ORDER-2021-30 : Authorizing a Bond under the Water Enterprise System through MWRA Local Water System Assistance Program bonds for FY2021 in the amount of Eight Hundred Seventy Five Thousand Dollars ($875,000)

Transcript (~20 min @ 8:07)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 8:03 Speaker 1: Councilor Thomas? Yes. Councilor Jamaleddine? Yes. President Grigoraitis? Yes.

▶ 8:19 Christopher Cinella: 11 yes okay so we want to order this evening order 21-30 authorizing a bond under the water enterprise system through MWRA loader local water resource

▶ 8:32 Christopher Cinella: system assistance program bonds for fiscal year 2021 in the amount of eight

▶ 8:35 Speaker 1: hundred and seventy five thousand dollars at this time I'll entertain a

▶ 8:39 Speaker 4: motion to suspend the rules motion to suspend the rules so we can hear from members of dpw

▶ 8:46 Christopher Cinella: motion to suspend the rules made by president franeritis seconded by vice chair Migliorelli

▶ 8:49 Speaker 1: adam clark please call the role chairman sanella yes vice chair Migliorelli yes councilor Tramontozzi tozy yes councilor mcmaster yes councilor mcnaught yes councilor eccles yes councilor Garipay Yes. Councillor Stewart? Yes. Councillor Thomas? Yes. Councillor Jamaleddine? Yes. President Grigoraitis? Yes. 11 yes.

▶ 9:18 Speaker 4: All right.

▶ 9:19 Speaker 1: I'll bring in the Director. One second. My mouse is not working. Okay. And I'm going to bring in Jim Troop. Elena, can you hear us? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

▶ 9:43 Speaker 1: Thank you.

▶ 9:46 Speaker 5: Thank you.

▶ 9:52 Speaker 1: okay can you hear me yeah yes Jim can you hear us I can hear you okay okay I

▶ 9:55 Speaker 5: have a brand new laptop and I'm still adjusting to it and also for some reason everything looks very green in my on my new camera um so I'm gonna share my screen assuming I'm able to do that

▶ 10:23 Speaker 5: kristin do you have to give me permission to share um it's not asking for anything elena

▶ 10:39 Speaker 5: hold on one second because when i go to share i'm not getting anything hold on privileges

▶ 10:59 Speaker 5: share documents apply okay how's it now uh it's giving me an option to share a file but not to share my screen let's see what happens when i do share file

▶ 11:11 Speaker 5: no i don't think that's going to work i didn't yeah we've never had trouble with this before

▶ 11:24 Speaker 1: i don't know i don't know you're sharing anything so on my end documents event communications everything is checked as in okay and to apply okay should i just send you the file

▶ 11:43 Speaker 5: sure okay sorry council sorry this normally has worked explain you're gonna send it via email

▶ 12:15 Speaker 5: yes i just sent it it goes over the airwaves quickly um okay water bond it's the attachment

▶ 12:19 Speaker 1: that you sent earlier last week for the to the file it's on the file right now on the order oh yeah it's also in the order correct yeah it's everything you guys have seen this

▶ 12:32 Speaker 5: It's a PowerPoint presentation that's attached to the order.

▶ 12:39 Speaker 5: Okay, did you receive it?

▶ 12:41 Speaker 1: Yes. Hold on. Yeah. I'm going to share my screen. Can you guys see this? Yep. Okay.

▶ 13:00 Speaker 5: There's still one thing in the way, Kristin. One dialogue box open, it looks like.

▶ 13:06 Speaker 1: There we go.

▶ 13:07 Christopher Cinella: Just to be conscious of the time too, we do have the public hearing at 8, as you know.

▶ 13:12 Speaker 5: Yes. Yeah, and this is quick. I think it's only 13 slides. And I'll go through it pretty quickly. So can you do start slideshow or do slideshow from beginning?

▶ 13:25 Speaker 1: This is from the beginning, Elena. But you have to go to slideshow

▶ 13:31 Speaker 5: and then make it so it fills the screen

▶ 13:42 Speaker 5: from beginning yep there you go there you go okay all right can everybody see that

▶ 13:52 Speaker 5: yep okay so um so normally when we do our uh our water main improvement projects we do a project every year and uh they are part of our larger multi-year roadway and utility program so i So I know we've discussed this in other venues before, but the components of that program are the water system improvements, sewer system infiltration and flow reduction projects, our paving projects, including our complete streets, and then national grids gas main replacements. Next slide.

