I think that is critical for us to continue to think about how we're -- how those -- how we are thinking broad by about these decisions as utilities, but also as the council. But again thank you. I think this has been a tremendous success and I'm again very grateful to the community members who stepped up and said -- suggested this path and the staff for working so closely and so collaboratively over the last several years on crafting a plan that I think really is top-notch. >> Mayor Adler: Leslie and then Ann. >> Pool: Thanks. When y'all come back for the second briefing, if you're not able to answer this here today, maybe we could get a little bit further context, but region K, how does our work as a city on the Colorado river affect the downstream businesses, residents and of course the ecosystem at the mouth of the river and to the gulf of Mexico and the various industries, seafood and so forth that that's their livelihood. And we know that the instream flows are key and significant to maintaining the health of the Colorado autism along its entire length. We're just one little piece of it way up north. I would like to get some context if I could. Jennifer, are you on the region K stakeholder's group? >> Yes, I serve on the region a water planning group as the environmental rep Andreas is a serves as the large aa and Theresa serves as the larger rep. [11:11:03 AM] And it is -- they put together regional plans that then feed up through the Texas water development board and to our state water plan, which has a 50 year planning horizon. So there is definitely a nexus between the two. For example, Austin water would make sure that the strategies in water forward are reflected in the region K plan. Once adopted, and some of these strategies are already in there. So it's Al more high level planning effort that aggregates into the state water plan. >> Pool: And that's been around for even 10 years, if not more. >> It was passed -- it was implemented by the Texas legislature in '97, so it's been about 20 years. So we're in the planning process right now developing water management strategies. And Theresa has been involved in that since it began and I've been involved for quite awhile. I had a child during that process and he is actually in high school. [Laughter]. So if that gives you any indication. [Laughter]. But yeah, so there's definitely lots of processes going on. I will say one thing, I appreciated mayor pro tem bringing up like the letter and stuff. I know that several folks around here know Dr. Kent butler who used to be in regional planning at UT. I have helped us to you all, but back in 2010 and later just talking about conversations about doing it -- how Austin really needed to do a planning process like this and he really kind of helped plant the seed for that for a lot of us. It was interesting to me to come back and look at my files for some stuff on the Kent butler summit to see some of the letters we had drafted to the city to start a process like this. So this is also a legacy of his as well and his fine work that he's done on water [11:13:05 AM] planning. >> Pool: Thanks for that and all the concerted efforts everybody has brought to the table. Thank you. >> Andy and then Pio -- Ann and then Pio. >> Kitchen: You can go to Pio first because I've already asked. >> Mayor Adler: Pio, adopt to go? >> Renteria: I want to thank you for all the hard work you've done. My question is I want to understand the [indiscernible] That you have here on page 18 and 19. And I know that the target is 2015, the yield, and they're like an ac condensate that's reused. It says 1,500-acre feet per year. And you're saying that the unit cost is 2,702. What does that actually mean? It means, every house, unit or what? >> >> The unit cost is for all of the water that's produced. We take of let's say all the estimated number of systems that would be required to produce that amount of water. And then we divide that cost, that total cost, by that amount of water that's produced. So it just gives you an indication of how much it costs per gallon or per acre foot. This is in acre feet, to produce that water. And it's what you can use to compare strategies one to another. >> Renteria: So why you are going to be running your air conditioning anyway. So what is the cost -- is that just to process and clean it? >> It's the pipes and the storage, the treatment systems that you would have to implement. I think it might be worth -- maybe the next time we meet with you to translate some of the stuff into goals. I know outside of the [11:15:06 AM] profession nobody thinks in acre feet. I can imagine on some of these things that a unit means a housing unit that this looks really scary. But that's more than 3 yeti thousand gallons of -- 380,000 gallons of water that would be at that price. Jennifer and I spent some time with county commissioner Shea as they adopted a plan and a contract for the new county courthouse. And did work also with bill Moriarty on our task force and the consultants that were designing the courthouse to look at pay back periods for water capture on site, including Ken den satellite, storm water, rainwater. And were able to get to a point where they implemented a lot of the systems on site and based on the cost savings of how much less water they would be buying from Austin water. So maybe it will help to bring some of the case studies in next time because there really is an opportunity for a lot of new development to save money. Certainly within the lifetime of the building by implementing some of this stuff. >> Renteria: Yeah, that would be very helpful because I think people might see it -- I was looking at it and thought what does this really mean. That would be really helpful. >> It's certainly not a matter of you just pay and don't get anything out of it. You buy less water from the city, you may have less wastewater discharge fees. It's complicated. It's not going to be cheaper in the future, but there are trade-offs. >> And we did similar work for the planning and development center with planning how we were going to size that system and understanding what the Republican on investment would be for that black water system that's going to be in that system. Just for some context, though, these numbers are based on estimates that we had developed of how much it would cost for each system so we had a representative [11:17:07 AM] system and those costs are actually in the report document. There's an appendix with what we called option characterization sheets. And in those there's a per system cost for all of the alternative water systems. So we can make that clear where those numbers are so you can see the kind of numbers we were using, how much it would cost for an individual rainwater harvesting system or for an individual ac condensate reuse system. It's in the report. >> Thank you. I'd like to see T numbers. >> Mayor Adler: Ann. >> Kitchen: Thank you. There was one more subject that I wanted to flag for further discussion later and that has to do with our targets. I'd like to drill down a little -- I'd like to drill down more to understand what we're setting for targets for gallons per capita daily and whether we're setting specific goals. And my understanding is perhaps we've already met our 2020 goal so my question is what can we do to accelerate those goals if it's appropriate. I'd like to flag that for further discussion. And then finally, I talked earlier asking about the relationship between this plan and flood mitigation. I also wanted to point out -- and you all may be aware of this. I understand that the city will be update be our citywide flood mitigation plan and may have already started that process. I'm not sure where they are in that process. But that's a major update to the existing plan. I'm just wanting to make sure that we're aligning our planning where it's appropriate. