I will call today's utility service board meeting to order. The City of Bloomington Utility's mission is to enhance the quality of life in our community by providing safe, sustainable, and high-quality drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater services in a cost-effective manner promoting public health, economic vitality, and environmental stewardship. If any board member has any personal or financial conflict with any issues or individuals on the agenda, then please be sure to recuse yourself during those portions of the meeting. Are there any petitions and communications from the public? No. We'll move on to the approval of the minutes of the May 19th bid opening. Do we have any questions or comments on the May 19th bid opening? Hearing none, do we have a motion for approval? So move. Second. We have a motion and a second for the approval of the minutes of the May 19th bid opening. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, say nay. Thank you. Minutes of the bid opening are approved. We also have approval of the minutes of the regular meeting on May 19th. Are there any questions or comments on the regular meeting on May 19th? I move approval of the May 19th regular meeting much. Second. We have a motion and a second for the approval of the regular meeting minutes. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, say nay. Not nay. Not nay. Remix of the nay. The regular meeting minutes are approved from February or May 19th. Easy for me to say. Moving on to the approval of the claims. First, we have standard invoices for a total amount of $915,307.85. Are there any questions or comments on the standard invoices? Two questions. The first is at the bottom of page two, city of Bloomington, interdepartmental agreement to 2023. It's all on water. Just wondering if that's correct. Oh, it is because we're paying the water for installments this year. So we paid this all the sewer the first time we went through, and this is the second of four payments. Yep. Second one is on the top of page eight. Stan tech for testimony in the water rate case. I was just wondering what their role is. Their role is so there's we have three professional organizations, I would say. We have a legal firm that's going to help represent us at the IORC. Then we have another firm that's putting together our revenue requirements. And then Stan tech is going to do the cost of service study after we get the revenue requirements. And the cost of service study is when it says that the revenue requirement says we need this big of a pie to do our projects. And then the cost of service people decide who's going to pay what part of that pie. Thank you. No approval of the standard invoices for today. Have a motion and second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed say nay. Standard invoices are approved. Moving on to utility bills for a total amount of $25,064 and 67 cents. Are there any questions or comments on the utility bills? I move approval of utilities for May 29th. Second. Have a motion and second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, please say nay. Utility bills are approved. Next we have wire transfers for a total amount of $528,045 and 37 cents. Are there any questions on the wire transfers? I move approval of wire transfers for June of 2025. Second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, say nay. Wire transfers are approved. Lastly, we have customer refunds for a total amount of $5,454 and 43 cents. Are there any questions or comments on the customer refunds? I move approval of customer refunds for June 6th. Second. Motion and a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, say nay. Customer refunds are approved. Thank you all. Item number five on our agenda is approval of this consent agenda for a total amount of $5,763. Kathryn Zager. Good evening. I'm Kathryn Zager, utilities director. I'm presenting tonight's consent agenda totaling $5,763. The first contract is with Smith's Design Group for $2,500 for plat amendment to Canterbury Lot 5 in order to vacate a portion of conservation easement. Next is with Brehop Corporation for $1,963 for a new oil water separator at Monroe Water Treatment Plant. Last is with Electric Plus Inc. for $1,300 for work on the low service tower at Monroe Water Plant. Is there any member who wishes to consider one or more of these items individually? Hearing none, if there's no opposition, these items will be approved as recommended by staff. Hearing no opposition, the consent agenda is approved. Thank you. Item number six is a request approval of resolution 2025-08 to designate surplus property for auction. Matt Haby. Yeah, we got several vehicles that we're wanting to auction off. If the description that says not used, but a better description is repairing them is too expensive. There's one that needs like a $20,000 engine, so we're just trying to get rid of these things. Any questions or comments? I just was wondering when you get the money for this, will you let us know? Oh, we get it all the time, yeah. Because usually it's like, you know, old filing cabinet, broken CD, and like this is something that might get some money for parts. Fair enough, yeah. Well, I know that you approved a loader maybe that last meeting or two meetings ago, and I know that we got like $46,000 for that loader. You said 46? Yeah. Great, and what are we going to do with that? Find a project. Okay. Okay, thanks. Any other questions or comments for Matt? All right, and if we approve Resolution 2025-8 for Surplus Property. Second. We have a motion and a second on the table for approval. Please say aye. Aye. Aye. Next we have Request Approval of Water Main Replacement