▶ 14:28 Speaker 5: So just a refresher that our 2020 program,

▶ 14:35 Speaker 5: our construction schedule that we presented earlier in the year, consists of a number of different projects. The gray are paving, the blue are water, the yellow is gas, and the green is sewer. And so the projects come together year after year where we do the utilities first, and then we do the above ground infrastructure after. And then at the end of about a three-year period, we have a brand new street, newly paved street trees, new street signs if we need them, you know, everything that the neighborhood actually sees happens usually at the end of the three-year period next slide okay so the capital efficiency

▶ 15:18 Speaker 5: plan which guides where we do our water main improvements has three components we look at

▶ 15:29 Speaker 1: oops back two i think elena you can just press the back arrows yeah sorry about that

▶ 15:41 Speaker 5: okay there we go um i think there's something else open on the top now too that's graying out the top of the slide. No, this is not. Oh, there it goes. Okay. So, the capital efficiency plan was completed in 2017, and that is our capital plan document that guides where we need to do improvements to the water system. So hydraulics are the areas that don't have good flow or good fire flow. Asset management refers to old pipes, pipes that are substandard materials and then critical components refers to is it say the only pipe that serves an important facility like a school or the hospital or or something like that that would make it a critical

▶ 16:26 Speaker 5: facility okay next so this capital efficiency plan was completed by tata and howard in 2017 and it breaks down the water main improvements by priority um the phase one priority areas have now all been completed and so now we're working on projects that are in phases two and three and then sometimes we add other projects to the plan just based on we might have a number of water main breaks in an area and then that is new information or we may have a pipe that we had to cut into for a different reason over the course of the year and we see what the condition looks like inside and we decide this really needs to be made a higher priority so sometimes we throw in other projects in that way okay next so this just shows um our projects from a couple years ago some of the streets that we did and just the difference in our flushing or our hydrant flushing data so you can see for instance florence street used to have a flow of only 300 to 350 gallons per minute when we would flush the hydrants during our biannual flushing and and biennial flushing. And then the recent results are on the right-hand side there, so 1,350 gallons per minute after we replaced the water main on the street. So this has a huge impact. These are just samples from one of our recent projects, but the impacts of these projects are huge, and it's important that we continue doing these projects to continually bring our system up to speed to how it should be. Next. So this map shows, I don't know if you're having

▶ 18:04 Speaker 5: trouble too seeing the one square on the screen, but the date ranges there are 2000 and 2010 are the mains we replaced in purple. The next range is 2011 to 15, I believe, are the ones in blue. um the next one is 16 to 19 is in red and then lastly oh there we go and then last year's project um is in green so this is the project actually this year 2020's project are all the ones in green so we're just finishing those up so those are now going into the next phase of the cycle so you'll see a lot of the red projects are where we're paving right now so um or where we've recently paved like Warwick Road and Altamont Ave, Florence Street, Ashmont, Ashmont Park. So those are the streets we did a couple of years ago and now we've brought those to completion with paving and restoration. The 2020 projects will now go into the queue for next year for 2021 paving. And then these new projects, National Grid has completed some work on some of these streets, the new streets, then those will go into the queue for 2022 paving next okay so this just runs through those projects

▶ 19:37 Speaker 5: that we just finished they were on damon and glendale first street from ashcroft to waverly echo from whitman to the hoover school brown street and wyoming heights and then some testing that we had to do on the pipe on wyoming ave next so the proposed projects with the new loan

▶ 19:57 Speaker 5: are burnett sycamore and hunwell so that's an area where we had national grid do work last year in anticipation of our doing work this year those were driven by their extremely poor roadway condition rankings that neighborhood has been asking for a long time when they're getting paved they've had a lot of roadway condition issues so we had told them a couple years ago you can get paid soon but we have to go through the utility replacements first and then brazil street brazil street is both in poor condition pavement wise and in need of gas main replacement and also we're going to be doing sewer work there so this is perfect timing for brazil street it's a phase two project in the water plan so it's perfect time to do it we have some portions of pleasant and washington streets just a very small segment but it is in proximity to 99 washington and because they're going to be doing other work in that area we thought now's the best time to get that done felt in place we national grid did work there last year we had the intention of paving it it was not on the water main replacement list but we had multiple leaks when we were trying to do the gas work and then when we were trying to replace the water services in advance of paving last year where we realized that we couldn't pave that street the water main is in terrible condition and really needs to be replaced and then ashland street is another one that we dug to do some valves in the last few years and that one is not in good condition we know it needs replacement but we're bidding that as what we call an ad alternate which means if we have enough money in the budget based on how the bid prices come in we'll do it and if we don't then it'll get delayed the design will be done but it'll get delayed till the following year next