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: All right. Thank you all for your work. Oop, mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: You've addressed this today, but I think the questions will continue to surface about what of the recommendations in the water [11:19:07 AM] forward plan could have been utilized in the boil water situation? I mean, you've addressed that on the aquifer storage and want other strategies for water supply, but-- I think it would be worth having that conversation in summary form again because it continues to arise in the community. And I guess as we transition to the council agenda, I'm interested in knowing -- I'm interested in hearing from our water utility staff what in number 41 is different from what you've just covered in terms of the intent with the after action report and water forward. So if we can do that before they all leave, that would be helpful. >> Mayor Adler: So manager, I think the question that the mayor pro tem was asking is what, if anything, in item 41 on the calendar this week isn't already being covered in the -- >> Tovo: In the planned after action report and in the water forward plan. Because it seemed to me add least in the version I read that it was asking for an after action report, which was your intention. And it's typical. And then the other part was asking for how we plan for sustainable water usage, which is in the water forward. So maybe before our staff leave we could get answered whether there's anything in number 41 that is not covered in both of those projects. >> Mayor Adler: Are you able to respond to that? >> Mayor, mayor pro tem, I'll look into a side by side to see, but there was something inconsistent or something that we weren't going to be doing anyway that was in number 41 so we were comfortable with having that move forward if that was the will of the council. >> Tovo: Okay. Then I'll look back and make sure there's an acknowledgment that this work is being covered. I think it's a better practice of the council if we're bringing forward [11:21:09 AM] resolutions directing work that's already ongoing or planned or finished in this case, that we be very transparent with the public about that. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. All right. Thank you very much. All right, colleagues, it's just a little past 11:15. Do you think we could do government that works between 11 and noon. We only have two pulled items, those are Jimmy's items on zoning. So maybe we could do government that works between now and noon if we want to go that long and handle those last two items you pulled and then go into executive session because they will be quick. Staff, do you want to take us through -- Elaine, hi, do you want to take us through the government that works item? >> Thank you, good morning. This morning we wanted to cover for you what we had distributed to you on Friday so that you could have an early look at the conversation. I want to cover briefly what we heard on the last work session. On the boards and commissions discussion. And generally just let you tell us if we accurately captured your conversation. If there are any corrections we need to make we'll be glad to do that. But in particular I wanted to cover what we took away as our nix steps as staffing to do the work and report back to council, and that was on the second page of that item, and so we -- and we actually did identify [11:23:10 AM] lead departments for those, but we didn't put a timeline to them because in some cases we need to scope the projects. We'd like in response to what we heard we'd like to develop and maintain a board and commission dataset, and the initial data would be taken back to the audit and finance committee to look at how frequently the boards and commissions have met, when they canceled, reasons they may have canceled for lack of a quorum, resolutions that they produced, demographic information on the members as well as the quantity of speakers. And we would first look to their annual work plans to pull information that is very useful. Much of this maybe captured there, as well as working with the office of performance management and the city clerk together to get the initial dataset. Once we're into this pro would look towards how we might maintain it on a regular ongoing basis for you. That one we need to scope out before we can give you a timeline. We'd also like to work on alignment. We heard you say you wanted to align the committees with the strategic outcomes and the boards and commissions as well, align the boards and commissions to the committees that we would align up and down to the strategic outcomes. We also heard that there was a need for a training curriculum and the implementation plan for both the boards and commissions members as well as the support staff to the boards and commissions. This work we think would best be lead by the city clerk and the law department. Much of it includes Robert's rules of order and how you set up an agenda and the posting material, that sort of thing. Then since the surveys, the clerk had mentioned she had done some surveys of the boards and commissions but also staff to find out how [11:25:12 AM] we might improve the process and the support of the boards and commissions, we would ask the clerk to continue work on that. And there was also a comment that we have the budget office work on how we might better use our boards and commissions during our bum process and they can get them solved at an earlier -- on an early early timeline for feedback into the manager's proposed budget. So if you have any discussion on that item, the boards and commissions item, or if you're okay with those marching off on that work plan? >> Alter: Thank you. I just wanted to add for the dataset that there are boards and commissions that do things other than just pass resolutions that are important to the productivity of the council as a whole, whether it's a planning commission or a parks board. They're doing things that then doesn't have to come to our plate, but provides oversight and resolutions as an allowable measure of that. >> This is not an exhaustive list. We'll look at master plans, rcas and other types of work they might be undertaking. >> Alter: Great, thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Jimmy. >> Flannigan: On number 3 on the next steps I would add helping connect our boards and commissions members to other training opportunities. Maybe not necessarily provided by the city. Leadership training, other types of trainings that -- I think we've all certainly appointed folks that it is their desire to be more active in community and this is how they want to give their time, but would not just benefit from a Robert's rules of Robert's rules of order training, but maybe leadership Austin and other opportunities to give folks that training. We could even have a boards and commissions toastmaster's club for all that matters because a lot of these folks haven't been public speakers before and now they're in roles that include public speaking. [11:27:13 AM] >> Mayor Adler: Anything else on the next items here? Ann? >> Kitchen: I don't know if we specifically talked about this, but it