Prioritization List, Phil Peden. I'm really tempted to go break a CD and see how well I do in the bid. They're old and they're too neat, right? So it's like, okay, we can get rid of it. That's right. Phil Peden, Engineering. Yes, this is a list of our water main replacement projects listed as a prioritization based on a number of factors. So there's a team of folks from engineering that I want to give credit to developing this list, but Assistant GIS Coordinator Jordan Kiso, Matt Dabberton, and Kayden Swanson helped create this list and the ranking factors that were put into that. So this is information that we carry in the GIS system, pipe diameter, age, material, and number of breaks. We've been tracking that for a number of years, and I believe the break data goes back to early 1980s. So a lot of communities don't have that. And so when you go to these seminars where they talk about how you're going to develop your water main replacement prioritization, it's all about data and what you have going back. So we're lucky that we had a lot of main break data, unfortunately, but also lucky that we have it. So this is how we did that. We ranked those and then gave them a score of one to five, and we were able to get all the number ones, which was the way chosen to say the worst, in this list of 30. So that's what we prioritize. Happy to answer any questions. We're looking at also, you'll see this evolve over the next few years. We're going to constantly look to, I guess, make this more accurate. Things change, and so this is consistently changing as we learn about more breaks. There's a lot of criteria that's not in our GIS that we want to add to this. In fact, we had a company come in and give us a seminar on how they can use AI to develop a way to sort this data, and they'll take a lot of exterior data outside of just the GIS data, but weather conditions, soil conditions, things like that, and train the AI to where it will predict where the main breaks are. They've had success in other communities. Unfortunately, the water budget isn't allowing us to pay for that service at this time, but we hope in the next few years we can do that. So we're doing our best at this time. We, like I say, we would like to add data where we could prioritize based on the paving list off of criticality, whether it's closer proximity to a school or the hospital, something like that. We've got a whole list here, but basically we expect that we will refine this list over the years, but we wanted to have something in front of you that we're starting from. This is great, by the way. Are there any questions or comments for Phil? Sorry, okay. This is fantastic, and it's just amazing to me that the AI technology that you shared with us, I mean, that's just crazy. Instead of going from the magic eight ball to tell us whether or not there's going to be a break to actual data. But in terms of this though, I mean, I can see how you've ranked it. Does this mean that these would be, like, you'd want to start at number one and we're going to work our way through? Or it's kind of like we're going to now make a master plan based on these? Honestly, to me, they made that list. Then from there, we really need to develop where they would go in order from there. I went ahead and based it off a number of breaks to get one through 30. But I think if it's on the 30 list, then we'll be strategic. Oh, that one's on the paving list sooner. We're going to move forward that first before we do one that's not. So it's not just operating in a silo. It's also looking at what other projects are going on too. The timeframe to get these done, is there, I mean, is this something that you're saying this we have to, we're going to, this is our one to two-year plan or our three-year plan? We don't have estimates on on those yet. We've done eight to ten water main replacements in a year when we had the two to three million dollar budget. Obviously, we're short on budget now, so it won't be to the new rate case. So we've got a year and a half or so, you know, whenever that rate case comes through before we can start doing those. But then I suspect, depending, and if you look, one of those is 2,400 feet. So that's going to, that'll eat up a big chunk of one year's budget. And then my last question is, I like too that you've talked about the neighborhoods that would be affected. What about the east third street? It says NA. Where is that? So there's one right near the bypass, right at third in the bypass. Third in the bypass is one, okay. And the other one's further east. Third in the bypass. A couple weeks ago. Yeah, CVS. Okay, the corner there. Okay, yeah, okay. It crosses the, I believe it crosses the intersection on the north side of third street. So that's one of them and then what's the other? Further east, near Park Ridge. Thank you. Those were my questions. Thanks. Yeah, thank you, Phil. This is nice. If you want, I don't know if you have logins to GIS, but Jordan created this really great interactive map where you can choose, I just want to see the ones that were ranked the highest, or I want to see ones and twos, and then it highlights red, orange, yellow, green, and you, and then you can see where they're at within the city, and then how they align with, say you had a one and a two and they were adjacent, you could see where you could tie those together as one project. So, and it turned off all the other layers. It was just very helpful to kind of analyze the... I encourage you guys to keep putting as much data as you can into these things, because if there's good data in, then we can get good data out, you know, and so it's fantastic. This is great. Well, in fact, we met on that about a