▶ 21:52 Speaker 5: So here's how the budget breaks down of the project. The construction cost is 850,000 and the total project cost is 930,000. So we would be using 875,000 from the new loan and then 55,000 we can either use from the operating fund or from interest from the old loans or leftover money from the old loans. So we do have, we just closed out our project from two years ago, we have 9,000 left from that project. So we would put that towards this. We also know we have interest in the account in the amount of about 150,000. So we would put that towards this as well if maybe Ashland Street only costs a little bit more, maybe we dip into that interest for this too. The interest is always available to us. It sits in an account that is dedicated to Melrose and it's just the interest the prior loan monies have earned in the time that we're spending them down and so mwra tracks how much money is left in that and then provides that money back to us whenever we need it for capital projects they have to be eligible projects next so details of tonight's request uh

▶ 23:09 Speaker 5: 875 000 from the mwra local water assistance program which is everything that's presently available to us they make about five to six hundred thousand a year uh available to us and um and uh we got a little behind a few years ago where one project took us into the next construction season and so then we got a year behind so then we had a little bit more money and actually there was some backlog of money from a few years ago as well um so we're now at the end we're fully caught up this brings us to zero available and then in july we get the next 500 something thousand and then that's what we would have available to us from here on out until mwra changes their program but i want to stress that this is our money basically being given back to us and every so often mwra re-evaluates the program they can take the money back from the communities not using it and then they can reallocate it within their budget um so this is almost like a reserve fund that through our rates mwra sets aside money for us to be able to then borrow back at zero interest and put towards capital projects um it's a way for them to ensure that we're funding the needed investment in our system and so if we don't use our money that's allocated then you know someday we could lose that money and so i always say that it's you know it's our money and so we should be using it rather than letting somebody else use it it's a 10-year payback with zero interest or $87,500 per year and to answer one of Mr. Pellerin's questions we do have an old MWRA loan that is going off the books in fiscal 21 so our first payment on this new loan will be in 22 and we have this loan for $105,898 that will no longer need to be paid starting in fiscal 22 um so that more than offsets the the new debt that we'd be bringing on for this loan and also in light of uh of covid we did not raise water and sewer rates for fiscal 21 as compared to fiscal 20. so we have made an adjustment that is um that has helped people in the current situation uh even given that this is uh just a slide to show that our water and sewer funds remain healthy our revenues collected in fiscal 20 met our revenue projections and we were able to cover all of our fiscal 20 expenditures in both water and sewer our first quarter revenues in fiscal 21 are up compared to prior years and are exceeding our projections so we're our water and sewer funds are receiving the revenue that we that we need to keep them sustained for the fiscal year. Part of this, the reason it's up, is due to increased water use with people being at home. And I will caution that in fiscal 22, our MWRA assessments are going to go up because we are assessed in large part on the water side 100 percent and on the sewer side in large part based on our percent share of what we're using of MWRA system. So as long as Boston does not have as many people in it during the daytime and their percent share goes way down compared to prior years, then the percent share of everybody else in the MWRA district is going to go up. So they'll probably be one year where it's a little higher than usual, and then we'll adjust back, assuming that COVID fiscal 22 that things are starting to return to normal. So that is just a caution. But even with all of that, we feel that our rate model shows healthy, steady rate, no large increases, no big impacts to customers. So I think we're in good shape.

▶ 27:20 Christopher Cinella: So I couldn't see anybody raising their hands for questions, but we only have three minutes to go before the public hearing. so I want to make sure that we have ample time for questions and responses.

▶ 27:32 Christopher Cinella: So let me just write down right now, Councilor Garipay, McNaught.

▶ 27:40 Christopher Cinella: Did I miss anybody else that has questions?

▶ 27:46 Christopher Cinella: Stewart, anybody else have questions at this time?