was a question that I was thinking about. And that is the -- is there potential at some point in the future to use a message board type of activity so that boards and commissions can talk to each other? Because right now they have the same quorum kinds of issues. And so I don't know -- I'm not familiar enough with the state law to know if that only covered electives or not, but I would like to explore what -- I'd like for us to explore the extent to which we could offer that kind of resource and/or if it might require any kind of legislative changes. And I would be thinking in terms of members of particular boards communicating with themselves, but also communicating across boards because there is interplay between boards and commissions. >> Mayor Adler: I'm still interested in trying to figure out - - I don't know if this rises to the level of a next step for staff, but if it's the council, the new council in January, trying to make sure that we can collectively make these appointments so that we actually have the diversity of people and ideas that we want to have on boards and commissions. And the current process for everybody is just to appoint their own person and then they get together and we see what happened. I'm not sure is the optimal way to do that. >> Kitchen: Mayor, can I ask a question? Does that include -- I'm not sure -- I'm not sure I saw it in our next steps, but maybe it goes under item -- it is, I'm sorry. The demographic information of members. When you're looking at demographic information I [11:29:14 AM] would like to be sure we include geography as well as what we might traditionally consider demographics. So that all parts of the city -- data about all parts of the city are captured. >> It sounds good. >> Mayor Adler: All right, thank you. Let's go into today's topic. >> Okay. The next piece would be a bet after facilitated discussion. We would have suggested some -- the topic is items from council, it was one of the high ranked items that when we surveyed the council sew that is the topic of the next section. We have offered some facilitated questions to maybe start the conversation amongst the councilmembers. And Kim and I have worked on this. The first -- we gave you these on Friday as well. If you haven't seen them, we'll repeat them here. And I'll let Kim lead this section. We've got a couple of examples under each of these. I will let her lead with a question and then follow with some conversation of the council. >> Kim Oliveras, information officer. Similar to the last discussion we have three prompts here and I'll just highlight the first few. First how might we improve the items from council process to accomplish your goals and objectives? The examples that we note are in particular relate to a work plan or policy agenda similar to what the city auditor's does with their work plan where they are very detailed about the number of hours that they have available to budget for audits and then how they spread it out amongst different projects, would something like that be applicable four for the ifcs. Another example of possible improvement would be taking steps to ensure that there's an adequate time frame for collaboration between council and staff in the development of the ifcs [11:31:15 AM] before they're actually acted upon. That was something that we had received comments on from several of you during our one on ones. The second question is some ifcs require a considerable amount of time to complete, whether it's through staff time or having to hire consulting services. So the question is how might we improve the ifc process and deadlines so council has adequate information before taking action. And the last question again during our one on ones, there were multiple comments about a need for a better means to track the status of the work taking place in response to the various ifcs. So as we look at a possibility redesigning that ifc status report we listed out several elements that were discussed, but we wanted to hear what were most important to you. For example, accessibility online, searchable keywords, the frequency of the status updates a means of tracking the memos that are sent out, and then any other items that you might have. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Conversation on ifcs? Jimmy. >> Flannigan: I'm really interested in the resource impact stuff and I've talked to y'all before about that and drafted some resolutions so that effect and my office keeps asking the Q and as to try and tease out owe know partnership with staff, what would it take to answer the question about how much it would take to answer the question. It's very meta. And some of it was a little harder than we thought and some easier than we thought. And it's been a productive back and forth with staff about them even figuring out how to know what things will take. But I think 1 and 3 are really tied together. I don't know that annual work plan for our offices is really realistic, but the -- knowing how many -- what kind of resource is going to be required is also important in context to what resources are already [11:33:16 AM] allocated. So to say it's going to take 1,000 hours of staff time is a random number if I don't know that the limit is 1,000 hours or everything is already allocate and that becomes a budget question as we head into a budget question to say as a Kuhn do we want to allocate more resources so we can do more ifcs are do we want to allocate more resources. Our ability to tie our hands is limited, but I think some system related to number 3 that's not so much like a memo update, but like a living document, some online place that we can go, that the community can go to understand the amount of resources currently allocated to this type of work and a lot of the ifcs we pass are exploratory and we'll go off and figure out a thing and come back to us and that will provide context to the resources we're asking to add to that list. I think to me they're really tied. >> Mayor Adler: Comment on ifcs? Alison? >> Alter: I appreciate the work on this and I too would like more of the sense of the resources involved with any given ifc. I don't think an annual work plan is going to be feasible. There's a part of this discussion that for me is missing which is that there's a lack of charity right now if you have to do an ifc to get something done or not. We went through a whole strategic planning process that was supposed to lead to us focusing on these strategic outcomes. In order to get anything done in those strategic outcomes do we now also have to do ifcs. And I do not have any clarity whatsoever, especially going through the budget process over where we're going with that. And [11:35:17 AM] we need to have some clarity otherwise we're all going to just do ifcs which I don't know is always the best use of our time. An ifc when it's very specific to a district and not necessarily resource intensive, is not always the best use of everyone's time. And often there are conversations where something gets done. You don't get the vote, you don't get to claim the credit in the public, but there are costs when we do the ifcs that are really much more about claiming credit than they are about actually getting anything done. And it feels like we're a little bit out of whack and out of balance and I'm not sure how we get back to that point. My hope was with the strategic planning and having the strategic planning process is that was a way that we could be accomplishing things without having to do ifcs on everything. But given the