month ago as a team, a lot of the ADs and TND staff to say, "Okay, you had a main break. What data can we collect? Water temperature? What were the pumps doing at the time? Was there an activity? Were we flushing in this neighborhood?" And just seeing what data was available so that the more data we can start to record and maybe in a year, then we can throw it in the AI and see if there's a deciding trend with that data. You might find that one of those elements that you weren't looking at really tells you the most about main breaks. Thank you again, Phil. I noticed that a pretty large number of these are on Fritz Terrace. Is that a really problem area that I know? James could speak on that, but what happens is they go in a certain time frame. It could be the soil type there. It could be they all went in in a certain era of time when the manufacturers were using a specific type of pipe or that manufacturer of that pipe, because we have different brands of pipe that create ductile iron. There's one brand that caused more breaks. If that brand got used when that contractor built Fritz Terrace, then you see a lot more breaks. Or the contractor did something when they did the install. There's so many different factors, but you can see that once it starts in that neighborhood, you get a lot of the pipes in the neighborhood all at once. Recalling a few years back, I remember Vic talking about taking the approach of there's a certain percentage, given the lifespan of these systems, that we need to replace every year. I'm just wondering if we're continuing on with that approach for water and stormwater, and how this fits in with that. We were doing our best. I feel like with the $2 to $3 million budget we had before water money got tight. We don't have any available this year for doing it, or next year before the rate case comes through. I think what you start to realize, the more research you do, and as we talked about taking the data, we found that the older pipe doesn't have the breaks. The more you look at the data, the more you realize where your focus should be. You see an era of 1950 to 1969 pipe that has the most breaks. That should be the highest priority. Pre-1950, you're not seeing the breaks or the problems. It's a much more nuanced approach than just a percentage that we were talking about a few years ago. So I think, yeah, we're not replacing everything when it hits 100 years old because a lot of that pipe is still good, but we are being more efficient at how when we do make a replacement that we're replacing the ones that need it the most. My opinion only is that we should allocate, we should budget for this, not work ourselves into a place of where we have a deficit, an infrastructure deficit. The challenge you get, and we thought the same approach, until we got two and a half million dollars, say last year, it was all we could do as project management and T&D staff to keep up with. We did eight or ten, I'm going to say, and that was about all we could do. The prices get a lot higher when you have to bid it out. You have to manage the project through the engineering department, and so you run out of time to get more done unless, of course, we expand and get more employees that can manage the project. We expand T&D and we have more crews that could do it. That would be one way to do it as well. I don't want to speak for James, but I felt like that was what we thought we could do internally. Some of those projects were more complex or larger, whatever it was. We weren't allowed to do them internally, but the ones that we did, they were pretty busy with those all year. Just as a board member, I want to know if we get to the point where we're making decisions by not growing, where we're increasing our deficit in our infrastructure, where we really need to be more proactive. We're certainly in a deficit with water main replacement. If you look at what we did for the Cruzan era, there wasn't a lot of money allocated to water main replacement. The rates weren't there to allocate toward that, so we got behind. Then we tried to catch up by increase, increase, increase, till we got from $500,000 to $2.5 million, I think. Again, we're making progress, but it's getting so much more expensive. Just a few years ago, what we thought we could do for $300,000, now $800,000. It ate into the $2.5 million budget really quick. That would be great. We'll get more. We'll do our best, but there is a point where staffing is limited to complete the goal. Just to tag on to that, though, let's all remember this conversation when we're giving positions to other departments, that they're helping them when our folks can't get the jobs done with the staff they have. I'm just bringing that up as a comment. I'm glad you mentioned phasing this with paving projects, because that's a really efficient way to do things. So I assume you're working with Public Works to see their paving plan for the year? Yes. And then we try to get in there before that? Yes. Okay. They don't have that available a year prior, so you get it. I think we get it February, let's say. But what they do, they do work with us really well, so we can say, "Hey, we want to replace that," and then they'll delay, they'll put that on, they usually shift that to later in the fall so that we can get to our work. Yeah, because it really frustrates citizens when they see having to dig up something that just got paved. If we could see a five-year paving list, oh, then we could really plan ahead. And maybe now with this great list, there's opportunity to share this list with them too, at least like they know our priorities. Yeah, that's a good point. Thank you. And if there is a bottleneck in terms of administering contracting, like someone mentioned, there's maybe 10 projects at Fritz Terrace, maybe that all gets bundled into one to have a better economy of scale there in terms of the contracting and do one large project. I don't know how we budget for that right now, but we can certainly plan for something like that going forward. I don't know how the neighborhood would react either, but I mean, maybe they'd rather see it all done at once consecutively rather than a new project year after year piecemeal. Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of it's planning and then the bidding. And so, yeah, sure. I think that that would save a lot of time. Great discussion. It's been a great one, Phil, to you and your team. Are there any other questions or comments for Phil? Do we have a motion for approval? I move we approve the water main replacement prioritization list. Second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, say nay. Request is approved. Thank you. Item number eight, old business. Any old business from staff? Any old business from the board? I did that backwards. It's okay. No. New business. New business from the board. New business from staff. And subcommittee report. Mr. White. Yeah, so property and planning subcommittee met just prior to this meeting, and our mission was to really have an open discussion, hearing in for reports and information from staff and related to the concept of our future space needs here at our current site, and what might be on the horizon for the Winston Thomas site. Remember, this was a follow-up from the mayor's presentation a month ago, expressing interest in arranging some, well, putting together some proposals for building public works, Department of Public Works for Civil City at our Winston Thomas site. So we brainstormed a little bit today to talk about different scenarios, thinking about what both utilities needs in a 30, 40, 50-year time frame, as well as what Department of Public Works needs. And I think as we kind of summed up the discussion, we had a list of things that Cat will take to the mayor's office to discuss with them. But in general, the committee really, I think, consensus was that we want to work as closely as we can with the mayor's office and with the Civil City side to see what their needs are and really look at the big picture. Lots of different scenarios, as the mayor mentioned at her presentation to us a month ago. This site that we're currently on may be highest and best used for new housing development. So that would be a good reason for us to end up in the Department of Public Works to vacate this entire site. We also talked about if we moved the utilities department to Winston Thomas, this might allow the Department of Public Works to use all of this site and just connect together. Or if they moved to Winston Thomas, we could expand on this site. So lots of good options and I think as I say the consensus was is that we're we certainly haven't decided anything. We're wide open for making sure that we make the best use of both our rate payers and taxpayers because on the Department of Public Works side it's it will require the city council to to expend a significant amount of money as well. We want a big picture to see what man I'm kind of looking your way take that message back. We really feel like in big picture we want to work together to make sure that the impact on citizens is the most efficient and taking advantage of what we know both we have information that we know what we what we need from the studies we've done and our space needs and we need to make sure that we know what DPW needs as well so that we can make best use in the big picture and think long term. So there's our report. Has there been more conversation with the mayor or her staff about those options? I was I was here at the board meeting where she initially laid that out uh deputy mayor now has there been more conversation exploring those options? We have not but one of the things we discussed with them was perhaps a joint meeting between a set of mentions that we might put a meeting together between the board about the works and the usb to talk about some brainstorming as well. And we did ask to get on her agenda but she was not available so we you know we couldn't for scheduling wise so we opted as the board to at least let us get together get all of our questions in line so but we've not had any further personal like discussion with her I don't think staff has either. Matt you ought to be at such a meeting. Yeah and potentially other council members as well I mean yeah to Kirk's point about the overall financial efficiency of you know across multiple units in a sense or you know revenue basis like yes we should have the city council involved in that. Great discussion on subcommittee forward to follow up answers and see what comes from our suggestions. Anything else subcommittee wise? All right staff reports. All right yeah I've got a couple items for us today. First we'd like to welcome Reston Souders he'll be joining us in T&D as the utility specialist one. I also have some congratulations for Joel Pontius the conservation energy resource manager. He earned his sustainability practitioner credential and Christy Lindbergh our environmental and environmental programs. She was awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Hoosier River Watch and IDEM for over 20 years of volunteering with the Hoosier River Watch. That's my staff report. Next is petitions and communications any petitions and communications from the public. And then do we have a motion for adjournment? I move we adjourn. (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (orchestral music)