|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The Pleasanton City Council received an update on the development of a Water System Management Plan on Tuesday, which outlined several short, middle and long term goals that staff said will ensure the city’s water system is modernized and functional.
Staff’s presentation of the water system plan — which was originally set to be presented at the Dec. 5 council meeting but was continued to Tuesday — highlighted how even though the city already runs a solid water system, more work will need to be done in the coming years to continue to keep that high standard.
“The city runs a fairly good sized water system and needs to formulate a plan for how we’re going to upkeep that for residents and businesses to maintain the … excellent level of service that you’re providing,” said Jerry Brown, the CEO and principal consultant of Waterology Consulting. “This water system management plan is the mechanism to report on and undertake that effort.”
Brown’s presentation on how the plan will help ensure the effective management of the city’s water system was more of a preview of steps that will be part of a 10-year capital improvement plan.
“I’ve been observing the meetings here for the past six months … and I know the water system issues go back farther than that but a lot of the discussion has been around well, what are our longer term needs for the water system?” Brown said. “That is what we’re talking about tonight — the longer term needs. We’re talking 10, 20 years down the road.”
Part of the presentation was on the effective utility management program that was used to assess and score the water system. Brown said that two priority attributes, which need to be addressed in the near term, came out of that assessment: financial viability, and infrastructure strategy and performance.
He said that helped form the priorities for the plan moving forward and that addressing the financial aspect of maintaining the water system — debt management, accounting practices, reserve levels and other similar factors — through the city’s new increase in water rates specifically was only the first step.
As for the management of the infrastructure and other physical assets, which covers the practices and procedures within the utility operations itself, Brown said that is where the real questions and actions need to be addressed.
He said that in order to come up with a list of capital improvement priority projects and actions for the city to undertake regarding water infrastructure, a team of engineers and technicians went around and performed assessments on city facilities and did high level analysis on the state of the infrastructures.
“You have 20 storage tanks, 14 pump stations and over 300 miles of pipelines in your system, that’s a good sized responsibility,” Brown said. “Reviewing and replacing that infrastructure is part of that responsibility and has very big cost implications.”
Brown also went over how the plan is being broken up into three priority levels ranging from high priority — which include things like pipeline replacements that are already being done but the city still needs to complete as soon as possible — to low priority, which are purely conceptual ideas and goals for the future.
He also broke down how the near and medium term goals and projects would be things that the city would need to account for budgeting wise but that when it comes to all three levels of priority projects, staff has some idea of what the funding will be for the next decade.
“There’s a range of variability that really reflects that timing aspect … those 10 year totals are anywhere from $135 to $205 million. So if you think about that in a 10 year window, that’s $13 to $20 million a year,” Brown said.
Vice Mayor Jack Balch addressed these dollar ranges, calculated the math for the $135 million over the next 10 years and said that given the city’s budget in the Water Enterprise Fund, he estimated that there would need to be a 51.8% rate increase to achieve the funding needed and a 78% rate increase to hit the $20 million a year goal.
Tamara Baptista, assistant director of Public Works, told Balch that while his calculations were accurate, staff had not done a funding analysis yet as the preliminary discussion they were having was still at a high level.
“We want to be able to get into workshops with you and have a dialogue and do the prioritization and part of it is funding analysis, which we’re not there yet,” she said. “Part of it would be to consider debt financing. So the debt financing the payback period would be over 20 years or 30 years, not just within this 10 year CIP window.”
Brown said that while there is still some work that needs to be done to determine the full scope of certain near and medium term priority projects, the most important thing will be for the city to continue generating money for the water system in order to fund these projects.
As for the water rates, Brown also said that the city will have to come back after two years and reevaluate the water rates at that time because the water system plan development is being structured around that time frame so that staff can figure out the funding plans for those medium and long term projects.
Baptista told the dais that the recent water rate increases were only the first phase of the city’s rate study that was meant to address the operational deficit and that a Phase Two rate study will be conducted and will incorporate the list of these capital improvements.
“We have to take a deeper look at these projects and then with that, coupled with the funding analysis on the water supply alternative project, then we will go to another rate study, a phase two rate study,” Baptista said.
City Manager Gerry Beaudin added to that, saying the 30% water rate increase, which will go into effect next month, was done because the city wasn’t planning ahead into the future as much as it should have and that by doing the work right now, they will be able to avoid such drastic measures like that in the future.
“The value of the planning work that we’re doing right now is that these costs can be anticipated and spread over a longer period of time, which helps us to manage water rate adjustments going forward,” Beaudin said. “The 30% that we saw the last time out was because we didn’t have the plan and we weren’t proactively addressing it over a number of years … so we got into a situation that was a bit of a bind. That’s what we’re trying to avoid going forward.”
Moving forward, Councilmember Valerie Arkin asked staff if it was possible to form a committee that could be involved in these water system plan development discussions, which staff said could be something they can consider.
However, as Brown explained all of this to the council, he said that it was important to realize that the presentation was merely a preview of the plan, which is a work in progress, and that there is still much more to be done.
“It is important that the council and residents be exposed to the magnitude of what’s needed in the future,” he said. “This is near term, medium and longer term needs. So this kind of a planning effort really goes to getting a result that is the lowest cost of service for the customers.”
After Tuesday’s presentation, staff will continue to provide periodic updates to the council on the plan’s development until it is completed, which is slated to happen around April 2024.