recent budget I'm not sure where we've landed on that. And I would like some clarity on that moving forward from staff because if it's going to be all ifcs all the time, then we're going to have even more of a problem moving forward, managing our time. >> Mayor Adler: I share some of the same thoughts, but I think you articulated some of my concern really well. The process feels a little ad hoc, and my hope was that the strategic planning process that we went through would actually focus us and tailor us and then we could consider ifcs or those concepts in the context of whatever it is that -- whatever strategic objective that's supposed to be addressing. And if it's not already part of what staff is doing or [11:37:17 AM] what the city is doing to have that conversation, that context, and then just generally -- and I know we've talked about this before. Ifc comes up and I haven't had my head in it for the two months or three months or eight months that the sponsoring councilmember has. Or involved in the conversations with staff or with stakeholders about what the topic is. And two weeks is barely enough time to be able to reach out to stakeholders and get people involved. So I think we've dealt with that as a group in two ways so far. One is we moved to a two-week scheduling so at least it wouldn't be four days to respond to an ifc. You would have eight days or 10 days to be able to respond to it. That made it better for me because it gives mow more of a time to be able to reach out to stakeholders and acquaint myself. But still doesn't seem like enough relative to folks that have spent months or years working on that topic. The second way is to make them less prescriptive. Someone comes up with an idea and they have identified a challenge and a solution to the challenge and we ask staff to move forward on that. I think council has been pretty good at not making it too prescriptive so it introduces the topic and allows for multiple solutions or resolutions or comments including the one that's looked at. But even with that when there's only 10 days it's hard to catch up to see if there's another idea that you get similar review and similar analysis or additional direction going to the staff with respect to it. So I don't know what you do with all that stuff but if we were going to come up with an ifc process there's a kind of community vetting or staff review or something that may be going on, but we [11:39:20 AM] don't see if you're not part of the group that's moving that forward. And then the last thing is on number 3 an online tracking of ifcs I think is really important. Right now I think there's a PDF that goes out to a limited number of people. I don't think it should go out to a limited amount of people. I think it should be online so anybody can access it and reference it and see where something is. Ann? >> Kitchen: I just wanted to add something with regard to the number 3 if you haven't talked about it already. And that's -- I think that it's absolutely -- it's really essential that we have this available online because it's important for the public as well as for us. And you know, right now unless you know -- I'm a member of the public. Unless I know what council meeting something was passed on, I can't find it. You know, and so -- or it's very difficult to find it, I should say. So I think -- I would add an F, I guess, or add to the other, searchable by councilmember. I think that -- or district. I think that members of the public should be able to search for what their district has -- ifcs their district has worked on, in addition to the other searchable by key word I think is important too. So -- >> Mayor Adler: Kathie? >> Tovo: I want to underscore the importance of that too and to get some sense of timeline on it because this is a request that members of the public and councilmembers have made for years. And I'd be interested to know kind of how far along we are on it. We have the kiur process but the only can't access, only certain staff members. How quickly could we get on this database so that people can track both councilmembers and members of the public can track where it is in the process. [11:41:21 AM] >> This is one where we really need some scoping meetings with staff and ctm staff. There may be some initial data that we can push out in an online format quicker. And then build on it and that would be our hope just like the memos that we implement it very quickly and we're working on getting the text into the emails. So we really have to scope some of this first. And that old system. That old system, we just haven't had the meeting with the right people in the room to find out how we can download data from that in the reports. I have run the reports. They're not very friendly. >> Tovo: And I wonder -- because probably four years ago my office asked the agenda staff to look into it. There may be some of those early groundwork conversations that could be resurfaced. I mean, it seems like at the time we asked city manager to look into this issue and so there may be some of those initial -- some of that initial thinking through. And I just want to continue to say that budget -- I find the budget -- budget question search database so super user friendly and such a great -- you can do keyboard, you can do -- key word, you can do by year, by councilmember. I don't know if that translates well into this need, but it seems like a very good format to consider at reinvestment and with regard to ifcs, it's not clear to me whether I need to weigh in right now on this piece or not, but just to say that a critical amount of the important work that we do are council happens through ifcs and so I absolutely want the ability to continue to do them. And you know, we just heard an capable in our previous briefing where actually the city was moving in a very different direction and it took the community staffing up. And the directions from council and the resolutions [11:43:22 AM] by council to try to shift that. So I'm happy to understand how we get realistic understandings of what the time -- what the time requirements would be from our staff at the time where we're making those decisions or we have a process -- you know, very often the staff will come back and say we can't do it on this deadline. We're asking to extend it. Well, maybe in certain cases it's appropriate for them to come back and ask for the council to weigh in again on whether given -- now that they've scoped it more carefully it's going to be this amount of time and it's going to take these resources, can you please confirm for us that you want to continue on. That this continues or remains a council priority. I'm happy to have those kinds of checkpoints back in on projects that passed as ifcs that turned out to be very large and time consuming or expensive. But again, I just think it's fundamental to how we initiate policy action here and we need the ability to continue to do so. So those are my initial thoughts on ifcs. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Leslie? >> Pool: I really like the accessible online searchable by key word and sort by councilmember. And maybe even capture the co-sponsors on initiatives. It might be helpful in two years, four years on on what was accomplished and who led on what and what the ultimate outcome was. I know one of the newspapers has a voter aggregator, I guess it is,ut it doesn't -- it occurs the items that they are focusing on not necessarily everything that was done. And so to the extent that we're able to have this searchable data as an archive -- database as an archive it helpful to everybody now and in the future. I would also like to ensure that whatever we do with items from council that we don't hamstring ourselves or [11:45:23 AM] tie our hands in any way to make us less nimble in responding to needs in the community like the mayor pro tem mentioned. I think that's actually how we serve, we bring initiatives through to our colleagues on the policy panel and sometimes shift the direction of how we're moving as a city. Like for instance, making sure that all of our employees have a minimum wage of $15. That was huge. And it has had it will positive effects across the board -- it has had really positive effects across the board and that just sprang up organically from this panel. I wouldn't want us to have to be tied down to anything that would prevent something like that from happening. >> Mayor Adler: Ann. >> Kitchen: I wanted to add to number 3 again, I think it would be helpful when you get through your -- the scoping aspect of it to share that with the councilmembers because we might be able to provide feedback. When I think of scoping I'm thinking of what are the functions we're trying to accomplish. What's its use case. So I'd like to make sure that we're scoping for all the use cases that we need. And I would also echo my colleagues in encouraging that we get this done as soon as possible because I think it's something we've been asking for for awhile. And then the last question I have related to that is maybe you've already had the chance to do this, but I know we had the public engagement task force a number of years ago and I would like to check against their recommendations to see if they had any specific recommendations related to this because I want to be able to capture that. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. Ms. Houston? >> Houston: Thank you, mayor. One of the concerns I had when the items from council go forward is the majority of time there's no fiscal impact and I would like to know how we can sync that up. Because if we're in a budget [11:47:24 AM] and the budget is set is that going to require a budget amendment? So I think that's some information that I would need to know if we continue to do items from council in the kind of way we have been doing them. >> Mayor Adler: Jimmy. >> Flannigan: Mayor pro tem, I really like your idea. It's something I really want to dig into a little bit. I don't know that we would remove our ability to do ifcs nor could we, I don't think, but to give space for staff to provide us more active feedback earlier in a process to say, oh, we're hitting roadblocks that we didn't expect. It's going to take longer and not just in delaying a deadline, but actually coming back and saying here's what we found out in an early version. Are y'all still good with us now knowing it's going to be a little harder and take a little longer. That's an interesting space that might be very effective. But I also want to caution all of us to not have the community believe that our success or failure is based on the number of ifcs we can sponsor or co-sponsor. You know, just speaking for my district, a lot of things that my folks are asking for are things that we're going to get done at campo, that we're going to get done in conversations with other elected officials or in regional collaboration. Those won't always show in ifcs. I'm excited about a searchable database, but I don't want to tell the community the measure of success is the number of ifcs. >> Mayor Adler: Alison? >> Alter: I was wondering if when the clerk did that data project, a year, year and a half ago, whether there was any distinction for ifcs or not. I'm trying to understand how much of our time is spent on ifcs. Not that we shouldn't be doing them, but to understand if there are ways to manage them better so. So I completely agree that we need to have the ability to put forward the ifcs but there is a part of the ifcs that I think is [11:49:24 AM] impacting the effectiveness of how we govern and what we're able to accomplish. And it is not because people have ideas that they want to bring forward. I think that's really important. I'm just questioning whether there are organizational things that we can do differently that would improve the effectiveness. One side of that is tracking it to make sure that those things are getting done. Another side is what the mayor talked about in terms of the input because you very often have a few councilmembers who have been working on something, as the mayor mentioned, for a along time. And others come in so late to the conversation that it ends up being a source of frustration instead of an opportunity to innovative and move forward in a city in a way that we might have in a slightly different process moving forward. >> Mayor Adler: Kathie. >> Tovo: I wanted to mention, as we're talking about ifcs and policy fifth street, I do think there's an -- initiatives, I do think there's an extent to which -- well, I think it is important that we continue to preserve the need for ifcs to come forward when it requires a fair amount of staff, research and time. And that was -- I think to the extent where there's a little bit of inconsistency, it's around that. And I believe it's really critical that those come forward not because somebody needs to get credit for it in the public eye, but because there needs to be a vote on council to authorize that work before it goes forward. And frankly, the public needs to be informed about what that work is and the other colleagues do too. So there are times where staff are doing informational research projects for one or two staff members and I thought the intent was to try to get away from that and make sure that everybody on council is informed and has access to that work. And that if it is requiring a certain level of staff time that it be a vote of the council. And I think that that's another important reason to continue to encourage ifcs sew that those are happening and so that we can make as a council priority choices [11:51:24 AM] about staff time. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Anything else on this? Let's go to the pulled items. Jimmy, you pulled two? Thank you very much. >> Flannigan: On 59, which is the first one, as I've done for a number of other cases, just showing the -- the overlaid compatibility height limitations on the site that exist. You can see that as a it makes your way around you will see that there's barely any square inch of the site that can get over 50 feet. And even the area from 50 to 40 is pretty centrally located. >> Houston: Can you wait to get what you're talking about so we can look at it. >> Flannigan: Yeah. But ultimately the height isn't kind of my primary thought process on this case because I think when you see the map it's kind of not that big of a deal. But it just seems a little curious approximate about the conflict of recommendations of staff and planning and the applicant's request. And this is an area that is already adjacent to -- it's basically adjacent to a school and then a big commercial area behind it so I'm not entirely sure that this is an area that we want to see expanded neighborhood retail. Maybe we have enough neighborhood retail. Or maybe we want to consider neighborhood retail maybe in another way, maybe with a V designation as opposed to going up to gr and doing an lr with a V. I think there's a couple of options there. I'm just curious what other folks are thinking. And then another something to consider is that any mixed use or new zoning that [11:53:25 AM] we might apply to ensure that it actually gets residential. And my understanding is there's a case nearby, a zoning from about 10 years ago that has a co on it that requires a certain percentage be residential, even though it has mu zoning on it. So I'm just curious if others have thought about it, especially the councilmembers where this is near their districts. >> Houston: I was hoping Mr. Guernsey could -- this is very complicated so I was hoping he would be able to explain the difference in the recommendations of staff and then the planning commission? >> Greg Guernsey, planning and zoning department. The staff recommendation is less than what the applicant asked for. And what the commission recommended. We recommend an lr-mu-np. And we took a look at zoning in the area and it located along a minor arterial and we felt that the intensity of the gr was too intense where this area backs up to some single- family residential areas. In the gr-mu it would have the equivalent intensity of almost like an mf-4 district and the lr would be something that would be closer to you might find in mf-3 or mf-2 district. So there's a little less density. The intensity of the gr zone itself, although the height might be lessened, it would allow twice the four-year ratio that might be allowed of the property. Building coverage, it would be in gr as defined in the lr district. It's mid block. It's something that you don't usually would see a lot of gr along the minor arterial roadway. You might see them along arterials like Lamar, burnet road, but you wouldn't see it along a minor road. So the staff recommended [11:55:26 AM] less intense development on the property. Mind you, without any conditional overlays in this particular case. >> Flannigan: So if I might, I think the question of intensity is an important one for us to consider. Not that we're going to answer it with this case or today, but when we think about entensety, I'm not entirely sure when we're talking about the massing of a building versus the types of uses versus other related impacts. And it's just a valuable question. There's a lot of gr R zoning a block away on the other side of the school, quite a significant amount of commercial zoning with no residential built on it on-site right now. And given the compatibility, I don't know that a little more building coverage is a bad thing. I think the planning commission if I'm Mott mistaken, went with kind of the gr, but then added a son of cos to it to try to dial back some of the uses that they felt. >> They did. The planning commission -- >> Flannigan: That they felt were intense. >> They took out pretty much all of the gr intensive uses so the co prohibits 23 uses. The most significant ones are the ones that deal with hotel, automotive related uses, some of those that might allow a theater or indoor, outdoor sports recreation. It also made allowable eight uses through the conditional overlay, conditional uses that deal with larger medical offices,. And then in addition they added the limitations that speak to development of personal improvement services and general retail sales, restaurants to be limited to a certain square footage. So the planning [11:57:26 AM] commission did add several cos and limit uses or limit the intensity of certain uses. >> Flannigan: It doesn't to me -- I think where I'm just struggling is it doesn't seem to be that crazy of a piece of property. It's a piece of property on a minor arterial, but we're building -- at least the planning commission I would say is building what appears to be a very custom zoning application, kind of a gr plus. I don't know if it's necessary or it makes sense. And then if we're thinking through maybe doing V designation, I don't know if that's available difficult given how V is constructed, but that would come wit some affordable housing requirements, if I'm not mistaken. >> They're not obligated to build residential. They still can do mixed use. You can still do office and retail. >> Flannigan: I'm sorry, say that again? >> They could do office and retail and not necessarily residential. >> Flannigan: For? Oh. I mean, I would love to make sure that they do, my understanding is the intent is that they will, but I think there needs to be housing on this site. >> We can take a look at it. >> Flannigan: We can get as complicated as possible, mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: [Indiscernible]. >> Mayor Adler: Yes, Greg. >> Casar: Within that struggle, I think, councilmember Flannigan, looking at this, it seems custom to me but in a way that we actually would like to have as a tool in our code in many places. My understanding is the contact team has been in support of this case and what we're trying to -- what we just don't really have a tool for, which is what I'm hearing from planning commissioners is for three-story, owner occupied with live- work in the bottom on a minor arterial, which is something I think that lots of people would really want. And I think it just speaks to the lack of tools available in the code for us [11:59:27 AM] to be able to have relatively dense, smaller home ownership units with a little bit of office or retail in the bottom, which I think the folks in the neighborhood and many neighborhoods would be very supportive of. So my understanding is this is three my understanding, this is three stories, with the hope it would be live-work in the bottom. And I think being able to have income-restricted requirements, not just on vmu corridors but smaller arterials also makes sense to me. I think the way this one has turned out, there's a restrictive covenant that's still going to do 10% of these units at 80% mfi and below, but again, it would be much better if it didn't have to be in priority restrictive covenants, if it was all baked in and we could get this type of housing type. On the back side of this street -- tell me if I'm speaking out -- district 1, but it's in a little nook where district 4 and 1 are weaving in and out of each other. On the back street we've got big single-family home developments that are number, and on the front side of this street, I think the neighborhood was -- many people in the neighborhood were excited about the opportunity to have, you know, smaller home ownership types and mixed use, and this seems to me to be how planning commission got there. But I totally agree that it would be great to just have this as a zoning -- have what they created here as just a zoning classification that wouldn't have to be so custom-built, which is just how do we zone a piece of property on a minor arterial to do small home ownership types that won't also allow for car dealerships. >> Right. >> Casar: You know, we should be able to do that, just it seems like, unfortunately, we're in a spot that we can't. My understanding also is that the builders here are going to do an equal mix of efficiency one-bedroom and two-bedroom, and we're open to doing more two-bedrooms, but just like the power lane case that we passed recently, they couldn't do more [12:01:29 PM] two-bedrooms because of parking requirements. So, again in some of these older neighborhoods, you have lots of two-bedroom houses that are 700 square feet. But if they wanted to build -- build a 700- square-foot home in this building, they have to add extra parking and extra parking won't fit. In these older houses, right up the street you've got one parking spot for a two-bedroom, 700-square-foot house but we've set it up so they will build 700-square-foot home ownership units as one bedrooms, and there's nothing we can do about that same thing in the housing authority case we had in my district, we were willing to do income restricted two-bedrooms and they were willing to do more but couldn't park them. In this case I appreciate the staff's work, the neighbors' work, but I think they can only go so far within the tools that we have provided them. >> >> Flannigan: Yeah. And if I'm not mistaken, the contact team was in support of the applicant -- the original application was the gr-mu. I think that's just a question of which end of working around a terrible code do you pick. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you, and I thank you for all that in-depth explanation of the case. There are some single- family homes, not huge ones, but some original homes across the street. There are just rows of them. This is just south. , If I remember correctly, of station 18, a little north on Berkman, so I think some of the concern was having something that high. There is an apartment complex, but it sits back from the road, and so I think there was some concern about it. But my question for Mr. Guernsey is what was the policy that you all could not -- I don't have in it front of me, but you said something about -- is it being on a small arterial that is a [12:03:31 PM] policy? >> Yes. You can look at the staff recommendation, but we looked at the land uses that were nearby, the zoning that is nearby. We also took a look at the neighbor plan which called us out to being a little less intense, also the street itself. Given all that's factors, staff considered those and recommended less than the applicant wanted. Councilmember Flannigan is correct, the team did support the Flum change and the zoning change. >> Houston: Right. Berkman is a very small arterial, but it's very congested, especially when Cameron road is backed up, then people go to Berkman to get north and south. And we have a school there, some school Zones, but Harris elementary and also further south we've got another elementary school. So I'm sure this will pass, but I just needed to talk to you about what that was that -- the policy was. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Anything else on this? Let's move to the next one. >> All right. 66, originally most of my questions are around this being a former txdot property. Memos went out to council before I got here. I didn't get to see that. I'm generally curious -- my understanding, the applicant is wanting to build a drive-through coffee shop? >> Coffee and pastry shop. >> Coffee and pastry shop? This is a piece of property high to a high traffic corridor. It's also kind of on an access road so I'm just kind of curious -- maybe this isn't the case to do a thing -- change a thing, but do we want more of the drive-through coffee, pastry shops, when we've got bus stops that are walking distance from [12:05:32 PM] this? I mean, is this not a place that's a place that could be taller or it's right at a highway. If you can't do height here -- I guess the cs zoning would allow it but is it not appropriate to be something else? >> Kitchen: Can I speak to that? What are you thinking about use there? In terms -- Mr. Guernsey, you can answer this, but I would share the same concerns, you know, from a drive-through. But there's already roads that run through this property so if the drive-through is off those roads, as opposed to Lamar or Ben white, it could be workable. I don't know, we'd have to see what the plan was at that time. Beyond that I'm not sure -- you know, this area -- you know, we had originally looked at, when it first came available, the potential for buying it and for using it for something else. But it's -- the impervious cover is only 20%, so it doesn't allow for much in the way of use because of its location near the quiver. That's why the impervious cover is limited. To my mind, it was a very interesting piece of property to consider something with, but there was all those kinds of limitations on it. >> I see. That provides better context. >> Kitchen: Yeah. That's the problem. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Yes, Ms. Alison. >> Alter: I had a comment on another item if -- >> Mayor Adler: Anything else on this item? Go to the next one, Alison. >> Alter: So I wanted to request item 69, which is the Texas gas that we postpone until the 29th. I understand that Mr. Robbins has some information that he wants to pull together that will be helpful for us in assessing whether these are appropriate rates for the rate payers and common regulatory affairs has [12:07:34 PM] indicated that postponing two weeks would not jeopardize any of the next steps that need to happen. >> Mayor Adler: What was the last thing you said? You checked with staff? >> Alter: My staff checked with staff and they're comfortable with a two-week delay but not longer. >> Mayor Adler: Is that okay? >> That's fine. The rates are due to go into effect on November 30th. Your meeting is the day before. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So we'll postpone this then for the two weeks, and if we could get -- if you have any questions circulated to everybody, make sure he does that, that would be helpful prior to that. >> Renteria: I also wanted to see something on 69. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Anything else? I think the mayor pro tem is out on the morning of Thursday. >> Tovo: I was going to mention, I'll be traveling tomorrow and coming back late -- I mean early on Thursday but late to the meeting, but I'm scheduled to get in around 11:00 so hopefully I'll be here by around 11:30, 11:45. >> Mayor Adler: And I'll be meeting with big city managers on the cap issue Thursday night so it would be my hope to leave when we break for dinner. If we do it that way, that means the police contract if it's approved by the association would probably get called like at 4 o'clock, it would be the last thing we would do prior to -- to dinner. Delia. >> Garza: Number 70 is the affordable housing tax credits that we had -- we've had some discussion about because it's in our etj, which means there is no capmetro service. I've met with the developer. I will be supporting this, but I guess I just want to reiterate 2 reiterate the need for us -- this is a joint program with the county so I just want to reemphasize the need for us to sit down with the [12:09:36 PM] county, with -- you know, especially as we're starting to decide how we're going to use our new affordable housing bonds, to make sure that these things aren't coming before us where we're putting affordable housing out where there's no transportation. The developer did say they would, you know, market it as -- they would provide some options for people who were in need of transportation, that their experience has been that the people -- folks in these kinds of developments don't need it. My response was, you're not going to look at an apartment way out there if you don't have a car. Obviously you have people that are car-dependent, but they reassured us -- and I'm waiting to make sure we have a letter or whatever, that they will market it to people and explain that they can provide transportation options for people who need them. But in the future, we really need to be -- I'm concerned about putting affordable housing on the outskirts like this. And I look forward to whatever policy their staff is going to bring us or one of us will have to bring through an ifc to ensure we're having these discussions because affordability is not just about rent, it's about transportation and all those other things. >> Kitchen: Could I speak to that, please? >> Mayor Adler: Yes. >> Kitchen: I met with the developer with councilmember Garza, and thank you for bringing this up. So we also -- I wanted to remind them, the other thing we talked to the developer about was, looking at the other options that are available for transportation that either capmetro offers or other services offer, and to include that in their planning for access to transportation. So it was a good conversation and I look forward to councilmember Garza's leadership and working with our staff to help us build in requirements for transportation when we're looking at our affordable housing [12:11:37 PM] options. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you. Next item, Greg? >> Casar: So on this particular issue, I do think that working on that issue of what transportation can be baked into 4% deals further out, I don't think it's something council or the staff have picked up as much, so I think that would be good thinking about. I would say we did pass an ifc on asking for policies and changes to bring 4% deals into high opportunity areas. My understanding, staff is going to be bringing back some work on that and I think passage of the bonds will help that really significantly because essentially the 4% tax credits aren't currently going far enough for us to cover some of the higher land costs, and there are also regulatory barriers. So I think that will hopefully come back as part of our implementation of the housing blueprint. As it relates to the office of police oversight item, I've been working with the manager on a number of amendments that I think would essentially bring over some of the -- of the responsibilities for the office that are in the memo that is attached, over into ordinance. A big reason to do that in my view, is that, currently, as we sit, we have an office -- an opm, who will be changing her title, but opm, police chief, and manager who have all agreed to do these things amongst themselves, bu as people in those seats change, I think it would be really important that if we think -- if we spent a year putting together that this is the right model, that we try to institutionalize some of those key functions so that they aren't in debate if people in those chairs change without council having to discuss it. So those are essentially going to be memorializing some of the issues as it relates to video release, transparency and release of information, community engagement, and review of the department. So I will post those. [12:13:39 PM] The legal department, I think, has had a final look at those, so I'll post those -- I will post those shortly, but I think that will go a long way. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Casar: In that part of the conversation. And as it relates to at what time and how it is we handle testimony, let me continue to think through how we best address that given a we'll have some folks gone in the morning and some folks gone in the evening and I know this is important to everyone. >> Mayor Adler: All right. Anything else? Ann? >> Kitchen: Yes. With regard to the issues surrounding public safety and policing, we had talked quite a bit about the staffing plan, so -- and I know we have a memo from -- you know, from staff on that. But I think as part of these conversations, it may be important to memorialize what we're thinking, going into the future, in terms of our staffing, and so I will be looking at the best, most appropriate way to do that. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. I think the manager is going to comment and bring to us information at some point on overlaying the contract with the staffing issues and relating that to the budgets out front. >> Kitchen: But I think that's supposed to be simultaneous, as opposed to later. >> Mayor Adler: No, no I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was speaking to -- >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Mayor Adler: I expect we'll hear that before we vote as well. >> We've got that information. It hasn't been distributed to you yet. When we have some analysis, I'll check with Spencer. >> Kitchen: I'd like for us to receive it not the day of. So I'd like for us to receive it before, so -- like today if possible. >> Mayor Adler: All right. Anything else? Greg. >> Casar: On that point, I think receiving it is good. I would have some concerns around being asked to vote on the staffing issues on Thursday because I just don't think that that's been out there enough for us to really analyze it well. >> Kitchen: Right. >> Casar: So Tse other things, we'll really been talking about them pretty repeatedly, week after week for many months, but [12:15:40 PM] as it relates to the budget and bringing in other people who have interest in the budget, and as it relates to some of the ifc's we've passed about spending and and public safety and how that achieves our strategic outcomes, I think that -- I would just have concerns. And I'm not saying that's what you brought, I just want to lay that out while we can talk, but I have some concerns about taking votes on staffing issues when, really, that's -- >> Mayor Adler: As a practical matter, we're not noticed to take notes on staffing concerns. Probably it isn't an appropriate part of the conversation for us to have on Thursday, if I'm understanding, you know, Ann's issue, which is similar to mine. But we can't be taking action on staff, it would just be taking action on the contract that's been presented and noted -- noticed. Ann? >> Kitchen: Yes, I agree, but I also don't want us to lose the opportunity, and that may come at a later meeting. But to memorialize and understand what we are considering for future staffing because part of my concerns have been, in the past, is we have -- we've had various reports and memos and things about staffing, and we've never, as a group, said, okay, we understand this is our goal, this is something we're going to work towards. And then we have to revisit it and argue about it every year, as if we never had any kind of conversation about it. So that's what my concern is. And I agree, councilmember Casar, that that needs some conversation. Not wanting to us pass this period of time without having that conversation, and if we choose to, memorializing it in an appropriate way. So it's something that we can go back to and say, yes, we agreed that this is an appropriate staffing approach, as far as we know at this point in time, given there could be changes in the future in terms of our revenues and things like that. >> Mayor Adler: All right. Let's go ahead then and recess and we'll move into executive session to take up two items pursuant to 551.071 of the government code, legal matters related to e2, Austin property [12:17:41 PM] taxes, e3, union pacific railroad downtown noise. Without objection, we're going into executive session. It's 12:15. I'm going to get there quickly so that we can start if folks want to do that. I'm going to be pulling out of executive session between 1 o'clock and 1:45. It is 12:15, and we stand adjourned -- or recessed for executive session. [Executive session] [01:34:15 PM] [Mayor Pro Tem Tovo] Hello welcome back I am Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo. We are now out of closed session. In closed session we discussed legal matters related to items: E2 and E3. Seeing no other business for the Council we stand adjourned at 1:35 P.M.